"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people."
- "Soylent Green" (Richard Fleischer, 1973)

For as long as there have been bailouts, people have known that bailouts suck.  The rich play, we pay.  "Privatized profit, socialized risk," it's called.  So when Congress was debating the $700 billion TARP (fig leaf?) the resentment really should have come as no surprise.  The S&L bailout, OK, was a long time ago in political terms, but we got a reminder because the Great S&L Protector John McCain was running for Commandant-in-Chief.  And the privatized Freddie and Fannie were already sucking down the cash - cash we could have used for sick kids or bridges or even cars with European or Japanese mpgs. 

What was a surprise was that the first version went down in flames.  A trillion dollars slurped out of pension plans, etc., when the Dow took a dive, and Congress was ready to try to bang out a compromise.  Now the auto industry bailout appears to be dying on the vine.  With more bailout requests almost certainly in the pipeline and the President-Elect promising the mother of all stimuli, critics are girding for battle - and rightly so - but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There's no sense in even discussing "free enterprise" at this point, except to say it's myth.  It doesn't work, never has.  The industrial revolution was born in Britain on land stolen from peasant farmers, paid for with wages held down by national law.  The US economy was built on stolen land by slaves, the Northeastern economy incubating side-by-side with the Southern (shipbuilding for slave ships and to move the product of Caribbean slave labor, bank loans and insurance for slave plantations, etc.).  Government contracts and publicly funded research (TV, drugs, military technologies, Internet) are gifts from taxpayers to private business, not to mention all the tax breaks, industrial development funds and so on that business now so frequently require before agreeing to come to town and drive the locals out of business.  Capitalism never works without massive government intervention, often including wars and coups to recover debts and protect investments or other business interests.

But there are critics on the left, too, some more insightful than others.  US Sen. Bernie Sanders says if a corporation is "too big to fail," it's "too big to exist."  He says the government should break them up.  Sanders also says, "let the rich bail out the rich" by paying a surcharge on income over $1 million to cover the costs.  Jobs With Justice, ACORN and others in the grassroots left are calling for a "People's Bail-Out."  All good ideas. 

But some of our friends, in their haste to fund "green infrastructure," sometimes forget who the effort is for. 

Reede Stockton of Global Exchange, writes in an article on Common Dreams <http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/22-3> about a "new green economy" with massive public expenditure to rebuild the nation's rail network and support free public transportation using all clean energy.  It's a great idea, but he says we should do it instead of rescuing the auto industry.

The US economy is on track to lose as many as a million and a half jobs by the new year.  If even one of the Big Three car companies goes under, that failure and its ripple effects could add another 2-3 million jobs lost next year - not counting other job losses, already estimated as high as 300,000 a month by year's end.  But they can go anywhere they want to go for free.

To be fair, the public investment in infrastructure Stockton proposes would create some jobs.  But these are different jobs, very different.  A comprehensive plan is needed, with public money for retraining, provisions for people who can't make the transition so easily - retirement, maybe a kind of G.I. bill for veteran of the workforce - etc.

But if the government decided to now turn its back and let an integral part of the economy collapse, millions of people fall into the dustbin of redundancy, buildings and machines tossed in the landfill or left to obstruct new development, that would be recklessly destructive.  And it would gain the "new green economy" a generation of enemies that could have been allies.  Why throw away the product of a hundred years of public subsidy and entrepreneurial ingenuity (albeit not "free")?  The car industry could help, with the proper realistic incentives.

Call it a Social Monetary Fund, a restructuring plan that's the reverse of the IMF-style "austerity" package of eliminating public services, busting unions, forcing wages down, privatizing.  Instead of paying the car companies to kick people out of work, the Social Monetary Fund would pay them to put people back to work - including a kind of retooled WPA or CCC.  And it would require recipient companies to diversify, but again on a social agenda: instead of fighting public transportation, invest in it - with financial incentives for "green economic" investment, penalties for the old way.  Likewise clean energy development, hybrids, etc. 

But the stimulus must not become a glorified workfare program.  A Social Monetary Fund would have to learn from the mistakes of the old WPA.  These workers need union protections, too, so the Employee Free Choice Act now before Congress has to be part of the package.  EFCA would allow workers to form a union with asimple majority of signatures on union authorization cards, without the lengthy and abusive election process.  They also need OSHA coverage, overtime protections, and a living wage. 

If we can put a man on the moon - if we can put an intelligent, well-spoken man in the White House, a black man no less, whose middle name is famously Hussein - we can do this.