The Flaw in the Green New Deal

The economic model Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is working from (as is Bernie Sanders) is FDR's New Deal: a well-paying job for every worker, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth. All good as far as it goes. The green part is building green infrastructure and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. Also all good.

What is missing from the Green New Deal movement's analysis is what are workers going to spend their money on? More to the point: people, in the Green New Deal, are still understood to be workers and consumers, not stewards of the land. Mass society is still understood in materialistic terms: everybody's job is to get money and spend it keeping the economy growing. Everybody shares in the financial prosperity, and the environment is still understood as resources that support consumption.

Leaving aside that automation idling tens of millions of workers is grounds to rethink the work-spend basis on which consumerism is predicated, work-spend as the definitional underpinning of public life reduces the function of every human being to making money change hands.

Money is the worst reason to do anything. Chasing it demotivates doing things that should be done because they do not pay money and motivates doing things that should not be done because they do pay money. Finally, the environmental crisis does not begin and end with fossil fuels. Every so-called resource on this planet has been almost entirely destroyed, and consumerism is the root cause.

The Green New Deal is a step in the right direction, but millions of supporters need to understand that it is only a step and more importantly that money as an organizing principle upon which to construct a society is fatally flawed on social, environmental, economic, and spiritual grounds.