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Consider it strange indeed that Congress won't even blink when asked to fund the military anything military whatsoever. In fact, when the Biden administration suggested a Pentagon budget of a staggering $715 billion for fiscal year 2022, both parties in the House of Representatives responded by insisting on raising that sum by another $25 billion and the Senate is sure to concur. The sky, in other words, is the limit (if there's any limit at all), and it doesn't matter if some of the weaponry slated to fill that sky doesn't even work.
On the other hand, when it comes to something like paid family leave that might help actual Americans in need, it goes without saying that every Republican in Congress will vote no (hands down, so to speak) and just enough Democrats (hey there, Joe Manchin!) will join the crowd to ensure that aiding those who truly could use a hand in this country is simply a no-go. Put another way, as columnist Arwa Mahdavi did recently at the Guardian, Republicans are increasingly eager to support a return to the good old days (of things like child labor) or to cancel any programs like federal extended unemployment benefits that actually help the neediest in this society. Think of it as an impulse to Build Back(ward) Better. Similarly, in September the Trump version of the Supreme Court rejected a Biden administration moratorium on evictions, endangering millions of poor Americans in a period when, amid a devastating pandemic, the billionaire class, growing by the week, saw its wealth surge by $1.8 trillion.
It's this very world that TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, takes on again today while considering what this country might look like if its politics were so much less top-down and so much more bottom-up. Tom
A Project for Survival in These United States
Lifting from the Bottom So Everyone Can Rise
When President Biden first unveiled the Build Back Better agenda, it appeared that this country was on the path to a new war on poverty. In April, he told Congress that "trickle-down economics have never worked" and that it was time to build the economy "from the bottom-up." This came after the first reconciliation bill of the pandemic included the child tax credit that combined with an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and other emergency programs reduced the poverty rate from 13.9% in 2018 to 7.7% in 2021. (Without such actions, it was estimated that the poverty rate might have risen to 23.1%.) All eyes are now on the future of this Build Back Better plan, whether it will pass and whether it will include paid sick leave, reduced prescription drug prices, expanded child tax credits, expanded earned income tax credits for those without children, universal pre-K, climate resilience and green jobs, and other important domestic policy investments.
For months, the nation has witnessed a debate taking place in Congress over how much to invest in this plan. What hasn't been discussed, however, is the cost of not investing (or not investing sufficiently) in health-care expansion, early childhood education, the care economy, paid sick leave, living-wage jobs, and the like. Similarly missing have been the voices of those affected, especially the 140 million poor and low-income people who have the most to lose if a bold bill is not passed. By now, the originally proposed 10-year, $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which a majority of Americans support, has been slowly chiseled down to half that size. For that you can largely thank two Democratic senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, unanimously backed by Donald Trump's Republican Party, which would, of course, cut everything.
Because of them, the "reconciliation" process to pass such a bill has become so crucial and politically charged, given that the same obstructionist Democrats have continued to uphold the Senate filibuster. All year, Manchin, Sinema, and the Republicans have blocked action on urgent issues ranging from climate change and immigration reform to living wages and voting rights. For example, after months of resistance to the For the People Act, a bill that protects and expands voting rights, Manchin forced the Democrats to put forward a watered-down Freedom To Vote Act with the promise that he would get it passed. In late October, though, he failed to win a single Republican vote for the bill and so the largest assault on voting rights since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era continues, state by state, unabated.
President Biden's original Build Back Better plan was successfully caricatured as too big and expensive, even though it represented just 1.2% of gross domestic product over the next decade and Congress had just passed a bipartisan single-year Pentagon budget nearly double the annual cost of BBB. In reality, $3.5 trillion over a decade would be no more than a start on what's actually needed to rescue the economy, genuinely alleviating poverty and human suffering, while making real strides toward addressing the climate crisis. Instead, cuts to, and omissions from, the reconciliation bill will mean nearly two million fewer jobs per year and 37 million children prevented from getting needed aid, while leaving trillions of dollars raked in by the super rich in the pandemic moment untaxed. Perhaps it will also fall disastrously short when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the level necessary on the timetable called for by the world's scientific community.
Much of the recent coverage of these dynamics has focused on what all of this could mean for the Democrats in the 2022 elections (especially given Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe's loss in a state that President Biden won by 10 points). With low approval ratings, striking numbers of retiring members of Congress and increasingly gerrymandered voting maps, as well as outright voter-suppression laws, the Democratic faithful have reason to be worried. Still, what's missing from such discussions is how bad things already are for tens of millions of Americans and just how much worse they could get without far bolder government action. It's true that the 2022 elections could resemble the 2010 midterm elections when Republicans broke President Obama's grip on Congress, winning control of the House of Representatives, but too few observers are grappling with the possibility that 2022 could also reproduce conditions of a sort not experienced since the Great Recession.
As our second pandemic-winter approaches, there are many signs of an economy entering crisis. Economists are warning that despite an employment bump thanks to direct government intervention, we may already be entering a recession that could, sooner or later, prove at least as severe as the Great Recession of 2008. The expectations of everyday Americans certainly seem to reflect this simmering possibility. Consumer confidence has dropped to the second lowest level since 2011 and holiday spending among low-income Americans is expected to fall 22% from last year. (The 11.5% of all shoppers who say they won't spend anything at all on gifts or services this holiday is the highest in a decade.)
As has been true throughout the pandemic, millions of people abandoned by the government will do whatever they can to provide for themselves and their communities. They will try to care for one another, share what they have, and come together through mutual-aid networks. Their resources alone, however, are anything but adequate. Instead, as conditions potentially worsen, such survival struggles should be seen as beachheads when it comes to organizing a largely untapped base of people who need to be awakened politically if any kind of lasting change is to be realized. These millions of poor and low-income Americans will be critical in creating the kind of broad movement able to make, as Martin Luther King once put it, "the power structure say yes when they really may be desirous of saying no."
The Greatest Threat or Our Best Hope?
Keep in mind that the survival struggles of the poor and dispossessed have long been both a spark and a cornerstone for social, political, and economic change in ways seldom grasped in this country. This was true in pre-Civil War America, when hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery in person and igniting a movement to end it. It was no less true in the 1930s, when the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions before President Franklin Roosevelt even launched the New Deal. The same could be said of the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, when Black communities began organizing themselves against lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence.
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