EP 690 New American Industrial Policy Focuses on a Cleaner Future
Manufacturing has been considered the backbone of the U.S. economy since the Industrial Revolution, yet with recent trade policies encouraging offshoring, there’s been a sense that America has lost its edge in this sector. More often than not, we hear that America’s economy has become one built on a services and not hard goods. Given the recent trade wars with China and the global pandemic, there has been a growing realization that we needed to re-shore much manufacturing for our national security and for the future of our young workers. With the passage of a combination of the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, we have three new pillars upon which to transform American manufacturing into a more efficient and greener approach. It is also designed to accelerate economic growth and rebuild broken supply chains. The green shoots of that effort are already apparent throughout the United States as new facilities are coming on line to support innovative approaches and new materials manufacturing for smart homes and cars. Battery development for electric vehicles is particularly important in this mix. Good paying jobs are also envisioned for many without college degrees. To discuss this effort, Professor Miki Banu, a mechanical engineer from the University of Michigan joins us.
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Bryan Stevenson(“Just Mercy”) considers him his mentor. He’s been the subject of books and a film for his work to correct the injustices that race and poverty play in our criminal justice system. In that pursuit, he has fought and won capital cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and was the recipient of the American Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award. A professor of law at Yale and Georgetown Universities, our guest, Stephen Bright, is a legendary figure in jurisprudence. He is also the co-author of a new book, along with James Kwak, “The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts.” In it they show the many ways the US criminal legal system fails to live up to the ideal of ‘blind justice’ and fairness. Innocent people are condemned to death and convicted of crimes because they cannot afford lawyers and because of the color of their skin. In the book we travel through the labyrinth of the system and meet powerful prosecutors, overworked public defenders, politicized judges and the many roadblocks put in the way of equal protections under the law. It is an indictment of a system in which Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black reminded us 70 years ago that there “can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the money he has.” And while there are pockets of improvement and good practices shared, we have not wiped away the stains of the past in the most important system available to each of us: justice.
The richest nation in the history of the world can do better. Let’s be honest. Whether you live in a pocket of destitution, or just drive by it, don’t you get the sense that something is wrong if millions of people, urban and rural, live in the squalor that you can see, even just passing by? Nikhil Goyal, a sociologist and former U.S. Senate staffer dealing with these issues, took a deep dive into North Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, and put his on the ground observations into his new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.” In it he profiles the chaotic lives of three young Puerto Rican boys who are by no means guaranteed an eighteenth birthday as a rite of passage. It feels more like a test of survival as they navigate the hypermasculine logic of the streets. And while Senator Tim Scott suggests the American Dream is now available to all, given his example, according to statistics his story is one of an outlier. In the Philadelphia we visit in this podcast, only one in 13 goes on to overcome the many impediments they started out life with. The lottery they lost from the get go is a real challenge to difficult for so many to overcome. We discuss possible answers to a problem which continues to vex America.
According to our guest, there is a lost chapter of American foreign policy–the century following the Civil War in which the United States carved out a sphere of influence and became the only great power in modern history to achieve regional hegemony. The ways in which America achieved complete supremacy in the Americas was at turns reluctant and at other times ruthless. The historical significance of this neighborhood dominance later becomes America’s ability to project its might throughout the world. And while questions have arisen about how well we have done that, America’s peacekeeping role has been the dominant fixture in world stability since World War II. According to Sean Mirksi, author of “We May Dominate the World”, this history offers us a window into the trajectory that other regional powers–China, Russia and Iran–may take in the coming decades.
Every October we wait to see what cases the US Supreme Court will be taking on in the coming session. And every June we wait to see how they rendered their judgments. On today’s podcast, we tell you ‘the rest of the story.’ You see almost 99 percent of the court’s decisions take place on the shadow docket, a term that was coined by legal scholar William Baude in 2015 for those orders that are not subject to what he calls “the high standards of procedural regularity set by its merit cases.” The latter being the cases we think they are limiting themselves to accept in emergency cases, where a ruling is needed expeditiously to keep a possibly innocent person from a death sentence. Our guest, law professor Stephen Vladeck argues in his new book “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” that this growing practice arose over the last century as a way to help judges address their growing caseload. Now it serves, in his mind, to make them more and more unaccountable to the American people.
Private equity is a growing sector of investment financing in America where whole companies, not shares in them, are purchased with money from the principals in the private equity firms, as well as outside investors, while the rest is borrowed, often with the company being purchased assuming that debt liability while the investors cash in from the get go. It sounds like a get rich quick scheme and in many cases it is, as these companies, in many sectors of our economy are bought, hollowed out and re-sold in a short time span. Companies like Toys R Us, Sears and Sports Authority have fallen victim to the machinations of private equity. Here’s the kicker:today the industry owns more businesses than ALL those listed on US stock exchanges combined. It’s staggering. Private equity firms gobble up a trillion dollars in new businesses each year and engorge politicians with campaign money to keep them virtually unregulated. At some point, like S&L’s, investment banks and others who have gotten too high on the hog, something will have to give in this new behemoth in the ‘financialization’ of America. According to Attorney Brendan Ballou, author of “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America”, ;private equity surrounds you’ as they buy up your veterinary clinic, your dentist’s office or your nursing home. It’s everywhere and we describe its workings today on this podcast.
As the wealthiest nation on earth, America should have made poverty a historical curiosity. Yet it is still with us and the wealth inequality gap continues to widen. As the major existential threat we face–climate change-is showing up everywhere in the form of floods, wildfires and intense hurricanes, some among us still doubt its existence and global consensus about what to do about remains elusive. So there you have it. Poverty and climate change. While we all aspire to create a better world, perhaps, what WE would have to give up to achieve it is beyond the level of sacrifice we are willing to pay. Do I want to pay more in taxes to help the other guy? Do I want to pay more for gas to drive my car if it pushes us to a cleaner future? Our guest, a respected professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford(yes that one) has written a compelling new book entitled “Why Politics Fail” in which he describes why are collective goals–democracy, equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity–are undermined by what he calls ‘political traps.’ Our aims are altruistic, but our actions are governed by self-interest that undermines our ability to deliver on our collective goals. Think about it as you listen.
Exclusionary zoning, practiced throughout most of the United States, is one of the most damaging forms of class discrimination. There is a racial component to it in many suburbs, but it really falls on a strata of society which is generally less educated and less affluent. Interestingly, liberal communities actually engage in the practice at higher rates than conservative ones. Call it a new and more subtle form of bias against those who have achieved less financial success. Its impact on educational outcomes, transportation problems and maintaining the yawning gap in income inequality in America is not well understood. And while there are reasons for minimum lot sizes, such as septic systems requiring land for their leach fields, in many towns the truth is the detached home on a large plot concept is meant to enhance property values and exclude those not welcome in various communities. In his book, “Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See,” Richard Kahlenberg does a great job of breaking down all of the issues at play as America maintains a legal, though harmful, form of discrimination. You’ll want to listen in.
Have you talked to anyone lately who thinks that the system of health care we have now is working just fine? I didn’t think so. You may have coverage but your co-pays and deductibles are going up and up. You may be eligible for government help but you didn’t know you were and, therefore, didn’t sign up. Or you made it to a stage of life when you’re eligible for Medicare but you didn’t realize all the choices you have to make about your coverage and the fact that the average Medicare recipient is still paying $5,000 a year for services. And on top of all this you are imprisoned in a job because your employer provides your health care and going out on your own, even with the Affordable Care Act in effect, might not provide you with the same coverage. In total, our system is a mess and unlike anything in the rest of the industrialized world. This system of coverage and delivery does not need a new coat of paint. It needs to be re-built in full, according to Liran Einav and today’s guest, Amy Finkelstein, who co-authored the book, “We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care.” It will happen, but like all things political in America not without much time and energy and enough people finally coming together to say enough is enough. Change it. What with? Find out today on this podcast.