Senator Clinton: Surge Domestic Occupation Armies

My friend Noah from Columbia University directed me to an article in today’s Los Angels Times:

“WASHINGTON — New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning for president in a neighborhood of Philadelphia so rough the mayor said, “Osama bin Laden wouldn’t last here,” pitched a $4-billion-a-year anti-crime package today that would put 100,000 new police officers on the streets and help stem the tide of repeat offenders back into the country’s prisons.”

A Surge didn’t work in Iraq. It won’t work in American cities.

Here’s what will: start addressing the roots of the problem, instead of putting band-aids on them. In his new slideshow presentation given at TED on the climate crisis and necessary urgency of addressing it (which is great by the way), Al Gore pointed out that when an addict’s veins collapse in their arms and other parts of their body, they finally start injecting themselves in their toes. The American economy and government, he posited, are at the point where we’re injecting ourselves in the toes - we are clinging to old ideas, old norms, and old frameworks. We’ve reached the end of the era where our innovation can actually lead to progress within existing frameworks of social organization.

We need new forms of social organization. The veins of society’s current institutions are collapsing - like the veins of a dying addict. The era of capitalism and its poverty, authoritarian government and its tyranny, and racial, sexism, and homophobia and their vast inequalities - economic, political, and social - are coming to an end.

Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, is well-known for infamous quote about global capitalism: “There is no alternative.”

If that were indeed true, I would have to admit that revolutionaries would do well in enjoying the rest of their lives, and doing something a little less stressful than trying to dismantle the dominant institutions of oppression.

But Thatcher’s claim doesn’t hold to more than a few minutes of careful and creative scrutiny.

We’ve seen that there are alternatives to market capitalism. The problem is that we just haven’t yet seen many good alternatives to it. So Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” (TINA), was actually a claim of “there is no better alternative” (TINBA). While this seems small, it isn’t.

I re-posted Michael Albert’s essay “There Is An Alternative” a few days ago. If you want to see a (very) brief description of an alternative, just, democratic economy, I’d encourage you to read the post and explore more (it has links to where you can read more about participatory and democratic economics)s.

In term of poverty (and the “crime” poverty causes), the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and many environmental justice groups propose, some variant of “green path ways from poverty to prosperity” (green pathways out of poverty, green pathways to prosperity, green collar-jobs, solar cells not jail cells, etc…). Here’s the idea: global climate destabilization and environmental crisis are a planetary problem that require planetary solutions. We need to embark on a generational quest to save humanity and the planet. As Al Gore said, “we need another hero generation.” So what can we do about it? Well, we need a green economic revolution. We need an Apollo Project or Manhattan Project scale program, and a Civil Rights Movement scale struggle to bring it about.

And we can learn from the past too. We can wage our struggles for a clean, green economy in such a way that it uplifts those currently under-served by our society. Green Pathways From Poverty to Prosperity can be the defining attitude of a new movement which is fighting for a new social contract, on our way to an entirely new society.

Finally, I should add one more point, that I haven’t said explicitly enough, often enough.

An environmentally-sustainable, participatory, democratic, just, and poverty-free economy, is a democratically-planned economy. Market competition discouraged the type and level of innovation (I’ll be elaborating on this more soon, but copyrights, patents, and trade-secrets are some of the most common “innovation spreads rapidly in a market economy” myth-debunkers) we need to bring about a sustainable society. And the drive to accumulate and make profit/power is directly at ends with the drive to protect humanity and the world we live in. A democratic economy is a planned economy.