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economics
Kamala Harris, Candidate of Economic Change, Breaks With Old Democratic Thinking
The key question remains: have voters heard her?
Nov 04, 2024
In mid-June I went to Nashville for a reunion of old friends who were activists with the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a group founded in 1964 by young Southerners inspired by the sit-in movement and devoted to dismantling racism all over the South and the nation. Like Martin Luther King Jr., we also went to work to end the war in Vietnam. In Nashville we shared stories about having stood up early—when it was dangerous—for racial justice and against a tragic war.
But today, decades later, we were staring into the vacuum of a terrifying potential disaster: Donald Trump—candidate of fascism and racism, enemy of women’s rights, friend of American billionaires and Russian oligarchs, and the guy who wants to dismantle U.S. democracy—could be (re)elected President.
My old friends—who stood up to George Wallace and Richard Nixon back in the day—were all committed to defeating Trump. But back in June many shared a troubled question about the Democratic incumbent. “Biden did a great job in the White House, but isn’t he too old to make the case against Trump—and for a better future—in this election?” Only a few months later—after Biden bravely stepped away and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz began energetically taking on Trump—celebration and optimism have reigned on our follow-up Zoom calls—because now we had a candidate who could talk with the American people—about making life better for working Americans. And many SSOC veterans, especially those in Georgia and North Carolina, have been working hard to build the movement that we hope will win in those key swing states.
Clearly, the Harris team (and Democratic operatives) have made saving democracy and reclaiming abortion rights as their key issues. When your opponent is a self-declared fan of Hitler and an enemy of democracy—and brags about getting rid of Roe v Wade—clearly saving our democratic political system and guaranteeing reproductive rights have got to be key to your primary message to voters. She and Tim Walz have been doing that—with joy and energy. And supporters are working hard to get all those folks who understand the Trump threat to come out to vote.
But an even larger group of Americans keep telling pollsters that the economy is their major concern. Many have faulty memories— of Trump’s White House years as a time of prosperity—and of the Biden-Harris years as COVID-driven chaos and inflation. As a result, many Democratic Party operatives and media pundits have pushed Harris to distance herself from Biden—and, to some extent, she has done so.
Even in the narrow context of today’s political debate, many Americans just don’t want to remember how big a medical and economic mess Trump left for Biden and Harris to clean up.
But this “Don’t talk about Biden” strategy has prevented Harris (and Democrats) from being able to tell a powerful story about the Biden-Harris presidency—and it has limited her ability to talk about what is wrong about the economic system—and to about what kind of economy agenda we need to build for working Americans.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris literally saved the U.S. and the world economy. They won the White House in 2020 in part because Donald Trump showed voters he was incompetent in the face of the COVID pandemic. And as a result of that pandemic-driven economic shutdown, Biden and Harris had to take on and reverse the most serious recession since the Great Depression. The amazing thing is that they actually pulled it off. When Biden and Harris took office, Americans had endured 8 months of official recession—and four years ago, the Trump unemployment rate was 9.2 percent. Deaths from COVID, which began in Trump’s last year in office, far from getting better, were at a deadly all-time high when Biden was sworn in.
Today, as a result of very ambitious policies that Biden and Harris put forward—and got passed through a divided Congress—the U.S. unemployment rate came down to below today’s 4.1%, and—if the Fed doesn’t blow it (or if Trump doesn’t win)—interest rates are coming down and inflation is stabilizing at 2.1% annual rate (down from the peak of 9.06% in June 2022). This Biden-Harris economic recovery is the envy of many other advanced nations that are still struggling to reduce unemployment. And we needed to remind voters that Biden and Harris surprised many economic experts by achieving a “soft landing”—getting jobs growing and bringing inflation down without tipping the economy into another recession. Ronald Reagan didn’t have such a great record when he ran for re-election declaring it was “Morning in America.”
Now clearly, working class Americans, white and black, don’t feel like it is Morning in America. But that feeling that the country is on the wrong track is not a recent development. For decades now, the very wealthy have gotten astronomically richer, and corporations have gained greater and greater control of our political and economic system, while middle-class and working-class people have seen declining real wages and fewer opportunities for themselves and their kids. Americans have been worried about their economic prospects for decades.
But even in the narrow context of today’s political debate, many Americans just don’t want to remember how big a medical and economic mess Trump left for Biden and Harris to clean up. And, since Democrats have been instructed to not talk about the Biden years, voters are now hearing just one explanation from Trump about what caused the post-COVID inflation: “Biden and Harris did it.” In other words, Trump blames the very Biden-Harris policies that helped Americans get through the COVID recession—and got the economy growing robustly.
Although not too many voters have heard it, Democrats have a different explanation: As the pandemic—worsened by Trump’s idiotic failures—literally shut down the global economy, the fragile international supply chain network froze up. And during the long period when the global factory system shut down—everything from food to cars to computer chips were stuck in container ships circling the globe or stuck in ports, huge parts of the U.S. economy were either forced to shut down—consumers experienced major shortages on store shelves or car dealers. Biden and Harris worked successfully to untangle these supply chain problem -- but the temporary shortages created huge opportunities for American corporations to raise prices and keep prices high (known as price gouging) for months and months. The painful result: higher prices for groceries, gas and oil, housing, and other essentials.
The Biden stimulus worked—the economy is growing and the inflation rate has come down for a rare “soft landing.” The Biden economic program wasn’t the cause of inflation. And without the Biden-Harris economic agenda, over the past few years Americans would have been struggling with the worst of both problems: high unemployment AND inflation.
Having revived economic growth and gotten the overall inflation rate going down—now at an annual rate of 2.1%—Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee and began to lay out a positive agenda to take on corporate price manipulation and real shortages in food, housing, energy, and health care.
She vowed to break the power of corporations to take advantage of shortages to raise prices and keep them high. This dynamic is most obvious in the food sector (where corporate concentration gives corporations great power) and in the health care sector, where she and Biden have already begun to force pharmaceutical companies to compete on the price of essential drugs. And public health insurance, like Medicare and Obamacare, are still too dominated by corporate insurance companies. In housing, although interest rates are going down, Harris pledges to fight for a long-term project to build more housing, break the power of speculators in the rental market, and help first-time home buyers with up to $25,000 to cover their down payments. And in energy, where the prices of gasoline and other fuels have come down, she also pledges to continue to support alternative sources of power, like solar and wind, and hydro—all of which will bring down prices for individuals and for utilities.
Keep in mind that Donald Trump has advanced no ideas at all for reducing inflation. He did meet with oil industry CEOs to demand $1 billion to finance his campaign in return for massive huge policy giveaways – and if you think that would lower energy prices, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on all imports would increase inflation dramatically, according to economists right, left, and center.
A Harris presidency would work to reorganize each of these key sectors to bring down prices—while creating new public systems to help families with other basic needs, like free or subsidized child care (and in home senior care), the costs of which is now borne almost entirely struggling middle class and poor families.
Based on polling that shows inflation and the economy are the top issues for many voters, some progressive analysts have been arguing that Kamala Harris and her campaign are not talking enough about her economic agenda.
Pollster Stan Greenberg has been making the case that the Harris-Walz campaign would be pulling strongly ahead if they were doing more to educate voters on Harris’s economic plans. He cites a TV ad tested by the super PAC Future Forward that garners strong support when tested with working people:
In that ad, (Kamala Harris) said, ‘When I am elected president, I will make it a top priority to bring down costs. We should be doing everything we can to make it more affordable to buy a home and more than 100 million Americans will get a tax cut. I will help families; letting you keep more of your hard-earned money. As president, I will be laser focused on creating opportunities for the middle class that advance their economic security, stability and dignity.’
Greenberg argued “Closing positive with Harris battling for the middle class and helping everyone on their very top issue will engage and unite the Democrats’ base. That will shift the trajectory of this race.”
Certainly, the next two days will tell if he and other progressives are right.
How Harris could have distanced herself from Democratic orthodoxy
Kamala Harris has been constantly pressured—by the media and some Democrats—to show how she would distance herself from Joe Biden and Democratic orthodoxy. As we have seen, the Biden economic agenda was remarkably successful—and that may be one good reason why she refused to attack the Biden-Harris economic strategy. But in response to this pressure, she has shifted her campaign to attacking Trump as an extremist. Greenberg and other progressives argue that she should have campaigned more on her anti-inflation plans and the larger economic agenda she has put forward.
Here's another approach: Kamala Harris—as candidate and as our new President—could distance herself from several generations of Democratic leaders. For decades now, several generations of activist movements have pushed energetically for a new economic agenda for the Democratic party. It has been a hard slog, but we have made progress even with party elites.
1. Inflation killed the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, who was the last Democrat who had to deal with high inflation. Prices were rising by 9.9% and remained high throughout his term. Shorly after he took office a coalition of progressive groups called Consumers Opposed to Inflation in the Necessities met with Carter and made the case that he should fight inflation in the key “basic necessities” sectors where increasing prices were driving inflation. Carter ignored us and instead listened to more conventional voices, and he tried various experiments in “deregulation,” none of which worked. Finally Fed Chair Paul Volker raised interest rates to 19 percent, precipitating a recession. And Carter lost his election to Ronald Reagan, who attacked him for 13 percent inflation and high unemployment. The good news is that Kamala Harris (and Joe Biden) took another path—and that new approach is working.
Kamala Harris—as candidate and as our new President—could distance herself from several generations of Democratic leaders.
2. Trade Policy advanced by conventional Democrats has ignored the economic pain and devastation caused by treaties like Bill Clinton’s NAFTA and his sponsoring of China joining the World Trade Organization. Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama both fiercely promoted another, even more ambitious treaty, known as the The Trans-Pacific Partnership. Eventually, both realized that voters hated these job-killing trade deals, but not until they greatly damaged the Democratic brand with heartland working class voters, and they gave up on the TPP. Many people remember the 1999 “Teamsters and Turtles” demonstrations in Seattle that brought together over 50,000 protesters—union members, environmentalists, family farmers, indigenous rights activists, faith-based groups, and solidarity organizations—to confront global elites attending the ministerial meetings of the WTO. Slowly, those groups have moved Democrats to understand the need for a trade policy that preserves and creates good jobs, reduces global warming and creates prosperity. The Harris campaign has broken with the old “free trade uber alles” agenda of the Democratic Party. And just in time, because she will forge a more functional trade regime that is more progressive than the mindless and opportunistic trade agenda of Donald Trump.
3. Industrial Policy is closely related to trade. For years Democrats joined Republicans to denounce any kind of industrial policy (except for military spending) aimed at making American industry more productive, cleaner, and more competitive—or to help create new high-tech industries that can anchor economic development and replace jobs lost to mechanization. But there has been a citizen movement demanding action. And polls show that most Americans—especially blue-collar workers—strongly support smart industrial policies. Biden and Harris made huge strides in this new direction with the passage of The American Recovery Act, which helped revive all sectors of the economy. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—to rebuild our semiconductor industry. The Inflation Reduction Act—which included $369 billion for a climate initiative to reduce greenhouse emissions and promote lean energy technologies. This legislation put an annual cap of $2,000 for out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for those insured by Medicare—and helped improve Obamacare, which was a beginning of an industrial policy for the huge and costly American health industry.
4. Investing in a Stronger Social Contract for Middle-Class and Working People—by Ending Austerity, Taxing the Rich, Growing the Economy.
The creation of Social Security by Franklin Roosevelt and Medicare by Lyndon Johnson marked major milestones in the ongoing quest to put an economic floor under the lives of working folks and poor people. After many battles which pitted the vast majority of Americans against Republicans (and conservative Democrats) who wanted to cut benefits or “privatize” these beloved social insurance programs, a new generation of activists have learned to stop attacks—and many are now working to expand and improve Social Security and Medicare, long harmed by conservative governments. And while we must protect the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans are working to transform Obamacare into a more comprehensive and less expensive system of health care.
If we want to live as well as the social democratic countries of the world, we will need to greatly improve our health care system.
Most advanced capitalist countries guarantee child care, pre-care education, paid family and medical leave, and in-home or community care for seniors and people with disabilities and their families. And if we want to live as well as the social democratic countries of the world, we will need to greatly improve our health care system.
Today there is a growing movement to win these expanded social insurance plans that can help make individuals and families more secure—and people who work for small businesses and corporations more productive.
Our crazy system of financing college and trade school education was so bad that when young people started talking about wiping out student debt—and making state universities tuition free, the idea took off like a rocket in the political debate—and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris became the champions of this big change. If Kamala wins the White House, we can expect her to keep pushing.
Popular programs like these are expensive. But our corporations and billionaires pay less in taxes than most other wealthy countries. Big coalitions like Americans for Tax Fairness are working for fair taxes—and an end to the Trump tax giveaways to the rich and corporations—that would provide us the resources we need to invest in a stronger social safety net.
5. Donald Trump thinks global warming is a hoax, but most Americans know we must act boldly to reduce carbon emissions. Unfortunately, for years Democratic leaders tried to achieve this by putting a tax on energy consumption—which would have raised costs to working Americans. Bill Clinton tried to pass a carbon tax in 1006, but even Democrats wouldn’t vote for it.
Eventually, after being schooled by climate activists—and by labor unions, who came to understand that transforming our energy system will mean good jobs—the Biden team proposed and got passed a historic legislation that used Federal funds to invest in energy conservation and new forms of green energy production. Those investments are producing millions of new jobs, many of them union jobs.
6. American workers have a right to be represented by a union. This proposition is increasingly popular today as billionaires and monopolies have come to dominate the economy and work places. The best unions have become creative about helping workers organize to secure rights at work and better lives for their families. And the Biden-Haris administration has not only taken important symbolic steps to support worker struggles—like Biden and Harris’s support for the historic United Auto Workers strike— they have made real change—for example by appointing Jennifer Abruzzo to the post of general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. She has charted a dramatic new path to strengthen and defend workers rights to organize and to challenge anti-labor employers. Democrats have long given lip service to passing a new labor law—known as the Pro Act—to strengthen worker rights. And if Kamala Harris wins the Presidency—with a Congressional majority, she should be expected to write and pass an even tougher labor rights bill that can begin the process of guaranteeing that American workers have the kind of rights at work that workers in other advanced countries won years ago.
If we want a government that works for a better life for Americans, we must get big money out of politics.
7. We must take our democracy back from the wealthy and corporate elites. It is hugely important that we stop Donald Trump’s systematic attacks on our democratic system. But even when we defeat him—we will still have a political system that is dominated by massive amounts of money—including an obscene $134 million this year from crypto-currency investors to buy elections for House, Senate and White House. The U.S. now has a legal framework in which the Supreme Court’s Citizens Uniteddecision allows corporations and billionaires to flood elections with unlimited money—and which allows lobbyists to reward Members of Congress to do their bidding. And in order to use democracy to clean up the system we are going to have to make the U.S. Senate more democratic—by abolishing the filibuster that now requires a super majority in order to pass any significant changes. And grass-roots Democrats have discovered that we need to change party rules to prevent mysterious and evil dark money from dominating the system for nominating Senators and Members of Congress. If we want a government that works for a better life for Americans, we must get big money out of politics.
8. The rich have gotten richer and they have hollowed out the middle class.
The economic gap between the very rich and the rest of us has been growing dramatically for the past 30 years and more.
Income disparities are now so pronounced that America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent in 2021, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In the 1980s, when the Economic Policy Institute was founded as a think tank for working people, EPI’s early research began to demonstrate that the income and wealth of the richest Americans was pulling away from middle-class and working Americans. At first establishment economists denied the trend—or they said it was only temporary. Today everyone—left, right and center— acknowledges the problem, and the debate is about what to do about it—or about whether we can or should do anything about it. But most working people now know what growing inequality is doing to their families. And they want solutions. And one of the first battles Kamala Harris will face require us to rally the country to put an end to the Trump tax cuts for the rich and corporations that did so much to accelerate inequality of income and wealth.
All of the inter-woven movements for economic change described above aim at making the U.S. a society where there are fewer extremes of wealth and income—and where the very wealthy do not have the power to block the aspirations of the rest of us for a better life.
The New Centrism
In May, the respected New York Times senior reporter David Leonhardt wrote an important article entitled “A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington: Call it neopopulism: a bipartisan attitude that mistrusts the free-market ethos instead of embracing it.” Here’s what he wrote in his article in the Times:
For decades, Washington pursued a set of policies that many voters disliked and that did not come close to delivering their promised results. Many citizens have understandably become frustrated. That frustration has led to the stirrings of a neopopulism that seeks to reinvigorate the American economy and compete with the country’s global rivals.
A defining quality of the new centrism is how much it differs from the centrism that guided Washington in the roughly quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, starting in the 1990s. That centrism—alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed. By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image, spreading democracy to China, Russia and elsewhere.
Winning this election is just the beginning of the work that needs to be done...
That hasn’t worked out. In the U.S., incomes and wealth have grown slowly, except for the affluent, while life expectancy is lower today than in any other high-income country.
Americans lean left on economic policy. Polls show that they support restrictions on trade, higher taxes on the wealthy and a strong safety net. Most Americans are not socialists, but they do favor policies to hold down the cost of living and create good-paying jobs. These views help explain why ballot initiatives to raise the minimum wage and expand Medicaid have passed even in red states. They also explain why some parts of Biden’s agenda that Republicans uniformly opposed, such as a law reducing medical costs, are extremely popular. This is where the center of gravity in the country is.
Leonhardt is right that this new neopopulist approach to economics is very popular across the spectrum of Americans—with those who didn’t go to college and those who did, with men as well as women, with people struggling to stay middle class and with working class and poor people—white, Black, Hispanic and Asian. But this new popularity is not just the result of “new thinking” by academics and policy advisers. What he calls this new “centrism” is now making sense to voters and politicians alike because of the work of several generations of progressive activists—from my old friends fighting for civil rights and against a terrible war—to today’s generation of activists fighting for economic equality, to break the power of corporate manipulation of our political system, and to build an economic system that can build a better life for all Americans. That multi-generational movement (See the Solidarity Agenda) has helped shape the Biden-Harris presidency—and we all must hope that our work has helped to put Kamala Harris into the White House. And, after all our work, we will need to take a breath, get some rest—and then get to work to make that new agenda a reality.
Assuming Kamala Harris wins the election, it will be due in part to her campaign to fight back against the Donald Trump’s destructive attacks on women, on democracy, and against his desire for authoritarian power. But her victory will also be due to her ability to lay out an economic agenda that builds on the record of her service with Joe Biden’s administration—which represented a sharp break with Republican and Democratic neoliberalism. But winning this election is just the beginning of the work that needs to be done to create a better life for the American people.
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The World Bank Needs Better Metrics to Understand Inequality
The bank is pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as one expert puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!”
Aug 03, 2023
Been eating a bit too much ice cream this sweltering summer? Thinking about going on a bit of a diet? Well, imagine yourself counting calories but exempting anything with sugar from all your counting.
Would that approach help you make an appreciable dent on your excess bodily baggage? Of course not. We can’t eliminate what we ignore. And that goes for inequality as well, over 300 distinguished economists worldwide are charging in a new open letter to the United Nations and the World Bank.
Back in 2015, these eminent economists remind us, the world’s nations came together and adopted a series of “Sustainable Development Goals”—SDGs for short—designed to systematically attack both poverty and climate change. The tenth of these goals specifically aims to “reduce inequality within and among countries.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The progress so far on this inequality SDG? Practically nonexistent. By many measures, the open-letter economists note, our “inequalities have worsened,” and that worsening really matters. Without reducing the “deep divide” that separates our global rich from the rest of us, the economists suggest, we’ll forever be going nowhere on “ending poverty and preventing climate breakdown.”
Significantly narrowing our world’s deeply unequal distribution of income and wealth will, of course, always remain a tall order, given the political power that grand fortunes create. The World Bank, unfortunately, has made that order taller.
The U.N.’s member nations have essentially made the bank the world’s official inequality scorekeeper. But the metrics the World Bank uses to track inequality have turned out to be “very inadequate,” charges Jayati Ghosh, a coauthor of the economists’ new open letter.
We already have, Ghosh points out, a variety of established yardsticks for measuring inequality. The Gini coefficient plots actually existing income distributions between 0 for total equality and 1 for infinite inequality. The more easily understandable Palma ratio divides the income share of a society’s top 10% by the income share of its bottom 40%.
The World Bank isn’t relying on either of these standard measures. The bank is instead pushing a statistical notion of “shared prosperity” that, as Ghosh puts it, “leaves the rich out of the equation!” This World Bank measure defines success in the battle against inequality as what we have when the incomes of the bottom 40% are growing faster than the national average income.
On the World Bank’s scorecard, in other words, any nation where the incomes of the top 1% are rising ten times faster than the national average income would be making “progress” against inequality so long as the incomes of the bottom 40% were rising slightly faster than that national average.
This “bizarre notion of ‘shared prosperity,’” says Jayati Ghosh, “provides very misleading estimates of the extent of inequality or progress in reducing it.”
By this bizarre World Bank yardstick, over half the world—53% of the nations the bank sampled—were making progress against inequality just before the pandemic hit and another 11% were showing no change.
Researchers with the World Inequality Database, an ambitious statistical effort that takes inspiration from the ground-breaking research of scholars like Thomas Piketty, paint a starkly different picture. Only 26% of the world’s nations, as measured by the Gini coefficient, are actually showing progress against income inequality, and only 12% are showing progress in Palma-ratio terms.
For three top global inequality watchdogs—Oxfam, the Development Finance International, and the New York University Center for International Cooperation’s Pathfinders initiative—the World Bank’s “shared prosperity” scorekeeping makes plain the need for a real “data revolution” that spotlights the wealth of the world’s wealthiest.
The World Bank’s current approach, these three groups charged in a new report released last month, essentially “ignores what is happening to the rich.” We cannot afford that ignoring, the groups stress, not at a time when “the world’s wealthiest citizens continue to be largely responsible for extreme carbon emissions” while the world’s “poorest citizens pay the price through climate disasters.”
Will critiques like this get the World Bank to change its statistical ways? We’ll see. The bank’s first reaction to the economists’ open letter has been somewhat encouraging. The World Bank, says a spokesperson, agrees “we need to do more to address inequality” and “do better in measuring progress.”
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A Global Green New Deal Is the Best Way to Save the Planet
What is urgently needed is a political platform that embraces a sound climate stabilization plan which ensures a just transition, creates a plethora of new jobs, reduces inequality, and promotes sustainable growth.
Jul 30, 2023
Another summer is upon us and heatwaves are scorching many parts of the world, smashing thousands of temperature records. Even the world’s ocean surface temperature is off the charts, reaching unprecedented levels, while sea ice level in the Antarctic has set a record low for the second year in a row.
Indeed, planet earth is screaming because “ climate change is out of control,” as U.N. General-Secretary António Guterres recently put it. Yet the global community’s response to the greatest existential threat facing humanity continues to be not merely unacceptably slow but borders on criminal negligence.
We know the reasons why.
But we should also be asking ourselves an additional question: Why is it that populations are not motivated enough to address the climate crisis?
Fossil fuels supply about 80% of the world’s energy, and contemporary politics is trapped in the short term, with little evidence that it can be repaired. Across the world, politicians continue to make enormous compromises to short term interests in the name of energy security. China and the U.S. are the world’s biggest carbon polluters. Yet President Joe Biden has signed off on a series of major fossil fuel projects, and China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world. This is even while both countries are also pursuing aggressive clean energy transition policies—indeed they are competing with one another on these.
To add insult to injury, governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel production. In 2022, subsidies worldwide for fossil fuel consumption rose above $1 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency. And the world’s biggest banks have provided $5.5 trillion in finance to the fossil fuel industry over the past seven years.
As for global climate conferences, they have turned out to be not only ineffective but something of a cruel joke. They function in the absence of an “enforcement mechanism,” and empty words and promises are their hallmark feature. Greta Thunberg was indeed right on the mark when she chastised global leaders at the Youth4Climate event in Milan for their failure to address the climate emergency, dismissing their rhetoric as “blah, blah, blah.”
Moreover, data has shown that fossil fuel lobbyists attending the negotiations in climate conferences outnumber almost every national delegation. There were more than 500 fossil fuel lobbyists at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, and more than 600 at the COP27 summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. As for COP28, which will take place this year from November 30 until December 12, the host is the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s major oil and gas producers, and will be presided by Sultan al-Jaber, the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Company. At this global climate summit, fossil fuel companies are expected to have an even bigger voice. And their main focus is to promote carbon capture technologies. These technologies have yet to demonstrate their capacity at scale, while also offering their own dangerous side effects.
This is all pretty understandable. It’s capitalism at work.
But we should also be asking ourselves an additional question: Why is it that populations are not motivated enough to address the climate crisis? Not only that, but far-right and right-wing populist parties, which are hostile to climate and carbon-low energy, are growing in prominence and influence. The rise of far-right movements is felt not only in Europe and the United States, but also in Eurasia and South Asia, while right-wing platforms remain popular across Latin America in spite of the fact that the region has shifted to the left over the past two decades.
The reasons for this unfortunate and disturbing development are a bit more complicated. Demagogues are the worst enemies of the laboring populations, yet the working class and poor people are easy targets. In our own era, neoliberal policies (deregulation of the economy, privatization, suppression of wages, and shifting the orientation of the state as far away as possible from redistribution and a socially-based agenda) had led to extremely harmful consequences, including poverty, mass unemployment, income inequality, deficits in decent work and labor rights, social exclusion, and overall decline in the standard of living.
In Europe, home to the majority of the richest countries in the world, in 2022, more than 95 million European Union citizens, representing close to 22% of the population, were at risk of poverty and social exclusion.
In the U.S., more than 51 million workers currently make less than $15 an hour—nearly one-third of the workforce—according to data compiled by Oxfam, and the official poverty rate with nearly 38 million people is considered by many experts to be based on a vastly inaccurate measurement of poverty in the United States. For example, the MIT living wage model uses a cost of living estimate that far exceeds the federal poverty thresholds.
At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal and world order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services. The neoliberal claim is that economies would perform more effectively, producing greater wealth and economic prosperity for all, if markets were allowed to operate without government intervention. This claim is predicated on the idea that free markets are inherently just and can create effective low-cost ways to produce consumer goods and services. By extension, an interventionist or state-managed economy is regarded as wasteful and inefficient, choking off growth and expansion by constraining innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit.
However, the facts say otherwise. During the period known as “state-managed capitalism” (roughly from 1945-73, and otherwise known as the classical Keynesian era), the Western capitalist economies were growing faster than at any other time in the 20th century and wealth was reaching those at the bottom of the social pyramid more effectively than ever before. Convergence was also far greater during this period than it has been during the last 45 years of neoliberal policies. Moreover, under the neoliberal economic order, Western capitalist economies have not only failed to match the trends, growth patterns, and distributional effects experienced under “managed capitalism,” but the “free-market” orthodoxy has produced a series of never-ending financial crises, distorted developments in the real economy, elevated inequality to new historical heights, and eroded civic virtues and democratic values. In fact, neoliberalism has turned out to be the new dystopia of the contemporary world.
Today’s left has failed so far to convince the laboring populations that it has a viable political agenda which can effectively address their immediate concerns as well as tackle the climate crisis.
Under the neoliberal socio-economic order and its effects, which provoke fear, insecurity, and indignation, it is not difficult to see why the laboring populations might fall under the spell of right-wing demagogues who know how to exploit societal divisions and resort to deception and manipulation with a political repertoire based on xenophobic nationalism and law and order. It is also not hard to see why concerns about climate breakdown might become far less of a priority for them when they are struggling to make ends meet. Putting food on the table, paying the rent, and fears of losing a job are what may keep average folks awake at night—not climate breakdown, even when they do recognize it as a major threat. Indeed, climate change, surely among U.S. voters, remains “a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing healthcare costs,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. And France’s “yellow vest” movement speaks volumes about the political risks of green taxes, in conjunction with tax cuts for the wealthy, while living standards are moving in the wrong direction.
This is where radical collective social and political action ought to come in, as it is the only hope we have for a sustainable future. But today’s left has failed so far to convince the laboring populations that it has a viable political agenda which can effectively address their immediate concerns as well as tackle the climate crisis. Today’s left, particularly in Europe, has an economic agenda which pays lip service to social transformation and lacks a concrete action plan for addressing the climate crisis through sustainable development strategies. Throughout the advanced industrialized world, existing climate plans remain insufficient and proceed alongside national plans to increase energy security through reliance on new oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure projects.
Make no mistake about it. “Oil and gas projects are back in a big way,” as a recent New York Timesarticle put it. And climate protests alone cannot stop global warming. They do have a positive impact on public opinion, though "extreme action protests" can also backfire, according to some studies.
Moreover, some bad ideas, such as that of degrowth, have begun to gain ground, distracting attention away from real solutions to the climate crisis and to the ills of neoliberalism.
What is urgently needed is building long-term progressive power around a vision of left-wing politics that is energized by the pressing need to tackle the climate crisis by radically accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels while at the same time pushing for a structural transformation of present-day economies. In other words, a political platform that embraces a sound climate stabilization plan which ensures a just transition, creates a plethora of new jobs, reduces inequality, and promotes sustainable growth. Of course, this is what the Green New Deal (GND) is supposed to be all about, except that there are a number of different versions of a GND policy plan, including one adopted by the European Union. But Europe’s green ambitions (they call it the “European Green Deal” and the aim is for the E.U. to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050) are contradicted by European countries’ quest for new fossil fuel supplies. In addition, and this is typical of poorly formulated GND policy plans, the European parliament has voted in support of E.U. rules labeling natural gas and nuclear energy as green investments.
Even so, the movement for the Green New Deal is growing and is making a positive impact on several fronts. Several states and over 100 cities in the United States have committed to 100% clean energy. The Inflation Reduction Act may not qualify as a GND, but it is still a historical piece of legislation, especially given the existing political climate in the country.
Still, one might say that what we really need in order to save the planet is a comprehensive GND, formulated as a worldwide program. But we do have such a blueprint in place, courtesy of the American economist Robert Pollin, and fully endorsed by the world’s greatest intellectual alive, namely Noam Chomsky.
All that degrowth will accomplish is more pain for working class people and will most likely fuel further support for the far-right.
Degrowth is not the answer. As Robert Pollin has argued powerfully and persuasively, cutting back on economic growth will have little to no impact on the task at hand, which is "delivering a zero-emissions global economy." More precisely, if we depend on reducing gross domestic product (GDP) to reduce emissions, then it follows that we can only reduce emissions by the same number we reduce growth. For example, if GDP shrinks by 10%—a massive global recession—it will succeed in cutting emissions by only 10%. We need emissions down to zero.
Moreover, the idea of shrinking rather than growing economies is, politically speaking, a self-defeating proposition. All that degrowth will accomplish is more pain for working class people and will most likely fuel further support for the far-right.
Of course, degrowth advocates argue that this is a project targeted at the Global North, not a path for the Global South. However, are we to assume on the basis of such claims that the developed countries are void of class inequalities and have somehow escaped the sort of socio-economic ills that accompany the implementation of ruthless neoliberal policies? Are we to believe that there is no need to improve living conditions, reduce poverty rates, and increase employment opportunities for the Western masses? Perhaps such notions do lie behind degrowth, which is why some, if not most, of its advocates reject the idea of economic planning and by extension of the GND. In this sense, I think it’s quite fair to say that degrowth is in fact working in service of neoliberalism while doing nothing to stop global warming. Committed socialists should have nothing to do with degrowth policy proposals.
Pondering radical proposals for saving the planet and humanity from the effects of global warming should be welcomed as they may generate opportunities for creative forms of political and social action. But degrowth is neither a radical alternative nor is it based on sound economics. Furthermore, it is a rather dangerous political idea as it will hurt mostly the laboring classes and deliver them straight into the arms of the far-right.
For all practical intents and purposes, radical politics in the age of climate breakdown goes through a (global) Green New Deal—not through degrowth rhetoric, which is in full display in the current issue of Monthly Review. It is up to the socialist left to embrace it and see that its vision turns into reality.
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