Los Angeles and New York share with other large cities a vulnerability to the effects of economic and demographic change,  more specifically, to the prospect of increases in joblessness, homelessness, hunger, and poverty.  These difficulties dramatize the failure of government at all levels to use the long period of economic prosperity to provide for the period of recession now underway. They ignored the story of Joseph in ancient Egypt, who put aside the bounty of good years to feed the people when harvests failed.
 
These failures did not occur because governments lacked the financial resources.  Their roots were in the bi-partisan rejection of an active role for government and in deference to the short-run interests of private corporate and financial interests that control government through the electoral money they provide.  When crisis comes, these interests are free to abandon ship in search of safer havens - at home or abroad - with no liability for the damage they leave behind, whether measured in reduced tax rolls, working families deprived of their livelihood, greater insecurity for everyone, and small business cast adrift.
 
The Bush Administration is not likely to respond effectively, in part because they have relegated the domestic agenda to the periphery in their embrace of a global war, in greater part because their ideology and their deference to powerful private interests bar serious consideration of the measures required to deal with the effects of economic decline. These measures include large-scale public spending, restoration and renewal of the social safety net, empowerment of workers’ rights to organize, limits on the freedom of action of business, enhanced protection of public health, progressive taxation, and other measures that history shows to have been at the heart of effective counter-cyclical public policy.
 
A political response can and should be organized by a bipartisan coalition of the elected leaders of the cities, with New York in the lead. The attack on New York was an attack on the Nation; the Bush Administration’s failure to respond seriously to the loss of lives, jobs, and livelihoods sends a dismissive message to urban America.  Cities are now the central engines of national economic growth and international economic viability.  It is time to send a message that a New New Deal, with cities at its center, is the only response that can restore and renew the nation’s economy.  New York’s mayor should take the lead; the nation will have reason to understand and appreciate the importance of this message and the political mobilization that is required.
 
Sumner Rosen is Chairman of the Five Borough Institute.
 

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