Human Rights Now:

Shovel Ready Projects

We sociologists should be ready with our shovel-ready projects since; after all, the economists have let the nation down. In fact, there is a national economic emergency that has been triggered by predatory lenders, greedy financiers, banks with sub-prime mortgages, CEOs with astronomical salaries, investors (who put their funds in derivatives, credit default swaps, hedge funds, and tax havens).

Did economists say anything over the past two decades while this was happening? To their credit, some did, including Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Pollin, and William Tabb. For the most part economists who dissented cast their arguments at the macro-level, that is, opposing neoliberal global capitalism. Yet, most economists defended unregulated markets and multinationals’ freedom to do what they wanted, go where they wanted, and produce what they wanted, all in hot pursuit of cheap labor and of places without environmental or other restrictions.

Yet what does a world and national economic crisis mean for societies and communities? What do sociologists know that would help a general understanding of how people can collectively engage shared projects and common endeavors? I am somewhat wary of the term, “civil society,” since its focus is on the buffer between people and the state, and what I have in mind are social relations in neighborhoods, community activists, social mobilization, thick democracy, the advance of human rights, NGOs, and pluralistic ties that cross ethnic and racial lines, as well as cross communities of faith.

Sociologists know that American communities are like a collection of many silos. People are trapped in ghettos and barrios, the rich choose to live behind walls and gates, and churches are as segregated as neighborhoods. This has been the perfect setup for creating the astronomical rise in the levels of economic inequality we have witnessed over the past two decades. It has also been the perfect setup for the growing concentration of developers’ power at the level of local governments.

Shovel-ready projects that sit on the desks of sociologists (or in their heads) include the following: social and cultural pluralism, gender equity and gender equality, school and neighborhood integration, decent work for all, participatory democracy, participatory economies, inclusive social institutions, universal healthcare, universal housing, protection of members of vulnerable groups (the elderly and disabled), expansion of parks and recreation areas, local food, and.

I would call these shovel-ready projects “human rights projects,” but others may call them, “sociology projects.”