interviews
It's All About the Money
by Mike Williams
October 20, 2021
This interview with Mike Williams, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Mike | I'm on the energy and environment team, but my focus is on how we put forward energy, environmental, and climate policy in a way that supports working people. My background is working at the intersection of labor and environmental movements. I spent 12 years at the BlueGreen Alliance, focused on passing some significant climate, energy, and environmental policy alongside the labor movement.
frank | How has your work been lately?
Busy, but positive. I think there's a lot of good things that are on the horizon.
I think it's nice that everyone is starting to engage in infrastructure. Does it feel like people are finally paying attention to some of this work you’ve been doing?
Yeah, when I worked for the BlueGreen Alliance, we started pushing the connection between solving the climate crisis and remaking our infrastructure. I think we started really putting it out as a public proposal in 2012, with a report called Making the Grade, when Superstorm Sandy hit New York City. So yes. Been at this for quite a while. It's phenomenal that this has finally broken through, that folks have made the connection between climate change and infrastructure, and that hopefully, we can get to some significant solutions.
To look at the infrastructure as it exists is to realize how massive it is in scale, but also how regional it is. How do you start thinking about modernizing the infrastructure and outlining priorities?
It's an incredibly important question and it's one that gets into the nuts and bolts of how you actually implement infrastructure policy. Some folks think it can be quite boring, but it is so important because what this will eventually come down to is actually building projects that change how our systems work. We have to think about it in a couple of different ways. One, there's obviously the function of the project. We have to make sure that whether we're rebuilding roads, rebuilding bridges, building transit systems, repairing the electric grid, or rebuilding water systems, they have to be safe and reliable. In the end, we're humans who need these systems to live and to have a decent quality of life.
Water, electricity, the internet — these things are public goods. They truly have to be safe and reliable.
The mindset around infrastructure in the past has been "we need to get the best bang for our buck." There needs to be a better purpose for our infrastructure projects. In addition to being safe and reliable, they need to meet the moment and achieve the goals that we as a society have. We need to make sure that our infrastructure projects think about their goals in a holistic manner. How are our goals lifting up communities and working for people who live in them? The projects need to be paying people decent wages, providing benefits, and using unionized labor. The projects need to pollute less, or potentially eradicate pollution at the point source. So that it's making everything around it better.
When we think about reductions, specifically reducing our emissions by 50 percent, what steps need to happen for that to be seriously attempted or achieved?
Before the last nine months, I would have been pretty worried that we could get to that metric, but with the investments at the forefront in Congress right now, I think we can get there.
When we sit down and we again look at it comprehensively, each system has its role to play. Some more than others, but they all add to emissions. When you think of the big ones, like the electric system, the shift to renewables and electrification is huge.
How do we get to zero emissions? Renewables are the biggest driver of that, but additionally, there needs to be a corresponding investment in transmission and storage. We need to be able to build transmission projects to move that electricity to the population centers where people need it. These renewables are to a certain extent intermittent, so we need high capacity transmission, and be able to store energy and then deliver it when people need it.
The technologies are there. We just need to be able to deploy them, at scale. We need rapid deployment of electric vehicles, and we need a major expansion of electric vehicle infrastructure. That's not just charging stations, but an updated and functional electric grid that can deal with all of these vehicles being plugged in.
All of these pieces together can take us beyond the emissions reductions set forth in the Paris Agreement. It can get us on the path to a 50% emissions reduction, which President Biden has called for. But again, this is across multiple sectors. I didn't even get into manufacturing. I didn't get into municipal wastewater management, so on and so forth. They all have their roles to play, but it's that direct investment that will get us there.
As far as implementation goes, how does this rollout? The scale makes it seem top-down.
The coordination from local all the way up to the federal government will be critical.
Funding is top-down. Planning and implementation are generally local.
There are municipal planning organizations in every city across America that are specifically focused on planning for infrastructure projects in their area. So, whether that is Austin, Texas figuring out what we are going to do with their transit system, or whether it is Trenton, New Jersey saying their road situation is a mess, all these planning organizations have put forward their ideas of what would we do if we had this money?
Now it is a matter of starting to put those ideas into motion. The money is hopefully coming. A lot of the planning has already been done locally. The federal government has the capacity to start to approve currents and future projects quickly, and then it's just going to start to move.
But, there isn't much planning needed. A lot of this stuff has been thought out. A lot of it is fairly straightforward. For example, there's been work from the Department of Interior for more than a decade, specifically on how we permit and locate offshore wind projects. These projects need an injection of funding right now from the federal government, and we need to set forward clear goals for what that funding is used for. And so, again to harp on it, the bills that are going through Congress right now do both of those things. It's helping us meet the goal that we need to reduce emissions by 50%, and it's providing the money to back that up. Once we give the money to local municipalities, I have full faith that it can be done.
I wanted to ask about challenges that rural areas face in terms of climate and adaptation, that are different from cities which we talk a lot about.
For a long time, rural areas have been under-invested in. We can see that across multiple areas. Broadband is the most obvious one. Rural areas do not have decent internet access. That is inequitable for people who live in rural areas. You're not as competitive in the job market if you do not have high-quality broadband. That is a hallmark of underinvestment in rural areas. We're about to go hopefully forward with massive investments in our country that will include rural areas. President Biden has called for 40% to go to disadvantaged communities, black and brown communities, environmental justice communities, and that will include rural communities. That's incredibly important.
Hopefully, we make this investment, and hopefully, we do it right. We also need to be thinking about 5, 10, 20 years down the road, when ongoing maintenance needs to happen, will we have set up processes that are providing consistent financial support to ensure disadvantaged communities aren't left behind? Hopefully, this will not just be a one-time thing, but that we actually provide the consistent financial support to ensure that there's equitable access and equitable funding available to these places.
In terms of revitalizing parts of the US that were sucked dry from abandoned industry – when it comes to new climate-oriented infrastructure do people seem excited or is it politicized and pushed back against?
Yeah. It's a critical question. And I appreciate you asking about it. Deindustrialization has been one of the biggest drivers of inequality in America. We should be thinking about how this could be a way to help communities build for the future.
One current example is Rivian in Normal, Illinois. It was the old Mitsubishi manufacturing facility. They closed down, they were purchased, and are now making electric trucks. I think they're gonna start putting them out in public by next year. It's a pretty darn cool story, that would be even better if they honored that plant and town’s history and allowed their workers to collectively bargain. Normal, IL is benefiting from this investment. I saw an article that referred to them as a boomtown because of this investment. It's a great story. But, it's not always going to be just that specific story. I hope there'll be a lot of those stories. The way we make this happen, the way investments need to be made, they need to be made with domestic content included so that we're making investments that have American manufacturing incorporated into it. They need to make the investments that are made so that when projects are built, they're built using union labor so that we are truly lifting up as many people in the community as possible. Again, we need to think about this holistically.
Investment in infrastructure allows for that community to build for the future to think about what they can do to support the people there. So whether it's building out broadband, refurbishing the schools, making a small incubator for craft beer – that's a choice that they can make once the investment in infrastructure comes on top of that back.
And circling back to your question with this massive investment and influx of funds into the clean economy, there will be an expansion of the supply chain. Batteries, the parts, and components of wind turbines–there's roughly seven tons of steel per turbine–all of this can be made in America.
If we're truly incorporating domestic content in these investments, that's going to support American manufacturing. Same with solar panels. You know we make glass in America, that's put into solar panels. We used to make polysilicon, it's critical for making photovoltaic solar panels, but over the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of that production moved to China. That's a long way to answer your question, but thinking about how this investment should help de-industrialized and disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged communities is critical to the success of this investment, and should be prioritized.
Outside of rehab, what are your thoughts on helping people move from areas that can’t be saved? I know retreat is looked at in this really negative way, but sometimes that’s inevitable.
It is a hard and controversial question. When will folks say, “South Beach doesn't work anymore?” I mean, it's a horrifying question to ponder, but if you trust science, it's a real question that will need to be pondered. It coincides with a need for investment in resilience in communities, the ability for a community to adapt and thrive in the face of climate change and its impacts.
Because we will see these changes, they are already baked in. We are going to have to deal with that in places like Louisiana, Miami, New York. We have to invest in resilience, so that we can make that determination in the future, with more clarity.
I'm punting because I think we have to punt at this point.
We haven't actually made that investment in resilience in our communities in any big way. We have to do that first to see what we can salvage for the people who live there. That is job number one. And then from there, we then can start to evaluate the really hard question of places we can't. That's already happening in Louisiana.
The seas have risen across Southern Louisiana in the Gulf, and they are losing a football field a day of land. There are communities down there that are already swamped. There does need to be an investment in and support for communities that are already dealing with this, that can't punt that question, but for the rest, it truly is a matter of, we have to make this investment in resilience first.
I want to be careful of your time, so I'll make this additional question quick – are we past the point of arguing about the existence and impacts of climate change? There will be arguments about how to move forward, but are we done with the denial?
I hope so. I really hope so. It's hard to say that I'm optimistic that we can get there, but I sure hope so. There has been polling done by Yale and others, and the polling is positive across the board. Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals agree that yes there is a problem, and yes, we should deal with it. The vast majority of people seem to agree. Where it starts to falter is when it gets into our political system.
And our political system is making a lot of things falter these days. I think climate change has been a harbinger. This issue became very partisan, but it didn’t used to be. We entered the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an effort to bring all countries together to fight climate change in 1992, under President George H.W. Bush. George W. Bush ran on pursuing climate action in 2000. He didn't actually do anything. In fact, he made it worse. John McCain ran on passing a cap-and-trade bill in 2008. These things used to not be partisan, but they are now and that's terrible.
It would seem like Governor DeSantis would have a lot to gain from putting Miami first in terms of resilience and climate. Even if that’s cynical, I don’t understand the hold-up.
Do you know who one of the few Republicans in Congress has stood up and said, “We need to act on climate change?”
Who?
Matt Gaetz.
Right.
A very far right-wing representative from Florida. He's from the panhandle of Florida and has seen direct impacts.
A number of years ago, Congressman Bob English from South Carolina came to a realization that we need to do something about the climate crisis; he got primaried because of it and lost.
But, that was a number of years ago. I agree with you, I think a person like Governor DeSantis could actually make a positive move on climate that would be very politically beneficial.
That the climate crisis became such a partisan fight was simply a harbinger of how everything has become a partisan fight. This was just the first of the other big issues. We have seen this happen to others. Immigration used to be a very bipartisan issue. It is no longer. Hopefully, this fever will break. Again, as I said before, I don't know if I can say I'm optimistic right now. I hope so, but I'm not sure.
interviews
How Things Changed
by Sanford Schram
February 14, 2021
This interview with Sanford Schram, professor of political science at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Sanford | Among progressives, there is widespread concern about poverty and about other hardship in our increasingly unequal economy — an economy that proven implacably resistant to change. And, you know, one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is just how much things have changed.
For one, the Democratic Party, as a whole, has changed. Somebody on Facebook yesterday posted this meme of all the things Eisenhower stood for when he was running for reelection, and it was to the left of the Democratic Party today. There has been an asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has moved radically to the right, and the Democratic Party has grudgingly moved to the center in order to try to stay competitive. That has made us, as a country, far less able to address these issues of poverty, inequality, social adversity, and economic hardship.
On top of that, the left has changed — it has fractured. A real division has emerged between whether we need to prioritize identity politics over an economic kind of change, or race over class, or vice versa.
And, finally, the right has proven to be much more aggressive in using their wealth, their money, and their influence over the mass media than I ever imagined. They have this willingness to put their resources into malicious lying and create a bloodsport politics that makes it very difficult for us to address any issues.
WBAP-TV (Television station : Fort Worth, Tex.). [Dateline show with guest], photograph, 1969; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1335899/m1/1/?q=news%20show: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.
The right rules by using plutocratic populism. The elites gaslit the public into thinking that outgroups: immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans are the cause of their problems, allowing the elites to avoid accountability and maintain power. The elites, even as a minority, have been able to hang on to power by generating support and then rigging the rules of the game through gerrymandering, undermining access to the ballot, and changing campaign finance laws.
All of these things have enabled minority rule to remain ascendant in our, supposedly majoritarian, system. The result is an undermined faith in our political system and in The Constitution itself. We are facing a crisis as a country.
frank | Historically the Democrats have been the party of the working class. Why do you see such a disagreement among the party about what sort of coalition to build?
Take the recent news about how McConnell is using every trick in the book to cling to power. Republicans have lost the presidency, lost the Senate, and still don't have the House, and he is trying to issue edicts that he's still in charge. He is trying to keep the filibuster in place. That is part and parcel of this anti-majoritarian strategy.
Meanwhile, Democrats are falling over each other as trying to figure out the best response to an extremely effective right-wing mobilization. The right has concentrated its resources in order to rewrite the rules so that they stay in power, and Democrats, Clinton and Obama, and maybe now Biden, fail to mobilize the left and liberals towards a progressive agenda.
Why? Because Democrats are worried that if they allow the left to have too much of a say that they'll get repudiated. Over time, the Democratic Party has come to be populated with a lot of people who are very cautious in that way. Rep. Spanberger, when the House lost seats, excoriated AOC and “The Squad” for bringing up all these "left-wing" proposals. They are worried that if they are too liberal, they'll lose the support of suburbanites.
Byrd Williams Family Photography Collection (AR0769), University of North Texas Special Collections.
The correlation between economic pessimism and out-group hostility and support for Trump and declining support for democracy is actually stronger in the suburbs and among middle-class people than among lower-income whites. I think that's a story that needs to be discussed more. That's why Rich Fording and I argue in our new book Hard White: The Mainstreaming of Racism in American Politics that if we want to really beat back this reactionary politics, it should be more about combating white racism that is energizing the right rather than focusing on hoping to get people to come over to the Democrats based on economic issues.
[Neighborhood on a Sunny Day], photograph, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth202022/m1/1/?q=neighborhood: accessed February 14, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Museum of the Gulf Coast.
I guess the question becomes does one identify more with race than class, and then what do your “best interests” really look like? Maybe the Republicans are serving them.
We discussed this at great length in our new book. The question of what we do know that white racism has been mainstreamed by a fearmonger like Donald Trump is a complicated one. This, of course, started way before Trump. The Tea Party created an opening for a resurgence of white racial extremist views in mainstream electoral politics, in large part, as a reaction to the first non-white president of the country, Barack Obama. Trump built off of that.
The white working-class has been leaving the Democratic Party for a long time — for about 20 some odd years, depending on how you define working-class voters. But, as we argue in our book, the overwhelming majority of poor people voted against Trump, both in 2020, as far as we can tell, and definitely in 2016. The fact of the matter is, most poor people still don't vote Republican. Trump disproportionately got his support from the suburbs. That really is the key battleground. A lot of the racism that's associated with Trumpism is not poor whites, it's white people who were moderately well off and disappointed in things beyond economics, including cultural change and a loss of white privilege.
That's a good story. And though there's an element of truth to that, I think that we have mischaracterized this resurgence of racism in that way. It's more a product of suburban, white people who are resentful of cultural change and racial diversification, including attempts to build an inclusive multi-racial democracy, than they are concerned about the economics.
Bradly, Bill. [Aerial View of SeedTec], photograph, 1988; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth10868/m1/1/?q=factory: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Deaf Smith County Library.
The correlation between economic pessimism and out-group hostility and support for Trump and declining support for democracy is stronger in the suburbs and among middle-class people. I think that's a story that needs to be discussed more. That's why we argue that if we want to really beat back reactionary politics we see today, it should be more about combating white racism than hoping that by stressing economic issues Trumpists will decide to join the Democratic Party.
How do you even begin to combat white racism?
Many people, like my good friend Kathy Cramer, the author of Politics of Resentment, think that we need to converse, listen, and make compromises. We reject that.
Over the past couple of years, we have seen just how hostile people are, how resentful they are and how implacably resistant they are to compromising. You can't reason with those people. Trump became dominant by mobilizing the inactive nonvoters. He didn't win so much by getting people to switch their votes. There were very few Obama to Trump voters. He won by mobilizing those who were resentful.
We have to do the same thing. We have to mobilize racially liberal people, who support multi-racial democracy and bring them in. In the last chapter of our book, we show that that's exactly what the “blue wave” was about. We present empirical evidence that the “blue wave” was driven by racial liberalism, and it was successful because it mobilized a lot of non-voters. And I think this happened effectively in 2020, especially in Georgia.
And then once you've done that, you're forcing the Republican Party to pay a price for aligning itself with the racists, and they will have to realize the electoral penalties of that strategy. Then, we can start to go further down the road of working towards an inclusive multi-racial democracy that lifts everybody up, including the working class, which is, I think it is important to add, disproportionately nonwhite.
A concern with progressive liberals is that you can’t detangle issues from each other – to tie the working class to The Green New Deal for example may be a deterrent.
Basically what it comes down to is what I always say to people on the left, “Why can't we just be like Denmark?” And they go, “Well, Denmark's a capitalist country.” For god's sake, get a life. They are a capitalist country, yeah, but everybody gets health insurance, everybody gets paid family leave, they have extra benefits for the father to stay home to encourage gender equity, everybody gets to go to college for free until you're 26, you can get unemployment benefits for six years. I have friends on the left that say that's not good enough. If we were like Denmark, a lot of our economic concerns would start to go away.
It starts to seem like people really aren't interested in solving the problems of inequality and poverty and social and economic hardship. They're interested in improving who's more virtuous or who's smarter, and who's more critical on the left. As I get older, it has made me more inclined to be disaffiliated. Like, I don't want to be a leftist anymore. I just want to be Danish, I guess. I don't know.
I think the same is true with leftist media. It breeds this sort of resentment that could make Glenn Greenwalds of us all.
You're absolutely right. It comes to be about your relationship to the people you're talking to, rather than about improving people's lives and wellbeing.
Kiecke, Albert. [Demonstrators Outside a Republican Rally], photograph, February 28, 1992; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth279487/m1/1/?q=republican%20rally: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting League City Helen Hall Library.
There's a new encyclopedia coming out called Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, and I've been asked to write a lead essay based on my memoir Becoming a Footnote. In this very post-modern way, I have to reflect on my reflecting. I don't know how I am going to pull this off, but I have to ask all these sorts of questions. Who am I? Am I a leftist? What are we trying to do here?
That’s heavy. Have you come to any conclusive thoughts?
I've always identified as blue-collar. My father didn't graduate from high school. He was a letter carrier and the president of our local letter carrier union. I was a letter carrier in that union. My mother was a bookkeeper. We weren't poor, you could do fine back then in those jobs. Now you couldn't.
I've always had this uneasy relationship with the left. I feel like, for a lot of them, their relationship is not to the letter carriers, it's to the people they're arguing with. And that's always been, I think, a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. Like, well, you try delivering the mail for a week, and then you wouldn't have these debates about whether or not it's good enough to be Denmark. Right? Damn right it's good enough to be Denmark. That's sort of how I come at it.
Young, Moon. TGT Workers, photograph, 1947; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117442/m1/1/?q=blue-collar: accessed February 15, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Cleveland Historic Society.
Political science nowadays is very much focused on political theory and much less focused on empirical work. That is the problem: the left has become too academic and it's become too theoretical. The left, even if it is appropriately critical of the existing structure of power, is disconnected from ordinary people’s struggles.
This becomes a problem of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is increasingly dominated by professionals and educated people who have really good policies, but they don't really understand who ordinary people are and what they need.
But things are up in the air at moment with the defeat of Trump, the persistence of Trumpism and the success of Democrats in gaining a foothold on power. While I am not yet convinced, given that Joe Biden has created an inclusive coalition, this could open the door to policymaking that actually serves the needs of ordinary people. Maybe better times are coming, especially for people on the bottom of the social order. Here’s hoping.