Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: I got so down in trouble I nearly lost my head I started waking every morning filled with sadness, fear and dread the world I took for granted was crashing to the ground and I realized I might not live long enough to ever see it and turn around oh, but then I got to thinking of the ones who came before.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: Of.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: All the sacrifices that they made to open up so many doors Doors I got to walk through on streets paid for me People who were working on a world they never got to see.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Welcome, friends, to another episode of the Culture of Protest. And we introduced everything with a new song by Iris Dement called Working on the World. And it's very appropriate for what we're going to do today. I'm very honored to have a very old and dear friend, Jeremy Brecker, as my guest and we're going to have a conversation for the whole program on his just published book called the Green New Deal from the Bottom Up. It's a very appropriate book for so many reasons, one being that we're in the midst of this global climate conference. So the question of that is very much finally on the news. It's often buried. But more importantly, the Green New Deal from the Bottom up as a concept and a book I think we'll see, is an important resource for action and for perspective in what is the new Trump time that we seem to be.
I say seem because I don't want to face the reality of it. We seem to be entering Trump time. Welcome, Jeremy. And I wanted to tell people that you are a great writer. You're one of the key writers of labor history. A classic book called Strike, published well over 50 years ago in several editions. I always used it in teaching for many years about labor history. It's the best single book I know to dramatize and bring home the full story of how workers in this country have tried to act for themselves.
And then Jeremy's done a number of other books, culminating right now in this book, Green New Deal from the Bottom Up. Welcome, Jeremy, to this culture of Protest.
[00:03:05] Speaker C: Hi, Dickie. It's great to be with you and great to be with your audience, if there is any.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Yes, Jeremy, you're coming from Connecticut, right? I'll just point that out, too. So this is the very special in so many ways.
And let's start with this. In an earlier book of yours that was very influential called Globalization from Below, you introduced, at least to me, this concept of a Lilliput strategy for social change. And that animates this new book as well.
And people may have a glimmer of what it means simply if they remember the Gulliver Travels story and who the Lilliputians were. But as soon as I read this in your original book, it shaped my sense of what needs to be done to a great extent. And why don't you tell us what this phrase means, why you use it, what it's about?
[00:04:10] Speaker C: Well, if you're familiar with Gulliver's Travels, and I'm sure there are many cartoon and other popular culture versions of it, that will mean that most people are familiar with it. The tiny little aputians, who were only a foot or so high, were discovered by Gulliver and Gulliver's Travels, and they were captured by a devious character. And they were waited until he was asleep, and then they tied him up with hundreds and hundreds of little pieces of string.
And although he could have taken any of them and just strangled them in one hand, he was tied by the strings, tied down so that he was unable to contain them, to capture them again, and they were able to escape.
And that's always seemed to me like a great metaphor. People generally feel so powerless in the face of these great powerful men and institutions.
But if we can cooperate and go at them from all directions, we have the capacity to tie them down and make them unable to dominate us and ruin our lives. And there's actually a more, let's say, sophisticated version of the same idea from the great historical sociologist Michael Mann, who speaks of social change emerging from interstitial locations and not from the center of the existing power structures, but from what I and my late colleague Kim Costello glossed as is from the nooks and crannies. And the little head strategy is a way of connecting the nooks and crannies, where each of us has a very small but some genuine amount of power, and connecting that up and multiplying it into something that is able to not perhaps directly overcome and overwhelm the powers that be, but rather to tunnel under them and destroy, undermine the pillars of their power.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: So in Globalization from Below, you say that battling against corporate power is. It fits that Lilliput metaphor, because all over the world there are communities, regions, everything from neighborhoods to maybe individual countries that are confronting invasive corporate development in so many different ways, but fighting back, and often fighting back successfully locally. If you multiply those local actions by their global nature, you're seeing how there is a kind of check from below of the corporate globalization dynamic to a great extent. And do you have any. I could give you an example Locally of that which why this metaphor made so much sense in the. You wrote that book about 30 years ago, right?
[00:07:42] Speaker C: Why don't you go ahead and give your example? Because.
[00:07:45] Speaker B: Well, the best example that people locally will recognize is how we as a county have battled the oil industry and basically been able to prevent the development of oil in our county or regulate it greatly.
It's a battle that keeps coming back, keeps going on, but surprising amount of local capacity to check the development plans, you know, of major oil companies wanting to drill in our channel to drill in areas of the county. Part of what enabled that help was the existence of some laws like eir, you know, ceqa, environmental quality requirements. Part of it was having some allies in state and even federal government, but particularly state government, so the local movement could count on legal and political capacities to win these victories. And I don't want to make it seem like it's a total victory because even to this very minute there are oil developments and collateral activity by the oil industry that we keep having to fight. But it's a. It's not simply the giant crushing us.
That's why the Lilliput concept or metaphor made sense just on that level. And that's only one example locally of how the Lilliput metaphor resonates. And the reason it certainly validates local action.
And I've spent the last 50 years or more in this region as a local activist feeling that we've been able to accomplish quite a bit, even though there's a limit, of course, to what simply locally based action can accomplish. So how does that relate to the Green New Deal?
[00:09:51] Speaker C: Well, the Green New Deal, which some of your listeners will remember when it first broke into the headlines, when there was an occupation, a sit in in Nancy Pelosi's office by the youth climate organization Sunrise. And it was joined by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, now well known as aoc, who held up a plan for a Green New Deal. And the Green New Deal became a huge nationalist sensation.
And the basic idea of it was we have to fight the climate crisis. We have to transform our energy economy so that we're no longer destroying the climate. And we can do that in a way that deals with the great injustices of our society and can deal with the need of working people for good union jobs. And that was the basic idea of the Green New Deal. And there was extremely wise support for it in the public. When the first polls were done, there was overwhelming support, and that has continued in spite of right wing attacks on the name. But if you ask people what do they think about the policies of the Green New Deal. They are still extraordinarily popular. However, the oil industry and employers and corporations have been very successful in blocking the Green New Deal in Congress. Some of the aspects of the Green New Deal have been incorporated in Biden administration programs like the Inflation Reduction act, but they are the main parts of it were gutted by right wing Democrats like Joe Manchin. So that is how the Green New Deal as a national program got stymied. However, I began seeing that people all over the country were creating their own Green New Deals from below. They were doing at a state level with legislation. They were doing it at a very local, in some cases tribal level. For example, in the book I tell this story, the shinnecook Co Op, which is now harvesting tons and tons of seaweed in Long Island Sound, both as an economic development jobs creating program, as a way to clean up the sound, because their seaweed is extremely effective at taking nitrogen and carbon dioxide out of the water. And it's also a climate strategy because that carbon, because the kelp that they're growing absorbs an enormous amount of carbon dioxide as it grows. So happening there state level, it's happening a lot at a city level. The Boston Green New Deal with Mayor Wu might be an outstanding example, but there are many others, including DeKalb of all places, which has its own Green New Deal. These are doing what can be described in military terminology as outflanking the opponents of the Green New Deal. They are going outside of the national arena to local and state arenas in many cases. Unions are also doing their own Green New Deal from below projects, for example, supporting and actually building all kinds of green energy and energy efficiency conservation programs.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Why don't we look at some examples in more depth? You brought up Boston, so I'm curious what is happening in Boston that illustrates and encourages us to see this process that you're talking about.
[00:14:14] Speaker C: There's a long chapter on the Green New Deal in the cities with quite a lot on Boston in the book. So I'll just quickly summarize, but one of the prime programs was a youth jobs program which involved both educational training aspect and then jobs which were jobs that people were being trained for. So they weren't just picking up garbage and job ladders that were designed to create pathways into climate protecting neighborhood, protecting employment, whether that was putting solar panels on buildings or planting trees, which in urban neighborhoods actually are extremely effective means of climate resilience. While also, as Mayor Wu always pointed out, beautifying our neighborhoods.
So that's one piece. Another piece was a program to provide free breakfast and lunch for all Boston public school students and with high standards for nutrition. And actually one of the concerns of the Boston Green New Deal is to use city contracts to help impoverished neighborhoods and discriminated against groups. And the food for the entire Boston Green New Deal food program is produced by a worker and black owned cooperative company in one of Boston's poorest communities.
So this is another example. There is a Green New Deal for Boston schools which have been highly neglected physically. And so there is a big push to build new schools and to refurbish the old schools, including doing it on a climate protecting way. So transforming from fossil fuel energy, especially heat, to renewable energy, putting solar panels on schools for example.
And also this is a jobs program for construction workers who are going to be doing this work.
And it's also rolled together with an educational program both about climate and pre job preparation for students to be able to go into climate protecting jobs.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: These are really incredibly interesting, each one of them. And one thing that I, I gather is that in Boston they are labeled the Green New Deal.
[00:17:17] Speaker C: Absolutely.
Mayor Wu ran as a Green New Deal candidate.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: And they are literally defined the Green New Deal for schools. It's called the Green New Deal for Schools. And similarly with the rest of the program.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: And that's important because.
But it isn't necessarily the case that similar programs exist without that political label, if you will. But nevertheless, and that's in a way true right here in Santa Barbara and in California we have many things happening that I think fit this model. But I haven't heard the phrase Green New Deal around here very much. I'm not sure why that difference can happen. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:18:04] Speaker C: The Green New Deal as I said, was very popular then subject to an incredible right wing attack pushback. And in places where that was relatively ineffective, by the way, included Republicans and independents supported the Green New Deal at the beginning. And judging by the coal data, the counterattack deeply affected Republicans and they became hostile to the very term the Green New Deal. Not so much so for independents and very much not the case for Democrats. So in places where people feel it's a political liability, they tend to shut up about the term. Even if what they're doing is applying the extremely popular program of the Green New Deal in their own locations.
But I think part of the significance, what I'm trying to do and what I hope this book is going to do is to help people to be able to Say, oh, this is the Green New Deal, whether we're going to officially call it that or not, this is actually all part of the Green New Deal from below. And it's what we need to be doing as a country. It's what we need to be doing in our communities, in our states. And there's no reason that people in Santa Barbara can't talk about what's going on as well. This is the Green New Deal. You may not call it that. Politician may decide it's politically savvy not to use the term, but I think if we characterize it as well, that's what it is, and it's very popular and it's really addressing the problems that people are facing, then I think it can be understood as, as a movement and as something that people are doing on a widespread basis and that it's effective and that it's working. So I see talking about, even if we can't persuade politicians to use the term in all instances, although they certainly do in some, but making it clear that that's what this really is, has its own role in moving the politics of the Green New Deal from below forward.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: It seems like using the term in the way that you're suggesting gives people locally a sense that their local action isn't just local. It's part of a much more national and even global process. And that means it is contributing to the change that people see as absolutely necessary on a global level, not just locally. I mean, the problem with the day to day, a day to day problem with local activism is you feel, oh, well, this is so minor. If you don't get the Lilliput metaphor and use something like a Green New Deal slogan, you think, oh, well, we're just fighting for streetlights here kind of thing. And here the world is turning toward disaster and fascism and all the rest of it. So that's, I think part of. Is that that fits your. That's your point, right?
[00:21:07] Speaker C: Absolutely. And actually the organization I work with, the Labor Network for Sustainability, is now creating a Green New Deal from Below project whose specific goal is to connect up these efforts and allow people to sort of building a Lilliput strategy by allowing people to see and to connect with each other as well as learning from each other. And having the mirror, which is part of what I hope the book is holding up a mirror to people so they can see, oh, I'm in this picture, but look who else is in this picture. All kinds of other people are in this picture. And so it's not, as you Say it's not just an isolated thing that's going to help us do better on our block. It's part of a much broader force. And very much, as you say, there is very much a global Green New Deal movement which takes these ideas and applies it both in terms of things that are happening in many countries, again sometimes with the label of the Green New Deal, sometimes without the name, but basically the same approach. And that's something that is ongoing and to the extent that it can be built in one place, that reinforces people's sense that it's worth doing and meaningful and potentially successful in other places.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: So the elements there are at least I can think of three dimensions you might say to the Green New Deal as a totality. One is clearly the idea that actions are being taken to reduce the threat of global warming. To reduce, to get us to the right targets with respect to whatever it is, temperature increase or air pollution, whatever metrics you want to use that will save the planet. That, that's the part of the key part is that we're changing the economy, we're changing practices in ways that contribute to those goals. The second is that the new practices should be providing jobs for people, partly people who are being displaced by the closing down of harmful economic activity, but partly also to create an economy for all as part of the goal of the Green New Deal. And the third part is a little less, you know, it's more, you might say radical or transformative in social terms is to create enterprises and modes of operation that are not simply corporate and favoring profit, or that are free, freed from those considerations. And so having all. Is there anything else, any other dimension that I've just missed?
[00:24:10] Speaker C: I think those are good. And the one that I would add is challenging the numerous forms of injustice that are present in our society.
Racial gender against immigrants, against people of various gender orientations.
And let me just give one example of channel. I don't want to lead away from where you were going, which is very important. But one of the things that the Green New Deal is doing in many locations is to shut down coal burning power plants that are concentrated in poor minority communities and to replace them one way or another with renewable energy. And doing that in a way which is a, it is a job producing thing to do that.
But it's also reducing pollution in the worst polluted neighborhoods with the highest ratio proportions of asthma. At the same time, it is also reducing greenhouse gases and climate change. So the climate justice aspect of this is the one other critical piece that I would Add to your three and.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: I maybe I'll just mention my sort of gut concern about that is that sometimes these goals could come into political conflict with each other.
Is that an experience that people have had? In other words, if you say we've got to have a client, a justice, not just climate justice, but there's got to be an equity dimension to what we're doing, and people might agree with that in principle, but then it could come into conflict with some other opportunity that doesn't quite achieve that. Am I making any sense?
[00:26:15] Speaker C: Yeah. It's something to be always conscious of and that possibility is always present. I think one of the successes of the Green New Deals from below at a city and state level is drawing people together and having very long running and intensive conversations about that exact concern and developing programs that are specifically designed to make sure that those different interests are represented. And I'll give you one example of this problem and the process of getting over it, which is there was a strong push for climate legislation in Illinois.
And there was a coalition that was developed with large number of community groups, many of them in minority communities throughout the state and poor communities throughout the state, which held an endless sequence of town meetings, community meetings, hearings, and developed a program for large energy transformation which was on the cards to happen in Illinois. There were large forces pushing for it. And then another coalition based primarily on unions developed with a different plan for what should be in the energy policy of the state in the new legislation.
And this was both bills were in the legislature, it was going on month after month. There were negotiations, there were battles, and eventually the two sides came together and developed a common legislation which became the. Was passed and became the most advanced both in terms of climate prediction and in terms of social justice program of any state in the country. And it's often referred to as the Illinois Green New Deal. They didn't necessarily use that term, but I think they fully understood that that's what they were doing. And the fact that those forces, which were very much at loggerheads and contesting with each other, were able to come together and largely because of the common frame. That said, this is in common interest of all these groups and you got to work out the details to make it to realize the benefits to you. You've got to work it out so that other people are also getting the benefits to them. So that happens over and over and over again in these Green New Deal from below efforts. But the Illinois legislation is one of the most impressive examples of that process.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: One of the values of your book is that you tell these stories in such enough detail that it enables people to learn from them for their own use. And it's one of the reasons I brought that topic up is because what we can accomplish in the conversation is to whet your interest, you, the listener, in delving more deeply into this very specifics of these, let's call it a process, a struggle that works, it works itself out in the community level to kind of point out what's happening around here that fits the model that you're talking about. And I don't, as I said, I don't hear the phrase Green New Deal much used here. But I don't think it's simply because politicians are averse to using it because there isn't really that kind of polarization. Well, there isn't that kind of right wing force in California that would make that a problem. I think it may be because a lot of what is happening is coming out of the practice of environmental and justice organizations that were already in place before the Green New Deal phrase came into being. And in a way it's almost, I don't know, like don't let's not give it an extra label or bring in baggage that isn't necessary because we're already able to think about these kinds of issues. For example, there is something in California called the Community Choice energy policy. This allows counties and other municipalities to create their own electric distribution companies that are aimed at bringing only energy derived from renewable sources. This has caught on throughout the state. There are a number of counties and Santa Barbara now is part of a network of counties that has a CC entity, Community Choice entity that is really the source of most of the energy that actually reaches people's homes. And of course the utility companies have resisted that, but it's also affected their own practice with respect to renewables. This is almost below the radar. Most people are not really fully aware of this policy and many intricate steps have been taken to bring it into being. But it's present and now. And these entities, these community choice authorities that exist in counties can invest in new policies and job creating new enterprises and things that help create jobs. They can help, they can provide subsidies for adopting electric vehicles and so forth. So we're just at the beginning of realizing this. And nobody called it the Green New Deal or anything. It wasn't even clearly connected to climate change in the formation of these things. But county governments with a lot of citizen and environmental activism enable this not only to pass, but to actually be implemented in many parts of the state. That's only one example that you know, and I think mention in the or talk about in the book that California adopted maybe the most sweeping environmental climate change goals that are supposed to be implemented in communities and in institutions.
And that is probably globally influential, that California set of rules. So and that's part of what affects how the University of California here in Santa Barbara operates with respect to many, many variables. Traffic and energy use and construction and all the rest of it is all governed by those climate change policies that now exist on the state level. And the struggle for affordable housing, which is something that I'm very active in, it pits this model too, because why do we need affordable housing in the city? Because we have thousands and thousands of people who work here, but who are commuting by automobile to get here. The idea of creating jobs, housing balance is a Green New Deal kind of measure. It creates it reduces pollution from transportation and creates jobs locally in terms of developing the housing and keeps people who are would unable to even afford to work here be able to afford to work here. So the beauty of your book in terms of being a mirror for those of us who are active locally to figure out how what we're how what we're doing actually fits what needs to be done on a global level, but also raising questions are we doing enough to fulfill that kind of model?
That's how useful. I think that what you're trying to do with the book is.
I don't know if you want to comment on anything I just said just.
[00:35:18] Speaker C: To say that the aggregate purchasing policies, cca, is that correct?
[00:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker C: Are covered in the book, both California ones and also some in other parts of the country as part of this broader picture. As you say, it's just part of it is part of the broader picture whether people talk about it in terms of the Green New Deal or not.
And that housing is, as you say, a critical part of job creation, of addressing community needs.
Also how these Green New Deal programs, and I'm sure this is also true with a lot of the housing that you're involved with, getting rid of fossil fuel energy and providing renewable energy for the housing is both obviously better for the people who are living in that housing, but also a key climate policy. A huge proportion of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States is from buildings, housing and other buildings. So I think you're right on target as far as how these types of activities fit into this broader picture or mirror of the Green New Deal from below.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: You, as I mentioned at the outset, Jeremy, you, Jeremy Brecker, and that's who I'm. Hi, Dick Flaxen, conversing with here on the radio show. You are a foremost historian of labor. You're also, your activism revolves around labor issues. The labor movement is very much in the eye of the political scene these days. And there's always been this kind of serious problem of contradiction between environmental activism and labor union, construction, union, other union resistances, which is certainly true in our county here at times. You have examples in the book of unions actually in the forefront of Green New Deal activity. But why don't you talk a bit more about the tension and conflict as well as the possibilities.
[00:37:40] Speaker C: Well, the organization I work with is the Labor Network for Sustainability.
And this is exactly the question that we were created to, to try to address and ameliorate.
There is a long standing tension between American trade unions and all kinds of environmental protection, including climate protection.
And both a belief on the parts of substantial, though by no means all parts of organized labor, both that any building is good and also that any energy source is good. And this is a problem that has many, many different aspects and faces. Some of it is related to the fact that the environmental movement historically has not been very friendly to labor and is not recognized very well the problems of working people. And so there's a sort of two sided disdain between the two sides that has changed a lot over the last few years. And it's now commonplace for not all but many environmental organizations to include jobs and quality of jobs in their programs and what they fight for. There have been, for example, in the cases where there have been environmentalists and environmental justice efforts to shut down coal fired power plants. It's now routine that the demands of the environmental organizations include providing what's often called a just transition for the workers who will be affected if those plants are shut down, and also for the often working class communities that surround those plants. And that. So the incorporation of a just transition program within the environmental and climate movement would be one example of the ways in which this is changing and very much so. Also on the labor side, I hesitate to talk to you folks about what's going on in California because you know so much more about it than I do. But there in the book there is an account of a coalition of 20 or more unions that is involved in supporting climate protection policies and pushing to see that just transition plans are incorporated in the transition. Recognizing that there is going to be a transition, that there's going to be a replacement of fossil fuel energy by renewable energy, no matter what the oil companies and even what Donald Trump thinks purely for economic reasons, if for no other reason. So there's going to be that transformation and there is now a California coalition to support that transition, but make sure it happens in a worker friendly way. And this coalition even includes the union, the steelworkers, that represents most of the workers in California's oil refineries.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Right. And that term, just transition is one that's used around here for the very thing that you're talking about.
There are organizations, one is key is called cause, which is a Ventura in Santa Barbara county major organization that bases in the immigrant communities and in the Latino communities. But CAUSE's agenda is environmental as well as social justice.
And they at the same time fight for raising the wages of farm workers through making a living wage for farmworkers policy in our counties and at the same time closing down a polluting power plant in Ventura. You know, all of this happening all at once. And the CAUSE is very much in the forefront of, of just transition kind of thinking, as are some people at UCSB on the faculty. We have a new thing in the University of California which is encouraging, called the labor centers. Each campus now is a funded labor center, sort of a mini business school, you might say, for labor. And it has a research arm, it has a teaching arm, it has a internship program. This is all just beginning, but it's a very promising thing. These centers existed at UCLA and Berkeley for quite a while. Now they're on all the campuses. And there's inevitably those centers are going to be a way to link people in the labor movement with environmental and economic, social justice kind of organizations and thinking. So I'm pretty optimistic about that trend, but I usually grasp any straws we can find. And that's these are.
[00:43:32] Speaker C: And I would just say, of course, University of California is now a major labor center in itself.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: Exactly. That's right.
[00:43:40] Speaker C: And those their negotiations and strikes and demands have included environmental and climate demands relative to the campus and the surrounding community.
And that's also true in other universities around the country. There's a section in the book about the Rutgers University union initiatives around climate and environment and essentially trying to make the university first itself become climate safe, fossil free, and also to be a source of energy for the communities around it and to combine that with jobs and housing and transit programs for the regions that those universities are in. So there's definitely a way in which universities and unionized university staff, faculty, student workers could well be the tip of the spear for green New Deal type programs in a lot of places. Where universities are a very, very important part of the local community.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: So, Jeremy Brecker, we have a little time to face reality, which is the fact that Trump is about to become president, and his agenda foremost includes opposing everything we're talking about. So how. But you just sent me a draft of a paper, I guess, or article that you wrote about how the Green New Deal from below is a anti Trump administration or anti Trump authoritarian dictatorship policy. How does the Green New Neil, from below work as a form of resistance or opposition to Trump?
Spell that out a little bit.
[00:45:43] Speaker C: Well, the first thing I'd say is that this book came out one week after the election, and I was, of course, heart stricken about the results of the election. Also at a much less significant level, I was also heart stricken that this book was going to come out and be seen as totally irrelevant to the world that we were actually facing. And a bit of sort of arcane history would be all that it conveyed.
And then I was on a series of big zoom calls and phone calls where people were saying over and over again, what we have to do here is there's not much we can do in the national arena. We have to dig down and build bastions of resistance and of solidarity at local and state levels. And this was such an almost universal theme. And what I was hearing that I thought, well, maybe there's some way that this will be relevant. And then when I would talk to people about the book, they would say, oh, this is so important for the Trump era. It's so critical that people are aware that this is happening and see amplifying this and creating further Green New Deals from below.
This is really crucially important for this period that we're going into.
And I guess they kind of persuaded me that they were right.
I think there's a couple aspects of it. One is that, as we discussed, a critical element of the Green New Deal from below is its ability to bring different constituencies and forces together.
And one of the prime problems in the era we're going into is Trump. And the Trumpetes are masters of playing one group against another, playing them off against each other, putting out little bits of bait. Well, if you will just work with us, we'll give you, your leader a nice appointment.
And one of the things that the Green New Deal from below has done and could continue to do on an extended scale is bring together the different constituencies that are really the ones that going to be hurt most by Trumpism and create a base for them to cooperate in their resistance to what's going to be coming at them. I think another important part is resist. Resist. Resist. Yeah. People are going to say, well, resist, but what's the point if we don't have something that is an alternative, that we. Is what we're, what we're advocating and what will happen if we're successful?
And the Green New Deal from below, because it's actually building houses with affordability in the neighborhoods that need them most, with renewable energy instead of fossil fuel energy. And similarly bringing together the needs and concerns of a wide coalition of constituencies, it creates a vision of what could be. And not only a vision, but it actually embodies that.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Embodies. Brings it out, brings it into being.
[00:49:44] Speaker C: In a way, even locally.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:46] Speaker C: Actual houses, actual solar.
[00:49:50] Speaker B: So we have run out of time. So how do people get the book?
[00:49:54] Speaker C: If you get it, you can get it through regular. You can get it on Google, excuse me, on Amazon or any of the other regular book trade outlets. However, if you buy it from the University of Illinois Press website, you can get a 30% discount.
That's a good clue if you. And it's already reasonably priced for a book these days.
And is it possible for me to send you the code and you tell people in your. I don't, I can't. I don't have it in the next.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: All right, so you send me the code and if anybody listening wants to get that 30% discount, send me an email, rflaxgmail.com and I'll share that secret bargain information with you.
[00:50:53] Speaker C: It's not secret. You can.
[00:50:55] Speaker B: I know. I'm joking.
[00:50:56] Speaker C: So.
[00:50:57] Speaker B: So, Jeremy, I'm going to say we're going to close right now with Iris Dement, who, whose song Working for a World is the last thing you talk about in the book. And I was struck by. Since that's the last thing we're going to have on the radio show, it fits our format very well, to say the least. Thank you so much for sharing this with you. With us. The work that you're doing is so valuable, so important and creative, and I hope people get a chance to read you in full. Jeremy Brecker, B R E C H E R In case you were wondering, what's the name of the book?
[00:51:38] Speaker C: The book is the Green New Deal From Below. How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate Safe Economy.
[00:51:45] Speaker B: Thank you very much, folks, for being a listener tonight, I may Never See.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: I'm Working on a World I May Never say La.
