Gun politics in the U.S. are inextricably linked to race.
Two recent studies have found more evidence that for many white Americans who advocate for gun rights, it isn’t simply about owning and using a tool, but even more about identity and power.
One of the research papers found that the larger the percentage of enslaved people a U.S. county had in 1860, the higher the rate of gun ownership its residents have today.
The second found that white Americans who express high levels of anti-Black sentiments associate gun rights with white people and gun control with Black people, and they are less likely to support gun rights if they believe Black people are exercising those rights more than they are.
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“I started thinking about what about race and racism might be particularly important when thinking about gun rights,” said Gerald Higginbotham, a University of Virginia researcher who was the lead author of the second study. “Because in mainstream conversation it isn’t necessarily framed in the terms of race, even though it is much talked about at least in Black communities that I’m a part of.”
Nick Buttrick at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, lead author of the study that found a significant relationship between enslavement rates and modern-day gun ownership, said he had long wondered why the U.S. has a different relationship with guns than most other places in the world.
“In the U.S., the dominant way of thinking of what a gun does is it protects you,” Buttrick said.
Surveys have shown that two-thirds of gun-owning Americans say it’s a way to stay safe, while people in other countries are more likely to believe the presence of a gun adds risk and danger to their lives.
“Why is it that Americans think guns will keep them safe?” Buttrick said. “What is the history of this?”
Two things stood out to Buttrick and his colleagues. Chattel slavery was different here than in other countries. So was the exit from slavery, called Reconstruction in the U.S.
Reconstruction was a time of instability and extreme violence in the South, when whites saw the destruction of the antebellum norms they knew. The chaos and distrust of the government bred an environment where they turned to guns to maintain order, Buttrick said.
He and his co-author found rates of enslavement prior to the Civil War from Census data. They then used a common proxy to determine current gun ownership levels in counties — a figure that isn’t tracked by the U.S. government — by looking at suicides by firearms.
That’s how they found the link between places with high levels of enslavement in 1860 and higher rates of gun ownership today. They also found that those high-enslavement counties are the places today where surveying shows the relationship between feeling safe and owning a gun are strongest. Finally, the researchers found that counties outside the South that also have high rates of people saying they own guns for protection have links and social ties to counties with higher rates of slavery before the Civil War.
Courtesy of Nick Buttrick
“Does this explain everything about gun ownership?” Buttrick said. “No, of course not. What we think it helps us to think about is where does protective gun ownership come from, what is the history. If it’s rooted in a political struggle and an anti-Blackness, that may help to explain some things about the way the modern American gun movement works.”
Higginbotham’s study was also, in part, inspired by history.
When white Americans talk about gun rights today, they’re often not talking about Black Americans’ rights. Some of the moments when politicians enacted stricter gun legislation came right after times when Black Americans exercised their rights to own guns. A prime example: The California Legislature passed the 1967 Mulford Act, which prohibited the open carry of loaded firearms, after the Black Panthers protested with weapons on the steps of the statehouse.
“If you go back and look at history, gun control laws that were targeting Black people were in many ways to keep Black people from being able to amass power or stay in power,” Higginbotham said.
This history, discussions among his friends and family and work by other Black scholars made him suspect that when white Americans advocate for gun rights, they’re usually thinking about white gun owners. But he and his colleagues wanted to test it using social-psychological methods.
Courtesy of Gerald Higginbotham
Understanding how race still shows up today in gun policy discussions can help ensure that gun control policies won’t criminalize or otherwise harm Black Americans, he said.
Higginbotham and his colleagues ran multiple studies with 850 participants in total, all white. One showed survey-takers phrases like “gun rights” and “gun control” and evaluated whether they associated those words with the images of Black or white people. Another study showed participants different articles, one where Black Americans were obtaining concealed-carry permits at higher rates than other races and another where white Americans were obtaining the permits at higher rates. Participants were also given surveys to evaluate their levels of anti-Black sentiment.
White Americans who expressed high levels of anti-Black sentiments associated gun rights with white people and gun control with Black people. They also indicated they would be less likely to support concealed-carry permits after reading that Black people were using them more.
This was even after researchers ensured that the articles made clear the increased permits among Black people did not cause higher crime.
“It’s important to think about who people are perceiving legal gun rights to be for and who they are perceiving legal gun owners to be, and how Black people, we challenge that and have challenged that through history,” Higginbotham said.
Higginbotham stressed that he doesn’t support gun control advocates using anti-Black sentiment to push their causes, because that can lead to policies that disproportionately impact Black people. But grasping this history is important, he said.
“Understanding how race and racism have long played a role and continue to play a role in politics in this particular policy arena is vital to ensure the policies that are made are equitable, and protecting everyone’s rights,” he said.
A broader takeaway of both new studies is how closely gun ownership is associated with racial hierarchy.
“A gun is a thing that doesn’t just protect you, but it protects your place in society,” Buttrick said.
That means that gun regulation goes beyond regulating a physical object.
“You’re potentially attacking a pretty important part of someone’s identity,” he said. “These things are not just tools, they’re symbolic objects — and the symbolism that is inherent in them may have been there for a very long time.”
Card machines might be an alternative for Australians who rely on spare change from strangers to stay afloat in today’s increasingly cashless economy, but is this the best way to get ahead?
This post was originally published on Michael West.
In the last years of his life, my father spent many days in intensive care. He had emphysema, the product of too many cigarettes and exposure to asbestos and silica dust at the glass factory where he labored for 44 years. Once during a visit, he said from his oxygen tent that a man was following the nurses around, marking down whatever they did. The nurses were trying to form a labor union, and the observer was noting their times and motions, no doubt in an effort to spot wasted efforts that had to be corrected and to intimidate them. My father said, “Dad did that to me once.”
My grandfather was an industrial engineer, the company man with the stopwatch timing workers’ motions so that these could be reengineered and the workers ordered to perform their jobs with greater “efficiency”; that is, faster, resulting in increased glass production per hour and more profits for the employer. Grandpa “time-studied” his son, illustrating perfectly that workers, no matter their capacities, interests — in a word, their humanity — are, to those who hire them, simply commodities to be manipulated and controlled. Treated no differently than the raw materials, tools, machinery and buildings with which the employees interact to produce the goods and services of modern society.
I have studied and written about work for more than 50 years, my own and that of many others, to uncover its nature, what its consequences are for those who do it, and what might be done to change it for the better. My last book reflects what I have learned; it is titled Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle. Its thesis is simple. In a capitalist economy, businesses, spurred by incessant competition, seek to make maximum profits and to use these to achieve high, unending growth. To get what they want, however, they must rigorously control what goes on in their workplaces. The power to do this is embedded in the nature of our system: A few individuals own society’s productive wealth, while the many need access to it to survive. The latter then must sell their ability to work to the former. While the advantage obviously lies with the few, the desires of employers and workers diverge, as anyone who has worked knows. Those who labor are controlled, treated as objects, but this necessarily negates the fact that workers cannot think of themselves as commodities. Workplaces are thus alive with tensions. Management must try to control the labor process, the way in which work is done, if it is to thrive, but this must be done in the face of potential resistance, in form of sabotage, slowdowns, strikes, picketing, boycotts, mass quitting and political agitations.
The essence of management is control, and the history of capitalism is but a sequence of the implementation of “control mechanisms.” (My book provides the detail of these, their effects on workers and the possibilities for radically changing the way we labor. Here we can give only a summary.) At capitalism’s dawn, people worked at home, producing cloth, for example, with wool loaned (put out) to them by merchants who were now capitalists. When this proved inefficient, the owners of the wool herded the weavers into factories, hiring women and children (often orphans) to aid them. Here, the employer could watch them to make sure they stole no wool and, importantly, to see exactly how they performed their labor tasks. The factory whistle served to habituate those who toiled inside to the rhythms of a new work regimen, punishing those who were late or left early.
The supervisors hired to watch over their charges soon saw that a person trained in a craft divided his task into component parts — that is, details or subtasks. It was a short step to see that it would be cheaper to hire untrained workers — at first, mainly women and orphaned children — to do the details and reserve the craftsmen for what the untrained laborers could not do. The number of people who could perform each detail was very large, and this kept wages low and employees fearful of being easily replaced. Once power sources such as water wheels and steam engines could make effort independent of the workers’ bodies, some of the subtasks were mechanized. Machines could control workers directly, making them “appendages” to a mechanism, to use Karl Marx’s famous word. Furthermore, as mechanization became more sophisticated, work became further degraded, such that the human ingenuity needed for the labor process to proceed successfully diminished as the level of mechanization increased.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Frederick Taylor took the existing managerial control mechanism — centralization in factories, the detailed division of labor and mechanization — and systematized them into what he termed, “scientific management.” The conceptualization of work processes would be the sole prerogative of the employer. His band of industrial engineers would do what my grandfather did. Workers would now simply be machine-like parts in an automatic system, carrying our explicit orders and nothing else. Personnel departments, now called Human Resources, offered carrots and sticks, such as incentive plans, modest fringe benefits, demotions, transfers and terminations to keep workers happily and fearfully hard at work. If readers intuit that Taylor’s aim was to speed up production so that profits rose, they would be correct.
Led by the Toyota Corporation, “Taylorism” has been extended and deepened in what is called “lean production,” or as its critics call it, “management by stress.” This form of control includes many elements:
* Systematic Hiring: Employers use metadata, personality tests and interviews to find people who easily take orders, identify with business, won’t likely support a union and will tolerate an intense work environment.
* Team Production: Using techniques developed by the military, companies divide employees into teams, fostering team loyalty and a competitive spirit in which workers are happy to pit themselves against other teams, plants and business rivals.
The cover of Work Work Work: Labor, Alienation, and Class Struggle.(c) Monthly Review 2022
* Cross-Training: Here, the idea is to have people think they are learning new skills, while the reality is that they are simply learning to do other subtasks. Work processes had already destroyed the integrity of task (skilled) labor in which one person performed a job from beginning to end. A metalsmith with a work order to make 100 funnels would make the pattern and then do each of these subtasks 100 times in succession: layout, cutting, shaping, joining, polishing and decorating (if needed). If people are hired to do each subtask only, then metalsmiths need only make the pattern. With cross-training, a person might be trained to do two instead of one of the subtasks, neither of which requires much knowledge or training.
* Just-in-Time Inventory: Parts, such as car steering wheels, are produced in subsidiary plants (saving money because the subsidiary workers are paid less, even if unionized, and now no money will be spent on inventory space and maintenance by the main plant). Workers in the primary facility will now be fearful their work will be subcontracted. For some production, it is possible that the external facilities will be exported abroad, further splitting the workforce and lowering costs. Today, this concept can be applied to workers, from those in fast food to the adjunct faculty that teach most of the classes in U.S. colleges, resulting in extreme stress and insecurity.
* Kaizen: Japanese word for “constant improvement.” This is a perpetual speed-up mechanism. For example, an assembly line might be sped up, a team might lose a member or inventory might be in short supply. Teams are then expected to solve the problem. This is where cross-training is most useful to businesses. Extreme pressure is put on teams, often through a system of lights that can go from green (good) to yellow (warning for teams to start hustling) to red (production will stop, and woe to the workers). Now, U.S. auto workers can expect, as a result of Kaizen, to work 57 seconds out of every minute.
* Extreme Surveillance: I call this the “panopticon,” after philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a circular prison with cells arranged so a guard can see all those incarcerated without them knowing if he was watching. Grandpa would have been astounded at the extent and degree to which employees are subject to employer monitoring. App developers are in competition to supply employers with ever more invasive ways to spy on those they employ. Even consumers have been used by businesses like hotels and colleges to surveil workers. What else can we call student evaluations, including external ones such as Rate My Professor and ratings on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor?
The effects on workers of all this control are wholly negative — stress, diminished mental and physical health, anxiety, depression, substance abuse and sometimes violent behavior — just what we would expect when human beings toil under the command of others. The etymological roots of the word “work” connote torment, compulsion, affliction and persecution. These well reflect the reality of labor for most of the world’s toilers. The global labor force is about 3.5 billion persons. Of these, 800 million are farmworkers. Partly uncounted in the labor force are at least 160 million child laborers, some of them under 10 years old toiling in dangerous workplaces such as metal mines. In 2020, there were about 1.5 billion people in “vulnerable” employment: self-employed women, men and children doing everything from making deliveries, sewing clothes, producing cheap cigarettes, and selling goods and services on the streets to scavenging mine waste for saleable metal and garbage dumps looking for anything that can be converted to cash. Even in the richest country in the world, which workers would not grasp these words immediately among the tens of millions who deliver mail and packages; drive trucks and buses; labor along the assembly and disassembly lines that give us our cars, trucks and meat; clerk in grocery stores and other retail establishments; sweat on kitchen lines preparing food; provide our health care; clean our offices and buildings; teach in our schools; do clerical work; perform yard work; build houses; tar our roofs and road; and many other labors large and small?
On this Labor Day, perhaps it is time for all members of the world’s working class, to ask themselves, why is work so often a “torment,” an “affliction,” done under “compulsion”? Why does it feel as if our bosses are “persecuting” us? Why does it wreck our bodies? Why does it seem so meaningless? It certainly doesn’t have to be and was not for most of our time on Earth. And then ask, if this is true, how can we create a society in which we control our own labor, where work is a natural and necessary part of life, one we do to produce the essentials of life, not for someone else’s riches but for use by everyone, equally and in harmony with the natural world?
In answer to these questions, perhaps every labor union, workers’ center, grassroots political organization and newly formed groups of those who want to change the world should embrace the slogan of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement: “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” Use the wealth of unions, political organizations and the pooled money of workers to buy land and produce food on it collectively; build new, cheap, energy-efficient housing — training people to both do and control the work. Forge worker-community cooperatives and collectives. Pressure governments everywhere to aid these efforts. Compel employers, by organized strength, to change the way work is done. Demand a say over the introduction of new technology. Insist on an end to employer surveillance.
The possibilities are many, and the goal of unalienated work is of the greatest importance. How can capitalism be transcended and a new world constructed unless the essence of this system — controlled labor — is abolished?
As a teenager, I was an avid reader of Judith Martin, the columnist more commonly known as Miss Manners. I was particularly fascinated by esoteric topics that seemed to belong to another era, such as how to address a formal wedding invitation to a woman doctor and her non-physician husband, or which fork is ideal for serving wedges of lemon (a three-tined lemon fork, of course). Martin taught me that etiquette is best viewed as a means of conveying appreciation and respect for others: Lemon forks may not always be necessary but thank-you notes will never go out of style.
In addition to Martin’s column, I’m now a regular reader of “Social Qs,” Philip Galanes’ unintentionally revealing New York Times column. Billed as “lighthearted advice about awkward social situations,” the column frequently tackles situations more miserable than awkward: inheritance disputes, homophobic parents, kids with serious behavioral problems, etc. Galanes is an able and breezy writer, but there’s only so much good humor one can muster in response to the misery, greed and pettiness of the Times readers whose letters the paper chooses to print.
A reader seeks help from the New York Times (8/17/22) about her daughter’s student debt relief: “My brother complains constantly about the ‘government handout’ she’s taking for her education.”
Common topics include: resentment of others’ good fortune, even when one is personally content and secure; ghoulish speculation about and disputes over the assets of living parents; disdain for anyone who relies on government programs rather than family money; and irritation at being expected to tip low-wage service workers—in short, the sticky “social situations” common to a narrow but politically powerful class of people with money and property, and little understanding of or patience for those with neither.
The sheer unpleasantness on display begs the question of why the paper prints these particular letters, of the thousands it must receive. Perhaps it’s meant to make the average reader feel better about ourselves (“I may not be the best person in the world, but at least I’m not as awful as that guy!”). Or maybe the Times simply highlights the situations it believes will resonate the most with the greatest number of readers. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: a column for and by the resentful rich.
‘Sick of being asked for handouts’
The mother of a young woman who paid off most of her educational debt via loan forgiveness programs for teachers (8/17/22) recently sought advice regarding an uncle who “complains constantly” about his niece’s “government handout.”
Question regarding a pool attendant who asked for a tip (New York Times, 1/16/20): Should I have reported him for rudeness?
Concerns about tipping abound. Under the headline “I Thought This Was an All-Inclusive Resort,” one reader (1/16/20) reported that a pool attendant at a resort in Hawaii had explicitly asked her for a tip (“‘Thank you’ doesn’t pay the bills, ma’am”), which, being empty-pocketed at the time, she declined to provide. Her husband later suggested she return with a tip; her daughter-in-law suggested she report the man “for rudeness.” In the end, she neither reported nor tipped him.
What did Galanes think? After expressing compassion for the worker, he indicated that the letter writer should have tipped. Yet he couldn’t entirely betray his class. If the attendant “tip-mongered daily, or was otherwise aggressive,” Galanes added with undue sympathy, he would certainly have “spoken to a manager.”
managed to get past [their] annoyance at the tip jar that appeared one day on the counter of [a] local coffee shop…. Now the proprietors have added a “tip screen” to the credit card payment process, reminding me to pay their workers for them in case I missed the tip jar.
“I am sick of being asked for handouts for people who are simply doing their jobs,” the reader continued, before asking Galanes’ blessing to “say something” to the owner of the shop.
Explaining that he tips because “our economy generates enough profit to pay all workers a living wage,” and “even if all full-time workers were paid the minimum wage…it still wouldn’t be enough to survive in many places,” Galanes wrote:
Many employers are not stepping up. So, while we wait for meaningful change for working people, some people tip. You don’t have to. But why make a fuss about others pitching in?
Why, indeed? One possible answer is that Times readers would rather whine publicly about workers looking for “handouts” than learn how to interact more charitably and peaceably with their fellow human beings.
‘Wise up and stop supporting’
Another common if mystifying complaint comes from those who can afford to be generous but would rather not be—or, even more bizarrely, would prefer others not to be. A reader (11/4/21) recently wrote:
I have been a Big Brothers mentor for six years…. [My mentee and I] share a love of dining out…. The problem: Apparently, no one taught him not to order the most expensive item on the menu when someone is treating him to dinner…. Before our last dinner, I played up the restaurant’s burgers and pastas, which are reasonably priced. I ordered an $18 entree. [Mentee] ordered a $14 appetizer and a $36 strip steak. I can afford it, but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Golf player to New York Times (9/10/20): “My friend’s son is a deadbeat…. I don’t want to hurt my friend, but he needs to hear the truth.”
Another (9/10/20) wondered how to break it to a golf buddy that his 35-year-old son was a “deadbeat” whom he ought to “wise up and stop supporting.”
It seems that New York Times–reading, Hawaiian resort–going, $36 strip steak–buying, “handout”-resenting advice seekers are more likely to ask (11/22/18) why a nephew whose parents “died when he was 18, leaving him impoverished,” is now living above his means than how best to support a family member in need.
Galanes’ column reveals a passion for rules-following and resolving petty grievances—Why won’t the man who swims at my local pool abide by pool signage and wear a swim cap, even though he has no hair (11/22/18)? Why must my neighbors leave their shoes outside of their apartment doors (1/28/21)?—that supersedes any commitment to neighborliness, civic virtue or intra-family harmony. At its best, etiquette is about ensuring the happiness and comfort of others, not policing their behavior and denying them income. Miss Manners would be appalled.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Where did all the good tunes go? Have millennials just gone the way of Gen X and Boomers before them, pining nostalgically for gilded memories of a past that never glittered? Or has the music business—and music along with it—really changed? In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta Gold explores the unsavory reality of the capitalist music industry with special guest Torquil Campbell (AKA Torq), co-lead singer of the acclaimed indie pop/rock band Stars. Torq guides us on a journey to understand the contemporary music industry, and how streaming platforms and usurious music-industry capitalists have built an environment hostile to creativity with their relentless fleecing of artists and consumers alike. To take back the culture, we’ll have to take back the means of artistic production, and Torq offers some thoughts on what that might mean for cultural workers. Torq Campbell is a socialist musician, songwriter, co-lead singer of the band Stars, and co-host of the Soft Revolution podcast. Stars have released nine studio albums—including, most recently, From Capelton Hill—and have been nominated for multiple Juno and Polaris awards
Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this story is in progress and will be made available as soon as possible.
In recent years, amid college admissions scams and student debt, a new debate is emerging around higher education. An increasing number of people are questioning the “paper ceiling” — the barrier for skilled job seekers who lack a bachelor’s degree. The education press is calling this an ontological threat in that it questions the existence and value of college itself, while accusing the system of perpetuating multiple forms of inequity. Of course, higher education often has found itself a political football in the past. What makes this time different is its critique of functions universities typically have seen as their strength: providing skills for reemployment and meaning for life.
Everyone knows it’s been a tough few years for higher education. With enrollments dropping during the pandemic at a pace not seen for half a century, concurrent changes in the U.S. workplace have rendered college degrees unnecessary for a growing number of high-wage jobs. Yet many employers require four-year credentials anyway, in what some observers see as an antiquated habit and a cover for discrimination.
The numbers are deceptively simple: 75 percent of new jobs insist on a bachelor’s degree, while only 40 percent of potential applicants have one. According to the advocacy group Opportunity@Work, employers mistakenly equate college completion with work aptitude, while disregarding self-acquired knowledge or nonacademic experience. The group asserts that the nation’s undervalued workforce “has developed valuable skills through community college, certificate programs, military service, or on-the-job learning, rather than through a bachelor’s degree. Workers with experience, skills, and diverse perspectives are held back by a silent barrier.” As a consequence, more than 50 percent of the U.S.’s skilled workforce has been underemployed and underpaid.
More concerning still is that such discrimination is unevenly distributed. Within a 70-million worker cohort of what are termed STAR (Skilled Through Alternative Routes) employees – those who don’t have a four-year degree — one finds 61 percent of Black workers, 55 percent of Latinos and 61 percent of veterans.
Academia has not ignored these issues. Schools know full well that students want jobs. Industry partnerships for job preparation, not to mention research and “innovation” programs, are common, especially for programs in science, engineering, technology or business. Equity and diversity programs likewise have become more robust, particularly in recent years. But the quality and quantity of these efforts varies from school to school. Unsurprisingly, the educational establishment uses its shortcomings to argue for more money and capacity. Pushing student loans and tuition discounts to boost enrollments, universities often cite statistics that their graduates have lifetime earnings of up to $1 million more than those without a degree. Many also assert the role of college in providing intellectual development, critical awareness and socialization.
But public opinion isn’t so sure, with Pew Research finding that only 16 percent of Americans believe college does a good job of preparing students for well-paying careers in today’s economy. Certain cohorts of the population have always held degrees of anti-intellectualism and resentment toward academic elites — but now even grads themselves express doubts, with only half saying their degrees helped them find work or do their jobs. The general public is divided on what higher education should do, according to a recent survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, revealing that 75 percent of wealthy and college-educated Americans believe a college degree is “definitely” or “probably” worth it, while only half of adults without a college degree or making less than $50,000 a year hold the same opinion. Pushback from inside the university enters this debate as well, with some faculty resenting the anti-intellectualism and vocationalism of the “corporate university.” Meanwhile, right-wing groups like Turning Point USA advocate the defunding of universities and prosecuting them for fraud.
Amid these disagreements, a growing bipartisan movement now is recognizing that the U.S.’s fixation with bachelor’s degrees ignores the many well-paid skills that can be acquired without going to college, not to mention the pace at which technology is creating more such jobs. Meanwhile, self-doubt is cropping up in publications like the respected Chronicle of Higher Education, which recently ran a piece asking, “If you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to get a good job, what does that do to the value of college?”
But it isn’t only job applicants who miss out. The entire economy suffers from narrow approaches to career preparation. The rising role of technology has meant that 37 percent of skills in highest demand have changed since 2016, according to data collected by the Burning Glass Institute (BGI) on over 15 million jobs. One in five jobs (22 percent) required at least one skill that was totally new, with positions changing rapidly in areas like finance, design, media, management, human relations and IT. Meanwhile, press accounts abound about jobs going unfilled in critical fields because employers can’t find “qualified” applicants. Labor reporter Eleanor Mueller asserts that “the U.S. spends far less on worker development than most other wealthy nations, which has made it difficult for its workforce and supply chain to meet current challenges.” According to Andy Van Kleunen of the nonprofit National Skills Coalition, the nation’s workforce strategy has declined because it relied too much on degree holders, when it “should be investing in all layers of our workforce.”
Little wonder that students are opting out of college at record rates. In a tight economy, only the wealthy can afford an education that promises no job at the end. The economic class division of higher education certainly isn’t lost on the 68 percent of college students who must borrow to pay for school, the majority of whom will spend decades of their lives paying off $1.7 trillion in tuition debt –– while deferring things like buying first houses (and often being prevented from securing home loans when they do try to buy homes because their student loans are too high) or starting families. Conditioned to see college as a requirement for the “American Dream,” many find themselves stuck with a flawed education that is increasingly overpriced, loaded with unnecessary frills, and punitive to anyone unfamiliar with its rules and culture.
Compounding this problem is the inequity running rampant inside colleges and universities in ways only recently coming to light. To make up for lagging enrollment numbers, schools increasingly base admissions decisions on willingness to pay (or borrow) over metrics that predict academic success and graduation. Once students get to college, they often find themselves struggling in poorly taught courses staffed by underpaid and overworked part-time faculty. A growing literature now documents the once-untold story of campus cost-cutting, especially as it shortchanges students with learning differences, special needs or limited experience with college life. All of this contributes to the rapid rise of student stress, academic failure and drop-out rates.
This new crisis in higher education is hardly a secret, yet it mostly gets viewed through such symptoms as rising tuitions, budget cuts, student anxiety and unemployment. Because of this, it’s not the type of problem resolvable with a single fix. Doing away with college certainly isn’t the answer at a time when all young people need the critical skills to make smart decisions for themselves and each other as workers, consumers and citizens. Pretending the problem will just go away won’t work either. At this point, nearly everyone involved agrees that much needs changing in the way higher education is conceived and how it operates. Groups like the Campaign for Free College Tuition find overwhelming public support for cost-free community colleges and state universities, as pressure continues to build in Washington for a broad-based federal program of student loan forgiveness.
Nascent movements like Critical University Studies — which examines higher education in a social context — seem one place to start. Writing an early article on this, Jeffrey J. Williams argued that any true reform of higher education must involve the many stakeholders inside and outside of institutions: students, professors, union organizers, business leaders. A growing body of helpful information/research is now becoming available; for instance, the online “Critical University Studies Resources” from Northwestern University’s Program in Critical Theory is listing current articles on the topic. Duke University Press offers a “Critical University Studies Syllabus” with links to online readings, largely free of charge. Both Palgrave MacMillan and Johns Hopkins University Press now have book series in university studies as well. Key in all of this is the need to begin a conversation, especially within an academic culture that all too often has seen itself exempt from the practicalities of the world around it. Unless something changes soon, higher education’s existential crisis may become very real indeed.
A day after Boris Johnson resigned as British prime minister but announced that he would remain as “caretaker prime minister” while the Conservative Party chose its new leader, the disgraced leader was hit with another scandal. Several media outlets reported that one of the reasons he wanted to stay in office for a few months was so that he could continue to have access to Chequers, the PM’s country residence, where he and his wife, who had gotten married during the COVID-19 lockdowns, were planning a belated wedding bash.
Others gleefully reported that any incoming resident to Number 10 Downing Street would, as a first order of business, have to replace the extraordinarily gaudy, and pricey, gold wallpaper and other baubles that the prime minister and his wife had ordered installed — using money donated by lobbyists — in their official residence.
Johnson’s tenure was defined by lawlessness and cronyism, dolled up by his carefully cultivated shambolic charisma and his ability to turn a phrase to his advantage. He was, as the Observer and Guardian columnist Andrew Rawnsley put it this weekend, a master of “verbal flatulence” void of any underlying philosophical principles. On Brexit, he talked a big talk of “getting the job done” and implemented changes that led to startlingly high inflation and low growth, to a damagingly weak currency, and to almost daily diplomatic spats with the EU. On “leveling up” the economy, he preached about the need to economically boost depressed areas of the country — yet, by the end of his tenure, inequality (including the geographic divisions that Johnson decried) was up and reliance on food charities was becoming a defining feature of the economic landscape.
The GINI coefficient, a number used to measure inequality in individual countries, rose slightly for the first two years of Johnson’s premiership; when it fell marginally last year, that was due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the initial hit to top earners’ wealth in 2020, rather than to broader long-term policy changes. Months into his premiership, Johnson was forced to admit that the U.K. was more geographically unequal, in terms of income, than any other major industrial democracy.
On COVID, he talked of the need for everyone to pitch in and sacrifice, yet it turns out that he and his colleagues were cavalierly breaking their own lockdown rules pretty much whenever the opportunity presented itself.
As with Trump, Johnson felt a need to install “loyalists” around him. While Trump’s loyalists were almost all white and Christian, Johnson’s government was more ethnically and religiously diverse. Yet, despite that fact, its members generally shared the same elite class position and opted not to force the larger-than-life PM to share the spotlight with them. In the end, when push came to shove, Johnson valued sycophancy far more than diversity of opinion.
Given this, it’s something of a miracle that Johnson sowed so much discord and distrust that even the loyalists who had spent the last several years compromising their own decency in pursuit of power felt the need to resign by the dozens last week, so as to force an end to his calamitous tenure in office.
But, now that he has resigned in disgrace, Johnson seems to have no intention of going quietly into the political night. Within a day of resigning, the caretaker prime minister had put together a new cabinet, many of whose members were promptly derided by Conservative insiders as being so politically toxic that their presence in government could only have been considered by a prime minister looking to set in place political landmines for whomever his successor might be.
His diehard supporters were already launching whispering campaigns against the frontrunner in the succession race, the ex-Chancellor Rishi Sunak. And despite promises not to embark on any controversial policy initiatives during his months as a caretaker, Johnson made it clear he would continue his policy of unilaterally ripping up the agreement with the EU regarding trade routes and inspection protocols in and out of Northern Ireland — a policy that threatens to trigger a trade war with Europe.
There are, at last count, at least 15 likely contenders to succeed Johnson as Conservative Party leader and thus, as prime minister. Some of them are backbench nonentities who will surely fall to the wayside over the coming days and weeks; but several others are top Cabinet ministers, who will be in the campaign for the long haul. There’s Sunak, who until last week was the chancellor (the rough equivalent to the U.S. treasury secretary, though with more powers to set tax rates and craft a governing agenda); there’s Liz Truss, the hardline foreign secretary; and there’s Transport Secretary Grant Schapps. And then there’s Attorney General Suella Braverman, who has made a name for herself championing the most right-wing of Johnson’s policies, and who many in the British commentariat have described as being the most Trumpian in temperament of the whole gaggle. It’s likely that Sajid Javid — whose resignation from his position as health secretary was, along with Sunak’s exit, the trigger for the revolt that led to Johnson’s demise — will put his hat in the ring, as will the fiercely anti-immigrant, “law-and-order” Home Secretary Priti Patel.
In this list of contenders, one can see the outlines of a Conservative Party at war with itself. There are one-nation moderates, such as the ex-military man Tom Tugendhat; but there are also a slew of hard-liners who care far more about the old Thatcherite project of lowering taxes and deregulating the economy. There are those opposed to recent National Insurance tax increases, and those who argue that every penny allocated for vital social goods, such as increased spending on the National Health Service and subsidies to tide poor residents over during this period of historically high energy prices, need to be paid for by taxes levelled not on the wealthiest but on ordinary, already financially strapped residents.
Despite Johnson’s efforts to purge the party of anti-Brexiteers, there are at least some contenders who would, if asked privately, probably want to round out the sharpest edges of Britain’s ugly divorce from the EU. On the other side of the divide, there are those who would like nothing more than to make Brexit as hard, and as ironclad as possible, to entirely separate the U.K. from Europe’s human rights court, and to shred the environmental and workplace rules that broadly harmonize the U.K.’s labor market with that of continental Europe.
Throughout, as this political saga has unfolded, the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties have largely been sidelined, watching as the Conservatives tear into each other and as their standing with the public has cratered. Some Conservative Party insiders have reportedly started talking about the prospects of the party splitting in the face of this bloodbath and these irreconcilable political differences, as did the Labour Party in the early 1980s, with disastrous consequences for its election prospects.
Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, himself not the most charismatic or imaginative of leaders, was until recently also facing investigations by police into possible breaches of COVID lockdown restrictions. But last week, the local police force involved cleared him of any wrongdoing.
If there were an election tomorrow, Labour, which is generally seen as being less corrupt and more in tune with the needs of economically struggling voters, would, according to these polls, come out with roughly 50 seats more than the Conservatives. As a result, it would be in a strong position to be able to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and a smattering of nationalist groups — though the Scottish Nationalists, in particular, would likely drive a hard bargain before agreeing to support a Starmer premiership.
Last month, when Johnson survived a no-confidence vote in his leadership, he made it clear he was hoping to rule for a decade. Now, barely a month later, he is about to be out on his ear, having suffered one of the most stunning turnarounds in British political history. Johnson the individual will soon be departing Downing Street, and Johnsonism as a political project has hit the rocks. Moreover, the party that he presided over so ruthlessly since 2019 is sliding into a summer of knives-out political infighting that could easily fracture it for years to come and ultimately lead to its electoral implosion two years from now when the next general election is held.
The capitalist world economy is facing major challenges today: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused damage to most economies around the world, skyrocketing inflation is disproportionately affecting poor and working-class people, and even stagflation (a combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth) looms on the horizon. In addition, there is a global food crisis fueled by the war in Ukraine. The current food crisis has its roots in neoliberal policies in agriculture in developing countries, according to radical political economist Shouvik Chakraborty.
None of the current global economic problems can be solved without massive changes to the workings of the world economy to counter the harms caused by neoliberal capitalism over the last 40 years.
Is neoliberalism dying? And what are the alternatives? Is socialism a viable option for developing countries? Chakraborty addresses these questions in an exclusive interview for Truthout below. Chakraborty is research fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of scores of academic articles in macroeconomics and political economy.
C.J. Polychroniou: The world economy is projected to experience feeble growth and high inflation in 2022, and there are even concerns about stagflation. What are the major challenges facing the world economy in 2022?
Shouvik Chakraborty: The world economy entering a stagflation phase genuinely concerns the working class across the globe. However, given the income disparity among the advanced and low-income economies, the challenges faced by the workers under such a stagflationary scenario are different. The concerns in the former are more focused on the continuation of a particular lifestyle — whether they would be able to purchase a single-family home, afford a vacation or continue driving their private vehicles. At the same time, the fear in the lower-income countries is related more to the necessities of life — whether they would be able to put food on the table, a minimum supply of clean and safe water, and access to some minimum level of electricity and cooking fuel. Given the lack of income support such as food stamps, social security benefits and unemployment benefits, the marginalized sections in these low-income countries are acutely vulnerable to the coming economic crisis. The advent of neoliberal policies over the last four decades led to the retreat of the state from even the basic forms of welfare measures in these low-income countries like providing food through fair price shops, price-controlled health care through primary care facilities, supply of clean water, etc., which were once part of the dirigiste regime, and, thereby, exposing these vulnerable sections now to the vagaries of the market forces.
The pandemic made things worse for these poorer sections of society, especially the women who have been disproportionately impacted. During the pandemic, these marginalized sections have already faced an economic blow to their income and in sustaining their livelihood. With the unequal distribution of income globally and inequality within nations accentuating further during the pandemic, the more affluent sections globally were less affected by the recessionary conditions and could shield themselves. However, the marginalized sections, especially those in the low-income countries, were the worst impacted. Therefore, it is true that the fears of an economic recession combined with an inflationary situation concern the global economy. Still, their extent and nature differ based on the current levels of income and development of those economies. Additionally, for the developing countries, repaying their debts at higher interest rates in a reduced growth rate environment would pose additional macroeconomic challenges.
There is a global food crisis going on, and many accuse Russia of using food as a weapon of war. Yet, there are many governments around the world that are imposing food-export restrictions that not only drive food prices up but also squeeze food supplies. So, what is actually causing the global food crisis, how bad is it going to get, and what ways are there to solve the current food security crisis?
The global food crisis will be acute, and it will be most felt in the countries that are already food-insecure and suffering from hunger. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has already issued dire warnings. Although one can point to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, export restrictions, supply-chain issues and climate change-related disruptions accentuating the global food crisis, it is not the entire story. During the neoliberal era, one sector that mainly got ignored by the policy makers, especially in the developing world, is agriculture and its allied sectors. According to the OECD Agricultural Statistics, the total budgetary support to the agricultural sector as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the emerging economies declined from 1.25 percent to 0.81 percent over the last two decades.
As a consequence of negligence to this sector, the average annual growth rate of agriculture, forestry and fishing sector worldwide, according to the World Development Indicators, declined from 3.7 percent in the 1980s to 2.9 percent in the 2010s. It is starker in the case of the lower- and middle-income countries. Over this same period, while the overall growth rate of low- and middle-income countries increased from 3.6 percent to 4.7 percent, agriculture and its allied sectors’ growth declined from 3.9 percent to 3.4 percent. The point of citing these statistics is that much before the Russia-Ukraine war and pandemic, the agricultural sector was already suffering, and the food supply was impacted.
Historically, agricultural prices are volatile. With the underlying crisis of this sector and the recent events accentuating it, global food prices increased last year, and that trend continues. The two other factors contributing to the rising prices, as a direct fallout of the neoliberal policies, are the increased profiteering of the major multinational agribusinesses and the speculative activities on the futures commodity market. The increased speculative activity is recently confirmed by a critical study that tracked the movements of financial investors (investment funds in particular) in commodity markets. Both profiteering and speculation need to be immediately regulated.
The production of agricultural commodities is usually price-responsive (although with some lag), and it is possible that other agrarian economies (assuming the Russia-Ukraine war continues) would probably respond by increasing their production level and improving the supply chain. However, to do so, the governments in those economies need to support the sector by increasing public investments and total budgetary support. This would, however, be an anathema to any state adhering to neoliberal policies and its obsession with balanced budgets; hence, the political challenge should be to do away with the neoliberal order.
Neoliberalism has been a disaster for most countries in both the developed and the developing world. Is it the case though, that neoliberalism has lost its force? Is it in crisis?
Neoliberalism has weakened the working class globally — the race to the bottom in wages, de-unionization and privatization. In the advanced countries, the workers’ wages have got tethered to those in the lower-income countries and, therefore, the share of labor compensation in GDP has been declining for several advanced countries around the world. In the United States, this share declined by 5 percent between 1975 and 2017. The decline in other countries like Germany, Japan and France is even more significant, with the largest occurring in Canada, at almost 11 percent.
This has accentuated the inequality within countries, especially in these advanced economies, in terms of both income and wealth inequality. Since 1990, income inequality has increased in these developed countries. It also further accentuated the already existing wealth inequality globally — while the bottom half of the global population owned less than 1 percent of all wealth in 2018, the richest decile (top 10 percent) owned 85 percent of all wealth, and the top 1 percent alone held almost half of it. The pandemic has only worsened this inequality, with hundreds of millions of people forced to leave the workforce. This level of inequality creates a lot of precarity and vulnerability among the working class.
With the rise of nationalist slogans and racist mongering in the advanced countries, the right-wing forces blamed the poor workers in the emerging economies — Mexico, India, China and African nations — for the loss of employment faced by the workers in the advanced countries. Right-wing people falsely argue that the advanced economy workers have to suffer because some guy in Bangalore or Shanghai is taking away their job, and the workers in these emerging economies are prospering. It is true that inequality among per capita national incomes has declined in relative terms in recent decades. However, the average income levels in advanced economies are still very high. For example, the average income of people in the European Union is 11 times higher than that of people in sub-Saharan Africa; the income of people in North America is 16 times higher than that of sub-Saharan Africans.
Despite this reality, the right-wing forces continue the narrative and challenge the process of globalization, and encourage the rise of nationalism. In many advanced countries like the U.S., France, Germany, and others, this false narrative, along with other factors like immigration, led to the rise of authoritative, undemocratic regimes. These regimes bolstered the narratives of xenophobia and nationalism. In the U.S., for example, the Trump administration decided to escalate trade wars with China, moved out of the Paris Climate Accords, and turned their back on the European Union in the name of nationalism and protecting the national economy. This led many scholars, including some progressives, to write the epitaph of the neoliberal order.
It is true that the ideas associated with neoliberalism, especially that of the free market, are facing some challenges, especially after the pandemic during which a significant chunk of the population in the advanced countries benefited from the welfare measures of the state. However, I still doubt whether the free movement of capital and international trade, an integral part of the neoliberal regime, faces the same challenge. Capital, especially speculative finance capital, is still free to move across borders in search of speculative profits. And the U.S. dollar is still the top currency in the world and enjoys the global reserve currency status. Most of the central banks in the world have to adjust their interest rates in response to what the Federal Reserve does, sacrificing their independent monetary policy. This might even push their economies into recession because the central banks of those countries are scared of a capital flight. So, Main Street has substantially challenged Wall Street, but I still think the former has a long struggle ahead to make a permanent dent in the latter. Hence, it is true that neoliberalism is facing substantial challenges, but it might be too early to write the epitaph.
If the neoliberal agenda has indeed failed, what alternative paths of development are realistic for today’s world?
As mentioned earlier, although neoliberalism has not entirely lost all its steam, it has been challenged. The Green New Deal proposed and discussed in the Global North by various sections of the progressives presents a viable alternative to the neoliberal agenda. Any alternative progressive path of development in today’s world must keep the science of climate change at the center of policy making. The world is facing an existential crisis, and an alternative progressive development path must consider these policies’ environmental and ecological impacts. It should directly link to access to natural resources such as water, air and land.
However, from a developing country’s perspective in the Global South, the pursuit of the Green New Deal in the Global North should not become a cause of pain and exploitation for the workers, peasants, petty producers and miners in the former. Historically, the economic interactions of the advanced economies through the mechanisms of “free and fair” trade led to the exploitation of human and natural resources in the Global South. Hence, one should think about the Green New Deal as a Global Green New Deal, where the interest of the populace in the Global South is equally protected like that of the Global North, and the North partially bears the cost of this Green New Deal program in the South. Otherwise, what would happen, as history has shown us time and again, that the Global North will prosper at the expense of the Global South.
Is socialism a viable option for the Global South?
Socialism is, of course, a viable option for developing countries. With the recent win of the progressives in Peru, Chile and Colombia, it seems to become more feasible. But, the critical question is: Which model of socialism will these emerging countries follow? Will it be the Chinese model of socialism? In that case, I believe the progressives globally need to give it a pause and rethink whether they want to follow that trajectory. I say this because many leftists in the world, including my country, India, seem to unquestioningly follow the Chinese model of socialism without even genuinely understanding its repercussions in a democratic setup.
I believe democracy today needs to be an integral part of the socialist agenda, with the dignity of individuals upheld, where a top-down approach to planning with the state deciding it all needs to be questioned. Local participation, decentralized administration and democratic interaction should form the core of a new socialist agenda. A rights-based approach, where the right to life and the basic necessities for it — food, clean water and air, housing and clean energy are upheld, needs to be a central part of a socialist program, along with other rights like the right to health care, the right to education and employment. We need better protection of social and economic rights, which does mean a more significant role for the state. Protection of the workers’ rights, petty producers, small farmers and miners, whose interests have been sacrificed in this neoliberal era, must form the core of the new socialist agenda. A newly envisioned socialist order in the emerging economies of the Global South has to learn from the mistakes made by the earlier regimes by engaging in dialogues and attending to the needs of the local communities.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
High inflation has returned after more than two decades of very low and stable inflation rates. While in the past, central banks were struggling to bring inflation up to a target of 2 percent, they are now confronted with the opposite task. Raising the interest rate is one way to combat inflation, which is why the Federal Reserve announced in mid-June its largest interest rate since 1994.
Will a hike in interest rates fix the real reason behind today’s inflation, which is now a global problem? What does the Fed rate hike mean for average workers and the poor? What other ways are there to combat surging inflation? And why do capitalist governments worry more about inflation than they do about unemployment or inequality? Progressive economist Gerald Epstein sheds light on these and other questions about today’s inflationary economy. Epstein is professor of economics and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a leading authority in the areas of central banking and international finance. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, The Political Economy of Central Banking and What’s Wrong with Modern Money Theory? A Policy Critique.
C.J. Polychroniou: In an attempt to combat high inflation, which rose in the U.S. by 8.6 percent in May, the Fed hiked its interest rate by three-quarters of a point. This is the highest interest rate hike in decades, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the Fed took even more aggressive actions in the months ahead as part of its war against inflation. How much of an impact can higher interest rates expect to have on inflation?
Gerald Epstein: It partly depends on how high interest rates are jacked up and how long they are kept up. In general, moderate increases in interest rates — say, 1 or 2 or even 3 percentage point increases — cause only small reductions in the inflation rate, which is defined as the percentage rate of increase of the price of a market basket (collection) of goods and services over a period of time. There are many reasons for this. For one thing, in the first instance, as Wright Patman, the populist congressperson from Texas in the 1950s repeatedly pointed out, increases in interest rates actually increase prices! The reason is that interest costs are, among other things, a cost of doing business for companies that borrow money to fund their operations. So, like wages, or gas or other costs, increased interest costs are likely to be passed onto customers by businesses that rely heavily on credit.
As for the price reducing impacts of interest rate increases — these occur only indirectly. The main channels are by raising the cost of borrowing by families for houses (mortgages), or credit card purchases, and by raising the cost of borrowing by companies that are planning to build new factories or buy new capital equipment. These reduce the demand for goods and services — houses, appliances, cars, new factories and capital equipment — and the workers that produce them.
It is the next step where possible reductions in prices and the rate of inflation comes in. Companies and workers are very reluctant to lower prices, or even to reduce the rate of increase of their prices and wages. So, what happens next depends on the power that workers and capitalists have to keep their wages and prices up — to wait out the reduced demand for their products and services until demand goes back up.
Typically, firms have a lot of ability to wait out the cutbacks without greatly reducing their prices. This is especially true when firms have a lot of pricing power if they are monopolies or have a big share of the market, as mega corporations often do. Workers, much less so. So as demand for products go down and unemployment goes up, we typically begin to see wages either go down or stop going up. Perhaps housing prices begin to slide or soften. Over time the inflationary pressures might subside.
But this can take a substantial amount of time. Estimates by well-known Yale economist Ray Fair, for example, indicate that a 1-percentage point increase in short-term interest rates reduce the inflation rate by one-half percentage point, but only after 15 months. So, as estimated by macroeconomist Servaas Storm, it would take a 4-percentage point increase in the Fed’s interest rate to reduce the inflation rate by only 2.5 percentage points — say from 6 percent to 3.5 percent — far above the Fed’s target of 2 percent. And the price tag for this modest drop in inflation would be an increase in the unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points and a significant fall of GDP.
Even these weak anti-inflation impacts are probably an overestimate of the impact of interest rate increases on current inflation. The reason is that so much of this inflation is due to production disruptions outside the U.S. that increases in U.S. interest rates will have, at best, weak effects.
The libertarian economist Milton Friedman famously said that inflation is caused by “too much money chasing too few goods.” He assumed that the culprit here was “too much money” — typically printed by the Central Bank (the Federal Reserve in the U.S. case).
But, historically, most really serious inflations are caused by “too few goods,” not too much money: that is, serious disruptions in the supply of goods. Typically, these are associated with wars, droughts and political instability. And this is largely true with our current inflation.
Most of the drivers of our current inflation come from disruption in the supply of key commodities such as oil, gas and food, and other key parts of the “supply-chain” such as microchips for automobiles. Some of these disruptions are still resulting from the COVID pandemic and the shutdowns associated with that disaster; and now, added on are the sharp increases in fuel and food prices stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Russian blockage of Ukraine food exports to the world.
According to Servaas Storm, increased prices of imported products to the U.S. account for upwards of one-third of the increased inflation we are experiencing.
In addition to the external sources of production and distribution (i.e., “supply-side”) disruptions, the U.S. has domestic disruptions as well. Some of the better-known ones include shortages of truckers, inefficient ports and a decline in the labor force relative to pre-COVID trends. The latter is very important but is poorly understood. It could be a combination of COVID health issues, poor pay and working conditions, more family obligations, and other factors.
The point, though, is that interest rate increases will do nothing to solve these problems, and might even exacerbate them by making it more difficult for families to get the health care, child care, etc. that would allow them to go back to work.
In short, even when we are experiencing “plain vanilla” inflation due to too much demand (“demand-pull” inflation), interest rates must be raised significantly and for a long period of time to reduce it, at considerable cost in lower economic growth and higher unemployment. But when the main causes of inflation are supply side factors and, especially, those occurring abroad, the potency of interest rate increases to fight inflation are much, much weakened. This means much more pain needs to be foisted on workers to extract the same gains in terms of lower inflation.
Who wins and who loses from the Fed’s interest rate hike?
The current inflation, which is caused by significant disruptions in the supply of key commodities, such as gasoline and food, among other goods, is very negatively impacting poor and working-class people in the U.S. These price increases are like a big hike in sales taxes, which is a “regressive” tax: That is, it most negatively impacts those groups who spend a high percentage of their incomes on these goods. And given that these are necessities, these represent a high percentage of the purchases of these groups. Very rich people spend more on these goods than do working-class people, but this represents a much smaller percentage of their incomes. So, bringing down the cost of these necessities would certainly help poor and working-class people and families.
However, as we have seen, increases in interest rates will not do this, at least not without hurting these very same groups. Raising interest rates will increase unemployment, reduce economic growth and raise mortgage interest rates, which makes housing even more expensive for these people.
The increase in interest rates will primarily help two groups: those with significant amounts of financial wealth, and financial institutions that lend money and will now be able to charge higher amounts of interest and whose financial assets will retain more of their value if inflation falls.
Now, those who have seen the stock market drop in recent years will question whether wealthy investors will benefit from higher interest rates. It is true that one impact will be a reduction in the value of financial assets like stocks; at the same time, the rates of return on newly invested income will be higher. Moreover, to the extent that, in the longer run, the higher interest rates limit inflation, it will reduce the possible erosion of the real value of the wealthy’s considerable wealth.
There is another group that potentially benefits from the high interest rates that will raise the unemployment rate: the capitalists who employ workers.
The Fed and capitalist governments in general worry more about inflation than they do about unemployment, poverty and economic inequality. Why is that?
The simple answer to this question is that capitalists of various stripes tend to be harmed by substantial inflation, and they tend to benefit from unemployment, poverty and economic inequality. All of these reduce the power of workers and increase the power and wealth of capitalists. The Fed and capitalist governments, who tend to be disproportionately influenced by (if not controlled by) various capitalist segments, conduct policies that reflect these preferences. An (overly) simple way to think about this is to think of capitalists as being divided between two groups: financial capitalists (bankers, rentiers, financial operatives) and non-financial capitalists (auto producers, internet, agrobusiness, etc.). Of course, this is overly simple since there is often a big overlap among these groups.
But to continue: The financial capitalists and rentiers are especially phobic about inflation because unexpected increases in inflation erode the purchasing power of their financial assets. The non-financial capitalists, for their part, are phobic about their workers having too much power which they can wield to get higher pay, better working conditions and even more control over the decisions of the firms. Karl Marx noted the fact that capitalists adore the ability to “discipline” workers so they can’t exercise their power, and the main mechanism that capitalism has to do this is to throw workers out of work — that is, create unemployment. Marx called this the “Reserve Army” of the unemployed. In Das Kapital, Marx noted that capitalism requires the periodic replenishment of the reserve army of the unemployed to keep the workers in line.
The non-financial and financial capitalists typically are united with respect to monetary policy when unemployment is low and inflation is high: the Fed should raise interest rates to throw workers out of work, prevent them from raising wages, and thereby put downward pressure of prices and inflation in order to protect the real value of their wealth and increase capitalists’ profits.
So, the previous question asked who benefited from higher interest rates in this current situation? The bankers and the non-financial capitalists.
What does today’s inflation and Fed policy teach us about capitalism?
The bankers, banker-friendly economists such as Larry Summers and his associates, and pundits in the press are all pressing the Fed to take extreme measures to reduce inflation, even if those measures will significantly injure those that they purportedly are designed to help by throwing them out of work. Summers, among others, has been claiming that the Fed must raise interest rates dramatically in order to stem a “wage-price spiral,” blaming workers’ wage increases for sustaining the higher inflation rates. This is false since workers’ average wage increases have only been a small fraction of the increases in prices.
The implication of this is that workers in the U.S., who have basically had a very little if any pay raise in 40 years, cannot be allowed to have any pay raise now, despite the fact that the incomes and wealth of the top 1 percent has gone up more than 10-fold in the last several decades. This call for higher interest rates is particularly damaging to African Americans and other people of color who only are able to get ahead during periods of very low unemployment. These calls are taking place in the context of what economists at the Roosevelt Institute, Economic Policy Institute, and elsewhere have identified as a significant “profit push” component to our current inflation: Mega companies with substantial pricing power are using the supply chain shocks and Russian war in Ukraine as excuses to flex their pricing muscles and raise their profit margins to 70-year highs.
In other words: this says that American capitalism seems incapable of delivering increases in the standard of living to the bulk of its population. Critics often refer U.S. capitalism as “neoliberal capitalism.” I think of it as “rapacious capitalism.”
Now, this is a statement in particular about U.S. capitalism, not necessarily all capitalist countries. Capitalist countries, such as the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) where workers, unions and social democratic parties have had significant power in the aftermath of the Second World War, have, for a number of decades, been able to “tame capitalism” to the extent that income distribution was more equal and real gains have been made by the working class and poor. To some extent, these gains have been recently eroded, but they nonetheless remain.
But this drive to have the Federal Reserve raise interest rates to bring down this inflation no matter what the cost reflects the “rapacious capitalist chorus” which has far too many powerful members.
What other methods are available to fight inflation besides contractionary monetary policy?
There are numerous other tools which are available to fight this mostly supply- and profit-driven inflation, but most require some coordination between the Federal Reserve and the government overall. Clearly, something must be done. This supply-driven disruption is having significant negative impacts on the standards of living of millions of people — in the United States and around the world — because it is raising the cost of a number of key goods that people need to live and thrive: fuel, food, housing, transportation.
So, what to do? I have already noted what the Fed should not be doing: raising interest rates sky high. To figure out what the Federal Reserve can contribute is to identify what the goal of policy should be. The goals of Federal Reserve Policy should be three-fold:
To protect the standard of living of the bulk of the population, and especially those who are most vulnerable, not primarily the bankers or the non-financial capitalists.
To help where possible to relieve the supply-side problems, and certainly not do anything to make them worse.
To facilitate where possible the needed transition to a non-fossil fuel-based economy, and not do anything that makes that transition slower or more difficult. This will help deal with the longer-term causes of inflation, namely climate change.
To achieve these goals, the Fed will not be able to operate on its own. Just as it did during the great financial crisis and then, even more so, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, the Fed should cooperate with a general government plan to deal with this cost-of-living problem. In those instances, the Fed developed multiple new and creative mechanisms primarily to bail out the banks and financial markets.
This time, the Fed should use the same effort and creativity to control inflation without imposing the costs on workers or the future possibility of controlling catastrophic climate change.
The Biden administration has attempted to lower the cost of fossil fuels. A better approach, suggested by Jim Boyce and Bob Pollin, among others, is to tax oil profits and return the receipts to people. This will retain the incentive to switch from fossil fuels to green energy, while helping workers and the poor with the hit to their standard of living.
The government should tax excessive corporate profits and use the returns to expand subsidies for food and other necessities for the poor and working class.
Isabella Weber and James Galbraith, among others, have suggested temporary price controls on key commodities to break the inflationary dynamics in these commodities.
Among the pressures affecting these dynamics has been an increase in financial speculation that has driven up these prices faster and higher than would be the case from simple supply and demand. Here the Federal Reserve, along with other financial regulators, should monitor and enforce rules to limit such speculation that is helping to drive some of this commodity inflation.
As I indicated before, the Fed allocated billions of dollars to bail out the banks and financial markets in 2008-2009, and again in the spring and summer of 2020. Now the Fed should devise special credit facilities to provide financing for the expansion of green energy, credit to expand day care and community health facilities, to help expand the effective labor force, and new initiatives for ecologically appropriate farming to provide foodstuffs. All of these would help to reduce bottlenecks. The Fed could do this by providing lines of credit, insurance and other facilities from community banks, special agricultural loan funds, affordable housing institutions and other similar financial institutions that have experience and a track record in funding these key goods… all of which are implicated in the current inflation.
In other words, since this is primarily a supply-side problem, the Fed should focus on helping to expand the supply, rather than on throwing workers out of work to limit demand at their expense.
Labour has won the Wakefield by-election, taking the seat from the Tories. But the data shows this isn’t any kind of resounding victory. Yet if you believed the party and the pundits then the result was ‘beyond their wildest dreams’.
Wakefield: wild?
As Britain Elects noted, Labour won Wakefield with 47.9% of the vote:
Across the media and on Twitter, Labour MPs are oozing positivity about the result. For example, shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh told BBC Breakfast:
We were obviously hoping for victory last night in Wakefield, but the result went beyond our wildest dreams. It was a higher turnout than we expected, a much bigger swing, and a much bigger vote share as well.
Haigh must have pretty tame dreams if the Wakefield result was beyond her “wildest” ones. Because actually, as pollster John Curtice noted, what actually happened was the Tories’ vote share collapsed more than Labour’s share rose. Never mind, though – because Keir Starmer branded the result as:
A historic victory — this city deserved a fresh start.
“Historic” is debatable. Because given the scandals surrounding Boris Johnson – Labour should have hammered the Tories. Plus, based on the size of the electorate in 2019 and the turnout – in reality only around 19% of the voting public voted for Labour.
Our systems of politics and democracy, and their proponents, disenfranchise the poorest people. So much so, that they rightly feel voting will change nothing. The difference in a richer area, like Tiverton and Honiton, is clear. Its by-election saw a 52% turnout and the Lib Dems got in – while the constituency has much lower rates of deprivation.
So, no – the Wakefield election wasn’t a victory for Labour. It was a victory for the political and media class, who’ve maintained the status quo. And it’s all thanks to their disenfranchisement of the poorest people.
People deserve a fair share of the wealth we build in this country, but right now, Americans’ paychecks are being squeezed while corporate CEOs make windfall profits. Any plan that seeks to address inflation, like President Joe Biden’s recently published piece in the Wall Street Journal, should acknowledge how corporations and the very rich are using our pain to push a false narrative about how we got here. Whenever they can, corporations blame workers who organize against unsafe, unfair workplaces, and voters who demand the public investments we need.
Let’s be clear about what’s really happening here: Prices are rising faster than wages, and the wages paid by corporations are not keeping up with rising productivity, nor is the federal government making the needed public investments to prevent serious economic hardship for the working class. While tens of millions of people were forced into poverty during the pandemic, billionaires got $1 trillion richer last year. And, as the recent report from People’s Action and Demos showed, corporations just spent millions of dollars to kill the Build Back Better agenda, which would have lowered costs for everyday people.
People do not have enough money because corporations and the very rich want it that way — and their propaganda blitz about inflation is designed to keep it that way. To truly understand their strategy, let’s take a step back.
When former President Ronald Reagan and the corporate forces behind him wanted to end the era of the New Deal, which dragged this country out of the Great Depression and lifted millions out of poverty, he leaned on fears about inflation. “Inflation,” he said, “is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.”
But inflation is about rising costs and who bears them, and while he was activating people’s fear-based mentalities about it with violent imagery, he and his allies were destroying the public structures that kept costs down for everyday people and attacking the main institution — unions — that defended worker pay and working conditions.
He frequently misled audiences about the relationship between inflation, taxes, and budget deficits. The basic frame he brought to bear was one of discipline — or, austerity and authoritarianism. By terrifying people about inflation, enabling the deeper exploitation of workers, and scaring the public away from public investments, Reagan ushered in a toxic era of neoliberalism that led directly to the crises tearing our country apart today.
You can see this squeeze play operating in politics now, from the factory floor to the halls of Congress. When PepsiCo announced billions of dollars in payouts and stock buybacks in its second-quarter earnings call for 2021, the company also announced that it intended to increase “productivity” at its facilities — facilities at which workers had just gone on strike for being forced to work “suicide shifts,” or schedules with only eight hours off between shifts and 84-hour work weeks with no time off. One worker published a public letter days before the earnings call, in which she described one employee dropping dead at the plant in question only to have her supervisors move the body and slot someone else in to maintain that productivity.
Meatpacking corporations made similar moves, including Tyson Foods. Last January, Tyson had to agree to a $221 million price-fixing settlement, but in the following year, their net profit soared by 47 percent while they gave out $700 million to shareholders. A few months ago, Tyson’s CEO’s credited rising meat prices for doubling the company’s profit.
So, what was happening on the factory floor while Tyson was raking in these profits and jacking up food prices?
In 2020, Tyson’s legal department drafted an executive order for the Trump administration to “insulate meatpacking companies from oversight by state and local health departments and provide legal protection against lawsuits for worker illnesses and deaths,” according to a new report from the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis. According to the committee, the meatpacking giant made “baseless” claims of an imminent meat shortage to justify keeping workers in their facilities as the pandemic took off, putting consumers and workers at risk. The result? During the first year of the pandemic, Tyson saw roughly 30,000 employee infections and 151 employee deaths, the worst among major meatpackers.
The organization I work for, People’s Action, has been on the front lines of the battle to win the Build Back Better plan, before it was killed by a corporate Democrat. It has been a bruising fight between everyday people on the one hand and entrenched corporate power on the other. Our member organizations from West Virginia to Arizona and a bunch in between hosted direct actions exposing corporations for their behind-the-scenes puppeteering during the Build Back Better battle. We won some real victories, like cutting child poverty in half through the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit and rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement, but corporations are doing everything they can to stop this kind of legislation.
The same folks who will work a person until they collapse and die on the factory floor will certainly stop at nothing, including misleading us about the source of our pain, to keep profits sky-high. That’s exactly what they are doing when they spin rising prices at the grocery store and the gas pump as end-of-the-world economics. They want you to believe it’s your fault, not theirs, because you had the gall to elect leaders who would lower costs for you for once instead of the rich.
When corporations and their shareholders make record profits, when their CEOs bring home $21 million and some change every year, when their stock prices break records — when all of these things are true and they still raise prices and try to force their employees to deliver “higher productivity,” to work until they break — the problem is not that we demanded that our elected officials pass the reforms and investments that we need to survive. The problem is greed.
With inflation running rampantin the United States and the Biden administrationscrambling for a solutionto what’s become a major political and economic crisis, new polling data and swing-state focus group results shared exclusively withCommon Dreamssuggest one approach would be especially effective: Challenging corporate greed.
Conducted by the research firm GBAO on behalf of Fight Corporate Monopolies, the recentnational surveys and focus groupsin two key battleground states show that voters are particularly responsive to and supportive of messaging that connects price hikes to profiteering by big business.
For example, GBAO finds that 74% of voters say they would be more likely to back a candidate who supports outlawing price gouging as a way to “crack down on companies using inflation and the pandemic to raise prices.” Voters, facing pain at the pump, become even more supportive when thesurging profitsof oil and gas companies are mentioned.
“There is hardly any difference across party lines in engagement on these policies, suggesting an opportunity for either party to define itself as a champion on corporate accountability,” GBAO notes in amemoprovided toCommon Dreams.
Speaking for themselves during focus group sessions held in April — when inflation wasup 8.3%compared to the year before, the highest level in four decades — voters in Wisconsin and Arizona confirmed their view that corporate profit-seeking is contributing to the price hikes U.S. consumers are seeing atgrocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, and elsewhere.
One voter, identified as a Black woman from Wisconsin, said that corporations are using inflationary pressures across the U.S. andglobaleconomy as a “convenient excuse to line pockets.”
Another, identified as a Latina from Phoenix, said that “there is a greed factor in the raising of prices.”
“I think they go up whether there’s a pandemic or not,” she added, “but companies are covering their losses from the last couple of years.”
Inflation in the U.S. has only gotten worse since April as Russia’s war on Ukraine roils global energy markets and corporations push higher costs onto consumers, even after raking inrecord profitsin 2021.
Federal data published last week showed that inflation was up 8.6% in May compared to a year earlier, exceeding analysts’ expectations and sparking fears of more aggressive interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, whose chair Jerome Powell hasexpressed a desireto “get wages down.”
In a statement responding to the latest figures, President Joe Biden vowed that his administration will “continue to do everything we can to lower prices for the American people.”
The president also briefly hit on price gouging by major fossil fuel companies. It is “important,” Biden said, “that the oil and gas and refining industries in this country not use the challenge created by the war in Ukraine as a reason to make things worse for families with excessive profit-taking or price hikes.”
Progressives have urged Biden to more forcefully highlight that dynamic even as top members of his own administration — including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — dismiss itand Powell pushes the widely disputed notion that modest wage increases are fueling inflation.
In recent months, administration officials have been locked in an internal battle over whether to publicly connect corporate profiteering and consolidation to surging prices. As theWashington Postreportedin February, members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers have “raised objections to the idea that a spike in prices was due to corporate power.”
But outside economists have said the connection is clear. In an Aprilblog post, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute pointed to data indicating that growing corporate profit margins “account for a disproportionate share of price growth.”
On top of evidence showing that the argument tying record profits to rising inflation is accurate, Fight Corporate Monopolies executive director Helen Brosnan noted that it is also very popular. Polls released over the past several months, including those carried out by GBAO, have consistently found that votersblame corporate greedfor the inflation spike.
“The results of our massive survey effort couldn’t be clearer,” Brosnan said. “Ahead of the midterms, voters across the nation are eager to support candidates who embrace economic populism and prove to the American people that corporations are no longer above the law.”
For much of the spring of 2020, I sat on a pink armchair in my bedroom and desperately tried to support the kids and families at the school where I was employed as a part-time social worker. I was armed with a lot, or very little, depending on your perspective: a phone; a laptop; consistent wi-fi; years of graduate school and work experience; compassion, more or less; and a working knowledge of children and the city in which I lived, more or less.
Many of the families on my caseload spoke of their desperation in the face of new and intensified problems, and the fear, conflict, stress and cloistered chaos that entered their lives in mid-March and then simply remained. Others were unreachable; my calls and emails went unanswered, and teachers reported students who seldom appeared on class Zoom calls, or appeared only as black squares, worryingly silent.
I remember parents crying as I met their pixelated faces with what I hoped was an expression of empathy and support, itself blurry. Sometimes children themselves articulated their difficulties, choppily, as the connection ebbed. These families spoke of food scarcity; constant strife; schoolwork that was never done; paid work that could not be completed; younger siblings who must be supervised; relatives who were sick or dying; children who wept, raged, or cowered, consumed by worry.
Sometimes I could offer solutions to these ills, but often I could not; my own children jangled at the doorknob, and I was forced to say, as I ended the conversation, “I’ll make some calls, and let you know,” or “I’m so sorry; that’s so hard.” It hurt, every time, but there was, ultimately so little I could do. It was an intensification of a sensation I’ve had for years: For every student whose life has been improved by my labors, there are those whose challenges are too deeply entrenched for me to help much at all, given the limited resources attached to my role and the tenuousness of the infrastructure our country has to support families — parents, children — facing addiction, mental illness, medical challenges, undiagnosed learning disabilities, poverty, intergenerational trauma or some combination of all of these factors.
My own school returned to in-person learning a few months later, in September 2020, much to my relief. Some of the problems vanished, seemingly overnight. Some seemed like ripples that died out slowly; some challenges simply stayed. Many other schools remained remote, in some form or another, until fall 2021. (According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 35 percent of 4th and 8th grade students were fully in person in February 2021.)
In May of 2022, I spoke to school social workers, counselors and psychologists across the country. I wanted to know about the shape and texture of their working lives during the pandemic. They told me things that were hard to hear, about fundamental shifts in their work.
“Usually I turn my phone off, but my phone has been really on all the time because I’m worried about this one student,” Marsha Carey, a social worker in a charter high school in a large northeastern city told me, speaking to a dissolution of boundaries that would have been unimaginable to her before the pandemic. “One of my student’s moms died [of COVID-19]…. Sometimes my phone rings at 1, 2 o’clock in the morning, [and I answer because I’m] scared that my student can’t handle it anymore, where she’s suicidal. She doesn’t have a mom anymore, she doesn’t have a dad, her support system is not that great. [I’m] on call 24/7. That’s been very hard. You take it home to your family.”
I have worked in school mental health for nearly 10 years, and throughout most of the pandemic. So much of what these workers told me — many of whom asked that I use only their first names, or share only general geographic information about their schools, given the sensitive nature of their work — resonated with my own experiences. The workers I interviewed for this piece range in focus from elementary to high school, and they come from public, charter and independent schools. But there was a striking sameness to their observations, as they described the effects of the harm wrought by the twin traumas of COVID-19 (by which I count both disease and economic fallout) and extended remote schooling.
School counselors and social workers described schools full of children who were, as a group, experiencing developmental delays: “The 9th grade class as a whole is having all these large-scale social issues that are just usually more common in middle school or elementary school,” Kira, a counselor at an independent high school in a mid-Atlantic suburb told Truthout.
Meanwhile, elementary practitioners told me their children were grappling with developmental struggles typical of preschoolers, and middle school practitioners told me their children were navigating the social, emotional and behavioral terrain of elementary schoolers.
Students struggle simply to be in class after remote learning. Jamie Spiro, a therapist based in a high school in a large city in Washington State, described the current landscape of her adolescent clients. “I have some students who wear a mask but not because of COVID; they have anxiety around showing their faces.… Doing school by Zoom provided an opportunity to have their screens off. Returning, they had a lot of anxiety about their face being shown, and also some students got used to being in a Zoom class and exiting when they wanted. They’re surprised when they can’t just … leave class.”
Teachers were ill-equipped to support these challenges. Zoe, an elementary school social worker from central Wisconsin told Truthout that, “Any time a student experiences anything sort of emotional, the teacher takes the approach of ‘I’m maxed out; can you just fix it?’”
Many people I spoke to were the only counselor or social worker in their school. They all served hundreds of students. As a culture, we have unceremoniously dumped the aftershocks of fear, loss, economic stress, uncertainty and isolation into the laps of thinly stretched professionals.
Like many, I have worked hard in my time as a social worker to manage my own and others’ expectations of my work. I do not “fix” children; I meet children and caregivers where they are, and support them — perhaps through change, perhaps not. I connect them to outside services and supports when they are available; sometimes such resources do not exist, or are geographically, financially or logistically inaccessible. I can go above and beyond on some days but not all. But when the problems become larger, more numerous, more entrenched, what becomes of your carefully constructed limits, your sense of efficacy?
Heather Findley, director of mental health services for Holt Public Schools, a suburban and rural district in Michigan, wondered aloud about the impact of the pandemic on Holt’s students and, as a result, on its mental health staff: “How do you ultimately know that it’s not you not doing your job; it’s everything else that’s going on around it that’s impacting that, and how do you not then take that personally and be like ‘I’m not servicing the way I should be?’”
Breanne, a school counselor in a mid-sized city in Washington State echoed this. “It’s been hard to even just take a day off to take care of yourself because you come back and students are like ‘Where were you,’ and ‘I tried to see you’ and ‘I needed this’ and ‘my family is getting evicted.’… You just feel that sense of responsibility for them but also, you’ve got to take care of yourself because everybody knows you can’t give from an empty tank.”
Breanne is leaving her role to become an assistant principal, and had a keen understanding of the ways in which the challenges of this moment extended beyond the walls of her school.
“We feel like we’re on our own in these situations, and even in our district we’ll talk and be like, ‘Maybe it’s just our population,’” she said. “Then we get to statewide events or national conferences online, and hearing these exact same things…. This isn’t isolated, this isn’t just a me thing; it’s not just my population, this is all over the country.”
And then on the day of my last scheduled interview, a teenager with an AR-15 murdered 19 schoolchildren and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The high school social worker in Chicago with whom I had arranged to speak that evening messaged me in the afternoon. “I’m struggling,” she wrote. She was very sorry, and sent me multiple apologies for canceling.
The day after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who in April slashed $211 million from the department that oversees mental health programs in his state — said: “We as a state — we as a society — need to do a better job with mental health. Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period.”
These words require some scrutiny as we try to make sense of what this country’s frontline mental health workers have been tasked with over the past 27 months.
The pandemic followed years of budget cuts to educational institutions and an increasingly frayed infrastructure (if it can even be called that) for addressing youth behavioral health. I absolutely believe in the power of mental health support. Researchers who highlight the value of identifying depressed and potentially violent young men are surely not wrong that the threats these teenagers pose to themselves and others are preventable. But I am increasingly wary of this notion — popular across party lines — that therapy is the tool that will rescue us from pain and dysfunction. (“Counselors not cops!” has become a popular rallying cry in progressive movements to defund the police, and while I agree that counselors are more useful to students than cops, I also have an intimate awareness of the structural barriers that stymie even the best counselors, and the ways that they are often inaccurately presented as a panacea.)
Introducing mental health into a conversation about patriarchal violence and access to militarized weaponry seems to be a dangerous splinter off of a large, long-held confusion: the idea that counselors, therapists and social workers can fix things. We cannot. We cannot fix the harms wrought by a starkly unequal, violent society. We cannot fix the harms wrought by racism and patriarchy. We can only listen, support, connect, and move those willing closer to change, or toward whatever it is that they seek.
I am reminded of another delusion of our culture. For years, this country has traded in the lie that the harms of inequality could be erased by fostering grit and resilience within schools. In the absence of a safety net — of universal health care; consistent poverty relief; access to quality, affordable and consistent mental health care; subsidies for families; or even sufficient programs to combat food insecurity — the school reformers of the ’90s and today have tasked educators with meeting needs, and repairing damage, of preposterous proportions.
Those who wish to avoid the reality that deep, systemic change is needed will push the fallout of the pandemic and the epidemic of gun violence onto the laps of overworked and underpaid school mental health workers. But the current reality crushes even the ambitions of those who are trying to exert change beyond the walls of their counseling rooms.
“There are a lot of instances of racism — student-to-student, teacher-to-student, at this school,” Sara, a school counselor in a Philadelphia charter high school, told me, her words slow and agonized. “Because everyone is at their [wits] end, to try to address those types of issues that need to be addressed, and as the counselor it is my job to do that … that becomes increasingly difficult.”
She, too, is leaving her job, to work in private practice.
We must shout the truth to those in power: They have abandoned this country’s children, and we cannot clean up their mess, however much our failure to do so might break our hearts.
In the shadow of the Davos summit of global elites taking place this week, a new report from Oxfam International details how skyrocketing inequality during two years of the global Covid-19 pandemic surged to a point where a new billionaire was created in the world nearly every day while over one million people are now being pushed into poverty at almost the same daily rate.
The new report — titled “Profiting From Pain” — is the latest accounting of how the pandemic has only deepened grotesque discrepancies between the haves and have-nots of the world, showing that while 573 new billionaires were created since the pandemic began, approximately one billionaire every 30 hours, an estimated 263 million are expected to “crash into extreme poverty” this year — a rate of one million people every 33 hours.
Such stark realities and gross injustice, the anti-poverty group concludes, is clear evidence that a tax on billionaire wealth and windfall pandemic profits is urgently needed to address crucial needs.
For every one billionaire minted since the pandemic began, 1M more people could be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022. While the world is reeling from multiple crises, the world’s wealthiest are unashamedly #ProfitingFromPain of ordinary peopleMorehttps://t.co/47FyVW5b0Upic.twitter.com/rRlKAFv1Nj
“Billionaires are arriving in Davos to celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes. The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them. Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.
Among the key findings of the report:
Today, 2,668 billionaires — 573 more than in 2020 — own $12.7 trillion, an increase of $3.78 trillion.
The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
The richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
A worker in the bottom 50 percent would have to work for 112 years to earn what a person in the top 1 percent gets in a single year.
High informality and overload due to care tasks have kept 4 million women in Latin America and the Caribbean out of the workforce. Half of working women of color in the US earn less than $15 an hour.
While a tall stack of reports has documented such trends since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, Oxfam’s latest study shines a bright light on the massive profits in the key sectors of energy, food, and pharmaceutical companies — all of which are able to consolidate financial gains due to their monopoly control over commodities essential to society.
According to Bucher, the fortunes of the world’s billionaires have “not increased because they are now smarter or working harder” than the average worker, many who faced layoffs, lack of hours, fractured families, childcare crises, and dangerous work conditions throughout the pandemic.
“The super-rich have rigged the system with impunity for decades and they are now reaping the benefits,” she said. “They have seized a shocking amount of the world’s wealth as a result of privatization and monopolies, gutting regulation and workers’ rights while stashing their cash in tax havens — all with the complicity of governments.”
At the same time, she added, hundreds of millions of regular workers and their families “are skipping meals, turning off the heating, falling behind on bills and wondering what they can possibly do next to survive. Across East Africa, one person is likely dying every minute from hunger. This grotesque inequality is breaking the bonds that hold us together as humanity. It is divisive, corrosive and dangerous. This is inequality that literally kills.”
The report notes that the profit margins of the world’s big oil companies doubled during the pandemic, while the cost of energy worldwide is projected to soar by 50% this year — the largest increase in energy prices, the group noted, since 1973. Giant food companies that control a bulk of the world’s food supply and the large pharmaceutical companies, some like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson which control large portions of the Covid-19 vaccine supply, have been swimming in profits since the virus struck.
Billionaires in the food & energy sectors have seen their fortunes increase by $1B every 2 days while 263M people could be pushed into extreme poverty in 2022 due to the pandemic, inequality & rising food prices. #ProfitingFromPain
With the world’s billionaire class and national leaders meeting in Davos this week as they pretend to meet as stewards of international leadership, Oxfam said there is one clear thing they should do if they want to be taken seriously: support a tax on billionaire wealth.
Among other things, Oxfam calls for a “one-off solidarity taxes on billionaires’ pandemic windfalls to fund support for people facing rising food and energy costs and a fair and sustainable recovery from Covid-19.”
Citing the nearly $8 trillion in tax havens that the global elite is believed to have stashed around the world, the group indicated the global tax system — which has never been defensible — is no longer sustainable in the face of such enormous challenges.
The group is also calling for an end to “crisis profiteering” by introducing a “temporary excess profit tax of 90 percent to capture the windfall profits of big corporations across all industries.” Oxfam estimates that such a tax on less than three dozen “super-profitable multinational companies” could have generated $104 billion in revenue in 2020 alone.
Lastly, Oxfam says a permanent tax on extreme wealth and the disruption of monopoly power by huge multinationals is essential to equalize the world’s economy, lift billions of people out of poverty, and to fund the kind of investments on healthcare, climate action, and social protection for all the low- and middle-income people of the world.
“The extremely rich and powerful are profiting from pain and suffering. This is unconscionable,” said Bucha.
“Over two years since the pandemic began, after more than 20 million estimated deaths from Covid-19 and widespread economic destruction,” she said, “government leaders in Davos face a choice: act as proxies for the billionaire class who plunder their economies, or take bold steps to act in the interests of their great majorities.”
It’s official – inflation hit 9% in April. We know what that means: the cost of everything we buy has gone through the roof. However, inflation isn’t the same on everything we buy. So, across the course of an average day, how much more does it cost just to live? Hint: it’s a lot more expensive for the poorest people than it is for the richest.
The rate shot up to 9% last month – its highest level since comparable readings in 1982.
It also noted that almost three-quarters of the rise came from the 54% increase in energy prices. However, this isn’t the whole story – as a day in the life of many of us shows.
Don’t even try to live a life
You’d best start putting less milk in your morning tea, because that’s gone up by 12.2%. If you want some toast to go with that, spread the jam thinly – it now costs 15.6% more. But you might want to skip both, given that the transport costs of doing the school run, getting to work, or going to sign on at the Department for Work and Pensions have rocketed by 13.5%. Let’s hope your car (if you can afford one) doesn’t run on diesel – because the price of that has gone up by 36%.
Lunch could be a no-no, unless you can afford the 22.7% increase in margarine to spread on the bread. Fortunately, that’s only gone up by 4.9% – so you can just eat it dry. Now, don’t forget to check on your baby – but only if you can afford to reproduce in the first place. Baby-related products have gone up by 15.9%. When the older kids get back from school, check their shoes for tears and tape them up if necessary; there’s been an 11% increase in the cost of children’s footwear.
It doesn’t really matter what (if anything) you choose to have for dinner – overall food prices have gone up by 10.6%. But if you want to make stuff from scratch, even that is costing a lot more. Because while the price of flour has risen by 9.3%, ready meals have only gone up by 7.8%. And if you can’t afford the gas/electric to cook or heat either of those things? Hey – at least the ready meal can technically be eaten cold.
Inflation = class war
If you try to navigate all this, you’d best not be poor. Because while headline inflation is 9%, for the poorest households it’s actually 10.2%. Take comfort from the fact that the inflation rate for the richest households is less than yours and the headline figure – sitting at 8.7%. Luckily for them, the cost of their servants has only gone up by 1.4%. They can jet off on a package holiday that’s only gone up by 3.1%, knowing that the kids will be well looked-after in their absence.
The point being, the government knows that inflation hits poor people the hardest. Yet it still chooses to do nothing about it – making the current chaos we face an intentional class war, not a cost of living crisis.
But don’t worry – if all this is utterly depressing, the cost of chocolate has actually fallen by 0.4%, and fags have only gone up by 7.5%. So, you can gorge and smoke yourself to an early, heart attack-induced grave safe in the knowledge that the cost of a funeral has only gone up by 3.5%. Small mercies, hey?
This month marks two years since the world witnessed George Floyd’s murder, sparking a global rallying cry for racial justice.
A new book written by two Washington Post reporters goes beyond the story of how Floyd’s death prompted widespread conversations about systemic racism, and a backlash to talking about race. It builds on existing reporting to trace the foundational systems that began to shape Floyd’s life and legacy long before he was born.
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“We went back centuries into his ancestry to find out why he came into the world poor,” said author Toluse Olorunnipa.
Floyd’s great-great-grandfather Hillery Thomas Stewart was born enslaved, became free after the Civil War and started on a path of American promise and opportunity. Stewart amassed 500 acres of land in North Carolina — a “feat for a Black man in the late 1800s” — but it was stripped away by unscrupulous businessmen and tax authorities during an era of racial terror, Olorunnipa said. “He knew that land in America was the birthright. The kind of thing that you can give to your descendants and allow them to have a shot in life.” The next several generations of Floyd’s family lived in poverty. Many of them, including Floyd’s mother, did sharecropping.
“It’s easy to say, ‘OK, that all happened a long time ago. Let’s focus on the present,’ Olorunnipa, a political investigations and enterprise reporter for the Post, said. “It’s much more difficult and complex when you do a comparative analysis of the family that abused Floyd’s ancestors and how they were able to benefit from the wealth that was created by that abuse. Floyd’s family suffered under the caprices of racism in the past and continued to suffer the reverberations of that going forward.”
Over the course of Floyd’s 46 years, U.S. politics and policy framed his efforts to navigate a number of interlocking systems, from healthcare to housing, education and criminal justice. “All of them seemed, in one way or the other, to be stacked against him as a Black boy and as a Black man,” Olorunnipa said. “We wanted to find out why that was, how that impacted him and how that can impact a life.”
“We didn’t just do this book because we had a curiosity about who George Floyd was, even though I think that would be a valid question,” added author Robert Samuels, a national political enterprise reporter for the Post. “But in thinking about who George Floyd was and how this country treated him, I think we get to learn about who we are as a country.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was your philosophy around reporting on inequality, and how did you apply that to telling Floyd’s story?
Samuels: This is something that I’ve thought about since the very beginning of my career. How do you report on inequality? The answer is you report it fairly. Not only do you think about the stereotypes and the prejudices that come from people who we often write about from marginalized communities, but it’s also thinking about the context of their lives, the conditions around them and whether or not there was fairness in the systems in their lives as there were for people who have more privileged lives.
That’s the philosophy that we took within the book. And so whenever we thought about George Floyd and where he was positioned in his life, the next question had to be, why was he in that position? And also if we believe in the idea of the American promise; if we believe that there are institutions there to support you and help to propel you to all your dreams and goals, did those institutions do their jobs? Did the school system do its job? Did the housing system do its job? Did the police do their job in protecting and serving? Would prosecutors do their job in terms of trying to prosecute the person who killed George Floyd?
Q: Floyd was a big Black guy who is described as a gentle giant. But he also had to comport himself for other people’s comfort. How were you thinking about the fear that many have of Black bodies and its roots in slavery and racism when you were telling George Floyd’s story?
Samuels: One of the things that I asked, that I know a lot of reporters didn’t ask, was about George Floyd’s relationship with his body. And this one I sort of understood internally, right? Because I know I have a strange relationship with my body, whether or not it should be big, too big, too small. Whether I look too threatening. It governs so many of the ideas of how I walked out the house; how I presented myself to folks.
And so we didn’t know what they would say. But then it turned out that George Floyd was constantly thinking about his size. One of the cruelest contradictions about this was, he was a tall and lanky guy for a good part of his life. And he was told that he should get bigger so he can play football, which was the only way to get out of the housing projects and [out of] poverty. And then that dream doesn’t work out and what’s he left with? He’s left with this frame that he never fully felt comfortable in. Like up until the end of his life, he was breaking glasses and constantly dropping cell phones. But what it left is this shadow, this silhouette of a man that every part of society says: ‘This is what an intimidating guy looks.’
And so the idea that he had to try to comport himself to say hi to everyone who he walked into a room with; thinking that he’d only be able to secure jobs that utilize his strength and his ability to intimidate, that had an impact on him. He’s never felt like he could walk into the world being exactly who he was. He wasn’t allowed that opportunity.
Q: What do you want people to take away from the book?
Olorunnipa: One of the things that I want people to get from reading this book is a sense of the value and importance of grace in a life. George Floyd was not given the grace from various systems that he tried to navigate, whether it was the criminal justice system or the education system or the police that he ran into. He was often scrutinized and viewed in a skeptical way from the get-go just because of how he looked and the color of his skin. And obviously Derek Chauvin did not show him any grace when he kneed on his neck for over nine minutes.
What does it mean as a country to bring a young child into the world and tell them that you’re not going to have any grace in your life when you make mistakes or when you struggle? That your difficulties are going to be seized upon? Your worst qualities and your biggest challenges are going to be emphasized? What does it mean to tell that to someone and what does it mean for the American dream for someone to feel that way from an early age, and to hear about what has happened to your ancestors? Envision what George Ford’s life could have been if he hadn’t been viewed in the way that he was by society and by the institutions that he tried to navigate.
Samuels: One of the big lessons that I learned is how to perceive systemic racism. Before we started this reporting, I used to think of it as this lingering stain on the fabric of America, like America’s dark cloud. But over the course of following the Floyd family, and those who knew George Floyd, as they waited for the criminal trial, as they thought about life after the criminal trial, after we think about how much has changed and how much hasn’t changed, I’ve learned that racism is something that’s far more terrifying. It’s starting to feel more like a force that was moving, that threatened to consume everyone. And so one of the takeaways I hope is that George Floyd was a man of flesh and blood and he was shaped by these forces.
One of the issues that his life turned out to be so different from the life he dreamed about when he was a child, is because these ideas, what’s baked into American policy, have not been acknowledged and confronted.
The other thing that I found that is so important is about the persistence of Black people themselves. Even though we all saw the same video, we all witnessed this movement, there was a sense from the people in the book who are marginalized that things could still get better. They still needed to keep pushing, even when the public fascination with systemic racism and the Black Lives Matter movement turned against them.
And I thought it spoke to the persistence of a people who are the holders of American hope. George Floyd was one of those people. It’s not like he had a perfect life. It’s not that he lived perfectly. He made lots of mistakes. He talked about them, but he never stopped trying. And up until the last day of his life, he was making decisions, thinking that he could still be something great in the United States. And then, look what happened.
As workers across the U.S. attempt to unionize and walk off the job over brutal conditions and starvation wages, an analysis released Sunday found that the median pay package of top U.S. CEOs jumped to $14.7 million in 2021 — the sixth consecutive record-breaking year for executive compensation.
According to theWall Street Journal’sreviewof data from more than 400 U.S. corporations, total CEO compensation “rose by at least 12% for most of the executives, and most companies recorded annual shareholder returns of nearly 30%.” Nine CEOs made $50 million or more in total compensation in 2021, up from just one in 2016 and seven in 2020.
“Much of the pay consisted of equity awards that could ultimately prove to be worth more or less than initially reported,” theJournalnoted. “In 2020, the median pay package was $13.4 million for the same companies, with median cash compensation of $3.1 million.”
TheJournal’s analysis showed that Expedia CEO Peter Kern brought in the highest total compensation — $294.57 million — among top CEOs last year. Other CEOs on the list include Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav ($216.06 million), ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott ($162.23 million), Apple CEO Tim Cook ($82.35 million), and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon ($77.62 million).
Rising CEO pay stands in stark contrast to the grim economic realities that ordinary workers are facing nationwide as inflation — driven in large part bycorporate profits — erodes modest wage gains andexpiring pandemic aidleaves vulnerable families without a safety net.
“While most of America struggles to put gas in the tank and pay the grocery bills, price-gouging, excessive-profit-taking CEOs used their captive boards to award themselves record pay,” Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law and an expert on corporate governance,tweetedin response to theJournal’s findings.
As CEOs rake in huge compensation packages, workers at prominent U.S. companies with ultra-wealthy chief executives — including Amazon, Starbucks, andApple — are trying to unionize in the face of relentless opposition from management.
In recent months, employees at more than 60 Starbucks locations in the U.S. have voted to form a union, winning a remarkable90%of elections held thus far.
Additionally, as labor journalist Michael SainatoreportedforThe Guardianon Monday, “workers in America’s fast-food and retail sectors who worked on the frontlines through the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic are continuing a trend of strikes and protests over low wages, safety concerns, and sexual harassment issues on the job.”
“My weekly paycheck is no more than $200, $260 at the max,” Ashley Sierra, a Dollar General employee who makes $11 an hour, toldThe Guardian. “I have three children, I cannot survive on $260 a week, it’s just not working. It needs to get upped to at least $15 an hour, the bottom is $15, because we work so hard for so little.”
Todd Vasos, Dollar General’s CEO, made$16.45 millionin total compensation last year.
“This strategy of making fetal protection more important than the lives and freedom of women and other pregnant people began with the prosecutions of Black women, who were pregnant and using drugs,” says Dorothy Roberts, author of Torn Apart and Killing The Black Body. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Roberts and host Kelly Hayes discuss the leaked draft SCOTUS opinion that would end Roe and how the child welfare system will ramp up family separations in a post Roe world.
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. Today, we are going to talk about reproductive justice, the foster care system, and some important history that I think is largely missing from the current discourse around abortion and adoption. We will be hearing from Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and most recently Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. To my listeners, trust me: to navigate the dynamics of this moment, you are going to want to read Torn Apart. I wish I could give everyone a copy. It’s especially relevant right now, as we are facing the end of Roe in a nation that terminates the parental rights of more people than any other country on Earth. Every year, agents of the state forcibly remove 250,000 children from their homes in the U.S. Another quarter of a million are removed informally, through coercive agreements that the system calls “safety plans,” which many parents accept in order to avoid going to court. If that sounds like a plea bargain, that’s because this process is incredibly carceral — and just like the criminal legal system, it is arbitrary, racist and violent. So-called child welfare services are systems of captivity and family separation, and as more people lose access to abortion care, we will see more captivity and more separation. So we have to talk about it now.
A lot of people do not understand the financial or racial dynamics of child removal in the United States, and that has led to some really bad analysis. For example, a lot of people were rightfully horrified over the language “domestic supply of infants” being used in the SCOTUS draft opinion, but some of the liberal responses I saw were also pretty horrifying: a number of people insist, for example, that there is no shortage of “adoptable” children in the U.S., because there are plenty of children in foster care. But children in foster care are not supposed to serve as an open adoption pool for anyone with money who wants a child. In fact, most of those children have parents and families who want them back. They are not the “domestic supply” of children the draft opinion referred to. I honestly find it disturbing that people are arguing that we don’t need a new stock of children for people with money who want a child to choose from, because there’s already an available catalog of kids. The correct position is that children should not be treated as a commodity that we need to stockpile, or that people are entitled to, simply because they have money and want a child. In Torn Apart, Roberts explains why what we tend to refer to as “child welfare services” can be more aptly described as “family policing” – and by the end of this episode, I think many of you will agree.
I have also seen some people suggest that white people do not want to adopt children from the foster care system because they supposedly want “healthy white babies.” And I think it’s really important to emphasize that, while I am sure some white people would prefer children who look like them, white adoptive parents have been seizing Black and Native children through the foster care system for years. With Roe still intact, the adoption industry often relies on the state’s termination of parental rights to produce adoptable children. But the adoption industry is not interested in most of the youth in foster care. Children under the age of four are the most sought after by adoptive parents. At present, states do not terminate the rights of nearly enough parents of children within that age range to meet the demands of a $15 billion a year adoption industry.
When Roe is gone, the same system that currently equates poverty with abuse, and snatches children on that basis, will ramp up its operations. Some people are imagining a post-Roe world where baby brokers are waiting by the phone for desperate, pregnant white girls to call their adoption agencies, when in reality, nothing is being left to chance. There is an apparatus that already works daily to snatch children from poor families and parents with disabilities, or from those who are grappling with addiction and other health issues. It will soon be poised to take the children of poor people who otherwise would have aborted their pregnancies — whether those people want to surrender their children or not. These extractive forces are fully operational, and, as is currently the case, we can expect Black and Native communities to bear the brunt of family separation in a post-Roe United States.
Now, in my experience, when people have a positive impression of the child welfare system, it’s usually the product of movies or television – particularly “copaganda” shows, which tend to monstracize parents whose children wind up in the system. On shows like “Law & Order,” even sympathetic characters whose children are taken away are usually depicted as posing some danger to their child, despite their best intentions. But that kind of propaganda is wholly divorced from the reality of the system. So, if you’re someone who has a positive, or even neutral impression of child welfare services and foster care, I am going to ask you to put aside everything you think you know about this topic, for the next hour or so, and try to keep an open mind, because with Roe on the way out, there is a lot that we need to get on the same page about.
For starters, I think people have a lot of illusions about the family policing system being grounded in a benevolent concern for children, and that has simply never been the case, so I asked Dorothy Roberts if she could walk us through some of the history that delivered us to this moment.
Dorothy Roberts: The family policing system’s punitive design that’s targeted at the most politically marginalized communities is deeply rooted in a history of state violence. It’s rooted in the history of the separation of enslaved Black families. Throughout the first 400 years of this nation’s history, where breaking up families at the whim of enslavers was an integral part of the slavery institution. It was part of enslavement that white enslavers had authority over Black children and could therefore separate them whenever it was economically advantageous to them from the children’s parents. Families were routinely broken up sometimes at slave auctions that were held by judges where children were ordered to be purchased by white enslavers, apart from their parents.
It also is rooted in the history of the apprenticing of Black children after the civil war, when judges would order Black children to be given over to their former enslavers, as apprentices on grounds that their Black parents were neglecting them. It’s also rooted in the history of the U.S. military’s use of child removal as a weapon of war against Native tribes during the so-called Indian Wars. And then into the 1970s, the official federal government’s adoption policy, which they entered into a collaboration with the child welfare league, to remove Native children from their families on grounds of child neglect, and give them over to white adoptive families, or put them in white-run orphanages. This history of using child removal as a weapon of terror against Black people and Indigenous people is left out of the common narrative of child welfare agencies as benevolent rescuers, saving children from abusive parents.
KH: These histories are also being left out of a lot of conversations around reproductive justice right now in the United States. I have, however, seen many allusions to “The Handmaid’s Tale” in popular discourse recently, and I find it interesting that this book and TV show hold such a fixed place in the popular imagination. In matters of reproductive justice, it seems as though a lot of white women find the show’s fictitious, totalitarian society more politically relevant and personally relatable than the history and present condition of Black and Native women in the U.S. Even now, as people who act against laws governing bodily autonomy face criminalization, it is not criminalization and the horrors of the prison system that are being highlighted, but rather, imagery of domestic sex servants in red capes. I’m not opposed to theatrical imagery or evocative metaphors, but right now, we need a collective analysis rooted in tough realities that people don’t like to talk about, and I think we need to start there. I also agree with Dr. Roberts that we need to take a hard look at how the government’s treatment of Black women got us into this mess.
DR: I think we need to bring into focus, for a couple reasons, the long history of regulating Black women’s childbearing in particular, because overturning Roe will have a disproportionate impact on Black women, because Black women are more likely to seek abortions because they’re more likely to have unwanted pregnancies for all sorts of reasons, stemming from structural racism and poverty, and other kinds of structural impediments to reproductive freedom. Also because they are more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes. And that includes the whole range of ways in which pregnancy can be dangerous. And because Black women are less likely to have high-quality medical care during their pregnancies, and also because of structural problems that make them less healthy when they get pregnant and have babies, or because of unsafe abortions as well. Again, maternal mortality relates to deaths from pregnancy-related causes. And then finally, they’re more likely to be punished for their pregnancy outcomes. And this brings me to the second reason why I think we need to focus on the history of Black women’s childbearing being devalued and regulated.
And that’s the way in which the right wing anti-abortion movement has been engaged in a concerted assault on reproductive freedom, both punishing women for their pregnancy outcomes like miscarriages and stillbirths, as well as punishing women for abortion. And this campaign, this strategy of making fetal protection more important than the lives and freedom of women and other pregnant people began with the prosecutions of Black women, who were pregnant and using drugs. And I’ve always seen that assault on Black women’s childbearing as being very connected to the assault on abortion, but it wasn’t really recognized as concerted-related types of assaults on reproductive freedom when these prosecutions began. I think today, it’s clearer that the criminalization of pregnancy, whether it’s for conduct during pregnancy, or whether it’s for a stillbirth or a miscarriage, or whether it’s for having an abortion, they all are part of the criminalization of pregnancy, generally.
And again, this entangled form of criminalization, this widespread criminalization, began with the punishment of Black women for having children. And so I think we need to focus on how the end of the right, the legal right to abortion, is a true atrocity against most people, but it is going to be disproportionately felt by Black women. But also, just as fundamentally, it is part of, and stems from, and is fueled by a particular kind of assault on Black women’s child bearing. That brings us to where we are today.
KH: Most people do not think of the child welfare system as a tentacle of the prison-industrial complex, but it is essential that we make that connection. The era of prison reform has outsourced a considerable amount of surveillance and control to other actors and agencies — such as doctors and social workers. Families are being policed with a racist lens, for signs of abuse or neglect, by a broad set of actors, many of whom cannot be avoided. This creates a minefield of potential contact with the family policing system.
DR: I think that it’s important to understand the way in which carceral logics spread across multiple systems and institutions in the United States. So what changes the terrain for how we approach the abolition of the prison-industrial complex is that when we recognize that similar ideologies and narratives and practices and policies are entangled in what I see as a carceral web, that includes not only prisons and police, but also the policing of families through the so-called child welfare system or Child Protective Services, and also the kind of policing that goes on in the health care system. And we could also add the education system, as well as others.
And one of the dimensions that this adds to the way we think about the prison-industrial complex is that it points out that even systems that are supposed to be protective and supportive and caring, like Child Protective Services and hospitals and medical centers and schools, are part of this carceral apparatus that uses a benevolent narrative in order to expand state surveillance and policing and punishment of the most marginalized communities.
The so-called child welfare system operates with a history and a logic and a practice that is extremely similar to the way in which police, criminal law enforcement functions. And that they really work hand in hand to police families in the same communities.
So let’s look at where their agents are targeted, and I’m talking about cops and case workers. They are targeted at impoverished segregated Black communities, and also at Indigenous communities. Those are where they do the most harm. And we can look at the over-representation of Black children and Native children and their families in the family policing system. So the same communities… and I’ll focus for a minute on Black communities, in particular. Black communities are inundated by agents of the state that surveil, monitor and disrupt, cage people and take their children by the criminal legal system, and by the so-called child welfare system. They also operate in very similar ways. So in the same way that the criminal legal system accuses people for so-called crimes that are largely the result of racial and class and gender inequities and the way in which crime is defined to target these people and these communities, and then they arrest people, they police them after arrest, they conduct investigations, they prosecute and they punish by caging people.
The family policing system operates on the same kind of carceral logic, which is that the reason why children in Black communities are suffering from unmet needs is because of their parents, not because of structural racism, racial capitalism and white supremacy. And so it accuses parents of child neglect. And neglect, by the way, is the main reason why children in Black communities are separated from their families. It then investigates the families intensively, including in ways that are even more disruptive and invasive than criminal investigation. They can come into families’ homes any time of the day or night. They rarely have a warrant, but they threaten parents and family caregivers that if they don’t let them in, they’re going to take their children away. They investigate throughout the home, intensive searches, they interrogate family members, they strip-search children, looking for evidence of maltreatment and they bring in other systems, the education system, the health care system, social services, to collect data. And by the way, this data collection is expanding just like it is in police departments by hiring computer companies like IBM, for example, to engage in massive data collection and surveillance and algorithmic predictions about which children are going to be at risk.
Then they supervise families, sometimes for years on end. They often take children away from their families, and almost like the death penalty as the ultimate punishment in the criminal legal system, there’s termination of parental rights or judges that permanently sever the legal relationship that children have to their family.
So every single way in which this terroristic family policing system works is mirrored in the criminal punishment system.
It’s also important to recognize that this kind of terror going on by state agents, whether they’re cops or case workers, that happens in Black communities is based on the same carceral logic, which is that the way in which to meet human needs and solve conflicts in communities, and needs that are unmet because of structural inequities that result from a racial capitalist system, that result from the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any western nation. And we also cage more people and separate more families than any western nation.
But these unmet needs are then blamed on the people who are suffering the most from structural inequities. Then the state punishes them as the solution. This oft though impedes the awareness that we need radical social change, because so many people believe that the solution is to put people behind bars and to take children away and put them in foster care.
The health care system then is entangled in both criminal punishment and family policing because doctors and other healthcare providers have been deputized to turn over their patients to these systems. There is a growing entanglement of hospitals and prisons with people moving between one or the other, in part because hospitals report patients that are seen to be disruptive to the police, but more fundamentally because jails and prisons are increasingly becoming the place where the most marginalized people get their healthcare, especially mental health care.
In the case of family policing, because of so-called mandatory reporting, this is the law that requires that people who engage professionally with children and their families must report their suspicions of child maltreatment to Child Protective Services. This requirement turns professionals who could support families, like teachers and doctors and social service providers, into deputized agents for the state. And this ends up driving many families away from the support that these professionals could provide, because they’re afraid that they will turn them over to child protective services and the families will lose their children to foster care.
Doctors and nurses and other healthcare providers are deeply implicated in this because they so routinely turn over families with unmet needs or where there’s some evidence of drug use in the family to child protective services, and they do this in an extremely racist way.
It is well-documented that doctors are far more likely to suspect child abuse and neglect in the case of Black families than they are in the case of white families. They’re much more likely to report Black parents to police and child welfare agencies.
KH: A 2021 study found that 72 percent of Black children in Los Angeles County will endure a Child Protective Services investigation at some point in their childhood. In Torn Apart, Dr. Roberts reminds us of the case of a famous white actress who was met with public sympathy after she accidentally dropped her five-year-old son on his head in 2019. The boy was hospitalized in intensive care with a skull fracture. A Black parent in the same situation would likely be met with suspicion, and could easily face a child welfare investigation, in the midst of an already traumatic event.
DR: Because of the class and race and gender biases in the way in which doctors report, it’s clear that they don’t really see themselves as mandated reporters that have to report every suspicion of child maltreatment they have. They see themselves as agents of family policing that targets the most marginalized communities, because those are the only people they report back to the system.
KH: Once an investigation begins, families quickly learn that in some ways, case workers can operate with greater impunity than police. In Torn Apart, Roberts wrote of a Black father whose caseworker told him, “I have more power than the president of the United States. I can come to your house and take your child away.” Case workers have considerable discretion in making subjective, on-the-spot decisions about whether there is evidence of maltreatment, and whether or not to immediately remove a child.
Roberts recalled an incident in Arizona in the summer of 2020, where eight employees of the Arizona Department of Public Safety were fired for posing for a photo in custom t-shirts that read, “Professional KIDNAPPER” and “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR children ARE?” The women were “DCS specialists,” meaning they investigated allegations from mandated reporters, neighbors and family members, as well as anonymous tips. The women claimed the shirts were an “inside joke,” but I doubt most of us can imagine joking about kidnapping people’s children, let alone making custom t-shirts for a photo op, so that the joke might be preserved for future enjoyment.
These women understood how they were viewed in the communities they policed, and rather than being disturbed that families experienced them as kidnappers, they found humor in that characterization. This attitude is comparable to that of many police officers, who often treat allegations of police brutality as a joke and mock those they harm and those who object to their harms. In fact, Roberts argues that the surveillance and interrogation of Black families by the family policing system “constitutes the stop-and-frisk of Black families that falls off the radar of public interest.”
The idea that individual parents, rather than our government, system or society, are responsible for the consequences of poverty is crucial to how all of this plays out. Why? Because without that fundamental assignment of blame, more people might ask, if the issue is that a family does not have enough money for groceries, or a big enough apartment, why can’t the money that would be spent on removal, foster care, court costs and whatever else, simply be given to families whose needs are not being met?
DB: I say that the state punishes families because they’re poor, not because they’re dangerous because of the way in which poverty is deeply confused with child neglect in the family policing system. First of all, state statutes define neglect very, very broadly. Many define it basically as caregivers’ failure to provide for the wellbeing of children, or they may specify certain kinds of needs that children have that are being unmet, like the failure to provide adequate clothing or healthcare or housing for children.
The reason why parents don’t provide those things to children is because they can’t afford to. And so, when they are accused of child neglect for failure to provide them, they’re basically being punished for being poor.
Child neglect is defined that way because the family policing system is designed to punish poor people. It’s not designed at all to deal with affluent people, especially affluent white people. It never was. It was designed from the very beginning to be a way of surveilling and monitoring and punishing impoverished families, especially impoverished Black and Indigenous families.
So that’s the reason why we have statutes like this, because they’re structured in a way to uphold the very design of the system. And the vast majority of children who are taken from their families are taken because of allegations of child neglect, not allegations of physical and sexual abuse.
KH: Our society has shown itself to be capable of recognizing how violent and damaging it can be to forcibly remove a child from their parents. When Donald Trump enacted his family separation policy at the border, protests and public outcry highlighted the extreme cruelty of separating children from their parents. Many Republicans were unmoved, insisting that the children’s parents had broken the law. But to a great many people, it was obvious that regardless of whether or not migrant parents had broken any laws, or whether or not they had money, a plan, or someplace to go, separating children and parents was an unthinkable harm.
DB: There was a stark contrast between the widespread public outrage at the separation of families at the southern border, migrant families whose children were taken from them when they arrived as refugees seeking asylum at the border, compared to the relative silence about the trauma inflicted in Black communities every day by high rates of family separation, by so-called child protective services.
Now it was absolutely warranted that we should be outraged at the way in which the Trump administration heightened a policy that also existed under the Obama administration of family separation at the border, and many professional psychiatrists and other experts on childhood trauma pointed out that taking children from their family caregivers is deeply harmful to children. Some even pointed out that it violates UN conventions and that it is a form of torture.
But that kind of outrage hasn’t been directed at the way in which child protection services routinely take Black children away from their families, and take them away primarily because they are unable to meet some of their children’s needs, but also because of deep, deep anti-Black racism that has treated from the beginning of this nation Black families as if they don’t have loving bonds and as if they need white supervision in order to be fed.
KH: There are a lot of infuriating moments in Torn Apart, but one passage that had me particularly enraged recounts how a top welfare administrator told Roberts she was right about his department and how it treated families. But the administrator added, “Do you know how many people make money from this system? There’s no way they will let me destroy their income and profit.” After I read those words, I had to put the book down for a moment and collect myself.
DB: The child welfare system is also structured to incentivize, financially, taking children from their families and to profit from child removal. It is a huge apparatus that spends about $30 billion a year in federal, state and local funding, mostly to separate families and maintain children in foster care.
And there are thousands and thousands of people who are invested financially as well as ideologically in what should be called a foster-industrial complex. There are case workers and supervisors and administrators within child welfare systems, and then they enter into contracts, multi-million dollar contracts, with corporations that are designed to manage their foster care systems and profit from having more children in foster care.
They make money off of family separation and managing the children who are in foster care and the people hired to care for them, although I hesitate to use the word care because the way this system is structured is to de-incentivize true care for children who are taken from their families.
It is an incentive to spend as little as possible on caring for children and to continue to pull children into the system to make profit off of them. And it’s not just the fact that there are so many people employed by the system who make money or people who enter into contracts to make money from family separation, but also cities and states take the money that children should be receiving from social security benefits, disability benefits, and survivor benefits.
In many child welfare systems, the state becomes the financial representative for these children and steals the benefits that these children are entitled to and they claim that this is some form of reimbursement for caring for these children, although they took the children from their families and they are under federal obligation to provide for them.
So they shouldn’t be reimbursed from the children themselves for the costs of caring for them. And then they don’t even spend the money directly on the children. It’s not as if they set up some kind of trust fund for the children or some kind of account that is used to pay for goods and services for the children.
They put it into state or city coffers, and then spend the money on meeting budget shortfalls. So in all of these ways, this is a multibillion-dollar apparatus that profits off of taking children from their families and putting them in a dangerous, violent, abusive, disruptive foster care system that we know produces bad outcomes for children, including increasing their risk of being incarcerated.
KH: When a loving family is separated, whether it is the parent or the child who is being held captive, or both, the state has an authoritarian level of control over the aggrieved parent. In prison, a person’s every move can be monitored or punished. As we have discussed on the show, women in prison are punished more frequently than men, and often, for smaller, informal offenses — including facial expressions that guards deem offensive. Parents whose children are taken from them via family policing also experience the policing of their entire being.
Parents whose children have been removed are given burdensome lists of assignments, which they are told must be completed prior to reunification. These tasks are often arbitrary, and expensive, and at times, virtually impossible. I have heard stories from formerly incarcerated parents about being expected to complete the same classes and therapy as someone who was not incarcerated. Roberts estimates that tens of thousands of children have entered the foster care system over the last decade solely because a parent was incarcerated.
Any failure to comply with a case plan can lead to the termination of parental rights, but even parents who do everything that’s asked of them can still be deemed unfit, at the discretion of caseworkers and agencies hired to assess parents. During such assessments, a parent’s frustration and heartbreak over being separated from their child can actually be used against them.
DB: One of the most pathological things about family policing is the way in which it punishes parents for their emotional outcry against the taking of their children, and this happens in so many ways. It happens when case workers write in mothers’ files that they are too emotional, too angry, too disruptive to be fit parents and should not get their children back.
It happens when they order parents to engage in forced therapy with therapists who are hired by the state and can become witnesses against the parents. And those therapists note in the records the way in which the emotions of parents can be seen as either not recognizing that they are to blame, the parents are to blame for the harms to their children or not being accountable for their deficits or showing that they’re too emotional to be good parents or wanting to blame the system for their situation instead of taking responsibility for it themselves.
And this not only is extremely unethical, but it also reflects the fundamental philosophy of family policing, which is to blame family caregivers for the hardships that their children face that actually stem from structural inequality. And so when parents point to the structural inequities that have led to their children’s unmet needs, when they point out the injustice of it, or when they’re simply saying, “This is what my family need,” they’re punished for it because it is seen to be a lack of recognition of their own deficits.
In other words, their failure to comply with this false and dangerous philosophy that parents are to blame for harms that are actually created by a racial capitalist system. So it’s not just that they’re punished for their emotions, which, they should be emotional. The state is taking their children from them, but they’re also punished for their resistance.
They’re speaking up against this false narrative, this false structure of family policing, this false ideology of family policing, that they are personally to blame for the suffering that their children encounter when they don’t have adequate housing or when they don’t have adequate clothing or they’re part of a defective educational system, or they can’t get healthcare.
You know that when parents point that out, they’re punished for it. They’re forced into compliance. This is the real sickness of this system that punishes people simply for telling the truth about what their needs are and why their children don’t have the material resources that they have and why their children are traumatized by this system.
KH: So I can imagine that some of our listeners may be coming around to the idea that this system is irredeemable, but they may also be wondering, then what? When a child is in danger, what are we supposed to do? First, I do want to remind folks who may have missed last week’s episode to please check out my interview with Morning Star Gali. The episode is called “Indigenous Abolitionists Are Organizing for Healing and Survival,” and I talk a bit in that conversation about the foster care system’s role in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relative crisis. We need to start from a place of understanding that family policing is part of the carceral system, and as such, it is a death-making force. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, children in the foster system are 42 percent more likely to die than children in the general population. So calling CPS really is similar to calling the police, in that trying to summon some basic assistance could end in tragedy for the very child we are concerned about.
So, that said, situations where children are at risk can be sad and desperate and terrifying, so that leaves us with the question, what is to be done?
DB: It’s true that there are many children in America who are in desperate situations, and most of that desperation stems from the kind of system we have in America and the philosophy that we have that blames the most marginalized people for that desperation, instead of looking at how we need radical change in our society.
Overall, we need to recognize that the so-called child protection system or child welfare system is an impediment to dealing with the desperation of children and dealing with families’ needs and conflicts. We need to replace it with an approach that would truly meet the human needs of families and would truly deal with conflict and violence in families.
So overall, we have to be working toward abolishing, dismantling the current dangerous system and replacing it with one that truly keeps children safe and truly supports families. It’s important to recognize that when children are taken from their families, again, mainly because the families are lacking some kind of material resource that they need, they are put into a very harmful foster care system where they’re traumatized by taking them away, but then their education is disrupted.
Their social ties are disrupted. Their health care is disrupted by moving them away from their family caregivers and putting them in substitute care where rarely do they have a long-lasting caring relationship with foster caretakers, and far too often are put in prison-like institutions, especially if they’re Black teenagers, they’re very likely to end up in a very violent and dangerous uncaring prison-like institution.
So we have to take into account the harms of removing children from their homes and putting them in a fostering situation as well. Now, yes, there will still be then, although far fewer, but there’ll still be some families where there is no other option. But we have to work steadily to eliminate that, to provide for families in ways that don’t require this form of separation that we have now.
And I think people who believe there’s no alternative but to call CPS would be surprised to know that many children, most of the children in foster care now, could be safely returned to their families. If their families had adequate income, adequate housing, adequate healthcare, adequate childcare, adequate food. If we could provide that, either by demanding that this $30 billion that’s spent primarily on family separation is diverted to cash income to families without having to give up custody of their children or be investigated by the state. And also if we build up the already existing community-based mutual aid and other kinds of resources and supports that families could turn to. So we don’t have to rely on this terroristic harmful system, even now in many, many cases, but we do need to be working diligently toward building up even more ways in which families can be supported and children can be kept safe outside of this system that we’re simultaneously working to dismantle.
I’d also like to share, including an answer to people’s questions about what do I do, recognizing that this is an extremely dangerous system that targets the most marginalized communities and is an impediment to radical change. What can we do? And I would point out that there is a growing movement to abolish family policing that is engaged in concrete strategizing and collective action to dismantle the system and to replace it with a caring, humane, just approach to supporting families and keeping children safe. And some examples are JMac For Families that was founded by Joyce McMillan in New York City, who herself had her children taken from her because of an anonymous tip to a child abuse hotline that she use drugs. Now, she has a plan for enacting legislation that would take away some of the power of child protection agencies in New York City. There’s also the Movement for Family Power in New York City that has a lot of information on its website about organizing to abolish the system. There is another organization called the upEND Movement, which is also creating various forms of information about why we need to abolish this system, and you can learn more about it on their website. There’s another organization founded by someone named Sixto Cancel. The organization is Think of Us, which is led by youth who were formally entangled in the foster industrial complex and have written a report called “Away From Home“ that lays out the way in which institutions are harmful for children placed in foster care and gives recommendations about how to dismantle them.
These are just a few examples and I’m sure people can find even more, but going to any of the websites of these organizations will provide more information about how to get involved in ending this horrible atrocious terroristic system of family policing and moving toward a society that truly cares for families and children, and truly meets their needs and ends the violence that we have in our society, and that state and intimate violence that our system today only fuels and has not prevented. We can have a society that cares for people and engages in less state and private violence.
KH: I am so grateful to hear about all of that powerful work and I hope we can all rally around those efforts. I also want to underline another way in which the child welfare system operates like the police: Whenever there is media attention around the fact that CPS does not protect children, agencies insist they need more discretion and money. When crime rates are up, the police also claim the problem is that they need more money, and that we need to give less consideration to people’s rights. We see this in debunked police claims that bail reform has fueled crime. Similarly, when a child who has had contact with CPS dies, and the case gets media attention, state agencies often conclude that CPS showed too much respect for the rights of parents, and that caseworkers need to be even more aggressive about child removal. More discretion. More money. More captivity. Anytime a case or a moment clarifies that these entities do not create safety, we are told we must fortify them. The popular lesson is never that the needs of families should be met, and the conditions of poverty alleviated. That kind of change is never on the table and we need to stop accepting that as a given.
I talked about the adoption industry at the top of this episode, but most children in foster care will not be adopted. Foster children who are one to three years old account for 37 percent of all adoptions. Teenagers in foster care represent less than ten percent of those adopted. Even children who are reunited with their families are often traumatized by their time in foster care. A study by John Hopkins University found that children in the foster care system are four times more likely to experience sexual abuse. Somewhere between one third and one half of foster care youth will run away at some point while they are under state control. Youth who are Black, queer or trans are more likely to run away, as are young people whose parents’ rights have been terminated. On any given day, thousands of children are missing and unaccounted for in the foster care system.
Adults who spent time in foster care as children have been reported to develop PTSD at twice the rate of U.S. war veterans, and 35 percent meet the criteria for substance abuse disorders prior to turning 18. 33 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who are experiencing homelessness have spent time in the foster care system. Current and former foster youth also face higher rates of incarceration. One study found that “over half of youth in foster care experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility.” Another survey found that by their 25th birthday, 81 percent of young men who were formerly in foster care had been arrested, and 35 percent had been incarcerated.
So, beyond feeding the adoption industry, why does our society do this? What does this system actually maintain or allow, given that it doesn’t actually protect children? The truth is, it allows people to go about their lives, in a society that generates so much harm, by disappearing children. By disappearing a child, the state also disappears any perceived crisis around a child’s well-being. The so-called child welfare system is a scam, and it can dupe desperate people, who want to rescue, or simply improve the situation of a child who may be in trouble. When the system ensnares a child, it exacts control over targeted individuals while also restoring the status quo. If the parent wants their child back, then the state has assumed control of that parent’s actions to a large degree. As Dr. Roberts discussed, there is a long history of the U.S. government taking Black and Native children hostage as a form of social control. But another important, immediate impact, from the state’s standpoint, is that to the people who raised the alarm, the situation has been resolved. Even if the child’s removal was not the outcome they had hoped for, the crisis, if there was one, is no longer theirs to attend to. They can go on with their lives, and reproduce capitalist relations as usual, without worrying about the child’s welfare. Because the child is gone and normalcy has been restored.
If this sounds similar to how jails and prisons function, when police disappear people who need help from our communities, that’s because it’s the same system at work — and that system offers violence, including captivity, as the solution to all ills. This is no way for us to live in relation to each other. This is no way to love or protect children. We need to rethink the way we solve problems within our communities, and we have to alter the social and economic contexts that generate suffering and despair. Because if we don’t, the system will run clean up here and there, disappearing children and adults as needed, to keep everyone cooperative. And as reproductive rights are stripped away, this process will be ramped up to separate even more families. But we can reject this cycle. We can abolish the prison-industrial complex, and all of its tentacles, including the family policing system. We can adopt new practices that address the harms in our communities with prevention and healing in mind, rather than submitting to an endless cycle of disappearance.
I want to thank Dorothy Roberts for joining me to discuss the lessons of her incredible book, Torn Apart, which I hope you will all pick up. It is essential reading for our times. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
JMacForFamilies works to abolish the current punitive child welfare system and to strengthen the systems of supports that keep families and communities together.
Movement for Family Power works to end the Foster System’s policing and punishment of families and to create a world where the dignity and integrity of all families is valued and supported.
The upEND Movement works to protect children, keep them in their homes and with their families, and change the structural barriers and inequities that set families up to struggle before they even enter the child welfare system.
Think of Us is a research & design lab for foster care, driving equitable systems change so that the youth and families most impacted by foster care have the greatest power and opportunity to reshape it.
Away From Home is an in-depth report on the experiences and perspectives of young people who have recently lived in institutional placements in foster care.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader wrote to the New York Times Magazine in response to its “Money Issue” (4/10/22), which focused on billionaires.
Your engrossing issue on megabillionaires—their road to riches and influence—devoted little attention to billionaire CEOs directly running their giant corporations. For example, how did CEO Tim Cook of Apple get his board to pay him $50,000 an hour or $850 a minute, while Apple store workers are making under $20 per hour? Apple’s wealth draws from a million serf laborers in China making iPhones and computers they cannot afford to buy.
Under Cook, Apple decided to pour over $400 billion of excess profits into unproductive stock buybacks. How fascinating would have been the Times covering how these decisions were made, in place of raising wages, thorough recycling, reducing prices for Apple’s expensive consumer products, bringing some production back to the USA or, heaven forbid, paying its fair share of income taxes.
While the hyperwealthy do attract celebrity treatment, it is when they manage multinational companies that their extraordinary supremacy becomes clearer.
A recent debate over the fiscal budget for 2022-2023 for the City of Detroit revealed the political character of the current administration and City Council.
The budget was approved for $2.4 billion in a municipality where a majority of the population are African American, working class and impoverished.
There were efforts by grassroots community organizations to influence the entire budget process. The Moratorium NOW! Coalition (MNC) in a public letter urged the City Council to include a $1400 “booster” check to retired municipal employees impacted by the more than 8% rate of inflation in the United States. In addition, to the booster campaign for retirees, the MNC in another correspondence to the City Council, demanded that the budget presented by the white corporate-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan be rejected due to its lack of consideration for the 80% African American population in Detroit.
We are living through a moment of great decline in the United States. The U.S.’s turn toward authoritarianism is evidenced by actions of the Trump administration and the GOP; the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol fomented by the big lie that former president Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election; and anti-Black right-wing attacks against voting rights, among many other right-wing machinations. Meanwhile, there is a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor. We are living in an age where the world’s 10 richest men (8 out of 10 of whom are American) have doubled their wealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has claimed the lives of nearly 1 million people in the U.S. alone; increased child poverty, hunger and food insecurity; and driven the highest rate of inflation in 40 years. In the meantime, Elon Musk, who refers to himself as a “free speech absolutist,” has bought Twitter for $44 billion to promote unfettered free speech rights for all. Anthropologist and journalist Sarah Kendzior has framed the moment we are enduring as the “erosion of America.” This erosion, characterized by a restructuring of how industries operate, attacks on democratic institutions, and a widening gap between the wealthy and the destitute also extends to higher education, a sector of society which is a key pillar of democracy.
The Emergence of the Corporate University
Bill Readings, a late Université de Montréal professor noted the move towards corporatization of universities in his 1997 study, The University in Ruins. While the 1990s were certainly not the golden age of higher education, there were aspects of them that were palatable compared to the current moment. At that time, tuition was lower and more affordable. Technological incorporation in teaching and internet accessibility had just begun. Google and Wikipedia were nonexistent, and living accommodations for students on college and university campuses were modest. Universities relied on shared governance (faculty participation in the governance of an institution) for decision-making. The rhetoric of excellence, innovation and efficiency in managing universities was beginning to gain traction, but it was not the driving force in decision-making in the neoliberal marketplace of ideas.
Yet, what has happened in recent years is a shift into what some have called the gilded age, where “the rich schools are getting richer, while the poorer ones are struggling to survive, with increasing numbers of fairly well known schools announcing they are closing or severely retrenching their operations.” In particular, since 2020 (the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), this gilded age is far more alarming than the situation described by Readings in the 1990s. From unsafe working conditions, to 700,000 (just over 50 percent) of faculty in the U.S. classified as “adjuncts,” to corporate-controlled donors, attacks on tenure, monetization of diversity initiatives, and strategies of restructuring to eliminate low revenue generating programs, corporatization of universities is no longer a theory but a reality.
Universities, both public and private, have been gradually moving away from their mission-driven models to market-driven models, where profits, branding and revenue-generating streams and programs are prioritized. With skyrocketing costs of education and tuition, fancy dorms, cafeterias, gyms and even a water-themed campus park, university campuses have been investing in fancy infrastructures — increasing their operational costs and pouring money into athletic programs, particularly football and men’s basketball, while lowering their instructional costs.
Joshua Hunt’s eye-opening book, University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education, narrates the relationship that the University of Oregon cultivated with Nike’s founder Phil Knight to transform “a once cash-strapped liberal arts college” into a “college football powerhouse with an increasingly competitive basketball program.” Hunt goes on to say how other universities have followed in the footsteps of the University of Oregon. “In 2016 the University of Michigan announced a $169 million contract with Nike” followed by a month later when “University of Texas at Austin inked a $250 million Nike deal.”
While corporations like Nike have been actively funding programs that university boards and presidents are welcoming, students are viewed as “tuition dollars” and as consumers. Many faculty and support staff have entered the exploited class who are disposable and easily replaceable. Despite receiving millions in pandemic-related federal relief funds, universities are slashing faculty and staff and blaming the cuts on COVID. Arvind Dilawar in The Nation reported, “In May of 2020, the University of Vermont’s president, Suresh Garimella, issued an update on the school’s finances. Citing the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Garimella put forth a bleak prognosis of lower enrollment, higher costs, and stagnant tuition rates necessitating reductions in salaries, benefits, and staff.” Unfortunately, what has happened at University of Vermont is a national story, as universities are using the false justification of COVID to push through long-sought budget cuts like cutting retirement benefits, freezing salaries, and cutting support staff and programs.
Barbara Madeloni, a facilitator with Public Higher Education Workers, a network that supports organizing among university workers, attributes the persistence of cuts to a much longer-term project of transforming higher education into an industry run on contingent faculty (insecure faculty positions like postdocs, teaching assistants, adjuncts and lecturers with little job security) and student debt, rather than a public good funded by taxes. Terminologies of right-sizing, student-centered, restructuring and reimagining are being used to create committees that recommend the elimination of disciplines, programs and majors that no longer serve the market-driven corporate universities that are built on revenue-generating enterprises. Portland State University most recently announced their own “Reimagine PSU” initiative “to provide spaces to create transformational possibilities at a larger scale.” One of the transformational possibilities will require “program reviews and reduction” and multiple programs are slated to be reviewed and possibly reduced or eliminated.
In the meantime, “administrative bloat” and administrative costs, as witnessed by large salaries paid to university presidents, numerous provosts, deans and coaches, have disproportionately increased. Even when university presidents are found to be most unsuitable due to various malpractices and wrongdoings (and where sacking them would be the most appropriate action), they are given golden parachutes by highly corporatized boards of trustees. Such expensive severance packages are often categorized under “mutual agreements” between the boards and the presidents asked to resign.
For instance, in 2017, Northern Illinois University (NIU) declared a $35 million funding shortfall. At the same time, former NIU President Douglas Baker was declared by state investigators to have mismanaged the public institution by sidestepping competitive bidding rules to hire consultants who were paid more than $1 million. The Hechinger Reporter noted, “Within two weeks of that report’s release, Baker resigned — and, in a closed-door meeting of the university’s board of trustees, was given $587,500 in severance pay, plus up to $30,000 to cover his legal fees. He’s also due a previously unreported $83,287 for unused vacation time, the university acknowledged. That’s a total of $700,787.”
Of course, the term “golden parachute” did not originate in the higher education sector but in corporations, as a response to hostile takeovers, mergers and acquisitions in the late 1970s. As higher ed has become increasingly corporatized, the concept of the golden parachute has been coopted by university boards that are comprised of wealthy donors, CEO’s and transplants from corporations. These board members have little to no knowledge either about shared governance or the internal workings of the university. These days, and particularly in the era of the #MeToo movement, such golden parachutes are not given due to any hostile takeovers, but to cover up scandals and other financial wrongdoings by university presidents. On February 17, 2022, Chancellor Joseph I. Castro notified the board of trustees of the California State University of his resignation as chancellor over his mishandling of sexual harassment complaints. He too will receive a $401,364 salary for one year and then return to teaching, according to the settlement agreement.
Under the corporate university the wage gap between those that belong to the top 1 percent and their compensation packages (even after they are no longer affiliated with a university) and those who are seen as “the employees” have grown wider and wider. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported the rapid erosion of tenure and shared governance for university professors, and the number of adjunct instructors living below the national line of poverty is at an all-time high.
Adding to the day-to-day realities of the corporate university is the ongoing attack on labor in higher education. Academic tenure, according to the AAUP, is an indefinite appointment which safeguards academic freedom for scholars in higher education and “allows faculty to pursue research and innovation and draw evidence-based conclusions free from corporate or political pressure.” This feature of academia is one of the targets of the U.S.’s right wing and is consequently being eroded. For the corporate university, tenure is an expensive system. And with right-wing forces declaring that “professors are the enemy,” as J.D. Vance, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, put it, tenure is under serious threat. According to the AAUP, a recent attack on tenure in South Carolina via the introduction of the South Carolina’s House Bill 4522, the “Canceling Professor Tenure Act,” seeks to “end tenure in the state’s public colleges and universities by prohibiting the awarding of tenure to employees hired in 2023 or later. If passed, this would be the first law of its kind in the nation.”
Of course, such attacks on tenure are part of a broader pattern of actions in states with Republican-led legislatures. For example, the University of Florida is trying to forbid its faculty from testifying in court cases against the state government. It is also blocking faculty attempts to include racial equity content in curricula under the guise of combating “critical race theory,” the latest bogeyman concocted by the right to chip away at academic freedom and push a conservative agenda in K-12 educational systems nationwide.
Dangers of the Corporate University
What are the negative effects of the restructuring of colleges and universities into corporate entities with top-down management models? One downside is the increasing adjunctification (defined as temporary and part-time workers with low pay, little to no benefits and any job security) of academia. In “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts,” Caroline Fredrickson noted, “thirty-one percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line.” Increased adjunctification, coupled with attacks on tenure and academic freedom, have only one major goal — accumulating more power and financial capital for the 1 percent of administrators, while depleting the resources, working conditions (as poor working conditions during the pandemic have highlighted) and livelihood of the 99 percent.
Another downside of the proliferation of corporate university models in higher education is an emphasis on producing STEM majors and less of an emphasis on encouraging majors in the humanities and social sciences. While more scientists, technological advancements, engineers, and mathematicians are certainly needed, what the humanities (fields such as art history, Africana studies, English, foreign languages, religious studies and history) and social sciences (anthropology, sociology and political science) bring to the table are deemphasized in a corporate-influenced educational setting as reflected in cost-cutting measures which tend to sacrifice humanities-related majors. The humanities and social sciences teach students empathy, humility, analytical techniques and critical thinking skills: humanistic qualities that are lacking in current public discourse and in various sectors within American society. Once they graduate, some college students will become leaders at local, state, national and international levels, and while the skills associated with the STEM fields are vitally needed, so are the qualities from the humanities which help people become better citizens and can promote human flourishing.
Other problematic features of corporate universities include increasing managerial costs and outsourcing as a model of governance, from deploying hiring firms used to hire presidents who are disconnected from faculty to the use of strategic plans created by outside organizations instead of created and driven by faculty, to the use of outside firms to manage enrollments instead of employing institutional staff.
Challenging the Corporate University
Challenging the corporate university will require a number of actions: Tenured and tenure-track faculty must join in solidarity with the exploited workers at these institutions (adjuncts, administrative and custodial staff, undergraduate and graduate workers). Solidarity includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Participation in one’s union,
Encouraging university workers to join organizations like United Campus Workers which organizes faculty, staff and student workers all across the South,
Resist some of these changes through a withdrawal of one’s labor. Case in point: Faculty at the University of Chicago were able to create a department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity partly through the threat to participate in committee work.
People inside and outside of academia must raise awareness about the ongoing changes in higher education and continue to pose questions that can lead us to viable solutions to the restructured corporate university. These questions include: What are the challenges, realities, symptoms and failures of corporatized colleges and universities? Who is impacted and how? What should the role of higher education be in forging a democratic society? And how can we move forward toward a more equitable and liberatory era in higher education?
These and other related ideas will be discussed more in the new Truthout series “Challenging the Corporate University.” We seek timely and well-written essays, op-eds, articles and interviews to expose and explore the various precarious labor and working conditions that the corporate university has produced. We are also interested in pieces which discuss creative ways to challenge corporatized higher education. The essays should be written for a broad audience and minimize the use of jargonized language, and the length of the essays should not be longer than 2,000 words. Please embed hyperlinks to sources seamlessly into the article text instead of including a works cited page. To submit a piece, please send an email with the subject line “Re: The Corporate University” simultaneously to bertinmlouisjr@gmail.com and DuttBallerstadt@gmail.com.
The current crisis in higher education leadership is on full display at California State University (CSU) — the nation’s largest four-year public university system. Take the case of former CSU Chancellor Joseph Castro.
Castro’s problems began with an underling — Fresno State’s Vice President of Student Affairs Frank Lamas — who was the subject of ongoing sexual harassment complaints and investigations. In 2018, Castro “enthusiastically” nominated his colleague to become the next president of CSU San Marcos. But later, as complaints about his VP’s behavior avalanched, Castro authorized a $260,000 payout and retirement package for the troubled subordinate. The sweetheart deal included a glowing recommendation letter. That’s golden parachute number one.
When these actions came to light last winter, Castro was forced to end his brief reign as chief administrative officer at CSU. Despite a rather ignominious departure, Castro received more than $400,000 “to advise” the CSU board of trustees for a year and, even without a glowing letter of recommendation, he retains the right to a high-salaried, tenured faculty position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Say “hello” to golden parachute number two.
These cases are not exceptions. For top CSU administrators, golden parachutes and insider dealing are the rule. As the Los Angeles Timesrecently reported, more than $4 million in salary and benefits has been paid out in recent years to former high-level administrators. CSU started its “executive transition” program in 1981; it has since been expanded three times. Castro’s predecessor as CSU chancellor, Tim White, receives $327,000 a year for two years plus a $24,000 car allowance. Executives in the program are typically “transitioned” into well-paying tenure-track faculty jobs. California’s state auditor has noted that these arrangements lack transparency and recommended that CSU do a better job of oversight. One beneficiary of the program recently informed a Los Angeles Times reporter that “she was not required to document her work performed under the program.” As students and faculty at the nation’s largest public university system struggle with a pandemic, skyrocketing costs of living, and major disruptions to teaching and learning, CSU continues to subsidize no-show jobs and secret deals for its managerial elite.
In its first public meeting since the revelations about the ex-chancellor, the Board of Trustees faced vocal criticism from CSU students, faculty and staff. Proclaiming that they “were kept in the dark” about Castro’s problems, the board announced that the executive transition program will be put on hold until an internal task force reviews the program and issues its recommendations.
We wish this scandal was just about some bad actors. Instead, it’s time to recognize that the whole mess — self-dealing, secrecy, mismanagement — reflects a systemic failure in higher education.
Banks and other lenders reaped the profits from this shift, while public college and university administration responded by mimicking the private sector. Presidents added “CEO” to their titles, while provosts became “chief operating officers” and budget offices were headed by CFOs. More importantly, administrators began to take control of public higher education from faculty and students. Student enrollment in U.S. higher education grew by 78 percent from 1976 to 2018 and full-time faculty kept pace by growing 92 percent, but the number of administrators and executives grew by 164 percent over the same period. Within the CSU system, the number of full-time faculty grew by a measly 3 percent from 1975 to 2008; over the same period, the number of administrators grew by a whopping 221 percent. Over a critical 10-year period (2004-2014) that witnessed catastrophic state budget cuts, California offloaded the costs of higher education onto students and faculty salaries trailed behind inflation, even as management salaries rose 24 percent and CSU president salaries swelled by 36 percent (excluding perks like housing and car allowances). The moral of the story echoes one of neoliberalism’s basic principles: austerity for most, prosperity for a few.
While some describe this management boom as “administrative bloat,” we believe it points to a more profound problem: the creation and growth of an administrative class within higher education, a special interest group that is profoundly disconnected from the vital heart of the university — teaching and learning, faculty and students. Members of this administrative class move from one position and one campus to another — often quite frequently. Many have brief or limited experience of the classroom. They usually have exclusive control of an institution’s purse strings. They also typically view the university in terms of organizational charts and “chains of command.” And, because they are only accountable to each other, they survive and prosper through patronage and clientelism.
When a subordinate reported being bullied and harassed by Fresno State’s vice president of student affairs, ex-Chancellor Castro reportedly responded: “Well, I’m in a really tough spot because Frank [the vice president] is babysitting my son this weekend.” It’s difficult to find a statement that better or more richly sums up the dynamics and dysfunction of the administrative class.
Like any large organization, universities require administration. That’s not the same as saying that universities need an administrative class. To avoid crony managerialism and create more effective administration, universities should instead practice a more democratic and participatory model of leadership. British, German, Japanese, and many other university systems offer one alternative. In these systems, students and faculty (and sometimes staff) play a more central role in decision-making because they elect academic officers — including chancellors, presidents and deans. The university rector is not a professional administrator but instead a member of the faculty who knows the institution well through their career as a teacher and scholar. In many of these systems, the rector enjoys a specific term of office before they return to the faculty. While rectors may appoint managers, their decisions are ultimately subject to the academic community they represent — not to a coterie of like-minded bureaucrats.
As recent events at CSU demonstrate, higher education leadership is in crisis. The current system — with its sweetheart deals and cronyism — benefits a few at the expense of the many, including students, faculty and the public. Hiring consultants and assembling task forces won’t resolve this crisis. More democracy is the only path to more accountability at California’s public universities and colleges.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked fierce political debate on the geopolitical consequences of the conflict. But less noticed and equally as important, the war has paved the way for a more sweeping militarization of what was already a global war economy mired in deep political and economic crisis. Geopolitical tensions and international conflicts may be tragic for those caught up in conflagrations such as in Ukraine — but advantageous for those seeking to legitimize expanding military and security budgets and open up new opportunities for capitalist profit-making in the face of chronic stagnation and social discontent.
In late March, the Biden administration, citing the Russian invasion, called for a $31 billion increase in the Pentagon budget over the previous year and on top of an emergency appropriation weeks earlier of $14 billion for Ukraine’s defense. Prior to the invasion, in late 2021, the U.S. government approved a nearly $800 billion military budget, even as, in the same year, it ended the war in Afghanistan. Almost overnight following the Russian invasion, the U.S., European Union, and other governments around the world allocated billions of dollars in additional military spending and sent streams of military hardware and private military contractors into Ukraine.
Shares of military and security firms surged in the wake of the invasion. Two weeks into the conflict, shares of Raytheon were up 8 percent, General Dynamics up 12 percent, Lockheed Martin up 18 percent and Northrop Grumman up 22 percent, while war stocks in Europe, India, and elsewhere experienced similar surges in expectation of an exponential rise in global military spending. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the words of the managing director of AeroDynamic Advisory, a Pentagon contractor, is “unquestionably the best F-35 salesman of all time,” in reference to a spike in U.S. government funding for the Lockheed Martin jet fighter. Said one consultant to Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies: “For the defense industry, happy days are here again. When the defense budget rises it tends to lift all boats in the industry.”
Militarized Accumulation
The Russian invasion — brutal, reckless and condemnable by any standard — has sparked debate on NATO’s proposed expansion into Ukraine and the role that it played in motivating the Kremlin. U.S. officials were keenly aware, in fact, that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict. “We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad,” notes a 2019 study by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank. “The steps we examine would not have either defense or deterrence as their prime purpose,” it states, but rather, “these steps are conceived of as elements in a campaign designed to unbalance the adversary, leading Russia to compete in domains or regions where the United States has a competitive advantage, and causing Russia to overextend itself militarily or economically.”
But the provocation could not be reduced to geopolitical competition, however important, as most observers were keen to do. Missing from the larger picture was the centrality of militarized accumulation — of endless low- and high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife and policing — to the global political economy. Militarized accumulation refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making, social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.
Wars provide critical economic stimulus. They have historically pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half century of expanding military budgets and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the longest in history, helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. From the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War, to the “war on terror,” then the so-called New Cold War, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transnational elite, led by Washington, have had to conjure up one enemy after another to legitimate militarized accumulation and deflect crises of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony onto external enemies and contrived threats.
The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel are more and more the privatized domain of transnational capital. The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total state military budget outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to more than $2 trillion. (This figure does not take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intelligence; contingency operations; policing; bogus wars against immigrants, terrorism and drugs; and “homeland security.”) During this time, military-industrial complex profits quadrupled.
However, focusing just on state military budgets only gives us a part of the picture of the global war economy. As I showed in my 2020 book, The Global Police State, the various wars, conflicts and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization, such as by facilitating global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016 and can be expected to escalate further in the face of a prolonged war in Ukraine.
By 2018, private for-profit military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, while another 20 million people worked in private security worldwide. The private security (policing) business is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors in many countries and has come to dwarf public security around the world. The amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement agencies. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.
These corporate soldiers and police were deployed to guard corporate property, provide personal security for executives and their families; collect data; conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations; carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters; run private detention and interrogation facilities; manage prisons and participate in outright warfare. Now, these same private military and security firms are pouring into Ukraine, with some mercenary companies offering between $1,000 and $2,000 a day for those with combat experience.
The Russian invasion has accelerated but did not originate the ongoing surge in military spending around the world. It is notable that state military spending worldwide skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse even beyond the post-9/11 spending hike, rising from about $1.5 billion in 2008 to over $2 trillion in 2022. The fact that this explosion in spending coincides perfectly with continued worldwide stagnation following the Great Recession suggests that the heightened militarization of the global economy is as much or more a response to this chronic stagnation than to perceived security threats. If bursts of militarized accumulation (such as that unleashed by 9/11, then by the 2008 financial collapse, and now by the Russian invasion) help offset the overaccumulation crisis further into the future, they are also high-risk bets that heighten worldwide tensions and push the world dangerously towards all-out international conflagration.
The Crisis of Global Capitalism
This crisis of global capitalism is economic, or structural, one of chronic stagnation in the global economy. But it is also political: a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The system is moving towards “a general crisis of capitalist rule” as billions of people around the world face uncertain struggles for survival and question a system they no longer see as legitimate. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy.
Economically, global capitalism faces what is known in technical language as “overaccumulation”: a situation in which the economy has produced — or has the capacity to produce — great quantities of wealth but the market cannot absorb this wealth because of escalating inequality. Capitalism by its very nature will produce abundant wealth yet polarize that wealth and generate ever greater levels of social inequality unless offset by redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent. In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 5 percent. The international development agency Oxfam reported in January that during the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty.
Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is — or could be — produced and what the market can absorb. The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the transnational capitalist class, or TCC, has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus it accumulated. In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a steady rise in underutilized capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. The surplus of accumulated capital with nowhere to go expanded rapidly. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate investment declined. Along with militarized accumulation, the TCC has turned to unprecedented levels of financial speculation and to debt-driven growth to sustain profit-making in the face of the crisis. If left unchecked, overaccumulation results in crisis — in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war — just what we are experiencing right now.
But there is a related dynamic at work in the global war economy: the need for dominant groups to suppress mass discontent and deflect the crisis of state legitimacy. International frictions escalate as states, in their efforts to retain legitimacy, seek to sublimate social and political tensions and to keep the social order from fracturing. All around the world, a “people’s Spring” has taken off. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, South Africa to Colombia, Jordan to Sri Lanka, waves of strikes and mass protests have proliferated and, in some instances, appear to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character. Wars and external enemies allow the ruling groups to deflect attention away from domestic malaise in their effort to maintain a grip on power as the crisis deepens.
In the U.S., this sublimation has involved efforts to channel social unrest towards scapegoated communities such as immigrants or other marginalized groups — this is one key function of racism and was a core component of the Trump government’s political strategy — or towards an external enemy such as China or Russia, which had clearly become a cornerstone of the Biden government’s strategy well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. U.S. presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings when they launch wars. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90 percent in 2001 as his administration geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H.W. Bush achieved an 89 percent approval rating in 1991, right as the U.S. declared the end of its (first) invasion of Iraq and the “liberation of Kuwait.”
It is unlikely that an increasing militarization of the world economy can in the long run offset either the economic or the political dimensions of the crisis of global capitalism. Global capitalism is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with more inequality, more authoritarianism, more militarization, and more civic and political strife. In the U.S., class struggle is heating up, with a wave of strikes and of unionization drives in Amazon, Starbucks, and elsewhere in the gig economy. The current inflationary spiral and the escalation of class struggle in the United States and around the world point to the inability of the ruling groups to contain the expanding crisis. The drive by the capitalist state to externalize the political fallout of the crisis increases the danger that international tensions and localized conflicts such as in Ukraine will snowball into broader international conflagrations of unforeseen consequences.
As the Ukraine crisis continues to drag on and the global revolt escalates, there will be a radical reconfiguration of global geopolitical alignments to the drumbeat of escalating turbulence in the world economy that will feed new political upheavals and violent conflicts, making global capitalism all the more volatile. While it is hard to imagine a return to the status quo antebellum in Eastern Europe, in the larger picture, the Ukraine crisis is not the cause but a consequence of the general crisis of global capitalism. That crisis will only get worse. Fasten your seat belts; it will get much worse.
This week on CounterSpin: News media coverage of taxes falls broadly into two camps: There are, especially in April, lots of “news you can use”–type stories—like NBC‘s Today show on April 14 warning viewers to be mindful of typos and not be lazy about filing for extensions, or NBC Nightly News on April 18, noting that if you filed by mail, you might wait five to eight months for your return, due to backlogs at the IRS. Taxes as an “oh well, what are you gonna do” thing that all of us have to deal with.
Then there are other stories, disconnected stories, about tax policy: Who pays, how much, and why? We’ve talked about that a fair amount on this show, and we’re going to revisit two of those conversations today.
Last April, we spoke with Emory University law professor and author Dorothy A. Brown about how, though you can scour tax policy and find no mention of race, our tax system still affects Black people very differently, in ways most conversation obscures.
CounterSpin220422Brown.mp3
And in February 2019, we spoke with economist Dean Baker about why the idea of raising taxes on the superwealthy makes sense to many mainstream economists and to the general public, but still faces a perennial headwind in corporate media.
CounterSpin220422Baker.mp3
Two revelatory conversations about tax policy, this week on CounterSpin.
Suzanne James spoke to Angela Carr, Socialist Alliance candidate for the Senate in Victoria, about housing, health, National Disability Insurance Scheme and the party’s plans to address the growing socio-economic inequality crisis.
A first-of-its-kind examination of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on low-income communities published Monday shows that Covid-19 has been twice as deadly in poor counties as in wealthy ones, a finding seen as a damning indictment of the U.S. government’s pandemic response.
“The neglect of poor and low-wealth people in this country during a pandemic is immoral, shocking, and unjust, especially in light of the trillions of dollars that profit-driven entities received,” said Rev. Dr. William Barber II, co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign, which conducted the new analysis alongside a team of economists and other experts.
Released on the 54th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in Memphis, Tennessee — where he was fighting for the rights and dignity of low-wage sanitation workers — the new report aims to bring to the forefront the relationship between poverty, income, and occupation and Covid-19 mortality.
The extent to which class is a predictor of coronavirus vulnerability is understudied, according to Barber, who noted that “Covid-19 data collection does not include data on poverty, income, or occupation, alongside race and pandemic outcomes.”
“The Poor People’s Pandemic Digital Report and Intersectional Analysis addresses this knowledge gap,” said Barber, “and exposes the unnecessary deaths by mapping community characteristics and connecting them with Covid-19 outcomes.”
Assessing figures from more than 3,000 U.S. counties, the researchers estimated that the poorest counties have suffered twice as many coronavirus-related deaths as the wealthiest. In the most fatal waves of the coronavirus pandemic — the spike in the winter of 2020-2021 and the Omicron surge — the poorest counties suffered 4.5 times more deaths than the wealthiest.
“This cannot be explained by vaccination status,” Shailly Gupta Barnes, policy director for the Poor People’s Campaign, said in a statement. “Over half of the population in [the poorest] counties have received their second vaccine shot, but uninsured rates are twice as high.”
The analysis features an interactive map that ranks counties based on the intersection between poverty rates — specifically, the percentage of people living below 200% of the official poverty line — and coronavirus death rates.
The county highest on the list is Galax, Virginia, where nearly 50% of the population lives below 200% of the poverty line. The county has a coronavirus death rate of 1,134 per 100,000 people, far higher than the national rate of 299 per 100,000.
Next on the list is Hancock, Georgia, which has a Covid-19 death rate of 1,029 per 100,000 people. More than 52% of the county’s population lives below 200% of the poverty line.
The counties with the highest coronavirus death rates, according to the new report, had one-and-a-half times higher poverty rates than counties with lower death rates.
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and one of the experts behind the study, said the findings make clear that the pandemic is “not only a national tragedy, but also a failure of social justice.”
“The burden of disease — in terms of deaths, illness, and economic costs — was borne disproportionately by the poor, women, and people of color,” said Sachs. “The poor were America’s essential workers, on the front lines, saving lives and also incurring disease and death.”
The researchers who conducted the analysis are expected to amplify their findings and discuss their implications during a press conference in Washington, D.C. at 10:00 am ET. The press conference will also feature people from some of the poorest, hardest-hit counties examined in the report.
SPECIAL REPORT: The Poor People’s Campaign releases “The Poor People’s Pandemic Report,” a generationally significant report that uncovers things that will shock the nation’s conscience and the political establishment. https://t.co/SxgV3BLJf9
— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) April 4, 2022
The analysis was released as the U.S. moves closer to the grim milestone of 1 million coronavirus deaths, an estimated toll that’s widely seen as an undercount.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said in a statement Monday that “the Covid-19 disparities among counties across the U.S. are striking.”
“This report shows clearly that Covid-19 became a ‘poor people’s pandemic,’” said Theoharis. “We can no longer ignore the reality of poverty and dismiss its root causes as the problems of individual people or communities. There has been a systemic failure to address poverty in this country and poor communities have borne the consequences not only in this pandemic, but for years and generations before.”
“However, this does not need to continue,” she added. “Our nation has the resources to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up.”
1 April saw energy companies hike their prices by 54% while the government stood by and watched. However, a think tank’s analysis has helped to expose the real issue here. It’s not a cost of living crisis. The issue is that the richest people are waging a class war on the rest of us – and energy prices are their latest weapon.
Shocking levels of fuel poverty
The Resolution Foundation, a living standards think tank, has done research into the effect of rising energy costs. It calls struggling to pay energy bills “fuel stress”. This is when households spend 10% or more of their budgets on energy. This used to be what the definition of fuel poverty was. But the government moved the goalposts to make it look like fewer people were in fuel poverty.
In short, the Resolution Foundation found that 1 April’s 54% rise will hit the poorest households the hardest. In 2021, it said that 37% of the very poorest families were in fuel stress. As of 1 April, that figure shot up by 67.6%. This means that 62%, or nearly two-thirds, of the poorest households are in fuel stress right now.
The Resolution Foundation says things will only get worse. Energy companies look set to increase their prices again in October. If this goes how the Resolution Foundation think it will, then 80% of the poorest households will end up in fuel stress.
The rich/poor energy divide
The think tank’s research also showed the bigger picture. In one graph, it’s very clear that the richest households are barely going to notice rising energy prices:
As ever, it is lower-income households who are disproportionately impacted by high energy costs, with four-in-five of England’s poorest families set to be facing fuel stress come October, compared with just one-in-fifty of those in the top income decile
So, what can be done about this? Well, if you’re the Labour Party or corporate media, then you won’t do anything.
Protecting the powerful
Labour leader Keir Starmer said that energy companies increasing their prices by 54% was due to “Tory incompetence” – like the government made a silly mistake that led to this situation. He then said:
People don’t want a revolution, they do want to know how to pay their energy bills.
Talk about not reading the room. A revolution of some kind would be better than a continuation of this shit – which is exactly what Starmer is propping-up. Moreover, his comments whitewash the chaos. Then, BBC News did similar.
BBC: ‘think your poverty better’
It ran an article where four “experts” told the rest of us how to “protect” our finances and “soften the blow of rising bills“. The four top tips were essentially:
Cut back elsewhere.
Cut back elsewhere again, after you’ve already cut back.
Look after your mental health – or, ‘think your poverty better’.
Much like Starmer, the BBC whitewashed the chaos. It’s also saying that it’s up to poor people to sort this mess out themselves. Further, both it and the Labour leader are ignoring the fact that companies are taking the piss with their price rises – and that the government is allowing them to do so.
‘Money Saving Expert’ Martin Lewis seems to get it. But as soon as he put his neck on the line to help people, energy provider E.ON promptly took to Twitter – blaming him for “bringing Britain down“. Little wonder Starmer and the BBC won’t rock the boat.
Energy price rises are class war
The level of difference between how hard energy companies are hitting the richest and poorest, coupled with the fact the government knows this and is barely acting is class war. That is, the rich and powerful are knowingly doing things that will suppress the poorest people and keep them in their poverty-stricken place. Shills like the BBC and Starmer are helping them out.
Decisions made by those at the top of society that will plunge 7.5 million families at the bottom into further poverty is class war. To say it’s anything else is just propping up those enacting this on the rest of us.
Boris Johnson has once again used Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to lie about child poverty figures. Good timing, though – #BorisTheLiar had already been trending.
The Tory class war rages on
During PMQs on Wednesday 30 March, Labour MP Apsana Begum asked the PM about the ongoing class war – or the “cost of living crisis” if you are a Westminster politician or journalist. She noted that the Tories are cutting social security in real terms from April – £10bn, by all accounts. She said that this crisis was:
due to Conservative economics and the notion that while some have the pleasure of partying, the rest of us should suffer.
Johnson waffled about “levelling up” for a while, then turned his attention to poverty rates. And once again, he lied through his teeth.
Johnson: think about the kids!
Specifically, Johnson claimed that there are:
200,000 fewer kids… in poverty
This is literally not true. The independent Children’s Commissioner, appointed by the government, said:
relative child poverty did indeed increase by 600,000 between 2011/12 and 2018/19 – from 3.6 million (in 2011/12) to 4.2 million (in 2018/19).
And in 2019/20, this went up by another 100,000. Though it’s true that by 2018/19 absolute child poverty had fallen by 200,000. But overall, this is still half a million more children in some sort of poverty.
Johnson: the serial liar
In July 2021, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) issued Johnson with an official warning for lying over child poverty. And this wasn’t the first time. The warning was issued because:
Over the last year, a number of concerns have been raised to us regarding the prime minister’s use of statistics on child poverty and in each case, we have brought this to the attention of the briefing team in No10.
So, will it do the same again?
Who cares – it didn’t stop him lying again, did it?
Watch:
Even after the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) rebuked Boris Johnson over his lies about poverty here he is again at #PMQs claiming there are "200,000 fewer kids in poverty" #BorisTheLiarpic.twitter.com/UU7balzBEK
The contemporary right has inherited two seemingly contradictory impulses from the neoliberal era: anti-democratic politics and a libertarian personal ethic.
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