Work-In-Progress Administration

Relocation

2009-07-26T16:35:00.001-07:00

This blog hasn't been updated a while, due to the fact that I've been blogging elsewhere and likely will be for the foreseeable future. However, this blog will stay up, both as an archive and for personal blogging.

Future political/academic blogging will be at The Realignment Project.

Kennedy's 12-Page Proposal: Why the Devil Is In the Details

2009-05-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

Note: This is a cross-post from my group blog The Realignment Project and DailyKos.

So, if you've been following the day-to-day drama over the health care bill - Baucus says he'll fight for public option! Ben Nelson backs off opposition! Schumer tries for some weird single-payer/trigger double play! - then you've probably heard about Senator Kennedy's attempt to push the emerging bill to the lift by getting his HELP Committee's version of the bill out first and pushing Baucus to the left.

Well people have been asking about the details of what this 12 page proposal that's been circulating are.

Well, look no further!

Background:

So for people who haven't maybe been following the back and forth over the health care bill, the basic elements of the legislation being covered are these:

Insurance Reforms - guaranteed issue, community rating, and banning pre-existing conditions exclusions have been mentioned here, along with some sort of minimum standards as to coverage and services.
Mandates - both individual and employer (so-called "pay or play") mandates have been central elements of the deal, in order to achieve universal coverage, and in the case of employers, additional funding.
Health Exchanges - state-level purchasing pools where insurance plans would have to compete for clients, overseen by some kind of board that would set minimum standards, and the like.
Sliding Subsidies - probably using some sort of refundable credit, the idea is to construct a subsidy to pay for premiums that "slides" up or down depending on income, to deal with the "affordability" question.
A Public Plan - details unknown as to how Medicare like this would be, but some form of public plan available for individual and group purchase has been a central part of the debate.

The Kennedy Memo:

The key purpose of the Kennedy memo (which you can find here) seems to be an effort to shift the terms of the debate, and the eventual legislation left-wards. Not quite in the same way that single-payer advocates are hoping to do, but in a more traditionally moderate liberal fashion, focusing on the expansion of public programs.

Kennedy accomplishes his aims in a number of ways.

Private Insurance Reforms:

Guaranteed Issue and renewal - this is quite clever, because not only does it include the basic concession that insurance firms have made in return for individual mandates, but it also closes a potential loophole by making sure that you couldn't later get dropped.

Banning Pre-Existing Conditions Denial and Underwriting - this is also quite clever, because it tackles both the denial of care, but also the increasing of premiums due to an existing medical conditions, which often creates cost-related uninsurability.

Community Rating - "Premiums charged by health insurers should vary only by family composition, geography, and age, within clear and reasonable limits," a little bit vague here, but it seems to be pointing to allowing some regional variation.

Mandatory % Spent On Care - called rather sneakily "ensuring value in health insurance purchasing," this would require a certain percentage of every premium dollar to go to care as opposed to administration.

Sliding-Scale Subsidy:

Here's the big one, and it's snuck in via a short paragraph. The Baucus bill being drafted assumes some kind of sliding-scale subsidy to help pay for premiums, but a rather limited one. Kennedy's memo calls for "sliding scale premium assistance for individuals and families with income up to four times the federal poverty level to help them purchase quality health insurance policies."

This is crucial, both in the policy and the politics. Policy-wise, this means that the money involved is likely to be substantial, bringing people's medical costs down substantially (which would have beneficial ripple effects on living standards and consumer spending), and ensuring that people lower down on the income scale really can afford the premiums. However, politically, it's very important that a family of 4 making $88,000 a year would be eligible for subsidies. That means that the subsidy provision would be a relatively universal benefit that the middle class would enjoy. This builds a huge potential coalition for this benefit, which is crucial for turning it into the future equivalent of Social Security or Medicare, rather than the future equivalent of AFDC. It also makes the overall bill more of a political winner for politicians - who doesn't want to pass a bill giving millions of middle-class voters unsubstantial checks?

Health Exchange:

Nothing particularly new here, although it's very explicit that "To ensure that fiscal discipline and full accountability are built into this new structure, one health insurance option available to participants will be a publicly sponsored and guaranteed plan." I think the guaranteed is quite important - it means that the public plan in question could not be a spun-off Amtrak like affair, but something that had the financial support of the U.S government, and thus would be as sound as the rock of Gibraltar.

Individual Mandate:

Boilerplate here, although the phrasing "national health reform requires that everyone who can afford to must sign up for coverage," is important, putting emphasis on ensuring affordability front-and-center.

Not Included in the Memo:

Although this was in a separate email, according to Politico, two important key elements of the Kennedy plan should be included in this discussion: "in an e-mail summary that began circulating this week, Kennedy was described as considering a public insurance option that would pay providers slightly more than Medicare rates...He would also expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program to cover individuals up to 26-years old – up from 18."

These two details are crucially important. First, the payment rates - this is important for several reasons. It means that doctors and the AMA will have more of an incentive to back Kennedy's version than Baucus' version; it also means that the resulting public insurance plan would actually be widely accepted and usable, and hence worth purchasing, as opposed to something like Medicaid where it's very hard to find doctors who accept it; it also means that costs should be closer to the Medicare model than the private insurance model. Second, the CHIP expansion - if, as I suspect, this is paired with an expansion of Medicare down to 60 or maybe 55, this is an important step in gradually moving us in the direction of single-payer. People like Medicare a lot, they like CHIP a lot as well, and moving people away from insurance-based-on-employment to insurance-based-on-citizenship is a crucial intermediary step.

So there you have it. Now, Baucus' plan is significantly to the right of this, and Schumer's weird thing is to the right of that. However, by putting this plan out there as the HELP committee's bill and the bill that's on the table, it changes the terms of the debate by establishing a positional bargaining point that's significantly in the direction of more leftward alternatives, which in turn shifts the middle ground away from industry's preferences.

Why the Law Matters: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad

2009-05-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

In light of Obama’s recent Supreme Court nomination and the likely fight over the liberal vs. conservative direction of the Supreme Court, I’d like to reflect on how recent and unusual it is that the major political conflicts around the Court have revolved around questions of abortion and the rights of the accused, as well as other so-called “personal freedoms.” Don’t get me wrong, however – I’m not arguing that there has been a recent politicization of an otherwise neutral Court. I find that to be a ridiculous assertion. In a democracy, law and its interpretation is inherently political, an expression of our most deeply-held beliefs about the extent and expression of our rights, the meaning and reality of justice, the nature and scope of the state and the market, our very definition of what freedom, equality, democracy, privacy, independence, speech, mean.

Historically, however, the conflicts over the Court have gone through phases: before the post-1973 struggle over abortion, Court politics largely revolved around questions of civil rights (especially questions around affirmative action and de-segregation) which exploded onto the national consciousness in 1954, but had obviously been brewing for at least ten years before that. However, the longest-lasting political fight over the Court has been the fight over the nature of the state and the economy, and the competing claims of democracy and property rights, that arguably lasted from the end of the Civil War (many of the Civil Rights Cases that emasculated Reconstruction and its 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments revolved around questions of economic regulation) through to the 1940s.

I’d like to consider this particular political struggle, because I think it illuminates the critical importance of the law and the Supreme Court in shaping the most fundamental political decisions in our country’s history (which raises the question of how democratic our decision-making process really is), and because it shows that the true fight being carried on is not actually a fight over the law (because neither side has even been consistent regarding separation of powers, judicial independence or activism, strict constructionism versus more expansive legal philosophies, etc.), but rather a broader fight over the direction of national policy. In that sense, both sides believe that the court “is where policy is made” in our peculiar system of checks and balances, but not everyone’s honest about it.

Before I start, let me just say that there’s so much to learn about the relationship between the law and policy that this post is really inadequate. I would recommend the following books. William Novak’s The People’s Welfare, Michael Curtis’ No State Shall Abridge, Ned Beatty’s Age of Betrayal, William Forbath’s Law and the Shaping of the Labor Movement, Morton Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law, and Martin Sklar’s Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, just for starters. They’re books every citizen should read, and they make great summer reading (for amnesiacs and political/legal junkies).

The reason I’ve singled out Santa Clara is that it’s a great example of how a small, almost unnoticed change in the law can have huge political ramifications, and also a good example of how law, even Supreme Court super-schmancy Constitutional law, is really politics with fancier words.

First, the background - in the 19th century, the railroad was the economic thoroughfare of life, especially in rural farming districts and anywhere out West; agricultural products traveled from country to town, and from the rural West to the urban East via rail, industrial goods went from the cities to the countryside, and from the developed East to the developing West via the same routes. As a result, railroads were perfectly placed to extract massive monopoly rents from their unique position, and did – there’s a reason why the first big corporations were railroad corporations, why they invested massively in political lobbying, and why they received such political largess in the form of Federal aid and land-grants to finance railroad construction. At the same time, the railroads began diversifying their interests – they used their position as carriers and huge landowners to exert a huge influence over the agricultural market, often buying up large percentages of the yearly crop through their carrier fees, they were bought out or merged with coal and steel companies to vertically integrate the product from the mine to the mill to the shop, and so forth. This naturally touched off a huge reaction across the country – in the East, the American labor movement rose against industrial corporations starting in the 1870s and in the railroad industry first; on the Great Plains and out West, the Populist movement began to rise; but throughout the country, even your garden variety republicans turned against the railroads and embraced education.

Out in California, the major struggle was between the state and the railroads. The major California railroads, especially the Southern Pacific, not only dominated the agricultural market through their monopoly on commerce, but also through their massive land holdings, and their whole-sale purchase of the state legislature. As a result, the major impulse behind California Populism was the fight against the railroads, the drive to regulate railroad rates, to tax railroad property, and to reform the political system.

And Santa Clara was fundamentally a fight over whether the state could tax railroad property, in this case, the fencing along the right of way. Ultimately, a minor, almost piddling issue. The true consequences of the case was the obiter dicta that “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” With those two sentences, not even decided by the Court but rather added in a headnote by John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the Court’s Reporter (and coincidentally the former president of the Newburgh & New York Railroad Co.), a massive change in American law was made. Where previously corporations had been viewed with suspicion as artificial creations of the state that should be carefully regulated to protect the “salus populi” (the people’s welfare), now they were legal persons with all of the rights that had been judicially stripped away from the freedmen. As a result, any regulation, any tax, any government action that could be construed as damaging to the rights of a corporation could be challenged under law as a violation of equal protection, or substantive due process, or any other right under the 14th amendment.

This one decision massively upended the political balance between corporations and their adversaries, bringing the courts (and thus the law-enforcement powers of the state) into the fray against them. Railroad rate regulations to stop railroads from robbing farmers blnd or rigging markets in favor of particular trusts? Violations of due process. Health and safety regulations? Violations of equal protection if they weren’t the same for all industries. Unions and strikes? Out of the question. And so it went.

Part of the tragedy of the decline of a genuine liberalism in the legal profession, a shrinking away from the boldness of the Warren Court years, has been a hesitancy to challenge the assumptions about the free market and the nature of property that are at the very basis of the corporation’s advantage in the courts. This is especially problematic because the conservative legal movement has not been so hesitant. One of their major goals, along with eviscerating a woman’s right to choose or the right to privacy, is a full-blown assault on the modern reading of the Commerce Clause. As Clarence Thomas has written, “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause. In a future case, we ought to temper our Commerce Clause jurisprudence in a manner that both makes sense of our more recent case law and is more faithful to the original understanding of that Clause.” This is the ball game right here. If the Commerce Clause goes, so does all economic regulation, so does any environmental or labor regulations, and so does anti-discrimination legislation in the field of employment or housing.

So when we gear up for Sotomayor, or for whoever Obama picks next, there is a much bigger fight we need to be ready for, and there is no reason why we should think defensively about what’s possible in the realm of the law.

Like Water Dripping on a Stone: Rethinking the Politics of Single-Payer

2009-05-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

In the run-up to the universal health-care bill being debated in Congress, one of the more contentious issues on the political left has been the question of single-payer and its’ inclusion or exclusion from the debate. Recently, we’ve seen single-payer advocates getting themselves arrested to draw media attention, a huge amount of back-and-forth within the progressive blogosphere (of which the links here are just a small sampling), and a good deal of fear about the public option getting watered down or eliminated.

I feel somewhat ambivalent in this debate, in part because I agree with the policy of single-payer advocates, but I find myself turned off by their political style. And I think a lot of it has to do with a particular theory of activism and an ahistorical understanding of how social policy happens that I really disagree with.

Especially as we draw closer to the crucial mark-up and voting phases, and ever closer to passage of the Baucus/Kennedy/Dingell/Obama health care legislation, it’s imperative that the progressive movement think very carefully about what we want to accomplish.

Background:

One of the ironies about the debate over the current health care reform versus single-payer is that the basis for the current plan (and indeed, the rough consensus between the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama plans during the 2008 primaries), the “Hacker Plan” – was designed as a compromise measure between gradualists who favored things like the exension of SCHIP in the wake of the Clinton health reform disasters and single-payer advocates.

For those of you not familiar with the Hacker Plan (available here), it basically consists of three key elements:

Employer Pay-Or-Play Mandate – Employers are required either to provide health care for their employees or to pay a payroll tax that goes into a fund for covering the uninsured.
Individual Mandate Plus Sliding Subsidy – Individuals not already covered by their employer would be required to purchase health insurance, either from a public or private insurer; income-based subsidies would ensure that the cost of insurance would be reasonable.
A New Public Insurer – A new, Medicare-like public insurer would be created to act as a competitor/yardstick to private health insurers and to ensure that there is an “insurer of last resort.”

With some alterations (a health care purchasing pool, new emphasis on reforming private insurance, new emphasis on reducing the growth of health care costs, new emphasis on cutting premiums and out-of-pocket costs for the insured, new emphasis on extending SCHIP/Medicare/Medicaid as part of the solution), this is essentially the plan that is being debated.

Single-payer advocates are upset that they are basically being shut out of the debate, and they have a right to be. However, I believe that a certain amount of the anger directed at advocates for “public option” reform is due to the fact that the Hacker Plan has become more or less consensus within a broad segment of the Democratic Party, from as far left as Ted Kennedy/EPI/labor to as far right as Max Baucus and Hillary Clinton, although there remains to be seen how extensive the Blue Dog/Evan Bayh contingent is, and how much they’re actually going to remain outside the consensus on this issue. This has meant that while the single-payer advocates have some base – especially with CTA/NNA (the nurses’ unions) and various health care grassroots groups (HCAN, etc.) – a lot of its natural supporters are now in the “public option” camp, which reduces the constituency for single-payer at the legislator and lobbyist levels. Even if single-payer was to “get a seat at the table,” they’d find that the other chairs – those not reserved for industry – are already taken up by “public option” advocates, and would find themselves on the losing side of a number of internal debates, and we’d probably end up exactly where we are today.

Like I said earlier, I feel very ambivalent about this, because I am ideologically and emotionally sympathetic to single-payer as a policy goal, but I feel really turned off when I see the tactics and strategies being carried out by single-payer advocates as they try to push their ideas back into the debate. For me, this isn’t a theoretical issue, it’s quite personal.

Humphrey Cooper Attewell, my great-grandfather. was elected to the British Parliament in 1945 as the Labor M.P for Harborough. As such, he cast his vote for the establishment of the National Health Service in 1946. The NHS was at the time and remains to this day the one of the most progressive health care systems in the world – a system in which the hospitals belong to the state, where the doctors, nursers, and other medical workers are public employees, and where health care is provided to all for free as a right. In a sense, therefore, the story of single-payer health care is the story of where I come from and who I am.

Yet I find myself oddly turned off when I listen to single-payer advocates, in part because I really disagree with the manner in which they are attempting to push their agenda, both in terms of their tactics and their larger strategy. I don’t find the tactics of single-payer advocates compelling in the slightest; I think direct actions and civil disobedience directed at the chairman of the committee who’s going to decide what health care bill will ever emerge on the floor of the Senate to be totally without merit. Simply put, it does not advance the cause of single-payer at all to piss off Senator Max Baucus, especially since single-payer advocates do not have the resources or the political strength necessary to seriously challenge him either in Montana or in the Senate Democratic Caucus. Strategically, I find the insistence on an all-or-nothing single-payer system to be utterly misguided and contrary to all the lessons that history can teach us about how advances in social policy actually happen.

Take a look at two of the most single-payer nations out there – Canada and the U.K. The Canadian health care system emerged, not in a single all-or-nothing burst, but rather in a gradual process of expansion. In 1944, Tommy Douglas of the CCF (Canada’s socialist part at the time) was elected premier of Saskatchewan on a platform that included free hospital care to all citizens. In 1946, his government passed the Saskatchewan Hospitalization Bill, which provided hospital care (not including physicians’ bills, prescriptions, etc.) to most, but not all residents. It took time to build up enough finances to cover all residents, and to extend coverage to all servcices; full Medicare for the province didn’t come in until 1959. Other provinces began experimenting with universal health coverage; Alberta establishing a pre-paid system that covered 90% of their residents in 1950. It took longer for the system to spread across the country: the first Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Act in 1957 merely provided 50% of the costs of running health care programs; in 1962, the national government passed legislatuion to include phsyicians costs in the federal susbsidy; in 1966, the national government passed the Medical Care (Medicare) Act, which enabled provinces to establish full Medicare systems based ont he Saskatchewan model; and in 1984, the Canada Health Act established the modern system that Canadians know today.

In the U.K, the move towards single-payer began in 1911, with the introduction of the National Insurance Act by Lloyd George’s Liberal government. This legislation established a national system of health insurance, funded by payroll contributions from workers, employers, and contributions from general taxation – quite different than the current system. However, this system only covered certain trades and occupations of workers paid into the system, and the relatively low government contribution meant that coverage could often be quite expensive. During WWII, the pressures of the mass bombing of civilian populations led to the creation of the Emergency Health Service, which put all medical professionals into government service, created a coordinated national hospital system, and so forth. And finally in 1946, the new Labor government passed the National Health Services Act, establishing the modern National Health Service (NHS) on the basis of three central principles, that services should be free at the point of use, that general taxation should be the source of financing for the system, and that everyone would be eligible for care.

The point of this history lesson is that single-payer has historically developed in a gradual fashion – the Canadian system took forty years to develop into the modern Medicare system, and the British system took more than thirty years. In both cases, it wasn’t a single piece of legislation that made single-payer a reality, but the gradual achievement of partial steps that, like water dripping on a stone, wore down institutional resistance to single-payer.

Which leads us back to the current debate. I think that single-payer advocates should rethink their attachment to immediacy and to all-or-nothing when it comes to achieving their goal of a single-payer system; moreover, I think this will lead towards a re-evaluation of tactics, and the embrace of a strategy that emphasizes allying with public-option advocates to gain entrance into the coalition, so that they can begin pushing for those elements that would make the current proposal a true stepping-stone to single-payer. Here, I’m primarily thinking about ensuring the inclusion of a public option, making that public option as Medicare-like as possible, pushing for more generous income subsidies and more comprehensive minimum stnadards for healthcare plans, and support for states to experiment with single-payer. The passage of any major health care reform would in itself be a major step forward, in that it would break the now forty year gap in major social policy achievements, it would de-stabilize and de-motivate opponents ot health care reform, it would create a political atmosphere more open to single-payer by making universal health care a new “third rail,” and it would create pressures and interest groups to reform and improve and expand the new system.

Furthermore, in policy, passing the bill is only half the battle – implementation is the longer and more crucial phase. Here, I think one way that single-payer advocates can begin to broaden their base while pushing for their objectives is to begin a national campaign to sign people up for the public option, pushing the system closer to single-payer with every person signed up, and concretely solving the crisis of the uninsured. Here, single-payer advocates could usefully work with allies within the labor movement to push all 12.4% of the workforce that’s currently unionized into the public plan, and other social justice groups (union organizing campaigns, civil rights groups, GLBT groups, feminist groups) could plug into the campaign by folding signing people up for public health care as part of their ongoing missions. Moreover, single-payer advocates, by being slightly outside the coalition of public-option advocates, would then be free to begein “raiding” the private insurance market, taking the fight to the private insurance companies by mobilizing their friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers into switching from private to public insurance; you could target major employers with public insurance drives, especially focusing on corporations like GM, Ford, and Chrystler, where the argument for a single-payer (as opposed to employer-based) health care system might resonate.

In my mind, that’s the winning strategy for single-payer.

Strange Fruits of Victory: A Vision of the Democratic Party in 2040

2009-05-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Note: This is a cross-post from my new group blog, The Realignment Project.

One of the side-effects (collateral damage if you want to be ironic) of the 2008 election, and the broader public reaction against the Bush Administration, has been a massive shift in partisan identification away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party.

One example of this trend is the most recent Pew Poll on partisan identification that shows a shift from a tie of 43% to 43% in 2002 to a 53% Democratic and 36% Republican split. This follows several other polls that suggest a massive decline in Republican identification and a smaller, but still significant increase in Democratic identification.

All of which has caused a bit of speculation over whether the Republican Party will survive as an institution, and what this will mean for the future of American politics. Will the Republican Party collapse, and what will fill its place? Will there be a new second party, and what will it look like? Will the Democratic Party become the lone major party, and how long would their sole dominance last?

For the purposes of a thought experiment, I’d like follow one particular line of speculation in order to tease out some major questions about the current nature and future direction of the Democratic Party.

One of the advantages of taking a historical approach to a question like this is that American history luckily gives us examples of how this kind of political realignment has happened in the past. Unusually, the United States seems to experience major political realignment on a fairly regular basis, so we have several models that could tell us what the collapse of a political party might look like:

A New Second Party – in this model, the fall of one of the two major political parties results in its place being taken by a new second party that assembles a new coalition, often borrowing from elements of the fallen political party’s coalition and adding new groups in order to forge a new and more durable coalition. The best example of this from American history is the rise of the Republican Party from the wreckage of the Whig Party. The Whig Party’s Northern and Southern coalition, previously formed on the basis of economic policy, was destabilized by the introduction of a new issue – slavery – into the political debate. The new Republican Party brought Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, Nativists, and abolitionists into a new anti-slavery coalition. It’s interesting to note, however, that the Republican Party’s economic policy largely followed Whig lines: support for a national banking policy, a protective tariff for industrial goods, internal improvements (public works, usually in the field of transportation infrastructure), and nationalism over regionalism.
The Dominant Party Breaks Into Two New Parties – in this model, the fall of one of the two major parties results in the remaining period experiencing a long period of dominance. Ultimately, underlying tensions within the ruling party’s coalition built to the point of fracture, resulting in two new parties. Here, the best example is the emergence of the Whig Party in 1828-1832 out of the National Republicans (who themselves had emerged from the ex-Federalist New England wing of the Democratic-Republican Party). The divisions between the Whigs and Jacksonian Democrats had many causes, including personality conflicts and divisions over separation of powers issues, but chief among them were the expression of economic policy divisions that had persisted for some time, with Whigs following the more Federalist lines of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Gallatin, and Jacksonian Democrats cleaving more towards the Jeffersonian economic philosophy.
The Second Party Gets Its Act Together, But Changes Dramatically – in this model, one of the two parties comes close to political oblivion and spends some time in “the wilderness,” before adapting itself to suit a new coalition, new ideological position, and/or geographic or demographic changes. In some ways, this is the most frequent case – one can look to the transformation of the Democratic Party in 1932 into the New Deal Coalition after spending 10 years in the minority, the re-emergence of the Republican Party as the party o anti-communism in the 1950s following nearly 20 years of political isolation, the Cold War Liberal dominance of the Democratic Party in the 1960s, the re-constitution of the Republican Party into the party of the New Right from 1964 to the 1980s, the emergence of New Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, and so forth. In each case, the party takes on new constituents (urban workers and African Americans in the New Deal coalition, Southern Whites in the Reagan coalition, and so forth) or new issues (anti-Communism in the 1950s, civil rights int he 1960s).

Ultimately, I’m persuaded by polling data that shows a continuing trend of declining Republican identification, which suggests that the failures of the Bush Administration have not merely damaged the reputation of George W. Bush, but have also damaged the long-term reputation of the Republican Party as well. In addition to the partisan damage, I think economic conservatism has been badly damaged by the Bush recessions, and it will take some time before the public is willing to support more pro-market policies. Furthermore, I think that surveys of political ideology – as can be found here and here - suggest that the political environment is likely to shift leftwards for some time to come, making it more difficult to establish a new second party. This evidence is especially persuasive on social issues, suggesting that cultural conservatism may be in for a more long-lasting decline, as younger generations turn against cultural conservative issues across the political spectrum.

What I think will happen, therefore, is a period of Democratic Party dominance for the next 10 to 20 years. However, I think tensions will gradually emerge between its left and right flanks over economic and social policy that may very well lead to the establishment of two new parties. What we may have in 2040 is one party that is socially liberal and economically liberal – a genuine Progressive party, although probably partaking less of the class politics of a Social Democratic Party than the “social organism” politics of Progressivism – and another party that is socially liberal and economically laissez-faire – what Europeans would recognize as a Liberal Party. The reason for this is that as moderate and liberal Republicans desert the Republican Party for the Democrats, there will be a wider base for this kind of politics – at least after expansions of the welfare state (especially in the area of universal health care) and the return of economic prosperity have given middle class and affluent Democrats the sense of economic security necessary for the return to a more New Democratic attitude towards markets, especially given the availability of corporate financing for such a political shift.

However, it’s hard to tell what will happen. It may well be that the Republican Party will jettison cultural conservatism and become a European-style Liberal Party – if that does happen, I don’t think it will happen any time soon. At the very least I would think it would take a period of sustained losses in 2010, 2012, and probably 2014 and 2016 to really produce enough of a scare to make that happen. It would also be wrong to suggest that any of this could happen on its own – any political shifts we might see over the next 10 or 20 years will require huge amounts of political work. At the very least, we will need to see key policy victories in the Obama administration – with universal health care being the most important among them – in order to create the political climate for an enduring left shift.

Re-Post Number 11: "Stimulus Is Not Enough: Job Creation Now!" (Jan 09, 2009)

2009-05-20T15:25:00.000-07:00

Note: and that's the last of the re-posts. The context for this post was the political fight over the Obama stimulus package.
---------------------------------------

In the last few months, the U.S economy has seen one of the fastest slides into one of the most terrifying employment declines in American history - we are now losing jobs at the rate of 500,000 a month.

Given this reality, the current stimulus proposal is no longer sufficient. We must move beyond a debate that tries to balance a couple hundred billion in tax cuts with four hundred billion in public works, aid to the states, and traditional stabilizers (UI, food stamps, etc).

In the last few months, the U.S economy has seen one of the fastest slides into one of the most terrifying employment declines in American history - we are now losing jobs at the rate of 500,000 a month. Given this reality, the current stimulus proposal is no longer sufficient. We must move beyond a debate that tries to balance a couple hundred billion in tax cuts with four hundred billion in public works, aid to the states, and traditional stabilizers (UI, food stamps, etc).

What we need are jobs, and jobs now.

Background:

For about two years now, I've been diarying about public employment programs, which I'm studying for a dissertation in U.S Public Policy History. If you're interested in reading more on job creation programs, you can check out any of these diaries:

[edit: see here]

The Current Crisis:

Given the stunning rate of job loss, I believe that traditional stimulus measures will not be adequate to offset the damage being done to the economy. On the jobs front, if we create three million jobs as President-Elect Obama hopes, we may well have only bought ourselves six months of breathing room rather than a lasting improvement. On the consumption side, even if we shovel $1 trillion into the economy, if people are seeing jobs disappear at the rate that they have, their propensity to consume will decrease and their propensity to save will increase as people batten down the hatches against the bad times and save money for when the jobs go. Not to say that it won't have any effect, but it's going to be much much weaker than one would hope.

Given the seriousness of this situation, I think we need to radically re-think the stimulus package. To begin with, the tax cuts need to come out - they're not going to have nearly enough of an effect on people's spending habits if people's psychological posture is determined by an omnipresent fear of layoffs and unemployment. Next, we need to understand that the current commitment to public works is inadequate to the task. While many of the existing public works plans - from greening buildings to building high-speed rail - are quite worthy, the nature of the process of letting out contracts, vetting proposals, and getting the site operational takes too damn long, and will not generate enough jobs fast enough.

What We Need:

As I have argued before (see here), public works are not the policy tool we should be looking to, at least not in the traditional contractor model.

Instead, I believe that the Federal government needs to hire unemployed workers directly and immediately. We should begin by hiring 5.5 million workers right now, to bring the unemployment rate down from 7.2% to 3.6%, and to increase that number at any time to keep the overall unemployment rate at 4% or below if/when additional private sector jobs are lost.

Why? First, we need to dramatically reverse our current downtrend. Creating these jobs would send a dramatic signal to every consumer and producer that mass unemployment is not going to happen, that it is not necessary to cut back in the face of crisis. Second, we need a policy big enough for our economy. Given the sheer scale of the American labor market, in order to send a signal that really resonates, you need to do something at a large enough level that it actually changes the economic reality - cutting unemployment in half is exactly the right kind of signal. Third, every month we wait to create jobs is less income going into the economy and more people falling into poverty - in order to start spending fast enough to get ahead of the deflationary effects of this recession, we need to create jobs faster.

Precedent:

Luckily, we do have precedent for how to do this, in the Civil Works Administration. In the fall of 1933, with unemployment still hovering in the 20% range, Harry Hopkins (the head of FDR's Federal Emergency Relief Administration) went to President Roosevelt with a plan to create 4 million jobs to reduce unemployment and keep people alive during the normal seasonal downturn in unemployment in the winter. To his surprise, Roosevelt agreed, and the CWA was born in October 1933, with a grant of $400 million dollars "borrowed" from FDR's public works program.

In three months, the CWA had created 4.26 million jobs. At a time when the most advanced administrative technology was the carbon copy and the rotary phone, all 4.26 million workers were hired and put to work that quickly. Surely, today we can do better.

The Cost:

Assuming a base salary of $24k/year and a non-salary overhead of 30% (a rather generous assumption, given that New Deal era programs managed to limit non-salary costs to 20%), it should cost roughly $31 billion to put one million people to work for a year. Five and a half million people makes $170.5 billion dollars - well within the current framework of President Elect Obama's $750 billion plus package.

In the end, this is not a question of whether we can find $170 billion to spend; the sheer size of the bailouts and the proposed stimulus package shows that the American government's fiscal powers are much greater than we've been led to believe on social welfare issues. It's more a question of how we spend money, and the ideology contained therein.

Republicans want to give tax breaks because they don't believe in government, and they want to benefit the rich who they believe are best suited to spend the money. Congressional Democrats want to spend the money traditionally, because they're used to spending on traditional areas and constituents (not that their proposed spendings are a bad idea, far from it), and because it's been 70 years since we've done anything like this. Creating millions of jobs directly is a radical departure from standard practice, and Democrats may well be nervous about doing something so drastic.

However, we simply cannot afford to wait.

Please read this, promote this if you can, pass the word on. There is a way out of this crisis, but we just have to remember how we did it last time.

California Budget: Where Do Progressives Go From Here?

2009-05-19T23:15:00.000-07:00

Given that the current ballot propositions have gone down in flames, then the state of California faces a brand-new budget crisis of some $21.3 billion. While obviously the Democratic leadership has focused their attention on trying to pass the ballot measures they thought represented the best possible compromise, I do hope that some thought has been given to what the new strategy will be on 5/20. Granted, the imperatives of political strategy mean that it's more than likely that there is a Plan B that's being kept under wraps at the Legislature, At the same time, however, it is vital that California Progressives come together to construct a stronger coalition and a winning strategy for the future of our state.

One potentially hopeful sign is that it appears that California may seek some sort of Federal bailout, either in the form of Federal fiscal aid or in Federal guarantees for California's bonds. The danger that progressives have pointed to is the possibility that Gov. Schwarzenegger will use this crisis to push for additional spending cuts, deregulation of environmental and labor protections, and other regressive pet projects.

Obviously, this would be catastrophic, both for California and for the nation. The Obama Administration must resist the Governor's request for "the right to make the cuts we need" - if for no other reason than pure self-interest. There is nothing to be gained from placating a Governor who has no political future in his or any other party, whose approval ratings are through the floor, whose administration has become a byword for failure, and who has nothing to offer the administration. Obama's political and policy interests converge in a successful economic recovery achieved through Keynesian stimulus; his interests in a California bailout would be to ensure that the Largest state in the Union and the world's 10th largest economy does not become a massive deflationary weight on the American economy. Acceding to further spending cuts, further job losses and furloughs, and especially to programs like Medi-Cal that benefit the poorest Californians (who as Keynesian theory reminds us have the greatest "marginal propensity to consume") would only serve to damage his own stimulus plan and slow the pace of recovery.

California Progressives at every level, from Senator Boxer on down to the Party Central Committees, local grassroots groups, and veterans of his 2008 campaign should absolutely lobby the President to ensure that any bailout is conditional on A. a reversal of prior cuts and firings and a commitment to pro-stimulatory policy, and B. Schwarzenegger's commitment to signing a new majority-vote budget written up solely by Democrats using the "Steinberg maneuver."

However, even this victory would be a mere cauterizing of the wound. If nothing else, the defeat of the May 19th propositions must show all members of the Progressive coalition that we cannot continue on the current path of division and drift - we must unify around a comprehensive strategy for confronting the crisis of governance once and for all in 2010, a new way forward.

To begin this process, we should start with a few fundamental strategic principles:

1. Aggressive Partisan Use of Majority-Vote
Progressives tried and failed to abolish the 2/3rds rule before. While we must absolutely put every resource we can into its abolition in 2010 (including putting abolition front-and-center in the 2010 Democratic Platform, making it a litmus test in the gubernatorial primary, and creating a narrative of constitutional reconstruction around it), our commitment to functioning democratic government must come first. Which means no matter what happens in the future - whether we pass an initiative or don't, whether we get to 2/3rds control of the legislature or don't, whether we get control of the governor's mansion or don't - that Democrats aggressively use the "Steinberg maneuver" to right the fiscal ship and get California voters accustomed to seeing majority budgets. This may very well mean strong-arming the governor, and potentially using our allies in the Federal government to provide additional leverage, but I see this as a crisis of democracy. Either the people rule in the state of California, or they don't, and we cannot allow a minority bent on the bankruptcy of the government to succeed.

At the very least, let's try - even failure would be better than doing nothing.

2. Creating a Progressive Foundation For the State's Finances
There's been a tendency in recent years for Democrats in the state legislature to nibble around the edges when it comes to raising revenue rather than going for comprehensive solutions. We can't afford to delay any longer. Democrats need to think more creatively about revenue generation, and about how to create progressive narratives around revenue and spending - even if it means going after corporate taxation and tax breaks in a major way. A good first step would be something like establishing an oil excise tax and putting the revenue into a higher education fund (simultanteously opening up more space in the General Fund) - thereby tying a tax on companies people don't like to a cause that people do like. Similarly, I think tying a cut in residential property tax rates to an increase in commercial property tax rates - and tying that revenue towards California's various green-housing ventures would also create a positive narrative that frames progressivization of the tax code in a personal and approachable way - do you favor cutting your taxes and raising more money for green housing, or protecting rich corporations?

Above all, we cannot let the debate over government taxing and spending be conducted at an abstract level that allows conservatives to milk voters' mixed feelings of resentment of taxes and apathy towards paying for services they want. At all times, the means (taxes on X) must be connected visibly to the end (spending on this program). We must learn to do that, not just for budgeting-by-ballot initiatives, but for the entire General Fund.

3. A Universal and Comprehensive Approach to Social Spending
Which brings me on to our next issue - the tangled nature of our state's social spending, a mixture of regular General Fund spending and special initiative funds. It's incredibly opaque, and makes it very difficult to understand what's going on, plan or coordinate, or to mobilize people around an ultimate goal for social spending. My current vision is that we should create unified social Services to centralize our competing and divided programs, and to create the administrative capacity for future progressive efforts. For example, a California Health Service to combine Medi-Cal, Prop 10's funds, and other programs, not only to improve coordination of current efforts, but also to create the state capacity for single-payer health care in the future. (After all, the British NHS required the prior establishment of the war-time Health Services who developed the expertise in nation-wide public health delivery). Moreover, a Health Service would allow taxation to be linked closely to spending, which would in turn be linked to public policy goals: "support bill/proposition X to increase revenue for the Health Service, to help move California towards universal health care," or "support bill/proposition Y to increase revenue for the Education Service, to reduce drop-out rates in half in five years."

Thus, the narrative of government is complete, from the tax, to the program, to the program's intended results. That way, debates over government shift from the conservatives' favorite territory of how big or how small or how efficient or wasteful to questions of which social goals we want to achieve.

4. A Unified, Party-Driven 2010 Campaign
In order to achieve all of this, we need to avoid the kind of factionalized intrigue and infighting that has sapped and dispersed the strength of the California Progressive movement - this means getting every group on board, including all of organized labor, all of the Latino groups, all of the African-American groups, all of the Asian-American groups, all of the progressive groups, all of the women's groups, all of the GLBT groups, and all of the electeds in the same coalition.

And just as importantly, it has to be centralized within the party. Every election cycle, we run into the same program of groups trying to re-invent the wheel by forming new coalitions, building up their own voter and donor databasers, running their own ads, doing their own GOTV. It's a massively wasteful duplication of effort, and it often means that politics becomes less democratic, as power is pushed upwards into the executive boards of temporary organizations that are unelected and not responsible to their constituency; it also means that official Democratic Party politics is diminished by the inattention of the progressive forces within the party, leading to capture by electeds and candidates and the devolution of what should be principle and policy-based politics into personality-driven politics. Hence the need for all groups to stake a common claim to a party organization that is, for all of its faults, visible, elected, and responsible to local Democrats.

This is not an easy thing to ask - it means giving up autonomy in favor of collaboration and compromise; it also means a genuine embrace of solidarity. Solidarity is a word that gets tossed around a lot in labor circles, sometimes genuinely, sometimes as a genuflection to a timeworn idol, and sometimes as cover for more complex politics. It's also something so deep in the bones and blood of the labor movement that it becomes almost an inexplicable article of faith - a shibboleth that separates those of the House of Labor from our uncomprehending allies. But what it ultimately means is a commitment to an other-directed politics, to the recognition of a wider moral commonwealth, an almost-spiritual oneness of need and humanity and frailty between disparate and remote groups of workers. It means being willing to march in a picket line and get your head beaten on for a different union's drive, for workers you may never have met before - because you recognize your struggle in theirs, and know implicitly that they'd do the same for you. It means refusing to cross a picket line even when it might hurt your pocketbook because crossing that picket line would be a betrayal of that part of yourself you see in other people.

It's a tough concept to live up to, a sort of discipline. And it's something that various factions of the Democratic Party need to understand and make a part of your life. It meets that Progressives - who are often whiter, richer, and maler than other members of our coalition - have to instinctively recoil from anyone who calls labor a special interest, because labor would do the same for them when conservatives attack them as anti-American. It means that African-American groups need to instinctively support GLBT groups on issues like Prop 8, not because the African-American community is morally obliged to be the conscience of the nation, or because they're required to accept any group's claim to similarity to the civil rights movement, but because they recognize GLBT Californians as part of a coalition for a broader conception of civil rights for all. And on and on, each group must be willing to put the interests of their peers at a level with their own, and the interests of the coalition above all else.

And this won't happen unless the center of a unified, party-driven campaign is a progressive platform that fully incorporates the major drivers of all constitutive elements of the party. That means not just Abolition of 2/3rrds, but also Repeal of Prop 8, and so on, so that each group feels that its political objectives can best be met by the enactment of the party platform, creating the level of trust and confidence necessary for concerted action and true solidarity.

Re-Post Number 10: "Going Beyond Obama's Two-And-A-Half: A Case for More Jobs Now" (Dec 06, 2008)

2009-05-17T11:42:00.000-07:00

Note: This post refers to the above YouTube Address, and is the last but one of this re-post series.
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Today, President-Elect Barack Obama went on YouTube to discuss the issue of unemployment, and how to "put people back to work." His proposal was a for public works and government investment in infrastructure and alternative energy, creating two and a half million jobs. At first glance, this is a major transformation in American public policy, since it was the first time that a president has advocated that the government should directly create jobs on a mass scale since 1944, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence," and argued that "the right to a useful and remunerative job" should belong to all Americans. His vision was first proposed in law a year later as the Full Employment Bill of 1945, the high water mark of American liberal economic policy never again reached.

To that extent, Obama’s YouTube address constitutes a quiet revolution, a small yet telling sign that change comes to Washington in many way.

But it’s not enough.

(Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in policy history, writing my dissertation on direct job creation policy, so I'm unreasonably obsessed about this topic.

Studying the job creation proposals that Obama’s campaign and his transition team has put forward (see here), we see a certain amount of caution and division as to how to achieve his goal of 2.5 million new jobs in two years: Obama has proposed $50 billion to the states to prevent cutbacks in spending and stimulate construction, a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to invest $60 billion over 10 years; an Advanced Manufacturing Fund and a Manufacturing Extensive Partnership to push private-sector job creation; $150 billion over 10 years to create a Green Energy Economy; a Green Jobs Corps which appears to be a mix of jobs and jobs-training; and $1 billion over five years in transitional jobs. Some common themes emerge: first, a preference for indirect creation, either through the states or through private industry; second, an emphasis on long-term rather than short term; and third, a general tendency to small-bore approaches. The policy history literature on these approaches suggests that these are not the most effective way to create jobs.

Even if every item on this list passes into law, and creates the 2.5 million jobs that are hoped for, it would still only bring unemployment down from its projected peak of 8.5% to 7.25%, still far above normal levels and far away from FDR’s call for a job for all who wanted it. If we really do want to change national economic policy and get our country moving again, we need to think bigger and bolder.

Luckily, we have a model for how to create jobs immediately. In October 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins pitched an audacious plan to President Roosevelt: create four million jobs directly by the Federal government, and then put people to work building necessary public goods, and do it all by Christmas. FDR signed off on the idea and the Civil Works Administration was born in November, with a month to go. Through Herculean efforts, Hopkins and his staff hit their goal and then some – by January, 4, 263,644 people reported for work. Though the CWA was a brief prelude to the later Works Progress Administration, its results were staggering. In six months, the workers of the CWA built nearly a half million miles of road; 7,000 bridges and 4,000 schools and 1,000 airports; the murals at Coit Tower in San Francisco and the Zoo at Central Park in New York stand as silent witnesses to their labor.

My advice to President-Elect Obama is that, yes he can do more. In the words of his Chief of Staff-designate Rahm Emanuel, the new administration will need to "throw deep and long" to deal with the crisis of unemployment. To accomplish this task, I recommend the following principles:

Think Big: the American economy and the American labor force is leviathan in scope, so a small-bore strategy, such as $1 billion for transitional jobs would have little macroeconomic impact and would serve only a small fraction of the unemployed. Four and a half million jobs, on the other hand, would immediately reduce unemployment from a hypothetical 8.5% to 6.25%, getting us half-way out of our current slump in one move (even before any Keynesian effect on the private sector). Not only would this have an enormous stimulatory effect on the economy, but it would also embrace almost a third of those in need of a job – a true down-payment on reform.

Focus on the People First, the Works Second: one of the reasons why public works programs are often less effective than their creators hope is that they focus on the works more than the public being helped – the money appropriated goes mostly towards land, equipment, materials, the jobs go to private contractors who are more likely to be employed already, and the impact of the program on unemployment is lessened. Focus first on putting four and a half million people to work, then focus on how you can use the sheer labor power of four and a half million people to accomplish your goals of renewing infrastructure and creating a new green energy economy. The results will flow – nine million hands working together can build as many schools as you like, install as many solar panels as you like, or throw up as many free wireless towers as you like.

Do It Now, Not Over Two Years: the longer we wait for these jobs to create, the harder a time you’re going to have getting the economy going again, even with a big stimulus package. But with four and a half million workers drawing paychecks (I would suggest paying $24,000 a year, so that these newly created jobs can fight not just unemployment, but poverty as well) every month, you would be able to create a steady stream of stimulus to the tune of $9 billion a month, flowing into the economy from the bottom up, exactly in the fashion most likely to cause the most re-spendings, and the greatest economic impact. Moreover, if FDR and Harry Hopkins could, at a time when carbon copy and the rotary phone were the heights in administrative technology, do all this in three months, you might be able to head off unemployment before it gets to 8.5%, and reducing unemployment from 6.5% to 4.25% would drastically cut short our current recession.

Why Does This Matter?

A reasonable person might ask, why quibble over the difference between two and four million? Isn't Obama already doing what you're asking him to do? Why does this matter?

Ultimately, it matters because of scale - the American economy is a leviathan, even if it's sick, and the scale of the jobs crisis is huge when we're losing a half-million jobs a month. In order to reverse the crisis, you need to send a signal to the system that's big enough to make every part of the economy sit up and take notice, that can actually move the macro-level of the economy in a significant way.

However, there's another issue - I want the U.S government, our political parties, and the American electorate to start thinking not just in terms of millions of jobs but in terms of percentage of current unemployment. The ultimate promise of public employment, the thread that runs from the CWA to the Full Employment Bill, is that the unemployment rate can be determined through collective democratic action, that we can establish full employment if we recognize the right of all citizens who want to work to a job. If we can restore that belief, that policy knowledge, then we can not just end this recession, but prevent the next one as it happens.

"Democrat Socialist:" Would a Party By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?

2009-05-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

In one further step toward political oblivion it seems likely that, when the Republican National Committee meets next week, they will approve a resolution to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist Party" in all formal communications. Thus, Republicans have managed to combine their 5th-grader's taunt of refusing to use the proper suffix for our party and their ridiculous habit of labeling anything other than massive regressive tax cuts as socialist.

In even more amusing turn of events, Frank Llewellyn, the national director of the actual Democratic Socialists of America, is apparently offended by the change. According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent, Llewellyn said "“It’s objectionable..because they’re giving socialism a bad name by associating it with the Democrats, who are the second-most capitalist party in the world."

But rather than simply labeling this event as comedy and moving on, I think we should rather treat this as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of our party and the future of American political thought.

What Does it Mean to Be a Democrat?

Part of what makes this event so ironic is that conservative elements in the Republican Party clearly believe that the Democratic Party has a much more coherent ideological posture, and a much more left-leaning ideological posture than we actually have. This isn't anything new: Republicans called the Democratic Party an agent of "creeping socialism" in the 1930s when the Party consisted of a tenuous alliance between urban liberals and southern reactionaries; Republicans considered Bill Clinton - who was, before, during, and after his presidency a moderate right-of-center Democrat - a dangerous radical, an unreconstructed McGovernite.

In reality, the Democratic Party is still an extremely ideologically diverse party, running from socialists (Bernie Sanders isn't in the party formally, but you could certainly find his ideological kin in parts of the Democratic Party) to conservatives like Ben Nelson. In some ways, we're more left-leaning than we were during the Clinton years - on the use of economic stimulus, the importance of public investments versus deficit spending, the public plan in health insurance reform, some elements of foreign policy and trade. In other ways, we've become more conservative - we don't talk about gun control much any more, I would argue we haven't significantly shifted on financial regulations yet, and so on.

And that's something I've always considered to be somewhat problematic. An open tent is a wonderful thing, but it does present certain problems. One of the largest is what overall direction we want to have as a party on the country. As one of my old mentors once said, one's politics should always begin with a vision of how you would want the world to look like if you were in charge, and then working how to get from where you are to where you want to go. Historically, political parties at their core are those visions. Communist parties had a vision of the end of capitalism and a new world to follow; in a different way, so socialist and social-democratic parties have a vision of a better world. Even conservative parties, like our own Republican parties, have a vision of an imagined past, a golden age they seek to return to, a sense of tradition they want to preserve.

At various times, the Democratic Party has had strong visions, although never uncontested. The New Deal vision was dominant, although challenged by the Southern Democrats, from 1932-1948; what has often been referred to as "Cold War Liberalism" was quite strong from '48 through to the collapse of the "Cold War consensus"; we've had "civil rights" Democrats and "New Left" Democrats, and so on. Yet for all the strum and drang that we hear about Progressive Democrats versus Establishment/DLC/DINO/whatever else you want to call them, it's more often been a conflict over policy or strategy, as opposed to ideology. Even within DailyKos, for example, there's a good amount of ideological diversity and fluidity, and a certain disagreement over what ideological terms even mean. Witness for example the lively debate in this thread over the difference between "progressive" and "liberal."

What Does "Socialist" Mean in 2009?

Of course, the irony of the Republican's newest rebranding exercise is compounded by the fact that it appears that socialism is becoming less and less of a negative label. While I take Rasmussen's results with a degree of skepticism, I'm less surprised that "adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided."

After all, you would have to be older than 20 years old to have even been born at a time when the Cold War had any real meaning. I'm 25, and I only vaguely recall the feeling of a world divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. I was woken up as a child to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall - none of my undergraduate students were even born in 1989. For them, socialism (if it means anything) is something they associate with campus radicals (who are essentially harmless), Europe (which they tend to like), and attacks on Barack Obama. And while I'm not the first to say this, the relentless Republican association of any progressive policy or politics with socialism I think will have the long-term effect of eroding public fear of socialism, at least in so far as socialism is understood to mean broadly progressive public policy like progressive tax cuts and increases, universal health care, Keynesian fiscal policy, and so forth.

But the interesting thing is that even the Republicans seem to have given up the ghost when it comes to the Evil Empire. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists, they tend to refer to the social democratic parties of Europe - Mitt Romney accuses the Democrats of trying to make the U.S look like Sweden, and Michael Steel believes that Democratic rule is "marching America toward European-style socialism." The problem is that "European-style socialism" isn't very scary - no secret police, no show trials, no one-party state, no gulags. It means higher taxes, more regulation, universal health care, more social spending, a bigger public sector, but that's not something that bothers most people.

What Would It Mean For the Democratic Party to Become a Social Democratic (or Democratic Socialist) Party?

All of this makes the idea that the Democratic Party is a Social Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party rather ironic, because those would be two very strong visions of the future to base a party around.

Democratic socialism broadly refers to an political philosophy that, unlike social democrats, does not accept the existence and continuation of capitalism as necessary but unlike Leninist communists abjures the idea of violent revolution as the means of achieving its end. You can think of Eugene V. Debs as an archetypal democratic socialist - someone who viewed capitalism as an inherently immoral and exploitative institution, but who sought to abolish poverty through the electoral victory of the Socialist Party and the passage of legislation. The modern Democratic Socialists of America - who might well have a trademark infringement case on their hands- are a group that emerged out of several factional disputes in the 1970s and 1980s, and have been closely associated with the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington. As their manifesto states, "we are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit," which fulfills the first point of the description, while their statement that "our vision of socialism is a profoundly democratic one, rooted in the belief that individuals can only reach their full potential in a society that embodies the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity" fulfills the second.

Social Democrats historically diverged from their socialist colleagues over the question of the question both of political change versus violent revolution, but also over the question of whether socialism would be achieved in a sudden revolution or a gradual evolution,

The point of all of this is that if the Democratic Party would actually become a social-democratic party, it would be a massive ideological shift comparable to nothing since the dramatic transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of laissez-faire into the party of the New Deal in the 1930s, or the transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the Segregated South to the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Ultimately, it would involve the Democratic Party grappling with two issues we don't really deal with - first, our relation to capitalism, and second, our conception of class.

On the issue of capitalism, our party is badly divided between those who are pro-market (especially in regards to major questions about regulation, especially financial regulation, taxation of corporations, estates, and high-income earners, impact of climate change on corporate behavior, copyright, patents and other forms of intellectual property, and the nature of free trade) and those who are more pro-worker, or pro-consumer, or pro-environment. If the Democratic Party would become a social democratic party, we would have a single vision: that unregulated capitalism is an inhumane socio-economic system, that the economy should be reformed and regulated to gradually move towards a different economic order where basic necessities are a matter of human rights rather than ability to pay and where workers have a voice in their working conditions. .

On the issue of class, our party and indeed many if not most Americans have an extremely fuzzy conception of what class means. You can see this in Democratic messaging which frequently conflates "working families" with "middle class families" or "working poor" with "working families," which uses the term "middle class" to include people making $30k a year and people making $225k a year. If we were a Social Democratic Party, we would have a very clear idea, based on hundreds of years of thinking about what it means to be a worker, and a solid sense that we are on the side of the working class when it comes down to a clash between their interests and the interests of corporations or employers.

What Might We Become?

Ultimately, I don't think the Democratic Party will become a social democratic or democratic socialist party, even in the event that the country as a whole shifts substantially to the left. To be frank, I don't think the ideological foundations for a capitalism-and-class based political party. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it.

What I do think could happen is for the Democratic Party to become a genuine Progressive Party, in the sense of the Progressive Party of 1912 and 1924 (interesting historical note: in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt won 27% of the vote and 88 electoral votes as a Progressive; in 1924, Robert LaFollette won 17% of the vote and 13 electoral votes as a Progressive).

The major difference between socialist or even social-democratic parties and progressive parties is that while the former are focused on class conflict, the latter tend to believe in social organic-ism, a belief that society is organized around functional groups rather than individuals, that all groups play an important roll in contributing to the whole, and that all groups are part of a single "industrial commonwealth." As members of a commonwealth, all citizens are entitled to social and economic rights and protections against the "hazards of modern life," and are entitled to a seat at the table in the governance of industry. Rather than seeing class conflict as between the working class and the bourgeoisie, progressives see conflict in populist terms between "the people" and "the powerful" or "special interests" or the "trusts," or between the "producing classes" and the "parasites."

In my opinion, I think if universal health care, EFCA, and climate change pass, and if the broad turn from deficit reduction and balanced budgets to Keynesian stimulus and public investments continues, then we may, in time move to a political environment in which the Democratic Party can be a Progressive Party, while democratic socialists and social democrats can exist as a legitimate part of the political culture, the left-most edge of "mainstream" politics.

But in order to get there, we will have to do a lot of political work to push our party to be more progressive, and eventually confront the more pro-corporate members of our party. As Frederick Douglass once said:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

Re-Post Number 9: "Obama's Choice on Jobs Policy - Job Training or Job Creation?" (Oct 16, 2008)

2009-05-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

Note: this repost, one of the last three to go, focuses on the difference between job training and job creation, and why the former is a weak policy option that doesn't begin to address serious structural problems in the American economic system.

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This diary is a follow-up from yesterday's diary here on Obama's proposals on jobs policy, in which I discussed how Obama's proposals are a vast improvement on previous Democratic nominees, but show a shot-gun approach that combines a number of different approaches to doing the same thing.

Today, I'm going to be talking about one choice, the choice between providing job-training programs (with the ultimate view being to get the currently unemployed back into the private-sector workforce) and providing direct job creation programs (with the ultimate view being to create new public-sector jobs to make up for the lack of private-sector jobs).

Background:

The debate over job-training and job-creation stretches back to debates within post-WWII liberal policy circles, starting with the fight between Fiscal Keynesians and Social Keynesians in the immediate post-war years. Just to summarize an earlier diary on the difference between the two here:

Fiscal Keynesians believed that you could achieve Keynesian goals (such as full employment, economic growth, consumer purchasing power, increasing investment, and the like) through the use of the "fisc and the Fed" - i.e, increasing or decreasing aggregate Federal spending on existing programs and increasing or decreasing interest rates.
Social Keynesians believed that such measures were inadequate, that the form of government spending was crucial to its effectiveness, and that the government would especially have to take a more interventionist role in ensuring that a high enough volume investment flowed in productive directions.

I don't want to get bogged down on this, but the parallels to recent economic policy is rather striking. In regards to the form of government spending, Social Keynesians pointed out that spending on poor and working class people would produce a higher multiplier effect than spending on middle class and rich people because poor people have a higher marginal propensity to consume and, because they tended to purchase mass-produced goods in a variety of industries instead of a few luxury goods, would lead to more respendings, as the people they bought goods from went out and bought goods of their own. Ironically, this insight has completely been ignored in the last eight years of tax cutting, especially during the last stimulus package debate over income rebates vs. unemployment insurance and food stamps. In regards to both form and investment, Social Keynesians argued that government spending on public works would be better than just handing out money, because the public works would add to productive infrastructure; moreover, they argued that since the stock market and financial industry tended to focus too much money and effort in beating the market or unproductive financial instruments, that public investment was needed to keep technological innovation, productivity, transportation, etc. all running at peak efficiency. Very different from solving our economic crisis through buying toxic financial instruments.

Job Training:
But to get back on topic, this division between the two camps was instrumental in shaping post-war liberal economic policy. During the 1940's, the defeat of the Full Employment Bill was due as much to the lukewarm feelings of Fiscal Keynesians and those politicians who followed their teachings as it did to conservative opposition.

The next crucial episode was a largely invisible fight within the Kennedy Administration in 1963 between the Fiscal Keynesians of the Council of Economic Advisors, led by Alvin Hansen, and the Social Keynesians of the Labor Department, led by Secretary Willard Wirtz over which direction the proposed War on Poverty would take. In Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race, Judith Russell describes the clash vividly. Alvin Hansen and his group, all of them staunch Great Society liberals, believed that fiscal and Fed policy could produce full employment and that a combination of anti-discrimination, compensatory education, and job-training programs would allow poor African-Americans and rural whites to escape their economic ghettos, reducing poverty without the need for messy, political controversial, expensive, and inefficient government intervention in the labor market. In this view, the poverty and unemployment of poor blacks and whites stemmed from the lack of job skills and education resulting from a "culture of poverty" within the ghetto. Willard Wirtz and his supporters, who came out of a more laborite sort of liberalism, argued that structural racial discrimination and the inherent weaknesses of the private labor market required the government to directly provide jobs and make investments in depressed areas, since the private sector wouldn't yet invest in ghettos or their residents. In their view, poverty and unemployment were caused by structural failures in American capitalism, not individual failings.

Ultimately, Hansen won. The results of the War on Poverty are instructive: great strides were made, especially in elderly poverty. But the major jobs crisis of the ghettos was not addressed. Compensatory programs in education and job training were helpless in the face of overwhelming economic forces and structures. As Gorden Lafer points out in The Job Training Charade, these programs often provided few actual real skills - what are called "hard skills," like training to become a carpenter, plumber, bricklayer, or electrician (or programmer, hospital tech, solar-panel installer, etc.) - but rather focused on "soft" skills like resume writing, interview training, and "job habits." When the graduates of these programs, provided with few marketable skills, were thrown onto a job market that had virtually no jobs for ghetto residents, they failed to find any work, and were shuttled back into the program to undergo another round of "training," trying to make ends meet on skimpy cost-of-living grants.

Despite this failure, job-training has become the hegemonic jobs policy, especially in the 20 years since the rise of Reagan eliminated the last gasp of direct job creation efforts of the 1970's. Ultimately, the question of jobs became inextricably linked to the politics of trade and welfare: the question of what should be done with former steelworkers or former welfare moms became inextricably linked to the question of whether "free trade is working" or "welfare reform is working," and the knottier political question of what the relationship between the state and the market, and between the state and its citizens should be.

What Does This Mean for Obama?

Throughout debates over NAFTA or welfare reform or economic policy, Democrats since the 1980's have continued the fight over how to deal with the major economic change in post-1970s America: increasing job insecurity, flatlining wages, and the decline in good, union, blue collar jobs that high-school graduates could use to support a family. The solution promoted by New Democrats like Bill Clinton was to provide Transition Assistance (read: extra unemployment insurance for people whose jobs have left for China), and more job training, to prepare us for the job market of the new high-tech future. On the other side, a scattering of progressives, from Congressional liberals to unions to academics, argued instead for what was variously termed "infrastructure investment," "public investment," or public works. There wasn't and hasn't been a whole lot of coherence or political influence behind this counter-argument, and certainly during the Clinton years, talk of public works dropped from the agenda.

For a while, the Clinton approach seemed to work: the good times of the 1990's seemed to suggest a kind of neo-Fiscal Keynesianism, where low interest rates and balanced budgets and deficit reduction would produce economic growth, low unemployment, and public surpluses that could be used to provide for programs to compensate the economic losers, and help them move into the economic mainstream.

However, the past eight years have begun, ever so slowly, to change the dynamic. First, there was Katrina; then, the Minneapolis bridge collapse. At the same time, many major thinkers who had previously been on what could be called the neoliberal side began to shift quite dramatically, driven by concerns about rising inequality and other indicators that their belief in the rising tide lifting all boats had been misplaced: Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Joe Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and Paul Krugman (yes, even Krugman) are all former pro-neoliberal thinkers who've seen the light over the last ten years. Especially in the wake of the financial collapse and the nationalization of the banking system, the mood on Capital Hill has swung much more in the direction of government intervention, considered more broadly.

Despite this shift, the status quo is very much uncertain, balancing between the idea that "transition assistance" and job-training is all that is needed to reverse increasing inequality and poverty and unemployment, and the idea that we have to do more.

One hopeful sign that suggests that the choice might come down on the side of jobs programs that have proven to work is the subtle, but remarkable shifts that we have seen since 2004. In 2004, all of the Democratic candidates proposed policies to "grow jobs, make jobs, build jobs, create jobs," and so on - but the ultimate policies came down to throwing money at the economy and making it stick. Such policies that actually directed themselves at workers tended to be of the job-training kind. 2008 saw an important shift, and if there is anything that Senator John Edwards can still be proud of, it's that he put the idea of "1 million public jobs" on the political agenda, and made Obama respond to that.

As we saw last time, Obama's response shows influences from many different approaches, which makes it hard to predict what would happen should he win, and propose a jobs program, what he would choose to do. Partly the confusion comes from the very broad strokes that his campaign has drawn (which is tactically shrewd and properly cautious), it's hard to tell how much money would go into the Green Jobs Corps (and whether it's a job-training program or a jobs program) or what exact form the Jobs and Growth Fund, National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, and "invest $150 billion" to create "Create 5 Million New Green Jobs" will take.

Conclusion:

Very simply, I would call upon Obama, congressional Democrats, and the progressive community more broadly, to eschew job-training proposals and similar hands-off approaches. They do not work, never have worked, and stem from a fundamentally wrong-headed view that unemployment stems from shortcomings of the unemployed, and that public policy should focus on making the unemployed better workers, not on economic structure.

Jobs creation, by contrast, has a proven record of success. When FDR and Harry Hopkins announced the creation of the Civil Works Administration in 1933, they created 4.2 million jobs in 3 months. When the WPA was in effect between 1935-1942, the Roosevelt Administration knew that anywhere from 2-3.5 million jobs at least had been created, not even counting jobs created in the private sector.

Starting January 2009, the next president will inherit an economy in steep recession, with an unemployment rate of anywhere from 6.1% (our current rate) to 8% (Obama's estimate) or possibly more. Economic recovery in the private sector is something that the next president and the next Congress should push for. However, private-sector recovery (as we have seen during the Bush Administration) does not necessarily mean that you assume large-scale job growth. Public-sector job creation policy, by contrast, will provide the next administration with a backstop or floor - that no matter what happens on Wall Street, they can count on X number of jobs being created.

In a nutshell: down with job-training, up with job creation!

Industrial Democracy: The True Meaning of EFCA

2009-05-12T16:20:00.000-07:00

The back-and-forth over the Employee Free Choice Act is often hard to decipher; like negotiations over health care or climate change, the real work is happening quietly behind the closed doors of committees and Congressional offices while the propaganda wars rage above them. Occasionally, there's a sudden announcement as a senator picks sides, but that's it.

It's a bit like a classic medieval siege - all the visible action is the catapults flinging giant rocks through the air, but beneath the ground, there are teams of miners burrowing under the walls.

But for all the confusion, it's important to take a step back and ask ourselves what the true importance of EFCA really is.

Where We Stand:

At the moment, the picture for EFCA is rather blurred. Most Democrats are on board, virtually every Republican is against, and significant numbers of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are walking sideways (Bayh, Lincoln, even our own Senator Feinstein). Arlen's Specter's switch to the Democratic party and non-switch on EFCA is a good sort of symbol of the ambiguity - neither here nor there.

Ezra Klein points out an interesting piece in the Washington Post:

That approach is being floated in Congress by, among others, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who suggested that an election be held within three weeks of the union filing such a request with the National Labor Relations Board and that union organizers be allowed "equal time under identical circumstances" to make their pitch to employees if management has held "captive audience" speeches making the anti-union case.

Floated "compromises" like this are difficult to suss out. Specter's compromise, that's being backed by Costco, Starbucks, and Whole Foods (and Lanny Davis), basically chops out card check and arbitration, but adds in a shorter, 15-day election campaign, guarantees "equal access" (organizers would have access to the workplace during the workday, on equal terms so that if management holds a captive audience meeting, labor gets one too), and increased unfair labor practices penalties. There's also another proposal being backed by Jay Krupin, called the 70/50/30 plan, that allows for card-check if you bring in 70% in cards, that chops the election campaign to 15 days if you bring in 50% in cards, and that guarantees "equal access" if you bring in 30% of cards.

These compromises leave me feeling rather ambivalent. On the one hand, passing EFCA straight-up would be best, and I still think there's a reasonable shot at getting it if Specter and the sideways Dems are willing to vote for cloture and then against the bill so that it passes with less than 60. On the other, I think these compromises are positive indications - first, because they indicate that the waverers and at least part of the business community doesn't think they can actually defeat the bill without paying a big price, and second, because it's focusing real attention on the unfairness of our labor elections system and forcing opponents to justify captive-audience meetings and barring labor organizers from campaigning on company property.

As Ezra points out, "The corporate community opposes this, too. But having predicated their assault on a principled belief in "workplace democracy," it's extremely hard for them to credibly oppose reforms that would help bring democracy to the workplace...the business community has made a bad decision centering their counterattack around workplace democracy."

These days, I am feeling more confident about the prospects of passing something - and that's what really matters. Especially when we're caught up in the passion of the moment, trying to push this bill through, it's important to remember our history and why laws are really important.

On June 16, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law. Among other things, the law established a system of industrial codes by which corporations could set price floors, production agreements, market share agreements, and so on. The sop to labor was Section 7a, which read:

Employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection

This provision was almost entirely ignored by employers, who continued to establish company unions and enforce the open shop, and the law itself would be declared unconstitutional two years later. Yet 7a lead to a huge upsurge in labor organizing, as millions of workers surged into the AFL. Why such a change, even when the law hadn't actually changed?

Because after June 16, 1933, labor organizers could go into any workplace in America and say "the president wants you to join the union," could point to 7a and reframe the entire conversation about joining a union as being the exercise of your rights as an American, and cast the conflict between workers and bosses as a conflict between patriotic citizens upholding the rule of law, and greedy, lawbreaking fat cats. In Fabric of Defeat, Bryant Simon writes about textile mill strikes where workers marched on mills defended with machine-gun nests and private armies, waving the American flag and led by preachers who declared that the union crusade was a fulfillment of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Symbols matter, and in the United States, the presidency and the law are still important symbols.

Labor historians talk about the impulse behind this phase of the 1930s union upsurge as "industrial democracy." Industrial democracy is a remarkably fluid term that at its most expansive form imagines workers owning the factory and organized through an internal democracy with management elected by the workers; or a system in which workers and unions have a say not just in bargaining for wages and benefits, but also deciding questions of pricing and design and organization and production;or a tripartite collaboration between labor, business, and government. But another form that labor historians talk about is instilling the "rule of law" inside the factory. If we think about it, the workspace is one of the least American places we live in - somewhere where the concepts of free speech or the rights of the individual or equality before the law, things we automatically assume are functioning everywhere we go in America- do not operate.

The idea of industrial democracy in the wake of 1933 was that 7a had extended the rule of law into the factory, that you had the fundamental right to tell your foreman that he was a son-of-a-bitch, the right to be treated with dignity when you needed to use the bathroom or eat lunch or even talk, or the fundamental right to not be fired without a good reason. And it was the belief in those rights that brought so many people under the union banner, even when the rights in question existed only in their minds.

So if we can pass a law, even if it gets us part of the way, if we can get a picture of Barack Obama signing a piece of paper and telling the tv audience that they have a legal right to join a union, that might be all the opening the labor movement needs to begin the hard work of changing this country.

Note bene, though. This does not mean that any compromise is legitimate, or desirable. To me, there are some "bright lines" that have to be honored:

Either Card Check or Fair Elections - in negotiations, it's always a good idea to go in asking 200% of what you want so you end up closer to 100% rather than 50%. Thus, while it's tempting for Democrats who are walking sideways on EFCA to look for a compromise that ditches the "controversial" card check provisions, there has to be some serious returns in exchange. Equal access and 15-days is a bare minimum; negotiators should ask for the abolition of one-on-one meetings without a union rep present, the abolition of the prophecy doctrine, campaign finance for union elections, and anything else necessary for truly fair elections.
Binding Arbitration - according to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, 33-46% of successfully-recognized bargaining units fail to reach a first contract, because employers can easily and painlessly extend bargaining, appeal, stretch things out until workers get frustrated and give up. If you look at the compromises being offered by retailers, arbitration is the one thing they don't mention, because it's hard to defend dragging your feet, but it's also a key fulcrum of labor relations. I think labor should fight hardest here, and demand some form of binding arbitration for first contracts as the "drop dead" line on EFCA.
Labor Penalties - sadly, this is one area where employers don't care and cheerfully throw in expanded unfair labor practices penalties, because even tripling the costs makes the accounting come out in favor of firing and paying the penalty down the road. Labor should not "weight" compromises here very heavily; even if senators start larding up penalties, it's unlikely to make a difference unless punitive damages come on the table.

So there you have it.

Re-Post Number 8: "Jobs How? An Introduction to Obama's Jobs Policy" (Oct 15, 2008)

2009-05-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

Note: This is one of the last re-posts, dealing now with the nature of jobs policy in the new Obama administration.

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A little bit of background: this essay stems from several years of research on job-creation policy colliding with the 2008 election. As you may have noticed, Obama's anti-poverty platform and his economic recovery plan both have a focus on jobs; it's a major part of the Democratic stump speech (not just in Obama's speeches, but also in the speeches of his surrogates); it's a winning issue at a time when unemployment hovers at 6.1% and may rise as high as 8% in the coming recession.

This essay is a pitch, both to the Obama campaign, to progressives, and to Congressional Democrats that the time is ripe for a new direction for jobs policy, from an approach that emphasizes job training and private sector job creation, to an approach that emphasizes on-the-job training and public sector job creation in light construction, "public works," and social services.

Background:

The current Obama platform includes the following jobs-related policies:

Provide $50 billion to Jumpstart the Economy and Prevent 1 Million Americans from Losing Their Jobs: This relief would include a $25 billion State Growth Fund to prevent state and local cuts in health, education, housing, and heating assistance or counterproductive increases in property taxes, tolls or fees. The Obama-Biden relief plan will also include $25 billion in a Jobs and Growth Fund to prevent cutbacks in road and bridge maintenance and fund school repair - all to save more than 1 million jobs in danger of being cut.
Reward Companies that Support American Workers: Barack Obama introduced the Patriot Employer Act of 2007 with Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to reward companies that create good jobs with good benefits for American workers. The legislation would provide a tax credit to companies that maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in America relative to those outside the US; maintain their corporate headquarters in America if it has ever been in America; pay decent wages; prepare workers for retirement; provide health insurance; and support employees who serve in the military.
Create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address the infrastructure challenge by creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments. This independent entity will be directed to invest in our nation’s most challenging transportation infrastructure needs. The Bank will receive an infusion of federal money, $60 billion over 10 years, to provide financing to transportation infrastructure projects across the nation. These projects will create up to two million new direct and indirect jobs and stimulate approximately $35 billion per year in new economic activity.
Invest in our Next Generation Innovators and Job Creators: Obama and Biden will create an Advanced Manufacturing Fund to identify and invest in the most compelling advanced manufacturing strategies. The Fund will have a peer-review selection and award process based on the Michigan 21st Century Jobs Fund, a state-level initiative that has awarded over $125 million to Michigan businesses with the most innovative proposals to create new products and new jobs in the state.
Double Funding for the Manufacturing Extension Partnership: The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) works with manufacturers across the country to improve efficiency, implement new technology and strengthen company growth. This highly-successful program has engaged in more than 350,000 projects across the country and in 2006 alone, helped create and protect over 50,000 jobs. But despite this success, funding for MEP has been slashed by the Bush administration. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will double funding for the MEP so its training centers can continue to bolster the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturers.
Invest In A Clean Energy Economy And Create 5 Million New Green Jobs: Obama and Biden will invest $150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy, invest in low emissions coal plants, and begin transition to a new digital electricity grid. The plan will also invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world.
Help Americans Grab a Hold of and Climb the Job Ladder: Obama and Biden will invest $1 billion over five years in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Americans succeed in the workforce.
Create a Green Jobs Corps: Obama and Biden will create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in energy efficiency opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in this important high-growth career field.

His Monday speech, "Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" also included several jobs-related policies:

A New American Jobs Tax Credit: Obama will provide a new temporary tax credit to companies that add jobs here in the United States. During 2009 and 2010, existing businesses will receive a $3,000 refundable tax credit for each additional full-time employee hired. For example, if a company that currently has 10 U.S. employees increases its domestic full time employment to 20 employees, this company would get a $30,000 tax credit—enough to offset the entire added payroll tax costs to the company for the first $50,000 of income for the new employees. The tax credit will benefit all companies creating net new jobs, even those struggling to make a profit.
Save one million jobs through immediate investments to rebuild America’s roads and bridges and repair our schools: The Obama emergency plan would make $25 billion immediately available in a Jobs and Growth Fund to help ensure that in-progress and fast-tracked infrastructure projects are not sidelined, and to ensure that schools can meet their energy costs and undertake key repairs starting this fall. This increased investment is necessary to stem growing budget pressures on infrastructure projects. In addition, in an environment where we may face elevated unemployment levels well into 2009, making an aggressive investment in urgent, high-priority infrastructure will serve as a triple win: generating capital deployment and job creation to boost our economy in the near-term, enhancing U.S. competitiveness in the longer term, and improving the environment by adopting energy efficient school and infrastructure repairs. In total, Obama’s $25 billion investment will result in 1 million jobs created or saved, while helping to turn our economy around.

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Now, all of these proposals are great in and of themselves, and they represent a huge leap from 2000 and 2004 in terms of a Democratic commitment to providing and creating jobs - moreover, in comparison to New Democrat priorities in the Clinton years, they really show the revolution in Democratic economic policy since the advent of the Bush years. In that regard, I have nothing but praise for Obama.

However, one thing that's clear is that there is a real tension between different strategies: the State Growth Fund, Jobs and Growth Fund, National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, and similar projects constitute a "public works" approach - creating jobs through public investments, primarily in infrastructure. This is a tried and true strategy of the Democratic Party in dealing with economic downturns. The Patriot Employer Act, New American Jobs Tax Credit, Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and Advanced Manufacturing Fund represent a similar, more private-sector approach that could be called a "labor demand" source - creating private jobs with public incentives. This is also a long-running approach to job creation, dating back to the Area Redevelopment Acts of the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the "career pathway programs" and "Green Jobs Corps" represent more of a job-training approach - you'll note that the actual transitional jobs in question are rather hard to pin down in terms of numbers, but $1 billion over five years is not an encouraging signs. In any case, it's quite different from John Edwards' proposal for one million public jobs in the primaries.

Now each of these strategies have advantages and disadvantages. I'm very much a biased partisan on this question; from my research, I think that direct job creation is best, followed by public works, followed by labor demand, and job training is the worst form of jobs policy. For more on direct job creation, I highly suggest Helen Ginsburg's Full Employment and Public Policy or Phillip Harvey's Securing the Right to Employment. For more on public works, I'd suggest Robert Leighninger's Long-Term Public Investment or Jason Scott Smith's Building New Deal Liberalism. For more on "labor demand" policy, I'd recommend Timothy Barthik's weighty study Jobs For the Poor. For more on jobs training policy, I'd recommend Gordon Lafer's The Job Training Charade.

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So why does all of this technical stuff matter?

Firstly, size, scope, and scale matter. The American economy, labor market, and working class are huge institutions and groups, and if you want to have a real impact on the jobs picture, you need to do something big. The Works Progress Administration worked because it provided jobs to a third of the unemployed; CETA didn't work because it provided jobs to only 725,000 people at a time when there were more than six million people unemployed (or 12% of the unemployed). Hence, spreading yourself across nearly a dozen programs could well mean that you create quite a few jobs here and there, but not the same kind of numbers you could create by maximizing your spending in the most effective area. It also means that the ultimate size of the program matters - a billion here or there over five years won't cut it, but if you were to take the $700 billion bailout and create $20k/year jobs with it, you'd employ every unemployed person twice over. Roughly speaking, it costs $30 billion/year to create 1 million jobs at $20k/year, which reduces the unemployment rate by half a percentage point.

Secondly, policy design has political consequences. Public jobs tend to produce public acceptance of and advocacy for the idea that the government can and should provide jobs for the jobless, and that the government can and should intervene in the economy to promote social ends. It's for that reason why jobs were at the center of the New Deal, and why one of Reagan's first social spending cuts were the 725,000 jobs of CETA. Thus, a choice between tax cuts and public works says a lot about our beliefs about what causes unemployment and what creates employment, the proper relationship between the public and private sectors, and the proper relationship between the people and their government. Hence, a more progressive policy will, over time, produce a more progressive public - political scientists of the American Political Development school refer to this as policy feedback (although I'd urge taking a pinch or two of salt with this idea).

Thirdly, not all policies are equal. For reasons that I will discuss in my next diary, job-training programs don't work very well; tax cuts are somewhat better but still uneven; public works are better still, but are less efficient in terms of creating lots of jobs quickly; direct job creation or "public employment" is best; the Civil Works Administration famously created 4.2 million jobs in just three months. Because of the political stakes, the consequences of programs will matter: if we invest in jobs policy, and it works, you shift the boundaries of acceptable economic policy in a big way, with the New Deal and its coalitions as a key example. If you do it, and it doesn't work, you establish a conservative conventional wisdom that's very hard to work against - witness the long-term influence of the Reagan Revolution over the last thirty years.

Devil's Advocate: Does Democracy Require Clean Elections?

2009-05-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Recently, there was a bit of a stir when, after the DSCC and DCCC put together a special Obama fundraiser with no lobbyist or PAC money for this summer, a number of progressive-types, like Laurence Lessig, Chris Bowers, Glen Greenwald and other big-name bloggers formed themselves into a group calling itself Stop Fake Reform and penned an open letter calling on the DSCC and DCCC to "ban PAC and lobbyist contributions 365 days a year."

A couple years ago I would have cheered this on as a noble reform effort. These days, I find myself less and less amenable to this particular brand of reformism. Because to me, there's a big difference for calling for the banning of corporate donations and calling for the banning of PAC/lobbyist money. The former is, in my eyes, a real reform fight aimed at winning the Democratic Party back from elements of corporate America (especially the financial industry) that have a significant purchase on decision-making, and the other is an elitist charge at a windmill that betrays problematic thinking about democracy.

*Explanation over the fold*

The problem is that the ACLU and Amnesty International are lobbyists, and so is the NAACP and LULAC and la Raza and Asian-American groups and Native American groups, and so is the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and all their member unions, and so is National Organization for Women and every other major feminist political group, and so is the Sierra Club and the NRDC. EMILYS LIST is a PAC, and so is MoveOn, and so is Act Blue and BlogPAC. In short, every element of the Democratic Party, from labor to African-Americans to women to environmental groups, organizes themselves into lobbies and PACs, because that's how you organize in our current political system.

What makes this effort all the stranger is that many of the signees - Laurence Lessig of Change Congress and Chris Bowers of Open Left are just two examples - would be barred from contributing to the DCCC and DSCC under their proposed rules, since Lessig's group lobbies and does fund raising, and Chris Bowers is the treasurer for BlogPac.

Ultimately, where this effort is coming from is an ideological position that dislikes political institution and hierarchy, and that believes that Democratic politics should be carried about by freely-associating individuals. Institutions can be corrupted or taken over, hierarchies are elitist and too removed from the people, whereas the grassroots are noble, democratic, and genuine. It has a long intellectual tradition - it can be found both in the liberal (for the emphasis on individuals over groups) and republican (for the distrust of elites and the valorization of the common people) wings of the Enlightenment. During the American Revolution, you could find this kind of thinking in the denunciations of the King's "evil ministers," the dislike of "factions" and "cabals," the simultaneous belief in voters exercising their individual powers of reason and in voters collectively striving for the common good.

What these 4,192 signees want is a purer, higher-minded form of politics, a politics without self-interest or corruption or elites, a politics ultimately without politics. And they're not alone - you see this attitude all the time when people fulminate against "career politicians," or when people run for political office claiming to be "not a politician."

There's just one problem - it's a bad idea. An ideal democracy, where high-minded individuals ponder the ins and outs of public policy and strive to persuade each other in reasoned debate without resorting to the blunt instruments of money or propaganda or party organizations, may sound great in theory, but it just doesn't work. Politics is inherently political; it's rude and crude and vibrant and alive, and it always has been.

Consider the origins of democracy. People often point to Classical Athens as a pure democracy - all citizens met in council directly and the true leaders of the Deimos were individuals who used the power of their rhetoric to persuade their fellow citizens; elections, even for executive officers, were disparaged as too aristocratic, and Athenians selected members of the executive council by means of random lottery, so strong was their belief that anybody could rule. There's just one problem with this vision - it's a fantasy. To begin with, Athenian democracy excluded all women, all non-citizens, all children born not of two Athenian citizens, and was perfectly compatible with the owning of slaves. However, even within the normal constraints of ancient civilizations, Athenian democracy was vibrantly partisan and not a bit corrupt. Cleisthenes, who overthrew the tyrant Hippias and was hailed as the "father of Athenian democracy," was also an aristocrat who turned to the democratic side after losing a power struggle. Themistocles, who led Athens and the Greeks to victory against Persia at Salamis, was known for being a political spin-master who hustled working-class votes, systematically exiled his political rivals, and who bribed widely to achieve his goals. Pericles, who led Athens through its Golden Age, also ostracized his political opponents, pushed through laws providing free (state-subsidized) theater tickets for the poor, built the Parthenon as a massive vote-winning public works project, and provided wages for juries (another crowd-pleaser). In short, classical democracy was a rough-and-tumble affair, where radicals and aristocrats fought with propaganda, "walk-around money," free theater, character assassination, and banishment laws to win leadership of the deimos.

If we fast-forward to the modern form of democracy, that emerged from the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, you also get an image of a vibrant and messy form of democracy. As Gordon Wood and George Rude and many other historians have shown, it was precisely the irrational, ideological, excitable, beer-and-circuses crowd that gave birth to the democratic revolution and without whom there would be no democracies in either the United States or France. Gary B. Nash and Eric Foner have both shown that urban political machines were alive and well in the American colonies before, during, and after the Revolution, issuing endorsements, running slates and passing out slate cards, conducting GOTV campaigns and street rallies, and yes, raising and spending money.

The great political machines that arose in the Age of Jackson and flourished through the turn of the century, the best known of which was New York's Tammany Hall, are often reviled as corrupting, anti-democratic, and morally bankrupt organizations that ruined the republic until liberal reformers could restore it during the Progressive Era. Yet the irony is that while the machines were certainly corrupt, they were operationally quite democratic - voter turnout at the height of the machines' influence routinely hovered at the 80-90% rate as competing machines fought for every last vote. And if they lacked the keen attention to public policy that progressive intellectuals would later wield, and if they were still as bent as corkscrews, their hearts were for universal suffrage. From the beginning, Tammany Hall fought against property qualifications for the vote: first by coordinating joint purchasing of property in 1800, then in agitating for the abolition of property qualifications for suffrage in 1827, worked to register immigrants, and continually fought against elite attempts to re-institute property qualifications or establish literacy tests and residency requirements, including major attempts in 1868 and 1876 to roll back universal suffrage in favor of suffrage for the rich.

In short, the history of democracy is the history of a grand, messy experiment in collective action, carried out on street corners and in marches, a fundamentally public and group activity.

Which makes the label of "reform" a tricky one. Among elite reformers in the Progressive Era, people who believed that voting should be a secret, individual, protected process; that government should be professionalized, and that political machines should be smashed, there has always been the undercurrent of dislike and distrust of poor people, immigrants (especially Catholics), and non-white voters "corrupting" the political process, and the desire to see the political process dominated by men of the right class. A lot of ink has been spilled about the extent of anti-democratic or elitist sentiment in the Progressive movement, but that's beyond the point. The question is what impact a lot of their reforms had. The written Australian ballot - introduced at a time when 17% of the population was illiterate - had a huge impact on the voting behavior of immigrants and African-Americans. The introduction of modern voter registration systems in the U.S offered huge opportunities to restrict access to the ballot on grounds of illiteracy, failure to pay taxes, or other qualifications. Non-partisan elections and the initiative system, especially in the state of California, have had the perverse effect of handing power over to incumbents (who have the name recognition to, for example, win both parties' primaries over less well-known opponents) and the wealthy (who have the cash to fund ballot initiative drives).

In sum, I think we need to be more careful about how we think about who counts as "reformers" and who counts as "special interests" and what "reforms" actually mean. Campaign finance is one of those areas where the rhetoric of reform often gets in the way of clear thinking about what we want. Ultimately, it's not the labor groups or the environmental groups or the women's groups or the NAACP that do or should bother reformers. The real threat to democracy is the unequal balance of power between the rich and the poor, between ordinary citizens and corporations in the political process. So as a campaign finance matter, I'd welcome the prohibition of all corporate lobbyist and PAC money from the Democratic Party. I'd also welcome measures to establish public funding of political parties and campaigns to balance; I'd welcome a progressive matching fund that added to the political donations of poor and working class voters and taxed the contributions of the wealthy.

But there is a difference between democracy as a process and democracy as a spirit, and my disagreement with the 30 would-be reformers mentioned above is that I think they focus too much on process (lobbying and PACs = bad) and not enough on spirit (poor people contributing = good, corporations = bad). Moreover, I would challenge anyone who believes in democracy as an atomic process of solitary individuals casting their votes as expressions of belief, and the resulting distrust of political groups as "special interests." Democracy is a collective process, the exercise of power by groups of people, and in such a system, all groups are welcome, all interests are worthy of being heard. The only test of "special"ness should be the ratio of votes to dollars, because the 16,000,000 workers in unions and the 19 members of the Board of Directors of Bank of America are not equally "special."

Re-Post Number 7: "The Road Not Taken: A People's Bailout" (Oct 03, 2008)

2009-05-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

Note: This post begins to shift towards the similarities between historical jobs policy and current events, as the Re-Posting series reaches its second half.
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The sheer size of the $700 billion bailout proposed by Secretary Paulson staggers the imagination of the American media. Groping for analogies, commentators from all points on the political spectrum, have turned to the past for analogies, dubbing the current proposal the biggest government intervention in the economy "since the Great Depression." But is that really the case?

At first glance, the analogy fails: FDR’s New Deal insured depositors, not bank debts; the Home Owners Lending Corporation provided relief to home-owners in default, not to holders of third-party securities; the government showered Wall Street not with liquidity, but with new regulations. The vision of an activist federal government rescuing beleaguered financial institutions rings false on the most important point – the government sought to rescue people, not firms, and looked beyond immediate crisis to underlying root causes.

As strange as it may seem in an era where conventional wisdom in Washington D.C demands billions for the banks, and not a penny for the people, the leading thinkers of the New Deal understood the Great Depression as caused by a weakness at the foundations of the American economy, and not up in the clouds of financial wizardry. They saw real cause of economic collapse was that the rich had grabbed so much of the nation’s wealth that workers couldn’t afford to buy the goods our economy created.

What’s so strange about the current crisis is that we’ve fallen so far back in our understanding of the economy that we lag behind the New Dealers. Talking heads on CNBC may rattle on about liquidity, counter-party debt agreements, and sub-prime crises, but is the underlying problem so hard to understand? The household incomes of ordinary Americans have stagnated and declined for a decade, and consumers trying to maintain living standards have made up the difference by borrowing heavily on the value of their homes. In those circumstances, who in their right minds would think that home-owners could make huge balloon payments on their sub-prime mortgages, if the real estate boom that increased housing values and allowed for easy re-financing went away? As it turned out, virtually all of corporate America, from Lehman Brothers and Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae to Merrill Lynch, were not in their right minds. And now America is shocked, shocked to find out that the wizards of Wall Street didn’t see the crash coming.

Our current financial crisis wouldn’t have shocked the New Dealers who experienced first-hand the folly of gambling with "other people’s money." For as the legendary economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1936, "our usual practice" as investors is "to take the existing situation and project into the future," even when our capacity to predict the future is weak. In a situation of such uncertainty, we cling to the unrealistic belief that tomorrow will always look like today – the collective mind of Wall Street assumed that the good times of the housing bubble would never end, and now assumes that the crisis of liquidity will never pass. Keynes concluded that the government would have to step in, and the New Deal took up the challenge.

But as it turned out, the big bailout that the New Deal engineered was the total opposite of the current proposals of the Bush Administration. In January of 1935, FDR introduced a proposal for $4.8 billion dollars to create three-and-a-half million jobs for the unemployed.

In the midst of the Great Depression, this was a staggering sum – two-and-a-half times the size of the entire Federal budget (equivalent to $6.75 trillion dollars today), the largest in American history at the time. Unlike today, the New Deal bailout went straight to the root cause of the problem – too few workers with not enough money in their pockets – and flowed upwards from the foundations, circulating throughout the economy as wages were spent and re-spent.

The results were dramatic: by 1937, unemployment had fallen from its high of 25% to 14% - a 50% decline! – and GDP had recovered to pre-crash levels. The New Deal bailout worked.

Look at the present day: unemployment has risen to 6.1%, working class family incomes have fallen by more than $2,000 since 2001, and 37.3 million people live in poverty. If these millions of Americans can’t pay their mortgages, the markets can’t recover. Yet the only victim of economic decline that the Bush Administration thinks worthy of support are finance corporations; people in danger of losing their homes are supposed to save themselves. Yet for the $700 billion demanded by Paulson and Bernacke, we could put every single unemployed person in America to work...twice over.

A people’s bailout: a bargain at half the price.

Reflections on May Day

2009-05-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

"Eight hours for sleep, Eight hours for work, Eight hours for what we will."

Today is May Day, which is International Workers' Day and the original Labor Day. In the spirit of this day of celebration, I'm going to talk (briefly) about the history of May Day, and then more fully about where I think the labor movement stands today.

In 1886, the soon-to-be American Federation of Labor (AFL) declared that May 1st would be a national general strike on behalf of the eight hour day. Anywhere from 300,000 to a million workers downed tools and walked off the job to rallies, where speakers proclaimed that the American labor movement had declared that the workday would henceforth be only eight hours, with no reduction in pay.

It wasn't a request, it wasn't a protest, it wasn't an appeal. Rather, the American labor movement simply announced that workers had made the decision and that was that. The idea that American workers could dictate their working conditions unilaterally is so audacious, so far removed from the unthinking acceptance of management prerogatives we see today, that it almost seems to have come from a different world.

Yet eighty thousand workers in Chicago took part in a parade that wound around the city, especially around the McCormick Reaper Factory where a bitter strike was going on. Two days later, a rally was held outside the factory, and a great mass of protesters confronted some 400 strikebreakers. Chicago Police fired into the crowd, and two workers were shot and killed. The next day, a protest rally was called at Haymarket Square and the rest was history. May Day was afterward adopted world-wide as a memorial to the workers' struggle and those workers who lost their lives in Chicago, and in a larger sense to all workers who die fighting for their rights.

And that's the history that gets told in every union hall and at every union rally. It's a saga of victory and defeat, of a radical demand that has become an unthinkingly normal part of American working life.

At this moment in time, the original May Day seems peculiarly both remote and immediate. The national unemployment rate is 8.5% - if you take the more accurate measurement that includes "discouraged" workers (unemployed people who want to work but have given up on finding a job) and the underemployed (people who want to work full-time but can only find part-time work), the unemployment rate is 15.6%. While the current recession seems to be at least leveling off, it's going to take a long time to fully recover:

And yet, I don't feel dispirited on this May Day. Unionization rates in 2007 rose from 12.0% to 12.1% and then again in 2008 from 12.1% to 12.4% - the first time in 25 years. It's quite possible that this year will see the passage of universal health care or the Employee Free Choice Act and possibly both. The UAW, my union, now owns 55% of Chrysler and 39% of General Motors, something that I don't anyone would have imagined would have happened back in 1935 when the UAW first began to organize auto workers in Detroit.

In short, the situation is uncertain. The old orthodoxies about the economy seem to have been refuted by the course of events, and there's a number of thinkers and groups that are jockying to fill the intellectual space left in their implosion. Yet we still don't have even a full vocabulary for talking about where we are and where we want to go, let alone a full policy program or an overarching ideology.

But if there is a good place to start, I think it has to be the idea of democratic control over economic life. One thing that this recession has shown us is that there is something fundamentally irrational and unlivable about an economic system in which the lives of tens if not hundreds of millions of people can be suddenly uprooted because of something completely out of their control yet entirely man-made. We should have some say in how we live our lives, some influence if not outright control over the parameters of what's acceptable and what's not in a civilized economic order, some way of protecting ourselves, and guiding our society from the present to a collectively-imagined future.

After all, that's what the American labor movement was doing on May 1st, 1886. They had a belief that it was wrong for people to spend every waking hour working at the direction of other people, that it was wrong for people to wake up in darkness and go to sleep in darkness without ever being able to walk freely in the sunshine. But above all, they believed that in a democracy, people have to exercise autonomy and freedom in their day to day lives, have to have time to walk and see what's happening around them, to talk and debate with their fellow citizens, to read about current events and improve their minds, to vote and volunteer and run for office, to live freely at least eight hours out of every day. And that's the part that's important - "eight hours for what we will" - the idea that for part of every day, each worker should be free to decide how to live their lives.

Culture Corner: The Politics of Prachett, Part 1 (Guards, Guards!)

2009-04-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

In my earlier post about the politics of fantasy, I talked about how I've found it difficult to enjoy works of fantasy that aren't critical of, subversive of, or consciously playing with the dominant tropes of the genre, and how I've found some accommodation in fantasy books that play with and deconstruct the politics of fantasy.

One of the best of these is the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett, both in terms of the thematic and aesthetic riches that Pratchett is able to pull out from his playing with the tropes of fantasy, but also the extent and depth of political thinking that's being done in these novels.

So, as a regular part of the Culture Corner, I'm going to be examining the politics of Discworld and there's no better place to start than with the eighth book in the series, Guards Guards, which I will argue contains a strong element of humanist polemic against the elitist themes embedded in sword-and-sorcery fiction.

Guards Guards makes a good starting point in part because Terry Pratchett very deliberately sets the book up as an attempt to make people think about the "mooks" of heroic fiction as real people, as a lens into making them think about the morality, ethics, and politics of heroism. You get this straight from the start with the dedication:

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No-one ever asks them if they wanted to. This book is dedicated to those fine men.

This quote should immediately set off a troubling thought to the fantasy fan: what, exactly, is the difference between the hero who slaughters his way through a room of helpless mooks and a villain who slaughters his way through a room of helpless Redshirts? When we're talking about a clash between the Strong and the Weak, when the outcome is absolutely certain, heroic combat beings to look a bit like wanton murder.

On to Guards, Guards. To quickly summarize the plot for those who haven't read it: Anhk-Morpork, the greatest and grubbiest of cities on the Disc, is going about its business when a book is stolen, a dragon appears and begins to burn down parts of the city, the city advertizes for a hero, a hero emerges claiming to be the rightful king and slays the dragon, and is carried off by the adoring crowds to the palace where the tyrant is overthrown and thrown into his own dungeons, and the coronation for the new king is planned. That's when it goes all wrong - the dragon comes back, torches the king, is given the crown, becomes the Dragon King of Anhk-Morpork, the terrified people welcome their new ruler and offer up a human sacrifice, the day is saved when a "whittle" of a lizard and the grubby members of the city police force arrest the dragon, and the tyrant resumes his rightful position as ruler of the city.

Because what the book is really about is Heroism, Monarchy, Chivalry, Romance, and why these things are in fact really, really dangerous ideas that most people would, in reality, find totally abhorrent.

We first run headlong into these themes when we encounter the Elucidated Brethren of the Ebon Night. This secret society is a multi-layered parody: it's both a parody of the Secret Society as it appears in fiction, the thinking of people who join secret society, and I'm going to argue, the thinking of fantasy fans. On the first point, there's the fact that while the "Unique and Supreme" Lodge sees itself as the ancient heirs to mystic secrets, they are in fact so unimaginative a secret society that their passwords and rituals overlap with other secret societies whose identical premises three doors down are constantly getting confused with. On the second point, while the members of the Ebon Night would like to believe that they are selfless seekers after ancient truths (learning "mystic prunes," how to walk on rice paper, etc.), they are in fact a bunch of credulous, mean-spirited people who joined the society in order to feel a false sense of superiority and paper over their massive insecurity complexes and resentment. In a harsh light, there's a resemblance between Brethren and fantasy fans who use escapist fiction as a source of revenge fantasies (there's a reason why the more violent fantasy works tend to draw large readership, and the similarity between the "Bad Guys" and real world figures of authority and social status) and escapism (there's also a reason why fantasy protagonists are social outcasts who are secretly possessed of Special Qualities, and/or physically and mentally perfect Superheroes to identify with).

What makes this kind of thinking dangerous, Pratchett is arguing, is that it blinds us to the difference between Myth and Reality, causes an unthinking valorization of the Past as better than the Present, and makes you vulnerable to people like the Supreme Grand Master. The Supreme Grand Master of the Ebon Night is the one who makes these losers dangerous, because he links their humdrum grudges to the reality of exercising unlimited power,and because his basic cynicism allows him to manipulate their belief in Destiny, True Heroes, and the Greatness of Kings (notice the way in which the Supreme Grand Master ties the discourse on myths, prophecy, the romantic Middle Ages with Chivalry and virtuous kings with his internal monologue on secret knowledge as willing ignorance and lies). The Supreme Grand Master doesn't believe that Magic has Morality, who is both willing and able to stage scenes of false heroism that's indistinguishable from the real thing, who knows that the Rightful King is the one left holding the crown, and his own vision of a Utopian Golden Age is a world in which he rules absolutely in the King's name, where People Know Their Place and where only the Right People Are In Charge. In this sense, the Grand Master represents all that's worst about both Idealism and Elitism - he's willing to murder on a grand scale to reshape the world to fit his personal vision, and his personal vision is a world of privilege and inequality.

Enter Carrot. While on one level, Carrot's supposed to represent the real thing - he's the secret heir to the throne, he's the one with the real sword and the bookmark and the prophecy, and he's actually good and noble and true, and he's the one who charges into danger to "serve and protect" - he's also deeply problematic. There's a reason why Pratchett compares him to an "iceberg drifting into a major shipping lane." Carrot is physically perfect - muscles on top of muscles - and charismatic, and therefore he can impose his will on others. But he's also "simple;" he doesn't understand the difference between what should be an what is, the difference between the law and reality, and the need to adapt institutions to human nature, instead of vice versa. In fact, his origins as an adopted dwarf can be seen as subtext - the hero isn't really a human, doesn't understand the basic frailty and shortcomings that make people human, and he doesn't fit into society. When Carrot first arrives in the city, he brainwashes an entire tavern of dwarfs because they're not living up to his ideal of what Dwarfs Should Act Like, beats the living crap out of everyone inside the Mended Drum because they are breaking laws that haven't been enforced in hundreds of years (which is rather unfair when you think about it), arrests the head of the Thieves' Guild in contravention of the guild's Charter, and so forth.

It's not until Carrot joins the Watch, and is brought face to face with three real and frail human beings, that he begins to change. The conversation between Carrot, Colon, and Nobby about "Leggy" Gaskin's death is an important turning point - where the young man begins to learn the difference between "what is" and "what ought to be," and what it means to ask a middle-aged obese man and a tiny weakling to go up against a dragon for thirty dollars a month. "All for one and one for all" only really works when you're dealing with two-dimensional Three Musketeers, yet the true nobility of Colon and Nobby comes through when they stand in the face of the dragon, not once, but three times (the first time when the Watch House is destroyed, the second up on the top of Small Gods, and the third on top of Bearhugger's Distillery). After this conversation, Carrot begins to shift to a different kind of character, a good man who learns how to be good in an imperfect world - he acts simple when he's not, he learns to change the world through persuasion and gradual reform rather than acts of sudden violence, and he renounces the idea that a King should make things better by appealing to the emotions, to Romance is wrong. More on this in a later post, as we'll see how an anti-monarchist royal becomes the true essence of the Good King in Men At Arms.

Pratchett is redefining heroism as ordinary people acting in spite of their ordinariness, and implicitly notes that the heroism of Conan-esque musclemen without a speck of fear (the same kind of heroic thugs who refuse to fight the dragon because the pay's too low, the same kind of good-looking protagonists like the King who put an attractive gloss on oppressive governments) is wrong, that it's rooted in a belief that some kind of people are better than other, and that physical force is legitimated by the moral character of superior individuals. After all Beowulf is good because the narrator tells us he is, but what does the situation looks like when Grendel's mother comes to complain? When it turns out that monsters are sentient beings? The dodge employed ever since Tolkien that certain races of humanoids are Always Chaotic Evil begins to look problematic in the face of its historical racism. All of the sudden, our simple enjoyment of fictional violence gets all complicated.

Sam Vimes, however, becomes Guards, Guards' protagonist in a way that Carrot couldn't be. In a certain way, because Sam Vimes' point of view is the foundation for the film noir elements that Pratchett uses to undercut and complicate heroic fantasy, he's absolutely essential, the Raymond Chandleresque noir hero. But what makes Vimes really interesting is that his heroism is essentially about ideology and belief. Captain Sam Vimes of the Night Watch, in a book about the allure of Monarchy, is the city's lone republican, a man who believes that people should be independent and equal, that the law should protect even the criminals of the Shades, and that power should be constrained by truth. Thus, Sam Vimes refuses to cover up murders, continues to hunt the Dragon despite the lethal danger, refuses to give up when he's fired by Wonse and later imprisoned. But unlike other idealists, Vimes is a pragmatist, a realist - he knows that people can be cowards, idiots, and so on; his beliefs are filtered through experience, so that they emerge from the world instead of being imposed on the world. He's also the foil to Vetinari, a man, who in his own way, like Carrot insists that people can be good. We'll find out more about his republicanism in later segments of the Politics of Pratchett.

Havelock Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork could be described as what a tyrant would look like in real life, if you removed the constraints of the genre that tend to make the Bad Guy stupid as well as evil. After all, he more or less admits that the reason why he's so good as a ruler of Ankh-Morpork is that "We're the only ones who know how to make things work...Because the bad people know how to plan. It's part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don't seem to have the knack.'" (Guards Guards) However, I'm going to argue something completely different. Vetinari is, in fact, not a sympathetic villain - he's a Machiavellian Republican.

Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli is among the most misunderstood political philosophers in the Western tradition, and unfortunately remembered as an amoral advocate of real-politik on on the basis of Il Principe (The Prince). What people sometimes forget is that Machiavelli was in life a staunch republican, who served as a diplomat to the courts of France, Spain and the Papecy from the Florentine Republic, and who, as commander of the Florentine militia, led Florence to victory against Pisa and in defeat against the Spanish/Papal/Medici alliance at Prato. Because he was a leading republican, the vengeful Medici had him put to the strappado (a form of torture where the subjects hands are tied behind their back and then lifted into the air on ropes attached to the wrists, causing intense pain and dislocation of the arms) to get him to name himself as a conspirator against the Medici and to name names of his fellow conspirators. Machiavelli refused. They strappado'd him nine times. He never said a word. This was not a man to be trifled with.

In his philosophy, Machiavelli was a republican who nonetheless did not idealize the common man (as did many later republican philosophers, especially those of the French Revolution). I would argue that he simultaneously believed that "For of men it may generally be affirmed, that they are thankless, fickle, false studious to avoid danger, greedy of gain," and that "a people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment than a Prince: And not without reason is the voice of the people like that of God." Human beings, in Machiavelli's view, were as good or bad as their environments and their social institutions allowed them to be - a well-ordered republic would make men behave better by restraining their negative impulses and encouraging their positive impulses, but in a monarchy, there is no constraint to the negative impulses of the king.

Compare this to Vetinari's discourse on human nature:

'I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,' said the man. 'You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.'

He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.

'A great rolling sea of evil,' he said, almost proprietorially. 'Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing!' He slapped Vimes good-naturedly on the back.

'Down there,' he said, 'are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no. I'm sorry if this offends you,' he added, patting the captain's shoulder, 'but you fellows really need us.' (Guards Guards)

This is Machiavellian Republicanism, aware of humanity's capacity for evil, but working always to build institutions that can reform it. And when we look aat how Vetinari operates, we see this philosophy in action. For while Ankh-Morpork may be on the surface a tyranny, ruled by an absolute ruler (the Man with the Vote), it's actually a syndicalist republic.

In Ankh-Morpork, most industries and professions are organized into guilds - not just the traditional guilded occupations of the Middle Ages like the Butchers, the Bakers, the Smiths, the Merchants, and so forth, but also the Beggars, the Seamstresses (prostitutes), the Assassins and the Thieves. All guilds operate under a civic charter, and guild charters have the force of law - such that, for much of the city, there is no free market as we would understand it, but the regulations and bylaws of unionized workers who own their skills, and in the case of Journeymen and Masters, the means of production as well. These guilds form the Guild Council, which serves as the city's legislative body, and which elects the Patrician - who is the executive branch of what is in the end a republic, even if one with a very powerful executive branch. For while the Patrician theoretically has the power to issue laws by decree, to operate beyond the boundaries of the normal criminal justice system, it's also the case that the Patrician can be removed by vote of the guilds, and prosecuted for violation of the law. More on this in later segments.

And Vetinari approves of this constitutional arrangement. Indeed, what we learn of Vetinari's public policy regarding the guilds is that he believes in extending the system of syndicalist guilds throughout the socio-economic order, as a Machiavellian-Republican means of creating institutions that guide human behavior. One of his first acts as Patrician was to legalize the previously extra-legal Thieves Guild, to make crime legal and organized, subjecting it to the bureaucratic process of yearly budgets and forward-planning, and rigorous maintenance of the closed shop. He then informs the somewhat incredulous masters of the Thieves Guild (who at this point think they've just made it for life) that he, Vetinari the graduate with full honors of the Assassins' Guild School, now knows where they and their families live, and that he will enforce the budgets that they've agreed to with any means necessary. We also learn later that another one of Vetinari's intial acts as Patrician was to legalize the Seamstresses' Guild - so that some of the most vulnerable workers in the city have the protection of self-organization.

And why does Vetinari do all this? Why struggle all the way to the top, having to fight off assassination attempts and engage in some of his own? Because Vetinari, like Machiavelli is a patriotic republican: "While he, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, ruled the city, preserved the city, loved the city, hated the city and had spent a lifetime in the service of the city." And as we'll see in future installments, Vetinari is one of the heroes of the story.

Re-Post Number 6: "Public Employment and Economic Planning: History, Theory, Implications" (September 19, 2007)

2009-04-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

Note:
You'll note some similarities between this diary and the more recent diary on economic planning and the Apollo Alliance. Luckily, the older diary goes into what future economic planning should look like, providing enough new material to be of interest.
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History

Economic planning is probably the most obfuscated public policy in American history, bar none. The cries of socialized medicine, the Harry and Louise ads, the current struggles over SCHIP - all of these pale in comparison to the sound and fury raised over economic planning. Conservative Republicans and Democrats called it creeping socialism, Hayek called it creeping fascism, and the public imagination reeled before an onslaught of images of totalitarian control.

The reality was much less terrifying. The NRPB, the National Resources Planning Board, was probably the most influential of the New Deal planning institutions. Ostensibly an institution for rationalizing use of things like coal, oil, timber, etc., the NRPB instead became a place for people to re-think economic planning as an exercise in democracy, as a way of directing the guiding the economy towards goals that enhanced the quality of life for all citizens, as a way of putting the people in charge of their economic life.

Throughout the 1940's, the NRPB published a series of reports, laying out the blueprint for a new kind of American society that would come after the war, a society based on the principles of the Four Freedoms and the Second Bill of Rights proposed by President Roosevelt.

Now how does all of this tie in with public employment? In their reports, the staffers of the NRPB looked to programs like the Works Progress Administration as an example of how the government could provide services en masse to Americans in need. More importantly, the NRPB's reports, especially the 1942 Report titled "Security, Work, and Relief Policies," envisioned the provision of jobs by the Federal government as a permanent policy designed to push the country towards full employment, in conjunction with Keynesian economic policies.

The importance of this shift in economic planning, from the crude efforts to secure price and wage cooperation under the National Recovery Administration to a more sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of public action, was that it expanded the policy imagination of New Deal Democrats far beyond the narrow scope we see today. Moreover, New Deal Democrats had reason to believe that such actions were possible. The WPA had shown that the Federal government could fund and administer mass employment projects and that such projects had a substantial impact on the unemployment rare. The Office of Price Administration, a war-time agency that was given the power to regulate prices and wages, succeeded in holding inflation below 1% in a period of full employment.

Because of these advances, the NRPB believed that the national government could provide the trifecta of broad prosperity: low unemployment, low inflation, high economic growth. In essence, everything that the so-called "golden age" of the 1950-1960's was supposed to have achieved. However, there were two key differences between the golden age as envisioned by the economic planners and the golden age that transpired: first, public employment, price and wage controls, and more expansive social insurance programs would have ensured that prosperity would have flowed from public actions, such that the political will of the people, not the largess of corporate America, would have promoted economic growth. Second, it would have meant that the benefits of post-war growth would have been much more broadly distributed, both to the poor, and to minorities.

The end result, however, was that of political defeat - the de-funding of the NRPB, the watering-down of the Full Employment Act (as discussed in my previous diary), and the demonizing of both public employment and economic planning.

Theory

So what should this tell us about economic planning and public employment?

First, it should remind us that the belief that the government's actions do not influence the economy is historically inaccurate - public action can and has dramatically shaped the economy, altering employment levels and inflation rates for periods of several years at a time. Thus, our understanding of what is and is not possible in terms of economic policy should be expanded beyond the boundaries of the orthodox.

Second, it should make us think about the purposes behind economic policy. It is often a habit of Democrats to focus on particular economic indicators - economic growth, numbers of jobs created, and so forth - instead of picturing a vision of the kind of economy and society that we seek to achieve and then moving towards it.

Third, we must realize that victory begets victories and defeat, defeats - we cannot allow any push we make in the future to be stymied by Republican obstructionism. Just as the defeat of health care in 1994 robbed the Democrats of a major policy victory that would rally the base AND working class voters, so too will defeats on public employment, or any other initiative. More on this topic in my next diary.

In terms of economic planning, we need to shift our theoretical perspective to the global and the long-term. The United States stands at an uncertain point - we are still the world's largest economy, but long term trends in terms of debts, deficits, and balance of trade shows how vulnerable our position is. The American people stand at an even more perilous position - the poor, the working class, and the middle class are all facing stagnating and/or declining fortunes in terms of income, wealth, homeownership, health coverage, and no doubt higher education will be soon to follow.

What then should economic planning aim at?

1. Restore Income to Restore Savings/Balance of Trade/Rough Equality

The American economy has been shored up in recent years by the endless cycle of consumer debt that masks the decline in real incomes. Boosting the purchasing power of the ordinary American would help to restore our internal market- an essential goal, given the variability of the globalized economy. Moreover, it would put our consumer base on a much stronger basis regarding income v. debt, allowing savings, assets accumulation, and investment to increase, and redirecting more income towards the broader economy and away from finance payments, which fuel an over-saturated financial sector.

2. Use Public Employment to Shield Against Globalization

If the reality of living in a globalized economy is that industries shift rapidly across borders, then it becomes essential for the U.S and other developed economies that are likely to lose industries to less developed region to increase, not decrease their social spending. Increasing public employment can keep unemployment rates low, preventing economic decay in areas that are losing jobs, maintaining consumption levels through fueling wages. Moreover, public employment provides a shield against the destabilizing effects of globalization, a safe haven against sudden ups and downs in world markets, by counter-cyclical actions.

3. Use Public Investment to Guide the Economy Forward

Public investment can act in a complementary fashion, to create new industries that take the place of old industries, to improve the national infrastructure upon which industries depend - not just roads, bridges, and levees, but also schools, wireless internet, and research and development into new technologies. This both creates new goods and services, adding to economic growth, but also provides jobs that are designed to be more "grounded" in the American economy than consumer-goods production.

4. Set A Comprehensive Target for Economic Policy

Although we don't admit it, and we don't approach it in as much of a conscious fashion as we need to, there are certain targets that government policy does aim at - inflation at less than 2% a year, economic growth of at least 3% a year have been fairly standard aims. However, they are not targets that particularly benefit ordinary Americans - they don't include wage growth, they don't include unemployment, and they don't include the distribution of wealth in American society.

So when we engage in economic planning, it should be to hit targets that represent the whole of the American economy and the whole of the American people as well.

Implications

I'm sure that many of you are familiar with the Apollo Initiative, a joint project of labor unions and environmental groups to achieve energy independence on a basis of green technology and green jobs.
http://www.apolloalliance.org/...

Now, on it's own, the Apollo Initiative is an impressive policy innovation, envisioning a 10-year, $300 billion push towards alternative energy that envisions a whole host of coordinated policies, subsidies, and tax reforms towards a single end. It's certainly much more innovative than anything we've seen in the last few years.

However, as a model for future policy, it suggests an intriguing possibility for American policy and economic planning. Here we have a model of coordinating economic and social objectives that aims to "do good and do well" at the same time, a way of economic planning without falling into the public relations traps.

Imagine, if you will, a host of Initiatives, all designed to boost economic performance, develop new industries, create jobs, improve the national infrastructure, and benefit the commonweal of the country:

Athena Initiative - centered around education (building new schools, recruiting teachers by providing salary bonuses, developing new educational technologies, expanding access to higher education through expanding campuses of both public and private universities - think about it, Harvard rejects all but 7% of applicants, turning away thousands and thousands of superlative students - why not expand the undergraduate body beyond just 6-odd thousand?)
Mercury Initiative - centered around telecommunications and information technology (providing free broadband internet, universally compatible cellular phone networks, expanding opportunities for startups in the music and movie business, and so forth).
Asclepius Initiative - centered around health care industry (leveraging our current public investments in medicine such as the VA, NIH, etc. into creative new publically-owned generic drugs, providing incentives for healthier work environments, improving our public health systems, using health research to uncover "best methods" of health care, so that more money is put towards care instead of overcare, and so forth).

In this way, the federal government would essentially become the national venture capitalist, using its ability to sustain investments across decades before technologies prove themselves.

Policy Round-Up: the Apollo Initiative as Democratic Planning

2009-04-17T00:42:00.000-07:00

Policy wonks and other people who follow public policy issues are probably familiar with the Apollo Alliance, a blue-green alliance of environmentalists and labor unions that's become a stock part of the Democratic Party's platform on environmental and economic policy. Back in 2004, Kerry signed onto it; Obama basically did the same.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the basic idea is to fuse environmental policy - alternative energy, "green tech," energy-efficient building, mass transit - with labor and economic policy - creating new jobs that are well-paid, have good benefits, and are union-friendly, as a way to create new domestic industry and manufacturing. The Apollo Initiative, which they were promoting back in 2004, envisioned $30 billion a year for ten years as a public investment into " promoting new technology, improving manufacturing processes, and expanding markets [of "green tech"]...improving the performance of our existing energy system... construction of high performance, energy efficient buildings...[new sources of] renewable energy...new transit system starts, maintenance of the nation’s passenger train system, development of regional high speed rail networks, and improvements in the nation’s roads and highways." Their current Apollo Program calls for a $50 billion a year for ten year investment in energy-efficient buildings, renewable fuels, a new power grid, increasing efficiency of existing power plants, building mass transit, building fuel-efficient cars...the list goes on and on.

In and of itself, it looks like nothing special - basic, Democratic Party boilerplate, the kind of buzzword-driven wonkery that gets tossed around in primaries and never amounts to nothing. I'm going to argue that it's actually a way to recover a missing part of progressive politics and policy that was lost to us during the Cold War.

Ever since the Progressive Era (1880s-1910s), one of the major political and policy divides has been between the advocates of economic planning and the advocates of the free market. To our modern ears, this sounds a little bit ridiculous - planning recalls the Soviet Five Year Plans, the forced industrializations, lousy steel being made to fit Communist Party quotas that couldn't be used, the whole panoply of anti-communist imagery that people who were born after the start of the Cold War have in our heads. But once, there were great thinkers like Thorstein Veblen, Henry Carter Adams, Richard Ely, and John Bates Clark debated whether the free market was an inevitable facet of economic life, or whether rational planning could replace it.

Enter the New Deal. With the free market in total collapse, economic planning entered into the mainstream of American politics and public policy, and the government for the first time in a non-war situation attempted to direct the course o economic activity. Roughly speaking, three kinds of economic planning were attempted during the New Deal:

Tennessee Valley Authority - founded on May 18th, 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was an experiment in regional democratic planning. Supported by activist-bureaucrats like David Lilienthal, and Arthur Morgan, the idea behind the TVA was to attack the economic problems of the Tennessee Valley from multiple directions - producing fertilizers and promoting modern farming techniques to raise production, hiring the unemployed to do conservation work, generating electricity and irrigation through the construction of hydro-electric dams, flood-control, reforestation, the development of industry (especially through the provision of cheap hydro-electic power), and so on. The TVA also recognized labor unions, and less successfully sought to find jobs for unemployed African-Americans and women.

However, the idea behind the TVA went far beyond that. In the vision of Arthur Morgan, the key element of the TVA were local democratic planning boards, in which farmers, aided by experts from the TVA, would decide the future of their areas and work to develop their way out of poverty. In the vision of David Lilienthal, the key element of the TVA was the creation of public power utilities which could restore competition, lower the price of electricity and water, and extend services to the underserved - with the ultimate aim being to challenge the monopolistic private utilities on behalf of consumers. While the two bitterly fought, the ultimate vision, of a public intervention into the economy, the creation of public economic power used on behalf of the poor, of attacking every aspect of regional poverty and underdevelopment was a powerful one.

And in a nation supposedly devoted to the free market, the TVA exists to this day as a massive publically-owned industry, a living legacy of economic planning, and one that is politically beloved by Americans of all stripes of political opinion.

National Recovery Administration - founded on June 16th, 1933, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was an experiment in tripartite economic planning. Promoted by expert-administrators like Don Richberg, Rexford Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, the basic concept of the NRA was that American industry could recover through an increase in prices, production, employment, and wages if government, business, labor worked together. The normal anti-trust laws would be suspended, and Codes would be set up for each industry, establishing codes of "fair competition," setting prices, wages, and hours, abolishing child labor and recognizing labor unions. The idea would be that by reducing competitive pressure and restoring profitability, production and employment would increase and the economy would recover.

The experiment has widely been seen as an utter disaster - codes were widely ignored, especially in regards to minimum wages, maximum hours, and the recognition of unions, red tape and arbitary regulation were blamed for strangling recovery and extneding the Great Depression. It was declared unconstitutional in 1935, and even many New Dealers saw the program's terminationa as a relief from an embarrasment. Economists especially hate the NRA and point to it as the prime example of why interfering with the free market never, ever works.

Myself, I'm a little bit more skeptical. After all, unemployment dropped from 22.9% in 1932 to 14.4% in 1935 (personally, I think that the New Deal's job programs had more to do with this). Prices went from dropping about 10% the year before, to increasing by an average of 3% in 1934 and 1935. Industrial production, which dropped by 25% in the first six months of the NRA, was up by 22% from its May 1933 levels when the NRA was terminated in 1935. If the NRA was so economically damaging, it didn't seem to prevent a recovery from taking place; perhaps the worst that could be said against it is that it was ineffective but benign.

While I wouldn't bet the farm on it, I think the case against the NRA might be worth re-opening.

National Resources Planning Board - the NRPB was founded in 1933, as a modest agency within the Interior Department, with a mandate to plan public works projects so that the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration could have a "shelf" of "shovel-ready projects" to build in the future. In 1939, however, this little policy shop was transferred into the Executive Office of the President, and was given an expanded brief as the central agency for national economic planning. Under the direction of FDR's uncle, Frederick Delano, and the research expertise of Eveline Burns (a Columbia University economist who had consulted for the Committee on Economic Security that established the system we know today as Social Security, and had worked closely with the WPA), the NRPB was tasked with envisioning the future direction of America, in every aspect of life.

By 1939, the New Deal had begun to adopt the theories of Keynesian economics, and many of the economic planners in the NRPB and other agencies thought that they now had the tools to ensure permanent prosperity and full employment, through government activism in the economy. The NRPB's main contribution to this body of thought were a series of reports laying out plans for economic development, government organization, the use of natural resources, and so on. The most important of these reports was Work, Security, and Relief Policies. In this report, the NRPB outlined a vision for a "cradle to grave" welfare state that would cover all Americans who were unable to work, and the "right to a job" for all Americans who wanted to work. In this manner, the government would ensure full employment, and the full production and rapid economic growth that would follow - and the expanded revenues would pay the cost of the welfare state. It was a total economic vision of a new economic order defined by universal rights and characterized by economic security - a world in which no American would ever have to fear poverty.

In the 1940s, the principles of the NRPB's report were introduced into Congress as the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill (combining the nationalization of unemployment insurance and disability insurance and the expansion of Social Security with a universal health insurance system), and the Full Employment Act (mandating full employment through Keynesian planning and a public employment program as employer of last resort). It was probably the most left-leaning moment in American history. And the result was total defeat - the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill went down to defeat every year between 1945 and the present day (John Dingell introduced the bill every year between 1945 and his retirement, his son John Dingell Jr. has continued this tradition); the Full Employment Act was eviscerated in committee and was passed in a toothless, watered-down version; and the NRPB itself was disassembled by a hostile Congress. Once the Cold War had set in, anything that smacked of state planning was demonized as Communistic, socialistic, and red.

Ok, so what's the relation between the Apollo Alliance and the New Deal's economic planning? Because when I look at the Apollo Alliance, I see something that looks like a cross between the NRPB (national forward planning) and the TVA (focused public investment in particular industrial developments). What animates the Apollo Alliance is a vision of a new kind of economy, one that has lower emissions, uses less carbon, is more energy-efficient and self-sufficient with alternative fuels, that has more of a manufacturing base, and develops towards high-density urban development along mass-transit corridors instead of massive sprawl.

What excites me about them is that what we have here are the first glimmerings of an idea, one not seen in seventy years, that the economic future of this country should ultimately be in the hands of a democratically-elected government, and not the whims of the casino we call the free market. Ultimately, if the Apollo Alliance is about anything, it's the idea that through a direct public investment, we can shift ourself from one economic model to another. While this might sound inconsequential to some, I would argue that the lifework of dozens, if not hundred and thousands of activists throughout the twentieth century, so long denied by the forces of fear and anti-communism, testify otherwise.

If we think of the economy and economic forces as similar to the great oceans and the natural laws that govern the winds and the tides, the hope of democratic planning is that we can build a ship and learn to tack into the wind, to guide ourselves with compass and sextant and marine chronometer, and that human reason, rather than the blind workings of fate, shall determine the course of our lives.

Re-Post Number 5: " WPA and Keynesianism - Theory and Policy of Public Employment" (August 13, 2007)

2009-04-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

Note:

The following post continues in the trend of moving from the technical aspects of public employment policy to the intellectual aspects of public employment policy. Here, I show how public employment policy both fits and doesn't quite fit within the boundaries of Keynesian economic theory.

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In my last diary, I wrote about the differences between public employment and public works, and the implications for current and future policy. Today, I’m going to talk about the relationship between Keynesian economic policy and public employment, and what lessons we can draw from this.

First, a quick definition of terms:

Public Employment – as has already been talked about, public employment is the policy of the government directly hiring people who currently are unemployed for the purposes of reducing unemployment, increasing purchasing power, and secondarily creating public goods and services.

Keynesianism - is a bit more complicated, and as a non-economist, I’m not really that qualified to talk about it (I have read the General Theory and several books about the historical impact of Keynesian theory on public policy, but I haven’t taken any courses on Keynesian economics). But to present just a simplified version of John Maynard Keynes’ theory, and the public policy that resulted from it:

* First, Keynes argued that classical economists had misunderstood key aspects of wages and prices. As he argued, the idea behind Say’s Law – that supply creates its own demand, and that therefore the economy is always at an optimum equilibrium – was not right. The level of production and employment in an economy at any given time was not determined solely by the individual calculations of capitalists regarding their own prices and wages, but was profoundly shaped by aggregate or effective demand. Essentially, Keynes was arguing that you can’t sell stuff without there being enough people with money to buy it.

* Second, Keynes argued that, contrary to the advice of orthodox economists at the time, slashing wages (both to cut costs and to increase willingness to work) was not the answer to the Great Depression. Rather, he argued that cutting wages also cut effective demand for goods (how much people are actually able to buy, versus how much they’d like to buy) – which cut profits, returns on investment, and any expansion of the economy those things would create. Essentially, Keynes was arguing that protecting profits at the expense of workers would make things worse.

* Third, Keynes argued that people are not as economically rational as classical economists would like to believe – that people have psychological reactions to the economy. To begin with, he argued that when wages and prices fall, people hold back from spending their money because they expect them to keep falling. Next, he argued that people have a preference to save more money than they need to – and that in a recession or a depression, people hold onto their money because they’re afraid that if they invest it, they’ll lose it. This leads to insufficient demand and insufficient investment that prevents recovery. Essentially, Keynes was arguing that economies could "stabilize" at levels far below their normal levels of "full" employment and investment – meaning that economies wouldn’t just get better on their own.

* Fourth, Keynes argued that the government was uniquely able to repair this situation, if it acted in an organized fashion. First, by using its power to tax and borrow, the government could bring the money that had flowed out of the economy (when people sold off stocks and bonds and emptied out their bank accounts( back into the economy. Second, by spending even at a deficit, the government could increase demand, investment and profits, "pump-priming" the economic recovery. As long as the government acted in a counter-cyclical fashion – borrowing and spending more in recessions, and increasing taxes and spending less when economies threatened to over-heat – they could stave off economic downturns. Essentially, Keynes was arguing that governments could and should manage their economies and create economic stability and prosperity, by acting in a counter-cyclical fashion.

Keynesian economics was probably the most influential economic theory for the broader left-of-center, both in the U.S and in Europe, other than Marxism, of the 20th century. For New Dealers and members of the British Labor Party, and even for more moderate or conservative people like Henry Luce of Time Magazine, Keynesian economic policies seemed to offer a solution to all of the problems of capitalism, the constant booms and busts, and in exchange provide perpetual prosperity. Moreover, Keynesianism offered this solution as a resounding affirmation of public action – not only was perpetual prosperity possible, but it would be governments, not the private sector, that would provide it. Keynesianism quickly became one of the cornerstones of liberal and progressive public policy.

How does this all tie in with public employment? Well, to begin with, public employment advocates shared many of the beliefs that Keynes held – that the problem of the Great Depression was that there was insufficient demand for goods (what public employment advocates and other New Dealers called insufficient purchasing power), that governments could act directly to reverse this, and that the way to end the Depression was to spend a lot of money to increase demand. As Harry Hopkins and the people who worked for him in the WPA argued, public employment was a proven way to spend a lot of money very fast, that the money flowed straight into the pockets of working class people who had lost their purchasing power (and therefore, their ability to translate their potential demand for goods into effective demand) when they lost their jobs. Hopkins and the administrators of the WPA and similar programs became enthusiastic advocates for Keynesian economic theory and Keynesian economic policy, using the ideas of Keynes as justification for increasing federal spending and the budgets of the WPA and similar programs.

Now, one of the most important divisions in WWII-era liberalism became a key issue. Liberals who favored Keynesian theories nonetheless disagreed over how to implement them into public policy and split into two camps: fiscal Keynesians and social Keynesians.

Fiscal Keynesians focused on Keynes’ arguments about the importance of interest rates (and spending) on economic recovery, and argued that you could implement Keynesian policies through the "fisc and the fed" – the Federal Reserve and the normal spending of the government (with a strong preference for using interest rates before spending). Essentially, the government could indirectly manage the economy by lowering and raising interest rates appropriately, thus stimulating investment (and ultimately jobs and economic growth). If necessary, the government could increase economic spending, but that should be a last resort and in any case done through more traditional channels such as tax cuts or contracts. This would allow for economic management with a minimum of interference with the free market – the government wouldn’t have to grow or spend money for "socialist" programs.

Social Keynesians emphasized much more strongly the importance of spending and a larger government presence in the economy, including regulation of corporate behavior. In their view, the kind of spending was important in and of itself – government had to spend money in ways (preferably through government programs) that directed the money to working class people who lacked purchasing power, as this would have the broadest impact on demand; moreover, the private sector on its own would never provide the kind of full employment needed, so the government would have to intervene on its own (by providing public employment and constructing public works, by supporting unions and by establishing min. wages and max. hours laws); finally, social Keynesians argued that the government shouldn’t just spend more money in the same way that the private sector did – government spending should flow to areas and people that the private sector neglected, providing things like housing for the poor, health care, and social security benefits.

Naturally, public employment advocates were fiercely committed to social Keynesianism, since it was the theory closer to their own beliefs – although public employment advocates did argue that, beyond issues of increasing economic demand by spending, public employment further showed that the government could modulate key economic variables like the unemployment rate directly. This all came to a head in 1945-1946, when the Full Employment Act was introduced into Congress.

The original draft of the Full Employment Act was a strongly social-Keynesian piece of legislation. The bill proposed to formally commit the United States government to achieving full employment as a matter of standard economic policy, and to establish for all Americans the "right to a job." (At the time, most government officials and Keynesian economists believed to be somewhere between 1-2.7% unemployment, since there would always be some people who were in-between jobs, not working because they were in school or caring for a relative, etc.) Further, the bill required the President to submit a "Full Employment Budget" to Congress each year, in addition to the normal federal budget – this budget would provide an estimate for the employment rate for the next fiscal year given current trends, and if that rate was lower than full employment, to recommend the necessary policies and spending levels to reach full employment.

However, the bill was considerably watered down as it passed through Congress, in response to the concerns of conservatives and moderates who disliked the idea of government economic planning or creating the "right to a job" and the concerns of fiscal-Keynesian liberals who believed that such measures were unnecessary. The final Employment Act that was passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Truman was a much more fiscal Keynesian bill. In this version, the government declared that it would seek to "promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power" without committing itself to achieving them, and the right to a job was stricken from the text. The Full Employment Budget was reduced to an annual economic forecast and a list of suggestions that neither the President nor the Congress was obligated to pay attention to much less enact into law. In no small part because of this defeat, social Keynesianism became rapidly eclipsed by fiscal Keynesianism, which solidified its status as the dominant theory of post-war liberals, especially in the Kennedy and Johnson years (for more on the importance of this, see Judith Russell’s book, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race on the influence of fiscal Keynesians on the Great Society and the War on Poverty). The WPA, which had outlasted many New Deal programs and remained in operation through 1942, was not revived after the war.

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So, what are the implications for progressives today?

First, ideas matter. Public policies are immensely strengthened when they have theories that explain why and how they work, and why they are a good idea; they are likewise weakened when those theories are eclipsed by theories which explain why they are inefficient, unnecessary, or counter-productive.

Second, compromise has consequences. The decision to opt for fiscal Keynesianism over social Keynesianism had a major historical impact, both for liberal politics and policy and for the country at large. Social Keynesiansm was effectively halted for (by this point) sixty-one years. And this meant that in the 1960’s, the people who designed the Great Society and the War on Poverty excluded large-scale public employment in favor of education, social services, and job training – which limited the impact on poverty and unemployment, especially among the young and working-age people. It also meant that when fiscal Keynesianism stopped working in the 1970s and came under assault from Milton Friedman and other neo-classical economists, that liberals had no alternative policy to guide them. Notably in the 1960’s, one of the chief demands of the civil rights movement was for full-employment through public employment – the "Freedom Budget" promoted by A. Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. was a major part of the civil rights movement’s platform, and the famous March on Washington was titled the "Jobs and Freedom March," as photographs of signs carried by participants attest to.

Third, when options are closed, so are imaginations. When fiscal Keynesianism became dominant, both experts, public officials, and voters alike were convinced that the most that government could do was to tinker around the edges of the American economy. Today, we’ve restricted ourselves even further, such that in 2004, when Democratic presidential candidates spoke of the need to "grow jobs...build jobs...make jobs," all they could think of to do so was to create tax credits and funds to lend money to businesses. Hopefully, by using history to remind ourselves that the options open today are not the only options available, we can begin to reverse this.

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EDIT: Damn, can't believe I forgot to add this point. In a previous diary I had mentioned that John Maynard Keynes was one of those who had missed the difference between public employment and public works, and I had intended to explain myself here.

In many writings and speeches before and after writing the General Theory, Keynes had argued that one of the key ways that Keynesian policies could be implemented was to use public works to lower unemployment. One of the objections to this policy, and indeed one of the experiences of later implementing these policies, was that public works failed to produce enough employment. This was used by conservatives, especially during the 1980s, that using the government instead of the free market was a bad idea.

The historical irony here is that the public works programs were being blamed for something that wasn't their fault - public works directs most of its money towards the works themselves, purchasing materials and land, purchasing machinery and equipment, and what employment it does generate tends to go to people who have experience in construction, which tends to be people who are already employed. By providing extra jobs to construction and general contracting firms, public works does increase employment around the margins, when these firms hire on extra workers to meet the increased need, but it's really not large enough an effect to provide the reductions in unemployment that Keynes was looking for.

So, the point I'm trying to make here is that progressives need to be very careful about what policies we support and why - clarity of theory and practice is really important. Supporting a program because it's intrinsically worthy is all well and good, but we have to be sure that they will have the effects desired, otherwise our opponents will use the results as a weapon to attack the basic idea of government action.

Misappropriated History and Tea-Bagging

2009-04-13T14:01:00.000-07:00

One of the peculiarities of recent conservative efforts to mobilize public opinion against the Obama administration's stimulus and budget plans has been their uncritical adoption of the mantle of the American Revolution on behalf of the conservative cause.

Witness Nebraskans chanting "no taxation without representation," Or the risible "tea-bagging" parties being held by a bunch of astro-turf conservative organizations promoted by Fox News.

On one level, this shouldn't be surprising. Conservatives like to think of themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution (see "original intent"), in order to claim the mantle of legitimacy and authenticity, and the anti-tax theme at least makes the fit better than other historical analogies. In addition to supporting their current political aims, this theme also does the yoeman work of insinuating that the U.S has always been a conservative, anti-tax nation, and that freedom equates with not being taxed. Winning the historical imagination, like winning the rhetorical battle for other powerful symbols such as the flag, mothers, "freedom," has a powerful impact on people's political thinking.

But as a historian, I would caution the modern conservative movement that historical analogies can be dangerously double-edged. The American Revolution was a tumulteous, and quite radical time period, and a lot of the ideas advanced by the Revolutionary Generation (a term I personally prefer to the Founding Fathers) go far beyond the anti-tax, small-government, negative liberties, property rights ideology of modern conservatives.

Consider, for example, Tom Paine. For a long time, I've considered Tom Paine to be my favorite member of the Revolutionary Generation - he wasn't rich (a struggling corsetmaker/tax-collector/pamphleteer), he wasn't a slaveowner (Paine was a fervent abolitionist), and he wasn't yet another bucolic farmer (Paine lived in London, Philadelphia and Paris).

Add to that his internationalism, his commitment to universal suffrage, and his quite radical economic policies - although a fan of Adam Smith, Paine advocated the distribution of public lands, progressive taxation, and an early version of social insurance. Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, is a brilliant overview of how Paine emerged from the world of Philadelphia's self-educated artisans, his participation in drafting the radical Pennsylvania Constitution, and his engagement with the question of controlling the price of food versus laissez faire in the commodtiies market.

Over on DailyKos, Sam Wise Gingy's excellent diary reminds us of how radical Tom Paine could be with this quote:

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.

It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason that, because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.

Here you see a lot of the elements of radical republicanism in the 18th century - the deep understanding of the social nature of economic activity, and the attendant social nature of property; a strong belief in the labor theory of value from an artisan's perspective, and a budding awareness that capitalism might cheat workers of the fair value of their work; and the almost unspoken idea that the commonwealth and the common good should be the foundation of society and economy. I doubt that modern conservatives would want to claim this American Revolutionary as their figurehead.

But even if you focus on more conservative Founding Fathers, you keep coming across comments so radical that they explode the staid veneer of patriotic memory. Even the arch-moderate John Adams argued that ""All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.," and called for speculators in grain to be shot. If you look at Thomas Jefferson's writings on corporations and banks, you begin to get a sense why the northern urban worker joined the Democratic Party - ""If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. "

One of my favorite works on the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, should remind us that the idea that the American Revolution was exception in that it was conservative, is a nonsense. The American Revolution turned society upside down, dispossessed much of the colonial elite, saw huge transfers of political and economic power, and set down new and newly combined languages, traditions of thought, and structures of government and politics. Inside the first twenty years of the new government, there were no less than two separate rebellions "from below," the emergence of the first American trade unions, and the first stirrings of abolitionism.

Remember that the next time you see some right-winger wave a tea-bag in your face.

Re-Post Number 4: "WPA or PWA - Which Policy for Progressives?" (Aug 11, 2007)

2009-04-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

Note: the following re-post moves from the mechanics of public employment policy to some of the intellectual issues that complicate the question of direct job creation. Here, the issue is whether there is an important difference between "public employment" and "public works;" my argument is that there is an important difference, and that progressives should emphasize the former over the latter as an anti-cyclical economic recovery policy.

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The difference between public employment and public works is not an easy one to grasp, and many very smart people (John Maynard Keynes for one, Léon Blum for another) have often missed the difference and advocated for one when they should have been advocating for the other. Many historians of the New Deal have been equally confused – to give a good example, Udo Sauter was particularly split on the issue: "It seems possible to differentiate between public works for relief purposes and work relief, he wrote, since "according to one definition, the former term would designate "needed public improvements," which may have been advanced [in time] to provide employment, but which must have been undertaken in the near future regardless...work relief, by contrast, would consist of "operations definitively undertaken to provide employment." However, Sauter then argued that this distinction was essentially artificial, since both programs involved building and both were intended to provide for employment. At first glance, this pronouncement seems reasonable: both policies involved the hiring of workers and the production of certain goods, both directed their workers to manufacture similar goods (buildings, roads, bridges and tunnels, and so forth); indeed, both policies drew their funding from the same bills and were carried out by agencies with similar initials.

However, I would argue that public employment and public works have to be seen as contrasting policies that, during the era of the New Deal struggled over funding, political support, and popular prominence, and that should be seen as distinct. Beyond the immediate level of competing bureaucracies, public employment and public works had important policy differences in regards to focus, effect, results, and method of administration.

To begin with, public employment’s focus was on employing people, while public works’ focus was on the end product of their labor; this difference would inform decisions made by administrators seeking to suit limited budgets to their programs focus – would they spend their last $100 for the month on three workers’ salaries or 75 bags of cement? These kinds of decisions would greatly affect how much each program would affect the economy and in what ways. Moreover, focus also became an important influence on how these programs perceived the Great Depression. Administrators of public employment programs tended to see the crisis through the lens of mass unemployment, and concluded that the road to recovery would be to bring unemployment down to "normal" levels. Public works administrators tended to emphasize the shocking decline in production and investment and argued that the best way out of the Depression was to use government dollars to re-invigorate America’s "core industries" – construction, steel, concrete and brick-making, lumber, and tool and machinery production being just a few of these.

This contrast carried over to the programs’ intended effects. Public employment officials believed their programs would impact the economy through its effects on people – first, by preventing outright starvation among the unemployed; second, by reducing the impact of mass unemployment on wages; and third and most importantly, by directing purchasing power into the hands of a population that had been unable to be consumers for some time, expanding demand while redistributing income and goods towards the lowest economic bracket. By contrast, public works officials believed that their programs would aid recovery by addressing the needs of industry. Public works orders would provide a baseline of demand to keep factories open, but even more so, the public works themselves would speed up the process of economic development – dams would bring new energy sources (both water and electricity) into rural areas, kick-starting the modernization of agriculture, and opening up new markets through the extension of modern transportation systems into remote areas.

The two programs’ results were also different. While both emphasized construction, public employment officials favored light construction, which favored large workforces and could be done without the need for heavy machinery or large amounts of materials. Light construction thus tended to produce goods suited to the needs of the urban public – schools, hospitals, libraries, city halls, airports, post offices, city streets, and housing. Public works programs tended to produce goods more suited to improving the nation’s economic infrastructure – electrical power generation, irrigation, national highways, large-scale bridges and tunnels, and so forth. These "public goods" not only had a close connection to the goals and intended effects of the program, but also had an impact on the two programs’ constituency – public employment tended to draw the support of the unemployed and the low-wage working class, while public works tended to draw the support of construction firms, contractors, and skilled workers, especially in the building trades.

Finally, public employment and public works used very different mechanisms to produce their "public goods." To create their light construction projects, public employment officials overwhelmingly used what is known as force account – the direct hiring of workers by the government, in this case with the Federal government as the employer of record. This technique gave public employment officials much more control over how many new jobs were created (and just as important who got them) in which areas, the wages and working conditions of those jobs (which often had serious impacts on local labor markets), but it also meant that the Federal government had to deal with the problems of managing workers with widely varying levels of skills, literacy, and experience. Public works administrators, on the other hand, in no small part because heavier construction required more investment in machinery, tended to build their projects by contracting out to private construction firms. This simplified the process of hiring workers, assured a level of skill and oversight over the construction process, and provided much needed business to a vital American industry. However, it also had its problems – contracts tended to provide work to the already employed, diminishing the potential impact on unemployment. Furthermore, the government had much less say over hiring, the conditions of employment, given the intervening layers of contractors and subcontractors.

As has been suggested, these technical differences tended to have ideological or intellectual consequences, as programs naturally gravitated towards political economies that validated their purpose. Public employment was more suited to, and open to, political economies that emphasized demand-side solutions to the Depression, redistribution of income, and more direct government involvement in the economy. Public works was likewise more attracted to political economies that emphasized growth, economic development, planning, and government stimulation of the private sector.

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So what does all of this historical theorizing mean for progressives today?

First, progressives should understand what different policy options should or are suited to do, and approach them as parts of a toolbox, and not one-or-the-other solutions. Public works, like building or repairing or maintaining the massive bridges across the Mississippi that we have seen are in urgent need of renewal, are not the best means of fighting unemployment, economic stagnation among the working class, or poverty. Similarly, public employment functions best when the majority of its funds can go towards payroll instead of towards the expensive machinery, materials, and land that are required for the heavier kinds of construction. However, there shortcomings – or as I would argue, specializations – are just the flip-side of advantages.

The strengths of public works are producing large-scale public goods that work to improve our national infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, and highways), provide important services like electricity, or defend us against natural disasters. The strengths of public employment are reducing unemployment, increasing purchasing power, and creating more real-estate-and services-type public goods – things like housing, schools, libraries, post offices, hospitals, and roads.

The two approaches complement each other, as public works creates the larger institutional frameworks that spur economic growth and economic opportunity and public employment provides the support to workers and consumers to turn that institutional opportunity into prosperity for all.

Second, progressives should think of policies not just as good in and of themselves, but as over-arching and inter-connected processes that shape the society and economy we live in. For the last thirty-odd years, Americans have been taught to be pessimistic about the ability of the government to effect change in our lives – you can see this in editorials that say that presidential policy has little impact on the economy, or pundits who assume that market-based approaches are the only efficient option possible. However, the truth is that the government can and does make a huge difference in our economic and social lives.

The next step towards building an effective progressive agenda is learning to visualize the economy and society we want to have, and seeing different policies as ways to achieve parts of that. Used correctly, public employment can give us a high employment, high wage economy; used correctly, public works can give us faster and cleaner transportation, cleaner and cheaper electricity, and a safe reliable infrastructure.

This Just In: Our Political Opponents Are Insane

2009-04-01T12:37:00.001-07:00

Perhaps it's just April Fools, but the Republicans have finally unveiled their budgetish-type document (now with numbers!), and it's so cartoonishly insane that liberal satire newspapers would reject the submission as too ludicrous to be plausible. What's in it?

Freeze All Non-Military Discretionary Spending for Five Years - thus, in the middle of a recession which has seen dramatic declines in purchasing power, the GOP proposes to throw the breaks on for 22% of the entire economy. This is Hooverism gone mad, Treasury thinking at a bone-deep level. Besides the basic economic insanity, it's political suicide. Let's see: Department of Transportation (let's see, you've now pissed off contractors, materials manufacturers, and every Congressman in the country who wants re-election, Department of Education (now you've pissed off parents, teachers, children's advocaes, "reformers,"), Department of Health and Human Services (now you've pissed off hospitals, doctors, nurses, and sick people), Department of Agriculture (now you've pissed off farmers and agro-business), and the list keeps going. Given that not even Reagan at the height of his influence was able to even slow spending increases, this is like proposing to replace the U.S dollar with candyfloss.
Ending All Stimulus - "the budget captures savings by repealing “stimulus” funding beyond the current year, excluding unemployment insurance; and these savings go toward reducing the deficit." So not only are we going to be halting any further efforts to stimulate the economy, but we're going to reverse the stimulus package Congress just passed.
Privatize Medicare - everyone 54 or younger? Guess what, you don't get Medicare anymore. Instead, you get yourself a "premium support payment," i.e a nice voucher that's also means-tested and capped at current levels. That should help a lot when the cost of health care increases at 7% and you're trying to buy individual health care plans instead of being covered under a group plan that spreads costs across all Americans 65+.
Block-Grant Medicaid - you know how huge numbers of people are losing their jobs and their health insurance, and how the Medicaid rolls are swelling as people try to get some sort of coverage? Guess what? The Republicans have decided to replace Medicaid's per-patient grant-in-aid with "an allotment tailored for each State’s low-income population, indexed for inflation and population growth." So if a recession hits, and all of the sudden the number of people in poverty dramatically increases faster than inflation and population? Tough luck, apparently Republicans believe in "individual Americans." Don't you feel better?
Huge Tax Cuts for the Rich, Corporations -Let's see now - all of the Bush tax cuts kept, naturally, a 28.% cut in the highest income tax bracket, a 28.5% cut in the corporate income tax bracket, elimination of the estate tax, and eliminating capital gains taxes for two years. All of this, by the way, won't apparently cut revenue at all, because tax revenues will magically increase by a trillion dollars a year by 2014!

So to sum up: Republicans want to freeze all spending and privatize your Medicare so that they can give CEOs, corporations, and other millionaires a whopping great tax cut.

I'm actually wondering if this is some kind of cry for help. Given that this goes even further than the already lunatic proposals that McCain put forward that were decisively repudiated in 2008, you really have to wonder whether a part of the Republican subconscious is attempting to go out in a burst of wingnut glory, a sort of death-by-electorate.

Ideology Matters - What's In a Name?

2009-04-01T07:49:00.000-07:00

One of the absolute truisms of political opinion polling for a long, long time has been that American political ideology has been relatively static for a long, long time. The graph to the left is based on the Harris poll of ideological self-identification that's been conducted over the last forty years, and the data's been almost constant - about 35% of the country identifies as conservative, about 40% identifies as moderate, and about 18% of the country identifies as liberal.

Now, I've long held the belief that this artificial stasis in ideology, given the dramatic upheavals in political fortunes from the Watergate revolt and the election of Jimmy Carter in 1974-1976 to the dominance of Reaganism from 1980-1992 and the rise of Clintonian Third Way-ism from 1992-2000 and the epic crash and burn of Bushian conservatism from 2000-2008, is the result of using the stale terminology of liberal, conservative, and moderate as the only ideological terms of note.

Now look at the second poll there, done by the Center for American Progress. If you give people more options, lo and behold, the pciture gets a lot less static. The number of liberals doesn't change much, but all of the sudden there's a whole 16% of the population who's calling themselves progressives, and there's even some libertarians and people who don't know what the heck they are. If you push the squishy moderates to pick sides, it turns out that about 47% percent of the country considers themselves Progressives or Liberals, 48% call themselves Conservative or Libertarian, and another 5% remain...well, very confused people

The closeness of all this actually makes a lot of sense, considering the tight elections we had in 2000 and 2004, and the differential mobilization in 2002 (when the Right really mobilized pro-war sentiment) and 2006 (when the Left really mobilized anti-war and and anti-party-in-power sentiment). I imagine the 2008 election might have shifted the boundaries somewhat, as Americans experienced both a conservtive campaign that was unusually open about what it was (no hiding those Palin rallies) and a liberal campaign that was actually willing to talk about why it thought the liberal philosophy of government was better than the conservative philosophy of government. Whether that will last, I imagine we'll find out in 2010 and 2012.

This doesn't actually surprise me, and it in fact it absolutely makes sense to me that - given the concerted demonization of liberalism by conservatives from the Great Society onwards - a good number of people were actually left-of-center but wouldn't call themselves liberals. But it does raise a good question - what does it mean to be a liberal, and what does it mean to be a progressive.

This is something that I've discussed and debated a lot with my friends and colleagues over the past couple of years. Daraka Larimore-Hall, whose political thinking I deeply respect, basically argues that, A. there is theoretically a difference between the two, and B. the differences have been blurred by people who are really liberals but won't call themselves liberals, and by people who are actually New Democrats who don't want to admit they're conservatives, and other weird political chameleons. (See also here). I think he's broadly right, although I wish he weren't.

I'd like to make the case that these two things actually do (or at least should) mean different things. If the two have been blurred, I believe that political space should be made for liberalism to stand on its own two feet, and for progressives to have their own turf. To say nothing of social democrats, democratic socialists, socialists, and other ideological formations further to the Left.

So, to explain what the difference between Liberalism and Progressiveism, I'm re-posting something I wrote in response to Matthew Yglesias' post here, which argued that:

But while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives. "Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy.

My response was this:

"While the question of "progressive" vs. "liberal" is not the most pressing of debates, in is an important one. How we identify ourselves goes further than issues of terminology; it speaks to who we are as activists and who we think we are, it asks major questions about what it is we seek to achieve and what it means to be on the left in modern America. Moreover, it begs the question as to what use activists should make of history in guiding our thought and action.

On one level, Matt raises a good point. In current political discourse, "progressive" can be a vague term than can be applied equally to the left-most Green Party activist or to the right-most New Democrat. Indeed, the term’s prominence in recent years owes as much to the efforts of New Democrats to elide the differences between themselves and traditional liberals as it does the efforts of liberals to reclaim a right to exist in the political mainstream. It is not by accident that the major New Democrat think-tank chose the name "Progressive" Policy Institute, or that Hillary Clinton described herself as a "progressive" in Democratic debates to muddy the ideological waters between herself, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, as if to say "we’re all progressives now, so let’s not compare agendas."

Historically, it is also true that in the Progressive Era, self-identified progressives supported some vile endeavors: they could be quite elitist, disdaining "ignorant" voters and preferring government-by-experts. Many were ethnocentric or outright racist, thinking of immigrants and blacks as lesser races in need of guidance from the Civilized West. Certainly, Woodrow Wilson thought so when he segregated the federal government and Theodore Roosevelt largely agreed when it came to the invasion of the Philippines or military interventions into Latin America. The Progressive Era was also the era when Jim Crow was established in law through the active disenfranchisement of blacks and poor whites, and the era of race riots. Certainly it is true that a conservative like Jonah Goldberg could take this history, sift out all contrary facts, and present progressivism as the authoritarian forebear of modern liberalism.

However, I would argue that liberalism would not fare much better under the same selective scrutiny. Liberals like FDR accepted and subsidized segregation in the South (and in the North) as the devil’s bargain for southern votes for the New Deal. As Ira Katznelson notes in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, the New Deal’s exclusion of blacks (and women) from Social Security, minimum wage and maximum hours laws, and the Wagner Act, while simultaneously boosting the economic position of whites through New Deal programs and the GI Bill, had a huge impact on racial inequality in America. It is also true that liberals like FDR carried out the policy of Japanese internment during WWII, and that Truman was responsible for dropping the first (and only) atomic bombs, giving official license to Cold War red-baiting, instituting loyalty oaths and purges, and creating the national-security and military-industrial complexes we live with today. The same liberals who gave us the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and the Civil Rights Act also gave us the war in Vietnam. The ultimate point here is not that liberalism is historically illegitimate; but that the study of history admits few pure heroes or pure villains and that a study of conservatism would lead to far more skeletons in the closet than Mr. Goldberg would care to remember.

So what now? Are we to decide who we are and what we stand for by a game of historical hot potato? Absolutely not. More serious issues are at stake, and the difference between "progressivism" and "liberalism" have deeper significances and broader importance than the brand value of a label.

As historians of the Progressive Era like Mary Furner, Daniel Rodgers, Robert Johnson, Eldon Eisenach, John Recchiuti, Martin Sklar, and others have explored, there was something special to the progressives. They were the first generation of Americans to live in an age of corporate capitalism, and they were perhaps the last generation of Americans whose minds were not limited by the acceptance of the resulting social order as natural. Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt or Robert LaFollette proposed far-sighted policies such as universal health insurance, the right to vote for women, the right to an eight hour day, the minimum wage, old age insurance, unemployment insurance, and disability insurance, the right to join a union, industrial health and safety regulations, and the abolition of child labor. In many ways, they defined the agenda that liberalism would pursue.

However, the scope of progressive imaginations was larger than just this. Progressives looked beyond the world they lived in to advocate for a new economic order, something different from either capitalism or communism. In bold, confident terms, Progressivism argued that an activist government should exercise economic sovereignty and engage in economic planning, and regulate, nationalize, or abolish the great industrial corporations of the day. Their vision was a way of life in which cooperation replaced competition as the guiding impulse of economic life, in which human values would be privileged above market values, and in which sweeping inequality would be replaced by a rough equality of wealth, a fair share in national prosperity, something they called "an American standard of living." Their rationale for this vision was not grounded in traditional liberal concerns about the individual or in Marxist ideology that the worker should own the means of production.

Rather, Progressives were animated by a faith in collective action, and a belief that the flaws in society created by humans could be fixed by humans. In a very real sense, the Progressives were the heirs of a rich tradition of American republicanism, a philosophy that saw the sovereign people as the only legitimate source of political and economic power, that believed in the defense of the common-wealth against private privilege, and that demanded the great concentrations of wealth be redistributed to create a "rough equality" among equal citizens, lest inequalities of wealth become inequalities of political power. Ultimately, the vision put forward was that economic sovereignty - the right to decide how each one of us lives our lives in the workplace, in the marketplace, and in the public square - must be taken from the hands of monopolistic corporations and restored to popular government. As Theodore Roosevelt put it:

"The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being."

Alan Brinkley and other historians have noted that the political vision of post-war liberalism shied from such challenges to capitalism. After a vigorous and diverse flowering of progressive experimentation in the New Deal – all the way from the economic planning enshrined by the National Recovery Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority to the provision of public jobs in the WPA and the vision of a right to a job, and the price-setting powers of the OPA – post-war liberals were tired of struggle. Abandoning even the modest progressivism of social Keynesianism, liberals looked to accommodate capitalism and capitalists, to use social programs to compensate (not prevent or replace) the shortcomings of the economy, of using interest rates and military spending to manage the economy, rather than expansive investments in housing and infrastructure. Above all, liberals sought safer waters than the issue of reconstructing capitalism. Ironically, liberals looked to civil rights, environmentalism, education, and other "quality of life" issues as safer targets for reform.

In the long run, it is to our great advantage that liberals took the cause of reform in new directions. On another level, it is important that we recognize that a price was paid: a narrow horizon of imagination, a smaller vision of what could be accomplished, and a certain complacency with the status quo. And when the foundations that underwrote that complacency – close to full employment, steady economic growth, a strong union movement, and favorable trade conditions – cracked apart in the 1970s, even liberalism became too radical for American politics.

And here we are today, in what I believe is the beginning of the post-post liberal era. Eight years of the Bush Administration have catastrophically delegitimized and exhausted modern conservativism, conservatives no longer have anything new to offer to each other or anyone else in terms of ideas, and the American electorate is increasingly comfortable and desirous of a more active government presence in their lives. Part of that desire comes from the fact that we are living in a precarious time: deregulation and free trade agreements have diminished the power of government to modulate the shocks of the global market, yet the promised results of a more risk-intensive world order have yet to arrive. Our economic system is badly imbalanced between our means and our salaries, between productivity and income, and between wages and profits. The world economic system seems no better, and instability and uncertainty are the order of the day.

Two things become clear. First, there is a space that will open in American politics for new agendas, new approaches, and new thinking. Second, the consequences of which ideas we will choose are very high. Will we take up the banner of liberalism, and strive valiantly to repair the damage that has been done, and to try once more to make the system we have more livable for the American people, all the while accepting the fact that we live in an age of international finance and globalized production that constrains our options? Or will we instead take up the banner of progressivism, and attempt to construct a new way of life, a political economy that is better suited to the current time and the human condition, knowing as we do that the one we have now is dangerously blind to human need?

For my own part, I would call myself a progressive, and call upon others to take up the label, and the cause. As a historian, I have never felt the kind of doubt that liberals post-1968 have felt – the creeping fear, after McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis, that maybe we’re wrong, that maybe Americans really hate us and what we stand for. For as Theodore Roosevelt once said, "we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."

Re-Post Number 3: "A WPA in 2008: 1 Million? Or 4 Million?" (Aug 09, 2007)

2009-03-30T18:29:00.000-07:00

Note: In this re-post, which follows directly from the second, I tie the issue of direct job creation policy to a larger political argument I have with certain members of the Democratic Party about negotiating strategy. In short, I think that one of the problems with the Democratic Party at present is that, in order to seem "reasonable" and "moderate," we propose legislation that gets us 50% of what we want, and then we end up with 25% or nothing. I believe that we need to start with 200% of what we want to end up with 100%.
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Hi,
In my last diary, I laid out a brief overview of what Senator Edwards' job plan would cost, what it would produce, and what it would look like. In this installment, I'm going to look at some hypothetical plans for job programs, and make the case that progressives, including but not limited to Sen. Edwards, should push for a larger number of "stepping stone" jobs.

At the moment, Sen. Edwards' plan calls for the creation of one million public employment jobs. This is, of itself, a perfectly acceptable number, given the levels of cost, production, economic effect, and so forth that it would have. However, I'd like to make the case that progressives should consider increasing that number, both for policy reasons and political reasons.

First off, the policy reasons. One of the ways that public employment works in terms of producing economic results is through multiplier effects - in terms of wages, when the newly hired workers spend their wages, it tends to prompt businesses to take the extra receipts and use the money to expand their businesses with new machines/workplaces/workers and pay their workers more (theoretically); in terms of employment, when you pull newly-hired people out of the ranks of the unemployed, it decreases labor supply, which tends to push wages upward. However, in order to affect something as large as the American economy, size does matter. The larger a program, the more of an effect it will have, and there is a certain threshold below which it won't really have an effect.

So, a one million-strong would have the effect of decreasing unemployment from 6.8 million people (4.5%) to 5.8 million people (3.8%). This is historically low, comparable to the height of the economic boom in 2000. However, it's questionable whether this would have enough of an impact on wages, which have seen almost flat growth in recent years despite relatively low unemployment. It we increased the size of the public employment program to, say, three million jobs, we'd get a drop in unemployment to 3.8 million (2.5%) which is comparable to the height of the post-WWII boom, and is much more likely to produce positive wage growth.

Moreover, the effects on poverty would be much greater. As I argued in the last installment, a one million-strong jobs program could bring 2.59-3.14 million people out of poverty, which reduce poverty by 7.2-8.7%, bringing the total U.S poverty rate down to 11.1-10.9%, which be the lowest since 1972. A three million-strong program could bring 7.7-9.4 million people out of poverty, which would reduce poverty by about 20-26%, bringing the total U.S poverty rate down to 9.7%-9.2%, which would be the lowest rate ever recorded in American history. To give some transnational perspective, reducing the poverty rate to 11.1-10.9% would bring our poverty rate down to only a little more than the Netherlands; reducing the poverty rate to 9.7%-9.2% would bring our poverty rate down to somewhat less than Ireland's. These numbers do not include the effects of expanding EITC, establishing universal health care, and other anti-poverty measures.

The economic effects of a larger public employment program would be considerable. In addition to the halving of the unemployment rate, this reduction’s effect on the overall economy, and the addition of some $60 billion a year in new wages to consumption, the production of goods and services would be considerably greater. A three-million-strong public employment program would cost approximately $80 billion a year, and produce approximately $141 billion a year, for a net profit of $61 billion a year (40%). Thus, public employment, on its own, would increase economic growth by 1.3% a year. This point is worth emphasizing: the American government, by intervening directly in the economy, would increase economic growth rates by 1.3%.

I’ve given you the numbers, but let me explain what this means in terms of ideas: for the last thirty years, Democrats have often been accused of not having an ideology or a set of principles they stand for. I would argue that rather Democrats had been made to believe that the principles they stood for didn't work as policies and were politically dangerous, but that's a topic for another diary. The important thing is that many Democrats internalized two major parts of the neoconservative/neoliberal message: that the public sector is inherently inefficient and can't offer solutions (only the private sector and the free market can), and that the government is essentially incapable of creating economic change. We see these beliefs spread wide throughout the world of politics, academia, and journalism - just look at the articles that say that "presidents are blamed for the economy, but do little to affect it."

What large-scale public employment would do would show Democrats, and hopefully voters and journalists as well, that the public sector can in fact provide solutions to major problems facing Americans, and that economic policy can in fact dramatically reshape the American economy. Moreover, it's the kind of policy that ties itself right into our ideas and ideology in a simple and clear fashion: we can believe that the government works, so Democrats can go out and argue that we are the party that believes in using the government to help ordinary Americans (as opposed to the Republicans who believe in billions for the rich, but not a penny for ordinary Americans), and make the argument that Democratic economic policy can provide jobs, economic opportunity, and rising wages - and that Republican policies can't.

Public employment would be our version of cutting taxes: Republicans believe in less government, and that provides a straight path to a policy of cutting taxes, which becomes the public conception of the Republican agenda (Republicans want to cut taxes, cut spending, fight wars). For us, it would be Democrats believe in active government, so that leads to a policy of acting to provide jobs, which becomes the public conception of our agenda (Democrats want to create jobs, provide free health care, establish peace). All of the sudden, everyone (including Democrats) know what Democrats stand for.

Second, in terms of politics, one of the problems that Democrats have had in recent years is that we have tended to propose our programs at 100% of what we want to achieve, or in an effort to appear reasonable or moderate, we lower our initial offer to something closer to 50-75% of what we want to achieve, and then in the normal legislative bargaining process, we get knocked down even further. Republicans have traditionally not done this - instead, they've started at 200% of what they want or think they can achieve, and then Democrats negotiate them down to something closer to 100%, and then we congratulate ourselves for forcing them to moderate their demands.

The first Bush tax cut was a perfect example of this - the Republicans opened with an offer of $1.6 trillion dollars, which was the biggest tax cut ever, and Daschle, et al. bargained them down to $1.3 trillion and congratulated themselves for pushing them down by $300 billion when really the Bush administration had got the bulk of what they wanted.

So even if progressives only want 1 million public employment jobs, they should ask for 3, so that when they get bargained down, the end result is big enough to have the kind of impact on American poverty rates and the American economy that they hope to achieve. In general, this should also be our policy on all legislation, from health care to taxes to environmental policy - come in at 200% to get 100%.

To offer a historical parallel: one of the worst policy mistakes made by a progressive happened in 1937, when FDR decided to show that the New Deal "had worked" and was no longer needed, and so balanced the budget by drastically cutting (more or less stopping) all of the spending programs - the WPA being the most prominent. The private sector hadn't actually recovered to the point where it could do without the government pumping money into the economy, and the economy went into a recession. Roosevelt realized his mistake, and put together a budget that restored the cuts, and more or less got the economy back to where it had been in 1937 (with economic production recovered, and employment partially recovered) by 1939-40. In the mean time, FDR had lost the major pillar of his political strength - his claim to fame that his policies were actually aiding recovery. As a result, FDR lost all opportunity to push for things like the Hospital Insurance Act of 1938 (which would have provided contributory coverage for hospital visits for American workers). (And yes, the court-packing scheme did also hurt his political position; the recession, however, made a setback a catastrophe)

The morale: appearing "reasonable" isn't worth it, being victorious is.

In my next diary, I'll be discussing the difference between public employment and public works, and the importance this has for Democratic economic and social welfare policy.

Culture Corner: The Politics of High Fantasy

2009-03-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

All my reading life, I've been a fan of fantasy novels. It started in grade school, where Dungeons and Dragons novels were the first adult-length novels I got my hands on in the school library.

However, in recent yesrs, I've become increasingly unable to read and enjoy traditional fantasy novels. That doesn't mean I've stopped reading fantasy altogether; I've just switched almost entirely to fantasy novels that subvert, challenge, or ignore the traditional tropes of fantasy: kings, knights, dragons, sorcerers, the whole, weighty tradition that runs from J.R.R Tolkien to Joseph Campbell's work on mythology.

Why? Because the politics of high fantasy sucks. It's usually not intentional; most fantasy writers and readers aren't really thinking about politics. But the fact of the matter is that all of those True Kings, Chivalrous Knights, Damsels in Distress, Towering Castles, and the rest of it are all based on the European Middle Ages or the Dark Ages. The source materials - La Morte d'Arthur, Beowulf, older myths of the Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic peoples - are all right there. And the society they are based on is one of feudalism and serfdom.

Serfdom, for those who weren't really paying attention to who the peasants fleeing the evil hordes who must be saved by Our Hero were, was the social order that emerged in Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire and lasted until, depending on which country you're talking about, well into the 19th century. Under serfdom, 90% of the population were legal property of their feudal lords, bound to work without pay for their masters, and tied to the land which they worked on. Serfdom was imposed on the common peoples of Europe by violence or the threat of violence - in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, farmers and former agricultural slaves were either pressed into serving the warlords who had conquered their lands, or were driven by necessity to selling themselves to the local warlords who promised protection from other rampaging warlords. While serfdom was not as uniformly oppressive as other regimes of slavery - serfdom divided peasants between "freemen," villeins," half-villeins, and other categories of greater and lesser freedoms - it's still a system of human oppression.

The True King who's been overthrown by his Evil Vizier, Scheming Relative, or the Barbarous Horde? He owns thousands if not millions of people. The noble Knight who rides to save the Fair Maiden from the Evil Dragon? His primary occupation is to kidnap people and enslave them, to put down slave rebellions with brutal violence, and to prevent other armed men from doing the same to his property. The Good Prince? Never worked a day in his life, and every crumb of bread and scrap of cloth he owns was bought with money stolen from ordinary people. This kind of thinking puts something of a damper on my enjoyment of the pleasures found within the luridly-painted covers of airport fantasy novels.

Yet in recent years, I've found myself increasing unable to stop thinking about them, because for me this history is quite real. European working class families have long historical memories, and when I was a kid, my English father told me about the history of his family. One of the stories was that one of my ancestors had been executed for rebellion against the crown. A couple of years ago, I found an actual academic source for this, in Willima Oren's The Great Rising of 1381:

...the two London butchers, Adam Attewell and Roger Harry, both of whom were afterwards prominent in the troubles in the capital, are said to have been raising the Essex peasantry fourteen days before they entered London, i. e. about May 31 or June i. See Essex indictments and the Sheriff's reports of Nov. ao, 1383, in R6ville, p. 196. (p. 33)

This stuck in my head, and its one of those family legends that you cherish, because it gives you a connection to some kind of past glory. But it did make me think twice about the romance of the medieval. How could I read about good Kings and noble Knights without thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind, that if I really was alive in Middle Earth or Krynn or the Forgotten Realms, that I would probably not be one of the big, muscle-bound armored men on horseback riding around Saving the Day, but rather some poor bastard chained to his plow, who works from sunup to sundown to put food into the belly of that useless hulk with the sword and shield.

It's a strange thing to think of heroes as social parasites, but there you go.

The better fantasy novels are aware of this history, and it allows me to keep on reading them. R. Scott Bakker's series about the Prince of Nothing and the Aspect-Emperor are steeped in the lore of the First Crusade, but it doesn't ever flinch from the fact that the Crusader Knights were vicious murdering fanatics, and that medieval society was based on the oppression of the peasantry. Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series shows its kings to be liars, madmen, and chronicles the overthrow of a corrupt tyrant. He's replaced by a "good king," which is a bit of a disappointment, but there you go. Other than these, and I'm missing out a few, I've really stopped reading medieval fantasy novels.

Instead, I've started to get really into fantasy novels set in the Renaissance or later. Unmfortunately, there aren't many of these - Mercedes Lackey, Dave Flint, and Eric Feer's Shadow of the Lion and the sequel This Rough Magic, and the various Warhammer Fantasy novels. Why do I prefer the Renaissance? First, you've got more interesting politics - in addition to kings and barons, you've got various forms of Republics, mercantile city-states, and petty princedoms, all of which gives much more scope for ordinary people to do important things. Second, you've got an explosion of knowledge, with a bubbling ferment of science, arts, literature, philosophy, history, political science, and a roster of geniuses whose human brilliance is much more appealing than the aloof other-ness of a Merlin. Third, you've got more cultural diversity - trade, intrigue, and war between Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, a world that is expanding, due to exploration and colonialism.

More modern settings, such as the "urban fantasy" of Charles De Lint, can be also very rewarding, if done with the correct tone and voice. But there's not enough of it compared to the huge mounds of standard sword-and-sorcery worlds with knights and kings, and faceless, happy peasants.

So why don't people go out and write fantasy novels that don't involve the disneyfication of serfdom?

Re-Post Number 2: "What Would a Modern WPA Look LIke?" (August 8, 2007)

2009-03-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

Note:

This post comes a day later than the first, when I shifted from talking about the historical issues involved and started doing a little policy-blogging. What's interesting here from two years out or so is how the numbers for poverty and unemployment look good compared to the current day.

So below you will find some of my earliest thinking about how direct job creation would actually work:

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In my last diary/blog post, I talked about learning about Sen. Edwards' job plan and my own research into the historical roots of public employment.

Today, I thought I'd share a rough idea of what a modern public employment program would cost and what it would produce and what it would look like.

In my next diary, I'll talk about the potential released by a larger public employment program than the 1 million suggested by Sen. Edwards.

Note: for the purposes of full disclosure, I'm not a trained economist. If I've made an error in my statistics or my economic assumptions, please feel free to correct me.

To begin with, I'm using Senator Edwards' proposal for 1 million "stepping-stone" jobs as my baseline, as its one of the more concrete of the current presidential candidates' proposals on creating public employment jobs. Let's say for the purposes of argument that Senator Edwards' plan would create 1 million public employment jobs. If we were to offer a salary of, say $20,000/year (approx. $10.50/hr) plus health insurance, which is not a great salary but not awful either, that would provide significantly more than the minimum wage and according to the current U.S poverty line (which I know if not very accurate), just about over the poverty line for a family of four.

In terms of cost, I've worked it out that Edward's proposal would cost $20 billion a year in payroll (assuming an avg. salary of $20k/year), so figure $30 billion total a year when you throw in land, materials, overhead, and so forth (historically speaking, the WPA's total non-labor budget was approximately 20% of the total; here, I've estimated 30% to be on the safe side). In budgetary terms, that's extremely doable without affecting the deficit to a degree that causes significant inflation.

In terms of the impact on American society, those one million jobs created, assuming an average household/family size between 2.59-3.14 (the difference is largely due to counting single households), could bring 2.59-3.14 million people out of poverty, which reduce poverty by 7.2-8.7%, bringing the total U.S poverty rate down to 11.1-10.9%, which be the lowest since 1972. This in in and of itself would be a major social and economic policy accomplishment, probably one of the greatest in the last thirty years.

In terms of what you could do with those jobs, quite a lot. The roughly two-million-worker-strong WPA's building program over the eight years of its operation included the construction of 116,000 buildings, 78,000 bridges, and 651,000 miles (1,047,000 km) of roads and the improvement of 800 airports. That works out to what, 14.5 thousand buildings, 9.75 thousand bridges, 81 thousand miles of road, and 100 airports a year? Keep in mind, that's with 1930's levels of productivity, skills, and technology.

With modern productivity, even assuming that the unemployed people who are hired have half the average productivity of the American worker (the average American worker produces approx. $90,000 a year in goods and services), we'd still produce public goods and services to the tune of $47,000/year per worker, for a grand total of $47 billion produced per year. Deducting the cost of running the program, and you're still adding $17 billion to the economy that wasn't there before (a net profit of approx. 30%)- just in untapped labor power.

As to what this program would look like, I'd point you back in the direction of the public employment programs of the New Deal. When the New Deal established public employment programs, they created a kind of "movement culture" that resembled that of the new unions. Workers on public employment programs showed a huge rebound of morale after dispiriting years after years on the unemployment line - famously, one woman told a reporter "my family isn't on charity. My husband, he works for the government."

People who worked for the CWA and later the WPA founded their own newspapers where they described themselves as an "army of the unemployed" who would "slay the dragon of the Great Depression through work." In New York City, for example, the administrator of the CWA (Civil Works Administration) was so dedicated to his work of providing jobs for some 250,000 people, that he actually worked himself to death in the winter of 1933. The New York City's CWA TIMES printed a banner headline "KILLED IN ACTION" and compared the administrator to Leonidas of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Workers in the CWA and WPA formed the Worker's Alliance, a union of the publicly-employed, who marched in the streets on behalf of their program and their work. In my research into these programs, I came across an envelope in the CWA correspondence archives in the FDR library in Hyde Park, which was filled with photos that workers on a CWA project in Pennsylvania had sent President Roosevelt of themselves building the stone wall of a library as a thank-you present for giving them jobs, and the look in the faces of these men, wearing fedoras and collared shirts to look their best even as they posed with wheelbarrows of bricks and trowels and hammers in hand, was one of great pride and joy, and a real sense of comradeship.

More on the potential of a larger public employment program in my next diary.

Re-Post Number 1: " The WPA and Sen. Edwards' Million Jobs - Historical Legacies of the New Deal" (Tue Aug 07, 2007)

2009-03-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

Note:
As part of a collection effort, I present the first in a series of posts formerly written as diaries on DailyKos, all focused on the theme of public employment policy. Each post will be preceded by a short comment explaining the context of the original piece.

In this first case, "The WPA and Sen. Edwards' Million Jobs," dates back to mid-May 2007, when I was first getting interested in the candidates for the 2008 presidential election. I had been feeling much more positive about politics since the 2006 midterms, when Democrats had taken over the Congress, and was starting to look around at who I would support.

Keep in mind that this was back during the days in which Barack Obama was a little-known politician, who I mostly knew for giving a good speech at the 2004 National Convention and beating the tar out of Alan Keyes in a race for the U.S Senate. Hillary Clinton was the odds-on favorite to win the nomination, and I knew I didn't want her as the party's nominee. As a New Yorker who had seen her 2000 campaign and her subsequent political shift to the right, I didn't think that Hillary could be the kind of unapologetically progressive candidate I was looking for. Obama, at that time, was still in the proecess of molding his platform, his argument, and his strategy, and was still in the more extreme phase of his "post-partisan" stance. This didn't really appeal to me.

Instead, I was interested in Senator John Edwards. I hadn't really liked him in 2004 - I supported Howard Dean - because of his then pro-war stance, but I had liked his "two Americas" rhetoric, and had preferred him against Kerry. However, it was his public policy positions in 2007-8 that got me to support him.

So here's the first post to be brought back into the light, warts and all:

Hi,

This is based on a blog entry I made on Edwards' blog in May, that I thought I'd repost here to add to the discussion of the WPA [ed - Works Progress Administration] going on in other blog/diaries. Just to introduce myself, I'm a graduate student in the history of public policy writing a dissertation on the history of public employment in the United States, with a central focus on the WPA.

Anyway, back in March, I had been an Edwards supporter for a while, but I was motivated to post about this on his blog when, challenged by some friends of mine on an email-listserv (I know, very quaint), I was asked to detail Sen. Edwards' poverty plan. Somewhat chagrined that I didn't know the details off the top of my head, I went back to his site and checked it out. (This was back when the plan was relatively new, before the tour and so forth).

Imagine my total surprise when I found that one of the first items on the page was the creation of 1 million temporary jobs for the unemployed. You see, my research subject, the topic I'm writing my dissertation on, is the history of public employment in the United States, beginning with the creation of the Civil Works Administration in 1933 through to the demise of CETA in the late 70's-early 80's.

As both a scholar and an activist, I have in my day-to-day life been making in the case that public employment - the direct hiring of the unemployed by the government to reduce unemployment and produce useful public goods and services - was the heart and soul of the New Deal in its day (Social Security being the most lasting and most important part since then), that it was the distinctively American approach to the welfare state, and that it was a truly successful program that should be the cornerstone of the Democratic Party's politics and policy, but was buried due to racial prejudice, fears of Communism, and business' desire for a monopoly on labor.

Indeed, I had just finished my first major piece of research on this topic, a study of the Committee on Economic Security (the committee that drafted the Social Security Act of 1935) arguing that public employment was the major competitor to the limited system social-insurance that was proposed, that it was a much more sweeping, inclusive, and original intellectual development, and that it was seen by the Committee as the critical policy that would extend the New Deal to all Americans (including women and blacks), fill in the gaps in the safety net, and ensure the fiscal wellbeing of the system, while preventing dependency and promoting work.

What I found in my study of the CES' archives was that many of the members of the committee had been officials from Harry Hopkins' Federal Emergency Relief Administration, veterans of the Civil Works Administration (a precursor to the WPA that employed 4.2 million people from the winter of 1933 through the spring of 1934), and were all advocates of public employment. These officials pushed for a vision of a social welfare state in which jobs, not welfare or unemployment insurance, would be the lynch-pin of protection against poverty. Essentially, any American who was without work or who had lost their job would have the right to apply for a public employment job.

Not only would this job stave off poverty by providing wages to the worker and their family, but it would also help to reinforce the Social Security system by keeping the drain on Unemployment Insurance low or preventing the need for it altogether, by ensuring that the newly-employed worker would continue contributing to Social Security (thus maximizing the in-flow to the Social Security coffers), and by ensuring that Americans "not normally eligible" for social insurance would build up participation in the system (namely domestic workers and agricultural workers, the majority of women and African-Americans in the work-force). Finally, the idea was that public employment would provide political cover for the rest of the Social Security program by emphasizing that FDR's new system would emphasize work over "the dole."

Moreover, the FERA advocates argued that the public employment program alone would act as both social welfare and economic policy. Public employment would directly reduce unemployment, boost the purchasing power of the average American and therefore consumption of goods, and set off a positive-multiplier effect throughout the economy at large. Thus, whereas social insurance would act to deflate the economy, public employment would re-inflate the economy and promote economic recovery. Moreover, public employment would serve to re-distribute wealth from the richest tax-payers to ordinary workers. But most importantly, public employment would do so in a way that returned value to the tax-payer - public employment workers would provide labor in exchange for wages, producing goods and services that would offset the cost of the program and increase economic growth, while improving the national infrastructure.

Little known today, the final Social Security report recommended public employment as the "first objective of reform." A public employment bill appropriating $4 billion dollars for the program was introduced nearly simultaneously to the Social Security bill, and was passed at about the same time. Yet today, few associate public employment with the achievements of the New Deal, let alone with Social Security.

Blog Launch, Activate!

2009-03-29T23:14:00.000-07:00

After many years of non-blogging, diarying/commenting on other people's blogs, and other online miscellanea, I've decided to set up this blog as a way of placing all the stuff I've written, am writing, and will write in one place.

Forthcoming regular series:

Re-Posting of Past Writings on History, Public Policy and Politics
Regular Roundups on Public Employment and Public Works Policy
Periodic Obama Administration Policy Analysis - Possibly as monthly series?
Random Historical Personality of the Week/Month
This Date In History