SMART Supporters Rally to Defend Rail Project
By Bob Norberg
North Bay rail advocates rallied Thursday in a show of support for the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit system, defending the commuter train project as a benefit for both the economy and the environment. About 300 people assembled at Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square for the hour-long rally, which was staged by the SMART Riders Coalition, a group of labor, business and environmental organizations.
“This is one of the best investments that Sonoma and Marin county has made. We are creating economic prosperity,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Shirlee Zane, who is also a SMART board member. The gathering came four days after a town hall meeting by RepealSMART, a group collecting signatures to place a measure on the ballot next June or November that would repeal the SMART sales tax.
SMART has a $360 million plan to build the first stage of a commuter rail line from Railroad Square to downtown San Rafael. As additional funds become available, the line would be extended north to Cloverdale and south to Larkspur. The board approved the sale of $191 million in construction bonds on Wednesday and will consider awarding a contract for construction in mid December.
Critics note that the initial rail line is smaller than the one promised to voters during the 2008 sales tax election and is one or more years behind schedule. As a result, RepealSMART organizers contend the public should have an opportunity to vote on the project again.
State Sen. Noreen Evans, however, said the voters have already spoken in favor of SMART. “This is happening statewide,” the Santa Rosa Democrat said. “There is an anti-rail movement, an anti-community movement, an anti-jobs movement, and we need them all and we need them now.”
The rally was meant to demonstrate that support.
“Where else are you going to find a group as diverse as this? The common connection is that SMART is good for the future. It will relieve dependence on petroleum, it will create jobs, it will promote tourism,” Jack Swearengen, chairman of Friends of SMART, told the crowd.
Jon Dick of Santa Rosa, a heavy equipment operator who was recently laid off by Syar Industries, said while he wouldn’t be working on the rail line, the work on SMART could affect him indirectly. “Working in mining is dependent on development,” Dick said. “The last two years things have been slow.” Rich Nosker, a Santa Rosa public works engineer, said he supports SMART even though he knows it has its problems.
“I’m a bike rider, I walk, I drive a car and I’d love to take the train,” Nosker said. More than a dozen organizations are part of the SMART Riders Coalition, which include the North Bay Central Labor Council, Operating Engineers Local 3, the Sonoma Alliance, the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, Friends of SMART, the Living Wage Coalition and the Accountable Development Coalition.
Presentation by Bonnie Petty, Co-Chair Living Wage Coalition at the November 17th Santa Rosa rally to oppose the repeal of the SMART train.
My name is Bonnie Petty and I am one of the co-chairs of the Living Wage Coalition of Sonoma County.
I’m guessing that about 99% of us in this country really get what will turn our economy around—jobs! And I don’t mean just any jobs. I’m talking about good jobs that will pay enough for people to actually provide a decent standard of living for their families.
I’m not talking about lousy jobs that keep parents working two or three jobs or working so many hours that they cannot spend time raising their children or simply spending time with them.
Or jobs that leave them with no time or energy left to participate in their communities, or volunteering in their children’s schools, or helping to build the kinds of safe, wholesome, and sustainable communities that we want to live in today and hope to leave for our children and our grandchildren in the future. What we need to turn our economy around are exactly the kinds of good infrastructure jobs that SMART will provide.
Jobs that pay a living wage and provide comprehensive benefits, including career ladders and training programs, and jobs that can move the workers who build and operate SMART into the middle class.
The SMART project is not an irresponsible, radical, or farfetched notion, as some would have us believe, even considering today’s tough economy. Experience in other metropolitan regions such as Denver, Portland and Minneapolis/St.Paul that have recently built new transit and rail systems suggests that a mass transit system like SMART can be an engine for equitable economic development across an entire region.
SMART will enable low income residents in Sonoma County to enter the construction trades’ apprenticeship programs and to find employment building the rail system.
SMART will create opportunities for low income riders to commute to better jobs outside their own cities. And SMART can encourage in-fill around the train stations that includes affordable housing, living wage service sector jobs and access to affordable transit options including bus, bike and rail.
We need to encourage more developers, builders and businesses to do as the SMART BOARD is doing—bringing all the stakeholders to the table to talk about the kind of development we want in our own neighborhoods, municipalities, and in our region.
What we need is to take the high road to a shared prosperity in the North Bay. And SMART is one of the best projects going that will get us moving down that road—that high road to getting us off the road, out of our cars and unplugging us from our unsustainable addiction to foreign oil.
That is a road that will lead to good middle class jobs and not WalMart’s poverty wage jobs.
SMART is a critical step towards a sustainable future that will provide us with a direct link to the greater Bay Area, an access point to other jobs in the region and the right kind of link to the wealth of educational and entertainment opportunities and all of the natural wonders that make the Bay Area the best place on earth to live.
That’s why the Living Wage Coalition and its dozens of affiliates strongly and enthusiastically supports SMART and adamantly opposes any effort to repeal SMART’s funding.We pledge to work hard—alongside all of you—to protect what has taken us so long to put into place—and to begin to build the right kind of future for 100% of us.
Thank You.
http://www.truth-out.org/jobs-crisis-and-new-new-deal-america/1321046261
Friday, November 25, 2011
The Jobs Crisis: What Did Roosevelt Do That Obama Should?
by Martin Bennett and Richard Walker Truthout/News Analysis
The nation is experiencing the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Princeton economist and former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Blinder, calls the current crisis a "national jobs emergency."
The official unemployment rate in September was 9.1 percent - nearly twice the rate a decade ago - leaving 14 million people out of work.
It's not just the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession. The American economy has been underperforming for years. Business Week calls 1999-2009 "The Lost Decade for Jobs" as private-sector employment grew by a paltry net 1.1 percent - the lowest increase for any ten-year period since the 1930s.
The original version of President Obama's increasingly embattled jobs plan aimed to provide a much-needed extension of unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut for working Americans, but outlined only scarce measures to dent the catastrophic rate of unemployment. What we need today is a massive jobs program like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) launched by President Franklin Roosevelt. The WPA put millions of people back to work in the midst of the Great Depression, restoring their dignity, putting money in their pockets and quite literally saving lives.
The crisis is much worse than most of us think. According to the US Department of Labor, the underemployment rate is 16.5 percent, if you count part-time workers who want full-time jobs and discouraged workers who have simply stopped looking. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reports that the number of long-term unemployed, meaning those unemployed for more than six months, hovers at a postwar record level of 45 percent. All these figures are much higher for black and Latino workers.
No one is insulated. Workers at every educational level have seen their unemployment rates double since 2007 - high school graduates, college graduates and even those with graduate degrees. The severity of the crisis has overturned conventional wisdom that higher education is a cure for joblessness. The unemployed do not need more education - they need work.
What Did Roosevelt Do That Obama Is Not Doing?
In the winter of 1933, with unemployment reaching 25 percent, Roosevelt established the Civil Works Administration, an emergency jobs program that put 4.2 million unemployed to work within six months. He also started the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ a half-million young men with minimal skills in useful work in the nation's parks, forests and rangelands. Meanwhile, Roosevelt launched the Public Works Administration, which funded long-term infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, dams and public buildings.
The WPA followed in 1935, employing 8.5 million more between 1935 and 1943. It put those men and women to work on projects requested by state and local governments, such as roads, schools, sewers and airports, and operated local arts, educational and media programs.
Once the New Deal was launched in 1933, the US economy began to grow again by leaps and bounds - at a rate of nearly 10 percent per year. By 1937, production had doubled and the unemployment rate had dropped by half. By 1941, before the war began, the economy was back where it would have been had the Depression never happened. With the wartime build-up, mass unemployment became a distant memory.
To tackle our current unemployment crisis, the federal government should spend $500 billion a year over the next three years on emergency jobs programs like those of the New Deal. The first step would be to give every state and local government the funds to restore their budgets. The loss of 680,000 teaching, police, transit, and other public-sector jobs over the last three years has contributed measurably to the downturn.
The second step would be direct programs to create new full-time jobs for the unemployed - at the median wage of $16.27 an hour - in areas where the need is obvious: in schools (e.g., teachers, school maintenance and enrichment programs); human services (e.g., child care, home care and health care); and energy conservation (e.g., retrofitting homes and public buildings).
To this should be added a third step: financing large-scale public works programs to build schools, bridges, a "smart" electrical grid, zero-emission buses, high-speed rail, wind farms and affordable housing. The pathetic state of our national infrastructure has been decried for years by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gives the country a D grade, and the United States ranks 32nd in the world in infrastructure, according to McKinsey Global Institute.
A substantial increase of government spending for public works will create expanded opportunity for youth, women and minority workers to enter state-certified apprenticeship programs in the construction trades and to earn a middle-class income.
How to Pay for Such a Jobs Program?
First, the federal government can run temporary deficits. While the federal deficit is relatively high at 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010, it is still dramatically lower than the peak of 30 percent of GDP during World War II. Contrary to popular thinking, government spending in a recession can lower the deficit by taking people off the unemployment roles and putting money in the hands of ordinary people to bolster consumer demand, which stimulates business and returns more tax revenues.
But since we are worried about the current federal deficit and the budget woes of state and local governments, we must heed investor Warren Buffett's call to "stop coddling the rich" by raising taxes on millionaires and closing corporate loopholes.
The upper 1 percent's share of national income increased from 9 percent in 1976 to 24 percent in 2007, according to a report by UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez. Nearly half of total income went to the upper 10 percent in 2007, compared to 33 percent 30 years earlier. The top income tax rate on the highest earners was 70 percent between 1940 and 1980 - when the economy was performing much better than it is today - and now it is just 35 percent.
Moreover, corporate profits increased at an annual rate of $1.6 trillion in 2010 - a record for the postwar period. The Tax Policy Center reports that federal revenue from corporate taxes has dropped by half over the last 60 years, while corporations like Verizon, Bank of America and General Electric pay essentially no taxes due to loopholes in the tax code.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 5.6 percent surcharge on incomes exceeding $1 million, as proposed by the Obama administration, will raise $40 billion a year. Ending the Bush-era tax cuts for the upper 2 percent, set to expire in 2012, will generate more than $80 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Economists Robert Pollin and Dean Baker estimate that a 0.5 percent transaction tax on the transfer of stocks and securities will yield $175 billion annually from the largest financial institutions and speculators. The Center for Tax Justice calculates that federal tax revenue will increase by $365 billion a year if corporate tax loopholes and subsidies are eliminated.
Republicans oppose taxing the rich, just as they did in the 1930s. It will take popular mobilization by labor, faith, civil rights, women's and youth organizations to overcome such resistance - just as it did then. Occupy Wall Street may be the beginning of a movement for a new New Deal. Collective action worked in the 1930s and it could work again now.
Martin Bennett teaches American history at Santa Rosa Junior College and is co-chair of the Living Wage Coalition of Sonoma County (http://www.livingwagesonoma.org). Richard Walker is a professor of geography at UC Berkeley and co-director of the California Living New Deal Project (http://livingnewdeal.berkeley.edu).
LIVING WAGE COALITION OF SONOMA COUNTY
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