Fragmentation of authority, planning and execution have been endemic to urban policy for the better part of four decades. A new report from the Drum Major Institute--"No Economic Recovery Without Cities: The Urgency Of A New Federal Urban Policy"--sounds a clarion call for dramatically turning that around, while also focusing efforts to ensure maximum impact from the existing federal stimulus.
Writing at Huffington Post, report co-author Harry Moroz called for the White House to play "a more active and visible role in cities":
Why not reactivate Obama's grassroots operation so that federal officials and urban stakeholders collaborate in real time and share responsibility for the stimulus? Why not set up stimulus accountability outposts of the White House in cities? Obama came into office with a metro mandate and now is the time to claim it.
All the doubts about the stimulus -- from foes like Senator Coburn and friends like the Conference of Mayors -- will only increase until President Obama empowers his White House Office of Urban Affairs to refocus the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on bolstering the urban areas that will drive economic recovery.
The report itself presents a more robust argument for pro-active White House involvement. From the executive summary:
The White House Office of Urban Affairs provides President Obama a unique opportunity to articulate a national agenda that recognizes urban areas as integral, indeed indispensable, to national prosperity. The last fifty years of federal urban policymaking have been characterized by two ideologies. The first considers urban decline as both a justification for and a mode of urban policymaking. The second deems federal urban policymaking intrusive and harmful to national economic growth. But research shows that cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas are engines of economic growth. Neither ideology recognizes this and so both fail to tie the fate of cities to the fate of the country at large.
*This post was written by Corinne Ramey and cross-posted from the DMI blog*
Until recently, I had never thought much about paid sick leave. But within this past week, leading up to an event on Wednesday that featured Sara Flocks, the co-founder of Young Workers United and one of the prominent voices behind San Francisco's first-in-the-nation paid sick leave law, I've become a big fan of this policy.
This is some of what I learned:
* Anecdotally, paid sick leave is a good idea. Flocks told story after story of workers who were forced to go to work sick. She told of a server at the Cheesecake Factory whose boss told her that she would be fired if she didn't show up for work, despite the fact that she had pinkeye. So the boss "allowed" the sever to wear sunglasses. (Call me crazy, but I don't like people with pinkeye touching my food.) In another example, a woman who was pregnant and hemorrhaging lost her job because her boss told her that if she didn't come to work she'd get fired.
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who was on the panel, gave what was perhaps the scariest example, telling of a hotel worker in Nevada who went to work sick and infected 600 hotel guests. "It's not only a moral issue but a social issue," she said.
* The statistics agree with the anecdotes.Forty-six million U.S. private sector employees don't have paid sick leave. One in three employees worry that taking time off when they are sick would jeopardize their job, and 58% of employees without paid sick leave say they cannot afford to take unpaid time off work when they become ill. Working when sick is especially common among restaurant workers. Eighty-six percent of food and accommodation workers don't have paid sick leave and 52% of NYC restaurant workers say they've gone to work when sick.
The problem:
America's current immigration policy is clearly unacceptable to the general public, immigrant rights activists, immigration opponents and organized labor. Even corporations are dissatisfied with the status quo, even if for their own profit-driven reasons. There is a consensus that reform is needed but there is no consensus on what that reform should look like. At the same time, the status quo of maximum noise with minimum action is a political strategy for a certain segment of the organized right wing. The netroots can play a critical role on this issue by facilitating a conversation that will lead to increased political will for a progressive immigration policy that will benefit America's squeezed middle class and all those struggling to become middle class.
Many progressive and centrist politicians and political influencers have, until recently, chosen to either remain silent on the need for comprehensive immigration reform or confine their speech to statements supporting an increase in border control only. Local elections across the nation have shown that anti-immigrant demagogy does not win elections despite the public's concerns about the issue. Yet political leaders continue to advise progressives running for office to regard immigration policy as a "third rail" that should not be touched.
The current state of the debate on immigration policy is entirely unproductive and the relative silence of progressive movement voices has, and will continue, to contribute greatly to the lack of vision and unity on this issue. Treating immigration as a cause to support or attack for the sake of political expediency will not lead to an immigration policy that will strengthen and expand the middle class.
Everyone remembers former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo's famed speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Even me (and I was 5). In it he said: "President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. `Government can't do everything,' we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class."
The speech could have just as easily been delivered in 2007 as 1984. So as the country plunges into another Presidential election cycle, Governor Cuomo, a practitioner and one of the left's most eloquent voices, once again asks to candidates to step back and examine their governing philosophy and the challenges the country faces, arguing that pat answers and rhetoric are insufficient to address them.
(this blog was co-written with Elizabeth Hartline Green who's been blogging up a storm on DMIBlog)
These days we hear a lot about America competing in the global economy-the trade deficit, the movement of jobs overseas, the performance of our students compared with those in other countries. A key element about our place in the global economy is the absence of a comprehensive and equitable information infrastructure. In laymen's terms, not enough Americans have access to affordable broadband internet service.
This is not just a tech-geek issue but a call to expand America's infrastructure. Real broadband expansion is of vital importance to supporting and expanding our middle class, and it is important for advocates of universal broadband to speak about the issue in those terms.
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