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THE BRIDGE TO THE HIGH ROAD, PT. 2
Our major problems all seem connected:
** Real wages for working people have been dropping for 20 years and there are no national policies (either governmental or private) to counter this trend. Indeed, there are legions of senators, Chicago economists, newspaper editors, and captains of finance who view this as a good thing --it holds inflation in check and "disciplines" working people so they don't get their expectations too high. As an unspoken industrial policy, America is vigorously pursuing the low road of economic development --"de-industrializing" and expanding the low-paid service sector.[1]
** As wages drop, working people are taking two and three jobs (increasingly, part-time without benefits) to make ends meet, thus making it harder and harder to pay proper attention to children, family, neighborhood and community life. More and more, people deal with their troubles separately and alone rather than in any organized way. The social fabric is becoming frayed as people are forced by circumstances to turn inward.
** The people who are promoting the low road are themselves getting rich. The S&P 500 stock market index had quadrupled in the past 5 years.[2] Mergers and acquisitions now total a trillion dollars each year.[3] In many cases, speculative ventures have replaced solid, productive business as major sources of new wealth. The newspapers have taken to writing coyly about our "casino economy." Many of these speculative Wall Street "deals" diminish the nation's productive capacity and destroy good jobs.[4]
In short, many corporate chieftains have figured out that they can make more money by buying and selling other corporations than they can by providing high-quality goods and services. The chairman of U.S. Steel epitomized this view when he said, "We are in business to make money, not steel." And, sure enough, American steel companies refused to modernize, foreign competitors beat them to the punch, and the nation's steel-producing capacity was destroyed. Communities dependent upon steel were simply written off, discarded, as thousands of good jobs were knowingly destroyed. This is the cynical face of the low road.
** Our economy is now characterized by an astonishing inequality --the richest 1% owns more than the bottom 90%.
** Inequality translates into political power for the few, and disengagement for the many. In both political parties, big money translates directly into insider influence with elected officials and lawmakers, leading to tax policies that benefit the wealthiest 5% at the expense of everyone else. This is the low road.
** Far fewer than 50% of the electorate actually vote, perhaps because they see that the system offers no real choices and that voting no longer promises to make any substantial difference in their lives;
** The "haves" have shown themselves dismayingly reluctant to invest in anything that might specifically benefit the "have nots." This is the low road. The wealthiest 40%, emulating the top 1%, tend to favor tax decreases at almost any cost, so we are cutting back the hours at our public libraries, and reducing budgets for our public schools. With voucher proposals, we are encouraging families to abandon our public schools entirely. In some central-city Baltimore public schools, the children have no books, let alone computers. No books. Thus are they being prepared for entry into the information age. Thus are we paving a long, low road into the future.
** Government bureaucracies are still huge and burdensome, but they are now in retreat, unresponsive, protected from public access by labyrinthine voice-mail systems.
** Technological changes --the electronics and information revolutions --have put a tremendous premium on quality and quantity of education that most people cannot afford. Yet neither political party --nor the private sector --has proposed programs to help large numbers of working people upgrade and modernize their skills, to keep America competitive. This is the low road.
** Forty percent of the nation's children are being raised in poverty. The prisons are being expanded now to house them when they grow up. This is the low road --turning our backs on the development of our people, writing off whole central-city populations.
In sum: America's governmental and private-sector leaders have chosen the "low road" of economic development --the road that:
** seeks short-term, speculators' gain for a small portion of the "private sector" no matter what the costs to communities or the nation's productive capacity;
** treats workers like any other inanimate cost of production, relentlessly driving down wages;
** actively discourages worker organizations;
** insists that firms and capital remain footloose and ready to move offshore at the first sign that a community expects something in return for hosting a firm;
** pays lip service to environmental values but refuses to develop sustainable alternatives, such as renewable sources of energy, and blunders ahead with powerful, poorly-understood technologies like genetically-engineered crops.
In sum, the "low road" is now synonymous with "business as usual" in America. And we are told that this is all inevitable and unchallengeable, made so by forces of "globalization" that are entirely beyond our control.
Fortunately, there is another way, though getting there will not be easy. Dan Swinney, of the Midwest Center for Labor Research in Chicago has recently published a manifesto called BUILDING THE BRIDGE TO THE HIGH ROAD, subtitled Expanding Participation and Democracy in the Economy to Build Sustainable Communities.[5] It could be as important as the PORT HURON STATEMENT was in 1964, provoking a generation of activists to do their best thinking.[6]
Swinney has worked for 20 plus years in Chicago, as a machinist, labor union activist, and, most recently, analyst helping small and mid-sized companies buck the trend and stay in business in Chicago. The low road has cost Chicago 80,000 good jobs in the last 20 years, and Swinney thinks 75% of those jobs could have been saved by people taking the right actions at the right time. Recently, Swinney's purview has expanded to New York City and beyond because the "low road" is destroying jobs and productive capacity everywhere, and everywhere people are looking for answers. Swinney's "high road" manifesto is the beginning of Swinney's answer --he says he'll probably turn it into a book during the next year or two.
The high road is about developing the nation's economy around high-wage jobs, investing in people and equipment to make firms efficient and productive and therefore competitive and profitable. But it's about more than that. It's about people in communities taking responsibility for CREATING WEALTH, insisting that they can control their local and regional economies.
This is the most far-reaching message for environmental and community activists in Swinney's paper.
For years, in an unspoken social contract, we have allowed the business community to create wealth, and we --tens of millions of us working in different ways --have restricted our efforts to urging a fair distribution of that wealth. Labor unions have urged that working people get their fair share. Housing activists have pressed for homeless people to get at least a pittance. Many people have urged that libraries and schools should get decent funding, that the minimum wage be raised, that the well-to-do pay their fair share of taxes. Others have urged that the salmon be protected, the trees preserved, and that "justice for all" must include environmental justice. Most of us have approached these problems in a single-issue way, focusing our efforts narrowly, fiercely, without letup. But we have taken a hands-off approach to business.
It is now clear that we have failed --failed to achieve a fair distribution of benefits, failed to persuade the well-to-do to invest adequately in the nation's human capacity, its infrastructure, or its productive capacity, failed to protect the ecosystems provide the platform that supports us all.
And so the old social contract is broken. It is simply no longer in effect. Communities and working people must begin to see themselves as having the responsibility to not merely redistribute wealth, but also to CREATE wealth and to do it sustainably. It will take 30 or 40 years to make the transition to the high road, but we are left with no choice. We must seek control of the economy, insisting on our right and our capacity to manage it at every level. That is what it means to be a sovereign people. Only then can the economy be made modern, efficient, and sustainable.
In Swinney's view, the high road is characterized by:
** Development that is environmentally sustainable, which requires companies to make products and use processes that are good for the health of workers, consumers, and surrounding communities; and that restore rather than damage the environment;
** Good jobs that can support a family and allow time for leisure, education, and social participation;
** Development that is socially sustainable, with a goal of overcoming historic divisions and oppressions related to race, class, gender, and national origin.
** A strategic alliance between the labor movement and political, democratic, environmental, economic, new immigrant, and social organizations;
** Recognition that labor and community must accept the responsibility to lead in creating wealth and developing productive capacity;
** Recognition that the business sector includes friends and allies as well as low-roaders, and that we must be prepared to modify a narrow anti-corporate analysis;
** Identifying market forces as well as mass movements as our tools and terrain for change;
** Being entrepreneurial --seeking to be leaders in the market place as well as in the social and political world --and defining the essential connection between the two;
** Defining a clear role for government, including a responsibility to expand our civic structure and life, and to measure success in governance by progress at the company and community levels.
Dan's paper is much richer in detail that we can recapture here. He offers numerous vignettes of real companies in real communities struggling to get onto the high road, some succeeding and some failing. Dan's paper is not the last word on this broad and deep subject, but it is an excellent first crack at stating the problem and the direction we need to go.
Dan is a member of the board of directors of Sustainable America (SA). We urge all our readers, including elected officials and business people, to join Sustainable America, so that, together, we can build a strong infrastructure for ongoing multi-issue work. Check out www.sanetwork.org, send E-mail to sustamer@sanetwork.org, or telephone executive director Elaine Gross in New York City: (212) 239-4221. --Peter Montague
THE BRIDGE TO THE HIGH ROAD, PART 1
The environmental movement is treading water and slowly drowning. There is abundant evidence that our efforts --and they have been formidable, even heroic --our efforts have largely failed. (For example, see REHW #613.) After 30 years of exceedingly hard work and tremendous sacrifice, we have failed to stem the tide of environmental deterioration.
Make no mistake: our efforts have had a beneficial effect. Things would be much worse today if our work of the past 30 years had never occurred. However, the proper way to judge ourselves is not to ask, Have we made things better? Clearly we have. But the proper question is, Have our efforts been adequate? Have we succeeded? Have we even come close to stemming the tide of destruction? And, more deeply, has our vision been commensurate with the scale and scope of the problems we set out to solve? To those questions, if we are honest with ourselves, we must answer No.
What then are we to do? A few things have become clear as our work has evolved over the past quarter century. This short series will reinforce some old ideas and introduce some new ones for sustainable development. The series is intended to provoke thought and debate, and certainly is not offered as the last word on anything.
Key ideas
Open, democratic decision-making will be an essential component of any successful strategy. After the Berlin wall fell, we got a glimpse of what had happened to the environment and the people under the Soviet dictatorship.[1] The Soviets had some of the world's strictest environmental laws on the books, but without the ability for citizens to participate in decisions, or blow the whistle on egregious violations, those laws meant nothing. Eastern Europe was thoroughly trashed under Soviet rule, and it will be decades (or longer) before repairs can be effected. Several generations of humans were sacrificed, and their natural environment was decimated.
For the same reason that science cannot find reliable answers without open peer review, bureaucracies (whether public or private) cannot achieve beneficial results without active citizen participation in decisions and strong protections for whistle-blowers.[2] Without many people looking at a problem and bringing their different viewpoints to bear on it, errors remain uncorrected, narrow perspectives and selfish motives are rewarded, and the general welfare will not usually be promoted (to paraphrase the Constitution).
The fundamental importance of democratic decision-making means that our strategies must not focus on legislative battles. Clearly, we must contend for the full power of government to be harnessed toward achieving our goals, but this is quite different from focusing our efforts on lobbying campaigns to convince Congress or a state legislature to do the right thing from time to time. Lobbying can mobilize people for the short term, but mere mobilization does not create long-term organization. Mobilizing is not the same as organizing. During the past 30 years, the environmental movement has had some notable successes mobilizing people, but few successes building long-term organizations that people can live their lives around and within (the way many families in the '30s, '40s and '50s lived their lives around and within their unions' struggles for decent wages, decent working conditions, an 8-hour day, and so forth). The focus of our strategies must be on building organizations that involve people and, in that process, finding new allies. The power to govern would naturally flow from those efforts.
This question of democracy is not trivial. It is deep. And it deeply divides the environmental movement, or rather movements plural. Many members of the mainstream environmental movement tend to view ordinary people as the enemy (for example, they love to point to Pogo saying, "We have met the enemy and he is us."). They fundamentally don't trust people to make good decisions, so they prefer to leave ordinary people out of the equation. Instead, they scheme with lawyers and experts behind closed doors, then announce their "solution" (whatever it may be). Then they lobby Congress in hopes that Congress will impose this latest "solution" on us all.
Naturally, such people don't develop a big following and their "solutions" --even when Congress has been willing to impose them upon us --have often proven to be expensive, burdensome, and ultimately unsuccessful.
Since the days of the American Revolution, thoughtful people have recognized that our democracy depends decisivly upon an informed citizenry. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1820, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." And Franklin Roosevelt said in a fireside chat in 1938, "The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government."
In the modern era, open democratic decision-making is essential to survival. Only by informing people, and trusting their decisions, can we survive as a human society. Our technologies are now too complex and too powerful to be left solely in the hands of a few experts. If they are allowed to make decisions behind closed doors, small groups of experts can make fatal errors. One thinks of the old Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) justifying above-ground nuclear weapons testing. In the early 1950s, their atomic fallout was showering the population with strontium-90, a highly-radioactive element that masquerades as calcium when it is taken into the body. Once in the body, strontium-90 moves into the bones, where it irradiates the bone marrow, causing cancer. The AEC's best and brightest studied this problem in detail and concluded that raining strontium-90 over the prairies of mid-America would not hurt anyone. They argued in secret memos that the only way strontium-90 could get into humans would be through cattle grazing on contaminated grass. They calculated the strontium-90 intake of the cows, and the amount that would end up in the cows' bones. Then they carefully measured the tiny slivers of bone fragments found in a typical hamburger. On that basis, the AEC reported to Congress in 1953, "The only potential hazard to human beings would be the ingestion of bone splinters which might be intermingled with muscle tissue in butchering and cutting of the meat. An insignificant amount would enter the body in this fashion."[4] Thus, they concluded, strontium-90 was not endangering people.
The following year, in 1954, Congress declassified many of the AEC's deliberations. As soon as these memos became public, scientists and citizens in St. Louis began asking, "What about the cow's milk?" The AEC scientists had no response. They had neglected to ask themselves whether strontium-90, mimicking calcium, would contaminate cows' milk, which of course it did. These particular AEC experts were not permitted to make decisions in secret for very long, and the world community soon put an end to above-ground nuclear weapons tests, formalizing a treaty 35 years ago. (Recently even China and France seem to have grasped the wisdom of this approach.) However, secrecy in government and corporate decision-making continues to threaten the well being of everyone on the planet as new technologies are deployed at an accelerating pace after inadequate consideration of their effects. Only by informing people broadly, and trusting their decisions, can we survive as a human society. Open democratic decision-making is no longer a luxury. In the modern world, it is a necessity for human survival.
For democracy to work, the economy needs to serve our democratic goals as well. It seems obvious that the overriding purpose of the economy is to serve the basic human needs of everyone according to a widely-shared standard of fairness. But increasingly our own U.S. economy is violating this principle. Five percent of the people are making out like bandits, 40% are doing well, yet the majority are increasingly excluded from the cornucopia, abandoned to fight among themselves over the crumbs. And the chasm between rich and poor is continuing to widen.
MIT economist Lester Thurow has observed, "No country not experiencing a revolution of a military defeat with a subsequent occupation has probably ever had as rapid or as widespread an increase in inequality as has occurred in the United States in the past two decades."[3]
No one is advocating equal distribution of income and wealth. Some people want to work harder than others and they deserve greater rewards for their efforts. However, it is obvious that all wealth is ultimately derived from, and dependent upon, the community. Bill Gates alone did not create the wealth that is now the Microsoft Corporation. With hard work and a measure of luck, Mr. Gates cleverly combined technical details and capacities that he inherited from the larger society that came before him. These centuries of accumulated development are the community's bequest to each of us, and they are what allows us to create wealth. Individual entrepreneurs are important, but wealth is largely created by the community, not by individuals. Each member of the community, therefore, has a just claim on a fair portion of the benefits of the economy.
Citizens who cannot share in the benefits of the economy can rarely participate in democratic decision-making and the republic is weakened accordingly. Furthermore, if a large segment of society is cut off from the benefits of the economy, this breeds envy, distrust, animosity and ultimately fear and danger for everyone. It weakens the fabric that makes one out of many (e pluribus unum, as it says on U.S. coins). A broad distribution of wealth and of human development should be the goal of our economy because it is morally and ethically right, because it will bring the greatest good to the greatest number, and because it is the only way to preserve our most important ideal --our democracy, without which we will surely lose our liberty.
A recent manifesto has caught my attention. It is called BUILDING THE BRIDGE TO THE HIGH ROAD by Dan Swinney who runs the Midwest Center for Labor Research in Chicago. It seems to me that it's an important new statement of how we might achieve some of our fundamental goals. And it just might offer the environmental movement new perspectives on ways to stop treading water and get moving again. You can get a copy from the world wide web --www.mclr.com, though you have to download it in 14 sections and reassemble them into one piece. You can also order a paper copy for $10 from MCLR, Room 10, 3411 W. Diversy, Chicago, IL 60647; phone (773) 278-5418. Next week, we'll look into Dan's promising manifesto.
--Peter Montague
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