It was a great interview. Parenti got some great insights... but I think you need to have worked for the feds or been on a direct federal grant of some kind to really see the potential. Parenti was not talking out his ass. The GSA, General Services Administration, here,
http://www.gsa.gov/portal/category/100000
is a vast system of procurment and distribution for a truly awesome array of stuff. I used to spend several hours a month going through their catelogues (for shop & office supplies). There was so much stuff I had to figure out the right catalogue to find what I was looking for. People forget things like office supplies, toilet paper, hand towels all the junk it takes to run an office, and even more junk to run a shop. GSA sold it all to all federal programs and agencies that wanted to buy from them. Now these catalogues are on line for:
Building & Industrial
Furniture & Furnishings
Hospitality, Cleaning, & Chemicals
IT Solutions & Electronics
Laboratory, Scientific, & Medical
Law Enforcement, Fire, & Security
Office Solutions
FSSI Office Supplies
Recreation & Apparel
Services
Tools, Hardware, & Machinery
Vehicles & Watercraft
They are the ultimate catalogue for catalogue nuts. If you thought Grainger's was fun, get a load of GSA. They supply everything you need for just about anything, including the property and the buildings. The UC system has its own version, with faster delivery and sometimes cheaper prices, so its a problem of comparsion shopping.
When you combined GSA with the idea that government is something like 20-30 percent(?) of the economy, as purchasers and employers you can see the governments could pull the economy out of recession and unemployment, just by expanding their own operations and get back all the lay-offs and down sizing they've been doing since at least the Nixon administration. By pumbing money into the state government, which in turn pumps the funding to local government, particularly public education, we'd be doing great.
In my theory of economics, governments create jobs, with a stroke of the pen. If the corporate sector doesn't want to hire, fuck'm. Let's see what those assholes on wall street think when the labor market expands into goverance, regulation, administration, services, infrastructure, and all the shit that is breaking down that needs to be done. If these pricks hate Social Security and Medicare, just watch them start screaming communism...and they'd be right.
One of the things that GSA does is quality control and contract by specification...where they can specify USA manufacture, Green specs, energy conservation, price, union labor, subcontractor details, etc. Unfortunately, GSA like the Pentagon is prone (ripe with?) corruption and collusion with their contractors... but that's what all those new hire regulatory field service people are for...right? GSA is something like the Pentagon for the non-military wings of government. Remember the warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc? That's what GSA warehouses look like.
There are probably enough departments within departments, programs within federal agencies to do just about any Left social economic overhaul without writing a single piece of legislation. But you really need to know government in-depth. There must be hundreds of programs and projects left over from both the FDR and Johnson administration that are still around quietly running on fumes with marginal staff mostly producing reports. Gore tried his best to get rid of them, but I bet he missed plenty There is a catalogue of these called Catalogue of Federal Domestic Assitance, CFDA:
Each of these programs automatically qualify for GSA services and materials, as well as have access to many other government agency programs. With a judicious use of the CFDA, combined with GSA and other fed programs and agencies you can almost create socialism just through the administration system within government. Of course it would take a staff of several hundred committed communists and war on poverty lawyer radicals to put it together, but it is a potential, just sitting here.
It was this potential that Parenti saw and reminded me of.
For example, let's take the broken down public schools in Oakland. One possible solution is to have GSA supply the district all its infrastructure needs, including school supplies for kids at way below private contract rates. They can even supply the school buses and maintenance systems (and specify green buses and union labor etc) as well as temporary buildings, and assist remodeling current buildings (earthquake ready, green specs etc). It's a form of instant relief so the district could hire back teachers and staff. Something like this, really needs a serious regional field office support to work right.
You can set up systems like this all through the economy and get a kind of instant socialism. This must have been pretty much how WWII was run on the domestic front...remember that was the solution to the depression.
Anyway, the best job I ever had was the first couple of years trying to develop a shop and transportation service system through a fed grant where I was exposed to the machinery of government---way down at the bottom wondering like a commie rat through the incrediable mazes of the system.
Here is one page of the CFDA, one program example of how to get rid of hunger:
https://www.cfda.gov/?s=program&mode=form&tab=step1&id=986bb30613570e77b71e032ccc3c981c
The key to making these programs work, requires (money) top and bottom coordination, very much on the OEO style, along with committed field agency staffing. It also needs top coordination with already existing federal distribution systems like GSA and DoA.
One of the most obvious applications of this program is a complete public school nutrition system, breakfast, lunch, and dinner for students in nice new cafeterias, union staffed, built and equiped through GSA. You can combined the food system with a public health system for paramedical staff, nurses, doctors, and counselors.
What most people don't see, is a school is a public service delivery system for everything from meals, concerts, healthcare, and political organizing . The whole public sector (minus the prison industrial complex) is or could be made into such a system.
See? This shit is already on the books
I've tried and tried to communicate this kind of concept and it never seems to sink in. I've tried to explain how this system works to guys in shops and they look at me like I am crazy. These kinds of services were privatized so long ago, nobody can even imagine them now. I sure hope Parenti has better luck.
One of the key problems is that we've had to live inside this damned neoliberal-welfarecop mindset for so long that it's like wading through mud to explain how these public systems can be made to work for the people for a change.
I remember the minute I heard Poulson wanted 700 billion for the banks I thought fuck you. Give us 700 billion and the CFDA, and imagined what could be done with that kind of blank check.
Another aspect to re-development of the public system is propaganda, advertising socialism and how government works for you. Yes, I am serious. You pay well, good benefits, interesting socially committed jobs working with people, instead of against them, and you are walking, talking real life propaganda machine. You will run into people who will ask you, how do I get a job like yours? Another soldier in the radical army is right in front of you.
CG