Alice Embree : Campaigning against Cuts at Corn Dog's Office

From left, at Austin "fiscal Cliff" demonstration: Aron Duhoon, Harrison Hiner, Grover Norquist (Thorne Dreyer), Alice Embree, Les Cunningham, Paula Littles, and, in front, Sen. John (Corn Dog) Cornyn. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.
Austin protest against cuts for rich:
'Racketeer' Norquist meets 'Corn Dog' Cornyn

Union members, MoveOn, and citizens who want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, made their message to Senator Cornyn clear with a 'Candlelight Campaign against Cuts.'

By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / December 18, 2012

AUSTIN -- Grover Norquist, Racketeer for the Rich, made an unannounced visit to Senator John Cornyn's district office in Austin, Texas, on Monday, December 10, 2012. His message, "Don't Tax the Wealthy," is still wildly in vogue with Republicans. A group of citizens was there with another message for Senator Cornyn.

Cornyn (who was affectionately known as "Corn Dog" by George W. Bush), was present in canine form in front of the real Cornyn's district office. Rag Blogger Thorne Dreyer (as Grover) tussled with Corn Dog handler, Alice Embree, over the direction he should take. Grover kept urging hard right turns.

As part of nationwide protests that coincided with International Human Rights Day, union members, MoveOn, and citizens who want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, made their message to Senator Cornyn clear with a "Candlelight Campaign against Cuts." There were also demonstrations in Dallas, Austin, Corpus Christi, Laredo, San Antonio, and Houston suburb Sugar Land.

Participants in the Austin action included members of the Communications Workers of America, Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), National Nurses United, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), United Steelworkers (USW), International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), and MoveOn.

Hats off to the spirited nurses who brought "Robin Hood" hats and a banner that read: "Don't Push Seniors Off the Fiscal Cliff, Tax Wall Street." (See RobinhoodTax.org and like it on Facebook.)

[Alice Embree is a long-time Austin activist, organizer, and member of the Texas State Employees Union. A former staff member of underground papers The Rag in Austin and RAT in New York, and a veteran of SDS and the women's liberation movement, she is now active with CodePink Austin and Under the Hood Café. Embree is a contributing editor to The Rag Blog and is treasurer of the New Journalism Project. Read more articles by Alice Embree on The Rag Blog.]

Here are links to demonstrations around Texas:

• Fox News coverage of the Austin event.
• Dallas Morning News video of the Dallas demonstration led by the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, featuring a “Don’t Mess With Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid” take on a well-known Christmas carol.
• Coverage of the Dallas event from brother Gene Lantz.
• Texas AFL-CIO Facebook album with pictures from Austin and Corpus Christi.

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'The People's Pension' and the War Against Social Security

'The People's Pension':
The war against social security

The opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / June 26, 2012

[The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan by Eric Laursen (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 750 pp.; $27.]

It seems like every few months alarms are sounded warning U.S. workers that Social Security is going bankrupt. Oftentimes, the follow-up to these alarms includes a warning that the only way to save the system is to turn all or part of the funds involved over to Wall Street investment houses like Goldman Sachs.

Usually the alarms are sounded by right-wing politicians from the Republican Party. In recent years however, this cacophony of lies has been assisted by more and more Democrats.

According to Eric Laursen, in his new book titled The People's Pension: The Struggle to Defend Social Security Since Reagan, the desire to end what is Washington’s most successful government program has been underway since Social Security’s inception. It has only intensified in recent decades. As the title suggests, that intensification sharpened in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became president.

As anyone with an understanding of neoliberal capitalism and the role played by investment houses in this stage of capitalism knows, that year coincides more or less with an increased interest in Social Security funds by those houses. Why? Because their required growth requires more funds to invest and there are billions of dollars in funds sitting in the Social Security reserves.

Laursen provides the reader with a brief history of the philosophy behind Social Security. Harkening to the writings of 19th century anarchists and leftists, he describes part of the impetus behind Social Security as coming from the ideas of mutual aid; where every citizen is cared for. More specifically, he traces the institution of the social security system to the Townsend clubs begun in the 1930s by Dr. Francis Townsend of California.

It was Townsend’s idea that old people should be guaranteed an income based on their work and funded by taxes. His reasoning was simple, if senior citizens had an income, they could remain consumers, thereby helping stimulate the economy. Millions joined these clubs, exerting political pressure that led to the Social Security Act of 1937. Naturally, this act was fervently opposed by many corporate executives and the wealthy as being socialist and un-American.

Most of today’s opponents are not so blunt in their assessment. However, their proposals to privatize the system suggests that they too oppose a government program that does not benefit their corporate benefactors. Instead, they would rather turn it over to the Goldman Sachs of the world. This desire is certainly related to the substantial campaign donations they receive from Goldman Sachs and their cohorts.

One expects right wing politicians opposed to any government expenditures not related to benefiting private industry and the Pentagon to oppose Social Security. It is the Democratic opponents who deserve our real attention. Laursen’s history is also a history of the gradual shrinking of support among Democrats and other so-called liberals.

The People’s Pension puts the beginning of the current assault on Social Security in the lap of the Reagan administration. Laursen makes it very clear that the opponents of this program are not interested in saving money, a fairer distribution of benefits, or helping the elderly. They are serving an ideological agenda of social Darwinism.

Furthermore, every attack on Social Security is nothing more or less than an attempt by the corporate world and its right-wing supporters to end it once and for all. Laursen further points out that the arguments used by Social Security’s opponents never address the economic consequences of ending the program; they only draw up flimsy prognostications of disaster should the program continue.

Privatization would  be nothing more than one more method for corporate America to take public monies and privatize the profits while insuring the continued socialization of the risks and loss. As Laursen points out, this is exactly what is done by the defense industry and any scheme to privatize Social Security would do the same thing.

A fact that is not very well known outside of certain circles is that the model for privatization promoted by the so-called supply side economists was developed in the fascist Chile of Augusto Pinochet. Championed by many Republicans and their banker/corporate sponsors, this model is ultimately more expensive than keeping things as they are and its greatest benefits would be to the banking industry.

Furthermore, this and other privatization schemes assume an ever-growing capitalist economy -- a phenomenon less certain than it was before the crash of 2008. Despite this, politicians continue to include Social Security in their gunsights. Whether it's Alan Simpson calling Social Security a "Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits,” or so-called Blue Dog Democrats suggesting that benefits be changed, the assault on the program never goes away.

Eric Laursen has written a comprehensive and exhaustive history of the Social Security program in the United States. The People’s Pension is an honest, detailed, and even eye-opening discussion of the program’s origins and continuing efforts to provide elderly and disabled Americans with a livable income.

Equally important, it is a discussion of the attempts to alter and ultimately destroy the program by forces whose only interest seems to be profit and the elimination of any government institution that guarantees every citizen worker an income in their old age.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Red-Baiting and Racism : Socialism as the New Black Bogeyman

Obama as Joker: Poster currently being distributed in Los Angeles.
Red-baiting and racism:
When 'socialism' isn't really about socialism

This noise is about race. It is about 'othering' a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power...

By Tim Wise / August 12, 2009

Throughout the first six months of his administration, President Obama -- perhaps one of the most politically cautious leaders in contemporary history -- has been routinely portrayed as a radical by his opponents on the far-right. In particular, persons who have apparently never actually studied Marxism (or if they did, managed to somehow find therein support for such things as bailing out banks and elite corporations) contend that Obama is indeed a socialist.

Reducing all government action other than warmaking to part of a larger socialist conspiracy, the right contends that health care reform is socialist, capping greenhouse gas emissions is socialist, even providing incentives for driving fuel efficient cars is socialist. That the right insists upon Obama's radical-left credentials, even as they push an Obama=Hitler meme (something they apparently think is fair, since, after all the Nazis were National Socialists, albeit the kind who routinely murdered the genuine article) only speaks to the special brand of crazy currently in vogue among the nation's reactionary forces.

As real socialists laugh at these clumsily made broadsides, and as scholars of actual socialist theory try and explain the absurdity of the analogies being drawn by conservative commentators, a key point seems to have been missed, and it is this point that best explains what the red-baiting is actually about.

It is not, and please make note of it, about socialism. Or capitalism. Or economics at all, per se.

After all, President Bush was among the most profligate government spenders in recent memory, yet few ever referred to him in terms as derisive as those being hurled at Obama. Even when President Clinton proposed health care reform, those who opposed his efforts, though vociferous in their critique, rarely trotted out the dreaded s-word as part of their arsenal. They prattled on about "big government," yes, but not socialism as such. Likewise, when Ronald Reagan helped craft the huge FICA tax hike in 1983, in a bipartisan attempt to save Social Security, few stalwart conservatives thought to call America's cowboy-in-chief a closet communist.

And many of the loudest voices at the recent town hall meetings -- so many of which have been commandeered by angry minions ginned up by talk radio -- are elderly folk whose own health care is government-provided, and whose first homes were purchased several decades ago with FHA and VA loans, underwritten by the government, for that matter. Many of them no doubt reaped the benefits of the GI Bill, either directly or indirectly through their own parents.

It is not, in other words, a simple belief in smaller government or lower taxes that animates the near-hysterical cries from the right about wanting "their country back," from those who have presumably hijacked it: you know, those known lefties like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. No, what differentiates Obama from any of the other big spenders who have previously occupied the White House is principally one thing -- his color. And it is his color that makes the bandying about of the "socialist" label especially effective and dangerous as a linguistic trope.

Indeed, I would suggest that at the present moment, socialism is little more than racist code for the longstanding white fear that black folks will steal from them, and covet everything they have. The fact that the fear may now be of a black president, and not just some random black burglar hardly changes the fact that it is fear nonetheless: a deep, abiding suspicion that African American folk can't wait to take whitey's stuff, as payback, as reparations, as a way to balance the historic scales of injustice that have so long tilted in our favor.

In short, the current round of red-baiting is based on implicit (and perhaps even explicit) appeals to white racial resentment. It is Mau-Mauing in the truest sense of the term, and especially since Obama's father was from the former colonial Kenya! Unless this is understood, left-progressive responses to the tactic will likely fall flat. After all, pointing out the absurdity of calling Obama a socialist, given his real policy agenda, will mean little if the people issuing the charge were never using the term in the literal sense, but rather, as a symbol for something else entirely.

To begin with, and this is something often under-appreciated by the white left, to the right and its leadership (if not necessarily its foot-soldiers), the battle between capitalism and communism/socialism has long been seen as a racialized conflict. First, of course, is the generally non-white hue of those who have raised the socialist or communist banner from a position of national leadership. Most such places and persons have been of color: China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, assorted places in Latin America from time to time, or the Caribbean, or in Africa. With the exception of the former Soviet Union and its immediate Eastern European satellites -- which are understood as having had state socialism foisted upon them, rather than having it freely chosen through their own revolutions from below -- Marxism in practice has been a pretty much exclusively non-white venture.

And even the Russians were seen through racialized lenses by some of America's most vociferous cold warriors. To wit, consider what General Edward Rowney, who would become President Reagan's chief arms negotiator with the Soviets, told Manning Marable in the late 1970s, and which Marable then recounted in his book, The Great Wells of Democracy:

"One day I asked Rowney about the prospects for peace, and he replied that meaningful negotiations with the Russian Communists were impossible. 'The Russians,' Rowney explained, never experienced the Renaissance, or took part in Western civilization or culture. I pressed the point, asking whether his real problem with Russia was its adherence to communism. Rowney snapped, 'Communism has nothing to do with it!' He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said simply, 'The real problem with Russians is that they are Asiatics'."

In the present day, the only remaining socialists in governance on the planet are of color: in places like Cuba or Venezuela, perhaps China (though to a more truncated extent, given their embrace of the market in recent decades) and, on the lunatic Stalinist fringe, North Korea. These are the last remaining standard-bearers, in leadership positions, who would actually use the term socialist to describe themselves.

Given the color-coding of socialism in the 21st century, at the level of governance, to use the label to describe President Obama and his administration, has the effect of tying him to these "other" socialists in power. Although he has nearly nothing in common with them politically or in terms of his policy prescriptions, he is a man of color, so the connection is made, mentally, even if it carries no intellectual or factual truth.

Secondly, and even more to the point, we must remember what "socialism" is, especially in the eyes of its critics: it is, to them, a code for redistribution. Of course, some forms of socialism are more redistributive than others, and even late-stage capitalism tends to engage in some forms of very mild redistribution (as with the income tax code). But if you were to ask most who grow apoplectic at the mere mention of the word "socialism" for the first synonym that came to their mind, redistribution is likely the one they would choose. Surely it would be among their top two or three.

Now, given the almost instinctual connection made between socialism and redistribution, imagine what many white folks would naturally assume when told that this man, this black man, this black man with an African daddy, was a socialist. Even if those using the term didn't intend it to push racial buttons (and that is a decidedly large "if"), the fact remains that for many, it would almost certainly prompt any number of racial fears and insecurities: as in, the black guy is going to take from those who work and give to those who don't. And naturally, we all know (or at least our ill-informed prejudices tell us) who's in the first group and who's in the second one.

Thus, the joke making the rounds on the internet, and likely in your workplace, about Obama planning on taxing aspirin "because it's white and it works." Or the guy with the sign at the April teabagger rally, which read, Obama's Plan: White Slavery. Or others who have carried overtly racist signs to frame their message: signs suggesting that Obama hopes to provide care for all brown-skinned illegal immigrants, while simultaneously murdering the white elderly, or that cast the President in decidely simian imagery, and refer to him, crudely but clearly as a monkey.

Or Glenn Beck's paranoid screed from late July, which sought to link health care reform, and virtually every single piece of Obama's political agenda to some kind of backdoor reparations scheme. This, coupled with Beck's even more unhinged claim to have discovered a communist/black nationalist conspiracy in the administration's Green Jobs Initiative. All because the initiative is headed up by author and activist Van Jones: a guy whose recent book explains how to save capitalism through eco-friendly efforts at development and job creation.

So even there, it isn't about socialism, so much as the fact that Jones is black, and was once (for a couple of months) a nationalist, and has a goatee, and looks determined (read:mean) in some of his more contemplative press photos.

Fact is, the longstanding association in white minds between social program spending and racial redistribution has been well-established, by scholars such as Martin Gilens, Kenneth Neubeck, Noel Cazenave, and Jill Quadagno, among others. Indeed, it was only the willingness of past presidents like FDR to all but cut blacks out of income support programs that convinced white lawmakers and the public to sign on to any form of American welfare system in the first place: a willingness that waned as soon as people of color finally gained access to these programs beginning in the 50s and 60s.

But even as strong as the social program/black folks association has been in the past, it has, until now, never had a black face to put with the effort. With a man of color in the position of president, it becomes far more convincing to those given to fear black predation already. It isn't just that the government will tax you, white people. It's that the black guy will. And for people like him. At your expense.

Much as the white right blew a gasket at the thought of bailing out homeowners with sub-prime and exploding mortgages a few months back (and if you listened to the rhetoric on the radio it was hard to miss the racial animosity that undergirded much of the conservative hostility to the idea, since they seemed to think only persons of color would be helped by such a plan), they now too often view Obama's moves to more comprehensive health care as simply another way to take from those whites who have "played by the rules" and give to those folks of color who haven't.

Even as millions of whites would stand to benefit from health care reform -- and all whites, as with people of color would enjoy greater choices with the very public option that has drawn the most fire -- the imagery of the recipients has remained black and brown, as with all social programs; and the imagery of the persons who would be taxed for the effort has remained hard-working white folks.

By allowing the right to throw around terms like socialist to describe the President and socialism to describe his incredibly watered-down, generally big business friendly approach to health care, while not recognizing the memetic purpose of such arguments, is to ensure that the right will succeed in their demonization campaign. To respond by pointing out how the plan really isn't socialist, or how Obama really isn't a socialist misses the point, which was never, in the end, about economic systems or philosophies: none of which the folks on the right raising the most hell show any signs of understanding anyway.

This noise is about race. It is about "othering" a President who is seen as a symbol of white dispossession: dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power, unquestioned and unchallenged from the darker skinned other. This is what animates the every move of the angry masses, individual exceptions notwithstanding.

Unless the left begins pushing back, and insisting that yes, the old days are gone, white hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and that we will all be better off for it, the chorus of white backlash will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing and conquering the working people who would benefit -- all of them -- from a new direction.

Source / Progressives for Obama

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Homeless Vets and Hungry Kids? Empathy Meets Realpolitik

Graphic by Larry Ray / The Rag Blog.
Empathy Meets Realpolitik

How many of our nation's leaders have ever gone to bed hungry? U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that, '12.4 million children in the U.S. are "food insecure" -- defined as not being able to get enough food to maintain a healthy, active life.'

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 26, 2009

Summertime and the living is easy... for our elected politicians in Washington D.C.

In just a few days they will suspend their hearings and deadline-driven decision making and return to the voters back home who keep them in office.

Homeless veterans across America, American children who do not have enough to eat, families facing foreclosure and unemployment all will still all be there when this great leadership body returns in a month or so, their campaign cash needs having been firmed up after non stop meetings with their voter base.

Meanwhile, last weekend almost one thousand homeless American military veterans in the San Diego, California, area sought help at a three-day tent city program called "Stand Down." This volunteer effort has been operating for more than 20 years. It is a three-day chance for homeless veterans, many from the Vietnam era, but with increasing numbers from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to get free housing and social services. Hot food, a haircut, dental work, legal aid and a clean place to sleep in a familiar military camp setting is there to help these souls living on the very edge.

That in the USA we have a thousand former military veterans, down and out in the shadows of one large city should evoke both sadness, and no small amount of outrage and frustration. However, it is not just San Diego. The Department of Veterans affairs estimates that one out of three homeless people across America is a veteran.

How do all the car magnets and lawn signs urging that we "Support Our Troops" somehow exclude those troops who become disabled and fall through the cracks once they get back home? Do we just say tough luck to those who turn to drugs and alcohol, the ones who desperately need extra help? Where is our empathy?

Empathy? Conservative politicians have loudly used that word as a pejorative just recently. The word was invoked by President Obama as a desirable quality in a federal judge. More specifically his nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Empathy? An effete, bleeding heart label? Hardly. Empathy is simply the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But in that very definition we see among our elected leaders many who neither understand, nor share the feelings of others than themselves and their starchy conservative cohorts.

Empathy? How many of our nation's leaders have ever gone to bed hungry? U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics show that, "12.4 million children in the U.S. are 'food insecure' -- defined as not being able to get enough food to maintain a healthy, active life."

Food insecure? Kids are hungry, not getting enough to eat. American kids. Using some bureaucratic euphemism does not fill empty tummies. Euphemisms make the reports coming out of Washington agencies look a little less shocking. "Food insecure" doesn't jump off the page like "starving" or "undernourished," and helps keep this disgrace beneath the political radar.

Homeless American veterans and American children who never get enough to eat are merely two examples of ongoing problems that many of our politicians somehow must not hear about when they go back home. Our bloated and ineffective health care system is on this long list of old and worsening problems. But as a majority of our politicians work diligently to finally bring forth a new overhauled and affordable universal health plan for all Americans, again conservatives throw up roadblocks.

Conservative protests about leaving huge indebtedness to our grandchildren actually mask a selfish fear of losing votes back home if they support a new, and initially expensive national health care plan. Empathy is absent from this narrow reasoning. Personal political career interests hold hostage the entire inertia and completion of work, particularly in the House of Representatives.

The very politicians now expressing such deep concern for our national debt were deafeningly silent as President Bush raised the national debt each of his eight years in office to a breathtaking record $11.3 trillion.

Properly done, universal health care would eventually greatly reduce soaring insurance and overall medical costs. But initially, funding for such a massive landmark change in the way we take care of America's health will be expensive and will require political backbone to make it a reality. More backbone will be needed to address the needs of homeless Veterans and our undernourished children.

Approval of long overdue universal health care will require the very two things sorely lacking in current political opponents -- statesmanship and empathy. For those lacking these qualities, it is essential that we point them out, on both sides of the aisle, and inundate their offices with email, letters and phone calls demanding that they use their stated concerns for program cost as positive negotiable input to the committees working to craft the final health plan and not as a singular duplicitous barrier to progress.

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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Mike Davis : Note to Obama: 'Futurama' Has to Wait Its Turn

'We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car.'
By Mike Davis / November 21, 2008

America's "Futurama" is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World's Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century's equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain's high-speed rail network will become the world's largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: "For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America." Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His "Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class" vows to "create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we'll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges." Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials -- from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi -- have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the "win-win" approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM's shareholders), but that infrastructure spending -- if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama's first 100 days -- can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush's "socialist" efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn't progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren't high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I'm not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis -- a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales -- has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis -- from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly -- is its potential universality. Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie's choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made -- with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America's Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I'll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids' school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama's left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect's original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities and poverty.]

Source / Progressives for Obama

Also see Mike Davis : Can Obama See the Grand Canyon? by Mike Davis / The Rag Blog / October 23, 2008

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