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News :: Environment : Organizing : Politics |
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Carl Davidson: Economic Crisis/ Green Alternatives |
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by Brandon Rawnsley
Email: brandon.rawnsley (nospam) gmail.com (verified)
Phone: 603.440.5296 |
05 Feb 2010
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Under the shadow of the State House, a small group of concerned citizens gathered last night to listen to Carl Davidson's speak, not of the challenges facing us, but of the opportunities that the current economic crisis presents to progressive and socialist groups around the country.
“Part of my new job for CCDS,” he said with a wry smile to an audience member just as the first speaker was to begin. As a co-chair for CCDS (Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism)—one of the sponsors, along with Majority Agenda Project, of the evening's forum—Davidson is traveling on a limited speaking tour, promoting green jobs, cooperatives, employee ownership, and alternative energy within the context of a solidarity economy. And while all that might appear to be too much for any person to squeeze into a little more than an hour lecture, Davidson's accomplished it and much more.
With a colloquial speaking style, and a proclivity for anecdotes drawn from personal experience, he offered his biography, complete with edifying failures and the most remarkable examples of inner-city and small town solidarity, as proof that the foundation of a new sustainable and non-exploitive economy is there to be built upon.
The projects Davidson proposed ranged from massive infrastructure projects in response to the deindustrialization that has devastated the middle class—such as a plan to convert many of the country's crumbling dams into modern locks, in order to transplant the massive wind turbines that are to produce the wind-generated power of the future across waterways rather than highways—to low-technology, high employment weatherization jobs, meant to rescue poor communities saddled with the innumerable burdens caused by double-digit unemployment.
As he reminded those present, it was pressure from below that forced government and private enterprise to establish the tentative social welfare programs on which so many now depend, and that organized pressure is again required. “I can go to any small business owner and ask, What would you rather have right now: a purchase order or a tax cut? Each would say a purchase order,” Davidson declared. “You've got to give people hope. You don't organize anyone with cynicism.” And with that the forum ended, and the former SDS organizer from a family of iron workers prepared to keep on driving, delivering hope to those that see beauty in tomorrow's world.
For more from Carl Davidson keep up with him on his blog: http://carldavidson.blogspot.com/ |
This work is in the public domain |
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