Green ideas from Ralph Nader can help right now!

The Sunflowers –image from “artquotes.net”

What does “green” look like?  It’s really basic.  It looks like America did in the 1950’s with the 70’s understanding of organics applied over the top, as well as the humanitarianism of JFK’s Peace Corps.  In other words, it’s a return to “simplicity” because of the bee problem and colony collapse we are facing as well as the climate change.

It’s an anti-corporate model that supports diversity.  My guess is that informed progressives in the blue states are already there, you know?  Yeah.  That’s why I wanted Hillary Clinton, because she was closest to this sort of plan.  It’s a great interview  below — I voted for Nader once because of his stance.  It’s just practical, and it’s also a humanitarian stance.  It’s not the “big-money” stance.

So, here is some thought from Nader in an interview with Amy Goodman off Democracy Now.

“…So, you can see in many ways that we favor workers, and we favor consumers, and we favor small taxpayers, we favor the environment to the expense of corporate power. I mean, the issue here is centralized corporate power. And that’s why day after day, whether through demonstrations in front of toady government agencies and trade associations in Washington to campaigning with people and their controversies for justice all over the country, we have made our website, votenader.org, a very vivid, vivacious website for people who want to volunteer, who want to get engaged, who want to contribute money to our campaign. We take no commercial money or PACs, so we rely on individuals…

So, to sum it up, really, our campaign is to subordinate corporate power to the sovereignty of the people. Why is that a radical notion? Doesn’t the Constitution start with “We the people”?

Number two, we’ve got to straighten out our food export situation. We import far too much food from China, which is contaminated. We’ve got to have much more food grown close to markets. For example, Massachusetts used to grow 80 percent of its tomatoes in 1948. Now, it imports 80 percent of its tomatoes from California, Mexico. There’s no reason for that. There’s plenty of land for vegetable growing, fruit growing near the metropolitan markets.

And above all, we’ve got to have a foreign policy that makes us into a humanitarian superpower, that is, more agricultural cooperatives overseas, showing with our technology, appropriate technology, how to greatly increase crops and preservation of crops. 30 percent of food grown in the third world is lost due to rodents, fungus and insects. And we have a lot of knowledge on how to store food and preserve it so it isn’t lost and so people don’t starve and children don’t have distended bellies because of gross undernourishment. It’s an absolute crime against humanity…

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, the issue of global warming?

RALPH NADER: Global warming, solar power. Solar power is the closest thing to a universal solvent that we have. Wind power, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, passive solar architecture, other forms—biofuels that are not corn ethanol—that’s the way to go. We’ve got to have a national mission of converting our economy and be an example for the world in solar energy. It’s four billion years of supply, Amy. And it’s decentralized, it’s environmentally benign, it makes us energy independent, and it replaces the Exxon Mobil-Peabody Coal-uranium complex. That’s what we’ve got to go for economic, political, health and safety, environmental reasons…”

Katrina happened because of weather changes.  All this flooding in the Mid-West?  Same thing.  There will be more, so we have to work together to clean up the oceans, keep our food chain safe and just get back to basics around here.  Conspicuous consumption is not a model when the middle class no longer exists, is it?  Who is going to buy the stuff?  Hillary had ideas (green) that could put America back to work, building up all this green industry.

Victims of the disasters that hit climactically can learn much from the Amish and the Shakers in terms of their neighbors and friends doing “barn raisings.”

People can be housed by using an indigenous model based on what is available in the landscape to build with.  Call me old fashioned but let’s talk straw bale?  Okay?  That’s mondo-green.  And inexpensive.

Green is an American concept, and also a Nationalistic concept.  It’s also “grassroots.”  It’s very old fashioned.

I can’t stand to see people homeless in our country, or children in pain.  I also can’t stand to see the corporate greed right now.  I hate to tell you this but the whole thing will backfire anyway if nobody buys anything.  The point is, how do you begin to rebuild an ethics and ethos here?

Get rid of the greed, okay?  Just get rid of the greed.

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