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A Sustainable Economy — “The Change We Need”
by Rick Cole
In his first press conference as president-elect, Barack Obama acknowledged, “Some of the choices that we make are going to be difficult…it is not going to be easy for us to dig ourselves out of the hole that we are in.”
In this crisis, the “change we need” is to invest in a sustainable economy for our future, rather than borrowing to sustain our current economy. Here’s how the new Administration can help us dig out of the hole we’re in:
Green business. In his new global survey of America’s peril and potential, Hot, Flat and Crowded, Thomas Friedman calls “green” the “new red white and blue.” Obama has pledged to create “green jobs” through alternative energy. But in the decade ahead, every single job in the American economy will need to go “green,” by ruthless pursuit of less waste and more sustainable and productive business practices. For the private sector to succeed, federal policies on taxes, regulations, research, purchasing and grant-making must all be reformed to promote green practices, rather than stifle them.
Smart Growth. The suburban, auto-dominated landscape of the past 50 years won’t work for a post-peak oil, post-carbon America. Alternate fuels aren’t enough, nor is transit compatible with sprawl. The Congress for the New Urbanism, headed by former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist, has revived traditional town and city building to emphasize mixed-use, transit-oriented design at every scale of development from neighborhood to metropolis. Rep. Earl Blumenauer from Portland, Oregon has emerged as the leading national leader for this movement, rapidly being adopted by cities and states across America.
Regionalism. In a June speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Obama identified metro regions as the engines of global growth. Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, Portland, Chattanooga and St. Louis have emerged as models for metro/suburban collaboration. Obama also embraced the social equity dimension of regionalism, to ensure inner cities will benefit from collaborative efforts to improve education, reinvest in older communities and create globally competitive high-wage, high-value jobs.
Transportation. In 1991, Senator Pat Moynihan spearheaded the landmark ISTEA transportation law. But instead of matching the investment by other advanced economies in high-speed rail and public transit, the Clinton administration let highway expansion continue to dominate federal spending. The Bush Administration failed to even keep up on infrastructure maintenance, so that sprawl continues to fuel oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The new administration will need to start where ISTEA left off to rebuild our goods–and people-moving capacity on an environmentally and economically sustainable model.
Human capital. Education is the key to restoring American competitiveness. Mayors around the country have emulated Chicago’s Richard Daley’s drive to rebuild inner city schools to restore America’s great cities as engines of new wealth creation, rather than gentrified havens for young professionals amongst crime-ridden slums. We need a national commitment to human capital to reduce the underclass, assimilate immigrants, and provide the workforce that can outperform the hard-working offshore workforce in the economy of the future.
Innovation. Obama’s popularity in Silicon Valley mirrors his embrace of venture capital investment in American jobs. The Japanese failed to shake off their decade-long slump because they remained tied to “pork barrel” public works stimulation of their economy. Harnessing private investment and entrepreneurship to rebuild America’s cities, older suburbs and essential infrastructure is essential not only to economic success, but to political success as well. Let’s take the huge brainpower and speculative investment that’s been devoted to financing consumer debt and redeploy it to rebuild America’s cities and productive economy.
New Orleans. Of all George Bush’s failures, the cruelest was his empty promise to rebuild New Orleans. The most hopeful counter-point to those wasted years would be to use the New Orleans region as a model for a green economy that puts people back to work in jobs that create wealth instead of consuming it. Instead of the default choice of tourism, gambling, and decay, New Orleans should rebuild around enterprise and trade, with first-class schools and a sustainable infrastructure.
Reshaping of the American landscape and economy won’t be easy. “Change we can believe in” must look beyond Washington and its stale wedge issues. It must harness local movements, as well as mayors, council members, governors and state legislators, advancing innovative new models throughout our federalist system. Obama carries the unique advantage of having been a community organizer and a state legislator. He can be the model and the inspiration for a broad-based movement for change.The new administration will be a time of harsh testing, for Washington and for the country. Our nation is too geographically diverse, our economy too gargantuan, for Washington to chart a single course. But investing in sustainability instead of spending on consumption could have a profound impact on the shape of American metropolitan regions and the communities they contain. That’s “the change we need.”
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reprinted from Citiwire.net with permission
Written by Rick Cole · Filed Under Guests
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I think there are a lot of near term problems that must be solved before we can start on these long term goals. We don’t seem to be getting an administration that has anyone in it who has ever really championed anything but the status quo. There’s no one who has ever demonstrated a capability to think outside the corporate box.
Jerry-i respectfully disagree. First, it s crucial for even shorter-run problems to be FORMULATED in ways that acknowledge the longer-term problems, even if short-run efforts to solve short-run problems end up emphasizing the short-run. I mean, you wouldn’t want to adopt a short-run solution that made longer-run problems even more impossible to remedy–would you? Second, when you wrote “There’s no one who has ever demonstrated a capability to think outside the corporate box.” i think you may have overlooked our first community organizer President, the guy from Chicago who would have had to intentionally look the other way to miss learning Saul Alinsky organizing. As you may know, Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals, provides the uderpinnings for ACORN, the much maligned by Republicans organizing group.
bob letcher
Rick — thanks for your important posting. I have a couple questions, though. Your essay makes no mention of “power”. Power allows people who have it to do terrible things to nice lists of nice things for nice people to do, nicely — said in empathy, for i am on your side of this matter, not in sarcasm. Sometimes, people who don’t have power find themselves so uncomfortable and unaccustomed to getting some of it that they just give it back (as Mark Twain parodied in his book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; or simply take on the views of “power” as their own (as John Gaventa discusses in his book, Power and Powerlessness, which is itself a development of Steven Lukes’ “3rd face of power”, which I guess gets back to Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony:”, which some way or other had to get us back to Karl Marx who, despite having fallen out of many people’s favor still has much to say about how the word works). So my first question is, how do you propose to develop a sustainable economy in the face of power?
Seond, it seems to me that for many reasons–esp those discussed in Meadows at al’s recent update of Jay Forrester’s groundbreaking book, Limits to Growth–a lower consumption lifestyle (lower “footprint” in their terms) is unavoidable, although i must admit that i am only 60 some pages in–and maybe they found a magic bullet. But if this guess of mine holds, then it seems to me that we in the US will nee to drastically cut back on our material consumption. That’s something americans resist with vigor–see for example, the difficulty of adjustng to reduced consumption during the current economic misfiring. So my second question is, how do you propose to go about getting everyday americans to buy into your vision?
bob letcher