Step Right Up: The 'New' Economy is here

I’m always amused listening to the Tom Waits song, Step Right Up when he gets to the lyric that goes: “it’s new, it’s improved, it’s old-fashioned!” He speaks so eloquently yet succinctly to the absurdity of modern mass-marketing. Of course, anything that perpetuates the old is not new. And that is just as true for the economy as it is for dish soap.
Old is not new.
The Establishment Conservatives tell us that the way to create jobs is by giving working people’s tax money to the wealthy and reducing payments wealthy corporatists have to pay to do business in the state. They don’t really want to talk about a ‘new economy’; for conservatives, it seems, the old economy worked just fine, thank you very much! In any event, all one needs to know about jobs in an Establishment Conservative world is that the ‘free-market’ will take care of any job needs, and those who lose their jobs or can’t find another one don’t deserve to work anyway. And by the way, if you’re too stupid to be able to find a job, you’re not entitled to eat, have a place to live, or get medical care if you need it either, you lazy bum. Get a job!
The Establishment Liberals tell us that they will make the old economy new and improved; they’ll put those of us out of work into new, ‘green’ jobs. They want to create a ‘robust’ economy, as if we didn’t have one before. This ‘new and improved' economy, they tell us, will look a lot like the old economy. Well, they don’t want to frighten anyone with the dreaded ‘C’-word (Change). There’ll be change, but not too much. The ‘new’ economy will consist of attracting the same old corporations to the area, but these corporations will have magically become ‘Green’, sustainable, and benevolent, as if the old ones weren’t. Establishment Liberals tell us that they get it now; the ‘old’ economy wasn’t ‘environmentally sustainable’. But the new one will be. It will build efficient houses that will consume less energy. And we will build more housing developments and strip malls that are cleaner, conserve energy (or are even energy net-neutral), and we will walk everywhere we need to go.
Establishment Liberals tell us that we must retool our work force. You didn’t lose your job because your employer found lower-wage workers in China, you’re unemployed because you need to be ‘retooled’ and more resilient. We must retool, apparently our education system as well in order to make our kids ‘job ready’; so much for education.
There must, of course be infrastructure to accommodate all this ‘Green’ growth and employment opportunities. We’ll need to build more roads, sewers, traffic lights and hire more government workers to guide and maintain the growth in infrastructure (or outsource the work to contractors). Our community will grow, as will our government, and as will our taxes.
But it will be new. All those who want to work will have a job, money will flow, incomes rise, and no one will be displaced or marginalized.

Yeah, right!
For both the Establishment Conservative and Liberal, growth is the solution to all problems, social and economic. It’s just that, for Conservatives, we haven’t grown any where near or fast enough. For Liberals, we could grow more, if only we do it ‘smarter’, ‘greener’, and ‘more efficiently’.
Of course: Growth isn’t the solution; growth is the problem.


The ‘old’ economy is thankfully dead. It was a several hundred year experiment that created waste, poisoned air, soil, and water, consumerism run amok, and a predatory Capitalism that is nearing its disastrous end. We need to get off that dead horse now.
Most importantly, we cannot continue to support the failed policies of the past that have led us to the economic situation we find ourselves in: sprawl growth and development and unbounded consumerism that has brought us more residents and commercial activity, and required more infrastructure and government.
We cannot just acknowledge that environmental sustainability is a goal; we must implement the policies and incentives to make the goal a reality.
Someone once pointed out that anyone can have a vision of a grand and glorious future; that’s easy. Most anyone can claim that. What’s necessary, however is to have a vision for the present. A vision that gets us to that future we seek. For example, we can’t have vision for a future free from dependence on fossil fuel while continuing to subsidize coal and oil production today. We can’t claim to have a vision for a sustainable economy tomorrow if we continue the same policies that bring big out-of-state corporations and the latest fad business into our communities today. We will never achieve our goal of a waste free community in the future by continuing to encourage and fund trash incinerators and landfills today.
NO. Building a truly new economy means not only implementing innovative new programs and policies today, it means thinking creatively and focusing on what we want to achieve, not on maintaining existing systems of power and privilege.
A truly new economy begins with a realistic, common sense approach to measuring economic growth and well-being.
A Green Party administration will implement a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) as an alternative to the meaningless GDP indicators in use today. A GPI will measure social and individual well-being and the economic health of the society, a much more meaningful indicator of progress than the narrow economic measurement of financial growth GDP provides.
State government can take the lead in setting the standard of excellence needed for us to transition to a waste free economy. We will make sure that any state-wide ‘Green Initiatives’ plan does not include waste incineration as a ‘renewable resource’. We will require bidders on government contracts to prepare ‘zero-impact’ transition plans and make public funding available for the analysis and implementation of cradle-to-cradle initiatives for bidders.
We need to implement a FeeBate program on major pollutants and critical non-renewable resources (like the Chesapeake Bay) to penalize waste while rewarding efficiency. A Green Party administration will assess various options so that we can implement a progressive system that taxes the ‘bads’ and not the goods.
Greens have long recognized that the short-term profit strategy of most corporations is not sustainable, either financially or environmentally in the long term. Many international investors are coming to that realization as well. An Allwine/Eidel administration will take steps to reorient and redirect state investments to bring them in line with the overall needs and necessities of a truly new economy. As part of our state bank concept we will direct state investments toward sustainable and renewable energy and set energy efficiency targets across the state property portfolio. We will articulate and publish a comprehensive ethical investment policy that will guide state investment decision-making.
Small, locally-owned businesses are the backbone and strength of every community. A state bank will ensure that investment is made in local communities to help them develop and sustain their own local businesses; cooperatives and other alternative business models will be encouraged and supported.
These are but some of the innovations necessary to truly move our state forward in a stable economical and social manner. The notion that what is needed is more building, more spending, more growth is part of an out-moded, 19th Century thinking that we can no longer afford to embrace. It might benefit the wealthy few; the developers, land speculators, and their hangers-on, but it has been a disaster for the 98% of us who must pay for the environmental and social destruction their notion of growth has created. We can no longer continue to try to recreate the destructive past of limitless growth and development, ever increasing production, consumption, and the consequent spirals of cost, stress on the environment, and depletion of our natural resources that ensue.
Change takes place whether we want it or not. there are those who will deny that it is happening and those who claim the change is only more of the same, only better. Both are wrong.
We can be dragged into the new American economic century kicking and screaming or we can be at the forefront, meeting the challenges to come head-on. Maryland can be a leader in this new economy by leaving behind the failed policies of the past and embracing the changes that lead to more stable, sustainable, vibrant, and economically secure communities. The Maryland Green Party, and its gubernatorial candidates alone support that kind of change and have the strength and knowledge to lead Maryland in that vision for the present.