Grace Ross: Time To Retrofit Our Economy

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

On March 22nd, I got a call from a long time coworker and friend. She’s been laid off as one of the early causalities of the sequester policy of our Congress and federal government. I’ve known Roxanne for some 25 years. Even when I first met her, she was working at this same agency committed to extending the reach of access to healthcare and housing.

In the last couple of weeks, I have met other folks who have lost their jobs because of the sequester cuts. Last Thursday saw members of the Worcester Unemployment Action Group and supporters out in front of the Worcester Housing Authority highlighting 12 job losses there because of sequester cuts.

And this is really just the very beginning of the curve. Many, many more job losses are coming.

None of these are jobs we can afford to lose. The most recent jobless claims from April 8th are in at an increase of 28,000 for that reporting week – a 4 month national high; and they climbed the two weeks before that as well.

When I started writing my book, I proposed an economic direction that spoke to avoiding the double dip that was experienced during the Great Depression. I am sure there were other voices I joined of those who bothered to look at the history and called for better choices this time reaching for a better mutual future. We have gone unheard.

While people I run into just on the street or through our anti-foreclosure work and other efforts, all are still struggling; they are at best trying to make ends meet with new jobs that pay less well.

For some reason as a society, we still have not figured out that these widespread problems are the outcome of widespread bad policy decisions.

As Saez, the Nobel prize winning economist, has shown: of all the new income created since the Great Recession supposedly ended, 121% of it (I got it wrong earlier) went to the top one percent! I’m all for the top one percent doing well but not when they’re doing well at the expense of others. In addition, statistics all show they sit on most of the money the get – not spending it. That means our economy slowly dies.

I was trying to make the analogy to a friend. It’s like denying water to a human body. The human body is ¾ water. You can’t drain the blood out of the human body and have it function. The same is true; you can’t have an economy function when there’s no money moving around.

It’s as if you have all of your money tied up in assets; Picassos and cars and the castle. There’s an old image of the wealthy noble no longer wealthy sitting in a castle that’s emptied of all of its furniture and selling it off his last cow and dying before he would give up the castle. That’s what we’re like as a society. We’ve given all the money and wealth to the very few who don’t spend it and then we look around and wonder why nothing is working.

It’s not like it has to be this way.

Saturday was enlightening. I was invited to an open house to one of 66 residential properties which have received a “deep energy retrofit”. This is part of a National Grid initiative offering a completely renovated new shell – roof, walls and basement, that completely stops heating loss (and also blocks noise, etc.). In the 66 residential properties, utility bills are down 40 to 80% - down to $10 per month in the last few winter months! AND 32 good paying jobs on average were created for the last year or two.

We only have hundreds of thousands of more Massachusetts homes to go retrofit!

It’s time to wake up. Most of us are fed up. Now we’ve got to figure out that every period of major change has come about because regular people stood together and shifted things at a fundamental, social, and governmental level. It’s time to retrofit our entire economy.

Periods of unrest don’t happen because people are grumpy; they happen because something is wrong and it’s going to take all of us working together in a positive direction to change it.