EPS Bernard Schwartz Syposium:
Crisis in the States and Cities: What Should Be Done?
Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill
Washington, DC
April 12, 2011
James K. Galbraith:
--welcome our keynote speaker.
Since I made a comment about France, I can’t resist opening my introduction of our speaker with a small story about an evening out on the town in Austin that happened to be the 14th of July 2003. And my wife and I took a dear friend, Elspeth Rostow, the widow of the National Security Advisor for the Johnson administration, distinguished economist Walter Rostow, to a bistro. And it was deserted. This was not a season in which U.S. relations with France were particularly warm, and especially in Texas.
But there was one other table that had a festive group of ten or twelve people. And I looked over, and sitting at the head of the table, obviously having a wonderful time, in her wheelchair, was none other than Lady Bird Johnson. So I got up, and I walked over, and I said to her, Ms. Johnson, I am shocked to see you here tonight, and I am going to call the White House tomorrow morning and report that you were observed celebrating Bastille Day in public. And she looked up at me—she had had some strokes and her speech was not easy--but she smiled from ear to ear, and she put her fist up in the air, and she said, “Yeeeees!”
I mention that because our keynote speaker, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, was from the very beginning one of the clearest, most direct, and outspoken opponents of the war in Iraq, and the one who saw most clearly from the start that this was something whose cost was going to exceed by enormous amounts what people were being told, and its results were going to be far less than was promised. And she is now the president of an organization that was founded in 1947 by a group that included my father, John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and also another distinguished Californian, an actor at the time who later went on to dabble in politics by the name of Ronald Reagan. So as a vice president of ADA, I’m particularly delighted to welcome my president, Lynn Woolsey here.
She is a ten-term congressman—congresswoman—from the Sixth District, north of San Francisco. She has a distinguished record on labor and education issues, and is one of our nation’s greatest defenders of the rights of workers and the position of families, particularly in the labor force. And the ability to maintain the balance between work and family life is, I think, one of her deepest concerns and one of her greatest contributions.
So it’s with particular pleasure that I welcome her today to this session, which is concerned with those levels of government that I think interact most directly with the issues on which you have the deepest [...?] and show the greates [...?]. Congresswoman Woolsey.
Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey:
Well, thank you very much, Jamie. It is a true honor to be here with such a distinguished group today. I was thinking, ohhhh, economists, what do I know? I have a six-year-old grandson that’s probably going to be one of you some day, and he’s way ahead of me. So know that. But I just want to thank you for thinking that my voice would bring meaning to your meeting today.
And I want to acknowledge Michael Jay Wilson, our national director of Americans for Democratic Action. Michael Jay has been so [?]. He is such a great partner in leading ADA and making it a strong voice for progressive values.
Before coming to Congress in 1993, I was in city government for eight years; so I have the fullest appreciate for the crisis you’re addressing with this conference. The many pressures—the many pressures—facing local budgets and the dedicated public servants of our country whose jobs have been eliminated because of cutbacks, those pressures are building; they are not getting lesser. Democrats in Congress have, I believe, done just about everything in our power to ease the burden with support through the Recovery Act in 2009 and many other measures; and we continue to defend public employees and the service that they provide, especially in light of the relentless attacks they’ve endured in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere around this country of ours.
Of course you can’t separate state and city budgets from what’s happening right here in Washington. We’re in the midst of the red-hot argument over the size and the scope of the federal government. It’s one of those situations where the leg bone actually is connected to the ankle bone. And although local governments don’t have military budgets, the set of choices is fundamentally the same: Are we going to invest in our people, in their health, their education, and their quality of life; or are we going to use budgets to continue lifting the playing field in favor of the privileged, while scapegoating working people for our nation’s problems.
So I want to pivot, if I can, to give you my perspective as a member of Congress about the national budget debate. And I want to demonstrate to you that progressives are fully engaged in this battle and fighting every day for the priorities that we all share.
We had a lot of drama late last week in Washington, and while I truly am glad that we don’t have the disruption of a government shutdown—I voted against the CR on Friday—I also believe that the cuts included in the final deal are far too steep and fall too much on the backs of working families. And I fear there will be future threats, threats to shut down the government when the Republicans aren’t getting their way.
But really this is just round one. It’s round one of a much bigger struggle. The deal struck Friday night merely funds the government through the end of September. And now we’re about to start a huge debate over federal spending and the relationship of the people to their government for 2012 and the next 10 years.
The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, has offered his blueprint; and it’s even worse than I thought it would be. Honestly, it’s one of the most radical, reckless proposals I’ve seen during my 18 years in Congress. They’re talking about cutting more than $6 trillion over the next decade. And guess who gets the back-of- the-hand treatment. Guess who assumes the burden and bears the sacrifice. Working families and the middle class.
Their budget ends the Medicare guarantee for seniors. It voucherizes the program. That’s a new word. I think I just coined it, didn’t I. They would essentially put older Americans at the mercy of the insurance companies. Insurance companies, which are, of course, known for their compassion and their willingness to keep premiums affordable, while taking on high-risk policy holders, right?
Their budget also slashes health support for seniors in nursing homes, and it cuts K-12 education and raises college costs for nearly 10 million students. And guess who makes out like bandits. The same wealthy and powerful interests whose nests always get feathered under Republican proposals. The money they’re taking from these core domestic programs—it’s not like they’re storing it away for a rainy day, believe me. They’re giving away that money to big oil subsidies, tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas, and bigger tax cuts for those in the very top tax brackets.
I don’t think they’re genuinely interested in closing the budget deficit at all. If they were, to give just one example, they would embrace the public option on health care. That’s my public option bill, the Robust Public Option Bill, that would save us $68 billion, maybe more, over seven years. The public option was even embraced by the president’s Deficit Budget Commission. But will they consider it? No.
But government spending isn’t as important to them as serving an ideological agenda. Wall Street wins; Main Street loses. Austerity for ordinary Americans versus windfalls for the wealthy.
There is a choice though: There will be a Democratic budget alternative, and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have our own proposal. We’re calling it the People’s Budget, which proves you can tame the deficit without shredding the safety net. By making our tax code more equitable, responsibly reducing defense spending, and implementing a public option, the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget eliminates the deficit within 10 years and puts us on a path to budget surplus.
We also make substantial cuts to defense spending, starting with ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We provide a year’s worth of funding to provide for a safe and orderly redeployment of our troops and our contractors out of Afghanistan, and then that’s it; we’re out of there.
We also cut the Pentagon’s base budget by more than $600 billion over 10 years by eliminating weapons systems and reducing fleet sizes, but without reforming military health benefits or compensation.
Of course the Republican budget has practically nothing to say about 10 years of war spending that has bankrupted morally and fiscally the United States of America. This military occupation of Afghanistan is costing taxpayers nearly $7 billion every single month. And for what? The Taliban hasn’t been defeated; democracy hasn’t taken root; we’ve undermined rather than advanced our national security interests. This war hasn’t accomplished a single thing that it was supposed to. Plus we still have boots on the ground in Iraq, and our military is further over-extended by the operation in Libya.
Under Republican logic, we should cut all of the programs that save and enrich people’s lives—Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start programs, and so on. But we should continue to throw billions every month at the war that has killed 1500 Americans and left thousands more with the physical and mental wounds that may never go away.
And it’s not that I don’t think we should be engaged with Afghanistan or other developing countries around the globe. We must. It’s just that we have to fundamentally alter our mindset about how we engage. Instead of military surge in Afghanistan, what we need is a civilian surge. That’s the whole philosophy behind the smart security platform that I’ve been pushing for many years now here in the House. Let’s reduce our nuclear arsenal; let’s finally cut off all those Cold War weapons systems designed to fight an enemy that no longer exists; and let’s reinvest that money in a cost-effective way at pennies on the dollar in humanitarian and debt relief, democracy promotion, and other efforts that improve people’s lives in the countries that have known so much poverty and so much hardship. Then we can win the hearts and minds of the people we’re trying to work with.
So in conclusion, my good friends, let me just say that I don’t accept the Republican premise—I guess you heard that—because it’s fundamentally bogus. I don’t buy the idea that our fiscal woes are the fault of teachers, or public employees, or nurses trying to make ends meet through a difficult recession. I don’t buy the idea that a decade-long foreign war halfway around the world somehow promotes our values as Americans;’ but guaranteeing education at the same time for schoolchildren and health care for seniors is somehow weakening America.
The good news is that I think they’ve overreached. The Republicans have not only lost their moral compass; they’re losing the American people as well. The polls clearly show that there’s no public clamoring for deep cuts in Medicare and education. By contrast, two-thirds of Americans want no part of the war in Afghanistan.
But it’s up to us, all of us, to go on the offense. That’s why the Congressional Progressive Caucus has been aggressively promoting its own budget principles. We can’t [seed?] ground in this debate. We have to push back against the dangerous set of priorities, and we’ll be counting on people like you to help us make the case. And we need your help, and I thank you for hearing, and I guess I can answer questions, right?
James K. Galbraith:
Please do.
Lynn Woolsey:
Okay, if you have some. Well, thank you very very much. Thank you.
James K. Galbraith:
Well, first of all, let me thank you for a real tour de force, and for so remarkably tying the concerns of this meeting with the larger concerns of this organization, which have focused on the need to reform the national security sector and the need to control and limit unproductive adventures overseas that are so much at the root of our problems.
Let me open it up for questions. Sir. If you’d identify yourself—
Q:
My name is Curtis Ganz, and I still identify with the word ‘liberal’ rather than ‘progressive’.
The question I have is how do you turn this around when you have an uncertain [?] in the White House who essentially has caved to the current conventional wisdom and not fulfilled a leadership role in choosing a new direction that would aim at jobs, it would aim at revenue, and it would aim at aid to the states. How do you turn that around without that support from the White House?
Lynn Woolsey:
Well, it’s very difficult, and we realized that in the CR, the continuing resolution debate. The only chance we have is for individuals, individual members of Congress, individual senators, individual leaders in this country that aren’t elected leaders to stand up and express over and over again.
Actually when—I was the first person to speak out against the Iraq War and have an amendment on the House floor to bring our troops home. And people, my own colleagues, good anti-war colleagues—Oh, Lynn, don’t call for a vote, we’re going to be so embarrassed! I said, Look, if I’m the only one who votes for this, I will not be embarrassed. That’s up to you if you want to be embarrassed or not.
Well, we got enough—we got 128 votes, or something, and some Republicans. But it turned the tide. Because the American people were ahead of us, like you are ahead of this debate we’re talking about today, and it showed my colleagues that indeed you could speak up for what’s right and you weren’t going to lose your job. You were going to become more popular, not less. And we have to keep doing that. We can’t depend on the White House to do that for us. We need to bully them into doing the right thing.
Q:
Thank you for visiting with us today. I’m an advocate with Results, a grass roots anti-poverty organization.
This week I believe the Gang of Six is releasing its proposal on the budget. To what extent do you think that the Democrats in that gang will pay much attention to the Progressive Caucus People’s Budget when they have so much work to do dealing with the Ryan Proposal. Do you expect the People’s Budget to get much actual play in the negotiations?
Lynn Woolsey:
No. No it won’t, but what’s important—and this is something I can ask all of you—is that the People’s Budget at least gets to the floor for a vote. That doesn’t mean we’re not going to vote for the Democratic alternative; I mean, that would be foolish if we didn’t. But we want the base Democratic supporters to understand that there’s another way to think about this, and some of us think differently. And I think we owe them this. And we’re not quite sure that the majority of the Progressive Caucus wants to do that. So if you know Progressive Caucus members, it would be a good idea to call them and say, We want to see that budget at least voted on.
I mean, we won’t win. We’ve brought it up—this will be the third or fourth year. Of course we don’t win. But we get the debate and people know that there is a way to balance this budget in a different way. There is a different way, and it really depends on having a peaceful world, and we should be a big part of that.
Q:
My name is Jeanne Athie. I’m with Peace Action. And first I want to thank you, Representative Woolsey, for all of the wonderful work that you’ve done over the years. It’s really incredible.
I live in Maryland, and we’re working to— We have a coalition that’s new that so far we’ve got 42 groups in that’s called Fund Our Communities: Bring the War Dollars Home. And it’s still pretty much what you’re talking about, that instead of sending money to Afghanistan, we want it to be used at home for the needs that we have here. But I would really appreciate your ideas as to the specific steps that a coalition like ours should take.
For example, one of the things that we’re trying to do is to get local governments to pass resolutions along these lines. The local governments will say, That’s not our purview, and I would like your response to that.
Lynn Woolsey:
Well, I’ll speak directly to that. When I was on the Petaluma City Council, and the first Iraq War, Desert Storm, happened, I bullied—I had to—I made my council vote to be against such action. And the big argument is, That’s not local government’s purview. And it isn’t. But it’s going to take away from local government in every way when we get invested in spending dollars in the wrong way. And you have to have a voice in that regard, at least to debate it. You may not be able to get the majority of your councils, or the majority of any council. Quite a few of—
Of course I represent Marin and Sonoma County, what does that tell you? They have resolutions against Iraq and to bring our troops home from Afghanistan because they’re my people. That’s the kind of people they are. But not all districts are like Marin and Sonoma County, and believe me, I know that. So just having the debate will bring the issue forward a step or two. So you’re brave to do that.
Q:
My name is Shelley Weinstein. And for 30 years I’ve headed up a global education initiative. But my question, Congresswoman, who I deeply respect, is, should be considered hierarchal [sic]—I hope not in this meeting: Will you stand up to the president after his speech on Wednesday of what he sees for the future of the country and tell him? Maybe if you did it by this evening, by building a coalition of people who said that he does not represent what many of us worked for, laid aside our own work for two years, to elect him, that we will think of a different, and plan on a different candidate for the next presidential election. When will the Democratic leadership that supports this stand up to the White House and say, We need to be represented. If we didn’t, the people who voted for him are not being represented by his behavior.
Lynn Woolsey:
Well, one, you’re going to do that, because you’re the people. We don’t speak for all the people. But every week they’re getting a letter from somebody, some group in the Progressive Caucus saying exactly what you’re saying regarding one or another of the issues. I mean, we are. That doesn’t mean that changes his mind. So it has to be grass roots.
When they use Lynn Woolsey as their example in the White House of a litmus test of, Well, we tried to change somebody’s mind on some issue, some other member, well they’ll say, Well, would you try to change Lynn Woolsey’s mind? Noo!
So, you know, I can say all that to them. They need to hear it from you. They do hear it from us, I promise you that. I promise. We do everything—I mean, we don’t insult our president. He’s president of the United States; he’s also our president. But we say, Here’s what you need to do, here’s what the people want, here’s why it’s the better idea. And I’m just as flabbergasted as you are that it’s not quite like you hoped it would be.
James K. Galbraith:
We’re all standing together in that effort. Let me thank you again.
Before you go, I can’t resist saying one other thing, which is that your mentioning of the Progressive budget reminds me of the effort that was undertaken in 1981-82 by Congressman Obie, Congressman Udall, and Henry Royce, the so-called Obie-Udall-Royce Budget, and there are actually two of us in the room, Richard Kaufman and myself, who worked on that. And it was, it proved over a long period of time to be an important line in the sand stating what the alternative principles were and rallying the progressive forces at a time when backs were really very much to the wall, and all of the momentum was on the other side.
So what you’re doing is in a great tradition, and I know that when Dave Obie retired and sent around his letter, one of the things he mentioned as one of his proudest moments was precisely that effort, the Obie-Udall-Royce Budget.
So once again, thanks again for coming, and thanks for your [?]. |