Disney World workers in Central Florida are battling with management for a new and improved union contract. In the process, they’re also trying to correct a gaping historical injustice. Workers with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 631 say a major pay gap exists at Disney World that leaves workers in traditionally feminized jobs, such as costume-making…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic compounded the existing crises of capitalism for workers everywhere. This was most obviously apparent for “frontline” or “essential” workers, who were forced by their need to survive to risk disease, disability, and potential death on a daily basis at their jobs. While lauded in media and culture in the early days of the pandemic, the rewards these workers have actually received have been precarity, damaged health, depressed wages, and for far too many, an early death. As a new ruling class narrative that insists the pandemic is over becomes hegemonic, the stories and ongoing crisis faced by these workers is fading from public view. In his most recent book, The Work of Living: Working People Talk about Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez chronicled the stories of frontline workers in the first year of the pandemic. Max joins the The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his book and the ongoing struggle of the working class under capitalism in the age of COVID-19.
Production: Dwayne Gladden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley, Kayla Rivara
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Chris Hedges:
Working men and women kept the country from disintegrating during the pandemic. They staffed the hospitals, stocked the shelves, drove the buses, manned the cash registers, cooked and delivered the food, grew the produce, drove the trucks, and collected the garbage. Yet these vital frontline workers were also sacrificed in disproportionate numbers in a system of grotesque inequality. In late 2020 and early ’21, at the height of the pandemic, Maximillian Alvarez conducted a series of interviews with workers battling to survive. They did not have the luxury of working from home, ordering what they needed from Amazon, and having it delivered. Their jobs, difficult before the pandemic, now came with grave health risks and few benefits or protection. Alvarez, as he does in his podcast Working People, set out to tell their stories. He raises up the voices and lives of those, the commercial media have largely rendered invisible, laying bare the huge divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Joining me to discuss his book, the Work of Living and the Untold Stories of Working Men and Women is Maximillian Alvarez, who is also the editor-in-chief of The Real News. So I read these stories, and there were certain themes that came out, which I wanted to ask you about. And I want to begin with, which was a constant for even when you’re interviewing a burlesque dancer, is the importance of work, not just in terms of exchanging labor for a wage, but in terms of self-importance.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, one of the things that I hope comes through in this book, in the interviews with workers that I do on my podcast, Working People and here at The Real News Network is working people aren’t dumb. Working people hold the world up. And there’s so much skill and knowledge and experience in everything that folks do and all the vital forms of labor that they perform to keep society running. And I think that you really see that in all of these interviews, whether it’s me talking with Willy, a gig worker in Texas who details all the ways that he goes above and beyond to get people their groceries, to navigate the craziness at this or that grocery store, or Kyle, a sheet metal worker in Louisville who really takes a whole lot of pride in the work that he and his coworkers do. Nick, a grave digger in New Jersey, you just hear directly from the people who do this kind of work, all the attention and accrued knowledge and even love that goes into performing the vital labor that they do.
Chris Hedges:
And yet COVID made them ask questions about work and about their place in society that they hadn’t asked before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that, honestly, as a society, there’s still a lot of big questions that we haven’t fully confronted since the onset of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. I think the most obvious is that COVID-19 forced all of us to confront our own mortality, in a way that perhaps we never had to before. And I think that you’re seeing the after effects of that. I do think that COVID-19 was a really concentrated, terrifying experience, but it was also an extended moment when workers realized that they are essential, that the work that we do does keep society and the economy running, even while the board members and shareholders and the corporate executives were able to ride out the storm in their second homes. It was people like the folks that I talked to in this book, who kept us all from falling into the abyss.
And I think that working people haven’t forgotten that. They know how essential they are. And so I think that you are seeing that sort of trickle out into things like the Great Resignation, record numbers of people quitting their jobs, a lot of whom I’ve talked to who said, “I got to sit down during COVID and think, ‘Is this what I want to be doing with my life? Should I be accepting the poor treatment that I’m getting at work? Should I be asking for more? If I died tomorrow, would I be pleased with how I’ve lived my life?’” But it’s also, I think, translated to workers becoming more militant on the shop floor. We’ve seen a lot of strikes over the past couple years, a unionization wave that’s extending into industries that have been very hard to unionize, like the service industry, because COVID, again, showed workers how little say they actually have over consequential decisions, whether that be when to open schools in-person, or what safety measures to implement in restaurants. If working people were the ones bearing the brunt of those decisions, but had no input over those decisions, a lot of people realize that actually having a voice on the job and banding together to demand what we need is actually something worth fighting for. And we’re seeing that happening all over the place.
Chris Hedges:
There’s a juxtaposition which you address in the book between the effusive, kind of lauding by the wider society of these quote/unquote essential workers. And yet during the pandemic, they’re clearly treated as if they’re disposable.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that this is one of the biggest disconnects or sort of logical knots that we’re still trying to unravel right now, because… I try to make this clear in the book, in the conversations that I have with these 10 amazing human beings, that there was also a lot of good that we saw in each other over the past two and a half years. Working people showed their mettle, not just at the workplace, but people sacrificed to bring their immunocompromised family and neighbors groceries. They found ways, even remotely, to stay connected to each other and to take care of one another. And also there are these great moments, like the one captured by the great artist Molly Crabapple, who designed the cover for the book, where people were standing on their balconies banging pots and pans in honor of the frontline workers who were risking their lives, many of whom never asked to risk their lives. They were just trying to make a paycheck at that very scary moment. But I think we collectively acknowledged one another in that way and celebrated one another.
And corporations and businesses really capitalized on that and took it as a marketing opportunity. So many different businesses celebrated their frontline workers as heroes and even used the opportunity to get favorable coverage in the press for giving their workers quote/unquote hero pay, like Amazon. Amazon was touted as this great benefactor for giving workers hero pay, that it then ripped away from workers weeks later and no one said anything about it. And it was a very calculated move. The reason that businesses like Amazon did not call it hazard pay is because then they would have to keep paying it as long as the hazard persisted. But calling it hero pay makes it seem like it’s just something given in recognition of heroism.
But actually on the shop floor, when workers would raise concerns over safety protocols like Christian Smalls at Amazon’s facility in Staten Island, they were fired for it, or they were reprimanded for it. And all the while, I talked to Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, a nurse in California for this book. She’s understandably, like so many healthcare workers, very bitter about the fact that their hospitals were celebrating the staff as heroes, while not listening to those very same staff members when they were saying, “Here’s the PPE that we need. Here are the safe staffing ratios that we need to provide the care that every patient deserves.” So workers were really, again, held up as these kind of human-shaped cardboard cutouts. But when it actually came to listening to what workers on the shop floor were saying that they needed, they were, as always, comfortably ignored.
Chris Hedges:
You do a good job of describing what work conditions are like. One person you interviewed, Nick, who’s… I just was stunned, and I’ll let you explain it. And of course, the pandemic exacerbates the difficulty and danger of these work conditions. But just lay that out. I mean, there are things that came with being a grave digger that I didn’t expect, including, of course, direct exposure to toxins. But you can talk a little bit about Nick’s work and what happened during the pandemic.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, the interview with Nick Galuppo, a grave digger in north-central New Jersey was one of the first ones that I recorded for the book. So in a lot of ways, it kind of set the tone for the other interviews that I did. And it really… I mean, I’ll let folks read it, but I think it’s a really fascinating conversation that he and I got to have, where we learned more about him, how he fell into working at a graveyard, what that work entailed before the pandemic hit, and the working conditions that he describes there. I mean, without going into full depth mean, we’re not talking about your typical flat suburban memorial park. We’re talking about an older graveyard with differing soil contents that largely serves a Jewish population, where the sort of customs and traditions are to bury people the day that they die or at latest one day after.
So what that means is they’re not embalmed. They’re not being buried in metal caskets. They’re being buried in quarter-inch pine boxes with wooden dowels, so that everything is decomposable. And again, it’s an older cemetery, where you have this older equipment that guys are jerry-rigging to keep going. And he describes it, Nick does, as a fast-paced construction site for the dead. And then COVID hit, and he talks about those early days in the pandemic. New York was really the epicenter of it in that kind of area of the country. And Nick saw that. He and his coworkers saw that in the graveyard, because he tells me that, on average, they do about four or five burials a day at this cemetery before the pandemic hit. In those early months, that number tripled. And so these guys are running all over the place trying to do an essential service.
You can tell when Nick is talking how much care he takes with the work that he does. He takes very seriously the responsibility of offering families a chance to send their loved ones off into the great beyond as best they can. And so he understands the high stakes of doing what they do right. But when you are trying to do that, when you’ve got 15 burials lined up, one after the other, and you’re running around this graveyard where some parts of the graveyard have water tables that are full, others where you have caves in, it really does paint a gruesome picture. But I think it makes you appreciate the invaluable work that folks like Nick do to provide that sort of peace and comfort that so many of us depend on when we bury our loved ones.
Chris Hedges:
I want to talk about a little. He has to sometimes remove these disintegrated coffin. I mean, talk about what happens.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, like I said, in this particular cemetery, given the population that it predominantly serves, the burial practices that are required of folks like Nick, and the geographical makeup of the cemetery that he’s working at, we don’t go into the goriest details of what he does, but you definitely get a sense of how packed that cemetery is. And again, when folks aren’t embalmed, when you have soil that gets a lot of water in it, when people are buried so closely together, you can kind of use your imagination that, if someone is being buried right next to a site where two people were buried the year before, and there’s been caves ins… I mean, the one detail that Nick gives is they got to put these shale bars in between the two graves on the side, so that essentially human remains don’t fall into the hole where new person is being buried.
And again, I think the thing that Nick says that is very profound is he says, “Our job is not just to bury holes and put caskets in it. Our job is to provide families with a sense of peace at a very critical moment, where they are saying goodbye to their loved ones for the last time.” And so imagine feeling the burden of trying to provide that peace, when you’re working in such a morbid kind of environment, where so many things can go wrong, and you’re dealing with so many gruesome realities and old equipment. And at the same time, these guys are also terrified of getting sick. These guys are also… Go ahead.
Chris Hedges:
There’s no personal protective equipment, hazmat suits, anything like that. This is Nick: “You can get a pair of leather gloves or something, or you could shove some Vicks or a scarf in your nose if you want.” That’s all the protection they’re given.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And he also talks about how on construction sites and a bunch of other sites, where kind of this sort of fast pace industrial work takes place, you have a lot of OSHA regulations and rules put in place to protect workers. And so in a lot of sites, if it’s raining outside, if there’s inclement weather conditions, you’re going to shut down the work site for a day. With a graveyard, you can’t do that. People die, and they need to be buried. And so rain or shine, snow or sleet, these guys are out there doing this work. And again, it was the perfect storm that Nick described, where numbers of burials have tripled. The conditions under which people were being buried were not getting any better. All the while, those sort of whatever lax OSHA regulations there are that pertain to graveyards, the fact of the matter is that on a day-to-day reality management throws those out the window. They say, “Get those people in the ground. I don’t care how you do it.” And that’s kind of how Nick understands that. I don’t think that folks Nick necessarily want or agree with that, but they understand the reality in front of them. And this is what they put up with that a lot of us just never see.
Chris Hedges:
Let’s talk about Willy. So he is a gig worker. I mean, I found this interesting, because it highlighted the kind of stress that gig workers are under, same with Amazon workers, for instance. I mean, they are measured down to the second, and their performance is rated on how fast. He’s a shopper, so he has to get food. And what happens when there’s long lines? What happens, he writes, when he calls shopper support and nobody picks up? That kind of stress, can you speak to that?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, gig workers, it’s a form of neo-feudalism, frankly, what we call the gig economy. And I point people to the great work of scholars, like Veena Dubal, who’ve written about this extensively or listened to folks like Willy or Vanessa Bain, another great worker organizer, who’s been speaking out about these horrendous conditions that gig workers have been working, under even before the pandemic. But so many of us, including many people in my own family, were drawn into the promise of the gig economy 10, 12 years ago, because it promised that we could be our own boss. It promised a degree of independence.
Chris Hedges:
Let me just interrupt, because I read in one of the questions you were a gig worker yourself in essence. What did you work in a-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, so I was a warehouse temp 10 years ago, while my mom and dad were both driving for Uber and Lyft. This was when the recession hit our family, like millions of other families, very hard. We eventually lost everything including the house I grew up in. But working as a temp, that’s kind of like the proto gig work. I mean, you’re not hired by the company technically, which essentially means you can get paid less. You can be fired at the drop of a hat. There was even a class action lawsuit filed against the temp agency I worked for, because they were stealing our wages so much. But yeah, I mean, the promise, again, for my folks and for folks like Willy, was that you can be your own boss, and actually if you can make a decent take-home pay, and you can do it on your own time. What we have seen the trend over the past decade is what Bernie Sanders famously called a race to the bottom, where the take home pay keeps going down.
And these black-boxed algorithms that determine everything, they determine, like you said, what route people should take from their home or from a drop-off destination to the grocery store. It determines how long that should take. It determines their ratings and what they should get paid for this or that delivery. And what Willy talks about is right when the pandemic was hitting, Shipt, which is the company he works for, which is the delivery service that is owned by Target Corporation, made adjustments to its algorithm and was telling workers, “Oh, this is going to be good for you. You’re going to get more take-home pay.” And Willy noticed that his take-home pay was going down. So he started talking to folks online, and he talked to over 500 people in a matter of weeks and was realizing that this was happening everywhere. And again, they have no control over that.
And they also have no control over all the things that can crop up when you’re trying to make those deadlines. If you’re trying to get a delivery in at 20 minutes, but say it’s around Christmas-time, and the lines are super long, and there are only two people at checkout, and maybe the card that Shipt gives you doesn’t work. And so like you said, you got to call Shipt shopper service. No one’s answering the phone. All the while your time’s clicking down and you have no control over that, but you, as the worker, are the one who take the brunt of it. Your ratings go down. Your pay goes down. And if your ratings go down enough, they can kick you off the platform, thus ripping away your lifeline. And so whenever Willy would raise this with Shipt or post about it on Shipt-owned Facebook groups, he would get viciously ridiculed by the moderators and by fellow shoppers and told that the problem was with him. So this is really what the gig economy does, is it puts all the burden onto workers and all the responsibility and all the liability onto workers, while it gives them, in fact, no control over their schedule. And the algorithm kind of is the all-seeing boss that tells them what to do every second of every day.
Chris Hedges:
Well, he gets so desperate, he wants to hire someone to help him, so he can make the time slot to stand in a line, while he gets the food, and they won’t let him.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, again, speaking to the brilliance I think of everyday working people, Willy will be the first to tell you that he’s an introverted guy. And he is not a natural-born organizer. It’s very uncomfortable for him to talk to so many people. But what I think you see is a guy who realizes that he’s getting screwed over. And so he starts digging into the contract. He starts reading the fine print. He starts seeing that there’s a problem here. And he kind of forces himself to talk to more people about these issues. And the example that you’re pointing out was Willy, he’s like, “I’ve worked as an independent contractor in construction before. Based on what I know from being an independent contractor, I can bring, say my daughter, with me to stand in line during Christmas-time, because those lines take forever while I go do the shopping. But in the Shopper’s Guide that Shipt gives us, they tell you that you can’t do that.” And so again, it’s kind of forced it’s leaving you no option to actually make your quotas and stuff like that.
But what Willy also points out is that legally they can’t necessarily do that. So they can essentially walk right up to the line of telling you, “You can’t have anyone helping you,” but within the fine print of the Shipt shopper agreement, you actually can do it, because Shipt wants to leave itself a back door for if it’s ever taken to court to say, “Oh, no, actually this is an independent contractor.” This is what they’re always trying to bounce. They want to tell workers that they’re independent, while taking away any independence that they actually have.
Chris Hedges:
Was it in Willy’s, or just a little aside, that at Christmas the tips went down? Was that Willy?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, yeah. Willy, he talks about… And there’s a lot of factors that go into that, right? But yeah, he was noticing that his tips were going down, because he was working twice as hard and still making less. And so he was like, “Something’s going on here.” But on top of that, he was noticing… People had probably all seen these commercials, whether it’s for Shipt or Instacart, they always say, “Our shoppers go above and beyond.” And they were even in these shopper groups on Facebook, people were celebrating Shipt shoppers for buying balloons for their customers or feeding their dogs or walking their dogs. And Willy had the gall to ask his fellowship Shipt shoppers, he’s like, “Why am I going to walk someone’s dog? If that dog gets loose and gets hit by a car, or if it bites me, I’m liable for that. I’m not getting paid for that. And yet it’s being held up as a virtue, when in fact, we should not be asked or expected to be doing this, when we’re already living so close to the bone.”
Chris Hedges:
I want to talk about the… Barbara Ehrenreich once said that being poor in America, or the working poor, it’s one long emergency, because your financial situation is so precarious, that if your car breaks down, if you are laid off, your entire life crumbles. And there’s a moment in, I think she’s a bartender in the book, and that happens. Of course, the bar is closed. And she admits that she was an alcoholic. She had been sober, and she goes right back into the drinking. So talk about that precariousness. We know the financial cost, but, throughout the book, there’s a very deep emotional and psychological cost.
Maximillian Alvarez:
There is. And I think one of the things that I hope people take away from the book and from this moment that we are in, this moment of labor unrest and worker action, is that so many of these problems existed long before COVID-19 ever hit our shores. Workers, who have been going on strike the past two years, these are long brewing problems. We are headed towards a national rail shutdown, because of problems that have been brewing in the industry for decades. I mentioned that because, up till COVID-19 hit in 2020, so many people were living so close to the bone. There were study after studies saying that one unexpected emergency expense would be enough to throw people into financial ruin, to the point of potentially losing the roof over their heads, so on and so forth. This is the reality that working people have been living in for a long time. Since the 1980s working people in this country have been more productive than they ever have been, and yet they share in less of the fruits of that productivity, while more of it gets pocketed by the 1%.
Chris Hedges:
Well, then the New York Times ran a story a couple years ago. They said that if wages kept pace with productivity, the minimum wage would be $20 an hour.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And yet minimum federal minimum remains 7.25. It remains 7.25 in places like Texas. And this is something that, again, really comes through in the book, is that, because of how much we have kind of limited the economic path to a comfortable, dignified life for working people, so many people were right on the edge, when something like COVID-19 hit. Then you add on top of that the ways that we have hollowed out the social safety nets and public institutions that are supposed to protect people in that sort of environment. So Ashley, the bartender in Portland, also describes trying to get unemployment when the system essentially buckled. My parents couldn’t get unemployment for weeks because that system was buckling under pressure.
Chris Hedges:
Isn’t this they were trying to call the unemployment office and they just put it on auto dial?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Chris Hedges:
So keep calling and calling. I just have a couple minutes left. You did mention the supplemental income and checks and extension of unemployment benefits. And that’s a theme in the book, and it turned out to be very, very important. All of that has ended, of course.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right, yeah. So I think one of the things that workers, who I talked to for this book, are sort of conflicted about is that they say, “Yes, for all the ways that the government, the market, the media failed us,” the fact of getting one stimulus check, the extended unemployment benefits, the eviction moratorium, the pause on student debt payments, the the child healthcare tax credits, those were a major boon for a lot of folks, who, again, were living so close to the bone, to the point where some could make more on unemployment than they could working in the early days of the pandemic. And that, they tell me, gave them a chance to actually stop from the rat race for just a second and think, “Is this what I want to be doing with my life? Should I be working somewhere where I’m treated better? Should I quit my job and go look elsewhere? Or should I stay at my job and demand better pay?” And yet, the order-giving class could not let that happen. And so they ripped away pandemic era vital social aid. And now they are jacking up prices on everybody and clawing all those gains back and calling it inflation. And we still haven’t raised the federal minimum wage, so you’re seeing a real class struggle here.
Chris Hedges:
I think we should be clear that most of these programs were initiated by Donald Trump, and most of them were ended by Joe Biden.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. I mean, it was potentially paradigm shifting, especially if you compare it to how we responded to the financial crash in 2008. Families mine were left to fall into the abyss, while everyone threw their weight behind the banks and the big corporations. What Donald Trump started by putting money directly in people’s pockets was a huge change in policy. And unfortunately, it seems like we’re doing everything we can to unlearn the potential lesson that we could have learned from that.
Chris Hedges:
I just want to close it just quickly on mental health, because that’s another theme that runs through most of the interviews. There’s huge mental health struggles, not only among the people you interview, but also many of those people. You interview a teacher, for instance. And they have to deal, and they don’t have any resources.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They don’t. I mean, right now the entire country’s talking about learning loss for students. And as Rebecca Garelli, an educator in Arizona and an organizer, tells me, she’s like, “Apart from parents, no one’s more concerned with students’ mental health than us, because we have to deal with it on a day-to-day basis.” Of course, teachers care about students’ mental health, their learning loss, their ability to kind of develop socially. But if we cared about that as a society, we would’ve cared about that for decades leading up to this point, when resources like counselors on campus have been hollowed out. And there’s so many ways that we can actually take care of our students and our educators, but we actually have to listen to what the educators are saying. And unfortunately, that’s not what’s happening right now.
Chris Hedges:
Great. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden, Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
Tax breaks such as TIFs, PILOTS, Brownfields Credits, Enterprise Zone Tax credits are used by corporate developers across the country to defer millions worth of property taxes for decades while working class property owners pay the full tax rate. TRNN reporters Taya Graham, Stephen Janis, and longtime Baltimore reporter Jayne Miller take a deep dive into this wealth creation mechanism that remains out of the hands of the people and leaves city taxpayers on the hook.
Taya Graham: Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch. Now, before we go any further, I know you’re used to seeing me on the Police Accountability Report, but as we always make clear on that show, bad economic policy drives bad policing, and that’s why Stephen and I produce a show called The Inequality Watch. It’s like the Police Accountability Report, in that it’s all about holding power accountable, but in this case, we focus on the uber rich, not cops. And what could be wrong with that?
Anyway, on today’s show, we’re going to be talking about a long-term investigative project we’ve been working on that gets to the heart of why the rich keep getting richer and the rest of us, well, you know the rest of that story. It’s actually a project that touches on greed, government, a political economy that boils down to something you’ve probably never thought of as an instrument of wealth, an acronym. That’s right. A couple of letters put together actually spells big profits for developers. Now, I know right now you’re saying, “How can a few letters from the alphabet strung together mean big wealth to tax breaks?”
Well, that’s the mystery we’re going to unpack today. And to do so, I’m joined by two of the best investigative reporters in the business who have been doing a deep dive into this little inequality machine. But first, I need all the PAR viewers to make a slight adjustment for me, at least for the moment, Stephen is going to be inside. Not for long, of course, but just for now. And of course, legendary reporter, Jayne Miller, can sit wherever she wants. Okay, now we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, like I was saying, broad economic inequality is not only widespread, but in some respects hidden. What I mean is that the processes that can heighten inequality can sometimes be cloaked inside what otherwise seems like the routine, everyday, onward march of capitalism. Case in point, is what we uncovered in Baltimore and beyond regarding a tax break system that is emblematic of how our country’s inequality machine works. It’s a system for enriching developers we started uncovering, as we began digging into how several apparently upscale projects are financed.
What we’ve learned is that innocuous little acronyms like TIFs or PILOTs were basically being used to exempt rich developers from paying property taxes in big cities like Baltimore and small towns alike. And the deeper we went, the more alarming this process became because we learned that beyond all the money flowing to the elite from poor cities like Baltimore, there’s literally no transparency about how much exactly these breaks were worth and what they were bringing back to the city.
That’s why five years ago, Stephen and I started to work on an investigative documentary about what we learned. It’s called Tax Broke, and it tells a story of how decades of bad public policy have created a, frankly, absurd situation where the wealthy developers pay little or no property tax, while the working class shoulders the burden. Recently, to help us dig deeper into the numbers, we were joined by investigative reporter, Jayne Miller, which led to us uncovering even more inconsistencies and red flags with this system.
But before we get to our discussion, I want to set the scene, so to speak, by showing you a clip from the documentary. And we focus on a high profile redevelopment of Port Covington, a piece of land situated near downtown Baltimore that Under Armour CEO, Kevin Plank, wanted to turn into a shining city by the Patapsco River. Let’s watch.
After the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, the world watched as my city, Baltimore, burned. Some called it an uprising.
Speaker 2: And there’s such a fear, a real trembling in the boots of elites at the top when poor people straighten their backs up.
Taya Graham: Others, a reckoning.
Speaker 3: We have become the most punitive nation in the world. We have constructed a penal system unprecedented in world history.
Taya Graham: But the anger on the streets was not just about policing. It was also a cry of desperation from residents who had lived with staggering poverty for decades.
Speaker 4: Because he lives in a community that historically has been abandoned. He grew up in housing that has lead paint, and then the whole uprising afterward and the community saying, “No more, we’re not taking this nonsense anymore.”
Taya Graham: Which made what happened next profound.
Speaker 5: So my office began working with Sagamore Development months ago to make sure that all of the people of Baltimore benefited from Port Covington.
Taya Graham: Less than a year after the unrest, the city rushed a deal through the council to approve a $660 million tax incentive, known as a TIF, to Kevin Plank, the billionaire founder of Under Armour, to build a luxury city on the water.
Speaker 6: Because the TIF was so huge, right? It’s the fourth biggest TIF, I think the third biggest private sector TIF in US history, the biggest TIF this side of the Mississippi, we couldn’t ignore it.
Taya Graham: My reporting partner, Stephen Janis, and I followed the story. But despite all the promises and protests, the deal was approved.
Speaker 7: For all the money that’s being poured into Baltimore City, it’s just not coming out to us. It’s not enough coming out to us.
Taya Graham: And that wasn’t the only tax break fueling construction downtown. Another type of incentive, known as a PILOT, was approved for all new apartment buildings with more than 20 units, just before the uprising. A move prompting a massive build out of luxury apartments, all amid a public housing crisis. When advocates struggled to get the city to set aside a small sum to build affordable housing.
Speaker 8: We need for our city leaders to be more than leaders at the podium, we need for them to join us in this great cause.
Taya Graham: And so in a city where a young Black child has less of a chance of making it out of poverty than a child in many Third World countries, people who were already rich seemingly got richer.
But that is just the beginning of the story. And to break down what we’ve learned since we started this and how we’ll move forward with our investigation, I’m joined by Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller. Thank you both for joining us.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having us.
Taya Graham: So, because there’s a debate about whether a TIF is a tax break or a tax subsidy and who benefits, just tell me, what is a TIF?
Stephen Janis: Well, a TIF is something known as Tax Increment Financing. But the basic idea and how it was created, was simply to take abandoned properties in big cities, that no one wanted to build on, and find a way to incentivize development. And what came out of that was this idea that any new value created would be exempt from taxes and the tax that would normally be paid would be used to invest in the property. But it’s the mechanism of how this works that makes it really, really beneficial and difficult to judge as being used as originally designed.
And primarily, what I mean by that, is they don’t say, for example, “Estimate what it would cost to build infrastructure or something on a site.” What they do is just estimate some conflated future value of the project and then give the property developer all the future taxes, sometimes 30 or 40 years, upfront. They use Wall Street to finance this. So Wall Street makes tons of money, with what we’ve learned, are much more expensive bonds than the she would normally use.
And thus creating this great wealth inflater for developers. And especially in Baltimore, because you look at Harbor Point, for example, the developer made a lot of money selling this property, but all of it was financed by the public taxpayers. It’s all financed by public dollars. And that’s basically what happens. Because if you get that much property tax in advance, you’re pretty much getting all the money you need to do to finance the deal. So it is public financing of private profit, basically.
Taya Graham: So Jayne, development is actually important for a city.
Jayne Miller: Absolutely.
Taya Graham: Why did you decide to dig in and investigate this?
Jayne Miller: Well, look, everybody wants good development that benefits everybody or has great benefit for the city. So the question that we have raised in the work we’ve done is: in Baltimore, is it fair, is it equitable, and is there benefit beyond the particular project itself? And so what we’ve found is that the subsidy that is going on in the city of Baltimore, what we’re really doing is subsidizing already valuable property, first of all, and affluent development. So we have tax credits that are available to apartment builders who are building these high-end apartment buildings, without any component or any real intention here on affordable housing. So I think, yes, development is good, if it is fair, if it is equitable, and it serves a greater good.
Taya Graham: Well, Stephen, this doesn’t just happen in a city like Baltimore. It happens in small towns too. It happens even in larger cities. So can you talk a little bit about some of our investigative reporting and what it revealed in Milton, West Virginia, which has roughly 2,500 people?
Stephen Janis: You would think that this type of tax credit would only be something that a big city could take advantage of, because what would be the point? But what we found, in really just doing reporting across the country, was that very small, poor communities are offering these kinds of lucrative tax breaks to spur development, and one would say questionable development. In this case, in Milton, West Virginia, there was a failed coal baron, named Jeff Hoops, who had bankrupt Blackjewel Coal, which had left coal miners, who had actually already received paychecks, had them clawed back from their accounts. So he caused a huge big mess. But at the same time, a small town in Cabo County, West Virginia, named Milton, was giving him a $15 million tax break to build, I don’t think they titled it ironically, but the Grand Patrician Hotel. I mean, given what we’re talking about.
And just Lake Baltimore, a poor city, a city struggling with concentrated poverty, people making $22,000 annually, per annum, per house, much lower than the national average in Cabell County, about 40,000, about half the national average. Very poor county, very poor people. And yet they used this lucrative tax break for a guy who had just bankrupted his company. Now, this was in 2018, but we came upon this in 2021 and the hotel was just still sitting there like a shell.
And we also uncovered that after we started reporting, they gave him tax rate after the original bank that was supposed to handle the deal had resigned without comment. So these things just perpetuate themselves. We found that the firm that was supposed to be reporting back to the taxpayers was also paid by Jeff Hoops, a law firm. But the reason I bring this up, it sounds sort of like inside baseball, but the point is, these are all interconnected. There’s no outside authority, as Jayne was saying, there’s no objective, transparent analysis of what we’re getting for our money. And that, I think, is intentional.
Taya Graham: So Jayne, I know this is also happening in bigger cities like Chicago. Can you talk a little bit about what’s happening with TIFs there?
Jayne Miller: Well, first, yes. First of all, let’s start with Chicago. The Tax Increment Financing was used so extensively, it covered a whole bunch of the land of Chicago. So recently, within the past couple of years, the mayor of Chicago actually set up an oversight commission to really keep an eye on and to oversee and supervise the use of Tax Increment Financing. This is something that is, in Baltimore, would be extraordinarily useful, is to have real oversight of the use of this kind of financing.
As we sit here, according to the most recent annual financial report for the city of Baltimore, the city has already committed to almost $600 million in diversion of property taxes over coming years to pay off the TIF bonds. And that’s a growing number, because more bonds get sold as these projects go forward. So it would be very useful and serve the goal of transparency if there was greater oversight of the use of these kinds of subsidies, tax breaks, tax credits, et cetera. So that, A, you how much you’re diverting from the general fund, and you start to ask the questions, “What are we getting for it?”
Taya Graham: Right.
Stephen Janis: And just to add to what Jayne, there’s not a day that goes by that Jayne doesn’t call me and say, “I found another one.” And when I say that, I mean another weird sort of tax break that wasn’t really used as intended, that was saving developers more money, but also making all this impossible to figure out the big picture, as you say in the documentary, “What are we really paying?” We don’t know.
Taya Graham: Well, why don’t you drill down a little bit into what’s actually happening here in our city, Baltimore, with TIFs?
Stephen Janis: Well, with TIFs, we kind of started out small with small TIF projects, [inaudible 00:12:59], like Belvedere Square-
Jayne Miller: 20 years ago or so. Right.
Stephen Janis: But then suddenly someone got the idea that the whole way to transform Baltimore was to be offered larger and larger TIFs, namely Harbor Point, which is about $108 million on face value deal, not including interest. And then Port Covington, which was a $600 million, I think at that time, the fourth largest in the history of the country. So it’s really grown into it. And what Jayne and I have uncovered, is around that grows an industry meant to make it, keep it going. Like the firm MuniCap, which is supposed to analyze these deals for the taxpayers and say whether they are necessary. But turns out, that we found, that MuniCap also gets paid when the bonds are issued for the TIFs. So they say, “Hey, this is great,” and then they collect on this great thing that they say was great.
Jayne Miller: Working both sides of the deal.
Stephen Janis: Right, working both sides of the deal. So Baltimore has developed this culture of TIFs, this culture of developers. And Jayne, maybe you can talk about this, where developers feel entitled to these tax breaks.
Jayne Miller: Well, I think this is really an important point of the culture that is created when a city increasingly uses and awards tax breaks. This really started in earnest in Baltimore in the mid to late ’90s with this extraordinary tax break for the construction of a hotel in a waterfront community, Harbor East, where the developer, who happens to be the baker, John Paterakis, who’s also a developer, was awarded a tax break that had him paying a dollar per year, $1 per year in property tax for 25 years. This is still an effect.
And so tens of millions of dollars have not been paid, have been abated on this particular project. And from there in the late ’90s, early 2000s, we really started this practice, this culture, of awarding tax subsidy and tax breaks to developers mostly on the waterfront, which is Baltimore City’s most valuable land, no question, is on the waterfront. And the argument that many can make is that we don’t need to subsidize land that’s already valuable and is already appealing. Other developers would do this without all these tax breaks. And that’s the question that has been avoided for years in Baltimore as the number of these credits, and new credits have been brought on board, have been implemented, which is, “Do we really need to do what we’re doing?”
Taya Graham: Well, you know what I wanted to ask you, Stephen mentioned Port Covington, which was supposed to be developed by Under Armour CEO, founder, Kevin Plank.
Jayne Miller: Yeah, very well known company, correct.
Taya Graham: So can you talk a little bit about what we saw with that particular TIF and what the status of the project is now?
Jayne Miller: Well, this was a big debate in 2016 about awarding this $660 million Tax Increment Financing deal to build out this piece of waterfront property in the very southern tip of Baltimore City. And it started out with this grand concept of what it was going to be, with big Under Armour headquarters, et cetera. So as the years went on since 2016, they didn’t sell the first bonds under the TIF deal until 2020. So the construction has started and some buildings are under construction, but at the moment it does not look anywhere near what it looked like in the original concept. And I think at this point, I think there are four or five buildings that are nearly built. I think at this point it’s a reasonable question to ask, is what’s ahead for this project in comparison to the way it was sold? It’s already been renamed from Port Covington to Baltimore Peninsula. It is an isolated part of the city.
Stephen Janis: Not integrated [inaudible 00:16:47].
Jayne Miller: Right. City planners are going to argue, “Look, you kind of want your development to integrate and to have spillover effect to surrounding communities so it has a greater benefit.” In this case, this is an entirely isolated parcel of land, actually hard to get to because of Interstate 95, and it is not exactly connected to other communities and to other parts of the city. So it’s going to be very interesting in the next couple of years to see what that really ends up being.
Taya Graham: Well, Stephen, these aren’t the only tax breaks that you’ve been looking at, right?
Stephen Janis: Oh, not at all. We have so many in process right now. We have the former Perkins Homes, which was a low income housing complex right near Fells Point and very approximate to Harbor East. That is now part of a massive TIF, which is just unfolding, which has required them to build more luxury apartments than before. And then we have Harbor Point, which is still always ongoing. We also have what is called a PILOT, a Payment in Lieu of Taxes, that is available to all new apartment buildings. So almost any new apartment building over 20 units that you see in Baltimore is getting a 10-year tax break.
Taya Graham: Wow.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, so we’ve been looking into other buildings. And I don’t know, Jayne, if you want to talk about the brownfields a little bit?
Jayne Miller: Well, we’re looking further, there is a credit that is offered by the state and then the city reimburses for it for brownfields. This just has to do with environmental damage. And a city like Baltimore, within all its industrial uses, et cetera, et cetera, you could argue the whole city is like a brownfield. But there’s been some questions raised to us about, and kind of encouraged us to really look at this, so that we’re looking at the use of that particular credit. We also have enterprise zone credits. Again, a city like Baltimore would have a lot of enterprise zone credit territory.
Stephen Janis: Which is credit that was created about 30 years ago that’s supposed to assist, give companies benefits to create jobs in poor neighborhoods. But right now, like the brownfields, the entire city is almost technically an [inaudible 00:18:48].
Taya Graham: So wait a second. How far does this rabbit hole go? I mean, what’s happening here?
Jayne Miller: Fishing rabbit hole. But you know it’s a rabbit hole because there’s no transparency of the rabbit. They’re just kind of, now we have a situation where these credits are just kind of awarded. Back in the day, when they started, there would be city council hearings. In fact, the first one, which I talked about with the hotel, the Payment in Lieu of Tax agreement with the hotel, that was a big deal. Controversial, we had hearings. That’s all gone away, and now it’s just kind of a standard operating procedure. This is the way we do business.
Stephen Janis: Yeah, it’s more like an entitlement system.
Jayne Miller: Right. It’s exactly right.
Stephen Janis: It’s entitlement.
Jayne Miller: You build a certain kind of building, you get this credit. You build somewhere in this particular place and you could try to claim this kind of credit. There’s no process, there’s very little oversight and it’s very difficult to find on a year to year basis, okay, so how much money’s involved? And most of all the, they’re supposed to, the goal here is, “Okay, we’re going to do this development, it’s going to create jobs.” Well, okay, temporary construction jobs, sure. But then beyond that, what’s the impact? Has it increased the employment base, the tax base, and the population base of Baltimore City? And that’s a big question, as since 2010, we’ve lost 35,000 people and we continue to lose population.
Taya Graham: Right. You know what, in fact, I want to show you what kind of rabbit hole we are going down. Let’s run a video clip of a city council meeting we attended where a very modest study of these tax breaks were proposed and we were rather surprised by the results.
Speaker 11: This legislation requires that the Department of Finance produce a report about the impact of our Tax Increment Financing projects and policies so far. Examination of some of the reasons why some have failed. I had one in my district that failed.
Speaker 12: I question studies because I just, through projects within my district, when we get studies, it seems to continue to delay and delay the project.
Speaker 13: So I see the TIFs already working. We should not be doing this, but right now the TIF works.
Speaker 14: Okay. Is there a motion to move the bill favorably as amended? Seconded by Dorsey, Costello’s a no, Burnett?
Speaker 15: Yes.
Speaker 14: Dorsey?
Speaker 16: Yes.
Speaker 14: McCray? This bill fails with four votes in opposition, three in support. Okay, next bill…
Jayne Miller: Did you just see that?
Stephen Janis: Yeah. Yeah.
Jayne Miller:Did you just see that shit?
Stephen Janis: How often does it happen when a council votes against a colleague who just has something, wants to report on something?
Jayne Miller: I don’t know. I’ve only been here for two years. I’m sure it’s happened before.
Stephen Janis: You seemed upset though.
Jayne Miller: Oh, I’m pissed. I’m really upset. I mean, I had no inclination that there was going to be any problem.
Taya Graham: So Jayne, you’ve been covering City Hall for a few decades.
Jayne Miller: Long time.
Taya Graham: Were you surprised by what you saw there?
Jayne Miller: That day? I was kind of texting with someone else, one of the business reporters in town, about going, and I hear this kind of out of one ear, I hear these no votes. I’m like, wait a minute. They just defeated this. This is a simple thing. This was a study, $30,000 study. The administration in the mayor’s office had already approved they were going to do it. Just to look at the effectiveness to get some information about whether Tax Increment Financing was beneficial to the greater good. That’s really what it was. I don’t think it was going to be any big deal. They voted it down, never got out of committee. Not the first time that this has happened. Back 10 years ago, there was a bill to set up a kind of an oversight panel for tax breaks, et cetera, and never got out of committee. There has been this baffling reluctance in the city to really have a mechanism of transparency and oversight of these kinds of subsidies.
Taya Graham: Stephen and Jayne, I have to ask, where is this investigation going to take you next?
Stephen Janis: Well, we’re about 50 feet down the rabbit hole right now, so I think another a 100 feet. But what I think, while we were saying there is no transparency and there is no number, in the documentary we do some numbers and we’re just going to keep pushing to complete this picture. Like a puzzle, we’re just going to keep getting the pieces. Where I think it’s leading is we’re going to learn that pretty much, we have a tax break variety store for developers. You go and say, “Hmm, do I want a brownfields credit or do I want an enterprise zone credit? What do you think?”
Jayne Miller: Or something that you got both of them.
Stephen Janis: What looks good? Oh yeah, [inaudible 00:23:35].
Jayne Miller: They’re different things. Right. Exactly.
Stephen Janis: And our main goal here is to disrupt that little store they have going on where they give a politician 500 bucks to go and pick out a tax break. It makes no sense. It’s not good economic policy even if you want. And also looking deeply into other alternatives to how this can be done, how we can tax a city fairly so that the residents of this city and other small towns aren’t paying higher taxes than the wealthiest people in the nation. So we’re really going to keep looking down the hole.
Taya Graham: All right. Well, I want to thank you both so much for joining me. Thank you, Stephen Janis.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me.
Taya Graham: And thank you, Jayne Miller.
Jayne Miller: Thank you, Taya.
Taya Graham: We appreciate you so much.
Jayne Miller: A lot of work to do. That’s right.
Taya Graham:Absolutely.
Now this is just the beginning of the story. There is so much more reporting to do and, frankly, facts to uncover that the public officials just don’t want you to know. And along with frequent updates on our reporting, we’ll be posting the full documentary of Tax Broke with a live chat, right here in a few months on the Real News YouTube channel. But what I want to make clear today is that what we’re actually doing here is deconstructing the narrative that being rich is being better. In other words, accumulating cash is a reflection of a certain type of superiority that justifies the bad policy, which makes it possible.
Which is why we’re going to use our reporting and the documentary and these shows to hit back at that same narrative. We are going to change the story or perhaps better, offer a more fair and accurate way the story is told. And we will achieve this by holding the hoarders of extraordinary wealth and the power that comes with it accountable.
I’d like to thank my guests, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, for their incredible investigative reporting. My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host of the Inequality Watch. Thanks for joining me.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work. So please, tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
On Feb. 7, France’s eight largest unions turned out for the third strike of the year against Emanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension reforms. The fight to prevent a rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64 has galvanized French workers. On March 7, French unions have vowed to mobilize for the country’s sixth strike so far this year. This video is part of a special Workers of the World series on the cost of living crisis in Europe.
Producer, Videographer, Editor: Brandon Jourdan
Associate Producer, Translation: Nicolas Lee
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s Workers of the World series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Anger has exploded onto the French streets as President Emmanuel Macron vows to push through pension reforms despite popular opinion and a new nationwide strike wave.
Daniel Ferté, Ticket Inspector, FO Cheminot (Federation of Railway Workers): Today, we are in a situation where the government governs against its population, because the vast majority of the population is opposed to the reform, especially workers. According to surveys, 9 people (workers) out of 10 are opposed to the implementation of this reform.
Gaëlle Cavelier, Confédération Paysanne (Confederation of Farmers): This reform is very unpopular, we see it everywhere in France. French women and men are all against this pension [reform]. It seems to me the government is completely alone. They decided to push through the pension reform like a bulldozer, without listening to anyone.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: On February 7th, 2023, the eight largest trade unions in France engaged in the third mass nationwide strike within a month. It was the first of two national strikes happening during the week with a second that occurred on February 11th. The strikes oppose President Emmanuel Macron’s plans, which include raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and increasing the total amount of years that people need to make social contributions in order to receive a full pension. On February 7th, there were mobilizations in over 200 French cities and towns. The General Confederation of Labor, or CGT, claimed close to 2 million people took to the streets, while the French Interior Ministry put the number at over 750,000 people.
Daniel Ferté, Ticket Inspector, FO Cheminot (Federation of Railway Workers): Today, in the demonstration, we will find absolutely all professional sectors that exist among workers, from steel workers to the road transporters, the railway workers, the teachers.
Maud Valegeas, Teacher, SUD Education union (Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques: All the existing professions are present today. There was a very big mobilization on January 19, and on January 31 as well, which had never gathered so many people in the streets. The mobilization we are experiencing today is historic because there is a union unity that is very large, where all the organizations call for mobilization against the pension reform project. This had not happened for 25 years, to have so many unions calling for mobilization. We have both private and public sector unions.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Public transit and railways were disrupted, fuel refineries slowed production, electricity production was decreased, and airline traffic was affected by the strikes.
Laurent Dahyot, Secretary General, CGT Air France: And today, we see that the population is coming togetherto say no to this reform.
We are fighting against this reform, but we are also fighting against harsh work conditions since we all face harsh work conditions, whether it’s on the ground or in the form of shifted hours, night work, carrying loads. For cabin crew, jet lag, toxicity in airplanes. In fact, harsh work conditions are a very important issue at Air France and working longer, it’s just not possible for all airport employees.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Farmers also joined the mass protest in Paris.
Gaëlle Cavelier, Confédération Paysanne (Confederation of Farmers): We want a retiree status for farmworkers in order to have a decent pension. Currently, the minister promises a gross pension of 1,200€, but it is only for people who contribute to the pension fund during their whole career without interruption. Few farmworkers are in that situation. There are many women farmworkers who have interrupted careers for maternity leave. There are women farmworkers who have a status of collaborating spouse, who never contribute to their retirement, who have no social status, therefore no pension. They will have zero euros.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Many school teachers also walked off the job to join the protests.
Maud Valegeas, Teacher, SUD Education union (Solidaires Unitaires Démocratiques): I’m Maud Valegeas. I am a French teacher in a secondary school in Seine-Saint-Denis and I am a member of SUD Education union.
In the education sector, we were very mobilized on the 31st. There are two mobilizations this week, so it will probably be split between the two dates. But in fact, there are more and more general assemblies, meetings and there is the idea of preparing a big re-occurring strike in the education sector in the coming weeks. The private sector is also on strike, like our colleagues from PSA in Aulnay-sous-Bois.
So, the mobilization, it is very massive and there is no one sector more mobilized than another. We can see today that all the sectors are there.
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Along with the mass of workers, there was a large youth contingent. Teenagers blocked high schools and at times clashed with riot police.
Teenagers blocking school chant:
Everyone hates the police! Everyone hates the police! Everyone hates the police!
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: The large march in Paris marched from the Opera Garnierto the Place de la Bastille.All major unions were present, along with a vibrant youth contingent, and even retired workers attending in solidarity.
Jiménez, Retired Taxi Driver: My name is Jiménez, I have been retired for a few years now and I am here to defend retirement at 60 for my children and grandchildren. Listen, the context is very simple. If the people do not mobilize, the retirement age won’t be at 64 years old, it will be pushed to 67 or even 70 maybe.
Crowd chants:
Retirement! It is ours!
We fought to win it!
We will fight to keep it!
Retirement! It is ours!
We fought to win it!
We will fight to keep it!
Brandon Jourdan [Narrator]: Small groups of people using Black Bloc tactics, committed acts of targeted property destruction against banks, corporate chains and insurance companies. Tear gas and police charges followed, often targeting anyone that happened to be in the way. Despite police aggression, the large protest pushed ahead to Bastille. As night fell, music rang out through the square, chants roared and colored flares lit up the night sky.
The nationwide strike was followed by another massive mobilization on February 11th.
The next month will prove to be a decisive battle in the ongoing fight to preserve France’s social safety net. A general strike involving all major unions is planned for March 7th, where unions are threatening ‘to bring France to a standstill’.
Daniel Ferté, Ticket Inspector, FO Cheminot (Federation of Railway Workers): And if we have to block the economy of the country, we will block it. If necessary, we will block all transportation.
Gaëlle Cavelier, Confédération Paysanne (Confederation of Farmers): A hardening of the protest would be to reach a general strike and completely block the country.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
After decades of targeted underfunding, the UK’s National Health Service is on the verge of collapse. Spiking inflation as a result of corporate profiteering in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine War have only worsened the situation, as the UK’s 300,000 nurses face staffing shortages on top of a cost of living crisis. All these conditions have driven the Royal College of Nurses to strike. This video is part of an ongoing Workers of the World series about the cost of living crisis in Europe.
Producer: Alexander Morris
Videographer: Julia Schönheit, Alexander Morris
Video editor: Leo Erhardt
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s Workers of the World series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms.
Jacinth – Community Nurse: It’s like I’m working to pay bills…as soon as it goes in, it just goes back out.
Vicky – Pediatric Nurse: We go through life and death situations because that’s what we’re doing here, that is the bottom line.
Bert – Haematology Nurse: The NHS is already partly private. Healthcare can’t be for profit.
Narration: Nurses are striking for the first time in British history. Many nurses are suffering burn-out from the coronavirus pandemic, large numbers have already left, and those that stayed were rewarded for their Covid sacrifice with a pitiful pay increase by the government – which left them with little choice but to strike.
But this strike isn’t only about pay and conditions, it’s about the future of Britain’s national health service, and with that, preserving the principle of universally free healthcare. Years of austerity and deliberate underfunding by right wing governments has meant the highly trained professionals that operate this system have not had a proper pay rise in years, and many are struggling to live a comfortable life.
Ameera – Senior Nurse: I’m reading out comments from our group called ‘NHS Workers Say No’ campaign on Facebook. So one of them says, ‘I am sat in my car, absolutely broken. I have £0.06 left after paying all my bills, and I’ve just had to go to the food bank for the first time in my life. I’m beginning to wonder why I bother. How can I work the wards full-time and still struggle like this? It’s gotten so much worse in the last few months.
Narration: Ameera is a senior nurse working in London hospitals that has been organizing with colleagues and encouraging them to vote for strike action. The cost of living has been very strongly felt here, one of the world’s most expensive cities in the world’s fifth richest country.
Ameera – Senior Nurse: Doesn’t feel like the fifth richest country if a government can’t afford to pay nurses. Nurses work really hard. We’re not taking industrial action lightly. We have tried to negotiate with the government time and time again, but they’re just not prepared to listen.
We are talking about years of austerity, of the pay that we’ve lost, the pay cuts that we’ve had to deal with, the chronic understaffing, what we went through in the pandemic. You now have five more days to really discuss it – really try and negotiate – otherwise it’s a strike and that is it.
Narration: Nurses voted overwhelmingly to strike and with over 500,000 of them across the country, they have the power to bring the health service to a standstill.
Nurses chanting:
What do we want? Fair pay!
When do we want it? Now!
Overworked and underpaid!
Clapping doesn’t pay the bills!
Narration: ‘Clapping doesn’t pay the bills’ is a reference to the politicians that took part in a weekly ‘clap for the NHS’ during lockdown but didn’t back up their support for NHS workers with a pay increase.
But beyond the excitement, and feelings of togetherness and solidarity, there was anger and also disbelief that they were forced to be out here, and not inside with their patients.
Chants:
Say hey, ho, Rishi Sunak’s got to go!
Pat Cullen, RCN general secretary: Today is about saying ‘enough is enough’. This government now needs to sit up, take stock, and listen to us.
They need to do that by paying the nurses a decent wage. They are not being greedy, they are asking for the 20% that has been taken out of their pay over the last decade to be put back in, and to make sure that they can continue to care for their patients.
Jacinth – Community Nurse: I love every bit of my job because I manage patients in the community and to get the positive feedback from them, that’s what makes it, and keeps me going. It’s not the money, if it was because of the money, I wouldn’t be in it. It’s because of the love of my job.
I pay over a thousand pounds a month: rent, water, gas, electricity. And I have family members back home who I have to take care of as well. So by the time…it’s like I’m working to pay bills. That’s how I see my monthly salary working; as soon as it goes in, it goes back out.
Some of the staff, even myself, you go home, sometimes you just sit and you start crying because sometimes you look into your cupboard, there’s less food in the cupboard. You can’t manage to really do what you need to do, and to buy what you need to buy to live a happy life. So it’s…it’s not a nice place to be at the moment. Yeah, I’m just feeling a bit tearful now, it’s not a nice place to be, honestly.
It’s really terrible.
Bert – Haematology Nurse: I hear about colleagues not being able to take care of ourselves before starting a 12-hour shift, it’s just unacceptable. What are we doing? I hear about people standing in food banks and asking for food packages from their trust In order to survive on, and feeding themselves. That makes me angry, that’s just, that’s not decent. I don’t think that’s fair, to keep on asking hardworking people to live in poverty. It saddens me… I just, I don’t understand that.
Narration: At the time of its birth, the National Health Service was a revolutionary idea. Socialists in the post-war Labour government came up with the idea of creating a world-class, universal healthcare system, free at the point of use.
More than 70 years later, the NHS has battled through numerous right-wing governments, 40 years of neoliberalism, and now a decade of austerity measures which has been particularly cruel to nursing.
Archive clip:
‘Are we facing more austerity prime minister?’
Narration: One measure was to cut state-financed nursing degrees, which has led to a huge number of unfilled vacancies in the NHS, putting pressure on nurses to look after more patients and making conditions very tough.
Vicky – Pediatric Nurse: We go through life and death situations because that’s what we’re doing here, that is the bottom line. People are dying and people are incredibly unwell, and we’re there at the bedside 12 hours a day, 24/7, looking after them.
We are doing this for patients. We need the public to realize that we’re doing this for them.
Chanting:
What do we want? Patient safety. When do we want it? Now.
Safe staffing saves lives!
Vicky – Pediatric Nurse: I mean, this is it…safe staffing saves lives. Give us more nurses, pay us adequate pay, recognize us for what we do and…and make us feel like we’re actually appreciated. We have the worst days sometimes, but we also get so much reward from that and seeing children and their parents and their families, seeing them recover and get better – it’s just beyond anything anyone could imagine.
I have colleagues of mine who are in with me, working every day, stressed and overwhelmed, and close to burn out, if not already burnt out. And a lot of that is because there’s just not enough of us to do what we need to do and to do it safely.
Narration: How did the NHS get here?
The poor state of the service, after ideological underfunding over decades, is now being used as an argument for privatization. Of course, treatments are still free for those in need, but since the neoliberalization of Britain in the 1980s, governments of all stripes have been privatizing the NHS by stealth, and several private health providers are already operating within the NHS and making huge profits.
Richard Burgon MP — Labour Party: There are some things in life and in society more important than the pursuit of profit. And make no mistake, there are some who want to turn our NHS into an American style, insurance-based system, where they feel for your wallet before they feel for your pulse. You’re not going to let that happen, are you? No!
Bert – Hematology Nurse: The NHS is already partly private. I mean, loads of the services that are provided in a hospital, with people I work with, work for private companies: cleaners, catering staff, porters, imaging. It’s already there and that’s part of the issue.
Private companies are going for profit—healthcare can’t be for profit.
I really proudly stepped into the NHS and I chose not to go private because I think there, the system that Britain has turned out is quite admirable and quite generous and, yeah, it has problems as well, but they’re fixable.
It’s a decline if we can’t allow everyone to have access to that. And if this goes to private care and the American system, which is very clearly not working because they’re searching for another solution as well. So, why would we want to go into that?
Narration: A look at the privatized, insurance-based health systems that exist not only in the United States but across the planet, show how access to healthcare exposes the deep inequalities within countries.
Not to say Britain doesn’t have its own inequality problems, it does, but the NHS provides a constant equalizer for the poor, for new migrants, for the disabled, the elderly and anyone that comes through these doors.
Healthcare here is universal, and it could be a blueprint for every country. But as these nurses have told us, it’s under attack from politicians who think private healthcare companies will do a better job. And that’s what these nurses are striking for and fighting for.
Ameera – Senior Nurse: We will win. I’m very optimistic. It’s the future of the NHS. It will collapse because nurses are leaving on a daily basis. Patients are dying every day as a result of things being missed, so we need to do something about this now.
Jacinth – Community Nurse: 100%. We will win. And I hope that after the next strike – I would think that after today, we would need to strike again.
Bert – Hematology Nurse: I think the public can’t afford nurses not to win. I think if the public, if Britain wants a NHS system as it was, then we all need to fight for that and support us, because we are actually doing this for the public.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
In late November 2022, an article in The Economist reported that “things have changed in Caracas” with the new availability of luxury consumer goods, a new generation of high-end restaurants and the return of traffic jams. Add to that a new Ferrari dealership and it becomes clear what sections of the population are the beneficiaries of the changes — a tiny minority of wealthy Venezuelans.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The victims of the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria need your help now. The surviving families and children and those rescued alive from the rubble are in serious danger in affected wintertime impoverished regions. Refugees in other places fleeing their war-torn homelands are also suffering. International aid agencies are grossly insufficient for these immediate humanitarian necessities.
What are you Big Business Titans doing sitting on massive pay, profits, and tax escapes? Awakening your consciousness for your fellow human beings may be a modest form of redemption. Further, you have access to logistics specialists, delivery systems, communication facilities, and many other contacts and resources. You get your calls returned! Fast!
Tim Cook, you have been making $833 a MINUTE (plus lavish benefits). Remarkably, your compensation is not even in the top ten of operating company CEOs. Moreover, your own cultivated sense of envy knows that there are Hedge Fund Goliaths, who in some recent years, made off with over $2,500 per MINUTE on a forty-hour week.
Tim, you and the Apple corporation are known to pay few taxes given what tax attorneys and tax accountants do for you (especially with Apple taking advantage of foreign tax havens while receiving the fruits of Washington’s free government R&D over the years). Your company has so much leftover money, flowing from the deprivation of a million serf laborers in China, and so few productive outlets for this mass of capital that you have set records for stock buybacks—over $400 billion in the last decade.
You and Apple and the Hedge Fund Titans are not known for your charitable giving as a percent of your adjusted gross income. Yet, if asked “Do you believe in the Golden Rule?” you would probably say “Yes”—at least in public.
Use your wealth and newfound empathy to organize direct relief for these earthquake victims and other major refugee areas such as the starving children of Somalia. Deliver food, medicine, clothing, shelter, mobile clinics, and many other available airlifted essentials. Hire skilled people to make it happen. Give your new organization a prominent logo for permanence and for setting an example for other super-rich to emulate.
Your isolation from the public expectation that you enter the above engagements in a significant way is quite remarkable. That should trouble you and your public relations advisors.
Just this week National Public Radio (NPR) featured a startling compilation of what producers of movies and TV shows believe appeals to their viewers. It is no longer awe or envy of the ‘rich and famous.’ It is no longer the Horatio Alger myth. It is encapsulated in NPR‘s headline: Why “eat the rich” storylines are taking over TV and movies.
As Bob Dylan sang, “the times, they are a-changin’.”
NPR reporter Kristin Schwab related:
Hollywood’s depictions of the wealthy—and perhaps societal attitudes toward them—have changed.… The moment isn’t random. Think about the extreme economic events we’ve been through. There’s the pandemic, when essential workers kept the country running while the richest 1% amassed a huge sum of wealth—twice as much as the rest of the world put together (her emphasis), according to the non-profit Oxfam. And before that was The Great Recession, which is how we got the term “the 1%.”
Mr. Cook, Apple is reportedly making a contribution to the Turkey/Syria relief effort. Are you personally making a contribution? Your Big Business Titan comrades may think they can get away with gated, cold-blooded mentalities. They may be right about that if the mass media doesn’t turn its steely gaze toward their hoards of gold and question their “don’t give a damn” attitude.
Maybe they just can’t help themselves—so busy are they counting their lucre. Here is an idea: ask them to ask their grandchildren, 12 and under, what they want them to do. Absorb their moral authority and MOVE FAST TO HELP THOSE IN NEED!
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The United States’ contributions to the climate crisis and its perpetuation of violence, particularly abroad, resulted in a score on a newly launched “Atlas of Impunity” that placed the country well below other wealthy nations in terms of the government’s willingness to be accountable for its impact both on U.S. residents and the global community.
Spearheaded by former U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the inaugural Atlas of Impunity was released Friday, the result of a collaboration between the Eurasia Group and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.
The groups ranked 163 countries from across the globe, scoring their level of impunity based on five factors: conflict and violence, both within the countries and perpetrated against other nations; environmental degradation; unaccountable governance; economic exploitation; and abuse of human rights.
Miliband, now the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, called the ranking of the U.S. at 118 “one of the major takeaways” of the index.
\u201cThe lackluster performance of the US and other powerful nations is one of the major takeaways of the Atlas of Impunity – thanks to @Patrickwintour for spotlighting.\u00a0\nhttps://t.co/FYir12Vgfo\u201d— David Miliband (@David Miliband)
1676642940
The countries were ranked on a scale of 0-5, with Afghanistan given the highest score for impunity at 5.00. Finland was ranked the most accountable nation, with a score of 0.29.
With a score of 1.91, the U.S. was ranked five places higher than Hungary, where President Viktor Orbán’s far-right government has been denounced as autocratic.
The U.S. was found to act with the most impunity in the area of environmental degradation, scoring a 3.02 in that category. The U.S. is biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, but President Joe Biden’s administration continues to approve fossil fuel extraction projects that are contributing to planetary heating and polluting communities.
“Impunity is the growing instinct of choice in the global order. It represents a dangerous world view that laws and norms are for suckers.”
The country’s “conflict and violence” score of 2.62 also contributed to its high cumulative score.
“The country’s arms exports are an even bigger negative factor” than the economic inequality, racial injustice, and restrictions that Republican policymakers use to cut off democratic access, the report stated.
The U.S. is the world’s largest arms exporter and has helped fuel the ongoing humanitarian crises in Yemen and the occupied Palestinian territories by supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia and Israel, respectively.
The country’s impunity score was also driven up by “a small number of ratified human rights treaties” and “its history of racial discrimination, particularly against Black Americans.” The authors noted that it performed well below other wealthy countries in terms of its efforts to ensure Americans are given equal economic opportunities:
While the U.S. performs well on most measures of economic exploitation, there is a higher degree of class inequality compared to similarly ranked countries. This likely stems from a long history of strike-breaking and union-busting that has undermined the power of organized labor. Individuals and corporate entities—both companies and labor unions—have a constitutionally protected right to petition the government, creating a robust lobbying landscape that allows the two major political parties to be very responsive to narrow interest group needs. This has contributed to low levels of taxation of capital income, a tax system with high levels of compliance but inconsistent enforcement, and a national minimum wage that has not risen with inflation.
“Impunity is the growing instinct of choice in the global order,” said Miliband in a statement. “It represents a dangerous world view that laws and norms are for suckers.”
Miliband noted in a New York Times op-ed on Friday that the Atlas illustrates how countries that are recognized as democracies are not immune from acting without accountability.
“While the fight for democracy is real, dividing the world into democracies and autocracies does not capture key aspects of the global power balance,” he wrote. “While accountability is critical to democracy, a democratic system of government alone is insufficient to fend off impunity. Several democratic countries, including the United States, underperform against the highest standards to which they are committed on measures of human rights and conflict and violence.”
“The most powerful countries in the international system are part of the problem,” he added. “China and Russia both score among the 50 worst ranking countries on impunity. The United States performs much better, but still scores worse than economic and Global North peers. There is a quantitative evidence in our project for the adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
For Disney workers, the “Magic Kingdom” is quickly losing its magic. The company recently announced that it was laying off 7,000 workers to cut operating costs, pulling the rug out from under thousands of employees who had dedicated themselves to their work at Disney. The layoffs were praised by the business community, including the billionaire hedge fund investor Nelson Peltz…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
How can we measure the work a particular society truly values? Take-home pay can make as good a yardstick as any: The lower an occupation’s compensation, the lower the esteem a society is showing for that occupation.
In the United States, our pay data show, no profession faces a reality that makes this link plainer — and uglier — than teaching.
All sorts of metrics can help us measure the level of our society’s esteem for the teaching profession. Are young people, for instance, interested in becoming teachers? Between 2008 and 2019, teacher ed enrollments in the United States plunged by over a third. Are current teachers feeling valued? Between 2019 and 2022, teacher retirements and resignations rose 40 percent.
But nothing says “esteem” more directly than paychecks, and, by that metric, American society has for years been systematically devaluing the work teachers do. Between 1996 and 2021, the Economic Policy Institute’s Sylvia Allegretto detailed last August, average teacher weekly wages adjusted for inflation rose a miniscule $29. Over the same years, inflation-adjusted weekly wages for other college graduates rose over 15 times faster, up $445.
What has this shortfall in overall compensation and esteem meant for America’s schools? In the current school year, the U.S. Department of Education reports, every single state in the union has reported teacher shortages, with 46 states citing shortages of science teachers and 44 missing math teachers.
Overall, some 36,000 teaching positions nationwide are going vacant, with at least 163,000 additional positions getting “filled” with unqualified teachers. Both these numbers, concludes a study by researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, represent “conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.”
Some observers of our contemporary education scene are contending, Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond noted last month, that the teacher resignations and vacancies we’re experiencing shouldn’t particularly concern us because they appear mostly in certain subjects and parts of the country. But that amounts to arguing, Darling-Hammond observes, that a house isn’t on fire “because only three of its five rooms are burning.”
Our educational house most definitely is burning, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders told a town hall on America’s teacher pay crisis at the U.S. Capitol earlier this week.
“I want the day to come, sooner than later, when we are going to attract the best and brightest young people in our country into teaching,” said Sanders. “I want those young people to be proud of the profession that they have chosen.”
All teachers, the Vermont senator believes, should be earning at least $60,000 a year. Some 43 percent of teachers currently fall short of that mark. In Florida, the average teacher earns less than $50,000, just $49,583.
How do the bargain-basement paychecks that go to teachers compare with compensation for other professions? Not well at all. In Florida, accountants make $76,320 annually, 54 percent more than teachers. And software developers in Florida average $105,200, 112 percent more.
But the most stunning pay contrasts show up when we contrast teacher pay to the compensation of our nation’s most generously rewarded power suits.
“The top 15 hedge fund managers on Wall Street,” notes Senator Sanders, “make more money in a single year than every kindergarten teacher in America — over 120,000 teachers.”
Sanders will soon be introducing legislation, the Pay Teachers Act, to ensure that all teachers make at least $60,000 annually and guarantee significantly higher pay for educators “who have made teaching their profession — working on the job for 10, 20, 30 years.”
Where could the funding for this teacher pay revolution come from? From a tax revolution.
Public schools across the nation have historically relied on the local property taxes that average Americans pay. Property taxes today are still supplying 40 percent of total public education funding. These taxes all fall on the primary source of wealth for average families, the owner-occupied home. But America’s rich hold most of their wealth in financial instruments, a category of wealth that essentially goes untaxed, even after death, since the current federal estate tax asks so little from families sitting on grand fortunes.
Senator Sanders has proposed a fix: a thorough-going reform of the federal estate tax. Rich married couples last year could exempt $23.4 million of their fortunes from all estate tax and pay no more than a 40 percent tax on any dollar of wealth above that. The Sanders legislation — the “For the 99.5 Percent Act” — would lower that estate tax exemption to $7 million per married couple and up the minimal estate tax rate on wealth above that level to 45 percent.
Wealthier estates would face even higher rates, with wealth over $1 billion facing a 65 percent estate tax.
The Sanders legislation also takes aim at current loopholes that lower the rate of estate tax that the families of dead deep pockets actually face. Over his legislation’s first 10 years, Senator Sanders notes, the federal treasury would collect an additional $450 billion in estate tax revenue, “precisely how much the Teacher Pay Act would cost.”
“Let’s be clear,” the senator added at the U.S. Capitol teacher pay town hall Monday. “If we can provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1 percent and large corporations, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to make sure that every teacher in America is paid at least $60,000 a year.”
This story is a collaboration between the Center for Public Integrity and Bolts.
The Howard R. Young Correctional Institution sits between a creek and Interstate 495 in Wilmington, Delaware. For the last ten years, the prison’s 1,281 residents were counted as constituents of Wilmington’s third city council district.
But when local officials sat down to redraw Wilmington’s city council lines after the 2020 Census, they took a new approach: They counted people in the prison at their last known address in Wilmington — and didn’t count them at all if they hadn’t lived in the city.
“Counting people where they are incarcerated during redistricting, it distorts our system of representative government,” said Wilmington Councilmember Shané Darby, who pushed for the change.
Several states, and a growing number of cities and counties across the U.S., have adopted this reform. They’re seeking to end prison gerrymandering — the term advocates use for counting incarcerated people at the facility where they’re locked up, rather than in their home community. The practice typically dilutes the power of urban areas and communities of color, which see higher rates of incarceration, and at their expense boosts white and rural areas where most prisons are located.
But prison gerrymandering affects more than the representation cities receive in statehouses and Congress, where the issue has drawn significant attention. It also distorts representation within a city, affecting the boundaries that define politics at the local level.
That’s the case in Wilmington, Delaware’s most populous city and one where Black residents make up a majority. The city also has the highest rate of incarceration in the state. And not only does a state prison sit within city limits, Wilmington is also home to a facility for people in substance abuse treatment programs and on work release, which itself has about 150 residents.
Delaware passed a law in 2010 ending prison gerrymandering in state legislative maps — but not in maps for municipal or county governments. That left it up to city and county officials to decide whether to do the same for their local districts.
Predictably, different places made different choices. Now, for the rest of the decade, people in this state will be governed by local maps that follow conflicting standards. This idiosyncrasy extends to several other states, with local officials’ choices on prison gerrymandering typically receiving little scrutiny.
In Wilmington, Darby and other officials voted to follow in the state’s footsteps in September 2021. Darby said the approach was designed to better reflect the city.
“When you divide up communities, you diminish their power and their voice,” she said.
In the city’s third district, that meant subtracting the 1,281 residents at the prison from its population count. But it also required adding back 281 residents of the district who were incarcerated around Delaware — some at the prison in Wilmington, but many in other parts of the state.
Wilmington’s third district, on the city’s east side, had the highest share of Black residents of any of its eight council districts as well as the largest number of residents who are incarcerated in Delaware. Several census tracts within the district have lower median incomes than the city as a whole.
The new approach to map-drawing left Wilmington’s third district with fewer residents than under the old formula. So the committee shifted its boundaries, adding several downtown blocks to ensure it had a population in line with other districts.
The end to prison gerrymandering enjoyed wide support among the politicians redrawing the lines in town.
The city finalized its maps in December 2021, and voters will cast ballots in the new districts for the first time in 2024. Separately, the city council adopted a measure sponsored by Darby to continue drawing maps this way in future cycles of redistricting.
“I was glad that we were able to count folks back in their home district and not overinflate the population of the district that has the facility,” said Dwayne Bensing, legal director of the ACLU of Delaware. In a newspaper editorial, Bensing wrote that Wilmington “avoided a prison gerrymandering fiasco.”
He told the Center for Public Integrity and Bolts that the redrawn districts weren’t likely to lead to huge political changes in the city, but in Wilmington’s compact districts, with about 8,800 people each, it’s a meaningful step.
The new approach “ensures that every person in Wilmington has an equal say in their government,” said Mike Wessler of the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative, which tracks reform efforts across the country.
Exploding prison populations in the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by America’s war on drugs, reshaped communities and political maps across the country. They also added weight to the issue of prison gerrymandering.
The city of Anamosa, Iowa, became a poster child for challenges at the local level: In one of its city council districts, about 95% of residents were incarcerated in a state prison. (After a local man won the seat with two votes in 2006, he told a reporter, “Do I consider [incarcerated people] my constituents? … They don’t vote, so, I guess, not really.”)
Prison gerrymandering “distorts our democracy,” Wessler said. “It fundamentally alters political representation, and that harms every single person, whether they live one mile from a prison or 1,000 miles from a prison.” He said local governments were early leaders on the issue, with over 200 adopting reforms in the 2000 and 2010 cycles.
In 2010, New York and Maryland passed laws ending prison gerrymandering at the state legislative level. By the next cycle, a decade later, over a dozen states had passed similar laws.
Nearly half of Americans now live in a state that has taken action to end the practice in drawing statewide maps, the Prison Policy Initiative estimates.
Wessler called the adoption of these laws “a sea change” from the situation two decades ago.
States that ended prison gerrymandering heading into the last redistricting cycle were nearly all run by Democrats, with a wave of newcomers passing the reform in rapid succession over the past four years — including Colorado, New Jersey and Virginia. In these states, with vast disparities in the geography of where people are arrested and where they serve prison terms, legislative maps now count incarcerated people at their last known address.
The issue has attracted attention in some areas that tilt Republican. Earlier this month, Montana’s state Senate passed a bill to end prison gerrymandering after the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission unanimously supported the change.
But any movement to end the practice altogether would have to come at the federal level. With that in mind, a group of three dozen advocacy organizations are calling on the U.S. Department of Commerce to change the tally in the 2030 Census. They write in a letter that “counting incarcerated people at home ensures that communities hit hardest by mass incarceration get equal representation in state and local governments.”
The combination of state and local laws leaves some Americans without any representation.
Take the situation in Delaware. Wilmington ended prison gerrymandering, but Newark, the state’s third most populous city, didn’t. That means a Newark resident incarcerated in Wilmington wouldn’t be counted in a city council district in their hometown — and also wouldn’t be counted in the city where they are incarcerated.
For the purposes of city council representation, they are counted nowhere.
Muddying the waters further: New Castle County, which includes Wilmington, still draws lines for its own districts that count people as living in prison.
“This fits within a broader scheme of a patchwork of laws governing voting rights within the state of Delaware,” said the ACLU’s Bensing. Several states take a scattershot approach to the issue, with inconsistent requirements for congressional districts, state legislative districts and even school boards.
A similar dynamic has played out in Nevada: The state ended prison gerrymandering in congressional and state legislative districts, but left decisions at the city council level up to local governments. In the most recent cycle, Las Vegas counted incarcerated people at their last pre-prison address, and Reno did not.
Some of these asymmetries stem from state legislators’ decision to exempt local governments from the laws they passed. Kathay Feng, an advocate at the voting rights organization Common Cause, said this may have been a tactic in some states to avoid paying the cost of local changes, or to sidestep conflicts with “home rule” laws that give localities wide latitude.
Darby, the Wilmington councilmember, was happy to bring her city in line with the way Delaware draws state legislative districts.
Now, she says she’d like to see governments include incarcerated people in the political process. Delaware currently bars people in prison with felony convictions from voting, and it also disenfranchises thousands of people on probation or parole. The state makes it more difficult to regain voting rights than most in the Northeast.
“How do we take it a step further?” Darby asked. “They need rights to vote — not everybody, but some people who are in prison should still be able to vote and have their voices be heard.”
Currently, only Maine, Vermont and Washington, D.C., allow people in prison to vote. Many Americans held in local jails also retain their right to vote but find it nearly impossible to cast a ballot. Advocates say that this “de facto disenfranchisement” affects the majority of the roughly 445,000 people in American jails who have not been convicted of a crime. A handful of states and counties around the U.S. have made a push to facilitate jail voting, including establishing precincts in jail, but some local officials have resisted such efforts.
As a result, thousands of Americans are counted for the purpose of redistricting where they are detained, increasing that area’s political clout, without the ability to participate in local elections.
And until the Census Bureau changes the way it counts incarcerated people, advocates and elected officials will be forced to address prison gerrymandering one place at a time.
“The city of Wilmington is small, and the population of the prison wasn’t anything crazy,” said Darby, who sponsored the measure to permanently end the practice in the city. “But I thought it was important to make that point.”
The post How one city ended prison gerrymandering appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
International anti-poverty organization Oxfam on Tuesday called an update to the European Union's list of tax havens a "joke," saying no inventory that excludes "countries with zero corporate tax rates" and countries within the E.U. can be taken seriously as a true accounting of the places used by the ultrawealthy to avoid taxes.
E.U. finance ministers unveiled their latest update of the so-called "blacklist" on Tuesday, announcing that countries including Bermuda and the Cayman Islands have been delisted, despite the fact that neither country requires residents to pay taxes and both have become favorite places for corporations to register and wealthy people in Europe and the U.S. to buy property and stash their assets in bank accounts.
Luxembourg, which allows hundreds of companies to pay an effective tax rate of less than 1%, was also left off the list as it has been in previous years—despite being "one of the most harmful tax havens in the world," according to Oxfam inequality and tax policy adviser Chiara Putaturo.
"The E.U.'s tax havens list continues to be a total whitewash," said Putaturo. "The update is yet another missed opportunity to put an end to tax havens and get billions back to bridge the gap between the superrich and ordinary people."
\u201c\ud83d\udc94 Today's update is another missed opportunity.\u00a0\n\ud83c\udfdd\ufe0f Zero and low-tax-rate countries should be automatically blacklisted.\n\u00a0\ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa EU countries should not get a free pass.\u00a0\n\ud83e\udd28 Until then, the EU tax haven's blacklist will remain a joke. \n#TaxValentines\u00a0\n\ud83d\udc49 https://t.co/iRGAjIjbrr\u201d— Chiara Putaturo (@Chiara Putaturo) 1676373142
The list is ostensibly meant to name countries that the E.U. has identified as helping wealthy corporations and individuals to avoid paying taxes. Countries on the list are restricted from some E.U. funding and face administrative penalties from the bloc, while its companion "graylist" includes countries whose tax policies warrant further investigation but whose officials have committed to some reform.
Four countries were added to the blacklist on Tuesday: the British Virgin Islands, Costa Rica, the Marshall Islands, and the Russian Federation. Albania, Aruba, and Curacao were placed on the graylist and four countries—Barbados, Jamaica, North Macedonia, and Uruguay—were removed from the graylist.
The blacklist only includes two countries—the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands—that were identified by the Tax Justice Network in 2021 as the world's 20 worst corporate tax havens. That list also included E.U. member countries France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Oxfam's report Survival of the Richest, which was released in January, showed that worldwide, the richest 1% of households control 54% of all new wealth generated in the last decade, and nearly two-thirds of new wealth created since 2020—a trend which was partially made possible by tax havens, according to the group.
Meanwhile, food insecurity is on the rise in the U.S.; right-wing lawmakers are decimating public healthcare systems in the U.K. and Spain, sparking widespread protests; and demonstrations over the rising cost of groceries, fuel, and other necessities spread across the globe last year, with an estimated 12,500 protests in 150 countries.
"Tax havens helped billionaires to double their wealth in the last decade and contribute to corporations raking in enormous windfall profits," said Putaturo. "With this joke list, the E.U. continues to allow the super-rich and profitable to stash away their fortunes while ordinary people are battling with the cost-of-living crisis."
On social media, Putaturo noted that in 2020, the European Commission called for a reform of the criteria the E.U. finance ministers use to compile the tax havens blacklist.
"But the E.U. countries seem to love tax havens," Putaturo said, "so there has not been any progress."
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
As discussions about reparations for Black Americans gain some ground, the first state with a task force on the issue is hearing that it needs to think bigger. African Americans in California have been telling the state’s reparations task force that a one-time payout would mean little if they don’t have equal access to education, employment, health care or housing. A payment, they said...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Energy and Policy Institute’s Shelby Green and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Selah Goodson Bell about utility shutoffs and profiteering for the February 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Some 4 million US households have had their electricity cut off in recent years. But before you say “Russia” or “Covid,” our guests would have you understand that it has something to do with the utility business model that we use in this country, for energy and electricity, and that that model is broken, and worthy of reconsideration.
Bailout Watch et al (1/30/23)
Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, and they’re both behind a new report called Powerless that is out from Biological Diversity and Bailout Watch. They both join us by phone. I’m happy to have you here, Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell.
Selah Goodson Bell: Happy to join.
Shelby Green: Thank you for inviting us.
JJ: Let’s just get into the content of the report. What do you mean by “powerless”? What is the problem that you’re describing? I think a lot of folks might think, oh, my lights blink out for a minute. Losing power is much, much more than that. And it’s life or death in some cases, yes?
SGB: Yeah, that’s well-said. Zoom out a little bit, I just wanted to share, this report is the third in a series that’s been tracking this issue, specifically the extent to which profit-driven utilities have been cutting off families’ basic human right to electricity and heat millions of times a year, while at the same time shelling out billions to their shareholders and executives.
We started tracking this in the pandemic, but it’s a pretty egregious injustice and has continued since. It’s still happening today. Most recently, we’ve seen that houses were cut off of electricity about 5.7 million times since 2020. And that’s a low-end number, as about 20 states don’t even provide information on household disconnections. And that’s about 40% of states that we’ve found.
And so all of the numbers and figures we’re going to share today are just a small scope of the issue. They don’t represent the full scope, and that’s also going to be something we talk about a little bit more: data transparency.
And at the heart of our report, it’s basically a desire to expose the utility industry’s greedy profiteering that’s ultimately driving the shutoffs crisis and energy insecurity.
JJ: I wanted to just, actually, you very forward, in the report, connect electric and gas service shutoffs and profiteering, and I think there’s a reason that you connect those two things.
SG: Yeah, I think most consumers really don’t realize what is happening when it comes to their utility bill, or the energy system that we have designed in America.
Most utilities, they’re able to get a rate of return from their customers, and they’re not really concerned about providing power, or ensuring that everyone has access to power. They’re more concerned about making sure they’re making enough money to give to their shareholders.
And so what we really wanted to highlight within this report is that not only are disconnections happening across the country, especially during a time where people are experiencing such high economic uncertainty, but they are also happening because of rising prices of gas, and utilities are heavily reliant on gas, and are building infrastructure and gas-fired power plants that will cause utility bills to increase further, and also cause customers to have to pay for these rate increases.
And so we really wanted to make the connection between consumers, the price of the utility bill, and also this model that is in need of reform in America.
JJ: Absolutely. And I think that’s not a connection that mainstream news media are making. In other words, we’re hearing prices are rising, and that’s hurting you, but we’re not necessarily connecting that to profit-making by utility corporations.
And so I appreciate the connection that you’re making there, but I just wonder if you could spell out–we’re not talking about a few more pennies at the pump. We’re talking about, in many cases, this is about whether people can do what they need to do to survive.
Selah Goodson Bell: “Last year, one in five American households struggled to pay for an energy bill, but that rate was 50% higher for households of color.”
SGB: I think framing it that way is really important. People seem to take for granted how important electricity is for physical safety; for food security, keeping your food refrigerated; for medical care, if you have medicine that needs to be refrigerated; and also for telecommunications.
And the nexus with disconnects and arrears is, when people are forced to bear those costs and have their service severed, it makes it also harder for them to maintain employment. It makes it harder for them to keep their kids in school. It can make it more difficult to get a loan or a mortgage. And so we really wanted to highlight how this energy and security issue just has tendrils into other ways that social instability can manifest, and how the utility industry is really complicit in that.
And, of course, the impacts of this are most disproportionately felt in households of color. We found that last year, one in five American households struggled to pay for an energy bill, but that rate was 50% higher for households of color, and a big reason has to do with some of the lingering impacts of redlining, and basically a lot of households of color might live in structurally deficient housing that ends up costing more to keep warm or cool, which is especially costly and dangerous in the wake of climate disasters like heat waves, freezes, etc.
They’re already hit the hardest, and are less likely to get the resources they need as early as they need. But then when it comes to the increases in energy demand that come with coping from those extreme weather disasters, we’re seeing households of color also get the short end of the stick. So that’s something that we also wanted to highlight, and really show the utility industry’s role in that factor.
And again, like Shelby said, since they’re continuing to invest in fossil gas infrastructure, but are completely disconnected from the implications of that, that itself is also exacerbating the climate emergency.
Shelby Green: “If just 12 utilities took 1% of their dividends that they paid out to shareholders, that could have covered the cost, that could have prevented disconnections.”
SG: And just to bring it back to profit for a minute, disconnections across the country, as we outlined in the report, occurred over 1.5 million times in just the first 10 months of 2022.
If just 12 utilities took 1% of their dividends that they paid out to shareholders, that could have covered the cost, that could have prevented disconnections. But now they’re also passing on the cost of rising fuel to their customers through rate increases for fuel rider adjustments.
So utility executives, they are not doing their part in making sure that they’re keeping the cost low for consumers. They’re not doing their part in making sure that consumers that fall behind can get access to relief dollars. And they’re also not doing their part in communicating properly why consumers’ utility bills are going up.
So there’s a really big problem here with utilities. They’re not really providing the public with an affordable or reliable service. And regulators, public service commissions, are not doing a good enough job requiring utilities to do that.
So there really is this broken system where the consumer gets hurt every single time. And so we really wanted to highlight in this report that you’re not alone when you say that you can’t afford your utility bill, or when you say that you have to use your credit card to pay for an essential service.
There are millions of people across the country who are having that same plight, and we need to start looking at utilities and their regulators, and how they are able to uphold this system that hurts the everyday American.
JJ: We hear that the role of journalism is to break stuff down for us. We can’t be in those boardrooms, we can’t be in those corporate decision-making rooms. And so we rely on journalists to break it down and explain to us as a consumer, or as a worker, what that means to us.
And so what’s so great about this report is it does break it down. You and I know folks will read the media. They’ll understand that prices are higher for them. They’ll understand that energy prices are higher for them. But they’re going to be told that it has to do with, you know, Russia or Covid or mysterious winds from the West, when actually there are systems that we can talk about, and that we have levers to control.
From Powerless in the United States (1/30/23)
SG: Yeah. And there’s a lack of accountability and transparency. And Selah can talk about this more, but while we were collecting this data, I mean, I live in Florida, and Florida utilities were only required to report disconnections during a very brief period during the pandemic, and then they stopped reporting this data in October of 2021.
But we also know that Florida Power & Light, one of the biggest utilities in the state, they performed almost a million shutoffs during that reporting period, and now we have no idea how many people they’re cutting off again.
So what’s frustrating is that there are people who think that they’re just alone in this process of not being able to afford their utility bills. And there’s also a factor of shame associated with that, not being able to afford your most basic bill, not being able to keep the power on in your house, not being able to cook food, because you have no electricity.
There’s a lot of shame associated with not being able to do the bare minimum, and people think that it’s their fault, but they’re not the only ones to bear this blame. There are utilities and regulators and state legislators who also should be bearing this responsibility, and thinking about: what can we put in place to make sure consumers are being protected?
So in states like Virginia, there’s a bill that’s going through the general assembly that is trying to pause disconnections during a state of emergency. Also, in North Carolina, there is a moratorium in place during winter, so when the weather reaches a certain point, you won’t be disconnected because of the temperature.
Those are protections that should be given to every American across this country. It should not be utility-specific or state-specific. It should be a protection that everyone can receive, because everyone does deserve that right to know, even when you are struggling, you do have protection still.
JJ: Selah, can you add to that? And also I love that you would name the names, you have a hall of shame. There are folks who are doing better and worse on this, in terms of just acknowledging what Shelby has just talked about. It’s a reality for many people, and they shouldn’t be punished by having their freaking lights turned off.
So, immediate action, thoughts?
SGB: Yeah, definitely can add to that. And also in the spirit of naming, I can list a couple of who those hall of shame utility companies were. Some of the top three this year were Exelon, Southern Co. and DTE Energy. And NextEra and Duke last year were two of our worst. But as Shelby mentioned, in Florida, since they no longer require utilities to report on household disconnections, we didn’t have any access to that data.
If NextEra were to continue the disconnection rate it had last year, they would’ve definitely topped our list this year. But even without that, they still made the top 12, when we look back from 2020 through October of last year. These dozen companies were responsible for 86% of the power shutoffs we saw.
So it’s a small number of companies that are just causing a massive amount of harm. Again, like Shelby said, it would’ve only taken 1% of the amount spent on shareholder dividends to prevent those disconnections. And so it’s truly inexcusable, and is a result of their corporate greed.
In terms of immediate actions, another state we want to lift up as an example of their regulators and their legislators actually putting money behind this issue is New York. They actually recently forgave the utility debt of almost 480,000 customers through May of last year, recognizing the different crises that were present, that of the climate crisis, in terms of Covid, and this is like a one-time payment, and they also did the same for low-income customers last summer.
But what we’re asking for is a broader forgiveness of utility debt that Congress can hopefully institute by taxing utility profits. As we just saw, it won’t even take that much to stop utility shutoffs, but when it comes to arrearages, it’s a much bigger issue. And that continues to mount.
Again, like Shelby was outlining, it doesn’t take a disconnection for someone to suffer from the punitive financial measures that these utilities are imposing. And so some other solutions we’re proposing, again, is some disconnection data transparency. In that light, we’re hoping that the Energy Information Administration or state utility commissions are able to mandate these utilities to start tracking and disclosing power and gas shutoff data on a monthly basis, and also include zip code and demographic data, so we know who is being impacted and where.
And we’re also hoping to just institute a shutoff ban. As Shelby said, it shouldn’t be limited to specific times of the year, specific temperatures, or specific states or utilities. Everyone has a right to access electricity and heat.
I already mentioned utility debt forgiveness, but I’m also hoping that Congress boosts funding for LIHEAP and WAP, the Weatherization Assistance Program.
And finally, we’re really trying to start a narrative around the need to really get off of this obsession with fossil fuels. We see how volatile fossil fuel prices are, but we also see how, again, they are what drives the climate emergency, and we’re hoping that the Biden administration uses its executive powers to halt new fossil fuel production and infrastructure.
There are a couple others we could go through, but I know I’ve been talking for a minute, so I don’t know, Shelby, if you wanted to add anything in that light.
SG: I thought that was a great listing.
JJ: Yeah. Let me just ask you both, in terms of journalists, because it seems like you’re in another world, in some ways, than the way that corporate media discuss things.
This kind of conversation is largely off the page, and so I would like to ask you both– obviously folks who are media consumers are also the same folks who might have their lights shut off, you know? But then they pick up the paper, and the paper tells them what the problem is and what the solution is.
And I would like to ask you both: What would you have journalists do? Who would you have them talk to? What questions would you have them ask that could turn this conversation around? And how do we reorient folks to the conversation that might change things?
SG: I think where journalists can start is just going up to people in parking lots, or people at the park, asking them, have you looked at your utility bill lately? Have you noticed any changes in your utility bill?
When I first started learning about shutoffs and utility bills, that’s what I did. I had a petition. I went to the park. I was asking people if they’ve noticed a difference in their utility bill, if they’ve accrued any debt during the pandemic. And I was asking them to sign a petition to make sure my city extended a moratorium, so people didn’t lose power.
So where journalists can start is just start talking to everyday people, and get them to look at things that they’ve stopped looking at, potentially. Not a lot of people look at the fees or charges that are hidden within their utility bill.
And so, yeah, I would just encourage journalists to get everyday residents to start thinking about energy, looking at their utility bill, even scheduling tours with their local utility, and understanding, where does the fuel come from, and what are the factors that are set in place that impact my utility bill?
But there’s not enough everyday people who are thinking about energy, and I don’t blame them. It’s a very difficult topic. Most people just turn on the switch, and that’s the most thinking they do about it. And then when you try to start looking at things, it’s a little bit complicated, because you don’t have access to utility executives, and you don’t understand what decisions they’re making that influence your bill at the end of the day.
So journalists really are the middlemen between the everyday people and the people in power, and the people that sit on those boardrooms for utilities. Those are the spaces where journalists need to be, and they need to disseminate this information in a more direct way to everyday consumers, so they really understand what’s impacting my utility bill, and what can I do to make sure that it’s not increasing.
Like right now across the country, there are utilities who are requesting rate increases from their public service commissioners. That information needs to be disseminated to everyday people, and people need to feel like they have a voice in the process.
They should use this voice. They should file testimony in these rate cases, and they should be more engaged. If we’re not engaged with society, then utilities will continue to do whatever they want, and that will impact us in a negative way.
JJ: Selah Goodson Bell, final thoughts?
SGB: Yeah, that was well said. I don’t have much to add; I just want to echo that last point that Shelby was talking about, of basically opening up the Pandora’s box of what the public service commission is doing and the hearings that they have. These are public hearings that folks don’t have access to, or, like Shelby was saying, they might be talking about topics that feel out of touch, that feel wonky, but know they are topics that affect people on a daily basis.
And I think journalists can do a better job of trying to break those topics down, and know that those are spaces where folks need to be. And so trying to uplift folks in those spaces, but then also translating a lot of the admittedly wonky topics that we’re talking about in a way that everyday people can understand, and feel pressured to get engaged on, so that they can actually hold these utilities accountable and, again, hold their regulators accountable.
JJ: I’d like to thank you both very much. We’ve been speaking with Shelby Green, research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute, and Selah Goodson Bell, energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. Thank you both so very much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SG: Yeah. Thank you for having us.
SGB: Thank you.
The post ‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
In what was probably the first reference to “junk fees” during a State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said Tuesday that his administration is cracking down on “those hidden surcharges too many companies use to make you pay more” and urged Congress to pass legislation expanding on the effort. “The idea that cable, internet and cell phone companies can charge you $200 or more if you...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This coming Sunday, tens of millions of people will tune in for Super Bowl Sunday, the most watched television broadcast in the U.S. By design, Super Bowl LVII will be an escapist spectacle — Rihanna’s halftime show and all — that many will sit back and thoroughly enjoy (including this author, though my cherished Buffalo Bills won’t be playing). But none of this should distract from the fact that...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In his third State of the Union address, President Joe Biden renewed his call for a billionaire minimum income tax, demanding Congress take action on a broken tax system that rewards wealth over work.
“Pass my proposal for a billionaire minimum tax,” Biden proclaimed. “Because no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a school teacher or a firefighter.”
Since the pandemic began in March 2020, U.S. billionaire wealth has increased by a staggering $1.5 trillion to a collective $4.48 trillion. Many of those huge billionaires’ gains will go untaxed under current rules — and will disappear entirely for tax purposes when they’re passed onto the next generation.
Under the billionaire minimum income tax, billionaires would pay a tax rate of at least 20 percent on their full income, including unrealized appreciation, just like workers pay taxes on their paychecks each year.
If Congress won’t take action, state governments should make good on President Biden’s proposals and take meaningful steps towards rebalancing the tax code.
According to the White House, the tax will apply only to the top 0.01 percent of American households, which currently includes those worth over $100 million. Over half of the revenue generated from the tax will come from households worth more than $1 billion.
And while Republicans are eyeing cuts to Medicare and Social Security as a means to address the federal deficit, a billionaire minimum income tax would not only make America’s tax code fairer. White House officials estimate it would reduce the deficit by about $360 billion over the next decade.
The U.S. has no shortage of wealthy tax cheats in need of fair taxing. The 20 percent minimum income tax proposed by Biden is a 12 percentage point increase from the average 8 percent tax rate those high earners currently pay, assuming they pay anything at all.
In 2021, a ProPublica investigation revealed how little in taxes the wealthiest Americans actually pay. In 2018, for example, Elon Musk — until very recently the richest man in the world — paid no federal income tax. A school teacher, like those in West Virginia who went on strike for higher pay that year, paid an estimated federal income tax rate of 22 percent.
While public support for a billionaire minimum income tax is very strong, the probability of it passing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives is highly unlikely given the GOP’s aversion to targeting the pockets of their most generous donors.
But federal gridlock provides state governments an opportunity to take income inequality into their own hands.
Voters in Massachusetts, for example, recently elected to amend their state’s constitution to levy a 4 percent surtax on all individuals with annual income of one million dollars or more. The Fair Share Amendment — or “millionaire’s tax,” as it is known colloquially — is expected to generate an additional $1.2 billion to $2 billion per year, which the commonwealth plans to invest in public education and transportation.
Similar wealth tax proposals are on the table in other states across the country, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Washington.
The astonishing, unequal wealth gains amid a global pandemic renewed public appetite for increasing taxes on billionaires — a significant majority of Americans believe billionaires are taxed too little.
If Congress won’t take action, state governments should make good on President Biden’s proposals and take meaningful steps towards rebalancing the tax code. Let’s ensure that everyone, including the ultra-wealthy, pay their fair share.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
See original post here.
Not poverty, not inequality, but insecurity is at the root of the worldwide upsurge in populism and disenchantment with democracy.
This is the main message of A world of insecurity, just published by Harvard University Press. The author, Pranab Bardhan, is a Calcutta-born, Cambridge-educated, highly respected professor of development economics at UC Berkeley. He is an expert on China and India. But his impressively comprehensive, richly informed and balanced book is about Europe just as much as about Asia and America.
The insecurity which Bardhan identifies as the source of our democratic troubles is in the first place economic. Globalization, understood as the expansion of world trade, has produced undeniable benefits. The poverty rate in India and China, for example, would not have shrunk as much as it has done had it not been for massive exports. But globalization has also shattered economic security in many places as a result of international competition annihilating millions of decently paid stable jobs and threatening to annihilate many more.
Globalization, however, is not the only source of this economic insecurity. Technological change is equally important. Projections about the rate of replacement of humans by machines may be exaggerated, but the ubiquitous invasion of automated digital services is now part of everyone’s daily life.
The insecurity created by fast technological change does not only affect workers whose jobs may be lost or unpleasantly redefined. It also affects consumers and users of public services who are constantly expected to acquire new skills if they are not to be left behind, deprived of access to what they are entitled to or subjected to heavy costs that the technologically up-to-date can avoid.
These two major sources of economic insecurity, which have been very perceptible for some time, were more recently joined by three more: climate change, the pandemic and the war. Climate change creates insecurity not only because of its haphazard physical manifestations but also because of the economic disturbances created by the urgent changes in production and consumption required to address it.
The Covid pandemic disrupted economic activities throughout the world both directly, through illness, lockdowns and other restrictive measures, and indirectly, by creating havoc in supply chains. And the Russo-Ukrainian war has not only affected the livelihood of the residents of the war zones and the economies of the two countries at war. It has also made access to energy and food problematic in countless places very remote from the fighting.
Economic insecurity, whether generated by globalization, digitalization or any other cause, is not the sole culprit. Cultural insecurity, Bardhan insists, also plays an important independent role. It is triggered when people feel that the identity of their community is threatened by the arrival, or the growth in numbers or power, of people who do not share their native language, cultural references, religious or civic beliefs and customs, dress, culinary and other everyday practices.
The upsurge in populism is sometimes strongest in places where economic insecurity is low, due to a thriving labour market, but where cultural insecurity, so understood, is high, owing to real, alleged or prospective immigration.
Both economic and cultural insecurity breed democratic disenchantment because of the feeling that democratic national governments, often bridled by international treaties or constitutional constraints, are unwilling or unable to address them effectively.
Because of the largely unstoppable cross-border movement of capital, goods, services and people and because of the need to keep pace with technological progress, governments often have to capitulate to market forces, or to resort to laborious supranational decision-making processes, more or less remote and more or less democratic. Faced with the impotence of democratic governments, the temptation to call for strong leaders and to embrace simplistic nationalist solutions can seem irresistible.
What can be done to resist this temptation nonetheless? Bardhan believes in the importance of markets, both domestically and globally. He does not want national autarky to replace globalization, nor all means of production to be nationalized. The state, the community and the market all have shortcomings, but all have a role to play.
However, globalization — migration included — urgently needs to be better regulated so as to protect the weaker actors while enabling win-win deals. Meanwhile, at the national and local level, measures can and must be taken to enhance the security, both economic and cultural, of the least secure, including among autochthonous majorities.
Bardhan discusses many such measures — from lifelong learning to strengthening the voice of the most vulnerable workers —, often in the light of empirical evidence from all over the world. But there is one measure to which he devotes an entire chapter: universal basic income. In his view, the best argument in favour of basic income is not that it is an instrument against poverty or inequality, but that it is an instrument against insecurity.
The fact that some non-poor receive a basic income is therefore not a regrettable targeting error. It is essential in order to Increase the economic security of both the poor and the non-poor: for women even more than for men, a sturdy universal floor in the form of an individual unconditional income is far superior, in this respect, to a means-tested safety net.
While the introduction of a basic income is mainly advocated in the context of relatively rich countries, Bardhan argues that it is even more relevant and may prove more realistic in poor countries. In his book, he presents some calculations for India.
Many subsidies currently in place mainly benefit relatively affluent parts of the population and are explained by effective lobbying rather than justified as useful incentives. They should be scrapped. And the overall rate of taxation is particularly low in India, in particular where real estate is concerned. It should be increased. These two potential sources of revenue account for about 10% of GDP.
If the whole of this amount could be allocated to a universal basic income, each person would receive the purchasing-power-equivalent of nearly 70 dollars per month, slightly above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line of 60 dollars per person per month. But given the other needs that must be addressed, Bardhan recommends that the additional revenue should be shared equally between education, health care, infrastructure and a universal basic income.
The basic income would then just be 17 dollars per person per week: peanuts by our standards, but “some minimum income security” for tens of millions of vulnerable Indian households, which “even under the pressing fiscal constraints may not be unaffordable”.
Whether in India, Europe or America, Bardhan does not claim that basic income constitutes a magic potion to guarantee security, let alone a magic bullet to kill populism. But it is part of the battery of security-enhancing policies that are needed if the root causes of the worldwide disenchantment with democracy are to be addressed.
This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.
A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises — namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet.
Every year, Oxfam, a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice, uses the occasion of Davos to release its latest rundown on global inequality. This year’s report, “Survival of the Richest,” offered a striking vision of global poverty from the trenches of the pandemic years. Imagine this as a start: in the last two of those years, the world’s richest 1% captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth, or twice that of the bottom 99%. Put another way, this planet’s billionaires have collectively “earned” (and yes, that’s in quotation marks for obvious reasons) $2.7 billion every one of the last 730 days. Meanwhile, in 2021 alone, at least 115 million people fell into “extreme poverty,” with billions more hanging on by a tenuous thread. By 2030, Oxfam reports, the world could be facing the “largest setback in addressing global poverty since World War II.”
The truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.”
The grim realities laid out in the report left me wondering: What kind of cooperation were they talking about at Davos? Did they mean a collaboration among all global communities? (Not likely!) Or did they mean the continued partnership of economic elites intent, above all else, on protecting their own wealth? And what of fragmentation? Amid increasing warfare and beneath the ongoing fracturing of democracies (including our own, thanks in part to a billionaire whose name I hardly need mention), nations, and long-held international arrangements, do they recognize the deepest fragmentation of all, that caused by so much needless suffering and inexcusable gluttony?
Poverty Amid Plenty
Here in the United States, it’s the same story: untold wealth and shocking want, even as House Republicans are threatening to slash programs like Medicare and Social Security just weeks into a new congressional session. Today, in one of the richest nations in the world, nearly half the population is either poor or a single $400 emergency away from poverty. The moral and cognitive dissonance of such a reality can be difficult to fathom, as can the numbers. At a time when the U.S. economy is valued at nearly $25 trillion and the wealth of the three richest Americans exceeds $300 billion, at least 140 million people strain to meet their basic needs and face the daily threat of economic ruin thanks to one pay cut, layoff, accident, extreme storm, or bad medical diagnosis.
Over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks out of the paychecks of their workers, so much so that the average CEO now makes 670 times more than his or her employees. It tells you how far we’ve come that, in 1965, that number was “just” 20 times more. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour, or about $15,000 a year) has remained remarkably low, hurting not only those who earn it, but millions of other workers whose employers use it as the floor for their own pay scales. Bear in mind that if the minimum wage had kept up with the economy’s overall productivity over the last half-century, it would now be $22 an hour, or close to $50,000 a year.
All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the U.S. economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat — politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.
America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.
Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plus in personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. As a result (as I wrote in 2021 with Astra Taylor), “millions of Americans aren’t just poor; they have less than nothing. The American dream is no longer owning a house with a white picket fence; it is getting out of debt. In one of the richest countries in the world, millions of people now aspire to have zero dollars.”
The view looks very different from the top. The first two years of the pandemic marked the most unequal recession in modern American history, with the wealth of the country’s 651 billionaires actually increasing by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of that year, he was joined by Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. At Amazon, where the median pay in 2020 was about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made that year to his own endangered workers and would still have had well over $100 billion left.
As an anti-poverty organizer, I’m regularly asked if we can afford to end poverty, even as politicians and economists cite the specter of scarcity to justify inaction or even outright anti-poor policies. Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.
Don’t be fooled. We’re not living in a time of insufficiency, but in a golden age of plenty amid grotesque poverty, of abundance amid unbearable forms of abandonment.
To Tackle Poverty, Tackle Wealth
Despite the capacity to wipe out poverty altogether, antipoverty advocacy generally operates within two interdependent philosophical frameworks: mitigation and charity. The first assumes that poverty is indeed a permanent feature of our economy best alleviated by job-training programs, fatherhood initiatives, and work requirements, but never to be abolished outright. The second approaches poverty as a sad social condition that exists on the margins of society and treats poor people as, at best, pitiable and, at worst, pathological. Together, those two frameworks funnel billions of dollars in charitable and philanthropic giving to explicitly apolitical measures directed downstream from the source of poverty.
While such giving does indeed help many impoverished people meet immediate needs, it does very little to confront poverty in its fullness or why it exists in the first place — and in most cases, the help is inadequate given the need. No wonder the wealthy tend to be the biggest proponents of mitigating poverty through charity, because to fundamentally address the problem would also mean addressing the unequal distribution of political power in our world.
Oxfam’s new report is a good place to explore this, since it not only critiques inequality, but offers possible solutions to the nightmares such a situation creates, above all increasing tax rates on the wealthy, which right now are mind-numbingly low. Consider this statistic: “Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, paid a ‘true tax rate’ of about 3% between 2014 and 2018. Aber Christine, a flour vendor in Uganda, makes $80 a month and pays a tax rate of 40%.”
To counter this, Oxfam proposes that worldwide taxes on the income of the richest 1% be raised to at least 60% (with even higher rates for multimillionaires and billionaires). They also suggest that taxes on the wealthy be levied in such a way that their number would be dramatically reduced and their wealth redistributed to meet the needs of the poor.
Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam’s executive director, explained it this way:
“Taxing the super-rich is the strategic precondition to reducing inequality and resuscitating democracy. We need to do this for innovation. For stronger public services. For happier and healthier societies. And to tackle the climate crisis, by investing in the solutions that counter the insane emissions of the very richest.”
A New and Unsettling Force
People often ask me for a plan to end poverty. Usually that means they want to know what policy positions and prescriptions to advocate for, a line of inquiry on which I have plenty of thoughts. As a start, I refer them to the fulsome agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign (that I co-chair), including our demands for fair tax policy. But long ago, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., suggested an approach to lifting the load of poverty that goes far beyond any single program or policy.
Some months before the launch of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, having been endlessly asked for an itemized list of demands, King answered this way:
“When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. When they have amassed such strength, the writing of a program becomes almost an administrative detail. It is immaterial who presents the program. What is material is the presence of an ability to make events happen… The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary tasks… We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse… Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands. We must develop, from strength, a situation in which government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us.”
The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign emerged on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement’s biggest legislative victories. At the time, King pointed out that, beneath the legal scaffolding of Jim Crow and institutionalized racism, areas in which they had made significant gains, millions of Black people remained locked in poverty in the South, as well as across the country, as did so many others from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. King himself was surprised to learn that poor white people actually outnumbered poor Black people nationally. Taking that into consideration, he counseled that the movement had to make an evolutionary leap from “civil rights to human rights” and from “reform to revolution.”
This may not be the King whom the nation chooses to remember every mid-January in glitzy speeches by politicians who vehemently oppose the very positions for which he gave his life. In fact, this year, on that very commemorative day, I couldn’t help but think of the words of poet Carl Hines:
“Now that he is safely dead, let us praise him, build monuments to his glory, sing hosannas to his name. Dead men make such convenient heroes. They cannot rise to challenge the images we would fashion from their lives. And besides, it is easier to build monuments than to make a better world.”
But the truth is that, right up to his last breath, King was deeply concerned about a nation, weighed down by war, racism, and poverty, that was quickly approaching the irreversible fate of “spiritual death.” Years of experience, and the guidance of others, had convinced him that the next chapter of the struggle required a mass movement of a breadth and depth not yet awakened. As he came to see it, strategically speaking, the unity of the poor would be the Achilles heel of a society desperately in need of restructuring. If poor people could unite to form a new political alliance across the lines that historically divided them, they would be uniquely positioned to lead a broad and powerful human-rights movement that confronted militarism, racism, and economic exploitation together.
The same is no less true today. To end poverty, our smartest and most innovative ideas have to be brought to the table. The right analysis alone, however, won’t end poverty. That will only happen through a movement or movements transforming the hurt and pain of millions into, as King once put it, a “new and unsettling force” carrying this nation to higher and more stable ground.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.
Did the lives of Native Americans improve as a result of the legislation mandating assimilation and the revoking of tribal land titles pushed through by Charles Curtis, the first Native American Vice President? Are we better off with Clarence Thomas, who opposes affirmative action, on the Supreme Court, or Victoria Nuland, a war hawk in the State Department? Is our perpetuation of permanent war more palatable because Lloyd Austin, an African American, is the Secretary of Defense? Is the military more humane because it accepts transgender soldiers? Is social inequality, and the surveillance state that controls it, ameliorated because Sundar Pichai — who was born in India — is the CEO of Google and Alphabet? Has the weapons industry improved because Kathy J. Warden, a woman, is the CEO of Northop Grumman, and another woman, Phebe Novakovic, is the CEO of General Dynamics? Are working families better off with Janet Yellen, who promotes increasing unemployment and “job insecurity” to lower inflation, as Secretary of the Treasury? Is the movie industry enhanced when a female director, Kathryn Bigelow, makes “Zero Dark Thirty,” which is agitprop for the CIA? Take a look at this recruitment ad put out by the CIA. It sums up the absurdity of where we have ended up.
Colonial regimes find compliant indigenous leaders — “Papa Doc” François Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Congo, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran — willing to do their dirty work while they exploit and loot the countries they control. To thwart popular aspirations for justice, colonial police forces routinely carried out atrocities on behalf of the oppressors. The indigenous freedom fighters who fight in support of the poor and the marginalized are usually forced out of power or assassinated, as was the case with Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba and Chilean president Salvador Allende. Lakota chief Sitting Bull was gunned down by members of his own tribe, who served in the reservation’s police force at Standing Rock. If you stand with the oppressed, you will almost always end up being treated like the oppressed. This is why the FBI, along with Chicago police, murdered Fred Hampton and was almost certainly involved in the murder of Malcolm X, who referred to impoverished urban neighborhoods as “internal colonies.” Militarized police forces in the U.S. function as armies of occupation. The police officers who killed Tyre Nichols are no different from those in reservation and colonial police forces.
We live under a species of corporate colonialism. The engines of white supremacy, which constructed the forms of institutional and economic racism that keep the poor poor, are obscured behind attractive political personalities such as Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street.” These faces of diversity are vetted and selected by the ruling class. Obama was groomed and promoted by the Chicago political machine, one of the dirtiest and most corrupt in the country.
“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Glen Ford, the late editor of The Black Agenda Report told me in 2018. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”
Ford called those who promote identity politics “representationalists” who “want to see some Black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want Black scientists. They want Black movie stars. They want Black scholars at Harvard. They want Blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”
The toll taken by corporate capitalism on the people these “representationalists” claim to represent exposes the con. African-Americans have lost 40 percent of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 from the disproportionate impact of the drop in home equity, predatory loans, foreclosures and job loss. They have the second highest rate of poverty at 21.7 percent, after Native Americans at 25.9 percent, followed by Hispanics at 17.6 percent and whites at 9.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department for Health and Human Services. As of 2021, Black and Native American children lived in poverty at 28 and 25 percent respectively, followed by Hispanic children at 25 percent and white children at 10 percent. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although Black people make up about 14 percent of our population. This figure does not include people living in dilapidated, overcrowded dwellings or with family or friends due to financial difficulties. African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly five times the rate of white people.
Identity politics and diversity allow liberals to wallow in a cloying moral superiority as they castigate, censor and deplatform those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech. They are the new Jacobins. This game disguises their passivity in the face of corporate abuse, neoliberalism, permanent war and the curtailment of civil liberties. They do not confront the institutions that orchestrate social and economic injustice. They seek to make the ruling class more palatable. With the support of the Democratic Party, the liberal media, academia and social media platforms in Silicon Valley, demonize the victims of the corporate coup d’etat and deindustrialization. They make their primary political alliances with those who embrace identity politics, whether they are on Wall Street or in the Pentagon. They are the useful idiots of the billionaire class, moral crusaders who widen the divisions within society that the ruling oligarchs foster to maintain control.
Diversity is important. But diversity, when devoid of a political agenda that fights the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed, is window dressing. It is about incorporating a tiny segment of those marginalized by society into unjust structures to perpetuate them.
A class I taught in a maximum security prison in New Jersey wrote “Caged,” a play about their lives. The play ran for nearly a month at The Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, where it was sold out nearly every night. It was subsequently published by Haymarket Books. The 28 students in the class insisted that the corrections officer in the story not be white. That was too easy, they said. That was a feign that allows people to simplify and mask the oppressive apparatus of banks, corporations, police, courts and the prison system, all of which make diversity hires. These systems of internal exploitation and oppression must be targeted and dismantled, no matter whom they employ.
My book, “Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison,” uses the experience of writing the play to tell the stories of my students and impart their profound understanding of the repressive forces and institutions arrayed against them, their families and their communities. You can see my two-part interview with Hugh Hamilton about “Our Class” here and here.
August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” foretold where diversity and identity politics devoid of class consciousness were headed. In the play, Harmond Wilks, an Ivy League-educated real estate developer, is about to launch his campaign to become Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. His wife, Meme, is angling to become the governor’s press secretary. Wilks, navigating the white man’s universe of privilege, business deals, status seeking and the country club game of golf, must sanitize and deny his identity. Roosevelt Hicks, who had been Wilk’s college roommate at Cornell and is a vice president at Mellon Bank, is his business partner. Sterling Johnson, whose neighborhood Wilks and Hicks are lobbying to get the city to declare blighted so they can raze it for their multimillion dollar development project, tells Hicks:
You know what you are? It took me a while to figure it out. You a Negro. White people will get confused and call you a nigger but they don’t know like I know. I know the truth of it. I’m a nigger. Negroes are the worst thing in God’s creation. Niggers got style. Negroes got . A dog knows it’s a dog. A cat knows it’s a cat. But a Negro don’t know he’s a Negro. He thinks he’s a white man.
Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A U.S. physician took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times on Sunday to offer a scathing condemnation of the country's for-profit healthcare system and his profession's historical complicity in campaigns against universal coverage.
"Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with 'demoralization syndrome,' a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that's characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose," wrote Eric Reinhart, a physician at Northwestern University. "American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work."
"The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn't provide universal healthcare to its citizens," Reinhart continued "Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because healthcare here is so expensive."
The coronavirus pandemic accelerated that trend and spotlighted the fatal dysfunction of the nation's healthcare system, which is dominated by a handful of massive corporations whose primary goal is profit, not the delivery of care.
According to one peer-reviewed study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a universal single-payer healthcare system could have prevented more than 338,000 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. from the beginning of the crisis through mid-March 2022.
"In the wake of this generational catastrophe, many healthcare workers have been left shaken," Reinhart wrote Sunday. "One report estimated that in 2021 alone, about 117,000 physicians left the workforce, while fewer than 40,000 joined it. This has worsened a chronic physician shortage, leaving many hospitals and clinics struggling. And the situation is set to get worse. One in five doctors says he or she plans to leave practice in the coming years."
"To try to explain this phenomenon, many people have leaned on a term from pop psychology for the consequences of overwork: burnout. Nearly two-thirds of physicians report they are experiencing its symptoms," he added.
But for Reinhart, the explanation lies more in "our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work" than in the "grueling conditions we practice under."
He explained:
What has been identified as occupational burnout is a symptom of a deeper collapse. We are witnessing the slow death of American medical ideology.
It's revealing to look at the crisis among healthcare workers as at least in part a crisis of ideology—that is, a belief system made up of interlinking political, moral, and cultural narratives upon which we depend to make sense of our social world. Faith in the traditional stories American medicine has told about itself, stories that have long sustained what should have been an unsustainable system, is now dissolving.
During the pandemic, physicians have witnessed our hospitals nearly fall apart as a result of underinvestment in public health systems and uneven distribution of medical infrastructure. Long-ignored inequalities in the standard of care available to rich and poor Americans became front-page news as bodies were stacked in empty hospital rooms and makeshift morgues. Many healthcare workers have been traumatized by the futility of their attempts to stem recurrent waves of death, with nearly one-fifth of physicians reporting they knew a colleague who had considered, attempted, or died by suicide during the first year of the pandemic alone.
Although deaths from Covid have slowed, the disillusionment among health workers has only increased. Recent exposés have further laid bare the structural perversity of our institutions. For instance, according to an investigation in The New York Times, ostensibly nonprofit charity hospitals have illegally saddled poor patients with debt for receiving care to which they were entitled without cost and have exploited tax incentives meant to promote care for poor communities to turn large profits. Hospitals are deliberately understaffing themselves and undercutting patient care while sitting on billions of dollars in cash reserves.
Acknowledging that "little of this is new," Reinhart wrote that "doctors' sense of our complicity in putting profits over people has grown more difficult to ignore."
"From at least the 1930s through today, doctors have organized efforts to ward off the specter of 'socialized medicine,'" he wrote. "We have repeatedly defended health care as a business venture against the threat that it might become a public institution oriented around rights rather than revenue."
Confronting and beginning to solve the myriad crises of the U.S. healthcare system will "require uncomfortable reflection and bold action," Reinhart argued, and "any illusion that medicine and politics are, or should be, separate spheres has been crushed under the weight of over 1.1 million Americans killed by a pandemic that was in many ways a preventable disaster."
"Doctors can no longer be passive witnesses to these harms," he concluded. "We have a responsibility to use our collective power to insist on changes: for universal healthcare and paid sick leave but also investments in community health worker programs and essential housing and social welfare systems... Regardless of whether we act through unions or other means, the fact remains that until doctors join together to call for a fundamental reorganization of our medical system, our work won’t do what we promised it would do, nor will it prioritize the people we claim to prioritize."
Reinhart's op-ed came as the prospects for legislative action to transform the U.S. healthcare system appear as distant as ever, despite broad public support for a government guarantee of universal coverage.
With the for-profit status quo deeply entrenched—preserved by armies of industry lobbyists and members of Congress who do their bidding—the consequences are becoming increasingly dire, with tens of millions uninsured or underinsured and one health crisis away from financial ruin.
In a study released last month, the Commonwealth Fund found that "the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates" among rich countries, even as it spends far more on healthcare than comparable nations both on a per-person basis and as a share of gross domestic product.
"Not only is the U.S. the only country we studied that does not have universal health coverage," the study added, "but its health system can seem designed to discourage people from using services."
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings—the corporate entity itself.
Ever since 1886 when a U.S. Supreme Court reporter, in a headnote for the Court’s opinion, wrote that corporations possessed equal rights under the Constitution, judges and corporatist legislators have equipped corporations with an arsenal of inequitable rights. (The Constitution makes no mention whatsoever of “corporation” or “company”).
How is that possible with the 14th Amendment mandating equal protection under the law? Because this central provision for our alleged rule of law didn’t take into account the contrivances of corporate lawyers, corporate judges, and corporate-indentured lawmakers.
Corporations that are created by state charters are deemed “artificial persons.” States like Delaware and Nevada have made a revenue business out of chartering corporations under permissive laws that concentrate power at the top of autocratic commercial hierarchies, leaving their shareholder-owners with very few options other than to sell. Since the early 1800s, states have chartered corporations giving their shareholders limited liability. The maximum they can lose is the amount of dollars invested in their company’s stocks or bonds. The modern history of corporate law is now aimed at maximizing the limited liability of the corporation itself.
The following twelve examples of inequality are shocking:
All these drives for maximum power and control are maturing the corporate state—as Wall Street and Washington merge. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a formal message to Congress in 1938, called the control of government by private power “fascism.” In 1933 Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote an opinion warning about big corporations becoming a “Frankenstein monster” in our midst.
So, all you fighters against inequality between people leap into the Big Leagues and confront the biggest progenitors of inequalities of all—giant corporations. Grab hold of the roots if you wish to prevent the bitter fruits. End cruel exploitation provided by these double standards.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
In 1956, the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite, a blistering critique of concentrated political, economic and military power in the United States. The book influenced many protest movements of the 1960s and has inspired radical scholars and activists ever since. Now, in 2023, Heather Gautney is continuing Mills’s project of analyzing and mapping out elite power in the U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Postal jobs have long been a road to the middle class for Black Americans. The Postal Service began employing Black workers shortly after the Civil War and became a major source of good, middle-class jobs for this share of the workforce in the early 20th century.
During the 1940s, civil rights advocacy, combined with wartime needs, created even more opportunities for Black postal workers. By the mid-1960s, their leadership had increased significantly, with the three biggest post offices in the country — New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — all headed by Black postmasters. By the end of the 20th century, Black employees made up 21 percent of the U.S. postal workforce.
In 2022, Black workers made up 29.0 percent of the Postal Service workforce — more than double their 12.6 percent share of the total U.S. labor force. According to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, postal workers have by far the highest median annual wage ($51,730) and the highest median hourly wage ($24.87) among the 10 occupations with the heaviest representation of Black workers.
Three of these 10 occupations have median hourly wages below $15 per hour. Of the 10 occupations with the largest shares of Black workers, USPS was the fifth-largest employer, with more than 600,000 employees.
Wage data are from the May 2021 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates supplemental tables. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
The Center for Economic and Policy Research notes that the wage gap between white and Black workers is narrower among postal workers than among private sector employees. The Economic Policy Institute has found that Black workers’ share of USPS jobs is significantly higher than their share of all public sector jobs.
Many Black families stand to gain from expanded postal financial services
The Postal Service faces constant pressure to make deep spending cuts that would be devastating for customers and employees across the country. Instead of cutbacks that could drive away customers, decisionmakers should explore new revenue sources, particularly those that would help meet important social needs, such as postal banking.
Black families would benefit significantly from expanded postal financial services. According to an FDIC survey, 11.3 percent of all Black households and 9.3 percent of Latino households did not have bank accounts in 2021, compared to just 2.1 percent of white households.
Among households with income between $15,000 and $30,000, 29.3 percent of Black households and 26.5 percent of Hispanic households were unbanked, compared with 13.6 percent of White households. Single mothers and adults with disabilities were also more likely than other Americans to be “unbanked.”
Families without bank accounts are much more likely to have to use high-cost financial services. For example, 21.8 percent of unbanked households used check cashing — almost 10 times the share of banked households that use such services. And 15.5 percent used money transfer services, more than double the 6.6 percent share of banked households that use these services.
Among all families without bank accounts, the most-cited reason was that they couldn’t afford minimum balance requirements. Other major reasons included distrust of banks, high and unpredictable fees, and inconvenient locations. A 2019 S&P Global report found that majority Black neighborhoods have lost more bank branches than non-majority-Black neighborhoods. JPMorgan, for example, reduced the number of branches in majority-Black areas by 22.8 percent from 2010 to 2018, compared to a decline of 0.2 percent in the rest of the country.
With more than 31,000 post offices across the country and a high level of public trust, USPS is well-positioned to provide dependable, affordable financial services. According to a 2015 USPS Office of Inspector General report, expanding postal financial services such as check-cashing, ATMs, and electronic money orders could generate as much as $1.1 billion in annual revenue.
Members of Congress have introduced legislation for two approaches to expanded postal financial services. These include a Treasury-backed savings system at the post office similar to what existed in the United States from 1911 to 1967 and individual FedAccounts accessible through local post offices in conjunction with the Federal Reserve.
These proposals would provide reliable, affordable alternatives to predatory financial firms. They could also facilitate distribution of federal stimulus checks. Every community across the United States benefits from a strong USPS.
Rather than weakening this vital public infrastructure, policymakers should focus on strengthening — and expanding — this service to meet 21st century needs.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23)
This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin.
You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hike in prices, it’s a time to acknowledge workers’ sacrifices and support them. Silly us. Actually, it’s a moment for powerful companies to raise prices on consumers—not to recoup losses, but just to raise profits, as their shareholder speeches will proudly reveal—and why would that gouging stop at life-saving vaccines or medicines? Why not also shut off the power to the homes of struggling families? Seriously, why not? If Wall Street will reward you for it, and corporate media won’t call you out or even seriously, humanistically report on what you’re doing? Or even easier, one might think, argue for the basic transparency that would allow that reporting?
Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Russian war on Ukraine. At the same time, shareholder payouts went up by $1.9 billion, increases that could have paid those households’ bills five times over. Our guests’ work illustrates how energy bills take up more and more of families’ earnings, and how the actions of corporations take a tough, in some cases life-threatening situation, make it worse, and then hand it off to their allies in the press corps, who they know will present it as “business as usual if regrettable,” but, above all, nothing worth looking in to or talking about seriously.
Our guests aren’t just complaining; they have ideas about what’s needed to address the situation. Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. We’ll hear from both of them this week on the show.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the police killing of Tyre Nichols.
The post Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on Utility Shutoffs & Profiteering appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
SAN ANTONIO — Marcelino Ramos said he joined the U.S. Marines Corps at 17 because he felt a duty to serve and because a recruiter in a pressed-blue uniform promised him citizenship. Ramos, now 54, had no idea that the country he swore to protect would deport him.
Ramos went on to serve in the Gulf War and after he completed four years of service, he returned to his family and home in Texas.
Ramos, who has PTSD, was arrested for a felony conviction that stemmed from a domestic violence incident in 2009. He said he tried to fight the charges but his public defender advised him to take a two-year plea deal.
But Ramos didn’t realize his conviction would put him on the radar of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which eventually found him and deported him because he was never granted citizenship.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of foreign-born U.S. military veterans convicted of crimes have been deported. Despite President Joe Biden’s promise to bring them back, only about 50 veterans, including Ramos, have returned under a 2021 executive order.
Advocates and immigration attorneys say Biden’s policy is a temporary fix that fails to find deported veterans and protect those still living in the U.S. from being forced out and possibly killed or recruited by criminal organizations looking to profit from their skill sets.
“Being deported is a death sentence to any U.S. veteran,” Ramos said. “This is my home, my family and everyone I love is here. I can’t go back.”
President Biden signed an executive order in February 2021 to immediately conduct a review of policies and practices to ensure that all eligible current and former noncitizen service members and their immediate families can remain in or return to the U.S. under a humanitarian parole.
The order created the Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative, which aims to consolidate all federal resources available to support noncitizen veterans, active service members and their families.
As of June 21, 2022, the IMMVI team had received 143 inquiries from veterans living outside the U.S. due to removal, or other issues that restrict their return, according to Congressional testimony from Debra Rogers, director of the initiative.
Many of the veterans who received humanitarian parole, such as Ramos, have been threatened by gangs and cartels that want them to help train their members, according to Danitza James, chief of policy and legislation at Repatriate Our Patriots, a non-profit that provides free services to deported veterans on both sides of the U.S.-México border.
About a dozen of the 50 or so deported veterans that have received humanitarian parole have been able to gain citizenship and stay in the U.S., according to James. The rest, like Ramos, remain in limbo.
Humanitarian parole is a discretionary visa granted to individuals who are inadmissible to enter the U.S. and remain for a temporary period.
After being deported in 2011, Ramos crossed back illegally to the U.S. and started a new life in San Antonio where he met his wife Frances Riojas. He was deported again in 2016 after landing in a hospital with a stab wound he suffered during a fight.
In November, after six years in México, Ramos was allowed to return home to his wife in San Antonio for one year. His attorney filed for his citizenship but it could be months before he knows if he’s been approved.
“I’m trying my best to stay busy and I’m getting the medical help I need with my PTSD but it’s a heavy burden to know that I might have to go back,” Ramos said. “Every day I’m grateful that I get to be home with my wife and that I get to spend some time with my dad and my daughter.”
Danitza James is the chief of policy and legislation at Repatriate Our Patriots, a non-profit that provides free services to deported veterans on both sides of the U.S.-México border.
Repatriate our Patriots has helped hundreds of deported veterans in México find a safe place to live, including Ramos. But even after Biden’s order, organizations like this one are the only one’s looking for deported veterans, according to James.
“It should be the U.S. government’s responsibility to know how many veterans they’ve deported,” said James, an army combat veteran. “But I think it’s not in their interest because then [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service] officials will need to explain, ‘Why were you not following the policies set in place? Why did you deport these veterans?”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, USCIS and ICE are the three government agencies responsible for veterans being deported, but ICE is the only one that had a policy in place to identify veterans before 2022.
But from 2013-2018 ICE did not consistently follow its own policies, failing to maintain complete electronic records on these veterans. As a result, ICE does not know how many veterans have been placed in removal proceedings or removed, according to a 2019 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
In February 2022, all three agencies issued supplemental policy guidance to help train officers to identify former military members and expedite requests for parole so they can return.
Jennie Pasquarella, director of immigrant rights for the ACLU of Southern California said she’s not sure how well immigration officials are adhering to the new policy but she’s seen fewer veterans placed in removal proceedings since it was put in place.
In 2016, the ACLU released the first comprehensive report explaining why veterans were being deported. The report, “Discharged then Discarded: How U.S. veterans are banished by the country they swore to protect,” looked at 59 cases of veterans who had been deported or were in removal proceedings.
Many were decorated combat veterans who sustained physical wounds and emotional trauma in conflicts going back to the war in Vietnam. Some were kicked out of the country for minor offenses that resulted in little if any incarceration, according to the report.
The report traces many of the deportations they studied to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996, which expanded the spectrum of deportable offenses to include misdemeanors. Many believed they became citizens by nature of their service and oath — some were told as much by their recruiters — and were never informed otherwise, according to the report.
Pasquarella said veterans were being deported long before the act was passed but she thinks it exacerbated the problem. And there’s no evidence to back this because no one knows how many veterans have been deported.
“There’s no way to recreate those numbers so it’s all anecdotal,” Pasquarella said. “It could be 1,000 or it could be 20,000.”
Margaret Stock, retired lieutenant colonel with the U.S. Army Reserve and managing attorney at the Cascadia Cross Border Law Group in Anchorage, Alaska, has represented dozens of veterans facing deportation, including some as early as last year.
Stock said deportations of veterans continue to happen because the process for service members to become naturalized is more difficult than it is for those outside the military.
As part of their citizenship application, service members are required to obtain a certified letter from a high ranking official who they often don’t have access to as new recruits. Those that successfully apply, often end up waiting indefinitely when their documents are lost in the mail or their notices of eligibility for citizenship never reach them through their deployments and transfers, according to immigration attorneys.
Service members, like all applicants, must be permanent U.S. residents and able to pass an in-person naturalization interview.
USCIS cut the number of its international offices from 23 in 20 countries to just four offices during the Trump administration, making it harder for deployed service members to apply and complete the interview, according to the testimony of U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) during a 2019 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on deported veterans.
In 2018, USCIS also terminated the Naturalization at Basic Training Initiative, which provided onsite immigration resources and staff to support recruits beginning the naturalization process and allowed non-citizen enlistees the chance to naturalize when they graduated from basic training.
USCIS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“This is a problem that could be fixed by the executive branch of the government but they don’t have the willpower,” Stock said. “The president made statements and said: ‘I’m going to do this and do that’ but then he didn’t follow it up with actually putting people in place and empowering them to fix the problem.”
The post White House initiative leaves deported veterans in limbo appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
The media and politicians are shocked to find out British Gas has been breaking into customers’ homes to install prepayment meters. Of course, if they’d bothered to listen to poor people they would have realised that energy firms have been doing this since 1954.
As Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported, energy supplier British Gas has announced that it would no longer “force-fit” prepayment meters in the homes of customers who are behind on their bills. Energy companies in the UK can obtain court warrants that allow them to enter people’s homes and fit the pay-as-you-go meters. Customers are then at risk of companies cutting their gas supply off if they fail to top them up.
However, an undercover investigation by the Times newspaper looked into this. It found that contractors working for British Gas sent debt collectors to “break into” homes and “force-fit” meters. Some of the customers the report identified had “extreme vulnerabilities”. Journalist Paul Morgan-Bentley went undercover with British Gas and exposed its practice. He noted that the company was breaking into the homes of disabled people:
Others who've had these meters force-fit for British Gas in recent weeks include a woman described in job notes as having “severe mental health bipolar”, a woman "with mobility problems and is partially sighted” and a mother whose “daughter is disabled and has a hoist”
— Paul Morgan-Bentley (@pmorganbentley) February 1, 2023
British Gas’s parent company Centrica was clearly rattled by the story. It said on 2 February it was suspending “all warrant activity” as a result. Centrica will also launch an investigation. Politicians, meanwhile, were outraged:
Today’s news about British Gas breaking into the homes of vulnerable people to install prepayment meters is absolutely horrific.
Wider action to deal with the scandal of prepayment meters is long overdue.pic.twitter.com/nl2eLztyNI
— Lisa Nandy (@lisanandy) February 2, 2023
However, energy firms breaking into people’s homes to fit prepayment meters is hardly news if you’re poor. This is because the government has let energy firms do it since 1954.
As the website Dealing with Bailiffs wrote, energy firms like British Gas can force entry into people’s homes to either fit prepayment meters or cut them off. They can do this under:
Section 2 of the Rights of Entry (Gas and Electricity Boards) Act 1954.
The energy firm has to have a “Warrant of Entry” notice from a magistrate. Dealing with Bailiffs noted that this:
allows a utility company warrant officer access to gas and electricity services in a property on application to a magistrate to lawfully break entry.
It is normally used when contact with the occupants has been unsuccessful and a utility service remains unpaid. A warrant of entry is used to either disconnect services or fit a pre-payment meter to the supply.
iNews reported on this in December 2022. It found that magistrates had granted nearly 500,000 Warrants of Entry since July 2021. iNews noted then that magistrates often signed off on the warrants without even asking if the customers were vulnerable. One magistrate reportedly did a batch-signing of “496 utility warrants in just three minutes and 51 seconds”.
Of course, if the Times and iNews had asked poor people in the first place then they wouldn’t have needed to investigate. However, why would they? Previously, fuel poverty, which would often lead to energy firms installing prepayment meters, was mostly confined to the poorest people. As the Resolution Foundation previously predicted, the cost of living crisis would change all this – and more middle-class people would be hit by fuel poverty:
So now British Gas are raiding slightly richer people’s houses, and suddenly the corporate media are interested – and politicians like Rishi Sunak call it “deeply shocking and concerning”. What’s really concerning is that no-one was interested in how energy firms were treating poor people – until now.
Featured image via Annasmith1986 – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 3.0
By Steve Topple
The dire warnings of fiscal hawks are once again darkening the skies of official Washington, demanding that the $31 trillion federal debt be reduced and government spending curtailed (thereby giving cover to Republican efforts to hold America hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling).
It’s always the same when Republicans take over a chamber of Congress or the presidency. Horrors! The debt is out of control! Federal spending must be cut!
Not only is the story false, but it leaves out the bigger and more important story behind today’s federal debt: the switch by America’s wealthy over the last half century from paying taxes to the government to lending the government money.
This back story needs to be told if Americans are to understand what’s really happened and what needs to be done about it. Republicans won’t tell it, so Democrats (starting with Joe Biden) must.
A half century ago, American’s wealthy financed the federal government mainly through their tax payments. Tax rates on the wealthy were high: Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, they were over 90 percent. Even after all tax deductions, the wealthy typically paid half of their incomes in taxes.
Since then — courtesy of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump — the effective tax rate on wealthy Americans has plummeted. Even as they’ve accumulated unprecedented wealth, today’s rich are now paying a lower tax rate than middle-class Americans. (The 400 richest American families paid a tax rate of just 3.4 percent between 2014 and 2018, while the rest of us paid an average tax rate of 13.3 percent.)
One of the biggest reasons the federal debt has exploded is that tax cuts on wealthier Americans have reduced government revenue.
Meanwhile, America’s wealthy are financing America’s exploding debt by lending the federal government money, for which the government pays them interest.
As the federal debt continues to mount, those interest payments are ballooning — hitting a record $475 billion in the last fiscal next year (which ran through September). The Congressional Budget Office predicts that interest payments on the federal debt will reach 3.3 percent of the GDP by 2032 and 7.2 percent by 2052.
The biggest recipients of these interest payments are not foreigners but wealthy Americans who park their savings in treasury bonds held by mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, personal trusts, and estates.
Hence the half-century switch: The wealthy used to pay higher taxes to the government. Now the government pays the wealthy interest on their loans to finance a swelling debt that’s been caused largely by lower taxes on the wealthy.
This means that a growing portion of your taxes are going to the wealthy in the form of interest payments, rather than paying for government services everyone needs.
So, the real problem isn’t America’s growing federal budget deficit. It’s the decline in tax revenue from America’s wealthy combined with growing interest payments to them.
Both are worsening America’s already horrific inequalities of income and wealth.
What should be done? Reduce the debt by raising taxes on the wealthy.
This back story needs to be told. Please spread the word.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
