Hey, Good Lookin', Whatcha Got Cookin'?

THIS IS THE YEAR Ronald Ray-gun's Citizens for the Republic is the number one political fundraiser. This is the year a screaming came across the sky in the form of TurboProp 13. This is the year a number of Great Society liberals like Minnesota's Don Fraser unexpectedly found themselves trudging the gangplank. This is the year the "barren ground" liberals like Mike Dukakis and Jerry "Jarvis" Brown are discovering precious little sustenance from the earth they scorched in a vain attempt to hold off the advancing barbarians. This is the year the swell for labor law reform hit a crosswind; the year natural gas deregulation came in a gusher. This is the year of The Great Temptation to trumpet a Right-Wing Trend. Well, get thee behind me, Satan. Because this is a year like most years in American politics.

What about the '60s, you ask. Sure, we all remember "I have a dream" and the civil rights movement dragging a whole society kicking and screaming partway out of its cave. Sure, we puddle with nostalgia over the hundreds of thousands who massed in Washington for the moratoriums against the Vietnam War. But those were the clear-cut issues, glamorous in a strange way; they were drama. But where was the institutional depth to deal with the more complicated structural issues, the inbred capitalist priority system? Check out your own neighborhood to see how far we still have to go on race relations. Tremble a little in the night over visions of the fleets of C-147 transports--in the macho twinkling of a President's eye we could be marching the streets of Beirut, or Johannesburg.

Remember the '50s. Nuf said. Remember the '40s, when our fathers died to rid the world of Capitalism's Evil Mutant, while our economy entered the state capitalist stage, run by and for big businessmen. Remember the '30s, when our poliomyelitic system acquired the leg braces that allowed it to keep playing hardball--braces like unemployment compensation, Social Security, deposit insurance, to make sure it never bottomed out again. Remember the '20s--the corporations are much bigger now, and they've expanded from Peoria to Pretoria.

The dismal accoutrements go on and on: America's striking lack of an electoral labor party, and in its place, "business unionism," concerned only with wages hours, benefits; America's Horatio Alger myths of upward mobility, still pervasive despite the historical evidence that demonstrates much more rigidity than pluralists or consensus historians will admit. But spare us the hot tubs and razor blades. Leftists take showers.

Leftists are out there organizing communities, building coalitions, forming institutions to pool resources and provide the necessary staying power in the running battle with immortal corporations. We're not talking here about the ideological zealots--the Sparts and Trots and PLPers and ilk, who spend their time bickering and backstabbing over the various Internationals or how best to bring on the Revolution. Rather, the Cactus Leftists have involved themselves in presenting concrete alternatives to present policies. Their pragmatism, unfortunately, has often landed them in that sprawling massage parlor known as the Democratic Party: Instead of pushing radical alternatives, leftists end up dealing the tired liberal band-aids. (Flesh-colored, the ads say--make that Caucasian-colored.)

One such band-aid is the circuit-breaker for property tax relief--when the state runs a surplus it gives the money back to home-owners, scaled according to need. This is all well and good--we don't want the corporations to reap the windfalls as they did from Proposition 13. But circuit-breakers only divert time and attention from the real structural inequities in the tax system--the loopholes for the rich, the abatements for the corporations, the regressiveness of using tax incentives and credits to execute policy.

THERE ARE LEFTISTS, however, for whom band-aids won't do. There are leftists who maintain a radical perspective while proposing concrete, feasible alternatives. A random sample:

Institute for Policy Studies: Washington, D.C. radical think tank. Asked by 56 members of Congress to examine the federal budget for this year, rejected it, and wrote a new one. "The Federal Budget and Social Reconstruction," a landmark guide to what the government could do.

Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies: D.C.-based, does research and coordination for leftist public policy, tremendous resource publications and listings of left organizations; program emphasis on role of left public officials like Byron Dorgan, North Dakota tax commissioner, and Sam Brown, now head of ACTION and former Colorado state treasurer.

Citizen/Labor Energy Coalition: D.C.-based new coalition to encourage job creation through safe energy development, combines left unions such as the Machinists with public interest and community organizations--a breakthrough in this kind of cooperation.

Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy: Also in D.C., brings together 40 different national groups from the National Council of Churches and the ADA to the Longshoremen's union, to push for a peaceful, non-interventionist, humanitarian and open foreign policy.

Agribusiness Accountability Project: Now based in San Francisco, has produced consistently the best literature on the corporate takeover of American agriculture, and the middleman's gouging of the consumer.

New School for Democratic Management: The same people who bring you Mother Jones magazine (which uncovered the Ford Pinto gas tank scandal), San Francisco-based, the first alternative business school, for people in worker-controlled, collective and cooperative enterprises.

Center for the Study of Public Policy: Mt. Auburn St. in Cambridge, publishes Working Papers for a New Society, the best left policy journal in the country, the Fortune magazine of the Left.

The Midwest Academy: Chicago training school for organizers, run by Heather and Paul Booth, "two of the three organizing genuises in this country," (the other being Mike Ansara of Mass Fair Share, according to those who know).

In These Times: National weekly newspaper, based in Chicago, run by socialist historian James Weinstein, the best labor coverage anywhere, the grass-roots conflicts you read about here show up a year later in the New York Times with a shallower understanding of the subject.

Many more.

SOME OF THE snarpest prickles from the Cactus Leftists have come from the Exploratory Project on Economic Alternatives, a D.C.-based, foundation-sponsored research operation. EPEA is headed by Gar Alperovitz, a highly-respected leftist economist who was even mentioned for Jimmy Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. Alperovitz's response to the wishful-thinkers was, "Thanks but no thanks."

EPEA's latest project was a feasibility study on the re-opening, under community and worker control, of the shut-down Youngstown, Ohio, steel mill. Alperovitz's analysis of the much-ballyhoed "steel crisis" last year shows that corporate greed was the core of the problem, the catalyst for throwing Youngstown out of work. Youngstown Sheet and Tube, locally-owned and highly-profitable in the '60s, was 1969's Ripe Takeover of the Year. Lykes Steamship Company, based in New Orleans and one-seventh the size of Youngstown, borrowed the buy-out capital from Wall Street and elsewhere, using Youngstown's positive cash flow as collateral. Since 1969, Lykes invested next to nothing in modernizing the Youngstown plant--profits went to pay off the buy-out debt. Meanwhile, Japanese and some American plants switched to the more efficient oxygen furnaces, at I when the down cycle in steel came last year, Lykes closed the plant rather than operate at a profit less than it could get from investing elsewhere.

As for the alleged "steel crisis," the Wall St. Journal noted this past July 15 that the industry was operating at full capacity. Alperovitz even predicts the steel equivalent of a "refinery shortage" in the '80s, in which an artificially reduced number of steel plants will make a killing. The Carter Administration is doing its best to bring this about: Attorney-General Griffin Bell approved Lykes' salvage plan of merging with LTV Corporation, despite the ruling by his own Antitrust Division that the merger was illegal because LTV operates Jones and Laughlin Steel.

Alperovitz's scenario in the feasibility study removes corporate clutches altogether. With federal loan guarantees similar to New York City's and with several million dollars of federal seed money, the Youngstown workers and community could buy, re-open, and gradually modernize the plant. The government's other choice is to pay the estimated $75 million in unemployment and increased welfare benefits over the next three years in Youngstown alone. Alperovitz puts it this way: A corporation would never be satisfied with a 3 per cent return because it could make 8 or 10 per cent elsewhere. But owners from the community or workforce mainly want the jobs--profits matter only in so far as they help pay for modernizing. It's the classic case of the counter-productive profit motive.

ALPEROVITZ's other major research project also concerns counter-productive profit motives, in regards to inflation. Contrary to Keynesian and neoclassical theory, Alperovitz believes government budget deficits have had little to do with the inflation of the past six years. The four necessities--food, housing, energy, and health care--account for over 80 per cent of inflation, he maintains. In health care, for instance, there is no check on greed--third parties, the insurance companies, pay for most treatment, and doctors and hospitals charge whatever the "market" will bear. The result: spiraling insurance premiums and profits, soaring medical costs, and inflation. The only possible solution is national health insurance, to remove the profit motive, to ensure adequate medical care for all.

The consumer is a double victim of the energy problem. First, we are victims of the oil companies with their rigged prices, artificial shortages, bookkeeping juggles, and growing control of all sources of energy. Second, we are victims of the U.S. government, with its blind reliance on the price mechanism (import taxes, natural gas deregulation) to force conservation. Vast amounts of energy consumption are simply built into the system, with interstates, suburbs, glass buildings, etc. The only way to force conservation without penalizing the poor or adding to the corporate coffers is to ration energy.

The analysis is similar concerning food. The processing and packaging middlemen take three-fifths of the consumer dollar. Giant agribusiness is forcing out the family farm. Farmers leave land fallow while people starve. The government needs to break down the monopolization of the food sector, encourage production, establish grain and other reserves to assure a steady supply, and provide mechanisms for distributing the surplus to the world. Then prices would stabilize.

The answer to the housing crisis is simple: The Federal Reserve Bank has to give up the notion of combatting inflation by contracting the money supply. Since inflation is primarily structural, the supply of money has little effect on prices. But it has tremendous effects on the construction industry and the housing market. When the Fed tightens money, interest rates zoom (up to 10 per cent at present), and people can't afford to borrow money to build or buy housing. Construction workers go on welfare, real estate values skyrocket, and you just get more inflation.

THESE ANALYSES and proposals by Alperovitz and other Cactus Leftists are eminently reasonable and practical; yet, because they would represent fundamental change in the status quo, the flight to institute them will be Sisyphean.

Tom Hayden, co-founder of SDS and veteran of the '60s, tells a story about his chat with Jimmy Carter last year. Hayden had five minutes with Carter, and what with the picture taking, there wasn't much time for hardnosed rapping. But finally Hayden felt the urge, tilted his head over at Carter, pointed his "steely brown eyes" straight at him, and said, "You know, you don't have as much power as some heads of giant corporations, who are unelected and unaccountable to the public."

Carter "looked right back at me with his steely blue eyes and said, 'I believe you're right, I've learned that in the last 12 months.' Sure makes you feel good, huh, we're not alone in thinking we don't count for much."