WE KNOW A ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE ON STANFORD IS NOT THE SOCIAL DEMOCRAT FDR-----IT IS CAPTURING ANOTHER SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC TALKING POINT AS THEY DID PROGRESSIVE.
I often talk of media outlets and how over these few decades our once social democratic progressive journals like Mother Jones and Progressive have been bought and sold to Wall Street neo-liberal owners now pretending to be that progressive labor Mother Jones or that social progressive Progressive. Both are writing articles having a goal of moving the US towards that rebranding of far-right CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal/neo-con-----to 1% WALL STREET LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.
So, we are going to see them return to the century ago economic collapse that brought the Great Depression and FDR's social democratic policies-----only this time they are going to take the other route being discussed by a smaller GANG of leaders in Congress at the time----that is bringing on MAO Marxist facism. When these people use the words democratic socialist they are making us believe they are pushing for the old-school FDR social democratic policies. Where they are going is far-right authoritarian MAO Marxism they call communist or socialist.
Stanford University has always been the neo-conservative university Stanford is to foreign policy what Johns Hopkins is...
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
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'Felicia Wong, president and C.E.O. of the Roosevelt Institute'.
_______________________________________
Could Hillary
Clinton Become
the Champion of
the 99 Percent?
A coalition of progressives has been quietly building a
plan to bring Occupy-style ideas into the political
establishment. Will the Democratic nominee get on board?
By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUSJULY 23, 2016
In June of 2015, Felicia Joy Wong was in her car, awaiting with some apprehension the economic address that would officially open Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The speech was being staged at the F.D.R. memorial on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, and though Wong is a political operative of atypical modesty — she describes herself as a former schoolteacher whose accession to minor power has been entirely accidental — she had taken the choice of venue as auspicious. Wong runs the Roosevelt Institute, a small think tank (for lack of a better term) that originated in trusts established to promote the legacies of Franklin and Eleanor. Its chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, indirectly coined the Occupy movement’s enduring slogan (“We are the 99 percent”), and Stiglitz and Wong each saw the election as an opportunity to channel Occupy energy into national politics. The country was perhaps ready once again, they believed, for what F.D.R. called “bold, persistent experimentation” in our economic affairs. Two of Wong’s senior staff members had gone to the island for the event, but she herself bowed out, claiming the duties of a part-time suburban soccer coach and mom.
In the car, Wong heard the candidate say: “The middle class needs more growth and more fairness. Growth and fairness go together. For lasting prosperity, you can’t have one without the other.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought, I can’t believe she just said that. Each time she repeated this story to me, she narrowed her eyes toward an imaginary car radio and pointed in disbelief.
“Prosperity can’t be just for C.E.O.s and hedge-fund managers,” the candidate continued. “Democracy can’t just be for the billionaires and corporations.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought again, I can’t believe she just said that. It may have been political boilerplate, but Wong thrilled to it. Her incredulity had yielded to pleasure and admiration. Republicans, the candidate went on, “pledge to wipe out tough rules on Wall Street, rather than rein in the banks that are still too risky, courting future failures.”
Wong stopped the car to check her phone. Exultant emails were streaming in. “This is our plan!” one Roosevelt board member wrote. “This is your plan!”
“Our plan” was “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” an inventive combination of narrative history and policy platform that Roosevelt published the month before. The report billed itself as a comprehensive agenda to ameliorate inequality. First, it said, inequality is a choice, not an inevitable byproduct of technology, globalization and the uneven distribution of personal virtue. Second, it held that the longstanding notion of an economic trade-off between growth and equality is a fiction.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EQUALIZING THAN EVERYONE EARNING THE SAME $3 A DAY---OR $20-30 A DAY FOR THE NEW ECONOMY MIDDLE-CLASS----WITH THE 1% POCKETING ALL THE WEALTH AS THEY HAVE BEEN THESE SEVERAL YEARS.
Unlike the myriad other white papers that each week were drafted, edited, somnolently received at other think tanks and shelved without fanfare, this report — original not so much in its ideas as in its clarity and vigor — had captured wide and consequential attention. In the months leading up to its publication, the Roosevelt team was in close touch with Clinton speechwriters and advisers, and in subsequent rallies the candidate continued to draw upon the report, even at the level of explicit language; calls to “rewrite the rules” found their way into more of her addresses. The many news reports that linked the speech to Wong’s organization consistently and erroneously relocated her team to Washington. (Their headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, in an Art Deco tower in the shadow of the Citigroup Center.)
Much of the left, including the significant bloc that rejected Clinton in the primaries in favor of Bernie Sanders and his call for “revolution,” finds Wong and her allies delusional in their hope that “Rewriting the Rules” might be realized in Democratic Party practice. But the Sanders and Trump insurrections revealed an appetite for economic populism that no one in either party establishment had quite anticipated. Now Roosevelt and other progressive groups are wagering that a mandate for economic overhaul might already exist, and that it might even be carried out by the woman who always was the party’s near-certain nominee. Wong herself believes that the financial crisis radically destabilized the politics of the American economy, possibly for decades to come, and that 2016 might well mark the early commotion of a genuine political realignment.
As the party heads into its convention in Philadelphia, this coalition sees encouraging signals — perhaps most notably the role that Elizabeth Warren, a key Roosevelt ally, has come to play in the campaign — that Hillary Clinton’s economic sympathies might ultimately lie further to the left than skeptics supposed. Roosevelt is a 501(c)(3), and though it does maintain a political-action arm, it does not work to elect specific candidates. Still, various representatives from Clinton’s speechwriting and policy teams regularly solicit the organization’s input. Roosevelt in turn has redoubled its efforts not only on advancing the ideas in “Rewriting the Rules” but also in recruiting the personnel necessary to carry them out, in the form of a methodical effort to find suitable candidates for economic positions in a future presidential administration.
Rob Stein, the liberal operative whose establishment of the Democracy Alliance in 2005 did perhaps more than any other act to funnel new money and new ardor into progressive causes, told me: “Like no other progressive institution, Roosevelt is bringing strategically relevant insight to the deeper structural problems of our economy.”
THEY MEAN GETTING PROGRESSIVELY RICHER----NOT SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
Part of the reason Wong and her team remain mostly unheralded is that they eschew power politics for the quieter work of developing networks to act on ideas. They thus do not see themselves as pushing or pulling or dragging the Democratic nominee to their position. They believe that this candidate, of all candidates, is unlikely to respond to public hectoring or ultimatums. The greatest incentive they can offer is a demonstration that Clinton may well already be the candidate that progressives — and the electorate — have been waiting for.
A displaced Californian, Wong lives with her family in Westchester but makes routine Amtrak face-work pilgrimages to Washington. She has thick, artfully unruly cataracts of black hair and moves with a long, darting, buoyant stride. In meetings, she spends much of her time profusely, sweetly and genuinely thanking people for their thoughtful recommendations of white papers she has already read, studies she has already digested, arguments she could recite by heart, academics she already funds or would like to, funders who already donate and, often, information or ideas she herself has originated. Men of bulk in loosened ties have a way of talking at her for hours and then lifting her best notions, as if accidentally choosing a nicer umbrella on the way out of a restaurant.
One cold, dreary spring day I accompanied her to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. building on 16th Street NW, a foreboding grid of polished beige stone with a lobby dominated by a hallucinogenic two-story marble mosaic. Wong often proceeds by indirection, and the obvious contrast of this first meeting — between Big Labor’s encumbrances and Roosevelt’s dexterity — made, in retrospect, a deliberate point.
Damon Silvers, the organization’s policy director, greeted us in a cluttered low-floor office that looked as if it might belong to a law professor. He showed us seats at a wobbly round table and talked about wages and productivity and economic pain. “There have been a few years over the last 30 with broad-based wage growth,” he noted, “but those are the outliers, the exceptions — a few years under Reagan, some under Clinton, but stagnation has been the regime since 1980.” He praised Roosevelt as the source of “heavyweight economic thinking” on this, and for “upping the ante.”
WHO KNOWS ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL REBRANDING TO LIBERTARIAN MARXISM? TRUMKA AND THE NATIONAL AFL-CIO. ELIZABETH WARREN IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL WHO COULD CARE LESS ABOUT LABOR OR JUSTICE----
Wong deflected the credit. “Well, you’ve been saying this,” she replied, “and Elizabeth Warren says it, and Stiglitz has been saying it for 30 years, but now it’s almost common knowledge.” Wong was more concerned about how they planned to put that common knowledge into action before the looming convention.
“Despite President Obama’s efforts, the rules of the economy continue to drive runaway inequality,” Silvers went on. “The power dynamics that were in place in 2008 are still in place now, and we don’t have all the time in the world to fix this.”
This continued for a while, as Silvers relaxed into the comfortable contours of his analysis and Wong steered the visit toward what might actually be done. Eventually she was summoned to see the union’s president, Richard Trumka, whose seigneurial berth looks down on the White House. Silvers directed me in the meantime to a vitrine of the fat blue bill-signing pens L.B.J. used to enact the Great Society — food stamps, public broadcasting, urban mass transport, water quality, wholesome poultry products. “If you want to see what structural change looks like,” he told me, tapping on the glass, “take a look at this.”
The progressive organizations in Wong’s rotation take as a matter of course the idea that the Obama administration was a significant missed opportunity for transformation on that order. They do not entirely blame Obama. He had his legislative victories — most importantly in the Affordable Care Act — but one lesson they drew from his time in office was that liberals had long been overly fixated on legislative success. (Johnson had a Congress he could work with; Obama mostly did not, and the next president probably won’t, either.) The right has set the agenda for the past 35 years because they built their economic movement deductively (from the first principle of the unregulated market) and took their victories where they could find them. The left, by comparison, tended to moralize, and spoke in the language of justice instead of growth. When they did talk about economics, it took the form of individual issues — minimum wage, student debt, paid family and sick leave — rather than overarching pronouncements. This muddle worsened during the Bush era, when urgent noneconomic concerns forced the left to privilege short-term electoral tactics over long-term strategy.
Roosevelt was designed to be a place, independent of the party establishment, to unite all of these factions under the banner of long-term, coherent economic thinking. Had such a movement existed in 2008, it might have seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity for structural economic reform. Obama’s recovery model, to the group’s lasting dismay, remained in thrall to old superstitions about growth. The goal of the bailout was to fix the existing financial system and get credit flowing back into the economy while keeping an eye on deficit spending. But today, though high-level macroeconomic numbers like monthly job growth or the headline unemployment rate have improved, almost half of the new jobs created in the first five years of the recovery were poverty-level. Repaired with a kludge, the system went right back to doing exactly what it did before: allowing the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the few to dominate the prospects of the many.
Roosevelt and its allies believe that the crisis could have been an occasion — unseen since the New Deal — for the diffusion of authority, large-scale infrastructural investment, attention to low-wage growth and relief for the plight of overextended homeowners rather than banks. But that opportunity passed by because, in the absence of a strong, organized countervailing force, responsibility for the bailout simply defaulted to the claque of Citigroup veterans and sympathizers that had administered Democratic economic policy for what was now a full generation. The critics didn’t think that these ex-bankers were unscrupulous, but rather that they acted in accordance with the free-market orthodoxy they inherited from their predecessors.
With all this resentment of bankers, a news consumer might have thought the enthusiasm in this milieu — that is, all the groups that resisted the legacy of deregulated, race-neutral, free-market bipartisanship — would accrue to Bernie Sanders. But Sanders in fact came up only rarely in my conversations with them, usually in praise of the sincerity of his message. The common view of the Democratic contest was that Sanders did a great service in pushing Clinton to the left. Though in some senses this was clearly the case — on the minimum wage and on college tuition — there was an alternate interpretation. As Sanders gained traction, it seemed to Wong and her partners that Clinton had simply ceded to him the territory of aggressive financial reform. Sanders, in their view, hadn’t so much pulled her to the left as pushed her to swivel.
The Roosevelt coalition agreed by and large with the direction of Sanders’s economic program, but they regretted the crudeness of his exposition. They understood, for example, the appeal of a call to break up the banks but found greater sophistication in Clinton’s proposals to regulate “shadow banking.” They wished his advisers had been more careful with the numbers. And the personal iconoclasm and moral purity of the Sanders campaign didn’t lend themselves to governance. How, given the way Obama’s ideals foundered on a kind of Washington default mode, did Sanders plan to staff an entire administration?
Wong and her allies spent a lot more time worrying about Donald Trump than they did valorizing Sanders. Their fear was, and is, that Clinton’s response to Trump’s faux populism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny — that we needed to make America not “great” but “whole” again — would crowd out everything she once said about corporations and inequality. Clinton’s central economic metaphor, “ladders of opportunity,” promised access to the current system rather than a wholly different one. But Roosevelt has found that a message of “leveling the playing field” polls much better with voters of color and the white working class. (Its recent follow-up to “Rewriting the Rules,” a paper about race by the fellows Dorian Warren and Andrea Flynn, acknowledges that the economic interests and political needs of the two constituencies may not always seem perfectly aligned.) The central preoccupation for Wong, and for Silvers and for Warren, was to demonstrate that it was the courageous thing, not the cautious one, that would capture the preponderance of the electorate.
It is common, in Washington, to view yourself as there by some celestial accident; Beltway insiders delight in a good sneering reference to Beltway insiders. But Wong really does seem like an improbable person to preside over a think tank. She grew up in Silicon Valley, studied poetry at Stanford, got a Ph.D. in political science at Berkeley, worked as a high-school teacher and then at a valley start-up and then happened into a job at the Democracy Alliance, a semi-secretive club of progressive donors. She can barely bring herself to utter the phrase “think tank,” much less “policy shop.” Late one evening in Washington, we walked by a thickset monolith that glowed with a cold marmoreal light, as if James Turrell had built a fortress for some paranoid ice king. The front read CSIS: the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Wong rolled her eyes, theatrically shuddered and tucked her runaway hair behind her ear. “Now that’s a think tank.”
On the left, there are lots of small organizations in Washington that publish granular research on specific economic trends. But the most significant liberal think tank in recent years has been the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003 by the former Bill Clinton chief of staff (and current Hillary Clinton campaign chair) John Podesta as his party’s answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. CAP has done a lot of innovative policy work, especially on universal preschool and health care, but it was always less of a research organization than a shadow government for an opposition in exile. When Obama was elected, roughly a third of CAP’s staff went into his administration. CAP was founded in an era when few liberals were of the opinion that the system itself was broken: If you just found slightly better Democrats, elected them to office and put smarter policies in their hands, they believed, the country would return to the prosperity of the 1990s. Liberal Washington was not equipped, when the financial crisis broke, to tender a holistic analysis of what was ailing the economy. (Today, CAP’s economic ideas are more in line with those of Roosevelt, and in 2015 it released a report on short-termism that anticipated part of “Rewriting the Rules.”)
In 2009, a political scientist named Andrew Rich, known for writing about the “war of ideas,” was drafted to reinvent the Roosevelt Institute as a place for the radical thinking that postcrisis politics seemed to require. Roosevelt at the time was an ad hoc collection of spare progressive parts, including the upkeep of the F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Rich believed that if you weren’t in Washington, and you weren’t beholden to the party apparatus, and if you got the right people — people who were too idiosyncratic or rough-hewn for academia, or academics who wanted to be politically relevant but needed help with finding an audience for their work — you could create a new kind of institution on a looser, livelier model.
At that moment of upheaval and administration dithering, financial reform was the new Roosevelt’s obvious first priority. Rich brought on Stiglitz and Mike Konczal, whose pseudonymous financial-crisis blog had a cult following among progressives.
WE ARE TO BELIEVE THAT STIGLITZ ---like REICH, both Clinton era cabinet and Stiglitz went on to World Bank----but, like Reich he has reformed his stances so we can now believe he is for the 99%!
Joseph StiglitzNobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economic Sciences and Professor at Columbia UniversityJoseph E. Stiglitz received his Ph.D from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Award. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, and MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He co-founded and directs the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995–97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997–2000.
_____________________________________
'The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism'
Below we see the Roosevelt name tied to what is now global profit-driven biotechnology health science having lost all oversight, accountability, ethics, hippocratic oath delivery. Since the FDR social democratic policies built our national system of public hospitals and public clinics just so health care would reach all citizens with strong patient protections in place----and there are the words---PRAGMATIC IDEALISM. For these few decades of Clinton neo-liberalism taking our Democratic Party they have been repurposing the FDR brand to that of PRAGMATIC NILISM. We have Roosevelt Institutions overseas-----Roosevelt Institutions at a few US universities all marketing on that brand of compassionate social democratic NEW DEAL bringing the strongest economy and rising middle-class in world history. Now, when an immigrant coming to the US reads about FDR----neo-liberals are ready to give FDR their pragmatic look.
'The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism'
IT IS NOT LIKELY THE ROOSEVELTS WOULD LIKE THIS.
University of Denver
Eleanor Roosevelt Institute >
About Us
About Us
About the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute
Brief History and Mission
The Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was founded in 1961 on the belief that biomedical and genetic research are the most cost-effective, long-term approaches to the eventual conquest of human afflictions such as cancer, premature aging, birth defects and genetic diseases. The Institute merged with the University of Denver in 2003. It is our mission to seek an in-depth understanding of the process of life, especially human life, and through this understanding, work toward unlocking the mysteries of human health and disease.
***********************************************************
TOP COTTAGE IN THE NEWS: Hear NPR's February 21, 1999
Weekend Edition report on FDR's "Top Cottage."
It was specially designed by President Roosevelt to accommodate his disabilities, and is currently being restored through the efforts of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. [real audio file]
The mission of the Roosevelt Institute is to inform new generations of the ideals and achievements of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and to inspire the application of their spirit of optimism and innovation to the solution of current problems. We believe, as FDR did, that the Four Freedoms are essential to a flourishing democracy, and we create programs to encourage those freedoms at home and abroad. The Institute commemorates the significant events of the Roosevelt years and works with educators to improve the teaching of that pivotal period in American history.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt communicated by word and deed a vision of a just and compassionate society. Now, more than ever, nations in many parts of the globe are looking for models for the development of democratic systems of government. The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism that these two great leaders brought to the problems of their time can continue to inspire the struggle for peace and social justice everywhere in the world.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Grants
The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute supports a program of small grants-in-aid, not to exceed $2,500, in support of research on the "Roosevelt years" or clearly related subjects. Grants are awarded each spring and fall. The deadlines for grant submissions are February 15 and September 15. Funds are awarded for the sole purpose of helping to defray living, travel, and related expenses incurred while conduction research at the Roosevelt Library.
The grants program is particularly designed to encourage younger scholars to expand our knowledge and understanding of the Roosevelt period and to give support for research in the Roosevelt years to scholars from the emerging democracies and the Third World.
Upon conclusion of their research, grantees are requested to submit a brief end-of-grant report to the Chairman of the Grants Committee; two copies of any publications resulting from their research are expected to be given to the Roosevelt Library and the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands.
____________________________________________
The United Nations today is not the United Nations Eleanor Roosevelt created a century ago designed to bring the then post-war nations together---the UN is now tied to expanding International Economic Zones and global neo-liberal policies both of which we all know kills human rights and social justice. Since the US is now ranked at the top of global human rights violators in the world-----exporting International Economic Zones and building and operating global human capital distribution systems. One cannot embrace the world's top human rights violator while calling itself the protector of human rights. This is why International Economic Zone ONE WORLD policies are sold as helping developed nations---helping the poor----helping women----as they are pushed into global sweat shop factories paid $3 a day.
So, around the world the Roosevelts having founded UN----also tied to social democratic policies in the US that were left-leaning and socially progressive----are being used to sell this authoritarian, far-right global corporate fascism as human rights.
The United States, with a “medium” risk of human rights offenses, ranked 139th among the 197 countries. The US has been outside all other developed world nations in human rights for these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA but they keep using that FDR----ROOSEVELT SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC BRAND to sell to citizens in nations around the world----now they are going to corrupt the history of FDR and New Deal here in the US. The systemic fraud and corruption in the US and that Wall Street and global pols export around the world is tops on violations of human rights.
The United Nations and Human Rights
www.udhr50.org/
Eleanor Roosevelt in Central Hall, Westminster, 1946
Because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's role in the founding of the United Nations and Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership in the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, FERI is deeply committed to the United Nations and its continued success. Currently, FERI manages the Office for the 50th Anniversary of the UDHR which it established in 1996 to coordinate plans for UDHR50 in the United States in 1998. More than sixty human rights, civil rights, and social justice groups have agreed on a "National Human Rights Agenda to mark the anniversary. The agenda's three broad goals are: A) To foster a wider appreciation of and commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through education and a media campaign; B) To further codify the protection of international human rights through the development and ratification of legal instruments, including the Convention on Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and, C) To promote more effective international institutions for the protection of basic human rights and freedoms by advocating the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court and the strengthening of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Office for the 50th Anniversary of the UDHR is now coordinating efforts to implement this agenda and to inspire young people to assume responsibility for expanding respect for human rights throughout the world.
To honor Eleanor Roosevelt on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995, FERI organized a conference in cooperation with the UN Group on Equal Rights for Women and the United Nations Association-USA on "Women and the United Nations." The speakers at the conference, who included First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dr. Nafis Sadik, and Gertrude Mongella, urged the United Nations to live up to the commitment in its Charter to "the equal rights of men and women" by achieving gender equity in the Secretariat. FERI remains committed to this goal, not only because it is a basic human right, but because it will make the United Nations more effective in carrying out its mission and a better place to work for both men and women.
____________________________________
'The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, founded in 2004, is a national organization that strives to uphold the values cast into the public discourse by Franklin, Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt and to promote the next generation of leaders through progressive policy'.
The global Clinton Initiative brought its network to our US universities these several years-----locally MICA and Towson have Clinton Initiative global policy organizations working for Wall Street Baltimore Development. This same political philosophy is coming out of what is now a global organization---THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE and it always sells itself as old-school social Democratic policy WHILE BEING TOTALLY PRAGMATIC NILISM. This is where our FDR as social progressive becomes far-right neo-liberal progressive----getting progressively richer. All the foreign students coming to US universities are connecting to this organization thinking they are learning about American democracy and social progressive policy.
NEO-LIBERAL PROGRESSIVE POLICY ONLY ALLOWS POLICY THAT DOES NOT TAKE FROM CORPORATE PROFIT OR SEND ANY FUNDING TO SUPPORT IT.
So, gay marriage and rights are fine---it does not take from corporate profit and no funds are used to support it. The fact this was created in 2004----in the midst of Bush era with Clinton Foundation and Clinton Initiative being spread overseas in International Economic Zone nations.
The goal of getting global corporations and Wall Street out of public policy starts with getting IVY LEAGUE universities out of our public policy----why would universities that exclude all but a a few percent of American citizens be writing policy for the 99% of Americans?
About UGA
Ideas, impact are explored at the Roosevelt Institute
Torre Lavelle experienced what she hopes won't be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when she presented a policy paper at the White House in late 2014. The idea for her white paper — on Environmental Protection Agency carbon emissions regulations — and the invitation to the White House stemmed from her involvement with the Roosevelt Institute at UGA.
"I couldn't have done it without the network I have here. Being able to present my ideas not only within the Athens community but at the state and national level, I feel like I'm making an impact," the junior says.
The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, founded in 2004, is a national organization that strives to uphold the values cast into the public discourse by Franklin, Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt and to promote the next generation of leaders through progressive policy. In 2006, Rhodes Scholar Deep Shah and Gabriel Allen co-founded the UGA chapter of the student-run think tank that teaches its members how to approach problems and create policy analyses.
In 2014 UGA was named Chapter of the Year for the Roosevelt network, which has 115-plus chapters in 38 states with more than 10,000 members.
UGA's Roosevelt students have presented their white papers in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and around the world. Congressmen and government officials have attended Roosevelt-sponsored symposiums on UGA's campus.
This spring the ideas of eight UGA students were published in the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network's 2015 edition of 10 Ideas, an undergraduate policy journal series. Two of the proposals — "Addressing Sexual Assault at the University of Georgia" by Cali Callaway and "Fighting Pain with Pills: Overprescribing and the Opioid Addiction Epidemic" by Erin Hollander — were selected as nominees for Policy of the Year, placing them among the best of the best student-generated policy ideas in 2015.
In addition, nearly every one of UGA's recent recipients of top scholarships — including the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman — have participated in the UGA chapter and Roosevelt Scholars course.
DOESN'T FEEL WRONG THAT PEOPLE AT IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS TIED TO RHODES SCHOLARS PROGRAMS BE THE FACE OF THE 99% SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC POLICY FOR THE MIDDLE/WORKING CLASS AND POOR? OF COURSE. IN ONE WORLD 1% LIBERTARIANISM----ONLY THE RICH HAVE A VOICE---WE THE PEOPLE HAVE NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS AND THEREFOR NO VOICE. THESE ARE GLOBAL UNIVERSITIES-
"It's a wonderful campus laboratory for our best and brightest students," UGA President Jere W. Morehead said. "For me, what makes the Roosevelt Institute so important is it allows students the opportunity to develop policy ideas in an academic environment and then test those ideas out on real policymakers who have touched the Roosevelt Institute over time, whether they are senators or congressmen or leaders in the General Assembly."
Shah saw Roosevelt as a way for students interested in policymaking to come together and focus on their ideas. University Professor Emeritus Gary Bertsch, then with the Center for International Trade and Security, told him about the Roosevelt Institute and suggested starting the chapter. The first year, the club had about 20 students; now it has about 100.
"I don't think we ever knew it would attract that much interest," said Shah, who is now an internal medicine and primary care physician resident in the J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency Program at the Emory University School of Medicine. "The first cohort believed in the power of college students to influence the policymaking process."
Students and faculty from public health, education, economics, international affairs, ecology, family and consumer sciences, and other departments, schools and colleges are a part of Roosevelt at UGA. The Roosevelt Issues Forum, hosted by the Honors Program for all students every month, seeks to sharpen their awareness of state, national and global issues.
Some students who attend the forums get more involved through the Roosevelt chapter and Roosevelt Scholars course, a three-hour research course that averages 15 students each fall.
"The importance of the University of Georgia Roosevelt chapter is that it is mature, it is robust and it can provide a leadership role across the nation," said David Williams, UGA Honors Program director and the Roosevelt Institute faculty adviser.
Kameel Mir, the club's co-executive director, said the students are passionate about their projects and inspired by the possibility of having an impact.
"That's really what the heart of the club is about. These kids not only want to develop themselves academically in their ability to write a policy paper, but they want to find ways to implement these ideas," said Mir, who is earning a bachelor's in international affairs and bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature. "You can also make active change, even at the age of 20, if you want to."
For some students, it sharpens their career path.
Former chapter executive director Lucas Puente, who interned in the office of then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, says Roosevelt gave him the best preparation for participating in the UGA Washington Semester Program in 2008.
"It was great to take what I learned about the policy process through Roosevelt at UGA my first two years and enhance that education in the actual policymaking environment of the Beltway," said Puente, who is now pursuing a doctorate at Stanford University.
Alex Edquist, an economics major and 2014-2015 Roosevelt chapter co-director, presented her policy on making the federal prison system more cost effective as it pertains to drug offenders during a 2014 conference in Budapest.
"Roosevelt has definitely been the most meaningful thing I have done on this campus," she said.
____________________________________
'the Next American Economy project took a collective oath of optimism. This is perhaps most apparent in our final brief, written by Next American Economy leader and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter, in which we project many of the ideas discussed in these papers into 2040 and paint a holistic picture of this (not overly) optimistic scenario'.
If one looks at the Roosevelt Institute its policies simply repeat what Wall Street and global corporations are telling us our NEW ECONOMY will be-----it will be urban---as in our US cities deemed International Economic Zones----it will be technology with smart cities----there will be different currency because this economic crash will kill our economy and we will then be told to make our own money----ergo BitCoin and bartering.
By capturing every aspect of FDR and his image-----global neo-liberals are making it impossible for REAL FDR social Democratic policies to be considered. Clinton did the same with social democracy when he captured the Democratic Party and pretended to be protecting our New Deal and War on Poverty programs while he was dismantling them. It was those REAL FDR social democratic policies that brought a strong stable economy, real free-market with broad competition, and a workforce paid well enough to fuel that economy. CLINTON WALL STREET ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE ARE DOING THE OPPOSITE. WE DO NOT MOVE FORWARD WITH A BAD VISION OF 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY FOR GOODNESS SAKE.
Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It's the working, the working, just the working life
—Bruce Springsteen, “Factory,” 1978
The predestined, blue-collar lifestyle that Bruce Springsteen sang about in Darkness on the Edge of Town is already a thing of the past, and it will only grow smaller in our rear-view mirrors as we approach 2040. Soon, the world of the large central firm and steady, predictable work will exist only in museums.
What will replace it?
The following set of thought briefs attempts to address this question and describe some ways that economic, social, and political institutions in the U.S. must adapt to provide opportunity and prosperity in the mid-21st century. Guided by the belief that we are in the midst of an economic transformation on par with the Industrial Revolution, the Roosevelt Institute’s Next American Economy project identifies the trends and challenges that will shape our economy in the next 25 years in order to better inform the policy decisions we must make today. We are particularly focused on the potential impact of new technologies on productivity, employment, and economic security.
To help glean insights on these topics, we convened a diverse group of economists, technologists, union leaders, and entrepreneurs, and framed a series of conversations aimed at identifying the key concerns of today and projecting how they might evolve, dissipate, or intensify over the next 25 years.
These briefs—our first public release—take on some of the most promising and challenging issues that our expert working group came up with, including the promise and perils of the gig economy, smarter cities, and better modes of finance, as well as the need for new worker bargaining platforms and improved, lifelong education. We consider these topics in what we hope is a thorough (though of course not exhaustive) and accessible narrative.
Although each brief in this series focuses on a different aspect of economic evolution, the collection as a whole is primarily concerned with a foundational question of adaptation:
How should American society—its workers, businesses, and government—adapt to a rapidly shifting economic environment? Generally, we identify four recurring formative trends that will shape the 2040 economy.
First, technologies like cloud computing, 3D printing, and robotics will revolutionize the way Americans work, communicate, and generally relate to the world. Technology will replace workers as a variety of professions become automated, but, as it leads to the creation of new jobs and overall economic growth, the extent to which technology can offset its own economic drawbacks remains to be seen. In “Where Will Work Come From in the Era of Cloud Computing and Big Data?” John Zysman discusses how American manufacturers can make up for lost business by ushering in a new era of high-tech, value-added products.
Second, changes in the workplace will move traditional employment increasingly toward entrepreneurship, freelancing, independent contracting, and gig economy or “peer-to-peer” work on platforms like TaskRabbit. This will result in myriad changes to the ways in which Americans look after basic needs, from health care to retirement planning, that were previously met by a single employer. In “Barriers to Growth in the ‘Sharing Economy’,” Denise Cheng addresses numerous facets of the gig economy, while in “Challenges in SME Access to Capital” Richard Swart discusses the importance of start-up capital in a more entrepreneurial future economy.
The third trend, following directly from the second, concerns the likely increase in overall economic insecurity that will result from a society-wide decrease in the number of traditional jobs. Without the stability of long-term, full-time employment from a single firm that provides not only salary but also comprehensive benefits, Americans will need new tools to provide economic security for themselves and their families. Key to this point is not only the cost of benefits but the increased time and effort workers will have to expend just to manage their careers. How will workers bargain, for example, when they are employed—effectively—by a multitude of customers across a number of platforms like Uber and Etsy? If they are contractors, what institutions will help them complete their annual tax returns and handle billing and payments? And lastly, how will workers keep their skills up to date as employer needs evolve around them? Michelle Miller addresses some possibilities for the future of bargaining power in “The Union of the Future,” while briefs by Chelsea Barabas and our colleagues at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture, and Commerce discuss two revolutions in education that will help workers adapt in a rapidly changing economy.
Finally, the government’s increasing inability to make policy that benefits society and meets the economy’s most pressing needs will be exacerbated by rapid technological and economic evolutions that make such policy ever more pressing. Simultaneously, swelling retirement entitlements will raise budgetary challenges that further restrict the federal government’s ability and willingness to invest and reform. As such, is out of necessity that we at the Next American Economy project feel cities—already successful laboratories for creative policy solutions—will increasingly become the incubators and epicenters for innovation and business growth. Julia Root goes into great depth on this topic in “Urban Platforms in 2040.”
The challenge of adapting to these evolutions is grave. Indeed, it would be easy—and some of us were tempted—to throw up our hands and prepare for the worst. To avoid unproductive handwringing, the Next American Economy project took a collective oath of optimism. This is perhaps most apparent in our final brief, written by Next American Economy leader and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter, in which we project many of the ideas discussed in these papers into 2040 and paint a holistic picture of this (not overly) optimistic scenario.
We hope that you will enjoy this foray into our future.
I often talk of media outlets and how over these few decades our once social democratic progressive journals like Mother Jones and Progressive have been bought and sold to Wall Street neo-liberal owners now pretending to be that progressive labor Mother Jones or that social progressive Progressive. Both are writing articles having a goal of moving the US towards that rebranding of far-right CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA Wall Street global corporate neo-liberal/neo-con-----to 1% WALL STREET LIBERTARIAN MARXISM.
So, we are going to see them return to the century ago economic collapse that brought the Great Depression and FDR's social democratic policies-----only this time they are going to take the other route being discussed by a smaller GANG of leaders in Congress at the time----that is bringing on MAO Marxist facism. When these people use the words democratic socialist they are making us believe they are pushing for the old-school FDR social democratic policies. Where they are going is far-right authoritarian MAO Marxism they call communist or socialist.
Stanford University has always been the neo-conservative university Stanford is to foreign policy what Johns Hopkins is...
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Featured Profiles
Gaffney, Frank
Frank Gaffney, director of the hardline neoconservative Center for Security Policy, is a longtime advocate of aggressive U.S. foreign policies, bloated military budgets, and confrontation with the Islamic world.
Berman, Ilan
Ilan Berman is vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, a think tank that promotes hawkish security polices and appears to be closely associated with the U.S. “Israel Lobby.”
Fort, Randall
Randal Fort, an assistant secretary for intelligence and research in the State Department during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency, is director at the Raytheon Corporation.
Kagan, Robert
Robert Kagan, a cofounder of the Project for the New American Century, is a neoconservative policy pundit and historian based at the Brookings Institution.
McCarthy, Andrew C.
A neoconservative pundit and former federal prosecutor, McCarthy argues that Islam is inherently radical and thus a threat to the United States.
Talent, Jim
Former Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO), a stalwart advocate of Pentagon spending now based at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, says he would have voted for the Iraq War even if he had known the Bush administration’s claims about WMDs were false.
Ledeen, Michael
Michael Ledeen, a “Freedom Scholar” at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has long been obsessed with getting the U.S. to force regime change in Tehran.
'Felicia Wong, president and C.E.O. of the Roosevelt Institute'.
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Could Hillary
Clinton Become
the Champion of
the 99 Percent?
A coalition of progressives has been quietly building a
plan to bring Occupy-style ideas into the political
establishment. Will the Democratic nominee get on board?
By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUSJULY 23, 2016
In June of 2015, Felicia Joy Wong was in her car, awaiting with some apprehension the economic address that would officially open Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The speech was being staged at the F.D.R. memorial on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, and though Wong is a political operative of atypical modesty — she describes herself as a former schoolteacher whose accession to minor power has been entirely accidental — she had taken the choice of venue as auspicious. Wong runs the Roosevelt Institute, a small think tank (for lack of a better term) that originated in trusts established to promote the legacies of Franklin and Eleanor. Its chief economist, the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, indirectly coined the Occupy movement’s enduring slogan (“We are the 99 percent”), and Stiglitz and Wong each saw the election as an opportunity to channel Occupy energy into national politics. The country was perhaps ready once again, they believed, for what F.D.R. called “bold, persistent experimentation” in our economic affairs. Two of Wong’s senior staff members had gone to the island for the event, but she herself bowed out, claiming the duties of a part-time suburban soccer coach and mom.
In the car, Wong heard the candidate say: “The middle class needs more growth and more fairness. Growth and fairness go together. For lasting prosperity, you can’t have one without the other.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought, I can’t believe she just said that. Each time she repeated this story to me, she narrowed her eyes toward an imaginary car radio and pointed in disbelief.
“Prosperity can’t be just for C.E.O.s and hedge-fund managers,” the candidate continued. “Democracy can’t just be for the billionaires and corporations.”
Oh, my God, Wong thought again, I can’t believe she just said that. It may have been political boilerplate, but Wong thrilled to it. Her incredulity had yielded to pleasure and admiration. Republicans, the candidate went on, “pledge to wipe out tough rules on Wall Street, rather than rein in the banks that are still too risky, courting future failures.”
Wong stopped the car to check her phone. Exultant emails were streaming in. “This is our plan!” one Roosevelt board member wrote. “This is your plan!”
“Our plan” was “Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy,” an inventive combination of narrative history and policy platform that Roosevelt published the month before. The report billed itself as a comprehensive agenda to ameliorate inequality. First, it said, inequality is a choice, not an inevitable byproduct of technology, globalization and the uneven distribution of personal virtue. Second, it held that the longstanding notion of an economic trade-off between growth and equality is a fiction.
THERE IS NOTHING MORE EQUALIZING THAN EVERYONE EARNING THE SAME $3 A DAY---OR $20-30 A DAY FOR THE NEW ECONOMY MIDDLE-CLASS----WITH THE 1% POCKETING ALL THE WEALTH AS THEY HAVE BEEN THESE SEVERAL YEARS.
Unlike the myriad other white papers that each week were drafted, edited, somnolently received at other think tanks and shelved without fanfare, this report — original not so much in its ideas as in its clarity and vigor — had captured wide and consequential attention. In the months leading up to its publication, the Roosevelt team was in close touch with Clinton speechwriters and advisers, and in subsequent rallies the candidate continued to draw upon the report, even at the level of explicit language; calls to “rewrite the rules” found their way into more of her addresses. The many news reports that linked the speech to Wong’s organization consistently and erroneously relocated her team to Washington. (Their headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, in an Art Deco tower in the shadow of the Citigroup Center.)
Much of the left, including the significant bloc that rejected Clinton in the primaries in favor of Bernie Sanders and his call for “revolution,” finds Wong and her allies delusional in their hope that “Rewriting the Rules” might be realized in Democratic Party practice. But the Sanders and Trump insurrections revealed an appetite for economic populism that no one in either party establishment had quite anticipated. Now Roosevelt and other progressive groups are wagering that a mandate for economic overhaul might already exist, and that it might even be carried out by the woman who always was the party’s near-certain nominee. Wong herself believes that the financial crisis radically destabilized the politics of the American economy, possibly for decades to come, and that 2016 might well mark the early commotion of a genuine political realignment.
As the party heads into its convention in Philadelphia, this coalition sees encouraging signals — perhaps most notably the role that Elizabeth Warren, a key Roosevelt ally, has come to play in the campaign — that Hillary Clinton’s economic sympathies might ultimately lie further to the left than skeptics supposed. Roosevelt is a 501(c)(3), and though it does maintain a political-action arm, it does not work to elect specific candidates. Still, various representatives from Clinton’s speechwriting and policy teams regularly solicit the organization’s input. Roosevelt in turn has redoubled its efforts not only on advancing the ideas in “Rewriting the Rules” but also in recruiting the personnel necessary to carry them out, in the form of a methodical effort to find suitable candidates for economic positions in a future presidential administration.
Rob Stein, the liberal operative whose establishment of the Democracy Alliance in 2005 did perhaps more than any other act to funnel new money and new ardor into progressive causes, told me: “Like no other progressive institution, Roosevelt is bringing strategically relevant insight to the deeper structural problems of our economy.”
THEY MEAN GETTING PROGRESSIVELY RICHER----NOT SOCIAL DEMOCRACY.
Part of the reason Wong and her team remain mostly unheralded is that they eschew power politics for the quieter work of developing networks to act on ideas. They thus do not see themselves as pushing or pulling or dragging the Democratic nominee to their position. They believe that this candidate, of all candidates, is unlikely to respond to public hectoring or ultimatums. The greatest incentive they can offer is a demonstration that Clinton may well already be the candidate that progressives — and the electorate — have been waiting for.
A displaced Californian, Wong lives with her family in Westchester but makes routine Amtrak face-work pilgrimages to Washington. She has thick, artfully unruly cataracts of black hair and moves with a long, darting, buoyant stride. In meetings, she spends much of her time profusely, sweetly and genuinely thanking people for their thoughtful recommendations of white papers she has already read, studies she has already digested, arguments she could recite by heart, academics she already funds or would like to, funders who already donate and, often, information or ideas she herself has originated. Men of bulk in loosened ties have a way of talking at her for hours and then lifting her best notions, as if accidentally choosing a nicer umbrella on the way out of a restaurant.
One cold, dreary spring day I accompanied her to the A.F.L.-C.I.O. building on 16th Street NW, a foreboding grid of polished beige stone with a lobby dominated by a hallucinogenic two-story marble mosaic. Wong often proceeds by indirection, and the obvious contrast of this first meeting — between Big Labor’s encumbrances and Roosevelt’s dexterity — made, in retrospect, a deliberate point.
Damon Silvers, the organization’s policy director, greeted us in a cluttered low-floor office that looked as if it might belong to a law professor. He showed us seats at a wobbly round table and talked about wages and productivity and economic pain. “There have been a few years over the last 30 with broad-based wage growth,” he noted, “but those are the outliers, the exceptions — a few years under Reagan, some under Clinton, but stagnation has been the regime since 1980.” He praised Roosevelt as the source of “heavyweight economic thinking” on this, and for “upping the ante.”
WHO KNOWS ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL REBRANDING TO LIBERTARIAN MARXISM? TRUMKA AND THE NATIONAL AFL-CIO. ELIZABETH WARREN IS A CLINTON NEO-LIBERAL WHO COULD CARE LESS ABOUT LABOR OR JUSTICE----
Wong deflected the credit. “Well, you’ve been saying this,” she replied, “and Elizabeth Warren says it, and Stiglitz has been saying it for 30 years, but now it’s almost common knowledge.” Wong was more concerned about how they planned to put that common knowledge into action before the looming convention.
“Despite President Obama’s efforts, the rules of the economy continue to drive runaway inequality,” Silvers went on. “The power dynamics that were in place in 2008 are still in place now, and we don’t have all the time in the world to fix this.”
This continued for a while, as Silvers relaxed into the comfortable contours of his analysis and Wong steered the visit toward what might actually be done. Eventually she was summoned to see the union’s president, Richard Trumka, whose seigneurial berth looks down on the White House. Silvers directed me in the meantime to a vitrine of the fat blue bill-signing pens L.B.J. used to enact the Great Society — food stamps, public broadcasting, urban mass transport, water quality, wholesome poultry products. “If you want to see what structural change looks like,” he told me, tapping on the glass, “take a look at this.”
The progressive organizations in Wong’s rotation take as a matter of course the idea that the Obama administration was a significant missed opportunity for transformation on that order. They do not entirely blame Obama. He had his legislative victories — most importantly in the Affordable Care Act — but one lesson they drew from his time in office was that liberals had long been overly fixated on legislative success. (Johnson had a Congress he could work with; Obama mostly did not, and the next president probably won’t, either.) The right has set the agenda for the past 35 years because they built their economic movement deductively (from the first principle of the unregulated market) and took their victories where they could find them. The left, by comparison, tended to moralize, and spoke in the language of justice instead of growth. When they did talk about economics, it took the form of individual issues — minimum wage, student debt, paid family and sick leave — rather than overarching pronouncements. This muddle worsened during the Bush era, when urgent noneconomic concerns forced the left to privilege short-term electoral tactics over long-term strategy.
Roosevelt was designed to be a place, independent of the party establishment, to unite all of these factions under the banner of long-term, coherent economic thinking. Had such a movement existed in 2008, it might have seized on the financial crisis as an opportunity for structural economic reform. Obama’s recovery model, to the group’s lasting dismay, remained in thrall to old superstitions about growth. The goal of the bailout was to fix the existing financial system and get credit flowing back into the economy while keeping an eye on deficit spending. But today, though high-level macroeconomic numbers like monthly job growth or the headline unemployment rate have improved, almost half of the new jobs created in the first five years of the recovery were poverty-level. Repaired with a kludge, the system went right back to doing exactly what it did before: allowing the extraordinary concentration of power in the hands of the few to dominate the prospects of the many.
Roosevelt and its allies believe that the crisis could have been an occasion — unseen since the New Deal — for the diffusion of authority, large-scale infrastructural investment, attention to low-wage growth and relief for the plight of overextended homeowners rather than banks. But that opportunity passed by because, in the absence of a strong, organized countervailing force, responsibility for the bailout simply defaulted to the claque of Citigroup veterans and sympathizers that had administered Democratic economic policy for what was now a full generation. The critics didn’t think that these ex-bankers were unscrupulous, but rather that they acted in accordance with the free-market orthodoxy they inherited from their predecessors.
With all this resentment of bankers, a news consumer might have thought the enthusiasm in this milieu — that is, all the groups that resisted the legacy of deregulated, race-neutral, free-market bipartisanship — would accrue to Bernie Sanders. But Sanders in fact came up only rarely in my conversations with them, usually in praise of the sincerity of his message. The common view of the Democratic contest was that Sanders did a great service in pushing Clinton to the left. Though in some senses this was clearly the case — on the minimum wage and on college tuition — there was an alternate interpretation. As Sanders gained traction, it seemed to Wong and her partners that Clinton had simply ceded to him the territory of aggressive financial reform. Sanders, in their view, hadn’t so much pulled her to the left as pushed her to swivel.
The Roosevelt coalition agreed by and large with the direction of Sanders’s economic program, but they regretted the crudeness of his exposition. They understood, for example, the appeal of a call to break up the banks but found greater sophistication in Clinton’s proposals to regulate “shadow banking.” They wished his advisers had been more careful with the numbers. And the personal iconoclasm and moral purity of the Sanders campaign didn’t lend themselves to governance. How, given the way Obama’s ideals foundered on a kind of Washington default mode, did Sanders plan to staff an entire administration?
Wong and her allies spent a lot more time worrying about Donald Trump than they did valorizing Sanders. Their fear was, and is, that Clinton’s response to Trump’s faux populism, racism, xenophobia and misogyny — that we needed to make America not “great” but “whole” again — would crowd out everything she once said about corporations and inequality. Clinton’s central economic metaphor, “ladders of opportunity,” promised access to the current system rather than a wholly different one. But Roosevelt has found that a message of “leveling the playing field” polls much better with voters of color and the white working class. (Its recent follow-up to “Rewriting the Rules,” a paper about race by the fellows Dorian Warren and Andrea Flynn, acknowledges that the economic interests and political needs of the two constituencies may not always seem perfectly aligned.) The central preoccupation for Wong, and for Silvers and for Warren, was to demonstrate that it was the courageous thing, not the cautious one, that would capture the preponderance of the electorate.
It is common, in Washington, to view yourself as there by some celestial accident; Beltway insiders delight in a good sneering reference to Beltway insiders. But Wong really does seem like an improbable person to preside over a think tank. She grew up in Silicon Valley, studied poetry at Stanford, got a Ph.D. in political science at Berkeley, worked as a high-school teacher and then at a valley start-up and then happened into a job at the Democracy Alliance, a semi-secretive club of progressive donors. She can barely bring herself to utter the phrase “think tank,” much less “policy shop.” Late one evening in Washington, we walked by a thickset monolith that glowed with a cold marmoreal light, as if James Turrell had built a fortress for some paranoid ice king. The front read CSIS: the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Wong rolled her eyes, theatrically shuddered and tucked her runaway hair behind her ear. “Now that’s a think tank.”
On the left, there are lots of small organizations in Washington that publish granular research on specific economic trends. But the most significant liberal think tank in recent years has been the Center for American Progress, founded in 2003 by the former Bill Clinton chief of staff (and current Hillary Clinton campaign chair) John Podesta as his party’s answer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. CAP has done a lot of innovative policy work, especially on universal preschool and health care, but it was always less of a research organization than a shadow government for an opposition in exile. When Obama was elected, roughly a third of CAP’s staff went into his administration. CAP was founded in an era when few liberals were of the opinion that the system itself was broken: If you just found slightly better Democrats, elected them to office and put smarter policies in their hands, they believed, the country would return to the prosperity of the 1990s. Liberal Washington was not equipped, when the financial crisis broke, to tender a holistic analysis of what was ailing the economy. (Today, CAP’s economic ideas are more in line with those of Roosevelt, and in 2015 it released a report on short-termism that anticipated part of “Rewriting the Rules.”)
In 2009, a political scientist named Andrew Rich, known for writing about the “war of ideas,” was drafted to reinvent the Roosevelt Institute as a place for the radical thinking that postcrisis politics seemed to require. Roosevelt at the time was an ad hoc collection of spare progressive parts, including the upkeep of the F.D.R. Library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Rich believed that if you weren’t in Washington, and you weren’t beholden to the party apparatus, and if you got the right people — people who were too idiosyncratic or rough-hewn for academia, or academics who wanted to be politically relevant but needed help with finding an audience for their work — you could create a new kind of institution on a looser, livelier model.
At that moment of upheaval and administration dithering, financial reform was the new Roosevelt’s obvious first priority. Rich brought on Stiglitz and Mike Konczal, whose pseudonymous financial-crisis blog had a cult following among progressives.
WE ARE TO BELIEVE THAT STIGLITZ ---like REICH, both Clinton era cabinet and Stiglitz went on to World Bank----but, like Reich he has reformed his stances so we can now believe he is for the 99%!
Joseph StiglitzNobel Memorial Prize Winner for Economic Sciences and Professor at Columbia UniversityJoseph E. Stiglitz received his Ph.D from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Award. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, and MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University and Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He co-founded and directs the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995–97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997–2000.
_____________________________________
'The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism'
Below we see the Roosevelt name tied to what is now global profit-driven biotechnology health science having lost all oversight, accountability, ethics, hippocratic oath delivery. Since the FDR social democratic policies built our national system of public hospitals and public clinics just so health care would reach all citizens with strong patient protections in place----and there are the words---PRAGMATIC IDEALISM. For these few decades of Clinton neo-liberalism taking our Democratic Party they have been repurposing the FDR brand to that of PRAGMATIC NILISM. We have Roosevelt Institutions overseas-----Roosevelt Institutions at a few US universities all marketing on that brand of compassionate social democratic NEW DEAL bringing the strongest economy and rising middle-class in world history. Now, when an immigrant coming to the US reads about FDR----neo-liberals are ready to give FDR their pragmatic look.
'The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism'
IT IS NOT LIKELY THE ROOSEVELTS WOULD LIKE THIS.
University of Denver
Eleanor Roosevelt Institute >
About Us
About Us
About the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute
Brief History and Mission
The Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was founded in 1961 on the belief that biomedical and genetic research are the most cost-effective, long-term approaches to the eventual conquest of human afflictions such as cancer, premature aging, birth defects and genetic diseases. The Institute merged with the University of Denver in 2003. It is our mission to seek an in-depth understanding of the process of life, especially human life, and through this understanding, work toward unlocking the mysteries of human health and disease.
***********************************************************
TOP COTTAGE IN THE NEWS: Hear NPR's February 21, 1999
Weekend Edition report on FDR's "Top Cottage."
It was specially designed by President Roosevelt to accommodate his disabilities, and is currently being restored through the efforts of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. [real audio file]
The mission of the Roosevelt Institute is to inform new generations of the ideals and achievements of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and to inspire the application of their spirit of optimism and innovation to the solution of current problems. We believe, as FDR did, that the Four Freedoms are essential to a flourishing democracy, and we create programs to encourage those freedoms at home and abroad. The Institute commemorates the significant events of the Roosevelt years and works with educators to improve the teaching of that pivotal period in American history.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt communicated by word and deed a vision of a just and compassionate society. Now, more than ever, nations in many parts of the globe are looking for models for the development of democratic systems of government. The Roosevelt Institute believes that the spirit of pragmatic idealism that these two great leaders brought to the problems of their time can continue to inspire the struggle for peace and social justice everywhere in the world.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Grants
The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute supports a program of small grants-in-aid, not to exceed $2,500, in support of research on the "Roosevelt years" or clearly related subjects. Grants are awarded each spring and fall. The deadlines for grant submissions are February 15 and September 15. Funds are awarded for the sole purpose of helping to defray living, travel, and related expenses incurred while conduction research at the Roosevelt Library.
The grants program is particularly designed to encourage younger scholars to expand our knowledge and understanding of the Roosevelt period and to give support for research in the Roosevelt years to scholars from the emerging democracies and the Third World.
Upon conclusion of their research, grantees are requested to submit a brief end-of-grant report to the Chairman of the Grants Committee; two copies of any publications resulting from their research are expected to be given to the Roosevelt Library and the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands.
____________________________________________
The United Nations today is not the United Nations Eleanor Roosevelt created a century ago designed to bring the then post-war nations together---the UN is now tied to expanding International Economic Zones and global neo-liberal policies both of which we all know kills human rights and social justice. Since the US is now ranked at the top of global human rights violators in the world-----exporting International Economic Zones and building and operating global human capital distribution systems. One cannot embrace the world's top human rights violator while calling itself the protector of human rights. This is why International Economic Zone ONE WORLD policies are sold as helping developed nations---helping the poor----helping women----as they are pushed into global sweat shop factories paid $3 a day.
So, around the world the Roosevelts having founded UN----also tied to social democratic policies in the US that were left-leaning and socially progressive----are being used to sell this authoritarian, far-right global corporate fascism as human rights.
The United States, with a “medium” risk of human rights offenses, ranked 139th among the 197 countries. The US has been outside all other developed world nations in human rights for these few decades of CLINTON/BUSH/OBAMA but they keep using that FDR----ROOSEVELT SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC BRAND to sell to citizens in nations around the world----now they are going to corrupt the history of FDR and New Deal here in the US. The systemic fraud and corruption in the US and that Wall Street and global pols export around the world is tops on violations of human rights.
The United Nations and Human Rights
www.udhr50.org/
Eleanor Roosevelt in Central Hall, Westminster, 1946
Because of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's role in the founding of the United Nations and Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership in the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, FERI is deeply committed to the United Nations and its continued success. Currently, FERI manages the Office for the 50th Anniversary of the UDHR which it established in 1996 to coordinate plans for UDHR50 in the United States in 1998. More than sixty human rights, civil rights, and social justice groups have agreed on a "National Human Rights Agenda to mark the anniversary. The agenda's three broad goals are: A) To foster a wider appreciation of and commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through education and a media campaign; B) To further codify the protection of international human rights through the development and ratification of legal instruments, including the Convention on Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and, C) To promote more effective international institutions for the protection of basic human rights and freedoms by advocating the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court and the strengthening of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The Office for the 50th Anniversary of the UDHR is now coordinating efforts to implement this agenda and to inspire young people to assume responsibility for expanding respect for human rights throughout the world.
To honor Eleanor Roosevelt on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995, FERI organized a conference in cooperation with the UN Group on Equal Rights for Women and the United Nations Association-USA on "Women and the United Nations." The speakers at the conference, who included First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dr. Nafis Sadik, and Gertrude Mongella, urged the United Nations to live up to the commitment in its Charter to "the equal rights of men and women" by achieving gender equity in the Secretariat. FERI remains committed to this goal, not only because it is a basic human right, but because it will make the United Nations more effective in carrying out its mission and a better place to work for both men and women.
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'The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, founded in 2004, is a national organization that strives to uphold the values cast into the public discourse by Franklin, Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt and to promote the next generation of leaders through progressive policy'.
The global Clinton Initiative brought its network to our US universities these several years-----locally MICA and Towson have Clinton Initiative global policy organizations working for Wall Street Baltimore Development. This same political philosophy is coming out of what is now a global organization---THE ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE and it always sells itself as old-school social Democratic policy WHILE BEING TOTALLY PRAGMATIC NILISM. This is where our FDR as social progressive becomes far-right neo-liberal progressive----getting progressively richer. All the foreign students coming to US universities are connecting to this organization thinking they are learning about American democracy and social progressive policy.
NEO-LIBERAL PROGRESSIVE POLICY ONLY ALLOWS POLICY THAT DOES NOT TAKE FROM CORPORATE PROFIT OR SEND ANY FUNDING TO SUPPORT IT.
So, gay marriage and rights are fine---it does not take from corporate profit and no funds are used to support it. The fact this was created in 2004----in the midst of Bush era with Clinton Foundation and Clinton Initiative being spread overseas in International Economic Zone nations.
The goal of getting global corporations and Wall Street out of public policy starts with getting IVY LEAGUE universities out of our public policy----why would universities that exclude all but a a few percent of American citizens be writing policy for the 99% of Americans?
About UGA
Ideas, impact are explored at the Roosevelt Institute
Torre Lavelle experienced what she hopes won't be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when she presented a policy paper at the White House in late 2014. The idea for her white paper — on Environmental Protection Agency carbon emissions regulations — and the invitation to the White House stemmed from her involvement with the Roosevelt Institute at UGA.
"I couldn't have done it without the network I have here. Being able to present my ideas not only within the Athens community but at the state and national level, I feel like I'm making an impact," the junior says.
The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network, founded in 2004, is a national organization that strives to uphold the values cast into the public discourse by Franklin, Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt and to promote the next generation of leaders through progressive policy. In 2006, Rhodes Scholar Deep Shah and Gabriel Allen co-founded the UGA chapter of the student-run think tank that teaches its members how to approach problems and create policy analyses.
In 2014 UGA was named Chapter of the Year for the Roosevelt network, which has 115-plus chapters in 38 states with more than 10,000 members.
UGA's Roosevelt students have presented their white papers in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and around the world. Congressmen and government officials have attended Roosevelt-sponsored symposiums on UGA's campus.
This spring the ideas of eight UGA students were published in the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network's 2015 edition of 10 Ideas, an undergraduate policy journal series. Two of the proposals — "Addressing Sexual Assault at the University of Georgia" by Cali Callaway and "Fighting Pain with Pills: Overprescribing and the Opioid Addiction Epidemic" by Erin Hollander — were selected as nominees for Policy of the Year, placing them among the best of the best student-generated policy ideas in 2015.
In addition, nearly every one of UGA's recent recipients of top scholarships — including the Rhodes, Marshall and Truman — have participated in the UGA chapter and Roosevelt Scholars course.
DOESN'T FEEL WRONG THAT PEOPLE AT IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS TIED TO RHODES SCHOLARS PROGRAMS BE THE FACE OF THE 99% SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC POLICY FOR THE MIDDLE/WORKING CLASS AND POOR? OF COURSE. IN ONE WORLD 1% LIBERTARIANISM----ONLY THE RICH HAVE A VOICE---WE THE PEOPLE HAVE NO RIGHTS AS CITIZENS AND THEREFOR NO VOICE. THESE ARE GLOBAL UNIVERSITIES-
"It's a wonderful campus laboratory for our best and brightest students," UGA President Jere W. Morehead said. "For me, what makes the Roosevelt Institute so important is it allows students the opportunity to develop policy ideas in an academic environment and then test those ideas out on real policymakers who have touched the Roosevelt Institute over time, whether they are senators or congressmen or leaders in the General Assembly."
Shah saw Roosevelt as a way for students interested in policymaking to come together and focus on their ideas. University Professor Emeritus Gary Bertsch, then with the Center for International Trade and Security, told him about the Roosevelt Institute and suggested starting the chapter. The first year, the club had about 20 students; now it has about 100.
"I don't think we ever knew it would attract that much interest," said Shah, who is now an internal medicine and primary care physician resident in the J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency Program at the Emory University School of Medicine. "The first cohort believed in the power of college students to influence the policymaking process."
Students and faculty from public health, education, economics, international affairs, ecology, family and consumer sciences, and other departments, schools and colleges are a part of Roosevelt at UGA. The Roosevelt Issues Forum, hosted by the Honors Program for all students every month, seeks to sharpen their awareness of state, national and global issues.
Some students who attend the forums get more involved through the Roosevelt chapter and Roosevelt Scholars course, a three-hour research course that averages 15 students each fall.
"The importance of the University of Georgia Roosevelt chapter is that it is mature, it is robust and it can provide a leadership role across the nation," said David Williams, UGA Honors Program director and the Roosevelt Institute faculty adviser.
Kameel Mir, the club's co-executive director, said the students are passionate about their projects and inspired by the possibility of having an impact.
"That's really what the heart of the club is about. These kids not only want to develop themselves academically in their ability to write a policy paper, but they want to find ways to implement these ideas," said Mir, who is earning a bachelor's in international affairs and bachelor's and master's degrees in English literature. "You can also make active change, even at the age of 20, if you want to."
For some students, it sharpens their career path.
Former chapter executive director Lucas Puente, who interned in the office of then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, says Roosevelt gave him the best preparation for participating in the UGA Washington Semester Program in 2008.
"It was great to take what I learned about the policy process through Roosevelt at UGA my first two years and enhance that education in the actual policymaking environment of the Beltway," said Puente, who is now pursuing a doctorate at Stanford University.
Alex Edquist, an economics major and 2014-2015 Roosevelt chapter co-director, presented her policy on making the federal prison system more cost effective as it pertains to drug offenders during a 2014 conference in Budapest.
"Roosevelt has definitely been the most meaningful thing I have done on this campus," she said.
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'the Next American Economy project took a collective oath of optimism. This is perhaps most apparent in our final brief, written by Next American Economy leader and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter, in which we project many of the ideas discussed in these papers into 2040 and paint a holistic picture of this (not overly) optimistic scenario'.
If one looks at the Roosevelt Institute its policies simply repeat what Wall Street and global corporations are telling us our NEW ECONOMY will be-----it will be urban---as in our US cities deemed International Economic Zones----it will be technology with smart cities----there will be different currency because this economic crash will kill our economy and we will then be told to make our own money----ergo BitCoin and bartering.
By capturing every aspect of FDR and his image-----global neo-liberals are making it impossible for REAL FDR social Democratic policies to be considered. Clinton did the same with social democracy when he captured the Democratic Party and pretended to be protecting our New Deal and War on Poverty programs while he was dismantling them. It was those REAL FDR social democratic policies that brought a strong stable economy, real free-market with broad competition, and a workforce paid well enough to fuel that economy. CLINTON WALL STREET ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE ARE DOING THE OPPOSITE. WE DO NOT MOVE FORWARD WITH A BAD VISION OF 21ST CENTURY ECONOMY FOR GOODNESS SAKE.
Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
It's the working, the working, just the working life
—Bruce Springsteen, “Factory,” 1978
The predestined, blue-collar lifestyle that Bruce Springsteen sang about in Darkness on the Edge of Town is already a thing of the past, and it will only grow smaller in our rear-view mirrors as we approach 2040. Soon, the world of the large central firm and steady, predictable work will exist only in museums.
What will replace it?
The following set of thought briefs attempts to address this question and describe some ways that economic, social, and political institutions in the U.S. must adapt to provide opportunity and prosperity in the mid-21st century. Guided by the belief that we are in the midst of an economic transformation on par with the Industrial Revolution, the Roosevelt Institute’s Next American Economy project identifies the trends and challenges that will shape our economy in the next 25 years in order to better inform the policy decisions we must make today. We are particularly focused on the potential impact of new technologies on productivity, employment, and economic security.
To help glean insights on these topics, we convened a diverse group of economists, technologists, union leaders, and entrepreneurs, and framed a series of conversations aimed at identifying the key concerns of today and projecting how they might evolve, dissipate, or intensify over the next 25 years.
These briefs—our first public release—take on some of the most promising and challenging issues that our expert working group came up with, including the promise and perils of the gig economy, smarter cities, and better modes of finance, as well as the need for new worker bargaining platforms and improved, lifelong education. We consider these topics in what we hope is a thorough (though of course not exhaustive) and accessible narrative.
Although each brief in this series focuses on a different aspect of economic evolution, the collection as a whole is primarily concerned with a foundational question of adaptation:
How should American society—its workers, businesses, and government—adapt to a rapidly shifting economic environment? Generally, we identify four recurring formative trends that will shape the 2040 economy.
First, technologies like cloud computing, 3D printing, and robotics will revolutionize the way Americans work, communicate, and generally relate to the world. Technology will replace workers as a variety of professions become automated, but, as it leads to the creation of new jobs and overall economic growth, the extent to which technology can offset its own economic drawbacks remains to be seen. In “Where Will Work Come From in the Era of Cloud Computing and Big Data?” John Zysman discusses how American manufacturers can make up for lost business by ushering in a new era of high-tech, value-added products.
Second, changes in the workplace will move traditional employment increasingly toward entrepreneurship, freelancing, independent contracting, and gig economy or “peer-to-peer” work on platforms like TaskRabbit. This will result in myriad changes to the ways in which Americans look after basic needs, from health care to retirement planning, that were previously met by a single employer. In “Barriers to Growth in the ‘Sharing Economy’,” Denise Cheng addresses numerous facets of the gig economy, while in “Challenges in SME Access to Capital” Richard Swart discusses the importance of start-up capital in a more entrepreneurial future economy.
The third trend, following directly from the second, concerns the likely increase in overall economic insecurity that will result from a society-wide decrease in the number of traditional jobs. Without the stability of long-term, full-time employment from a single firm that provides not only salary but also comprehensive benefits, Americans will need new tools to provide economic security for themselves and their families. Key to this point is not only the cost of benefits but the increased time and effort workers will have to expend just to manage their careers. How will workers bargain, for example, when they are employed—effectively—by a multitude of customers across a number of platforms like Uber and Etsy? If they are contractors, what institutions will help them complete their annual tax returns and handle billing and payments? And lastly, how will workers keep their skills up to date as employer needs evolve around them? Michelle Miller addresses some possibilities for the future of bargaining power in “The Union of the Future,” while briefs by Chelsea Barabas and our colleagues at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture, and Commerce discuss two revolutions in education that will help workers adapt in a rapidly changing economy.
Finally, the government’s increasing inability to make policy that benefits society and meets the economy’s most pressing needs will be exacerbated by rapid technological and economic evolutions that make such policy ever more pressing. Simultaneously, swelling retirement entitlements will raise budgetary challenges that further restrict the federal government’s ability and willingness to invest and reform. As such, is out of necessity that we at the Next American Economy project feel cities—already successful laboratories for creative policy solutions—will increasingly become the incubators and epicenters for innovation and business growth. Julia Root goes into great depth on this topic in “Urban Platforms in 2040.”
The challenge of adapting to these evolutions is grave. Indeed, it would be easy—and some of us were tempted—to throw up our hands and prepare for the worst. To avoid unproductive handwringing, the Next American Economy project took a collective oath of optimism. This is perhaps most apparent in our final brief, written by Next American Economy leader and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter, in which we project many of the ideas discussed in these papers into 2040 and paint a holistic picture of this (not overly) optimistic scenario.
We hope that you will enjoy this foray into our future.
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