Friday, July 17, 2020

Brooks on Biden's Green New Deal (Spoiler: He doesn't know it's there)


Mary Pickford in D.W. Griffith's The Hessian Renegades (1909), via Fritzi.


David Brooks Self-Shorter (President Biden's First Day):
Joe Biden may turn out to be what radical centrism looks like.
Then again, who can say? David Brooks has been talking about "radical centrism" for years and he still doesn't know what it looks like. 

David Brooks interviews Joe Biden:
I asked him to describe the big forces that have flattened working-class wages over the past decades. Other people would have spun grand theories about broken capitalism or the rise of the corporate oligarchy. But Biden pointed to two institutional failures — the way Republicans have decentralized power and broken Washington and the way Wall Street forces business leaders to focus obsessively on the short term.
He spun a grand theory about broken capitalism and the rise of the corporate oligarchy, but he didn't use any mean or divisive language, so Brooks didn't notice. Maybe. What does "the way Republicans have decentralized power" refer to? Is that a phrase Biden actually used, or a garbled expression in Brooks's notepad, or something Brooks simply made up? Here's how Biden's website accounts for stagnant wages:
Today... there’s a war on organizing, collective bargaining, unions, and workers. It’s been raging for decades, and it’s getting worse with Donald Trump in the White House. Republican governors and state legislatures across the country have advanced anti-worker legislation to undercut the labor movement and collective bargaining. States have decimated the rights of public sector workers who, unlike private sector workers, do not have federal protections ensuring their freedom to organize and collectively bargain. In the private sector, corporations are using profits to buy back their own shares and increase CEOs’ compensation instead of investing in their workers and creating more good-quality jobs. The results have been predictable: rising income inequality, stagnant real wages, the loss of pensions, exploitation of workers, and a weakening of workers’ voices in our society.
That's definitely got Republicans and corporate oligarchs in it. And various kinds of dispersed power, taken away from organized labor, and passed out to state governments, I guess, along with the oligarchs, and plainly pushed by Republicans at federal and state levels. It doesn't look like broken capitalism at all but capitalism with the brakes taken off, grinding labor into the dirt as it sucks up all the profit. Actually a fairly grand theory when you think about it.

David Brooks enthuses over Biden's White Working Class background:
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were all emblems of this university class, and it was easy for the Republican media wing to gin up resentment against them. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton among the white working class by a crushing 28 points.
But Biden is not an emblem of this coastal elite. His sensibility was nurtured by his working-class family during the postwar industrial boom of the 1950s and 1960s. He graduated from the University of Delaware in 1965 and missed the late 1960s culture war that divided a generation....
Biden’s worldview seems to come mainly from lived experience, not a manifesto somewhere. He has lived experience of a time when there were good manufacturing jobs, when unions protected workers, when the less affluent had a ladder to climb.
 No offense to Joe, his ability to communicate that Susquehanna white boy soul is one of the things I truly love about him, because it's real soul, but he did get a chance to go to college, you know, as well as a moderately exclusive Catholic prep school (Archmere Academy, mostly a boarding school at the time Biden was there, not to mention law degree from Syracuse), and Joe Sr. wasn't a happy factory worker at all: 
Biden’s father, Joe Sr., was raised in a life of privilege, complete with polo matches and hunting trips in the Adirondacks, thanks to the lucrative career of his own father, Joseph, who ran a division of American Oil. But Biden’s dad failed in his own early business ventures, which included a Boston real estate deal and a crop-dusting effort, leaving the family “broke,” according to Joe Biden’s 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. The family relocated to an apartment in Wilmington, Delaware, when Joe Biden was 10. His father eventually found work selling cars. 
He's completely from the coastal elite, much more than Arkansan Bill Clinton or Barack Obama getting shuffled between Kansas and Hawaii, both children of shaky marriages, but he knew real precarity as a child. Nevertheless he didn't know anything about good manufacturing jobs until maybe when he was working as a pool lifeguard and got to know Corn Pop. Why, why, why is David Brooks so stupid?

David Brooks takes a look at Biden's economic agenda:

His economic agenda, promoted under the slogan “Build Back Better,” is about that, not some vast effort to remake capitalism or build a Nordic-style welfare system. The agenda is more New Deal than New Left.

In the two speeches he has delivered so far there are constant references to our manufacturing base — infrastructure, steelworkers, engineers, ironworkers, welders, 500,000 charging stations for electric cars. “When I think of climate change, the word I think of is jobs,” he declared.

The agenda pushes enormous resources toward two groups: first, African-Americans, who have been pummeled by deindustrialization for decades; and second, white working-class Trump voters.

"Building Back Better" is the slogan of a movement that's been building since the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami to take advantage of natural disasters to remake societies from the bottom up with a lively participation from scientific experts:
Disasters have been recognized and leveraged as opportunities for change and improvement and, in some cases, are even considered as a “helpful interruption” to previously unchallenged inadequate policies and practices, such as those that disadvantaged certain groups, for example persons with disabilities [35]. BBB includes efforts to prevent re-creating or exacerbating pre-disaster vulnerabilities in the process of reconstruction [38,45]. By strategically embracing and optimizing institutional, financial, political, and human opportunities, positive externalities are believed to arise from disasters, which can lead to safer and more resilient communities [52]. As a consequence of the growing prominence of BBB, many organizations involved in disaster recovery, rehabilitation, and reconstruction have re-labeled their activities as espousing BBB [26••]
And the Covid-19 crisis has, obviously, brought it to the fore, as the OECD has explained:
For the economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis to be durable and resilient, a return to ‘business as usual’ and environmentally destructive investment patterns and activities must be avoided. Unchecked, global environmental emergencies such as climate change and biodiversity loss could cause social and economic damages far larger than those caused by COVID-19. To avoid this, economic recovery packages should be designed to “build back better”. This means doing more than getting economies and livelihoods quickly back on their feet. Recovery policies also need to trigger investment and behavioural changes that will reduce the likelihood of future shocks and increase society’s resilience to them when they do occur. Central to this approach is a focus on well-being and inclusiveness. Other key dimensions for assessing whether recovery packages can “build back better” include alignment with long-term emission reduction goals, factoring in resilience to climate impacts, slowing biodiversity loss and increasing circularity of supply chains. In practice, well-designed recovery policies can cover several of these dimensions at once, such as catalysing the shift towards accessibility-based mobility systems, and investing in low-carbon and decentralised electricity systems.
It's not just any New Deal, it's the Green New Deal, peeps! And Biden knows it:

Biden believes this is no time to just build back to the way things were before, with the old economy’s structural weaknesses and inequalities still in place. This is the moment to imagine and build a new American economy for our families and the next generation. 

An economy where every American enjoys a fair return for their work and an equal chance to get ahead. An economy more vibrant and more powerful precisely because everybody will be cut in on the deal.

In this time of crisis, Joe Biden has a plan to create millions of good-paying jobs and to give America’s working families the tools, choices, and freedom they need to build back better.

That starts with a real strategy to deal with the pandemic....

We’ve seen the need for a more resilient economy for the long-term, and that means investing in a modern, sustainable infrastructure and sustainable engines of growth —  from roads and bridges, to energy grids and schools, to universal broadband. Biden will soon release updated proposals to meet the climate crisis, build a clean energy economy,  address environmental injustice, and create millions of good-paying union jobs.
I'm sicker than I can begin to tell you of posturing about who's lefter than whom—






—But I'd like to say that the radical part is more operative, if you know what I mean, than the centrist part.

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