Up Next: Reconciliation II

Drawing via TaxmanComix.

While everybody's talking about Manchin and the filibuster, I'd like to note that there should be more good news for Democrats and other Americans working its way through the pipeline, in the form of a sequel to today's $1.9-trillion BFD: because the current bill is actually last year's budget reconciliation (fiscal year 2021), the thing Mnuchin and McConnell and the Speaker weren't able to do; there's still FY 2022 to go, and it is likely to be a fairly BFD in its own right.

Not that it will include a minimum wage hike or paid family leave or the election reforms we need so badly—these aren't eligible for reconciliation because they're regarded as "extraneous" to the budget. But you know what isn't? 

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:

The Center of Nowhere, or the Rosy New Deal

Montsalvat. Painting by Alarie-Tano/DeviantArt.

You have to be totally lost before you can find it, so nobody can say where it is, but on a high plain somewhere, could be the kingdom of the Visigoths or Asian Byzantium, where the priests wear long beards and take wives, you'll be in some desolate treeless country and come on a castle of ancient stone, set in a marsh, apparently unguarded; you can cross the drawbridge and enter the yard, and penetrate into the great hall without hindrance, and on certain days you'll see a strange ceremony performed by a company of knights.

In silence, a chief or officiant goes to an aumbrey built into the wall next the fireplace, with the knights behind him, opens up the doors, and pulls out what looks like a wedding cake mounted on a silver charger. It is a wedding cake! But it seems to have been baked centuries ago, it's dull and gray, and it seems unnaturally heavy, as the chief struggles, grimacing, to bring it out the the middle of the hall. There, still in silence, with the knights forming a circle around him, he kneels, changes his grip on the charger so that his palms are underneath, stands again, and lifts it into the air as far as his arms will extend. Extraordinary emotions cross the faces, and some of the men begin to weep. After a few moments, he lowers it again, goes back to the wall as the circle of knights breaks to let him through, and shoves it back into the aumbrey.

At which point the silence finally breaks, the men begin chatting by twos and threes, and if you ask the right questions, you can learn the significance of what you've just witnessed. Or you can go to The New York Times, where David F. Brooks will lay out the catechism for you ("An Agenda for Moderates").

What "environmental" means

You know those coastal élites who think it's funny to be preoccupied with cow farts and the like? I guess they just think the 40% of all US land that's devoted to agriculture, as Purdy notes, producing 9% of our carbon emissions (in the very conservative EPA figures), is just flyover country. Seriously, those people love to talk about the "heartland" and their deep connection with the rural population, but they don't really believe it exists outside of their sentiments. Photo via University of Minnesota Extension. 

Another approach to the thing I wanted to say about the Green New Deal from Jedediah Purdy-Britton in the Times ("The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like") and its roping of everything from indigenous rights to combating monopolies into the same structure:

this everything-and-the-carbon-sink strategy is actually a feature of the approach, not a bug, and not only for reasons of ideological branding. In the 21st century, environmental policy is economic policy. Keeping the two separate isn’t a feat of intellectual discipline. It’s an anachronism.

Because all these factors are literally built in to the situation:

Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents, getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.

So the proposals to retrofit buildings, retool transportation and build a clean-energy system are simply ways of tackling the problem where it starts. They are public-works projects because large capital projects — especially ones that, like highways, involve widespread public benefit — have always required public money. They are jobs programs, unless robots do the work, so the jobs might as well be good.

The deeper point is that any economic policy is a jobs policy. The oil and gas sector provides at least 1.4 million American jobs, more if you believe industry estimates, and depends on public subsidies and infrastructure. You might say that producing the disaster of global climate change has taken a lot of economic policy and produced a lot of jobs programs. Reversing direction will take the same.

And so on. It's kind of what "environmental" means, isn't it?

It's Green and it's New

Harold Lloyd, Royal Slyness (1920), via somebody's Pinterest.

Tom Friedman's 2007 idea of a Green New Deal (adopted, as he points out, in the 2008 Obama campaign, but melting after the financial collapse and the Obama election into the $800-billion vastness of the American Recovery and Readjustment Act, of which it formed a very successful $90-billion component but didn't seem anything like a full-blown New Deal any more) is moving out of the realm of Friedmanian fever dream and into the world of maybe, and I'm starting to believe it could really happen, judging from the panic with which it is being greeted by David Brooks ("How the Left Embraced Elitism"):

Under the Green New Deal, the government would provide a job to any person who wanted one. The government would oversee the renovation of every building in America. The government would put sector after sector under partial or complete federal control: the energy sector, the transportation system, the farm economy, capital markets, the health care system.

The authors liken their plan to the New Deal, but the real parallel is to World War II. It is the state mobilizing as many of society’s resources as possible to wage a war on global warming and other ills. The document is notably coy about how all this would be implemented. Exactly which agency would inspect and oversee the renovation of every building in America? Exactly which agency would hire every worker?

I can answer about the renovation of every building: that would be overseen by the same state agencies that enforce the energy efficiency building codes that already exist and report to the federal DOE. Brooksy picturing this unforgiving federal servant on every building site, carrying a clipboard no doubt, is imagining things. The plan will grow state governments more than it does the federal one.