Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Because my formal commentary on Mrs. Clinton's kick-off policy speech is extensive, I'll keep this Intro very brief. I do my best to fill in what she left out about the New Deal, which she suggested but "edited," to put it mildly. So here is the missing history and the other items from the broad New Deal menu that were not "selected."
I think I could have been much tougher, given the joint Clinton "track record." But judge for yourselves.
June 18, 2015
ON THE SPEECH IN FOUR FREEDOMS PARK…AND AN INVITATION
Doubtless in some quarters it will be seen as impolite of me to offer commentary upon “the speech” recently delivered, on Saturday, June 13th, by Hillary Clinton, Democratic aspirant to the White House, in Four Freedoms Park, in New York City – since no one has issued an invitation to me. However, since one of those Four Freedoms is the freedom of speech, perhaps I shouldn’t think that way; but then again, we all know the power of the Clintons to monopolize the discourse, the fund raising and the policy options.
Therefore, I’m going to assert a hard earned right to comment, since of all the writers on the American left, I am unaware of anyone else who has made so many references, in depth, to the works of the New Deal, and in calling for a new green one, since 2007. That’s a claim I’ve staked out through almost 1600 pages or so, about four volumes, of the yet to be published “A Citizen’s History of the Great Financial Crisis,” which has appeared year by year in essays of varying length. If that seems like a lot of pages devoted to one crisis, please remember that it is also a history of an era, the neoliberal era of conservative economics, and the story really began when the U.S. left the gold standard in the early 1970’s, if not earlier. As Karl Polanyi tells it in The Great Transformation, the other great book from 1944, the roots of our troubles date back to the early days of the industrial revolution in England, and the thinking of the “classical” economists.
During this time, I’ve also collected a small library on the New Deal, and I began to realize that I really didn’t know its many facets or the complexities of its President very well. They didn’t make much sense to me as a young man; like an acquired taste for difficult literature, and its authors, and further illuminated by personal hardship, they make more sense to me today. The ideologues of the Right, like Amity Shlaes, who want to revise its history into an unrecognizable form, couldn’t be further off the mark about its un-ideological response to the collapse of capitalism, 1929-1932.
I also couldn’t help but notice the almost universal silence which followed in the wake of its 75th Anniversary Celebration conference, held in Washington, DC on April 9, 2008, which I attended. It was a conference which had so very few – dare I say none – of the Democratic Party’s major “luminaries” of the time in attendance, and I offer my apologies to Representatives Paul Kanjorski and Rosa DeLauro, and Senator Bernie Sanders, who were there. Bill and Hillary, Al and John (Kerry) and Senator Barack, they were nowhere to be found. No Nancy P. either. I guess, as the Right would tell it, true socialists just couldn’t abide hearing about the pragmatism of those Depression years.
Go ahead, Google any combination of phrases you like, including the name of the conference – “FDR’s Liberalism and the Future of American Democracy,” it being sponsored by The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Roosevelt Institution - and by what remained of the American left in the spring of 2008. Let me know what you find, because when I did this search in 2008, I couldn’t uncover any reporting about the conference. It was like the old Soviet Press, right here in the land of the Four Freedoms, there apparently was a secret “finding of no significance” and therefore “no coverage.”
Is my recollection of this fact a left-of-center gentle elbow toward Mrs. Clinton’s speech this past Saturday, and its long awaited signal that it is now safe to channel FDR, if not the entire New Deal, and may even be downright politically expedient to do so? Well, yes, I suppose it’s safe to go in the water now, but which stream of the many channeled New Deal are we going to swim in: the distant Four Freedoms, which were a foreign policy challenge issued to material want and the awful solutions offered by the varieties of fascism which grew abroad in the 1930’s, or the apparently still “No Swimming, Dangerous Currents” channel of the Second Bill of Rights, which was actually FDR’s “enduring vision of America, the nation we want to be?”
And what do we make out of the reaction to Cass R. Sunstein – certainly a major intellectual figure on the American Center-Left, and his 2004 book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, which was also greeted by near total silence? Sunstein didn’t even make it to the list of the many conference participants, which shows you how treacherous some of the currents of the variegated New Deal streams still were in 2008. What a fraught idea, a Second Bill of Rights, all eight of them, to be worked through the Congress, the sovereign legislative body in a representative democracy, not through the amendment process, to take their place next to the Declaration of Independence as guidance and inspiration - goals to be fleshed out in legislation. These rights grew out of FDR’s concept of the Four Freedoms, but with this crucial understanding: “Roosevelt contended that people who live in ‘want’ are not free. And he believed too that ‘want’ is not inevitable.” The first two rights in this Second Bill of Rights could very easily have been adopted into Mrs. Clinton’s speech. Here they are in Roosevelt’s own words: “The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.”
And how do you give a speech, which by setting and selected content is announcing that it is time for a new New Deal, but dilutes that obvious dawning down to just being a time for a “better deal”? Mrs. Clinton spoke of the need for shared prosperity – of climate change and mentioned jobs about a half-a dozen times, but she still cannot bring herself to say “WPA,” “Civilian Conservation Corps” or even the necessity of full employment, which the private sector will not or cannot supply. And especially that Civilian Conservation Corps, created early in 1933 and so close to FDR’s generous heart, but also his practical head, the land-owning conservation steward, and the “bridge” to much of what we have to do today to stop global warming. If Mrs. Clinton still can’t cross that bridge, I’m not climbing aboard.
How are we going to get those “millions of new jobs?” Will some major changes in the tax codes bring home America’s prodigal, globalizing international businesses, who have had a longstanding financial affair with Asia, and with China in particular, which has repaid us by hacking into every significant institution, public and private, that they could find? (Where on earth could they ever have gotten these notions?) China has been the silent partner beating up American labor on behalf of those corporations, “arm’s length, legally, of course, and now is also a burglar in the night. The consolation prize for soft minded “liberals” to comfort themselves with is that “we” have lifted millions of Chinese peasants out of poverty. One economist, Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, has even suggested that when we in the advanced Western post-industrial nations are feeling down about our diminished economic circumstances, we can take heart from all the good we’ve done abroad. That was the topper to my often expressed line that workers need to dedicate a monument to Bill Clinton for the Mall in DC – Chinese workers that is. That should be easy to get done with the help available on K Street, given its devotees to “free trade.”
Or will the jobs come from this by now universal boilerplate language about small businesses: “We will unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs and small business owners by providing tax relief, cutting red tape and making it easier to get a small business loan.” I heard nearly the same speech when Maryland Governor Larry Hogan took office this past January, with Chris Christie doing the introduction.
And what are we talking about here, Mrs. Clinton? I’m talking about a new social contract, and that begins with a job for everyone willing to work, and it doesn’t take much looking around this country to see all that is not being done. You can start with our ancient infrastructure, which has been malnourished under the Republican Right’s strategy of “Starve the Beast,” with a second helping of thin gruel having been served by Democratic Centrists, like your husband, Bill, placing his austerity stew of balanced budgets on the same neoliberal menu. You mentioned balanced budgets twice Mrs. Clinton, and the second time you did, you implied that it really ought to be our goal, “that instead of a balanced budget with surpluses that could have eventually paid off our national debt” Republicans gave us more tax cuts for the wealthy. May I offer you a referral, a policy one, to have James Galbraith come in for a chat about debts and deficits, and why nations in our structural position of trade deficits and being the world’s dominant currency, must run domestic deficits?
You rightly gave prominence to the threat from global warming, toned down to climate change, but I’m not sure that you are ready, in the sense of the Four Freedoms, to give it the same priority as defeating Fascism in the 1940’s, when we didn’t worry about balanced budgets while arming against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. I’ve got some difficult news to break to you, Mrs. Clinton. In the coming struggle against greenhouse gases, if we achieved the alternative energy dream you outlined, we still have 75% of the carbon dioxide generating problem left, since energy production and heating only account for 25% of the total, according to Richard Smith in his “Green Capitalism: the God that Failed.” And that’s why Naomi Klein named her book “This Changes Everything,” or more accurately, a whole lot else has to change to win this war. It will take all out mobilization and different lifestyles, perhaps even greater than those called for in the domestic sacrifices made during World War II. If you’re worried about how to fund this massive effort, there is no shortage of ways: a carbon tax, a tax on financial transactions, and then the modern development, building on what we did without the theory during the 1939-1945 period – have L. Randall Wray, who wrote a book about Modern Monetary Theory, have him in for a friendly chat, and be sure to check with Larry Summers to make sure it’s ok. Larry should have no problem with that, right Larry?
Or with Nomi Prins coming in to give you some ideas about co-operative or community banking, a very real alternative to the oligopoly of Wall Streets’ giants. You’re “down with that,” aren’t you Larry? Good.
When I heard you repeat the pledge to help Americans once again to “get ahead,” I couldn’t help but think of what the first President Bush told the Climate Summit in Rio, way back in 1992: “‘The American Way of Life is not negotiable.’” Yet if the rest of the impoverished nations are to achieve even the basic outlines of a decent life – notice I didn’t say a middle-class American way of life - then there is no way we can keep on with the lifestyle we currently impose upon Nature. There’s no other way to lay out the basic equation: to have even a fighting chance to keep CO2 below 450 ppm, to keep temperature changes at 2 degrees centigrade rise or less, then we have to mobilize at a World War II level - or greater. The dream of 350.org, to keep CO2 levels at that number, has already been lost when we passed 400 ppm on May 10, 2013, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. They began their measurements there in 1958 at 315 ppm. There is now a new form of “getting ahead”; it’s making sure that we don’t fall behind the carbon dioxide-greenhouse gas curve. And right now, we’re way behind that curve.
Now I’ve heard it declared that this speech was a left turn signal, and a populist course was set, and I suppose if you can ignore the history I’m relating here and the fact that the speech didn’t find its way to the Second Bill of Rights destination, you can foster that impression, or is it illusion? After all, to be fair it wasn’t very clear in the campaign of 1932 either, despite all that had happened to our nation since the crash of 1929, what FDR stood for. He was still partially walled in by the 19th century’s great carry-over obsession with balanced budgets, and indeed, William E. Leuchtenburg, the Dean of New Deal scholars, tells us that when Herbert Hoover came to see the newly elected President in early 1933, he tried to get him to sign a contract with “austerity,” locking him in to balanced budgets. FDR refused to sign it. The ghost of balanced budgets still haunted FDR, though, just less so than Hoover; as soon as it looked like the worst was over in 1937-1938, out went the public works appropriations, and in came another recession amidst the not-quite-cured Depression.
When I looked at an online image of the bust of FDR in Four Freedoms Park, the bust done by Jo Davidson (1883-1952) in 1933, which is a good one, I was shocked to see that it was literally walled in, on three sides. It was as if someone wanted to contain the New Deal’s meaning, the programs that came out of his head, unspoken confirmation of why official Washington DC cannot seem to imagine constructing a fitting monument to one of our greatest presidents.
Yet, in reality, I don’t think FDR as I’ve “come to know him,” or Eleanor, would have cared much for the monuments. But I do think, if they could shine a light upon us today, they would urge us to take up the task outlined in that Second Bill of Rights, the next step for our nation “to get ahead” in a better relationship with all our citizens, and on better terms with the Nature which sent us that early warning signal in the Dust Bowl, when the displaced soils from misplaced agricultural practices, and the obsessive American Dream to get ahead at all costs, “rained” down, May 11, 1934, on both parties in Washington, DC.
I have a few thoughts to pass along too, Mrs. Clinton, about how life out here in the mountains of Western Maryland fits in with you speech and its promises. Things are tough out here in Allegany and Garrett Counties, as they are in a good part of West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. In Allegany County where I live, they keep cutting staff and then hours in the county library system, part of the permanent austerity picture that has descended upon many state and local governments, who must balance their budgets by law. So it is in that spirit, to supplement this important but diminishing public resource, that I offer a few books for those readers who might want to learn more about the New Deal and its struggles.
For those further to the left than you want to go, Mrs. Clinton, readers can’t do better than Richard Pells Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years. Its third chapter – “The Search for Community” – as perpetual a quest in these United States as the American Dream itself, ought to be required reading over there in “The Next System Project,” where Gar Alperovitz and James Gustave Speth are thinking out loud and outside the existing political discourse. They’re thinking local, very local, seemingly having been driven from the national legislative body by its ideological stalemates. But Gus Speth knows about the Second Bill of Rights, he’s said we made a very large mistake in not pursuing it.
For a full appreciation of the achievements of the New Deal, set against what happened in other countries, and the domestic congressional limitations placed on its ability to do more, there is no better, cold-eyed and brutal, even, appreciation of the terrible dilemmas FDR faced in Congress, a Southern dominated Congress, than Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origin of Our Time. By 1937-1938, FDR was facing the shape of things to come, and he could go no further, blocked by the alliance between conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans.
Robert Leighninger Jr’s Long Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal, should, just by looking closely at the title, tell you that we will need a review of its lessons if we are ever to successfully combat global warming and enjoy full employment as a right, not a gift from when the private sector is feeling “in the mood.” The range of what the New Deal built and left to many future generations is breathtaking, and yet I would bet that even in academe, especially economic academe, many years if not decades will pass before anyone ever hears its title spoken.
Nick Taylor has a narrower focus, but tells the story of the WPA with a literary flourish in his American-Made, The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR put the Nation to Work. Just a few months ago, while stopped in traffic along East Main Street in Frostburg, that’s also the old National Road, Route 40, I noticed a large weathered plaque near an impressive stone retaining wall and elevated sidewalk. I couldn’t read it from the car, but I later went back on foot, and sure enough, it was from the project that the WPA funded, late 1930’s, containing the names of the local town and county officials. In Frostburg, you can’t do much building without retaining walls, everything slopes at a pretty steep angle, so this was fitting. And retaining walls are under constant pressure, but this one looks very much intact, built to last, as much of the WPA’s legacy has.
I can’t mention those two books, about public investments and the WPA, without citing James Galbraith’s call for, once again, national planning, which he does in his fine book The Predator State. America’s Center-Right Alliance, the one that gave us NAFTA style corporate planning and threatens more of the same with the TPP, offers us instead the “serendipity” direction of private market forces hoping, praying, for the “next big thing” - well, good luck to that approach if you want “shared prosperity” and something left of Nature to support it. “Planning,” there, I wrote it again Mrs. Clinton. Can you pronounce that word without clearing it with Larry? Planning can be as centralized and bureaucratic as its worst critics fear, or as democratic, inclusive and flexible as the democratic left has always dreamed. Those two famous programs from the New Deal, the WPA and the CCC had federal funding, oversight for corruption, and administration, but they carried out projects that came from state and local governments. So please don’t tell me it can’t be done. This is one of the reasons why the Republican Right wanted to bury the actual history of the New Deal. If you want to know a bit more about the history of the “pure” planning agencies inside the New Deal, Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform can fill you in.
Does anyone remember the symbol of the best of the old left, from Michael Harrington’s days, if not earlier, the fist and the rose, “Bread and Roses?” Well, Morris Dickstein comes close in his cultural history of the Great Depression: Dancing in the Dark. You can get lost in this book’s wonders, its tales of films, plays and literary works of all types. And the lives of the creators too, a reminder that there is always life outside of politics, told without at all diminishing the crucial role of politics in our hoped for democracy. What was our national cultural production saying at a time when the American Dream stopped functioning, leaving many citizen’s numb, directionless? That’s what the book is about, I’m on my third time through, drawn by its coverage of the Fitzgerald’s boom and bust, Steinbeck’s fable, and women authors now placed back on the national stage.
And now for an invitation, which I am in no formal position to offer, please understand, let’s be very clear about that. But somehow, given the context out here in Frostburg, and Cumberland, the “Twin Cities” of Allegany County, Maryland, though ten miles apart, and with fracking the major issue along with the missing jobs (and newly found drug trade) in an old coal mining and manufacturing area, and with Frostburg University doing good work in many things green, and seeming to me to stand for, by its programs, good faculty and striving student body, something very much in the spirit of your speech…it makes much sense to me for you, Mrs. Clinton, to come out and give a major ecological-economic speech.
I say that because Maryland has just passed a two year moratorium bill to hold up fracking for natural gas, and the cutting edge to stop the onslaught was led by green businesses, most of them small ones in agriculture, vineyards and wineries, green tourism and recreational resorts. Local recycling in all its ramifications, farm to restaurant table, with Frostburg Grows linking the city to the college food service and forest restoration. You can see the beginnings, actually more than that, of a new green economy out here, but we are short of capital, public and private. Fracking’s impacts threaten this progress, and to add to the cruelty, Maryland is going ahead with a huge export facility for that gas at Cove Point, also a very unpopular direction. I have written in anger and alarm about the program you initiated, in late 2011, the new energy “planning” section at the State Department, “The Bureau of Energy Resources,” seeking to weaponize our natural gas for use in the new Cold War with Russia. That’s a new Cold War that will not have a happy ending for any of the participants.
That made me think also of the old Cold War when a certain famous Prime Minister went, in March of 1946, to a little known small college town in Missouri to deliver a major speech. That’s how I came to think of Frostburg and fracking, the outlines of our new green economy, and the potential for a major speech. Out here, many of us see natural gas as a diversion and perhaps much worse, an obstacle to stopping global warming.
I think that such a setting gives you a great opportunity to come out and clarify things, and to show your colors in deep Republican territory, in two counties that went for McKinley, not Bryan in 1896. Coxey’s Army marched through here in the spring of 1894, protesting the hard times of the first Gilded Age. It passed through Frostburg and Cumberland in its long journey from Ohio, along the old National Road, on its way to the nation’s capital to make its case for public works to relieve unemployment. Its leader was a small businessman himself, but he had a new and very different notion of government than that proclaimed by Democratic President Grover Cleveland, in 1887, when he vetoed a bill appropriating $10,000 so that draught stricken Texas farmers could buy seeds, stating that “‘the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people.’”
Coxey wanted to deliver his speech on the steps of the nation’s Capitol, but existing laws said that tactic threatened too much direct democracy, and so he spent a month in jail. Reading about this in Benjamin F. Alexander’s new account, Coxey’s Army: Popular Protest in the Gilded Age, reminded me of the recent attempt by a postal worker to deliver his message about the pollution flood of private money in our politics, a drop in by a brave man in a little helicopter. Official Washington obsessed about the security ramifications, not the message or the citizen’s frustration. The reaction wasn’t too different, a hundred and twenty one years later, than the official reaction to Coxey’s long march.
And speaking of citizen frustrations, our two counties of Western Maryland are formally part of the Appalachian Regional Commission, founded in 1965, and federally funded. Its main goal was to bring the portions of the 13 states which form its geographical basis up to the national averages of income and infrastructure. But my sense is that it now has suffered the fate of so many previous efforts, that it has become part of the political status quo, which is not a healthy place to be in 2015. And the federal appropriation for the entire operation was about $64 million in 2014, just $5 million per state. I think its time has passed, and in this morning’s paper (The Cumberland Times-News) I read that West Virginia now leads the nation in drug over-dose deaths, surpassing New Mexico at 600 per year. The harsh reality on the ground, the intensity of the drug problem, tells me that it surpasses the intensity of the “ARC,” if it ever had any. It needs a new mission and a new set of goals, something more akin to the passions of the early TVA from the New Deal, but now focused on alternative energy, not dam building, ecological restoration, and a green tourism economy. And, as I hope I’ve made clear earlier in this “essay,” bringing Appalachia up to Montgomery County economic standards under the new climate and ecological imperatives would be a contradiction of terms – and mission.
I wish you and your campaign well, even though I’ve already given Bernie Sanders ten dollars, and Frostburg doesn’t quite yet have the same contribution reputation as the zip code for Potomac, MD. But it does offer a very good opportunity for you to come out and tell us more about what you meant in Four Freedoms Park and what it might mean for us, and for a green New Deal for our nation, and our region.
And if you need a place to stay, just give me a call at ... I’m the property manager at ... a good green renovated house, ½ of it for rent, just a few hundred feet from the college campus. It has good views of the mountains. Nearby, the last of the surface coal operations can still be seen, contesting with ridgeline wind turbine “farms,” posing the question, if not yet the answer, of where we are headed.
Bill Neil
Frostburg, MD