Democracy and Public Investment

What democracy can do is obscured by today’s free market, anti-regulatory, anti-government rhetoric. That rhetoric creates real winners and losers, but taking it at its word, it’s based on an everyone-for-him-or-herself form of individualism. It asserts that our successes and failures are almost solely the result of our personal abilities and denies that what we accomplish always rests in part on what society gives us.

That flatly contradicts reality. This country blossomed because we worked together, with a spirit of cooperation. Cooperation that made associations, large businesses and elective government possible.

Everyone-for-him-or-herself-alone ideologues shouldn’t blind us to the public role in development. America’s Founders knew they needed government. As aptly described in the show Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris and their colleagues understood the importance of a banking system and had government create it. Across the thirteen original states, Founders used government to open transportation to the west. Washington himself was deeply involved in efforts by Virginia and Maryland. When New York, which had a sea level path to the interior, finally built the Erie Canal, it set the path for industrialization and settlement for a century and a half, and made the North into the powerhouse that won the Civil War.

Today we’ve lost a shared sense of the public investments necessary to continued development, and the foundations of American success are falling apart. Bridges take unsuspecting occupants into the rivers and ravines below. Water systems deliver lead, mercury, and an armory of toxins. Sewage systems poison rivers, people and the living things that depend on them. Trains crash for lack of decent equipment. The electronic grid barely carries ordinary loads. The next solar storm can take the electrical and internet grids down, bringing the country to a lengthy stand-still. American colleges and universities have been the envy of the world but stripping their resources will ensure their replacement abroad and with them the R&D that has been central to American leadership. We are the wealthiest of countries but too cheap to fund our infrastructure, terrified that taking care of America would actually put people to work, or that public spirit in building and rebuilding America will help someone else’s business.

The best stimuli for business are investments in the capacity of the public, infrastructure for getting things done, and rules that create a common floor of good behavior. The idea that everything depends on lowering taxes is pure garbage from people who want their winnings the easy way – by taking them away from the people.

Trump promised to put infrastructure in his budget. It’s hard to know whether he’ll keep that promise, whether enough Republicans will follow him, or whether it would include anything more than a wall on the border or brick and mortar repairs. Public investment could make infrastructure better and more resilient, as so dearly needed in Puerto Rico and on the coasts. Public investment could go well beyond controversial minimum wage laws by offering decent, useful, jobs at livable wages. Public programs could improve the private market by creating a model to compete with, like the public health care option that Obama tried to get.

Madison, Hamilton and their contemporaries had a much more patriotic and mature understanding of what American progress depended on – the people, the whole people, not just a few plunderers appropriating for themselves what should be our birthright.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, Jan. 30, 2018.

Freedom for the Boss; Drudgery for the Rest of Us

I keep looking for ways to talk with supporters of the Administration. President Carter started the deregulation frenzy. That has become half of the Republican cut-and-deregulate refrain ever since, consistently repeated by the current White House and the Republicans in Congress. I’d like to focus on the things that will affect those of us who are, financially speaking, ordinary, middle-class Americans.

Here are changes the Administration and congressional Republicans are considering that affect working conditions:

• The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been postponing and considering cutting down a Labor Department rule that limits “workers’ exposure [to] toxic material, which can cause a deadly lung disease.”
• The same White House Office is also “considering a proposal to roll back protections for workers in construction and shipbuilding.”
  • Those rules allow our employers to save cash by risking our health.

• “The Working Families Flexibility Act … would give employees a choice between taking time off or being paid time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours in a week.”
• Either way, Republicans oppose changing overtime rules to raise eligibility for overtime above the current $23,660 per year.
  • Those rules allow our employers to save cash by shortchanging us.

Here are some that affect the health of financially ordinary Americans:

• The Administraton has already taken steps to “roll back healthy school lunch standards”
• The new head of the FDA “has invested in or consulted for dozens of healthcare companies” which suggests that the Food and Drug Administration won’t be much help in preventing unnecessary complications and expenses.
• The House health care bill would eliminate Obamacare requirements that insurance plans cover prescriptions drugs and mental healthcare. Like all insurance, drug and mental health care coverage are intended to protect people from unplanned changes in the costs of survival.
• Senate Republicans narrowly lost an effort to roll back a regulation that “limit[s] methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling.” Methane is even more damaging to the climate than carbon.
  • Those rules risk our health for the sake of other people’s profits.

On savings for retirement:

• “Trump’s Labor Department delayed the so-called fiduciary rule, ordering financial advisers to act in … [your] best interest[s] … [if you] are saving for retirement.”
• The CHOICE Act would allow the banks that brought us the crash of 2008 to opt out of regulations adopted after the crash and intended to prevent another. And the bill renames the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and “reduces its power to enforce pre-existing consumer protection laws.”
  • Those rules risk our financial security for the sake of other people’s profits.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the Supreme Court show little respect for working men and women.

• With Breyer’s help they have blessed “Professional debt collectors … [who] built a business out of buying stale debt, filing claims in bankruptcy proceedings to collect it, and hoping that no one notices that the debt is too old to be enforced by the courts.”
• The Court continues to apply a 1925 statute intended for interstate business transactions to consumer contracts and the Court bars state regulation entirely.

What Republicans continue to give us is freedom for the boss and drudgery for the rest of us. As the old folk song has it, “same song, second verse, could get better but it’s gonna get worse.”

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 16, 2017.

Chemicals, Infertility and Morals

You’ll be subjected to rolling commentary on innumerable aspects of the Gorsuch hearings. I prefer, as I often do, to address deeper aspects of our competing value systems that underlie the surface of our political battles. One is the human impact of our treatment of planet earth.

Human behavior is injuring our environment. But nature has ways of winning the battle. It turns out that our fertility is as fragile as the eagles’ before DDT was banned, that endocrine disruptors and other environmental toxins are damaging our ability to reproduce – they’re in our kitchens, pesticides and other purchases.[1] That can be a powerful counterattack against the human activity that is warming the globe. If we become infertile and our population plummets, America will become a sad, lonely, vulnerable place, and, quite likely, conquered by any healthier peoples left.

Nevertheless, I’m sick of making consequential arguments, to tell people that if we don’t do this or that, bad things will happen. I think the arguments I’ve been making are air tight. But the science floats over people’s heads. A women, well-enough educated to know better, told me that she chose not to think about the environment because it was too big to deal with. Her comment made clear to me that reason doesn’t reach nearly enough people. Science won’t solve anything unless we accept and act on it.

So let’s address the moral issue. No one, no business, no company or corporation has the right to put toxins in the environment, chemicals that can make it impossible for people to reproduce or kill or maim those of us alive, or make us produce deformed and handicapped children – no one and no company has that right. And they don’t have the right to change the subject, throw smoke in our eyes, saying something else is the problem when they aren’t bothering to check. We’ve had enough lies. This is not a football game where deception is a winning strategy. In human life, deception is sinful, immoral, totally unacceptable. Taking risks with other people’s lives and making excuses for it is criminal.

If there is an economic problem, then, as many labor leaders have suggested for decades, let’s share the work, or create other jobs that don’t do damage – jobs aren’t an excuse for hurting people. Hurting people isn’t a job; it’s a crime. People aren’t entitled to work at criminal enterprises.

The Cabinet and the President and the Members of Congress and the state and local governments aren’t entitled to commit the crime of murder by poisoning the environment. Pro-lifers and liberals should be united on the environmental front given the enormity of the killing, of adults, children, fetuses and sperm. We’ve all seen multiple films with populations at risk and the starship or other craft working hard to prevent destruction of civilizations. The authors of those stories were trying to portray the immorality of destroying civilizations, and they were warning us of the likelihood that we would face that problem.

How many of us are moral enough to deal with this issue? Isn’t it criminal to support the rape of the air, land, food and water that give us life? Isn’t it criminal to carelessly poo-poo the dangers? How many of our corporate and elected officials are criminals?

Those with so little respect for the lives of fellow human beings must repent, stop and stop those who do, immediately and completely.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 21, 2017.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/are-your-sperm-in-trouble.html.