https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJTwrsbzkB8
Thursday, March 18, 2021
‘A Huge Part of That Would go to China’: Richard Wolff on a Potential Surge in Consumer Purchases
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqRCpa1AEMc
Kerala polls: Left triumph will help transform the very base of the economy, says Thomas Isaac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wttOGUY2mc4
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Struggles for Human Dignity
By Marcos Roitman Rosenmann, March 11, 2021
https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/03/17032/
What has been achieved by the exploited classes is preceded by the conscious sacrifice of thousands of lives. It doesn’t matter if it has been under bullets, in concentration camps, prisons or torture. Dignity has been the benchmark. Courage, integrity, and defense of the common good and effort. Peter Bieri, in his essay “Human Dignity”, stresses; He is not without dignity who fails in autonomy because he/she lacks the overview of thought and stumbles. One can go astray and get lost; one can be too demanding. This does not bury dignity. It is lost only when one loses sight of autonomy as a criterion or lacks it from the start. It is not the failed effort that is unworthy, but the absence of effort.
There have been many battles for dignity. Few remember that the right to strike and improve working conditions has been preceded by repression, massacres, dismissals, and deaths. Its practice has not been a concession of the employers, who use violence to criminalize its exercise. An example is the strike in Pharaonic Egypt during the reign of Ramses III in 1152 BC. The craftsmen employed in the Valley of the Kings denounced corruption, punishment, and non-payment of wages. They were sculptors, painters, scribes, and masons. They said: we are hungry, 18 days of this month have passed, we have come here driven by hunger and thirst; we have no clothes, no fish, no vegetables. They occupied temples, held sit-ins, built a platform of demands, and triumphed.
Likewise, the struggle of slaves for their freedom is full of heroism and dignity. One, in particular, has gone down in history, that of Spartacus, who vowed never to serve Rome again. He fled with less than 200 comrades and forged an army of 60,000 fighters. He won battles like Vesuvius; then came defeat. However, the fear put in the plutocracy forced an improvement in the living conditions of the slaves. His body was never found. The story was told by Howard Fast, who in 1951 published his novel with his own funds.
In Haiti, the slave rebellion was the beginning of the emancipation movement in Latin America (LA). Toussaint Louverture or Jean Jaques Dessalines were its leaders. The struggles for the civil rights of the African-American population or against apartheid in South Africa are associated with Martin Luther King and Mandela. In Nicaragua, the free men’s general Augusto César Sandino stood up to the US invasion. Not forgetting the feminist struggles in Latin America that recall Micaela Bastidas in Peru, strategist of the Tupac Amaru rebellion; Juana Azurduy, today recognized as a general of the liberating armies; the Mexican Elena Arizmendi, president of the First International League of Latin American Women in 1920, and the Ecuadorian Matilde Hidalgo, who fought for women’s right to vote. In the 20th century, Chile’s Gabriela Mistral, Cuba’s Haydée Santamaría, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Comandanta Ramona of the EZLN, and the Chilean writer Mónica Echeverría, whose struggle against the dictatorship is worthy of note.
In this century the struggles for dignity persist. The just ones, the inevitable ones that have human rights, social justice, equality, denouncing machismo and patriarchy on the horizon. All of them, without exception, drink from those who have watered the path of dignity, to paraphrase Violeta Parra’s poem dedicated to the Spanish communist militant Julián Grimau, shot by Franco’s regime in 1963.
Dignity understood as a decision to act. Dignity as a way of understanding life. Is this not the message of the EZLN? “We spoke to ourselves, we looked inwards and we looked at our history […] we saw that not everything had been taken from us, that we had what was most valuable, what makes us live, what made our steps rise above plants and animals…, and we saw, brothers and sisters, that all we had was dignity and we saw that the shame of having forgotten it was great, and we saw that dignity was good, so that men could be men again”. The little and nothing that has been gained, which in perspective is a lot, is sown with dignity, which the plutocracies, unworthy and cowardly, lack. They kill and murder.
We are witnessing battles against megaprojects, against neoliberalism. These are struggles for dignity. Today the lives of trade union leaders are being claimed, such as Berta Cáceres in Honduras, the Zapatista militant José Luis Solís López, Galeano in Chiapas, Camilo Catrilanca or Matías Catrileo Quezada, members of the Mapuche people. Journalists who uncover corruption are riddled with bullets, teachers, peasants, students, young people of our America, sow with their effort, courage, and blood, the path of dignity. Meanwhile, the transnationals and the governments create and finance the action of paramilitary groups, militarize and send the armed forces, which, unquestioning, assassinate in the name of power and money. However, they have not achieved their goal: to humiliate, denigrate and destroy the struggle for dignity and a full life.
Source: Red in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
WORKERS INSIST THE $15 MINIMUM WAGE FIGHT ISN’T OVER
By Joe Maniscalco, DC Report.
March 15, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/workers-insist-the-15-minimum-wage-fight-isnt-over/
Labor Groups Angry That Biden And Democrats Didn’t Push For The New Base Pay In The $1.9 Trillion COVID Relief Legislation.
Women comprise the overwhelming majority of frontline workers who risk their lives and the lives of their families during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But the Democrats who they helped retake the White House and the Senate don’t seem so interested in rewarding that support.
The proposal to set a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2025 in President Joe Biden’s signature $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan could have helped lift some 74 million poor and low-income women out of poverty, according to the Poor People’s Campaign.
But eight Senate Democrats opposed the measure. Team Biden also declined to challenge arcane and non-binding parliamentary procedures, supposedly prohibiting a $15 minimum wage in the coronavirus relief package. That’s understandably left a bitter taste in the mouths of many who helped get Democrats elected. It also stoked a renewed and fiery determination to press the fight until it’s won.
“During the presidential election, we had over 1,700 laid off hospitality workers knocking on doors of three million voters in four battleground states — and that made a critical difference in the results,” said Marlene Patrick Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23. It represents more than 4,000 airport workers in 13 states from Georgia to Idaho.
Election Support
Members of Local 23 — overwhelmingly women of color suffering pandemic-related layoffs — joined other worker advocates in knocking on 1.5 million doors in the successful effort to elect Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate from Georgia.
“Our folks sacrificed time away from home and their families canvassing, knocking on doors, to get out the vote because their lives depended on it,” Cooper said. “Now, it’s time for us to continue to hold this administration accountable and push them to pass transformative legislation for working people.”
According to the Poor People’s Campaign, in a report titled A Call for a Moral Revival, women constitute almost 60% of low-wage workers who have all been hit hardest by the pandemic.
Rhiana Ford, a server earning a pre-tip wage of $5 an hour at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in Florida, broke her foot during canvassing efforts in Georgia as a member of the union’s Local 355. She also provides care for her 90-year-old father.
“I left my home, I left my dad, I left my sister, I left my fiancé — I left everyone here and risked my life to go to Georgia during a pandemic to make sure I could have a better future…
“And I’m coming back home, and we still don’t have $15? Why?” Ford says. “Does no one think we deserve it; that the job that I do is so nothing?”
‘Refuse Pennies’
The lack of support for better pay is making many workers rethink the idea that those at the top earned their money by tolerable, if not perfectly fair, means. The idea that wage suppression helps wealth pile up at the top is gaining acceptance, which, at a self-preservation level at least, ought to concern the best-paid one in a thousand households, the ones with million-dollar-plus annual paychecks.
“I broke my ankle in Atlanta — and I’ll do it again for this $15 an hour,” Ford says. “I refuse to take pennies while people live in mansions.”
Recent history makes it clear, that’s exactly what millionaire political elites on both sides of the aisle think.
The frustration of low-paid workers like Ford could spell serious trouble for Democrats in 2022 as Republicans assert they are poised to take back the House by appealing to a combination of people frustrated over the pandemic and disaffected workers unhappy with the Biden administration.
Just how Republican policies would benefit low-paid workers isn’t something the GOP says much about. But if voters like Ford simply stay home in 2022, the Republicans, who generally want to end minimum wage requirements, would benefit.
Both Parties To Blame
Antagonism toward raising the minimum wage, which adjusted for inflation was worth about $12 an hour in the 1960s, persists in both parties.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) can’t bring himself to match even the $12 an hour minimum wage that Hillary Clinton advocated in 2016.
Then there’s Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) who last month moaned during a House Education and Labor Committee meeting that the aborted Raise the Wage Act “doesn’t deal with the realities of what it takes to run a business.”
Politicians opposed to any minimum wage increase typically assert that businesses will go broke, ignoring the fact that businesses can raise prices, especially as America is on the cusp of what economists predict will be a year of robust economic expansion.
The current $7.25 an hour federal minimum wage has not budged since 2009. Adjusted for inflation it’s really just $5.82 an hour.
Clinton-Cain Deal
The sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in restaurants has been fixed at $2.13 since 1993, under a deal President Bill Clinton agreed to with former takeout pizza executive Herman Cain. In 2021 dollars that’s about $1.18 an hour with tips filling in the shortfall to $7.25.
Overall, some 140 million Americans are poor or low-income. They are also those hit hardest by the pandemic. Women comprise more than 30% of the low-wage workforce, while roughly half of all U.S. children are subsisting near or below the poverty line.
Rev. William Barber, who started the Moral Mondays demonstrations at the North Carolina state capitol, says it was the desire by poorly paid workers to earn $15 an hour that was behind the Democrats taking control of the Senate this year.
“The two senators from Georgia got elected because of $15 — let’s be real about that,” said Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. “If they had run on just dealing with racism and health care, they would not have made it.”
Barber is not surprised that no Senate Republican backed the push for $15 an hour minimum wage, which if phased in over the next four years would only be worth about $13.50.
“We already knew what they were going to do because they stood with Trump,” Barber says.
“But when eight Democratic senators — seven white men, one white woman — cross over and block $15 and a union, which is a compromise in and of itself, and hide behind a parliamentarian and say, it’s not the time, but I’m ready to do $11 over three years — we cannot accept that.”
Romney’s 30-Cent Raise
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) co-sponsored a competing plan to raise the minimum wage to $10 by 2025, which adjusted for inflation would be an increase of about 30-cents compared with today, leaving the lowest-paid workers far short of where they were in 2009.
Organized labor’s drive for a $15 an hour minimum wage has always been a modest proposal — even when it was first launched in New York City way back in 2012.
In 2016, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare East — the largest healthcare union in the nation — backed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders for president, along with many other powerful unions — even though Clinton failed to match Sanders’ commitment to a $15 an hour federal minimum wage.
At the time, George Gresham, the chapter president who was also then head of N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “Campaign for Economic Justice,” said that worker advocates would first have to win a $15 an hour minimum wage — and then fight for indexing it to inflation.
Today, indexing the federal minimum wage to productively alone would pay low-wage American workers more than $24 an hour.
“We don’t want to scare people,” Gresham told me five years ago. “First we’ve got to get a living wage established. Then we fight to index that going forward into the future.”
Inflation-Adjusted Tax Breaks
In contrast, many of the tax breaks awarded to wealthy people with Republican sponsors are automatically adjusted for inflation.
Despite some crucial pandemic aid, worker advocates who stumped hard for the Democratic ticket insist they’ve more than earned the right to criticize the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package where it fails to deliver for working people.
“We know how to say what part of it is good; we know how to say what part of it is bad — and we know how to say what part of it is nice. But at the end of the day, the bill did not go far enough,” Cooper says.
Sunita Viswanath, a co-founder of Sadhana and Hindus for Human Rights, is also upset that a minimum wage hike was cut from Biden’s pandemic relief legislation.
“I am so disheartened that even after we elected the Democrats back to power — this is the side that is supposed to care about the poor and equity — we’re still fighting this fight like this,” Viswanath says. “There’s a lot in the stimulus bill has a lot in it that’s good — and we applaud that. We like the expanded child tax credit — but how does it make sense to give a child tax credit and give the parents poverty wages? The stimulus package as it stands is not the best we can do.”
Shailly Gupta-Barnes, policy director for the Poor People’s Campaign and The Kairos Center, challenges the Biden White House narrative that the child tax credit contained in the president’s Rescue America Plan will halve child poverty.
“It is not, on its own, enough to address child poverty, let alone cut it in half,” she says.
‘Get With The People’
Mary Kay Henry, head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — the leading union behind the nearly decade-old Fight for $15 movement — says passage of Biden’s signature policy goal is “not a time for celebration.”
She said that the eight Democratic senators who voted against a $15 minimum wage need to “get with the people of their state.”
“We will win a $ 15-hour minimum wage and we will win every fight for justice that is part of this incredible fusion movement,” said Henry. It is unclear whether union Democrats will try to unseat any of the eight.
Traditionally, organized labor has generally backed establishment Democrats even in the face of increasingly diminishing returns. But when it comes to a $15 minimum wage, Cooper says the Democrats should not expect trade unionists and their allies on the front lines to “dance and be happy.”
“We cannot,” says Cooper, the union local leader representing airport workers seeking $15 an hour at least. “We will not stop and we are not going away.”
The Biden White House says it has not given up the fight for $15. It has not made clear just how it could achieve that goal since Senate Republicans can still block legislation requiring a 60-vote Senate majority and Democrats hold only 50 seats.
BUILDING OR UNBUILDING AMERICA?
By Nomi Prins, Tom Dispatch.
March 15, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/building-or-unbuilding-america/
Infrastructure Should Be The Great Economic Equalizer.
During the Trump years, the phrase “Infrastructure Week” rang out as a sort of Groundhog Day-style punchline. What began in June 2017 as a failed effort by The Donald’s White House and a Republican Senate to focus on the desperately needed rebuilding of American infrastructure morphed into a meme and a running joke in Washington.
Despite the focus in recent years on President Trump’s failure to do anything for the country’s crumbling infrastructure, here’s a sad reality: considered over a longer period of time, Washington’s political failure to fund the repairing, modernizing, or in some cases simply the building of that national infrastructure has proven a remarkably bipartisan “effort.” After all, the same grand unfulfilled ambitions for infrastructure were part and parcel of the Obama White House from 2009 on and could well typify the Biden years, if Congress doesn’t get its act together (or the filibuster doesn’t go down in flames). The disastrous electric grid power outages that occurred during the recent deep freeze in Texas are but the latest example of the pressing need for infrastructure upgrades and investments of every sort. If nothing is done, more people will suffer, more jobs will be lost, and the economy will face drastic consequences.
Since the mid-twentieth century, when most of this country’s modern infrastructure systems were first established, the population has doubled. Not only are American roads, airports, electric grids, waterways, railways and more distinctly outdated, but today’s crucial telecommunications sector hasn’t ever been subjected to a comprehensive broadband strategy.
Worse yet, what’s known as America’s “infrastructure gap” only continues to widen. The cost of what we need but haven’t done to modernize our infrastructure has expanded to $5.6 trillion over the last 20 years ($3 trillion in the last decade alone), according to a report by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Some estimates now even run as high as $7 trillion.
In other words, as old infrastructure deteriorates and new infrastructure and technology are needed, the cost of addressing this ongoing problem only escalates. Currently, there is a $1-trillion backlog of (yet unapproved) deferred-maintenance funding floating around Capitol Hill. Without action in the reasonable future, certain kinds of American infrastructure could, like that Texas energy grid, soon be deemed unsafe.
Now, it’s true that the U.S. continues to battle Covid-19 with more than half a million lives already lost and significant parts of the economy struggling to make ends meet. Even before the pandemic, however, America’s failing infrastructure system was already costing the average household nearly $3,300 a year.
According to ASCE, “The nation’s economy could see the loss of $10 trillion in GDP [gross domestic product] and a decline of more than $23 trillion in business productivity cumulatively over the next two decades if current investment trends continue.” Whatever a post-pandemic economy looks like, our country is already starved for policies that offer safe, reliable, efficient, and sustainable future infrastructure systems. Such a down payment on our future is crucial not just for us, but for generations to come.
As early as 2016, ASCE researchers found that the overall number of dams with potential high-hazard status had already climbed to nearly 15,500. At the time, the organization also discovered that nearly four out of every 10 bridges in America were 50 years old or more and identified 56,007 of them as already structurally deficient. Those numbers would obviously be even higher today.
And yet, in 2021, what Americans face is hardly just a transportation crisis. The country’s energy system largely predates the twenty-first century. The majority of American electric transmission and distribution systems were established in the 1950s and 1960s with only a 50-year life cycle. ASCE reports that, “More than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.” That means our systems weren’t and aren’t equipped to handle excess needs — especially in emergencies.
The country is critically overdue for infrastructure development in which the government and the private sector would collaborate with intention and urgency. Infrastructure could be the great equalizer in our economy, if only the Biden administration and a now-dogmatically partisan Congress had the fortitude and foresight to make it happen.
American History Offers A Roadmap For Infrastructure Success
It wasn’t always like this. Over the course of American history, building infrastructure has not only had a powerful economic impact, but regularly garnered bipartisan political support for the public good.
In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act. That landmark bill provided federal support to an already ongoing private effort to build the first transcontinental railroad. Though at the time all its ramifications weren’t positive — notably escalating conflicts between Native Americans and settlers pushing westward — the effort did connect the country’s coastal markets, provided jobs for thousands, and helped jumpstart commerce in the West. Believe it or not, most of that transcontinental railroad line is still in use today.
In December 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed a bill authorizing the construction of a dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River in the American Southwest, a region that had faced unpredictable flooding and lacked reliable electricity. Despite the stock market crash of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression, by early 1931, the private sector, with government support, had begun constructing a structure of unprecedented magnitude, known today as the Hoover Dam. As an infrastructure project, it would eventually pay for itself through the sale of the electricity that it generated. Today, that dam still provides electricity and water to tens of millions of people.
Having grasped the power of the German system of autobahns while a general in World War II, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, under the guise of “national security,” launch the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, with bipartisan support, creating the interstate highway system. In its time, that system would be considered one of the “greatest public works projects in history.”
In the end, that act would lead to the creation of more than 47,000 miles of roads across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. It would have a powerful effect on commercial business activity, national defense planning, and personal travel, helping to launch whole new sectors of the economy, ranging from roadside fast-food restaurants to theme parks. According to estimates, it would return more than six dollars in economic productivity for every dollar it cost to build and support, a result any investor would be happy with.
Equivalent efforts today would undoubtedly prove to be similar economic drivers. Domestically, such investments in infrastructure have always proven beneficial. New efforts to create sustainable green energy businesses, reconfigure energy grids, and rebuild crippled transit systems for a new age would help guarantee U.S global economic competitiveness deep into the twenty-first century.
Infrastructure As An International Race For Influence
In an interview with CNBC in February 2021, after being confirmed as the first female treasury secretary, Janet Yellen stressed the crucial need not just for a Covid-19 stimulus relief but for a sustainable infrastructure one as well.
As part of what the Biden administration has labeled its “Build Back Better” agenda, she underscored the “long-term structural problems in the U.S. economy that have resulted in inequality [and] slow productivity growth.” She also highlighted how a major new focus on clean-energy investments could make the economy more competitive globally.
When it comes to infrastructure and sustainable development efforts, the U.S. is being left in the dust by its primary economic rivals. Following his first phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Biden noted to a group of senators on the Environment and Public Works Committee that, “if we don’t get moving, they are going to eat our lunch.” He went on to say, “They’re investing billions of dollars dealing with a whole range of issues that relate to transportation, the environment, and a whole range of other things. We just have to step up.”
As this country, deep in partisan gridlock, stalls on infrastructure measures of any sort, its global competitors are proceeding full speed ahead. Having helped to jumpstart its economy with projects like high-speed railways and massive new bridges, China is now accelerating its efforts to further develop its technological infrastructure. As Bloomberg reported, the Chinese are focused on supporting the build-up of “everything from wireless networks to artificial intelligence. In the master plan backed by President Jinping himself, China will invest an estimated $1.4 trillion over six years” in such projects.
And it’s not just that Asian giant leaving the U.S. behind. Major trading partners like Australia, India, and Japan are projected to significantly out-invest the United States. The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Competitiveness Report typically listed this country in 13th place among the world’s nations when it came to its infrastructure quality. (It had been ranked 5th in 2002.) In 2020, that organization ranked the U.S. 32nd out of 115 countries on its Energy Transition Index.
Despite the multiple stimulus packages that Congress has passed in the Covid-19 era, no funding — not a cent — has been designated for capital-building projects. In contrast, China, Japan, and the European Union have all crafted stimulus programs in which infrastructure spending was a core component.
Infrastructure Development As A Political Equalizer
Infrastructure could be the engine for the most advantageous kinds of growth in this country. An optimal combination of federal and private funds, strategic partnerships, targeted infrastructure bonds, and even the creation of an infrastructure bank could help jumpstart a range of sustainable and ultimately revenue-generating businesses.
Such investment is a matter of economics, of cost versus benefit. These days, however, such calculations are both obstructed and obfuscated by politics. In the end, however, political economics comes down to getting creative about sources of funding and how to allocate them. To launch a meaningful infrastructure program would mean deciding who will produce it, who will consume it, and what kinds of transfer of wealth would be involved in the short and long run. Though the private sector certainly would help drive such a new set of programs, government funding would, as in the past, be crucial, whether under the rubric of national security, competitive innovation, sustainable clean energy, or creating a carbon-neutral future America. Any effort, no matter the label, would undoubtedly generate sustainable public and private jobs for the future.
On both the domestic and international fronts, infrastructure is big business. Wall Street, as well as the energy and construction sectors, are all eager to learn more about Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan, which he is expected to take up in his already delayed first joint address to Congress. Actions, not just words, are needed.
Expectations are running high about what might prove to be a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure initiative. Such anticipation has already elevated the stock prices of construction companies, as well as shares in the sustainable energy sector.
There are concerns, to be sure. A big infrastructure package might never make it through an evenly split Senate, where partisanship is the name of the game. Some economists also fear that it could bring on inflation. There is, of course, debate over the role of the private sector in any such plan, as well as horse-trading about what kinds of projects should get priority. But the reality is that this country desperately needs infrastructure that, in turn, can secure a sustainable and green future. Someday this will have to be done, and the longer the delay, the more those costs are likely to rise. The future revenues and economic benefits from a solid infrastructure package should be key drivers in any post-pandemic economy.
The biggest asset managers in the country are already seeing more money flowing into their infrastructure and sustainable-energy funds. Financing for such deals in the private sector is also increasing. Any significant funding on the public side will only spur and augment that financing. Such projects could drive the economy for years to come. They would run the gamut from establishing smart grids and expanding broadband reach to building electric transmission systems that run off more sustainable energy sources, while manufacturing cleaner vehicles and ways to use them. Going big with futuristic transit projects like Virgin’s Hyperloop, a high-speed variant of a vacuum train, or Elon Musk’s initiative for the development of carbon-capture technology, could even be included in a joint drive to create the necessary clean-energy infrastructure and economy of the future.
Polling also shows that such infrastructure spending has broad public support, even if, in Congress, much-needed bipartisan backing for such a program remains distinctly in question. Still, in February, the ranking Republican senator on the environment and public works committee, West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, said that “transportation infrastructure is the platform that can drive economic growth — all-American jobs, right there, right on the ground — now and in the future, and improve the quality of life for everyone on the safety aspects.” Meanwhile, the committee’s chairman, Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, stressed that “the burdens of poor road conditions are disproportionately shouldered by marginalized communities.” He pointed out that “low-income families and peoples of color are frequently left behind or left out by our investments in infrastructure, blocking their access to jobs and education opportunities.”
Sadly, given the way leadership in Washington wasted endless months dithering over the merits of supporting American workers during a pandemic, it may be too much to hope that a transformative bipartisan infrastructure deal will materialize.
Infrastructure As The Great Economic Equalizer
Here’s a simple reality: a strong American economy is dependent on infrastructure. That means more than just a “big umbrella” effort focused on transportation and electricity. Yes, airports, railroads, electrical grids, and roadways are all-important economic drivers, but in the twenty-first-century world, high-capacity communications systems are also essential to economic prosperity, as are distribution channels of various sorts. At the moment, there’s a water main break every two minutes in the U.S. Nearly six billion gallons of treated water are lost daily thanks to such breaks. Situations like the one in Flint, Michigan, in which economic pressure and bankruptcy eventually led a city to expose thousands of its children to poisonous drinking water, will become increasingly unavoidable in a country with an ever-deteriorating infrastructure.
The great economic equalizer is this: the more efficient our infrastructure systems become, the less they cost, and the more they can be readily used by those across the income spectrum. What American history shows since the time of Abraham Lincoln is that, in periods of economic turmoil, major infrastructure building or rebuilding will not only pay for itself but support the economy for generations to come.
For the next generation, it’s already clear that clean and sustainable energy will be crucial to achieving a more equal, economically prosperous, and less climate-challenged future. A renewables-based rebuilding of the economy and the creation of the jobs to go with it would be anything but some niche set of activities in the usual infrastructure spectrum. It would be the future. High-paying jobs within the sustainable energy sector are already booming. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that among the occupations projected to have the fastest employment growth from 2016 to 2026 will be those in “green” work.
Wall Street and big tech companies are also paying attention. Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become the world’s biggest corporate purchasers of clean energy and are now planning for some of the world’s most transformational climate targets. That will mean smaller companies will also be able to enter that workspace as innovation and infrastructure drive economic incentives.
The Next Generation
It may be ambitious to expect that we’ve left the Groundhog Day vortex of “infrastructure week” behind us, but the critical demand for a new Infrastructure Age confronts us now. From Main Street to Wall Street, the need and the growing market for a sustainable, efficient, and clean future couldn’t be more real. An abundance of avenues to finance such a future are available and it makes logical business sense to pursue them.
It’s obvious enough what should be done. The only question, given American politics in 2021, is: Can it be done?
The economy of tomorrow will be built upon the infrastructure measures of today. You can’t see the value of stocks from space, nor can you see the physical value of what you’ve left to the next generation from stat sheets. But from the International Space Station you can see the Hoover Dam and even San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. What will future generations see that we’ve left behind? If the answer is nothing, that will be a tragedy of our age.
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