Thread by @JonathanCrock

We need a #GreenNewDeal and #JG. Most people aren't socialpathic. In their jobs, they don't want to work on making the planet unlivable for their children, they don't want to engage in fraud or corruption, they don't want to stand by while their coworkers are harassed and abused.

Most people don't want to build systems of mass surveillance, psychological manipulation, and autonomous weapons. Most people don't want to work on how to exploit others more and more. But fear, fear of unemployment and loss of livelihood gets people to work rapidly on all these.

This fear is real. Whistleblowers are completely destroyed in this system. This is a system of socialpaths, by socialpaths, for socialpaths. With impending climate catastrophe and massive concentration of autonomous means of violence, we need a new system immediately.

Instead of a system based on fear of job loss, imagine if people can speak up against fraud, abuse, socialpathy without fear of unemployment and loss of livelihood because everyone has a job guarantee.

Imagine a job guarantee with living wages, equal pay, employee ownership, good benefits, and democratically controlled workplaces. This would set a new standard against which other employers would have to compete.

A #GreenNewDeal and #JobGuarantee are urgently needed to green the economy and head off climate catastrophe. They're also needed to turn away from the corporate-state arms race to develop systems of mass autonomous violence, surveillance, and psyops.

Human beings aren't commodities and neither is their labor. Everyone has a human right to a job and fair and just conditions of work -- work that fixes the planet instead of destroying it, work that builds communities instead of surveilling them.

None of this is new. One hundred years ago the Versailles Treaty saw these issues as threats to global security and called for "the prevention of unemployment" and established "the principle that men and women should receive equal remuneration for work of equal value." In 1919!

We've already been waiting 100 years. We need a job guarantee now with equal pay for equal work to eliminate unemployment and eliminate the threat of unemployment that keeps people in a state of fear and isolation doing socialpathic work like destroying the planet.

None of this is new. This has been done before in the original New Deal, which provided socially beneficial jobs to builders, teachers, artists, all kinds of people. And that was done in an economy that barely compares to the vast wealth and resources of today.

In the 1930s, 3 billion(!) trees were planted. Imagine what could be done with today's vastly greater resources & technology to head off climate catastrophe. It's suicidal to continue to wait for change that will never come from the very structures that created this catastrophe.

The solutions are #GreenNewDeal and #citizensassemblies to take democratic control of saving the planet. Ireland has run #citizensassembly on climate crisis and @ExtinctionR in the UK calls for #citizensassemblies to take control of climate policy-making. resilience.org/stories/2019-0…

We've been waiting a century for elected politicians to secure the right to work and equal pay, to eliminate unemployment as called for in 1919, and we keep waiting for them to head off the climate catastrophe. We don't have time to keep waiting.

We need to take the climate crisis out of the hands of elected officials and give it to a #citizensassembly like Ireland did, but as a standing body with real power.

A randomly selected #citizensassembly--which has 50% women's participation and brings in marginalized people--can hear from experts and would immediately act on climate crisis through a #GreenNewDeal that would be more robust than anything we get years from now out of congress.

Our fellow citizens can hear from experts, deliberate, and come up with far better solutions than a dysfunctional legislature ever can. Elected officials are given a way to wash their hands of the issue by kicking it to a #citizensassembly.

We can pursue both: #GreenNewDeal out of congress (likely watered down) and creating #citizensassembly for climate crisis. Why do we still trust the institutions that created the climate catastrophe more than we trust our fellow citizens to do what's best for everyone?

#Citizensassembly has a track record of producing better policies for the good of society than dysfunctional legislators. We need to stop looking to the people who created the problem to solve the problem. We need to solve the problem ourselves. #GND #JG
newint.org/features/2019/…

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