How about a new "New Deal"?

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Via: Daily Kos


Not your father's FCC

"To the extent that the ownership of and control of...broadcast stations falls into fewer and fewer hands," the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concluded, "the free dissemination of ideas and information, upon which our democracy depends, is threatened." With those words, the FCC ordered the breakup of the leading broadcast network and banned a single company from owning more than one station per city.

Is this an FCC you recognize? Probably not. That's because it's not your FCC--it's your father's FCC (maybe even your grandfather's). These media reforms were the work of James Lawrence Fly, the FCC chairman appointed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. A card-carrying New Deal trustbuster with good access to the President, Fly was a relentless opponent of "chain broadcasting"--the domination of local broadcasting by the CBS and NBC Red and Blue radio networks.

What a far cry from the media regulation we have today. In 1981 President Reagan appointed an FCC chairman who described a television set as nothing but a "toaster with pictures." The commission went on to dismantle nearly every public-interest obligation on the books and to enable a tsunami of media consolidation. The results have been disastrous--reporters fired, newsrooms shuttered and our civic dialogue dumbed down to fact-free opinions and ideological bloviation.

...

Where to start? First, let's reinvigorate the license-renewal process. Under FDR, renewals were required every three years, and a station's public-interest record was subject to FCC judgment. Today a broadcaster sends in a postcard every eight years, and there is no credible public-interest evaluation. We need to get back to renewing every three years--and add enforceable guidelines to encourage coverage of real local news, culture and civic affairs. Second, let's revisit media ownership--this means not just preventing bad new rules (like letting more newspapers own TV stations) but revisiting the bad old rules that made this mess in the first place. And finally, let's make sure the Internet remains free of the network consolidation and content control that wreaked such havoc on more traditional media. MORE

A Green Corps

Many people have used the Apollo Project (or the Manhattan Project) as the template for how we can quickly wean ourselves off fossil fuels and replace them with renewable sources of energy. That's good as far as it goes--we do need new technologies. But in a sense our task is almost the reverse of the Apollo Project. Instead of focusing our resources to land a few people on the moon, we need to spread them out to affect everyone. It's as if we've got to get the whole nation into orbit, and fast. And for that, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the CCC (and the industrial thrust to gear up for World War II) may provide a better analogy.

The people hired by these agencies went out and did things, and did them in large numbers--the CCC planted 3 billion trees (which would be no small help with global warming). Imagine an army of similar size trained to insulate American homes and stick solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs. They could achieve, within a year or two, easily noticeable effects on our energy consumption; our output of carbon dioxide might actually begin to level off. And imagine them laying trolley lines back down in our main cities or helping erect windmills across the plains. All this work would have real payoff--and none of it can be outsourced. You're not sending your house to China so they can stuff it with cellulose.

There are people starting to think along these lines: the Green for All campaign has been pushing for a billion-dollar commitment for a quarter-million green jobs of just this kind, designed to pull people out of poverty. And as the depth of our environmental trouble and the probable recession become clearer, others are more ambitious yet: on the fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, activists will gather in Memphis for the Dream Reborn, a conference whose organizers argue that were King still alive he'd be fighting to take on the twin scourges of global warming and global inequity with a massive new public works campaign. MORE

Race and the New Deal Coalition

The perception that Reagan's victory had resulted substantially from the defection of suburban white middle- and/or working-class, particularly male, voters fueled an argument that Democratic liberalism had failed because it strayed from its "traditional" base and became too narrowly identified with "special interests" like racial minorities. This view, which represented the New Deal as having been built on a nonracial, or "universalistic," approach to social policy, often went hand in hand with a nostalgic call to return to that supposedly traditional principle by retreating from race-targeted policies and race-conscious politics.

But the fact is, most New Deal programs were anything but race-neutral--or, for that matter, gender-neutral--in their impact. Some, like the initial Social Security old-age pension program, were established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time. Others, like the CCC, operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt's housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.MORE

The Bare Minimum

"The proposal is unworkable, un-American, impractical and dangerous to our institutions," said Representative Wade Kitchens, a Democrat from Arkansas, during the Congressional debate over the Fair Labor Standards Act. What were these radical ideas, guaranteed by the last great piece of New Deal legislation, that in Kitchens's view threatened the future of the Republic? A minimum wage, limits on overtime and a prohibition of child labor. In submitting the act to Congress on May 24, 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt succinctly explained its basic goal: "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work."


...

Seventy years later, the Fair Labor Standards Act is still under attack. "A higher minimum wage equals less economic freedom," a Heritage Foundation essay claimed last year. Although the rhetoric is more subdued, the underlying attitude has changed little since Representative Kitchens railed against the bill. The minimum wage doesn't eliminate poverty; it creates poverty, we are told. When do-gooders demand a higher wage, poor workers lose their jobs. Countless studies are cited as proof. Yet the period of America's greatest economic growth coincided with its highest minimum wage rates. In 1956 the minimum wage in today's dollars was about $7.93 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage reached its peak in 1968, at about $9.91 an hour. During the decades that followed, its real value declined by almost 50 percent. That enormous pay cut for the nation's poorest workers benefited some industries enormously--supplying cheap labor to fast food restaurants, retail stores and farms--while imposing enormous costs on society. When the federal minimum wage hits $7.25 in July 2009, it will still not reach the level considered adequate by President Dwight Eisenhower.

The high-minded arguments against the minimum wage, for the most part, are merely justifications for higher corporate profits. Since passing a minimum wage law in 1998, Britain has enjoyed some of the fastest economic growth rates and lowest unemployment rates in the European Union. The British minimum wage is now equivalent to more than $11 an hour. "No business which depends...on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country," President Roosevelt once declared. "By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level--I mean the wages of a decent living." Those words are as true today as when they were first spoken. I hope our next President will not only agree with Roosevelt on this subject but will have the courage and compassion to do something about it. MORE

The Only Fitting Tribute

It was thus, very practically, the New Deal that freed me to explore the "big questions." Food, the basis of life, seemed like a smart place to start, so I asked, Why hunger in a world of plenty?

Soon it began to dawn on me: as long as food is merely a commodity in societies that don't protect people's right to participate in the market, and as long as farming is left vulnerable to consolidated power off the farm, many will go hungry, farmers among them--no matter how big the harvests.

I might have gotten there quicker if I'd studied Roosevelt's insight that, to serve life, markets need help from accountable, democratic government. Against those who saw "economic laws" as "sacred," he argued that "economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings." So in 1944 (my birth year), Roosevelt called on Americans to implement what was already "accepted"--"a second Bill of Rights" centered on economic opportunity and security. It would, in effect, put values boundaries around the market. His goal wasn't a legal document, observes University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, but the generation of a "set of public commitments by and for the citizenry, very much like the Declaration of Independence."

The first two economic rights assured a "useful" job that paid enough to provide "adequate food and clothing." The third guaranteed farmers a high enough return for their crops to provide their families with a "decent living." To begin, he asked Congress to pass a "cost of food law," putting a price floor under farmers and a price ceiling on the cost of food necessities for all. MORE

A Chaos of Experimentation

Historian Richard Hofstadter once characterized the New Deal as "a chaos of experimentation." Fresh ideas were constantly tossed on the wall to see what stuck. They didn't always work, but this spirit of experimentation was an attempt to address the central problems plaguing Americans at the time.

The National Industrial Recovery Act led to higher prices and ultimately overstretched the bounds of federal authority, but it set a minimum wage and forced big businesses to collaborate with one another to get out of the Depression. The WPA didn't cure unemployment, but it was an ambitious experiment that allowed 3.3 million people to put food on their tables. Contrast this effort with our recent Congressional debates over whether we should extend unemployment insurance an additional thirteen weeks (a proven solution) or pass any kind of stimulus package "quickly.

...

Today's policy experiments are profoundly insubstantial, offering the smallest of ideas to counter the most peripheral of challenges. The annual State of the Union address is a perfect example, where we all wait with bated breath to see which idea of microscopic import will be floated with much fanfare. One year it was steroids in baseball (well, I guess Congress thinks this is really important too). This year the President spent more time talking about earmarks than he did discussing the home mortgage crisis devastating the nation's economy, despite the fact that earmarks are only half of 1 percent of the budget. The right wing's devotion to small government is reflected not just in spending limits but in its limited imagination of what government can do.

But the GOP isn't alone. There is a certain brand of Democrat, who came to power in the '90s, who revels in policies about school uniforms, mandatory 401(k) plans and tax rebates--as if school uniforms can fix the profound problems facing public education. Look at the Senate Democratic Policy Committee's "Fresh 50" report and you'll find limiting gift card expiration dates, a "Hire Heroes" public-service campaign to put returning veterans to work and a plan to develop 25,000 Super Principals to ship out to our neediest schools. These ideas are good ones. I applaud the Senate Democrats for acknowledging that generating new ideas is an important function of government. But these ideas are inoffensive and marginal, and don't directly tackle the major issues of the moment.

...

As FDR put it, "The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."MORE