10/10-11 Weekend News Roundup and Open Thread
Fix America With Libraries (And Playgrounds and Parks and Rec Centers)
Meanwhile, state and local governments, lacking federal support, are considering deep cuts to budgets and public services. These measures reflect a deep problem in American policy and culture: the systematic undermining of public infrastructure.
When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s.
n an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. The 2017 Trump tax cuts of $1.9 trillion sent most of its gains to corporations and the wealthiest Americans; the United States has spent more than $820 billion on the Iraq War since 2003, and hundreds of billions every year to fund the prison-industrial complex.
Any 21st-century civil-rights and economic agenda must involve a massive shift in our public investments. The human cost of the failure to invest in these crucial social goods falls disproportionately on Black and brown communities. In the midst of the current economic crisis, more than a quarter of Black and Latino households report missing their last rent payment, and more than one-fifth of Black and Latino households are food insecure. Our public-investment decisions reflect who and what we value: Too often, the decision to underinvest in public infrastructure has stemmed from a desire to restrict access to those goods and services for people of color, in an attempt to preserve the benefits of public infrastructure for wealthier and whiter communities.
The public provision of certain services, and universal access to them, has been a central fault line in the long quest for economic and racial inclusion—and for democracy. In the 19th century, for example, as the industrial revolution began to transform the economy, local judges and reformers became concerned with the problem of private actors controlling access to new infrastructural services such as water, electricity, or transportation systems. If control remained in private hands, owners could employ arbitrary, profit-driven policies that left individuals and communities utterly dependent on those owners’ benevolence and good will.
The response of reformers was to imagine a radical alternative: public oversight and control of these utilities, if not outright municipalization. This “sewer socialism,” at the state and municipal levels, led to the first electric, water, and transportation utilities. Over time, the idea of the public utility became the forerunner of the modern administrative and regulatory state, as state officials pioneered public-utility regulation over other necessities, including milk, ice, and banking. Practically as soon as public utilities and other public services emerged, they became the heart of the struggle for racial equity. After the Civil War, Congress briefly seized the opportunity to advance a variety of foundational civil-rights provisions. A hostile Supreme Court invalidated these efforts, helping usher in a century of Jim Crow segregation—until the civil-rights movement vindicated the aspiration for desegregation and equal access to public goods.
But even formal desegregation has not assured equitable access to public infrastructure. Governments, usually at the prompting of coalitions of business interests, wealthy Americans, and white voters, have restricted access to these services and systems through a range of other hidden strategies. Austerity and privatization have driven the defunding of public infrastructure—even as wealthier and whiter communities have maintained access to their own private versions of these systems.
Schools are the perfect example: The shift to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education prompted vociferous efforts by white communities to relocate to more homogenous suburbs, while civil rights made conservative appeals for lower taxes and deregulation more potent as “public” goods came to be seen as racially inclusive goods. More broadly, the rise of conventional anti-government and anti-tax rhetoric has been more politically effective since the late 20th century for this very reason: Corporate interests committed to deregulation made common cause with opponents of desegregation to form a shared anti-government coalition that has powered the modern conservative movement. These measures effectively ensured that wealthier and whiter communities could maintain preferential access to parks, schools, and other municipal infrastructure without sharing them with the wider multiracial public. Meanwhile, the trend toward onerous bureaucratic requirements for enrollment into safety-net programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance reflects paternalistic and racialized attitudes against beneficiaries of these programs, and has further winnowed away access.
What, then, is the way forward? First, the public needs to broaden its conceptions of public goods and infrastructure. Beyond roads and bridges, reformers should focus on those services and systems that are essential for full-fledged membership and well-being, that expand the capabilities and capacities of individuals and communities, and where leaving the provision in private hands would create too great a risk of exclusion or unfair, arbitrary, and extractive pricing. Concretely, this means focusing on two types of public infrastructure in particular: foundational back-end services such as water, electricity, mail, credit, broadband, and the like; and the safety net and systems for community care, including health care, child care, public schools, and more.
Second, we need to ensure that these infrastructures are, in fact, public. That means subjecting them to stringent regulations ensuring quality, nondiscrimination, fair pricing, and equitable access. It might mean outright public provision—either through a public option as in the health-care debate, or through outright nationalization or municipalization. And it means creating oversight to ensure racial and gender equity in access, just as the Civil Rights Act led to the creation of administrative offices charged with preventing discrimination and resegregation in access to services including hospital health care.
Many reformers and social movements today have advanced proposals that evince this broader recommitment to public infrastructure. In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations have proposed an “Essential Workers Bill of Rights” to fill gaps in access to the safety net and a broader push to create a public-care infrastructure spanning child care and elder care as part of the new post-pandemic social contract. The Medicare for All debate is fundamentally about public options and the public provision of health care; other advocates have also proposed public options and the public provision of basic banking and credit systems. Critics of big tech, meanwhile, have proposed that information platforms such as Facebook be regulated like public utilities as a way to fight the proliferation of disinformation and extractive data mining, an approach that also addresses some First Amendment concerns about online-speech regulation. The climate-justice movement has, over time, embraced proposals to convert energy utilities into more democratic utilities with mandates for assuring equity.
Inevitably, these proposals will crash into old frames and rhetoric. “Can we afford it?” “How do we know public versions will actually be high quality and effective, instead of corrupt, costly, and hapless?” These ready retorts are more about how deep our anti-public conventional wisdom runs, and less about reality. As the trillions of dollars of crisis spending in the early months of COVID-19 highlights, we have ample resources to fund extensive public infrastructure. The Movement for Black Lives’ demands for defunding the police turn in part on exactly this point: The billions we spent on mass incarceration and the policing of Black and brown communities dwarfs what we spend on positive public infrastructure; radically reallocating our budgetary priorities would transform our economy and society for the better. Nor is the fear of public corruption or failure that compelling: We’ve all seen that the private provision of essential services, including food, health care, and banking, is often predatory, extractive, exclusionary, and not especially efficient. Nevertheless, we should not be Panglossian about the prospects of public provision; real public infrastructure will also require truly democratic, accountable, and responsive administrative bodies.
If we are to survive this crisis—and imagine a more equitable, dynamic economy to come, we must start with a recommitment to the value of universal, inclusive public infrastructure. Tens of millions of Americans currently face homelessness, are unable to put food on the table, and lack access to schools or child care or health care, even as the stock market booms and CEOs like Jeff Bezos gain billions in wealth. Instead, we could have an economy where these public needs are fully funded, securing the health and well-being of millions. That alternative future is still possible—should policy makers choose to make it real.
More news, tweets, analysis, and good opinions in the comments section. See you there! Fly high birdies!
Tip jar for a progressive bench and looking towards the future.
Bernie’s bench endorsements list, alpha by state, the first ones are Arizona, California, Colorado, & Orlbucfan’s State of FL
ARIZONA
Andres Cano for State Representative, LD 3
Athena Salman for State Representative, LD 26
Melody Hernandez for State Representative, LD 26
Diego Rodriguez for State Representative, LD 27
Reginald Bolding for State Representative, LD 27
Richard Andrade for State Representative LD 29
Raquel Teran for State Representative, LD 30
Juan Mendez for State Senator, LD 26
Martin Quezada for State Senator, LD 29
Adelita Grijalva for Pima County Supervisor, District 5
Gabriella Cázares-Kelly for Pima County Recorder
Laura Conover for Pima County Attorney
CALIFORNIA
Kansen Chu for Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, District 3
Abigail Medina for State Senate, District 23
Alex Lee for State Assembly, District 25
Ash Kalra for State Assembly, District 27
Reggie Jones-Sawyer for State Assembly, District 59
Fatima Iqbal-Zubair for State Assembly, District 64
Lacei Amodei for City Council, Hayward
Nestor Castillo for City Council, Hayward
Elisha Crader for City Council, Hayward
Cheryl Davila for City Council, Berkeley
Carroll Fife for City Council, Oakland
Nithya Raman for City Council, Los Angeles
Suely Saro for City Council, Long Beach
Tunua Thrash-Ntuk for City Council, Long Beach
Cari Templeton for City Council, Palo Alto
Jovanka Beckles for AC Transit Board of Directors, Ward 1
Holly Mitchell for Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County
Al Clark for Vice-Mayor, Carpinteria
George Gascón for District Attorney, Los Angeles County
COLORADO
Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez for State Representative, District 4
Alex Valdez for State Representative, District 5
Emily Sirota for State Representative, District 9
Monica Duran for State Representative, District 24
Yadira Caraveo for State Representative, District 31
Iman Jodeh for State Representative, District 41
Alexis King for District Attorney, JD 1
Alonzo Payne for District Attorney, JD 12
Amy Padden for District Attorney, JD 18
Ilana Spiegel for CU Board of Regents
FLORIDA
Monique Worrell for State Attorney, 9th Circuit
Harold Pryor for State Attorney, 17th Circuit
Alton Edmond for Sheriff, Brevard County
Marco Lopez for Sheriff, Osceola County
Eliseo Santana for Sheriff, Pinellas County
Continued list:
MAINE
Troy Jackson for State Senate, District 1
David Miramant for State Senate, District 12
Stacy Brenner for State Senate, District 30
Patricia Kidder for State House, District 19
Ben Collings for State House, District 42
Jim Handy for State House, District 58
Ken Morse for State House, District 71
Lydia Crafts for State House, District 90
Amy Roeder for State House, District 125
Lillie Lavado for State House, District 147
MICHIGAN
Abe Aiyash for State Representative, District 4
Abdullah Hammoud for State Representative, District 15
Chris Slat for State Representative, District 17
Julia Pulver for State Representative, District 39
Nicole Breadon for State Representative, District 43
Yousef Rabhi for State Representative, District 53
Felicia Brabec for State Representative, District 55
Tamara Barnes for State Representative, District 58
Lily Cheng-Schulting for State Representative, District 72
Chokwe Pitchford for State Representative, District 79
Brian Mosallam for Michigan State University Board of Trustees
Eli Savit for County Prosecutor, Washtenaw County
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Manny Espitia for State Representative, Nashua 4
Carlos Cardona for State Representative, Belknap 3
Sherry Frost for State Representative, Strafford 16
Tim Smith for State Representative, Hillsborough 17
Renny Cushing for State Representative, Rockingham 21
Mackenzie Murphy for State Representative, Hillsborough 21
Jan Schmidt for State Representative, Hillsborough 28
Mark King for State Representative, Hillsborough 33
Mark MacKenzie for Executive Council, District 4
Mindi Messmer for Executive Council, District 3
NEW YORK
Jessica González-Rojas for State Assembly, AD 34
Zohran Mamdani for State Assembly, AD 36
Ron Kim for State Assembly, AD 40
Yuh-Line Niou for State Assembly, AD 65
Anna Kelles for State Assembly, AD 125
Dia Carbajal for State Assembly, AD 126
Christine Pellegrino for State Senate, SD 4
James Sanders for State Senate, SD 10
Mike Gianaris for State Senate, SD 12
Jessica Ramos for State Senate, SD 13
Julia Salazar for State Senate, SD 18
Jabari Brisport for State Senate, SD 25
Luis Sepúlveda for State Senate, SD 32
Patrick Nelson for State Senate, SD 43
Samra Brouk for State Senate, SD 55
Continued list:
PENNSYLVANIA
Sara Innamorato for State Representative, District 21
Summer L. Lee for State Representative, District 34
John Padora for State Representative, District 37
Nicole Miller for State Representative, District 87
Tara Shakespeare for State Representative, District 88
Tara Zrinski for State Representative, District 138
Elizabeth Fiedler for State Representative, District 184
Rick Krajewski for State Representative, District 188
Nikil Saval for State Senate, District 1
Amanda Cappelletti for State Senate, District 17
Shanna Danielson for State Senate, District 31
RHODE ISLAND
Brandon Potter for State House, District 16
Megan Cotter for State House, District 39
Leonela Felix for State House, District 61
Michelle McGaw for State House, District 71
Kendra Anderson for State Senate, District 31
Jen Volpe Douglas for State Senate, District 34
Charmaine Webster for City Council, Woonsocket
Marlene Guay for City Council, Woonsocket
Vaughan Miller for City Council, Woonsocket
Alex Kithes for City Council, Woonsocket
Adamaris Villar for City Council, Central Falls
SOUTH CAROLINA
Terry Alexander for State Representative, District 59
Leon Howard for State Representative, District 76
Ivory Thigpen for State Representative, District 79
Justin Bamberg for State Representative, District 90
Cezar McKnight for State Representative, District 101
Wendell Gilliard for State Representative, District 111
Krystle Matthews for State Representative, District 117
Michael Rivers for State Representative, District 121
TEXAS
Alex Annello for City Council, El Paso District 2
Greg Casar for City Council, Austin District 4
Erin Zwiener for State Representative, District 45
José Garza for District Attorney, Travis County
VERMONT
David Zuckerman, Governor
TJ Donovan, Attorney General
Jim Condos, Secretary of State
Beth Pearce, State Treasurer
Doug Hoffer, Auditor
Chris Pearson, State Senate
Cheryl Hooker, State Senate
Anthony Pollina, State Senate
Andrew Perchlik, State Senate
Tanya Vyhovsky, State Representative
Mari Cordes, State Representative
Matt Birong, State Representative
Jubilee McGill, State Representative
Joseph “Chip” Troiano, State Representative
Scott Campbell, State Representative
Dennis LaBounty, State Representative
Emily Hecker, State Representative
Emma Mulvaney-Stanak, State Representative
Selene Colburn, State Representative
Taylor Small, State Representative
Bob Hooper, State Representative
Brian Cina, State Representative
Martha Allen, State Representative
Mike McCarthy, State Representative
Dennis Williams, State Representative
Jo Sabel Courtney, State Representative
Dave Yacovone, State Representative
Avram Patt, State Representative
Susan Hatch Davis, State Representative
Larry Satcowitz, State Representative
Katherine Sims, State Representative
Robin Chesnut-Tangerman, State Representative
Mollie Burke, State Representative
Kevin “Coach” Christie, State Representative
Elizabeth Burrows, State Representative
Heather Surprenant, State Representative
WEST VIRGINIA
Rusty Williams for House of Delegates, District 35
WISCONSIN
Kendra Anderson for State Senate, District 31
Supreme Moore Omokunde for State Assembly, AD 17
Sarah Yacoub for State Assembly, AD 30
Kristina Shelton for State Assembly, AD 48
Kriss Marion for State Assembly, AD 51
Dan Schierl for State Assembly, AD 55
Emily Berge for State Assembly, AD 68
Samba Baldeh, Assembly District 48
An interesting candidate for Soil and Water Management in our area is Nate Douglas. He is a Democratic Socialist. Both Hubster and I voted for him. Water Management is a big pollution deal cos the over development damage to our low water tables/ land barely above sea level has been an ongoing battle here for as long as I’ve been alive. Douglas is a threat to the corrupt developers. So, fingers and toes are X’ed for him to win. Worrell got both our votes. 😊☮️👍
Speaking of your neck of the Central FL:
The Villages is a newly created town like Celebration for rich retirees. There is another one in the Daytona area called Margaritaville and backed by Jimmy Buffett. These places are fancy retirement homes and nothing more. Long time residents and crackers consider them jokes which they are.
Most are pretty conservative though, the “I got my stuff, who cares about anyone else?” Maybe they will start caring a little more.
awww, CT always loses out on these things it seems. For the most part I understand why, but still.
-Jahana Hayes will probably win again, which would be good because the R guy is awful, his platform is basically capitalism good, solicalism bad (eyeroll).
-Jim Himes will probably win yet again as he has the $$ behind him, his R challenger doesn’t look very strong and his I challenger, Brian Merlen, who is reportedly trying to move Himes left, is a bit rough around the edges, claims that when he first started running he was offered a secret meeting with Himes, and was encouraged to drop out and that if he did drop out they’d “let” him have a meeting between Merlen and the prosecutors handling the Sackler family case (Merlen apparently has some recordings of those communications). And they offered him some money out of the coronavirus bill to help his efforts against the Sackler family (that’s Brian’s main issue). Brian is a registered Democrat, but trying to beat Himes is a tough one. My link is Brian infiltrating a Himes event, clumsily I’m afraid, but at least he tried and he was wearing his MFA face mask.
-Rosa DeLauro will probably win again with name recognition, I think, her R challenger might do decently, but DeLauro’s GP challenger, Justin Paglino, looks interesting:
Connecticut could benefit from ranked-choice voting. It would free people up to vote for people like Justin Paglino first, then DeLauro second and encourage progressives to run as I or GP.
CT is pretty much locked down by Dem establishment.
Tricky Prick Nixon approved the creation of the DEA and ramped up the War on Drugs to target the minorities and white anti-war protestors. The usual FRightwingnut attack on our country. 🤬🤮🤬
U.S. Covid-Testing Plan Aims to Open New York-London Travel by Holidays
The UK is run by Boris Johnson, a tRump groupie. The EU is not allowing US visitors unless they have a truckload of cash and connections. Hubster has friends in Costa Rica, and their borders are closed to US passports.
T and R, Ms. Benny!!☮️😊👍
The writer, who is anti-Bernie, must be a never Trumper as well to post this tweet:
https://www.facebook.com/785936231584382/posts/1687426754768654/
ty benny❣️
I don’t know if this will work. This was Bernie’s TH in Arizona.
Amid chaos and contention of Trump-Biden race, hip-hop stays on message
My city is in the news, kind of wish it was for a better reason, but this is 2020 after all.
John Oliver is getting his name on a sewage plant in Connecticut