Happy Birthday, Mr. President!
As FDR once said, “The most serious
threat to our institutions comes from those who refuse to face the
need for change." This week, we celebrate the president’s birthday and
legacy with an eye to progressivism’s future. “We @rooseveltinst work to construct new ways to think about
our economy and our democracy. We honor FDR's legacy today—and every
day,” Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong tweeted. “We believe Franklin would be proud of us
today. Eleanor too! We're here to bring their ideals into the 21st
century. Government for the common good. Civil rights = women's rights
= human rights.”
 How
Executive Action Could Curb the Climate
Crisis
To start addressing climate change at
the federal level, a president wouldn’t need Congress’s approval. The
reason: Dodd-Frank, as Graham Steele explains in a new Great Democracy
Initiative (GDI) report. “Dodd-Frank established new mechanisms for
federal regulators to tackle risks that threaten the entire financial
system, many of which can be deployed to mitigate the financial risks
of climate change,” Steele writes. “If these measures prove
insufficient, financial agencies have authority to prohibit
institutions from making further investments in climate change drivers
and to require divestment from climate-related assets.”
Read
more.
- Why this matters: “Some individual
investors and financial
institutions have already chosen to divest on
their own terms—for their own interests, their own values, or some
combination of both,” Roosevelt Editorial Manager Matt Hughes and
Senior Network Program Manager Fernanda Borges Nogueira write for the
blog. “Private
actors may change of their own volition, but
government action is necessary to hold all entities to the
standards necessary for the scope and scale of the climate crisis.
Until climate deniers cede the Senate, Dodd-Frank may be our best hope
for a path forward. As Americans continue to clamor for bolder action,
comprehensive legislation is the next frontier.” Read
on.
- Divested development: In a second blog post, Borges Nogueira and
Hughes explain how
student movements helped normalize divestiture. “As Roosevelters know well, who writes the
rules matters; in the case of divestiture, students have taken the
lead in rewriting them. While we find avenues for action today—such as
the Dodd-Frank approach proposed by Graham Steele—students show us the
possibilities of tomorrow. Luckily for the planet, they’re
ready.”
 Why We Shouldn’t Fear the
Deficit
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO)
released its
Budget
and Economic Outlook for the next decade, and deficit hawks are already seizing on
the numbers. A closer look, however, suggests that deficit fears are
overblown. Roosevelt
Fellow JW
Mason writes for the blog: “However worried we
were about government debt six months ago, the latest CBO numbers
should make us less worried—and more confident in our ability to spend
more on the major challenges facing our nation."
-
Another angle:
“You’re driving down a road you don’t know and trying to drive based
on where the car will be in two miles, you can’t do that. We can solve
immediate pressing problems, and when debt seems like a problem, cut
spending and raise taxes,” Mason tells the American Prospect
in a piece on the CBO. Read
on.
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