The bill aims to ensure "an intersectional response" to the climate crisis, coronavirus pandemic, economic inequity, and racial injustice "that is proportionate to the scope of the problems we face."
On the heels of President Joe Biden unveiling the second prong of his infrastructure proposal, progressives in Congress came together Thursday to formally introduce sweeping legislation that would invest $10 trillion over a decade in advancing climate, economic, and racial justice while putting 15 million people nationwide to work.
Whether it is called "Build Back Better" or a "Green Industrial Policy" or, indeed, a Green New Deal, it is imperative to reject the false dichotomy of "jobs against climate."
Metaphors matter. As a metaphor, the "New Deal" has been mobilized both in response to climate change and in support of President Biden's rescue and infrastructure initiatives. It needs examination if it is to go from serving as a mere slogan to defining a coherent program. Compelling invocation of the New Deal turns on:
After years of delay and denial from the highest levels of government, the Biden administration has promised to confront the existential threat of the climate crisis with trillions of dollars in “green” investment. Such a massive infusion of spending on energy, transit, housing, and more would reshape the entire physical landscape of the country.
In so far as participating in bourgeois democracy remains a component of socialist strategy in Canada, voters on the Left are largely limited electorally to the New Democratic Party (NDP). As with many western socialist and social democratic parties, however, the federal NDP has been following a steady course of neoliberalization over the past decades. The party’s commitment to the workers’ movement and its own foundational labour-centred principles have been jettisoned in favour of a far more moderate political project.
"This is not nearly enough," the New York Democrat said of Biden's $2.26 trillion proposal.
With President Joe Biden expected to unveil the first part of his jobs and infrastructure plan from Pittsburgh later on Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is warning that the White House's $2.26 trillion proposal does not come close to meeting the scale of the unemployment, inequality, and climate crises facing the nation and world.
