SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
franklin roosevelt
Urgent Message to Progressives: Infiltrate Your Local Democratic Party Before It's Too Late
Take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up.
Jul 28, 2025
What if, lacking an organized resistance to fascism like we have had in previous eras (the civil rights movement, SDS, BLM, the Wobblies), the Democratic Party itself could play the role of producing radical, positive transformation across America?
Sound crazy? It’s actually happened twice.
The first time was in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt’ New Deal literally flipped our politics and the American economy upside down, turning us from a raw, harsh capitalist system to a democratic socialist system with Social Security, legalized unions, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, workplace safety rules, massive infrastructure construction, and millions of Americans being employed directly by the government to end poverty.
It happened again in the 1960s, with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, producing Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights act, the voting rights act, food stamps, low income housing, National Public Radio, a transformation of our educational system for the better, USAID, Job Corps, VISTA, Head Start, a major Social Security expansion, The National Endowment for the Arts, and what was essentially free college.
Sunday, I was on Ali Velshi’s show on MSNBC a conversation about protest movements. I pointed out that back in the 60s, when I was in SDS, there were a number of groups that were quite active, particularly on college campuses, but today most of them have been gutted or banned.
Black Lives Matter has disintegrated, the movement against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has led to universities rolling over and capitulating, and the #MeToo and abortion rights movements are essentially leaderless.
Which leaves the Democratic Party, as I mentioned on Ali’s show. Billionaires and racists turned the Republican Party into a neofascist protest party over the past decade; progressives and those of us who want to preserve democracy in America need to similarly says control of and radicalize the Democratic Party in the tradition of FDR and LBJ.
There is a vital lesson progressives must learn, which is how the far right took control of the Republican Party over a decade ago and forced the entire Conservative establishment to lurch so far to the Right that they’ve even dumped people like Liz Cheney and George W. Bush.
If progressives hope to have any shot at influencing today’s Democratic Party and kicking out the corporate sellout Democrats and replacing them with real-deal progressives, then we need to get to work right now to do exactly what the Tea Party did a decade and a half ago to take power.
And it starts in our own backyards.
Let me introduce you to the now-defunct Concord Project, a right-wing organization that, a decade ago, was in charge of helping the Tea Party’s Successful effort to take over and radicalize the GOP.
The Concord Project expanded their get-out-the-vote strategy beyond just traditional phone banking, canvassing, and putting up “vote Republican” signs. Instead, they decided to infiltrate local politics by encouraging Tea Partiers and conservatives more generally to become “Precinct Committee Members.”
Here’s their pitch in their own words from one of their Obama-era YouTube training videos:
“What’s the most powerful political office in the world? It is not the President of the United States. It’s Precinct Committeeman.”
So why is a Precinct Committeeman (or person) so important?
“First, because precinct committeemen and only precinct committeemen get to elect the leaders of the political parties; if you want to elect the leadership of one of the two major political parties in this country, then you have to become a precinct committeeman.”
As in the oldest and most basic governing reality in a republic: true and effective political power flows up from the bottom.
It starts with Precinct Committeemen and women — people who are either appointed or win local elections with very few votes at stake, in some cases only 10 or 20 votes — to gain positions that pretty much anyone can hold but which wield enormous power.
It’s Precinct Committee Persons who elect district, county, and state party officials and delegates, who choose primary nominees that then go on to hold elected office, and who help draft a party’s platform.
They’re also generally the first people who elected officials meet with when they come back into the district. And those officials listen carefully to what Precinct Committee persons have to say.
So, the Concord folks told their people, if far right Tea Partiers moved in and took over Precinct Committee seats then they’d also be able to nominate a slew of Tea Partiers to hold higher offices within the Republican Party and for primaries.
And those Tea Party Republican Party primary candidates would then be winnowed down in the primary to one Tea Party Republican to run against the Democrat in the general election. This way, Tea Partiers would end up dominating the GOP.
That was their pitch: take over the party from the inside, from the bottom up. And it worked.
Control the primaries — as the Precinct Committee Members do — and you control the ultimate candidate, the election, and ultimately the nation, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the Tea Party era.
This is from a video they posted in January of 2010, with the same Concord Project Representative encouraging people in the Tea Party to do exactly what I just described:
“This video is for all the people out there in the Tea Party movement, the 9/12ers, just good decent people who are really fearful of what’s going on in the country and want to do something to fix things and they’re not sure what to do. Well, I’ve got a solution for you. The best way to ensure that conservatives win that all-important primary election is to become a real ball player in the ball game of politics. And that ball game is called party politics.
“And this is a secret, they don’t want the party establishments, any incumbents don’t want you to know about this and that’s why I’m telling you about it. Only precinct committeemen get to vote for, to elect party leaders. Only precinct committeemen can vote to endorse candidates.”
Again, that was in 2010, 11 months before that year’s elections.
In 2008, half of the Republican Party’s Precinct Committeemen positions around the country were vacant.
But by 2011, motivated by the efforts of people like the Concord Project, the Tea Party (which has now mostly morphed into MAGA) had swept in to fill the gaps: They’d filled up the Republican Party.
And we saw the results of the Precinct Committee takeover first in 2012 and more and more vividly in every election since: the GOP is now being driven largely from the bottom up by activists who’ve taken over the party and are also running for school boards and other local offices.
In 2012, after this campaign to get movement conservatives into the GOP, Tea Party candidates got onto nearly every ballot around the country and picked up 87 new seats in the US House of Representatives and 9 new seats in the Senate.
And even though the Tea Party didn’t then control a majority within the GOP in Congress like MAGA does now, they did control the Republican Party’s platform because they had control of the Precinct Committees.
Progressives and believers in democracy who want to fight Trump’s fascism need to do the same thing, only within the Democratic Party.
The rules about how to become a Precinct Committee Person vary from state to state, so step one is to show up at your local Democratic Party, sign up, and find out who the players are and what the rules are.
Even the names of these positions vary, as former Ohio Democratic Party Chairman David Pepper notes on his excellent Substack newsletter Pepperspectives:
“In Cincinnati, we call them ‘precinct executives.’ Elsewhere, they are called ‘committeemen’ or ‘committeewomen.’ In other places, ‘ward chairs.’ Whatever they’re called, they are the basic unit of each city or county party structure in the country.”
If we’ve learned one thing over the last few years, it’s that the Democratic Party shifted to the corporate “center” with Clinton and Obama and its establishment has been highly resistant to adopting real progressive change or elevating genuine progressives (like AOC) to senior/leadership positions.
And as we see right now in the Party’s leadership’s apparent inability to call out Trump and his parade of horribles, this unwillingness to stand up and fight is leading to the dismantling of programs that progressives fought so hard for over the entire last century.
We have been too often losing these fights, and to win them takes more than union protests in Wisconsin, a march on Trump’s birthday, or even voting, although those are all important.
But to really take power, like the Tea Party did in one short year, it will take an infiltration of the Democratic Party itself through claiming Precinct Committee positions, as well as simply showing up regularly at the meetings.
If this year, starting now, we execute the same strategy the Tea Party did when the billionaires funding it first set out to take over the GOP, then we can move the Democratic Party back to its progressive roots and finally see the progressive reforms — and election victories — that we’ve been fighting for.
We have 16 months before the 2026 midterm elections and your mission is to show up at your local Democratic Party headquarters and begin the infiltration.
Good luck and get started!
Keep ReadingShow Less
The GOP Is Trying to Undermine Social Security With Zombie Lies—Don’t Be Fooled.
Throughout history, Americans have recognized when Republican opponents of Social Security were lying. With Trump returning to power and Congress under right-wing control, we must be vigilant once again.
Jan 10, 2025
In addition to seeking to expand Social Security, those fighting for greater economic security must always continue to play defense. There have always been those who want to end Social Security. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower once described them as “a tiny splinter group” that seeks “to abolish Social Security.” He explained, “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Unfortunately, that tiny group now controls the Republican party.
Most of the time, they hide their true feelings, knowing how popular and important Social Security is, even with the Republican base. Sometimes, though, the veil drops and their true feelings are revealed. That happened most recently last month when Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) decided to share his true feelings about Social Security in a lengthy Twitter thread. Elon Musk, the soon-to-be shadow President of the United States, amplified the thread, calling it “interesting.”
That “interesting” thread was simply a rehash of lies first uttered by Alf Landon, the 1936 Republican nominee for President, who lost in a landslide. These lies are not just falsehoods but zombie lies, which are used to try to undermine support for Social Security, over and over again.
Every time, Americans have recognized that they were being told lies, and the opponents of Social Security failed. We must be vigilant and make sure that these current efforts fail, too.
Enemies of Social Security willfully refuse to see it as what it actually is: insurance against the loss of wages due to retirement, disability, or death of a family breadwinner.
Let’s review just a few of those zombie lies told by Alf Landon in 1936, Senator Lee last month, and numerous other opponents in the decades in between. They mischaracterize Social Security as individual savings and then claim people would be better off saving on their own. Indeed, they claim, in the words of Lee, that “the government routinely raids” our money. Some even slander our Social Security system by calling it a criminal Ponzi scheme.
These enemies of Social Security willfully refuse to see it as what it actually is: insurance against the loss of wages due to retirement, disability, or death of a family breadwinner. They ignore that Social Security is most working families’ only disability insurance, largest life insurance policy, and most secure, effective and efficient retirement income.
While you can outlive savings, you can never outlive Social Security. The liars refuse to acknowledge that Social Security is strikingly superior to its private sector counterparts—more efficient, secure, universal, and fair. Its one shortcoming is that benefits are too low.
President Franklin Roosevelt responded to Alf Landon’s lies eloquently, in words that are as true today as when he spoke them:
Never before in all our history have [the wealthy] been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred…[They] are not happy. Some of them are desperate. […]
They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit…
They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit…
But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy.
Everyone should save, if they possibly can. Everyone should also have adequate insurance. Savings are necessary for short-term emergencies and expenses; insurance, for large losses that are predictable for groups, but not individuals.
The liars refuse to acknowledge that Social Security is strikingly superior to its private sector counterparts—more efficient, secure, universal, and fair. Its one shortcoming is that benefits are too low.
To manage the risk of the financial loss associated with the loss of a home as the result of fire, homeowners purchase fire insurance; they do not simply save for the contingency. Similarly, car owners have car insurance, not car-accident savings accounts. And to manage the risk of lost income as the result of disability, death, old age, or unemployment, everyone who works for wages needs wage insurance in the form of Social Security and unemployment insurance.
In addition to the disinformation and the lies, Alf Landon, Mike Lee, and many other Social Security opponents claim that Social Security, in the words of Mike Lee, “is government dependency at its worst.” In truth, rather than undermining freedom, Social Security unlocks the freedom to change jobs, change careers, and change life circumstances while providing some measure of peace of mind that your earned Social Security benefits are there if misfortune strikes in the form of disability or death leaving dependents. They are also there if you have good fortune in the form of a very long life.
Perhaps Republican President Eisenhower said it best:
Retirement systems, by which individuals contribute to their own security…have become an essential part of our economic and social life. These systems are but a reflection of the American heritage of sturdy self-reliance which has made our country strong and kept it free; the self-reliance without which we would have had no Pilgrim Fathers, no hardship-defying pioneers, and no eagerness today to push to ever widening horizons in every aspect of our national life. The Social Security program furnishes, on a national scale, the opportunity for our citizens, through that same self-reliance, to build the foundation for their security.
Senator Lee’s zombie lies about Social Security may be appealing to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who will do whatever he can to avoid paying his fair share. But these lies will never convince the American people to abandon their overwhelming support for our Social Security system.
Lies about Social Security may be appealing to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who will do whatever he can to avoid paying his fair share. But these lies will never convince the American people to abandon their overwhelming support for our Social Security system.
Those lies have failed to change the narrative for 90 years, and they’re not going to work now.
It’s no surprise that Musk wants to undermine support for Social Security and is eager to amplify Mike Lee’s lies to do so. Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” is designed to target our earned benefits, with Republicans already admitting that “there will be some cuts” to Social Security and Medicare.
We must not let that happen.
Keep ReadingShow Less
In Private Meeting, Sanders Urged Biden to Embrace FDR-Style Agenda
"Democrats seem to think—many of them—that, only if we can explain all that we have accomplished, people will come on board. But that ignores the pain ordinary people are now experiencing," said the senator.
Mar 06, 2024
In a private meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden and his top advisers last fall, Sen. Bernie Sanders urged his former rival in the 2020 presidential race to disregard pundits and strategists deeply embedded in the Washington, D.C. "bubble" who believe the president can ignore the daily economic strife of millions of Americans, and speak candidly to voters who are struggling despite his administration's accomplishments.
As The Washington Post reported Wednesday, the Vermont Independent senator called on Biden to take inspiration from former President Franklin Roosevelt, who won reelection in 1936—three years after he introduced the first New Deal programs—after running a campaign in which he made clear that he would continue fighting for the working class and the 16% of Americans who were unemployed.
According to the Post, Sanders pointed to a portrait of Roosevelt in the Oval Office and quoted his 1936 remark about powerful corporations' and Wall Street's opposition to the New Deal: "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred."
Sanders told the Post that Biden "has a lot to be proud of" in his first term and that he should continue to "proudly talk about those achievements," including the inclusion of Medicare drug price negotiating power in the Inflation Reduction Act and his push for more clean energy manufacturing.
But Sanders emphasized in the private meeting that neither Biden's accomplishments nor the relatively low unemployment rate change the fact that many working people are struggling to afford essentials as corporations keep prices high for consumer goods and the costs of essentials including rent and childcare rise.
"You have to understand that people can't afford housing. The healthcare system is broken... If you want to get reelected, talk about how you're going to solve and address those enormously important issues."
One of Biden's accomplishments, the expansion of the child tax credit in 2021, pushed child poverty to a record low before it was allowed to expire by Republicans and right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, after which the rate roughly doubled.
Like Roosevelt, Sanders told the president and his advisers, Biden should call out his public enemies and those who are to blame for the suffering of working people.
"You have to understand that people can't afford housing. The healthcare system is broken. The housing system is broken. We have more income inequality than we've ever had," Sanders told the newspaper. "If you want to get reelected, talk about how you're going to solve and address those enormously important issues."
The senator, who has previously pushed Biden to embrace Social Security expansion and proposals to lower drug costs, called on the president to explain to voters an agenda for the first 100 days of his second term if the Democrats win the House and maintain control of the Senate, modeled on Roosevelt's historically productive first 100 days in office.
Expanding Social Security and Medicare benefits to help senior citizens, 23% of whom live in poverty; taxing the estates of the richest Americans; and raising the minimum wage should be agenda items for the beginning of Biden's second term, said Sanders.
"Democrats seem to think—many of them—that, only if we can explain all that we have accomplished, people will come on board. But that ignores the pain ordinary people are now experiencing," Sanders said. "He has got to lay out a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of working people, and promise if he has a Democratic majority in the House and Senate that he will implement that in the first few months of his term."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Biden's Picket Line Solidarity Is a Big Deal—Even Though It Shouldn't Be
Biden’s UAW picket line visit reflects the fact that the strike by union workers is so popular that the leader of the most pro-capitalist country on Earth believed being seen standing alongside them was politically advantageous. That's historic.
Sep 28, 2023
On Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line when he visited striking United Auto Workers (UAW) members outside a GM parts facility in Belleville, Michigan.
“You guys, UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices, gave up a lot when the companies were in trouble,” the president said to picketing workers. “But now they’re doing incredibly well, and guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too.”
The president has voiced support for the UAW’s strike at the Big Three automakers since it began on September 15. But after former President Donald Trump announced plans to hold a campaign rally at a non-union auto parts plant near Detroit — which the media grossly mischaracterized as “Trump standing with striking autoworkers” — Biden was pushed by fellow Democrats to visit a UAW picket line.
As a candidate in 2019, Biden joined workers on picket lines, including striking GM employees. Candidate Bill Clinton also walked a picket line in 1992, as did candidate Barack Obama in 2007. But no president has ever joined a picket line while in office until today.
On the campaign trail, Obama promised workers that, if elected, he would “put on a comfortable pair of shoes” and “walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America” — a promise he never fulfilled. As Obama’s vice president, Biden rebuffed a request from Wisconsin labor leaders in 2011 to join their massive protest against Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s push to curtail public sector union rights.
Biden’s UAW picket line visit reflects the fact that the strike by union workers is so popular that the leader of the most pro-capitalist country on Earth believed being seen standing alongside them was politically advantageous.
“This is absolutely unprecedented. No president has ever walked a picket line before,” labor historian Erik Loomis told the Associated Press.
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein similarly told the Guardian, “This is genuinely new — I don’t think it’s ever happened before, a president on a picket line.”
Presidents and picket lines
Almost three years into his term, much ink has been spilled debating whether Biden is living up to his promise to be the “most pro-union president leading the most pro-union administration in American history,” and today’s event will undoubtedly further fuel that discussion.
But what often goes unmentioned is what a low bar it is to earn the distinction of most pro-union president in U.S. history. Far from joining picket lines, most presidents have firmly sided with bosses, if they weren’t bosses themselves.
Twelve U.S. presidents (one in four) were literal slave owners — eight of them while in office. They physically coerced men, women and children to work for them in cruel, excruciating and humiliating conditions with no freedoms and no rights to speak of, let alone compensation.
Several presidents have deployed federal troops to break strikes and crush worker rebellions, including Andrew Jackson in 1834, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, Grover Cleveland in 1894, Theodore Roosevelt in 1903 and 1907, and Warren G. Harding in 1921.
Calvin Coolidge’s ascent to the White House was set in motion in 1919 when, as Massachusetts governor, he defeated the unpopular Boston police strike and declared, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”
During wars, Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman seized control of certain enterprises or entire industries a total of 71 times to prevent or end strikes — sometimes on the side of unions, sometimes on the side of management.
Since Congress passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman’s veto, the law’s emergency injunction provision — allowing the federal government to shut down strikes in the private sector — has been invoked by presidents 35 times.
Ronald Reagan — the only White House occupant to have previously been a union president and strike leader—infamously fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 rather than negotiate a new contract with them, setting off the modern era of union busting.
Still, some presidents have also occasionally provided organized labor with moral and tangible support.
In March 1860, as the New England Shoemakers Strike was underway, candidate Abraham Lincoln addressed the situation while campaigning in Hartford, Connecticut. “I know one thing — there is a strike! And I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to,” he said.
Four years later, as the Civil War raged, a printers’ strike in St. Louis was in danger of being broken by U.S. Army troops commanded by General William Rosecrans, who saw labor disputes as impediments to the war effort. The printers appealed to President Lincoln by reminding him of his campaign remarks about the right to strike. Lincoln is said to have ordered Rosecrans to stand down.
President Teddy Roosevelt made history during the anthracite coal strike of 1902 when, instead of simply having the military stamp out the strike, he attempted to mediate a fair resolution by bringing union and management representatives to Washington to negotiate as equals.
During World War I, Woodrow Wilson rewarded union workers with shorter hours, higher wages and better conditions to avoid strikes. But Wilson was also merciless toward anti-war labor radicals, imprisoning many organizers with the Industrial Workers of the World for “obstructing” the war.
Franklin D. Roosevelt is often considered the most pro-labor U.S. president because he oversaw the New Deal — a slew of reforms in the 1930s that uplifted much of the industrial working class, including the pro-union National Labor Relations Act. A famous 1940 union poster quotes FDR as saying, “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I’d do would be TO JOIN A UNION” — but it’s unclear if he ever actually said this.
“Earned, not freely given”
FDR’s New Deal wouldn’t have been possible without overwhelming Democratic majorities in Congress, a critical advantage not enjoyed by Joe Biden and his stalled Build Back Better agenda.
Nevertheless, Biden has made a decent effort. Under his administration, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been more unabashedly pro-worker than likely any time since the 1930s. Biden has also followed union leaders’ wishes on who to elevate into key positions such as Secretary of Labor and NLRB general counsel, and has used his bully pulpit to make some of the most pro-union public statements we’ve ever heard from a president (again, it’s a low bar.)
At the same time, Biden has so far failed to get Congress to pass the union-friendly PRO Act, though he was all too successful in getting Congress to preempt last year’s potential railroad strike and impose an unpopular contract on rail workers despite a majority of them voting to reject it. Anti-union actions like overriding rank-and-file democracy and denying workers’ their fundamental right to strike are unfortunately par for the course for U.S. presidents.
This seems to be something UAW President Shawn Fain understands. Just as Fain refused to engage in the traditional, ceremonial handshake with the Big Three CEOs at the start of contract bargaining, he and his union have so far refrained from endorsing Biden’s reelection (while 17 other unions and the AFL-CIO quickly endorsed him back in June).
“Our endorsements are going to be earned, not freely given,” Fain has said. This example of labor proudly standing up for itself and demanding respect, instead of reflexively bowing to those in power, likely encouraged Biden to make history by joining the picket line today. It may also be what ultimately forces the Big Three to make historic concessions to striking autoworkers.Keep ReadingShow Less
Report Details How Community Utilities Can Usher In Green Energy Transition
"We have a powerful tool to accelerate the energy transition in a way that builds community wealth and energy justice in our communities: publicly and cooperatively owned utilities."
Apr 18, 2022
Publicly and cooperatively owned utilities offer a better transition path to a fossil-free power grid than their corporate-owned counterparts--as long as they are properly reformed and regulated--the authors of a report published Monday argue.
"It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system."
The report--by Thomas Hanna, Johanna Bozuwa, and Raj Rao of the Democracy Collaborative and Climate and Community Project--found that community utilities "are better suited for a 'Green New Deal'-style transition than for-profit corporate utilities."
However, the authors also contend that "many community utilities as they currently exist must be significantly reformed to fulfill their full potential."
"The United States urgently needs to transition off of fossil fuels and onto clean sources of energy (especially renewable energy) to maintain a livable climate," they assert, noting that "as of 2020, only around 20% of U.S. electricity generation is from renewable energy sources."
"Energy utilities--the companies that run our power systems--have enormous control over the scope and scale of the transition, but have often dragged their feet or even fought against clean energy," the report continues. "Not only does their inaction imperil the very future of humanity, but it directly harms families--often Black, Indigenous, low-income, or otherwise marginalized--who live in the shadow of toxic power plants."
"The current U.S. energy system is dirty and expensive," the publication states. "Thirty-one percent of households in the country have to make the choice between buying groceries or paying their energy bills. In response, communities across the country are beginning to mobilize to demand an energy transition."
The authors stress that "we have a powerful tool to accelerate the energy transition in a way that builds community wealth and energy justice in our communities: publicly and cooperatively owned utilities."
According to the report, around 30% of U.S. households are currently powered by community utilities, whose historical roots the authors call "radical."
"In the early days of electrification 100 years ago, residents across the country rose up against profiteering private utilities who provided poor (or nonexistent) service at high prices by creating their own publicly and cooperatively owned utilities," they note. "In the state of Nebraska, for instance, they kicked all private utilities out of the state for good. To this day, there are no private utilities providing electricity to Nebraskans' homes."
The report also cites the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's Rural Electrification Administration, a New Deal program that boosted the electrification rate from 10% to 90% in a decade as farmers united to start their own electric cooperatives.
"It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system," the report's authors assert.
The report lays out a nine-point plan for community utilities to realize their full potential. Blocking privatization, setting incentives and mandates for renewable energy, establishing public banks and financing, and boosting democratic governance are some of the steps the authors say are crucial for success.
"Community utilities are much better suited to support a just and equitable clean energy transition than for-profit corporate utilities," said Hanna.
"However, many must be reformed and democratized to fulfill their potential," he added. "Alongside (and integrated with) larger public interventions and institutions in the energy system (such as regional public power producers), community utilities can play a prominent role in the clean energy future we desperately need."
Keep ReadingShow Less
How the US Government Segregated America
All of these racist government housing policies and neglect underlie the extreme wealth gap between black and white Americans.
Dec 16, 2021
For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart of the city neighborhoods, I was keenly aware of the apartheid nature of public and residential housing (black Roxbury, white South Boston, white gentrification overtaking Boston's mixed-income interracial neighborhoods, and white suburbs)
Many do not realize that the first public housing built in cities by the New Deal was built for white-only working and lower-middle class and even middle class white families, given the housing shortage during the Depression.
I had been familiar with the mid-20th century pattern of "white flight" from urban neighborhoods to suburbs, abetted by venal realtors scaring white residents to sell low while selling high to black homebuyers, and "redlining"- realtors and banks refusing to show or offer mortgages to qualified African American homebuyers in white neighborhoods. Both fostered the toxic racial segregation in our cities and metropolitan areas. But we learn in Richard Rothstein's deeply researched and thoroughly documented The Color of Law: How the US Government Segregated America that this was one of many drivers of our national black-white segregation. Beginning in the early 20th century, strictly enforced government policies formed the foundation of black ghettos and white suburbs and the consequent missed opportunity for African American wealth building.
The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 during the New Deal, forced newly built suburbs to be racially exclusive through guaranteeing whites-only mortgages. State courts colluded in restrictive covenants, by excluding blacks from certain neighborhoods and ordering the eviction of African American residents from designated white neighborhoods. Churches, universities and hospitals supported restrictive covenants in their vicinities to keep their neighborhoods white, yet they never lost their tax-exempt status. Federal and state highway planners used the interstate highway construction to demolish black neighborhoods and business districts, pushing African Americans deeper into urban ghettos. Public housing since its inception was segregated. And, when black-only public housing was sited in stable, integrated urban neighborhoods, it often catalyzed white residents to leave. Police refrained from arresting white mobs that threatened new black homeowners in white suburbs.
Many do not realize that the first public housing built in cities by the New Deal was built for white-only working and lower-middle class and even middle class white families, given the housing shortage during the Depression. And it was provided with many amenities such as, landscaping and playgrounds. Public housing built subsequently for African Americans had none of these amenities.
Likewise, all of the housing built for government job-creation programs of the New Deal was segregated, including the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Public Works Administration (PWA) as well as the war industries at the onset of WWII. In most cases the housing for African American workers--when it was provided--was shoddy in construction with no amenities, sited near industrial areas deemed unsuitable for white housing and more remote from the workplace industries. Many local governments and states rejected African American CCC camps within their borders, forcing the federal government to house the workers on army bases and federal land.
Because of institutional racism Black veterans of World War II received only 40% worth the benefits of white veterans. Local VA officers had created administrative obstacles for black veterans to access their benefits, including guaranteed mortgages for homes; and they directed them to vocational and non-degree programs rather than four-year colleges and universities. Black wealth building was again stymied by intentional government racist neglect.
The following incident, one of many recounted in this book, portrays the brutal abuse African Americans bore when defying restrictive housing covenants in white-only suburbs. A large housing development that the Levitt Company built during the 1950s in Bucks County, a suburb of Philadelphia, was emblematic of new suburbs throughout the country. The Federal Housing Administration would only guarantee the mortgages if the developer refused to sell to African Americans, in violation of the 5th, 13th and 14th amendments of the Constitution.
By the late 1950s, white suburban homeowners in Levittown planning to sell their homes realized that African Americans would pay more than whites because they had been shut out of middle and lower-middle class housing developments. A college-educated black couple tried to obtain a mortgage to buy a house in Levittown, but no bank would provide them one. A philanthropist gave them a private guaranteed mortgage; but once they occupied their new home, the mailman, a US federal employee, shouted as he delivered mail, "Niggers have moved into Levittown." Hundreds of white demonstrators gathered in front of the black family's home, hurled rocks at them and their house, blasted music nearby all night, and burned crosses with the KKK symbol in full view. Local police made no attempt to arrest the law-breaking demonstrators.
After four years of torment, the family sold their home and returned to the African American neighborhood in which they had lived. "This unremedied conspiracy of government authorities [federal, with mortgage refusal and postal employee; local, with lack of police protection] contributed "to maintaining de jure residential segregation of the communities for whose welfare they are responsible," concludes Rothstein.
Today the median black family's wealth is about one-tenth that of a white family, with no progress made in 70 years.
All of these racist government housing policies and neglect underlie the extreme wealth gap between black and white Americans. Most white middle class Americans gained their wealth through home equity appreciation over time and mortgage interest deductions for homeowners. Further, mid and later 20th century studies of many US cities--among them, Albany, Boston, Chicago, Fort Worth and Norfolk, exposed the excessive tax burden on urban African Americans homeowners and their landlords, leading to their housing deterioration and financial worth. One salient example from many that Rothstein cites: in Baltimore the white middle-class community of Guilford near Johns Hopkins University had 1/9th the property tax costs of African American East Baltimore.
Today the median black family's wealth is about one-tenth that of a white family, with no progress made in 70 years. Nearly one-half of poor black children live in deeply impoverished neighborhoods, four times the rate of poor white children. Upward mobility is frozen for generations of African Americans.
These same neighborhoods are food deserts with limited access to nutritional and affordable food and have fewer primary care physicians, and fewer bookstores and literacy experiences. They are more toxic, having greater airborne pollution because of traffic congestion and disproportionately sited industrial facilities. "The percentage of minorities living near incinerators was 89 percent higher than the national median," according to government and environmental justice studies of the late 20th century. These same communities are plagued with more overcrowded living arrangements, neglected playgrounds, underfunded schools, greater risk in situations with police and criminal justice, and higher Covid infection rates and deaths. Cities have consistently zoned commercial and industrial sites proximate to or within African American residential communities, such that studies have concluded that race was a predominant statistical predictor of where hazardous waste facilities have been sited.
As a consequence of this de jure segregation in violation of the Constitution, government-driven remedies are owed as a moral and legal obligation, a theme that gains increasing weight with every chapter of The Color of Law. This demand has a precedent. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 gave surviving Japanese American internees reparations and a formal apology by President Reagan for their incarceration during World War II. Though late in happening and meager in amount, it is a precedent.
The remedies the author suggests include affirmative action in housing policy and practice. For example, the Section 8 voucher program for low-income households has the mainly unrealized potential to enable low-income recipients to live in integrated neighborhoods with better schools, which is likely to give more mobility out of poverty, as studies have shown. But many more are needed to meet the demand. In 2015 about one million families had vouchers, while another 6 million languished on waiting lists. Further, the voucher amount is often too low to cover rental and security deposit costs.
Another remedy, which Rothstein admits is highly unlikely in today's climate, though it is fair and just, is the following. Given African Americans are 15 percent of the population, the federal government "should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown and other suburbs built with exclusionary zoning, at market price and sell to African Americans for $75,000," this being the price in today's dollars their grandparents would have paid, if they had been allowed to do so.
Other housing remedies include banning zoning ordinances that prohibit multifamily housing and apartments and require large lots. With the goal of reducing the residential isolation of low-income families, two states--Massachusetts and New Jersey--require developers in towns and suburbs without a "fair share" of subsided housing to "set aside units in middle-income projects for low-income families."
What The Color of Law does not do--but is essential for the housing policy remedies to succeed--is address how whites and blacks move from being strangers to neighbors, who live well side-by-side. This will demand that whites commit to examining our conscious and unconscious racial attitudes. I highly recommend: Let's Talk Race: A Guide for White People by Fern Johnson and Marlene Fine. The former UMass professors are white mothers who together raised two black sons. As reviewers of this book wrote: "A solid and practical guide to having the necessary conversations that those of us who are white are so reluctant to have." "... With a call for fearless speech and courageous listening, the authors refuse to be complicit with white silence, apathy and ignorance..." These capture my own perspective of this fine, insightful, educational book.
Keep ReadingShow Less
If Biden Genuinely Aspires to Build Back Better, He Would Deviate From US Militarism
if President Biden intends to Go Big at home, he will need to Go Big in changing U.S. policies abroad as well.
May 18, 2021
Is President Biden afflicted with the political equivalent of a split personality? His first several months in office suggest just that possibility. On the home front, the president's inclination is clearly to Go Big. When it comes to America's role in the world, however, Biden largely hews to pre-Trumpian precedent. So far at least, the administration's overarching foreign-policy theme is Take It Slow.
" Joe Biden Is Electrifying America Like F.D.R." So proclaimed the headline of a recent Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times. Even allowing for a smidgen of hyperbole, the comparison is not without merit. Much like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his famous First Hundred Days in office in the midst of the Great Depression, Biden has launched a flurry of impressively ambitious domestic initiatives in the midst of the Great Pandemic--an American Rescue Plan, an American Jobs Plan, an American Families Plan, and most recently an environmental restoration program marketed as America the Beautiful.
Biden's Build Back Better domestic campaign qualifies as a first cousin once removed of Roosevelt's famed New Deal. To fix an ailing nation, FDR promoted unprecedented federal intervention in the economy combined with a willingness to spend lots of money. As then, so today, details and specifics took a back seat to action, vigorous and sustained, not sooner or later but right now.
Of course, FDR's Hundred Days did not actually end the Great Depression, which lingered on for the remainder of the 1930s. From the outset, however, the New Deal captured imaginations, especially among progressives. It invested national politics with a sense of hope and excitement. As historians subsequently came to appreciate, the New Deal was also rife with internal contradictions. Nevertheless, in terms of both style and substance, Roosevelt became and remains the beau ideal of the activist president. As press depictions of Joe Biden as our latest FDR proliferate, one can easily imagine the president happily filling his scrapbook with newspaper clippings.
That said, any political leader who embarks on an aggressive domestic reform program has to prevent the outside world from getting in the way. Roosevelt largely succeeded in doing so through his first two terms. Activism at home did not translate into activism abroad. Eventually, however, the outbreak of war in Europe and in the Far East famously prompted FDR to retire "Dr. New Deal" and don the mantle of "Dr. Win-the-War." In doing so, he was bowing to the inevitable. The New Deal was already running out of gas when the danger posed by a global struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan brought it to a screeching halt. FDR wisely chose to accommodate himself to that reality.
In the ultimate irony, defeating those enemies made good on various unfulfilled New Deal aspirations, restoring both American prosperity and self-confidence. Yet war inevitably imposes its own priorities and creates its own legacies. World War II did so in spades. If postwar America bore the imprint of the New Deal, it also differed substantially from what New Dealers back in the 1930s had envisioned as the purpose of their enterprise.
Not least of all, during the ensuing Cold War, standing in immediate over-armed, over-funded readiness for the next war became a permanent priority. As a consequence, domestic matters took a backseat to a fundamentally militarized conception of what keeping Americans safe and guaranteeing their freedoms required. As the self-designated guardian of the "Free World," the United States became a garrison state.
"That Bitch of a War"
A generation later, a reform-minded president fancying himself FDR's rightful heir faced a variant of Roosevelt's dilemma, but demonstrated far less skill in adapting to it.
In the mid-1960s, Lyndon Baines Johnson conceived of a domestic reform plan that would, he believed, out-do the New Deal. His vision of a Great Society would guarantee "abundance and liberty for all," while ensuring "an end to poverty and racial injustice." And that, Johnson insisted, would be "just the beginning":
"The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."
Here was a promise of nothing less than a federally designed and federally funded utopia. And for a brief moment, it even seemed plausible.
Winning the presidency in his own right in 1964--he had first gained it as vice-president when John F. Kennedy was assassinated--elevated LBJ to a position in American politics not unlike FDR's 30 years earlier. Senator Barry Goldwater's abysmal showing as the Republican presidential candidate that year left his party in disarray. Democrats enjoyed clear majorities in both houses of Congress. Assuming he could steer clear of complications related to the ongoing Cold War, the way seemed clear for LBJ to Go Big as a domestic reformer.
As it turned out, this was not to be. Within a year of unveiling his Great Society, Johnson made a fateful decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in an ongoing war in Vietnam. In effect, LBJ laid down a huge bet, calculating that Going Big on the home front would prove compatible with fighting a major war in Southeast Asia. He wagered that "Dr. Great Society" could simultaneously serve as "Dr. Win-the-War," so long as that war remained manageable.
Over the course of several agonizing years, Johnson discovered that the two roles were incompatible. The conflict he came to call "that bitch of a war" doomed his Great Society, destroyed his presidency, and left a legacy of bitterness and division from which the nation has yet to fully recover. Rather than ranking alongside his hero FDR, Johnson ended up being roundly despised by conservatives and liberals alike, by those who had served in Vietnam and those who had opposed the war. In the estimation of many, "Dr. Great Society" ended up as "Dr. Callous and Cruel."
Recall, however, that Johnson chose to go to war in Vietnam, even while persuading himself that politically he had little choice but to do so. The trivial Tonkin Gulf Incident of August 1964 did not even faintly replay Pearl Harbor, yet LBJ pretended otherwise. His misguided decision to use that pseudo-event as a pretext for armed intervention stemmed from a wildly ill-advised reading of contemporary politics. An ostensibly savvy pol, Johnson backed himself into a corner from which he could find no escape.
The imperatives of the Cold War seemingly dictated that, if the United States allowed Vietnam to "go Communist," the sitting commander-in-chief and his party would incur unacceptable political damage. In Washington and across much of the country, the prevailing mood demanded toughness in confronting the Red Threat. Better to fight them in the jungles of Indochina than in the suburbs of San Francisco--so went the thinking at the time.
That a conflict between two recently minted Southeast Asian nations, neither of them democratic but each claiming to represent the Vietnamese people, could determine the fate of the entire Free World will strike most readers today (schooled by more recent debacles like the invasion and occupation of Iraq) as preposterous. In the mid-1960s, however, Lyndon Johnson judged the risks of saying so out loud too great for him to chance. So he sent hundreds of thousands of G.I.s off to fight an unwinnable war and put the torch to his own presidency.
Will Joe Biden Be Dr. Build Back Better?
To most Americans today the Vietnam War has become a distant memory. Let me suggest that its lessons remain notably relevant to our reform-minded administration of the present moment.
Johnson's mistake was to defer to an entrenched but deeply defective national security paradigm when the success of his domestic reforms demanded that he reject it. President Biden should take heed. To preserve his status as the latest reincarnation of FDR, Biden will have to avoid the errors in judgment that consigned LBJ's Great Society to history's junkheap.
On the foreign-policy front, the Biden team can already claim some modest, if tentative achievements. President Biden has indeed preserved the New Start nuclear agreement with Russia. Unlike his predecessor, he acknowledges that climate change is an urgent threat requiring concerted action. He has signaled his interest in salvaging the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Perhaps most notably, he has ordered the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, ending the longest war in American history. Implicit in that decision is the possibility of further reductions in the U.S. military footprint across the Greater Middle East and much of Africa, all undertaken pursuant to a misguided post-9/11 Global War on Terror.
That said, so far President Biden has left essentially untouched the core assumptions that justify the vast (and vastly well funded) national security apparatus created in the wake of World War II. Central to those assumptions is the conviction that global power projection, rather than national defense per se, defines the U.S. military establishment's core mission. Washington's insistence on asserting global primacy (typically expressed using euphemisms like "global leadership") finds concrete expression in a determination to remain militarily dominant everywhere.
So far at least, Biden shows no inclination to renounce, or even reassess, the practices that have evolved to pursue such global military dominion. These include Pentagon expenditures easily exceeding those of any adversary or even plausible combination of adversaries; an arms industry that corrupts American politics and openly subverts democracy; a massive, essentially unusable nuclear strike force presently undergoing a comprehensive $1.7 trillion "modernization"; a network of hundreds of bases hosting U.S. troop contingents in dozens of countries around the world; and, of course, an inclination to use force unmatched by any nation with the possible exception of Israel.
Military leaders like to say that the armed services exist to "fight and win the nation's wars," a misleading claim on two counts. First, based on the results achieved since 9/11, they rarely win. Second, their actual purpose is to satisfy various bureaucratic and corporate interests, not to mention ideological fantasies, all captured in the awkward but substantively accurate phrase military-industrial-congressional-think-tank complex.
Put simply, ours is a nation in which various powerful and influential institutions are deeply invested in war. If President Biden genuinely aspires to be "Dr. Build Back Better," he would do well to contemplate the implications of that fact, lest he willy-nilly find himself sharing LBJ's sad fate.
In Washington and various quarters of the commentariat, an eagerness to get tough with China and/or Russia and/or Iran--a veritable Axis of Evil!--is palpable. Biden ignores these tendencies at his peril. Indeed, if genuinely committed to prioritizing domestic reforms, he should actively resist those intent on diverting him onto a path pointing to military confrontation.
Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser, says that his boss has "tasked us with reimagining our national security." Of course, reimagining presumes a high level of creativity along with an ability to cast aside obsolete habits of mind. Whether Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Pentagon chief General Lloyd Austin, or Biden himself possesses the requisite level of imagination remains, at best, an open question. Little in their collective backgrounds suggests that they do. In the meantime, somewhere out there in the South China Sea, the Donbas region of Ukraine, or the Persian Gulf, some variant of a Tonkin Gulf event lurks, ready to sink the administration's domestic agenda.
If Biden wants to be "Dr. Build Back Better," he should assume the additional role of "Dr. Curb the War Habit." That means rejecting once and for all the illusions of military dominion to which too many in Washington still pay tribute, whether cynically or out of misguided conviction. Doing so will require not only imagination but gumption. Still, if President Biden intends to Go Big at home, he will need to Go Big in changing U.S. policies abroad as well.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Just How Bold Is President Biden's Tax-the-Rich Plan?
A little history can help us with the answer.
Apr 30, 2021
President Joe Biden has made no secret of his admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He's even given a painted portrait of FDR the most prominent place of honor in the White House Oval Office. A bit more significantly, Biden has just announced the most ambitious gameplan--since FDR's New Deal--for enhancing the well-being of working Americans and trimming the incomes of America's super rich.
Has Biden, with this gameplan, definitively reached FDR-like levels on the political daring meter? Has his administration now earned something close to Rooseveltian stature? That all depends--on how we answer just one more question: Just how bold does Biden's new tax-the-rich plan actually happen to be?
This observer's answer: Much bolder than the numbers--at first glance--might seem to suggest.
Let's start by going back to FDR's last year in office, the 12 months before he passed in 1945. At that point in time, the nation's most awesomely affluent faced a 94 percent tax on their ordinary income over $200,000, earnings that would equal a little more than $2.9 million in today's dollars.
The new Biden tax plans ends the most basic of our tax code's breaks for the ultra rich: the preferential treatment they get on the income from their wheeling and dealing. And the ending of this preferential treatment would be a big deal indeed.
Tax brackets below that $200,000 back then also carried stiff rates. One example: Affluents in FDR's last year paid a 78 percent tax on income between $50,000 and $60,000, the equivalent of between $736,000 and $883,000 today, and every income bracket between $60,000 and $200,000 sported a progressively higher tax rate.
The tax rates the Biden administration has just proposed come nowhere near those 90-plus or even 70-plus Rooseveltian rates. If Congress goes along with the Biden plan, any personal income over $400,000 from employment or the ownership of a business will just face a 39.6 percent tax, a rate only up slightly from the current 37 percent.
But what seems a huge gap between New Deal-era tax rates on high incomes and what the Biden administration is proposing starts shrinking big-time when we toss capital gains--the dollars the rich make buying and selling stocks and bonds, property, and other assets--into the picture.
In 1945, at the end of the Roosevelt administration, the nation's deepest pockets paid a 25 percent tax on their capital gain windfalls. Today's really rich currently face a capital gains tax that tops off at 20 percent. For households making over $1 million in annual income, the Biden plan would raise the top capital gains tax rate to 39.6 percent, the same top rate that applies to earnings from employment.
In other words, the new Biden tax plans ends the most basic of our tax code's breaks for the ultra rich: the preferential treatment they get on the income from their wheeling and dealing. And the ending of this preferential treatment would be a big deal indeed. In 2019, 75 percent of the benefits gushing in from the capital gains tax break went to America's top 1 percent.
Dividends currently get the same preferential federal tax treatment as capital gains. Americans making over $10 million in 2018 took in over half of their total incomes--54 percent--via capital gains and dividends. If Congress adopts the Biden tax plan, the basic federal tax on that 54 percent would just about double, from 20 to 39.6 percent.
The Biden plan also totally eliminates the federal tax code's open invitation to dynastic family wealth: the "step up" loophole. Under this notorious tax code giveaway, any fabulously wealthy American sitting on unrealized capital gains can pass those gains onto heirs tax-free.
Suppose, say, that a billionaire passes away while still holding $100 billion worth of stock that he bought for $20 billion. That billionaire's heirs need pay no tax on any of that $80 billion gain because, under current law, the original $20 billion value of this stock gets "stepped up" to the stock's value at the time of the billionaire's death.
Under the Biden plan, if the heirs in our little morality tale sell their inherited shares, they'll pay a capital gains tax on the difference between the $20 billion originally spent to buy the shares and whatever they reap from selling them. In effect, the Biden plan short-circuits the simplest route to dynastic fortune. No more tax-free pass on inherited capital gains.
In a United States with the Biden tax plan the law of the land, new dynastic fortunes will have a much harder time taking root. Already existing dynastic fortunes, on the other hand, will still be with us. Biden--like FDR in his day--has not yet warmed to the idea of a wealth tax.
Earlier this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren led a Capitol Hill hearing that highlighted the enormous contribution that even a mere 2 percent annual tax on grand fortune could make. Among the insightful witnesses at the hearing: the 61-year-old Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Roy Disney, the co-founder of the Disney empire with his brother Walt.
"I can tell you from personal experience," Abigail Disney told the assembled senators, "that too much money is a morally corrosive thing--it gnaws away at your character, it narrows your focus down onto your own well-being, it warps your idea of how much you matter and rather than make you free it turns you fearful of losing what you have."
Franklin Roosevelt understood that debilitating dynamic well enough to propose, in 1942, a 100 percent tax on annual income over what today would be about $400,000. Joe Biden hasn't yet ventured anywhere close to that level of daring. But he's certainly come much further down the road to tax and economic fairness than anyone could reasonably have expected. FDR must be smiling.
Keep ReadingShow Less
What We Can Learn From the First New Deal to Make the New One Better
Whether it is called "Build Back Better" or a "Green Industrial Policy" or, indeed, a Green New Deal, it is imperative to reject the false dichotomy of "jobs against climate."
Apr 14, 2021
Metaphors matter. As a metaphor, the "New Deal" has been mobilized both in response to climate change and in support of President Biden's rescue and infrastructure initiatives. It needs examination if it is to go from serving as a mere slogan to defining a coherent program. Compelling invocation of the New Deal turns on:
- Building state capacity for implementing interventions in the market economy;
- Navigating potential conflicts in overlapping missions; and
- Managing inescapable tradeoffs between efficiency versus effectiveness.
For a long generation from Pearl Harbor, the language of war provided the liberating rationale for mobilization of resources by the American state. Liberating, because a legitimate war frees state actors from the constraints of prospective cost-benefit analysis, where the costs are always easier to quantify than the putative benefits. "Whatever it takes" is the message.
From World War II through the Korean conflict and the 40-year Cold War, including the War on Cancer, this metaphor did its job. The overriding importance of the mission outweighed the economic calculus of opportunity cost versus net present value of expected returns. In this spirit, World War II was won "on the unorganized momentum of American Democracy," not by the efficient allocation of scarce resources amongst competing demands. But after Vietnam, the endless quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, the War on Drugs, and the Global War on Terror, the language of war has lost its rallying force. It has been debased. This why retrieval of the "New Deal" as a metaphor to propel action is so relevant today.
In folk memory, FDR's New Deal combined relief, reform, and positive investment in one great seamless demonstration of the progressive potential of vigorous government. In reality, it was complicated and conflicted. Multiple references to FDR's own statement of purpose in his 1932 campaign hint at recognition:
The country needs and unless I mistake its temper the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all try something.
The successive experiments that characterized the New Deal during FDR's first two terms, prior to the onset of World War II, illustrate the conflicts--even contradictions--that may be expected to result from improvising policy responses to crisis. Consideration of those policy responses focuses attention on three prime lessons for any administration that seeks to devise and execute grand programs, whether in response to systemic financial and economic collapse, a viral pandemic, or climate change.
(Re)Building State Capacity
New Deal: At the onset of the Great Depression, the economic footprint of the Federal Government was minimal: expenditures were less than 2% of retrospective estimates of GDP. Apart from the armed forces totaling some 260,000, Federal civilian employment at 500,000 (half of whom worked for the Post Office) was only 1% of the employed labor force of 50 million. By the time Franklin Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the share of federal expenditures had almost doubled, but that was because GDP had declined in nominal terms by almost 50%.
This meant that the new agencies created during the famous First Hundred Days were starting from scratch. For example, the Public Works Administration (discussed at greater length below), created by legislation on June 16, 1933, hired some 6,000 staff in two months. The Deputy Administrator, Henry M. Waite, subsequently recalled:
First they hired lawyers, many lawyers--more than 100 for the Washington office alone...
After the lawyers came the engineers...
Added to all these were the platoons of accountants, clerks, stenographers, and typists, until there were more than 2,300 jammed into the Interior Department building.[3]
Another 3,700 new recruits staffed the PWA's 10 regional offices.
The same was true of all the other alphabet soup of Administrations, Agencies, Bureaus, and Commissions created under conditions of extreme urgency. Inevitably the Federal programs had to look to the states for support in implementation. But, constrained by their constitutional requirements to balance their budgets, state expenditures fell with the Depression-forced reduction in their tax revenues. And so, in critical instances as we shall see, partnerships with business became a fact of life.
In one crucial respect, however, FDR's capacity to mobilize state authority was unchallenged. Massive Democratic majorities in Congress backed his executive initiatives through his First Term, even though the power wielded by the Southern segregationist components of his coalition were manifest in every piece of New Deal legislation. Substantial congressional opposition only emerged in the late 1930s, as Southern Democrats increasingly aligned with a Republican minority much strengthened in the 1938 off-year election.
Today: In 2018, Michael Lewis correctly anticipated the crisis of state capacity that confronted the Biden Administration in January 2021. That crisis was compounded by two processes operating on two very different timescales.
A generation-long effort to restrict the scope and scale of the Federal Government's engagement with the market economy was aggressively pursued whenever Republican Administrations and/or Republic majorities in Congress held power, from 1981 on. And from the Carter Administration, which initiated the first rollback of market regulations, through the Clinton Administration and even to some extent during the Obama Administration, Democratic neoliberals acquiesced.
Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department were starved of funds. The Congressional Office of Technology Assessment was closed. As Matt Stoller has documented, government officials were mandated to defer to increasingly concentrated private contractors with the expected consequences in terms of rent extraction both by suppliers and the consultants increasingly invited into the process.
During the four years of the Trump Administration, the attack on state capacity accelerated in new ways. On the one hand, any existing element of the Federal Government that could be deemed concerned with responding to climate change was proposed for liquidation, as was the Energy Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Additionally, whether or not Congress (as with ARPA-E) refused to confirm such initiatives, the Trump Administration pursued a less transparent course.
Across the Federal Government, new rules and regulations were promulgated to reduce the reach of the "Administrative State," deemed pernicious by construction. And Trump appointed senior personnel dedicated to opposing the mission of those agencies they had been chosen to lead. To the extent possible, they were granted civil service status to render it more difficult for the new Administration to remove and replace them.
Everywhere access to expert scientific and technological policy guidance was minimized if not totally foreclosed. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is a case in point: it took 18 months from Trump's inauguration for any Director to be appointed and once appointed there is "scant evidence" evidence that the Director,
tried to mitigate any of the administration's most controversial policies relating to science and innovation. The list includes its chaotic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, rolling back a slew of environmental regulations, restricting immigration, and proposing deep cuts in the budgets of most federal research agencies.
The Biden Administration has an enormous challenge just to undo the damage wrought in the past four years. But there is a further, transcendent component of state capacity, one that for the most part FDR did not have to confront, at least until he was challenged to pledge, during the 1940 presidential campaign, that "your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." This is the matter of basic trust in the country's political leadership.
President Biden may be constructing a path towards rebuilding trust through success in delivering the Coronavirus vaccines to the arms of the American public as well as delivering the retroactive insurance payments provided by the American Rescue Plan. Demonstration of what a competent state can deliver in pursuit of a well-defined mission is a necessary step. So far, it appears that the President has met the most critical test: Under Promise and Over Perform. The broad public support he has earned stands in stark contrast with the almost unanimous opposition of Republicans in the narrowly divided houses of Congress.
Strategic Missions
New Deal: FDR's New Deal encompassed three strategic missions: recovery from the Depression, reform of particular aspects of the market economy, and regime change in the fundamental structure of the American political economy. A necessary condition for freedom to act was an assertion of nationalist autonomy: escape from the "golden fetters" of the gold standard and refusal to stabilize the international value of the dollar against sterling or the franc.
On December 31, 1933, the New York Times published an open letter from John Maynard Keynes to President Roosevelt. The core of the message was delivered in the third paragraph:
You are engaged on a double task, Recovery and Reform;--recovery from the slump and the passage of those business and social reforms which are long overdue. For the first, speed and quick results are essential. The second may be urgent too; but haste will be injurious, and wisdom of long-range purpose is more necessary than immediate achievement. It will be through raising high the prestige of your administration by success in short-range Recovery, that you will have the driving force to accomplish long-range Reform. On the other hand, even wise and necessary Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action, before you have had time to put other motives in their place....
Keynes' economic genius was not fully matched by his political insight, even in Britain where he failed to win over the political and administrative leadership of the country to overt policies of macroeconomic stabilization until World War II. FDR, by contrast, recognized that the context of crisis was necessary to enable the profound structural reforms to the American political economy that he proposed.
The central policy to which Keynes addressed himself was the National Recovery Administration, Part 1 of the National Industrial Recovery Act passed in June 1933. The NRA proposed a comprehensive system of "codes of fair competition" that were required to include: (1) a specified minimum wage, (2) a specified maximum number of working hours per week, and (3) recognition of the workers' right to collective bargaining. The goal was simultaneously to restore the profitability of employers and to increase the purchasing power of employees. The means were the legal cartelization of markets, both for goods and labor services.
Often neglected by economic analysts of the NRA is that the author of its source-text was no New Deal radical but rather Gerard Swope, President of General Electric. In September 1931, Swope had proposed a national assemblage of trade associations under the supervision of the Federal Trade Commission with authority comparable to the NRA's codes. Following where Swope had led, the NRA precisely operationalized Adam Smith's famous remark: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Given the constrained state capacity of the New Deal, the industry committees mandated by the NRA were dominated by business. The tobacco industry, already notorious for its political clout, succeeded in preventing any code from emerging. In the oligopolistic heavy industries--steel, autos--the Administration's only bargaining chip, exemption from anti-trust enforcement, was irrelevant. By the summer of 1934, after a transient surge in prices and wages, noncompliance was rampant. A year later, the Supreme Court declared the NRA and other New Deal interventions on the supply side of the market economy unconstitutional. By denying that the federal government had the authority to respond to the crisis, the Court transformed a policy fiasco into a popular political cause.
As the incipient recovery appeared to stall and in response to the Court's challenge, FDR launched the substantially more radical "Second New Deal" of 1935, encompassing the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations ("Wagner") Act, the Banking Act of 1935, the Rural Electrification Administration, and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. Recovery resumed in a timely fashion for FDR's triumphant reelection in 1936: Recovery and Reform marched hand in hand. Although the extent to which the Supreme Court "followed the election returns" is contested, in the event the Court broadly validated the constitutionality of the Second New Deal.
Today: The immediate strategic priority facing the Biden Administration embodies no conflict: to accelerate Recovery from the pandemic in order to Restore economic prosperity. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, however, combines funding for enhanced vaccination programs and retroactive insurance payments for those economically damaged by public health lockdowns with a host of progressive reforms. Measures such as expanded child and earned income tax credits may be formally time-limited, but they suggest this Administration knows how to exploit crisis for progressive ends, very much in the spirit of the second phase of FDR's New Deal.
Looking Forward, Response to climate change, Inequality of income and wealth, and Racial Justice may seem bound to compete for priority. But, not unlike the first New Deal's haphazard integration of recovery and reform and President Biden's own American Rescue Plan, programs to "green" the U.S. economy can serve both to reduce inequality and promote racial justice. The specific mix of programs and the ways of financing them are what matter. Integration of such priorities can be approached by concentrating direct state funding and indirect state subsidies, financed by progressive taxation, to deliver green infrastructure preferentially to those constituencies without the resources to protect themselves from the impact of climate change. These include abandoned rural towns as much as formerly redlined central city neighborhoods.
One central initiative--reflexively recommended by almost all conventional economists--is a carbon tax high enough to endogenize the costs that generating carbon dioxide imposes on the environment. Get the prices right, mainstream economics asserts, and the market will take care of the rest, efficiently allocating resources to serve the multiplicity of demands. But resource allocation is not all that markets do. They also distribute the returns generated by the employment of those resources.
One unconventional, Nobel-prize winning economist, Joe Stiglitz, identifies the crucial flaw in the argument for a carbon tax:
carbon taxes have distributive implications. In particular, it may be (if carbon consumption increases less than in proportion to income), and be perceived to be, regressive.
The politics of a carbon tax are further complicated because the distributional consequences are not only "vertical," adversely affecting the poor more than the rich, but also "horizontal," with differential impacts on people with similar incomes but different degrees of dependence on carbon-generating sources. One obvious example is the difference between city-dwellers with access to public transportation and rural populations utterly dependent on their cars. Any resort to taxing carbon is bound to be complicated by rebates and exemptions and augmented by regulations such as increased fuel efficiency standards or even--as in the UK--by prospective banning of hydrocarbon fueled automobiles.
Consideration of a carbon tax as the solution calls attention to the third dimension along which we can learn from the first New Deal. This is the inevitable tension between Efficiency and Effectiveness. In economic terms, a Carbon tax, indeed, would be theoretically the most efficient response. But when it comes to responding to crisis, Efficiency can be the enemy of Effectiveness. FDR's New Deal offers a most relevant case in point.
Efficiency versus Effectiveness
New Deal: The National Industrial Recovery Act had two parts. In addition to the NRA, it also created the Public Works Administration with an unprecedented appropriation of $3.5 billion. Recall that at the time, total Federal annual expenditures were less than $2 billion. What is more, dramatizing the conflicts engendered by aggressive experimentation, the Economy Act of 1933 has already been passed to reduce Federal expenditures by $500 million, honoring a campaign pledge to restore confidence by balancing the budget, whose deficit was the result of the collapse in tax receipts. FDR squared the circle by establishing an Emergency Budget, which included the PWA, distinct from the traditional one.
As Administrator of the PWA, FDR named his Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Ickes was a committed progressive who had left the Republican Party to join Teddy Roosevelt's third-party campaign in 1912 and never returned. He inherited an Interior Department that was deeply tainted by corruption, most recently by the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Harding Administration: the then Secretary had been bribed to lease naval oil reserves under the Department's supervision to private oilmen. Ickes was determined to reconstruct the Department's reputation as subject neither to financial nor political influence. And this determination carried over to the PWA.
A project proposed for PWA funding passed through a sequence of detailed analyses - engineering, legal, economic, financial -, before it worked its way up to FDR himself for final approval. For Ickes, this was a feature, not a bug. His biographer puts it well:
Ickes firmly held that speed was less important than stability, permanence, and a fair return to the government for its investment.
After six months, only $110 million of the appropriation had actually been spent. Business Week remarked that "Mr. Ickes is running a fire department on the principles of a good, sound bond house."
Under "Honest Harold," however, the PWA delivered a host of great works, from the Triboro Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel in New York to the Grand Coulee Dam and San Francisco Bay Bridge in the far west, and all without scandal. The PWA, indeed, represented efficiency in the expenditure of public moneys for public goods. But measured unemployment was still above 20% when the first appropriation ended in 1935. In response, FDR turned to a man, Harry Hopkins, who was temperamentally Ickes's opposite while also possessed of relationships with those big city machines that Ickes had dedicated himself to fighting. And Hopkins had already demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in the early days of the New Deal.
In October 1933, with few signs of recovery visible, $400 million had been pulled out of the PWA to fund the Civil Works Administration, the New Deal's first program of "work relief." Under Hopkins, the CWA put more than 4 million men to work at PWA wages (well above the paltry level of relief payments) in barely three months. It was, in fact, so effective in spending its money that it ran out of cash and closed down in March 1934.
Now, frustrated by the slow pace of recovery and appropriately alert to the rise of radical voices such as Louisiana's Huey Long, FDR asked and got $4.8 billion for a new program of work relief. The Works Progress Administration was led by Hopkins over Ickes's staunch objections. It was inevitably politicized, both by the need to rely on local proposals for projects and Hopkins' own propensity for alliance with local political powers. It was all the more effective as the result, giving work to more than 5 million men over its first three years.
The broad range of projects, including public art and entertainment as well as road improvements and sewage works, led critics to label it the sponsor of "boondoggles." In 1935, Ickes suggested to Vice President Garner that "the way the money was administered might mean the defeat of the administration next year." As usual, FDR understood the politics, remarking: "If we can boondoggle our way out of the Depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of Americans for many years to come."
The PWA and the WPA exemplify the programmatic and institutional alternatives for how to mobilize resources for strategic purposes. During the first New Deal, they turned out to be complements, although they were hardly planned as such. On a project by project basis, with each project of grand scale and logistical complexity, the PWA represented efficiency in the allocation of large quanta of capital: a model for the future. Given the overriding priority of getting men off relief and into work, the WPA demonstrated effective response to urgent need.
In fashioning any comprehensive response to climate change, President Biden will need to avoid sacrificing effectiveness in pursuit of efficiency, especially as Republican opposition is likely to fixate on programs they oppose in principle as wasteful boondoggles in practice. Yet effective response to climate change will necessarily include grand projects of transformational infrastructure, where manifestly wasteful inefficiency may threaten to undermine support for the mission itself. The next New Deal will need both its PWA and its WPA.
Today: Response to the Coronavirus to date provides an illustrative cross-cutting chronicle of failure and success:
- First, failure to orchestrate access to key supplies--masks, ventilators - generated a fiasco of competitive bidding by state governments and amongst federal agencies as President Trump sought to deny a national responsibility that the presidential election demonstrated he could not evade.
- But then the "Warp Speed" program of vaccine development combined efficiency and effectiveness. Multiple parallel projects were funded by pre-production procurement contracts as well as R&D grants and covered the spectrum from traditional approaches to the innovative mRNA technologies deployed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.
- Third, however, delivery of vaccines into arms reverted to the same fragmented, inefficient and ineffective process that characterized the first months of the pandemic until the new Administration brought some coherent rigor to the task.
- Throughout, the diverse array of "non-pharmaceutical" regulations and guidelines across the American landscape--and opposition thereto - confirmed that the pandemic response would express, not override, political polarization.
Even in the absence of the political polarization that has infected the American government, fashioning programs that appropriately balance between efficiency and effectiveness would be hard. Yet the difficulty may be somewhat eased because, when it comes to climate change, it appears that the public is ahead of many politicians.[17] Of the sample polled by a consortium of Yale and George Mason Universities, 75% support rejoining the Paris Agreement, 66% say developing clean energy sources should be a high or very high federal priority; 55-82% support a broad range of regulatory and tax initiatives to encourage a reduction in carbon-generating production and consumption.
On every subject, the partisan split between Democrats and Republicans is visible. As with the American Rescue Plan, Biden's appeals to bipartisanship are likely to resonate more outside than inside Washington. And it is suggestive that 66% of those polled "support the Green New Deal," although understandably at this stage "only 18% say they have heard 'a lot' about it.
In 1933, evidence of crisis was unavoidable even for those most insulated by wealth: the Dow Jones Index had declined by 88% from its 1929 high; Hoovervilles of the homeless were found in public parks across the nation's cities; and the banks were closing everywhere. The mandate for action was manifest. Today, building and maintaining the mandate will be an essential element of all responsive initiatives. What will be comparable to the New Deal is the wide range of programs of varying degrees of relevance to the multiple missions facing the Biden Administration post-pandemic.
Princeton University has recently published a comprehensive agenda for achieving "Net-Zero America" by 2050. The report presents an array of programs under 6 headings:
- End-use energy efficiency and electrification
- Clean electricity: wind & solar generation, transmission, firm power
- Bioenergy and other zero-carbon fuels and feedstocks
- CO2 capture, utilization, and storage
- Reduced non-CO2 emissions
- Enhanced land sinks
Of these, some call out for the sort of meticulous planning and careful implementation that characterized the PWA's grand projects. Such will be the case with the necessary requirement to expand and extend and harden electricity grids nationally (even in Texas) and to deploy software to manage intermittent sources of electricity. But with other initiatives, especially when they concern the gains available from mass electrification at the residential and retail level, effectiveness should dominate efficiency.
One example of the latter, referenced in the Princeton Report, is the plan for "Rewiring America" conceived by Saul Griffith and his colleagues: to bring electrification to American households funded by subsidized credit. Using electricity alone for heating, cooking, and transportation would not only contribute massively to the Net-Zero goal. The process of universal electrification would generate millions of "green jobs" and yield significant reductions in the cost of living. But the very distributed nature of the program--like the WPA--is bound to generate some degree of waste: unrepaid loans, faulty installations. Public tolerance of such necessary inefficiency will turn on broad public acceptance of the mission.
One example of an initiative that can serve all three missions would directly draw on a first New Deal model. Then, the Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to Americans ignored by the public utilities as uneconomic to serve. Today, the "digital divide" reveals an inverse correlation between income and access to broadband internet that intersects the urban-rural divide. When the pandemic closed schools across the country, the impact of the Digital Divide on access to education and prospective life chances was devastating. At the same time, the positive effect of virtual working and meeting on carbon-generating travel adds to the case for a "Broadband Access Administration" that would serve all three missions.
The Princeton Report correctly recognizes the need for frontier innovation of critical technologies. Two examples are grid-scale energy storage and carbon capture and sequestration. Here the history of the American innovation economy offers a compelling model. The US Defense Department's support for all the emergent technologies that combined to make the Digital Revolution was not limited to funding R&D. It included programs of procurement--of computers, semiconductors, software--before they were cheap and reliable enough for the commercial markets. The American state pulled the suppliers down the learning curve, preferentially favoring young, entrepreneurial companies like Texas Instruments and Intel over the established giant incumbents, IBM and ATT. This was the model implicitly and effectively followed by Project Warp Speed.
There is another opportunity for the Biden Administration to learn from the Obama Administration's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Not only is that "stimulus bill" now recognized as having been sub-scale. But the "green" elements buried within it were misconceived. The Act extended nine-figure loan guarantees to a set of GreenTech ventures. One of them was Tesla, which paid off its loans from the massive private funding that Elon Musk subsequently mobilized. Two others, sadly, were Solyndra in solar panels and A123 in advanced battery technology. Both went bust in highly visible fashion. Procurement contracts to follow R&D grants were the available alternatives, against which they might have been able to secure conventional venture capital and incidentally avoid political embarrassment if they nonetheless failed.
One strategic issue will confront President Biden in a more nuanced and complex fashion than that which faced FDR: go it alone or collaborate. In 1933, international collaboration would have meant freezing the American state in the face of calamity, even while protectionist programs of national economic defense were proliferating globally: from the UK's abandonment of free trade in favor of Imperial Preference to Nazi Germany's autarchic determination to escape from the Versailles Treaty.
The choice is more complex today, not only because climate change is existentially global, as symbolically acknowledged by Biden's return to the Paris Agreement. At the practical level of implementation, forty years of globalization have left the US bereft of the high-tech manufacturing base that had been constructed over the previous forty years. The combination of free-trade political economics and shareholder-maximization financial economics made abandonment of that strategic resource both economically logical and politically acceptable. Doubling down in strategic opposition to China's rise, therefore, has costs that go to the heart of an effective response to climate change.
To begin with, China generates 29% of the world's annual production of CO22; the US follows with 16%. No global response to the global problem can leave out either. Beyond that fact, a recent paper in Science magazine asserts an obvious hypothesis:
Meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement will require net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 and substantial reductions before then. It will also require collaboration with China, which has emerged as the global leader in the mass production of low-carbon energy technologies (LCETs). In part because of China's investments in manufacturing, the LCETs required to meet climate targets have become increasingly cost-competitive with fossil fuel sources.
As the authors acknowledge, "some attribute China's rapid rise in LCET sectors to unfair industrial policies--such as forced technology transfer requirements, massive subsidies, and outright intellectual property (IP) theft." Pragmatically, nonetheless, we are where we are.
A wise man once said that political leadership resides in fashioning third alternatives to seemingly intractable dilemmas. Such alternatives may exist on each side. Necessarily inefficient US investments aimed at rebuilding at home the capacity that now exists in China may well prove the effective game-theoretic approach towards strategic collaboration. It will likely be matched by China's equally inefficient determination to reach the frontier in semiconductor design and fabrication in order to reduce its strategic dependence on the US.
Conclusion
Saikat Chakrabarti was the co-author of the plan for a "Green New Deal" brought to public attention by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has summarized the shared purpose of the initiators:
(1) Create a plan that Democratic presidential candidates would have to respond to, creating pressure on them to have a race to the top against each other on climate proposals. We aimed to have an order of magnitude increase in the ambition of climate proposals being put out by presidential candidates and, through that, dramatically change the scale of what would be "politically acceptable."
(2) Introduce (but really reintroduce) a new approach to solving climate change that didn't pit jobs against climate, but made the project of solving climate change the same as growing, upgrading and developing our economy, creating millions of high wage jobs in the process.
The tactical political initiative worked: through the presidential primaries that candidate Biden wound up dominating climate change gained traction as a salient issue. The central strategic insight is more remarkable and resonates with FDR's rejection of Keynes' advice to separate explicitly Recovery from Reform. Given the intensely conflicted state of the American political economy today, it reaches beyond the terms set by Chakrabarti. Any opportunity to serve the two missions that overlap in political space with response to climate change--reducing inequality and pursuing racial justice--may only be addressed by implementing the broad and inclusive agenda of investment and employment that response to climate change legitimizes.
Whether it is called "Build Back Better" or a "Green Industrial Policy" or, indeed, a Green New Deal, it is imperative to reject the false dichotomy of "jobs against climate." However it is branded, if response to climate change is truly to renew the grand promise and the meaningful--if incomplete--achievements of the first New Deal, it will do so by addressing the cumulative inequities that have reached intolerable levels of social and cultural and political stress. Somehow, President Biden seems to have intuited this simple, profound truth. Without any doubt, efforts to implement that agenda will be contested every step of the way and not a few will fail. But as FDR put it almost 90 years ago, "above all try."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Descendants of FDR and His Cabinet Urge Biden to Embrace 'New Deal-Scale' Public Jobs Program
"Today's crisis of unemployment requires a federal response at least as bold as they designed to pull America out of the Great Depression and usher in the New Deal."
Mar 30, 2021
With the pandemic-induced economic emergency far from over as weekly jobless claims and long-term unemployment remain sky-high, descendants of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and key members of his Cabinet published an open letter Tuesday morning urging President Joe Biden to embrace a "New Deal-scale" public jobs program to help end the crisis and set the stage for an equitable recovery.
"What President Franklin Roosevelt said, when taking office in the depths of the Great Depression, remains true today: 'A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.... Our greatest primary task is to put people to work," the new letter reads. "Today's crisis of unemployment requires a federal response at least as bold as they designed to pull America out of the Great Depression and usher in the New Deal."
"Sustained government investment in our infrastructure and our people lifted us out of the Great Depression and I believe President Biden is thinking along those very same lines."
--Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, grandson of Frances Perkins
Released as Biden is set to unveil the details of his nascent infrastructure and green jobs package, the letter was signed by James Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of FDR; Harry Hopkins, the grandson of former Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace; June Hopkins, the granddaughter of former Commerce Secretary Harry Hopkins; Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, the grandson of former Labor Secretary Frances Perkins; and Harold M. Ickes, the son of former Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes.
The descendants of key architects of the New Deal--the ambitious series of programs that helped end the Great Depression of the 1930s and provide permanent economic assistance for millions--argued that a similarly ambitious approach will be necessary to reverse the damage inflicted by the most unequal economic crisis in modern U.S. history.
Specifically, the letter presses Biden to support legislation led by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that aims to establish a new jobs program through the Social Security Act, one of the most important and enduring New Deal programs.
"The 'Jobs for Economic Recovery Act'... is boldly New Deal-ish in its potential to quickly get Americans back to work," the letter reads. "The legislation would enable unemployed Americans to work in wage-paying jobs, carrying out useful projects, until they can be absorbed in the recovering labor market."
"If they were alive today," the letter continues, "we believe our New Deal forebears... would agree that the 'Jobs for Economic Recovery Act' should be included in the recovery plan you send to Congress."
The group also applauds Biden's January executive order directing the Interior Department to begin work establishing a "Civilian Climate Corps," an initiative modeled on a major New Deal public works program.
"We hope your modern-day version will add urban projects, such as building retrofits for energy efficiency, urban gardens and bike paths, and brownfield remediation, in addition to tackling the 21st Century climate challenges identified in your order, like carbon sequestration in soils and plants, and strengthening coastal and marine ecosystems," the letter reads.
The fresh calls for Biden to emulate the New Deal in his response to the coronavirus crisis comes weeks after the president reportedly hosted historians in the White House to discuss "how big is too big--and how fast is too fast--to jam through once-in-a-lifetime historic changes to America."
"President Biden took notes in a black book as they discussed some of his most admired predecessors," according to Axios. "Then he said to Doris Kearns Goodwin: 'I'm no FDR, but...' He'd like to be. The March 2 session, which the White House kept under wraps, reflects Biden's determination to be one of the most consequential presidents."
While some analysts have pumped the breaks on commentary likening the temporary relief programs established by the recently passed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the lasting, transformational accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society, others have argued that Biden "doesn't need to be FDR or LBJ to change America," as New York magazine's Eric Levitz recently put it.
Amid progressive demands for as much as $10 trillion in new infrastructure spending over the next decade, Biden is expected to begin releasing a recovery package that--according to the Washington Post--could call for $4 trillion in spending on a variety of initiatives, including "proposals to repair the nation's physical infrastructure, such as its bridges, railways, ports, water systems and more, as well as revive domestic manufacturing; invest in research and development; expand clean energy investments, and create a nationwide infrastructure for electric vehicles."
Coggeshall, the founder of the Frances Perkins Center and one of the new letter's signatories, said in a statement Tuesday that his "grandmother, an architect of the New Deal and Social Security, would be very pleased with President Biden's leadership in this time of grave economic hardship and inequality."
"Sustained government investment in our infrastructure and our people lifted us out of the Great Depression," Coggeshall added, "and I believe President Biden is thinking along those very same lines."
Read the full letter:
Dear Mr. President:
We write, as the descendants of the men and women who designed the New Deal, to commend your focus on the urgency of big, bold action to create jobs to help America build back better. Specifically, we commend your Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, and we heartily recommend including the "Jobs for Economic Recovery Act" in the upcoming economic recovery package.
What President Franklin Roosevelt said, when taking office in the depths of the Great Depression, remains true today: "A host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.... Our greatest primary task is to put people to work."
The concept of a Civilian Climate Corps, laid out in your January 27 executive order on climate, harkens back to one of the New Deal's most successful jobs programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC gave jobs to some three million unemployed young people on projects like dams, phone lines, and irrigation. CCC workers planted millions of trees, built hundreds of trails, and constructed dozens of visitor facilities in parks.
We hope your modern-day version will add urban projects, such as building retrofits for energy efficiency, urban gardens and bike paths, and brownfield remediation, in addition to tackling the 21st Century climate challenges identified in your order, like carbon sequestration in soils and plants, and strengthening coastal and marine ecosystems. We commend your improving on the original CCC to include women and people of color. We recommend a focus on veterans and homeless unemployed, and an element of education and skills training. Many federal agencies can usefully partner in the new CCC, including Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Commerce, HUD, the VA, EPA, and perhaps the Army--which, in the original CCC, played an indispensable role in the logistics of organizing and running the 2500 work camps sprinkled in grateful communities all across America. And of course, the new CCC should rely on the expertise and infrastructure built in more recent years by AmeriCorps and the nation's Corps Network of 130 service and conservation corps.
The "Jobs for Economic Recovery Act"--just reintroduced as S. 784 by Senators Ron Wyden, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Van Hollen, Michael Bennet, and Cory Booker, and whose prior House version has the support of Representatives Danny Davis and Gwen Moore--is boldly New Deal-ish in its potential to quickly get Americans back to work.
The legislation would enable unemployed Americans to work in wage-paying jobs, carrying out useful projects, until they can be absorbed in the recovering labor market. It gives the lead to states, tribes, and local governments in designing specific employment projects to meet the varied needs of a diverse country. Like the new CCC, it ensures that groups left behind by the New Deal's jobs programs--Blacks, Hispanics, Asian and Pacific Island Americans, LGBTQ+ individuals, other minorities, women, and people with disabilities--will get their fair share of wage-paying jobs.
It also is careful not to infringe on the rights of workers and unions, or to displace current employees or spending. Rather, the "Jobs for Economic Recovery Act" will add hundreds of thousands of workers by creating new and useful jobs.
We believe that many of these jobs will advance your priorities on the environment, health, and infrastructure:
- Your new CCC could be expanded with funds provided under the Act.
- Public health initiatives, like contact tracing and removing the lead paint that primarily poisons Black, Hispanic, and low-income children, could be bolstered.
- Major infrastructure projects, such as fixing decaying roads and expanding broadband in rural areas, could also be accelerated under the Act.
Americans want to support themselves and their families by doing useful work, but the COVID-19 pandemic has severely shrunk the labor market. The real unemployment rate, as Federal Reserve Chair Powell and Treasury Secretary Yellen have made clear, remains near 10 percent. The U.S. has shed a net of roughly 9 million jobs in just a year.
To reboot the economy, and to provide paid work in the future for many who will still remain left out and left behind--especially Blacks, Hispanics, other minorities, persons with disabilities, and residents of isolated rural areas and segregated urban neighborhoods--the "Jobs for Economic Recovery Act" is the right policy.
If they were alive today, we believe our New Deal forebears--
- President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt
- Vice President, and Agriculture and Commerce Secretary, Henry Wallace
- WPA Administrator, and Commerce Secretary, Harry Hopkins
- Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and
- Interior Secretary, and PWA Administrator, Harold Ickes
--would agree that the "Jobs for Economic Recovery Act" should be included in the recovery plan you send to Congress. We ask this in their names--above all, because today's crisis of unemployment requires a federal response at least as bold as they designed to pull America out of the Great Depression and usher in the New Deal.
Sincerely yours,
James Roosevelt, Jr.
Henry Scott Wallace
June Hopkins
Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall
Harold M. Ickes
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy