| Open Left: As to why now, is there any one factor, such as unemployment hitting double digits, or do you think it's just a combination of things?
Darcy Burner: My educated guess is that it's a combination of things. Unemployment hitting double-digits is certainly a factor, the upcoming financial reform legislation, which has been watered down and watered down, and watered down again to the point where there are legitimate criticisms that it probably institutionalizes some of the worst abuses, rather than fixing them, the introduction by Congressman Conyers of a bill to restore Glass-Steagall, the ongoing discussion of the [Elizabeth] Warren Commission about what's broken in the way that this set of economic advisors has approached stabilizing the financial sector. All of those have been building and building and building, to the point that at some point we were going to hit a tipping point, and we may be just about there.
Open Left: The thing that always gets asked by insider journalists, and I hate to be like that, but to the extent it can shed some light on something people outside the Beltway always have to wonder--Is this just a trial balloon? Or can we expect more congressmembers to speak out in the next several days? Should people expect that? Or not be disappointed if that doesn't happen? What's your sense of how our audience should see it?
Darcy Burner: Well, I think it's certainly a call to take a hard look at what's going on in Congress at what progressives both inside and outside of Congress should be working on. One thing I was thinking about was that you should-I know that Congressman Grijalva made a statement at some point today, to a member of the traditional press about Congressman DeFazio's statement. I don't know exactly what was in his statement, but probably worth setting it up so that you can talk to him directly and either get a statement form hi press person to figure out what Congressman Grijalva is saying, because as one of the co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, it's entirely possible that he'll be driving something. [Editor's note: We're following up on this.]
Now it's worth noting that Congressman Frank is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. SO there are interesting dynamics at play.
Open Left: Is there anything you can tell us about discussions going on about the need to change direction. You've mention these things before, and how they're converging in terms of pressure, is there something more that's going on that without breaking confidences that you can tell us might be about to surface?
Darcy Burner: There has been consistent discussion among the progressive members that I talk to on a regular basis, including Congressman Grijalva of the need for progressives to be very actively engaged in the discussions about the economy, and what we do relative to the economy, both in terms of financial sector reforms and in terms of a potential upcoming jobs bill, and the set of policies around that.
To a large extent, it was we get past health care, we're going to take a breath for just a second, and 'All right now, we need to deal with the economy.'
But it has been, I think, assumed that the next big fight they would pick would be around making the economy work for most Americans rather than just multi-millionaire investment bankers.
Open Left: On the subject of a jobs bill, something else I've been working on ever singe since the Stimulus fight is the inadequate funding of the states for the shortfalls for their budgets, because it's a dollar-for-taking away from public sector spending, and that's a lot of jobs, particularly in education and health care, construction. Every time the states have to cut their budgets, fiscally it's really no different than if the federal government was cutting spending. So is that a topic that people have been discussing?
Darcy Burner: I know that it's a topic that's being discussed in DC. I've attending a number of the briefings and think-tank events that people have been talking about the various ways, different progressive approaches to fixing the economy. And certainly dealing with state and municipal spending, and trying to deal with their budget shortfalls has come up repeatedly as one of the issues that needs to be addressed. I don't know how engaged the members of Congress are in that discussion. And at the moment I think it is pretty clear that it will be one of the things that will be on the table to be discussed, in figuring out how to create jobs in actually meaningful ways to fix the economy.
Open Left: Is there anything that activists or ordinary citizens can do to contribute to changing direction on economic issues that you would recommend?
Darcy Burner: I think that there are two related but not identical efforts that are going on. One is what do you do about financial sector reform, and the second is what do you do about a jobs package and economic policies more broadly than just financial sector reform. There are opportunities to get engaged in both.
Some of the work that the Warren Commission has done in financial sector oversight and the TARP program is surprisingly readable, and I think that applying some pressure to Congress very broadly to take the recommendations of the Warren Commission seriously would be frankly really helpful.
From my personal perspective, if I were going to chose one thing that I would ask people to focus on-and this is me, speaking as me-in the next few weeks, it would be get a basic handle on that part of the recommendations to push forward, they have the potential to have a big impact.
The other thing is I think there is an opportunity to do some interesting policy work around how you create jobs, that the Progressive Congressional Caucus, and progressives in general are much more open than most of Congress to some inside-outside approaches to figuring out what the best policies are.
Were starting to have some active discussions about what might make sense, would I think be really constructive. I mean, does it make sense to approach-if there is going to be a jobs bill--does it make sense to create some WPA-like program? And if so, what does it look like, and who are the experts? And what do the numbers look like on that? Does it make sense-as you said--to focus on state and municipal spending? What are the numbers there? Who are the experts? Are there other things they should be looking at? In terms of creative ways to leverage federal dollars into jobs and economic growth in the country?
I think that now would be a really good moment for the progressive community to do some of the really creative thinking, which I think the movement is frankly pretty good at when it tries.
Open Left: Switching gears a bit, to a more negative sign that's come up, Obama was also just quoted saying that if we didn't cut spending, it could lead to a double-dip recession. There was a direct quote on this--""I think it is important though to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession." But that totally confuses short-term and long-term consequences, and in fact cutting back on spending before the recovery is accomplished is most likely to cause a double-dip recession, similar to what happened when FDR tried to balance the budget in 1937. Are congressional Democrats worried about that sort of thinking as well? Is that even on people's radar yet?
Darcy Burner: Based on the conversations that I have had, progressives understand the problem It's not the progressives issue here. Not to be cynical, but it's fascinating to me that spending doesn't count when it's war spending. But does if we're actually helping people keep their houses for certain factions of the party.
I would argue that spending on the creation of the US infrastructure, that people keep their houses so that it's stabilized the underlying security on which the financial crisis was founded... Even the cash-for-clunkers program had significant positive impact in a Main Street sort of way. But we don't blink an eye at dropping $700 billion on TARP.
Open Left: I always like to end by asking a person I interview what's the most important question I didn't ask that I should have, and what's the answer to it. It just a way that, often something pops into your head that doesn't get expressed because you're already saying something more responsive. So I always like to give a chance for someone to reflect and say something about something that they wanted to address that didn't get asked about directly.
Darcy Burner: There's something that I'd actually like to emphasize, which is that in the fight over heath care reform, we saw for maybe the first time, the outside progressive movement and progressives in Congress align around a set of ideas and principles, and move the legislation substantially to the left of where it would have been otherwise.
Nobody will claim that the House Bill was perfectly progressive or everything they want, but it is a much more progressive bill than the progressives on the Hill could have gotten without the help of the movement.
That alignment between the inside and the outside and recognizing that the whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts, in the case of the movement and Congressional progressives actively working together on policymaking, applies equally well to fights around the economy.
If we want progressive policy enacted, then the Congressional Progressive Caucus and its members are our champions, and we're the leverage that they bring to bear that gives them a real competitive advantage over the Blue Dogs and the New Dems.
Open Left: Since you brought that up, there's still this lingering fight that comes up with some people who are advocates of single payer-and I am a longtime single-payer advocate myself, though I don't take this position-but some single-payer advocates take the position that single-payer has been sold out because people were fighting for the public option, in a way that they weren't fighting for single-payer. I'd like you to speak to that.
Darcy Burner: I think we're addressing tht pretty directly. It might be worth you dairying about it separately at some point.
Open Left: I do have something written for this weekend, but I wanted to let you address it yourself, since you mentioned working together. And I do see what you were saying, that the result we have is much more progressive than seemed possible coming out of August. Things did not look headed in a very progressive direction at all at that time.
Darcy Burner: Exactly. I have several drafts of several angry diaries that I have not posted for obvious reasons. The deal is that governing and policy-making, unlike electoral politics, isn't something where you win it all or lose it all at a single moment in time. It's a [question of] where do you fall on the spectrum, more progressive, less progressive, and trying to figure out within the constraints in which you're operating, how to maximize the progressiveness of the result that you get. And it's perfectly fine to disagree on strategy, I think that having active discussions about what works, what doesn't work, what we might try next time, I think that that's really healthy and constructive.
I, on the campaign trial was pretty clearly a single-payer advocate. I'm on the record in that regard, the vast majority of the members of the Progressive Caucus are co-sponsors of HR 676, John Conyers is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. You know, the issue was never that people didn't want single-payer. The issue was figuring out strategically how to effectively move the legislation in as progressive a direction as you possibly could, and the view of the caucus leadership-and it's really hard to claim, for instance, that Lynn Woolsey isn't sufficiently progressive, that's a tough sell. But the view of the caucus leadership was that they couldn't see a path to get 218 for single-payer in the short term.
That wasn't a fight that given this congress, given this environment was possible to win. And everything that they did started with the statement, 'We would strongly prefer single-payer, but given we understand that that's not what's going to happen, as a second choice we demand, at a minimum that ther be a public option.
When I was putting together briefings for them, when we brought in experts, we tried to bring in experts not only the public option, but also on single payer to have a discussion about how we make sure that the path they were pursuing left open possibilities for the future.
I think that a significant majority of the people who believe that single payer is a much better solution than the path we're on right now-and this includes myself-figured it was better to make the legislation as progressive as possible than it was to take our ball and go home. Because if progressives had taken their ball and gone home, and said our line in the sand is single-payer, we won't settle for anything less, then in order to get 218 votes for health care reform, the leadership would have actually had to go in the other direction, and to figure out how to pick up Republican votes.
Because this is not an issue of it being a little bit worse than it would have been. Had the progressive walked, had they drawn the line at single-payer and said 'We're going to walk if we don't get single-payer'. since your not going to get 218 votes for single-payer, that effectively cuts them out of the loop, and at that point it's 'How do we get the votes of however many-20 or 30 Republicans.' And think about how bad the legislation would have to be to pick up 20 or 30 Republicans in the House.
So I think it's totally fine to have a real discussion about strategy and what we can learn and what works and what didn't work, and how we can make future battles that we fight--how we can get stronger, for the next fight, as well as winning the fights that we're picking.
Those are discussions we should absolutely be having. My frustration is with the accusations of bad faith, on the part of the people who have been working incredibly hard to try to make the legislation that was moving through Congress as progressive as we possibly could.
Open Left: Okay, thank you very much for your time. |
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