California’s Progressive Leverage
By Tom Hayden / The Peace Exchange Bulletin
Governor Jerry Brown is finding California to be an effective Archimedean leverage point in shaping a progressive alternative to a federal system stalemated by the New Civil War.
The latest example is a West Coast pact to combat climate change by the governments of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, a region populated by 53 million people with a GDP of $2.8 trillion.
The plan will produce energy savings, green jobs and greenhouse gas reductions, and will exploit any new Obama emissions standards that will eliminate new coal plants. California also will soon forge a carbon-reducing trading market with Quebec. The growing clean energy bloc will pressure for adoption of a new global energy agreement in 2015.
California created similar leverage by adopting energy efficiency standards and renewable energy incentives in the Seventies, when America was paralyzed by Detroit’s political monopoly over transportation policies favoring gas-guzzlers. At least fourteen states, led by California, formed an alternative energy bloc that resulted in greater fuel efficiency, consumer savings and domestic manufacturing jobs.
Many progressives traditionally regard “state’s rights” as the exclusive banner of racial and economic reactionaries. The rise of the Tea Party with its political grip on 23-25 so-called “red” states and its leverage over the House of Representatives is a case in point. But progressives have no alternative to reviving their own tradition of states being “laboratories of reform” as Justice Brandeis once said. Progressive examples in American history include the Farmer-Labor parties in Wisconsin and Minnesota, the election of hundreds of socialist mayors in the Midwest, and the achievements of New York’s Wagner and La Guardia administrations in shaping the New Deal.
A progressive state and local strategy does not abandon struggles at the federal level. The victory of Obama over Romney, the subsequent fights over federal regulatory power, the struggle to limit wasteful US military intervention, and the all-important appointment of Supreme Court nominees are the clearest examples of the national stakes.
The reality, however, is that the US is divided solidly between a Progressive American Bloc and one based on the Old Confederacy and the Wild West, with only about a dozen so-called “swing states” where the civil war is internalized. The progressive state-based strategy is born of necessity.
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http://sandiegofreepress.org/2013/11/californias-progressive-leverage/
