Author: Money on the Left

Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.

Drawing on his recent writing and policy interventions, Pickard breaks down three distinct layers of media capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian. Crucially, our conversation stresses how the foundational layer—the capitalistic privatization of news and communication as market commodities rather than vital public goods—directly conditions and enables the other two. As long as media institutions remain captured by capitalist imperatives, treating political information as a vehicle for private control and exploitation, attempts to counter oligarchic consolidation or authoritarian coercion will fail to address the root causes of our institutional breakdown.

During our discussion, we explore the history of the struggle to build public media in the United States, from early twentieth-century regulatory choices that privatized the public airwaves to the gradual weakening of public-interest protections and the chronic underfunding of public broadcasting. Against this hyper-commercialized landscape, we insist upon the necessity of fighting for democratic, diverse, and locally sensitive public media infrastructures. Rather than relying on broken advertising models or corporate philanthropy, we explore what it would mean to construct non-capitalist, community-governed media systems designed from the bottom up to serve local publics.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

Victor Pickard, welcome back to Money on the Left.

Victor Pickard

Thanks so much for having me. It’s good to see you guys again.

Scott Ferguson

It’s great to see you. You are an expert at the political composition and history of the US media system, thinking specifically about the press, but also other aspects of the media system, how it’s developed over time, how it’s been fought over over time, insisting that it’s been constructed and reconstructed, nothing about it is natural. You have plenty of important critiques of the way that our media system has been privatized to the detriment of the public, and we spoke to you, I think, six years ago, back in 2020, checking in with your analysis back then.

And we wanted to invite you back because it seems to us that maybe things have shifted a little bit and not for the better. And we’ve been following your work and finding your updated analyzes very helpful. Another thing that we really find helpful about your work is that you’re not just a critic. You insist on having a kind of capacious, future-oriented imagination that is centering the public, centering the possibilities for public options for public media, public media ownership, different kinds of designs, different kinds of constructs, especially during these dark times.

So we wanted to bring you on and learn more from you about what you’ve been doing recently and helping us to understand what’s going on with the US media system today and how we get here. So that’s a wide open question, but you can start wherever you want.

Victor Pickard

Great. Well, thank you for this invitation and I’m so delighted to have this conversation with you all. I can’t believe it’s been six years. That blows my mind. But of course, a few things have changed or a few things have happened, at least, since then. Much of my analysis, for better or for worse, has not changed as far as what’s wrong with the US media system in particular, and what we need to do to try to fix or at least confront some of these problems.

But in many ways it still has accelerated. It has qualitatively shifted in important ways, and there are a lot of different places where we could kind of dip in and depart from, for example, obviously the journalism crisis, which I’m assuming is something we talked about six years ago, has only gotten worse. Quite predictably, that has gotten much worse.

The latest calculation I saw is that since the early 2000, we’ve lost about 81% of our local journalists in the US, you know, more than 40% of our local newspapers, so that now tens of millions of Americans are living in news deserts, in areas with little or no access to local news media whatsoever. So this is catastrophic for any kind of semblance of democratic society.

And certainly during Trump 2.0, we’ve seen nothing constructive happening on this front whatsoever in terms of trying to address the journalism crisis in any structural, substantive way. That’s not to start out on such a dismal note, but certainly things have gotten much worse. There are many pathologies that we could talk about.

I’ll leave it there for now to see which direction you’d like to go and of course, I’m sure we’re going to talk about the future of public media, whether there is a future for public media. But you tell me where you’d like to go first.

Billy Saas

I’m incredibly excited to talk about the future and to do some vision work with you and chart the path forward out of this mess, but I think it might be a good place for us to start with the the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a kind of case study of where we are, something that had been on the chopping block or in the sights of conservatives in this country for a long time, finally seems to have have suffered, at least at the institutional level, its public support, which was minimal in the first place, but now is zero through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

So if we could talk about that in the state of the Public Broadcasting Act in 2026.

Victor Pickard

Sure. Yeah, that’s not the most cheerful place to start. But of course, we should probably warn our listeners that this is not going to be a cheery conversation. Despite all the doom and gloom, I will try to hit on a few points of at least potential optimism and hopes. But we won’t get there yet. So we’ll start out with the doom and gloom. 

So regarding the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as you suggest, Billy, it was never adequately funded. It was established with the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and just to back up for a moment to talk about the strange history that led to the very belated and suboptimal establishment of public broadcasting in the United States.

Unlike most democratic countries around the world, when we established our broadcast media system in the United States, and of course, we’re speaking specifically about radio in the early 30s, we went down a very different path compared to most other democracies. To be more specific, we created a highly privatized and commercialized broadcast media system, which again, was very different. We were pretty much a global anomaly by not establishing a more public oriented broadcast media system and, of course, a media system that was dependent on the public airwaves.

I mean, it was inherently a public resource that we then essentially handed over primarily to two large corporations in the early 30s, CBS and NBC. And we can get more into the weeds on this history momentarily if we want to geek out on that, but long story short, because we went down this commercial trajectory, there was this ongoing media reform activism that tried to create a different kind of system.

At the same time, there was a growing awareness of all the systemic limitations that a commercial broadcast media system has vis a vis democratic society. In other words, we found out quite glaringly that there were a number of things that a commercial broadcasting system would never do, would never make sure that all communities have access to a baseline level of news and information, and also cultural and educational fare.

So as we went through the 50s and 60s and some of your listeners may have heard about the famous speech by then FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow in 1961, when he referred to, especially television in general, as a vast wasteland, there was this growing awareness that we needed a systemic alternative to deliver on some of our informational and communication needs.

So that is a very long winded wind up to basically set the stage for why we finally established a public broadcasting system in the late 60s in the United States that was always woefully underfunded. It was never insulated sufficiently from economic precarity and from political pressures, because it was being funded on this annual appropriations process and it was being funded or at least mediated through this CPB organization, where the federal government would fund CPB to then allocate a certain amount of money to various stations, television, radio stations around the country.

Just to bring it up to our current or recent moment, so, as I said, it was always chronically underfunded up until last year, when it was finally defunded completely, it was getting a whopping dollar $1.60 per person per year at the federal level. I mean, this was literally off the chart compared to most Democratic countries around the world.

Compared to the Brits, they were spending close to $100 per person per year for the BBC and many other western European, or northern European countries were spending well over $100 per person per year, and it shows in the health of their democratic societies. We were this global outlier for the pittance that we were allocating towards our public broadcasting system and then even that was phased out by congressional Republicans and by the Trump administration, so that now they’re getting zero at the federal level. This has created all kinds of problems, especially for rural stations, that really disproportionately relied on federal funding to stay afloat. Ironically, it is often in Trump voting regions where its public broadcasting stations are suffering the most.

So those are just a few of the highlights of both the history that led us to this moment, and where we are at this very moment with our public broadcasting system.

Scott Ferguson

And you have been developing, recently, a kind of tripartite – and I don’t know how you would characterize it – if it’s a question of stages, if it’s a question of periodization or more a question of impulses that might be interpenetrating in different ways at different moments, I’ll let you answer it.

Victor Pickard

I like that.

Scott Ferguson

Okay. There. Let’s roll with that.

Victor Pickard

I might steal that. 

Scott Ferguson

Okay. Go for it. 

Victor Pickard

Of course, these are all metaphors all the way down, but one of the ways that I was trying to think of this was that, for understandable reasons – and we might get into this as well – in recent years, especially during Trump 2.0, there’s been a growing awareness and sensitivity towards what we might think of them as these media oligarchs; the Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the Ellison’s, the Murdochs. There are these right wing moguls that control so much of our media and so understandably, our attention is being drawn to this glaringly evident problem.

But what I’m trying to show in my work is that the structural conditions that allow for the oligarchs to capture so much of our media really traces back to these capitalistic logics. Before we even start thinking about oligarchic capture of our media, and, of course, another growing concern with the Trump administration is just flat out authoritarian capture of our media, but we also need to understand how there initially was this capitalistic capture. I think the metaphor I use is that they are nested or overlapping, but however we want to phrase it, there are these different stages of capture of our media system and to really try to penetrate to the core root of the structural problem, I do try to bring it back to the capitalist capture. As much as it’s always fun to talk about these cartoon villains like the Musks and the Ellisons who are so easy to hate, but it’s much more than these bad billionaires doing bad things, right. It’s not a bad apples argument. It really is more deeply systemic. 

That’s why throughout my work, I try to really surface these inflection points where our media became captured by these hyper commercial logics. We already touched on one around our broadcast media.

I’d pinpoint 1934 when we passed the Communications Act of 1934, that, again, initially privatized and commercialized our broadcast media. But if we want to trace back to one of these inflection points with our print media, I’d say we’d have to go back to the 80s, the 1880s, when so much of our newspaper industry became so inordinately dependent on advertising revenue.

Up until the 1880s, it was much more of a mixed, or today we might call it a blended revenue model, where newspapers typically were getting support from individual readers. We call them subscribers today, perhaps. They were also getting funding from political parties. They were getting a large amount of funding, especially through coastal subsidies from the government to the tune of what would be the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars in today’s currency. The industry was being subsidized in basically very cheap circulation through the entire postal system throughout the 1800s. Even to this present day, there’s still pretty meager print subsidies still at work. So when we start bringing this into focus, we see that it was only when our core media systems became so hyper commercialized that they became biased against and essentially turned against democracy in many important ways.

And of course, looking at the newspaper industry again, once it became so dependent on advertising revenues, it really changed the relationship between newspaper owners and reading audiences. Instead of seeing their readers as first and foremost engaged citizens of a polity, and of course, we should always be clear that oftentimes publishers weren’t truly trying to reach all members of society, that it was always certain members, especially white propertied men, going back to the earliest days of our newspaper system, but they still saw their readers as citizens instead of consumers.

Once they became so dependent on advertising revenue, where they were trying to capture the attention of their readers and deliver those readers to advertisers, this really changed the core relationships between newspapers and democratic society. So these are just the broad strokes of how there were these structural transformations of our core media when they became captured by these hyper commercial logics, these capitalistic logics.

Of course, once our media became primarily commodities, that really teed it up and made it ready-made assets for oligarchs to just start buying up all these various media properties into massive conglomerates and large monopolistic corporations. That’s pretty much where we are today. But again, I think we need to understand those initial capitalistic logics that took over our media to really understand how we got to this point today.

Scott Ferguson

Something that’s in the news as of this week. This interview won’t come out for a couple of weeks. But in the news this week is that California is leading a lawsuit with several dozen other states or so to block this Paramount deal that seems ill advised and scary for countless reasons. But I think through your analysis and your stressing that at the bottom of this is capitalist capture, it’s privatization of public infrastructures, public possibilities, I think this case brings your analysis out more because, at least as I initially read the terms of the lawsuit, they’re just a kind of anti-monopoly, a kind of antitrust suit where the claim is being made that this is bad because it’s going to reduce competition. Right. And so, great. I mean, I don’t want this deal to go through and I hope they win. But it seems like the terms of the lawsuit, at least from what I’ve read, are all just taking for granted that privatization feature that has become so naturalized.

Victor Pickard

That’s right. I think you’re absolutely right. And I agree with you, Scott. Both things are true once, which is, for this merger to go through, it would be bad. It would make bad things even worse. But at the same time, simply stopping this merger and the rationale that’s being used to stop the merger, at least potentially stopping the merger – it’s an ongoing battle – it’s really indicative of this core misdiagnosis of our media crisis, which is, they aren’t just monopoly problems that we are grappling with. They are capitalism problems at root. And so to stop this merger and even to try to break up some of these conglomerates, which to be clear, I think we should do, I think that would be a step in the right direction to really try to break them down  to paraphrase a terrible thing that Grover Norquist once said, break it down to the size of being able to drown it in a bathtub.

He, of course, is talking about government. You might think that way about these media monopolies, right? At least cut down on their political and economic power, which is a threat to democratic society. Make no mistake about it. However, having smaller capitalist media organizations won’t solve many of our problems, won’t solve the news deserts problem, won’t solve what Zuboff has talked about in terms of surveillance capitalism.

It’s still going to be capitalism that we’re dealing with. So we really do need to try to create a non capitalistic media system. Stopping a merger or two or even trust busting some of these big combines will not bring us to that solution. So I think we need to be clear about that.

Scott Ferguson

I want to compliment you and suggest to one of the points of convergence between our project in your project, which is, yes, we have a critique of the privatization of public goods, and for us, that includes all kinds of forms of mediation and for us in particular, money as a form of mediation, which is a public good that has been, arguably even more so than journalism and broadcast media and print media, has been privatized in our country.

But what I love hearing from you, and whenever I talk to you, whenever I engage with your work, is that you don’t use your critique of these capitalist structures as the opportunity to just kind of shrug and say, “well, we live in a capitalist society, and unless there’s a revolution tomorrow, it’s just going to be capitalism and those are the laws of capitalism.” I think we share this commitment that, no, it’s being constructed and reconstructed every day, and we always have to be making choices about how the public is empowering people and empowering the private sector, let’s say, over the public sector. So I think we really share that commitment that it is always up for grabs. There are no laws of capitalism that tell us that this is just going to go on for infinity.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I, of course, couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying. I guess, at heart, I’m a Gramscian when it comes to thinking through these things and hegemonic power relationships always need to be recreated day in and day out. There is an inherent kind of open-endedness to all this.

As long as we say there is no alternative, the so-called “TINA” [“there is no alternative”] premise, then we won’t even be able to imagine alternatives. It’s always going to be a challenge to be realistic about what we can do in the immediate future. A great example would be trying to stop these mergers and trying to hopefully even break down some of these media conglomerates, but we must have a bolder, more systemic vision for what needs to happen on our political horizons that we’re working towards for the long term.

But we have to do our best to try to articulate what this different kind of system could and should look like. There’s different ways of phrasing this. A wonky phrase is “non-reformist reforms” could be one approach, one framework that we’re using where we’re doing what we can given the immediate terrain of struggle, but always with an eye towards the long term to trying to create greater possibilities for transformation down the road, and we have to try to keep these things in mind all at once.

It’s never easy, but we must try.

Scott Ferguson

Maybe before we get into some of your constructive ideas, I’d like us, in part for analysis and catching everybody up to speed, but also kind of for the archive, we think of our show as not just being topical, we’re building an archive. So I wonder if we could just spend a few minutes talking about what this Trump 2.0 is doing to the media system and perhaps with some focus on Brendan Carr and what he’s been up to.

I mean, I think a lot of people are aware of the harassment of late night and daytime TV.The takeover of CBS, the installing of Bari Weiss. There’s so many different aspects of this, but what’s your analysis of how this is playing out?

Victor Pickard

That’s a great question. A big chunk of the current book project that I’m working on right now is trying to make sense of all this. I constantly have to go into these chapters and update the latest thing that the Trump administration is doing.

Essentially they’re trying to weaponize every instrument at their disposal. So that includes everything from frivolous lawsuits to relying on an apparatchik like Brendan Car at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to carry out Trump’s agenda and serve as his attack dog, and basically do everything they can in their power to ensure that our entire media system looks and sounds like Fox News and brooks no dissent.

They’re trying to undercut any capacity for dissenting views for independent journalism. This takes the form in so many different ways. In addition to the things that I just mentioned, it takes a form of trying to facilitate these media mergers that we’ve been talking about with the Ellison’s, these friendly oligarchs that the Trump administration can lean on.

Really, they’ve taken a page out of the Viktor Orbán  playbook for controlling the media, which, again, goes back to some of the things we were just talking about about oligarchic media capture. An authoritarian regime like Viktor Orbán and like Trump can quickly realize that they don’t have to take over newsrooms by gunpoint. Instead, they can rely on friendly, aligned oligarchs.

They can change media policy to, again, undercut any kind of potential for independent journalism. They defund public media in various ways. They capture public media. We’re just seeing all these things happening at once. It’s quite overwhelming to try to even make sense of all of it, and also just constantly verbally attacking journalists, which has an indirect effect of really chilling news media discourse.

Journalists quickly internalize what they’re allowed to cover or what’s going to cause problems, what’s going to be inherently controversial. So take all these pieces together, and we are basically left with a very compliant media system, much worse than Trump 1.0. We’re seeing the media falling in line underneath these official Trump narratives and talking points being amplified.

Of course, during all this, a very strong right wing media sphere is gaining more and more traction all the time with the Ellisons taking over CBS News, for example, and now potentially CNN as well, even owning a chunk of TikTok. I mean, you have Musk taking over what used to be known as Twitter. So we’re seeing so much of our infrastructure become captured in this way so it’s constantly amplifying and just flooding the zone with Trump approved narratives. It has an effect on our politics and on any hope for any semblance of democratic society.

Billy Saas

So to find our way to some hope, where do we look? You mentioned that the United States started off on the wrong foot or on the capitalistic foot, and we stayed on that path and that has shaped everything that we are seeing and experiencing today.

We can’t go back in time, but can we look at present at those other countries and societies that did things differently as models today? Is that enough? Is there sort of fallacy of composition as the US becomes so hegemonic that there’s no model that we could look to that would scale? Where do we start looking and where have you found some promise when it comes to working our way out of this?

I mean, of course, you’ve got, “stopping the mergers.” You’ve mentioned a couple of options, but what else can we be looking toward?

Victor Pickard

Sure. It’s always an important question to ask. I think it kind of presupposes what we’ve been discussing all along, which is that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about our current media system. It was socially constructed, was based on political decisions and policy decisions that can be unmade or made differently. That always needs to be our analytical starting point.

Beyond that we need to also look internationally, not just historically, but internationally, to look at historical contingency, but then look at these other practices, perhaps best practices, how things could be done differently. Another important starting point is to look at public media systems around the world. I don’t think there’s an ideal model out there that I would say, “we must do that,” but I think at the very least, we begin by looking at how the strongest democratic societies – I mentioned this in passing earlier – empirically, we can show the strongest democratic countries on the planet also have the most robust public broadcasting systems. Now, I don’t think that we should take from that the assumption that we need to simply throw more money at NPR or PBS. But I do think a starting point would be to try to bring the funding of our public media up in line with global norms. If we were each spending $100 per capita per year towards our public broadcasting system, we would have an amazing public media system.

But beyond that, any kind of romanticism I may have harbored towards the BBC has been beaten out of me by my British friends. So I don’t want to make that mistake of saying that that’s some kind of ideal model. When I hear about their problems, I kind of wish we had those problems here in the US.

But nonetheless, I think, at the very least, if we were to begin with the kind of funding level that the BBC has and then radically democratize to make sure that the public media system that we have to rebuild here. This really is another key point too – there is a silver lining. This starts getting more into the kind of hopefulness. The silver lining to the destruction that Trump has brought upon so many of our core systems and infrastructures really gives us this rare historical opportunity to rebuild things from the ground up and to remind ourselves that what we had before was not necessarily awesome. It was always already, inherently, structurally flawed, especially our media system. To be able to reset and rebuild, reconstruct, reimagine is really an incredible opportunity. It’s something that we’ll be able to start working on hopefully in just a couple of years. 

Scott Ferguson

That’s a word I keep seeing more and more and it’s very exciting. The word is reconstruction. It’s got the resonance with post-Civil War with what the Radical Republicans were up to and that feels very exciting. That’s across the board. That’s not just about the media in a narrow sense, that’s about all of our institutions. There’s a sense that so many of our institutions were inadequate and that’s in part what got us into this mess in the first place.

Victor Pickard

That’s absolutely right. We can imagine something better, you know, building back better, as it were. Something that, of course, I think we could do much better than the Biden administration was able to do. But I do think that begins with imagining a public alternative to our failing commercial media system. It really should be based on these principles of not just deprivatization, decommodification, but really radical democratization.

Why I think of it as radical is that I think it has to be based on radical participatory democracy that really begins at the local level and that, of course, is where our media crisis is most acute: around the utter collapse of local journalism and by extension also the collapse of emergency communications, to give one example. We can unfortunately assume that that’s only going to become more of a problem in the years ahead with the growing, ever worsening climate crisis. So we really need to have this infrastructure in place and it can’t be a commercial infrastructure. These are not things that a commercial media system can do or will ever do.

To begin on that basis, if we’re really going to confront the news deserts problem, if we’re really going to maintain this normative benchmark that all members of society should have access to a baseline level of news and information, then that really has to be a public media system. I think it’s something that we’ll have to really work on and hash out at the local level.

I think it should be federally guaranteed, but locally owned and controlled, locally governed. There are ways we can do this. We can devolve control down from the federal to state and local levels or other models we can look to. On one level, some of this seems utopian by necessity and I think in a practical sense, we need to be utopian right now, but at the same time, I think there are concrete examples of this happening internationally and in our own history and so I really think we can broaden our political imaginary about what’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

Some of the concrete ideas that you’ve discussed is using and amplifying and transforming extant public infrastructures, like local libraries, for example. I remember from your 2020 book, talking about the ways that actually this public media movement uses university radio stations as a kind of testing ground. 

So public universities and public libraries being extant, public infrastructures that we could be building out in new ways.

Victor Pickard

Absolutely. I think we have these already existing public infrastructures that we can leverage. I would also include post offices. There are tens of thousands of post offices across the country in far flung locations, and that is critical public infrastructure. It also would be poetic if we were to deploy our postal system towards disseminating news and information, which really was its original purpose in this country. It was primarily a newspaper delivery infrastructure, where up to 95% of the weight of the postal system into the 1800s was made up of newspapers.

So I think just using those spaces as a place where we can house local, community journalists. In fact, speaking of real world examples, in the middle of the cornfields in Urbana, Illinois, media activists more than 20 years ago raised funds and bought the downtown post office. To this day, it serves as this multimedia hub for community news media production.

I think that’s a great proof of concept of something that we could replicate across the country. Also, Public Access Media Centers like the PEG (Public, Educational, and Governmental) stations). There’s a fantastic one in Philadelphia here called Philly Cam that’s also multimedia. It does video, audio, and various kinds of media production and it involves members of the community.

These are things that we can point out and say this isn’t just pie in the sky dreaming. These kinds of models already exist. We need to find ways to replicate them and to scale them and I think that’s possible.

Scott Ferguson

What do you think about the scale of politics and advocacy now? I think for us, in our experience, in our theoretical framework, there’s no proper scale. All scales matter and you take up whatever scale of politicizing that seems to be open that you’re aware of. If that means doing something locally and then trying to scale it up, fine.

If that means you’ve got a mass movement that’s pressuring Congress members, then you do that. I mean, ideally, you do all of it at the same time and you probably share this approach. But I’m curious if you have a sense when it comes to the politics of media broadcast print journalism, and what’s worked, what hasn’t worked. Are there any lessons here in terms of just the scale of politicizing this?

Victor Pickard

Right now, just out of sheer necessity, we have to focus on the state and local levels. In fact, and again, this is keeping with our theme of trying to be a little more hopeful as we’re looking across this blasted landscape, we’re seeing so many things here. I’m thinking of like Mamdani’s  New York, it’s sort of like a return to the sewer socialists of old.

But I do think at the municipal level, there’s some real opportunity at the state level. We’re already seeing a number of blue or purplish states, because I’m thinking of including Pennsylvania in this category, but at the state level, we’re seeing a number of public investment schemes towards subsidizing local journalism. So the exemplar has always been sort of the gold standard has been the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, where they’ve been allocating millions of dollars towards local journalistic initiatives and have been quite successful.

California just passed a recent civic media bill that’s going to put at least potentially tens of millions of dollars towards the local journalism we’re seeing here in Pennsylvania. Chris Rabb, who recently won a primary, is most likely going to the US Congress – he was my state representative at the state legislature – has been pushing a bill modeled after the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. So there are all these signs of hope at the state level where we’re moving in this direction, where we recognize that there is no commercial future for the local journalism that we need. We’re going to need public investments. We’re going to need to shift towards this predominantly public media model, especially at the local level.

When I’m thinking of scale, I don’t necessarily mean scaling it up to the federal level, although I do think at a certain point we are going to have to have these policy interventions at the federal level, but it’s also just about replication and just learning what is something that could work in communities across the country.

I’ve been talking more and more, probably six years ago with you guys about this idea of a public media center based in every community across the country that, again, is federally guaranteed but locally owned and controlled. So I think we need to have those dreams on our horizon and just work towards it however we can.

Billy Saas

Talking about federal guarantees and evolving control over these local, state and municipal media systems, you can imagine, and we frequently do, that people are going to ask, “how are you going to pay for that?” in this context. That’s where we come in and with respect to the current media landscape and the death of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, you noted that a pretty fatal flaw of the Public Banking Act was to bring the issue up for a vote every year or two in terms of the funding.

That’s exactly what happened this time. They voted for zero funding and that was it. That makes it contentious and up for grabs more often than we would like it to be. That’s certainly not a guarantee, right? If you look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as maybe a model today, they received their funding directly from the Federal Reserve on a guaranteed basis and the near death of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is much easier avoided because it was that guaranteed direct payment from the Federal Reserve rather than routing through Congress. I don’t imagine, as we’re thinking in utopian terms, and we’re thinking small and local, that we have much faith or belief that the Fed can be operationalized in that way soon. But there are maybe other ways that we could fund these local initiatives.

I wonder if that has come up in your recent thinking at all, like, okay, so we get these motivated local journalists together with the spirit of revivifying local public institutions, how do we pay for their lunches, right? Or how do we keep the lights on?

Victor Pickard

Yeah. Always such a wickedly daunting question, “How do you pay for it?” But I really try to make sure that’s a conversation starter, not a conversation stopper. I think we have to begin with the core assumption that we need insulated, permanent and adequate funding for the media that we need, that democracy requires. There are at least a couple of different models. I mean, ideally, yes, that could come directly out of the Treasury.

There could instead be an autonomous endowed fund to support the media that we need. The original blueprint for our public broadcasting system in the United States was modeled a little bit like the BBC. The BBC has historically had a license. Everyone pays this license fee so it has this guaranteed revenue stream. The initial blueprint for our public broadcasting system was that there would be an excise tax of up to 5% on television sets, and this was in the original Carnegie plan, which almost verbatim became the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, except that key detail didn’t make it into the final cut.

So we always left it in this very precarious situation. I’ve very loosely calculated that we need a budget of about $30 billion a year to support a national public media system. That’s really not, if you look at what we’re spending now on our war on Iran or like whatever tax cuts that were in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill.

This is pocket change, right? This is not that much. As much as I do think we need to talk about that, I also try not to get too caught up in the weeds about it, because that too often derails the conversation. I think what’s as important, if not more important, is to also talk about how the money is allocated and how those decisions are made.

I’ve looked at things like community action programs during the LBJ administration’s anti-poverty initiatives. It was based on this assumption that the communities themselves who were purportedly being helped with these funds, had to have a say, had to have representation in deciding how that money is going to be spent. I think that also needs to be a core feature of how this new kind of public media system should be designed, that local communities really help determine how this money is being allocated.

Scott Ferguson

This is maybe just a different way of getting at the reconstruction question, but I think that at least in certain social circles. I think of Cory Doctorow’s now often-used term enshittification. I think the fact that that term circulates so widely is an index of its usefulness in calling out the reality of what’s going on.

I think that there is a strong sense, at least in parts of public discourse, that our media system sucks. One question would be, what’s the difference between this vast wasteland and the vast wasteland of 1950s commercial television? A part of me wants to go back to that vast wasteland. It seemed less of a vast wasteland by comparison.

Victor Pickard

Less enshittified.

Scott Ferguson

Although, you know, plenty racist and patriarchal and sexist. I guess I wonder, it seems like there’s an opportunity just in terms of public opinion about our media. It just seems like such a shit show, right? The way that television has exploded into all these streaming services that you have to buy à la carte that nobody can afford. You’re constantly buying one and then subscribing and then stopping. The whole thing seems like such a big mess. Let me put it another way. Even if we’re going to accept the capitalist logic by capitalist logic standards, I don’t think that you can put out a bunch of surveys today and have the so-called customers, instead of citizens, say that they are happy, or say that they’re enjoying themselves.

Maybe there are swaths of the public that really like what’s going on. But it seems to me that there’s a lot of unhappiness.

Victor Pickard

I couldn’t agree more. I agree also that this is an opportunity, or at least it should give us some leverage over steering what’s already low opinion towards our media, towards something more constructive. But that is where it often gets lost. Even this notion of enshittification, although Doctorow is clear, though I don’t think clear enough, but he does say in his writings that this is stemming from these hyper capitalistic logics. Enshittification is what you get, this is what capitalism does to our media.

Scott Ferguson

Right, this is not a natural evolutionary tendency of technology or something like that.

Victor Pickard

Exactly, but too often the critique sort of stops with, “oh, it just sucks,” and not why does it suck? That’s where we all have work to do, to try to connect these dots to show people,” oh, it sucks because they don’t care whether you enjoy it or not. They’re just trying to extract as much value in and generate as much profit from this as possible.”

So once you start understanding that that is where this hyper capitalistic logic takes us, then we begin to realize, “oh, we have to build something new that’s not so dependent, that’s not so pegged so closely to these capitalistic market relationships.” It’s this very inchoate sense of, our media system sucks, we want something better, but to understand how we get there, to create something better, we really have to understand the structural roots of these problems, right? This is what capitalism does to our media. That’s what I’m trying to walk through in my own work. But going back to the original idea, though, I do think it’s another silver lining with Trump 2.0 that people are carrying and thinking and talking more about media ownership, for example, than they normally ever would.

And so that, again, is a fleeting window of opportunity that we really should try to exploit.

Scott Ferguson

This is part of the mystery of how we got Trump. How did the latter day Trump come to be? How did he become president? There’s all kinds of explanations for this, like these ridiculous claims coming out of the last election, not the left, but the Democrats need their own Joe Rogan.

A bunch of big donor Democrats are going to do the great search for our own Joe Rogan, as if Joe Rogan is single handedly responsible for putting Trump back in into the White House. I guess I tend to think more in terms of the long game. I guess it seems to me that the neoliberal legislation that was ushered in under the Clinton administration, not that it single handedly did anything because nothing is single handed, everything is always up for grabs. But it seems to me that in privatizing the internet, in its commercial construction in the way that they did, they essentially took what was mostly on AM radio and Fox News and just opened the door for that sensibility to take over. I think about the way that the centrist, neoliberal Democrats who helped engineer that system just screwed themselves, and screwed their party.

I don’t know if that makes any sense. I don’t know if this is even worth keeping in, but I’m just curious if you have any thoughts about that.

Victor Pickard

Yeah, I do. I have a lot of thoughts on all that and I agree with the thrust of that line of reasoning, which is certainly under what we’ve come to refer to as this kind of neoliberal paradigm. We basically privatize public goods and we undercut capacity for healthy public discourse about anything by ensuring that there’s little journalism, because journalism typically costs money to produce. Good journalism costs money to produce and it also is often bad for business because it often would take an adversarial position, even by simply reporting on things factually, often does not redound to the business interests. For these reasons and more, we have created such a public sphere, but really we’ve ensured that there is very little public sphere beyond just like shouting and commentary and shouting heads on ubiquitous screens, but not really creating the capacity to develop political consciousness and a healthy political consciousness outside of kind of proto fascistic formations.

I’m also being very vague here, but basically, I’m agreeing with the premise that systemically, at a structural level, we basically undercut the preconditions, the necessary preconditions for a healthy democratic society. We’ve undercut any kind of viable communication infrastructure and the internet is another one of these examples of privatizing what inherently began as a public resource.

The internet was a testament to socialistic fostering of a media system. It was born out of pub massive public subsidies and then was essentially handed over to a handful of corporations and continued to develop along those trajectories so that when social media firms took root, it was assumed that they were beyond reach of public policy, they could not be subjected to democratic decision making.

This has all helped. I would always be careful in the kind of causal relationships that I draw. But at the very least, they are contributing factors to the rise of Trump and where we are today.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And then, of course, there’s Section 230 and the fact that these social media companies are not liable for what is said on their websites. Yeah.

Victor Pickard

Yeah. I mean, there are so many of these kinds of policy decisions or indecisions. Sometimes the shorthand is this kind of Silicon Valley, techno libertarian ethos, but it was just always assumed from the get-go that we couldn’t regulate them, that they were just beyond reach, that somehow these new technologies were magical in a particular way, that we just could not try to wield any sort of public policy over them.

Now we’re reaping the rewards of those earlier mistakes.

Scott Ferguson

Right. And that’s what’s happening with the generative AI push now. 

Victor Pickard

We’ve seen this movie before. The same discourses are being deployed. It’s treated as something like fait accompli. It’s already beyond our control. This is where things are headed and we need to just adapt to these new technologies instead of trying to steer them in democratic ways and making sure that they’re serving our social needs, and not simply the profit imperatives of a handful of tech oligarchs.

Scott Ferguson

Is there anything in your tracking of the contemporary situation beyond the basic point that all of this oligarchic and authoritarian capture is predicated on a deep privatization that is unjust and ill conceived? Is there anything else that’s going on in the contemporary media scape that you wish people were attending to more? Because I think in a sense, these are front page headlines, like California going after the Ellison’s for the Paramount deal.

Is there anything else that you can attune us to that maybe the public isn’t thinking about or that isn’t being framed for everybody in a flashing headline.

Victor Pickard

I would keep coming back to the same drum I’ve been beating on forever, which is the collapse of local journalism and how that is treated as something that’s utterly beyond our control. It’s like a natural disaster. It might be unfortunate, in fact, many people think it’s unfortunate to the extent that they even know about it even now.

I mean, in our little circles, it probably seems like such old news and it’s so banal to even bring it up again, but the fact is, survey data show consistently that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that there’s any kind of journalism crisis. They think they have access to more news and information than they’ve ever had before.

That is such a problem. The fact that people don’t even know that the crisis is happening and then the extent that they are aware of it, again, it’s thought of as just something completely beyond the reach of public policy, it’s beyond our control, it’s an act of God and we really need to start seeing this as a political decision if we’re allowing 81% of our local journalists to lose their jobs. It’s just mind blowing. There was that weekly newspaper in Kansas a couple of years ago where local authorities marched in and shut it down because it had ran some article that offended some local elite and that was treated as a national scandal that people would come in and shut down a local newsroom.

But when the market is doing that day in and day out, there’s this kind of sociology of resignation where it’s like, “that’s unfortunate, but, you know, the market has spoken and there’s just nothing we can do about it.” That’s a very long winded answer to your excellent question, which is, that’s an example of something that should be headlines every day about what’s happening to our local journalism.

In so many ways that’s much more fundamental than what the media oligarchs are doing right now  and if a couple corporations merge, these are bad things, but this is nothing compared to the utter collapse of our local journalism.

Billy Saas

Well, thank you so much for that reminder and for joining us again on Money on the Left six years later, let’s not let another six years pass without another conversation. This has been lovely. Victor Pickard, thank you so much for joining us again.

Victor Pickard

Thank you both for having me. It’s always great to talk to you. Let’s definitely make sure we don’t wait another six years. Hopefully the next time we talk, we’ll have even more hopeful things. Lots of things will have changed by then. We will have solved all these problems and we can just talk about how great it is.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript. 

This month, Scott Ferguson speaks with Mario Rendina about the politics of public employment and training in the United States as they shifted over the course of the late 20th century. Unlike our standard episodes, this conversation is an archival treat: it was originally recorded 11 years ago in 2015, three years before the Money on the Left podcast officially began.

Rendina brings over thirty years of hands-on experience working within municipal government in Tampa Bay, Florida—specifically within Hillsborough County. Grounded in his extensive career as a local administrator, Rendina walks us through the decades he spent supervising county initiatives, sketching out how local experimentation actively moved with and against broad macroeconomic shifts at the federal level.

As Rendina explains, local administrators routinely interpreted federal laws regulating public employment and training rather than passively accepting top-down mandates as fixed or uncontestable. Despite federal directives to prioritize private-sector placement, Rendina and his colleagues routinely found creative ways to bolster and expand public employment—whether by baking future public employment contracts into library building projects or dynamically staffing their own municipal offices.

Throughout the interview, Rendina’s testimony tacitly underscores a core Money on the Left lesson: we must not underestimate the institutional and communal capacities that regional governments always-already have at their disposal. While pro-social change requires funding, local institutions can actively leverage their crediting powers and existing infrastructure to mobilize and value local communities.

Ultimately, the conversation maps a troubling yet instructive historical trajectory from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Bill Clinton’s notorious “end to welfare as we know it.” While the federal government never fully committed to a well-compensated, non-exclusive public job guarantee during this era, Rendina’s account highlights genuine pro-social advances we can still learn from today. Crucially, it recounts how Reaganite and Clintonian neoliberalism systematically undercut these endeavors over time, defunding public training programs and increasingly privatizing their leadership, operations, and aims.

Conducted with an eye toward future struggles for a federal Job Guarantee grounded in an inalienable right to work, this interview provides a vital archive from which to advance modern movements for public provisioning.

Additional Resources:

• The Full, Raw Audio: Listen to the complete, unedited 2015 recording on our SoundCloud.
• Conference Presentation: Watch Mario Rendina’s presentation delivered at the inaugural Money on the Left Conference at the University of South Florida in 2018.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson

So, this is Scott Ferguson. This recording is being done on Sunday, July 12th, 2015. I’m here with…

Mario Rendina

This is Mario Rendina. I have worked with employment and training programs since October of 1969. I remember this because I remember looking down at my very first report. I was the statistician for a concentrated employment program (CEP) and I remember looking down at my first report, and I remember keeping that report in my bottom file drawer, and I would look at it every time I wondered about when did I start working in employment and training?

And I looked down there and there was that October of 1969 report. So I’m pretty sure when I got involved in employment and training programs. That’s when it was.

Scott Ferguson

To explain what has brought us together, I’m interested in Modern Monetary Theory and their ideas about large, publicly funded, full employment programs. These programs would be used countercyclically in relationship to the expansions and contractions of the market. You, Mario, have years of experience not only in job training and in job placement, but when there were opportunities – if I’m understanding you right – when there were opportunities, meaning when there was public funding available, indirect job creation. You have already told me some of these stories about creative ways that this was done. I guess, to me, this conversation, in addition to learning from you, about this history and what we can draw from this history to move forward, but it is basically bringing the power that Modern Monetary Theory or MMT brings us, which is the power to use fiscal policy to fund public works programs as much as we need to. With your experience and know-how – I guess one way of putting this question more simply is – what would you do to bring about full employment in the United States if you had no fiscal limits?

Well, we can start by just talking about your career and let your career be kind of a window into this whole larger history. We should start with where we are right now and what county you’re working in.

Mario Rendina

Right. Well, basically, my career started with the concentrated employment program in Tampa, which was the Tampa CEP, also known as TCEP. There are a bunch of people still around that were involved in the sub-program. 

Scott Ferguson

And what did that stand for?

Mario Rendina

The Tampa Concentrated Employment Program. I can’t remember exactly how many, but I think there were only about nine in the country and they focused on specific areas. For example, in Tampa, it was an extremely poor area of Tampa focused, not the whole of the city of Tampa, but on a specific target area. So it was literally focused down on working at the problems in a very specific area. And it was so highly directed to that area that all the staff, which included coaches for participants in the program, coaches that would get people out of bed in the morning if they didn’t show up for appointments.

You had counselors that were trying to come up with an employability plan for the participant. You had job developers that were going out and finding jobs in the community for folks. You had supportive services. We had a supportive services section, which could buy boots and uniforms or whatever was necessary for the employment of an individual.

Scott Ferguson

Is that where something like childcare could be funded?

Mario Rendina

Daycare was the biggest piece of support services, for us, it was child daycare. Of course, it was a hugely important piece of any US person’s employability plan. So anyhow, it was a concentrated employment program and so all these people were supposed to come from the target area, which made it a very pure group kind of thing. Everybody knew everybody else’s business pretty well. You just live down the block from me, and that’s why you’re coming to get me out of bed in the morning, because I didn’t show up for the job interview. 

Scott Ferguson

Oh, wow. So, it had a community feel.

Mario Rendina

It definitely had a community feel to it. I ended up in the program simply because they couldn’t find somebody that had any kind of a statistical background in the target area. So they had to pull from outside the target area in order to get a statistician in there, even though I had failed statistics once and passed it finally once it was social science statistics for social science sociology majors that had it completed in their major. So, in any case, I was brought in by a friend who, in fact, had gone to Vanderbilt and virtually completed his master’s degree. He said, “you need to come over here.”

Now, I had come from being the first man in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in Hillsborough County. I had engaged them for one year. I said, “I will work for you for one year.” That was my promise. At the end of the year, I went with the TCEP program as a statistician, he had moved to a position of evaluator. These are very, very important things in any programs that we need to look at in the future. It’s evaluating the program. I think one of the major problems that we have is that we’re not doing any monitoring and evaluation of what we do. Did it work?

How well did it work? How is the staff doing? What are the outputs? Where did it screw up in the middle? How does the front end work? So anyhow, the concentrated employment programs were, to my mind, clearly experiments in how we do manpower programs where we have concentrations of poverty and all the things that are implicit there. So that was the CEP programs, and they can be found. You can look them up. There’s very, very little information on the CEPs, but the forerunner of all of that was the Manpower Development and Training Act, MDTA. 

Scott Ferguson

What year was that? 

Mario Rendina

1962. 

MDTA was, as much as I can recall, it went to the school systems for vocational training, manpower development through the school systems, the VoTech system. But it also had an element of on the job training and I think they looked a little bit toward the unions as to what could we do in terms of on the job training?

Basically, it was a subsidy to the private sector for a given occupation. Basically, the policy was that the government would pay one half of the wage for a specific period of time. You had MDTA and so you might have welding going on in the school system and you might have on the job training, doing whatever jobs that the private sector wanted that you were going to pay half for over a specific period of time. That was a pretty limited program, at least in the Tampa area. I think the funding was such that you could maybe put together a complete welding program or something like that, where you’re actually buying the hardware as well as uniforms and that kind of stuff.

Pretty expensive stuff. Then you’d have an OJT (On-the-Job Training) program on the side, which could in fact lead to the skills training, which had a skills training component and you had on the job training components. That is what I remember about the way we operated here. There may have been some other variability, but with the CEP program, you brought in EOA Money, Economic Opportunity Act.

Now we’re talking about President Johnson, right? So it’s “war on poverty” money and it was flexible. That was what brought your counselors, your job developers, the staffing to carry out very much expanded training programs and we’re talking about structural unemployment. There’s no question we’re talking about structural unemployment here. So, virtually, in terms of training, if somebody didn’t have a G.E.D., we’d start there. You do a G.E.D., you get your G.E.D., and then meanwhile, the counselor was trying to develop an employability plan that would go on from the G.E.D. You need the G.E.D. in order to go into clerical training, and so forth.

Meanwhile, of course, for the women, we’re providing child daycare in most cases. We were, in fact, an avenue for welfare recipients. Also, if the case manager welfare could get one of our people into the CEP program, then they knew that we could take care of them and the welfare people didn’t know how to get people on jobs.

So there was the WIN (Work Incentive Program) program, which was later actually. There’s Project Hopeful early on, but, these programs would have a sewing class, that would be your project. So, to be able to get somebody into a program where the client could literally move through the program to reach their capability in terms of education and training, was a big deal.

So they would love to have us take on a participant, and the person was tracked through what was called a central records unit. Now, this was the first tracking mechanism for any of this stuff that was done at a local level. We’re talking about a federal grant, a federal grant to a local area…

Scott Ferguson

One time or ongoing?

Mario Rendina

You would renew it. It was an annual renewal with a contract. It was approximately 3.5in thick. All the regulations related to the CEP are there as part of the contract. And you had assurances that ran on for 50 pages and so forth and so on. Then you probably had a good inch and a half of a programmatic description and budgets.

And so it was a highly structured program in terms of what are you going to do? You’re going to have both statistically and narrative wise, you’re talking about how many you’re going to do? How are you going to bring them into the program? How many are you going to bring into the program? 

What’s the flow through the program? What’s it going to be? How many people are you going to put in on the job training and so forth? But the “and so forth” was the critical part of it, and that was skills training of anything that could be offered by the VoTech system in Hillsborough County, which was absolutely extensive.

We had Erwin VoTech later. I’m not sure that Erwin existed originally. Erwin has everything up to LPN training in the medical area and we had welding and auto mechanics and diesel mechanics and all kinds of other things. But virtually anything that they had and also the things that the community college had. So you have his very, very wide range of available training. On staff, we also had a test administrator. So the test administrator would determine that there was one basic test of adult basic education. I don’t know how I remember that, but, yeah, it was a test on basic education. That would be the first thing that would give you an idea of where the person’s grade level was and so forth.

This test administrator could administer a number of tests. We have ways of determining proper directions of people, whether or not they’re succeeding or not in terms of our design versus the school systems design or what have you, but the central record unit was keeping track of all this, and you would see somebody go into a training component and you would know how long they were there, and you would know what happened to them after they came out of that training.

Where did they go from there? All of this was done on a key punch machine and this is brand new stuff. Nobody else had this kind of a drive system. We had a key punch machine and a counter sorter. The counter sorter is the machine that you see in the old FBI movies when they wanted to show high tech stuff.

It’s the machine that made a huge amount of noise and went “BARARARA” and all the punch cards would go into different piles. Well, we had different decks. We had a deck for intake and it would give you the characteristics of the participants. That deck represented the characteristics of the participants. Then when somebody would move from one place like intake to assessment and orientation.

So, anyhow, you might be in this component, you go assessment and orientation, then you move on to maybe skills training or on the job training or something like that. We had teams that were composed of a coach, a counselor, a job developer – at least those three positions that I can recall. People were being handled by six teams, so we would look at the overall statistics of the program at the end of the month and say, “okay, overall, we had so many placements. We had so many dropouts of different kinds, but we also have evaluations of two types.”

One was of each of the teams. Each team had its own set of statistics that were identical to our inputs and outputs. How many people did you send to orientation? How many people did you send to skills training? How were the exits from your team? So the teams were the output of the total system was the aggregate of the units. So each team was being closely monitored and again, I emphasize, monitoring is the only way that you can achieve anything in these kinds of programs.

You have to know what you’re doing and have responsible staff. In order to affix responsibility, you break it down into units that are small enough to where you can look at it and say, “how come Mary ended up dropping out?” So what do we do? We have a meeting every month with every team. We had one monitor or one evaluator that did nothing but the teams and was responsible for doing reports on six teams every month, on every aspect of those teams. On the other side, we had a monitor that would look at the components. How did we do in welding training? It might be by institution. How did we do in skills training? And we had some subcontractors. So we might be looking at that subcontractor that had a very specific kind of a job.

So anyhow, it was a very comprehensive system in terms of tracking individuals through the system. You often discovered what your problems were as you went along and you would fix the system as you went along. So, you know, people are stacking up here at assessment of orientation. What’s going on there? Maybe we should maybe filter down the front end a little bit so that we can handle all the people that are stacking up. Teams can only handle a case load of so many.

I think we were an unusual program of, maybe, nine in the country. So anyhow, that was an interesting program. That was the first one that comprehensively included all these wonderful things like support services and training and so forth.

The delightful person that ran the summer program, which was a summer program. Delightful lady who was probably someone that was dead serious about making a success of her life as a professional, and ran this program. She had maybe more than a high school education, you know, possibly community college.

She ran an elaborate summer program. We’re talking about a couple million dollars worth of summer programs in all the parks and recreation areas and a lot of county departments. It was a huge job. So it was someone who was taking great advantage of being a staff member in an organization that respected black staff for their abilities.

She had the ability to do this. Wow. Great. Let’s let her do that. Let’s have her do that. I think we tried to figure out how somebody would work out best in the organization. Our counselors were largely degreed people. It started out with the counselors. Under the CEP, that was actually a subcontractor of the job service, the teams of the counselors and job developers were under the job service in our house, but they had a director that was in our house that was the job service. Why? Probably because of the job development part of it. You don’t want to have job placement being done by anybody other than the job service. Right? So you have them over your structure that results in job placement. So that was there. But the counselors could be degreed, and they didn’t have to come from the area because it was under a subcontract.

It was a subcontract of the job service, so they weren’t required to hire only from the target area. So we did have professional counselors, two of which I had brought in later into the social record unit to be monitors or evaluators or statisticians. But in any case, all of these folks worked together as teams.

Everybody we had had quirks. Okay. Weird personal kinds of stories.The fiscal officer was a Vietnam vet. He had fixed F-4 Phantoms at one of the bases in Vietnam. He was about my age, I guess, at the time and he was a tremendous fiscal officer.

He could throw money around pretty well in terms of putting it in the right places and he was known to be a Vietnam vet. I had been a little sailor boy at one time or another, “No, no, I’m not, I’m not the right type to take care of situations.” Right? But we could serve virtually any population that came to us.

Well, we quite purposefully developed training that we knew was in demand that was portable. You are talking about demand occupations, but actually one of the more important things is portability. Portability of an occupation. If you’re a nurse here, you can be a nurse there. LPN, same thing. So the medical stuff is really important in terms of portability.

But anyhow, we saw a demand for therapeutic massage. It paid pretty well. It was portable, and it was the kind of thing that we could buy the table. We could buy the training from a training provider. We could do those things, and we could place them, and that was fine.

The Department of Labor went bananas. Well, when they saw the placement that we had placed a massage therapist with anybody, labor went bananas. “What are you guys doing down there? Somebody is going to get a hold of it, the paper is going to get a hold of it.”

The paper did discover that it was a legitimate placement. That was really flying on the edge. But we knew that that was a portable occupation that had a certain amount of demand. And so we’d risk these things. We’d say, “okay, this is a small school. Let’s give them one. Let’s see if they can turn out one massage therapist where they can place. And if that works out, we’ll give them one more.”

I mean, we were not afraid to do a one off of something. So that’s a pretty good example of what was really pretty out there on the edge of what the government and society was willing to do. You could say it’s therapeutic massage and you could back it up, but it just didn’t sound so.

So we were out there on the edge on a lot of things and we’d have a lot of situations in which we would have two competing privates, like in truck driver training and a CDL (certified driver’s license) will get you a job anywhere. Again, portability. If you can drive a big rig, you can get a job here, you can get a job there. We needed jobs for men, also. I mean, at that point we were just thinking about demand occupations. So you’d have some friction between two privates that both did the same kinds of things. We’d decide on the basis of outcomes on who we’d be using most. We wouldn’t be exclusive to one or the other.

Scott Ferguson

So how often, in these programs, in the late 60s into the 70s, how often did you find that there were always demand sectors that you could train, support, and funnel people into?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. I remember inflation but as the economy receded, we were getting into a major recession eventually. Then it became really difficult. But it was at that point that CETA (Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) went to public service employment. Title VI. Title VI of CEDA is public service employment. It was countercyclical.

We were working with structural unemployment. That was our big deal. All of a sudden we’re talking about countercyclical. And we were saying, “what the hell is countercyclical? Counter to what? It’s a cycle, right? Counter to what cycle?” You know, we didn’t know cyclical.

Scott Ferguson

What year is this? 

Mario Rendian

It was ‘73 that the act was made. But I’m pretty sure our recession was getting into the early 80s. You can probably place better than I can.

Scott Ferguson

I think there were several in there.

Mario Rendina

There were several in there. But one that was most profound is when they started pouring a lot of money into Title VI. It was interesting because under the CEP, under TCEP, under the original program, they had, what I now can only assume, was Labor’s attempt at a pilot for public service employment.

We got a small grant for the public employment program and it was like $30,000 or something. What the heck are you going to do with $30,000? And it needed to be a public employee. How many can you hire for $30,000? I amused myself by saying, “look, we’ve got a program that if I hire them into the Central Records unit, they can enroll themselves. They can put themselves into a job, which is to monitor themselves.”

I said, “you know, this could be done with $30,000. You can’t hire more than one person. Why not hire somebody that can also help us out with the rest of our monitoring and stuff.” So anyhow, that was the public employment program and the giggle on that one was I said, “public employment program. Ah! It’s the PEP program!” Labor came down on me like you wouldn’t believe, with Palmdale boots, “No, we’re calling it the PEP program. You can’t call it the program.” “Okay.” But it was this tiny little thing, but it really was the forerunner of the whole Title VI public employment. They didn’t get much of a test out of us.

We had one, right? We converted them. We turned them into full-time employee. They worked up until 2000. They retired from the county. Anyhow, prior to 1970, we were under the hospital welfare board of Hillsborough County. That’s who the grant came to. In January of 1970, we became a county department. So, there’s the transition where we became county employees, but we were funded throughout the whole CETA and so forth. So anyhow, that is kind of a divisor, because all of a sudden you have to have benefits and so forth.

You’re getting into recession and public service employment and Title VI. What does it do? Jobs for people that met the definition of unemployed for a very short period of time. It was the job service definition of unemployed, meaning that you didn’t have a job and you were seeking employment, you had to be seeking employment, and you didn’t have a job for a period of time. I don’t know what it is, two weeks. Whatever it was back then, it was a relatively short period of time.

Scott Ferguson

So this wasn’t really for the long term unemployed.

Mario Rendina

Well, it was because people are coming out of college and they don’t have a job and they don’t have a horizon for a job. We employed a lot of those too. But, what was it for? Okay, it was government jobs that had a huge diversity in Hillsborough County. I’ll get into that in a minute. 

But also for private not-for-profits. And it was jobs. All we would pay is the salaries. So in the county, we built all the boardwalks at Lotus Lake Park, for example, and several other parks. The county would provide the materials and we did all the labor, including a supervisor. You had a contractor that was out of business who knew how to bang lumber together and make boardwalks.

Hire him as the supervisor. What do you do? You hire them at prevailing wages. We need to think about that in MMT, right? We’re hiring people in government at prevailing wages for the job. One guy is banging lumber. He gets that wage and it’s all established in the government structure, right?

We can create new jobs, but basically, let’s say we’re just filling jobs descriptions that exist in, say, the county and city structure and at those prevailing wages. It’s supposed to be a two year term and by that time, the economy will have recovered or the economy recovered enough for the counties and cities to pick up these people.

Okay, the same thing is going on in the state.

Scott Ferguson

Because their tax revenues are increasing.

Mario Rendina

So that’s the presumption. 

Scott Ferguson

Then they can afford to take these people on as full time employees and your funding mechanism ceases to support these jobs.

Mario Rendina

Right, and that’s the concept. Also for private not-for-profits. That was, I think, a very elegant idea because, in a recession, one of the first organizations to feel the pressure is private not-for-profits. I don’t have enough money to give any to the end of the line people. So we had onesies and twosies out there. It would be a job description: “I need a secretary in order to run my whole operation.” So the private not-for-profits, we had bunches of them. They would simply give us a two page proposal saying “I need this for that.”

We ended up with a complete public service employment section. You had the structural unemployment section over here basically doing all the structural unemployment stuff and you have public service employment over here. It was a separate shop. The city did their own and the county did their own.

They simply said, “you’re going to get $6 million and you’re going to get $6 million. Do with it the way you want.” The piece I was looking at was, let’s say, the county’s portion. So we got all the county departments, find out what their needs were and this was over and above whatever they were doing, they had to be over and above whatever they were doing.

Good. So you’re going to create a new library, but you don’t have any staff for it because your budget lines are full-on librarians. You get that built, fine, with public service employment, you can hire librarians that need to meet the eligibility requirements to be libraries, that just an example.

Scott Ferguson

And you can train them if you need to.

Mario Rendina

You could do that. There was a title in which you could do training and employment together. It was designed more for youth, where you do training in a job, and a kind of work experience with related training.

We always wanted it related. None of this business about sweeping the floor over here and learning to be an accountant over here. It had to be related. Anyhow, not too much training. You were usually picking up somebody that had a construction job over here, and see if we have a construction job over here.

So, the areas, in, in the county structure, there were most impacted were, were, things like parks and recreation. Okay. And, where, where you needed staff and where you could train them. You’re training them on the job with county employees at no cost. You know, that’s the cost of doing business is training, is training a new, you know, recreation work.

Okay. Parks and Rec was a big one. That is the single largest part of a summer program when school was out. Where the people in the city, the poor people in the city and in the county send their kids? They send them to the parks. And what we would do is staff those parks.

We had recreation leaders who would take smaller kids and supervise their volleyball or whatever the games were, you’d become recreation leaders. We had park ranger trainees that would help the park rangers with whatever they were doing, which might be emptying the big trash cans into the whatever.

But, it gave jobs for all these people and it provided child daycare for thousands of working parents. It was a marvelous program. Everybody loved that program. So it was fantastic. And it came out under Title 2 at one point. It was the only part that wasn’t structural under Title 2, it was a jobs program. Anyhow, that’s how public service employment was supposed to work, also. It was that you had a need and a way to impact it was staff. If it required equipment or nuts and bolts, that was at the county’s expense. Then the labor was on that side. This is one of the areas where it caught a lot of hell, in terms of the press, because it did have a minimal requirement up front, you could place professionals straight out of college. Okay. They did have student loans. They were people that were going to contribute to the economy if they could get a job. Some of the super examples of that kind of thing that bothers some people sometimes is that the state attorney was E.J. Salcines at the time, and E.J. had come from a school in Texas, this law school in Texas.

And that school became known as EJU, “E.J. Salcines University,” because he would bring them over and they would qualify because they had just been through law school. They didn’t have a job. They had been unemployed for two weeks. They were seeking employment and they would qualify for that. We staffed the State Attorney’s office and if they passed the bar, he’d hire them as full time. Not a bad thing. Mark Ober, our current state attorney? He was from public service employment. 

Okay, there was some high level stuff that went on, as well as low level stuff. I remember a guy that came in under CEDA, but it was the very, very beginning of CEDA and another good friend of mine was a counselor at the time.

I eventually hired him to do monitoring and evaluation of teams, but he was a counselor of one of our teams, and he got this guy, Vietnam veteran, wired to the gills. He was just a wired guy, stringy, strong Vietnam veteran. Crazy. “Yeah, I need a job. I want a job. Get me a job.” Our counselor, my good friend, says, “okay, look, here’s the deal. You give me 30 days retention and I’ll put you on a job. And you know what? You give me 30 days of retention, and you can come back to me, and we’ll talk about it again, and I might put you on another job, but you got to give me 30 days retention.” Playing the statistics game, but to the advantage of the client and to our own advantage. I mean, you know, this kid was beginning to learn how to hold a job. “I gotta hold it for 30 days. I gotta do that or he won’t give me another job.” I went to one of my retirement functions and he was there. He was there after he had gone through the structural program. We eventually got him over into public service employment with the Parks and Recreation Department. He was a multi-trade worker. He could change locks on every park in the county. I saw him one time when he was out there working with some of our summer program people, putting together a dock or floating dock. Yeah, that’s an enormous success. You can see public service employment as being abused. You can see it as being used properly. The whole thing has to do with how you’re going to implement a program. It all has to do with that.

Our implementation, I think, was highly successful, inasmuch as we converted 40% of the people we put into those jobs into full time employment with the county organization or with the private not-for-profit, I don’t think anybody else in the country did that. So it had to do with implementation and taking the regulations seriously.

You know, the regulations are saying that you are supposed to convert people as the economy improves and so forth and so on. So, when budget time would come around, we would say, “pay attention to your PSE people, you know, if you can make a spot in your budget for that PSE person, you need to take them.”

And at some point we started paying the benefits too, because to start with, all we were doing was paying the wages. At some point somebody decided, “oh my God, these people would do benefits.” And that came straight out of the public till, fortunately out of the national money, to back pay the benefits.

I say fortunate for local governments because, you know, there was a lot of back pay due. But anyhow, they really became exactly the same as county employees. A lot of those converted. So there were successes and, and there could easily be abuses. It was easy to have an abuse there.

And of course, the abuses are the ones that hit the papers. But as a program, think about the idea of WPA (Works Progress Administration) but think about that as having it go from top to bottom. Okay. Now we’re telling you about block grants again. CEDA was successful in as much as it got the attention of local governments, because it was a block grant to areas of a certain size.

It gave them a lot of muscle in a lot of ways. But what did it do? It could also take care of an awful lot of things that were going on in addition to, maybe, somebody building boardwalks. We had a pothole crew out there. Let me tell you how much people like the pothole crew.

Because, what happens? “I got a pothole in my yard! People are breaking their axles here.” 

“Call the county commissioner for your area.” 

“I got them potholes here.” 

You know, it was a huge success. It’s two guys behind a truck with asphalt, two shovels and a tamper.

By God, you saw that pothole and the politicians were going bananas. “Wow, what a program!” You can do infrastructure stuff at that level all the way up. That’s what I think needs to be done. First of all, you define infrastructure very broadly to include, at the high end of the whole thing, the electric grid.

Scott Ferguson

Sure. And bridges and dams and…

Mario Rendina

Bridges and dams and all that. And you look at the federal block grants to do those things. My God, the interstate highway system, the bridges, etc.. And let’s not forget the power grid. That’s part of our infrastructure. So you’ve got those, but then you do a block grant to the states and to areas of a certain size, and each takes care of its own and you call them infrastructure projects. They have to be infrastructure projects at the local level, at the state level, and at the federal level. Now you’re picking it up from the bottom to the top, okay. And when you’re doing this big stuff up here, you’re also hiring people at this level and the state is doing the same thing and the local levels are doing the same things.

Scott Ferguson

Things are flowing up and down at the same time.

Mario Rendina

Absolutely. My God, money can’t be spent better than that. You can probably follow the regulations. You see what I mean? If you broadly define infrastructure, so that you get to the pothole, but you say infrastructure and by God, I can write a regulation that says this is infrastructure and your projects must be inside of this parameter.

I can monitor that. I can determine whether you’re ripping me off or not as a local government, as a state government, or if I’m a IAG (Industry Advisory Group) at the federal level. I can see if that’s what is happening. So that is what I see as the cure-all of that. You could get a lot of political mileage behind it if people remember what they could do in their Title VI projects, because there were one offs and there were projects and the projects are what I’m talking about here, being the parks, the boardwalks, the, you know whatever.

Scott Ferguson

And this is during the 70s and the 80s.

Mario Rendina

Yeah.

Scott Ferguson

So did Tampa, or Hillsborough County, have a better time than the rest of the country as a result of these projects, do you think?

Mario Rendina

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s sort of like WPA, right? Okay. You go to North Florida and you go to the Suwannee River anywhere on the Suwannee River.

You will find, within two miles, every two miles, you’ll find a concrete boat launch that is made out of concrete, that was done and poured in the 30s and I guarantee you it is the best boat launch you have ever seen in your life. The whole concept of projects can work fine.

That was done by local labor, no doubt. It can also be very high quality stuff, but with the boardwalks and all that stuff, if you live around Hillsborough County, you need to talk to people. I wish some of the people that put people in public service employment were around that you could talk to because it was a very, very broad program and I’m only remembering some of the projects that went down.

Scott Ferguson

So there was a moment of regained autonomy at the county level where you could do a lot of good. Then came this new legislation from the feds. 

Mario Rendina

We pretty much continued to do the adult work. Yeah. All of that worked out pretty, pretty darn well, really. Meanwhile it’s becoming more and more private and at some point, the Job Training Partnership Act rears its head and JTPA is clearly going to be a private sector dominated council. The JTPA council is going to be private sector dominated and it was. So the shift then goes from government control of everything that’s going on, under a council that they have absolute control over. Everybody is getting what they want anyhow, so it’s not a big deal, to a more private sector dominated kind of thing. The whole thing came back together at one point with city staff and county staff.

Okay, you’re backing in two silos.

But I was like, at one point, the director of both of the operating staffs, whether it was county or city, I was now a county staff member. We’ve gone over to JTPA. But the councils wanted to create one council. They said, “we’re not going to have two CEDA councils,” because for a while there we had two CEDA councils chugging along.

We said, “no wait a minute. The superintendent of schools, they have a meeting over here and then two weeks later he has a meeting over here with this CEDa council. All that crap got to be brought back together. Everybody agrees? Yes, it does, but what we’re going to do is we’re going to run parallel until JTPA goes along. We are going to have one council that controls both of them. Okay. Now this is where privatizing comes into it, because at some point, the director of the council and that staff becomes privatized in every county in the state of Florida, every prime sponsor in the state of Florida, with the exception of Hillsborough.

Hillsborough was the last holdout, where it was run by the government, and at that point, county was the government entity.

Scott Ferguson

What are the political forces or legal changes that create this privatization?

Mario Rendina

The JTPA Council is very private sector oriented.

Scott Ferguson

Which comes from legislation. The law was written to be private sector oriented.

Mario Rendina

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. A lot of the councils really wanted the private sector to have the ball and run with it. 

Scott Ferguson

What years are we talking about? 

Mario Rendina

I don’t know. The JTPA, we can look up. But anyhow, when JTPA forms that’s when…

Scott Ferguson

Is this the 90s?

Mario Rendina

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re in the 90s. 

Scott Ferguson

Is this part of Clinton’s?

Mario Rendina

Could be, but he was mostly under CEDA. Nixon formed CEDA. So Ford’s in there, but only for a short while, a couple of years and then Carter. That continues and that was CEDA all through there. Yeah. And I think you can say JTPA is basically a baby of Clinton’s in the 1990s.

I remember my friend and fiscal officer went to work for the Department of Labor, and ended up in Colorado and the Denver office. He said, “You’ll never see a more Republican president than Clinton.” I think he was alluding to the privatization that we were beginning to see.

When the board started becoming private not-for-profits, the law clearly read that the buck stops at the political entities doorstep. Okay, but what would happen is you’d have a bad audit on somebody, and they’d work out some way where the political entity didn’t have to pay money. “Okay, well, we’ll reduce your funding by that $10,000 and then you play games with it up there in Atlanta and make sure that everybody’s made whole.”

So it was never a real threat. Around the state, they became private, not-for-profit, they incorporated. Then they would take the whole show and run with it. Budget, finance, bank accounts, they ran the whole thing. It became a privatized unit and the county was still over here. Here’s the very, very important distinction between the CEDA system and JTPA to follow. As long as it was under the county, for example, or the city or whatever, but under this county, every contract, every modification of contract, anything that had to do with change or new had to go through the county’s budget and finance office. It had to go through the county’s legal office.

It had to go through every office that any agenda item had to go through. It was difficult to do fraud and abuse when it had to go through county legal and county budget and finance, the budgets had to balance. They had to equal the amount of money you had available. They had to add up to something.

They had to do that, you couldn’t put in hidden little items. They might get found. So when you allow the privatization, because it’s the government that allows the privatization, you become a private board. And the county could still say, “oh yeah, we’ll listen to you. You’re a private board. We’ll listen to you. But the money comes through us because we hold the bag on any illegal activities that go on in any of the funds. We’re still holding the bag over here.” And at some point, they gave that up and said, “okay, you guys have got it wrong.” Even though they really were still holding the bag, they gave away the shop.

And when you do that, then you start having things that happened here and other places.

Scott Ferguson

Like what? What happens?.

Mario Rendina

Well, you can decide to have extremely lavish staff parties, like what happened here. The next thing that really happens, though, at the same time as the board becomes privatized, along comes TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) of which is what? Which is Clinton. Clinton’s welfare will no longer be as it has always been. What do they call it?

Scott Ferguson

The end of welfare as we know it.

Mario Rendina

The end of welfare as we know it. It comes in at the same time as these entities are becoming privatized and Mario’s right in the middle of this mess. Okay. At some point, I became the TANF director, also. Staff director. Writer, too. I did the planning for it. We had a contract, right for TANF. I can’t remember what god awful stuff it incorporated. But anyhow, I had a planner write a proposal and it went out to the world and back came Goodwill Industries and Lockheed Martin.

Oh, yes, Lockheed Martin. They make rockets. They also wanted to do – and did – TANF programs. Not in this area. We got Goodwill and then somebody over there had another agency and over the period of a couple of years, this entity would get rid of Goodwill and get in somebody else. I was there the day that Lockheed Martin showed up at the county trying to talk the county into going with them.

But anyhow, I put out the proposal for TANF with a neophyte planner. She was bright. All this stuff has to go in there. You know, you have got to fix that and so it goes out as an RFP (request for proposal).

We got back 2 in. thick volumes about “how we’re going to do this,” “how Goodwill is going to do all this stuff,” and so forth. So TANF got totally inner meshed with that mess. The councils became the same thing. I mean the TANF council became part of the overall council.

Not only that, but critical to the whole thing is the privatized councils at a state level all get together. We all meet together and we have an organization that is an organization composed of all the executive directors, that are executive directors now because they are privatized. We all get together and we form an organization.

Our organization is so politically powerful, particularly with the private sector, that we tell the state we want the employment service and they got it. This employment service here in the city of Tampa, throughout Hillsborough County and throughout the state are run by the workforce boards, the privatized workforce boards those directors are under and literally say yay or nay to who is going to be the next executive director for the chief of that office.

Okay. So all that is basically under a private, not-for-profit. It’s a private sector deal. All of it. That’s the horror of the whole thing. Hey, when was the last time that you heard, “oh, there’s going to be a workforce board meeting that maybe you should attend?” Or, “gee, I wonder what’s going on with TANF these days?”

Scott Ferguson

So, I want to have you spell out, in a bullet point kind of way, some of the key points of fallout.

One is, concentrated power and lack of transparency and lack of open public engagement.

Mario Rendina

Are you talking about now? 

Scott Ferguson

What I mean, what’s happened since the 90s in your experience? Another thing that you’ve told me about previously that I want to have you talk about, but I’m assuming there are other points that followed as well. But, one is about data collection in contrast to your early experience collections and what all this means for people.

Mario Rendina

Devolution. As long as the government held the bag and things needed to filter through its organizational structure in order to become a product of the board of county commissioners or or the mayor, as long as that filtering process was there, I think two things happened. It was basically for the public good. Okay. We’re approving projects that are for the public good.

Whatever they are training, whatever it is, private sector training doesn’t make any difference. We’re doing all this for the public good because that’s what we do as a government. We filter through all these mechanisms to make sure that it’s good, that it doesn’t look like any fraud and abuses in the middle of this thing. It’s for the public good.

And we have all the controls. One I didn’t mention is that you have a county audit. We also got audited by the county as well as a required independent audit. So you had an independent audit, but the county audited you too. Okay. Now you move over to a privatized board and a privatized organization organization.

Let’s say, I run a private school and I get on that board and I say, “Let’s take any non demand occupation. What I teach in my school is a non-demand occupation. It is what I teach.” But I’m a member of the board and this guy over here is a member of the board, and the school system doesn’t like it.

The school system says “we don’t want you to teach non-demand occupations.” So there’s some squabbling going on there, but they have 50% of the board in the private sector, 50% of the board. It has to be more than 50%. So it’s 50% plus a guy or gal, okay.

So he says, “hey private sector guys. What do you think? I mean, can I do this?” he says, “it’s this damn system school system that is giving me a hard time about this. You know these non-demand occupations that I’m training people in, they’re perfectly fine. If you can get enough of your buddies to say “yeah, okay, we’ll let you have that kind of training.”

And I tried to find demand occupations on the computer and I’m going to follow up on it in a little bit, but I think the system has completely collapsed. You know, the school system, I’m sure, does things in demand occupations and community college because that’s the bread and butter. But in terms of the system, I have no idea what’s going on there.

It’s all maneuvering and not for the public good. That’s the point. It’s for yourselves. We’ve gotten independent. We’re a private not-for-profit organization and by God, if we want to go over and have a conference over in Melbourne, let’s go to the space center. Let’s have a conference over there. Another example: we’re going to have one down in Naples. Naples is a very expensive place. So we go down there and of course in a lavish hotel and all that. Like I say, speakers are of no particular consequence. I think I was a speaker at a number of these, and I was of no particular consequence.

We’re going to do this and then, “okay, it’s golf time!” The links out there are horribly expensive, but we’re holding the event in a hotel where the links are, and you just go out and say, “Oh, okay, so it’s 3:30pm. Well, okay, just enough of the stuff over here. We’re going to go play golf.” I don’t play golf. So they went on to play golf and then you have the evening doing evening social and so forth and so on and then get back together for the next day. But, when you’re privatized, you can do that. How about you try to get a party through the board of county commissioners?

Not only that, under government, you get a per diem. I’m sure you run into that in the education system, right? You got a per diem, you’re going to go over here and you’re going to get so much, so much a day for meals and whatever and either, enough to cover the room, or if it happens to be an expensive place, they cover the room and give you the per diem for the meals.

That goes away in your private not-for-profit. You say, “yeah, I think we ought to have a per diem that, first of all, is going to cover the hotel, whatever that is, and then $200 a day? You think we can live on $200, so let’s do $200 a day plus the room,” for example, you could do that.

As long as it’s policy, as long as we all agree that that is the policy, compared to when you try and do it without it being the policy and the director is in trouble. But if you can get everybody to agree that this is policy. The state will have to let it go by the same, let it go by, I mean, well, it’s policy…It’s not very good policy, but it’s policy.

Scott Ferguson

So maybe a final question.

Is there more of a problem matching people with demand sectors? Is that what you see as the crucial task with public works as a supplement in a way where in a counter-cyclical way or what?

I mean, if the goal is full employment, by which we mean, there is always a job made available for anyone who wants.

Mario Rendina

I think what it boils down to is you have to decide one thing. You have to decide whether or not the employment and training of people is a government function or not. I think it’s as simple as that. It’s either something that the government does or it’s something the government doesn’t do. And as long as the government does it, it will be in the public interest in some way or other.

The minute that it’s not the government’s job, who’s the oversight? And it all boils down to that. It boils down to oversight. And that really gets into your whole business about monitoring and statistics and management information systems and all that. As long as it is considered a function of government, I think you’re okay and the funds come down to the government to spend with all of its safety nets and so forth.

When it gets over on the private side, it is completely opaque. I can’t tell you. I’m a product of the business and I couldn’t tell you the name of what the job service is now. It’s changed three times since I retired ten years ago.

It’s changed three times. It’s the Agency for Workforce Innovation or it’s the Bay Area Workforce something or other. Not the job service anymore.

So, you know, that basically boils the nut down to, it needs to be defined either as a government function or not. And if it’s not, you’re going to get what we got and so we’ve got to move back the other way. 

Scott Ferguson

Well thank you so much. This has been so illuminating. 

Mario Rendina

I’ve had a terrific time. As Lois [my spouse] would tell you, I could go on for hours about this stuff.

* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.