Category Archives: grassroots

12/10 Hello Somebody! Nina Turner files paperwork for Ohio-11 & Open Thread

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From Cleveland.comm:

Both Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Shontel Brown and former Cleveland City Councilman Jeff Johnson said they would run for Fudge’s seat if the Senate confirms Fudge as President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to oversee HUD. Another, former state Sen. Nina Turner, filed paperwork with the Federal Elections Commission on Wednesday, indicating she will also run.

snip

Following Sanders’ unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, Turner ran Our Revolution – Sanders’ political group set up to back more liberal candidates who share the senator’s politics. She co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 presidential run as well.

Those connections give her a potential advantage in one of the most important assets a candidate can have: campaign cash. Access to Sanders’ and Our Revolution’s vast fundraising network means she has the resources to outraise and outspend competition.

Our Revolution already sent an email missive out to its members asking them to prepare to help Turner in a potential bid.

The Hill reports:

Nina Turner files paperwork for Ohio congressional run

Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator who served as national co-chair for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) 2020 presidential campaign, has filed to run for Congress.

Turner filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Wednesday for a committee titled “Nina Turner for US,” local NBC affiliate WKYC reported.

The outlet reported that Turner is expected to formally announce a bid soon for the seat currently held by Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio).

Fudge has reportedly been selected by President-elect Joe Biden to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The Hill has reached out to Turner for comment. A person listed as a campaign treasurer on Turner’s FEC forms did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Shall we add Nina to our 2021 list of candidates?

Hello Somebody!

More news, tweets, videos, etc in comments section. See you there!

Special Nest Edition: Briahna J. Gray Critiques Biden’s WW & EOB Picks on Democracy Now

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Former press secretary for the Sanders campaign Briahna Joy Gray appeared on Democracy Now to give her thoughts about Biden’s selections for his cabinet and WW operations. A link to the full video portion of the interview is here.

The transcript is below if you prefer to read it instead, courtesy of Democracy Now!

The segment is called “Where Are the Progressives? Briahna Joy Gray on Neera Tandem & Other Biden Picks for His Economic Team.”

President-elect Joe Biden announced his top economic advisers this week, setting the tone for his administration’s recovery plan, including Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress think tank, as head of the Office of Management and Budget. While Tanden would be the first woman of color and the first South Asian woman in the role, critics oppose her organization’s cozy relationship with corporate funders, her record of antagonizing and undermining progressive Democrats, and her aggressive foreign policy positions. Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, says there has been “a lot of emphasis on the identity of the individuals picked” for Biden’s incoming team, but representation alone is not enough. “Several of these individuals have real problems, and none of them truly represent a progressive in the mindset of most Americans, especially those who identified with Bernie Sanders.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: With stimulus talks in a stalemate amidst a devastating economic crisis generated by the coronavirus pandemic and how it’s been dealt with, President-elect Joe Biden’s proposed top economic advisers addressed the nation for the first time Tuesday, setting the tone for his incoming administration’s recovery plan. Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden introduced Janet Yellen as his treasury secretary pick. Yellen led the Federal Reserve from 2014 to ’18. If confirmed by the Senate, she’ll be the first woman to lead the Treasury in its 231-year history. This is Janet Yellen.

JANET YELLEN: The pandemic and economic fallout together have caused so much damage for so many and have had a disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable among us. Lost lives, lost jobs, small businesses struggling to stay alive or closed for good, so many people struggling to put food on the table and pay bills and rent — it’s an American tragedy, and it’s essential that we move with urgency. Inaction will produce a self-reinforcing downturn, causing yet more devastation.

AMY GOODMAN: President-elect Biden also noted that Wally Adeyemo, his pick to be second-in-command to Yellen, would be the highest-ranking African American in the history of the Treasury Department.

Other new economic advisers on Biden’s team include Princeton University economist Cecilia Rouse, who will be the first Black woman to lead the Council of Economic Advisers, and Brian Deese, an executive at investment giant BlackRock, as director of the National Economic Council. He was not present on the stage Tuesday.

In a move that’s drawing outrage from progressives, Biden also announced Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress think tank, as his pick for head of the Office of Management and Budget. While Tanden would be the first woman of color and the first South Asian woman in the role, critics oppose her organization’s cozy relationship with corporate funders, her record of antagonizing and undermining progressive Democrats, including then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and her aggressive foreign policy positions. This is Neera Tanden speaking Tuesday.

NEERA TANDEN: Mr. President-elect, Madam Vice President-elect, I am here today thanks to my mother’s grit, but also thanks to a country that had faith in us, that invested in her humanity and in our dreams. I am here today because of social programs, because of budgetary choices, because of a government that saw my mother’s dignity and gave her a chance. Now it is my profound honor to help shape those budgets and programs to keep lifting Americans up, to pull families back from the brink, to give everybody the fair chance my mom got.

AMY GOODMAN: Biden’s Cabinet nominees still face approval by the Senate, and The Daily Beast reports Tanden has now deleted more than a thousand of her own tweets, some of which were critical of the senators who would vote on whether to confirm her. Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas has said her nomination is, quote, “radioactive.”

To look more at Biden’s incoming Cabinet, we are joined by Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Bernie Sanders 2020, co-host of Bad Faith podcast and contributing editor to Current Affairs.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Briahna. Let’s start off with Neera Tanden. You were tweeting up a storm, tweets you did not delete. Can you talk about your thoughts on the person proposed to be head of the Office of Management and Budget?

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: Yeah. I mean, there’s been a lot of talk, ever since Biden officially clinched the nomination, about the efforts to unify the Democratic Party and his efforts to reach out to the left. And a lot of his moves have been characterized as a kind of sop to the left, while there hasn’t been a lot of substance behind those characterizations.

So, what you’ve seen in this latest slate of picks is a lot of emphasis on the identity of the individuals picked, a lot of firsts in the group. And even folks with less — or less, shall we say, more attenuated relationships to traditional identity characters have gone as far as to talk about the struggles of their stepfather’s family, right? And I think that’s very intentional, because substantively several of these individuals have real problems, and none of them truly represents a progressive in the mindset of most Americans, especially those who identified with Bernie Sanders.

And Neera Tanden is someone, in particular, who was very notorious for being openly antagonistic of Senator Sanders, who, again, represented the largest coalition of progressive voters in this country; perhaps most notorious for physically assaulting Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager when he was an employee at — an editor at ThinkProgress, a vertically integrated media institution under CAP.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Briahna, I’d like to ask you — The New York Times and The Washington Post both sort of talked about these nominees as basically being pro-labor and friendly to labor unions. Could you talk about this emphasis on the policies toward labor, supposedly, that all of these folks represent?

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: Yeah. I mean, what’s most — the thing I would say would most accurately characterize Neera Tanden, in particular, is that she is fundamentally a party loyalist. Even her mother has described her as such, as someone who’s very aggressive and very devoted, in particular in 2016 to Hillary Clinton.

So, what we’ve seen over the course of her career is that she has repeatedly kind of represented herself as open to the kind of moderate, I would describe it as, corporate Democratic pushes, to cut entitlements, for instance. She said in a notable clip in 2012 that entitlements had to be on the table. And that’s in stark contrast with this portrait of a woman whose mother very sympathetically relied on public assistance in her youth, and who has used that experience to try to, I think, shield herself against the substantive criticism that she has been open to Medicare cuts, Social Security cuts, and has spoken about these things, even using the language “entitlement” in a way that is not at all typical of someone you would describe as progressive, and which is really distressing given the extent of economic crisis this country is in now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me go to that comment Neera Tanden made around the issue of slashing Social Security. This is Tanden speaking to C-SPAN after the 2010 midterms.

NEERA TANDEN: Center for American Progress has put forward ideas and proposals to reform the beneficiary structure of Social Security. Some of our progressive allies aren’t so — aren’t as excited about that as we are, but we’ve put those ideas on the table.

AMY GOODMAN: So, she’s talking about her group, the Center for American Progress. Briahna?

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: Yeah. I mean, and, look, all of the emphasis on the firsts, of the diversity of this crew, but less emphasis on whether or not these individuals represent the interests of the group that they are assumed to represent because of what they look like, right?

So, we live in a country where 50% of African Americans rely on Social Security for upward of 90% of their income. And you have someone being put forward by Joe Biden — Joe Biden who, again, relied overwhelmingly on the support of African Americans to clinch the nomination — who is speaking in such cavalier terms about cutting one of the most important social safety net programs. And I think it’s rightfully distressing to a lot of progressives, on top of the interpersonal issues and kind of lack of decorum she’s demonstrated on the internet.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the big questions, clearly, especially among young people in this country, is how the Biden economic team will deal with the issue of student debt, which is now into the trillions of dollars. Any sense that you have from these picks so far where the direction of his policies might go in that area?

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: I’m not overly optimistic. You know, I don’t know that Neera Tanden or any of the others have spoken directly on this issue, but she’s someone who over the course of her career has emphasized moderation, right? So, back when she was working for Hillary Clinton in 2016, she was one of her advisers that was advising her against adopting a $15 minimum wage, something which is hardly some far-left radical program. She’s on record as having said that we will never have Medicare for All, because people are going to be unwilling to let go of their private health insurance — this at a time where I believe we’re up to 14 million Americans losing their employer-based health insurance because of the COVID crisis and, of course, unemployment.

So, in a world where student loan debt, especially in the course of the primary, was still being characterized by the overwhelming bulk of Democratic Party candidates as something that was a far-left, inappropriate policy to pursue, and which, even in the context of Joe Biden, is still being framed as something that should be pushed in a very minimalist way — right? — he has the power to cancel all student debt on day one but is talking about canceling a maximum $10,000; Chuck Schumer, some others are pushing for more — I’m not overly optimistic that this policy, which is one of few that Biden has control over, is going to be dealt with in the maximalist way that the crisis compels.

Comments? Thoughts?

11/18 Rev. Raphael Warnock for Senate

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Birdies – do you think we ought to add Rev Warnock to our Senate Progressive Candidates list?

I think he’s got potential. I noticed that Breitbart and some of the RWNJ rags are trying to frame Warnock as someone who can’t be a moral authority from a church and support the legality of Roe v Wade. Warnock was endorsed by Planned Parenthood last May, but I guess no one took his candidacy very seriously then. He says that reproductive rights are very much aligned with his views of healthcare and justice.

Warnock how the Democratic Party’s support for abortion rights fits with his role as a “minister, a leader of the church, (and) a man of God.”

Warnock serves as the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where both Martin Luther King Sr. and Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastors.

The pastor responded to Bryant’s question by declaring that he believes that health care is a “human right” and “something that the richest nation in the world provides for its citizens.”

“[A]nd for me, reproductive justice is consistent with my commitment to that,” he stated. “I believe unequivocally in a woman’s right to choose.”

Warnock argued that a woman’s decision to have an abortion as “something that we don’t want government engaged in,” adding that such a decision is “between her and her doctor and her minister.”

Regarding climate change, he supports moving towards a GND. According to his campaign’s website, Warnock believes

Reverend Warnock believes that solutions to climate change are moral issues and that we can act on the consensus that already exists among Americans by ignoring Washington special interests and putting effective, common sense policies in place. Starting with rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and restoring America’s place as a leader in the fight for climate justice we can achieve this. As a Senator, he will advocate for the United States to:

  • Rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and build upon the international commitment to fighting climate change;
  • Work to reverse the Trump Administration’s attack on the Environmental Protection Agency and standards for clean air and water;
  • Prepare Georgia’s coastline for rising sea-levels with investments in green infrastructure, structural reinforcement and climate science;
  • Push for investment in resources, infrastructure, and education in communities of color to benefit in energy cost savings;
  • Advocate for marginalized people to receive training and education to participate in the green new economy and jobs;
  • Set goals for carbon reduction and robust climate standards for newly manufactured cars and infrastructure;
  • Encourage investment in clean energy and commit to transitioning to a clean economy by 2050; and
    Hold polluters and utility companies accountable

One can tell that his work with Rev Barber and Al Gore illustrates he’s not a newcomer to environmental justice. From his website:

Reverend Warnock has focused on the work of environmental justice throughout his time at Ebenezer Baptist Church, helping organize and lead a public interfaith mass meeting on climate change with the Reverend William Barber II and Vice President Al Gore. He is proud to have the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters and is committed to fighting climate change and environmental racism in the U.S. Senate.

His emphasis on climate justice is guided by his faith and his understanding that “the Earth is the Lord’s.” He believes that we must be stewards of the earth our children will inherit, and that we all should have the right to clean air and water. He also understands that our harm to the planet often causes those who can least afford it to experience the most tragic consequences, often communities of color and lower income populations.

Understanding the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized communities, Reverend Warnock’s view of environmental justice doesn’t just focus on addressing long term challenges, but everyday problems. That means addressing the lack of access to clean water and air in many impoverished communities and the higher share of income many Black and brown households pay in energy bills, often as a result of limited cost saving tools like alternative energy sources. He also believes in working toward a clean economy that will create jobs, reduce pollution, and produce a world that our children can inherit.

I’d like to nominate Rev Warnock to be added to our candidates list (maybe start it as a 2021 list?) and have a link added to his profile.

Thoughts? Feel free to add other things you may like or have concerns.

11/13 TGIF – Every Picture Tells a Story – Open Thread

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TGIF from Benny’s Bar…Theme for Tonight: Songs and Images that Tell Us a Quick Moment or Story

Mocktail 2020-09-08 213703.jpg

Mocktail 2020-09-08 213703.jpg

WI Old Fashioned Brandy 2020-10-07 212822.jpg

WI Old Fashioned Brandy 2020-10-07 212822.jpg


(2nd drink is for @wi62, whom we celebrate in getting out of the COVID club this week)

Here’s a picture that has started a story…and with our help and words, craft more of our stories to bring to Capitol Hill, for economic, racial, and environmental justice.

I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job or simple justice.

—James Earl Carter, new governor of GA in 1970.

I sent the organization a snack. Well done!

Another image, courtesy of the Atlanta Constitution-Journal:

Biden cleared the 300 EV mark. Congrats to his campaign. (I won’t congratulate the DNC though.)

And the chanson? Rod Stewart on the Video Jukebox:

Post your fav images, photos, videos appropriate for our place! News, tweets — keep them coming. Drinks are on the Nest! This serves as an evening open thread.

10/21 News Roundup, Numbers, and Open Thread

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Here’s something cheerful to start the day:

Make America Green Again

In fact, the U.S. is currently on a path away from that green dream. Bigly. The Trump Administration is in the process of finalizing the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. (It will shortly become the only one in the world that contributes more than 2 percent of global emissions without being a member of the landmark climate pact). Emissions have been on the rise again after years of incremental dips — slowed this year only because of a deadly pandemic. And the nation’s most vulnerable communities are routinely forced to reckon with environmental contaminants, extreme weather, and industrial pollution.

Climate change could tip the scales in these 6 toss-up House races
The issue — and, frankly, the world — is hotter than in any previous election cycle.
If a couple of intrepid aliens dropped by to observe a Congressional hearing on climate change, knowing that humanity’s survival hinged on finding a solution to rising temperatures, they would hurry back to their home planet under the impression that Earth was doomed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. That green dream could be a reality — and for the most part, we know what we need to do to bring it to life.

Below, you’ll learn about eight tools lawmakers could leverage to make America great on climate change. These are interventions that already exist, and concern everything from your home to your local transportation system.

All we need to do is reach out and grab them.

More news, tweets, videos in the comments section. 13 days until Election Day.

10/20 Down Ballot News Roundup and Open Thread

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Let’s check on our list of progressives and see how things are going for them, starting with Paula Jean Swearengin. The link in the tweet leads you to video clips from In West Virginia Politics.

More news, tweets, video, and good jibber-jabber in the comments. Sure Happy It’s Tuesday.

10/19 News Roundup & Open Thread

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‘Democracy Has Won’: Year After Right-Wing Coup Against Evo Morales, Socialist Luis Arce Declares Victory in Bolivia Election

Twice postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Sunday’s election was a do-over of last year’s presidential contest, which was thrown into chaos after the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) leveled baseless allegations of “fraud” by Morales, who was eventually forced to resign and flee the country under threat by Bolivia’s military.

The coup against Morales sparked a wave of Indigenous-led protests that were violently repressed by the Bolivian military and police forces, which were granted sweeping immunity from prosecution by the anti-Indigenous Añez government.

“The OAS allegations were indeed the main political foundation of the coup that followed the October 20 election three weeks later,” Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote last month. “But they provided no evidence to support these allegations—because there wasn’t any. This has since been established repeatedly by a slew of expert statistical studies.”

From exile in Argentina, Morales on Monday celebrated Arce’s apparent victory as a “great triumph of the people.”

“Brothers and sisters: the will of the people has been asserted,” Morales tweeted. “This is an overwhelming victory… We are going to give dignity and liberty back to the people.”

More news, tweets, and good jibber-jabber in the comments.

10/10-11 Weekend News Roundup and Open Thread

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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!