Infrastructure

Mark Thoma explains:

.... If we had included, say, infrastructure spending as part of the initial stimulus package, then the effects would kick in on a sustained basis over time rather than as a one-time hit as with the tax cuts. Thus, this type of spending could have provided the continuous stimulus Shiller is calling for. And if we are wrong and there is no recession, how big a problem is that? Well, what's so bad about building new infrastructure repairing what we already have, don't we need to do that anyway? With a stronger economy, wouldn't it be easier to pay for it? Insurance that also has investment value seems like a good bet to me. ....

Some of the most exciting policy work these days is happening at the intersection of the economy and the environment. This work was on display last week at a meeting of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. At the hearing, Jerome Ringo of The Apollo Alliance, Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and others provided testimony on the importance of "green-collar jobs."

Here's an excerpt from Van Jones' testimony:

.... we believe that the national effort to curb global warming and oil dependence can simultaneously create good jobs, safer streets and healthier communities.

....

We simply have no throw-away resources or species. Nor do we have any throw-away neighborhoods or children. All of creation is sacred. All our people are precious. And we must begin to act again as if we know this fundamental truth – and that it matters to us.

The first step toward keeping faith with this truth is to begin to prepare American workers now for new jobs in the clean-energy future – especially those who most need jobs.

To do this, Congress must realign our workforce development and job training dollars – to give ordinary Americans a shot at life-long careers in this growing part of the U.S. economy.

Congress must give our struggling vocational schools, community colleges and public high schools the resources they need to train and retrain our youth, displaced workers and veterans. A prepared ―green-collar‖ workforce will be key to successful transition to a green economy.

That is why we applaud Senator Bernie Sanders, Congressman George Miller and Congresswoman Hilda Solis for their commitment to passing a Clean Energy Jobs Bill this year. A proposal is being developed to put $120 million into job training to get more than 30,000 U.S. workers (and would-be workers) properly install tens of millions of solar panels, build and maintain thousands of wind farms and weatherize millions of buildings.

....

Just got an e-mail from a good Minnesota friend giving me the latest news about the merger of two great multi-issue progressive organizations in Minnesota, one of which, MAPA, I was on the board of when I lived there back in the 1990s. Here's the story from their website:

Prior to 2005, two successful multi-issue progressive organizations existed in Minnesota, working toward social and economic justice in Minnesota.

Progressive Minnesota, comprising individual members and affiliated organizations, concentrated its efforts on grassroots electoral work in the Twin Cities. The Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action (MAPA), a coalition of member organizations, worked directly at the legislature to effect change on a statewide level. Traveling along parallel paths, MAPA and Progressive Minnesota both evolved into mature and highly effective organizations.

Leaders of both organizations met over a cup of coffee and began a year-long strategic conversation about how to build a more powerful progressive movement in Minnesota.

The resulting organization—TakeAction Minnesota—has the power to shape Minnesota politics in profound and fundamental ways.

Founded in 2001, the American Constitution Society promotes a progressive vision of law and policy, and is increasingly becoming a counterweight to influential conservative legal organizations like the Federalist Society. ACS recently launched a new legal journal, the Harvard Law and Policy Review. Both ACS and the new journal are exciting developments, paticularly because they're trying to move beyond "issue-driven" legal and policy analysis. In an article welcoming the journal, Robert Post explains:

Until the end of the 20th Century, liberals had no analogous incentives to unite. Progressives felt insulated and protected within the largely sympathetic environment of the law schools. Clinton’s presidency offered a false sense of security. Progressives felt free to pursue their distinctive agendas and to splinter into what it has now become fashionable to call “issue silos.” Liberals defined themselves in terms of the particular policy perspectives they wished to advance, rather than in terms of a common opposition to conservative domination.

From a review by Michiko Kakutani in today's NYT of Thomas Edsall's new book, Building Red American: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power:

[Edsall] argues that “Democrats and liberals have shown little interest in maintaining and sustaining institutions designed to produce majorities in Congress and to win the White House.” He says that progressives tend to make project-specific grants instead of building party infrastructure and that “the mainstay organizations of the left,” which were created when liberals were in power, aim to influence “sympathetic decision makers,” not “to wrest power from adversaries,” as many of their counterparts on the right so aggressively do.

You can say that again. Of course, Edsall isn't the first person to make this point—but as an important inside-the-beltway figure, he's national politics correspondent for the Washington Post, it's helpful to have him transmitting this message.

Stirling Newberry has a good piece on TPM Cafe about the most recent ideology vs. competence debate (he uses the terms populists vs. technocrats) in the progressive blogosphere. This one was kicked off by Brad DeLong. Newberry's contribution is somewhat long and rambling, but it makes a number of very good points that are worth highlighting. I pasted the three most interesting paragraphs below:

Populism is often a run away bulldozer, technocracy is often fooled by its own heuristics. This is why out of the wreckage of populist movements of the late 19th century there was a new movement which combined both the moral and energetic stance of populism, and the intellectual edge of sensible elitism. That movement was called "progressivism" and it took root in the Republican Party first, and combined with Wilsonian "liberalism" in the hands of FDR. FDR's best technocrats were often ideologs. Ideologs often make good technocrats because they are absolutely driven to find a solution to a problem, no matter how frustrating it might seem. The emotional fire keeps the ideological technocrat up at night until the numbers finally click into place.

The Department of Education released a report yesterday finding that fourth graders attending public school “did significantly better in reading and math than comparable children attending charter schools.” So, I have to admit my deep bias against charter schools, which I regard as an effort to privatize the ultimate public good – a free, high-quality education. But is anyone really surprised to find that students in the highly regulated and well monitored public school system performed better than students in the limited-oversight, mish-mash, for-profit/non-profit, free-for-all world of charter schools? Not so much.

But what did surprise me was that the Department of Education released this report at all. This administration is notorious for simply rejecting any research that is inconsistent with its agenda, so how did this one slip through the cracks? Turns out, it didn’t so much slip through as much as it was yanked through by one of the teachers’ unions, the AFT. Apparently when the assessment was originally completely in 2004, the Department tried to limit the release of the results and confirmed their accuracy only after the teachers’ union found the data buried on the agency’s website.

From yesterday's Progress Report:

A renovation of the White House press briefing room will include a video wall that could display everything from "flags waving in the breeze [to] detailed charts and graphs," part of a "subtle but sweeping effort by administration officials to deliver their message directly to the public, particularly through video.”

Mark Schmitt has written some of the best stuff out there on the Lamont/Liberman race (may help that he's a Connecticut native). In a post today at TPM Cafe, he ties the race to what is hopefully the demise of "checklist liberalism." He also provides one more reason to contribute to Lamont: Lieberman's support of the incredibly sucky bankruptcy bill.

... Lamont supporters actually aren’t ideologues. They aren’t looking for the party to be more liberal on traditional dimensions. They’re looking for it to be more of a party. They want to put issues on the table that don’t have an interest group behind them - like Lieberman’s support for the bankruptcy bill -- because they are part of a broader vision. And I think that’s what blows the mind of the traditional Dems. They can handle a challenge from the left, on predictable, narrow-constituency terms. But where do these other issues come from? These are “elitist insurgents,” as Broder puts it - since when do they care about bankruptcy? What if all of a sudden you couldn’t count on Democratic women just because you said that right things about choice - what if they started to vote on the whole range of issues that affect women’s economic and personal opportunities?

An interesting point from an article on participatory media in this week's Economist:

As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many “lectures” (ie, from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into “conversations” among “the people formerly known as the audience”. This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Centre, “don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations”. That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.

Michael Gilbert of the Nonprofit Online News has written a fascinating piece on the effect that new forms of networked digital communication, including blogs, are having on traditional nonprofit organziations, and how nonprofits will need to evolve as result.

Here's the intro:

The boundaries of traditional nonprofit organizations are under relentless assault by new patterns of communication and association that are stronger than the corporate model of governance and stronger than nonprofit brands. The media of this assault are social software and the network on which such software flourishes. The assault is fueled by the very passions and people from which the organizations themselves once emerged. Ironically, although it threatens to dissolve their boundaries, this assault is very much on the same side as most of the organizations themselves.

From an interview in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy:

FOREIGN POLICY: Do you think there is anywhere in the world where the left remains a vibrant and progressive force?

Bernard-Henri Lévy: I don’t know, but I do know that that place is not America.… There is such vibrancy, strength, and imagination on the right and not the slightest equivalent on the left. For someone who sees you with foreign eyes, this is one of the most dramatic paradoxes…. The American left has lost the battle of ideas. They have this very strange idea that in order to win [it], you have to first win the fundraising battle. But this is crazy: Money never made ideas.

From a recent Hacker/Pierson essay in the NYT magazine:

The beauty of the Republican network is that it is stronger than the sum of its parts. The conservative power broker Grover Norquist - the head of the antitax group Americans for Tax Reform - recently said that if he were run over by a bus, someone else would take his place. Many thought G.O.P. cohesion would collapse when Newt Gingrich fell from grace. It didn't, and all signs are that it will also survive the loss of the House's latest strongman, Tom DeLay.

From Charles Cooper's blog at cnet.com:

A few unrelated items for your consideration:

• Last spring, an assembly of editors was asked how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was? A few hands in the audience went up. And how many had heard of Craigslist? A few more people added their hands.

• The latest statistics out of the Audit Bureau of Circulations find that newspaper circulation dropped 2.6 percent in the six months that ended in September. That's more of a drop than in any comparable six-month period since 1991.

• A new Pew survey reports that 48 percent of blog creators are under 30 and 39 percent of them have college or graduate degrees.

All this speaks volumes about the state of the print news business, and its increasingly perilous future.

E.J. has a great op-ed out today on the Democratic Party's "vision debate." Here's the best part:

Consider this vision statement: "The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government of economics -- or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women."

The words are Franklin D. Roosevelt's from his 1932 speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, FDR's boldest statement of purpose before he was elected. Roosevelt's point was that while powerful groups often claim to oppose a strong government role in the nation's economic life, they almost always seek government's protection for their own interests. Government's task, Roosevelt argued, was to intervene "not to hamper individualism but to protect it" by helping the less powerful confront economic difficulties and abuses of the system by the powerful.