Platform - Green Party US Section IV. Economic Justice and Sustainability A. Ecological EconomicsTo create an enduring society we must devise a system of production and commerce where every act is sustainable and restorable.
We believe that all business has a social contract with society and the environment — in effect a fiduciary responsibility — and that the concepts of socially responsible business and shareholder democracy can be models for prospering, successful business.
- We call for an economic system that is based on a combination of private businesses, decentralized democratic cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises, and alternative economic structures.
Collectively, this system puts human and ecological needs alongside profits to measure success, and maintains accountability to communities.
- Community-based economics constitutes an alternative to both corporate capitalism and state socialism.
It values diversity and decentralization.
Recognition of limits is central to this system.
The drive to accumulate power and wealth is a pernicious characteristic of a civilization headed in a pathological direction.
Greens advocate that economic relations become more direct, more cooperative, and more egalitarian.
Humanizing economic relations is just one aspect of our broader objective: to shift toward a different way of life characterized by sustainability, regionalization, more harmonious balance between the natural ecosphere and the human-made technosphere, and revival of community life.
Our perspective is antithetical to both Big Business and Big Government.
- Greens support a major redesign of commerce.
We endorse true-cost pricing.
[See section E.1. True Cost Pricing]
We support production methods that eliminate waste.
In natural systems, everything is a meal for something else.
Everything recycles, there is no waste.
We need to mimic natural systems in the way we manufacture and produce things.
Consumables need to be designed to be thrown into a compost heap and/or eaten. Durable goods would be designed in closed-loop systems, ultimately to be disassembled and reassembled.
Toxics would be safeguarded, minimally produced, secured, and would ideally have markers identifying them in perpetuity with their makers.
- The Green Party opposes capitalism and seeks to build an alternative economic system based on social ecology, decentralization of power, and freedom from state control.
We will build an eco-socialist economy based on large-scale green public works, municipalization, and workplace and community democracy.
Worker and community empowerment will ensure that decisions that greatly affect our lives are made in the interests of our communities, not at the whim of capitalist CEOs and distant boards of directors.
Democratically run enterprises embedded in and accountable to our communities will make more ecologically sound decisions and help end labor exploitation, environmental exploitation, and racial, gender, and wealth inequality and bring about economic and social justice.
- Greens view the economy as a part of the ecosystem, not as an isolated subset in which nothing but resources come in and products and waste go out.
There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and environmental protection.
There is an absolute limit to economic growth based on laws of thermodynamics and principles of ecology.
Long before that limit is reached, an optimum size of the economy is reached which maximizes human welfare in an holistic sense.
- We support a Superfund for Workers program as envisioned by the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union in 1991.
Such a program would guarantee full income and benefits for all workers displaced by ecological conversion until they find new jobs with comparable income and benefits.
- The Green Party supports methods, such as the Index of Social Health Indicators, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, and the Genuine Progress Indicator, that take into account statistics on housing, income, and nutrition.