At some point we will come out the other end of this international crisis - or sadly, only most of us will. That is going to require vast expenditures and, unless there are some model-breaking strategies, a spectacular amount of new public debt - here in America and around the world, simultaneously. That means that desperately needed deep social change could be forestalled, and it cannot and must not be.
Who will be the targeted recipients of this boggling public spending, and what criteria of need and desperation will we establish? Who will be saddled by its costs? And how do we structure this plan to be an investment in our future needs - there won't be much left for some time and we have serious crises that must be addressed. This can be a new start to chart an urgent course of urgency that this virus may - let us hope! - make more possible, because we will see so plainly the benefits or consequences our public action decisions for better and worse.
From climate change (the linkages established in the Green New Deal should be easier to explain to people amid the virus' fallout) to nationally and internationally coordinated public health and food security to international labor rights standards - and somehow all with that bumblefuck psycho still in the White House. We must be explicit in these links, because if we squander this chance our opportunity for a desperately needed change in direction will be lost forever.
This needs to be Joe Biden's new call, his new campaign. What happens with this viral crisis is not his hands yet. But he may be the only person, at least in the US, in a position to assemble the pieces that are required, since we have an AWOL POTUS and Biden is in the process of building a national campaign and fully understands the levers of government and international cooperation.
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Demand true, real, needed preparation for the aftermath and beyond by starting now to establish the parameters of a recovery that reforms (dreaded R-word) rather than retrenches. The long recovery and all its consequences, Biden will argue, will be on his watch, not Trump's - and the num-nut saboteur of decency at 1600 Pennsylvania cannot, must not be trusted to create that plan and commit those resources. This was the role Obama took before his inauguration during the financial crisis — and we learned lessons good and bad from that.
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Create a national kitchen committee of true experts and planners and advocates. Create a template that can help guide our country and in so doing, help to responsibly guide the world to a better future. Make it a specific plan to be implemented by our government, not waiting for the new Administration in distant January; we haven't got that time. Make it seem and be inevitable.
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When it's safe to gather, hold hearings organized by unity committees across America in towns and cities where people can help to create their own community needs assessment of their recovery priorities and use this time to have some of those in place. We know these won't be banker plans. Hell, let's put Bloomberg to good use and have him finance and develop a data program that can collect and organize this vital community-based input, since God knows the federal government won't use it's resources wisely under the Great Fool - and it actually does need doing. It could make sense for Biden to ask Warren to lead the planning force that coordinates our needs into a movement; he could even ask her not to endorse.
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In the meantime, start to create a damage and needs inventory as we go along. Perhaps there are idled workforces that could be put to use doing just this, and in so doing will establish new local networks of new activists. A sort of CCC for local activists to start planning the reconstruction.
These local networks and then meetings will serve as the pressure point, from the People up, to force Congressional action to move toward the real relief needs of our lives and our communities instead of a redistribution of wealth to corporations so enormous that it'd be the biggest bailout since the end of Noah's flood. Obviously, if meetings cannot safely be held for a long time, these efforts would need to start primarily online but would need more direct outreach than mere social network postings. There could be virtual town meetings, perhaps, and these could be seen both online (and participated there) and on TV to reach as many as possible.
From these actions, undertaken by a hopeful nation amid fear and turning our home imprisonment into an atomized but organized movement, we could see true change.
This isn't about seizing an opportunist moment to force political positions on society. It is vitally necessary to start a plan now, a serious and ambitious plan, a sensible plan, a plan that helps lead the world to make use of this - let us again, hope! - one-time necessary expenditure of yet-unknowable trillions of dollars responsibly and not let it be diverted, squandered, hoarded, and misguided to those who would make the worst of it. If we do not do this, we will face a poorer nation and world, one that misspent its one chance at the precise moment when the whole world could shift in its response to this globally shared disaster.
Why Joe Biden? Sometimes, as a certain someone has repeating recently, the times choose us. I know this won’t be the fully radical restructuring of society many, me included, may want. But we cannot let this moment pass. These trillions worldwide will only be spent once. Let’s do it as right as we can rather than not at all. Let’s not do mere patchwork and leave all the cracks in place. Let’s build a better house.