In a scene from The Interrupters, a 2012 documentary chronicling the rise of violence interruption efforts in Chicago, a group of workers with CeaseFire, many of them formerly incarcerated men, brainstorm how to confront a recent spike in youth violence. The discussion centers on the then-recent death of high school student Derrion Albert, who had been beaten to death by a group of his classmates.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The central place of sports in American life lends immense influence to athletes to shift the culture of the country—and for more than 150 years, Black athletes have done just that. Few scholars are as attuned to the intricacies of this history as renowned sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards. From his role in shaping the events of the 1968 Olympics to the politics of Colin Kaepernick, Edwards is just as much a participant in this history as a student and teacher of it. Now 80 years old, Dr. Harry Edwards joins Edge of Sports as he embarks on his “Last Lectures,” a final project to close his long career as a public intellectual.
Dr. Harry Edwards is a renowned sociologist whose work examines the relationship between race, sports, and politics. He is the author of The Revolt of the Black Athlete.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Tonight on Edge of Sports. I can’t believe it. We’re talking to famed sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards. We’re talking about somebody who influenced the 1968 Olympics and the politics of Colin Kaepernick. He’s been in this game over 50 years. Can’t wait to talk to him, Dr. Harry Edwards.
Welcome to Edge of Sports, the TV show. I’m Dave Zirin. This week an icon joins the program and I do not use that word lightly. We have civil rights activist and sports sociology pioneer, author of the seminal book, Revolt Of the Black Athlete, Dr. Harry Edwards.
In Dr. Edwards, we are talking about someone who is an advisor and organizer of figures ranging from to Smith and John Carlos and the lead up to the 1968 Olympics to 50 years later, Colin Kaepernick. It’s a remarkable, legendary stretch as the preeminent public intellectual of the sports world.
Now, Dr. Edwards is actually why we have no sports scholar on this week because we have Dr. Harry Edwards and that’s enough sports scholarship over a lifetime to fill a library. So, let’s bring him on now. The great Dr. Harry Edwards. Dr. Edwards, welcome to Edge of Sports TV.
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dave Zirin:
I just want to jump right in. If you could tell us, I mean you’ve been giving lectures for decades and now you’re doing something called a project called The Last Lectures. Can you speak to our audience a little bit about what The Last Lecture’s composed of?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Well, what I intended to do three years ago was to make this my last series really of public lectures, spend more time with my grandsons and family and so forth. This is my 80th trip around the sun and I thought it was about time that I tried to prioritize what I really wanted to do with my life.
So, I wanted to put a cap on over half of century of scholar activism and look at the whole history of athlete activism, the 157 year history and the contributions that had been made by athletes to those efforts to form that more perfect union, contributions that have either been downplayed or overshadowed by their athletic prowess are simply ignored and denied because that degree of activist concern beyond the arena made a lot of people in the mainstream in particular feel uncomfortable. And so, they tended to downplay, discount, neglect, forget, lose that perspective on 157 years of athletes transforming their athletic stages into platforms of advocacy, in an effort to help broaden democratic participation in American society.
Dave Zirin:
Now, athletes of course have this incredible ability to affect society, affect change, move the needle, reach people who otherwise perhaps could not be reached. What is it about the situational place of the athlete, particularly the Black athlete, that has given them a degree of power that allows them to punch through a little bit of the silencing that particularly happens to Black America?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Well, as I point out in the Sociology Of Sport, a discipline that had been disciplinary possibility that had been overlooked for generations. We invest so much in of our most critical values and sentiments into sport. People identify with athletic teams because they see themselves in their own life struggles taking place through that prism of sport that we can usually change … Circumstances change people by changing their perspectives and understandings of the games that they played. That was a revolutionary statement in 1968 when churches were being bombed and leaders were being shot down and people were being bitten and driven down the street with fire hoses so powerful they could take the bark off trees. For somebody to stand up, raise their hand and say, “Hey, these guys out here playing basketball have something critical to contribute. These guys out here running track have something critical to contribute.”
And of course, a lot of people laugh. They’re not laughing anymore. But initially they didn’t understand that whole history. But at the time I was writing the Sociology Of Sport, so I understood that struggle was already a century old. So, the basic investment that people and societies have in their sports institution as an affirmation of a legitimation … a something that legitimizes the perspectives and so forth that they have ideologically value, sentiment-wise and so forth, you can use that investment to change people’s perceptions and understanding of sport and in that way, change them and society.
So, women’s sports have had a tremendous impact in terms of changing perceptions of women in American society. And of course, it’s inextricably intertwined with what’s going on in the broader society. So, something like the resending of Roe v. Wade constitutes an existential threat to women’s sports.
People talk about Title IX in 1972, that mandated parity for women in terms of expenditures in sports and other areas of education. But what they don’t talk about is 1973 Rowe v. Wade, which gave colleges and universities and professional teams that would eventually emerge some assurance that if we gave this woman a contract, if we gave this woman an athletic scholarship in May, she’d be around in September to start the season. She’d be round in March to play in March … and she’d be round in June to run in the NCAA track championships or play the finals of a professional sport and so forth.
So all of that now is again in question, but it goes back to something else that I stated in 1968, that the challenges of our circumstances are diverse and dynamic. Our struggle therefore, necessarily must be multifaceted and perpetual and there are no final victories. We keep going back, fighting battles that the last generation thought won, but there are no final victories. So, here we are again, trying to eliminate this consigning of women to reproductive bondage, as if it were 1920 or 1950.
We’re again fighting for voting rights, as if it were 1965 or 1866 at the onset of reconstruction. Here we are again, fighting for access to higher education, terrain that we thought we had conquered. We’re going back fighting battles over that terrain. So, there are no final victories and sport reflects all of this. Sport in point of fact is the canary in the mineshaft that tells us something about what’s going on in the broader society.
Dave Zirin:
In the late ’60s, did you believe then that a final victory was possible that smashing or dismantling institutions of oppression was a possibility? And how has your thinking evolved on that over time?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
No, I never thought that there was a final … Matter of fact, the statement that I made about there being no final victories was in response to a reporter in 1968 when we shut down the New York Athletic Club over discrimination. They would invite us in to participate in the New York Athletic Club Indoor Track Classic, but we couldn’t walk into the New York Athletic Club. We couldn’t stay overnight at the New York Athletic Club. And so, I knew that the reporter asked me, Well, doctor, if Jackie Robinson wasn’t able to get this done, look at Bill Russell. Look at Elgin Baylor, look at all of these great Black athletes who’ve come along. What makes you think that you are going to be able to get it done through such tactics and strategies as boycotting the New York Athletic Club or this proposed boycott of the United States Olympic team that you’re proposing? What makes you think that that’s going to get it done?”
And that’s when I made the statement that there are no final victories. Every generation has to confront the challenges before them. And sometimes, those challenges involve re-fighting, re-battling over terrain that the last generation thought it had conquered. There are no final victories.
This is what this whole notion of pursuing that more perfect union, we’re never going to be have a perfect union, but we have that mandate constitutionally, we the people, to pursue forming that more perfect union. And it doesn’t say we the people with the exception of athletes, and thank God it doesn’t say we the people, thank God it says we the people and not we the presidents, or we the Supreme Court justices or we the United States Congress, or we the state legislators or governors. It says we the people and that includes the athletes. And many of us always took that seriously.
So, there was no question in my mind, or in the mind of H. Rap Brown, who I had extensive discussions with about this issue, or in the mind of Dr. King who I also discussed this issue with. And we held a press conference in New York City on January 17th, 1968 in point of fact, about this very issue, that sport and society are inextricably intertwined. And what is a legitimate battle in society is also a legitimate battle in sports. And we have a greater and more visible platform to make statements and to project visions of change in sport.
So no, I was writing my dissertation on the sociology of sport in 1968. I was a student of sport and society. And so I’ve never had this notion that somehow there’s going to be some final blow that’s going to free up even the institution of sport, much less society.
Dave Zirin:
One of your observations in the ’60s, which was so bracing, which I have not found record of anybody making previously, was that US Black Olympians were being used to sell a lie abroad about the state of racism in the United States. Fast forward to today, global superstars from Jordan to LeBron, are we still in that place where the global fame of athletes can be incredible and powerful, but it could also possibly obscure problems here at home?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Well, that’s true, but you have to put that in context as well. There’s never been a progressive movement involving race in American society that was not transactions. What we have to offer that society values in exchange for giving us a role, a participatory role, in increasingly democratic society. What do we have to offer? So, there’s never been a move, progressive move, involving race in American society that was not transactional.
People talk about the Black quarterback today. “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that the NFL has finally awakened to the fact that Black quarterbacks are intelligent enough and so forth to play quarterbacking at the highest level?” Nonsense. What gave us the Black quarterback was not a change in attitude about race and so forth in the NFL among NFL owners and coaches. What gave us the black quarterback was the fact that Bill Walsh, Sid Gillman, Eric Coryell, moved the game from a run first to a pass first game, which meant that a quarterback could win a game with a 80 yard pass. And I don’t care if he had been ahead, the other team had been ahead, the whole game.
So, you began to develop a counter to the quarterback, which was the sack artist, Lawrence Taylor, most certainly Charles Haley, people like Michael Strahan and so forth. These sack artists began to take over. So, now it wasn’t enough just to have pocket mobility, despite all of the built-in Tom Brady protections for the the pocket passer and so forth. You had to have escapability. And so all of a sudden, a Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, these guys became prototypical NFL quarterback.
What gave us the Black quarterback was not a change, a victory in NFL football in terms of the perceptions of black intellectual capability and so forth. What gave us the black quarterback in the NFL was Michael Strahan, Charles Haley, Lawrence Taylor, and others, just as surely as the lion gave the antelope his speed.
So, at the end of the day, we have to recognize that transaction is what is critically important, and that has been all along the way. So, Black athletes taking center stage abroad came about as a consequence, in part as a result of the post World War II, Cold War with China and the Soviet Union. And now, with Russia and China as they point out to Africa, Central and South America and Asia, you’re going to go with them as opposed to us? Look at how they treat Black people in their own country. Look at how they treat Asians in their own country. Look at how they’re treating Latino immigrants in their own country.
And so, to have Latino baseball players at center stage, to have Black basketball and football players at center stage, is a transactional situation that evolved in consequence of broader issues, as well as internal demands for greater freedom, justice, and equality as we pursue forming that more perfect union. And it’s an ongoing struggle. Yes, is the situation changed today from the post-World War II years when they brought in Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby in baseball, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode and Marion Motley and Bill Willis in football, Chuck Cooper, Nat Clifton and Earl Lloyd in basketball? No, it hasn’t changed. The dynamic is the same. What has changed are the actors.
Dave Zirin:
There’s a story that I’d love for you to tell. I just read about it at the Andscape website. I didn’t know any of this history. 1987, Al Campanis on the Nightline TV show, he was the president GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers and he said that Black people did not have the necessities to become baseball managers and executives. He was quickly fired. And then please take it from here. What happened next?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Well, my fellow San Jose Spartan, Peter Ueberroth was also commissioner of Major League Baseball at that time. And he asked me to come in, work out a plan, a strategy to make this correct because Al Campanis was really being scapegoated for a attitude that was more or less general in the baseball hierarchy in this country. And Peter Ueberroth understood that.
So, he said, “I’m not going to interfere with you. You do what you feel is necessary to make this right, to put us on the right path in terms of it. Campanis is probably through in baseball, but we can do something I think to get on the right path in terms of how we handle this situation.” So, the first thing I did when I came in was to hire Al Campanis. Because at some point, I don’t care how far apart we are as a nation, we’re going to have to come to together.
We’re going to have to sit down at the table, arrive at some agreement as to the direction we want to go in, and then give people the latitude, even those who have made grievous mistakes to say, “I want to help.” And when I contacted Al, the first thing he asked me was, “What could I do to help?” I said, “Al, you know more about baseball than I will ever know. Who are great candidates to be front office officials in Major League baseball.” The first person he named was Dusty Baker. And I said, “Well, let’s meet with Dusty Baker.” He was out of the Dodgers organization, like Al.
And so, we met at a restaurant that was under pressure because of hiring practices and so forth in terms of minorities. We went in there and sat down at that restaurant and met with Dusty. And we decided that not only would we bring pressure to hire Dusty Baker, but we would have him hired by the Dodgers’ arch competitor, arch adversary, the San Francisco Giants.
And so, Dusty went into the San Francisco Giants organization, was hired and now has worked him his way up, of course, to be a successful manager. And in point of fact, was the World Series championship manager in 2022. Unfortunately, neither team had a African American on its roster, even though the Astros had … Dusty’s team of course had a Black manager. So, at the end of the day, Dusty Baker was a product of Al Campanis and I trying to come together to demonstrate two things, that even arch rivals could cooperate and collaborate to make something great happen in terms of what we’re supposed to be as a society, what we professed to be as a nation. And that even people as far apart as a 1960s radical such as myself, a Black Power advocate and organizer, and a Al Campanis can come together to try to make this thing right.
And in point of fact, our basic position was that as a people and as a nation, we have no other option. And the greatest thing about having no other option than to come together, sit around the table, arrive at some strategy to move forward, is that you have no other option. And so, that makes it a little bit easier. And that’s what Al Campanis and I were trying to do, both in terms of us getting together and also having Dusty Baker who came out of the Dodger organization, being hired by the Dodgers’ arch rival, the San Francisco Giants, and then moving forward of course, and it all coming to fruition this past year in the World Series.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, an amazing story. And that chapter in it was certainly something that was not said during the broadcast, which makes your testimony about it so incredibly important.
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Absolutely.
Dave Zirin:
And it speaks to this other question which I’d be so remiss if I didn’t ask you. Over the last many decades, you have been the most prominent public in intellectual allowed in this sports world space, to be able to debate, discuss, and influence policy. And frankly, I don’t even know who number two would be.
And I wanted to ask you about the secret sauce because I know a lot of young academics right now, young sports … I’m sure you’re meeting them too. This new generation of sports scholars are attempting to be more forward facing, more public, trying to connect with athletes, trying to develop new theories. I think they who watch this program would love to know how it’s done. Is there any applicable advice for your ability to get inside the room that you can share?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Yes. My first piece of advice would be to hold on to that dream of contributing, of being part of that narrative, of making a contribution in that definitional struggle about what we ought to be as a society, what we already are as a nation, and the trajectory of where we might be headed as a people if we do not resolve some of these critical divisions and so forth that we’re faced with.
Hold on to that dream of having input into that. Do not be dissuaded, discouraged and so forth because you’re not getting a call from a major network or because you’re not getting eighty requests for lectures and panels a year.
The second thing that I would say is learn to dream with your eyes open. Never allow yourself to take for granted that anything that has happened will continue to have the impact initially, as it was initially conceived. And also, understand that there are things that emerge within the context of evolving reality that nobody had anticipated, but that can be managed within the context of your understanding of the dynamics involved.
And the third thing that I would say, is take full advantage of the only shortcut to getting to where you want to get. Take full advantage of the only demonstrable shortcut to success in this realm. And that is hard work. Everything else is more difficult.
You have to put in the homework, the study, the analysis. You have to make the kinds of decisions that position you to see more clearly. That position you to think in greater depth. And if you don’t do that, if you are discouraged by, “Well, so-and-so said that that’s not important. So-and-so says that sports is the tar department of human affairs. So-and-so says there’s no such thing as a sociology of sport.”
And I mean, the kinds of arguments that I had to pose to simply get that argument and discussion on the table. It sounds ludicrous, but I had to argue at one of the greatest institutions in this society, Cornell University, the PhD program. I had to argue, if sociologists are paying attention to dyads, two person relationships and triads, three person relationships and writing dissertations and monographs and all other kinds of things on these relationships, but a hundred million people watching the NFL championship game is not worthy of sociological analysis, then somebody is insane and it’s not me. And finally he said, “Okay, you can write your dissertation in that area.”
So, you can’t be dissuaded by the limitations of vision evidenced by those who you, because of the area that you’re working in, have to work with. You have to cut them some slack, give them some latitude, try to point them in a different direction, but never, ever be diminished in your dream of making a contribution.
Look, I’m on my 80th trip around the sun. This is one that is going to be over sooner rather than later, more than likely. There’s going to be ample space for people to step in and say, “If old Edwards can do this, if he can illuminate an area of academic activist, popular development to this extent, geez, how much more can I do? Because I’m just that much better, smarter, insightful than he was.” That’s the attitude that they should take.
Dave Zirin:
And the other incredible, almost puzzling talent that you’ve had over the decades is the ability to connect with the individual athlete. I say puzzling because we all know that to be a pro athlete takes an incredible dedication. A lot of these young men and women wear blinders just for the purposes of getting to those goals. And yet, you’ve been able to pull back the blinders in a lot of one-on-one and group conversations.
Again, an advice question. You’re connecting with an athlete. What is the best way to let them know that not only you care, but that you have some knowledge that can help push everybody forward?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
I think that in the age of social media, that’s easier than ever. You can respond to athletes’ websites, Twitter accounts, Instagrams and so forth. But more important than anything, it’s dealing honestly with the realities and so forth that athletes and all of us are impacted by and involved with.
I was blessed throughout my professional and career development to have personal contacts, to be able to pick up the telephone and call, to be able to meet with, one-on-one, some of the greatest athletes that this nation has ever produced. I don’t care whether it’s Arthur Ashe, or Tommie Smith and John Carlos, or Bill Russell or Jim Brown, or Curt Flood, Wilma Rudolph. To be able to pick up the telephone and chat with them about an issue that came out in a Sports Illustrated, or how they might handle a problem that came up in their particular sport, has been a tremendous blessing for me.
But the obstacle, the main obstacle, to getting to that level is not from the side of the athletes. It’s from the side of the individual who aspires to have those kinds of conversations which become a critical dimension of their analysis and understanding of the sports institution and its role in society. If you don’t know the people most critically involved, and it is the athletes who are most critically involved in sports, I don’t care how great an owner you are, nobody’s going to come to see Jerry Jones play quarterback against Robert Kraft. They come to see the athletes. And so, that connection becomes critical, but getting access to that connection is always difficult but there are … It’s easier today because of the social media than ever before.
Dave Zirin:
You’ve been so generous with your time, Dr. Edwards. Just one last question. We’re going full circle now with the last lectures. No one really gets to choose their legacy, but what would you like your legacy to be in the decades ahead?
Dr. Harry Edwards:
You know, that’s one that I’ve given virtually no thought to cause that’s not one that I can control. That’s something that people will ride after I’m on the other side of the lawn. But if I had an image, if there was something that I would like to be remembered for, it would be this. I would like people to know, to believe, to think, that I was a great teacher.
We’ve all heard that old saying, those who can, do. And those who would prepare, develop and certify those who do, teach. I think that teaching is the greatest profession in the world because unlike dentistry, medicine, architecture, law, chemistry, who do … All of these professionals, who do something for somebody, a great teacher incites people to think and inspires them to learn, so that they can do for themselves. And that is the greatest thing that you will ever do for anyone.
So, I hope that somebody at some point will at least say, “Well yeah, old Edwards was a pain in the you know what. But he was also a great teacher. I think that he helped to change the world’s perspective and understanding of sport, which meant that they had a greater and better understanding of themselves.”
And that is what I would like to be a central part of my legacy. Of course, I’ll never get away from the activist dimension of it, which was such an important part of my teaching because I was just teaching, teaching the world. Being a teacher to me is what is central and critically important.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, we just happened to be interviewing Solomon Hughes last week and he said to us, “Yeah, my life was changed at Berkeley when I had a professor named Dr. Harry Edwards.” So, that part of your legacy, I think is very secured. Dr. Edwards, thanks so much for joining us on Edge Of Sports TV.
Dr. Harry Edwards:
Oh, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be with your privilege, anytime.
Dave Zirin:
Okay. As I said earlier, I have no ask a sports scholar segment because who would want to follow Dr. Harry frigging Edwards? But I do have some choice words.
Okay, look, for those who do not know, we record and produce this TV show in the great city of Baltimore, a place with a sports history, as rich as any in the worlds of pro baseball and football, but without an NBA team. This was not always the case. In 1963, Baltimore got a team as the Chicago Packers moved to town and called themselves the Baltimore Bullets. Then a decade later, the Bullets left Baltimore for the DC suburbs, first as the Capital Bullets in Landover, Maryland outside of DC. They eventually became known as the Washington Bullets.
The story continues. In 1997, the team dropped the bullets name because of concerns of owner Abe Pollin, that they were glorifying violence. They became the Wizards. But with that rebranding, the team enacted a different kind of violence, this kind cruel and cold, with prophets running rough shot over the people. Pollin moved the team to a brand spanking new arena in the heart of DC’s Chinatown, irrevocably changing the area.
The arrival of the arena was like a bomb going off, flattening the entire community. It signaled the end of Chinatown as a place where actual Chinese and Chinese American families lived and ran shops and restaurants. Instead, it became a neighborhood that adapted to the stadium, as developers tore down local businesses in favor of high-end chains with impossibly bright signage. And of course, in a nod to what was, the names of the restaurants are spelled out in tiny Mandarin lettering, beneath the big signs writ large, promising high end gluttony, either before or after the game. A community had been replaced by a brand.
That shoddy Blade Runner-esque landscape is what exists now in the Chinatown corridor. And so it has been for a quarter century. But now, there are reports that the Washington Wizards are planning their fifth move in 60 years, with an eye on tax breaks and public funds that could be accrued by hightailing it to the Commonwealth of Virginia, along with the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and perhaps even the WNBAs Washington Mystics who are playing in a brand new arena themselves in Southeast DC.
Franchise owner Ted Leonsis who bought the team from Abe Pollin, has decided that threatening to move the teams, straight extortion, is the way he wants to do business with the city. Let’s forget a moment that 70 million was spent to refurbish the arena just two years ago. Let’s forget that if this move happens, the team will either call themselves the Virginia Wizards, which sounds more KKK than a pack of Marlboros, or remain the Washington Wizards, keeping the commercial branding while abandoning the city, a total slap in the face.
Forget that if they dare continue the tradition of playing Welcome To DC by go-go Legends Mambo Sauce in the arena, it would be yet another slap in DC’s face by a feckless franchise that hasn’t won 50 games in a season since Jimmy Carter was president. Also forget that while Northern Virginia is close, it’s psychologically and politically for a lot of folks in DC, a whole other world. Forget all of that.
What is truly vexing me, what’s really grinding my gears, is that this team is now threatening to gut the same neighborhood for the second time in a quarter century. What is going to happen to all those big box bars and restaurants in Chinatown? If the arena leaves, will they be able to stay open? No. Will Chinatown magically come roaring back? No. Instead, we’ll be left with a ghost town of boarded up restaurants, with tumbleweed lazily being blown across Seventh Street.
This is maddening. An utterly venal effort aimed at extorting more money out of a city and a budget crunch. Team owner, Ted Leonsis, might as well be saying, “Nice neighborhood you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
Look, if you know me, you know what my solution to this would be? The city should seize the Wizards, pay off Leonsis and have the team become the most lucrative public utility in the city. Enough with franchise owners coast to coast, threatening our cities for more public welfare during a time of rising inequality and infrastructure degradation. I mean, a portion of I95 quite literally collapsed. And yet, new sports arenas is where the Ted Leonsises of this world are saying we should be spending our precious public funds. So, if you want to break it down to a slogan, save DC save the Wizards, seize the team.
Well, that’s all the time this week. Thank you, Dr. Harry Edwards. Thank you to the team here at The Real News Network. If you are listening right now, if you are watching, please stay frosty, stay safe. We are out of here. Peace.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Karl Marx once observed that “equal rights” under the inequality of capitalism simply means the right of capitalists to exploit workers. Anyone who’s attempted to unionize their workplace has discovered the truth of this—as employers frequently stoop to unethical and dishonest measures to prevent workers from building collective power. Felix Allen, a Lowe’s union organizer based in New Orleans, speaks with The Real News about his experience organizing his workplace for fair pay.
Studio Production: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Vince Quiles:
Hey everyone, Vince here. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up, a couple weeks after we recorded this interview with Felix, he was unfortunately fired. Now, Lowe’s says that it wasn’t a targeted firing for organizing but we all know what’s going on here. There’s still a lot of good applicable information out here for anybody looking to organize so without further ado, here’s our interview with Felix Allen.
Vince Quiles:
What’s up everyone? My name is Vince Quiles. I’m the lead organizer from Home Depot, store 4112 in Philadelphia and today I have a very special guest. Lead organizer, Felix Allen from Lowe’s down in New Orleans. Felix, how are you today?
Felix Allen:
Doing good, Vince. How are you doing?
Vince Quiles:
I’m doing well, man. Always get to talk to a buddy of mine. So really, really happy to talk to you today and speak on your guys’ efforts. So with that being said, can you just give us a little bit of background to yourself? What led you to organizing, and anything you feel pertinent to set the background for your story?
Felix Allen:
Yeah, well, I guess so I should start. I’m from North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina, and I actually moved to New Orleans to be a musician. That’s what I went to school for and everything but I ended up moving here during the pandemic and decided to get a job at Lowe’s. Worked there for about eight months full-time during the pandemic and then moved to part-time as the music stuff started opening back up, but noticed a lot of problems there that I know Vince will relate to and we just sort of got the ball rolling with organizing, which I guess we’ll get into shortly.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and just to give people a little bit of background for the viewers watching this. Felix and I spoke back during the beginning of Home Depot’s organizing drive and so that was where we got connected and we really felt strongly pulled towards each other just because we’re both in that home improvement market and it’s a reminder of the fact that this is a solidarity based movement. This is about people reaching out across the different organizing campaigns, trying to get whatever information you can.
And so that’s where our history kind of starts. I mean, I remember you calling me way back when, I think I was driving to an AutoZone or something like that to pick up something from my car and I get a call from Louisiana, I’m like, “I wonder who this is?” And lo and behold, I hear your voice on the other side.
So with that being said, you had some struggles that you were going through, so if you can just elaborate on that so that the viewers can better understand.
Felix Allen:
So there was a lot going on at the store. I guess I started working there in December of 2020 and then I think it was maybe September 2022 when I called you but I had been organizing for a while before I got in touch with you and by the time I did get in touch with you, it felt like things were stagnating and seeing you all in Philadelphia filed a petition to unionize, it was kind of a shot in the arm for us.
But I think the thought first occurred to me about organizing probably in April of that year, April of last year, and I actually just jokingly out to a friend saying, “Hey, I found out you only need 30% of the signatures of folks at your store, whatever unit you’re trying to bargain for, to file for an NLRV election. Maybe I should unionize the Lowe’s.” And he was like, “Hell yeah, dude, you should totally go for it. I’m actually talking to the IWW right now about unionizing, the startup I’m working at.”
So it started out almost as a joke but he was actually encouraging about it. So as you know, there’s so much information you got to know about do you want to go with an established union? Do you want to be an independent union? And there’s so many little procedural things you don’t know about, but some local organizers inspired me and gave me some information. There was this group called the Louisiana Workers Council who I actually met. They were leafleting outside of the McDonald’s and I became friends with them and got started talking to workers and I was kind of like, “Hey, maybe I should do this at Lowe’s.”
So that’s how things started and all the problems we have over there are pretty much verbatim the same ones you’ve had at Home Depot, so when I saw the articles that you had, or the interviews that you had done about your struggles at Home Depot, I literally thought, “Man, that is exactly what I’m thinking about in Lowe’s.”
Vince Quiles:
And I mean, can you illuminate us on some of those struggles? I mean, obviously from working at Home Depot, I know, but I think it’s important to speak on, right? Because even though we’re both in the home improvement sector, so the workload that we deal with is very similar, I still think, you would agree, that there are comparisons that can be drawn across the board because I’m sure as you were doing the leafleting with the workers over at McDonald’s, there were probably similar things that you talked about, whether it be under-staffing, whether it be pay.
So if you can just break us down a little bit on some of the things that you guys were personally facing in your store.
Felix Allen:
So I think for a lot of folks who was paid, it was pretty noticeable how people who had been working at Lowe’s for 16 years were getting paid less than folks who had just started. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s wrong at all that folks who just started are getting started at $15 an hour, or I guess now more it should be a livable wage. That’s absolutely what they should be getting paid.
But really when you see someone who’s a veteran, someone who trained me getting paid less than the dude who just started, that really drives home the point that we are just metrics and numbers to these people. They can talk all they want about how we’re a family but that’s not what families do. Families don’t fire people for being a couple minutes late a couple times, or I don’t know, for forgetting to clock out or something, which is probably an honest mistake.
So a lot of people noticed that. My personal experience was I had been there for about a year and a half. I was one of the only people certified on power equipment, so I was constantly having to stop what I was doing to go help other folks. And there’s nothing wrong with that but there’s so many demands we have and I was getting paid about, I think it was like $12.67 an hour at that point and I jokingly asked my supervisor, “Hey man, why aren’t they paying me more, bro?” Because everybody else was at $15 an hour and these were people who I was training.
And my supervisor was a cool dude so he put in for me to get a raise to at least $14 to at least get me closer but he doesn’t really have control over that. So he put in the raise, and that was nice of him but when I looked at the paycheck, it turned out that later on when I guess the higher up saw, they only gave me 21 cents. So that was like my, I guess, in that Michael Jordan documentary, he says, “I took that personally.” That was kind of my moment like that. I was like, “All right, so this is how you all are going to do us.”
So obviously pay is a big thing, as you know, under-staffing is a huge thing, and that’s not always necessarily something a union is going to take care of most but I think knowing that you have something and a grievance process to protect you, if the frustrations that result from under-staffing get to you, that can be a powerful thing.
So like you said, someone might come in with a list of things that they need in the plumbing department and they might have some… they might bring in a 500 year old archaic screw or something, and they expect you to find it on aisle 16. It’s like, I’m a merchandiser. I build the displays. I’m actually on a time crunch doing what I need to be doing, but there’s so few people in the store to help that I got to go through an entire list with someone.
So it’s like I want to help people but I mean, I have other people telling me I got to have this project done by the end of the day so it puts us in a difficult position. And a lot of customers are always frustrated, and I don’t blame them at all for being frustrated. I noticed before I started working there, I needed help finding the right kind of doorknob and it took me forever so I totally get it. But again, it drives home the point that these companies do not care about their customers. They do not care about their workers. They care only about their bottom line.
So yeah, two big things, and other things like folks getting fired for just little attendance issues and I mean, some people think it’s simple getting to… for me, it’s easy to get to my job on time because I have a car, I don’t have any kids, I got a pretty stable life but that’s not the case for everybody here. They’re taking care of their kids. A lot of people are maybe taking care of their parents or grandkids, and a lot of younger people don’t have cars or they’re getting rides from someone else, so you’re going to be late sometimes.
And again, they say, “We’re a family,” but I think family gives each other second chances so I find that claim rather dubious from the management.
Vince Quiles:
You speak on something very important there where you talk about how you had people in middle management trying to come in, trying to help you out and in the end, they’re overridden by people who ultimately don’t understand your life, who don’t understand the things that you guys are going through and I mean, ultimately, that’s even the power in you being an organizer is because you’re there on the front lines every day. You’re dealing with the people, you’re seeing what’s going on and you’re trying to fight for them when ultimately all of these executives are doing is just fighting for corporate profits to just disseminate amongst themselves, disseminate amongst their shareholders, and in the end, people like yourself who are working, who are trying to do a good job, who are trying to do the best that they can and help the customers coming through the store as well as the customers who are shopping, are the ones that are left holding the bag.
And it’s something that’s extremely unfortunate and it’s the importance of doing what it is that you do, trying to organize there. And so with that, I know you had some fun with some of Lowe’s management, so please tell us a little bit about what it was like once you got your drive going, once you got your signatures and how it is that they responded.
Felix Allen:
So I guess I should back up a little bit. It was very tricky getting to the actual drive part. I got a lot of little training from some people including the IWW, which was helpful, and part of it was mapping out your workplace so I had tricks to find out how many people really work here, who knows who, that kind of thing. And a lot of it was at first figuring out that… The first just what are we going to do? Do people want to go with an established union? Do we want to try to go at it ourselves? How do we do it? So we reached out to people like the teamsters and various different established unions, and everybody was extremely generous with their time but eventually I think we decided, I think the best way… we think the best way to do this is go independent.
And so I reached out to you, you shared some important strategies that I think reinvigorated things for us, and we got our union drive going pretty quickly, and it was actually remarkable how easy it was. Even when you tell folks about things like dues, how easy it is to get them to understand. If you’re a worker and you work hard and people trust you, they’ll know you’re not running a pyramid scheme against them. Even if you’re talking about dues and you’re talking about things like, “Well, dues are part of the contract,” but you get to vote on the contract and no one is going to vote for a contract that leaves you with less than when you started out.
Which I guess leads us to some of the things that management were doing. One part of it was captive audience meetings, which were usually held when I wasn’t there because I was working, actually working part-time at that point. And they love to hammer home, as you know, dues. you’re going to have to pay $50 a month, you’re going to have to do blah, blah, blah. But of course they don’t tell you you’re going to get a raise that’s going to far outweigh the cost of any dues you might be paying.
So people recognized, a lot of folks recognized that what they’re coming at us with was bullshit but one thing I think management did that was effective for them was sending in a ton of managers from neighboring stores or ASMs, as they’re called, and they would just walk around and ask people questions, “How do you like the store?” And stuff like that, kind of putting on airs, pretending they really care what’s happening. But folks mostly got the idea that they were there to intimidate us. They were there to figure out who might have signed this petition.
So that scared a couple people off at least enough maybe to not want to stick their neck out. So that was effective on their part and I know you experienced that. I remember you saying it was hard to even have a conversation about sports or something with all those managers walking around. But yeah, that was part of it. I got followed around. I tried to do leafleting outside the store and they would always have managers finding a reason to be outside there and they would tell me to leave. They said they considered the parking lot a working area.
They kicked me out of the break room when I was off duty. Well, no, actually, they made all of my coworkers take their break in the training room instead of the break room so I couldn’t talk to them because since the training room is technically a work area.
So there’s all kinds of little ticky tack stuff like that. And of course, one thing I thought was funny, I see in the media, a lot of people talk about other countries being authoritarian or whatever. They’ll talk about China or North Korea or something and during this experience, I was experiencing some generational level gaslighting and like, “Dude, you want authoritarianism? Try starting a union in your workplace. We got a police state right here at home. You don’t have to look across the ocean for it. They’re watching us on camera 24/7.” So we had fun with it though.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and it’s something I think that’s so important to really put a pin in it and talk about, and something I try really hard to bring across to people when I’m trying to organize, whether it’s in the Home Depot that I worked in or talking to other people in different work environments, is you can see by the actions that you just described, these people aren’t special. They’re not overly smart. In the end, at least for where I come from growing up in Philadelphia, if you’re tough, if you’re big, you’re bad. You don’t run from the fight, you stand in front of it and you go toe to toe and you say, “No, we can hang. We can handle this.”
And to your point, whether it was in our effort over at Home Depot, clearly from the things that you just described constantly, they were trying to run away from that fight and it’s just one of those things again that I think really helps to show these people aren’t anything special. They don’t have anything special. To your point, they’re actually very authoritarian and in the end it’s crazy because it’s not like you’re coming from it from a bad angle. I mean, look at the things that you talked about that brought you to the point of organizing. It was from a place of caring, of compassion, and I’m sure that they probably have something similar to the value wheel that we had at Home Depot, and they talk about the inverted triangle.
But again, to something that you spoke on and something again that you showed is you didn’t just speak on different values, you stood up for it, you fought it, and what did they do? I remember you actually sending me the video of when you were handing out the leaflets and they were trying to kick you out of the parking lot, and it’s like, “Hey, why are you so afraid of Felix? What is so horrible about what he’s doing?”
I mean, you showed a little bit in what you’re talking about and the way that you were able to counteract the arguments with dues, because it’s like, crazy idea. If you actually sit down and have a humane conversation with people, they actually understand more than what they’re given credit for. I mean, it’s absolute insanity and to see, again, the lack of respect, the lack of regard that they have for individuals, and I would say good on you because I saw you keeping on that fight, keep on chugging along.
And I’m really curious to know, how did your coworkers view those efforts in conversations that you had with them? I’m sure some of them were probably afraid to talk to you about the organizing efforts, but I have to believe that some of them were coming up and commending you and giving you kudos.
Felix Allen:
So throughout, even before the drive, there were of course folks who were hesitant to get involved with organizing. That was a huge struggle. So a lot of folks had a lot more… it was a lot more of a risk for folks other than me, in some cases. I had something to fall back on and a lot of people were really taking care of their kids and they needed this job. They could not afford to lose this job.
But I found some folks who were willing to serve on an organizing committee with me, and they mostly did that behind the scenes, but their efforts were crucial, of course. But to your question, some people were just like, “Give me whatever I need to sign and I will sign it. I trust you.” Other people were hesitant because maybe they were about to… They said they were about to retire, they said they were about to get a new job, which is usually just an excuse saying, “I don’t want to get involved in something that might be troublesome.”
So that was a thing, but a lot of people were really ready to do stuff. Just you find out that really a yes usually means maybe, a maybe usually means no, particularly if you’re trying to get folks to meet outside of work, that can be really tricky. Even if you’re just trying to get them to meet out in the parking lot, it can be tough.
I set up one meeting where six to 10 people were supposed to be there and literally no one showed up. The texts started rolling in when we were 15 minutes before, “Hey, I’m not going to make it,” that kind of thing. So I was literally standing out there in the rain by myself. But then there are going to be high points too, like after we started the drive, I remember this one dude coming up to me and he shook my hand. He was like, “Bro, you got some balls, son,” and that kind of stuff. So he was like, “You are a real N-word, bro.” That kind of stuff.
And there were a couple old ladies who kept trying to buy me food and stuff, so that was cool, because they recognized exactly what was going on. They recognized that the response we were getting was because they were scared of what we’re doing, even though I’m like a barely five foot, 26 year old dude who can’t really grow a beard. They were sending all these managers in and eventually they gave us a raise. There are some other pretty minor concessions, but they recognize that organizing has power.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and that’s something that’s so big. Once workers are willing to use their leverage, that changes the whole landscape of things and I think it’s kind of funny when you look at it and you look at the situation that you described because it just shows Lowe’s took you guys for granted. They took all of the things that you brought to the table for granted and it wasn’t until you said, “All right, enough is enough.”
We’re dealing with things like wage compression in which people aren’t actually being valued the way that you guys say that you’re going to. You’re dealing with under-staffing that is preventing you from being able to adequately do your job in your instance in terms of setting up the displays you’re supposed to, but then also not really meeting the needs of the people who are shopping there.
And just something I think is so important for viewers to really understand when it comes to these big box hardware stores, I can at least speak from my experience in Philadelphia. One of the things that is the most infuriating for customers in these stores is that there would be small mom and pop hardware stores, electrical stores, and then these big box stores come in, they put them out of business. They make it so that they’re the only place you can go to get help on these things because that’s what they want to do is monopolize the market, corner of the market, and then they don’t even have a system in place to which people’s needs can actually adequately be met.
I don’t know if you ever do it, but I look a lot at different tweets to Home Depot and oh my goodness, you just see all of these things where it’s like people are like, “I’m waiting for forever. I got this crappy service. I got that crappy service.” And it’d be one thing if Lowe’s was this struggling company. They were barely making it. But I think I just read something about how your guys’ CEO made, what was it? Like $17 million last year? And that’s just the CEO that’s not even getting into board of directors and it’s just absolutely wild, man.
Felix Allen:
Yeah, they’re doing okay, let’s just put it that way. But yeah, I have seen some of that on the internet but I mean, you see it in the stores. The customers get frustrated and they’re going to take that out on us and again, I don’t blame them. I would be doing the same, I’m sure. But that has made me realize, like sometimes when I go to pick up a pizza from Domino’s, it’ll usually be late, so I’ll walk by the pickup window or whatever because the store is closed.
But I feel like I’ll be waiting forever and it is frustrating like, “Dude, I’m just trying to get this pizza and then go to sleep.” But working at Lowe’s made me realize there’s probably a good reason why it’s taking a long time. There are probably only two people in there trying to cook a thousand pizzas at one time, and that’s why it’s taken a long time. So that sort of keeps me in check.
Vince Quiles:
It absolutely helps to shape perspective, I feel you on that. I’m the same way where I do my best to try and be as patient as possible because look, you always get a couple bad apples. People who aren’t the best for sure, that’s in any environment that you go to. But to your point, when you look at the systems in place and the way that they’re structured, it’s usually something little, it’s like an iceberg basically. You see the surface level problem and it’s really easy to hone in on that, but it’s actually this much, much deeper issue that to be honest, I mean, ultimately workers in the store don’t really have any say over.
To a large extent too, I’m sure you had people in your immediate management team within the building who probably wish that they could address these issues, but were never empowered to. And so in the end, again, it’s the workers and the customers who are left holding the bag while the shareholders walk away or the CEO walks away with $17 million dollars. That’s absolutely insane.
So I’m just curious to know. So you go through your drive, that’s the response you get. So how was it dealing with the NLRB? How did your guys drive finish off?
Felix Allen:
Oh, so that was a little bit frustrating. Well, let me qualify everything with everybody at the NLRB was extremely nice, extremely helpful. So what happened was on the petition cards, we handed out to sign, we hadn’t designated a name for our union because we hadn’t chosen a name for our union yet and I actually had called before I made the cards. I mean, this is a pretty ragtag effort. I printed the cards out at Office Depot, so it’s not like I’m the most official people ever, but I literally called an NLRB informational officer, and they told me exactly what I had put on the cards was totally fine, but once we had all the signatures and brought them in to the NLRB, and they were very kind when they helped me fill out the petition and everything, they were extremely helpful.
But a week later I got word, “All right, there’s a problem with the cards. They don’t have a name on them.” And the reason we hadn’t chosen a name yet was because we wanted to ask people what they thought the name should be, “Do you want it to be Lowe’s Workers United? Lowe’s Workers Union? Fuck Lowe’s, or anything like that?” And eventually we set it on Lowe’s Workers United, but it turned out being a problem because of some language in the NLRB manual and because of some issue that Lowe’s lawyers got a little bit lucky on that we were either going to have to withdraw or have our petition dismissed.
So I got with all the people and we said, “Let’s go ahead and withdraw and if we want to refile that, we can.” So that was frustrating and it goes to show you the government is not necessarily our friend. Supposedly the NLRB is supposed to be neutral, and I think they’re a lot better than they have been, but you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Being neutral when one side is Lowe’s and one side is 26 year old dude with not a ton of experience. You can’t be… Being neutral in that situation is not exactly neutral. You need to give the workers the benefit of the doubt.
Everybody knew what they were signing up for. It was a union started right there in the store and everybody knew that. So that was really frustrating. I mean, it just goes to show, I mean, that’s what the government is going to do. They’re not going to protect us, we have to protect ourselves. I remember President Biden said he was the most pro-union president in history, but he went on and decided to break a rail strike. So we got to look out for each other, no one’s going to save us.
Vince Quiles:
And to your point, there’s been so much coverage here at the Real News Network on that, and it’s really important to look at what you’re saying there, in this sense. He goes, he breaks a rail strike, and then look at what happens in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s almost as if though the workers on the railroads were trying to warn about that.
But to your point, that’s something that is being made known here. Obviously something I know I personally say a lot to various people, especially during the organizing drive is, “Nobody’s going to come and save us here. We have to be proactive in our own salvation and this is how we do it is by trying to form a union. And the deck is going to be stack stacked against you but ultimately the question becomes are you going to relinquish yourself to the crappy working environment that you’re in, to the crappy life that you end up living because of the fact that these companies don’t give you what you’ve earned, what you deserve, or are you going to stand up and fight and make your case?”
And so with that, I’m just really curious to hear what’s next for you guys? How can people keep up with your fight with different things that you have going on?
Felix Allen:
Well, so we’re obviously going to run it back because that’s what we do. Who dat? As we say in New Orleans, but we got to focus on forming a stronger committee, think about how we can change our strategy to build something more durable than what we have, which was initially that first drive was a little bit of a Hail Mary. So obviously I don’t want to reveal too much in case the ops are watching, but we’re definitely going to keep organizing because there are a lot of bright and talented young folks who deserve respect.
Because that’s basically what it comes down to. There’s pay and there’s under under-staffing, but really when you wake up at 5:00 AM in the morning and then you got to go to work and deal with all this patronizing bullshit and just be talked to like you’re in fifth grade. It’s not just me. There are like 50, 60 year old folks getting talked to like they’re in the fifth grade. So I think for a lot of people, the bottom line is respect, and that’s why we’re going to keep fighting.
I filed several unfair labor practice charges, which are in the process of being addressed. So we’re not going to give up here and as you’ve experienced at Home Depot, a lot of folks are reaching out from across the country, whether it’s Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, they’re reaching out to organize with us, and I think that’s exactly what we need.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and so where can people keep up with your fight? I know you guys have a Twitter. Is there anything else?
Felix Allen:
We got a Twitter, I think it’s called like Lowe’sU_Nola or something, you’ll probably be able to find it, but there’s Instagram too, I guess. But our email is, let me actually, I got it written down somewhere. I don’t actually remember what the exact address is. It’s lowesworkersunited@gmail.com. If you Google and you see it on the Twitter, it’s probably up there too but we will get back to you.
I will give you my phone number, you can call me at all hours of the night and I might be asleep, but I’ll do my best. And I’m sure Vince would say the same, of course.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and what we can do too is make sure that we put all of that contact information in the bio of this video so that to your point, if anybody watching works at Lowe’s, so talk to Felix. He’s also a musician, if you want to talk to him about music as well. Please feel free to reach out. As we said at the beginning of this, this is a solidarity movement. That was how Felix and I connected, and through that, we’ve been able to build a strong relationship in which we’re able to support each other, and we want to do that for other people who want to try and make their work environment better.
So with that, my friend, greatly appreciate your time. Thank you for telling us your guys’ story, and I very much look forward to seeing what you do in the future.
Felix Allen:
Likewise, thanks for having me.
Vince Quiles:
So there you guys have it. That was Felix from Lowe’s Workers United. And something that’s extremely important to consider, whether it’s looking at his organizing campaign, the organizing campaign that I was in at Home Depot. Even when you look at, for instance, Amazon with Bessemer, Alabama and these different drives that didn’t quite get it all the way across the finish line is even when you lose, you still win.
We talk a lot about wages, we talk about under-staffing, and these are definitely core issues in the fight that we’re engaged in, but the thing that’s important to remember most of all, is the concept of hard power. That’s why these companies react the way that they do because they understand just like the rest of us do, that there are two core components to any business, capital and labor and they absolutely are afraid of the fact that labor is starting to organize itself because once that happens, they lose their leverage.
So if you’re somebody that’s watching these interviews, you’re considering organizing in your workplace, you feel that fear, you feel that uncertainty of being able to get it done, please reach out. Reach out to people like myself, reach out to people like Felix because in the end, like we both said in this interview, nobody’s coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves, but as long as we got each other’s back, nobody can stop us. Till the next one, guys.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling struck down the constitutional right to abortion, society has been seeing the results of a post-Roe world.
While there is no law in the U.S. that regulates what a man can do with his body, the reproductive health of women is now more regulated than it has been in 50 years. And the scope of reproductive health care that women can receive is highly dependent on where they live.
This creates a system of inequalities and further exacerbates health disparities.
I am a nurse practitioner who studies women’s reproductive health across the lifespan.
My research found that college women are concerned about pregnancy, but they lack knowledge and skills about navigating sexual consent and often participate in sexual activity without explicit consent, leaving them at risk for not using contraception and exposure to sexually transmitted infections.
These findings indicate that women are at risk of pregnancy at a historic time when women’s reproductive rights in the U.S. are restricted and not guaranteed.
The Dobbs v. Jackson ruling returned decisions regarding abortion to individual states. This has led to a patchwork of laws that span the entire range from complete bans and tight restrictions to full state protection for abortion.
In some states, such as Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, abortion is banned beginning at six weeks gestational age, when very few women even know they are pregnant. Other states, such as Massachusetts, Vermont, New York and Oregon, have enacted state-level protections for abortion.
The patchwork of state laws also results in a great deal of confusion. In the past year, women’s rights organizations and women’s health advocates have brought numerous legal challenges to restrictive abortion laws. These cases have halted the implementation of some of the strictest abortion regulations until additional court rulings are finalized.
Abortion training is considered essential health care and a core competency for physicians in obstetrics and gynecology, or OB-GYN, residency programs. Approximately 50% of OB-GYN residency programs are located in states with restricted or highly restricted access to abortion. This will logically result in not only fewer health care providers being trained to perform gynecologic procedures for abortion, but also other conditions such as miscarriage, fetal death and nonviable pregnancies.
In states with changing abortion laws and legal challenges to new laws, physicians are uncertain of what procedures can be legally done. Penalties for violating abortion laws may include arrest, loss of medical license, fines and discipline by state boards of medicine.
As a result, physicians are choosing to leave states with the most restrictive abortion laws, and clinics are closing, which is contributing to the current shortage of health care providers.
The unequal access to abortion procedures across the country is most directly affecting the poorest women in the U.S.
Currently, 12 states restrict abortion coverage by private insurance, and more than 30 states prohibit public Medicaid payment for abortion. Women who qualify for Medicaid are among the poorest in the U.S. Lack of access to abortion limits education and wage earning and contributes to poverty. States with the most restrictive abortion laws also have limited access to pregnancy care and supportive programs for pregnant and parenting women.
In addition, traveling to a different state to obtain an abortion is often not possible for poor women. Lack of transportation and limited financial resources reduce or eliminate options to obtain an abortion in a different geographic location.
What’s more, states with the most abortion restrictions have some of the worst pregnancy and maternal health outcomes for women, especially women of color. Pregnancy itself is associated with a risk of dying.
Maternal morbidity is the term used to describe short- or long-term health problems that result from pregnancy. Maternal mortality refers to the death of women during pregnancy or within the first six weeks after birth.
States with the most abortion restrictions have some of the worst pregnancy and maternal health outcomes for women, especially women of color.
For example, Mississippi and Louisiana have the highest rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. and also have the most restrictive abortion laws. Black women have the highest maternal mortality of all races and ethnicities. Women in these states who are unable to terminate a pregnancy have a higher risk of dying as a result of the pregnancy than women in other states.
Additionally, research shows that a woman’s risk of dying related to pregnancy or childbirth is about 14 times higher than the risk of death from an abortion.
In addition to the increased risks of death, there are other physical and mental health implications associated with carrying an undesired pregnancy to term. Being denied access to abortion is associated with increased anxiety and fewer future plans for the next year. Research also shows that not being able to obtain an abortion makes women more likely to live below the federal poverty level and to lack partner support.
Conversely, research has shown that there are few if any significant negative mental health outcomes among women who have abortions.
Restricting legal abortion increases the risk that women will seek out pregnancy termination from unskilled people in unsafe settings. Or they may not seek care quickly for pregnancy complications due to fear of being accused of a crime.
In Texas, physicians are reporting an increase in sepsis, or an overwhelming response to infection, from incomplete abortions. These physicians predict that sepsis will become the leading cause of maternal death in Texas.
Prior to 1973, when Roe v. Wade established constitutional protection for abortion in the U.S., women often resorted to unsafe methods to induce abortion that resulted in a high death toll. Septic abortion wards – or designated areas of hospitals where women were treated for sepsis as a result of illegal abortions – were common. In 1965, 17% of all deaths related to pregnancy were attributed to illegal abortion.
Now that the constitutional right to abortion has been eliminated, more women will inevitably die or become seriously ill due to lack of safe access to abortion services. In states with the most restrictions on abortion, whether a woman meets the criteria for an exemption to save the life of the mother may be decided by a hospital committee. This can delay necessary care and increase the risk to the mother.
In the U.S., more than 25% of women will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Violence from an intimate partner is a leading reason for abortion. My research shows that women affected by violence have a higher risk of pregnancy and that college women are at increased risk of nonconsensual and forced sexual encounters.
Currently, there are 14 states with abortion bans that contain no exception for rape or incest or require that the sexual assault be reported to law enforcement to qualify for exception.
Research has shown that women often don’t report sexual assault due to stigma, embarrassment or fear of not being believed. Even if women qualify for an abortion as a result of sexual violence, those who have not filed a formal police report lack “proof” that their pregnancy resulted from assault.
While the changes that have occurred since the fall of Roe one year ago are already deeply concerning, the full effect of eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion won’t be known for years. And as laws are enacted and subsequently challenged, uncertainty and confusion regarding women’s reproductive health care will undoubtedly continue for years to come.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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El Niño has arrived — and it will likely be the hottest in human history. It may already have made its presence felt in the April-May heat wave in Asia. The current heat waves in Mexico and the U.S. bear its imprint too. In El Niño years, warmer seas in the equatorial Pacific raise global temperatures. The upcoming El Niño years will probably breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming limit…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The ability of millions of Americans to make ends meet hinges on how we measure poverty.
But the “how” may shift after a national panel recommended changes to one of the Census Bureau’s poverty measures.
Designing a fair and accurate measure is no simple matter. It’s also surprisingly political because it drives public policy and government spending, including who gets access to help such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“There’s two main uses for poverty measures,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, executive director of the Center for Law and Social Poverty. “One is determining eligibility for programs or benefits or tax credits. The other is just to paint a portrait of the actual income deprivation that families face throughout the country.”
Some of the debate boils down to which of the Census Bureau’s two poverty yardsticks is more appropriate for determining who qualifies for government aid: the Official Poverty Measure or the Supplemental Poverty Measure.
The country’s Official Poverty Measure was developed in the 1960s, based solely on a family’s ability to purchase food. The supplemental, with data first released in 2011, uses a standard of living based on expenditures that include food, clothing, shelter and utilities, compared against a household’s post-tax income, which accounts for government aid and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
It’s rare for the two measures to go in different directions — but recently they have.
The poverty rate under the Official Poverty Measure grew from an estimated 10.5% to 11.6% of the population between 2019 and 2021, the Census Bureau reported last year. In contrast, the rate under the Supplemental Poverty Measure decreased from 11.8% to 7.8%.
One of the main reasons: stimulus payments from the government to households during the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped raise many households’ incomes temporarily.
That’s the backdrop to a new National Academy of Sciences panel report, requested by the Census Bureau, that recommends the agency make the Supplemental Poverty Measure its official yardstick and incorporate several updates to it.
Unlike the Official Poverty Measure, whose methodology has remained largely unchanged since its inception, the Supplemental Poverty Measure was designed to evolve with the changing demands of society.
The panel was tasked by the Census Bureau to see if the supplemental measure, or SPM, “was adequately measuring the economic needs of disadvantaged households in the country,” said James Ziliak, professor of economics and director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of Kentucky, who chaired the panel.
“The SPM has a long and sound conceptual basis but itself is imperfect and should be continuously improved,” said Dutta-Gupta, who was also on the panel. “The hope is to get a more accurate portrait of poverty in the United States.”
Medical care — and specifically health insurance — should be included when considering a basic-needs bundle for a household, the panel found.
The panel also determined that child care has become a large and rapidly growing portion of families’ out-of-pocket spending.
“Every child needs care, and we’re spending significant resources for households to meet that care,” said Ziliak.
The panel also suggested ways for the Census Bureau to better capture housing costs, generally the largest component of a household’s spending.
Perhaps most significantly, the panel felt that this measure should no longer be considered “supplemental” but be elevated to be the “Principal Poverty Measure” and used as the “nation’s headline poverty statistic.”
That could have big ripple effects. The Official Poverty Measure — or a close variation — is used by nearly two dozen government agencies to determine eligibility for federal programs, according to the panel’s report.
There’s wide recognition that the current official measure’s income thresholds for poverty are far below what families need to sustain themselves. Many agencies try to account for that with their program eligibility limits: The USDA sets the maximum income to qualify for the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program at 185% of the Official Poverty Measure thresholds, for instance.
“There is a desire to have an absolute measure of poverty,” said Gregory Acs, vice president for income and benefits policy at the Urban Institute, who was not on the panel. That’s what the Official Poverty Measure is meant to do, “but that misses the point. What food a family needs to buy and what constitutes a healthy diet has changed over time — and what you need to participate in society has changed.”
The panel suggested continuing to use the current Official Poverty Measure — though perhaps renaming it the Basic Poverty Measure or Basic Income Poverty Measure — to maintain data on historical poverty trends and as an alternative yardstick for program eligibility.
The panel’s recommendations sparked some political pushback. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, sent a letter to the Census Bureau that expressed concern over the potential impacts.
The report, Rubio wrote, “recommends a sweeping set of changes that would prevent our government from accurately measuring poverty and would instead advance progressive political priorities. The authors of this report have not only overstepped their commission, but have also broken a sacred trust long defining the relationship between research experts and policymakers.”
“Poverty measures, in other words, are not purely technical instruments,” he added. “They signal a national consensus about the goals of our economy and system of government.”
In addition to criticizing the panel’s recommendation to elevate the Supplemental Poverty Measure, Rubio disagreed with the suggestions to include other variables in the calculation, like childcare and health insurance.
“What food a family needs to buy and what constitutes a healthy diet has changed over time — and what you need to participate in society has changed.”
Gregory Acs of the Urban Institute
A May study from a right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, determined that several federal programs — including food assistance — would expand to cover families making more money if the Supplemental Poverty Measure was broadly used to determine program eligibility. That would come with a multi-billion-dollar price tag, the study concluded.
The Official Poverty Measure has long been criticized by experts across the political spectrum, but many say it still serves a purpose.
“For program eligibility at the household level, you want a straightforward measure that’s not hard for people to document or produce lots of paperwork for sources of income,” Dutta-Gupta said. “If you made that measure too complex for program eligibility, then families struggling would have to figure out if they need to get their housing assistance before food assistance and other things that would be highly undesirable.”
Ziliak said it would be a huge administrative undertaking for the federal government to change eligibility rules for so many programs. The Official Poverty Measure also offers historical trends and data going much further back than the supplemental measure.
“Official poverty gives us a consistent long history,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief for economic characteristics at the Census Bureau. “SPM allows us to study the impact of government programs on reducing poverty.”
Others have said that neither of these measures are adequate for determining who is most disadvantaged economically, but have suggested that a consumption-based measure, rather than an income-based measure, would be better.
The debate over the National Academy of Sciences panel’s suggestions shows just how subjective defining poverty is. And it underscores the importance of that definition for households struggling to cover basic costs of living.
“I think it’s important for people to understand how we measure poverty so they understand how public policy and macroeconomic conditions impact poverty,” Dutta-Gupta said. “Large changes [in poverty] are entirely because of the economy or public policy changes. It has shockingly little to do with people’s individual choices.”
But all of these measures have been facing new challenges over the past decade. Survey responses involved in these data collection efforts are decreasing as people regularly screen phone calls from unknown numbers and answer their doors less — and some communities have long been hard to reach. To address this, the Census Bureau is trying to use other data, including administrative information from programs like Social Security.
“But that data is often terrible at identifying some identities, like race, and don’t perfectly align with the poverty measures,” Dutta-Gupta said of the administrative data. “I would note that in general, the worst data quality is often from people who are struggling the most.”
The Census Bureau’s Fox said that any changes implemented to the Supplemental Poverty Measure would take years to implement.
An interagency working group will be vetting the report’s recommendations. Once that’s done, there will be a multiyear process for public engagement.
Fox said the agency’s priority is to be transparent.
Acs thinks it’s important not to lose sight of the people that the poverty rate encompasses as we weigh these changes.
“We measure poverty because there are people who have such limited resources that they cannot make ends meet,” Acs said. “They cannot fully participate in society. They are so resource-deprived that it is a threat to their health and wellbeing.”
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If you have been reading European news outlets the past several days, you’ll have seen a number of lead stories on the horrific tragedy of a people-smuggling ship, crammed to the gills with migrants hoping to reach European shores from Tobruk, in eastern Libya, sinking off the coast of Greece. By contrast, most U.S. news organizations have only paid sparing attention to the calamitous event…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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This story was published as a partnership between the Center for Public Integrity and Fresnoland
When Arlin Benavides Jr. set out to hear residents’ environmental concerns in one of the most marginalized parts of a region facing water scarcity, groundwater contamination, extreme heat and other woes, he wasn’t sure if people would open their doors, much less talk.
He was aiming to engage with people in Tulare County in California’s Central Valley, a region known as the food basket of the world and a place with extreme poverty. Many of the residents live in remote, isolated farming hamlets.
In these far-flung communities, Benavides, an AmeriCorps CivicSpark Fellow working for Tulare County’s Resource Management Agency, discovered that residents felt forgotten by their local government officials. When he explained that he was part of the agency’s effort to develop an environmental justice element for the county’s general plan, he was met with suspicion and skepticism.
“You could see anger rise within them. They would tell me stories of just not having good experiences — most commonly it was the story that they had told previous government agencies what they needed, what were the challenges, and they felt like those changes were not done soon enough,” said Benavides, whose fellowship was part of a CivicSpark program that aims to help local public agencies address community issues such as climate change, water resource management and housing.
What had changed between those experiences and Benavides showing up on their doorsteps: California started requiring local governments to integrate environmental justice principles into their planning processes.
The first such law in the nation, Senate Bill 1000 calls for municipal leaders to engage communities in a meaningful way while doing land use work, such as updating general plans, which set priorities for development. Ultimately, the 2016 law aims to address environmental inequities caused by land use policies, such as poor air quality in communities of color hemmed in by industrial facilities. But on the ground, addressing entrenched inequities baked into urban planning policies can be tough.
In a newly released study, two researchers examined those challenges as municipalities across California implemented SB 1000. It’s an analysis they hope can illuminate efforts across the nation as civic leaders seek solutions for communities burdened by pollution — often Black, Latino, Indigenous and low income.
The study’s authors, Michelle E. Zuñiga and Michael Méndez, said the research was inspired by feedback they heard from community and environmental justice organizations who shared their struggles about how SB 1000 was being implemented and what they described as spotty compliance, particularly in communities facing environmental hazards.
For example: city or county planners who don’t understand institutional and socio-economic barriers facing residents, or planning managers who aren’t supportive of or in some cases are hostile to incorporating environmental justice into their work.
Some municipalities argue that existing land use regulations and policies benefit everyone equally, and that explicit environmental justice ordinances or provisions in a general plan are unnecessary, said Méndez, an assistant professor of environmental planning and policy at the University of California, Irvine.
“Time and time again we see how that is not the case, that urban planning has been used as a racist tool kit to enforce existing disparities within and among communities,” he said.
To determine how the law was being implemented in communities with high levels of cumulative environmental health impacts, Zuñiga and Méndez focused their study on cities and counties with census tracts identified by the state’s environmental health screening tool as the most disadvantaged by pollution, such as toxic releases, groundwater threats, traffic fumes and hazardous waste.
Results, they found, have been mixed. There are positive outcomes, such as the creation of environmental justice advisory committees in Tulare and other counties. But many obstacles remain. The researchers found that some communities experience ineffective community engagement, little support from elected officials, limited discussions of environmental racism and a lack of resources to implement and monitor the measures needed to comply with the law.
These challenges mean progress toward environmental justice will be slow and uneven, the authors wrote: “Environmental justice will not be fully realized without strong oversight and political leadership, and racial diversification of urban planning institutions.”
Their research also affirmed the need for the type of guidance that the California Attorney General’s bureau of environmental justice has issued to local governments about the law. The bureau has done this via comment letters that point out shortcomings in local approaches, but it also provides feedback on how to comply with the law. One of those letters to Tulare County, for example, urged officials not to rush through their general plan amendments before fully engaging with disadvantaged communities.
Attorney General Rob Bonta has also intervened in Fresno, saying in 2022 that Fresno County’s draft general plan raised “civil rights and environmental justice concerns” and pressing Fresno city leaders not to approve a rezoning proposal that would add pollution in “some of the most over-burdened and under-invested environmental justice communities in all of California.”
In some cases, Zuñiga and Méndez discovered a lack of understanding among planners on how to define environmental justice, so they outlined in the paper how environmental justice is measured, observed and defined.
Last fall when they presented their preliminary findings at the American Planning Association conference, some planners shared that they’ve faced pushback from leaders in politically conservative municipalities, while others described challenges with implementation in areas with historic under-investment, said Zuñiga, an assistant professor of urban and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Increasingly, she’s seen more planners across the country take on the task of addressing environmental injustices through local government plans, even without laws such as SB 1000.
“This work is very important, not only for California, where there is a policy mandate, but for other planners in other areas of the country that are taking on this charge as well,” she said. “Because of the push of the community organizations prioritizing environmental justice, they also are pushing for environmental justice plans.”
When Benavides first began his fellowship in Tulare County in late 2019, he decided to reach out to Sacramento County, which had already approved an environmental justice element in their general plan. He wanted to know how they involved community organizations in the process. He learned that Sacramento opted to create an environmental justice advisory committee, a process that he knew would also reinforce the requirements of SB 1000.
But first Benavides set out to conduct outreach to understand the issues — from housing and food justice to public utilities and transportation — that residents faced. Benavides, a resident of the more affluent Marin County near San Francisco, was shocked by what he found.
“I didn’t really realize that there were people that didn’t have potable water; that the conditions which [farmworker advocate] Cesar Chavez was trying to improve or ameliorate are still existing in Tulare County,” said Benavides, who was particularly struck by the stark disparities in wealth between farm owners and the working class residents living in unincorporated areas of the county.
The geographical distances between the county seat of Visalia and these small communities were further deepened by a lack of regular visits from county officials. One woman Benavides spoke to was initially angry as she described how, despite repeated efforts to share the problems facing her community, living conditions either don’t improve at all or don’t improve fast enough. “I think that this is also an ongoing cycle where planners go out into a community to really try to understand people, and then, the moment a plan is developed those relationships are not maintained, those stories are not valued,” said Benavides.
He knows that often this happens because planning agencies may lack the bandwidth or resources to maintain these relationships. But that day, as he spoke to this resident, he decided that no explanation could excuse what she had gone through.
So rather than offer an excuse, he apologized. The woman was so overcome with emotion that she started crying. “I felt like as a representative of local government, it was my due diligence to say, ‘I’m sorry for everything that you’ve experienced,’” he said.
But he also explained that there was something he could do to help in that instance, and that was to invite her to participate in the environmental justice advisory committee that was being formed as part of the general plan process to develop an environmental element.
“There is something that I can do for you, and that is to guarantee that you have a seat at the table,” Benavides told her.
Ultimately, Tulare County did create an Environmental Justice Advisory Committee in 2020 to advise its Resource Management Agency. Key to that is providing feedback on the county’s draft environmental justice element and ensuring that it improves the quality of life for disadvantaged communities throughout the county.
When Benavides ended his fellowship in 2020 and passed the baton to the next AmeriCorps CivicSpark fellow, he was glad to know the committee would continue the relationship-building work.
It’s that level of engagement, he said, where residents’ experiences are not only valued but are imprinted in the land-use planning documents, that can transform lives for the better.
Inviting residents to collaborate on land use and development was a first step, he said. Equally as important for real change, he told residents, is that “we continue building a relationship after that is done.”
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Many mainstream accounts of the recent debt ceiling deal make it sound like the negotiations represented a give and take between spending and saving — with President Biden and Democrats aligned with spending, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republicans aligned with saving. The real interests of the Republican Party in these negotiations, however were not actually about spending…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Hundreds of anti-transgender bills proposed in state legislatures are sold as measures to protect minors — such as Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act and Montana’s Youth Health Protection Act — but advocacy groups and doctors warn that the effect is exactly the opposite.
So far this year, legislators in nearly every state have introduced over 550 anti-transgender bills — more than in the past eight years combined. Almost 30 such bills have been introduced in Congress.
The onslaught includes limits on health care access, removing LGBTQ+ materials from schools and banning trans athletes from sports teams. Seventy-two measures are now law.
“Young people are being harmed, regardless of whether bills pass or not,” said Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that provides crisis support to LGBTQ youth.
In a nationwide survey of LGBTQ+ teens and young adults in late 2022, the Trevor Project found that 86% of transgender and nonbinary youth said anti-trans bills negatively impacted their mental health.
“It’s a constant debate on my existence and it just makes me exhausted and frustrated that I have to legitimately just live,” one trans individual responded.
Others said they feared for their life, safety and future.
The survey found other impacts from the legislation, including:
“LGBTQ young people are watching, and internalizing the anti-LGBTQ messages they see in the media and from their elected officials,” Kasey Suffredini, vice president of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, said in a statement. “And so are those that would do our community harm.”
In 20 states, those younger than 18 have lost or will soon lose access to the health care necessary to transition to the gender with which they identify. Legislatures in seven other states are considering similar policies, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Gender-affirming care encompasses a range of social, medical, behavioral and psychological services to support and affirm a person’s gender identity when in conflict with the one they were assigned at birth. Treatment plans vary depending on the needs of the individual.
It can include puberty blockers, which pause development to give an individual time to decide whether to continue transitioning. They are completely reversible. Puberty blockers also have been used for decades on cisgender children experiencing early-onset puberty.
In later adolescence, a transgender teenager might undergo hormone therapy. The medication can help align a person’s body with their gender identity, including regulating hair growth and vocal pitch. It is partially reversible.
Despite rhetoric used by prominent Republican politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, gender-affirming surgeries are uncommon in patients under 18. Current medical guidelines say minors should not undergo genital surgery. Chest surgery is recommended only in specific cases — and after a teen has lived as their desired gender for ample time and undergone hormone therapy for at least a year.
“When you have legislation that works to require people to hide or not be in their own identities, it will likely cause substantial damage to their health and wellness.”
Christopher AhnAllen, a clinical psychologist
More than a dozen studies of trans youth show that access to gender-affirming care is associated with better mental health outcomes. It has also been recognized as a medical necessity by more than 25 major medical organizations.
But new policies in some states eliminate options for those wishing to transition.
“When you have legislation that works to require people to hide or not be in their own identities, it will likely cause substantial damage to their health and wellness,” said Christopher AhnAllen, a clinical psychologist who developed the Gender Diversity Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts.
AhnAllen said some of his own patients have expressed concerns about the recent anti-trans legislation and debates.
While most legislation applies only to new patients, proposals in some states — including South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Kentucky — require youth currently receiving care to stop, effectively forcing them to detransition.
“Detransitioning is going to exacerbate gender dysphoria and collectively lead to poor health outcomes,” AhnAllen said.
In 2020, the Idaho legislature passed the country’s first statewide law banning transgender student athletes from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Florida’s 2022 “Don’t Say Gay” law was the first enacted in the country in 20 years, restricting school employees from discussing gender identity and sexual orientation. Similar proposals in over a dozen states followed.
The American Civil Liberties Union tallied over 200 anti-LGBTQ+ bills relating to schools and education proposed by state legislators this year.
“Following a year of unprecedented book bans and classroom gag orders, this state legislation is not surprising,” said LGBTQ+ youth activist Cameron Samuels. Now a freshman at Brandeis University, they led a successful effort, along with the ACLU, to reverse book bans and internet censorship at their high school in Katy, Texas.
For years, the Katy Independent School District had blocked online resources like the Trevor Project, the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBTQ+ advocacy groups with a “human sexuality” filter, according to the Houston Chronicle. The school also removed “books upon books” touching on topics like LGBTQ+ identities and race, Samuels said. Classroom censorship bills proposed across the country aim to do the same — but at a statewide level.
“These policies are not just political statements but affect our very lives each and every day,” Samuels said. “It could be a matter of life and death whether a student can access a suicide prevention lifeline like the Trevor Project.”
LGBTQ+ students’ need for these resources could rise as advocacy groups track an increase in hostile educational environments.
A 2021 study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network also found negative impacts on trans youth as a result of anti-trans legislation. Its recent research on school climates suggests the nationwide debates over trans rights have created more hostile attitudes toward LGBTQ+ students.
“Trans and nonbinary young people in schools who have been targeted by these athletic bans and medical bans have reported higher rates of things like bullying and harassment,” said Aaron Ridings, GLSEN chief of staff and deputy executive director for public policy and research.
Ridings said GLSEN research shows that four supports are critical for LGBTQ+ students. These include curriculum that represents all students, youth leadership clubs like Gay-Straight Alliances, comprehensive anti-discrimination policies and a network of supportive adults.
“These four supports improve school climate, student health and academic achievement,” Ridings said.
But those supports would be restricted under numerous bills proposed in state legislatures.
Some have already passed this year. Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa and Kentucky enacted so-called “bathroom bans,” which prohibit trans students from using restrooms that align with their gender identities. Wyoming and Kentucky banned trans girls from participating in interscholastic girls’ sports.
New laws in Utah and Arkansas prevent schools from acknowledging trans students’ gender identities, including preferred name and pronouns, without written parental permission. An Indiana bill would require school staff — including school psychologists — to notify a parent if their student requests to use a different name or pronoun.
In late March, the Kentucky General Assembly overrode Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of an omnibus anti-trans bill, which included prohibiting schools from requiring the use of preferred pronouns. The policy also bans lessons “studying or exploring gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation.”
Samuels, who is studying politics, said the students being affected by these anti-LGBTQ+ policies do not have an equal voice on school boards and in state legislatures. This has led to policy decisions being made “at the expense of students.”
“If we are proposing legislation that will harm a certain group of people, no matter how large or how small, it’s an attack on all of us, because this could happen to any community,” Samuels said.
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Maryuri embarked on her three-month journey from Venezuela to the U.S. in July 2022, crossing nine borders on crutches with a broken foot.
She traveled with her son, now 9 years old. Their path included traversing the often deadly Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.
She fled an economic crisis that left her unable to afford basic necessities like food and antibiotics, under the shadow of the Venezuelan government’s human rights abuses. Public Integrity is not publishing Maryuri’s full name to protect the safety of her and her family.
Soon after arriving in Texas in October, Maryuri and her son boarded a bus bound for D.C. where she hoped “to prosper, not just survive.”
Instead, Maryuri said she has struggled to access quality food, stable and clean housing, work opportunities and affordable health care because of her migrant status.
Maryuri and her son are among at least 9,400 Latin American migrants who have been voluntarily bused to D.C. from Texas and Arizona in the past year. The approximately 12% who stay in the city face similar challenges as Maryuri, according to advocacy groups, which are pushing for more long-term solutions.
“We are being penalized for being poor and this goes against the definition of sanctuary that this city supposedly claims to be,” Maryuri told the D.C. Council on Feb. 23.
The Migrant Services and Supports Act passed late last year authorized D.C.’s mayor to establish programs for the arriving migrants, including the Office of Migrant Services. The new division supports bus reception, immediate care of new arrivals, temporary housing and, if desired, transportation to other destinations.
The city should “absolutely” have an office and accompanying legislation that provides services to migrants, said Eli Johnson, executive director of Congregation Action Network, which has been working with the migrants since the first buses arrived. However, the current system “is very focused on short-term emergency services and not long-term resettlement services,” Johnson said.
The act bars those eligible for aid through the Office of Migrant Services from resources provided to unhoused people in the district under homeless services law. This includes long-term housing and childcare vouchers.
“There should be no immigration-based restrictions on any services in the city,” Johnson said.
An emergency amendment to the migrant services law was enacted in late April to clarify who is eligible for aid, require written denials and set shelter safety standards. But these policies are set to expire later this summer. A proposed extension is awaiting congressional review.
“We are still evaluating what a permanent support system for migrants coming to D.C. should look like,” said Councilmember Robert White, who introduced the legislation.
After arriving last fall, Maryuri and her son moved into one of the three shelters the city set up for migrants with children. These facilities reached capacity on April 26, with about 1,250 people across 370 families, according to city officials.
The city is keeping the shelters closed despite having open rooms, said Madhvi Venkatraman, a core organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network, which was formed in response to the buses. MSMAN reported the facilities now house 359 families.
Venkatraman estimated that there are about 20 migrant families in Washington currently without housing.
“There are definitely a bunch of families sleeping in cars or some that are out in the streets that we don’t know of because not everybody knows [about MSMAN],” she said.
Those who are staying in the family shelters have experienced “dirty and dangerous” conditions like bed bugs and mold, Maryuri said.
The food is sometimes raw or rotten, she said. Maryuri and her son have experienced stomach aches, diarrhea and hair loss.
“I live without appetite and without energy due to the malnutrition that we are experiencing in the [shelter] due to the poor quality of the food we receive,” Maryuri told the council in February.
But council members, including White, who visited the shelters in March saw a different picture. He said the rooms he was shown were clean and OMS staff “made it sound like they had responded to issues with food” and other necessities.
“But the fact that what I saw on my visit contrasts so strongly with what I’ve heard directly from migrants and advocates makes me believe the emergency legislation is even more important to ensure our agencies are clear on the services and resources they are required to provide,” White said.
Shelter residents told Johnson that the visiting council members were taken to a room that had been cleaned in anticipation of the visit. It was made to look “much better than what the migrants are actually living in,” Johnson said.
Migrants without families rely on short stays at homeless shelters and volunteers’ houses, Venkatraman said. For long-term options, advocacy groups try to find cheap apartments. Venkatraman said MSMAN sometimes pays the first month’s rent, furnishes apartments and even co-signs leases. But that’s not sustainable in a city with housing costs 50% higher than the national average.
“We can’t put up people indefinitely in housing, we don’t have the resources,” Venkatraman said.
Finding a job that will cover D.C.’s high cost of living has been a struggle for many migrants, Johnson said. Most lack the permits required to work in the U.S.
Those who work without authorization are vulnerable to unhealthy conditions and wage theft, which MSMAN has seen “rampant amounts of,” Venkatraman said.
While the district offers a limited purpose ID for residents who do not have a social security number, Venkatraman said many recent migrants do not have the required documentation. That means they can’t work, open bank accounts, sign leases, apply for health insurance or get married — which can be important for asylum applications.
“It is truly an uphill battle,” Venkatraman said.
“There’s upfront issues of conditions and the services [the district is] not providing, but the scarier, bigger issue is there’s no long-term plan for these folks,” she said.
No line item in the D.C. budget accounts for the Office of Migrant Services, Venkatraman said, so the services are being funded on contingency. This offers less transparency and is unreliable — shelters and services could abruptly end, Venkatraman said. The mayor’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year does not include funding for OMS.
In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson from the D.C. Department of Human Services said all statements regarding OMS are currently on hold.
While buses continue to arrive in Washington, it is not the only city struggling to accommodate migrants. New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently implemented plans to transport willing migrants to locations outside of the city. On May 23, he announced a court filing seeking to suspend the long-standing “right to shelter” mandate that requires the city to provide temporary accommodations to anyone seeking it. Chicago officials have resorted to using police stations and community centers to temporarily house hundreds of people.
Despite the recent expiration of Title 42 — a COVID-19 era policy that allowed the U.S. to expel asylum seekers without due process — many migrants will still not qualify for asylum in the U.S. because a new regulation requires anyone who passes through another country to seek refuge there first.
“It’s extra important that local jurisdictions provide services to people even if they’re not here with authorization,” Johnson said. “Because we’re turning away refugees en masse at the border, so this is people’s only option.”
The post As migrant busing continues, advocates push for long-term solutions appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
Months after a catastrophic Norfolk Southern train derailment changed their lives and communities forever, residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding area feel “numb,” lied to, and abandoned. On Tues, May 30, TRNN hosted a solidarity livestream and pledge drive to raise money and secure much-needed supplies for residents living in and around East Palestine. We spoke directly with residents living in and around East Palestine about what they and their families are going through, what assistance they are (or are not) receiving from the government and from Norfolk Southern, and what we can all do to help.
Fundraiser and information links:
Studio Production: David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. On February 3rd, 2023, around 9:00 PM at night, residents of East Palestine, Ohio in the surrounding area had their lives changed forever. A Norfolk Southern train on its way from Madison, Illinois to Conway, Pennsylvania, a train carrying over 100,000 gallons of toxic materials derailed and all hell, as they say, broke loose from there to be exact. 38 of the trains, 150 cars derailed from the track running through the town, which had at the time a population of 4,700. The derailment caused a fire. Eyewitnesses said it looked like the entire town and even the sky itself was on fire and residents in the immediate area of the crash site were told to evacuate days later on February 6th, fearing the damage that an uncontrolled explosion involving the train’s, contents and shrapnel from exploding rail cars could cause Government officials at the urging of Norfolk Southern approved a plan to conduct a controlled release and burn of hazardous chemicals, namely vinyl chloride contained within five of the rail cars and we all saw what happened next.
Like a hellish volcano, the controlled burn created a massive black death plume, spewing hydrogen chloride and fosen into the air. The controlled burns were approved by the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania, but the Federal Environmental Protection Agency claims it did not sign off on the plan. Though Norfolk Southern claims, the E P A was involved in the discussions at the time. In the nightmarish aftermath, residents’ lives have been completely turned upside down. Entire families have been uprooted from their homes with many having to live in hotels or wherever they can find shelter, unable to return home at a fear of exposure to chemicals that were spilled into the water and soil from the derailment and spewed into the air from the controlled burn. Even though government and company officials have claimed the air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink, residents have continuously reported negative health effects from skin rashes, headaches, and dizzy spells to nausea, diarrhea, shortness of breath and mouth numbness, farm animals, pets and crops have been contaminated.
Property values have plummeted, local businesses have shuttered or are barely surviving. All the while frustrated residents report feeling lied to, misled, disregarded and abandoned by Norfolk Southern and by their state and federal governments and their ongoing nightmare has been gradually forgotten by the national media. It’s going to take a long time to fully appraise the damage of this train derailment on the local population, on rail workers and first responders and on the environment. But like many of you, I have a terrifying suspicion that for the past four months we have all born witness to the unfolding of a disaster that will be a black putrid stain in our history books. Life for the People of East Palestine and the surrounding areas in Ohio and Pennsylvania will never be the same. That’s what you need to remember always, no matter how much money Norfolk Southern throws at the problem it caused, and Norfolk Southern, by the way, made a 3.24 billion in revenue last year.
It can never buy back the life that it stole from these people. No matter how much politicians and the media want to move on and return to normal people living in and around East Palestine working people, they can never return to normal. This is their reality now. They have been irrevocably Unforgivably failed by Norfolk Southern and by their governments. If you listen to a recent episode of my podcast Working People, which we also publish here at The Real News, then you already have a sense of how deep this failure goes. On that recent episode, I have the honor of speaking with three women living in and around East Palestine, Ashley McCullum, Kayla Miller and Christina Selo about what their families and their communities are going through, how they are banding together to provide mutual aid for one another, and what we can all do to help.
What they told me frankly was harrowing. They are running out of drinkable water. Their children are understandably traumatized. They are still waiting on results for tests on their water supplies if they even got their water tested in the first place. There is so much more that is needed to begin the process of repairing the damage that has been done to this community. And clearly the people that are supposedly in charge of this situation from Norfolk Southern to the government are not doing enough. And that is why after we finished recording that recent episode of my podcast, I spoke with Christina, Ashley and Kayla about how we would try to do everything we could here at The Real News to lift up their stories and to help get their stories out there to our audience and to encourage as many folks as we possibly could to listen to them, to hear what they and their families and their communities are going through to hear what they need and what they’re not getting and what and to hear what we can all do to support them.
So that’s what we’re going to do today on this urgent Real News live stream. You’re going to get to hear directly from the incredible brave folks of the East Palestine Unity Council, a number of whom we had on that recent podcast episode, as well as some other residents who have agreed to come on and will be joining us later in the live livestream. We’re also going to be hearing from the great Matt Weaver of Railroad Workers United, and we’re going to talk about how everything that we covered last year, the intense reporting we did on the crisis, on the nation’s freight railroads by talking to railroad workers like Matt Relentlessly. You guys know myself and my colleague Mel Buer have been doing that work for about a year and a half now, and if people had listened to the railroad workers, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this situation, but we’ll get to all that in a minute.
The point I want to make, and I promise then I will shut up and I will bring in our incredible guests, is that we are here to listen and to offer as much support and mutual aid as we can. That is the goal of tonight, and I am so grateful to all of you for caring about this, for tuning in and for helping us spread the words. So please, before we get going, go to the description of this YouTube live stream. There you will find a list of links that we have collected that include GoFundMe for the individual families that you will hear from on this call, as well as general GoFundMe that have been organized and vetted by the East Palestine Unity Council. Also information about how you could donate to individual individuals on this call as well as participate in a resource drive for essential things like bottled water ahead of a June 3rd shipment that so Mama Official is bringing to East Palestine.
So you will find the information on how to donate to those different drives and fundraisers in the description for this video. I’ll remind folks throughout the stream that those links are there, but I just wanted to let everyone know upfront that that’s where you can find them as you watch this stream. All right, so enough from me, we know the basics of why we’re here and we’ve got about an hour and 20 minutes to give y’all access to the people who are living on the front lines of this nightmare that they never asked for. And without further ado, I want to bring in our first guest whom you guys know from the recent podcast episode that I mentioned. Christina Selo is a member of the East Palestine Unity Council, but she is representing residents living on the Pennsylvania side of the border, and residents in Pennsylvania have been sorely underrepresented in this story and in the relief efforts as Christina can tell you in a second.
But of course we know that when you know that massive black plume of smoke, toxic smoke rose out of the derailment site, it’s not as if all those chemicals just stayed on the Ohio side of the border. So it’s really important to sort of understand that this is not an issue that is only applying to red states or blue states or that somehow only certain people living in certain parts of the affected area matter. Here we’re trying to do what we can to get as much aid to as many people as we can as possible. So Christina, I wanted to bring you in here and first of all, thank you for joining us and ask if you could introduce yourself to the good livestream viewers and listeners and in about say five minutes, if you could just say a little bit about your experience of the derailment and what life has been like for you and your family in the nearly four months since that fateful day. On February 3rd,
Christina Siceloff:
It was about nine o’clock at night and I saw a post on social media about the trained derailment in East Palestine and rushed outside with my dad to see if we could see anything. And we live in the middle of the woods so we could see through the trees and going up over the trees, a wall of fire and smoke going up into the air. At that point, we thought that the whole town of East Palestine was on fire, so we started calling neighbors and until about four o’clock in the morning I was up trying to figure out if we should leave at that point even. And then I ended up going to bed and hoping that everything was going to be okay through the night.
Then a couple days later, I was getting my son ready for school, actually the Monday after I was getting my son ready for school, whenever I heard on social media that the train cars might be detonated. So I decided that I wasn’t going to send him to school because I was concerned that if they locked down and then sent the kids home that I wouldn’t be able to get to him or get back home to get my dad. So instead we decided that we were going to get enough food for our animals and ourselves and come home in case we ended up getting put on a shelter in place order. As the day went on around, it was around three 30 that they were supposed to do the controlled release. And so we were at home, we were still debating on leaving or not trying to call friends and family outside of the area.
We weren’t really sure how far we should go. We did not have an evacuation order where I’m at. So it was kind of like you go on your own dime if you want to put it that way. So we ended up staying home because we couldn’t get ahold of anybody to know where we could go and we thought, well, if we stay here, we’re going to see what happens and see if we’re going to get blown away. So afterwards, even later on that same night, I started getting sore throat, coughing, headache and that sort of symptoms and even more symptoms continued to last even up till now. The past week has been a little bit better with symptoms, but from what we understand, they have not been working on the contaminated soil and things like that because of a fair that was going on in town.
So since this morning I’ve started coughing again, have a little bit of a headache, things like that, as since the controlled release we’ve had, my whole family has had all kinds of symptoms, headaches, our throats have been sore, itchy eyes, burning eyes, congestion, vomiting, diarrhea, all kinds of stuff. And I’m afraid when my kid goes outside to play, I don’t know if he’s playing in contaminated grass. We don’t go to the park that we used to go to anymore because it’s in East Palestine. Even going to parks around where I’m at, we don’t really go there anymore because every time I go around places, even in the area, I end up getting a headache. Coughing makes it hard to breathe, especially when it’s hot or out. But ever since then, life has really changed.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I Christina, before I move on, I meant to ask if you could just, I was very grateful to you, Kayla and Ashley for spending so much time with me on that podcast recording that we did, and I was also really glad that we got a chance to talk a little bit about what life was like for you all before the derailment and not defining you and your family and your communities by just this awful thing that has happened to you. I was wondering, before we move on, if you could just say a little bit about your life and roots there near East Palestine.
Christina Siceloff:
So I grew up in this area. My parents got divorced when I was really little, so my dad’s lived in the same house for the last 40 years, but my mom and I have a brother and myself. We moved to another neighboring town and I grew up there most of my life. And then in 2010 I think it was, I moved back here. Since then, I’ve lived in this area and never wanted to leave this area. I consider, well the area I’m near, I consider Pittsburgh my home. It’s all I’ve ever known. And now it’s like since the derailment has happened, you don’t want to leave, but you kind of feel forced to because if you stay, are you going to continue being sick forever? I also wanted to raise my kid here because I really liked the area. I liked that he can go outside and explore. He has always played up at the park in East Palestine, and I like the people in East Palestine too. They’re nice people, they’re welcoming people. You go to the park and people will share their life story with you. So now everybody you talk to, it’s you end up sharing your story of the derailment, not just your life story. But
I don’t know if I want to continue to stay here yet because I feel like it would be safer to leave for my kids’ sake.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, I’m just, I’m going to say it a billion times over the course of this live stream, but I’m just so incredibly sorry that y’all are going through this and that you don’t deserve this goes without saying, but needs to be said anyway. And I’m really excited to see other familiar faces on this live stream as well as new faces. And I’m grateful to all of you for making time for joining this livestream and sharing your stories with our audience and letting them know what you’re going through and what they can do to help. And so before we go to Kayla, who y’all also heard on that recent Working People podcast episode, I see we got Stella on the line. And Stella, I wanted to bring you in here. First of all, hello, great to meet you in person, but wanted to thank you for joining us on the live stream and ask if you could pick up kind of where Christina left off in about five minutes. If you could tell us a bit about yourself and your life and roots in East Palestine, your kind of experience of the derailment and what life has been like for you in the nearly four months since then,
Stella Gamble:
Or the area, the surrounding area. Most of my life, the house we live in was my husband’s family for three generations. I have nine granddaughters and I have three foster children and I have a daughter that’s a disabled veteran that still lives at home. And our house was always the center of the holidays. All the birthday parties, we have a backyard pool and everybody went swimming and when there were any problems, the grandchildren always knew that they had a home and they had a place to go. And after this derailment, I get violently ill if I’m in town now, it’s as little as 15 minutes that I’m in there. I start to feel my arms tangled. I get very dizzy and lethargic and confused and I get diarrhea. I get really bad headaches and two of my foster kids get headaches and nose bleeds. Now it doesn’t affect my husband the same way that it affects me. And he goes into town and takes care of the animals and takes care of the lawn and so on. And he tells me all the irises are up or you should see the rhubarb. I don’t know whether we should eat it or not.
We can’t go home and my grandkids can’t come there. One Memorial Day this year, we always have a big party and a big picnic in our backyard. We’ve got one daughter living in Lisbon and one’s living in East Liverpool and we’re in Hanover 10. And it was like, where are we going to go to have a picnic? Should we go to a state park somewhere? Not our whole lives have been completely uprooted. And the worst part about it is that we don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to go home. They told us that once they dug up this chemical pit where they had burnt those chemicals and once they dug up the toxic soil along the tracks that the air would be better and there wouldn’t be any dust and everything would be safe to go home. There’s 240 tons of that stuff piled up in East Palestine.
It’s two stories high and a mile long. They have to load all of that. And now they just came out with the E P A reported, they found 11 roll off containers full of asbestos that they have to dispose of. It’s not going to be safe for a while. They’re still polluting the water. There was a video taken yesterday, Rick Cha, a doctor from East Palestine, went out and took a video of the creeks. They are completely, the whole top of them is covered in chemicals. It’s not cleaned up and is it ever going to be cleaned up? We don’t know. So until then, we just have to live one day at a time and stay in hotels. And we rented a house. The house was rented. We could rent it for the whole month all except for one week because it was already rented. So we had to pack up all the kids and all the stuff and move to a hotel for a week. Then you have to pack up and move back again. Or you’re in the hotel and Hey, you guys got to leave Saturday, we’re booked up on Saturdays. It’s an absolutely horrible existence. And the kids trying to drive them back and forth to school or trying to get ’em to do online school, just been a nightmare.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, that’s genuinely, I don’t know, I can barely even wrap my head around this and what y’all are going through. And it is a nightmare.
Stella Gamble:
It’s United States of America and the worst part about it, and through all of this stuff in all of these months, the people from all around this country have sent us caravans of water. They’ve sent food, they’ve sent money, they’ve sent blankets, they’ve sent all this stuff. And you know what we’ve gotten from our state, federal and local government, not even a bottle of water. They, we’ve had some politicians come in and get their picture taken and then they leave. We have got not one thing from our government, not one bit of help, nothing at all. And this is the United States of America. We’re 4,500 poor people and we’re going to fight the 58 billion railroad. Not going to happen. It was the battle that was lost before we started it, but some of us still have to keep the fight on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, that’s really powerfully put. So before we move on, because Kayla, I want to bring you in here in a sec, but as I mentioned when I got to record that podcast with Kayla, Christina and Ashley, they each gave it started by each of them kind of giving their own account of the night of the derailment. And I just wanted to ask, since we’ve got you, if you wanted to share your experience of that terrible night with viewers and listeners.
Stella Gamble:
Well, the night of the derailment, I was in bed and my husband called me downstairs and he said, look over there. He said, something’s going on and you could see the flames from our porch. And so of course we got on social media and then we heard on the news that there was an evacuation. They wanted everybody to evacuate their homes and go to the high school, the high school’s, two or three blocks from where we live. So he’s getting the foster kids and the granddaughters gathered up and he said, come on. He said, we’re going to evacuate. And I said, well, I’m not going anywhere. And he said, what do you mean? He said, we have to evacuate. And I said, would you please explain to me how the air at the high school that’s two and a half blocks away is any different than it is in our house?
So the next day they evacuated the town and we went to a hotel, and one of the things that’ll always stick in my mind is my granddaughters were talking with one of their friends, they’re 14 years old. And I said, well, where we were in the hotel room, we’re laying on the bed munching and talking. And I said, where did she go? And they said, well, grandma, she didn’t go anywhere. Her dad made her go to the attic. And I said, what do you mean she didn’t go anywhere? And she said, well, he didn’t get his paycheck yet, and he didn’t have enough gas to leave town and didn’t have any money to go anywhere. If he did get out of town, they evacuated that town. But how many other people, I mean, that’s part of Appalachia, that’s a poor area that the towns poor.
Their average incomes like $29,000 a year. How many other people didn’t have the gas to get their kid or their kids or themselves out of that town? How many old people, elderly people, I mean, I’m old myself, but I’m just saying how many elderly people that didn’t have transportation or didn’t have a way out, they didn’t bring a bus around and say, Hey, if you don’t have a car or if you don’t have gas money or if you don’t have any family to help you, we’re here to help you out. They put that evacuation order up and that was it. And that little girl to this day is still, she’s probably a thousand feet from where that train railed. And she talks to my daughters all the time about how sick her cat is. And she’s been exposed to that since day one. Never had a break from it. And every day of my life, I wonder how many other kids, kids are there that the same thing happened and they’re still being exposed. She didn’t have enough gas. He didn’t have enough gas to get her out to town.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s not often, I mean, folks who watch this network know that I talk a lot. I always have a lot to say, I’m genuinely at a loss for words and I can’t forgive any of these companies or entities for what they’ve done to you and your neighbors. I don’t know if it’s, I’m overwhelmed with sadness and heartbreak or rage or both. But again, I wanted to remind everyone that if you join the live stream after my introduction, I will remind folks periodically through this stream that we have included a list of links to fundraisers and donation drives in the description for the video that you’re watching right now on YouTube. So if you click on the description of this video, you will find those various fundraisers and donation drive links. So please give whatever you can spread the word however you can, as we say all the time here at The Real News, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.
So please do something. And Kayla, I’m great to see you again. I wish we were seeing each other under less horrifying circumstances, but I wanted to bring you in here. And then Matt, I’m I’m going to bring you in after that. So yeah, I guess for folks who haven’t had a chance to listen to that podcast episode that we all did together, I was wondering if you could take a few minutes to introduce yourself to the folks watching say a bit about your life and roots in the East Palestine area, your experience of the derailment on February 3rd, and what life has been like for you and your family in the months since.
Kayla Miller:
Well, my name’s Kayla Miller. I live three and a half miles from the derailment in Negley, Ohio. I have a homestead. I have three young children who I’m raising here. I was born and raised here. I know every road in the county. I know just about everybody around here. I make my money off of my land. I live off my land. And that’s not happening right now. And it’s a huge blow and I’m going to apologize in advance. Cause today has been a really hard day. I’m getting tired. This is the hardest fight I’ve ever had to deal with my entire life.
That’s why I apologized The night of the derailment, I heard it through social media because the emergency response to the public was subpar. That’s how most of us found out was through word of mouth from people firsthand experiencing it. So I heard about it on social media and one of my friends who was staying with me at the time, we jumped in his car and we drove up to see what was going on. He works at one of the stores close by and he just wanted to make sure that the store was okay because he helped run it. So we went up there and it was terrifying. It was absolutely terrifying. The flames were massive. Everything looked like it was on fire. The smell took your breath away. And at the time we didn’t know that there was chemicals. If we would’ve known, we would’ve never have went.
Not a million years. We just assumed that it was a derailment. Things catch fire. And there was also word that they had crashed into one of our local gas station storage tanks. And we kind of assumed that that was from, but once I smelt that smell, I knew something was drastically wrong. And we did end up getting out of there pretty quickly after that. And it was utter chaos. There was firetrucks flying everywhere. It didn’t seem like they knew what they were doing. And now that we found out, they really didn’t know what they were doing. It was utter, utter chaos. There have been text messages now put in the public eye that our fire chief literally was told to treat it like a house fire and he had to sit back and just watch it burn. That’s the extent of the organization that night.
I still have not got my results back from my first well test from the health Department and Norfolk Southern, they took those tests on April 17th. Now granted, they did try to take my tests. I think it was the beginning of March because I am in the zone for the well testing because I live right beside Decontaminated Creek, Leslie Run. So I have been offered the well testing, have not received my first round. They’ve already scheduled me for my second round, but yet I still haven’t received the first round. They are refusing to give us soil samples down here, and not everybody in my town is getting the well, the well testing. It’s only the people that live close to the creek. And it’s extremely frustrating because these chemicals, they don’t know boundaries. They don’t know that what their zones are that they’re allowed to go in and where they’re not like this stuff’s everywhere and these chemicals are bioaccumulative, so it’s only going to get worse. I have fought for 13 years to get the life that I have now. My life is pretty good. And I feel like that night in an instance, it got ripped away.
The life that I wanted for my kids could very well be gone because we may have to leave. My kids have been sick since this happened off and on. Same thing that Christina was talking about. Diarrhea, fever, vomiting, respiratory. It’s ongoing and it’s exhausting. I’m normally pretty good with these interviews, but like I said, today has been a hard day. I’ve kind of had to unplug because it gets overwhelming.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, Jesus. I mean, I remember remarking when we were recording that podcast together, I said, I don’t know how you guys are all holding it together. And you guys admitted to me, you’re like, it comes in waves, man, some days I can hold it together. Other days. I can’t mean you’re a human being who doesn’t deserve this. And I mean, thank you. I want to thank you for sharing with us even though you are feeling this way. And I’m so incredibly sorry for everything that has happened to you. And of course, if at any point you need to exit the call, we will continue to plug the fundraiser, which y’all can find for Kayla’s family. In the description for this YouTube video, you can also find information about how to donate supplies like bottled water to suit Mama official, whom Kayla works closely. Kayla, Kayla is deeply involved in that. And there is a new shipment of supplies coming to East Palestine on June 3rd. So if you want to contribute to that donation drive, again, there’s a link in the description of this video that’ll show you how to do that. And I guess I want to make a plea to everyone watching that.
Don’t just watch this and feel bad and close the window because I remember Marcus Derby union worker, who was on strike through most of last year, who we also had on a livestream here at The Real News a few months ago that was a strike at C N H Industrial in Iowa. Something Marcus said always stuck with me where he said it was in the dead of winter in December, I believe, when we had that cold snap in the Midwest and it was bitterly cold. And Marcus and his coworkers were still out on the picket line on strike. And he said to the people watching the stream, and to me, he said, look, when this live stream is over, this is still my life. I’m still on strike.
Take that for what it is. But please understand that if you get to go home and rest easily and not worry about where your next meal’s coming from or whether or not your kids can play in the grass without being poisoned, just don’t take that for granted. And don’t forget that this is what everyone over there in and around East Palestine is going through. So do whatever you can to donate to their fundraisers to spread the word about their fundraisers. If you yourself can’t donate, send it to 10 people and mobilize your community to contribute whatever you can to get the folks of East Palestine and the surrounding area what they desperately need. And again, the links where you can donate are in the description of the video here. We’re going to go around the table again in a few minutes to talk about that side of things, the mutual aid side, what has been done on the ground, what folks there on the ground need most of all.
But I also wanted to impress upon everyone that these stories, this pain, this heartbreak, this unforgivable catastrophe, this avoidable catastrophe, this didn’t just happen. This isn’t just some freak accident that tragically be fell a town in Ohio. If you watched and listened to our relentless coverage of the crisis on the freight railroads last year here at The Real News, if you watched and listened to and read our interview after interview after interview with railroad workers, that this was avoidable and who’s responsible for this? Because railroad workers warned us that something like this was inevitable. If the greedy practices of the rail carriers and their Wall Street shareholders were not reigned in if they’re bought off lackeys in the government, didn’t start doing their goddamn jobs, pardon my language, and regulate these companies the way that they should put an end to their greedy practices that are sucking all of the profits generated by railroad workers.
And instead of reinvesting that into essential safety measures, track maintenance, more people checking the cars and checking the track, more people manning those trains, making sure those trains are not nearly as long carrying as many hazardous materials as they are today. All of this stuff contributed to the catastrophe in East Powells theme. And then we have five more derailments the next week. The derailments are still happening. They’re just not as horrible as the one that happened on February 3rd. When I was recording that podcast with Christina, Ashley and Kayla, another derailment in their area had just happened. Another rail car was on fire and I almost lost my shit. And so I say all that because I want to bring in a familiar face to real news viewers, the great Matt Weaver who is a longtime with the brotherhood of maintenance and way employees. Matt is also working with Railroad Workers United.
Matt was the first person that I interviewed after the Norfolk Southern derailment in a sort of reactive podcast. So what the hell is happening and how does this connect back to everything we’ve been talking about with railroad workers over the past year and a half? So Matt, I want to bring you in here. So obviously you’re not living in East Palestine, but you are in Ohio. You are the legislative rep for your union in the State House there. You’ve worked on the railroads for many years. I wanted to ask if you could first introduce yourself or reintroduce yourself to the Real news viewers and listeners talk, remind them a little bit. We don’t have to go into the whole thing because we don’t have that much time, but remind them a little bit about all the crap we were talking about on the railroads last year and how that was all playing in your mind when you were watching the catastrophe in East Palestine. What should folks see in that catastrophe that you see as a veteran?
Kayla Miller:
Well, thanks again Max for the opportunity to join you. And my heart goes out to all the ladies who’ve spoken and we’ve heard the personal problems they’ve had. It’s really terrible. So my name is Matt Weaver. I have been working for the railroad 28 and a half years. I hired on in 1994, and I usually don’t say the name of my employer because whistleblower retaliation is alive and well in the industry. So I have been vocal and active legislatively and contractually. So I’ve filed enough grievances to get our guys nearly 5 million for contract violations. And right after the derailment I headed over to East Palestine and was there for the town hall where Erin Brockovich was, and I got to meet with her in the middle of it. And we’ve been talking about our workers there who also were on the job site with leather gloves in these chemicals.
And all along, I mean when we first talked, I had asked you if you had known why they collected all of this in a line ditch and why did they light it on fire instead of TA putting in tanks. And now we see the EPA last week saying, oh, we didn’t allow that. Or they’re the finger pointings beginning and everyone’s getting lawyers now. And it’s like, boy, oh boy, this doesn’t sound good for the residents, the people in the area. And especially when you talk about the dioxins that were created when it went and they all went downwind. So there’s a lot of people that are contaminated with this stuff and we need to know more, so we need good answers. I’m surprised hearing the young lady who said she hasn’t got testing back from April, what’s that all about? How is that a just and genuine response to take care of people?
Yeah, so our members, brotherhood of maintenance way, employees division of the Teamsters, build and maintain America’s railroad track, bridges and buildings. Currently, I’m a carpenter foreman. I was actually painting today. We put new replacement windows in that kind of stuff. But I’ve been on all the track and bridge b and b jobs on my railroad, and we’ve seen a lot of, as a result of precision scheduled railroading, the Hunter Harrison, bless his heart business mantra of Do more with less. And now really it’s do less with less because we’re not moving as much freight as we used to. There’s lot call it the economy, call it whatever. But I would have a good conversation with you about the railroads being a great cause of this inflation. We’re seeing profit margins, stock buybacks instead of reinvesting in infrastructure. Rail labor is down 30% in the last decade, and we’re seeing a tremendous, like I said, railroad workers united@railroadworkersunited.org.
We predicted this was like, if you’re not fixing it, it it’s bandaids on broken legs and something bad is going to happen. And with this round of bargaining, we saw that where we had terrible attendance policies continue to be the status quo. Engineers and conductors have terrible work hours on call and no defined time off and stuff like that. It’s gotten better most recently after the contract was stuffed on our throats. But in general, it’s a rough road. Ahoe being a railroad worker, I mean, sure the pay is decent, but these days our pay increases haven’t kept up with inflation and there is no cost of living in our contracts. So the people have really seen with your help, the voice of rail labor and the problems we’re facing right now, and really it’s all of the working class and we need to express that it’s class conflict in America, and it’s not union or non-union. The working class being devastated by the donor class. They’re pulling all the strings on the politicians through campaign finance and lobbying, and our voice is muffled out, you’re, how much is your vote worth when they’re throwing millions of dollars at politicians? It’s very frustrating.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You know, said something to me, Matt, when we recorded that podcast in the immediate wake of the derailment in East Palestine on February 3rd. I mean, you and I got on the horn maybe three, four days after that. And you said something to that effect that also really stuck with me where you said, these trains, these three mile long trains carrying just hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic materials and so on and so forth. They’re not passing through the backyards of the rich enclaves in this country. They are going through our towns. I mean there, there’s the CSX terminal here in Baltimore. The entire surrounding area is a sacrifice zone. They’ve had explosions there, they’ve poisoned residents. This is happening in poor and working class communities. It’s your roads that are being stopped up with these massive trains that make you late for work. It is your neighborhoods.
We heard on this live stream, people who lived a thousand feet away from the crash site. Is that happening to Warren Buffet? Who owns BNSF Railway? Is that happening to Joseph r Biden, Donald J. Trump? No, it’s not happening to them. It’s happening to us. Meanwhile, they are the ones making mad Bank off of all of this. They are the ones on the industry side, cutting the workforce year after year after year, making these trains less safe because it’s more profitable for them driving workers into the ground, making them more tired, fatigued, not giving them paid sick days, not letting them see their families. That’s obviously going to have an impact on the quality of service. Whether that means that more people, as we have been seeing and reporting on more people are leaving the industry, even if they’ve accrued 10, 15 or more years of seniority and retirement benefits, they can’t take it anymore.
And so think of that brain drain, all that accrued knowledge and skill that is leaving the railroads, all of the infrastructure that is being left to rot. And we’re being told that like, oh, we could just sort of replace those human beings with some technological detectors that’ll let us know. And when there’s a problem, well, those hot box detectors detected a problem as this train was careening towards East Palestine. And look what happened, it still caused this catastrophe. So you guys have heard me scream and yell about the railroads many, many times before. So I promise our other livestream guests that I’m not going to do it more now, but I just wanted y’all to remember that anger and frustration and that righteous anger that we all felt last year when Matt and his brothers and sisters and siblings across the different unions representing over a hundred thousand workers on the freight rail system, were fighting tooth and nail to get what they deserve.
To stop this madness, this Wall Street led madness that has destroyed our supply chain, that has destroyed the workers who make it run all for the sake of their bottom line. I want you to take that anger, harness that anger, and fuse it with the heartbreak and anger and pain that you are feeling for and with the residents of East Palestine in the surrounding area. Because again, as a class, like Matt said, as a class of poor working people, people who care about one another, people who are not in the order giving class, but we are in the order taking class, it is our job to band together and stand up against this and to reach out and to build those bonds of solidarity between the railroad workers, the residents, the other people working and living in the area and beyond. So I’m why, I’m really, really grateful to have Matt on this live stream with us. And please, as he said, go to Railroad Workers United, follow them on social media, subscribe to their newsletter because that is where you’re going to get the best and most important information about what’s going on on the railroads and how you yourself can be part of the solution that they are fighting for. Matt, go for it. And then I’ll, I at one
Matt Weaver:
Point that I have to make it, to me, it’s really obvious. We don’t want these chemicals and these materials on the highways, and we can’t have a different pipeline for every different chemical individually a grid across America. So we want it on the rail, but we want this industry to regulate it better, to do a better job, make it safer, and take care of the people whose backyards they’re, they’re hauling this dangerous stuff through.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that is a great segue to our next incredible guest, Ashley, who’s also a member of the East Palestine Unity Council and who, if y’all listened to that working people episode that we published two weeks ago, Ashley was one of the voices that you heard on that podcast. Ashley, I believe it was you who said something during that podcast like that you had a friend who worked for the railroads who was like, you need to get out. I know what’s on those cars. You need to get out. So again, just kind of connect or is that Kayla? Oh, bye Kayla, thank you so much for joining us. And oh no, that was you. Sorry you guys can’t see me. I can see all of them, but that was Kayla whose friend worked on the railroads and said, you got to get the hell out because I know what’s on those trains.
So apologies for that. So Ashley, I want to bring you in here and first of all, thank you for joining us. I know you are incredibly busy and you got a lot going on and you guys are living through hell right now. What we were doing kind of in the first round of this live stream was going around taking about five minutes each. And just for folks who didn’t listen to that podcast and are just learning about a lot of this through this live stream, I was wondering if you could say, introduce yourself and say a little bit about your life and roots in East Palace theme. Talk to us a bit about your experience of the derailment and what life has been like for you and your family in the months after.
Ashley McCollum:
Well, I’m Ashley McCollum. I’ve lived in East Palestine for eight years. My experience overall before this happened was it was a nice close-knit kind of town. No one ever had to worry about anything. You never had to lock your doors, you had no fear at all. And then the derailment happened, and now our new fear that out of everything that you could think of is, am I going to have some kind of chemical exposure that’s going to cause my death or my family’s, or am I going to get cancer or is my home not clean good enough? Am I ever going to be able to go back?
It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions and just everything that has went on from the time of the derailment to this point, there’s been so many flaws and the way things are done, the way things are being tested, it’s just astonishing or astonishing, what we’re really being subject to and the lack of care with how it’s being done and handled and continues to be handled. I mean, we don’t want to place blame and say, well, you should have did this. You should have did that. That’s not what we want to do. We just want to start living and have our lives back.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and could you say a little bit about the night of the derailment, Ashley, because you also live very close to where the train derailed.
Ashley McCollum:
Just a normal Friday, I got done babysitting for a friend. We were kind of having the wine down. Me and my son were just hanging out. I had laundry. I was folding and getting things done. We sat down on the couch and a couple minutes later we hear sirens, which is odd for that time of night in the town, hear another round of sirens. Me and my son both jump up, we look out the front door, there’s nothing out there. We look out the back door. Soon as I open the back door, everything was lit up. It looked like the entire town was on fire. It looked like it wrapped all the way around. It was terrifying. My son started to panic, what do we do? What do we do? I said, grab what you need. Okay. So I got down to his level and I said, we’re going to leave what you want to take. So whenever he grabbed what he wanted, I wrangled up the animals. I got the car up front, called my mom, and I said, mom, I think the town’s on fire. You need to get here now to help me so I can get the rest of the animals. She came back or she came to my house and I had moved other cars because I figured if anything, maybe that would stop some more explosions happening, if that’s the case.
Everyone started to show up outside and I told people we’re going to have to evacuate. Another person said, I don’t think we’re going to have to evacuate. And I said, I think we will. And right after I said that, here comes a man telling everyone on my road, evacuate, leave. We all have to leave. So my son’s still kind of panicking and still worried about what’s going to happen. My mom called me down, we started to go and I stopped at a neighbor’s house in the corner and I asked her, I said, could you please let me know if my house catches on fire? Please let me know if it’s gone or not. And she said, I will. And right at that time, another person came and said, you have to leave too. Everything was on fire. It smelled like chemicals. It didn’t smell like a normal fire.
So we left and couldn’t sleep that night. And when my son did sleep, he was having nightmares for weeks. I probably only slept for about four hours, maybe three hours here and there. I would wake up to my son crying, saying, no, no, no. And it, it’s like a reoccurring thing. Anytime he hears something that sounds like a siren or an older style alarm clock, he panics. He’s like, mom, what do I take now? And it was unfortunate. One of the hotels we stayed at did have an alarm go off where their elevator caught on fire. He started screaming, what do I take mom? And I said, we don’t take anything. We take us because if this happens again, at least we have each other because at this point we have nothing. And I even looked at my house the last day I was there living in my home, and I looked at it and I really thought, it’s not going to be there. It’s not going to be there. It’s going to catch on fire and we’re not going to have anything. So I just started to accept that. And it still feels the same. I can’t be in my house, I can’t go to my house. I can’t remove things from my house. And I feel like that’s even more mental anguish because I don’t know what to do or where to go.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well again, we’re at an hour with the live stream now. We’ve got 30 minutes left. And y’all have heard from every one of our incredible guests so far, you’ve heard about their experience of or their understanding of the derailment. Yes. And you’ve heard about what they’ve been going through ever since that, right? There are going to be a lot of other questions and stories that we’re not going to necessarily be able to address here. There’s a big tangled mess of who’s calling the shots. Is it Norfolk Southern? Is it the epa? Is it the local EPAs? Is it the governor? Like who’s making the determinations on who gets the money to pay for their hotels while they’re waiting months to get their water tests back? Just all this crap that these people have to deal with now because of the corporate malfeasance and government negligence that created this catastrophe.
I don’t want to keep squeezing these people for their horror stories. I hope that we’ve communicated enough to you guys how serious this is and how much pain they’re going through and why we all need to care about it. And I wanted to use the final 30 minutes to really focus on what we all as fellow working people, as the working class community that needs to protect itself. What we can do to better support our brothers, sisters, and siblings living in and around East Palestine. And to lift up the efforts that have been allowing people to stay afloat, right? Because amidst this tragedy, there have been people banding together, like the incredible folks on this call, forming the Unity Council, using social media to exchange information, to let folks know who needs what and where to try to raise awareness by doing interviews like these and getting these stories out there.
And so I know that folks tuning in right now, they want to help. Once again, I want to remind everyone here at the top of the hour that we have collected a list of links to different GoFundMe fundraisers. We’ve included information about how you can donate to the individual and family funds of the folks on this call, as well as general funds like the one East Palestine off the rails organized by Rick Si, who you heard about earlier in this stream. That is a general GoFundMe that has been sent to us through the East Palestine Unity Council. It’s vetted. You guys can donate there. There’s the soup Mama official supplies drive on June 3rd, there’s going to be another shipment made to the folks living in and around East Palestine. So if you are able to donate the basic supplies that are being collected, including an especially bottled water, you can donate there.
I want to bring our incredible panel back on and just for me to take a step back, we’ll start, we’ll go in the order that we went in before. So Christina and then Stella, then Kayla, Matt and Ashley, and then we’ll close out. But I just wanted to ask if y’all could take a few minutes to talk about the aid that you have received or not received. Again, from the government, from Norfolk Southern, from your community, from people around the country. And you know, can talk directly to our audience right now, they’re there, they’re watching. Can you tell them what you need and where they can go to help contribute to these mutual aid efforts? So Christina, let’s start back with you.
Christina Siceloff:
People in Pennsylvania have not really received much aid at all from Norfolk. So well, we haven’t received aid from Norfolk Southern. If you’re outside one or two miles, they don’t really acknowledge you at all. And same with the government. I’ve even called the government PA for water testing and such. They won’t do any testing here. Any testing I’ve had done was through independent researchers. Dr. Welton from Purdue has done a lot of independent testing around the area.
Water donations that I have received have been from Dr. Rick Chai in with the East Palestine off the Rails group, as well as Soup Mama official. And at the beginning I was able to get some donations for water from placing up in East Palestine. But we still need water. We don’t know when our water will go bad or if it is bad if we haven’t had any testing done. Dr. Chai is taking donations for water as well as for relocation. He’s, him and his wife have done really well at helping one person already. Every $10,000 they raised, they help a family move out area. But that’s all the places I’ve received donations. But the government and Norfolk Southern have not helped Pennsylvania.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess, Christina, in case we don’t get a chance to, before the end of the stream, did you have any final words that you wanted to share with folks out there watching and listening?
Christina Siceloff:
Don’t forget about us. Keep sharing our stories. Keep pushing our governments to our government officials here in PA and Ohio, both to help us and especially reach out to Governor Mike DeWine and ask for him to, or pressure him to declare a Emerge emergency in Ohio. Because if he declares an emergency, then it opens up doors for our governor to do the same.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you so much, Christina and Stella, I want to bring you back in here and ask if you could pick up as well and tell us a bit about what aid you have received or not received from the government, from Norfolk Southern, from people around the country and what folks can do to help you, your family and your neighbors. Oh, you might be muted, Stella. Sorry.
Stella Gamble:
Okay. We were stuckey to be able that we lived inside the one mile area. This one mile area was originally set up by Norfolk Southern in the E P A, because they said if the trains ex
Would probably go that far. So they set up this one mile zone in the beginning of this disaster. Well, since then they have used the one mile zone as reference to who the railroad would help relocate. And they have helped us with our hotel bills and because we live in that one mile zone, but all of the people who live outside the one mile zone, and there are people on one side of the street who are in the one mile zone and people on the other side of the street that they can’t get any help at all. And there are a lot of people who are sick. There are a lot of people whose kids are sick and they want to leave. They want to relocate either permanently or temporarily, and they don’t have the money to do it. So Rick Cha and his wife Tammy have started a GoFundMe and they have already helped one family and they are helping others.
And I also would like people urge people to contact Governor Dew Wine’s office and put some pressure on him. He has till the end of July to declare a state of emergency. Thus far, he hasn’t done it. And if this isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is. But we’ve received no help from the government. And if you don’t live inside that one mile, then you have to keep your kids there. You have to stay there. No recourse. There’s nobody there to help you. So I would urge people to donate and to off the rails and help people get out that need out.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Did you have any, I guess, final general words you also wanted to share with people watching and listening? Stella, before
Stella Gamble:
We, well, I guess I’m almost 70 years old and what happens to me in the next 10 to 20 years is kind of irrelevant. I’m my life’s times pretty much over anyway, but these kids
That have been allowed to live in this and have been told that everything was safe, that leaks that are breathing these toxic chemicals, they’re the ones who 10 years from now are going to pay the price for what is happening to us now. I guess, like I said, I don’t have much hope for what’s going to happen because it, it’s he who has the most money wins and they definitely have the most money already. The media has already lost interest in East Palestine. Nobody’s coming to help us. I tell people all the time, pray because God’s the only one that’s going to help you. And if we could get a few of these people out, a few these families out, that would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. So like I said, off the rails, Rick and Tammy are doing a great job. They’re trustworthy. That’s a big issue too. I mean, a lot of these GoFundMe and a lot of the things that happened at the beginning of this, the people of these Palestine never saw that money. We never saw any of that money that was donated. The money that goes to off the rails, that money will go to the people
And I would like Thank you for keeping us in the news.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, Stella. That’s truly the least we can do. And thank you so much for taking time to share your story with us. And Kayla, I wanted to bring you in here as well. And same prompt. Tell us a little bit about the support you’re getting, not getting and what your neighbors, your family need, what folks can do to help contribute.
Kayla Miller:
For me, like I said, I’m in the three and a half mile mark. So as far as any kind of money that some people have access to, I don’t have that. I was not reimbursed for evacuating, even though I did take my kids in as many animals as I could, did not receive anything for that. As far as donations and everything, we’ve had a bunch of people come in with donating from across the country. That’s actually how I got involved with Sup Mama. They are an amazing group of patriots that genuinely care about our country and the people that are in it. And they said from the beginning that they’re going to be here till the end and they’ve stuck to their word and we’re going to be doing our supply drop on June 3rd. We are in desperate need of water because it’s becoming a very thin, thin thing around here. And there’s still people like myself who haven’t got their test results back and we were told not to drink the water until we do. That can get very expensive, very fast. So water is a huge thing. Funding to get some families out of here, that’s great. Me, I don’t have that option.
I have too much family, too many friends. My husband works out of town. I have to have a support system. I can’t just pick up and leave. I have three kids on my own basically. So for me to leave is just emotionally it would not be doable. So I am stuck here. So the biggest thing for me is if there is money that needs to be donated, that somebody’s willing to donate it to. Obviously the rails for people that do want to relocate, but there’s also families that have their own GoFundMe and that will help with trying to get water filtration systems because they’re not cheap. You can get under the sink ones, but that’s just for drinking water. That’s not for your washer, that’s not for washing dishes and your dishwasher for baths, for showers, those systems are very expensive and all of us can’t afford that. So that money goes towards that and it would help drastically with a lot of us.
Like I said, the testing, they will not give us soil testing out here. Even though I’m close enough for my will to be tested, they won’t test my soil. It makes perfect sense. So I did get independent testing and I’m waiting on those results to come back and that’s going to kind of tell me where I go from here. Mean obviously if it gets to a point where we continue to be sick, we’re going to have to do some sort of change. What that is, I don’t know yet. And that’s what a lot of this is. A lot of it is unknown. We don’t know, keep pressing. Our government officials, just like Christina and Stella said, they have to declare the state of emergency for us to even have a hope of continuing with life. How it was even in an inkling of how it was this has to be done and they’re not wanting, they’re not willing to do it and it’s very frustrating. But people outside keep pressing or pressing our officials. And if you can donate to the organizations that you listed.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Kayla, just before I move on, the link that we sent that directs people to suit Mama official includes a number of different, I think there’s some QR codes that people can scan so that they know they can donate on Cash app, PayPal, all that good stuff. There’s also an email address on one of those flyers that we linked to for suit Mama official. Would you say that that right now, since the next supply drop is happening on the third, would the best thing for people to do through Suit Mama official, would it be to donate funds for them to procure the water ahead of that June 3rd drop off?
Kayla Miller:
Logistic wise, probably, yeah, because we are coming up super close here, it’s this weekend, but we can still, if somebody’s wanting, there’s different, if they get on our social media pages, you can find on their different drop locations. So if you have a drop location near you, you can drop it there or you can direct drop. There’s addresses on our post on the social media sites that tells you where you can direct drop straight into East Palestine.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Beautiful. Thank you so much Kayla. And a reminder to everyone, because this’ll probably be one of the last times you hear from me on the stream along with the info to suit Mama official Rick Chai and the East Palestinian off the Rails, general GoFundMe for families who are trying to relocate. You will also find individual GoFundMe as well as cash app information for Kayla Ashley and Christina. Ashley, I want to close, want to round out with you. So before we get there, Matt, I wanted to bring you in here. And again, I want us to be thinking about the struggle of the residents in and around East Palestine in direct conversation with the ongoing struggle of our fellow workers in the railroads. Because Lord knows after Biden prevented y’all from striking, Congress forced a deal down your throat that happened before East Palestine. So the problems that were problems on the railroads did not get solved in the last contract negotiations and catastrophes like East Palestine and the billion other derailments we’ve seen this year, so on and so forth. That’s all downstream from that. So I wanted to ask Matt, if you could hop in here and if you had any final words that you wanted to say to folks about the state of the struggle of railroad workers, what folks can do to continue to support you all, and the role that a stronger unionized workforce on the railroads plays in ensuring that catastrophes, the one that is befallen East Palestine and the surrounding areas never happens again.
Kayla Miller:
Well, I think, like you said, I believe it’s the idea of that it’s working class people who are being affected by this the most. And I would like to agree with everyone who spoke before me. Call your representatives, be in contact. Good communication and networking is a powerful tool. Vote, get out and vote. Be vocal and active because that’s what we have. We don’t have millions of dollars for lobbying. We don’t have some politicians in our back pocket. We, we’ve got to stand up and be noisy about the vote. I think that the ladies have said we, we’ve got to think of be my brother’s keeper, take care of your neighbors. We’ve got to do better. And the idea that the railroads, the industry is so in depth, involved in taking care of the shareholders, it’s not taking care of the community. This industry was chartered as a service for the American people and it’s been twisted to be a service for only the shareholders. And America’s really suffering because of this.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And of course everyone should go to railroad workers united.org. If you’ve been checking out Matt’s great shirt, keep up to date, keep your ear to the rail. That is definitely your best source to know what’s going on across the different craft unions and getting the real on the ground perspective, the worker’s perspective on what’s going on. The railroads. Yeah. Matt, please,
Matt Weaver:
One thing is that our workers that were on the ground for the derailment have had to get legal counsel not been taken care of, and they have all gotten legal counsel, as you know, because of the injuries they’ve received and future damages that may happen that they don’t know what’s going to happen.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And will folks be able to get updates on that? You think through Railroad Workers United,
Matt Weaver:
I think that more, most likely the company will settle and it will have a requirement that people can’t talk about it. That’s how it works in the industry.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yep. Yep. Love living in a plutocracy. Ashley, you were the first person I connected with and I wanted to make sure that I got this on the live stream because I really want to shout out the great Steve Mellon. Steve Mellon, as you guys know, is a longtime dedicated journalist out of Pittsburgh, who along with dozens of his coworkers, has been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette since October. And yet even as they have been dealing with their own struggle against a horrible corporate ownership of that paper that wants to destroy the unions that represent the workers there, that’s why they’re dragging the strikeout for so long. As these workers who we’ve had on the real news I’ve spoken to at breaking points, so on and so forth, we’ve heard from them about what they’re going through. And yet for all these months they’ve been on strike.
The journalists at the Post Gazette, the striking journalists have created a newspaper that they’re still producing for free while they’re on strike. And that’s how I connected to Ashley was because of Steve Mellon, who I interviewed on my show working people. And he was like, yeah, let me connect you to Ashley. I’ve been going down there and covering what’s been going on there. I was like, you got to be kidding me, you’re on strike. You know, guys are facing this incredible struggle of your own and they’re still going down there and doing great reporting. So everyone should go support the Pittsburgh Union progress, the strike paper put on by striking journalists at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Shout out to Steve Mellon. Thank you brother for connecting me to Ashley and in essence making this live stream possible. Now, Ashley, I wanted to close out with you and ask if you could just pick up where everyone else was leaving off. Talk a bit about the support you’ve gotten, haven’t been getting what you and your neighbors need, what folks can do to support y’all, and any final closing thoughts that you had for folks watching and listening.
Ashley McCollum:
Well, it’s kind of funny that it’s going into this and you’ve mentioned Steve Mellon and at the town hall where I actually met him, he approached me because I was expressing the need for the housing, the need for the clean housing. I’ve received help with lodging and food from the railroad, but they’ll only cover takeout food. It, it’s hard to find hotels, so if you spend too much on a hotel, they question you. It feels like you’re badgered a lot. And it’s very difficult to actually get the money without feeling guilty in some way, which we shouldn’t. We’re supposed to get travel as well as necessities covered some, do some within the mile, and I’m not going to sit there and fight with someone just because I need the travel or I need the necessities. So it’s kind of like being bullied just to have somewhere to stay because I don’t feel safe in my home. So, so far I’ve had that and really nothing else. I haven’t been back to my home, I haven’t been able to stay there. I can go in and get sick. And that’s it really the places that everyone else said to donate to. And there’s another way that they can donate water as well, which would be good for Kayla. And since there’s an email and a way to contact her, if anyone has a Sam’s Club account, they can actually order water ahead of time in a location close to us. And if they’re willing to and arrange it with them, they can pick up those cases of water.
But really what we need is a new home. It’s unfortunate. I don’t think I’ll ever get my home clean and I don’t think I’ll ever trust my son being okay in my home just because his dream is to have a family and to be a police officer. And if I go back there, I don’t think, I mean, I don’t know if he will be able to have kids or if I would have to worry that if he starts to think about it and want to have kids, that’s going to be on my mind. Are they going to be okay? Are they going to have birth defect forms, health problems? We don’t know. And I can’t expose my family to that, but myself and my boyfriend, we both have mortgages. They offered to give us a place to rent, but when they cut that off, am I going to be stuck with rent as well as two mortgages and I have to disclose what’s in my home and I’m not going to feel okay just selling a home without telling people I have independently tests. Here they are. I don’t want you to get sick because that’s the reason why I’m moving. But if you understand and you want to purchase it, fine,
But I don’t think I’m going to be able to sell my home being honest and open about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So there you have it. I have nothing to add to this. You guys have heard enough of me tonight. Please don’t forget about the people living in and around East Palestine. Don’t forget about the railroad workers, don’t forget about any of this. Don’t let the media politicians or Norfolk goddamn Southern sweep under the rug because as you’ve heard tonight, life for these people has been forever changed. And the least we could do is help them get to a safer place. Help them at least have safe water to drink, use our different platforms, use our voices to pressure public officials or raise a stink however we can to get the action that these folks are calling for, that these folks desperately need, that they are not getting. You’ve heard a million different ways tonight that you can help. So please do however you can. I want to really, really thank our incredible guests for taking time out of their hectic days to sit down and chat with us and share their stories with us and our viewers, even though it is incredibly painful to do so. So again, thank you so much to Ashley, to Kayla, to Stella, to Matt and Christina and thank you all so much for watching and thank you for caring. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
High food prices and the end of extra food-stamp allotments mean hard choices around the country for lower-income people:
“You’re having to make the decision between ‘am I paying my mortgage, or my medical bills or my medication or buying food?’” said Stacey Andernacht with hunger relief organization Feeding South Dakota.
But in her state, there’s yet another factor pushing up costs: South Dakota is one of just three — along with Mississippi and Alabama — that levies its full sales tax rate on groceries without a credit or rebate to offset the costs.
That hits low-income people hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on groceries than wealthier residents, said Rick Weiland, co-founder of grassroots advocacy organization Dakotans for Health. It’s the reason that most states have eliminated sales taxes on groceries over the past couple of decades.
A bill to do the same has been introduced in the South Dakota Legislature for years to no avail. But in November 2024, South Dakotans may have the opportunity to repeal the grocery tax themselves.
Dakotans for Health began collecting signatures earlier this month on a ballot measure that would eliminate the state portion of the grocery tax. Municipalities would be able to continue taxing groceries, as the state has more resources than localities, Weiland said. Dakotans for Health is forming a coalition of nonprofits and faith-based groups to work together on the campaign.
“This is just something that’s long overdue,” Weiland said. “And so I don’t think the timing could be any better than to do this after 20 years of failed attempts to get it done by the Legislature.”
Statewide sales taxes originated in Mississippi during the Great Depression and quickly spread throughout the nation. Groceries were included in the general sales tax in most states at first, said Eric Figueroa, senior manager of strategic projects and initiatives at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
A few decades ago, concerned about the impact on hunger, states began to exempt groceries from that tax. Of the 45 states that impose sales taxes, only 12 still apply it on groceries. And nine of those — Hawaii, Oklahoma, Utah, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Tennessee, Illinois and Missouri — do so at a reduced rate or offer rebates or credits.
A surge in food prices has brought repealing grocery taxes back to the forefront of policy discussions. “It has always been an issue that anti-hunger advocates have rallied around, but I think recently we’ve seen both parties be involved in efforts to try to eliminate it and try to figure out how to pay for the loss of revenue,” Figueroa said.
Earlier this year, Virginia eliminated its 1.5% state sales tax on groceries. (Local jurisdictions there can still levy up to 1%.) Alabama’s Legislature is poised to cut its state grocery tax rate in half. A cut already went into effect in Kansas in January, while Idaho increased its credit on the tax beginning this year. Illinois residents are in a year-long pause on collection and Tennessee instituted a three-month suspension that begins in August.
During South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s re-election campaign last year, she promised to eliminate the grocery tax. But the proposal died in the House earlier in the year. There was also concern that eliminating the tax could reduce $2 million that goes to the nine Native American reservations’ tribal government operations, though Noem later said that the tribes’ contracts would be renegotiated so they would not be economically affected.
However, state leaders did agree to reduce the statewide general sales tax for four years, starting in July, from 4.5% to 4.2%, which will also affect groceries.
Noem originally expressed support for Dakotans for Health’s petition. She backed out due to fear that as written, the ballot measure would jeopardize an annual $20 million that the state receives through a 1998 agreement with major tobacco companies to settle lawsuits for healthcare costs related to smoking.
“She supported it in the past, in the present, and will in the future. But that tax cut needs to be written appropriately,” her chief of communications, Ian Fury, said in an email. He added, “The language proposed by the Governor and legislators during the legislative session did not have these problems and is the right way to go for the state.”
Weiland expressed skepticism about the potential risk to the settlement.
“If the initiated law we are currently circulating passes, and if the courts determine that it exempts tobacco from state sales tax, the Legislature with its one-party supermajority has full authority, before the initiative goes into effect on July 1, 2025, to eliminate any of the Governor’s recent concerns about any potential problem by amending the initiated law to fix any alleged problem,” Weiland said in a press release.
In 2004, over 67% of South Dakotan voters cast ballots against a similar initiative to eliminate the tax on groceries. But Weiland, whose group was among those coordinating a successful 2022 ballot measure to expand Medicaid in the state, believes that the governor’s campaign for eliminating the grocery tax and legislative action in recent years will help garner widespread support for a new citizen-led proposal. He said the organization is working with the tribes to try to ensure that the loss in revenue won’t impact them.
“By letting the people vote on it, we can bypass all the politics that goes on in the Legislature and do what we did with working on the Medicaid expansion campaign — by taking it directly to people and letting them make the decision,” Weiland said.
The organization is going door-to-door, attending events and standing outside public buildings to collect the 17,509 valid signatures needed from registered voters. Those signatures must reach the secretary of state by May 2024 in order for it to appear on the November 2024 ballot.
Accessing healthy food is already a challenge in the rural state of South Dakota, where grocery stores are sometimes few and far between. One in 12 people in the state, and one in nine children, experience hunger, according to Feeding America.
A 2021 study that looked at grocery taxes between 2006 and 2017 found that areas with the tax experienced some of the greatest food insecurity in the nation.
In South Dakota, food insecurity is particularly pronounced in the state’s nine Native American reservations, where residents face the additional challenge of lack of transportation. On the Rosebud Indian Reservation in St. Francis, Feeding South Dakota’s Andernacht said, residents shop at a convenience store when they can’t reach the closest grocery store 40 miles away. Getting a ride there and back can cost around $100. The nonprofit has increased its food distribution to the reservation from every other month to once a month.
Another client in the central part of the state lives 30 miles from a discount grocery store, so she bought more expensive groceries at a nearby shop where her food stamps didn’t stretch as far. As a result, she used the nonprofit’s mobile distribution food drive to supplement her groceries until she found a better paying job. Now she’s returned to the food drive due to increased food prices, Andernacht said.
Feeding South Dakota provides food for hungry families throughout the state through programs including drive-through sites, school pantries and food boxes for seniors.
Over 11,500 families are served through mobile food distribution per month, which Andernacht says is a 22% increase since last year. She attributes that rise to higher food costs and an end to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s emergency allotments, which resulted in a $90 a month decrease in grocery money for the average SNAP recipient nationwide.
Any state repealing its grocery tax must account for the loss of revenue. In South Dakota, the tax brings in about $102 million annually.
The sales tax on groceries has an even greater impact in Alabama, generating about $500 million that goes toward the state’s already strained education coffers.
“It’s been a very hard political problem to eliminate the tax and make up for the revenue in a way that satisfies everybody,” said Figueroa, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
However, a 2020 paper he co-authored suggests that states can raise revenues in ways that don’t hit lower-income people hardest, such as expanding taxes for the wealthy and corporations and cutting special-interest breaks.
Figueroa also referenced a proposal in Alabama he found powerful. Proposed by the organization Alabama Arise, the plan would replace grocery-tax revenue with a cap on the state income tax deduction for federal income taxes, which would bring in an estimated $520 million annually.
“We are in this peculiar position that we have an incredibly regressive tax in the sales tax on groceries and we have a tax cut that is really a tax break that benefits … mainly the top 5% of income earners in the state,” said Carol Gundlach, senior policy analyst at Alabama Arise.
The plan would require a constitutional amendment, so it was not included in a current state bill to cut the sales tax for groceries in half, which Gundlach expects will pass. Eliminating the sales tax on groceries has been a priority for Alabama Arise for three decades. The organization was involved in writing the bill, education, outreach and lobbying.
Gundlach is hopeful that South Dakota will manage to eliminate its grocery sales tax next year.
“We get Alabama and South Dakota, then all we’ve got to do is Mississippi,” she said.
The post Grocery taxes face the chopping block in South Dakota appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
With global finance leaders set to gather in Washington, D.C. this week for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Oxfam is warning rich countries against using accounting gimmicks to artificially inflate their global climate funding commitments.
The international humanitarian group estimated in an analysis released Monday that low- and middle-income nations will need an additional $27.4 trillion at minimum by 2030 to “fill financing gaps in health, education, social protection, and tackling climate change”—as well as addressing the damage already inflicted by intensifying extreme weather and other consequences of fossil fuel use.
Interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other powerful central banks have compounded the financial struggles of poor nations as debt servicing costs rise, putting critical public investments at risk.
“But despite the dire economic situation facing the poorest countries today, and much political discussion of the trillions needed to tackle poverty, inequality, and climate change, there is no indication that rich countries are willing to pay the true price of a fair and sustainable future,” Oxfam said Monday. “In fact, there is a risk that rich-country finance ministers meeting in Washington this week will celebrate progress on reforms that deliver just 0.1% of the climate and social spending gap in low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs) between now and 2030. And that they will do so through financial wizardry that doesn’t cost them a cent.”
The group pointed specifically to the recent replenishment process for the International Development Association, a member of the World Bank Group ostensibly dedicated to aiding poor nations with grants and loans.
“Although IDA20 saw a record replenishment in 2021, this was not a result of increased donor contributions. In fact, donor contributions declined and the increased allocation was only achieved through the financial wizardry of ‘balance sheet optimization,’” Oxfam noted. “Now, with IDA20 commitments again being frontloaded due to mounting crises, there are fears that IDA is facing a ‘financial cliff’ in the near future.”
Oxfam also criticized “green bonds” and other such “financial innovations” that—while positive-sounding and potentially beneficial on the margins—ultimately provide minimal benefit relative to what’s necessary to help avert climate catastrophe in nations that did the least to cause the crisis.
“If rich countries were serious about investing in people and planet, they would go beyond financial wizardry,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International’s incoming interim executive director. “It’s time for governments to find their moral fiber and tax the richest, so we can stave off climate catastrophe and lift everyone out of poverty.”
Oxfam’s analysis suggests several policy steps for wealthy countries, including actually meeting their existing aid commitments to poor nations and ending “the accounting trickery of siphoning off large amounts of aid to spend in donor countries on things like in-country refugee costs and vaccine donations”; committing to a “debt swap” whereby rich nations would borrow $11.5 trillion to help fund climate costs in low- and middle-income countries; and pledging new Special Drawing Rights (SDRs).
The group also called on rich nations to pursue “steep and progressive tax increases on the incomes of the super-rich, on property, land, and inheritance, and on the profits of the wealthiest companies, especially windfall profits, as well as on fossil fuels and on financial transactions.”
“If rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms there would be more than enough money to go round,” Oxfam said. “We cannot allow the richest countries to argue they ‘cannot afford’ to raise the trillions needed for social and climate spending in the poorest countries. It is clear that mobilizing this money would simply take political will.”
\u201cAs poor countries cope with a climate crisis they did little to cause, the pandemic’s impacts, + widespread poverty even in normal times, rich countries say they don’t have the money to do anything about it.\n\nAmazing new Oxfam briefing shows this is false\nhttps://t.co/YAxhWyXPkp\u201d— Tim Hirschel-Burns (@Tim Hirschel-Burns) 1681145368
The new analysis comes as the World Bank is preparing to confirm Ajay Banga, a private equity executive and former Mastercard CEO chosen by the U.S., as its new president, replacing an outgoing leader who has come under fire for climate denial.
In recent weeks, as E&E News reported Monday, the World Bank has outlined changes that would “free up roughly $5 billion annually over the next 10 years, mainly through a slight relaxation of the bank’s rules for how much risk it can assume.”
“Specifically, it would lower the bank’s so-called equity-to-loan ratio from 20% to 19%, which would allow it to increase its lending with the same amount of shareholder money,” the outlet noted. “Critics have called the plan underwhelming, saying it’s still too vague and risk-averse. Some argue that the equity-to-loan ratio could be lowered further without jeopardizing confidence in the bank’s lending ability, making additional lending capacity available.”
Oxfam said Monday that it is “essential that the World Bank and IMF also step up their ambition” during this week’s talks.
“The World Bank’s own analysis shows that extreme economic inequality is a barrier to poverty reduction—yet the current goal on ‘shared prosperity’ is weak and ineffective,” said Behar. “We need to see far more ambition from a global body tasked with fighting poverty.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
After a historic 22 percent spike in 2021, the average annual bonus for New York City-based securities industry employees fell 26 percent in 2022, according to just-released New York State Comptroller data. But the rate of increase in average Wall Street bonuses since the 2008 crash is still far higher than wage increases for ordinary workers, according to Institute for Policy Studies analysis of comptroller and BLS data.
Source: Institute for Policy Studies analysis of NY Comptroller and Bureau of Labor Statistics data
Wall Street pay v. the minimum wage
Wall Street bonuses and gender and racial inequality
The rapid increase in Wall Street bonuses over the past several decades has contributed to gender and racial inequality, since workers at the low end of the wage scale are disproportionately people of color and women, while the lucrative financial industry is overwhelmingly white and male, particularly at the upper echelons.
Sources: Bank diversity report indicators for 2021 and Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data for 2022
Source: Bank diversity report indicators for 2021 and Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data for 2022
Regulators Fail to Rein in Wall Street Bonus Culture
The Comptroller’s bonus report comes amidst heightened scrutiny of Wall Street bonuses due to recent banking collapses. Silicon Valley Bank executives received their 2022 bonuses just hours before regulators seized control of the collapsing firm.
For more than a dozen years now, Wall Street and corporate lobbyists have blocked both financial executive pay restrictions and a federal minimum wage increase. This speaks volumes about who has influence in Washington — and who does not.
What Can Be Done to Rein in Excessive Wall Street Pay?
Wall Street’s bonus culture encouraged the high-risk behaviors that led to the 2008 financial crisis, costing millions of Americans their homes and livelihoods. In response, Congress inserted several compensation-related provisions in the post-crisis Dodd-Frank financial reform. These include Section 956, which bans Wall Street incentive pay that encourages “inappropriate” risk-taking. For more than a dozen years, regulators have failed to implement this rule, despite continued financial recklessness, as Public Citizen has documented.
Biden administration financial regulators should swiftly – and rigorously – enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street pay restrictions that were supposed to have been enacted by May 2011. This new regulation should include:
Options allow executives to buy company shares at a set price, offering all the benefits of share price increases with no downside risk. According to the bipartisan 2011 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, these pay structures create “incentives to increase both risk and leverage” in order to boost a company’s short-term stock price.
If such a regulation had been in place before the SVB collapse, top executives would’ve automatically forfeited this deferred pay to help cover the cost of their recklessness. Former New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley first proposed such collective funds in 2014, arguing that making executives put their own “skin in the game” would help change Wall Street’s dangerously risky culture.
Any effort to reduce inappropriate risk-taking will be ineffective if employees can buy insurance to protect their compensation from the risk of poor company performance, as the AIG CEO was able to do in 2008.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Major League Baseball and recently unionized minor league players working for MLB team affiliates reached a tentative deal Wednesday on a historic first collective bargaining agreement.
The pending five-year contract is set to more than double the pay of athletes who currently receive poverty wages even though the average MLB team is worth more than $2 billion. It comes just months after the MLB Players Association, the union representing major leaguers, successfully organized highly exploited minor leaguers who are striving to join their ranks into a new collective bargaining unit.
“Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”
MLB recognized the union’s minor league unit in September, paving the way for negotiations that wrapped up on the eve of opening day in the majors and two days before opening day in the minors.
Citing unnamed sources, ESPN‘s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday night:
After years of disillusionment among future major leaguers about paltry salaries forcing them to work offseason jobs—and coincidentally on the day a judge approved a $185 million settlement the league will pay players who accused it of violating minimum wage laws—the parties agreed on a deal that went out to a vote among the union’s rank and file and that will need to be approved by owners, as well, before it is formalized. The agreement could be announced officially as early as Friday, the first day of games in the minor leagues.
The deal was confirmed by numerous other reports citing league and union sources.
Unlike now, minor leaguers are set to be paid “for most of the offseason as well as spring training, including back pay for this season,” according to Passan. He detailed the annual pay increases on social media.
\u201cBREAKING: Minor league baseball players\u2014among the lowest earning workers in America, who are paid as little as $7/hour by billionaire MLB owners\u2014have reached a first union contract that would more than double the pay of all players.\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1680143267
In addition to pay hikes, players “emphasized better housing and transportation as a matter of import,” Passan reported. “Starting in 2024, those at Triple-A and Double-A will receive their own bedroom, and players with spouses and children will receive special accommodations. In rookie ball, Single-A, and High-A, teams will provide transportation to stadiums, where they’ll eat meals provided under rules negotiated by a joint clubhouse nutrition committee.”
As More Perfect Union detailed on social media, harsh living conditions on the road between games prompted players to organize for better accommodations and nutrition. Thanks to this effort, MLB began requiring its minor league teams to provide housing to players in 2022. The pending agreement seeks to secure additional improvements.
\u201cIn 2021, a courageous campaign by former and current players forced the league to start offering housing.\n\nhttps://t.co/Yqu2NIK8MR\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1680143267
While name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights are currently controlled by MLB, the pending agreement grants full NIL rights to the union, which can use them to strengthen group licensing deals. In addition, it expands players’ medical rights, including covering post-injury health expenses for a longer period of time.
“Among those not included in the deal are players at teams’ complexes in the Dominican Republic,” Passan reported. “The minor league unit of the MLBPA includes only players on teams’ domestic rosters—and players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other foreign countries will still reap the benefits when stateside.”
In a concession to owners, “the deal includes the reduction of the maximum Domestic Reserve List, which governs the number of players a team can roster outside of its Dominican Republic complexes, from 180 to 165 starting in 2024,” Passan noted. “The union had previously fought MLB’s efforts during the lockout last year to reduce the reserve list, which teams had identified as a priority.”
Nathan Kalman-Lamb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, wrote on social media that “Minor League Baseball players were perhaps the single most exploited group of men’s athletes in North America other than college basketball and football players.”
“Now they have a new (good!) collective agreement,” he added. “No better evidence of why college athletes need unions.”
“For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns… This is for you.”
Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher who spearheaded early organizing efforts, celebrated on Twitter.
“This is big,” Broshuis wrote. “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”
“Is the deal perfect? No, but every negotiation ends in compromise,” he continued. “This will truly better the lives of thousands of players and their families. And that is what this fight has always been about.”
Broshuis concluded: “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns. For those who grinded away at two or even three offseason jobs. For those who skipped breakfast or even lunch to pinch pennies. For those who have [given] up the game not for a lack of talent but for a lack of funds. This is for you.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The federal minimum wage in the United States would be more than $42 an hour today if it rose at the same rate as the average Wall Street bonus over the past four decades, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Citing newly released data from the New York State Comptroller, IPS noted that the average Wall Street bonus has increased by 1,165% since 1985, not adjusted for inflation.
Last year, the average cash bonus paid to Wall Street employees was $176,700—75% higher than in 2008 but slightly lower than the 2021 level of $240,400.
The federal minimum wage, meanwhile, has been completely stagnant since 2009, when it was bumped up to $7.25 from $5.15. While many states and localities have approved substantial pay increases in recent years, 20 states have kept their hourly wage floors at the federal minimum.
Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS and the author of the new analysis, wrote Thursday that “average weekly earnings for all U.S. private sector workers increased by only 54.4%” between 2008 and 2022—a significantly slower pace than inequality-fueling Wall Street bonuses.
Anderson argued that there are a number of straightforward steps lawmakers and regulators can take to curb exorbitant Wall Street compensation and bonuses.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Congress passed several provisions aimed at reining in bankers’ compensation as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
But as The American Prospect‘s David Dayen pointed out last week, “bank regulators hip-pocketed one of those rules that Congress mandated in 2010—the one that would prohibit banker compensation that is specifically tied to taking inappropriate risks.”
“The last time there was even a proposed rule on this was nearly seven years ago,” Dayen continued. “And in 2018, when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was asked whether he would abide by Congress’ wishes and finish the rule, he blandly replied, ‘We tried for many years’ and ‘we were not able to achieve consensus’—just thumbing his nose at a congressional mandate.”
Anderson urged the Biden administration’s financial regulators to stop deferring to Wall Street lobbyists and “swiftly—and rigorously—enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street pay restrictions that were supposed to have been enacted by May 2011.”
Any new regulation, Anderson wrote, can and should include “a ban on stock options at Wall Street banks” and mandates requiring Wall Street executives to “set aside significant compensation for 10 years to pay potential misconduct fines.”
“If such a regulation had been in place before the [Silicon Valley Bank] collapse,” Anderson noted, “top executives would’ve automatically forfeited this deferred pay to help cover the cost of their recklessness.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
If you grew up in America, then you almost definitely have heard some variation of the refrain: “America is the greatest country in the world.”
It’s an idea that’s so commonplace that it’s more or less taken for granted. We boast of inventions like the airplane, the light bulb, the internet, and even the humble chocolate chip cookie. We are home to some of the best universities in the world and most of the largest corporations.
But when we look more closely at other metrics, America’s position as the top country in the world is called into question. There are many such metrics, but perhaps none more important than life expectancy.
According to a report released last year by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can now expect to live 76.4 years. Life expectancy in the US has dropped off in recent years; as life expectancy in other wealthy countries rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued to decline in the US. All in all, the US now ranks 53rd among 200 countries in life expectancy. Citizens of all developed countries suffer from things like heart disease, cancer, and liver disease, but Americans suffer more and, as a result, live shorter lives.
Countries where life expectancy is the highest ( > 82 years) include places like Japan, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. What are these countries doing differently than the US, you may ask? Why are their citizens living longer?
It all comes down to one word: inequality. The US is not poorer than any of these countries – year after year, we have the highest GDP in the world. And on a per-capita basis, we’re consistently in the top 10, far from 53rd in the world. But the difference between the US and other developed countries is that we do a much poorer job sharing wealth (and all the benefits that come with it) among our citizens. Among developed countries, the US has one of the highest rates of inequality, both in terms of wealth and income – and we can, unfortunately, see that disparity in health and life expectancy as well.
Just because the average American life expectancy is 76.4 years doesn’t mean that all Americans can expect to live that long. It’s sad, but in America how long you live has a lot to do with how much money you have. People with high incomes can live 10 to 20 years longer than people with low incomes, even if they live just miles apart in the same metro area. For example, rich residents in Columbus, Ohio can expect to live close to 85 years while poor residents in the very same city typically live just 60 years.
This trend applies to a host of other social outcomes besides life expectancy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson made this case in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They found that countries with low inequality consistently outperformed those with high inequality not only in life expectancy but in literacy rates, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness, and social mobility. (With high inequality, the US was among the lowest performers in all of these metrics.) It was not GDP or overall levels of wealth that mattered for these social outcomes; it was instead how wealth was distributed that made the difference.
Inequality is not just an abstract concept or a set of numbers – it’s a real-world phenomenon that has tangible effects on the way that ordinary people live (or don’t live) their lives. And we are clearly not doing very well in the US on this front compared to the rest of the world. Americans shouldn’t go around boasting about living in the greatest country on Earth when our citizens are quite literally not living as long as their neighbors.
But all hope is not lost. Our situation in the US is not in any way an inevitability. Inequality is a choice. We certainly can’t bring about change overnight, but, if we keep at it, we can bring about change.
What can be done to turn the tide? It’s simple: follow the example of our neighbors with less inequality and orient our economic policy around reducing the gap between those at the top and everyone else. We can do that by raising taxes on rich people like us, just as President Biden proposed in his latest budget, to limit extreme wealth. We can also lift up the bottom by raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and investing in a strong social safety net that keeps all Americans afloat.
The policy possibilities are limitless. Our only limit is a lack of political will. We truly believe that the United States can and should be the greatest country in the world – after all, we’re not called “Patriotic” Millionaires for nothing. But the American Dream that was once a shining light for all is fading. If we want to revive it, we need to start fighting against the inequality that is holding us back.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
While race intersects with every aspect of American life, hard data on that is limited when it comes to taxation. The IRS does not collect taxpayers’ racial or ethnic identity.
New research using novel methodology — starting with Survey of Consumer Finances household survey data, creating tax units and running a tax calculator against it — supports what Black legal scholars have long posited: that racial disparities are baked into the tax code.
The analysis, from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, looked at the impact of the “marriage penalty,” when a couple pays more in federal income tax than the combined bill if they were single. That generally occurs when each spouse earns around the same amount of income.
In situations where a couple pays less, they’re receiving a marriage bonus.
The new analysis shows that Black couples are more likely to experience marriage penalties than white couples, even controlling for income. Under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that’s still in place, 46% of Black couples paid marriage penalties, compared to 43% of white couples. Marriage bonuses are more stark: only 36% of Black couples get them, compared to 43% of white couples.
The Tax Policy Center’s paper, published last month, builds on work by Dorothy Brown, a Georgetown University law professor who wrote The Whiteness of Wealth. Black women have worked outside the home more than white wives throughout history, she noted, whereas the marriage bonus often goes to couples with one spouse who stays home. The new paper attributed the presence of children and differences in income distribution as additional reasons for the disparities.
The Center for Public Integrity sat down with Janet Holtzblatt, senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center and the study’s co-author, to learn more about racial disparities in the joint tax return and how agencies are working to make it easier to study the impact.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: What findings surprised you while working on this paper?
To some extent our findings confirmed what others have been saying. Going back to the 1990s, there were several Black legal scholars who had looked at the data and indicated that it was likely that Black married couples would incur larger penalties than white couples. And the premise was that Black couples were more likely to have two spouses who were working and for those two spouses to have equal earnings. And our findings confirmed that.
I expected that would be the case in the 1990s, when the scholars were first making this analysis and conclusions. And the reason I thought it’d be likely to happen in the 1990s was that … the tax rate structure and standard deduction was structured in a way that gave rise to marriage penalties. When two people got married and they were both working, their combined income as a married couple would push them into a higher tax rate. In the ‘90s, amongst all couples, you would expect a higher probability of marriage penalties.
The other aspect was that between the 1970s and the 1990s, there were more and more two-earner couples in the labor market. I anticipated that would continue to grow so that whatever gap that legal scholars had seen in the 1990s between two-earner couples who were white, rather than two-earner couples who were Black, would shrink over time so there would be less of a racial disparity between the two groups.
Beginning in 2001, Congress took a number of steps that reduced marriage penalties. They doubled the standard deduction and increased rate brackets for married couples relative to unmarried couples. And in 2017, under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, more and more married couples were getting that kind of relief. There are still lots of provisions in the tax code that give rise to marriage penalties. But I thought that the combination of more two-earner couples and that changes in the tax code to reduce marriage penalties would mitigate this observation in the ’90s that there was greater occurrence of marriage penalties among Black couples than white couples.
We looked at marriage penalties over time, prior and post the 2000 and 2017 tax law changes. And we did find that both white and Black couples were less likely to have marriage penalties over time than before 2001.
But there’s still a gap.
So the biggest surprise, to me, was that after all the legislation of the past 20 years … under the 2017 tax law, we still observed that Black couples are more likely to incur marriage penalties than white couples. And that the magnitude [of the gap] is a greater percent of income for Black couples than for white couples.
Q: What do you think still needs to be done to make the tax code more equitable for all couples?
We are beginning to do research where we see more and more inequities in the way in which the tax code affects white taxpayers versus Black taxpayers. That’s an area of research that has not had much attention, in part because we [as a country] think that the tax code is race neutral and we don’t have tax data that distinguishes taxpayers by race.
All of that is changing now. But because it’s very unlikely, and perhaps undesirable, to have taxpayers indicate their race on their tax return, it’s also unlikely to [have] tax laws that achieve equity between Black and white taxpayers by explicitly referring to race.
So what are the characteristics that can be observed in the tax code that affect these racial disparities? There are several factors that differentiate Black couples from white couples that contribute to marriage penalties. And some have fixes and some may represent a trade off with more desirable policy goals.
So one way to fix the marriage penalties, which will affect both Black and white couples, is to allow couples the option of filing as individuals. That would eliminate marriage penalties and it would be very expensive. It might be difficult to allocate which spouse gets unearned income, interest income, dividend income, capital gains, and mortgage interest deductions, or who gets to claim the kids as dependents. It could still open the door for tax avoidance where taxpayers come up with strategies in order to minimize their tax liability in various ways.
It also cuts away the progressivity of the tax code. Because right now the tax rates go up based on the combined taxpayers’ income. But if you were to tax each individual, you could then end up with a lower tax liability because one of the individuals might get taxed at a low salary and not fully adjust for the resources that the family has in combination.
The other approach was one done in the 1980s that lasted for about three years, … called the two-earner deduction. It was targeted to a group of people who were most likely to move up into a higher tax rate as a consequence of their combined income. It gave them the opportunity to reduce their income by a portion of the lower earner’s income to alleviate marriage penalties.
That approach is desirable in that it’s very well targeted. It’s undesirable in that the benefit of the 1980s law was regressive, because the more income [the couple had], their tax rate and the value of that deduction increased. So it was much more valuable to higher-income taxpayers than lower-income taxpayers.
Another reason we observed marriage penalties more likely among Black couples than white couples is that Black couples are more likely to have dependents. And the reason that matters is that Congress recognizes that families with dependents have greater expenses that make it more difficult for them to pay taxes on the same amount of income as a taxpayer who doesn’t have kids. And so the tax code provides the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit and the head of household filing status. But those provisions actually lead to an increase in marriage penalties.
The head of household filing status gives taxpayers a standard deduction that’s halfway between being single and filing jointly. And that means that if an unmarried single person marries a single parent, the single parent loses a head of household filing status and it makes it more likely that they’re going to have a marriage penalty.
When a couple gets married, their combined income may result in a smaller or no Earned Income Tax Credit, relative to what they would have gotten filing as unmarried individuals.
Q: You mentioned that it’s not ideal to eliminate marriage penalties altogether. Why is that?
Policymakers try to achieve a number of different goals through the tax system. One is tax progressivity, where people pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes as their income goes up. A second goal may be treating families who are similar alike … and [another is] trying to reduce complexity.
[Marriage] neutrality may be a fourth goal, but tax experts have not found an equation that works. It’s not possible to achieve progressivity, treating similar families alike, and marriage neutrality [with neither penalties nor bonuses]. So policymakers are forced to make trade offs and sometimes those other goals have taken precedence over [eliminating] marriage penalties. In addition, there may be other goals such as tax subsidies.
For over 100 years, in one way or another, Congress has dealt with how married couples are treated relative to unmarried couples. Sometimes it’s been to the benefit of married couples and sometimes it’s been to the benefit of unmarried couples.
So this has been a struggle since 1913, when the tax code was first in place. And they still haven’t come up with a solution that achieves all of these goals simultaneously.
Q: Now that all federal agencies are required to assess how their programs impact racial and ethnic equity under Biden’s Racial Justice Executive Order, do you find that there’s greater access to data around the racial implications of taxes?
There’s definitely greater attention to how we’re going to measure this.
Taxpayers are not asked to declare their race on their tax returns, and at least from my perspective, it’s a good thing … [because of] concerns that it might have dangerous effects on tax enforcement. But on the other hand, without that information, we have been stymied in the past in our efforts to understand how the tax system affects Black and white taxpayers differently.
So what is happening right now across the government agencies that evaluate tax policy — Department of Treasury, the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congress, the Congressional Budget Office, the Government Accountability Office — is [that they] are developing methodologies to impute race into the tax data.
And they’re not alone. The Tax Policy Center is also working diligently to come up with methodologies to better understand the racial implications of tax policy. Our study on marriage penalties is an example of one way of doing it, where we started with the [Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances] household survey data, created tax units and ran a tax calculator against that.
But what’s [a bigger] effort for various government agencies and us, is beginning with tax return data, which can give a fuller picture of what’s going on in the tax system, and developing imputations for race and ethnicity to add to our tax analysis. Then we can get this broader picture of the different disparities in a tax code by race and ethnicity.
Some preliminary results are beginning to emerge, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before we’re able to produce more comprehensive studies of the impact by race and ethnicity. It’s a very important question and a lot of very smart people are working as quickly as they can, but they’re essentially building new infrastructure from scratch.
The post If you’re Black, saying ‘I do’ can increase your taxes appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
Former Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker sold $3.6 million worth of shares on February 27, just days before the bank disclosed a large loss that triggered its stock slide and collapse. Over the previous two years, Becker sold nearly $30 million of stock.
But Becker won’t rake in the most from this mess. Jamie Dimon, chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest Wall Street bank, will likely make much more.
That’s because depositors in small and medium-sized banks are now fleeing to the safety of JPMorgan and other giant banks that have been deemed “too big to fail” because the government bailed them out in 2008.
Last Friday afternoon, the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, met with Dimon at his office in New York. He asked Dimon whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank could spread to other banks. “There’s a potential,” Dimon responded. Presumably, Dimon knew such contagion would mean vastly more business for JPMorgan. In a note to clients on Monday, bank analyst Mike Mayo wrote that JPMorgan in particular is “battle-tested” in volatile markets and “epitomizes” how the largest U.S. banks have shed risk since the 2008 financial crisis. “Recent industry developments should further its ability to gather core funding and act as a source of strength.”
Recall that the 2008 financial crisis generated a gigantic shift of assets to the biggest Wall Street banks, with the result that JPMorgan and the other giants became far bigger. In the early 1990s, the five largest banks had accounted for only 12% of U.S. bank deposits. After the crisis, they accounted for nearly half.
After this week, they’ll be even bigger.
Their giant size has already given them a huge but hidden federal subsidy estimated to be $83 billion annually—a premium that investors and depositors willingly pay to these enormous banks in the form of higher fees and lower returns, because they’re too big to fail. Some of this hidden federal subsidy goes into the pockets of bank executives. Last year alone, Dimon earned $34.5 million. (Greg Becker is a piker by comparison.)
The 2008 financial crisis generated a gigantic shift of assets to the biggest Wall Street banks, with the result that JPMorgan and the other giants became far bigger. After this week, they’ll be even bigger.
Jamie Dimon was at the helm in 2008 when JPMorgan received $25 billion from the federal government to help stem the financial crisis brought on largely by the careless and fraudulent lending practices of JPMorgan and other big banks. Dimon earned $20 million that year.
In March 2009, President Obama summoned Dimon and other top bank executives to the White House and warned them that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” But Obama never publicly rebuked Dimon or the other big bankers. When asked about the generous pay Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs continued to rake in, Obama defended them as “very savvy businessmen” and said he didn’t “begrudge peoples’ success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”
What free market system? Taxpayers had just bailed out the banks, and the bank CEOs were still raking in fat paychecks. Yet 8.7 million Americans lost their jobs, causing the unemployment rate to soar to 10%. Total U.S. household net worth dropped by $11.1 trillion. Housing prices dropped by a third nationwide from their 2006 peak, causing some 10 million people to lose their homes.
Rather than defend those CEO paychecks, Obama might have demanded, as a condition of getting bailed out, that the banks help underwater homeowners on Main Street.
Another sensible proposal would have been to let bankruptcy judges restructure shaky home mortgages so that borrowers didn’t owe as much and could remain in their homes. Yet the big banks, led by Dimon, opposed this. They thought they’d do better by squeezing as much as possible out of distressed homeowners, and then collecting as much as they could on foreclosed homes. In April 2008, Dimon and the banks succeeded: The Senate formally voted down a bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages to help financially distressed homeowners.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Dimon warned against policies that Bernie Sanders and AOC were then advocating, including Medicare for All, paid sick leave, and free public higher education. Dimon said they amounted to “socialism.” “Socialism,” he wrote, “inevitably produces stagnation, corruption, and often worse—such as authoritarian government officials who often have an increasing ability to interfere with both the economy and individual lives—which they frequently do to maintain power,” adding that socialism would be “a disaster for our country.”
Dimon also warned against “over-regulation” of banking, cautioning that in the next financial crisis, big institutions like JPMorgan wouldn’t be able to provide the lending they did during the last crisis. “When the next real downturn begins, banks will be constrained—both psychologically and by new regulations—from lending freely into the marketplace, as many of us did in 2008 and 2009. New regulations mean that banks will have to maintain more liquidity going into a downturn, be prepared for the impacts of even tougher stress tests, and hold more capital,” he wrote.
But as was demonstrated again this past week, American capitalism needs strict guardrails. Otherwise, it is subject to periodic crises that summon bailouts. The result is socialism for the rich while everyone else is subject to harsh penalties: Bankers get bailed out, and the biggest banks and bankers do even better. Yet average people who cannot pay their mortgages lose their homes. Meanwhile, almost 30 million Americans still lack health insurance, most workers who lose their job aren’t eligible for unemployment insurance, most have no paid sick leave, child labor is on the rise, and nearly 51 million households can’t afford basic monthly expenses such as housing, food, child care, and transportation.
Is it any wonder that so many Americans see the system as rigged against them? Is it surprising that some of them become susceptible to dangerous snake-oil peddled by demagogues?
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
In 1937, the American folklorist Alan Lomax invited Louisiana folksinger Huddie Ledbetter (better known as Lead Belly) to record some of his songs for the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Lead Belly and his wife Martha searched in vain for a place to spend a few nights nearby. But they were Black and no hotel would give them shelter, nor would any Black landlord let them in, because they were accompanied by Lomax, who was white. A white friend of Lomax’s finally agreed to put them up, although his landlord screamed abuse at him and threatened to call the police.
In response to this encounter with D.C.’s Jim Crow laws, Lead Belly wrote a song, “The Bourgeois Blues,” recounting his and Martha’s humiliation and warning Blacks to avoid the capital if they were looking for a place to live. The chorus goes,
“Lord, in a bourgeois town
It’s a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around”
And one verse adds,
“I want to tell all the colored people to listen to me
Don’t ever try to get a home in Washington, D.C.
‘Cause it’s a bourgeois town”
Such affronts, Lead Belly sang, occurred in the “home of the brave, land of the free,” where he didn’t want “to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie.”
There are music scholars who believe that Lead Belly didn’t really understand what “bourgeois” meant. They claim Lomax, later accused of being a Communist “fellow traveler,” provided him with that addition to his vocabulary and he simply understood it as a synonym for “racist.” Personally, I think that, in a few deft verses, Lead Belly managed to show how racism and class stratification merged to make it all but impossible to find a home in Washington, as in so many other places in America.
Still a Bourgeois Town
In the late 1970s, after a period of unemployment, my mother got a job for a year in Washington. We’d lived there while I was growing up, but she hadn’t been back for almost a decade. She was a white middle-class professional and it was still hell finding an affordable place to rent. (She’d been without a job for more than a year.) It would be some time before credit ratings would be formalized, thanks to the financial corporation FICO, producing a model of a standardized credit score for anyone. But her prospective landlords had other ways of checking on her creditworthiness. That she was a divorced woman with no rental history and no recent jobs didn’t make things easy.
Still, she had her sense of humor. One day during that search, she mailed me an old 45 rpm recording of Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues.” It seemed to perfectly catch her frustrated efforts to escape a friend’s guest room before she wore out her welcome.
I was reminded of that record recently when I read about the travails of Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a new Democratic congressman from Orlando, Florida. Born in 1996, he’s the youngest member of the House of Representatives. He quit his full-time job to campaign for Congress, supporting himself by driving an Uber. When he tried to find a home in Washington, his application for a studio apartment was rejected because of a bad credit score. As Frost tweeted:
“Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee.
This ain’t meant for people who don’t already have money.”
Nor, as Lead Belly might have added, for people like Frost who are Black.
Washington, D.C., it seems, remains a “bourgeois” town.
The True Costs of Renting
Suppose you want to rent a place to live. What will you need to have put aside just to move in? This depends not only on the monthly rent, but on other fees and upfront payments in the place where you plan to live. And, of course, your credit score.
Application fee: One part of Frost’s story caught my attention: he had to forfeit his “application fee” for an apartment he didn’t get. If, like me, you haven’t rented a house or apartment in a while you might not even know about such fees. They’re meant to cover the cost of a background check on the applicant. You might expect them to be rolled into the rent, but in a seller’s (or renter’s) market, there’s no risk to landlords in making them extra.
Frost’s fee was $50 for one application. (These fees tend to top out around $75.) Not so bad, right? Until you grasp that many potential renters find themselves filing multiple applications — 10 isn’t unheard of — simply to find one place to rent, so you’re potentially talking about hundreds of dollars in fees. California, my own state, is among the few that regulate application fees. The maximum rises to match inflation. In December 2022, that max was $59.67. Some states set a lower maximum, and some don’t regulate the fees at all.
Move-in fees: If you haven’t rented in a while, this one may take you by surprise. Unlike a security deposit, move-in fees are nonrefundable. They’re supposed to cover the costs of preparing a place for a new tenant — everything from installing new locks to replacing appliances and painting. Once subsumed in the monthly rent, today these costs are often passed on directly to renters. Nationally, they average between 30% and 50% of a month’s rent.
In June 2022, the median rent for an apartment in the United States crossed the $2,000 threshold for the first time, which means the median move-in fee now ranges from $600 to $1,000.
First and last months’ rent: This upfront cost should be familiar to anyone who’s ever rented. Landlords almost always require two months’ rent upfront and hold on to the last month’s rent to ensure that a tenant can’t skip out without paying. Because landlords can invest the money they’re holding (and tenants can’t invest what they’ve forked over to landlords), in recent years, most states have required landlords to pay interest on the tenant’s funds.
Security deposit: Unlike the move-in fee, a security deposit — often a month’s rent — is refundable if tenants leave a place in good condition. Its ostensible purpose: to reimburse the landlord for future cleaning and repair costs that exceed normal wear-and-tear. (But wait! Isn’t that what the non-refundable move-in fee should do?)
Other fees: If you’re renting a condo, you may have to cover the owner’s monthly Home Owner Association fees. In some cases, you’ll also pay for a utility’s hookup like gas or electricity.
So, how much will you have to pay to set foot in that apartment? Well, if you’re like Nuala Bishari, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who recently tried to rent a house in nearby Oakland, California, you’ll need to set aside almost $10,000. If you’re not sure how you could possibly put that kind of money together, the credit score company Experian has some advice for you:
First, “calculate your odds.” Find out how many other people are applying for the unit you’re interested in and, if the competition is stiff, “consider looking elsewhere.” (As if you haven’t done that already!)
Then tighten your belt. “Reducing extraneous expenses,” it observes, “is an easy way to save.” Stop going out to eat, for instance, and look for free family activities. If that’s not enough, it’s time to “get serious about cost cutting.” Their brilliant suggestions include:
Such “advice” to people desperate to find housing would be amusing if it weren’t so desperately insulting.
Rent Is Unaffordable for More Than Half the Country
Suppose you’ve managed to get together your up-front costs. What can you expect to pay each month? The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development considers housing affordable when rent takes no more than 30% of an individual’s or family’s monthly income. Human Rights Watch (!) reported in December 2022 that the Census Bureau’s 2021 Annual Community Survey revealed a little over half of all renters are spending more than 30% of their income that way — and in many cases, significantly more.
It tells you something that Human Rights Watch is concerned about housing costs in this country. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) put its data in perspective through what it calls a “Housing Wage”: the hourly rate you’d need to make working 40 hours a week to afford to rent a place in a specific area. For many Americans, housing, they report, is simply “out of reach.”
“In 2022, a full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $25.82 on average to afford a modest, two-bedroom rental home in the U.S. This Housing Wage for a two-bedroom home is $18.57 higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In 11 states and the District of Columbia, the two-bedroom Housing Wage is more than $25.00 per hour. A full-time worker needs to earn an hourly wage of $21.25 on average in order to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home in the U.S.”
Unfortunately, many people don’t earn $21.25 an hour, which is why they hold two or three jobs, or add Uber or Door Dash shifts to their other work. It’s hardest for minimum wage workers. As the NLIHC observes, “In no state can a person working full-time at the prevailing federal, state, or county minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the [fair market rate].” Furthermore, “in only 274 counties out of more than 3,000 nationwide can a full-time worker earning the minimum wage afford a one-bedroom rental home at the [fair market rate].”
For people living at or below the poverty line, the situation is even direr, which is why so many end up unhoused, whether by couch-surfing among friends and family or pitching a tent on the street.
In the coming months, the situation is only expected to worsen now that pandemic-era eviction moratoriums and the $46.5 billion federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program are expiring. According to the Pew Research Center, those programs prevented more than a million people from being evicted.
It Wasn’t Always This Way
People have always experienced poverty, but in the United States, the poor have not always gone without housing. Yes, they lived in tenements or, if they were men down on their luck, in single-room occupancy hotels. And yes, the conditions were often horrible, but at least they spent their nights indoors.
Indeed, the routine presence of significant populations of the urban unhoused on this country’s city streets goes back only about four decades. When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1982, there was a community of about 400 people living in or near People’s Park in Berkeley. Known as the Berkeley Beggars, they were considered a complete oddity, a hangover of burnt-out hippies from the 1960s.
During President Ronald Reagan’s administration, however, a number of factors combined to create a semi-permanent class of the unhoused in this country: high interest rates implemented by the Federal Reserve’s inflation fight drove up the cost of mortgages; a corruption scandal destroyed many savings and loan institutions from which middle-income people had long secured home mortgages; labor unions came under sustained attack, even by the federal government; and real wages (adjusted for inflation) plateaued.
Declaring that government was the problem, not the solution, Reagan began a four-decade-long Republican quest to dismantle the New Deal social-safety net implemented under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and supplemented under President Lyndon Johnson. Reagan savaged poverty-reduction programs like Food Stamps and Medicaid, while throwing more than 300,000 people with disabilities off Social Security. Democrat Bill Clinton followed up, joining with Republicans to weaken Aid to Families with Dependent Children (“welfare”).
A decade earlier, scandal-ridden state asylums for the mentally ill began to be shut down all over the country. In the late 1960s, Reagan had led that effort in California when he was governor. While hundreds of thousands were freed from a form of incarceration, they also instantly lost their housing. (On a personal note, this is why, in 1990, my mother found herself living in unsupervised subsidized housing for a population of frail elderly and recently de-institutionalized people with mental illnesses. This wasn’t a good combination.)
By the turn of the century, a permanent cohort of people without housing had come to seem a natural part of American life.
And It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This Forever
There is no single solution to the growing problem of unaffordable housing, but with political will and organizing action at the local, state, and federal levels it could be dealt with. In addition to the obvious — building more housing — here are a few modest suggestions:
At the state and local level:
At the federal level:
Then maybe the next time we send new people to Congress, all of them will be able to find a home in Washington, D.C.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A mid-pandemic survey from Pew found that 55 percent of Americans have no opinion on whether billionaires – whose wealth doubled during the pandemic – are good or bad for the United States.
How do we shift the narrative to convince a larger majority of the dangers of wealth hoarding at the top end of our economic ladder?
Inequality.org managing editor Rebekah Entralgo sat down with Gabriela Sandoval, the Executive Director of the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute – a new think tank focused on curbing the excessive wealth of the nation’s richest individuals through elevating policy campaigns and shifting the narratives on wealth.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rebekah Entralgo: When did you first become aware of inequality?
Gabriela Sandoval: My first recollection of inequality, and maybe I wouldn’t have called it that at the time nor would I have really been able to articulate it, was really in elementary school. I grew up in a working class immigrant family from Mexico and helped them navigate a lot in this country because I spoke English and they didn’t. I used to help my mom write checks and translated information on grocery store runs as early as nine or 10 years old. I soon realized not all of my peers had the kind of economic power that I had in my household. And of course what I mean by economic power is not really that I had actual economic power, but that I had an influence on my parents’ economic power in a way that was disproportionate for a child.
RE: That resonates with me as well. My mom is also the child of immigrants and shared with me stories from her childhood of having to call the utility company and translating for her mother so she could pay the electric bill. I never thought of it as a kind of economic power. With that lived experience in mind, what brought you to this position working to fight against mass concentrations of wealth?
GS: I spent a lot of time thinking I wanted to be an academic. I got a Ph.D in Sociology and landed a pretty plumb tenure track job at a California university. I quickly realized it wasn’t the right fit for me, but it took me a long time to do something about it. Just as I was coming up for tenure I realized that if I ever got tenure, I would never leave. So I jumped ship and started working as the academic director for a technical midwifery school in Mexico. That was my first opportunity to wade into the policy world in a real way.
When I came back to the United States a year later, I started working at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, a national think-and-do tank out of California, as its research director on their closing the racial wealth gap initiative. We talked a lot about wealth-building strategies for communities of color, structural impediments to wealth building for those communities, and the policy choices that have led to the massive racial wealth divide. But I was frustrated because we never really talked about the other side of the wealth divide — all of the mass concentrations of wealth.
More recently, I worked at the Utility Reform Network, a state-wide consumer advocacy organization in California, advocating on behalf of utility consumers in the state legislature and working to bridge the digital broadband divide. I remember speaking on a panel in front of regulatory commissioners from around the country and telling them that we don’t have a poverty problem in this country, we have an affluence problem. I started thinking about how so much of my work has been about addressing affordability, but the lever I was pulling on was regulatory rules. I knew that if I was going to make an impact, it needed to be through our broader economic system.
We won’t move the needle on any of the many of the existential crises we are facing if we don’t address wealth hoarding and the fact that the ultra-rich are sitting on so many of our resources. We can’t address climate justice, racial justice, or economic justice without addressing mass concentrations of wealth because so much of that hinges on resolving this issue.
RE: So much of our country’s work on inequality focuses on lifting the bottom up and leveling the top down, meaning focusing on alleviating poverty without addressing the concentrations of wealth at the top end of our society. Why is it so important to make sure that those working in support of economic justice tackle both at the same time?
GS: If you look at the economic system we have and the disparities facing us today, those are all policy choices. And this gets at why the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute focuses on the ultra-rich and not just the wealthy. There’s a point at which individuals in this country have come to have so much wealth that they are holding our government hostage. And not just them, but their lobbyists, their armies of attorneys and tax professionals, and the politicians that they’ve bought off.
There’s no way for us to undo the damage that is causing without breaking up those intense concentrations of wealth. The reason that we were able to create such a prosperous middle class at one point has everything to do with policy decisions. In some ways I was compelled to apply to this position because of its name: Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute. There’s a provocation there, but there’s also a very real truth in that we are living in a dysfunctional system. It is very much disordered and we can fix it.
RE: One of the ways your organization is working to fix it is by shifting the narrative on deservedness and wealth. What is your approach to that and what are some common narratives that you are wanting to debunk through your work?
GS: I’m a big believer that our words and our stories help us win. We can’t use language that presupposes that this is a natural way of being or that billionaires worked hard and that’s why they now get to reap the benefits of that work. In order for us to move the hearts and minds of so many people, we really need to be able to talk about this complicated issue in a way that everyone, across multiple audiences, can understand.
With the threshold at which our government can be captured by so much wealth, we need allies who are wealthy to join the struggle with us, especially the ultra-wealthy. It’s really about finding the words to convince and persuade our country and the entire world that this inequality is more damaging than it is worth. And I do feel that narrative shift is part of what has to happen.
The evidence from a mid-pandemic Pew survey found that 55 percent of people in this country don’t think billionaires are either good or bad for this country. They are indifferent to their presence. But the fact is that they capture so much of the power in this country that there is no way that this is good. Jeff Bezos has more money than he can spend in multiple lifetimes. The struggle is in how we educate people about that. We need to move public opinion in order to be successful.
RE: Your distinction between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy is important because I think when people hear the phrase “tax the rich,” they think of the wealthy individuals in their community who they aspire to be. But there’s a disconnect, because we aren’t talking about the people you see in your community driving a fancy car, we’re talking about the nameless, faceless 0.1 percent who hoard wealth for generations. What is your take on the extent to which making that distinction plays a key role in shifting the narratives on wealth?
GS: By no means are we interested in stunting folks’ aspirations, but when the game is rigged against the vast majority of people, the system is not working. I think there’s an important distinction to be made between our neighbors who have nurtured our communities through a small business and the ultra-ultra-wealthy, the top 0.1 percent of people who have more than $40 million in assets. My next-door neighbor — and I’m in California so many of my neighbors live in homes worth over a million dollars — they aren’t holding our government hostage and I’m not begrudging them or their success. But it is a problem when we have such intense concentrations of wealth at the top that our whole government is then dysfunctional.
It’s pretty clear that after a certain point, all of this wealth hoarding isn’t really about production and productivity. It becomes less about the things that people own or what they make, and it becomes so much more about power and status. That’s a really critical part of the puzzle. That power to influence our lives and government is at the heart of this problem.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
While far-right Republicans continue threatening to blow up the global economy unless Congress makes cuts to popular social programs, progressive taxation experts are celebrating U.S. President Joe Biden’s latest push to invest in “widespread prosperity” by raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. As part of his fiscal year 2024 budget blueprint unveiled Thursday, Biden calls for a…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
After a decade on Seattle City Council, socialist Kshama Sawant is declining to seek reelection and will instead launch a new national coalition called Workers Strike Back this March in cities around the US. The goal of Workers Strike Back is to build an independent workers’ movement that fights for the interests of the working class, rather than the agenda of either corporate party. This coalition will organize for a $ 25 an hour minimum wage, build grassroots labor unions, fight for a clean energy transition, battle anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ legislation, and more. Kshama Sawant joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the launch of Workers Strike Back.
Kshama Sawant has spent 10 years on the Seattle City Council, during which time she accepted only workers’ wages, increased the minimum wage to $15, and fought to increase taxes on Amazon. Sawant is a member of Socialist Alternative.
Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden, Adam Coley
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Tommy Harron
Chris Hedges: Kshama Sawant, a socialist who served for over a decade on the Seattle City Council, has announced she will not seek reelection. Instead, she will launch a national coalition called Workers Strike Back this March in cities around the country. This coalition will organize for a $25 an hour minimum wage, build grassroots labor unions in corporations such as Amazon, and advocate for a shorter work week without a cut in benefits and pay. It will also employ strikes when its demands are not met. It will work to build a massive green jobs program that can employ millions of workers in clean energy and prevent climate catastrophe, along with public ownership of the big energy corporations.
“Only the bosses profit from divisions among the working class,” she notes. Workers Strike Back will be a united, multi-racial, multi-gendered movement of working people. It will battle anti-trans legislation, and stand against all right-wing attacks on LGBTQ+ people. It will organize to win legal, safe, free abortions for all who need them. It will campaign to end racist policing, putting police under the control of democratically elected community boards with full power over department policy, hiring, and firing.
Her new labor organization calls for rent control, with no rent increases above inflation, as well as a massive expansion of publicly owned, high quality affordable housing, by taxing the rich. “We’re dying from unaffordable healthcare,” she notes, “As the pharma bosses and for-profit health insurance industry makes money from our sicknesses.” She and Workers Strike Back will call for free, state of the art Medicare for all, owned and democratically run by working people.
“The Democrats and Republicans both answer to the billionaire class. That’s why working people,” she writes, “keep getting screwed. Even so-called progressives in Congress,” she notes, “have completely failed to fight against the establishment, and offer no solutions.” The elected leadership of Workers Strike Back will accept only the average worker’s wage, as she did when she was a member of the city council.
Sawant, in her decade as a member of the Seattle City Council, has had an impressive track record. She helped win a $15 minimum wage for Seattle workers, pushed the council to tax Amazon, and championed renter protection as the chair of the Renters and Sustainability Committee. She joined the Socialist Alternative Party in 2006, and since then has helped organize demonstrations for marriage equality, participated in the movement to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was involved in the Occupy movement. She’s an active member in the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, fighting against budget cuts and tuition hikes.
Joining me to discuss the launch of Workers Strike Back is Kshama Sawant. So let’s begin with your tenure at the city council. I listed some of the achievements you and Socialist Alternative managed against fierce opposition, including a recall attempt to remove you from the council. What you managed to achieve. Why this break with local politics? Why this shift?
Kshama Sawant: As you recounted yourself, Chris, we have, in the near decade that I’ve been on the City Council, we meaning Socialist Alternative and I, have demonstrated a phenomenal example of what can be achieved when you have an elected representative in office that is unflinchingly tied to building movements of working people, and the marginalized, and the oppressed, and understands that, as a representative of working people, your job is not to make deals with the Democratic or Republican establishments. Not to make friends with your supposed colleagues in the halls of power. But instead, your loyalty lies with the people who suffer under the system of capitalism and through the policies of the parties of big business.
We have won numerous victories, as you were also talking about. We feel that, at this point, after a decade on the city council, it is important for us to share the lessons of how we won this, and what it took to win these, what it took to overcome the dogged opposition of the ruling class, of the wealthy, of corporate landlords, of billionaires like Jeff Bezos. To take this message of a fighting strategy. How to build fighting movements to win victories for working people. We believe that it’s time to take this message national.
As you also importantly noted, we don’t have this kind of fighting politics virtually anywhere in the United States, and it’s unfortunate. Especially what’s striking is the absence of any fighting left politics in the US Congress. That’s happening in the midst of an historic cost of living crisis. Many young people have only known economic insecurity, and low wages, unaffordable housing that gets more unaffordable every time the landlord jacks up rent. The statistics are just damning. To see how the bottom has fallen from under working people’s lives.
Throughout the pandemic and its aftermath, working people have lost trillions of dollars worth of what was with them. Not only in terms of the recessionary effects of loss of jobs, but the overall cost that they’re going to pay. But it’s not happening in a neutral world. At the same time, billionaires have added trillions of dollars to their fortunes during that same period of the pandemic.
So it really reveals how capitalism is a zero sum game. The wealthy are becoming wealthier, not because they have high IQs or because they’re creative, but because they’re siphoning off wealth from the vast majority of workers. Workers, that’s why, are falling further and further behind. This has resulted in huge anger among workers.
At the same time, what is conspicuously missing by its absence is genuine left leadership, as I was saying before, and as you were saying as well. That’s why we are launching this nationwide movement, Workers Strike Back. Really it should be the labor leadership, leadership of the labor movement, that’s launching this, just like Enough Is Enough in the UK. However, that’s not happened, and we can’t hold our breath that they’re going to do it. That’s why Workers Strike Back is being launched.
As you correctly said, we are raising the demands of a real raise for workers, like $25 an hour. Good union jobs for all. We are also continuing to fight racism, sexism, and all oppression. Again, as you said, free healthcare for all, and quality affordable housing. Bottom line, this is very important, if we are to build a real force on the left for the working class whose leadership does not sell out, we need a new party for the working class where the rank and file of the party can hold its leadership accountable.
Chris Hedges: Is the idea to build a militant labor movement, and out of that build a political party?
Kshama Sawant: I think that that has to… I don’t know if we can lay out a blueprint schematic of the chronology of how it will happen. But absolutely, what you’re indicating is very true, which is that the two things are going to go together. In other words, we are not going to get a new party of a working class outside of building rank and file militancy in the labor movement as well. Those two things are going to go hand in hand.
At the same time, it’s not only about the labor movement as it is today. Because we also have to remember that the vast majority of young people, young workers, where there’s the strongest support for the politics we are bringing forward, most of them are not unionized. Workers Strike Back understands that. We obviously want to specifically and consciously orient towards the rank and file today, who are already within the labor movement. But at the same time, also begin helping to mobilize and organize the unorganized.
You mentioned Amazon. Absolutely, Amazon is a crucial, crucial battle. Right now, actually, Socialist Alternative, my organization, and also Workers Strike Back, the national movement we are launching, we’re already in solidarity with a campaign that Socialist Alternative is leading in Kentucky. The largest Air Hub of Amazon in the world, which is located in Kentucky near Cincinnati Airport, we are carrying out a union drive there. This is extremely important, because this is one of the choke points of the capitalist class. So all of this has to go hand in hand with building the efforts to build a new party.
One other thing I’ll add here is, and then the reason also why these two things are so deeply interconnected, is that one of the key obstacles to building a new party for the working class, to actually have fighting politics that represent the interests of the working class, as opposed to those of the billionaires, is that the majority of the labor leadership has been, and continues to be, tied at the hip to the Democratic establishment. That is not coincidentally existing on its own. That goes hand in hand with the primary strategy of the same labor leadership being business unionism, which is trying to make peace with the bosses.
Trying to make peace with the bosses goes hand in hand with trying to keep the peace with the Democratic and Republican establishment as well. So we need a real break from all of this towards rank and file militancy, whether it’s unionized or not.
Chris Hedges: When you look at the rise of the Swedish socialist state, which the capitalist class managed finally to dismantle, but it was built through strikes. A series of strikes. Very high, I think over 70% of the Swedish workforce was unionized. They used that power to paralyze the country and get what they wanted. I’m looking at your movement, essentially, as embracing that tactic. That understanding that the only real weapon we have is no longer at the ballot box, with the two-party corporate duopoly, which blocks – I worked for Nader, as you know – Blocks any attempt by third parties to build a viable movement. But by mobilizing the working class to cripple the billionaire class through strikes. Is that essentially where you would like us to go?
Kshama Sawant: Absolutely correct. I could not agree more with what you said. In fact, for Workers Strike Back and for building any kind of movement towards concrete victories for the working class, for any of that agenda, using the working class weapon of going on strike has to be an integral component. Without that, it’s not going to work. In fact, this very much goes into the heart of the problem with business unionism as well, and why these ideas are ultimately not only problematic, but actually rotten, in the sense that they negate a very basic reality under capitalism, which is that the interests of the billionaire class, the bosses, the major shareholders, the corporate executives, their interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of workers.
So when you have a majority of labor leadership that is married to the idea of business unionism, then you have a leadership that, for the most part, they consciously refuse to mobilize, activate their rank and file members, because the whole idea of business unionism is that the tops of the labor leadership will quietly negotiate contracts with the bosses. Unfortunately, we’ve seen the history. Often these are filled with defeats for workers, setbacks for workers, rather than what we feel should be class struggle unionism, which is actively organizing the rank and file. Not only organizing them in general, but organizing for powerful and successful strike actions.
Because class struggle unionism recognizes that the bosses will never concede anything unless they’re forced to, because their profits and their position of power and the system of capitalism itself, all of this is directly derived from underpaying workers. From stealing the value of the labor that workers produce.
One of the hallmarks of business unionism is preventing strike actions at all costs. Business unionists put their stress on the so-called bargaining process because they fear antagonizing management by any real mobilization of workers, much less going on strike. In fact, often what you see is the majority of the labor leadership even refusing to carry out militant protest actions, much less go on strike. In fact, not only is it going to be important in general, going on strike. But already, as The Guardian newspaper reported just this past Sunday, that the bosses at corporations like Amazon, it’s not like they’re asleep at the wheel. They know the anger in society. They know that unionizing drives are starting to pick up. They know that young workers are especially angry. So what they are doing is they’re beginning to counter all of that with fierce, old school anti-union or union busting measures.
So how will we push back against any of this successfully? It will not happen through business unionist strategy. It will require a class struggle approach, which is, as I said, rooted in the recognition that workers have to fight against the capitalist class’s interests, not engage in the futile idea of wanting to morally persuade the boss, because they’re not going to be persuaded.
The reason we want the Amazon tax, or the $15 minimum wage, or the series of renters’ rights that we want is not because we made moral arguments to the ruling class, the Chamber of Commerce, or Jeff Bezos. No, they fought tooth and nail against each such movement. Corporate landlords were absolutely against what we were calling for. But we won because we organized rank and file workers, renters, to go up against the might of the billionaire class.
Class struggle unionism recognizes that worker power does not reside in the bargaining room, but outside it. In the workplaces and on the streets. As you said, throughout history, not only Europe, obviously in Europe the labor movement trajectory was much stronger historically than in the United States. But even in the United States, there was a powerful American made worker tradition of militant strike action.
In fact, the New Deal and the creation of the measure of material standards of living that the middle class did get, that came not because of FDR’s beneficence, but because of militant strikes. General strikes, including in Minneapolis. These are historic, earth shattering events that changed the course of history. But that happened because there were Marxist socialists and other courageous leaders of the left who understood that we have to have this fighting strategy.
Today, concretely, we need this strategy to unionize Amazon and other prominent workplaces like that. Also coming up, the UPS contract is up for renewal. The contract of the longshore workers on the West Coast, all the way from Washington to Southern California, they are up for renewal. These are, alongside the Amazon Air Hub, these are strategic choke points for the capitalist class. So it is really crucial that we start educating. Have active discussions and debates inside the labor movement, and outside it, to discuss how do we shut down the corporate money making machine of capitalism, and win over the wider working class for the strike actions, and really win some real victories, and raise the consciousness, the political education of the working class?
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the Democratic Party. Biden calls himself a pro labor president. Maybe you can mention what happened to the freight rail workers. But the Democratic Party essentially works hand in glove with the corporate community to prevent labor unions, and most of all to prevent strikes. That’s what they did with the freight rail unions, which actually, that’s one of the few groups of workers that retained the right to collective bargaining. The Biden administration took it away.
Kshama Sawant: Yes, it was a deeply shameful moment for president Biden, and all the Democrats in Congress who went along with it to carry out, as you said, historically shameful strike breaking action by breaking the railroad worker strike. In fact, to keep in mind how it’s almost Dickensian, this situation they were facing. On the one hand, you have billionaires like Warren Buffett who are the main owners of the freight railroads. You’ve got the railroad bosses. On the other hand, you have railroad workers who are facing very dangerous working conditions. Even facing loss of life, injury, repeated cases of injury. What were they demanding? Just basic paid sick leave. Here, in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of humanity, these workers are having to fight for these basic needs. What you saw was the complete betrayal by this so-called pro labor president.
But we have to be clear. If we are going to be clear about the Democratic Party, then we also have to call out the role played by the so-called progressives. The Congressional Progressive Caucus – So-called progressive as I called them – The Congressional Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party in the US Congress is 100 strong. The chair of that caucus is Pramila Jayapal, again, another so-called progressive. Then you have all these members of the so-called Squad, who were elected with these high expectations that they will show courage in the face of Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, and all the power brokers on behalf of Wall Street. What you have seen again and again is repeated betrayals of working people. The betrayal of the railroad workers and the breaking of their strike, obviously, was one of the starkest moments, and I think really crystallized for millions of people.
Obviously I am aware that there are many well meaning people who still may have illusions. But it’s our duty to clarify to them that, “Look, this is what happened.” We cannot just keep thinking that at some point, somewhere, something is going to change, and finally the progressives in the Democratic Party will do something for working people, because they are not. We are seeing repeated betrayals from them.
Now we are seeing the brutal consequences from the Democrats siding with the railroad tycoons. We’re seeing this apocalyptic scenario unfolding in East Palestine, Ohio. So the only way we can come out of this really tragic situation, not only in East Palestine, but all the living standards that have stagnated and slipped back for the majority of the American working class. A non-starter for us to change anything is if we continue putting our faith in the Democratic Party.
That’s another very dangerous component for the left, failing to build a new party for the working class and the Democrats continuing to sell out working people, as the threat of the growth of right populism is still hanging in the air. Because workers are angry. They’re going to be looking for alternatives. In the absence of a genuine left alternative, they are going to end up getting scapegoated by right populism.
In fact, in the wake of the sellout by Biden, some railroad workers feel like, well you know what? I’m going to just maybe end up voting for Trump next time. Because what else is there for me to do? Trump came to power in the first place because there was such massive anger against the betrayals by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Unfortunately Trump ran, he was a con man through and through. He’s a member of the billionaire class. But he ran with this idea, the false idea that he was going to represent ordinary people. Obviously he didn’t. But the threat of Trumpism and right populism, far from gone, is actually growing.
Then the other thing I think to note is, when we were calling, when sections of the left, and Socialist Alternative, and you, and others were calling for Force the Vote, the Squad members like AOC said, you can’t do that. Now we are seeing the rightmost, and some of the most dangerous right-wing Republicans, like the Freedom Caucus, not to mention the MAGA squad within the Freedom Caucus, they showed that Force the Vote can be done, except they showed it from the right.
I have to say, it’s really just terrible that in response to the left asking, ordinary people asking, well the right wing showed how to do Force the Vote. What stopped you from doing Force the Vote for Medicare For All? Unfortunately, AOC’s response was, we can’t do that because it will cause relational harm. Actually, I think that was a rare moment of political honesty. Because what she really means – And this is true – What she means is that it is relational harm. Meaning if your priority is to keep cozy relationships with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden, then you’re not going to fight for working people, because that will cause conflict between you and people like Pelosi and Biden. You will become public enemy number one to them. But that is what is needed.
We need leaders on the left for working people who have the courage to become public enemy number one of the ruling class, and understand that, actually, that is necessary in order to fight for working people.
Chris Hedges: I just want to throw in that part of the contract negotiations for the freight railroad workers was addressing the lack of safety. They warned precisely that because they had downsized or fired so many workers and reduced crews to skeletal levels, and then were also not instituting even basic safety reforms, they completely predicted this horrific chemical spill we’ve seen in Ohio.
Kshama Sawant: Oh, absolutely. You’re totally right, Chris, that the demands of the railroad workers were connected with the actual conditions. This was a completely predictable and avoidable catastrophe that has happened in East Palestine, Ohio. In fact, many of your viewers might know already that these freight magnates, the billionaires, their agenda is to expand profits, obviously. So they introduced a concept that they call Precision Scheduled Railroading. It sounds like something sophisticated. But that’s just, Precision Scheduled Railroading, or PSR, is just corporate speak for, let’s make everything as crappy as we can get away with for railroad workers and working class people as a whole, and take the maximum loot for the billionaires, the major shareholders, and the top executives. Basically what it meant was making the trains longer, reducing the staff, scrapping safety inspections, and lobbying the government to whittle down regulations. This is what’s happening.
In fact, that’s why it’s important also to highlight how we want to use Workers Strike Back as a nationwide movement to raise the consciousness of working people and also start building an alternative to the corporate parties. We are now launching a new petition, hopefully in collaboration with left railroad union leaders and other progressive labor unions, which is a petition, where the demands are that we need to bring railroads into democratic public ownership. Because the East Palestine derailment, and also what happened with the strike breaking shows that we need to eliminate the profit motive from the railroads altogether. Because it’s only when it is owned publicly, by workers, that we will be able to ensure safety measures and stop these preventable tragedies, and not further enrich the billionaires through stock buy-backs.
This petition, in response to the railroad crisis, is also calling for free healthcare for all. Obviously this is an overall demand that rank and file Democrat and Republican voters agree with. But most immediately, obviously we know that East Palestine residents will likely suffer serious, and even deadly health conditions, from this toxic disaster. We know that the railroad tycoons are attempting to evade any liability. So we need, as you said before, free state of the art Medicare for all, publicly owned and democratically run by working people. Of course, again, fundamentally all of this is also still tied to the need for a new working class party.
Chris Hedges: Well let’s talk about strategy. Only about 11% of the US workforce is unionized. I think it’s about 6% are in the public sector. Like the freight railroad workers by law, essentially, can be blocked from carrying out strikes. The billionaire class itself has pushed through a series of measures going all the way back to the 1947 Taft-Hartley act that makes it difficult to strike. But right-to-work laws, very sophisticated union busting, units in large corporations like Amazon, Starbucks, Walmart. So let’s talk about where we’re starting from and what has to be done.
Kshama Sawant: Yes, your point is very well taken. If you look at the proportion of workers who are unionized, it’s abysmally small. These are both historical failures by labor leadership, and also the fact that there has been a real concerted attack against the labor movement in the last 50 years, starting from the neoliberal era. So the reality is that the majority of young people are not in unions. At the same time, the popularity of unions among young people is historically high.
We have to be very clear. If we are going to be building a national movement like Workers Strike Back, then it’s not only for people who are today members of the labor movement. It is also for young people and other workers who are trying to organize a union in the workplace, but they don’t have a union. It is for all working people who want to get organized to fight back. Not just on workplace issues. It’s also, whether it is a housing struggle for rent control,or it is a struggle against oppression.
You mentioned trans rights. In fact, just last week, actually last Tuesday, our office, alongside Socialist Alternative and many South Asian activists, and also union members, we were able to win the nation’s, and in fact, outside South Asia, the world’s first ban on caste discrimination. Caste oppression is one type of oppression. We have to tie the struggles of workers related to workplace issues to these other struggles as well, because the cost of living crisis and the crisis around discrimination and oppression affects all of us in the working class. So we need to build a united movement of that kind.
At the same time, we also want to keep in mind that the struggles inside the labor movement also, even though at this moment encompass a minority of workers, if we can build rank and file militancy within some crucial unions, sectors of unions and sectors of industry, and win some outsized victories through powerful strike action – And I don’t mean to in any way inadvertently suggest that it’s going to be easy. This is going to be a real struggle, and we’re going to have to go head to head against the rotten business unionist ideas inside the labor movement.
There will need to be very patient political education also being carried out. Because many workers are not familiar with labor history, so we have to have respectful debate and discussion inside labor. This is going to be a difficult process, but a necessary process.
But the point I’m getting at is that, if we can get to a point where we can build major strike action in some crucial sectors of industry and win outsized victories through that process, then that will have, again, as you would say, it will punch above its weight. The effect it will have will boomerang throughout the working class, and especially young people will pay attention to it. That is why it’s important for us to both keep in mind that there are non-workplace issues where struggles will break out, like Black Lives Matter. At the same time, there are very strategic workplace situations that we have to pay attention to. That’s why I was also mentioning UPS. I think that is upcoming. That’s the most urgent dialog that we need, with UPS rank and file.
Chris Hedges: So talk a little bit about how it’s going to work. Are you going to try and build chapters in various cities? What are you going to do?
Kshama Sawant: Yeah, we do want to build chapters in various cities. Undoubtedly, we’ll need to have people who are watching shows like this one to contact us and let us know that they would like to do it for the beginning process. In Socialist Alternative, we are launching Workers Strike Back in various cities. In Seattle for example, on Saturday, March 4 will be our official launch. You are going to be part of that obviously, Chris, and some other leaders, including leaders in left labor.
So the launch is going to be on, as I said, Saturday, March 4 at 12:00 Noon Pacific Time at the University of Washington. If you are watching this, and you are in Seattle, you should definitely join us. Regardless of where you are, if you find this message exciting, please look us up on workersstrikeback.org, and get in touch with us.
Just to give you a sense of what we’ve already done, as I said, we fought for this past legislation. We also are launching, as I said, this petition in solidarity with railroad workers and with the people in East Palestine. But aside from that, we are also helping build this union drive at the largest Amazon Air Hub, which I mentioned before. Then we are also helping to organize a network of undergraduate support for unionized graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia, who are fighting for a living wage.
We picketed alongside American Airlines employees demanding a fair contract. We’ve stood with nurses calling for safe staffing. We joined over 200 union journalists in a walkout against retaliatory firings at NBC. So all of this shows, these early initiatives show that we can build real solidarity in action and class struggle. So I really hope that thousands, tens of thousands of workers and young people take up the mantle of Workers Strike Back, and build branches in various cities across the country.
Chris Hedges: That was Kshama Sawant on her new organization Workers Strike Back. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay—given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid?
Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public school system: 80 percent of children in public school are low-income; 90 percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter. Almost all new residential buildings are high-income; and the city is referred to as “two Bostons.”
In one of these “two Bostons” live low-wage women workers, a wage that consigns them to poverty compounded throughout their lives and in old age. “Nearly two-thirds of all low-wage workers in the United States are women,” an inequality worsened by racial inequality. Consider, too, the persistent “motherhood penalty”—whereby mothers are further set back financially by lack of paid parental leave and government-funded child care.
But, my worry today for these working mothers and their children that day concerned only one dimension of the arduous reality facing many women—most egregiously women of color—as we mark International Women’s Day, March 8, a day founded on the fact of women’s inequality. Female textile workers launched the first march on March 8, 1857 in protest of unfair working conditions and unequal rights for women—one of the first organized strikes by working women, during which they called for a shorter work day and decent wages.
Women have gained considerable rights since that and subsequent marches, through our own organizing, protests, and arrests: the right to vote, to own property, to inherit, to education, to have once-legal rape in marriage criminalized. A revolution for human rights without weapons, fists or a drop of blood spilled. Yet, only a handful of countries are nearing full equality for women; and ours is not even close. Indeed, U.S. women’s progress in gaining equality has both stagnated and lost ground.
Worst of all, violence against women by men in all its forms: pornography, rape, prostitution, physical beating, murder increased during Covid. Women’s reproductive rights have been trampled by the 2022 Supreme Court decision to void the right to abortion; and many states are sponsoring a plethora of regulations to deny women access to abortion and birth control. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that domestic abusers can own guns – a “death sentence for women and their families,” given “abusers are five times more likely to kill their victims if they have access to firearms.”
From 2001 to 2019, approximately 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, a period of time in which more than 18,000 US women were killed—nearly 3 per day—by current or former intimate partners. (For those who assume male violence and war are inevitable, don’t waste your time on a doomed view. Consider this: during thousands of years in Neolithic Europe women and men lived in egalitarian, peaceful societies, according to respected archeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas.)
In that same period of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an estimated 14,400 US women died before, during and just after childbirth—more than twice the number of US soldiers killed in these wars. Thousands of memorials commemorate those who gave their lives for their country in war; name one for women killed by men or who lost their lives giving birth to the next generation.
The injustice of women’s inequality ripples out to national governments. Peace and the security of nations are powerfully linked with the equality of women. Comparing the security and level of conflict within 175 countries to the overall security of women in those countries, researchers have found that the degree of equality of women within countries predicts best how peaceful or conflict-ridden their countries are. Further, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are less stable and more likely to choose force rather than diplomacy to resolve conflict.
So, if you care about turning back from the warpath the U.S. is on and eliminating nuclear weapons, consider the words of the revered Ghanian statesman and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan:
“There is no policy more effective in promoting development, health, and education than the empowerment of women and girls … and no policy is more important in preventing conflict or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead. She had given birth within hours of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on the night of February 6, 2023. Like her, more than 50,000 people died in the earthquake. As tragic as it is hopeful, this story has moved the international media. It also reminds us that over 350,000 pregnant women who survived the earthquake now urgently need access to health care, according to the United Nations. And this is only one aspect of women’s vulnerability to natural disasters.
Floods, droughts, earthquakes, and other extreme events are not gender-neutral, especially in developing countries. Evidence shows that women and girls die in greater numbers and have different and uneven levels of resilience and capacity to recover. Of the 230,000 people killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, for example, 70% were women. Because of gender barriers, they often have fewer survival skills: boys are taught to swim or read first. This makes it difficult for them to access early warnings or identify safe shelters.
In addition, it is more difficult for women to escape from danger, since they are most often responsible for children, the elderly, and the sick. Heightened tensions and fear, as well as the loss of income provoked by disasters, drive increased domestic violence against women and girls. They are also the first victims of sexual violence and exploitation when entire populations are displaced—this was one of the first concerns in Pakistan when more than 8 million people had to leave their homes because of the terrible floods in June through August of 2022.
Progressive taxation—making the richest people and multinationals pay their fair share—is one of the most powerful tools for reducing inequality of all kinds.
Natural catastrophes negatively impact everyone economically, but women and girls are disproportionately affected. World Bank data show that female farmers suffer much more than male ones in rural areas. Assigned to domestic tasks, they are more dependent than men on access to natural resources and are, therefore, the first to suffer when these become scarce. In every region, food insecurity is higher among women than men. In 2020, it was estimated that nearly 60% of the people who go hungry are women and girls, and the gender gap has only increased since then. Their lack of access to bank accounts also means that women’s assets are less protected than men’s.
And, of course, recovery from any crisis builds on societal expectations related to gender roles. Consequently, women bear the brunt of the increased domestic burden after a disaster at the cost of missing out on other income-generating activities. We know that women spend, on average, 3.2 times more time than men on unpaid care work, and the COVID-19 pandemic—another human-induced natural catastrophe—made evident how unequally unpaid care and domestic work is shared, and how undervalued and underrecognized it is. This is a major constraint on women’s access to education, an obstacle to their entry into and advancement in the paid labor market, and to their political participation, with serious consequences in terms of social protection, income, and pensions.
Gender inequality exacerbates the impact of natural disasters, and the consequences of natural disasters exacerbate gender inequality. This is an unacceptable vicious cycle. With the world already facing a growing number of climate-related tragedies, governments must take immediate and long-term action to invest in universal access to health care, water and sanitation, education, social protection, and infrastructure for gender equality and the full enjoyment of women’s human rights.
As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, let’s keep in mind that it is impossible to build more resilient societies without fighting for gender equality.
Even in times of crisis, when state coffers are nearly empty, there are equitable solutions to raise revenues to fund the investments needed to strengthen women’s resilience: to make those who profit from the crises ravaging the planet, including from those natural disasters, pay, as recommended by the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT), of which I am a member alongside, among others, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, and Thomas Piketty. Instead of implementing austerity programs that devastate the most disadvantaged, states can increase their fiscal space by taxing companies and the super-rich more.
It starts with taxing the super profits made by multinationals, and several countries in Europe and Latin America have already begun to do so. This is particularly true for the pharmaceutical giants that have made a fortune selling vaccines against Covid-19, which they were able to develop due to public subsidies. This is also the case for multinationals in the energy or food sector: Oxfam estimates that their profits increased by more than two and a half times (256%) in 2022 compared with the 2018–2021 average. For the same reasons, it is urgent to tax the richest, who get away with paying hardly any taxes these days. One cannot accept that, as Oxfam reminds us, a man like Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in history, is taxed at 3.3%, while Aber Christine, a market trader in Uganda who sells rice, is taxed at 40%.
Progressive taxation—making the richest people and multinationals pay their fair share—is one of the most powerful tools for reducing inequality of all kinds. As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, let’s keep in mind that it is impossible to build more resilient societies without fighting for gender equality. Continuing to ignore it is a political choice, and an even more perilous threat to development than natural disasters themselves.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.