{"id":56961,"date":"2021-03-02T10:09:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-02T15:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56961"},"modified":"2021-03-05T13:31:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-05T18:31:14","slug":"mass-education-and-the-climate-crisis-lessons-from-the-pandemic-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56961","title":{"rendered":"Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2)<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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This is part two of a five-part essay that highlights lessons from the coronavirus pandemic which could advance the fight for a Green New Deal. Part one (published on Resilience.org here<\/a>) argues that money is not scarce. Part two argues that control of government policy by wealthy elites tends to produce unnecessary suffering and inadequate responses to major crises. Part three argues that plutocracy is incompatible with serious climate action. Part four explores how the public can easily draw very different conclusions and argues that the climate movement must undertake mass education to ensure these lessons are learned. Part five outlines a broad curriculum containing these lessons and many more.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Lesson 2: Plutocracy\u2019s Deadly Cruelty<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Many Americans recognize that their government does not represent them. Political scientists have\u00a0shown<\/a>\u00a0that we live in a vastly unequal society where the wealthiest individuals and large corporations control not only the economy, but the political system as well. When the policy preferences of the superrich diverge from the rest of the population, those are the policies typically implemented. Though it possesses some essential elements of a democracy, the US political system often operates as a form of plutocracy. However, discussions of politics tend to explore the surface phenomenon of Democratic and Republican politicians\u2019 approaches to social issues like the pandemic. Seldom does the public hear serious discussion about how political decisions reflect the dynamics of a profit-maximizing economy and the priorities of the wealthy elites that control both parties.<\/p>\n

Many crises facing society can be explained simply by reference to the economic goal of profit maximization. When greed is an economy\u2019s central organizing principle, it means that financial self-interest is pursued even at the expense of diverse public interests…<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n

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Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 2) This is part two of a five-part essay that highlights lessons from the coronavirus pandemic which could advance the fight for a Green New Deal. Part one (published on Resilience.org here) argues that money is not scarce. Part two argues that control of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[31002,111,140,141,1053,23450,2238,3329,6665],"class_list":["post-56961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-environment","tag-aaron-karp","tag-capitalism","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-crisis","tag-green-new-deal","tag-plutocracy","tag-profits","tag-resilience-org"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}