Beyond the greed economy.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Criticisms on the United States economy - Essay

Our current economy works for those at the very top. It doesn't work well for the rest of us--or for the environment. We must refashion it.

The rich may have exulted--or at least exhaled--when the Dow cleared the 10,000 mark and the third quarter showed a growth rate of 3.5 percent.

But the vast majority of Americans are still holding their breath, fearful of losing their jobs and their homes (if they haven't already) and watching their paychecks shrink and shrink.

As Naomi Klein has warned, this may be the "new normal": a temporarily stabilized financial sector, 9.5 percent to 10 percent unemployment for month after month, and a permanently destroyed middle class.

President Obama has not responded adequately to the crisis.

He came in with too timid a stimulus package, one that relied on the private sector for more than 90 percent of the new jobs instead of the public sector, where the pay and benefits are higher and--not incidentally--the rate of unionization.

He reacted feebly to the housing crisis.

He reacted obsequiously to the banking crisis.

And he's shown little appetite for the hearty re-regulation that the moment requires. Instead of fighting for economic justice, he's leaving the fundamentals of the economy just as he found them.

I n the short-term, progressives must demand a new New Deal. On the employment front, we need to put America back to work, at decent jobs in every sense of the word: jobs that pay a living wage, jobs that are safe and humanizing, and jobs that beautify this country. For more than a year now, Bernie Sanders has been pushing a bill to pay people to build ten million solar roofs. Let's get on it. Let's ramp up the wind farms. Let's manufacture highspeed rail and electric cars. And let's make sure our bridges are safe and not crumbling.

We should also return to the New Deal's way of subsidizing the arts, as Robert Redford has suggested, with a new Federal Theatre Project, a new Federal Art Project, a new Federal Music Project. In FDR's day, these efforts enlisted thousands and thousands of creative minds, which made the culture flourish. We should do so again.

The states need help, too. They are reacting to this recession by slashing jobs in order to balance their budgets, which most are required to do. But at a macro level, this is like having Herbert Hoover in the governor's chair in each state capital. As a result, teachers, nurses, social workers, and police officers are being laid off, and state...