United Auto Workers are caravanning to Washington this Monday, December 8 to have their say in the discussion on saving the Big Three.
Among their demands:
“Transform the Auto Industry. Congress needs to establish a national industrial policy that will direct, plan and finance the transformation of the auto industry’s existing capacity. We need to expand our efforts to produce fuel efficient automobiles and electric cars, and branch out into green energy technologies such as wind turbines, and mass transportation such as light rail and high speed trains.”
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Interesting. “Industrial Policy” is a naughty word in most political circles, ever sense market fundamentalist dogma labeled it as a tool for socialist governments, not the good ole US of A. But with pressing crises and clear national imperatives, the time to rehabilitate the concept may have come. We don’t necessarily need to have the kind of centralized industrial policy that you see in Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Technology and Industry – which has been unabashed about using industrial policy to help Japanese industries expand into emerging markets, like the US auto market in the 70s – or the command and control economies of the Soviet states. University of California at Davis sociologist Fred Block points out that we already have a distributed set of institutions that help direct national industrial policy in what he calls a “networked developmental state.” If you’re interested, check out his writing here.