Five Borough Report June 2003
Imagining a New New Deal
Mike Wallace
What
we should not be asking for – as victims – is for the national
government to underwrite an ambitious program of improvements in New York
City…What we should be
doing is making common cause with the millions and millions of people all
over the country who are hurting – some from fallout from September 11th,
most from the arrival of hard times.
We should immediately strike up alliances with
other states and localities and together insist that the federal government
– that is, us – should deploy its resources – that is, our tax dollars – to
alleviate suffering and revitalize the economy. We should launch a massive program to create and enhance
the nation’s social capital – investing in people and resources in a way we
haven’t done recently, but used to do brilliantly. I’m talking about something far
greater than the anemic “stimulus packages” that were discussed
briefly. What we need is a new
New Deal.
Three accomplishments of that distant era seem
particularly worthy of emulation: (i) the compassionate provision of
relief, in the form of income and jobs, for victims of the amoral marketplace;
(ii) An effort to jump-start the private economy with a jolt of government-underwritten
demand; and (iii) the rehabilitation of the public sector, marshaling our
resources to augment the nation’s social capital.
Let’s imagine what a new New Deal might look
like. Not a revival, but a
twenty-first century version – bolder, smarter, more inclusive. We should launch a Prometheus
Project to eliminate remaining obstacles in the path of producing affordable,
practicable replacements for fossil and nuclear fuels. Massive resources should be pumped
into dragging land transportation into the twenty-first century by
underwriting silent, frictionless, high speed magnetic-levitation trains.
Universal health care with a focus on public health has now become critical
to national safety and economic recovery as well as social justice.
The
massive withdrawal from public housing since the seventies must be
reversed. And we need to
reimpose government oversight of banking and commercial investment. But the initiatives that seem most
immediately relevant to Gotham’s current plight were the “alphabet”
agencies – FERA, CWA, WPA, PWA – which channeled federal monies to states
and localities, allowing them to hire the unemployed and put them to work
providing public goods and services.
What’s appealing about the New Deal are its
roots in our own city’s history, the range and scope of its ambition, its
awareness of the interconnectedness of problems, and the inventiveness and
durability of many of its solutions…It constitutes an inspirational chapter
in our national narrative, one eminently worthy of revisiting as we chart
our course in the years ahead
--Excerpted from A
New New Deal for New York,
Bell
and Weiland, New York, 2002
June 2003
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