American billionaires grew in number and expanded their collective fortunes by $2.1 trillion since Covid-19 sparked a worldwide pandemic nineteen months ago, according to a new analysis unveiled Monday.
An overall 70% surge of wealth among the nation’s richest individuals since March of 2020 has resulted in approximately 130 new billionaires, found the new report released by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). In a statement, the groups noted that there are now 745 people with “10-figure bank accounts” compared to the 614 that existed when the pandemic first hit.
In total, those 745 billionaires now hold $5 trillion in collective wealth, which the groups note is “two-thirds more than the$3 trillion in wealthheld by the bottom 50% of U.S. households.”
While ATF and IPS have been tracking the explosive growth of the uber-wealthy throughout the pandemic, the latest figures come as Democrats in Congress continue to negotiate with themselves over the cost and scope of President Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ agenda which aims to provide expanded Medicare, paid family leave, universal childcare and pre-K, bold climate action, and an expanded childhood tax credit to alleviate childhood poverty and provide a more robust economic foundation for millions of working American families.
According to IPS/ATF:
The great good fortune of these billionaires over the past 19 months is all the more stark when contrasted with the devastating impact of coronavirus on working people. Almost 89 million Americanshave lost jobs, over 44.9 millionhave been sickenedby the virus, and over 724,000 have died from it.
To put this extraordinary wealth growth in perspective, the $2.1 trillion gain over 19 months by U.S. billionaires is equal to:
The entire $2.1 trillion in new revenues over ten years approved by the House Ways and Means Committee to help pay for President Biden’s Build Back Better (BBB) investment plan.
At the heart of their latest analysis, said ATF executive director Frank Clemente, is the failure to adequately tax these outrageous and growing fortunes.
“This growth of billionaire wealth is unfathomable, immoral, and indefensible in good times let alone during a pandemic when so many have struggled with unemployment, illness, and death,” said Clemente. “For practical and moral reasons, Congress must start effectively taxing the outsized gains of billionaires.”
Like other advocates, IPS and ATF are calling for much higher and stricter taxation on the windfall profits of the billionaire class — especially in light of the social needs that the pandemic has made so apparent.
Currently under consideration in Congress is theBillionaires Income Tax (BIT)bill, spearheaded by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.), chairman of the Finance Committee, which Clemente and Chuck Collins, director of IPS’ Program on Inequality and the Common Good, say is the best piece of legislation to target the wealth of the super-rich. As the new analysis notes:
Most of these huge billionaires’ gains will go untaxed under current rules and will disappear entirely for tax purposes when they’re passed onto the next generation. UnderWyden’s BIT, billionaires will start paying taxes on their increased wealth each year just like workers pay taxes on their paychecks each year.
The tax will apply only to taxpayers whose wealth exceeds $1 billion: about 700 households. It will be assessed annually on tradable assets, such as stocks, where the value of the asset is known at the beginning and end of the year. For non-tradable assets, such as ownership in a business or real estate holdings, taxes will be deferred until the asset is sold.
“Billionaires are undertaxed and playing hide-and-seek with their substantial wealth,” said Collins. “Targeted tax increases on billionaires, including the proposed Billionaire Income Tax, would rebalance the tax code and reduce these glaring abuses in who pays for the services we all depend on.”
In a statement last month following the release of a White House report on the average income tax rate of U.S. billionaires, Wyden said that it’s shameful for the nation’s wealthiest to pay lower tax rates than most working Americans.
“Billionaires are paying a mere 8 percent tax rate, lower than millions of working Americans,” said Wyden.
“It’s time for a Billionaire’s Income Tax that ensures billionaires pay taxes just like the nurses and firefighters,” he added. “Nurses treating Covid-19 patients pay their taxes with every paycheck, and they know it’s fundamentally unfair that billionaires and their heirs may never pay tax on billions in stock gains. Instituting a Billionaire’s Income Tax would go a long way toward creating one fair tax code, rather than one that’s mandatory for working people and another that’s optional for the fortunate few.”
A new weekly show aims to bring some socialist chat to people’s Sunday evenings. And with a fresh and exciting line-up for its first episode, the signs are already looking good.
Socialist Chat Room
The Socialist Chat Room is a new, live YouTube political show. It’s been created by RD Hale, who’s behind Council Estate Media. It’s a website and YouTube channel dedicated to amplifying the voices of working class writers. The first episode of Socialist Chat Room is at 8pm on Sunday 17 October:
I am hoping my equipment and very old PC are up to scratch, but I can’t properly test them until I can purchase the streaming software I need in the coming days. Once I have more funding, I will upgrade to a more professional setup, but expect day one to be ultra low budget!
Not that that should bother most viewers. Because the Socialist Chat Room’s first panel is worth listening to, regardless of any tech issues.
Hale wrote that the Socialist Chat room format will be:
a six-person panel to discuss recent events and the issues that matter to us in a friendly and accessible manner. It will not be a place to argue and divide the working class, because God knows there is too much division already! I would like our panels to be as diverse as possible, and most of the people who’ve approached me so far are straight white men like myself! Nothing wrong with that, of course, but if you are female, non-binary, LGBT, or from an ethnic minority, I would love to hear from you. Let’s represent a wide range of people.
He told The Canary:
I’m launching the Socialist Chat Room because the mainstream media, and even left wing media, is too often dominated by middle class voices. I want to create something where regular people can actively participate in the live chat, or even join our panel and discuss issues that matter to them in a fun and accessible way. I particularly would like to engage younger viewers and show them that politics doesn’t have to be dull.
It’s an entrenched problem that middle class, university-educated voices control the corporate media and some of its independent counterparts.
Not classy
As Sam Gilfillan wrote for DiEM25, research throws up the scale of the problem:
journalists are almost twice as likely to have at least one parent from the highest earning work classification than the average worker, with over half of the UK’s top journalists privately-educated. In fact, it is thought that only around 11% of UK journalists come from a working-class background.
Gilfillan also noted how the industry has brought about the “academisation” of journalism too. In other words, he says that to get into journalism you more often than not need to have a degree and work through an unpaid internship. So, Council Estate Media and the Socialist Chat Room aim to redress the balance.
The key difference between this show and most other leftist content in the UK is that I aim to primarily platform ordinary working-class people. Many on the left are expressing frustration that the working-class are rarely given a voice and more often than not, we are ventriloquised by (often well-meaning) middle-class people. I would like this to change.
So, all power to Hale and his guests – and make sure you tune in on 17 October at 8pm.
When President Joe Biden toured storm-ravaged neighborhoods in Louisiana in September, he portrayed the damage of Hurricane Ida as a national issue. He claimed that “its destruction is everywhere,” and even more so, that, “it’s a matter of life and death, and we’re all in this together.” As comforting as it may be to hear the president taking storm relief seriously, Biden is getting it wrong.
Natural disasters could not care less about the unity of the American people. And they hurt underprivileged communities the most.
The year 2005 showed us a preview of how storms can unleash massive social and economic disruption. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast that August, causing the loss of almost 2,000 lives and an estimated $125 billion in damage. Cities like New Orleans were swarmed with images of poor, mostly Black residents navigating the flooded streets.
Floodwater had broken through the frail levees of New Orleans and taken over the Lower Ninth Ward, an overwhelmingly poor and Black area. Emergency food and medical aid took five days to come. A group of military contractors and the National Guard later organized the full evacuation of the city. Since then, Katrina has become a widely recognized symbol of neglect towards poor and Black communities, in addition to a blatant case of environmental injustice.
Several studies in the aftermath of Katrina have exposed the relationship between the hurricane and class or racial divides. Research confirms that the storm damage was concentrated in low-income areas. In fact, there is substantive evidence that low-income people — particularly in communities of color — had been disproportionately vulnerable to unemployment and decreasing housing availability in the years following the storm.
These unequal levels of devastation are not unique to Katrina. A 2018 paper pointed out that wealth inequality increases with the frequency and intensity of natural hazards, especially along lines of race, education and homeownership.
For example, during a period of substantial natural hazards between 1999 and 2013, white Americans living in counties with $10 billion worth of property damage from storms gained an average net worth of $126,000 per county. Black Americans in the same areas lost $27,000 per county. Similar trends are visible when comparing college-educated to non-college-educated Americans, as well as comparing home-owning to non-home-owning Americans.
It turns out that natural hazards are really good at making poor people poorer, and rich people richer.
While hurricanes chase some people out of their homes and trap them into poverty, risk-taking investors follow the storm path in order to buy property that will make them even wealthier. Less obvious ways to make money from storms include selling flood-damaged cars without disclosing the damage (yes, this is legal), payday lending to desperate financially insecure people, or selling protective materials and simultaneously funding climate denial lobbies. These tactics purposely take advantage of vulnerable populations for profit. They are, by definition, predatory.
What’s even more concerning is that federal aid doesn’t help reduce inequalities in the wake of a storm. For the past couple of decades, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has offered billions of dollars to counties and individuals coping with storm damage. Yet the more FEMA aid a county receives, the starker the wealth disparities become within its residents, possibly due to misallocation of funds. At the same time, private sources of community reinvestment are concentrated in predominantly white middle-class communities.
This means that — like many others in the past — the current hurricane season created more than a natural disaster. It also fueled a social, economic and cultural calamity.
FEMA has already filed over half a million applications since Ida. To date, it is the second-most intense hurricane to have hit the state of Louisiana, right behind Katrina. Moreover, Ida triggered a tornado outbreak and flash flooding across the Northeast, making it one of the costliest tropical cyclones in U.S. history.
Could the situation get any worse?
Actually, it probably will.
Hurricanes form in the Atlantic Ocean every year, June through November. National climate prediction centers are expecting 2021 to be an exceptionally active season for tropical cyclones. In the upcoming years, hurricanes will likely only get stronger and more frequent as global temperatures continue to rise.
This is an opportunity to do better: Apply the lessons learned from Katrina, commit to the fight against environmental injustice and pay more attention to the wealth trajectories of the country.
If previous natural disasters taught us anything, it’s that we cannot abandon those who need the most assistance after a storm. Katrina exemplified how relying exclusively on the private sector and the military for disaster relief can lead to exploitation and violence. Instead, we must prevent large-scale physical damage by strengthening the infrastructure of hazard-prone areas. Furthermore, legislators should put a halt to predatory private companies and individual profiting from natural hazards — from enforcing laws against price gauging to banning the sale of damaged goods without disclosure. In the event of a natural hazard, FEMA should provide emergency aid quickly and equitably.
It’s imperative that policymakers launch focused and comprehensive reforms that provide aid beyond short-term economic recovery. These could include targeted reemployment programs, unemployment benefits, relocation assistance, rent subsidies, education grants or infrastructural support — possibilities for holistic recovery following a natural disaster are endless.
Making people feel united after a harrowing hurricane is cute. Now it’s time for the Biden administration to really address the aftermath of Ida.
Almost 20 years ago, a police shooting left David Makara without an arm and facing jail. Inspired by the blind lawyer who saved him, he now defends others facing injustice
When the police started shooting at David Makara in his home town of Nyahururu, in Kenya, he ran before quickly collapsing. Two bullets had hit him – one in his right arm, one in his hip – but he only realised when he looked down and saw his hand dangling from his wrist and blood pouring out.
Students have had a range of experiences with remote learning over the past 18 months, with some students thriving at home, others completely disappearing from the school system, and most falling at various points in between. Since last spring, when it seemed that vaccines could end the COVID pandemic in the United States, families and educators have eagerly awaited the start of a new “normal” this fall.
But the latest COVID spike, which in September led to over 2,000 daily deaths and critical shortages of ICU beds across much of the country, has once again turned school reopenings into a source of anxiety and argument — especially because children under 12 are ineligible for the vaccine (although that may change soon). But while some districts, including Los Angeles, are offering a choice of in-person or remote learning this year, many others are forcing almost all students to attend in person.
This decision is especially controversial in New York City, where the failure to promptly shut down schools in March 2020 was a major factor in allowing the deadly disease to spread. Throughout the following school year, Mayor Bill de Blasio — eager to get students back in school and parents back to work — promoted the safety and educational benefits of in-person learning, but the vast majority of families chose to remain remote, with Black and Asian students avoiding school buildings in especially overwhelming numbers.
This year, de Blasio is giving students no choice. But many parents remain concerned about the safety of in-person learning, especially because while cities like Chicago and Los Angeles plan weekly COVID tests for each student, New York’s plan is to test far fewer students — and only to test those who fill out a consent form. These fears have been borne out by the first weeks of school, which generated numerous social media images of overcrowded hallways, almost 3,000 positive COVID tests and the closure of over 1,000 classes. One week into the school year, the Department of Education (DOE) abruptly changed policy and announced that unvaccinated students in a class with a student who tests positive will no longer have to quarantine at home — doubling down on its plan to keep all students in school no matter what.
For months, a small coalition of parents and educators has sounded the alarm about the city’s reopening plan. Tajh Sutton, the president of the Community Education Council for District 14 in Brooklyn and the program manager for Teens Take Charge, a youth activist group that organizes against school segregation, has been one of the lead organizers of the #RestoreRemote campaign. In this interview, which was conducted before the DOE policy change on quarantining, Sutton says the refusal to create a remote option is a connected to the ongoing struggle to make the New York City school system democratically responsive to its majority of Black, Brown, Asian, working-class and poor constituents, who have expressed high levels of concern about the safety of in-person learning throughout the pandemic.
Danny Katch: Why should the New York City public school system offer a remote learning option for all students?
Tajh Sutton: Everywhere needs to offer remote learning because the pandemic is not over. In fact, we’re at higher risk because these variants are coming out that are even more contagious and deadly than their predecessors. So the idea that we would limit the possibility for safety by not providing virtual schooling and work options is counter to public health.
This is an issue everywhere, as you say, but New York City’s plan seems particularly negligent around testing. Can you speak about that?
There’s an intentional negligence taking place with safety precautions. As of now in New York City public schools, only 10 percent of the school population at any given time is being tested. Last year when there were only 30-40 percent of New York City public school students in the building, testing was mandatory for everyone. This year it’s not, and that is a direct result of affluent white families who want schools open at all costs, who are advocating that all of the health mitigation measures in place be eradicated so that there are no more quarantines and no more school closures, health be damned.
The irony is that a lot of the arguments for mandatory in-person schooling argue that it’s especially necessary for students of color.
Yes, don’t you love it when we’re tokenized? If we need something, don’t you think we’d tell you? And we have been. Black and Latino and Asian families and educators, since the schools closed, have been attempting to provide the mayor and the chancellor — both old and new — with demands and recommendations about what a safe and equitable reopening would look like. And all of that has been discarded so that we can reopen the system at all costs — so that we can reopen the city.
I understand that there are students — particularly students of color, particularly students who live in temporary housing or have disabilities or are multilingual learners — who need to be in person. What I don’t understand is why the entire system needed to be reopened to do that, when one of the things we were fighting for first and foremost was prioritized reopenings. Because we wanted those kids back in school as soon as possible, but if those children are in a school that is overcrowded, what quality education and services are they even providing?
As a longtime organizer against school segregation, particularly the racially biased admissions screening in New York City schools, do you see continuity in terms of things being done in the name of Black and Latino families who in fact are being ignored?
Oh, absolutely 100 percent! It’s the same individuals who were slandering Teens Take Charge when we were trying to get rid of admissions screens, who are fighting to keep schools open, who are fighting to eliminate things like quarantines and mask mandates, which is how you know that the safety and care of our children aren’t what’s actually their focus. Wanting kids in school is something I can understand, but not wanting to know if there’s an infection in the school? Not wanting to do everything possible to keep children safe — particularly children under 12 who cannot be vaccinated? That’s not something I can understand. None of them care about Black and Latino children, so they really need to keep our names out of their mouths.
Most coverage of people opposing testing and mask mandates is of Trump supporters. In your experience, are these people Trump supporters or do they view themselves as liberal Democrat types?
A lot of individuals in New York City who believe they are progressive are actually one Twitter argument away from agreeing with everything someone in a MAGA hat would say. And that’s a conversation that we really need to have as a city.
In New York City, parents of color — particularly African American parents — have long organized for greater community control against the institutional racism of the school system. Is the #RestoreRemote campaign part of this very long debate about community control?
I do think it’s part of that legacy. There’s an incredible amount of organizing that’s being unnoticed, by the mayor and also by the city at large. Most people don’t even know that this Restore Remote coalition and this organizing even exists, or that we have 7,000 signatures or that we were able to convince over 35 state senators and city council members to come out in support of this — as well as two borough presidents and the public advocate.
But the thing about these systems is that they are designed so that none of that matters. In a system like mayoral control, the mayor’s going to do what he’s going to do. So our next fight, especially with Eric Adams coming in [as the likely next mayor], is really going to be about how we put that power for public education back in the hands of students and educators and families and communities.
The individuals leading the so-called “keep schools open” campaign can make one petition that barely got any signatures and wind up in Vogue magazine. But Black and Latino and Asian mothers like myself, who have been fighting for an equitable reopening for 18 months — and who were fighting before that for public education in general — we don’t get shit.
What’s it been like leading this fight while being the parent of two kids you’ve been keeping out of school?
I would love nothing more than to send my children to school. This is my son’s 8th grade year. I hate that he’s not enjoying it with his friends in his school. But what I would hate more is if my child got sick or worse. Because I’m coming home to an asthmatic husband, an immunocompromised baby brother and a daughter who is too young to be vaccinated. And I wish that we were having more multilayered conversations about that, because you’ll find way more community members who live in a multigenerational home and who are immunocompromised than you will these individuals who just can’t wait to get to get back to work — especially since a lot of those folks have the capability to work from home.
When the pandemic started, I interviewed a teacher who said the city’s delayed closing of schools was due to its failure to listen to teachers and parents. Do you feel like the current failure to offer a remote option is due to the people in charge of schools not being in touch with the needs of most public school families?
Looking at Twitter and listening to the news, you can feel mentally unwell because the gaslighting has been so effective — particularly over the summer in terms of this idea of “get back to normal.” Seeing all these pictures of these beautiful little masked faces walking into school, you really start to feel like maybe you’re just overreacting. But then you see the COVID case numbers, you start hearing about even more variants, start hearing about the disparity in the vaccination rates across communities.
The Department of Education had a moral obligation to have a culturally competent conversation about valid vaccine hesitancy and medical racism, and create the space to change minds and support people in making healthy decisions. That did not happen. Who’s doing that work? Parents like myself, for free. Two days ago, I was at my church in Harlem virtually, talking to my elders and community members about ventilation, masking, hand washing, and how they can get in touch with their superintendent or their principal and advocate for their children. We’ve been doing panels since last year, and for that to all just be ignored because we are not white and moneyed is disgusting but also so unsurprising.
How is the campaign for a remote option going so far, and what do you see as the next steps?
We have a toolkit that tries to draw out different resources together that folks can utilize virtually from the comfort of their home to join this fight. What this looks like around the corner is really applying pressure to our new governor, because the mayor has made it clear he does not care. And I think as cases skyrocket, which they inevitably will, we’re going to see more families opting out of in-person learning, because now they’ve seen it firsthand. It’s different when someone tells you something and you’re holding out hope, and when you actually experience that classroom closure, experience your child sitting next to a child that you find out two days later was positive, and now you have to go get that rapid test. And so we’re going to see a lot more families opting in to this strike for school safety as the weeks go on and the numbers rise.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
When the world was plunged into crisis during the global financial meltdown of 2008, Iceland was dubbed “the canary in the coalmine.” The country was hit hard by the crash, and Icelanders took to the streets almost immediately, demanding that their long-ruling conservative government step aside for snap elections. The movement succeeded in January 2009, leading to the first left-wing coalition government in Iceland’s history. Sweeping constitutional reform was subsequently put on the table. The canary sang of discontent with neoliberalism and the promise of a left-wing alternative years before the rise of socialist figures like Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K.
Unfortunately, that alternative never emerged. The left coalition ruled as liberal technocrats implementing programs approved by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and it never advanced constitutional reform through parliament despite a lengthy and inclusive drafting process that produced a draft constitution, which was widely approved by voters in a nonbinding 2012 referendum. When the next election came around, in 2013, the right was swept back into power on promises of mortgage debt relief that were branded as populist, but disproportionately benefited the rich. In hindsight, it was like the canary was trying to warn the rest of the world about the appeal of figures like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the face of ineffectual liberalism.
Unsurprisingly, that right-wing coalition angered voters by doing favors for special interests, like Iceland’s all-powerful fishing industry, and finally fell apart in 2016 when it was revealed that then-Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson was evading taxes. Another right-wing coalition government followed, but that rapidly collapsed in 2017, after it emerged that government officials did favors for a well-connected child abuser. Since then, Iceland has been ruled by a prime minster from the Left-Green Movement, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, in a coalition with the Independence Party, the conservative faction that dominated Icelandic politics during the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s and 2000s. Iceland couldn’t seem to decide how to orient itself, years after it was hailed for questioning capitalist orthodoxy and declared a bellwether for doing so.
This year, it looked like Iceland was finally going to make a solid shift to the left. The Socialist Party, which was founded in 2017, was contesting its first national election on September 25 and polling well above the 5-percent threshold needed to win seats in Iceland’s parliament, the Althing. Members hoped this would be enough to influence coalition-building after the vote. The party had already built power by electing a member to Reykjavik City Council, Sanna Magdalena Mörtudóttir, who rose to prominence speaking eloquently of her struggles being raised by a single mother in poverty. The Socialists had also forged ties with the labor movement, in a country where organized labor and electoral politics are often viewed as wholly independent of one another. Most notably, party leaders include union organizers who revived labor militancy in Iceland after being elected to lead the second-largest union in the country, Efling, a trade association with a disproportionate number of low-income Icelanders and immigrants as members. In the past few years, strike action by Efling has won raises for service and municipal workers, and prevented employers from using the COVID pandemic from clawing back benefits won during these struggles.
“We told them: ‘Over our dead fucking body,’” Efling leader and Socialist Party founding member Sólveig Anna Jónsdóttir told Truthout. “Because we said, ‘We have this fucking worker power and we will use it if you take our precious money away.’”
But the Socialist Party performed worse than expected in the election, winning only 4.1 percent of the vote, and failing to send a single member to the Althing. In fact, only right-wing parties made gains, including the People’s Party, which is center-left on economic matters, but far right on immigration, and now controls roughly 10 percent of the seats in the Althing.
Mercifully, Iceland is only so capable of playing the role of the world’s canary. Left-wing movements recently made gains after elections in Germany and Norway. In Norway, a Marxist party, the Red Party, went from one to four parliamentary seats. But there are still lessons to be learned from the Socialist Party of Iceland’s growing pains. Jónsdóttir spoke with Truthout roughly 12 hours after polls closed to discuss what went wrong and how to go forward. The following are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Knight: It’s the morning after the election. It didn’t go how Socialists were hoping, based on how they were polling. What do you think happened?
Sólveig Anna Jónsdóttir: I think in the end, what our biggest problem was is that we had no money. We are a grassroots party run by people donating their time and efforts, and we were up against many well-funded party machines. In the end, this is going to have a huge effect and it is, of course, anti-democratic as you well know. In America, money in politics is poison. The same applies here.
One other issue we were dealing with: The Socialist Party had this huge open political platform on Facebook with 11,000 members, many not in the party. It’s extremely active and everything is discussed. The rules are not strict about content. Of course, racism and such are not allowed, but freedom of speech is practiced very extensively there, and it kind of gave off this negative vibe. The other parties are much stricter about ruling content in their name, whereas the Socialist Party is not, which can be both good and bad.
Number three: The party was not able to come across as the democratic element for marginalized groups. There are many reasons for that. One of the reasons is that there is a party here called Flokkur Fólksins, the People’s Party. They’ve been dealing with a lot of difficulties, but they have a very charismatic leader, a woman called Inga Sæland, who has gained the trust of marginalized groups here.
Also, part of the issue is that the people here in Iceland who have suffered the most because of COVID are foreign workers. We have a huge influx of foreign workers. They get the worst deal, and are stuck in the rental market, with prices disgustingly high because the market has literally been given over to the capitalist class, which was one of the hideous results of the 2008 crisis. These people are low-income workers, and very few of them can actually vote. They are here, they are the engines of the GDP, but they remain marginalized.
There’s also the extreme power of right-wing media in Iceland. Two of the biggest print papers are owned by ferocious right-wing capitalists who are totally willing to do whatever it takes. It’s a complex matter.
There is a tragic element to this: The socialists were organizing some of the most marginalized workers in Iceland, immigrants who can’t vote. Then the People’s Party, which is anti-immigrant, ends up doing better than expected.
It’s an interesting party because it has this charismatic leader who I like when she talks about issues facing the poor in Iceland, the marginalized people who are forced to live on disability payments, poor older people and children. But the party has this very real petit bourgeois element there, which is reactionary in many ways, which I do not see doing any good.
But I should add this: You have in Iceland people who are born poor here. They live in this rich society. They are surrounded by great material wealth, but from the moment that they enter this world until they leave it, they are in dire straits. You have childhood poverty here. You have people living in housing not fit for human dwelling, and children who are living in such bad housing that they don’t even have access to showers. So these people, when they hear someone talk about their plight in such a convincing manner, as she does — these people, they are not racist, and they are not necessarily anti-immigrant. Low-income Icelanders are the ones working side-by-side with immigrants. That was my experience. But the party has drawn into its orbit people who are shit people. That’s the way it is.
My understanding of labor unions in Iceland is that for a long time, they have kept out of parliamentary politics, and the Socialist Party broke that mold. How do you think that was received?
It is widely known that in Iceland we still have a strong union movement, and that a huge percentage of people who work for a living belong to unions. But this only tells part of the story and we need to be careful not to be flippant when we talk about this. Yes, we have a very large union movement. But, in that movement are people from all walks of society: people who have the lowest pay, people who are at the bottom, and then you have people who I don’t think would be called workers anywhere else in the world — men who have very high income, mostly men who have a learned trade and are firmly positioned in the middle class, with all of the good stuff that entails. We also have educated people with university degrees. So, it’s a very complex, huge movement and therefore it doesn’t have a single political will. It is unified on certain issues, like needing to protect the workers’ movement because that is our strength, and we can band together to fight on certain things. But when you get down to the nitty gritty, quickly these class struggles within the movement become extremely real. I have experienced that myself. When I started in the movement, I knew that would be the case, but I was still surprised by how real it is. In the end, it is surprising that we can still band together and fight on certain important issues. But it is a complex movement, and the Socialist Party still needs to make more inroads.
Do you think one of the reasons why the labor movement in Iceland has conservative tendencies is that the labor movement has taken itself out of party politics for so long?
One of the big reasons is that the leadership of the movement, and how it worked on political matters was very professionalized. For example, Efling was this big union, and quite powerful within the movement just because of its size. But when I was working in the care sector as a low-income woman, never did I feel there was any possibility of any radical activism, working-class, labor struggle stuff. There was no interest in mobilizing and organizing within the low-income workers, the true working-class people.
Instead, the union movement had totally, or almost totally, gone into this professionalism: “We all need just to work together, there is just a certain amount of GDP generated, there is this one cake, and we all need to get together and figure out who will get what slice, and if workers will get too big of a slice, inflation will follow blah blah blah.” And this was never actually even debated with workers themselves. There was a very elitist group of people who saw, as their primary function, to protect stability. This reasoning has especially been used since the crash.
Because the working and low-income people were so marginalized and so powerless, there was never any opportunity for them to say, “Your stability rests on my instability,” and the movement was just perfectly fine with this. So not only was the movement elitist and professionalized, but also just incredibly undemocratic. That was where we were. That is what we are trying to change. We have made great inroads, but like you can imagine, it’s not a simple task.
Can you briefly talk about the history of the Socialist Party in the context of the 2008 crash? It’s interesting that the party wasn’t founded until nine years after. It almost seems like the party was established because during the recovery, society was fragmenting. The gap between the haves and the have-nots was widening when there were years of austerity.
In that aspect, you can say the Socialist Party is directly the offspring of the crash. In the years following, what happened politically was that we had a group of people who were economically affected in a very serious manner. Workers like myself, for example. I was working in the care sector when austerity hit us. I know what it’s like to work in an already-underfunded workplace and then you also have to implement bullshit austerity rules that make your life more shit. You also have people who are maybe not personally experiencing the hardship of the crash — austerity, and the trouble that followed — but who realized how some elements in Icelandic society had just corrupted and taken over so much. In that way, the Socialist Party is the coming together of these various elements: people who already had a Marxist socialist analysis of power dynamics and wealth, and working-class people who themselves suffered, and people who have, because of what has happened in the past years, come to the conclusion through their analysis that only a socialist political and economic vision and movement can be the way forward for us to not live in this extremely wealthy society where still we have way too many people suffering because of political decisions.
What do you think that those of us outside of Iceland can learn from this most recent election?
I was so excited about what happened in Norway. There was this change, and not only did traditional left parties perform well, but the Red Party became a political machine to be reckoned with. I was very much hoping this would be the result here, that we would have a small left wave that would sort of force the middle parties to acknowledge that we need a more left-wing outlook on economic matters, tax matters and matters of economic justice, and that the Socialist Party would have a good solid election result that would give the party this power to take up this space with its analysis. This obviously didn’t happen.
What I think the lesson is: When you live in a class-based, capitalist society, the task of building up a socialist party and movement is very hard. It will not be done easily. That is the lesson that all socialists know, and the political environment we all live in. It’s no great astonishing insight. What we do now is we keep on going, we don’t give up. We understand what we did wrong, we learn the lessons, and we keep organizing. This is what we will keep on doing.
In the end, that is the only thing that works. Just build the fucking foundation, lay the bricks, do the work, and don’t give up. Use the power and the willingness to work for a just society to propel you forward.
The next election, four years away, is a long time, but getting into parliament is only one part of the big struggle. It is, of course, extremely important because that’s where you get the platform, that’s where you get access to lots of stuff, but it is only one part, and in the end, it’s not even the most important part.
The New York Times (9/23/21) criticizes the White House for taking into account the main way billionaires make money.
According to a White House analysis (9/23/21), the country’s 400 wealthiest families have an effective tax rate of just over 8%. At the New York Times (9/23/21), reporter Jim Tankersley was quick to cast doubt on the figure.
According to Tankersley’s framing, the analysis “seeks to show a gap between the tax rate that everyday Americans face and what the richest owe on their vast holdings,” and is “an attempt to bolster Mr. Biden’s claims that billionaires are not paying what they actually should owe in federal taxes, and that the tax code rewards wealth, not work” (emphasis added). In other words, it’s an analysis with a political agenda.
Dubious data point
This is in contrast to “most measures of tax rates,” which “do not use the White House method of counting asset gains as annual income.” The piece emphasizes how “unconventional” the White House analysis is, and that it’s “well below what other analyses have found.” (Note that these analyses don’t “seek to show,” but simply “find,” thus enhancing their social science credibility.)
Tankersley points to one data point here:
The independent Tax Policy Center in Washington estimated this year that in 2015, the highest-earning 1,400 households in the country paid an average effective tax rate of about 24%, compared with an average rate of about 14% for all taxpayers.
First, that “most” measures don’t count asset gains says more about how thoroughly the rich have rigged the tax code to exclude most of their income than it does about how one ought to measure income—or tax rates. The Tax Policy Center figure, for instance, only considers federal income tax, which ignores state and local income tax, as well as payroll, consumption and excise taxes.
Second, the “independent” Tax Policy Center should hardly be assumed to be agenda-free; according to its most recent annual report (2017) available online, the group’s “Leadership Committee” includes representatives of major financial firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the Carlyle Group, entities that have a direct stake in keeping gains in financial assets from being counted as income.
And third, it’s crucial that the data from the Tax Policy Center comes from 2015, since that was before the 2017 Trump tax cuts slashed taxes even further for the ultra-rich. As New YorkTimes columnist David Leonhardt (10/6/19) pointed out in 2019, the tax cuts “helped push the tax rate on the 400 wealthiest households below the rates for almost everyone else” in 2018, to 23% for the wealthiest versus 28% for the average taxpayer.
Top tax rates have been pushed so far down over the last 70 years that the richest households now pay a lower percentage than any other income group (New York Times, 10/6/19).
Victory for the richest
It’s a remarkable victory for the rich over the rest of us: The richest Americans had an effective tax rate of 70% in 1950 and 47% in 1980. Meanwhile, the average taxpayer has seen relatively little change in their effective tax rate over the same period.
That’s all according to University of California/Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (Triumph of Justice, 2019), who were not using the “unconventional” White House method of dividing taxes paid by total asset gains. They were, however, using the White House method of looking at the top 400 as measured by wealth, rather than the top 1,400 as measured by adjusted gross income. They were also considering all taxes, including payroll tax (Social Security and Medicare), state income tax, and consumption and excise taxes.
ProPublica (6/8/21) “compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period”—an obvious precedent for the White House analysis that was overlooked by the New York Times.
If you want to look at what the very richest Americans pay in taxes, then the way Saez/Zucman and the White House do it is more accurate than the way the Tax Policy Center does it, because those 400 billionaires—worth a combined $3.2 trillion last year, up $240 billion from the year prior, as calculated annually by Forbes—are very often not those with the highest taxable income.
For instance, Warren Buffett, a perennial Forbes 400 member who currently ranks No. 4, voluntarily released his tax returns in 2015. His reported income ($11.6 million) didn’t even put him in the top 14,000 earners. That year, Buffett paid about 16% of his reported income in taxes.
Buffett released his returns in response to Trump’s attempt to deflect attention from his own refusal to release his returns; Buffett had nothing to hide, since his methods of avoiding taxes were perfectly legal.
As ProPublica (6/8/21) found in its recent bombshell report on leaked tax returns of the ultra-rich—yet another analysis using similar methods to the White House that went unacknowledged by Tankersley—Buffett is particularly good at tax avoidance: From 2014–18, while his wealth grew by over $24 billion, he managed to pay less than $24 million in taxes. It’s an effective tax rate of 19% on reported income measured the “conventional” way, but a tax rate of just 0.1% on his actual gains. That’s the lowest of any of the country’s billionaires.
Mind-boggling methods
The ultra-rich have myriadmind-bogglingways of getting away with not paying taxes that the rest of us have to. Two that the Biden administration is pushing to eliminate relate to asset gains.
If someone sells a stock, any gains from the purchase price are taxed at a significantly lower rate than other income; the White House is seeking to end that preferential treatment for those earning above $1 million.
Further, if someone instead holds that stock until they die, and leaves it to an heir, those gains are not taxed. So billionaires like Buffett and Jeff Bezos can vastly increase their wealth, never pay taxes on most of it as long as they don’t sell it, pass those assets to their children upon their death and—poof!—those billions are never subject to income tax. This dodge is called the stepped-up basis, and it’s a major driver of the racial wealth gap.
Lawmakers impacted
As Open Secrets (4/23/20) points out, many lawmakers have a direct interest in avoiding taxes on wealth.
Most people don’t think the wealthy—or corporations—pay their fair share of taxes (Pew, 4/30/21). But their representatives aren’t eager to fix the system. Tankersley mentioned at the end of his piece that congressional Democrats have “pushed back” on Biden’s efforts to change both capital gains taxes and the stepped-up basis. He didn’t mention how many Democrats would be directly negatively impacted by those fixes.
Given that the majority of members of the last Congress were millionaires (Open Secrets, 4/23/20), any children they have will greatly benefit from the stepped-up basis. And any member of Congress who holds stock and ever plans to sell any of it is impacted by increases in the capital gains tax. Not to mention all the wealthy donors funneling money into super PACs for most Congress members.
Fortunately for them, they’ve got the New York Times running interference.
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Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley delivered a scathing indictment of the rich and powerful during her address at the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, condemning the leaders of wealthy countries for refusing to take basic steps to end the coronavirus pandemic, tackle the climate emergency, and usher in a more just society.
“If I used the speech prepared for me to deliver today, it would be a repetition, a repetition of what you have heard from others and also from me,” Mottley said at the outset of her remarks, which came after the leaders of African and Latin American nations decried the massive, persistent inequities in coronavirus vaccine distribution that have left billions of people without access to lifesaving shots.
“How many more times will we then have a situation where we say the same thing over and over and over, to come to naught?” she asked. “My friends, we cannot do that anymore.”
In the roughly 15 minutes that followed, Mottley — the leader of Barbados’ Labour Party and the first woman to serve as the small island nation’s prime minister — decried the international community’s continued inaction in the face of intensifying global crises.
“How many more variants of Covid-19 must arrive, how many more, before a worldwide action plan for vaccinations will be implemented?” Mottley said. “How many more deaths must it take before 1.7 billion excess vaccines in the possession of the advanced countries of the world will be shared with those who have simply no access?”
Watch the full speech:
“None are safe until all are safe. How many more times will we hear that?” she continued. “How much more global temperature rise must there be before we end the burning of fossil fuels? And how much more must sea levels climb in small-island developing states before those who profited from the stockpiling of greenhouse gases contribute to the loss and damage that they occasioned, rather than asking us to crowd out the fiscal space that we have for development to cure the damage caused by the greed of others?”
Mottley went on to dismiss the notion that the international community lacks adequate resources to make transformative progress in the fight against Covid-19, the climate crisis, and global inequality.
“We have the means to give every child on this planet a tablet, and we have the means to give every adult a vaccine, and we have the means to invest in protecting the most vulnerable on our planet from a changing climate — but we choose not to,” she said. “It is not because we do not have enough, it is because we do not have the will to distribute that which we have. And it is also because, regrettably, the faceless few do not fear the consequences sufficiently.”
“The nation states of this assembly and the people of this world must indicate what direction we want our world to go in,” Mottley added, “and not leave it to the faceless few who have worked so hard to prevent the prosperity from being shared.”
Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s global coronavirus summit later this week, the People’s Vaccine Alliance is warning rich countries that mere pledges to donate additional doses to poor nations will not be enough to close the massive — and widening — inoculation gap that has left billions of people without access to lifesaving shots.
At a virtual event Wednesday on the margins of the U.N. General Assembly, Biden is expected to push other wealthy nations to join the U.S. in taking steps to ensure that 70% of the global population is vaccinated by next September. But experts argue the president’s plan to reach that goal isbadly inadequate, relying heavily on vaccine charity that has yet to make more than a small dent in global inequities.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 human rights and public health organizations from around the world,estimatedTuesday that just 13% of the roughly one billion vaccine doses that G7 nations pledged to donate in June have been delivered thus far — a lag that has allowed Covid-19 to continue running rampant in poor regions as rich countries begin rolling outbooster campaigns.
Even as they start offering third shots to certain groups — including the elderly and immunocompromised — new researchshows that wealthy nations are still expected to waste 100 million vaccine doses by the end of the year and up to 800 million by mid-2022. The ONE Campaign, a global anti-poverty group,estimatesthat G7 countries will soon be sitting on enough excess doses to provide one shot to every adult in Africa.
“Rich countries are selfishly looking out for themselves but short-changing all of us. We need bold solutions now, not more empty gestures,” Dinah Fuentesfina, campaigns manager at ActionAid International, said in a statement Tuesday. “Enough is enough, we must put people before profits. We need a People’s Vaccine — now.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) hassaidit hopes to help all countries vaccinate at least 10% of their populations by the end of September and 40% by the end of 2021 — modest objectives that won’t be reached if current production and distribution trends persist. Overall,according toOur World in Data, just 1.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one coronavirus vaccine dose.
Earlier this month, COVAX — a WHO-backed global vaccination initiative — slashedits forecast for available doses in 2021 by around a quarter, warning that its capacity to obtain and distribute shots to low- and middle-income nations has been “hampered” by the “prioritization of bilateral deals by manufacturers and countries.”
The Biden administration says the U.S. has donatedmore than 140 millionvaccine doses, many of which have been shippedthrough COVAX. But expertsestimatethat 13 billion doses will be necessary to end the global pandemic.
BREAKING: @POTUS‘ ambitious goal to vaccinate 70% of the world by this time next year will not be met with the trickle of charity currently on offer from rich countries.
Instead of bilateral agreements and inadequate charity, the People’s Vaccine Alliance has argued that rich nations and pharmaceutical companies must share critical vaccine technology and know-how with manufacturers around the world, a step that would empower low-income countries to ramp up regional production.
Failure to do so, the coalition warns, would prolong the deadly pandemic and increase the likelihood that even more dangerous variants — possibly vaccine-resistant mutations — will emerge.
“Rich countries continue to offer pathetic trickles of charity while protecting the monopolies of pharmaceutical corporations and denying billions of people protection,” Maaza Seyoum of the People’s Vaccine Alliance in Africa said Tuesday. “With up to 10,000 people dying every day, nothing short of redistributing the rights to produce the vaccines will be enough.”
But rich countries and major vaccine makers — eager to protect their bottom lines — havestonewalleda World Trade Organization (WTO) effort to temporarily waive intellectual property protections that have entrenched the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly control over production. Pharmaceutical giants have also refused to voluntarily take part in tech-transfer efforts, including a WHOinitiativein South Africa.
And despite pressure from advocacy groups and aleading scientistwho helped develop key vaccine technology, the Biden administration has thus far declined to use the U.S. government’s ownership of akey patentto force pharmaceutical companies to share theirrecipeswith the world.
“The U.S. government has the recipe for the world’s most effective Covid-19 vaccine and can choose to share this knowledge to help make billions more doses in the year ahead,” said Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. “The World Health Organization has established an mRNA manufacturing hub in South Africa and will need far more ambitious support than wealthy countries have offered so far. Ending the pandemic is a choice.”
On the eve of Biden’s Covid-19 summit, the People’s Vaccine Alliance urged the U.S. president to use the virtual gathering to:
Reach an urgent agreement on a waiver of intellectual property rules ahead of the TRIPS council in October, so that all qualified manufacturers, especially those in developing countries, are able to produce Covid vaccines;
Make legally binding commitments to share vaccine doses immediately, so that the most vulnerable and those working on the front line in developing countries are protected, before rich countries give third shots to healthy adults; and
Use every power available to make it a requirement for pharmaceutical companies to share technology and know-how with the C-TAP and the mRNA Hub in South Africa and ensure there is enough funding to make the technology transfer happen.
“Shameful inaction by President Biden is resulting in countless preventable deaths across the global South,” Asia Russell, executive director of the Health Global Access Project. “President Biden must use his global stage at the Covid-19 summit to call for rapid passage of a robust TRIPS waiver at the WTO. The world can’t tolerate another day of his deadly delays.”
A new analysis projecting that 100 million Covid-19 vaccines stockpiled by rich nations and set to expire by the end of the year could be left to waste is prompting an outcry from social justice campaigners who warn of a potential “atrocity” as poor nations are refused access to doses.
The estimatereleasedSunday by science analytics company Airfinity came astrackingby Our World in Data showed that just 1.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. By contrast, 63% of people in the U.S. and 71% of those in the U.K. have received at least one jab.
Out of the 100 million vaccines set to expire by the end of the year, the European Union holds 41% and the United States 32%, Airfinity found.
According to Global Justice Now, the potential for the huge quantity of expired and unused doses is more damning evidence of vaccine inequity and underscores the need for governments do much more to get doses in the hands of lower-income countries including by supporting a waiver of intellectual property rules related to Covid-19 vaccines and technology.
“Rich countries like the U.K. are hoarding vaccines that are desperately needed in low- and middle-income countries. We should immediately hand doses over to Global South nations. But that alone will not be enough,” Global Justice Now director Nick Dearden said in a statement Sunday.
“Wasting millions of doses that could be used to save lives would be an atrocity,” he said, “but it’s almost inevitable when a handful of rich country companies monopolize vaccine production.”
“Poorer countries shouldn’t have to wait until our doses are about to expire to vaccinate their populations,” Dearden continued. “Many are capable of safely manufacturing vaccines if only we would waive intellectual property so vaccines can be produced patent-free in the countries that need them most.”
That capability is clear, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF),saidin a statement last month.
“Setting up mRNA vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa is absolutely possible,” said Lara Dovifat, campaign manager with MSF’s Access Campaign. She pointed to MSF’s analysisdemonstrating“that at least seven manufacturers in African countries currently meet the prerequisites to produce mRNA vaccines, if all necessary technology and training were openly shared.”
Airfinity’s projection came ahead of a Covid-19 virtualsummitthis week convened by U.S. President Joe Biden as member states gather for the United Nations General Assembly.
There is a battle raging in U.S. cities around land and who controls it. It is fought with zoning laws and red lines. Its battlefields are neighborhood associations and local elections. Across the country, racist reactionaries square off against capitalist developers in a struggle to determine the future of the housing market. In these types of battles, whoever wins, tenants lose, according to housing organizers working to halt the damage wrought by both developers and racist politicians.
The U.S.’s housing crisis began long before COVID eviction moratoria brought the problem into the spotlight. Median rent in the United States has increased 70 percent since 1995, even as real wages remained static. This lack of affordable housing kept millions of people one crisis away from losing their homes. Before the pandemic began, almost half of all tenants in the United States were cost-burdened, meaning they paid over 30 percent of their income towards rent. One in four Americans paid over 50 percent.
“There’s basically no city in America where you make minimum wage and work 40 hours a week and afford the median rent on an apartment,” says Max Besbris, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The solution is clear, academics and activists say: more housing for low-income tenants. However, for decades, the reactionary “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) movement stymied such construction in the name of keeping their neighborhoods white and property values high. Meanwhile, in recent years, the far more charismatic “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement has pushed back against regressive NIMBYs through aggressive advocacy for loosening of zoning restrictions and the construction of dense urban housing developments.
Ultimately, though, grassroots activists reject this binary and argue that neither movement has the ability to solve the housing crisis.
Whose Backyard?
The term NIMBY first appeared as a pejorative for opponents of the planned construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, in the 1970s. The truth is that nobody wants to live next to a nuclear power plant. The trouble is that as long as these power plants continue to be built, they will end up in someone’s “backyard.” The question of whose backyard is a question of political power.
NIMBYs existed long before the term came to prominence and it was never just about waste disposal. At its core, NIMBYism is an understandable desire for local autonomy. However, in the U.S. context, local autonomy also allows for the reification of racial and class segregation. In 1917, the Supreme Court outlawed policies that zoned separate residential areas for different races. In response to this, NIMBYs exploited a loophole that still allowed for class-based discrimination to indirectly ensure racial discrimination. Zoning board meetings, dominated by wealthy, white homeowners, put new zoning laws into effect around the country, which decreed that only single-family housing could be built in a residential area. This kept many neighborhoods racially segregated, and the lack of apartment buildings effectively kept poor whites from entering these communities as well.
“NIMBYism stems from the idea that segregation in some ways is good, in an economic sense,” Besbris says. “People don’t want developments, especially dense developments. Certainly not public housing.”
The ideological successors of the early NIMBY movement continue to stymie efforts to construct affordable housing where it is most needed. San Francisco has one of the worst housing crises in the country. The median cost of housing is 257 percent higher than the national average. This crisis in housing affordability has fueled a precipitous growth in the city’s unhoused population. Between 2017 and 2020, San Francisco was responsible for driving up the national houseless population by over 25 percent.
Despite the clear need for low-income housing, attempts to construct an affordable housing complex in San Francisco this summer met with extreme hostility from surrounding residents. Anonymous fliers circulated that described the project as a “7-story, 100-unit high-rise slum” which would “become the best place in San Francisco to buy heroin.” Hundreds of homeowners descended on a meeting with their district supervisor to warn about the dangers of toxins at the building site from the dry cleaners that had occupied part of the space. When the supervisor attempted to address the crowd, he was drowned out by chants calling for his recall.
Despite this uniform hostility, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the construction. This stunning defeat for the NIMBYs reflects broader trends in housing policy. As the housing crisis grows more acute, the cries for more housing have begun to drown out the NIMBYs.
If You Build It, They Will Come
After decades of dominance in town hall meetings across the country, NIMBY reactionaries find themselves challenged by the relatively new YIMBY movement. The newer movement’s approach to housing is simple: If the problem is a housing shortage, the solution is to build more housing. If zoning regulations historically limit housing developments, YIMBYs say, cities ought to relax or eliminate zoning requirements. If NIMBY logic leads to racial segregation, reversing NIMBYism will mend racial divides, according to YIMBYs.
YIMBYs, a cohort of young affluent reformers, are currently having a striking influence on public policy. In a few short years, their ideas have gone from fringe to mainstream. The coverage from the national press has largely been glowing, painting YIMBYs’ market-based approach as the salvation of the housing market. YIMBY influence can be seen in President Biden’s sprawling infrastructure bill, which eliminates exclusionary zoning.
At first glance, the YIMBY agenda seems to align with progressive goals. If you look more closely, however, the plan begins to look like a market-based, public-private Frankenstein. YIMBYs believe “we need to simply build more housing [in accordance with] the principles of market economics,” says Tracy Rosenthal, organizer and co-founder of the LA Tenants Union. The new housing would be built with tax credits and changes to zoning laws would be incentivized through a competitive grant program. But reliance on competitive grants for zoning reform, as a White House official put it, seeks to influence developers with “purely carrot, no stick.” The zoning laws are not an accident; they are the result of a century-old political project that is not going to disappear in exchange for extra federal funding.
Minneapolis offers an example of a YIMBY program in action. In 2018, as part of its cutting-edge 2040 plan, the city abolished exclusive single-family zoning. The idea was that this would allow for the construction of new duplexes and triplexes, as well as the conversion of existing single-family homes.
In 2020, however, developers filed only three permit requests for new triplexes, all for renovations of existing buildings. Rather than rethink the efficacy of YIMBY solutions, the Minneapolis City Council doubled down on attempts to persuade developers to create denser housing by getting rid of all parking requirements for new developments.
Neo-Reaganomics
Even if doubling down on market-based incentives results in denser housing the second time around, increased development will not reduce costs for low-income tenants; it will price them out of the neighborhood, according to Besbris.
The YIMBY movement holds that the market will solve the housing crisis and generally rejects public housing as a solution. As a result, YIMBYs often work with large developers, who know they can make more money with luxury accommodations than affordable apartments. “There is money to be made as a developer, but only when you’re developing a certain kind of housing,” Besbris says. “No matter how much you let people build, it’s not necessarily going to equate to more affordable housing.”
For YIMBYs, spurring high-end development isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. As wealthy tenants move into luxury housing, the slightly less wealthy will take their place in a game of “musical chairs” that will eventually trickle down to the poorest tenants, YIMBYs argue. This process of filtering, they say, will eventually result in more available low-income housing. The parallels with Reaganomics are hard to ignore.
YIMBY logic might hold up if the United States had a single housing market that encompassed low-, middle- and high-income housing. A study of the Minneapolis housing market suggests, however, that low-income and high-income housing do not compete with each other. While filtration might occur decades down the road, high-end developments do not address the immediate issue, which is very specifically a crisis of affordable housing. For every 100 low-income tenants in the United States, only 37 units of affordable rental housing exist.
Far from alleviating the shortage of affordable housing, studies suggest that luxury developments actually increase rent for low-income tenants. “At the bottom end of the market, a landowner or a landlord is likely to see a new luxury building that is built nearby as a market signal that this is an up-and-coming neighborhood,” Edward Goetz, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota, explains. “And they’re just as likely to raise rents as do anything else.”
This kind of gentrification does not increase affordable housing, as YIMBYs claim, but can dramatically reduce it, according to a 2016 study comparing gentrifying and non-gentrifying neighborhoods within New York City. The study found that this gentrification increases housing stock, just as predicted by the YIMBYs. However, gentrifying neighborhoods also saw affordable housing availability decline by over 27 percent. Gentrifying neighborhoods also saw a disproportionately high decrease in Black population, which directly contradicts the YIMBY claim that so-called “up-zoning” acts to reverse racial segregation.
When gentrification drives low-income residents out of their homes, competition for the remaining affordable housing drives rent up even further. A study by the Institute of Children, Poverty & Homelessness (ICPH) compared two adjacent New York City neighborhoods: gentrifying Bed-Stuy and non-gentrifying Brownsville. As higher-income tenants moved into Bed-Stuy, displaced low-income tenants migrated to the now-more-affordable Brownsville, which increased competition for Brownsville housing and led to rent increases in that neighborhood as well. “The poorest of the city’s residents now face competition not only from wealthier households but also from other families living in poverty,” the study concluded.
Rosenthal compared the impact of the acronym “YIMBY” to that of the phrase “pro-life” in the abortion debate. “I am impressed,” Rosenthal said, “and I find it devastating.”
Reimagining the System
Like many intractable American problems, the answer to the housing crisis is both simple and widely adopted elsewhere, progressive activists say: The United States needs more public housing.
Currently, less than 1 percent of the U.S. population lives in public housing, and even the mention of building more is taboo in some circles in the U.S. The phrase “conjure[s] images of failing housing projects from the middle and later part of the 20th century,” Bresbis says, “but that really doesn’t have to be the case.”
“Red Vienna” provides a model for large-scale social housing, a blanket term for public housing that emphasizes affordability, equity and tenant control. Vienna, Austria, has a long history of investing in publicly owned housing for low- and middle-income residents, an effort spearheaded by socialists in the 1920s. Today, 62 percent of Vienna’s population lives in social housing with rent control and strong protections for tenants. The decommodification of the housing market has had remarkable effects on the lives of the residents. The low cost of housing has kept Vienna as one of the most affordable cities in the world. For 10 years in a row, Vienna has ranked first in the Mercer’s Quality of Living city rankings.
In addition to the lack of public housing, another major problem with the U.S. housing market is the perception of housing as an investment vehicle. “For homeowners, housing is basically your retirement,” Bresbis says. “It’s the major source of wealth for the vast majority of American households,” he said. This view of real estate as a financial vehicle creates a perverse incentive to maintain a housing shortage in order to drive up costs and reap a profit. “If we actually provided people with a generous, sustaining and honorable retirement at the national level, like other developed countries do, you wouldn’t necessarily have the same kind of interest in making sure that housing prices are always going up,” Besbris said.
Rosenthal agrees, noting, “We have a housing market in which prices only go up. And, therefore, housing has become an investment asset for corporations, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts and pension funds. Housing has become an investment for global financial actors, and has more in common with the stock market than it does with shoes.”
Ultimately, however, Rosenthal doubts that reform will do the trick.
“This system can’t be fixed,” Rosenthal said. “It can only be overthrown, transformed and replaced.”
An estimated 9 million Americans got the rug pulled out from under them over Labor Day weekend as enhanced pandemic federal unemployment benefits expired, leaving millions of families in the lurch during a record-breaking season for COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
Some 35 million people — nearly 1 in 10 Americans — live in households that will be impacted by the cut. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tweeted a response to those families: “Um, get a job?”
If only it were that simple.
Workers in this country aren’t lacking work ethic. They simply don’t have reliable child care, health care, or economic infrastructures to support them in times of crisis.
Vaccination rates are still lagging in much of the country, yet many state governments are undermining masking rules and other basic precautions. That makes returning to work more dangerous for frontline workers, many of whom also continue to lack paid leave or reliable child care.
Additionally, in a pandemic that’s sent billionaire and CEO wealth soaring, many workers are asking if their labor is worth the risk if their bosses are the ones reaping the benefits.
For instance, Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta rigged the company’s pay rules to inflate his 2020 compensation to $56 million — 1,953 times more than the company’s median employee. Frontline Hilton workers, meanwhile, face a 39 percent reduction in staffing as the company moves to cut costs.
How could we expect an abrupt and mass return to work under these conditions?
Republicans thought they could force it by simply cutting the added $300 a week in federal unemployment insurance. It didn’t work.
Over the summer, governors in 25 states prematurely ended the enhanced unemployment benefits to pressure people back to work. The results? Unimpressive. Payrolls grew by a meager 1.33 percent in the states that chose to end the benefits — compared to 1.37 percent in states that maintained them.
Unemployment insurance wasn’t keeping people out of work, it turns out. It was keeping them out of poverty.
After Congress expanded government assistance programs in spring 2020, including unemployment insurance, the number of people in poverty actually fell. All told, pandemic government aid programs kept 53 million people above the poverty line in 2020.
Had enhanced programs not been in place, the number of people in poverty would have increased by 2.5 percent, new data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities suggests.
The pandemic unemployment benefits also, for the first time, reached workers previously left out of our already-faltering unemployment system — including part-time workers, gig workers, and the self-employed.
Ending enhanced federal unemployment benefits during a global pandemic isn’t just cruel — it’s ineffective. Taking away $300 a week — equivalent to $15,200 a year — from a single parent won’t make that parent return to work during a global pandemic. It will force them deeper into poverty.
Fortunately, Congress has an opportunity to build a just economy that advances equity in the pandemic recovery and beyond.
The $3.5 trillion reconciliation package Congress is debating would provide paid leave, universal pre-K, affordable childcare, an expanded Child Tax Credit, and better health care programs. These badly needed investments would provide families and individuals with the social safety net needed to recover from the pandemic before the next crisis hits.
If policy makers want to get people back to work, they need to make our economy work for people.
With a key panel of the World Trade Organization set to convene this week to discuss a potential patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines, rich nations are under growing pressure to stop obstructing the proposal as the coronavirus continues to ravage poor countries that have been denied access to the lifesaving inoculation.
Nearly a year has passed since South Africa and India first introduced the temporary patent waiver, which now has the support ofmore than 100WTO member nations — including powerful countries such as theUnited Statesand France. But Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, andother rich nationshave thus far refused to support the waiver, leaving powerful pharmaceutical companies with a stranglehold over the production of coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics.
The WTO’s TRIPS Council — a body that oversees the implementation of intellectual property rules — is scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss the proposed waiver, which aims to lift legal barriers stoppingmanufacturers around the worldfrom producing generic coronavirus vaccines for low-income nations.
“Despite the groundbreaking medical innovations delivered in the past year, and tall commitments by some powerful nations promising global solidarity and equity, access to these innovative Covid-19 medical tools remains scant in too many low- and middle-income countries,” Candice Sehoma, South Africa advocacy officer with Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF) Access Campaign, said in astatementMonday.
“People in these countries, facing life or death in this pandemic, can no longer rely merely on charitable or voluntary measures dictated by only a small number of high-income countries and the pharmaceutical industry they host,” Sehoma added. “We demand the countries opposing the TRIPS Waiver to stop blocking the will of the majority of the world to obtain this additional legal tool in the pandemic to achieve self-reliance in producing Covid-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests.”
Yuanqiong Hu, senior legal and policy adviser to MSF’s Access Campaign, said that adoption of the patent waiver would represent a “critical and historical step to remove monopoly barriers hindering increased global production and diversity of supplies — and all people’s access to desperately needed Covid-19 medical tools.”
As countries meet tomorrow to discuss the #TRIPSwaiver at the @wto, MSF calls on EU member states including Ireland, as well as the UK, Norway & Switzerland, to stop blocking this initiative on lifting the monopolies on lifesaving #COVID19 medical tools.https://t.co/o5pRjKLj6spic.twitter.com/IwWfU2bTKf
The latest informal TRIPS Council meeting will come as the U.S. and other rich countries are preparing to make third doses of the coronavirus vaccine available to their populations — even as billions of people around the world have yet to receive a single dose.
During apress conferencelast week, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus estimated that 80% of the 5.5 billion vaccine doses administered globally thus far have gone to people in upper-income countries. Tedros isdemandinga moratorium on booster shots until at least the end of the year in order to free up vaccine supply for poor nations.
“Almost every low-income country is already rolling out the vaccines they have, and they have extensive experience in large-scale vaccination campaigns for polio, measles, meningitis, yellow fever, and more,” Tedros said. “But because manufacturers have prioritized or been legally obliged to fulfill bilateral deals with rich countries willing to pay top dollar, low-income countries have been deprived of the tools to protect their people.”
“There has been a lot of talk about vaccine equity,” Tedros added, “but too little action.”
Last Thursday, the WHO Africa director Matshidiso Moetiwarnedthat the continent is now on track to “get 25% less doses than we were anticipating by the end of the year” as rich nationshoardmuch of the existing supply.
Echoing Tedros, Moeti blamed the worsening vaccine delivery forecast on “prioritization of bilateral deals over international solidarity.”
“Every dose is precious,” Moeti said. “If companies and countries prioritize vaccine equity, this pandemic would be over quickly.”
Millions of people havedied of Covid-19since South Africa and India first introduced the patent waiver at the WTO last October, and more than8,800 peopleacross the globe are still dying each day as the Delta variant and other dangerousmutationscontinue to spread.
In the face of such grim figures, Australia last week became the latest country toendorse the patent waiver, a decision that public health campaigners hoped would build momentum for the proposal heading into the fresh round of negotiations.
“The tide is turning in the battle against global vaccine inequality,” Nick Dearden, director of the U.K.-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “Australia’s support for a waiver puts the WTO in a strong position to make progress.”
“The British and German governments have no allies or excuses left,” Dearden added. “They must stop obstructing efforts to waive patents so that we can finally vaccinate the world.”
Tunis, Tunisia — Thus far, the Global North collectively has fully vaccinated more than half its population against COVID-19, with 57.7 percent for the EU and 52.9 percent for the U.S. In Africa, only 2.7 percent of the population received two doses of vaccine, while the rate in Asia is 29 percent. The pandemic has laid bare disparities between the Global South and Global North — and with the advent of vaccination, it has also accentuated them, as rich countries bought more doses than they needed and poor countries struggled (and continue to struggle) to get access to vaccines.
Although the huge gaps between the Global North and South are eminently clear, there are also imbalances within the Global South itself. In the Middle East, the wealthier Arab Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar have more than 75 percent of their population fully vaccinated, followed by Bahrein with 66.4 percent. However, other countries like Jordan (29.04 percent), Lebanon (16.32 percent) and Palestine (8.85 percent), have much lower vaccination rates. In North Africa, there are also major disparities when it comes to vaccination rates between the countries. While Morocco vaccinated 41.37 percent of its population, followed by Tunisia with 19.56 percent (since August 30), neighbors Libya (16.42 percent) and Algeria (9.93 percent since August 26) were much slower in the vaccination process.
To understand the reasons behind the huge gaps in vaccination rates in the Global South, we can look to Tunisia — which currently has the highest COVID mortality rate per capita in Africa — as an example.
Tunisia’s first pandemic wave from March 2, 2020 to July 24, 2020, which ended with 50 deaths, was successfully contained with a strict lockdown of two months. Zakaria Bouguira, an anesthesiologist in Tunisia, has been advocating for more than a year for a “0 COVID” strategy based on three pillars: a lockdown with a minimum of two months, mandatory quarantine for people coming from outside the country and a 95 percent vaccination rate of the population. Now in its fifth and deadliest wave, peaking in July 2021 at 300 COVID deaths per day, the country is now seeing more than 100 COVID deaths per day.
Moreover, Bouguira questioned the government’s official death toll, asserting that the real number is much higher. “As of August 2, the Tunisian government declared 20,000 deaths, which isn’t the real number,” Bouguira told Truthout. “According to a study conducted by the University of Washington, there are 60,000 deaths, which is a huge number for a country of 10 million inhabitants.”
According to Bouguira, the Tunisian government failed to act in time, with a lack of prompt international aid playing a role. “When governments started buying vaccines last November, ours waited for international aids (financial aid as well as medical equipment and personal protective equipment). Contrary to what some people believe, this failure isn’t due to a lack of financial resources, since Tunisia has received financial aid from international organizations like the World Health Organization, European countries (especially France and Germany), the U.S. and Arab countries since the beginning of the pandemic.”
Boutheina Louhichi, a generalist doctor working in educational institutions and activist with the Tunisian League of Human Rights (LTDH), hosted awareness campaigns and information sessions during COVID’s first wave in Tunisia. In recent months, she has criticized the slowness of the vaccination pace in the country. “It was so slow that it seemed illogical for me as a doctor,” Louhichi told Truthout. “The results of our failed vaccination strategy were clear; whereas the sanitary conditions improved in many countries, we were living the peak of our crisis.”
Not only did the Tunisian government receive the vaccine late, but its vaccination strategy also wasn’t efficient. Both doctors agree on the absurdity of having vaccination posts only in big cities, far away from a large part of the rural population. Louhichi, who participated in vaccination campaigns, said that 2,176 basic health care centers throughout rural territory would have been more appropriate for reaching these populations.
For Bouguira, this bad strategy also contributed to the virus’s spread. “The government opted for a strategy where the people come to get vaccinated, not the other way around. This mistake delayed vaccination [rates].”
Witnessing such chaos in the vaccination process, Tunisian civil society mobilized and demanded the government improve the logistical management system of the vaccination. “As activists in the LTDH, we complained to the government about the slow pace and the bad management of vaccination,” says Louhichi. “They told us that that’s how things are, and they can’t change anything about it.”
However, their activism seems to have had an effect: On August 8, Tunisia organized an open day for vaccination for people over the age of 40. Doctors (both active and retired), nurses and youth organizations volunteered, and the Health Ministry reported that 551,000 people received a vaccination that day.
Aside from the failing vaccination strategy, the Tunisian government’s plan to prevent the spread of the virus during the second wave leaves much to be desired.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many experts and civilians were against lockdown as a preventive measure; they feared economic recession and heavy costs for the government (aid funds to companies, financial support for underprivileged families and unemployed people). However, for Bouguira, those possibilities should be weighed against the loss of human life and the cost of widespread illness.
According to a study conducted by the International Monetary Fund last October, countries that chose lockdown had better economic results than those that opted for “herd immunity.” Among the measured economic outcomes that were measured in this study, are retail sales, gross domestic product, consumption and unemployment rate.
“What costs more: a person in an emergency room who costs 1,000 dinars ($360) per day, or buy one shot of vaccine for 30 dinars ($11)?” says Bouguira.
A Februarystudy conducted by Honoris United Universities et Eshmoun Clinical Research showed that only 41 percent of Tunisians were willing to get vaccinated. Bouguira says this low rate can be explained by the lack of trust between the citizens and their government.
“After successfully containing the virus, the government opened the borders for tourists who brought the virus along with money,” says Bouguira. “So there wasn’t any trust between the government and the citizens who felt betrayed by these risky decisions. As a psychological defense mechanism, the citizens denied even the existence of the virus, believed conspiracy theories and didn’t want to get vaccinated.”
Honesty and consistency in government messaging are also important, says Louhichi.
“The government’s communication strategy should reassure people and not make them have second thoughts about getting vaccinated,” Louhichi says. “However, people are told that the vaccine is good, and another day they’re told, by representatives of the Ministry of Health that it’s dangerous.”
Louhichi adds that awareness campaigns should be more regular and officials shouldn’t take inadequate measures like changing the curfew hour every two weeks. According to her, it’s important to inform the public about the potential side effects of the vaccine, while insisting that it’s the only way to defeat the virus. “There’s no vaccine or drug without any side effects. Some complications are better than thousands of deaths,” she says.
Seeing the number of deaths, especially during the peak in July, Tunisians are now largely convinced more than ever of the urgency of getting vaccinated.
“After every family lost at least one of their members, people are scared and want to get vaccinated,” says Louhichi.
However, despite the logistical mistakes that contributed to delaying the beginning of the vaccination process, the inequality between the Global North and the Global South remains the major factor in having late access to vaccines, and insufficient quantities.
With children returning to school, the Tunisian government’s vaccination efforts should get even more serious. “The suspension of classes is an efficient preventive measure since although children are asymptomatic, they’re 10 to 100 times [more likely to get infected] than adults,” says Bouguira. If the school year resumes without vaccinating children, “we’ll have a disastrous sixth wave, with many infections and deaths among children.”
Bouguira said that during the fifth wave, he has witnessed 2-month-old babies with more than 70 percent of lung damage, and 4-day-old babies dead from COVID. “The vaccination would cushion the impact of the sixth wave,” he said.
Bouguira is still demanding the government pursue a strict “0 COVID” strategy.
“We can’t wait ‘til the sixth wave hits us, because it’d be fatal; and we can’t count on international solidarity, since countries would be too busy dealing with their own situation,” he says.
A court case has forced the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to changes its rules. It surrounds the department issuing sanctions and taking money off people. But in reality – it was the DWP not following its own rules in the first place.
Hardship payments
The DWP offers hardship payments to some claimants. As the website Turn2Us noted:
Hardship payments are reduced-rate payments of jobseeker’s allowance (JSA), employment and support allowance (ESA) and universal credit (UC) that are made in limited circumstances, including if you have been sanctioned.
In short, hardship payments are what the DWP gives you if it sanctions but you’re too poor to live without money. For Universal Credit claimants, the DWP calculates a daily rate for hardship payments. In the case of sanctions, Turn2Us noted this as 60% of the sanction amount and that:
Important: Hardship payments… are recoverable so you must pay them back.
But now, a court case led to the DWP admitting this is not necessarily always the case.
The DWP: rogue sanctions
The Public Law Project (PLP) took on the case of a Universal Credit claimant who the DWP had sanctioned six times. As it noted, its client was:
a vulnerable care-leaver with physical and mental health problems and experience of domestic abuse.
The PLP said the DWP “unfairly sanctioned” her. It left her to live “on reduced benefits for over a year and a half”. Some of the DWP’s actions included sanctioning her for:
Not attending an appointment when she was at a funeral.
Missing appointments because she couldn’t afford the bus fare. This was due to Universal Credit’s built-in five week wait for a first payment.
So, the PLP supported the claimant with an appeal in 2020. She won this and the DWP had to pay her back the money. But then, there was another issue.
Waiving debt
During the time the DWP sanctioned her, the claimant applied for and received hardship payments. As the PLP said:
she was left in debt which included [hardship payments] that were taken on to cover her basic needs during the period of sanctioning.
So, the PLP started judicial review proceedings over this. At first, the DWP refused to waive its client’s debt. But after the PLP threatened to take the judicial review further, the DWP caved in. It wrote off the hardship payment debt.
Because of the case, the DWP changed its guidance. And this is the crucial part for countless claimants.
An important move for claimants
The DWP has admitted that its recovery of hardship payments due to sanctions was always discretionary. That is, claimants can ask it to waive the debt caused by them. This is even if a claimant has signed a declaration saying they will pay the DWP back the hardship payments. As the PLP noted:
This choice applies in all cases, including where the individual’s sanction has been subsequently overturned, for example following mandatory reconsideration or a tribunal appeal.
But the DWP’s own guidance did not previously say this. So, it was giving out the wrong information to both claimants and staff.
Thanks to both the PLP and the claimant in its case – everyone claiming Universal Credit should now be aware that the DWP’s recovery of hardship payments is discretionary. And if the DWP still refuses to waive them? Then the PLP said it may be able to help. You can email them via enquiries(at)publiclawproject.org.uk
The Biden administration recently announced a record permanent increase in the value of food stamps aid going to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients around the country. The average amount received each month by each of the 42 million Americans relying on SNAP, formerly titled the Food Stamp Program, to put food on the table was $121 before the pandemic hit. It will now increase by $36, or 27 percent, reflecting what the Agriculture Department believes to be a more realistic cost of healthy foods.
This boost is nothing to sneeze at – it constitutes the largest permanent boost in the history of the public benefits program. But to truly end hunger in the United States and address the ongoing economic crises faced by people across this country, it’s vital for the same sort of boost to happen across all U.S. anti-poverty programs, with funds extracted from corporate profits and the ultra rich.
Bernie Sanders, chair of the powerful Senate Budget Committee has proposed just this, putting forward one bill to restore the corporate tax rate to 35 percent, which is where it was until Republicans reduced it to 21 percent in 2017. He has also introduced a second bill to create a progressive estate tax that would kick in on estates valued at $3.5 million and above. Such reforms would generate large sums of money that could be used to expand health care access, to put in place more programs tailored to low-income children, to expand safety net programs to noncitizen immigrants, and so on. These reforms will, however, take time; in the meanwhile, increasing the value of SNAP benefits is a good way to get bang-for-the-buck in reducing hunger, one of the most destructive consequences of poverty.
As with so many of the new social programs and spending being pushed by the Biden administration, the impetus for the recent boost in SNAP benefits came with temporary fixes put in place during the first two waves of the pandemic. Then, with tens of millions of Americans suddenly out of work and unable to meet their basic needs, Congress temporarily increased the value of food stamps aid sent out to recipients by 15 percent. But that boost was initially slated to expire at the end of September.
The GOP critique of these benefits was disingenuous. For even though the original increases were only meant to be temporary, the reality is that the United States has long failed to allocate enough resources to properly provide for the nutritional needs of its poorest residents. The COVID crisis shone a spotlight on the hunger crisis that has long been brewing in the shadows, and the temporary increases in food stamps and unemployment benefits were effective at taking millions of families out of absolute poverty; they showed that targeted government interventions can be dramatically powerful tools to mitigating the worst impacts of economic inequality.
The Biden administration’s permanent increase in food stamps this month is an overdue acknowledgement of this reality. And it stands in stark contrast to the efforts by his predecessor to block emergency SNAP payments to the poorest of recipients at the height of the public health crisis.
In fact, from the earliest days of the Trump administration, SNAP came under sustained fire from a political leadership that saw recipients as spongers and loafers, and viewed cutting SNAP as a key part of its toolkit to further limit the welfare system and further undermine vital anti-poverty programs. In the very first months after Trump’s inauguration, administration officials proposed cutting the program by $191 billion over 10 years. Luckily, that didn’t fly. Then, in late 2019, members of the Trump administration unveiled rules tightening up work requirements for recipients without children — putting the food stamps of roughly 700,000 people at risk. They also sought to make states more rigorously police who could enroll in SNAP, and recalculate income of applicants in a way that made it easier to deny benefits. All told, the Urban Institute estimated that if these reforms were fully implemented, the number of recipients in several states would fall by at least 15 percent in 13 states. Then, during the pandemic, the Trump administration continued to wage war on SNAP, despite private food bank and food pantry networks being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of suddenly hungry people lining up on foot and in cars to access their food supplies.
Thankfully, Trump’s team never really managed to implement its draconian cuts to food stamps. There was no congressional consensus to accept these cuts, and no public support to impose hunger on millions of Americans already living on the margins. In fact, by the time the pandemic rolled around, the administration had been participating in a yearly stunt for three years already, regularly promising huge cuts to food stamps as a way to assuage its anti-government base, while knowing full well that of all the big pillars of the U.S. welfare system, food assistance is the one that has garnered more bipartisan support in Congress — and among the public — than virtually any other part of the social support web outside of social security and Medicare.
Biden came to power last January projecting ambitions to use government in the way Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson had done, as a counterbalance against economic policy that kept millions of Americans in dire poverty. He had, as a result, a dramatically different understanding of the social safety net from his predecessor, and a willingness to put his weight behind huge expansions in government programs ranging from the provision of health care to low-income people to child tax credit payments offered to parents by the federal government.
Biden has ambitions to use the power of government to massively reduce poverty in this country. In particular, he has focused on halving child poverty in the coming years, through direct monthly payments to families, and through a better use of existing programs such as SNAP.
But to truly change the landscape of poverty and inequality in this country, this turn toward state spending can’t just be framed in limited ways as a project to restore consumer spending. And the expansions to public benefits programs can’t adequately be paid for through tax revenues without a targeted effort to redistribute the gross profits that corporations have been hogging in increasing proportions each year.
The U.S. was at its most dynamic economically in the post-WWII decades, when income inequality was lower than at other moments in the country’s history, and when corporate tax rates were higher. Today, wealthy individuals and corporations pay less into the tax pot and, in consequence, public systems and benefits programs are chronically underfunded. The president has the public behind him on the changes needed to tackle poverty in the U.S. Now he needs to marshal his negotiating skills to get the fractious Democratic coalition in Congress to coalesce around this agenda.
Misogyny continued to run through society behind the ‘new Afghanistan’ facade
I am thinking about Farkhunda. You may have read about her six years ago and felt outrage at the Afghan men who killed her. All that represents Farkhunda now is a forlorn clenched fist emerging from a block of stone, silently aimed at the sky near the place where she was publicly tortured and murdered in 2015, a popular shrine in Kabul where pigeons circle and hawkers and beggars approach crowds of pilgrims. Her “sin” was burning pages of the Qur’an, a fake accusation aimed at her by the vendor of charms whom she had criticised.
Farkhunda’s fate should also tell us that brutal corporal punishment meted out by the mob on religious grounds, especially to a woman, is not just the domain of the Taliban. More disturbingly, it should also tell us that even in the “new Afghanistan” there remained a troubling undercurrent of misogyny in some quarters of society. On that day, Afghan security forces stood by and watched as people tried to rip the young woman apart. I suspect the frustration of decades of being told to grudgingly accept women’s rights in public was unleashed on one small crumpled body.
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that passed earlier this month fell short of many progressive aspirations, shrinking to fit Republican demands. However, if implemented wisely (in conjunction with the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill), it could still open the door to important new possibilities for U.S. governance, in which the feds, cities and states learn to better cooperate with each other to use their economic leverage to ramp up large-scale (and long-overdue) social investments.
After all, $1 trillion-plus is a lot of money. If and when the 2,700-page bill becomes law, vast sums will start flowing to build or upgrade bridges, roads and sewer systems — traditional brick-and-mortar infrastructure investments. Even a small state like Mississippi stands to gain upwards of $3 billion for its highways and hundreds of millions of additional dollars to repair bridges.
But it isn’t just about bricks and mortar. The bill will also expand broadband access, improve cybersecurity, set up huge networks of electric vehicle charging stations around the country and clean up polluted superfund sites. There are provisions for improving wildlife crossing points on roads, for creating better pedestrian and bicycle routes in cities and for tackling invasive species.
As is the way with big spending bills like this, much of the actual implementation will occur over the coming years at a city and state level. That’s critical to remember, because, for decades now, many localities have failed to invest adequately in infrastructure, preferring instead to cut taxes and to defer needed improvements. The result has been dilapidation, with the U.S. ranking 13th out of advanced economies in the quality of its infrastructure, according to a much-quoted study by the World Economic Forum. In 2019, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reported that state and local government infrastructure investments had declined from a high of 3 percent of the country’s GDP in the 1960s to less than 2 percent a half century later. Making matters worse, the CBPP researchers found, was that the federal government was also pulling back on such investments. The result has been akin to what, in earlier decades, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith derided as “public squalor, private affluence” — a society with a glut of wealthy people living in wealthy neighborhoods, surrounded by a crumbling public infrastructure that they have largely opted out of.
Now, finally, that trend may be in the process of being reversed.
Many older cities will use some of the dollars coming their way to update water systems that are reliant on lead pipes. In fact, fully $15 billion is specifically ear-marked for this, allowing Chicago — which had already started work on creating pilot programs, using its own funds, to remove lead pipes in some neighborhoods — and other cities a once-in-a-generation chance to remove these dangerous, antiquated pipes.
For western states, billions of dollars allocated for water infrastructure investments will allow them to increase their storage facilities, upgrade their dams and invest in state-of-the-art desalination projects. Given the dire drought situation in the West and Southwest, which recently triggered unprecedented restrictions on Colorado River water distribution, such investments are both long overdue and also increasingly vital for the western states’ booming populations. These projects won’t, of course, solve the water crisis by themselves, but they will at least allow states a fighting chance to invest more in long-term strategies to mitigate this growing calamity.
This something-for-everybody approach explains why the infrastructure bill enjoys such strong public support, and why, despite the GOP’s desire to hamstring the Biden administration at every turn, Mitch McConnell and many of his colleagues felt compelled to support its passage.
For decades, a disproportionate number of state and local governments, pandering to a conservative public sentiment, have bought into conservative strategist Grover Norquist’s infamous notion that the duty of public officials is to shrink government down to a size that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Now, in a pandemic era that has clearly demonstrated the importance of big-spending, rational, effective governance, the public’s thinking on this has shifted dramatically. Increasingly, so too has that of U.S. political leadership. Assuming the infrastructure bill does indeed soon pass into law, it could provide city, state and federal leaders a unique opportunity to show residents that, when the funds are made available, government can actually deliver projects and programs that improve people’s lives in tangible, easy-to-understand ways.
Congress just took a historic step forward for racial, economic and reproductive justice 45 years in the making. Every year since 1976, lawmakers have chosen to deny insurance coverage of abortion to people working to make ends meet by adding a policy known as the Hyde Amendment to federal spending bills. But now, for the first time since Hyde’s inception, the U.S House passed a budget without this harmful policy.
The House vote marks a bold rejection of decades of injustice against women, people of color and people living paycheck to paycheck, among others targeted by Hyde. Now, we turn our attention to the U.S. Senate.
The push to end Hyde is happening at a pivotal moment. As a country, we are finally beginning to critically reckon with policies that hurt people of color, whether they shape our chances of surviving a pandemic or an interaction with police. Bans on abortion coverage are driven by the same forces motivating state-sanctioned violence and even voting restrictions. Each aims to control the lives of Black, Brown and other people of color, especially folks struggling financially.
Abortion coverage is absolutely a matter of racial and economic justice. The ban targets people enrolled in Medicaid. In 2019, this meant denying abortion coverage for one in five women of reproductive age. Today, Hyde’s targets are disproportionately Black, Latina and Indigenous, because they confront the steepest barriers to health care and financial security. This ban also hurts others marginalized by our health care system, including young people, immigrants and LGBTQ people.
These are the same communities who continue to bear the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, deepening Hyde’s consequences. Many people with low incomes can’t afford a $400 emergency, which is less than the average cost of an abortion. Most would also need to find money to pay for child care, missed work, and possibly travel and housing.
Not only does Hyde target those working to make ends meet, but withholding coverage of abortion care can be what pushes someone deeper into poverty. Studies have shown that if a woman seeks abortion but is denied, she is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who can get an abortion. Other research has found that when policymakers severely restrict Medicaid coverage of abortion, it forces one in four women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
In the face of an unprecedented spike in state restrictions on abortion and the threat of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, that directly challenges reproductive rights, this House vote is a beachhead of expansion for abortion justice, racial equity and economic security.
New polling shows that a resounding majority of voters understand just how critical it is to keep working toward this better future. Nearly 7 in 10 voters in battleground congressional districts support Medicaid coverage of abortion care. This majority cuts across all ages and different racial and ethnic groups. It also cuts across the political spectrum.
Uprooting such an entrenched policy was only made possible by the dedication, grit and commitment of women leaders of color. Alongside allies, they have continued speaking up for abortion coverage in states and local communities, including Maine, Illinois and Texas. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) have advocated against Hyde since it was first authorized. With growing numbers of colleagues, she has championed the EACH Act, a bill to permanently reverse Hyde and similar bans on abortion. In the Senate, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) is leading this charge.
Like other relics of racism and economic inequality, it is time to leave the Hyde Amendment in the past where it belongs. Decisive support of abortion justice by voters nationwide proves that we are ready to do so. House lawmakers’ historic vote was a crucial step in the right direction. Senators must follow their lead. By finally rejecting Hyde, we can build a future where each of us can make our decisions with dignity and economic security.
Sex worker activists are among the most at risk defenders of human rights in the world, facing multiple threats and violent attacks, an extensive investigation has found.
The research, published today by human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, found that their visibility as sex workers who are advocates for their communities’ rights makes them more vulnerable to the violations routinely suffered by sex workers. In addition, they face unique, targeted abuse for their human rights work.
A new analysis released Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in the United States rose by a staggering 1,322% between 1978 and 2020 — a sharp contrast to the pay increase of the typical worker, which was just 18% during that same period.
In 2020, a year of pandemic and widespread economic dislocation, the top executives at the largest public firms in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as the typical worker, with CEO pay measured by salary, bonuses, long-term incentive payouts, and exercised stock options.According toBloomberg, Tesla’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk was the highest-paid corporate executive in the U.S. in 2020.
Highlighting the extent to which inequality has soared in recent decades, EPI observes in itsreportthat the CEO-to-worker-pay ratio was 61-to-1 in 1989.
CEOs saw their compensation increase by 18.9% between 2019 and 2020 while the pay of typical workers — those who were able to hold on to their jobs amid mass layoffs stemming from the pandemic — rose just 3.9% over that time, EPI shows.
“Even that wage growth is overstated,” notes EPI, which has been tracking and documenting executive pay trends for years. “Perversely, high job loss among low-wage workers skewed the average wage higher.”
Authored by EPI distinguished fellow Lawrence Mishel and research assistant Jori Kandra, the new report argues that “exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with.” In 2020, EPI finds, a CEO at one of the top 350 public companies in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average.
“CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80%) is stock-related, not because they are increasing their productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills,” Mishel and Kandra write. “This escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or were taxed more).”
Other recent research has similarly called attention to the growing disconnect between CEO compensation and measures such as company performance, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, the Institute for Policy Studiesfoundthat 51 of the nation’s 100 biggest low-wage employers — including Coca-Cola, Chipotle, Tyson Foods, and YUM Brands — altered their own compensation rules to grant top executives massive pay packages as their workers struggled to get by on paltry wages.
“Common manipulations included lowering performance bars to help executives meet bonus targets, awarding special ‘retention’ bonuses, excluding poor second-quarter results from evaluations, and replacing performance-based pay with time-based awards,” the report showed. “Companies enlisted an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants in an effort to give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.”
In its new analysis, EPI points out that the 1,322% CEO pay jump between 1978 and 2020 far outstripped the 817% growth in the S&P stock market during that same period. The dramatic increase in executive pay has also significantly outpaced the 341% earnings growth of the top 0.1% overall since 1978.
Refuting the notion that skyrocketing executive pay is merely a reflection of “the market for skills” or “talent,” Mishel and Kandra write that “CEO compensation grew far faster than compensation of very highly paid workers over the last few decades, which suggests that the market for skills was not responsible for the rapid growth of CEO compensation.”
To reverse the decades-long trend of soaring CEO pay — which EPI argues is damaging to workers and the broader economy — the report suggests several potential policy solutions, including imposing higher marginal income tax rates on top earners and setting higher corporate tax rates for companies with high ratios of executive-to-worker compensation.
In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)introduced legislationthat would raise the corporate tax rate by 0.5% for companies that report a CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio of 50-to-1. The tax increase would grow to 5% for companies reporting a ratio of 500-to-1 or higher.
“At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are demanding that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes and treat their employees with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Sanders said upon introducing his bill, which hasgone nowherein the Senate.
Amber Moreland wasn’t supposed to be getting evicted from her Akron, Ohio, home.
For one thing, the federal government issued a pair of moratoriums on evictions during the pandemic. For another, the Akron Municipal Court adopted a rule early last year saying it would no longer allow landlords whose properties weren’t registered with the city and the county to give renters the boot.
But there was Moreland one morning this spring, her face pressed close to her phone, logging onto a Zoom hearing in which the judge, Magistrate Kani Hightower, would decide whether she would stay or go. The property manager, Gary Thomas, who was also the landlord’s father, was in the Zoom hearing, too, along with the Thomases’ attorney.
Last year, Moreland, a nursing assistant juggling part-time jobs at various care facilities in the area, had been forced to make a difficult choice that threatened her family’s fragile stability just as the pandemic hit. To prevent the spread of COVID-19 between nursing homes, her employers said she could work at only one location, effectively slashing her hours. She chose the one where her mother was in hospice care, dying from a heart condition.
By August 2020, Moreland stopped paying her full rent of $800 a month. An eviction summons followed in February.
Moreland was exactly the kind of person whom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was trying to help when it ordered a stop to evictions last fall, a policy the Biden administration has extended until October in much of the country. She was an essential worker reeling from the economic and emotional traumas of the pandemic. Akron exemplified the kind of community that needed the moratoriums most; even before COVID-19 arrived, it had the worst eviction rate among Ohio’s large cities and one of the highest rates among big cities in the U.S., according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.
But for Moreland and hundreds of other Akron-area tenants during the pandemic, the federal moratoriums provided little protection.
Unlike the landlord, Moreland didn’t have a lawyer to defend her rights. In her Zoom hearing, her phone screen and audio weren’t working, which made it hard to explain her situation and understand what others were saying.
Hightower, the magistrate, didn’t ask how the pandemic had affected Moreland’s earnings, a key question that would have shown she was eligible for the CDC reprieve. Hightower also didn’t ask any questions about the elder Thomas, whose frequent battles with tenants and housing authorities the Akron Beacon Journal has extensively chronicled.
There’s another reason Moreland should have been protected: The house she was renting wasn’t properly registered with the city and county. But the Akron court wasn’t enforcing the rule against landlords the way it had said it would.
Still, Moreland stayed calm, believing the CDC moratorium would protect her. Then the magistrate issued her ruling: The Thomases had prevailed. In a few days, an eviction notice would be posted on Moreland’s front door. If she didn’t vacate the property on her own, Hightower said, her belongings could end up “on the curb.”
The hearing lasted 9 minutes, 53 seconds.
Throughout the pandemic, some variation of this story played out every week in the Akron Municipal Court and around the state. As COVID-19 swept through Ohio, sickening more than 1.1 million people, shuttering businesses and schools, and decimating livelihoods, the federal moratoriums and local rules designed to hold Akron-area landlords accountable failed to protect tenants from eviction and its life-altering consequences.
The Devil Strip and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting spent six months attending public eviction hearings at the Akron Municipal Court – which serves the cities of Akron and Fairlawn and several other towns in Summit County – to understand how landlords and the courts treated tenants during the pandemic. We observed a dizzyingly complex and opaque system that often led to a confounding result: Magistrate judges granted landlords the right to evict tenants, even when landlords didn’t follow the publicly stated rules and even when renters like Moreland were the exact people the federal government was trying to prevent from being kicked onto the streets. In the Akron court, judges granted at least 665 evictions from April 2020 through this past March, not including cases filed before the pandemic, according to municipal court data. That’s an average of almost two tenants and families evicted a day in the midst of the biggest public health emergency in a century. In all, judges granted at least 42% of the nearly 1,600 evictions that landlords filed over that 12-month period.
The first moratorium, passed by Congress in March 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, applied to tenants and landlords who received federal aid, such as government-subsidized rent or mortgages; it lasted about four months. The second one, ordered by the CDC in September out of fear that forcing large numbers of Americans from their homes would be catastrophic for public health, was much broader, though still not as sweeping as it seemed.
There’s no question the federal measures had a big impact in the Akron area: Eviction filings fell steeply from 2019, when 2,147 petitions were filed, according to the court. But the pandemic-era numbers still dismayed James Hardy, who until recently was Akron’s deputy mayor for integrated development. He criticized the court for not doing more to help vulnerable tenants stay in their homes while giving landlords the benefit of the doubt.
“The Akron Municipal Court doesn’t take the eviction problem seriously,” he said. “They’re more concerned about not making anyone angry than they are about really being partners on addressing this issue.”
Hardy said city officials had assumed the CDC moratorium in particular was “ironclad.” “With everything going on,” he admitted, “we dropped the ball.”
The Devil Strip and Reveal emailed detailed questions to the Akron Municipal Court and reached out numerous times to discuss our findings. The court’s spokesperson, Nicole Hagy, did not respond.
The court had adopted a regulation, known as Rule 29, just before the pandemic that should have helped tenants such as Moreland.
Under the rule, landlords seeking to evict a tenant in Akron are required to provide proof that the property is registered with both the city and Summit County; if the property is outside the city, it must be registered with the county. If a rental isn’t registered, landlords must submit proof they’re exempt. “Noncompliance … shall result in the dismissal of the complaint,” the rule states.
The rental registries are meant to help housing officials keep tabs on landlords. But landlords often failed to register with little or no consequence. The court’s new policy was announced in a press release March 9, 2020, a few days before COVID-19 sent the country into lockdown.
Then magistrates decided not to follow the rule once the pandemic hit. But The Devil Strip and Reveal could find no public statement announcing the change of plan.
Our analysis found that during the pandemic, magistrates granted evictions in at least 148 cases in which landlords did not submit the proper registration documentation, according to hearing records.
One of those cases was Moreland’s. During the hearing, the magistrate confirmed that the run-down home she was renting was on the city registry. The court’s paperwork also said the landlord was registered with the county. But according to the Summit County Fiscal Office, that wasn’t true.
Amber Moreland’s son helps move a mattress out of their Akron rental house. Credit: Noor Hindi for Reveal
Three Akron Municipal Court magistrates spoke last fall with The Devil Strip and Reveal in a joint interview and acknowledged that they hadn’t been following their own rule. Magistrate Angela Hardway said landlords had a hard time registering because government offices were closed, while city officials “were not prepared for how many people were going to suddenly start contacting them.”
Instead, magistrates said, they were using the rental registries as part of the “weight of evidence” to determine a case’s outcome. “There’s a lot of weighing of credibility,” said Magistrate Thomas Bown, “you know, who’s telling the truth and who do you not believe.” Failure to register is often a red flag pointing to other problems with a landlord, magistrates said.
Hardway also drew a distinction between the court’s rules and statutory law. For example, she said, the law clearly says tenants can’t be evicted if they haven’t received proper notice of the eviction. By contrast, Rule 29 isn’t the same type of legal mandate, she said. “There’s a requirement for them to be registered. There’s nothing in the law that says, because they’re not registered, we have to dismiss their case.”
Tens of thousands of renters elsewhere in Ohio have also faced the threat of eviction during the pandemic, with more than 68,000 filings in 2020.
That’s down 36% from 2019, according to data from the Ohio Supreme Court. However, it’s unclear how many have actually been evicted, as neither the court nor the Eviction Lab track that data.
Housing advocates say the state’s historically landlord-friendly laws have always tipped the scales in favor of landlords.
In Ohio, for example, property owners are required to give only three days’ notice to evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent, whereas in neighboring Indiana and Pennsylvania, the minimum notice is 10 days. Some states mandate as much as 30 days.
There was also resistance among Ohio lawmakers, businesses and some courts against strengthening protections for renters affected by COVID-19 or clarifying the inevitable conflicts between the CDC order and state law. Ohio was among just seven states that didn’t pass some version of its own moratorium, according to a recent study. And real estate groups in the state aggressively fought the CDC edict, arguing that the public health agency had overstepped its authority. A Cleveland federal judge ruled in their favor in March, further undermining the moratorium’s impact.
A woman holds up a poster at a rally for housing reform in Columbus, Ohio, in June. Credit: Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Credit: Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Just getting reliable court data about the number of evictions in Ohio’s major metro areas is difficult to nearly impossible, our investigation found – hampered by inconsistencies in record keeping and official resistance to public scrutiny.
The upshot, said Emily Benfer, a housing law expert and visiting professor of law and public health at Wake Forest University: Ohio “has made it very easy for tenants to be evicted throughout the pandemic and before the pandemic.”
Akron-area residents feel the housing instability acutely. In community dialogues sponsored by a local media collaborative in 2019 and 2021, residents said safe, affordable housing is essential to improving quality of life – but there was a growing perception that Akron was moving in the wrong direction. They told reporters of tension among homeowners, renters and unseen landlords and a belief that too many landlords didn’t care about building a stable community.
So the collaborative – comprising the Akron Beacon Journal and The Devil Strip newspapers, WKSU public radio, News Channel 5, the Kent State University Collaborative News Lab, Reveal and the Your Voice Ohio statewide media partnership – is working with residents and advocacy groups to explore what’s wrong and what can be done.
As part of that effort,The Devil Strip and Reveal attended more than 130 online eviction hearings during the pandemic. We discovered that Akron tenants like Moreland didn’t just slip through the cracks in eviction court. They encountered a system that was fundamentally unequal.
Most landlords in the hearings had lawyers, but Ohio – along with almost every other state – doesn’t give tenants the right to counsel paid for by taxpayers. In the proceedings we observed, fewer than 5% of tenants had an attorney.
Tenants also suffered from a lack of access to technology. Unstable Wi-Fi connections sometimes pushed renters out of their own hearings. In one proceeding last fall, a tenant got through most of his testimony, but when the time came for follow-up questions, his Zoom crashed and he couldn’t figure out how to log on again. In her virtual courtroom, Magistrate Jennifer Towell tried to keep the proceedings moving, attempting to ask the man if he’d paid his rent until she realized she’d “lost him.” Seconds later, she asked her bailiff whether the tenant had called back into the courtroom before stating, “I do think I have enough testimony.” Then she granted the eviction.
That rushed pace was not an exception. By their own estimate, Akron magistrates heard as many as 15 to 20 cases per two-hour session, allotting an average of six to eight minutes per case. “It’s not so much a court as it is like a massive cattle call,” said Graham Bowman, an attorney at the Ohio Poverty Law Center, which advocates for low-income residents at the state and federal level.
And like Moreland, many of those sent to eviction court were Black women. It’s a phenomenon researchers have noted around the country.
“Evictions are to Black women what mass incarceration is to Black men,” said Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson, a social epidemiologist at The Ohio State University who is studying the health effects of evictions on families. “Black men are locked up, Black women are locked out of their housing.”
In their joint interview, magistrates acknowledged the difficulties many tenants faced during the pandemic and pointed to steps they took to make the process less daunting – for example, having a bailiff on hand to act as tech support during hearings and allowing people, under special circumstances, to either call in for their hearing or come to the courthouse to use a court-supplied laptop. The online hearings actually made it easier for tenants to show up and defend their interests, Hardway said.
Andrew Neuhauser, a managing attorney at Community Legal Aid who handles cases throughout the region, said the Akron court showed flexibility toward renters in ways that some other local jurisdictions didn’t. “The judges and magistrates have been very willing to give tenants an opportunity to access rental assistance funds and to stay in their house using the CDC moratorium,” he said. “There are other jurisdictions nearby – it could just be on the other side of the street for some people – where they don’t have those same protections and the judges and magistrates are less willing to work with them.”
But the municipal court also sometimes changed plans without informing the public – and not just about Rule 29.
In November, for example, a COVID-19 exposure in the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center prompted the municipal court to declare via press release that all eviction hearings would be postponed until after Jan. 1, 2021. The new rule would have halted dozens of scheduled hearings.
But a few days after the announcement, the court quietly resumed virtual eviction hearings, without issuing a new press release or other public notice. Magistrates allowed cases to proceed, but only if both the tenant and the landlord appeared – again, without explaining the revised temporary policy. As a result, some tenants who showed up to their hearings were inadvertently punished, while renters who stayed away got a reprieve.
Akron magistrates did not respond to follow-up questions about why evictions resumed but the public wasn’t informed.
Amber Moreland has been to eviction court at least four times in recent years. A native of Canton now in her late 30s, she’s endured many other struggles as well, including bouts of homelessness and battles to regain custody of her kids. But she never gave up. “At times, it felt like I did, because (I was running) into a brick wall,” she said. “Sometimes, it felt like it (wasn’t) moving. But I was really moving that wall the whole time.”
Moreland thought she’d finally cleared the wall in the winter of 2019. Her nursing assistant jobs provided her with steady income. The custody fights had quieted down. The three-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood not far from Akron’s downtown was another fresh start. She fell in love with the big backyard, imagining family barbecues and long summer nights around the firepit. As she surveyed the expanse of grass from her porch, the “clear, open view” gave her hope.
But it didn’t take long for Moreland to realize that her new home was not the haven she’d been longing for. There was the broken screen door that wouldn’t open, the sunk-in bathroom floor, the tub that wouldn’t drain. Worst of all were the leaks that forced her to set up buckets around her bedroom.
“If it rained, it rained inside my room,” Moreland recalled a few days after her March eviction hearing. “Not even drips. It was, like, literally water coming in my room.” Other parts of the house weren’t much better. “The bathroom walls would sweat, like they were crying.”
According to court documents, the property owner was Lee Thomas. But the person who took Moreland’s rent and responded to her requests for help was Lee’s father and property manager, Gary. Over the years, the elder Thomas has had many run-ins with local housing agencies over the poor condition of his rental properties, and he listed nearly $800,000 in unpaid property taxes when he filed multiple bankruptcy cases in 2018. Housing code enforcers and county tax collectors have filed numerous actions against him and his properties, and he was the target of Ohio’s first-ever joint effort by a county auditor, land bank and prosecutor to collect a public debt.
Almost all of Thomas’ tenants in Akron were low-income, the Beacon Journal reported, and they often complained about the conditions in which they were forced to live. Moreland said she contacted Gary Thomas about the leaks numerous times, but after waiting in vain, she called city officials. After that, Moreland said, Thomas patched the roof, though she still had a hole in her bedroom ceiling from the water damage.
By February 2020, Moreland began running up against the brick wall again. First, her mother’s deteriorating health pushed her into a long-term care facility; Moreland’s father was ailing as well. Then the coronavirus arrived, upending Moreland’s job along with so much of her life. The financial and emotional stresses of caring for her parents, her kids and her patients – COVID-19 was spreading through the nursing home where she worked – often felt overwhelming.
As money became tighter and tighter, the choices grew harder and harder: Pay her rent, fall behind on gas and electricity and risk losing her kids again, or keep the lights on and make partial payments to Thomas whenever she could.
“As much as I could, I made sure if I got any piece of change, I gave it to Mr. Gary,” she said. “I’m going to feed my kids, I’m going to make sure lights, gas and electric is on in here before I give you something. But Mr. Gary didn’t see it like that. It was more or less like, ‘Well, you paid gas and electric and bought food. You couldn’t give me rent?’ ‘No, because I don’t have any rent to give you. If I’m telling you the only thing I got is $300 to give you, take the $300. At least I’m giving you something and not nothing.’ ”
The Devil Strip and Reveal contacted Gary Thomas three times by phone. He declined to be interviewed, saying he’d had enough trouble with the city. “I think I’ll pass,” he said when pressed for comment.
After six months of not paying her full rent, Moreland received the notice she’d been dreading: Her landlord had filed a court petition to have her removed from the house.
When the CDC halted evictions last year, the federal government didn’t issue a lot of guidelines about how the moratorium should be enforced; many of the details were left to states to work out.
“Local courts and even different judges within those courts were coming to wildly different conclusions about what things mean,” said Bowman of the Ohio Poverty Law Center.
The Akron court required tenants who hoped to benefit from the moratorium to do one of two things before their hearing: Either sign a declaration stating that they’d lost income because of the pandemic or apply for rental assistance under the CARES Act. But tenants who didn’t have lawyers or computers frequently didn’t know the rules or understand which approach might be best for someone in their circumstances.
In Moreland’s case, a signed declaration could have been enough to stop the eviction. But she didn’t submit one to the court. Instead, she focused on trying to get CARES Act money. And that’s when she encountered an especially frustrating Catch-22.
The problem was that in order to benefit from CARES Act assistance for tenants, properties had to be listed as a rental unit on the county rental registry. Because Moreland’s house wasn’t registered with Summit County, she wasn’t eligible.
Still, through it all, Moreland said she kept being reassured that she couldn’t be evicted.
When she called a lawyer for advice, he told her not to worry, she said: Not only was she clearly covered by the CDC moratorium, but because the property wasn’t properly registered, she was also protected under the court’s Rule 29. When she called 211, a hotline that provides information and referrals for things like rental assistance, the reasoning was similar, she said: They couldn’t find the property’s rental registration and thus couldn’t help her, but because she couldn’t be evicted, there was no reason to panic.
Moreland panicked anyway, calling a homeless shelter to try to line up a place to stay in case everyone was wrong. When she showed up to her hearing, she was without an attorney, CARES Act rental assistance or a signed declaration.
It turned out Moreland’s instinct to prepare for the worst had been correct. Yet even the social services providers and advocates who were helping her navigate the system couldn’t believe it.
She called back one of those providers, and the woman who answered the phone was astonished. She went to get her supervisors.
“I heard the supervisor, like – ‘Amber, you mean to tell me right now, you just got out of court and they told you that you were evicted?’ ”
Moreland responded, “Yes.”
They were both stunned.
Since Moreland’s hearing in late March, Akron eviction proceedings have continued over Zoom, with at least 100 additional tenants and families ordered from their homes. As the end of the CDC moratorium loomed in July, housing advocates were expecting the numbers to soar. Their fears eased somewhat after the Biden administration reinstated the ban in parts of the U.S. experiencing “substantial or high levels of community transmission of COVID-19,” but the details of the new policy are fuzzy and legal challenges are expected. As of this writing, Summit County is experiencing substantial community transmission, according to the CDC, but it’s still unclear how the new order will be implemented.
UU.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., stands outside the U.S. Capitol on July 31 to call on President Joe Biden and Congress to renew the expiring CDC eviction moratorium. Biden ordered a two-month extension on Aug. 3. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images
Meanwhile, the Akron City Council has passed two bills that could give renters facing eviction a reprieve. The first prohibits housing discrimination based on a tenant’s source of income. The other, known as “pay to stay,” will require landlords to accept any back rent they’re owed if the tenant provides the money before the eviction is finalized with the court.
The good news for Moreland is that she wasn’t completely unprepared – while trying to figure out how to stop her eviction, she had already done the legwork required to find a new place to live. And the new house is properly registered, so the landlord is eligible to receive rental assistance from the government, should Moreland ever again need to access those emergency funds. She and her family were ready to move on.
It was the evening before the deadline she’d been dreading, April 19. Between working, taking classes at Stark State College and caring for her kids, she’d struggled to find time to pack. A nationwide outage on the U-Haul website presented another unexpected crisis. But Moreland got through it.
“It’s just staying focused and taking everything one day at a time,” she said, watching her youngest son wrestle a mattress three times his size into a truck. “What happened yesterday happened yesterday. I don’t wake up the next morning with what happened yesterday. I just wake up, and today is Monday. We are going to keep Monday as Monday.”
Reveal fellow Grace Oldham and data reporter Mohamed Al Elew contributed to this story. It was edited by Nina Martin, Soo Oh and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
On one level, the data was entirely counterintuitive. After all, as the COVID crisis has raged the past 18 months, we have witnessed Great Depression-era level spikes in unemployment and unprecedented increases in housing and food insecurity. On the other hand, it oughtn’t to have been entirely surprising, because in 2020 and 2021, Congress, despite its general dysfunction, managed to pass into law several pandemic relief packages worth trillions of dollars — and much of that money ended up flowing, often at speed, to households around the country.
The lesson is clear: Ambitious, outside-the-box government programs and investments can be extraordinarily effective in helping vulnerable Americans escape poverty. The Urban Institute’s research concludes that absent these interventions, the poverty rate at the end of 2020 would have been above 20 percent of the population.
There’s a historical precedent for big-thinking and big-spending government programs successfully driving down the poverty rate: At the height of the “war on poverty,” in the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States also began posting huge drops in the number of residents living in poverty — though at a slower pace than occurred in 2020 and 2021.
From 1964 to 1973, from the year Lyndon Johnson began putting in place the building blocks of his anti-poverty programs to the year that Richard Nixon began shifting the emphasis away from these programs and toward more punitive social policies such as the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs,” poverty in the U.S. declined by 42 percent.
Of course, some of this data should be taken with a grain of salt: For decades, experts have critiqued the government’s definition of poverty, and the threshold that it uses to determine whether individuals and families are income-insecure as failing to fully measure economic hardship. Most poverty measures used by the federal government don’t, for example, fully take into account the high cost of housing in states such as California or New York; nor do they fully recognize that things such as affordable broadband access are now necessities of life rather than luxuries. Certainly, during the Trump era, falling official rates of poverty masked deepening fissures of inequality and deepening financial straits faced by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
When the government invests in anti-poverty programs, across-the-board measures of poverty show that these programs can work to improve the financial condition of millions of Americans. Yet, despite that, too often those programs fail to sustain popular support over the long-term.
In fact, historically, across-the-board anti-poverty programs have only ever attracted lukewarm political support from U.S. leaders. Poverty embarrasses those in power. They don’t like to talk about it or admit its durability. In the 1960s, the sociologist Michael Harrington wrote of a poverty that was rendered invisible by the broader affluence that hemmed it in. As a society, we have, over the decades, been remarkably willing to sweep our poverty crisis under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Harrington’s book, The Other America, helped trigger a political and cultural awakening around poverty. It helped open eyes and create the conditions in which it was possible to put in place interventions such as Medicare and Medicaid, an expansion of food stamps, free and reduced school meals, increased job training and housing programs in poor neighborhoods, and so on. But, over time, the public’s appetite for these programs — and the costs of maintaining them — waned, and poverty rates began creeping up again.
Today, in 2021, the country has a huge opportunity. Out of the pandemic, remarkably creative economic and political thinking has emerged about how to reduce poverty. Federally, one-year child tax credits are now in place that will massively reduce child poverty this year. At a state level, states like California are implementing universal pre-K education. Ideas around creating guaranteed income programs are no longer dismissed as being utopian or un-implementable. A dramatic expansion of unemployment benefits was shown not only to be possible, but to be remarkably effective at keeping unemployed people afloat economically.
Yet all of these changes are as fragile as were so many of the programs of LBJ’s war on poverty. Already, Republican states have dismantled their expanded unemployment benefits. Already, Congress and President Biden have allowed the federal eviction moratorium to sunset — despite millions still struggling to pay their rent. Already, there is a political battle underway about whether or not to continue the child tax credits beyond this current year.
Take these tools away, and poverty could all too easily boomerang back up to pre-pandemic levels within months. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions — and an entirely avoidable one at that.
Yet those numbers, horrific as they are, do not tell the full story of the devastation caused by this summer’s record-breaking temperatures caused by a climate catastrophe that, until recently, even the most pessimistic climatologists thought was still two or three decades out. Indeed, the mortality data show that recent deaths were not simply a result of just one extreme “heat event.” There have already been a series of “heat domes” — a phenomenon in which extreme heat generated by warm ocean air is trapped under a high-pressure cap — parked over the western part of the continent this summer, with more on the way.
Awful as the recent numbers coming out of the western U.S. are, those preliminary numbers do not tell the full story of excess mortality — a story that takes time to fully investigate. Moreover, they do not tell the more intimate story of who is getting sick and dying, and of the disparate impact — too often ignored in the broader political conversation — of these increasingly devastating environmental cataclysms on poorer communities of color.
“When it comes to heat waves and the violence they produce, we have this will not to know that makes it very difficult to act,” explains Eric Klinenberg, a New York University professor of sociology and author of the 2002 book Heat Wave, about a lethal weather event in Chicago in the summer of 1995 that resulted in hundreds of isolated, mainly elderly residents dying. “There’s something existentially challenging about absorbing the reality of climate change, what it means for how we live, how we settle, how we organize our lives. The health risks of heat are hard for people to understand — because they’re not like fires or hurricanes or earthquakes where everyone can recognize the threat. Heat doesn’t feel scary to most Americans, because we’re one of the most air-conditioned, artificially cooled nations on Earth — so it’s hard to generate political will to protect poor people in heat waves.”
In the coming years, Klinenberg fears, the U.S. is uniquely ill-positioned to deal with the consequences of an escalating global warming crisis. “We have a climate emergency, a racial justice emergency, an inequality emergency and a social infrastructure emergency,” he argues. “We have to deal with the fact that there is grotesque poverty in the United States, and that cities are heat ovens. That combination of poverty and urban heat leaves our vulnerability to climate events extreme. We still have a chance to avert the worst possibilities with climate change, but we still have centuries of warming baked in because of greenhouse gas emissions we’ve already put out into the atmosphere. So we have no choice but to adapt.”
A report has raised human rights concerns regarding decades of failed government privatisation in the UK. A campaign group said it identified potentially ‘serious human rights breaches’. And one of its authors, former UN investigator Philip Alston, is no stranger to criticising UK political agendas. Indeed, it was Alston who wrote a damning report on poverty in the country in 2018.
“Public Transport, Private Profit”
Alston is the former special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. His 2018 report was scathing in its criticism of the UK government. Now, he’s helped put together another damning assessment.
The new report is called Public Transport, Private Profit: The Human Cost of Privatizing Buses in the United Kingdom. It looks at the state of bus services across the UK since Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised them in 1985. Alston co-authored the report with Bassam Khawaja and Rebecca Riddell. They are co-directors of the Human Rights and Privatization Project at New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. They’ve pulled together facts and figures and collected testimony from passengers across the country.
Alston: a “master class in how not to run” a public service
Over the past 35 years, deregulation has provided a master class in how not to run an essential public service, leaving residents at the mercy of private actors who have total discretion over how to run a bus route, or whether to run one at all.
In case after case, service that was once dependable, convenient, and widely-used has been scaled back dramatically or made unaffordable.
The absence of a strong public bus system affects a great many people’s economic opportunities, but also their means to participate in their communities, travel to football matches or libraries, and visit family and friends.
These comments were just the tip of the iceberg. Because the report itself detailed how the UK’s bus network is failing the poorest people the most.
Spiralling financial chaos
There are overarching problems with the services. For example:
Average bus fares have risen by 403% since 1987. Yet the government has frozen fuel duty on cars for the past 11 years.
Prior to 2013, bus companies made an average profit of £297m a year. But they only reinvested between 0.2-1.5% of turnover into services.
As of 2019, the public was paying for 42% of funding for bus services in England, to the tune of £2bn a year.
Since 2009, local authorities have cut more than 3,000 bus routes in England which they were subsidising.
The end result of all this? A service that’s falling apart.
Unreliable
As the report summed up:
Deregulation has failed to provide a reliable bus service. Passengers said buses were frequently late, did not show up at all, or often broke down.
The report didn’t document the statistics for bus punctuality and reliability. But the latest government figures show:
“Frequent” bus services in England were on average 1.7 minutes late in 2018/19.
This lateness varied across local authorities. For example, in Gloucestershire it was 6.1 minutes. A lot of local authorities did not report their data.
Meanwhile, “non-frequent” bus services in England (outside London) were only on time 83.5% of the time in 2018/19.
Again, the local authority figures for this varied. For example, in Leicestershire only 63% of non-frequent services ran on time.
The report was clear on where the blame lies for this run-down industry.
Deregulation has made it impossible to run the type of integrated network of services that is taken for granted in many countries around the world. The government argued in 1984 that a free-market approach would outperform an integrated, regulated system, confidently predicting that “informal measures of co-operation between operators will develop to ensure that their services connect. But deregulation of bus transport has led to a deeply fragmented system that would shock those not accustomed to it: multiple private bus operators competing in the same areas and sometimes on the same routes, timetables that do not line up between operators or other modes of transportation, and multiple ticketing options that add needless complication to bus journeys.
So, what is the effect on passengers?
Passengers at the sharp end
The report found multiple failures in bus services for passengers. For example:
Between 1982 and 2016/2017, passenger journeys on local bus services dropped by 38% in England (outside London), 45% in Wales, and 43% in Scotland. Yet under the government-regulated Transport for London in the capital, they rose by 89%.
A 2012 study found that 19% of workers turned down a job offer because of “the quality of bus service”.
Almost 300,000 children cannot reach a secondary school within 30 minutes using public transport.
Less than 50% of rural households live within a “13-minute walk of an hourly bus service”.
By 2019, over 3 million people couldn’t “reach any food stores within 15 minutes by public transport”.
And bus privatisation has hit poor and disabled people the hardest.
Poor people
The report noted that around 40% of “low-income” people don’t have a car. Yet as it said:
those on lower incomes take the highest number of bus trips.
Such individuals can face severe barriers to public transport and are heavily impacted by rising costs and service cuts. They often have worse bus access, may not be able to afford it, work non-standard hours, and are more likely to rely on the bus as their only option. An inability to afford transportation can prevent people from accessing necessary services, limit access to work, reduce quality of life, increase health inequalities, and lead to social isolation.
Disabled people
For chronically ill and disabled people, the law says buses have to have at least one wheelchair space. But this doesn’t mean buses are fully accessible. A 2019 report found numerous barriers for chronically ill and disabled people in London. These included:
Ramps not working.
Bus drivers prioritising pushchairs over wheelchairs.
Some buses only having one wheelchair space.
Also, up until last year, the government had not made accessibility a legal requirement on rail replacement bus services. Figures showed that six out of 10 of the vehicles train operators used did not comply with accessibility requirements. Moreover, England’s disabled person’s free bus pass only permits off-peak travel. So if chronically ill and disabled people want to travel at busier times of the day, they have to pay. In 2019, only 60% of disabled people in England (excluding London) were happy with bus services.
2021 bus strategy for England doubles down on the role of private companies to deliver a public service, without addressing the reasons they have failed in the past or meaningfully expanding options for public ownership and control.
The proposed reforms do little more than tinker with the existing system. The strategy does not commit the government to legalizing new municipal bus companies or removing the severe barriers to achieving bus regulation that local authorities face. It does not address power imbalances between local transportation authorities and bus operators. And it does not impose an obligation on local authorities to provide a minimal service, leaving the core of the deregulated system fully in place.
The report also compared the aims of bus privatisation according to Thatcher’s government with what the UK government now says about it. This essentially shows the government admitting that privatisation has failed:
The UK government says…
The government disagreed with the report’s conclusions. As the Guardianreported, a spokesperson for the Department for Transport said the new bus strategy would “completely overhaul services”, and:
Services across England are patchy, and it’s frankly not good enough.
They added:
We will provide unprecedented funding, but we need councils to work closely with operators, and the government, to develop the services of the future.
But overall, it seems that little is going to change. This is despite the UN already expressing concerns over the UK’s public transport system. And as the report notes, it’s not just the detailed issues around bus services which are the problem here.
There is currently no right to a minimum level of public transportation set out in UK law or policy. And public transportation is not traditionally regarded as a right in and of itself. Yet it is abundantly clear that lack of transportation has severe impacts on people’s ability to live a decent and fulfilling life, including their access to work, education, healthcare, and food.
It also noted:
The privatization of public transportation raises significant human rights concerns. There is a strong case to be made that human rights law requires States to directly provide public services or ensure the provision of public services by a public body where the service is essential for realizing one’s rights—and that increased privatization of rights-related services undermines human rights.
There is only one conclusion to take from this report – the government must urgently amend bus legislation and provide proper support to councils to move towards public control and ownership. There are now just months left before England’s National Bus Strategy locks us into bus deregulation for another generation. Failure to act will leave the UK on the wrong side of history – and the government in serious breach of its human rights obligations.
The United Kingdom is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and can afford a world-class bus system if it chooses to prioritise and fund it. Instead, the government has outsourced responsibility for a vital public service, propping up an arrangement that prioritises private profits and denying the public a decent bus.
Given the UK government previously ignored UN reports into its human rights violations against chronically ill and disabled people, it will probably not heed this report’s findings. But Alston and the team’s report provides a valuable and much-needed insight into the state of bus provision in the UK. It’s one that campaign groups and trade unions can use to drive the narrative around our public transport system forward. And hopefully, the report will lead to change in the future.
The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, yet its poverty rates are higher and its safety nets are far weaker than those of other industrialized nations. It is also the only large rich country without universal health care. In fact, as Noam Chomsky argued in Truthout, the U.S. health system is an “international scandal.”
Why is the U.S. an outlier with regard to health care? What keeps the country from adopting a universal health care system, which most Americans have supported for many years now? And what exactly is Medicare for All? On the eve of scheduled marches and rallies in support of Medicare for All, led by various organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, Physicians for a National Health Program, the Democratic Socialists of America and concerned citizens throughout the country, the interview below with Peter S. Arno, a leading health expert, sheds light on some key questions about the state of health care in the United States.
Peter S. Arno is senior fellow and director of health policy research at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance. Among his many works is his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, Against the Odds: The Story of AIDS Drug Development, Politics & Profits.
C.J. Polychroniou: U.S. health care is widely regarded as an outlier, with higher costs and worse outcomes than other countries. Why are health care expenditures in the U.S. significantly higher than those of other industrialized countries? And how do we explain poor health outcomes, including life expectancy, compared to most European nations?
Peter Arno: The short answer as to why the U.S. has the highest health care expenditures in the world is simply that, unlike other developed countries, we exercise very few price constraints on our health care products and services, ranging from drugs, medical devices, physician and hospital services to private insurance products. On a broader level, the corporatization and profits generated from medical care may be the most distinguishing characteristics of the modern American health care system. The theology of the market, along with the strongly held mistaken belief that the problems of U.S. health care can be solved if only the market could be perfected, has effectively obstructed the development of a rational, efficient and humane national health care policy.
Despite the U.S.’s outsized spending on health care, its relatively poor health outcomes are beyond dispute. For example, in 2019, the U.S. ranked 36th in the world in terms of life expectancy at birth — behind Slovenia and Costa Rica, not to mention Canada, Japan and all the wealthy countries in Europe. This is not solely, as one might at first think, a function of racial and ethnic health disparities, as dramatic as they are in the U.S. A recent study found that even white people living in the nation’s highest-income counties often have worse health outcomes on infant mortality, maternal mortality, and deaths after heart attack, colon cancer and childhood leukemia than the average citizens of Norway, Denmark, and other wealthier countries.
The relatively poor health outcomes in the U.S. require a more nuanced explanation based on income, wealth and power inequalities. These factors drive inadequate and inequitable access to health care. But they also undermine many of the social determinants of health, particularly for poor and vulnerable populations, which fall largely outside the health care sector. These include, for example, higher income, access to healthy food, clean water and air, adequate housing, safe neighborhoods, etc.
Given the above facts, it’s important to ask: Why doesn’t the U.S. have universal health coverage?
The simple answer is that the economic and political forces that profit greatly from the status quo are opposed to universal health coverage. It’s certainly not too complicated to implement such a system — nearly every wealthy country in the world has figured out how it can be done. Many academics and pundits point to surveys indicating that Americans are fearful of change and are satisfied with the status quo, in particular with their employer-based health insurance (which covers more than 150 million workers and their families). In part, these attitudes are understandable. Most people are healthy and thus are not faced with the inequities and indignities that befall those who become ill and must deal with the private insurance industry and a dysfunctional health care system. Additionally, the true costs of health care are often hidden from workers who receive their insurance through jobs in which insurance premiums are automatically deducted from their paychecks. Even less well understood is the fact that we all subsidize employers’ contributions to workers’ health insurance with more than $300 billion of our tax dollars (employer contributions are not taxed but are considered a line item in the federal budget). But public sentiment is changing as health care expenditures continue to outpace earnings. Over the past 10 years, insurance premiums have risen more than twice as fast as earnings, while deductibles rose more than six times as fast. And the even more rapidly rising price of prescription drugs has particularly captured the public’s attention. This is likely because prescription drug prices rose by 33 percent between 2014 and 2020, and the average price of new cancer drugs now exceeds $100,000 per year. There is also an increasing public recognition of the massive and growing medical debt burden. One recent study estimated that nearly 1 out of 5 individuals in the U.S. collectively had $140 billion worth of medical debt in collections in June 2020.
You have done outstanding research on the economics and politics of AIDS. How did your background in AIDS research shape your views on health care and social insurance?
My background in AIDS research, which began in the mid-1980s as the epidemic exploded around the country, highlighted a central weakness of American health care — if you become ill and lose your job, you frequently lose your health insurance. Thus, at the point when you need it most, you lose access to health care. This was driven by the private health insurance profit-maximizing model, the reliance on employment-based insurance and the lack of recognition of health care as a human right. The Affordable Care Act provided some mitigation but, with tens of millions uninsured today, these issues are still with us.
Another dimension of American health care that came into sharper focus for me was the sheer power of dominant stakeholders, such as the pharmaceutical companies, to extract profits with little restraint. The clearest example of this is perhaps the relentless increase in drug prices, which one could argue began when the first AIDS drug, AZT, was marketed at $10,000 per year in 1987; today we have cancer drugs sold at more than 10 times that price.
Medicare for All is now gaining traction in the U.S. What exactly is Medicare for All and how would it work?
The term “Medicare for All,” as it is commonly known and described in congressional bills such as the Medicare for All Act of 2021 (H.R. 1976, which currently has 117 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives), is a short-hand expression for a universal, single-payer health care system. Essentially, this means that health care will be provided to all U.S. residents and a single payer — the federal government — will pay all bills. The Act’s summary states in part:
Among other requirements, the program must (1) cover all U.S. residents; (2) provide for automatic enrollment of individuals upon birth or residency in the United States; and (3) cover items and services that are medically necessary or appropriate to maintain health or to diagnose, treat, or rehabilitate a health condition, including hospital services, prescription drugs, mental health and substance abuse treatment, dental and vision services, and long-term care.
The bill prohibits cost-sharing (e.g., deductibles, coinsurance, and copayments) and other charges for covered services. Additionally, private health insurers and employers may only offer coverage that is supplemental to, and not duplicative of, benefits provided under the program.
The “single payer” aspect of Medicare for All has several crucial virtues. First, it would do away with the thousands of private claim processes that currently exist to service the private insurance industry, thereby reducing an enormous amount of bureaucratic waste that is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. At the same time, with the negotiating power given to the federal government, prices for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and other medical expenditures could be brought under control. But most importantly, the single-payer approach is the most realistic approach to providing health care to all Americans.
Medicare for All marches and rallies are taking place in scores of cities across the country on Saturday, July 24. In fact, there is ample evidence that most Americans already support universal health care. But can we have health care reform without reforming the political system?
There is no doubt that the road to Medicare for All is an uphill struggle, given the array of political and economic forces that benefit from the status quo. However, the more than 50 marches and rallies around the country on July 24 reflect not only public support for transformative change in our health care system, but the type of movement building that is necessary to carry out this change. A complementary strategy, which could ignite a national consensus, would be a breakthrough success for a Medicare for All-type program at the state level, particularly in large states such as California or New York, where organizing efforts have been underway for several years. This could well have a cascading effect on other states and ultimately at the federal level. The common strategic thread for success at the state or federal level, is building a strong, popular social movement demanding universal health coverage for all.
On the show this week, in the second of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges continues his discussion with philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the social, political and psychological consequences of prolonged lockdowns and social distancing, as well as the mass illness and death caused by the pandemic.
In his new book, ‘Pandemic 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost,’ Zizek argues the failure of global capitalism to cope with the pandemic presages, he fears, a systems collapse, a dress rehearsal for a frightening new form of authoritarianism in which the world is starkly divided between the elites and the rest of us. “…[T]he return to normality thus becomes the supreme psychotic gesture, the sign of collective madness,” Zizek writes.
“Britain demands that I give up my back talk and ‘know my place,’” sociologist Akwugo Emejulu tells me. “I’ve been told to shut up, directly or indirectly, more times than you would imagine. But how could I when there’s so much to be said, plainly and without artifice?”
In her work, Emejulu — a Black feminist scholar at the University of Warwick in England — provides us with an unfiltered look at the racism and oppression faced by Black British women across significant domains of unequal employment, housing and health care, especially within the context of COVID-19. She documents how Black women’s suffering is exponentially increased relative to such crises as austerity in the U.K. And Emejulu also discusses the shared global dimensions of anti-Black racism vis-à-vis Black women.
As a Black male philosopher with feminist commitments, I want to do what I can to draw more attention to the importance of Black feminist “back talk”: daring to disagree with hegemonic authority. I find that Black women’s voices are marked by an exhaustion that is unique and specific to their social locations, and yet their voices are relentless — conceptually amplifying the hegemony of anti-Black racism through their specific modes of what bell hooks calls “back talk.”
To explore the importance of Black feminist back talk, and to highlight Black feminist similarities and differences between different political geographies, I spoke with Emejulu, the author of Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2021) and Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017), and the coauthor of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Her research interests include the political sociology of race, class and gender, and women of color’s grassroots activism in Europe and the United States.
George Yancy: When I think about Black people throughout the Black diaspora, I think about a spirit of resistance, of refusal. This is one reason why I find cultural theorist bell hooks’s conceptualization of “back talk” to be so powerful. The expression is indicative of having a self-empowered perspective on the world. Back talk, for hooks, functions as a site of agency. In fact, she links the process of finding and honing one’s voice to processes of Black women’s liberation. She calls it “the liberated voice.” I take it that back talk is a key feature of Black feminist thought and practice. It is important, though, to be mindful of the social, historical and geographical specificity of Black women’s suffering, political struggles and expressed agency. In this way, Black women’s back talk isn’t rendered monolithic. Please speak to how Black women’s voices within the U.S. have impacted your own “back talk” as a Black woman in the U.K.
Akwugo Emejulu: I grew up in a household full of back talk. My mother and grandmother provided different kinds of role models for me about how to live a dignified life and be self-possessed. My grandmother had a steely, almost patrician air about her — she did not suffer fools and made that very plain to anyone she encountered.
My grandmother desegregated the public hospitals in Dallas, Texas, becoming the first Black nurse employed at Parkland Memorial Hospital (this is the hospital where President John F. Kennedy died after being shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963). Living and thriving under Jim Crow meant that she couldn’t afford to be anything but true to herself and her own wishes and desires. Her sparkling self-confidence and charisma meant that she attracted a lot of people to her, but she always warned me to choose friends wisely.
One of her favorite aphorisms was: “Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe.” I took this to heart. I think growing up with my grandmother and coming to maturity during the civil rights movement, my mother consciously chose a different way to be a Black woman. More open and kind-hearted than my grandmother, my mother channeled her energy externally. As an English and French teacher working in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas, she sought to fire up her Black students’ imaginations, helping them envision other lives and other wonders for themselves through literature. In her classes, before the violence of standardized testing, she read Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner with her students and helped many of them, materially and emotionally, build different kinds of futures for themselves.
Given this upbringing, I really had no choice but to be who I am now. As a Black American living in the U.K., my back talk has constantly gotten me into trouble. I think most Americans living here are genuinely surprised by how repressed and passive aggressive most people are here. Nobody says what they really mean. Everything is coded and said indirectly. For years and years, I truly did not understand what anybody was saying to me. I’d have conversations with colleagues and later on realize that we were in a dispute — but there were no harsh voices or angry tones — just a look and a raised eyebrow. I think Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day are the best representations of this particularly British and Irish repression. Anyway, because Britain is a deeply hierarchical society, riddled with class anxieties (and in England in particular, racial panic), as an outsider I had to learn how to navigate these complexities. Britain demands that I give up my back talk and “know my place.” I’ve been told to shut up, directly or indirectly, more times than you would imagine. But how could I when there’s so much to be said, plainly and without artifice?
I like your insistence here. This is also what I like about bell hooks. There is that courage to engage in frank speech. To further avoid the problem of erasing important differences, how would you characterize the oppressive experiences of Black women in the U.K. and, by extension, what are some of the differing ways that Black women’s voices in the U.K. speak critically to their lived specificity of oppression? Of course, I’m also keeping in mind that the U.K. isn’t the whole of Europe.
I’ll start by acknowledging the problem of a Black American woman speaking on behalf of Black British women. This remains a real source of tension between some high-profile Black American women living in the U.K. — such as myself — and various Black British activists. And this tension about who speaks, and who gets listened to and taken seriously probably best sums up the material and discursive inequalities that Black women experience here — that of erasure. Black women are more likely to be living in poverty, working in low-skilled, low-paid work and more likely to be in precarious employment, regardless of class. Black women must navigate, what we call here, both a gender and ethnic penalty in the labor market, which means that they must contend with a gender and ethnic pay gap as well as gendered and racialized labor market segregation and discrimination. It’s a double hit to earnings, wealth accumulation, career progression and pension savings. Being trapped in low-paid work, as we know, has all kinds of knock-on effects with regards to housing and health. Indeed, a new report by Bloomberg demonstrated how Black households in London — where almost 60 percent of all Black Britons live — have been almost totally shut out of the housing market, meaning there’s little possibility of living in secure housing nor building generational wealth through bricks and mortar. Further still, we see already existing health inequalities exacerbated by the COVID emergency. Because Black British women are over-concentrated in low-paid work, they have been less able to protect themselves from infection. Being a briefly honored essential worker hasn’t really meant much beyond high levels of exposure to the virus and a huge number of COVID deaths. Truly, this is a catastrophe.
In my own work, which examines how women of color activists organize against austerity, my colleague Leah Bassel and I found that because Black women were already in a state of almost permanent precarity before the 2008 economic crisis, austerity measures — tax increases and cuts to public spending — have hit this group even harder. The rollback of the welfare state — from library and community center closures to benefit cuts to loss of government employment — have all had a deleterious effect on Black women’s income, wealth and health. However, in Britain, we are still in the middle of a decades-long debate about how the “white working class” has been left behind and has, in response, abandoned the socialist and social democratic left for the center and far right. At no time, whether it’s been public intellectuals chattering about the “left behind” nor about the racial disparities in COVID deaths, have Black women prominently featured in these public debates or policy interventions. Instead, Black economic insecurity and Black death are treated as taken-for-granted and routine. This is what erasure looks like. As both you and Charles W. Mills remind us, the racialized social order is maintained through an active state of violent ignorance and acceptance of the way things are.
Thank you for bringing these realities to our attention. They confirm, for me, the often unknown or unspoken (at least from within the U.S.) ways in which Black women in the U.K. suffer from institutionalized forms of anti-Black racism and face forms of precarity and erasure. Raising a different form of erasure, as a Black male academic, I have taught within predominantly white institutions. As a Black male philosopher, however, the presence of white faces only increases. So, I know what it is like to in teach within a sea of whiteness. Black women philosophers, of course, would have a different set of experiences owing to their intersectionality in terms of being in a sea of maleness and whiteness. And while the number of Black philosophers in the U.S. is still significantly low, the U.S. has more Black academics than the U.K. Two questions: As you see it, what are some of the factors for such low numbers in the U.K.? And what is it like teaching as a Black woman, which no doubt raises all sorts of intersectional dynamics, within such white spaces, especially as you teach Black feminism? I’m tempted to say, “Black feminisms.”
It’s no mystery as to why we see so few Black academics in British higher education. For context, I am one of 25 Black women professors out of more than 21,000 professors across the whole of British higher education and the first ever in the history of my university. There is one Black woman professor, the brilliant scholar, Olivette Otele, in the discipline of history, and she was only promoted to full professor a few years ago. It’s a scandal. But it’s a scandal that has been designed into the education system. Generally speaking, in England, Black pupils leave school with similar qualifications as their white counterparts. In Scotland, pupils of color are more likely to have better qualifications than their white peers. However, in both England and Scotland, Black pupils are less likely to be admitted to the best universities, which are collectively called “the Russell Group” here in the U.K. So, Black pupils are already at a disadvantage of being shut out of this small group of elite universities where the vast majority of our leaders are incubated.
Even those few Black pupils who do manage to gain entrance to the Russell Group, they must navigate a hostile and alienating environment in the classroom and in student halls. Time and again, we see stories of hideous racism, sexism and classism at these universities. The final blow comes in terms of degree classification. Black students are less likely to leave university with top honors — what we call first-class honors, a first, or even an upper-second class honors, a “2:1.” Across the Russell Group, we see the same patterns repeat: Black pupils do well enough to be admitted to these top flight universities but then something happens whilst they are at university which means that they do not graduate with the best marks.
You can see how this situation then has a knock-on effect in terms of developing the next generation of Black scholars. Without those top marks — and sadly, the imprimatur of the Russell Group — it means Black students are less likely to win prestigious studentships (scholarships) for their masters and doctoral work. This is sometimes called a “pipeline problem,” and there have been some half-hearted attempts in my disciplines of political science and sociology to address this, but really, by the time students get to university, many of these dynamics that erode success are already in motion.
As for me, I love teaching — I get that from my mother. I saw firsthand how her teaching changed the lives of her students. I was also transformed by a few amazing professors during my university years, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what good teaching looks like. So, in that sense, I haven’t really ever struggled in the classroom because I have self-consciously honed and developed a particular kind of teaching persona. I try to take a very informal air in lectures and seminars with lots of jokes and asides. I think this is probably in response to being on the receiving end of so much bad teaching over the years, but it’s also because I think many academics think too highly of themselves and the classroom space. Yes, this is a space for learning, but it needn’t be alienating nor exclusive. We can still have high-minded discussions and I can break the tension by cracking a bad joke. I don’t know why this works for me. I’m sure other Black women academics wouldn’t be able to get away with this informal approach.
Further, having spent the vast majority of my academic career in Scotland, one of the whitest places on the planet, I almost never had Black students in my classroom during my 15 years there. This has changed since I’ve moved down to England, but it is still a little disorienting to me for sure. Having taught some permutation of feminist theory or gender studies for almost 20 years, to be quite frank, the current fashion of so-called “intersectional feminism” has been a boon to me. Before this, it was a struggle to teach feminism because most students were reflexively hostile to it and it was a challenge to get them to engage meaningfully with key ideas and concepts, unlike when I taught Marxism or post-structuralism.
For the past four years, I’ve been teaching a new module here at the University of Warwick called Feminist Pedagogy/Feminist Activism which is about the learning and education that takes place within feminist movements. I won’t lie; the first two years of teaching this module were a bit of a struggle because of some of the white students, self-proclaimed feminists, natch — were surprised and angered that Black feminism was the default, taken-for-granted position of the module, and that it was not treated as an almost forgotten add-on, as is usually the case in mainstream gender studies courses. Having to contend with an idea that gender is always classed and raced was very disconcerting for some students, and I don’t think they ever really reconciled themselves to it. Which is fine by me, as that pattern is writ large across the mainstream feminist movement too.
From what you’ve shared thus far, we must grapple with the deep political, social and affective sites of anti-Blackness in the U.K., and we must announce these to the world. Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a leading Black activist in the civil rights movement, is famously known to have said, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired!” I think that this functions as a form of “back talk.” Hamer isn’t just stating a fact about being sick and tired. Rather, she is commenting on a form of exhaustion that speaks to being so exhausted. What Hamer says might be said to function as an affective tissue that describes what it means to be Black in the U.S. How would you theorize Hamer’s clarion call for Black people within the U.K.? Also, please speak to how the affective gravity of Hamer’s exhaustion speaks to a shared collective identity among Black women within the U.S. and the U.K.
My colleague Leah Bassel and I published a paper in 2020 called, “The Politics of Exhaustion,” which examines the processes by which women of color activists in Europe become exhausted and how, in some cases, exhaustion can be a source for new forms of solidarity. In short, our current circumstances demand extreme physical and psychological fatigue from Black women. Whether it’s the retreat of the welfare state, the normalization of the far right in mainstream politics or the ongoing deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean, the challenges are vast and allies are few.
The political situation in Europe is unstable and unrelenting. Since the start of the debt crisis (and, of course, much of this work predates 2008, but it’s the intensity of the work that has changed), Black women activists have been working hard on survival, self-help and mutual aid to stay alive. However, it is both impossible and unconscionable to allow activists to be in a state of high alert for more than a decade. But European countries have allowed this multifaceted emergency to continue, and now with COVID, there seems to be no end in sight.
These are exhausting circumstances which have sparked a mental health crisis amongst activists and is promoting many to burn out and leave the activist scene altogether. Further still, for those activists still working hard at the grassroots, they must contend with comrades who cannot be fully trusted because they perpetuate and reproduce racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia in the ostensibly “radical” spaces of activist networks and coalitions. Those Black women activists who persist in these spaces must also contend with what we call “exhausting solidarity.” They must work together with activists who perpetuate harm because the outside threat is such that they cannot afford to work by themselves. These are the untenable conditions in which many activists across Europe are having to navigate and it is heartbreaking for me.
We also found that exhaustion can sometimes operate as a kind of collective identity/identifier. That if you look around and are sick and tired of how things are, that can be an important activation to get involved to try to make things better. So, exhaustion should be understood in a nuanced way. For sure it is a byword for fatigue and emotional distress, but it can also be a resource that can sometimes be mobilized to support activist work by building the ranks and helping to identify and analyze shared grievances.
Given the weight of this, where do we go from here? As I ask this question, I don’t want to leave “we” uncontested. Yet, Black people of African descent have had to deal with shared painful and brutal histories of slavery and colonialism. The dehumanization is there as well as the seemingly endless mourning caused by anti-Black racism. Our Black existence is held captive by anti-Black symbolic and structural forces. And yet we continue to resist, to exist despite forces of Black social death. It isn’t enough that Black unity is felt after the brutal murder of a Black body. And here I am thinking about the tragic killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. How might we collectively imagine an empowered world, a more loving world, in which Black bodies matter, where finding it hard to breathe no longer exists?
You have unfortunately caught me in a gloomy mood about the future, but I will do my best to think positively for this final question. I return to the importance of community and connection. The activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee called it the “beloved community.” I don’t think I ever believed that I would be living through bad times such as these. What makes it bearable, what allows me to breathe a bit easier, is my meaningful connection to others and our working together to make our little patch a wee bit better for everyone.
Especially in the U.K. context, we’ve been contending with closed opportunity structures for more than a decade and have seen living conditions worsen, especially for the most marginalized and vulnerable groups. To create possibilities for change requires diligent work locally to change political attitudes and political culture and build new forms of solidarity. This moment is so unstable; who knows what comes next, but what persists is our ability to hold each other close in pure connection.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
MPs have “blood on their hands” over their vote to cut foreign aid. That’s the view of one campaign group, as the impact of the decision becomes clear. But is the budget all that it seems in the first place?
Foreign aid: MPs revolt
As PA reported, chancellor Rishi Sunak put forward a plan that will see a reduction in aid funding from 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) to 0.5%. It’s a cut of around £4.4bn this year. The government wrote the commitment to 0.7% into law. The Tories then restated it in their 2019 manifesto. But the government has now ditched it in a supposed attempt to save money in response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
So, on Tuesday 13 July, the change came to parliament. MPs voted by 333 to 298, a majority of 35, to cut foreign aid. But it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing for the government. 24 Tory MPs joined opposition parties to vote against the plan. Both Boris Johnson and Sunak said that the cut was only temporary. Under the new system, funding will only return to 0.7% if the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) believes the UK is not borrowing to finance day-to-day spending and underlying debt is falling. The chancellor noted that:
Whilst not every member felt able to vote for the Government’s compromise, the substantive matter of whether we remain committed to the 0.7% target – not just now but for decades to come – is clearly a point of significant unity in this House.
Today’s vote has made that commitment more secure for the long term whilst helping the Government to fix the problems with our public finances and continue to deliver for our constituents today.
But Sunak may well be performing an economic sleight of hand.
The devil is in the detail
As PA noted, foreign aid will only return to 0.7% if the OBR allows it. The existing OBR forecasts run to 2025/26. In no year does the OBR forecast that the current budget will be in surplus. Moreover, it says net debt will not start to fall until 2024/25. In other words – the government will not return foreign aid to 0.7% any time soon.
It’s important to note that for many of the MPs who rebelled, foreign aid may not necessarily be about supporting the world’s poorest people. Some people believe that the government uses aid as ‘soft power’; that is, pushing British imperialist aims abroad. Socialist Appealcalled foreign aid “the smiling face of imperialism”. Anthony Oakland noted that governments do not always use the budget to support the world’s poorest people. Instead, they said that foreign aid was:
used as a lever to encourage ‘trade liberalisation’. This of course means better access to profitable markets for corporations.
those defending the aid budget don’t care a single jot about the world’s poor either. For them, foreign aid is merely a tool for exerting the ‘soft power’ of British imperialism.
This fact was revealed in a letter to the Financial Times, signed by big business groups… In it they stated that reducing the aid budget would “reduce the UK’s credibility” (on the world stage), and “hamper gains made on social and economic development, which are prerequisites for businesses to trade”…
In other words, if Britain’s diplomatic standing on the world stage declines further, these gentlemen’s bottom lines stand to suffer!
Even the archbishop of Canterbury said of foreign aid:
British aid efforts increase the UK’s soft power. They stabilise and support people in areas of instability. They strengthen the rules-based international order.
Soft power versus no power?
Even through the prism of foreign aid being about the British exerting influence abroad, the cut still seems illogical by Tory capitalist standards. As the British Academy wrote, the government:
should be aware that short-term gains in terms of improving a budget deficit will create long-term damage by withering the very assets on which soft power rests, whether at home or inside international organisations. International cultural relations are a long game and a matter of strategic relationship-building rather than short-term tactical advantage. There is thus the world of difference between using foreign aid, say, to buy influence or win contracts – both of which are dubious practices from all points of view – and investing in the institutions and practices which provide a platform for intelligent, constructive diplomacy.
“Blood on their hands”
Daniel Willis, campaigns and policy manager at Global Justice Now, noted the use of foreign aid as soft power. He said in a press release:
When the inevitable death and suffering from aid cuts hits the news, each and every MP who has voted to sever the UK’s 0.7% commitment should know that blood is on their hands.
The kind of chicanery this government has used to dodge its international responsibilities lays bare the myth that these cuts are needed to balance public spending during the pandemic. 0.7% was already proportional. This bill only commits the government to deeper cuts…[t]oday, claims of Global Britain ring hollow.
Charities previously warned that the funding reduction meant they were stripping back services. Now, we wait to see how the government’s cut of billions of pounds will further affect people globally. Moreover, it will be interesting to see how the changes will effect Britain’s capitalist soft power.
Boris Johnson’s latest video about England’s Euro 2020 journey is short and to the point – to the point of making you feel nauseous, that is. But it also hints at a broader issue in our society.
Johnson: England flag-shagger-in-chief
The PM has once more indulged in nationalistic flag-shaggery over the England team’s performance in the Euros. As many people prepare to watch them take on Italy in the final on Sunday 11 July, Johnson made his own contribution to the nation’s excitement. It was enough to put you off football (and the English flag) for life.
Johnson spouted:
Best of luck to England tonight. It’s been an incredible journey so far. But we’re all hoping you can go one better and bring it home tonight.
We’re all hoping you can go one better and bring it home tonight @England.
Of course, much of Twitter wasn’t having any of Johnson’s bandwagon-jumping bullshit.
As several users pointed out, Johnson initially didn’t call out fans who booed the team when some of them took the knee. Nor did he endorse the players’ stand against racism:
Meanwhile Barbara thought Johnson may be trying to distract us from other issues:
All in @10DowningStreet are hoping you can bring it home for me so I can distract you from 150,000 dead…tens of thousands suffering from long Covid & I have the 'feel good factor' before I swan off on another free holiday from an anonymous donor during recess.
Others questioned whether the PM was really a footie fan, while doing some neat photoshopping:
Yet more vacuous gesture politics from a PM that doesn't believe in gesture politics! You'd probably expect them to win by a wicket or a try! pic.twitter.com/XMVDz036Mh
One person made a point about the cost of Johnson’s flag-shaggery:
Have you got any idea how all your flags, your bunting, your personalised football shirt appears to someone Universal Credit? You’ve probably spent more on all that than a person on UC gets to live on in a month! Sickening display of ignorance and thoughtlessness.#levellingup ? https://t.co/LvFOIbNYfF
Former Labour Party general secretary Jennie Formby cut through the bluster of football. She highlighted that:
Horrible statistic that when England win, domestic violence increases by 26%; when they lose it increases by 38%. 24 hour National Domestic Violence helpline 0808 2000 247 pic.twitter.com/4mG7HVfgLA
This is the bittersweet reality of national pride in football. The establishment pushes the narrative that the country is all behind the England team. For many of us, it is a source of pride, excitement, and pleasure. A lot of the time, the country does appear to rally behind a unifying cause in football. But it’s a shame that that’s all we tend to unite over.
Tory policy killing sick and disabled people in their tens of thousands; homelessness skyrocketing; millions of children going hungry; over 150,000 possibly preventable deaths from coronavirus; and older people not being able to heat their homes in winter. The list of things that should unify us as a society goes on and on. Yet, none of it ever cuts through.
If we could channel that common passion for football into changing society for the better, then maybe many of the issues that blight England, and the rest of the world, could be solved. Sadly, unless there’s a ball and a flag involved, that seems unlikely to happen.
(@atulharia) 