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Now or Never: a NEW New Deal

If the Biden administration can dramatically improve the lives of all Americans before the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats can keep (or swing) the Senate in 2022 and keep the White House in 2024 and beyond. This requires rolling back 40 years of neoliberal/​neoconservative rule (i.e. socialism for the top 1%, austerity for the rest of us). Biden's playbook should be FDR's first term. In short, a New New Deal. Anything less, and Democrats are finished and the USA will remain fractured beyond repair.

Frank da Cruz
10 November 2020

Most recent update:  Thu Jan 21 07:29:47 2021 EST

Putting America back to work: Construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State, mural by William Gropper for the US Dept of the Interior, 1938. Click image to enlarge.

I started re­search­ing the New Deal in New York City while Obama was still president; you can see the results here. The idea was to remind Americans of a time when we all (or mostly all) came together, led by a government we could trust, to rescue the country from disasters caused by runaway unregulated capitalism and forces of nature: the Great Depression resulting from the 1929 stock market crash and a severe years-long drought starting in 1934. Massive federal spending by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, carried forward through World War II, transformed a broken and impoverished country into the world's greatest economic powerhouse and ushered in an era of widespread stability and prosperity. Like me, fellow War Baby Joe Biden lived through the postwar boom and remembers it well. Unlike the 75% of the population who are too young to remember, Joe knows what is possible.

Today we have a crisis comparable in magnitude to the Great Depresssion: Civil-War level polarization aggravated by an economy that works for only the super-rich, plus a deadly pandemic killing (at this writing) at a rate of about one 9/11 every two or three days for the past nine months with no end in sight (and as of December 10th, every day), and a growing environmental catastrophe of temperature extremes, raging wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, floods, increasingly toxic air and water, and on and on. And a federal government completely unconcerned with all of it.

How did we get here?

USA income distribution 1960-2018. Source: Zucman and Saez;  click to enlarge.

The Obama administration came on the heels of decades of growing economic disparity, senseless wars, privatization, oustsourcing, decaying infrastructure, and environmental degradation brought on by a decades-long assault on New Deal programs, laws, and regulations. With his overwhelming electoral mandate Obama could have been the next FDR, but instead he pivoted to Wall Street, the insurance companies, and the banks, allowing millions of good jobs to be exported[1] and millions of families to lose their homes, and he launched an overpriced for-profit medical insurance program that left tens of millions without medical care and many more tens of millions with unafford­able medical bills[2].

US household income brackets 1979-2007. Source: Congressional Budget Office; click to enlarge

It was the last straw. Millions of Americans woke up to the fact that establish­ment politicians had never done anything but squeeze them dry. Hence Trump: the non-politician "outsider" who promised to put everything back as it was when "America was great", circa 1950. Maybe he even believed it himself but for whatever reason, it didn't happen.

So what have we learned from the last two presidential elections? Above all, that a LOT OF PEOPLE are EXTREMELY ANGRY at establishment poli­ticians. If neither Republicans nor Democrats will do anything to undo the damage of the past decades, then why not vote for Trump? In 2020, a vote for Trump — who was running with no platform — was, for many, a vote to obliterate the whole rotten system.

President Biden

NY Times January 5, 1935.

But Biden won after all, most likely with a hostile Senate and definitely a hostile Supreme Court. All hopes are pinned on Biden's "humanity" and "decency" and "compassion" and "bipartisanship" to "heal the wounds" and gain the cooperation of Republican politicians and restore "normalcy". That won't happen. There is, however, a way to win over Republican voters[3]: rather than mouthing empty platitudes, Biden can take DECISIVE ACTION, following a script based on FDR's first term, and launch a New New Deal.

Over the past 40 years, millions of people have lost their secure comfortable lives — union jobs, health plans, retirement plans, and in many cases even their homes — due to arrogant privileged elites of both parties selling them out. The real way to "heal the divisions" is to improve the lives of the angry public by restoring its long-lost prosperity and security.

The way to do this is with massive federal spending, just like in FDR's New Deal and World War II. First with stimulus packages so life can go on until the pandemic is over, and then with public works programs to restore our crumbling transportation, health-care, and education infrastructure, and to build a new clean-energy network and everything else that badly needs doing but that never gets done because there is no profit in it for investors. And finally to find a way to make health care a right for every single person in the country, regardless of ability to pay (if the COVID-19 pandemic taught us nothing else, it is now apparent that if we deny health care to some, we increase the risk to all). The party that provides decent jobs with living wages and good benefits, affordable housing, and health care for everybody before the 2022 mid-term elections (or at least makes credible progress in that direction) will win large majorities in both houses of Congress and prevent a Trump resurgence in 2024[4]. Remember, when FDR delivered for the American people instead of Wall Street and the banks, he won four consecutive terms.

How to pay for it

The New New Deal can be funded by some combination of taxing the rich and large corporations as they were taxed in the prosperous postwar years, taxing investment income and closing tax loopholes, ending subsidies for powerful interests such as Big Oil, cutting investment in weapons and war and repurposing most of the military as a much-needed domestic disaster-response / reconstruction force rather than a taxpayer-funded world-domination tool of the multinational corporations, and even (if necessary) by "printing money" as FDR did... a concept that provoked horror at the time but in fact works just fine if done right; read about Modern Monetary Theory; somewhat controversial perhaps, but I'd say that if it's OK for banks to print money for home loans, it's also OK to print money to pay real people to do useful work — it flows directly to small businesses and their workers, and from there it spreads throughout the real economy, as opposed to the sham economy of Wall Street, the banks, big investors, and "complex financial instruments". This is not a time to be screaming bloody murder about the deficit; if Republicans can run up trillions of dollars of debt in giveaways to the rich, Democrats can spend trillions on making America functional again, for all of us.

Consequences of not acting

Angry voters vote for Republicans because Republicans offer them targets — scapegoats — for their anger; it's their entire platform. Whereas Democrats offer "hope and change" which they never deliver. But the days are gone when parties can win with happy talk and empty promises. If angry Trump voters (and for that matter, angry Biden voters) don't see TANGIBLE RESULTS in the first 18 months or so, we'll have a solid Red Senate in 2022 (like in 2010 after Obama turned his back on "Main Street"), and this time probably a red House too. Biden will have no power to accomplish anything and Trump or a clone will be president in 2024. So for Democrats, it's time (as we used to say in the Army) to shit or get off the pot. The billionaires and elites have had a nice ride for the past 40 years at our expense, but time's up.

The Roosevelt Administration lasted 12¼ years, and its domestic afterglow lasted approximately until Reagan in 1980. But even the "good" post-FDR years were poisoned by misbegotten wars like Korea and Vietnam, the endless "War on Terror", and by CIA sponsored coups in countless countries including Iran, Guatemala, Congo, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Afghanistan, and on and on. In any case, it doesn't seem fair that after just 12 years of good government, Americans and the world suffered through 35 years of so-so government with a very dark side, followed by 40 years of uninterrupted looting and pillage. It can't continue, it's not sustainable, the pendulum has to swing back. Remember: Republicans will never do anything to take the pressure off poor, working, and middle-class people, so if Democrats don't do it either... Next Stop: Mad Max.

Postscript 21 January 2021...
Biden takes office

Biden's first day in office was promising. The past week or two, op-eds in the major publications were finally saying what I said above back in November, good. For example, "Democrats, Repeat After Me: Help People Fast by Ezra Klein in the New York Times, 21 January 2021, where he examines the mechanics of "helping people fast" and concludes that all efforts are likely to die in the Senate unless the filibuster is eliminated. So eliminate it! And then, by simple majority vote, make Washington DC and Puerto Rico* states to get a slight bit more balance in the Senate, and for extra safety also the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa — twelve more Democratic senators, payback for all the small-population red states that wield grotesquely disproportionate power in the Senate. Fair is fair.

*	"Una nación, bajo Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos!" —Jennifer López. Of course it remains to be seen if any of these places would want to be states, and who could blame them if they don't.

• William Miller writes in The Nation magazine, December 7, 2020:
      I think you're right on the mark Frank. In retrospect, it seems Trump was little more than a hand-grenade, thrown into the system by those who felt it had left them behind, without hope.
      The obvious solution is to once again give them something to hope for. Redirect the policies that work primarily to benefit phony corporate "persons" and instead directly benefit actual living, breathing, flesh-and-blood persons.
      Thanks also for also bringing up the Modern Monetary Theory in your Kermit article. One of the greatest and most harmful illusions is that "debt" at the federal level means the same thing as in consumer and commercial debt. The latter are loans that need to be repaid whereas the former is simply the national money supply. Since we have a debt-based currency system, federal debt doesn't (and is not supposed to) get repaid - otherwise there'd be no circulating money. Instead it is recycled as old T-Bills etc. are retired and new ones issued.
• Victor Sciamarelli writes in The Nation magazine, December 9, 2020:
      Lobbyists, private equity, finance, corporate think tanks, and military contractors did not dominate FDR's administration. ... Most Americans still don't believe either party represents them; they are correct. The corporate and political elites can accept the Left or face a worse form of Trumpism in 2024.
• Valerie Hayden writes in The Nation magazine, January 10, 2021:
      Spot on as to the solution. These people have been brought up in highly abusive, authoritarian families, in abject poverty, with little chance of escaping and they have been angry as hell. The rates of domestic abuse (spousal and child) are the highest in the country as are alcoholism and drug addiction - all the symptoms of poverty and lack of a proper education creating a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair of anything ever changing. With a jobs program, a livable wage, medical benefits, etc. they will feel heard. But I disagree with you that it is the liberals who have caused their conditions though they haven't helped much either. However, I believe it is their own leaders who bear most of responsibility for the condition of their people and who have redirected and their stoked anger against the liberals. In at least one state (TX) I know of (and probably many, if not all, of the deep red states) the Republican platform states that it doesn't want their children being taught "higher order thinking skills." They have been used as pawns to serve the interests of their leaders and brainwashed into believing that it isn't their leaders who are to blame. H.G. Wells once said, "History becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe" -- and here we are. We need to provide an escape for them - especially the youth. We could immediately expand the Job Corps program where they would live on campus, receive a high school diploma while learning a trade, and find out what it's like to live among adults that aren't abusive. If we progressives truly believe in equal justice for all it's time for us to start putting money where our mouth is. We can't afford to harbor grudges. Our destinies are inextricably linked and understanding that is going to be critical if we are to achieve the kind of justice we claim we want for everyone and prevent these continued assaults. Trumpism won't go away until we do. I know several republicans that switched parties before the 2016 election because they were afraid to lose their newly gained medical benefits under Obama. If we advocate for the rest they are likely never go back to the republicans. What will the republicans be able to say to attack us on that? And their lies about us taking over the country will be revealed for exactly what they are. Biden needs to go big on all of these things.

  I replied...

  There's plenty of blame to go around. The "Liberals", just as much as the "Conservatives", have been taking stuff away from the entire sub-elite population for decades while raising the cost of the essentials of life. The main difference between Democrats and Republicans is messaging: as I noted in the article, Democrats offer "hope and change" and Republicans offer scapegoats. Clearly the "hope and change" never materialized ("How's all that hope and change workin' out for ya?" -- my favorite Sarah Palin quote), so that's why so many people listen to Republicans and vote for Trumps. Of course you're right, education or the lack of it plays a role but both sides are responsible for wrecking public education. I got a great public education in the 1950s and 60s -- and some of the best of in an Army high school in Germany -- and that just doesn't happen anywhere any more except the richest school districts. So yes, Biden NEEDS to go big because if he doesn't we're all cooked.