| New Green Economy: Labor Day and the New Green Economy |
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| Policy - Economy |
| Tuesday, 02 September 2008 01:39 |
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I couldn"t help thinking about the New Green Economy this Labor Day. Labor Day was originated in 1882 to recognize workers and their contributions. Part of my thinking was in reaction to last week"s convention and the rhetoric about manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas and how we have to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas if we want to turn our economy around. Is that really the solution? It seems to me that manufacturing isn"t necessarily the solution to our economy. It may indeed be that manufacturing elsewhere is more efficient or at least cheaper, as long as true costs are not calculated. But, as I"ve heard Van Jones and Majora Carter and others say, "You can’t take a building you want to weatherize, put it on a ship to China and then have them do it and send it back. So we are going to have to put people to work in this country — weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms." Shouldn"t our Labor Day and convention conversations be about how we create the new jobs that will fuel a new economy -- a new green economy?
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