Tim Barker and Ben Mabie join to tell the story of American labor militancy in the 1930s—and how the right responded.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Over the past several decades, there have been rapid and fundamental changes in the finance and banking sectors. The banking reforms of the New Deal, which endured up until about 1980 and provided a relative degree of banking and financial stability, were reversed by the neoliberal counterrevolution with an eye toward increasing profits and shredding social responsibility. A new book by world…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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There have been many job creation programs implemented around the world – let’s take a look at some of them.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
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Sometimes a little socialism is a very good thing. But don’t tell Mike Pence or the billionaires who bankroll him and his GOP colleagues.
Or, for that matter, the 109 Democrats who were suckered into joining every single Republican in the House of Representatives to vote for a resolution saying that:
“Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”
The resolution leads up to that conclusion by quoting President Thomas Jefferson wildly out of context. Here’s what the resolution says:
“Whereas the author of the Declaration of Independence, President Thomas Jefferson, wrote, ‘To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.’”
The Republican authors of the resolution, however, neglected to include the context or the next sentence from Jefferson’s May 18, 1816 letter to Joseph Milligan about their combined efforts to translate A Treatise on Political Economy by French economist Destutt de Tracy.
Milligan and Jefferson were discussing Tracy’s call for a national sales tax (like what the GOP proposed last week), which both men opposed. Which is why the next sentence got right to the heart of the matter:
“If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra [sales] taxation violates it.”
Jefferson, in other words, was calling for an inheritance tax — rather than a sales tax — to fix “overgrown wealth” that was “dangerous to the state,” something the Republicans who drafted this resolution would certainly call socialism.
This entire bit of legislative theater, in fact, is preparation for the 2024 election and the GOP’s new plan to end “socialism” in America.
By socialism, of course, they don’t mean subsidies to the fossil fuel industry that made their billionaire donors rich.
They don’t mean the hundreds of billions we shovel at defense contractors every year for unnecessary boondoggles.
Nor do they mean farm supports dear to their rural voters.
They mean Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Mike Pence drew the battle lines last week around the same time House Republicans were forcing the vote on their anti-socialism screed:
“There are modest reforms in entitlements that can be done without disadvantaging anybody at the point of the need. I think the day could come when we could replace the New Deal with a Better Deal. Literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account.”
Republicans have been calling Social Security “socialism” ever since it was put into law on August 14, 1935. In part this is because arguably it is: it’s a form of social insurance.
But the larger reason is that the GOP has been funded by morbidly rich banksters ever since the early 1920s, and those banksters would give nearly anything to have Social Security’s trillions in their banks instead of invested in treasuries.
Social Security isn’t a savings account: it’s insurance against poverty in old age.
And like all insurance policies, some people make out better than others. People who live a long life may take more out of it than they put in; people who die young leave behind much of their working life’s contributions.
That’s how insurance is supposed to work. It’s how your life and health insurance policies work.
But the GOP wants Americans to think of Social Security as a simple savings account, so they can move Social Security’s trillions from government control into the hands of Wall Street.
And that’s just the beginning. Republicans in Congress are still 100% down with the platform on which David Koch ran for vice president back in 1980:
— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.”
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.”
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.”
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.”
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.”
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.”
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.”
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.”
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.”
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.”
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called “self-protection” equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.”
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.”
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.”
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.”
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.”
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.”
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.”
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.”
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”The real target Republicans are gunning for, in other words, is — as Mike Pence admitted — the New Deal itself.
When FDR came into office in 1933 he began a fundamental transformation of American government from one rooted in Laissez-faire to one rooted in democratic socialism.
It was so successful that Roosevelt was elected President of the United States four times in a row, serving from 1933 to his death in office in 1945.
While the American people loved Roosevelt’s New Deal democratic socialism—and still do—the morbidly rich have always opposed any programs that lift up average working people.
— They don’t want workers empowered to challenge their bosses through unions.
— They don’t want their tax dollars to go to help “moochers” and “takers” who weren’t born wealthy.
— They don’t want wealth broadly distributed across America because it might mean they can’t hoard as much as they want.
Almost as fascinating as Pence and the GOP’s efforts to privatize Social Security and “end socialism” are the media’s response to them.
Two weeks ago the GOP put forward a 30 percent national sales tax (ironically, just like Tracy was proposing in 1816). Last week the former Vice President and unannounced candidate for the White House, Mike Pence, openly called for privatizing Social Security.
But there was no mention of either on any of the Sunday “politics” shows that I saw. Instead, the day was filled with Republicans bashing President Biden for his great economy and failing to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon over populated areas.
Will Republican extremism and hate for the New Deal—programs that have become absolutely essential to our even having a robust middle class—ever become grist for the media mill? Will they actually expose to the American people and discuss these GOP plans?
I’m not holding my breath.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
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What connection does the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson have to the party of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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The left tends to dismiss corporate pandering to identity politics as insincere and inconsequential. It does so at its peril.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Organizers now recognize that to remake higher education as a public good, they must fight and win at the national level.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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The murderous hysteria over white patrimony is inseparable from the private capture of both economic opportunity and political authority.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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If the Democratic coalition remains reliant on well-to-do suburbanites reluctant to accept taxes on the rich, the new Popular Front strategy will fall short.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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In the face of COVID-19, the political response has been at best temporary relief and at worst indifference. What we need going forward is not just better public health measures, but a response to the economic insecurities and policy failures that it laid bare.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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A massive overhaul and expansion of the wildland workforce is the best hope we have to confront the firestorm that threatens to engulf the West Coast.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Here in New Hampshire, the real governing is done at the town level by Boards of Selectmen, a council of elected officials who ride herd over the rawest, purest form of democracy practiced in the country. Majority vote rules, proposals are raised at “town meeting” and subsequently voted on by whoever raises their hand. Sometimes the room is packed, other times most seats go empty, but decisions are always made by the ones who show up.
Last night, for a brief moment, President Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress looked like one of those New Hampshire town meetings. Here stands Biden, asking the Board for funds to purchase a new city plow so the streets can get cleared faster after a storm. Better for business and safer for families, is his argument, and it is sound. Oscar Wilde would recognize the scene in an eyeblink.
The mirage, alas, was punctured by the image of Ted Cruz’s eyes rolling up in his head like a guy who’d spent too much time in Cancun. Yes, this was Congress in all of its squalid glory, the man at the podium was the president, but the difference between now and last year is the difference between a friendly shoulder rub and being devoured by a hammerhead shark.
“Madam Speaker, Madam Vice President,” said Biden as he began. Those words had never been spoken in that chamber before. It was an intense moment, a piece of long-awaited history, and seemed to promise a day to come when all three seats in that upper podium will be occupied by women.
As for the content of the speech, well, it was a time warp all its own. Biden’s list of policy proposals represents something of a rewiring of the American experience, from work to family to school to medicine and science, from transportation to elder care. Much of what he proposed came thanks to the sustained pressure of progressives, which started the minute Biden won the nomination.
It was that very slate of markedly progressive proposals that kept the Republicans in their seats as if they were nailed to them. Even behind his mask, the smile on Bernie Sanders’s face when Biden said, “Health care is a right, not a privilege,” could be seen from space.
Could Biden have asked for more in his proposals? Absolutely, and progressive members of the House are marshaling their forces to see if they can improve upon them. “Congressional Democrats are planning to pursue a massive expansion of Medicare as part of President Biden’s new $1.8 trillion economic relief package,” reports The New York Times, “defying the White House after it opted against including a major health overhaul as part of its plan.”
To underscore this effort, newly elected progressive House Rep. Jamaal Bowman offered a rare Democratic rebuttal to a speech delivered by a Democratic president. Bowman praised Biden for his accomplishments to date, before daring him to do more. “The proposals that President Biden has put forward over the last few weeks would represent important steps — but don’t go as big as we’d truly need in order to solve the crises of jobs, climate and care,” said Bowman. “We need to think bigger.”
“With Democratic control of Congress and the White House,” reports Sharon Zhang for Truthout, “Bowman said now is the time to pass the bold policies that he highlighted in his speech. He mentioned climate bills, such as the Green New Deal for Public Housing and Green New Deal for Cities, introduced earlier this month by fellow progressive colleagues, including Ocasio-Cortez, to provide funding for more climate-friendly public housing and cities. Bowman also drew attention to the THRIVE Act, a $10 trillion infrastructure and climate justice bill of which Bowman is a lead sponsor. The bill, Bowman said, could potentially create 15 million union jobs to help the U.S. economy bounce back while at the same time addressing the climate crisis and environmental justice issues.”
There will be more of this, you can count on it, because Biden to date has revealed a very important aspect of his leadership style: When it comes to some issues, at least, he can be pressured and he can be moved. Progressives in Congress intend to use their influence at this unique juncture to maximum effect.
Pundits on the non-Fox networks heaped praise upon Biden and his soft, unassuming delivery. After four years of screams and rants from that podium, an hour of just business, the people’s business, was a balm. Comparisons to Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and even Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” were bandied about.
The president can certainly take that as a compliment, but he ain’t no LBJ, and he ain’t no FDR. Not yet, anyway… and in a very important sense, he should hope to rise above those legacies if he can. Johnson’s grand plans were devoured by a ruinous war in Vietnam, and Roosevelt only achieved his lofty goals after cutting deals with racists and secessionists which exacerbated the horrors of the Jim Crow South.
The nose count does not favor the president at present. “Democratic senators had a 23-seat advantage during Roosevelt’s presidency and a 36-seat advantage during Johnson’s,” according to The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein. That, simply, makes legislative life a hell of a lot easier. Also, and not for nothing, but neither LBJ or FDR had a Joe Manchin lurking like a pulmonary embolism, waiting to find a place to clog up the works.
Biden’s slim majorities, and the short timetable to election 2022, make the road to fulfilling his intentions fraught with peril. Speeches like this are always wish lists. Last night, the president wished for the moon and stars. Now we see how much of it he can get.
The Republican rebuttal by Sen. Tim Scott provided a vivid counterpoint to the agenda set forth by the president. No policy ideas were offered beyond the rote recitation of right-wing culture war grievances. According to Scott, the violent divisions loose in this nation are the fault of Democrats. He said this in response to a speech delivered in the chamber that was sacked by hyper-violent Trump voters only four months ago.
At bottom, last night contained an important element of defiance: a full-throated declaration of war against the rancid legacy of Ronald Reagan. “Trickle-down economics has never worked,” the president announced to a mighty roar from half the chamber. Forty years of supply-side feed-the-rich economics has delivered us to this shabby estate, and the agenda laid out last night — if realized — would at long last begin to dismantle that legacy.
Former President Clinton can take note, too: The era of big government is back, maybe. The idea that government can help has been well-served since January, as Biden’s vaccine program has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Infection rates are dropping across the board, and while we have many masked miles to go before we sleep, we are in this better place because competent government has finally served the people like it is supposed to.
The wind at Biden’s back, even with his slim congressional majorities, is the simple fact that his proposals are wildly popular. Combine that with the increased public trust in government that has erupted in 2021, and Republicans face a grim task trying to throw rocks in this road. They will, of course they will, but ‘22 is coming, and the people are watching like hawks.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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An interview with Kate Aronoff about her new book Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet—And How We Fight Back.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Is President Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs plan too big? Conservatives are arguing that the package is too expensive and its broad reach is unnecessary.
In order to assess the size and necessity of the bill, it’s important to situate Biden’s jobs plan within a larger federal budget context. Looking at the spending patterns going back decades, the upshot is that the Biden plan is really not all that big, especially given how overdue it is. In fact, progressives have argued that the package, while ambitious in its aims, doesn’t provide enough resources. The plan as proposed is less ambitious than Biden’s campaign proposals, and it already enjoys widespread popularity. There’s plenty of room to make this bill larger, and to make that easier by cutting some of the most egregious uses of federal dollars.
$2.3 trillion sounds like a lot, and it is. But trillions have been spent and are still spent every year in the course of normal government business, on everything from wars and weapons to much-needed but exclusionary social programs like the GI Bill, to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. To reach the level of spending that is really needed to solve problems like climate change and inequality, it will be necessary to be as bold with this jobs package as the country has been with so many other costly endeavors.
President Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure package is worth half of the $4 trillion annual federal budget — but the infrastructure plan spans a period of eight years. On an annual basis, that amounts to an approximately 14 percent increase to the federal budget for a finite number of years. It’s significant, but not earth-shattering. Meanwhile, we must remember what this country has already proved it is willing to spend trillions of dollars on, over the years.
War Spending: $6.4 Trillion
Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has spent $6.4 trillion on wars that have served only to further destabilize the Middle East, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and enrich military contractors. If that money had been spent on infrastructure and clean energy instead of destructive and deadly wars, the U.S. could have had a fully renewable energy grid by now. The Pentagon is one of the most egregious uses of trillions of dollars.
That $6.4 trillion doesn’t even include the regular, non-war Pentagon budget. President Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs package works out to about $280 billion a year. The last time the military budget was less than that amount was 1951.
Just a week after announcing his jobs plan, President Biden released a budget proposal that pegged Pentagon spending at $753 billion. That’s more than the $740 billion the Pentagon got this year under President Trump, and it’s more than two and a half times the annual value of the jobs proposal. Every year in recent memory, the Pentagon has accounted for more than half of the discretionary federal budget that Congress allocates each year. Federal spending on domestic militarization and policing, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, the FBI and the need to take care of veterans of our wars adds another 10 percent. All told, war and militarization accounts for nearly two-thirds of annual discretionary spending.
Even the amount the Pentagon awards to contractors each year exceeds the jobs plan’s annual projected expenditure. In 2020, due to a COVID bump (of which the Pentagon spent $1 billion intended for COVID on jet parts and body armor), the Department of Defense awarded $422 billion in lucrative and often non-competitive contracts. Last year, the Department awarded $383 billion in contracts. And the year before that, $358 billion. The Pentagon’s expenditures on military contracts alone have surpassed the amount of Biden’s infrastructure package every year for decades.
Investments in infrastructure, clean energy and education all create more jobs than the military, dollar for dollar.
The Pentagon has big plans for future spending, too. There’s the $1.5 trillion estimated cost to perpetuate the nuclear threat into the 21st century. And another $1.6 trillion for a single plane — the F-35 fighter jet, recently famous for literally shooting itself.
These are foolish and destructive uses of money. If the Pentagon can afford trillions for its dangerous future, we should be able to afford at least that much for priorities that promote health, environmental transformation, economic justice and the survival of humanity.
20th Century Investment: Not for Everyone
Launched in response to the Great Depression, the New Deal cost $41.7 billion in non-inflation-adjusted terms. The New Deal was worth about 40 percent of the 1929 GDP; today, a jobs package worth 40 percent of GDP would come in at more than $8 trillion, much closer to the $10 trillion that some progressives have suggested would come closer to meeting the true need.
And the New Deal was in a sense just the first part of a package. A decade and a half later came initial investments in the interstate highway system, which cost $468 billion in today’s dollars. The GI bill, which sent nearly 8 million veterans to college and job training and put home ownership within reach for so many, cost another $107 billion.
In short, the U.S. would be unrecognizable today if not for politicians who had the foresight that big investments would be worth the cost. Of course, the benefits came with drawbacks, too: the highway system now has us trapped in reliance on carbon-spewing cars and trucks, and the GI Bill and the New Deal melded to further cement economic inequality for Black people.
All the more reason to enact bold new policies that transition to a clean, 21st century transportation system and lift up Black, Brown and Indigenous people instead of doubling down on inequities. And these new policies should be every bit as ambitious as the originals.
Trump Tax Cuts: $2.3 Trillion
The Trump tax cuts that passed in 2017 were estimated to cost the U.S. government $2.3 billion over 10 years. The Biden jobs plan would do much to undo the worst of the Trump cuts, raising $2.5 trillion even without fully restoring the corporate tax rate to its former level. More progressive proposals have identified trillions more that the U.S. is leaving on the table with tax policies that favor corporations and the wealthy. In effect, this is trillions that the U.S. government is giving away.
Trump made the tax problem much worse, but he didn’t create it. Even prior to the Trump tax cuts, the U.S. gave away more money in tax breaks that heavily favored the wealthy than it spent on the entire federal discretionary budget. Fair tax policies, including taxing financial transactions on Wall Street, taxing investment income the same as income from work and strengthening the estate tax could bring in an additional $886 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Right now, that money is bolstering extreme wealth inequality and its distortions on democracy.
In a mark of where the resources really are in this country, the wealth of the nation’s billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion from the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020 to February 2021. The billionaires’ pandemic windfall brings their total wealth to $4.3 trillion. These profits aren’t government spending, but government tax policies have made it possible, and it’s time to call in the bill.
A Country of Tremendous Resources
Trillions of dollars are spent in this country, and by the federal government, on a regular basis. A $2.3 trillion jobs plan is not particularly remarkable in the scheme of things — it only seems that way because the federal government has grown so stingy toward real investment. But the federal government has been more than able to put forth hundreds of billions of dollars on a regular basis for war, tax breaks, and even for infrastructure and social programs that benefit some at the expense of others.
The new jobs plan has an opportunity to change all of that, by finally putting adequate resources into the country’s future. The Biden administration put forth a wide-ranging plan with fairly bold aims. Now it’s just time to recognize that a bold approach to funding could require more than $2.3 billion, and that there are precedents for even higher spending levels. Progressives need to drive this point home, because conservatives will waste no time claiming the opposite.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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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.”
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
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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An interview with Gabriel Winant on deindustrialization, the care economy, and the living legacies of the industrial workers’ movement.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Deference to state governments has severely undermined public health efforts during the pandemic and deepened geographic inequality in the United States.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Joe Biden and his Democratic allies in government have successfully gotten their signature stimulus package through Congress. Despite many compromises to the right wing of the Democratic Party along the way, the package is still one of the most expensive in U.S. history, totaling $1.9 trillion. With the pandemic passing into its second year and an economy that is still far from recovered, the Democrats passed (without any Republican votes) a stimulus that is double the size of the Obama stimulus in terms of percentage of GDP, signaling what might be an important shift in the government’s approach to economic crisis. While critics and supporters alike are hailing this as the “inequality stimulus,” a closer look reveals a more complex picture. On the one hand, it is true that this package includes many meaningful concessions to the working class, and those concessions should be analyzed in terms of both their content and the method in which they were won. However, on the other hand, many of the more progressive measures were removed from the bill before its passage, and many of the concessions given are only temporary.
The package includes a $300 weekly boost to jobless benefits extended through September, direct stimulus payments of up to $1,400 per person, $350 billion in aid to the states, increased child tax credits, and a 15 percent increase in food stamp benefits through September. In addition, the bill also offers $50 billion in support for small businesses, expands Obamacare, and changes the rules for the direct payments to allow more people to collect, including those with disabilities, students, and those in mixed-immigration status families. The stimulus does not, however, include the $15 minimum wage hike that many had promised it would. Nor does it include any debt forgiveness.
FDR, LBJ, Joe Biden?
The stimulus bill is incredibly controversial with some economists who fear that it will “overheat” the economy by lowering unemployment below the “desired” rate and increasing inflation. That there is a desired rate of unemployment is but one of the many obscenities of the capitalist system; capitalism requires a “reserve army of labor” of unemployed workers whose existence helps keep wages low by keeping the fear of unemployment and demand for limited jobs over workers’ heads. Other fears from the right about the stimulus involve concerns about the national debt, government deficits, and other fears about “fiscal irresponsibility.” Critiques of Biden and the Democrats using this stimulus to enact “policy initiatives” and “combat inequality instead of the pandemic” run rampant in right-wing circles. Still others are concerned that by improving unemployment benefits, the bill deters workers from re-entering the workforce, possibly stagnating the growth of the economy.
Setting aside the more theoretical discussions about what impact the stimulus will have on the debt and deficit, it is important to engage with the question of how far-reaching the stimulus bill is in addressing the economic problems of the working class and poor people. The New York Times took the position that the stimulus signaled that Biden was becoming a “crusader for the poor” and that the bill was the “biggest antipoverty effort in a generation.” Jacobin Magazine took the more moderate approach that the bill is “good but not good enough” but also asserted that the bill signals “that the Democratic Party is finally willing — at least for a moment — to turn on the money hose and for once aim it not at Wall Street moguls, but instead at the raging wildfire of poverty and desperation incinerating the poor and middle class.” The more right-wing Wall Street Journal unfavorably compared the bill to Lyndon Johnson’s famous (or infamous, depending on who is asked) Great Society programs.
So is this the anti-poverty bill of our generation? The only reason these publications can even seriously debate this position is because the last generation of politics was characterized by attacks on the working class and tax cuts for the wealthy, creating the vast wealth inequalities that led to destabilizing political phenomena from Sanderism, Trumpism, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. And it’s true. This bill is focused around short term help for the working class.
But the most progressive measures in the bill, which would have actually helped working people over the mid- and long-term, were killed in the crib, leading to a stimulus that more or less aims to give a “shot in the arm” to the economy rather than doing anything to address longer term trends. This can be seen in the fact that many of the more sweeping provisions (such as unemployment extensions and tax credit reform) will expire after a year at most. This means that any measure of support that those policies provide for working people will disappear as soon as the capitalists feel like the economy is back on its feet.
By cutting checks for Americans, Biden and his allies are hoping that consumer spending will restart the economy without many lasting scars. This ignores the true scope of the current crisis. For decades, wealth inequalities have been spiking, with the United States having the highest level of inequality of any G7 nation. In addition, the working class never fully recovered from the 2008 economic recession, so the economic devastation that we are currently seeing is merely the tree that is bearing fruit from seeds that were planted almost 13 years ago.
For example, even before the pandemic started, many working people struggled to afford rent. Once the pandemic started and many lost work or had a reduction in hours, it became impossible to pay. While Biden has provided some money to help provide emergency rent support, he hasn’t done anything to address the larger trends of rent becoming unaffordable for working people in the long term or even taken steps to cancel rent in the short term. There are no rent control measures in the bill, nor is there a wage hike. Indeed, the bill also doesn’t extend the eviction moratorium, which will now expire on March 31. In these examples, we can see that these concessions in the bill are just a stop-gap measure meant to tide the workers over for a few more months until the pandemic is resolved and everything can go back to how it was before.
Dropping the $15 minimum wage from the bill is the perfect example of this. Despite $15 an hour being far below an actual living wage, it would have represented a sizable increase in income for low-wage workers. That provision was dropped largely because the Democrats didn’t have the support from within their own party to pass it. This gives lie to all of their playacting as “crusaders of the poor.” They could have actually passed a bill that gave long-term help to working people, and they chose not to. This is obscene, and all of the applauding of the bill is quietly brushing over the fact that the most helpful concession for working class people was taken out of the bill.
However, it would also be inaccurate to simply write off this stimulus as more of the same from Washington. This is a far-bigger concession to working people than we’ve seen in decades.
For example: the stimulus does increase the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the child tax credit (CTC)— though both are only increased for one year. This change is impactful insofar as it represents a relatively major extension in “welfare” for working families. Indeed, the changes to the tax credits are the rationale for all the Democratic back-patting for supposedly lifting half of impoverished children out of poverty. These changes, while they may very well be helpful while they last, go away after a year — this is not some sort of lasting measure to minimize poverty. In addition, as Matt Bruenig wrote for Jacobin: “the new tax credit regime continues to exclude the poorest kids from the majority of the nation’s tax credit benefits…. the poorest kids will only receive $3,000 from the tax credit system, while kids with incomes right around the poverty line will receive more than twice that amount, $6,618.”
To return to the more theoretical debates among economists, this is the point that underlines them all: the U.S. economy is fundamentally unstable, and Biden must take increasingly desperate measures to stabilize it. How exactly he ought to go about this is a debate among bourgeois economists, but they all fundamentally agree that too much in either direction (be it spending or austerity) could tip the economy into even greater instability. This brings us to another fundamental fact of the economy: that the capitalists have very few solutions to the crisis facing them. So, they are offering half-measures and one-time payments in hopes that an injection of capital into the economy will artificially speed up recovery.
In this, we should be very hesitant to hail this as the second-coming of FDR and the New Deal. For all of its many flaws, the New Deal created lasting social programs that are far harder to undo than this or that temporary provision. In general, the New Deal was a much greater concession because Roosevelt was able to convince the capitalists to give up some of their rate of exploitation in order to avoid very combative (and possibly revolutionary) class struggle. In this, we cannot consider the Biden stimulus, no matter how sweeping it may be, to be comparable to FDR’s New Deal. Biden’s stimulus is a one-time steroid injection into working class and poor households in hopes to get the economy up and running. There is essentially nothing lasting in this bill.
How Concessions Are Won
Biden helped shepherd the Obama stimulus package along, which was mostly a Wall Street bailout with very little for the working class. This stimulus bill is distinctly different in that it is primarily directed at working class people. Why did Biden pass a Wall Street bailout then and this stimulus now?
Biden was elected with broad support ranging from Wall Street and much of the Bush administration to the BLM movement. This coalition was always going to be an unstable one that would leave Biden in a very complex position as president. He has to both be a servant to capital, which bankrolled his election, and also keep the more progressive elements of the Democratic party in the fold. Add to this the fact that the polarization between the left and the right has only increased as a result of the economic crisis. In this sense, members of the Biden coalition supported him for very different reasons. Wall Street wants enough stability to go back to normal, Bush-era neocons want to re-establish American hegemony abroad, and BLM and progressives supported Biden to stop a dangerous and far-right Trump.
Biden’s presidency, then, takes on a very contradictory character, mixing some progressive reforms with “back to normal” capitalist politics. One day he’s rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, and the next he’s bombing Syria. One day he’s ending the ban on trans* people serving in the military, and the next he’s keeping the concentration camps open. This stimulus is in many ways another element of this vacillation, with Biden offering some crumbs to his base to keep them believing both in him and the institutions of government (whose reputations were severely damaged by four years of Trump). In other words, Biden wants to pass a huge stimulus so that he can say that he is a friend to working people and that the government can still work on the side of working people. In addition, some sectors of capital believe that stimulating the economy in this way will help get consumer spending up again, which will restart the economy. The concessions offered to the working class in the stimulus are an attempt to ensure greater earnings for the capitalists.
It should also be noted that, if this package seems better than average, that is in large part a result of the threat of class struggle. In other words, like FDR and others before him, Biden is offering some preemptive concessions to the working class in a time of economic strife in order to kill any potential of class struggle that could win more sweeping concessions, while also hoping to abort any radicalization that may happen inside or outside of the Democratic Party. Conversely, we also have to acknowledge that if there was more class struggle happening currently, then the concessions in the bill would be even stronger. The relatively low level of class struggle right now resulted in less pressure on the Democrats to actually pass lasting reforms, which is another reason why the benefits are going to expire as soon as the pandemic is over.
If Biden and the Democrats hadn’t offered up some level of conciliation to their working class base, then they would run the risk of both losing that base in the next election and threatening the very stability that Biden was elected to ensure. Biden is trying to soothe the working class so that they are more demure in the eventuality that austerity comes along down the line. He wants to toss us some crumbs so that we think he’s on our side so that we fight less when he comes to knife us in our sleep.
Biden has already failed to deliver the $15 minimum wage hike (which is already a massive step down from what would actually constitute a living wage), and his promises of student loan forgiveness have yet to materialize.
It should also be noted how absolutely undemocratic the process of passing this stimulus was. Much of the bill was tailored to win support from one single senator (the notoriously right-wing Democrat Joe Manchin), allowing him almost total veto power over the contents. In general, this stimulus process shows the failings of bourgeois democracy. It should make us sick to watch these people with six-figure salaries sit in expensive suits and argue on television about whether we deserve to make more than $7.25 an hour. That is shameful, as is the debate over whether or not giving unemployed folks more money during a pandemic and economic crisis will discourage them from finding work. The fact that we have essentially no say in the policies handed down from Washington should be crystal clear, no matter what Biden and his allies want to say on cable news.
What We Need
Working people can win reforms from the Biden administration (just as they could win reforms from the Trump or Obama or Bush administrations), but they must understand that Biden will never offer reforms open-handed. We have to fight for every needed reform and can’t trust any member of the capitalist parties — even progressive ones like AOC or Sanders — to give us the reforms we need. Struggles of this kind pose a threat to the capitalist order, so the capitalists, their politicians, and their allies in the union and social movement bureaucracies do whatever they can to ensure that class struggle never develops. Sometimes that looks like brutal repression, and sometimes it looks like concessions in hopes we’ll take what amounts to a buyout. Biden et al are trying to buy our passivity for $1400 and an extra $300 a week. We can’t make that bargain.
Instead, we need to raise demands for the working class that will actually go a long way towards resolving the crisis. We don’t just need one-time payments of $1400; we need a monthly quarantine wage paid to all workers who are unable to safely return to work. We don’t just need a $300 weekly bonus added to unemployment benefits; we need federal jobs programs that distribute working hours amongst all available workers without reduction in pay. We don’t just need more money for testing; we need a public health service run by the healthcare workers and the patients, not the bosses who want to enrich themselves off of our diseases. There is money for this; in fact, just the money that billionaires have gained since the beginning of the pandemic could pay for two-thirds of the entire stimulus bill. But to get these reforms, we will have to fight for them. We can’t trust Biden and his cronies in capital to give them to us.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The PRO Act would establish a baseline for ensuring that working people can fight for and win transformative climate policies that benefit everyone.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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In order to make sense of the natural and human-induced disaster that has struck Texas, the nation will first need an accurate picture of who lives here. Yes, Texas has its oil barons, fossil-fuel lobbyists, and opportunistic political “leaders” who have extracted wealth from the state at the expense of the environment and human needs. But the real figure that should stand out is 17 million people.
That’s roughly the Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Asian population of Texas, which comprises nearly 60 percent of the state. Only 3 states and 69 countries have a larger total population. Denmark, Finland, and Norway combined do not total 17 million residents. Of the 13 cities in the U.S. with populations above 900,000 today, five are in Texas (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, and Fort Worth) and only 25 to 48 percent “non-Hispanic whites.” Thus, any story of Texans freezing, dying or hospitalized from carbon monoxide poisoning, losing power for vital medical equipment, or suffering without water or pipes bursting is more than likely occurring among the states BIPOC majority.
Outrage has erupted in Texas and throughout the nation, perhaps building on the momentum of the 2020 uprisings against white supremacy and police-perpetrated violence. Coming on the heels of the Trump-fueled mob attack on the Capitol and GOP refusal to hold the former president accountable, the catastrophe in Texas may be similar to the many “100-year” or “500-year” events that have now become commonplace. Floods, wildfires, freezes and heatwaves wreak havoc today but provide a preview of much worse effects to come from the compounded effects of industrial pollution and capitalist consumption.
As a result, three long overshadowed problems are now being widely discussed.
First, after the popular revolts of the 1960s, global powers responded with neoliberal restructuring designed to heighten the free reign of capital while weakening the collective power of workers and unions. This is what the Zapatistas called the Empire of Money, and it’s the mentality behind the deregulation and privatization of energy markets and utilities that leaves people literally in the cold when rapidly changing realities overwhelm systems designed to cut corners for immediate profiteering.
Second, Gov. Greg Abbott’s spurious scapegoating of renewable energy for the power outages—a perfect exposition of what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism”—has escalated demands for a Green New Deal. More broadly, it has exposed the need for an immediate and transformative response to the climate crisis rooted in principles of climate justice that empower and uplift peoples in the global South and the most oppressed sectors of the global North bearing the brunt of the crisis.
Third, Ted Cruz’s “let them eat cake” vacation to Cancun was a visible reminder of the cruelty of our political system — a system that rewards politicians propped up by corporate money, right-wing lies, and racist ideologies for blaming others and evading responsibility. The elites most responsible for the disastrous effects of climate change, racism, ableism, and poverty would have us believe that it is always others who must suffer instead of their own families.
The policies that have caused death and suffering have not “failed”; they have worked exactly as intended. The exponential growth of the billionaire class has been a direct product of five decades of neoliberalism, but the gains for the working and middle classes have been deliberately illusory. Yet, there can be no innocent return to the era of liberalism and the New Deal. We need to appreciate from history how the problems illuminated now in Texas are interconnected with the decline of the white majority and the liberal order.
Herrenvolk Democracy and the New Deal Order
Prior to the policy reforms of the first half of the 20th century, there was little assumption that the government had a responsibility to intervene to redress even the most grotesque economic injustices, such as exploitation of child labor, starvation wages, deadly working conditions, or food contamination. FDR’s New Deal galvanized a new and unprecedented coalition in support of social and economic reform, creating both employment and relief programs in response to the Great Depression and safety net measures like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance that have continued to the present.
The age of FDR represented a dramatic shift from the laissez-faire Hoover administration and a form of dominance that has been largely unparalleled in U.S. politics since. At its core, however, the New Deal coalition embodied the central contradiction in American democracy. Going back to at least Jefferson and Jackson, the push to expand the franchise and economic opportunity was tied to white supremacy. Thus, in the words of the late sociologist Pierre van den Berghe, it promoted herrenvolk (master race) democracy, or the concept that only the dominant group was entitled to such rights and capable of using them responsibly. White small farmers, settlers and workers routinely internalized a belief that they earned their freedom and citizenship rights as Americans through wars of genocide, campaigns of dispossession and reactionary social movements to uphold white supremacy.
The New Deal, though never coming close to achieving full equality, provided a new opening for labor unionization, civil rights, and Native sovereignty, thereby raising the prospects for multiracial democracy. Yet, the New Deal also continued to reinforce the contradictory unity of democracy and white supremacy. For example, it established public housing on a limited and racially segregated basis. However, the greater and longer-term impact of federal intervention was to subsidize white homeowners to buy homes with government-backed mortgages in neighborhoods restricted to whites by racist developers, realtors, and covenants.
Particularly in the South, FDR and national party leaders embraced white supremacist Democrats who prevented most African Americans and Mexican Americans from voting. So long as Black and Brown voters were shut out of the system, whites could perceive their votes as being for liberal economic policies like infrastructure development that served their self-interest, rather than simply voting against what they feared.
In Texas — part of the “Solid South” backing the Democrats almost exclusively for over 100 years — FDR won his first three elections with over 80 percent of the vote. Even when prominent conservative and white supremacist Democrats defected in 1944, he prevailed with 71 percent. During this time, the population of Texas was on average 70 percent or greater “non-Hispanic whites.”
The End of Liberal Hegemony
The Civil Rights Movement was born of a refusal to allow the white supremacist rule of herrenvolk democracy to continue. The right-wing currents that emerged in response were thus distinctly grounded in white supremacy. Though the new right was led by the corporate class — eventually finding a firm home in the GOP of Nixon and Reagan — it came to power with the fracture of the liberal order by winning middle and working-class whites away from the Democrats. This was a national phenomenon not limited to a “southern” strategy. In my 2017 book The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, I argue that Detroit, once the model of progress for capitalists and socialists, alike, became a model for the new right strategy of Black disenfranchisement and neoliberal dispossession.
During Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy engineered through a state takeover, the autocratic “emergency manager” worked with moneyed interests to take away or gut union jobs, homes, water, pensions, and health care benefits in order to impose austerity on the people and pave the way for billionaire developers and investors. This was an extreme form of a national trend to dismantle social programs and impose a Social Darwinist neglect of human needs by writing oppressed communities out of the social contract. The racist, classist and ableist response to COVID-19 has made this all too tragically clear.
As in Detroit, right-wing revanchism and race-baiting generally arose wherever demographic growth heralded a nonwhite majority. California was a pioneer of the dog-whistle racism that Republicans used to win over suburban whites from the 1960s to 1990s until the new majority came of age. Texas, whose once-commanding “non-Hispanic white” demographic majority disappeared between 1970 and 2010, has perfected much of the voter suppression, gerrymandering, and racist/heteropatriarchal scapegoating at the heart of the neo-Confederate playbook for minority rule by the current GOP.
The wealthy, privileged whites served by the Texas’s dominant political class are a small minority of the population. That’s the ongoing legacy of conquest, colonialism and proletarianization. Seen in this light, the unnecessary human suffering and death during the current catastrophe — whose full effects may not be known for some time — connect Texas to New Orleans and Flint, where short-term economic and political expediency have combined with racist, classist and ableist dehumanization to render mass populations disposable before, during, and after natural and human-induced disasters.
Contesting Minority Rule
This is how the bifurcation of herrenvolk democracy is now playing out: We are simultaneously moving toward a new social order that fulfills real democracy and a worse system driven by “master race” ideology. In Texas, where new and sustainable infrastructure is desperately needed, the New Deal has been supplanted by conspiracy theories and political Ponzi schemes. Like deregulated energy rates, these schemes promise cost savings at the expense of long-term stability and security, ultimately drowning households and local governments in debt while the Dow reaches record highs.
What is conceivable with the empowerment of a new majority in Texas and everywhere? We need structural change in politics to sweep away the politicians controlled by big money and dependent on lies, climate denial and scapegoating to remain in power. We all saw what Trump was able to get away with, and his legacy continues through the likes of Cruz and Abbott. But we also know that these crises are not limited to red states, and that Democratic policies have generally been inadequate, even as bolder and more promising proposals and leaders linked to activist movements have begun to arise and challenge the party’s establishment.
As Grace Lee Boggs recognized the growing illegitimacy of dominant institutions, she taught us that “the only way to survive is by taking care of one another.” That does not mean we should let those in power off the hook. What it implies is that we must do more than protest. We must to look to grassroots organizers, Indigenous peoples, and women of color feminists for models of solidarity in this transitional era of systemic collapse. In recent years, movements at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea have responded to colonial desecration by projecting a future centered on Earth, water and life.
During this catastrophe, Mutual Aid Houston has reported an “overwhelming wave of support” to provide food, blankets and money to people in need. The self-described BIPOC abolitionist collective formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality. It demonstrates scholar-activist Dean Spade’s point that mutual aid is not charity: “It’s a form of coming together to meet survival needs in a political context.” These local acts are putting into practice the values and concepts of community-based care that can establish relations for a more humane social order.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.