Rob: What
does that mean? "Direct job creation?" That sounds like bottom up to me.
Jill: Exactly.
It's totally bottom up, so that it would provide the funding from a national
level. It would provide the funding, and I'll talk about where the funding
comes from in a second. But it provides the funding to communities, so it's an
extremely bottom up solution. It provides it to communities. It's not a top
down cookie cutter program. It provides resources to communities and certain
guidelines that allow the communities to identify what kinds of jobs they need
in order to become sustainable; not just ecologically but also economically and
socially. So, it provides communities the ability to create jobs which are
locally based. So, we're not talking about bringing in a branch of Bank of
America or some mortgage foundation or some multi-national corporation: Coca-Cola
or whatever. It's about jumpstarting local small businesses and worker
cooperatives in a whole broad area of the Green economy and areas that meet our
social and economic needs so that we have local economies where the dollars are
being re-circulated. Where, as you probably know, every dollars counts for much
more because it's passing through the hands--many hands within the community.
Every dollar counts for more and the profits are not being shipped overseas to
corporate headquarters in the Cayman Islands. They stay right there in small
businesses, who've been killed, been killed by both Democratic and Republican
policies over the last couple decades. So this re-establishes local small
business-based economies and businesses as well as worker cooperatives, because
we need to diversify this economy.
It also creates public services and public works which allow you to just
go down to the employment office instead of the unemployment office and at the
employment office, you can get a job doing a whole variety of services and
works that serve your community. And again, this is within that broad spectrum
of jobs that range from local food supplies, establishing a relocalized organic
agricultural system, which is resilient to the stresses of rising oil prices as
well as climate change and all that. There's just innumerable benefits to
developing local sustainable agriculture and supporting our small farmers, as
well as public transportation, including an active. What we call recreational
transportation components, so you can ride your bike to the train, get on the
train, have a place to take your bike with your or leave it there, etc. That
begins to create an infrastructure for health that allows us to get our
exercise, getting to where we need to go safely and conveniently instead of
having to go join a health club and pay a big health fee. That's not how you
get a healthy society. We need to be able to be active as a component of
transportation.
It includes, of course, weatherization, insulation--all those things that
can put communities to work that have high unemployment rates but don't have
PhDs. You don't even need a high school degree in order to do that insulation
and sort of simple construction and weatherization work. So, we can get the
jobs into the communities that need them most and I should mention that that is
a provision also of the Green New Deal; that it directs the resources to where
they're need, not to the places that have political influence, but rather
particularly it prioritizes the places with the worst unemployment so we can
start providing the relief where it is most needed. That includes, creating green
energy as well, solar and wind as well as the efficiencies and as well as the
social services, like teachers and nurses, after school daycare, elder care,
drug abuse prevention and rehabilitation, violence prevention and affordable
housing construction. So, it's a broad range of job.
Communities have full leeway to decide what kinds of jobs are priorities
for them and are needed most in their communities. So, it's a win-win because
it not only solves the economic emergency, it also solves the climate
emergency, because it prioritizes that transition to green energy and it also
just so happens, it make wars for oil, obsolete. You don't need oil when you've
got green energy here at home. And in doing that, it allows us to cut back on
our military budget which has doubled over the last decade without making us
twice as secure. Hardly, in many ways, we are not more secure at all. So, we're
calling for downsizing and right sizing the military, bringing the troops home
and bringing the bases home as well that are scattered around the globe.
Putting the hundreds--
Rob: That
sounds like the same thing that Ron Paul has been calling for; getting rid of
all the overseas military bases.
Jill: Exactly.
We're in good company on this one and that's what I hear from members of the
military all the time; that they've been supporting Ron Paul and many of them
are ready to move over. That's he's not any longer in the race and they're
coming into our campaign because they feel like they are in harm's way.
Rob: How
else do you agree with Ron Paul?
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