During the financial panic this past year, an oft-repeated assertion by analysts and politicians was the reassuring nostrum: "The fundamentals of the economy are sound."
For me -- believing differently for 30 years while watching our productive manufacturing base erode, our family farms shrivel and our children's social and individual debt balloon -- the financial panic that enriched its perpetrators and impoverished the nation was a symptom of a deeper structural crisis that threatens collapse. The drive for short-term gain is killing us. Completely deluded about causes, the tea-bag partiers are correct about the urgency of the moment.
Bob Dylan sang: "You don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows." Today, local and national political leadership appear to be standing in the teeth of a Category Five hurricane repeating a variation on the mantra: "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie."
The truth is that the world, and especially this country, cannot afford a system driven by narrow private interest and short-term profit that remains willfully ignorant of the consequences of its actions and expends its energy frustrating efforts to confront fundamentals. Examples:
• We are launching a disastrous expansion of our involvement in the Middle East. Our military is engaged around the world primarily to defend an untenable and undesirable dependence on fossil fuels. We need to think defense; bring the troops home and rebuild America.
• We are about to patch a dysfunctional health-care system with expensive, inadequate Band-Aids when America simply cannot sustain the swollen overhead and profit-making nature of the present Byzantine system.
• Meanwhile, Pittsburgh's mayor proposed taxing students, increasing our children's debt load while ignoring the most flagrant pseudo nonprofit -- UPMC. Just how does a nonprofit invest for profit in seven foreign countries while closing the system of community-based hospitals that provide its central nonprofit rationale? The closing of Braddock hospital, built partly by steelworker contributions, serving emergency needs of the Edgar Thomson steel mill, key employer in one of the county's most vulnerable areas, is a shame and an outrage. UPMC's shirking of its duty to provide fair and reasonable compensation to the city of Pittsburgh for the services it consumes rubs salt in the collective wound.
• We allow anti-tax forces to strangle government services increasingly needed by poor and working families. Despite a state budget crisis, the Legislature and certain gubernatorial candidates refuse to support taxation and regulation of Marcellus Shale gas extraction in the face of an invasion by thousands of drillers punching many very deep holes in the Earth, exploiting a basic resource of the commonwealth with little compensation, while threatening vital water supplies only gradually recovering from two centuries of mining and industry. Political courage anyone?
• We fail to grasp an available solution to our dysfunctional transportation system of overcrowded highways and nightmarish airline terminals. We need a comprehensive rail passenger system (jobs anyone?) that includes high-speed and maglev trains that qualitatively exceed the 90-mph limits that our timid leadership seem to think is all we are capable of building. The Chinese are expanding their maglev project while simultaneously building extensive high-speed steel-rail corridors with trains in excess of 200 mph. Here, blocked by private freight interests, it's neither maglev nor high-speed rail. Taxes support automobile and airline infrastructure in America, while rail passengers cede to container cars bearing Chinese imports. The nation's most advanced maglev project is in McKeesport, hanging by a thread despite its obvious advantage in Pennsylvania's variegated terrain, being capable of surmounting gradients twice that of steel rail.
• We allow traditional oil, gas and coal interests to thwart our adoption of sustainable energy sources on a scale needed to provide jobs for our young and energy security for all. The Chinese are aggressively moving to dominate solar- and wind-energy markets. They have muscle. Two generations of American economic leadership, dominated by a fear of manufacturing that might resurrect unions and opposed to taxes required by large-scale public investment needed to rebuild our infrastructure, have defined economic development in terms of consumption and profits rather than production for human needs. Free-trade ideology impoverishes the many, enriches the few.
• Finally, regarding unions: Do we really believe that we can do without the free-will involvement of workers in rebuilding America? Has the top-down leadership of our business class been manifestly effective lately? Did we send a whole generation of our young to college so they can be without a voice at work? Shouldn't union training and workers' centers be embraced proudly as a regional asset?
How can anyone say -- with a straight face -- our economic fundamentals are sound?
First Published: January 20, 2010, 5:00 a.m.
