Howard Zinn Got It Right Up to the End

Playboy has a page and a half interview with Howard Zinn this month that turned out to be the last interview Zinn ever gave. In it, he addresses the lack of jobs in this country and how the Obama Administration has handled that crisis.

I wanted to share a couple of quotes that peg some of our problems exactly:

:: "The Democratic Party is stuck, and President Obama is stuck, in the idea of doing things through the market and depending on private businesses to create jobs. It's like easing home owners' problems by giving money to the banks or giving subsidies or tax benefits to employers in the hope they will then create jobs. This will not happen. The government needs to guarantee jobs to everyone willing to work. If private enterprise won't hire people, the government must."

One of the weirder criticisms of Obama from the more uninformed masses on the right has been that he's some kind of ultra-liberal. But he's a moderate at best, and the way he tries to prop up a system that isn't working has been disheartening to me. Zinn also says that for a job plan to really work in America, we need something that is wider-reaching than the Works Progress Administration of the 1930s. I don't see Obama ever being so bold.

:: "Obama needs to educate the American people about the necessity for government to do things private enterprise will not. Look at Social Security, Medicare, the post office and the G.I. Bill. There's historic precedent for the government doing things private enterprise won't."

Zinn goes on to argue that Obama should be fighting to create policy, not to win the next election, but admits that Obama has been timid when faced with the hypocritical Republican outcry that helping the poor and middle class is "big government." (And then rightly points out that a government at war is big government.)

:: "The Democratic Party isn't a fighting party on economic issues. Its reforms are so modest and timid that even if they were passed over the filibuster, they wouldn't be fundamental reforms."

:: "We have a serious unemployment problem. The 10 percent statistic underestimates the real situation because it doesn't account for people who have stopped asking for unemployment insurance and people who have been discouraged from looking for work."

:: "The problem with the language of economics is that it's based on the stock market. If business and stockholders are doing well, and if the Dow Jones average goes up, it's assumed you have economic recovery. But you have to measure a recovery not by how people at the top are doing but by how people at the bottom are doing. If the indexes show a recovery but people are still unemployed or still losing their homes, then you don't have economic recovery. They ought to stop giving the Dow Jones average every night on television. Instead they should give figures on unemployment and foreclosures."

I had to highlight that portion because I've been saying this here for a year or more. I feel better finally seeing someone else say it, too, especially someone like Zinn.

:: "Instead of giving a trillion dollars to financial institutions and hoping they will then make it easier for people to pay their mortgages, the government has to help people directly. The Obama administration's reliance on the private sector is really the trickle-down theory--the idea that if you give people at the top a bailout of $1 trillion, they will use that money to help people in need. But the people at the top won't do that, because their motive is profit, not humanitarian concern."

I feel like they've given the hen house keys to the foxes with those bailouts. The banksters are being rewarded for their avarice and failure, and down here on the bottom we're being told that it's all our fault for believing their lies. Any way I look at it, banks and real estate scheming hand in hand to do what they did with mortgages and loans was a way to deliver a captive market, and the fact that they lied about their value and what people could afford, and then approved these gigantic risks in order to keep milking money from people they knew were bad risks, constitutes a massive fraud. They should be paying for it now. They gambled and lost.

Zinn goes on to argue that people need to organize at the local level to combat these things (as people did in the 1930s to stop evictions), but I don't see that happening, either. I think the concept of community has been all but eradicated in this country.

He also goes on to point out that European countries with similar unemployment rates are better off because they have free health care and better unemployment benefits, calling America's lack of universal, government-organized health care "one of the true scandals of the Democratic Party."

:: "What we call an economic crisis is when things get very, very bad. In normal times, one out of five kids grows up hungry, people lose their jobs and homes are foreclosed. That's normal. When that situation exists, they don't call it an economic crisis. We have to understand that when you have an economic system in which wealth gravitates to the top and you have a permanent underclass of people living in poor homes and without health care, then you are in constant economic crisis. You have to rethink the kind of economic system you live under and take bold steps to change it."

But, you know, don't hold your breath.