Stop underestimating the Green New Deal

Eleven months ago, a shocked primary election turned a 29-year-old Bronx bartender into national fame. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Social Democrat Social Democratic Party (DSA), has become an instant sensation, the new face of the young, diverse and extremely progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

Last April, the new congressman attended a conference hosted by MSNBC. town hall discuss his "New Green Deal". It is an ambitious plan to fight against climate change of human origin, a problem she says apocalyptic. "First of all, we've been here before," she told the exuberant audience. "We have already experienced the Great Depression, the Second World War and even the Cold War. And the answer has been an ambitious and directed mobilization of the US economy to lead and solve our biggest problem. "

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's initial New Deal was a series of federal programs designed to help the unemployed, restore the US economy after the Great Depression, and introduce major reforms to the financial system.

Even if it did not achieve these objectives (the average unemployment rate was 18% between 1933 and 1940), the New Deal widens the authority of the government on the private sector in an unprecedented way in peacetime. The highest marginal income tax rate increased from 25% to 63%. Corporate, estate and gift taxes have been increased, as well as taxes on cars, tires, gasoline, toiletries, electrical energy, luxury goods, bank checks, telephones and telegraphic messages.

The New Deal's boldest attempt at a state-planned economy was an NRA that Ocasio-Cortez would like: the National Recovery Administration. Managed by a former army general, the NRA regulated US companies through a minimum wage, minimum price, and fixed production hours. Industry leaders would write codes that Roosevelt would later impose by decree. If you do not comply with these codes, you will be penalized.

To show their neighbors that they were in line with the program, the companies hung posters representing the NRA Blue Eagle on their windows (lest the same windows be broken by street toughs). It is not surprising to think of the similarities between the public pressure exerted by the Blue Eagle campaign and the standards of social justice imposed by today's culture.

The NRA, the most blatant form of economic fascism ever created on US shores, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.

The second inspiration of Ocasio-Cortez, the controlled economy of the Second World War, continued the same trend. Basic kitchen items such as sugar were not available, while products such as meat and gasoline were rationed. The government banned the production of new cars during the war, an emissions reduction edict in which Ocasio-Cortez probably took notes.

The Green New Deal, specifically described by comedian Dave Smith as the Green Leap Forward, seeks to outperform its predecessors in terms of reach, size and revolutionary nature.

The main objective of the ten-year plan is "[d]radically expand existing renewable energy sources and deploy new generation capacity in order to meet 100% of national energy demand through renewable sources ". This means the total removal of coal, nuclear, natural gas and oil energy over the next decade, replacing them with wind, solar and other green alternatives.

To this end, it would be necessary to "modernize each residential and industrial building to improve its energy efficiency, comfort and safety". The economic impact would be the redesign and reconstruction of every structure in the United States, the result of nearly four centuries of capital accumulation, in 1/40th The delay. The legal and philosophical impact would be the complete subversion of private property in America. When the government can dictate to a citizen that his home or business must be reallocated to join a national mobilization program, who actually owns the structure? In fact, the proposal explicitly encourages the development of "cooperative and public ownership".

In addition to controlling where a person rests at night, the Green New Deal also seeks to "provide all members of our society, in all regions and communities, with the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program guaranteeing a life-saving job for anyone who wants one. Anyone who wishes can receive a government job for a "living wage", as sterile as it is. It would immediately send private sector workers to government jobs that they could not be fired from.

The Green New Deal also promises to "reduce deep-rooted income and wealth inequalities among races, regions and genders (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investments are equitably distributed among historically poor, low-income, deindustrialized or marginalized communities, so as to create wealth and ownership at the community level). "Beyond positive actions and quotas, this would imply a monumental transfer of the wealth of society. most radical nature, a policy that will not fail to ignite and exacerbate racial tensions.

Supporters admit that private capital is totally insufficient to finance a project of this size. The estimated costs range from $ 8 trillion to $ 93 trillion, depending on the quantity of proposal proposed. Compared to that, Amazon's $ 1 trillion market capitalization is a radical change. The Green New Deal would be funded "the same way we paid for bank bailouts in 2008 and extended quantitative easing programs, in the same way as in the Second World War and many other wars". Through the system of currency fiduciary, the government use debt and monetary expansion to cover costs. This superimposed economy was judged "Modern monetary theory"(MMT) and its consequences in terms of inflation and resource destruction are almost incalculable.

"America will never be a socialist country" promised President Trump during his speech on the state of the Union. He is wrong. Republicans must understand that socialism has already taken place here, that it can happen again, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the woman who can do it.

First, we must accept the fact that Ocasio-Cortez is not a traditional progressive like Barack Obama, nor even a domesticated social democrat like Bernie Sanders. She is a red tinted in wool, very familiar with socialist doctrine. "I think we are in a crisis of advanced capitalism, where people work sixty, eighty four hours a week without being able to feed their families," she said. told New Yorker. "There is a lot of economic dystopia in this country. That's why people are open to change. "She qualifies capitalism as" irremediable "and often exposes on the materialist theory of the history of Karl Marx.

She speaks with the confidence of a religious fanatic. "If people really want to blow up a figure here or a word out there, I'd say they're missing the forest for the trees," she said. told Anderson Cooper when asked about his fuzzy calculations. "I think a lot of people are more concerned with being accurate, factually, and semantically correct than having moral reason." These are the words of someone who will never be far from his goal.

Before turning 30 years old, Ocasio-Cortez has established himself as one of the country's most talented politicians. Roosevelt had the radio, Reagan had television and Donald Trump had Twitter. Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez has mastered all the other digital communication services of the 21st century, from Instagram Live to Twitch feeds. She is culturally comfortable and comfortable, at ease, as most politicians are not.

How did the Republican Party react to this existential threat? By criticize his clothes, to complain that the Green New Deal will ban hamburgers, and scoffer she can not afford to buy an apartment in Washington, DC. The Conservative movement has become so intellectually bankrupt that it is unable to oppose it. literal socialism. This is what happens when the shoes of Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet and Richard Weaver are filled by personalities such as Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk and Tomi Lahren.

Ocasio-Cortez is not the only one. Several DSA members have been elected across the country, including Lee J. Carter in the Virginia House of Representatives and Julia Salazar in the New York State Senate. In one meeting with JacobinSalazar explained that while his short-term program is more realistic, his ultimate goal is to "dismantle" the capitalist system and "ultimately, the abolition of private property." Republicans should say unequivocally that Salazar's election is also reprehensible David Duke's lineage in the House of Representatives of Louisiana in 1989.

Maybe the threat is exaggerated. It is possible that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's career mirrors that of other New York congresswomen Elizabeth Holtzman and Bella Abzug, two progressive feminists whose brilliant stars in the 1970s quickly died out after only a few years in power. But would you bet your life on it?

Hunter DeRensis is a journalist for The national interest. Follow him on Twitter @ HunterDeRensis.