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A New
Era
This moment of crisis demands bold
change: Roosevelt has the blueprint. This week, Roosevelt unveiled a
structural policy agenda that both speaks to the immediate needs of
the COVID-19 pandemic and seeks to reshape racist and patriarchal
systems in more lasting ways. A
True New Deal: Building an Inclusive Economy in the COVID-19
Era outlines
nine policies—from universal childcare to a modern Reconstruction
Finance Corporation—that can help America balance power, ensure
equity, and build a better economy. For more fresh policy ideas and
proposals, explore Roosevelt’s state-of-the-art
new website, which
launched this week.
- Rewrite the rules: “The new
Roosevelt Institute report is built on several core ideas. The first
is premised on this 1932 quote from FDR: ‘We must lay hold of the fact
that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human
beings,’” Greg Sargent writes for the Washington Post. “. . .
in the current context, it gives rise to the report’s other core
idea—that our crises have exposed deeper systemic problems and
injustices in our political economy, ones that predated the virus and
are baked into our market rules, ones that we created and that we can
change.” Read
on.
- Lessons learned: “We think
the New Deal provides inspiration and in some ways a model for what
ought to be done now, particularly in terms of the mix of immediate
relief for families and structural changes to the ways our economy and
society operate,” Roosevelt Vice President of Research Julie Margetta
Morgan told Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik for a
piece on the report. Read
more.
Corporate Accountability
in the COVID-19 Era
Last August, the Business
Roundtable’s “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” affirmed that
corporations must benefit not just shareholders but all
Americans—including workers, consumers, and communities. One year
later, during an economy-shattering pandemic, what’s changed?
In
a webinar yesterday, Roosevelt Managing Director of Corporate Power Bharat
Ramamurti asked leading experts, including Roosevelt Fellow Lenore
Palladino, United for Respect leader Janie Grice, former Patagonia CEO
Rose Marcario, and Amalgamated Bank President & CEO Keith
Mestrich.
With a keynote by Rep. Ro Khanna
(D-CA), the webinar also featured Leo E. Strine, Jr.—author of a new
Roosevelt working paper, “Toward
Fair and Sustainable Capitalism.”
For more about Ramamurti, read Harvard
Magazine’s new profile, which includes praise
from Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong: “Having a really
important power lens and real, technical expertise—a real deep
understanding of what is going wrong with corporate power in our
economy and why, and literally how to write the rules to fix it—that’s
a rare quality.”
 To Rescue the Economy, Center Black
Workers
“As the national chorus of chants that
Black Lives Matter grows louder, it’s time to move beyond a political
economy that sorts and devalues a class of workers based on something
as cursory as their race,” Roosevelt Fellow Darrick Hamilton
writes
in a Politico op-ed. “If Black lives matter, this is the time
to start making the kind of economic policy choices—like a paycheck
guarantee—that show that we mean it.” In the New York Times, Hamilton explains how baby bonds can help
close the retirement race gap. Read
on.
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