Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Introduction:
What are we to say of a great nation, the wealthiest the modern world has ever seen, that can no longer dream of, much less enact, “big things,” even when the world’s leading scientific body, and indeed this nation’s own scientific assessments emphatically declare that what must be done has no precedent in terms of scope and urgency? And will require vast changes in economic arrangements as well, the economic now being inseparable from the ecological.
What are we to say of this great nation which can no longer protect its own citizens from mass murder with battlefield grade firearms, not even its elementary school children, some of whom now carry Kevlar armored back packs as a last resort?
What are we to say of one of the world’s oldest legislative bodies, where the winners of its elections are denied any chance to enact their programs based on fear of the precedents set by the successful New Deal legacy from the 1930’s: that success might be appreciated and remembered by its citizens, so enactments must be denied at all costs, resulting in complete legislative paralysis? Or, more generously, where the deepest held values about the economy and proper role of government are as wide and incompatible as in the failed institutions in Western Europe in the 1930’s?
What are we to say of this great nation when the most watched HBO series, for eight years or so, Game of Thrones, features what one insightful cultural critic called a Hobbesian worldview, with its “war of all against all”? Fintan O’Toole went on to write that “at its most basic level, Game of Thrones is a far-right fantasia. Its apparent world view is the one that is taken for granted in far-right thinking: that there is no such thing as society, only a crudely Darwinian struggle for existence and domination in which one must kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved. The vision would not be out of place in Mein Kampf and it informs (if that is not too flattering a word) the rantings of every white nationalist psychopath.” You are invited to visit the full piece by O’Toole: www.irishtimes.com/…
What are we to say, of this “Epic for our Times” when it presents itself wrapped in a pastiche of pseudo Middle Age trappings, complete with magic dragons and face shifting personae which cannot give us any clue into how its society and its power institutions run? In other words, an Epic for Our Times totally absent on advice about our own power structures. Its final episode didn’t offer much beyond hope for a “good” King or Queen. Wouldn’t an Epic on Weimar Germany or the American 1850’s, sliding towards Civil War, been a bit more on target? Well, yes, but of course that’s why fantasy loves the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones was not an exception in mood: I found the same “Hobbesian” bleakness in the series that ran contemporaneously alongside it: the Walking Dead; Breaking Bad; Boardwalk Empire; Black Sails; Spartacus (these two at least had egalitarian themes);Outlander, and the Handmaidens.
Does this sound like a setting, or an “Age” — where a few tweaks to the Clinton-Obama legacy can meet the demands of our time, and let us try to name that time: the Age of Inequality, the Age of the Sixth Extinction, the Age of Mass Shootings...of the looming next Super Power about to displace us, China?
Which reminds me of the best course I took during my undergraduate days at Lafayette College in the late 1960’s. It was on Revolution, and taught by a charismatic old white man with a British accent, George Heath, the best college lecturer I ever heard. Dr. Heath was not a revolutionary, and he demanded a lot: an essay on each of the major Revolutions we studied: the English, the French, the American, the Russian, the Chinese and the Cuban. And then one grand long paper at the end, “pick your own.” My point in mentioning this now is not to toss Revolutionary rhetoric or fears around; the term has become a bit too casual on the left, although I suppose it’s fair to say that the scope of what is in the Green New Deal Resolution could qualify as a peaceful one in the making. No, I’m raising this old course of mine — I still have my copy of Crane Brinton’s classic on the theme, first published in 1938, “The Anatomy of Revolution” ...because I think the most useful thing in the course was how the struggling old regimes, the Ancien Regimes, could not meet the needs of their times, and offer the leadership and scope of changes which the circumstances demanded.
I think FDR sensed that history too, and, quoting a British poet in his second Inaugural Address in January of 1937, a quote which I have never heard before, said that “’Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.’” (thanks to Douglas Brinkley in “Rightful Heritage.”)
For ten years I’ve been reading about what the New Deal did and didn’t do, and how it might inspire our time to rise to its great challenges. When I was asked to address a gathering of young interns participating in Congressman Jamie Raskin’s (D-MD, D-8) Democracy Summer, I was going to, among other things, leave them with a reading list to take home. Instead, it turned into something more, with a lot of my heart and soul and head in it…wrestling with the works reviewed, because so much is as stake, and so much isn’t being discussed, out here in Western Maryland, Trump country, or in the mainstream outlets.
And giving twenty or so candidates one minute speeches and 15 second replies to the issues of our age...is a travesty of full democratic debate, a shallow illusion. I learned a lot more about Kamala Harris in Dana Goodyear’s long article in the New Yorker — “First Person” (in the July 22, 2019 print edition) than I did even at her brightest moment on stage in grilling Joe Biden. I kept wondering if she would ever say something substantial in the article about escaping from our current economic assumptions, but there was no discussion of the political economy whatever, no mention of the difficulty we must face down in fully integrating (yes, a different form of “integration,” probably harder than “busing”) economics with ecology.
Best to you all, and I hope my idea of an adequate “Compass in the Storm” provides if not a full course correction, at least some decent “readings.”
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD
If you find the opening book in this essay, the primer on FDR and the New Deal not to your liking, then by all means proceed to Donald Worster’s 1979 work, “Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930’s.” It won the Bancroft Prize in 1980, and was written by the person many consider to be the Dean of ecological historians. No book about Nature that I have ever read so closely integrates economics with ecology, (and history) specifically, the values of American capitalism as writ large in our ranchers and farmers, and which so bluntly describes the results: the destruction of Nature.
In this case, the focus is on the Dust Bowl region of parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. The author’s first 20 years of life were spent in Kansas, the epicenter of one of the three greatest ecological disasters in human history, according to one historian cited in the Introduction, after the deforestation of China’s uplands in the 3rd millennium BC and the overgrazing of the dry Mediterranean lands beginning in classical times. It is a window into our times and troubles as well, focused on the destruction of the soils and their original grassland cover, the interaction between capitalist grazing/farming practices and the long known, but ignored climate reality: West of the 100th Meridian, there is not much rainfall and droughts come in regular cycles of varying intensity. No matter to the striving ranchers who first overgrazed this area in the later decades of the 19th century, supplemented by international capital flows from an earlier era of globalization, and then the farmers who ploughed the soil from fence row to fence row to maximize profits, long term viability be damned. And damned it was, these practices coupled with an epic but predictable drought giving rise to dust storms so powerful and awfully majestic that they dumped a rain of soil, dust and haze on the Northeast in May of 1934, right in the midst of Washington hearings on how to help the farmers of the region.
The power and optimism of the American Dream written into farming practices, leading to monoculture and reckless acreage conversions driven by high market prices, results in a form of economic mesmerism, or, if you prefer, delusion, where the “rain will follow the plough.” It was a prelude performance of the science denying wing of American politics today. Even as the economic and ecological collapse brings the region to its knees, resulting in heavy out migration (the Okies, the Joads) and copious farm foreclosures, the farmers have a hard time adapting the new practices which the New Deal agriculture experts urge upon them. One of which is a FDR favorite: planting a vast “Shelterbelt” of trees running from the Canadian border to Mexico, just to the region’s east, to break the power of the wind and help keep the soils in place. Even as the New Deal remedies lead Kansas to vote against its Republican native son, Alf Landon, haplessly running against the full flood tide of the remedies in the 1936 Presidential election, Worster is very clear: the outlook hasn’t changed much even today. The long running “faith” of the farmers who tough it out is capitalist individualism, not the paler alternative offered by the new agriculture science or the Mennonite farmers’ practices nearby, of multi-crops and gentle soil treatment, guided more by self-sufficiency aims than the gyrations of world markets.
It’s a powerful, unforgettable tale of capitalism’s deep roots in the American psyche, clearly a near fanatical secular faith, and its willingness to rip nature up by its roots in pursuit of short term profits, denying the obvious realities blowing all around them in the terrible dust storms. As the “Afterword” reminds us, written 25 years later (I have the 2004 paperback), the farmers who stayed cope with the realities of a basically dry climate by dramatically “mining” the famous Ogallala aquifer, something they couldn’t do very well in the first decades of the 20th century, but can now with very powerful pumps.
This is a sobering tale - culturally, ecologically and economically - for those of us who are calling for, and supporting a Green New Deal in 2019. Yet citizens did respond at the polls to the significant remedies the New Deal offered: money and better practices. FDR carried all the Dust Bowl states in 1936 and I will leave readers with an upbeat selection from Worster’s Chapter entitled “If it Rains.”
When the President went to Amarillo on 11 July 1938, in his only venture into the Dust Bowl itself, the city assembled the largest massed marching band in the history of the nation to greet him, thousands lined the streets, and mirabile dictu, rain began to fall shortly before he arrived. As he stood hatless in the downpour, uttering genial platitudes in his clear ringing style, a woman in the audience exclaimed: ‘I am ready to make him king, anybody who can smile like that.’ So warm a reception was bound to cool, of course, and by 1940 portions of the dust belt began to defect, reverting to their traditional political views. But throughout the dirty thirties it was all New Deal country.
Now the dominant themes of the vast FDR-New Deal scholarship have been focused on politics, programs and economic philosophy, if that is not too decisive a word to describe a President torn between a Keynesianism yet to be fully born, and the oppressive 19th century legacy of free trade and balanced budgets. But our times demand something fuller, and an under reported side of FDR is now getting its due. Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement, published in 2007 and written by Neil M. Maher, who teaches in several NJ colleges, puts the work of the famous, and popular, Corps in a new light. It did much good to prevent soil erosion, revive denuded forest landscapes, build roads, water resources and construct new state and federal parks, but its “wise use” philosophy, melding conservation and economic utility, including recreation, ran afoul of the militant rising wing of the national conservation movement, represented by Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall, among others. They gave the preservation of Nature, and Wilderness areas a higher priority than the more commercial aspects of New Deal conservation efforts, especially the tourism expectations of the expanding national parks and monuments systems.
The tensions between those two poles, preservation and economic utility, always present in FDR himself, are given fuller treatment in a remarkably comprehensive look at FDR’s conservation thinking , brought to us by a major historian, Douglas Brinkley, in his 2016 work “Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America.” This is a work of grand reorientation away from the traditional FDR-New Deal themes, revealing FDR’s love of trees and birds, his permanent roots in his beloved rural Hudson Valley, New York, and indeed, his entire gentleman farmer orientation. He understood industrial urban America to be sure; however, by his true nature, his inner most leanings were towards farms and forests. For anyone who has worked in the conservation movement in this and the century just past, the book is a marvelous resource covering all the struggles of competing philosophies and personalities which shaped the protections of our national conservation lands. If FDR’s heart lay with conservation it often too had some practical use, as on his Springwood estate on the Hudson River, Dutchess County New York, which most of us know as Hyde Park, with selected timber harvesting and Christmas trees raising. But he had an economic depression to combat, which required, in the eyes and demands of the citizens, that human welfare come first. Yet we’ve never had a president who did so much for the conservation of nature by his legislative actions, and when blocked there, by the exercise of the substantial Executive Powers of the office. So yes, ecology and economics were in tension then, as they so often have been, and even as our time and the Green New Deal Resolution demonstrate. It’s all there in the very concept of a “just transition” struggling to be born, getting off fossil fuels: meeting the needs of displaced workers, communities and yes, most likely, and partially, the demands of stranded investors in a grand write down of old investments in the wrong resources, with some salvage price.
This book made for a great summer read for me, so full of the famous and obscure names and places in the history of American conservation, from Gifford Pinchot to Rosalie Edge (who saved Hawk Mountain in Kemble, PA, from the hawk hunters) to Ding Darling, a Republican conservationist, cartoonist and writer from Iowa. And many I did not know who played citizen activist roles in saving the now famous places. This is not a philosophical or intellectual work in style, but the substance is there, in the tensions between one of the great liberal Republican figures of American history, Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, battling it out for conservation and turf control with Henry Wallace at the Department of Agriculture. Wallace is usually seen as the liberal champion, the ally of the small farmer, but here he is at odds most of the time with the attempts to save “the land of America” for Nature, competing ideals at a time when both people and nature were pushed to the extremes of human abuse.
And human contradictions abound. As with FDR the Southern and Western water resource developer - dams, dams, dams - running as the Democratic VP candidate in 1920, his conservation side almost disappearing; most of the time in his Presidency he would side with Ickes and not the resource extractors: the timber barons, mining moguls and oil and gas extractors.
And then there is the aspect of FDR perhaps most neglected in my past readings : his ability to connect, often from his own manually controlled auto, with farmers at the roadside, talking weather (and what a decade of weather turbulence the 1930’s were…), soils and farm and forest practices, his values put on the line by his personal financial investments around Warm Springs Georgia, with the citizens responding, the looming issue of race not surfacing. And then there are his travels by boat all along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, in search of good fishing, relaxation…and the best coastal lands to preserve to save species.
If it is true that FDR was our greatest modern president, he is a figure difficult for undergraduates to understand; it’s taken me a long time to see the complexities and flaws in the man, his Machiavellian side, and his seeming human remoteness even to his closest aides. A man of personal charm and many masks. Yet the full human being, without illusions, comes forth in Brinkley’s work: not a saint, but a President who more than any other in our history, came the closest to integrating economics and ecology, limited by the best understandings of each in his time, which point us in the right direction today. His philosophy and policies don’t get us there all the way, not today, given the magnitude of the twin crises we now face, and have to solve in a decade, give or take a couple of years.
Yet no reservations: the compass for us, building on this great legacy, 1932-1945, is justly named “The Green New Deal.” Brinkley’s book, without using those terms, tells us why that is the correct compass bearing.
The Ecological Crisis - Beyond the Climate One:
It is there in the very first paragraph of the Green New Deal Resolution, fourteen pages long and introduced on February 7, 2019, mention of the U.N.”Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 C by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (October 2018) and our own Fourth National Climate Assessment the following month, the bad news of how little time we have to turn the direction around and limit the damage. They are alarming enough, stating that the effort and time frame to halt global warming are unprecedented in our human and national histories.
There is mention of ecosystems and biodiversity in the Resolution, on Page 9, but it is set in the context of what the Resolution addresses head-on: the Climate crisis. The broader causes of the alarming and rapid decline in Biodiversity, only partly intertwined with the Climate Crisis, is over the horizon. But not in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Yes, there is a lot of climate science in the book, and travels to the far corners of the globe to record this human generated great extinction, but the wider context of human impacts on nature go to land use, especially the fragmentation of habitats, introduced species, and the all- around pressures of our huge human population on Nature’s species’ abundance and diversity. We’re causing this latest great extinction event. Yet Kolbert’s work is not fully integrated in the way Worster’s is: the Index is replete with scientists, but there is little attention paid to our formal economic structures, much less the laser focus which Worster delivers on the impacts of the American Dream, how driven we are by competitive motivations, oblivious to impacts to Nature. Kolbert rounds out the scientific picture, but doesn’t deliver the withering critique of modern capitalism which Richard Smith does in his book “Green Capitalism: The God that Failed.” (2015). Here at https://www.academia.edu/26469863/Green_Capitalism_the_God_that_Failed
In fact, in looking over the Index of Kolbert’s book, what is striking is the absence of economics – no reference to Worster, or to Karl Polanyi, whose magisterial work from 1944, “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, ” proclaimed one of the earliest warning cries of what would happen to Society and Nature if unregulated capitalism was fully unleashed, free from other countervailing values which had historically held markets in check, subservient even, to other, deeper cultural ones.
And the alarms keep pouring in on the collapsing biodiversity front, insect collapses in the tropical forests, in Great Britain, in Germany…here is coverage of another comprehensive UN Report from this spring of 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/06/human-society-under-urgent-threat-loss-earth-natural-life-un-report - compiled by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (also known as IPBES).
And now, let’s turn to the economic side of the Green New Deal. Why, so many moderates and incrementalists have asked, are the Right to a job, the Right to Medical Care, the Right to Decent Housing and Education included in what is essentially an environmental crusade to limit Global Warming? Well, I hope the ground already covered in this essay helps explain that. If it hasn’t, here are two sources, an interview and an editorial, which hone in exactly on the why of the inclusion of “other” rights in the GND Resolution.
First, from the Director of the Living New Deal, Richard Walker, the artistically brilliant site that has kept alive the history and the intellectual legacy of the first New Deal, an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the Washington Post earlier this year: https://livingnewdeal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Nine-principles-that-should-guide-the-Green-New-Deal-The-Washington-Post.pdf
And here is the link to the website itself, where you can find an vast listing (15,000, with some to yet be archived) of most of the what the CCC and WPA built, state by state and category by category, including the wonderful murals in the public buildings: https://livingnewdeal.org/
Second, from Senator Edward Markey himself, co-author of the Resolution, in an interview with David Roberts, the reporter at Vox (and formerly with Grist) who, in my judgement, has the broadest command among reporters, of both the economics and the ecology of what has been placed on the national policy table: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/16/18306596/green-new-deal-climate-change-ed-markey
And here is Robert’s article (end of March, 2019) placing the Green New Deal in the dual context, ecology and the political economy, amidst the ideas which dominant our current economic public policy, such as it is, inevitably leading to a critique and overturn of Neoliberalism and addressing the question of “how will we pay for it.” It is an article rich with links to the Sunrise Movement, the think tanks behind the GND, and some of the key economists working on Modern Monetary Theory, like Stephanie Kelton and L. Randall Wray, who say we can afford it: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez I’m still waiting for Chris Cuomo to interview them.
And here is Robert’s response to the cautious Democratic centrists, like Speaker Pelosi, and Joe Biden, the incrementalists: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/3/28/18283514/green-new-deal-climate-policy
I think that one of Robert’s most resonant insights is in the way of a jibe that the Democratic Party suffers from “Stockholm Syndrome” - held hostage since 1980 to ideas of Neoliberalism dominated by the Republican Right and Libertarians. But it is more than a jibe. It echoes Keynes’ notion of a time lag between the ideas held in the present by policy makers, the political elites, dependent on older economic formulations from very different times – and inadequate to meet the pressing contemporary crises.
There is a looming crisis in the field of economics itself, evident since perhaps the Wall Street Panic of October 26, 1987, when the Dow plunged 22%, the largest ever in one market session. It was followed by the late 1990’s Asian and Russian crises and perhaps most revealingly for the presumptions of the profession, the implosion of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund advised and designed in good part by Nobel Laureates in Economics, some of the most sophisticated mathematically minded modelers of the age. It imploded in 1998 and had to be bailed out by a consortium of major banks under Federal Reserve guidance. Diagnosis: its models could not encompass the complexity and chaos, and yes, “innovations” in world financial markets, unleashed since the US went off the gold standard in August of 1971. Wikipedia has a basic summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management
This essay is not the place to give a full accounting of economic turbulence since the Dot-Com bubble burst of 2000-2001 and the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression – the Great Recession of 2007-2008 – the traumatic effects of which are still with us. Unfortunately, the general public, most of who still are misled by the guidance from mainstream centrists, like President Obama, who equate the family, “kitchen table” budgeting constraints with the very different federal situation, have been led into a fiscal dead end zone: we can’t afford anything big anymore. Contemporary mainstream economic talk presents that public with wildly incongruous facts and explanations. Unemployment is at a 50 year low and inflation rates are having trouble meeting the Federal Reserve’s targets – not enough of it. So why has the workforce participation number, especially for men, been so historically low, and why have the Federal Reserve studies found that 40-60% of the citizens don’t have the savings to meet a $400 financial emergency? And wages lagged so far behind the cost of living - which in areas that matter and hurt – housing, education, medical care and child care – seem to be on another planet from the official low “inflation” rate?
Of course the summary reality of the divergence between people’s lives and the Democratic Party Centrists can be found, staring at us in the 2016 election results: add the voters for Trump to those for Bernie Sanders, and to the statements from candidate Clinton on the state of the economy, and there you have two nations, divided by their experience and not far from FDR’s ringing phrase of “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” (From his Second Inaugural Speech, January of 1937) – to which we must now add wealth concentrated at the top at a level not seen since the 19th century’s Gilded Age, and the Roaring Twenties.
What to read then to best understand our coming economic crisis, the stark reality that should another 2007-2008 crisis strike, the likelihood of policy stalemate is again very high because no new economic understanding has emerged to empower solutions to the twin ecological and economic challenges laid out for us in the Green New Deal Resolution?
Modern Monetary Theory looms as the replacement, fits with neo-Keynesianism, but is anathema to the Center-Right and now, in addition, a stark new fact of economic power is standing astride the world stage - China, the new superpower, and the clash between the U.S. and this very old civilization seems almost inevitable. As Yanis Varouvakis, a professional economist and perhaps the leading public intellectual in Europe, whom I have called the “Churchill of the Left” has lamented, there is no functional international economic order to replace the New Deal liberal one erected at Bretton Woods in 1944 (it ended when the US went off gold in the 1970’s). In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, the void was filled by the US Federal Reserve, well beyond its mandated range of actions, which became the “lender of last resort” to the whole world, and probably was the deciding factor in preventing another Great Depression. As the world’s leading financial journalist, Martin Wolf, points out in his 2014 book “The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned – and Have Still to Learn from the Financial Crisis,” core assumptions of Neoliberalism failed abjectly – financial de-regulation and the shrunken range of governmental fiscal policy. And monetary policy alone, no matter how skillful, cannot close the gap. Neoliberals still cling to perhaps the most religious of their vows: to reform labor markets, to make the average worker perform longer for less, in essence, precisely the policy bound to play into the hands of the nationalist Right, the Yellow Vest protests in France against Macron being exhibit number one.
In reality, however, Neoliberalism stumbles on, a shaky set of economic assumptions not ready to deal with the next crisis, or the one here now.
Let’s not forget the emergence of attempted grand theory, Thomas Piketty’s monumental “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” which appeared in France in 2013 and the US in 2014, to great acclaim and debate. Its been accused of harboring the ghost of Marx. At its core, Piketty marshalled the historical evidence that the equilibrium trajectory of capitalism is to accumulate earnings, rates of return, for its owners which have, through the centuries exceeded the GDP growth rate. So 5% to capitalists, compared to growth rates which have averaged 1-3% over the centuries, usually in the lower end of that range. It is, in good part, his answer, explanation for the rise of Inequality in our time, surely one of the leading competitors for the “Name our Age” contest, alongside the Age of Extinction, or if you prefer, the Anthropocene, and the Age of Fracture.
Of course Piketty’s work carries the whiff of the old Marxist inevitability of capitalist crisis, and Piketty further inflames the contented political center of our time by the assertion that it was only in response to outright calamities in the 20th century, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, that the countervailing public policies were put in place to tame the inherently anti-egalitarian gravitational field of capitalism, including the ones Bretton Woods tamed, trade and currency problems (but not trade surpluses, such as Germany and China are running. Keynes had an answer, which was rejected by the US.) The result of making banking boring, empowering labor, high wages alongside high income and estate taxes, were the Trente Glorieuses, the three decades from 1945-1975, when it appeared that the ghosts of the Great Depression had been finally put to rest.
My heart, and my head, grieve to tell you that in terms of the dual front presented in the Green New Deal Resolution, the ecological leads in the mind of the public ahead of the economic. The level of public debate, the concepts in the minds of the man and woman in the street are not comforting to anyone to the left of the Clinton’s and President Obama, who repeatedly made the very false analogy between the federal budget and the family budget. Yet I take hope from a deeper gut level sense in the average citizen that something is terribly wrong, something that the two good numbers on unemployment and inflation don’t capture, demonstrated in the urgency to go populist, left and right in 2016, and the current prominent standing of Senators Sanders and Warren amidst the enormous field of competitors. That and the responses to the programs put forth by the left on health care, education, climate change and the minimum wage temper this lack of basic tools to grasp the very political nature of the economy. Reality can cut both ways: some individuals respond to the sense of things gone terribly wrong by embracing bold course corrections, as with Senators Sanders and Warren; others by seeking safety in old familiar harbors, like Joe Biden.
So here are recommendations, brief “briefs” for a few key books, and recent publications, essays and videos, to make the case for a new economic vision, pointing towards the broad values and policy directions (quite different than the policies themselves, still in the making, to put it mildly) in the Green New Deal Resolution.
Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,” was written mostly in exile in Vermont in 1944 and researched earlier in England. Polanyi was a refuge from the Nazis and from his beloved Vienna, where, if it is not stretching it too much to say, he worked for the equivalent of today’s Financial Times. So he was no economic fool, and already was at odds with the “Austrian School” of Von Mises and Von Hayek. If we have lived in the Neoliberal Era for the past 30 years, since Reagan, (its roots going back at least to the founding of the Mt. Pelerin Society in 1947) what was the “liberal” part that preceded it? “Liberal” in 19th century meanings needs a translation today: in contemporary terms, it is conservative-libertarian economics. Well, that’s the heart of Polanyi’s passionate and detailed story of the rise of Market Fundamentalism, in its full religious-like intensity, which governed the 19th century economic world view based on free markets (constructed by government, not part of a “natural order”), free trade and a solid currency standard – linked to gold and backed up internationally by the British navy. China hasn’t forgotten that last part, let me assure you.
It all came apart, that long 19th century, between 1914 and 1929. The heart of the policy gridlock in the Twenties and Thirties, in the legislative bodies in Western Europe, and in the US after 1938, has its roots here in the disputed role of the state, its ability to spend, and, most importantly, spend for whom, and the form of the currency ties. Polanyi was a mild socialist, good social democrat, if that helps. The only cries of pain louder in his account than those from the working classes in the 1840’s came from the concentration camps in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and from Nature, being torn apart by the full power of the human economic juggernaut.
These enormous powers recognized by Polanyi are the same human powers which die hard conservatives like Rush Limbaugh deny could have equal power to unleash global warming harm to that Nature. Awe struck in their admiration for “Creative Destruction”, “Innovation,” IT and AI, the powers of the private entrepreneur and the private marketplace, these ideologues then plead powerlessness in the human ability to harm Nature. It’s a very unbalanced equation of power proclaimed, and power denied. True willful blindness.
And it is the gap between these two views which gives rise to my pessimistic side, the side that has two running historical analogies, one with Polanyi’s focus on the rise of Fascism from the failures of capitalism, the Weimar story, and the other, my own formulation, in which the U.S. is well into a modern version of the 1850’s. In other words, sliding down the slope to a Civil War, with the shooting mostly done so far by the fire power in the hands of unhappy individuals. If it was John Brown who told the nation “what time it was” with his raid on the Harper’s Ferry Federal Arsenal in October of 1859 (see Henry Mayer’s “All On Fire,” his biography of William Lloyd Garrison) it is American “shooters” who are tolling the bell for us today, pronouncing upon a society so paralyzed by its ideological divisions, real ones, that it can’t act to protect its own citizens: grammar school children, high school and college students, religious worshipers, concert goers. The wealthiest and most powerful nation in modern history can’t stop the murder of its own citizens. The CCC “boys” would seem to have one answer, since almost all the shooters are men, mostly young men.
James K. Galbraith, a left-liberal and explicit non- socialist, wrote the prelude to the stalemates of the Obama era, to the Republican hypocrisy of balanced budget stances since Reagan, in his 2008 book “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.” That’s a provocative title with clear implications for our everyday understanding of how the political economy actually works. Galbraith writes that the gap in the US between official economic pieties and actual functioning is as wide as it was in the land of our great rival, in the late days of the Soviet Union. I recently re-read parts of this book, maybe my third or fourth time around, prompted in part by the HBO mini-series on Chernobyl, the epic nuclear meltdown in 1986, a catastrophe that Galbraith compared to our American institutional fumbling-dysfunction on Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina was a real world demonstration that the US was unable, thanks to Neoliberalism, to do anything large and humane anymore. Let me sum it up by saying that Galbraith declared, long before the notions of climate emergency, climate mobilization and the Green New Deal, that without a revival of national planning, deeply informed by public participation, there is no hope in grappling with Global Warming. And the fact that our de-regulated markets have led to a form of predator dominated markets – think fossil fuels and the online world – and, in some eyes, the career of Trump himself, well…it’s a great introduction to the current state of affairs and the inability to get beyond it. And it’s written for the average informed citizen, not economic specialists.
Because the campaign to stem Global Warming has increasingly been led, in its most dramatic public forms, by young activists, like the Sunrise Movement and Greta Thunberg in Europe, I thought it would be appropriate to choose, from among a spate of recent books from Yanis Varouvakis (a friend and colleague of James Galbraith), one he wrote for young people, directed to his own daughter, who was fourteen or so at the time he wrote it in 2013, with the English translation not appearing until 2016. It’s entitled “Talking to my Daughter About the Economy; or how Capitalism works – and doesn’t Work.” It’s a book which weaves ecological analogies into economics, how the failures at the international level of the surplus trading nations to “recycle” their gains and savings into productive investments in the lagging deficit nations of the world is bad policy, like the breakdowns in the energy and carbon re-cycling in the natural world. I highly recommend it, although his other works are commendable, and readable, as well: The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (2011); “And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s Crisis and America’s Economic Future (2016); “Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment,” (2017).
Some reviewers have compared that last book to a modern day version of Keynes’ “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” (1919), laden with foreboding of a Europe trapped in German financial austerity notions, which date back, yes, all the way to the catastrophic inflation of the early 1920’s, the Weimar days again, another consequence of the extractive Versailles Treaty. It’s an intellectual auto-biography of his role in the fatal, for Greece, negotiations with the orthodox powers of the European Union, which amply displays the many hats Varoufakis can wear: professional economist, able writer and speaker, shrewd negotiator, and in my opinion, the closest we have to a genuine Renaissance Man in the Age of Specialization, indeed, hyper-specialization, which is one of our main problems. (See Age of Fracture, Daniel T. Rogers.).
It was a pleasant discovery to see the serious resources, economic books, listed at the New Consensus think tank’s website, here: https://newconsensus.com/reading-list/ What surprised me were the familiar names from some comparatively open minded, yet mainstream economic thinkers, like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, whose work we have mentioned. And Mariana Mazzacato’s ground breaking book from 2015, praised by Wolf, “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Myths.” It helps begin the long overdue effort to see with clearer eyes how much national governments have shaped, pioneered even, in risky sectors, not just research, in the private economy – and gotten back very few of the just rewards for their investments. She and her graduate students’ work - on who did what in the rise of the giant Apple - is eye opening.
If there is to be a serious intellectual and institutional challenge to Neoliberalism, it is going to come from somewhere between Ellen Brown’s work on public banks, and Stephanie Kelton and L. Randall Wray’s work on Modern Monetary Theory. Boiled down to a crude oversimplification, MMT says that we can afford the major programs in the Green New Deal, taking the four major ones, and handle them with the same tools and allocations that the Federal Reserve bailed out the financial world with in 2008 and beyond, that Japan is using today with deficits and debts which dwarf our own, and that our own government used to pay for the huge costs of World War II.
So here we go with the links:
Ellen Brown: https://ellenbrown.com/2018/12/17/this-radical-plan-to-fund-the-green-new-deal-just-might-work/
L. Randall Wray’s working paper at the Levy Institute, from May of 2019: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_931.pdf
Stephanie Kelton’s “presidential address” (at Stony Brook College, SUNY), given in October of 2018, so just before the public wave of the Green New Deal first broke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9nP-BKa3M
There is much in motion in the US, and around the world, increasingly sophisticated challenges to mainstream economics, accounts of which rarely reach the average citizen, a network like CNN being a prime example, very close minded on matters of political economy. MMT is perhaps the leading challenger, and probably stands about in the same proportion that Keynes and Keynesianism did during the Great Depression, rising, but hardly yet close to an even footing with the lingering 19th century orthodoxy.
The World Economics Association, launched in 2011, now has more than 13,000 members, including me, late in this year’s voluntary dues, and is the world’s second largest professional organization for economists, but has a policy of admitting voices, like my own, from outside the profession. Among its better known members are James Galbraith, Dean Baker, Herman Daly, Michael Hudson, Anne Mayhew, Peter Radford, Richard Parker, Dani Rodrik, Immanuel Wallerstein and L. Randall Wray in the US; Jayeti Ghosh in India; Richard Koo in Japan; Henry C.K. Liu in China (whom I used to read regularly during the Great Financial Crisis); Jacques Sapir in France; Heiner Flassbeck in Germany; and Edward Fullbrook, Geoffrey Hodgson, Ann Pettifor, Robert Skidelsky and Jamie Morgan in Great Britain.
A very interesting book, an outright challenge to the reigning sovereigns, has just arrived in the mail. It’s by Edward Fullbrook, an American ex-pat and British academic. And in his usual quiet way, he’s titled it, humbly, as “Market-Value: Its Measurement and Metric.” Its claims are boldly and logically laid out like a geometry theorem in the first 20 pages. They are that the entire edifice of macro and micro models is built on an unexamined set of measurements and metrics, market value itself, a most unscientific Trojan horse which threatens the castle of modern economic assumptions. And what is more, Fullbrook claims he has worked out a sounder basis for grasping market value.
A light went on for me on my second morning’s breakfast reading. It was about valuing “real estate,” surely an important aspect of a very significant market’s products, land and housing. It reminded me, in a flash, of what I was told about real estate “appraising” during my environmental career in NJ, as I worked to oppose two very one-sided land-swaps, bent towards the private sector drivers, to swap their parcels in exchange for public lands. To make a couple of years of work boil down to a sentence or two, I was told, as I increasingly shook my head over the land valuations of the appraisals involved here, which in my view over-valued the offered private land and undervalued (not hard, it was zoned for parkland) the public, that real estate appraising was an “art,” not a science. That estimation was accompanied by a tone which suggested the great flexibility of art. My recollection went to the heart of the early going in Fullbrook’s work: if such an important part of market-value was based on potentially quite subjective Art- like appraisals, and such valuations are writ large across the many markets that make up GDP, how “scientific” is the whole modern field of economics?
Meanwhile, economists appear at the elbows of all the major governments in the late 20th and early 21st century, as powerful and mysterious, in reality, as the seers and entrails gazers were for ancient Rome and Greece. At this point, I can’t say more, but stay tuned, the gauntlet has been thrown down, although I doubt it will be Krugman or Summers who will pick it up. Anyone who challenges the basis of economic modelling is fishing for big trouble, and doubtless Fullbrook will catch it. Or be ignored, the way MMT has been until just recently, when the commentary has turned outright insulting. Come to think of it, how does Wall Street place a sure market-value today on natural gas and oil reserves, as the Green New Deal threatens to “strand” all those market assets? Maybe I will find Fullbrook’s answer in later chapters.
Fullbrook’s attempt here at solving the riddle of market value reminds me of the broader difficulty of merging economic and ecological thinking, of fully integrating the two value systems. I have cited Donald Worster as having done the best job of that in Dust Bowl. Even Douglas Brinkley’s lengthy effort in “Rightful Heritage” strains at times to hold the two halves together in FDR’s actions. For example, the crucial Second Bill of Rights doesn’t mention Nature’s Rights. Those working at the border crossings of the two fields, like Herman E. Daly of the University of Maryland, must reconcile a Gross Domestic Product, GDP that doesn’t account for the damage economic processes and products extract from Nature; on the positive side, those trying to place an economic value on Nature’s services to humans run the risk of monetizing “everything,” undermining the concept that the health of nature and our dependence on it was here first, the foundation for the evolution of our now “out of control” species. Yet here now are the financial and human casualty lists from the fires, hurricanes and floods, demanding that we finally acknowledge the grand relationship between economy and ecology, more than two centuries after the scope of the impacts have come home to roost with a vengeance. And I’m going to leave out a topic which deserves its own essay, but is surfacing more and more in the debate: what will the course changes outlined in the Green New Deal Resolution mean for the American standard of living, does it have to go down in material terms, or can we live just as well in new processes and lifestyles, or perhaps better if we include broader metrics of human happiness?
And here are a few major pieces, not books but some closing in on book length, works which help close the open loops in our understanding of the political economy, ecology and economics.
First, a direct link to the Green New Deal Resolution Itself: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf
Next, The Victory Plan from the group Climate Mobilization; long, well-written and a good template for what ought to have taken place in a public, official forum had we gotten a Select Standing Committee on the Green New Deal to take testimony and write an actual plan. No one has all the answers, but many of the necessary pieces and the arguments between the various pieces, the trade-offs and re-organizations necessary to get a working plan up and running, are found here: Bravo! Some of the federal agencies reorganization suggestions, and those for new agencies, remind me of the long New Deal struggle to create a Department of Conservation, out from under the intense economic shading of the Department of Agriculture. https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/victory-plan
Did we really come close, in the decade 1979-1989, to getting a bi-partisan consensus on stopping climate change? Nathaniel Rich’s long essay in the NY Times Magazine says we did. I think he underestimates how powerful the prevailing currents were inside the Republican Party during this period, moving Right, not to the center, and not anxious to compromise or accommodate governmental power to address the crisis. Yes there were the last few liberal Republicans, but the arm wrestling inside the George H.W. Bush administration was won by John Sununu, not William O’Reilly, or James Baker, who revealingly backed down from a confrontation with the New Hampshire conservative over our stance on international climate proposals. Instead, the President told the world that the American Standard of Living was not up for negotiation. Again, front and center, the confrontation between economics and ecology, and in the old balance scales, the economy wins and Nature loses.
I remember Sununu as being as a very stark warm up act for the rise of the Tea Party, and I think Rich has confused which are major, and which are minor notes in his ideological assessment. I still see Sununu as an anti-Tax and anti-Regulatory fanatic. Other than this call, which is no small matter, it’s still one very informative essay on who was at the table, early in the saga, many names which I think will be unknown to you, and arguably, supplying more details to support legal action against the leading oil and gas company, one flip-flopping on the science findings and the corporate compass settings. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
I want to close with a sobering reminder, the most difficult reading of all the works I have listed in this essay. That’s Daniel T. Rogers The Age of Fracture, which won the Bancroft Prize in 2012. It’s not where I want to be. I want to be with the Second Bill of Rights, and the Green New Deal Resolution offering the most universal solutions to the economic and ecological crises of our Age, and its fragmented identities and ideological politics. But if it turns out we don’t succeed, nowhere are the reasons better laid out than in The Age of Fracture.
It’s a difficult work, despite my having read it twice now. Difficult because it examines many academic disciplines to see how we have come to the evaporation of faith in public power, that we once had in the post New Deal era, through the Cold War, until the Vietnam War. That war eroded the secular faith in Progress by progressive government; and the 1970’s economic turmoil, especially the failure to solve stagflation, threw the Keynesian faith on the defensive until 2008.
I was impressed not so much by the opening chapter, “Losing the Words of the Cold War,” but by the second, “The Rediscovery of the Market,” what I would call Market Fundamentalism. That core societal wide power, which Piketty gives full justice and more to in his “Capital in the 21st Century,” the much contested foundation stones of Western material life, dissolves in theory, and in the imaginations of leaders in so many other fields. That is what worried a sophisticated thinker like David Harvey: in their attempts to pin down what they feel are truer and more fundamental sources of power: “Race and Social Memory”; “Gender and Certainty” (ending in uncertainty); “the Little Platoons of Society” (the appeals to fading civic organizations from the 1950’s…”) the social sciences have forgotten the material base of the economy, who owns it, and who holds sway over the national and state legislatures.
To me, the full tragedy of the massive ground covered in the book came in the author’s recognition of four conferences which ended in discord or worse. They were, in chronological order: a Gary, Indiana Conference on forging a “common black political agenda” in 1972; “dueling” women’s conferences in Houston in 1977, with Phyllis Schlafly holding her counter conference “across town”; a Barnard College one on “The Politics of Sexuality” in 1982; and a DeKalb, Illinois labor conference in 1984 “on the future of labor history.” Rogers comments on that labor conference that “Mari Jo Buhle was trying to think through the consequences of Helene Cixous’s aphorism: ‘Everything is word, everything is only word.’ None of the male labor historians…seemed to have any understanding of what she was talking about.”
What can overcome such centrifugal forces today? It remains to be seen. It was the nature of the Pearl Harbor attack in December of 1941 to remove doubts and hesitations about going “all in” to World War II, aided by Germany’s brash declaration of war. For me, following upon the major U.N. and U.S. climate assessments, after Paradise burned and parts of the Florida Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico were blown away or washed out, the course was clear. But perhaps no longer in a nation of only big private dreams and ambitions. Maybe the billionaires of the 1% will save us. They can help, but I think on the whole, their most passionately held ideas about limiting government’s role – and spending - prevent effective action, along with the systemic limitations of capitalism itself as Richard Smith wrote in “Green Capitalism: the God that Failed.”
David Roberts is right - the GND is a longshot of policies and politics; “but long shots are all we have left.” I’m with him on that and the Green New Deal. And that’s my answer to Joe Biden’s favorite phrase: “here’s the Deal.”
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD