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HOUSING IN AMERICA: A SYMPOSIUM MAUREEN TKACIK: SHATTERED HOSPITALS

II D DE EA A S, S, P PO O LL II TT II C CS S& &P PO OW WE ER R

WHAT NOW? Election 2024 and its aftermath

DAVID DAYEN | HAROLD MEYERSON | GABRIELLE GURLEY ROBERT KUTTNER | JANIE EKERE | EMMA JANSSEN LUKE GOLDSTEIN | PAUL STARR DECEMBER 2024 PROSPECT.ORG

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December 2024 VOL 35 #7

Features 14 The Money Game

06

53

The Democratic Party had more money than God this election. At what cost? By Luke Goldstein

20 The Social Triumph and Political Tragedy of Immigration

Even if you think immigration is good, you must consider the people who don’t. By Paul Starr

26 The Ambulance Chasers of Totaled Hospitals

Insight Health is the pride of Flint, Michigan, and it’s coming for a failing hospital near you. By Maureen Tkacik

36 Tackling the Housing Crisis

A symposium on how housing unaffordability happened and what can be done Essays by David Dayen, Robert Cruickshank, Sulma Arias, Ryan Cooper, Tara Raghuveer & Ruthy Gourevitch, and Paul Williams

26

Prospects 04 What Is the Democratic Party? By David Dayen

Notebook 06 How the Democrats Can Regain the Working Class

By Harold Meyerson 08 Abortion Dislocations By Gabrielle Gurley 10 Billionaire Gifts and Cuts for Everyone Else

By Robert Kuttner 12 Making Room Under the Bus By Janie Ekere and Emma Janssen

Culture 53 Hassan Ali Kanu on The Message 56 Siddhartha Mahanta on Saturday Night 60 Susan Linn on cellphones in schools 64 Parting Shot: Mr. President, It’s Time to Do Crime

By Francesca Fiorentini Cover art by Eric Palma

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 1

FROM THE EDITOR

My five-year career here at the Prospect has covered

either the anticipation of the 2020 election and the battle of ideas within the Democratic Party, or the fruit of those ideas in the Biden presidency. It was all a time of looking forward to a brighter future. This extended period has ended, and as progressives we’re in a new position: the wilderness.

This is also a familiar place in the set-them-up-to-knock-them-down political culture of modern America. As I write in our lead essay of this issue, whether because of a relentless focus on negativity, the high number of veto points in our political system, or just the lack of ambition or competency or both from our ruling parties, we’ve become a country with short-term politics and no lasting popular shifts. It’s actually not limited to politics but the culture in general: We put people on pedestals and then enjoy their downfall. It’s the E! True Hollywood Story phenomenon, writ large.

Donald Trump’s first term was terrifying in its unpredictability. A man with no formed beliefs on anything other than self-enrichment was taking the controls of the national machinery. What we learned is that he didn’t really know what to do with them; he would soon lose Congress and then the White House, as voters turned on him for his inability to manage crisis or get much accomplished.

The second term is supposed to be different; the Trump machine has learned, and will implement Project 2025 with ruthless efficiency, or at least intimidate any checks on power. But nobody really liked the policies the first time around, and the internal contradictions—how deportations or across-the-board tariffs could boost inflation and subsequently interest rates, for example—are likely to collapse on themselves.

We know what our role will be. We will document what Trump means to do, who on the inside will personally benefit from those decisions, and who on the outside is vulnerable. And second, there’s what’s more of the focus of this issue: making sense of where the Democrats go from here if they want to be a force in national elections again.

Figuring out what matters will not be wrapped up in a hot take or a podcast episode. We will be focused on getting the whole story, outside of the conventional wisdom. We will cover the battle to defend the country from Trump’s whims in courtrooms, state capitols, and city halls all across the country. But we will also seek to illuminate what the American people actually believe, and the broader societal forces that bring them to those views.

At this moment, we are reminded of just how important independent media is. We don’t take our responsibility to inform the public lightly, at a time when so many people have lost trust in the mainstream press. We thank you for having faith in our unique storytelling about ideas, politics, and power. We’re going to need each other in this moment. Thanks for helping us figure this out together.

2 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

—David Dayen

EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVID DAYEN FOUNDING CO-EDITORS ROBERT KUTTNER, PAUL STARR CO-FOUNDER ROBERT B. REICH EDITOR AT LARGE HAROLD EXECUTIVE EDITOR DavidMEYERSON Dayen

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WRITING FELLOWS JANIE EKERE, LUKE MANAGING EDITOR Ryan Cooper GOLDSTEIN, EMMA JANSSEN ART DIRECTOR Jandos Rothstein INTERNS K. SLADE, SEAN EIFERT, ASSOCIATE EDITOR Susanna Beiser LYDIE LAKE, DAHLIA TARVER STAFF WRITER Hassan Kanu

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S T C E P S PRO DAVID DAYEN

What Is the Democratic Party?

The statistic that like we’ve just witnessed with the Trump/ best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House.

(The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties.

After Republicans defeated John Kerry in 2004 and snatched five Senate seats across the South, commentators believed social issues like gay marriage would set an unwinnable trap for Democrats. Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called Painting the Map Red, imagining a permanent conservative majority. Democrats then took the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms.

When Barack Obama crushed John McCain in post–financial crisis 2008, Democratic pundits decided they had an enduring majority. The Tea Party thrashed them in 2010. The conventional wisdom was that Obama was toast; he won in 2012. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory signaled a changed electorate, until Democrats won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, only to lose both in 2022 and 2024.

In fact, only two other times in American history have there been as many as three consecutive one-term presidencies, 4 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Biden/Trump sequence: the intense pre– Civil War period from 1836 to 1860, and the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age from 1876 to 1896. Both of those eras felt the reverberations of slavery, racial strife, and disunion, with multiple national depressions (“panics,” in 19th-century parlance) thrown in.

What accounts for today’s political pingpong match? In my February feature about American democracy, I put it this way: “Voters keep electing a new party to fulfill promises that are blocked by the structure of the political system.” Whether due to constitutional gridlock or the paucity of ambition in our politics, voters are in a state of perpetual anger, ready to throw the bums out, throw out the bums who replaced those bums, and eject those new bums, too.

Amid despair and recriminations on the left and unprecedented multiracial support on the right, many are talking yet again about a realignment. But the real paradigm shift will only come when one political party actually responds to the public’s needs.

MAGA has its own strategy to do that: mass deportation, tax cuts and deregulation to satiate business, and a neo-19th-century reprisal of high tariffs. Project 2025 shows that Trump and his allies have prioritized removing structural impediments to this

agenda, skirting constitutional hurdles, firing disloyal bureaucrats. But Trump’s erratic record as president did not produce firm support. Even in this “realigning” election, four Republican Senate candidates running in states Trump carried lost, and the House barely budged. As president, Trump only has a short window to earn public trust, which has proven elusive for two decades.

The much more mysterious question is this: Who leads the Democratic Party, and what do they offer America?

One bad outcome of the election that could paradoxically prove useful for Democrats’ future is the uniformity of the swing away from Kamala Harris. Practically no section of the country, no demographic subgroup, nothing was spared; she lost vote share relative to Joe Biden in 2020 in all but two states. This actually keeps Democrats, or at least it should, from playing their favorite parlor game: slicing and dicing the exit polls and county-level data until they find somebody to blame.

This November’s failure has a thousand fathers. The demonstrated tendency of voters globally to reject incumbents who presided over post-pandemic inf lation, regardless of the incumbent party’s ideology or the state of inflation at the time of the election, created a powerful undertow that nobody, least of all Harris, could combat. A simple model of Biden’s disapproval rating, plotted on a graph, would predict a three-point popular-vote loss; Harris lost by less than two.

But a legion of other inadequacies stand out. Harris replacing Joe Biden at the last minute put her at a severe disadvantage, without the familiarity and trust of voters, and the command of her own ideas that get honed through an extended primary schedule. Harris’s shambolic 2019 bid for the White House produced numerous agenda items from the cultural left that Republicans made sure would haunt her attempt to run a conservative, pro-business, promilitary, tough-on-the-border campaign in 2024. Even during this campaign, whatever economic populist vision she placed into her paid media (there was close to $1 billion in ads on pocketbook issues) would be contradicted by top surrogate Mark Cuban in earned media.

The takeaway from these endless contradictions is that Harris had no core, just a bundle of positions that fluttered with the political moment. When pressed, she

couldn’t come up with a single thing she would do differently than Joe Biden, amid an electorate demanding something, anything different than Joe Biden.

Some commentators have decided that Democratic losses amid a strong economy and powerful association with unions, both tangible and symbolic, means that the mother’s milk of politics, economic policies that improve people’s lives, no longer matters. Biden did have many successes in his presidency, which if they hold (a big if), will propel the country toward a better future.

But these commentators should look closer at the lived experience of Americans today.

Though unionization rules improved under Biden, a lack of consistent organizing across the labor movement meant that union density continued to shrink; more than 90 percent of the working class is not organized.

Biden’s industrial reshoring led to a manufacturing construction boom, but that is not the same as permanent manufacturing jobs anchoring a community. Millions of families benefited from full-employment policies; but many more millions are affected by inflation, which hits everyone.

For half of Biden’s presidency, wages did not outpace inflation. That reversed itself, but Americans see wage increases as the result of their own talent and inflation increases as a government failing. The primary channel to tame inflation, Federal Reserve interest rate hikes, increased the cost of borrowing, making big purchases like mortgages and car loans more expensive. The cost of living in 2024 was simply higher than in 2020 across the board.

The pandemic’s pop-up safety net, with enhanced unemployment benefits and expansion of the Medicaid rolls and rental assistance and increased food stamp benefits and paid leave and child care programs, all ran out under Biden. Student loan payments were reinstated under Biden after being paused for three years. The administration and the Democratic Congress passed a groundbreaking monthly advance Child Tax Credit; it ran for exactly six months, without any connection to Biden or the Democrats who pushed it through (the direct deposits contained the indecipher-

able code “IRS TREAS 310”). Recipients associated the temporary relief with all the other temporary relief that vanished during Biden’s presidency.

The behind-closed-doors process of who created these pandemic welfare programs in Washington and who was responsible for them going away (hello, Joe Manchin) was never articulated. All a young mother of two knew is that she got help when the virus appeared, and then it all disappeared precisely when everything got more expensive, while billions were sent abroad to finance disastrous wars and rampant slaughter. Anyone who says that voters punched a great economy in the face ignores these realities.

There’s another aspect to this that’s harder to confront. The cover-up of Biden’s obvious mental decline until the whole world witnessed it at the June debate made Democrats look like a party full of liars trying to trick the American people. And here is where we get to one of the bigger problems with the Democratic Party today: its tendency toward conflict aversion.

For three and a half years, nobody wanted to say Biden couldn’t hack it, or even interrogate the evidence. Even after the debate, some progressive politicians attempted a strange play to back Biden in exchange for some platform positions. Status within the party was prized over telling the public the truth.

Establishment Democratic politicians constantly lament the loss of a Republican Party they could work with. They make a fetish of bipartisanship, of adopting positions that “even Republicans” support.

Harris appeared most at home when promising Republican representation in her cabinet, even as she called her Republican opponent a threat to everything we hold dear.

There is an important role for compromise in American politics, but when compromise becomes a candidate’s virtue and calling card, voters wonder what underlies it, if anything.

Democrats have an unwieldy coalition of progressives and moderates, consumer advocates and Wall Street bankers, environmentalists and labor organizers, muscular foreign-policy promoters and pacifists,

people who want the party to be about tax fairness and health care and abortion and democracy and any of about a hundred other silos. Little stitches together these priorities, outside of being a jumble of words on a page.

In the end, the sum of all these discrete and disparate passions is a passionless party, one that relies on focus-group testing to set priorities rather than any animating set of principles. Democrats prefer to diagnose voters, rather than take care of their concerns.

And there’s no leader currently available to mold this mass into anything coherent. In that void, the other side fills in the blanks, and the public, absent any other information or clear definition, tends to believe them.

Nobody should overreact to a single election. As I said at the top, historical trends strongly suggest Democrats will regain the House in 2026, because Republicans’ own internal contradictions, proclivities to corruption, and inability to govern will rapidly reveal themselves. That’s a tantalizing prospect, but also one that indulges Democratic conflict aversion. It lets them muddle through until the next election. Until people are satisfied that their concerns are heard in Washington, we’re just going to keep lunging from one broken party to the other.

Here it’s worth thinking about the two actual realignments in American politics in the last century: Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Nobody would confuse the two, although Reagan was an FDR Democrat when he joined the Screen Actors Guild, a union he would eventually lead.

Roosevelt defined government as an interventionist force to limit the economy’s excesses and protect the vulnerable; Reagan redefined government as an inefficient yoke on the backs of the people. But the two realigners shared an ability to convince voters that they believed in something. Trump has a vision, however wrongheaded it is, and however lacking it may prove once put in contact with reality. The Democratic vision, however, is more distant, more ephemeral, too constructed in a lab to be seen as authentic.

I recognize, as good politicians who don’t want the responsibility for making progress themselves sometimes say, that movements for change typically happen from the bottom up. But someone at the top has to acknowledge that outcry, and work to satisfy it. Two decades of voter behavior suggests that they wonder whether anyone is actually listening.

Who will fashion an answer for them? n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

NOTEBOOK How Democrats Can Regain the Working Class It’s time to go after the nation’s real elite— not the Republicans’ largely fictitious one.

The next time Democratic primary candidates debate one another, they should have to answer one straightforward question: Whose hatred do you welcome?

That question derives from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s nationally broadcast 1936 speech in Madison Square Garden, delivered just before voters went to the polls three days later. Roosevelt provided a list of the “old enemies” who attacked him during his first term: monopolists, speculators, bankers, oligarchs. “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today.

They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.”

The following day, a few of Roosevelt’s more centrist supporters suggested he moderate his words. Roosevelt rebuffed them. Three days later, he won what is still the most overwhelming victory in American political history, not only taking the Electoral College by a 523-to-8 margin, but also winning 61 percent of the popular vote, and carrying his fellow Democrats to what are still the nation’s most lopsided congressional majorities.

That kind of sweep is not at all possible for either of today’s parties. But I recount this history because Roosevelt understood better than almost all Democrats who succeeded him the importance of identifying public enemies at a time when the nation is troubled and divided. This understanding is the sine qua non of any Democratic effort to win back enough working-class voters to reclaim a popular majority in future elections.

We live, after all, in an angry nation where government bends over to meet the needs of various elites rather than ordinary people—precisely how Roosevelt characterized big business’s goals in his time. It’s been the genius of the Republicans to cre6 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

ate a counter-elite to the economic powers that actually dominate the nation. Their Frankenstein monster consists of deepstate government bureaucrats, academia, the socially liberal sectors of the wealthy

who imposed these affronts on the Northern working class, too. Wallace had his own version of the deep state; he termed them “pointy-headed bureaucrats,” a more acceptable target to Northern whites who

Franklin Roosevelt at his “I welcome their hatred” speech at Madison Square Garden in 1936

and upper middle class, and those corporate leaders who are influenced in some degree by those constituencies.

This counter-elite long predates Donald Trump. Alabama segregationist Gov. George Wallace ran for president against the specter of Blacks gaining equal rights, but quickly and effectively enlarged his target list to the egalitarian policymakers

didn’t back the Jim Crow laws of the South but feared Black advancement nonetheless.

This approach pulled down enough Northern votes in the 1964 Democratic primaries and the 1968 general election (running as a third-party candidate) that Republicans began echoing Wallace’s attacks.

By 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president by running against government

AP PHOTO

By Harold Meyerson

in a time of inflation, and while he quickly realized there was scant support for cutting Social Security and Medicare, he gleefully targeted most everything else (except the Pentagon). But Reagan proved powerless to stop the sociocultural movement toward greater tolerance.

By 1992, Pat Buchanan ran for president, proclaiming the nation to be in a “cultural war” and urging his fellow Republicans to focus their attacks on feminists, gays, abortionists, and racial minorities. Indeed, with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Republicans had lost their number one enemy, and subsequently their number one attack on Democrats: that they were “soft on Communism.”

Buchanan was the culture war’s prophet, but Newt Gingrich really cemented this line of attack on Democrats. Elected House Speaker following the 1994 Republican midterm sweep, Gingrich convinced his colleagues, and almost all subsequent Republican pols, that Democrats should be dealt with as soft on deviants, if not deviants themselves. If overt signs of abnormality were hard to discern, Gingrich made clear, Republicans should magnify what was available and invent the rest. Rush Limbaugh and the newly founded Fox News were enlisted into this effort.

Republicans ran against gay marriage in 2004 and against transgender people this year. In Michigan, which Trump narrowly carried, there are 170,000 high school students on their schools’ sports teams, exactly two of whom are transgender and playing girls’ sports. No matter.

The Democrats’ number one problem in 2024 had nothing to do with this fearmongering. An uncommonly high percentage of voters believed they were left behind by an economy in which the price of some basics—housing and food most especially— was often beyond reach. For this, Republicans held the Biden administration and its vice president responsible. But Republicans also conducted their culture war on the Democrats with unrelenting ferocity. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s most notable ad against Harris concluded with the words: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

It should not be that hard for Democrats to associate Donald Trump and the Republi-

cans with the elite that actually is responsible for the shrinkage of the middle class and the abandonment of investment in rural and small-town America, regions of the country that have become most heavily Republican.

The Biden administration’s resurrection of industrial policy was specifically targeted to such regions, and much of the factory construction boom that it engendered has been located in the very areas where corporations shuttered factories and moved the work to China or Mexico. Thus far, this has had little or no appreciable electoral effect, but factory construction takes some time.

Preventing Republicans from taking credit for a Democratic program will be critical.

In Nevada, prompted by the hotel workers union’s survey data on the lack of affordable housing, the Harris campaign ran one ad that mentioned how a lot of homes had been purchased by financial institutions and converted to rentals, thereby pushing up the price for would-be homebuyers.

But one mild-mannered ad against a sea of right-wing media wasn’t up to the challenge of changing public opinion.

And yet: In recent decades, with the decline in the share of unionized workers, the steadily growing power of major investors who’ve demanded and received share buybacks and the like, the growth in price-setting corporate concentration, the reclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, and more, the share of national income going to wages has declined, just as the share of working-class anger has soared. Public polling shows low approval ratings for corporations and high approval ratings for unions.

You wouldn’t know this from the tone and substance of Harris’s campaign and most of her fellow Democrats’. Despite such notable exceptions as Bernie Sanders, Democrats have yet to call out the elite that’s really responsible for these epochal changes.

Democrats have yet to call out the elite that’s really responsible for the shrinkage of the middle class.

In the post-election miasma, discussion of how Democrats can regain enough working-class support to arrest America’s plunge into neofascism dominates our discourse.

Happily, virtually no one is suggesting Democrats revert to the Rubinomics that dominated economic policy in the Carter, Clinton, and Obama administrations. If there are any cases being made by Democrats for corporate free trade and financial deregulation, I haven’t heard them.

As for a pro–working class to-do list, one can begin with the paid sick leave and higher minimum-wage laws that voters in red states enacted by ballot measure this November, and move on to expanding Medicare coverage to dental and home health care, making community college and trade schools tuition-free, and providing massive investments in affordable housing and infrastructure. Democrats should also target our malefactors of great wealth by proposing to prohibit private equity’s gutting of businesses they purchase, to end price-fixing in rental and other markets, to institute windfall profits taxes when the profit share of revenues increases at the expense of wages and investment, to scale corporate tax rates to the ratio between CEO and median worker pay (the higher the ratio, the higher the tax rate), and so on.

But none of this, I fear, will really put a dent in the working class’s support for Republicans. Democrats need to go after financial and corporate elites at least as much as Republicans go after cultural elites. Democrats don’t have to say that Carl Icahn and Paul Singer are Satanists, which is a term the right applies to any number of stray liberals; but they do need to call them out in public and make that message heard. Candidates alone cannot change the public discourse. Liberals have not made investments in media the way the right has, and if Democrats are to reawaken the public’s awareness of the real elites, investments in media are what liberal’s monied components—in which I include major unions—need to make.

In a divided nation, Franklin Roosevelt made crystal clear which side he was on, and whose hatred he welcomed. If Democrats are to regain the American working class, they need to state whose hatred they welcome, too. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

NOTEBOOK

Abortion Dislocations Seven states passed constitutional amendments protecting abortion this year, but the backlash from anti-abortion forces has only just begun.

By Gabrielle Gurley In an era when the existence of women and girls’ reproductive rights will turn solely on their addresses, the 2024 election results— seven out of ten states enshrining abortion in their state constitutions—seemed to be an encouraging outcome on an otherwise bleak electoral map.

But November 5 was largely a victory for fine-tuning exercises. Voters in five of those seven states built upon existing protections.

In four of them—Maryland, New York, Nevada, and Montana—abortion is already legal. Then there is Colorado, with no restrictions whatsoever. Two of the bluest Eastern states put forward their state constitutional remedies as proactive moves to prevent future interference by anti-abortion actors.

Only in Missouri and Arizona were meaningful restrictions rolled back. Those results not only opened up new efforts to eliminate abortion access implemented by ballot initiatives; they’ve set off some fresh attempts by legislative manipulators to jam up the machinery of direct democracy.

In Missouri, voters threw out a draconian ban that allowed abortions only for the gravest health issues and threats to the life of the mother in favor of a constitutional amendment that guarantees reproductive freedoms, including abortion, pregnancy, prenatal, and postnatal care. Seeking to expedite access when Amendment 3 goes into effect in early December, the ACLU of Missouri filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Planned Parenthood facilities seeking to strike down a number of existing regulations, such as TRAP (“targeted regulation of abortion providers”) laws—waiting periods and other regulations designed to make seeking an abortion more onerous—that would conflict with the amendment and endanger health care providers. A court must issue a preliminary injunction to block the state from enforcing those bans and restrictions; until that time, they remain in place.

The state has a Republican trifecta, but 8 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Missouri state lawmakers have set themselves up for a battle royale on the amendment. Although incoming House Speaker Jon Patterson has said that he will accept the will of state voters, Rep. Justin Sparks deems Patterson insufficiently pro-life and plans to challenge him for the post next year. Not surprisingly, anti-abortion lawmakers had indicated that they planned to pursue new restrictions before the results were even tallied.

The Kansas City Star explains that the Missouri legislature has a track record of returning to voters with initiative changes that include sweeteners designed to mask the fact that lawmakers are snatching previous gains out from under them. A 2018 initiative erased a voter-approved redistricting plan by dangling new restrictions like eliminating lawmakers’ ability to accept lobbyists’ gifts. It was accompanied by deceptive language (including a similar title) that glossed over the fact that voters were actually repealing the redistricting changes they’d made in a previous election cycle.

All state lawmakers need to do is agree on a new legislative constitutional amendment and that proposal can head straight on the ballot, minus the hoops that citizenled initiatives, like Amendment 3, have to navigate to get on the ballot.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s constitutional amendment, which grants a right to abortion before fetal viability, goes into effect at the end of November, while pro-choice groups have a similar set of legal appeals to put forward to repeal the abortion laws already on the books. In January, Republicans will be in the majority in both chambers when the legislature reconvenes, and may well fight to take it on. They’ll have backup, too. The two judges who proved to be pivotal votes in resurrecting an 1864 territorial law’s near-total ban on abortion survived re-election challenges.

Arizona voters did stave off two attempts to make the citizen-initiated ballot measure process more difficult—a reassuring

sign of democratic impulses. Voters decisively rejected a more complex formula that would have established signature minimums in each of the state’s 30 legislative districts (rather than statewide) to get on the ballot. They also opposed a measure that would have allowed anyone to challenge the constitutionality of a ballot imitative before an election.

The biggest loss came in Florida, where a citizen-led coalition aiming for an abortion constitutional amendment—which would have won in states where only simple majorities are required to pass a ballot measure— came up three percentage points short of the 60 percent threshold they needed to reach.

Gov. Ron DeSantis used Florida taxpayer dollars to muddy the waters with all sorts of gambits, from threatening TV stations running abortion rights ads, to having his election police squad investigate individual voters over allegations of signature-gathering fraud, to directing the state health agency to create a pro-life website in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign—using funds allocated to fight the opioid epidemic to pay for those spots.

Other initiatives that shared the ballot with Florida’s Amendment 4, such as a state constitutional right to hunt and fish, were believed to be expressly added to the ballot

by Republican lawmakers to attract more conservative voters—ones who might vote against the abortion amendment. (That one passed easily, 67 percent to 33 percent.)

They also championed moving to partisan school boards and removing public financing for candidates who agreed to spending limits. (Both, however, failed.)

Despite their win, Florida’s anti-abortion supporters have vowed to fight on to make sure that if abortion supporters circle back for another amendment attempt, they’ll have to navigate minefields of bureaucratic obstacles, in what may prove to be one of the country’s more audacious forays into direct-democracy backsliding.

In October, the Florida secretary of state’s Office of Election Crimes and Security published an interim report that declared that the sponsor of Amendment 4, Floridians Protecting Freedom, ran a petition signature-gathering effort that was rife with fraud. It included claims that the contracted petition signature gatherers forged voter signatures and used “known fraudsters” to handle those jobs. The use of state contractors and subcontractors and

ROBERT COHEN / AP PHOTO

With Amendment 3, Missouri became the first state to overturn a near-total abortion ban at the ballot box.

nonresident signature gathers, and people with criminal records, also came under withering criticism.

The report notes that “barring outside companies” from working on petition drives might prevent future problems, as might restricting nonresidents and returning residents from collecting signatures.

(Campaigns across the country rely on nonresidents, but some states have moved to prohibit the practice.) The report also suggests making future signature-gathering efforts as complicated as possible: “It is imperative that the state,” the report intones, “consider major reforms to the initiative petition process to prevent groups from doing this ever again in Florida.” Expect Florida’s Republican lawmakers to take these challenges up.

Leaving the states to sort through the legislative and legal exercises on abortion would seem to be one way to lower the national temperature. The courts could also settle the issue. The Comstock strategy, for example, now rests with federal District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the anti-abortion maverick who has become a central figure in medication abortion cases. Named for a

The temptation for Congress to finally implement a national abortion ban might just be too tantalizing to resist. notorious anti-vice crusader, the 1873 Comstock Act has been a dead letter for decades, but specifically prohibits “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion” to be sent through the mails.

The Republican attorneys general of Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho are pursuing new federal restrictions on mifepristone and other limitations that could ensnare medical items used in some conventional abortion procedures (such as surgical instruments) and set the stage for broader nationwide restrictions. Those questions

would end up on the Supreme Court’s docket rather than in Congress or the White House.

However, with an electoral victory that dropped complete control of Congress into the laps of Republicans, the temptation for Capitol Hill’s solons to finally implement a national ban (or a set of narrow restrictions tantamount to a ban, such as a six-week “heartbeat bill”) might just be too tantalizing to resist. What Trump might do in those circumstances would be pure conjecture at this stage: He has both boasted about his Supreme Court nominations that produced the Dobbs decision and offered that he would veto any national ban that comes to his desk. He could very well use his veto pen, and then declare helplessness since Congress would have the two-thirds majorities they’d need in both chambers to override his veto. Under that scenario, Trump Republicans would achieve one of their most anticipated goals—any new federal abortion restrictions would go into effect, preempting the seven states’ newly passed constitutional amendments as well as every other state law that currently sanctions the ancient practice. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

NOTEBOOK

Billionaire Gifts and Cuts for Everyone Else

The numbers don’t work for Trump, and neither do the politics.

By Robert Kuttner Seemingly, President-elect Trump has it all.

Republicans control the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Trump’s legislative allies are on board to extend and expand Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as to slash government spending.

There is only one obstacle: reality. Once the cutting gets specific, grave problems arise and one part or another of the Trump coalition will resist. Democrats, if they do their job, will have a field day pointing out how valued government benefits are being sacrificed to finance tax cuts for billionaires.

Extending expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act carries a ten-year revenue cost of at least $4.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The law cut taxes for the top 1 percent by an average of $61,090 per household for 2025; the average savings for the bottom 80 percent is well under $2,000.

In addition, Trump proposed at least $2 trillion in other tax breaks during the campaign, including ending taxes on Social Security, overtime income, and tip income, and lowering the corporate tax rate for domestic manufacturers to 15 percent.

On top of that, Trump promised to repeal the 2017 law’s $10,000 cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions, mainly the costs of mortgage interest and property taxes. This was the sole progressive provision of the tax cut package, designed partly to pay for other tax cuts and partly to punish affluent taxpayers who own expensive houses in blue states. But a lot of Republicans live in those states, too. Blue-state Republican legislators want the cap repealed, and Trump has signaled his support. If Congress does nothing, the cap sunsets at the end of 2026.

10 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Repealing the cap would cost $1.2 trillion over ten years. Nearly half of the tax savings (42.8 percent) would go to the top 1 percent, and 93.2 percent would go to the top 20 percent. Most taxpayers would get nothing because they don’t itemize deductions.

Trump has said that he can pay for all of this tax-cutting by increasing acrossthe-board tariffs. His exact proposal has bounced around: sometimes 10 percent, sometimes 20 percent, plus a 60 percent or higher tariff on goods made in China.

Dream on. At present, tariffs on imports of industrial goods have an average rate of just 2 percent and bring in just 2 percent of all government revenue. If tariffs were raised to 10 or 20 percent, much of that would function as a surtax on consumers, though some of it would be borne by importers and retailers, depending on the industry. Tariffs on manufacturing components would also increase the cost of finished products. The bottom line is that higher tariffs would depress the economy, and not begin to make up for lost revenue from Trump’s other tax cuts.

Trump’s business supporters will unite against his tariff proposals. Targeted retaliatory tariffs against China’s export subsidies and dumping made sense as China policy and industrial policy, which is why President Biden maintained them.

But across-the-board tariffs are something else entirely.

The other way to finance tax cuts is with spending cuts. While Trump has not fully embraced Elon Musk’s proposal to cut federal spending by $2 trillion a year, he has proposed substantial cuts, while making Musk the co-lead on a “government efficiency” advisory board that will recommend more.

The problem is that most of the big-ticket items provide valued benefits to the middle class, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Affordable Care Act subsidies. Fully $5.8 trillion of the $6.75 trillion federal budget is spent on Social Security, health care, defense and veterans’ benefits, and interest on the debt. Put another way, you could cut everything else in the budget and not get close to $2 trillion.

Trump is a better politician than Musk.

In the same way he revised his stance on abortion, he has backed off cutting Social Security, Medicare, or Obamacare. He might try to repeal Biden’s more generous Medicaid spending. But taken as a whole, the American welfare state is so miserly that there are scant savings available from further slashing spending for the poor.

Trump has also spoken of clawing back unspent Biden infrastructure and local aid money. The problem with that is twofold.

First, many subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and other industrial-policy support have gone to underwrite new production and jobs in red states. These projects are just getting up and running. If Trump tries to abort them, politicians in those states will scream bloody murder.

Second, emergency COVID aid to states and cities, which reached an unprecedented $800 billion in relief, is already running out, and much of it will end this fiscal year regardless of what Trump does. If anything, red states were more reliant on federal aid, and this is already causing excruciating dilemmas.

According to a survey reported by Governing magazine, Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed spending nearly $900 million over the next two years to help prop up the state’s pandemic-era child care expansion. In Republican-led Indiana, lawmakers have already acted to expand child care.

States are not permitted to run budget deficits, so these programs must be financed with higher taxes or cuts to other services.

Should Trump claw back unspent federal aid, it would intensify the pressure and place Republican officials in a political bind.

The GOP supports Trump, but the usual pressure points of state and local politics have not been suspended.

If Trump insists on his tax cuts and doesn’t slash Social Security, Medicare, Obam-

JANDOS ROTHSTEIN

acare, or aid to states and cities, there is only one alternative: increasing the federal deficit. The deficit was $1.83 trillion for the fiscal year that ended September 30, or about 6 percent of GDP. That was already high by historical standards. But with all of his tax cuts, Trump would add as much as $700 billion a year, or close to three additional percentage points of GDP. At a time when the economy is already near full employment, a deficit on that scale would spook bond markets. More

investment bankers, hedge funds, and tech monopolies savored the end of antitrust enforcement and a new merger wave. By any normal measure, the stock market is overvalued. All it will take is an abrupt shift in interest rates, and the market will come thudding back down. Nothing will reverse the Fed’s rate-cutting as surely as unsustainable deficits.

Trump may control all three branches of government, but he doesn’t control the Fed. Trump suggested that Fed chair

importantly, it would alarm the Federal Reserve. While there are few deficit hawks left in the congressional Republican Party, the Fed is a prime aviary.

The stock market took off like a rocket after Trump was elected. Investors and corporations slavered over tax cuts, and

Jerome Powell might wish to resign so the new president could pick his own chair.

When a reporter asked Powell about this, he responded with a f lat no, adding for emphasis that it’s “not permitted under the law” for presidents to remove members of the independent central bank. Powell’s

fixed term doesn’t expire until mid-2026, and he intends to stay.

You might imagine an enraged Trump trying to get Congress to amend the Federal Reserve Act to make it possible to fire the Fed chair. Imagine how the bond market would react to that.

The likelihood is that Trump will insist on most of his tax cuts, find whatever spending cuts are palatable to his coalition, add some token tariffs just because he likes them so much, and take his chances with an enlarged deficit.

That will give Democrats plenty to shoot at.

Republicans will have a narrow House majority of between 220 and 221 votes at this writing. Trump has named a sitting member of Congress, Elise Stefanik, as his U.N. ambassador, and another, Michael Waltz, as national security adviser.

In the short term, that narrows the Republican House advantage even further.

When the two chambers have different budget bills, that requires a reconciliation process on which House and Senate must agree. Getting the House GOP to agree on anything has been an impossible task the past two years; getting in sync with the Senate is not guaranteed.

Meanwhile, Democrats could submit their ow n proposa ls, w ith a clear narrative: Trump and the Republicans are cutting your hea lth ca re, child care, home care, public education—you name it— to finance tax giveaways to the rich. Democrats want to raise taxes on the rich, the better to expand help to regular people.

This is simply better politics for Democrats than for Trump. As both parties look forward to the 2026 midterms, Trump’s tax and budget program will do almost nothing for the grumpy disaffected voters who put him in office, and quite possibly leave them worse off. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

NOTEBOOK

Making Room Under the Bus After Donald Trump’s transphobic campaign, will Democrats continue to support transgender people?

By Janie Ekere and Emma Janssen In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Donald Trump pivoted from his two main issues—immigration and the economy—to go on a rhetorical assault against transgender people. He spent close to $20 million on ads. Swing-state audiences, particularly football fans, likely saw an anti-LGBTQ+ spot that focused on Kamala Harris’s record on transgender rights. The ad ends with a chilling tagline: “Kamala Harris is for they/ them. Trump is for you.”

A Gallup poll in late September found that only 18 percent of respondents viewed transgender rights as “extremely important,” while a majority, 52 percent, labeled the economy as “extremely important.”

In an October Fox News interview, Bret Baier asked Harris to explain her views on transgender rights. She said that she would “follow the law, and it’s a law that Donald Trump also followed,” a reference to the fact that the first Trump administration had also allowed transgender inmates to receive gender-affirming care.

The co-director for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, Chase Strangio, told Them, an online LGBTQ+ magazine, “Courts have consistently held that blanket denials of medical care, including medical treatment related to gender dysphoria, are unconstitutional. This is a clear constitutional principle that applies in all confinement settings.

The government, once it confines someone against their will, cannot deliberately withhold needed medical care.”

Harris’s answer, however, may have unintentionally undercut the potential danger the new Trump administration could pose to transgender people. It was also criticized for being unusually evasive, given her long record of open support for LGBTQ+ rights throughout her political career. From her time as the district attorney for San Francisco to her campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Harris has supported pro-LGBTQ+ policies, such as banning con12 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

version therapy and providing affordable gender-affirming care.

Trump didn’t need to focus on LGBTQ+ issues. He was already on solid ground with his base on inflation and immigration and had made significant inroads with other groups, including Latinos, young men, and swing-state voters. But by attacking transgender Americans, Trump brought identity politics to the forefront of the 2024 election season. For some, prioritizing problems like inflation seems to require turning away from supporting the hard-won rights of people once forced to exist on the margins. In this volatile political environment, transgender Americans have become scapegoats.

With the Democratic Party already engaged in rounds of finger-pointing over Harris’s brutal loss, some Democrats are ceding ground to conservatives on transgender rights, backtracking from their previous support, and repeating the antitransgender language of Republicans. The day after the election, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told The New York Times that Democrats must “stop pandering to the far left” on transgender rights issues. “I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports,” Suozzi added, using language commonly employed by Republicans and other social conservatives to describe trans people.

Remarkably, a day later, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA)—a two-time co-sponsor of the House’s Transgender Bill of Rights, which includes protections for transgender athletes—criticized the party on the same grounds, buying into fears of trans people dominating women’s sports, a phenomenon that has been widely debunked but, nevertheless, persists—even among once-supportive lawmakers.

“I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete,” Moulton told the Times. “But as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” There’s no nationwide count of the number of transgender high school students who partici-

pate in sports, but researchers at UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute told Newsweek in 2023 that they doubt the number exceeds 100 nationwide.

Many Democrats have already suggested that a renewed emphasis on economic populism—a focus on kitchen-table economic issues like inflation, health care, and

Republicans spent close to $20 million on anti-transgender ads in the final weeks of the election. jobs—could be the solution to the Democrats’ hemorrhaging of support among working-class, non-college-educated voters.

The argument is convincing—Senate candidates who leaned into economic populism, like Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Jon Tester in Montana, both ran around seven percentage points ahead of Harris in their deep-red states, despite losing their elections.

Anti-transgender rhetoric doesn’t always benefit Republicans’ campaigns and can cost them elections. Two North Carolina GOP candidates, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson

and Michele Morrow, ran on platforms that heavily demonized transgender people. Robinson, who lost his bid for governor to Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, had called for transgender women to be arrested—“or whatever we gotta do to you”—if they were found using a women’s public restroom.

Morrow narrowly lost her race for state superintendent of public instruction to Maurice “Mo” Green, her Democratic opponent. She has repeatedly called for the exclusion of LGBTQ+ topics from public-school curriculums, labeling efforts to educate students on these topics as “grooming” or “indoctrination.” Both the Stein and the Green campaigns successfully leveraged their opponents’ extreme

vated risk of suicide: 40 percent of transgender adults have attempted to end their lives.

In the days since the presidential election, the Trevor Project reported a 700 percent increase in calls, texts, and chats made to its suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.

Project 2025, the far right’s blueprint for Trump’s presidency, uses several derogatory terms (“pornography,” “transgender ideology,” and “the sexualization of children”) to refer to transgender issues. It calls for all mentions of transgender people and transgender identity to be rooted out of educational curriculums. Its proposed attacks on Medicaid and Medicare would also disproportionately harm transgender people, who are more likely than cisgender people to live

rhetoric to highlight the dangers they posed to North Carolinians.

Have Democrats emerged as protectors of transgender rights only to abandon them in a period of great danger? Transgender Americans, particularly Black transgender women, are at a high risk for hate crimes, which data shows rise whenever Trump is a candidate; in 2016, hate crimes spiked 20 percent. In 2024, an estimated 29 transgender people have been murdered; about half of those victims were Black women. What’s more, transgender Americans are at an ele-

in poverty and are therefore more likely to rely on state-subsidized medical care.

Many of Trump’s anti-transgender proposals focus on youth under 18. In an Agenda47 video from early 2023 that outlined the Trump GOP’s platform on gender issues, Trump said that he plans to ask Congress to stop using federal money to “promote or pay for” gender-affirming care, regardless of the age of the patient. In the same video, Trump threatened the Medicaid and Medicare eligibility of any health care facility or provider that offers gender-affirming care for minors,

which would be a devastating blow to hospitals that rely on those funding sources to provide this care and to remain open.

He also claimed that he will use the Department of Education—which he has threatened to eliminate—to “inform states and school districts that if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences, including potential Civil Rights violations for sex discrimination, and the elimination of federal funding.”

Democratic leaders must resist succumbing to far-right conservative transphobia, and find ways to support transgender people and to forcefully articulate that they understand that all Americans face profound economic challenges. In a November 12 essay in The New York Times, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear articulated a path forward that doesn’t require abandoning marginalized groups.

Beshear describes having vetoed anti-LGBTQ+ bills sent to him by the state legislature and still beating his Trump-endorsed opponent in 2023. “Even if some voters might have disagreed with the vetoes,” Beshear writes, “they knew the next day I would be announcing new jobs, opening a new health clinic or finishing a new road that would cut 20 minutes off their commute.”

Govs. JB Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, who have already announced their intentions to block extreme Republican measures and codify essential rights in their respective state constitutions, may emerge as leaders of efforts to resist backsliding on transgender policies. Some state and federal judges may also block Trump’s anti-transgender policies. As the Democratic Party rebuilds its coalitions, it must also continue to protect transgender people. Beshear’s assessment of this moment rings true: Democrats must focus on the things that affect Americans’ everyday lives—their commutes, jobs, and health care—without sacrificing the most vulnerable people. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

MONEY THE

GAME

The Democratic Party had more money than God this election.

At what cost?

Luke Goldstein

ILLUSTRATION BY JOSEPH GOUGH

After Joe Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris became the presumptive presidential nominee back in July, a brief period of jubilance erupted, reaching its zenith at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone was riding high and the base was thoroughly activated, unburdened by the weight of their sunsetting president. “Brat” flags abounded, even among the anarchists protesting the convention because of the war in Gaza. The coconutpill memes that took over the internet had reached the masses.

The last thing anyone wanted to talk about was the dirty business of money in politics. Perhaps foolishly on my part, that was what I had come to discuss. Because in the background of this convention’s rosy 14 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

picture were a few titanic forces reshaping American politics.

Everywhere you turned in Chicago, mega-donors and top lobbyists fraternized among civilians at forums during the daytime and soirees at night, all prominently sponsored by giant corporations. On the convention stage, former bank CEOs and scam for-profit college board members got speaking slots, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, an “actual billionaire” in his words, boasted about his personal fortune relative to Donald Trump’s.

A favorite giveaway at the convention was a phone charger stamped with the phrase “I stood with crypto at the DNC.” The cryptocurrency industry, which was all over the event schedule, emerged as one of the

largest outside special interests in the 2024 elections, with a roughly $245 million war chest. Democrats had grown accustomed to the tech industry being an ally. But this crop of Silicon Valley oligarchs felt betrayed by the Biden administration’s regulatory crackdown on digital assets. Through a PAC called Fairshake, they vowed to carry out vengeance on any Democratic candidate who didn’t bend the knee, and reward those who pledged subservience.

Another active presence at the DNC was the various pro-Israel interest groups. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee amassed a $100 million budget used almost exclusively in primaries, and went about systematically purging any candidate who didn’t sufficiently echo their

unflinching support for Israel amid the butchering in Gaza.

These twin pillars dramatically shook up Democratic politics, threatening not just the progressive wing but the Senate majority. Earlier that summer, Fairshake had put out notice on both Sens. Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, promising to nuke their re-election hopes.

I wanted to know whether the looming tsunami of cash might re-energize the

long-sought goal of imposing new campaign finance restrictions after the election, if Democrats regained power in Washington. For the most part, I received blank stares. “We need every tool in the arsenal to defeat MAGA Republicans,” was the consensus response.

This encapsulates a specific feature of Democratic politics in the Trump era: Defeating Trump supersedes all other goals, even the ones fueling his rise, such

as a prevailing sense of deep corruption and rot in Washington.

Nobody working on the campaign side wants to engage in what was described to me as “unilateral disarmament.” And the open secret is that Democrats have been highly effective in this money race, relative to their GOP opponents. In 2020, for example, Democrats took in more than twice as much untraceable dark money as Republicans—one of the illicit channels of DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

“We’re living now in the hellscape created by Citizens United,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 2010, which declared that political spending is protected speech that cannot be impeded by the federal government. Cohen, a DNC member and board member of Our Revolution, has spent decades trying to fix the corruption inherent in campaign spending rules.

One immediate consequence of the ruling, and a harbinger of how corporate America would use the new rules to their advantage, was the GOP’s complete reversal from a moderate stance on climate change, as exhibited during the 2007 presidential primaries. Geysers of oil and gas cash started pouring into American politics, and Republicans complied. It would prove to be a pattern, in both parties.

A projected $16 billion was pumped across federal elections this year; the first presidential campaign after the Citizens 16 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

size, making them much more convenient venues for mega-donors. A few varieties of super PACs have sprung up: PACs working on behalf of a specific campaign or candidate to bring in larger volumes of cash, PACs organized at the behest of party leadership to boost their most promising candidates, and PACs organized on behalf of special interests to advance a specific corporate or political agenda for multiple candidates.

This two-track campaign finance system—limited donations to candidate accounts and unlimited donations to super PACs—now defines all modern political campaigns. But the ways in which the two parties have harnessed this new landscape are not entirely congruent.

Kamala Harris’s campaign raised an astounding $1.2 billion during her fourmonth sprint to the finish line. Her campaign drew on big donors from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. But she wasn’t just raking in donations from the wealthy. Over the course of her campaign, she expanded her small-dollar donor base, too, which Democrats have continued to do for multiple election cycles now.

The Harris campaign outspent the

Trump campaign nearly 3-to-1, and still got swept across the seven battleground states. Her campaign was so flush with cash that it gave $25 million to down-ballot races through the party’s various committees, and splurged on an advertisement on the Las Vegas Sphere that cost $450,000 per day. Based on filings, the campaign not only spent everything but are reportedly paying off $20 million in debt.

YOMIURI SHIMBUN / AP PHOTO

campaign finance that Democrats say they United decision, in 2012, saw just $7 billion, which at the time set a record. So spending want to regulate.

The Democratic fundraising advantage has more than doubled in 12 years.

Campaigns have scaled up their fundcreates friction with the strategists and staffers on the political side in Washing- raising operations over the past decade, ton, who see the broad popularity of getting including through platforms like ActBlue money out of politics and want to prioritize that allow for gathering more small-dollar campaign finance reform, but are stymied donations. Those individual contributions by the lure of big money. “If you’re party are limited to $6,600 ($3,300 per primaleadership and you keep winning the game, ry and $3,300 per general election). Regthen you don’t want to stop playing,” a staff- istered political action committees (PACs) er for the Congressional Progressive Caucus can donate directly to candidates, but those explained to me. contributions are limited to $5,000.

But that only holds true if Democrats None of that accounts for most of the keep winning elections. In the most expen- exponential growth in campaign spending. sive campaign in political history, Demo- Super PACs, developed with the blessing of crats outperformed their opponents on most Citizens United and other Supreme Court spending metrics in 2024, yet still lost the decisions, have no limits on contribution presidency and the Senate. These dual outcomes are not unrelated: The extent to which Democrats The Harris campaign had so have catered to the wishes of the much available cash, it spent donor class to the detriment of $450,000 per day for an ad their own electoral chances is on the Las Vegas Sphere. exactly the problem the party now has to reckon with. It starts with the plumbing of how money flows into elections.

Republican campaigns, on the other hand, have fallen behind in their fundraising totals for individual candidates, in part because they haven’t been able to draw on as deep a well of donors. To make up the fundraising gap, Republicans lean heavily on super PACs, allowing them to absorb giant checks from a handful of uber-wealthy families who finance the bulk of their campaigns. “Republicans’ fundraising strategy is all about finding ways to get more money out of fewer people,” said Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United.

More than 1 in 6 dollars used by presidential candidates and associated PACs this year were contributed by a billionaire, according to the Financial Times. One hundred and fifty billionaire families broke

A

projected $16 billion was pumped across federal elections this year; 2012 saw just $7 billion. spending records by contributing $1.9 billion to a multitude of PACs this cycle. With last-minute spending, that will likely reach over $2 billion. Of that total, just over 70 percent went to Republican candidates and right-wing PACs, per data compiled by Americans for Tax Fairness.

This dynamic is reflected in the list of mega-donor rainmakers this election. Of the top ten largest campaign contributors, only

two gave to Democrats: Michael Bloomberg and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, each netting less than $50 million. Put together, those two Democratic bundlers don’t even reach the individual contributions for several of the GOP’s top donors.

The largest donor this election was Timothy Mellon ($197 million), the highly secretive heir to the Mellon railroad fortune.

This top-heavy donor base explains why Republicans defend the campaign finance status quo and block even modest restrictions on outside spending. But while Republicans are more dependent on super PACs, it’s not the whole story.

Citizens United opened up another sinkhole in campaign finance: dark money, now one of the fastest-growing areas for moving cash around in election years. While most contributions even to super PACs have to be filed with the Federal Election Commission, political fundraising professionals discovered a work-around. Registered nonprofit entities known as 501(c)(4) organizations, based on a particular section of the tax code, don’t have to disclose their donors and then can transfer funds to a super PAC without any way to track the money trail. There are some light restrictions on what (c)(4)s can spend on directly, but there’s very little oversight.

In the 2024 cycle, dark-money operations will reach over a billion dollars in total, a major share of overall spending. Dark money and so-called “gray money,” which is money fed into super PACs from darkmoney entities, will make up about half of the $4.5 billion in outside spending on all federal elections this year.

Most super PACs now have their own affiliated dark-money receptacle to offer to their donors who may prefer more secrecy about their political dealings. “You have all these different P.O. boxes, but they’re all run by the same people and the money is ultimately going through the same bank accounts,” said Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel at the Brennan Center.

In the 2020 cycle, Democrats won the dark-money game by a long shot and are expected to outpace Republicans this year as well. More than $500 million went to Democrats in 2020, compared with $200 million to Republicans.

A lot of the dark money Democrats received this year was funneled through the super PAC Future Forward, bankrolled

by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskov-

itz and other Wall Street and Silicon Valley titans.

Future Forward was the largest single outside spending PAC in the entire election with $700 million raised, and it effectively functioned as an arm of the national Democratic Party. Of that total, $136 million came in the form of dark money from Future Forward’s affiliated (c)(4) Future Forward USA. Future Forward didn’t just raise and distribute money. The PAC essentially set strategy for the Harris campaign to an unprecedented degree. A consulting firm housed inside the PAC called Blue Rose Research was given “agenda-setting power” to conduct detailed message testing and polling that defined the campaign’s approach.

Democrats’ cash advantage in campaign fundraising at the presidential level was replicated in House and Senate races, too.

Republicans were only able to stay competitive on television thanks to super PAC spending by party-affiliated PACs and outside spenders.

Take, for example, Elon Musk’s America PAC, a top funder in 18 House swing districts, helping to bridge a $60 million funding gap between the official Republican and Democratic campaign arms.

Republicans didn’t win all of those races, but they had a much better chance with Musk’s air support.

In the Senate races, Montana became one of the most expensive races this cycle, notching a whopping $300 million. Jon Tester’s campaign spent over $79 million, while Republican challenger Tim Sheehy’s campaign spent nearly $22 million. But Sheehy received assistance from four separate GOPaligned PACs, three of which dropped $20 million in spending. Tester had his own help from independent expenditures, which slightly undermatched the GOP spending.

Still, it couldn’t save Tester in the end.

In Ohio, a similar dynamic played out between Sherrod Brown and Republican challenger Bernie Moreno. Despite being out-fundraised, Moreno received a major boost from various special-interest outfits, including an aggressive money dump from crypto umbrella PAC Fairshake. In the end, Fairshake spent $40 million on ads to exact their revenge on Brown for his perceived hawkishness on crypto enforcement. Moreno won by four points.

Fairshake proved to be perhaps the biggest winner of the elections. Other than Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA), they won DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

every one of the 48 races they spent on.

Crypto donors made up almost half of all corporate donations to PACs in the 2024 election cycle. The majority of that mountain of cash went to Republicans, including last-minute support for candidates like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“Tonight the crypto voter has spoken decisively—across party lines and in key races across the country,” gushed Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose company was responsible for much of Fairshake’s funding, in a post-election statement. But there’s no way to divine the crypto voter’s preferences, if they exist; none of Fairshake’s ads even mentioned crypto.

The PAC staked its claim early in this election year, when it used $10 million to knock Katie Porter (D-CA) out of the California Senate primary in favor of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). Fairshake also helped knock off progressive Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), spending $3.4 million on their primaries in all. That didn’t come close to AIPAC’s $14 million spent against Bowman, but it certainly contributed to the defeat, and showed progressives that both interestgroup PACs will team up against them over any perceived slight.

Fairshake’s 48 victories may actually understate the overall impact crypto had on the 2024 elections. Crypto’s interventions in the primaries instilled the fear of God in other Democratic candidates, so much so that Fairshake’s presence was felt even in races where they never ended up getting involved. Campaigns put up pro-crypto language on their websites just to avoid a massive money dump from these outside independent expenditures.

After Fairshake indicated that it would threaten Brown and Tester (the latter threat was ultimately empty), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) promised at a “Crypto4Harris” event that “Crypto is here to stay no matter what … we all believe in the future of crypto.” After that, Fairshake returned the favor by intervening to spend $10 million on behalf of Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. Both won close Senate races in states Trump carried.

Fairshake’s inf luence across elections is unprecedented in American politics, according to campaign finance analysts.

And the PAC isn’t going anywhere, having banked $78 million for the 2026 midterms 18 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

while pledging to continue punishing any candidate who steps out of line. The crypto industry will almost certainly be rewarded with deregulatory legislation in the next Congress.

As Fairshake harnesses the post–Citizens United world to its fullest, other independent expenditures this cycle pioneered novel tactics to tear down even the few remaining restrictions in place on their spending.

The one key restriction, in theory, on super PACs is that they can’t coordinate with campaigns directly. For several election cycles now, that firewall has been slowly disintegrating. One way to get around the rule is through “red boxes.” The way it works is that campaigns put up a media tab on their websites with explicit messaging guidance, information that super PACs can then use to target expenditures. These boxes signal what points to include in paid advertising, keeping the super PAC aligned with the candidate without directly communicating with them.

Red boxes have become common across the board. But campaigns are still finding novel ways to move into new territory for candidate coordination. A relatively new phenomenon that emerged this election cycle was super PACs running canvassing operations directly on behalf of their preferred candidate.

Forerunners to this arrangement can be found in earlier election cycles. In the 2004 presidential election, a George Soros–funded PAC ran get-out-the-vote operations in swing states for John Kerry.

But the PAC was ultimately found in violation of campaign finance rules because of how it had sourced funding for these types of retail politics activities. Fast-forward 20 years later, and the same practice has been legalized.

The Trump campaign hardly ran a ground game at all this election, but in states like Pennsylvania, his team effectively outsourced field work to GOP megadonor Elon Musk’s America PAC to hire door-knockers and run canvassing.

The reason this raises red flags for campaign finance law is that canvassing is a targeted type of voter outreach that requires detailed precinct-level data, voter rolls, party affiliation, neighborhood layouts, and some underlying strategy. For there to be no coordination on these practices between the independent expenditure and the campaign

would be highly dubious, because it risks redundancy in voter outreach.

But the practice was effectively legalized by a ruling the Federal Election Commission handed down earlier this year. The case was brought by a Democratic-aligned super PAC called Texas Majority, which sought to employ canvassers. In typical Democratic fashion, the group sought FEC approval beforehand, whereas Republicans would

Some Democratic members see any path to progress as unpassable without getting money out of politics first.

ask for forgiveness later. When the FEC gave their blessing, Musk then picked up on the ruling and used it to his own advantage.

In the case of the Trump arrangement with Musk in Pennsylvania, some media reports suggested that his operations were a disaster, with widespread dysfunction because of a lack of professional experience. But Trump did after all win the state, and Musk’s resources relieved the Trump campaign from having to spend on those operations.

A lower-profile development this year was in the extensive use of joint fundraising committees. These are spending vehicles operated on behalf of multiple different candidates of the same party to pool fundraising resources. The main benefit is that the joint fundraising committee can

solicit much larger donations than individual campaigns. Joint fundraising committees used to have stricter aggregate caps on the donation amounts they could receive, but those caps were all but rolled back after a 2014 FEC ruling.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) used these joint committees to their advantage to make up for their campaign’s shortfalls. They devised a

Democrats and Republicans. If a party wants to do something in campaign finance, it’s hard to get the Commission to tell them no.

As remaining firewalls come crashing down and the campaign finance system looks as broken as ever, some Democratic members want to reignite a galvanizing fight from the 2010s that was a key plank of Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs. In their view, any

ANDREW HARNIK / AP PHOTO

The crypto industry dominated the elections; spending $40 million to defeat Sherrod Brown was a signature win.

strategy of using the committee to pay for candidate advertising but framed it as a fundraising solicitation to bypass certain content restrictions for these types of ads.

Joint committees also allowed the NRSC to stretch their ad dollars. One of the biggest advantages for candidate campaign spending is the law that entitles them to lower ad rates. Sometimes ads bought by super PACs are as much as 20 times more expensive than candidate ads. But these hybrid committee ads could qualify for the discounted rate.

Democrats tried to challenge this use of a joint fundraising committee in the Wisconsin Senate race, but the FEC deadlocked at 3-3. This was something of a preordained result: The Federal Election Commission has only six members, evenly split between

path to progress will be unpassable without getting money out of politics first.

“I think there is genuine desire [on the Democratic side] to try to fix the system, because letting dark money and outside spending influence the system really minimizes the voice of actual American voters and maximizes the voice of corporations,” said Claire Kim, legal counsel to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). The current setup of effectively unlimited campaign cash also forces members to start fundraising again almost as soon as they win office, rather than prioritizing legislation.

Yet without control of Congress or the presidency, and with Republican hostility to campaign finance restrictions, Democrats have no clear path at the moment to push for federal legislation. This is in a sense

an entirely predictable result. Democrats rode high on dark money and fundraising advantages for years, only for Republicans to innovate and skirt the remaining FEC restrictions, while bringing mega-donors off the sidelines. The rules aren’t working for Democrats anymore, and now they have no way to change them, as big money gets ever more powerful.

That doesn’t mean all is lost. Internally, the party can get its own house in order, and revamp its image in the eyes of the electorate, without unilateral disarmament.

The Citizens United decision said that the federal government can’t interfere with how outside entities decide to use their money in elections. In most states though, primaries are organized and controlled by state party chapters, which have discretion to set different rules for how candidates qualify to win the nomination before going on to the general election. Given how much money is spent on primaries now, they’re an important locus for reform.

State parties could amend their charters to impose various rules on how candidates finance campaigns. In the most ambitious case, they could ban candidates competing in primaries for the nomination from accepting money from corporate registered PACs or dark-money funds.

This novel idea is being tested

by Larry Cohen. “We need to get more creative and experimental with the levers of power we have control over, and I see this as the best way forward,” he said. Cohen was instrumental in the fight at the DNC to get rid of the superdelegate system. He recently stumped for a proposal at the DNC to study restrictions on campaign spending that was never taken up by the Rules and Bylaws Committee.

For the next four years out of power, Democrats will have to push new boundaries to take on money in politics. There’s a lot of soul-searching that will take place over the next several months. One option for Democrats is returning to their long-forgotten progressive roots, which along with trustbusting and other economic reforms included a strong anti-corruption plank. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

The Social Tri and Political of Immigratio Even if you think immigration is good, you must consider the people who don’t.

BY PAUL STARR

When Joe Biden took office in 2021, the United States was in an unusually pro-immigration mood, perhaps because of the sympathy for immigrants generated by Donald Trump’s policy of family separations and other harsh measures. Since 1965, Gallup has asked whether immigration should be “kept at its present level, increased or decreased.” The only years when Gallup has ever found more Americans favoring

20 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

an increase rather than a reduction were 2020 and 2021. Gallup has also historically asked whether immigration is a “good” or a “bad” thing. At the start of the 2020s, three-quarters of Americans said it was a good thing.

Biden’s initial policies reflected that singular moment and his own determination to adopt a more humane approach to migrants, in stark contrast with his predecessor’s cru-

iumph Tragedy on

The Rio Grande River along the U.S.-Mexico border

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

22 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

The transportation of migrants into Democratic cities broadened concerns about the surge and split the Democratic Party. and this includes the second generation of immigrants from most Latin American and African countries—have outpaced other Americans in social mobility.

The myths about immigrants promoted by Trump and other nativists have had the facts exactly backward. Instead of bringing crime and disorder, the recent immigrants have had lower crime rates than the native-born, and helped revive declining communities.

Contrary to the idea that they bring disease, they are healthier than other Americans.

The trends in health and longevity in the United States would all be worse if not for what social scientists call the “immigrant health advantage.” As of 2017, life expectancy among the foreign-born—81.4 years for men and 85.7 for women—was seven years greater than for U.S.-born men and six years greater than for U.S.-born women. Although comparable data on qualities like initiative and persistence are not available, it shouldn’t be surprising that immigrants and their children show up so conspicuously in the history of American inventors and entrepreneurs, the ranks of Nobel Prize winners, and top leadership positions in the tech industry.

But the supporters of immigration need to recognize that they have been asking a great deal of their fellow citizens. The United States has by far the most international migrants of any country in the world, more than the next four countries combined. While the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, it has 20 percent of global migrants. Nearly everywhere in the world, people fear outsiders, especially racial and religious outsiders; it is not unusual for them to see no benefit to themselves from immigration, even if that’s incorrect. They may conceive of their nation’s economy in static terms as producing a fixed number of jobs, which immigrants will only steal away. They may worry, not unreasonably, that their taxes will go up and housing will be in short supply when large numbers of immigrants arrive in their area from poverty-stricken countries.

If you believe immigration is a good thing, you must take into consideration the many people who have reasonable worries that it’s a bad thing for them. Americans have historically been, if anything, amazingly open and generous in their views of

K ARLA ANN COTÉ SIPA USA VIA AP

elty. But by the beginning of 2024, the public mood and the politics of immigration had taken a radical turn. Americans favored a reduction over an increase in immigration by a more than 3-to-1 margin, and only 32 percent of Americans expressed any conf idence in Biden’s immigration policies.

Conf ronted w ith mass disapproval in an election year, the president reversed course and sought to shut down the border. But it was too late to change the public’s verdict on his immigration policies.

Biden’s reversal, and the little that Kamala Harris had to say about im m ig rat ion in her campaign, also seemingly validated Trump’s view that a humane, welcoming immigration policy is a mistake.

One of the tragic aspects of Biden’s presidency is the setback it has now dealt to immigration. The United States has enjoyed an enormous economic and social benefit from immigration since 1965, when Congress ended the national-origins quotas dating from the 1920s that limited entry largely to Northern and Western Europeans. The post-1965 immigrants—some 72 million of them, just under half from Latin America and just over a quarter from East and South Asia—have added immensely to American culture and American wealth.

Many people may believe that the new immigrants have not been as high-achieving or as interested in assimilation as the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But that perception is wrong, as the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan demonstrate in their 2022 book, Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. The new immigrants have done just as well as their earlier counterparts and assimilated at a similar rate.

In fact, Abramitzky and Boustan’s data on immigrants who entered the country in 1980 show that their sons and daughters—

The myths about immigrants promoted by Trump and other nativists have had the facts exactly backward.

grant, right-wing parties. The United States has now reached about the same proportion of immigrants in its population—14.3 percent in 2023—that it had in the early 20th century, before the passage of immigration restrictions that lasted until 1965. The sharp increase in the immigrant population has been testing the limits of public tolerance. Yet still, as I’ve mentioned, when Biden came into office, there was a great deal of goodwill toward immigrants. If Biden had acted preemptively to avoid a crisis on the border, he might have maintained that goodwill. But he didn’t, and that failure holds lessons about how we ought to think about immigration now.

immigration. Accusing your fellow citizens of racism when they have doubts about welcoming foreigners may not be the best way to win them over. If you are a public official, you must be determined to give people as little basis for their fears as possible, and you must be able to tell a convincing story about how all Americans can benefit from the infusion of energy that immigrants bring.

Most of all, you must show them that immigration is orderly and under control. You cannot take any of this for granted and simply make policy through below-the-radar executive actions.

Liberals and progressives need to be especially sensitive to these political imperatives.

Internationally, rising levels of immigration are associated with support for anti-immi-

After taking office, Biden reversed many of the policies that Trump had used to deter migrants and provided new ways for migrants to get temporary authorization to stay in the United States. With the end of the COVID pandemic and the eventual lifting of Title 42 restrictions that imposed a blanket ban on asylum seekers, there was a surge of migrants on the southwestern border, after relatively few crossings in 2020.

Demographers often analyze migration in terms of “push” and “pull” factors. No doubt desperate conditions in many countries such as Venezuela and Ukraine pushed migrants to flee. The prospect of jobs in the United States, where an economy recovering faster than others had millions of job openings, also pulled them in America’s direction.

But Biden’s immigration policies also pulled them to the United States in such large numbers that border regions seemed in chaos and the asylum system was overwhelmed. Not only did migrant apprehen-

Encounters on the Southwest Border 2019–2024 300,000

Biden Inauguration

End of Title 42

200,000 100,000 0

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

sions on the border rise to record levels, exceeding two million in both 2022 and 2023, more than twice as many as under Trump. A majority of those apprehensions, far more than in previous years, resulted in migrants staying in the United States rather than being expelled. As the number of migrants seeking asylum overwhelmed detention centers, they were released into the interior with instructions to show up at an uncertain date, perhaps years later, in immigration court. Many people in distant countries learned about these conditions through online and personal networks and made a rational decision to risk a dangerous journey to reach and cross the U.S. border, knowing that they would likely be able to stay.

The Biden administration is right that congressional Republicans prevented the president from getting the authority and resources to address the crisis. In 2022, moreover, two Republican governors, Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, made sure that the migrants didn’t all just stay in their states, and began shipping them to Democratic cities. Eventually, tens of thousands of them arrived in New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, and elsewhere, raising pressures on housing and other services as well as local budgets. The governors’ strategy worked. It broadened concerns about the migrant surge and succeeded in splitting the Democratic Party.

The basic problems with the asylum system had already become evident during Trump’s presidency. Increasingly, people from Latin America and around the world were not surreptitiously stealing across the border in violation of U.S. law, but presenting themselves at the border to immigration authorities and seeking asylum under U.S. and international law. U.S. law granted them a right to a hearing, but the immigration courts did not have the capacity to conduct those hearings immediately. Trump dealt with the problem in his first term by requiring migrants to “remain in Mexico” until their cases could be heard.

Biden was slow to recognize that his initial policies would contribute to a crisis.

Perhaps he didn’t want to contend with the immigration advocates in his own party who would accuse him of being just like Trump if he limited access to asylum. But the rumblings from overwhelmed blue cities could not be ignored.

Finally, at the end of 2023, the Biden administration secured Mexico’s agreement DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

Donald Trump has learned that he can vilify immigrants yet still win adherents in immigrant communities. to limit the number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border. In January 2024, Biden said that if Congress gave him the authority to shut down the border, “I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.” He endorsed a bill being negotiated by congressional Democrats and Republicans that would have been a major enforcement-oriented shift in immigration law—until Trump, preferring to keep the issue boiling, shot the legislation down.

In June, after long insisting that he needed authority from Congress, Biden discovered, lo and behold, that he could do on his own what was necessary to stop the flood of migrants. He issued an executive order denying migrants asylum if they arrived illegally and established new border procedures making it less likely migrants would qualify for asylum. By September, border apprehensions fell to the lowest levels in years, but the election was now only weeks away.

Biden had put the public’s tolerance for 24 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

immigrants to a stress test it should never have had to face. Since the 1980 Refugee Act, the United States has had a wellstructured program for refugee resettlement that long enjoyed strong bipartisan support. After Trump sharply cut the program, Biden appropriately revived it, but he did far more than that. He enlarged another legal pathway, immigration parole, for people whom the limited refugee program couldn’t accommodate. In 2022, the administration began extending parole on a nationality basis to up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua. If they passed background checks and had a financial sponsor, they could take flights to the United States and receive legal permission to stay for up to two years.

In addition, border authorities began granting short-term parole to migrants encountered illegally crossing the border.

Between 2008 and 2020, Border Patrol had

extended parole only to about 770 migrants, but from January 2021 until June 2023, 718,000 migrants apprehended between ports of entry received parole. Parole was only one of several forms of temporary protection.

As of last January, there were about 2.3 million immigrants in the country who had been given temporary protections of one kind or another. The Migration Policy Institute called them a “ballooning population in limbo.”

Millions of immigrants now occupy a “twilight” status, living in the United States but with no guarantee that they can remain.

“When Mr. Biden was elected,” Michael D. Shear and Hamed Aleaziz of The New York Times pointed out in November, “more than three million migrants tracked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been released into cities across the United States while their cases were considered by a backed-up court system. Four years later, officials say that number has more than doubled to 7.6 million people.” Biden also

ALEX BR ANDON / AP PHOTO

raised the number of immigrants receiving permanent legal residency back up past one million a year.

The public wasn’t wrong in 2020 to think that immigration is a “good thing.”

The influx of immigrants has been positive for the economy. Just as in the past, the recent immigrants have helped fill unmet demands for labor, fueled growth in declining cities (like that target of Trump’s animus, Springfield, Ohio), and even improved the nation’s fiscal outlook. A report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, projected that “as a result of the immigration surge,” GDP over the 2024–2034 period would rise by $8.9 trillion, federal tax revenues would increase by $1.2 trillion, and the federal deficit would fall by $900 billion.

Even with the influx of immigrants, unemployment didn’t just stay low under Biden.

It stayed lower for longer than during any other administration since the 1960s.

But the persistent chaos at the border and the sheer scale of immigrants admitted on a temporary basis created two political problems. The first was an election problem for Democrats in 2024. Biden had never made a case as to why the country ought to extend temporary authorization to migrants on such a broad basis. The arrival of immigrants without networks of support created major fiscal and housing problems around the country, led a majority of voters to believe that immigration was out of control, and lent credibility to Trump’s antiimmigrant tirades. Immigration became one of the top issues in the election and contributed to Kamala Harris’s defeat.

And that defeat has now created a second problem. The fate of those temporarily authorized immigrants, along with the undocumented, will be up to Donald Trump.

This past year has marked the hundredth anniversary of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, though I am not aware of any public events either condemning or celebrating it. The act drastically reduced overall immigration, blocked most Southern and Eastern Europeans, and barred Asians entirely until Congress reopened the doors in 1965. But while the centenary of the Johnson-Reed Act passed largely unnoticed, the voters this year did commemorate it, albeit in the worst possible way. They elected a president who waged a relentlessly anti-immigrant campaign and

If we do enter a new era of immigration restriction, it will not make America great again. promised the largest mass deportations in American history.

How far Trump will go in carrying out those mass deportations is impossible to say now. He has ample legal authority to go after immigrants who are in the country without legal authorization, and he can end temporary authorization for those who are here on that basis. Deporting the temporary population alone would affect millions of families.

During Trump’s first term, immigration was a top issue for him, but he achieved remarkably little. When he became president in 2017, according to analyses based on census data, the unauthorized population stood at 10.5 million; when he left office, the unauthorized population was … still 10.5 million. Even during his first two years, when Republicans controlled Congress, the supposed master of the “art of the deal” was unable to work out a deal on immigration legislation that might have enabled a tighter border. Within the White House, Stephen Miller sabotaged the kind of compromises that could have gotten Trump billions of dollars to build his wall on the Mexican border in exchange for a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers.

There were nearly one million border crossings in fiscal year 2019. It took the COVID crisis to provide a public-health pretext to effectively shut the border.

But as in so many other areas, Trump’s first term may not be indicative of his second. He will not have to deal with some of the officials who previously blocked him from getting his way on asylum. He can use his executive authority and possibly invoke

the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to fulfill his promise of mass deportations.

Trump, however, has to worry about the likely inflationary effects of deporting workers who are vital to key industries.

As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, immigrants make up about three-fourths of agricultural workers, and half of them are undocumented. More than one-fifth of construction workers are also undocumented. As a result of today’s low unemployment rate, there aren’t enough able-bodied, native-born Americans sitting around ready to fill those jobs. Mass deportations could drive up grocery bills and limit the nation’s capacity to build new housing.

I am not saying Trump won’t deport the Haitians in Springfield. He will need some conspicuous victims. But he will have to think twice about deporting immigrants on the scale that he and Miller have been suggesting.

Whatever happens with deportations, the 2024 election may hold even more farreaching implications for immigration.

Trump’s Republican Party is an immigration restrictionist party. It has even learned that its presidential candidate can vilify immigrants and still make gains among Hispanic voters. There may not be much to hold Republicans back from undoing the foundations of contemporary immigration policy and bringing to an end the era of mass migration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa that began with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. But if we do enter a new era of immigration restriction, it will not make America great again. On the contrary, it will make America smaller and poorer. As the Federal Reserve study of the recent immigration surge points out, “The nation is in a sort of demographic autumn, and winter is coming. The retirement of the baby boomers and overall aging of the workforce, as well as low and falling birth rates mean population growth will become entirely dependent on immigration by 2040, as deaths of U.S.-born will outpace births.”

Long before that point, there would be enormous economic pressure to reopen the country to immigration. So I don’t think the United States would stick with immigration restriction indefinitely, but it could be on the horizon for years to come—unless Trump, having won more support from Hispanic voters in 2024, decides that immigration is not such a terrible thing after all. With Trump, you never know. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

The Ambulance Chasers of Totaled Hospitals Insight Health is the pride of Flint, Michigan, and it’s coming for a failing hospital near you.

Monday manager meeting, Spring 2023, Insight Chicago hospital, second f loor.

Department heads were taking turns brief ing one another on the “special challenges” they were facing. A quality assurance manager from the compliance department rose to speak.

“We’re still working to locate a family member of the patient who has been in the morgue since last year …” the manager told the group, according to someone who attended the meeting.

Last year?

“We’re taking care of it,” a top hospital official interjected, silencing the gasps. End of discussion.

The corpse, internally named “John Doe,” would come up again every few Mondays. Invariably, someone would ask when it would be removed. There was never a straight answer, only the reassurances: We’re taking care of it.

In July, the compliance department finally reported that they’d found someone—no one asked who—to pick up the body.

The legend of John Doe would live on among staff, especially after the morgue’s chillers broke a few months later, causing temperatures to rise and one or two of 26 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

the bodies to leak so profusely the stench spread through the basement. This warranted additional Monday updates from facilities management.

The mystery corpse wasn’t the worst or even weirdest development at the Insight Chicago hospital. But of all the exotically awful things ten former employees of Insight Health divulged to the Prospect about working there, it was the most, as the kids might say, “iconic.” Even terrible hospitals usually treat death seriously, because in-hospital deaths have a substantial impact on a hospital’s Medicare reimbursement rates and by extension its bottom line. Insight was so chaotic and dysfunctional, it couldn’t identify a dead patient; by the time it was discovered, no one who might have remembered him worked there any longer.

In a stretch of Flint, Michigan, once inhabited by a sprawling General Motors campus and now populated by an abundance of “meth heads” according to a former employee, a Pakistan-born neurosurgeon named Jawad Shah has been cobbling together a burgeoning health care empire, replete with sports medicine and rheumatology clinics, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and fitness

center, a postoperative nursing home, an imaging center, a toxicology lab and specialty pharmacy, and even facilities for growing and provisioning medical marijuana.

The empire is called Insight Health, and over the past year it has embarked on an ambitious nationwide expansion, adding eight community hospitals in five states, from California to New Jersey, to its portfolio of just two hospitals and the medical mall in Flint. Most recently, Insight took over Trumbull Regional Medical Center and a sister long-term hospital called Hillside Rehabilitation in Trumbull County, Ohio.

But former employees at Insight’s acute care hospital in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, which it purchased from the Trinity Health system for all of a dollar in 2021, told the Prospect that Insight lacks the resources—both financially and managerially—to functionally operate that single facility, much less any others. Court documents filed in an array of criminal and civil disputes, coupled with the accounts of former Insight physicians and nurses, suggest that a not insubstantial portion of Insight’s revenues are derived from various forms of what has been termed in those cases as insurance fraud. And interviews

MAUREEN TK ACIK

By Maureen Tkacik

Trumbull Regional Medical Center, Warren, Ohio

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

with current and former Insight employees and patients in Illinois and Ohio portray an institution that falls well short of its stated commitment to patient care.

And let’s not forget John Doe. In a statement to the Prospect, Insight defended its work, while not answering any specific allegations from this article. “We’ve developed a distinct approach to assuming management of troubled hospitals experiencing unique challenges that often result from years of mismanagement,” an Insight spokesperson said. “Our goal with every engagement is to make a positive difference and ensure patients have access to care that is second to none.”

Insight’s Jawad Shah is part of a class of entrepreneurs who fly from fading rural town to postindustrial urban neighborhood promising to “save” decrepit hospitals.

These modern-day Music Men are perfect for the Gary, Indianas of 2024, trading in Professor Harold Hill’s bandleader outfit for blue suits and arcane knowledge about the latest obscure CMS rule revision. Invariably, the hospitals don’t have many options: 90 percent of metropolitan areas in the country have high or extreme levels of concentration in their hospital markets. But the men who promise to break that cycle often end up accelerating it, leaving new health care deserts in their wake.

Eight years ago, a pair of brothers from Miami promised to save 18 rural hospitals by building lucrative urine testing labs in their basements. The scheme raked in more than a billion dollars for the brothers, but workers didn’t get paid for nearly a year and most of the hospitals shut down for good. In 2018, a Los Angeles investor named Joel Freedman promised to “save” Philadelphia’s 139-year-old Hahnemann University Hospital and a nearby children’s hospital, only to file for bankruptcy protection the following year; the hospital was sold to a private equity firm that specializes in conversions into mixed-use commercial projects. A few months before the bankruptcy, a close friend of Freedman’s teamed up with a close friend of Barack Obama’s to “save” a failing hospital in Chicago and ended up closing it almost immediately; subsequent bankruptcy filings revealed the terms of the transaction had actually required them to close the hospital.

And of course, there’s the infamous Steward Health, which billed itself as a “savior” of a doomed system of Catholic neighborhood 28 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

hospitals; instead, owner Ralph de la Torre triple-mortgaged every lab, office building, parking lot, medical device, and Medicare receivable in its possession to finance a vast portfolio of international villas, and oceanworthy yachts and private jets in which to travel to them. (De la Torre, currently under federal criminal investigation, recently launched a website to dispel “myths” about his deeds, with such explanations as “Dr. de la Torre’s compensation, even including the use of a plane, is still well below market as determined by a third-party independent compensation consultant.”)

As a result, most observers doubted there was any juice left to squeeze when Steward’s raided hospitals needed re-saving. But rather than take more write-downs on its battered portfolio, Steward’s landlord Medical Properties Trust (MPT) announced in September it had found operators to take on the unwanted leases of 15 Steward hospitals.

Two of them, Quorum Health and American Healthcare Systems, had considerable preexisting financial ties to MPT. But Insight Health seemed different.

Until early 2024, it operated just a single acute care hospital in Chicago but had received fawning media coverage from Bloomberg Businessweek, the Detroit Free Press, and especially various outposts of the Crain’s local business journals, which have published a dozen positive stories about or substantially informed by the company. Insight’s suave, cerebral founder, Shah, insisted that Insight abided by the tenets of Islamic finance and would never saddle his hospitals with the kind of debt that had doomed Steward. Perhaps most assuringly, he volunteered his services for much of the month of June to the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, where he saw as many as 100 patients a day and performed surgery on an average of 17 of them.

An employee at Insight’s Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital said a recent town hall meeting left the staff full of hope that the charismatic neurosurgeon would “make Hillside great again.”

“Dr. Shah is an incredible speaker, he really is. When I left the town hall I was like, ‘Holy moly, this is actually good!’ And then about an hour later I thought to myself, ‘Oh my god, they just brainwashed me!’”

Like many buildings in Warren, Ohio, the nine-story Trumbull Regional Medical Center exudes a big-city grandeur that seems

slightly out of place in a town of 40,000.

A skybridge connects the main hospital building to the physician offices across East Market Street. Every yard of eye-level wall space is adorned with prints commemorating exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or posters memorializing chapters of regional history: the nursing school whose students staffed the hospital from 1951 to 1968, the defunct local industrial giants that built automobiles and factory equipment, an artsy black-and-white print of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Plaza photographed by one of the hospital’s late internists.

In 2017, Trumbull Regional Medical Center was sold to Steward Health, and the cuts

Shah is part of a class of entrepreneurs who fly from fading rural town to postindustrial urban neighborhood promising to “save” decrepit hospitals. commenced. A nurse standing in the elevator bay complained to me that two elevators are down. “First they shut down peds [pediatrics], then OB, pathology, geriatric behavioral health …” she ticks off the specialties and patients lost to “Ralph’s yachts,” referring to de la Torre, who bought two.

In May 2024, Steward finally filed for bankruptcy protection, disclosing it had already spent more than $11.2 million retaining investment bankers to sell off the company’s 30 remaining hospitals. (The dol-

lar amount would more than double.) But in late July, restructurers canceled a scheduled auction for Trumbull and two other nearby hospitals, blaming an absence of “qualified” bids. The few hundred remaining employees organized a rally, where a union leader challenged Gov. Mike DeWine to get his “ass down here and help these people.”

Within weeks, though, came a flash of hope: A group of local business leaders and physicians founded Warren City Hospital, Inc., and told local media they were putting together a bid to save Trumbull. Local county commissioner Niki Frenchko, a Republican former social worker, was relieved but skeptical. Her backyard faces the hospital’s parking lot; one of her daughters and several

working on the project “for free” but would not disclose whether he was doing it on behalf of a client. (Diamond and McNaull did not respond to a request for comment.)

Their revenue projections had been inexplicably calculated by applying a 15 percent across-the-board increase over 2019, when the hospital still had a busy maternity ward.

Most alarmingly, McNaull mentioned that the new hospital would be obligated to pay $7 million a year to Steward’s old landlord, Medical Properties Trust. Frenchko, a licensed real estate appraiser who owns ten rental properties along with a small house she purchased for $20,000 in cash, doubted whether she could sell the entire hospital complex for $7 million, much less

Trumbull County, Ohio, commissioner Niki Frenchko has been fighting to save the local hospital in Warren.

friends used to work there, and close family members had leaned on the behavioral health wing in times of crisis.

Like all would-be saviors in Trumbull County, the Warren City consortium first needed public handouts, and Frenchko was dismayed when the group made its formal pitch. The appointed spokesmen were two out-of-towners: an Atlanta-based consultant named Tom McNaull and an Akronbased health care attorney named Jack Diamond, whose associate claimed he was

the dubious $70 million “value” upon which the lease was based. An underwriter at a local bank estimated the hospital building would appraise somewhere between $10 and $15 million.

Six years of paying an impossible lease had left the Trumbull hospital with $25 to $30 million in deferred maintenance.

(Frenchko knew as much because the state had been forced to gift the hospital a new morgue after the hospital’s chillers failed and the temperature inside shot to 90

degrees.) And even by the group’s optimistic projections, $7 million would consume almost the entirety of the hospital’s profits.

A realistic plan for “saving” the hospital, Frenchko believed, might start with seeking permission from the state to declare a health care emergency, so the county could invoke eminent domain to buy the property at its fair market value.

“The reason for this failure is because [of] MPT and the lease not being affordable,” Frenchko said at a public meeting in late August. “I just don’t want to see this kind of situation where you’re throwing good money after bad, [using] the county’s money to prolong the inevitable.”

“You’re absolutely wrong, you’re misinformed, and if you’re going to be Negative Nancy over here, there is the door,” interjected Denny Malloy, another county commissioner who said he had worked for 16 hours straight the day earlier hammering out the details. “You can put all of the trash out of your mouth that you want,” he went on. “We’re here to be positive.”

After a local news station covered the controversy, the hospital president sent a message to her contacts in the health group, warning them that asking too many questions or speaking to the media could lead to “bad press” and jeopardize the hospital’s survival. But MPT had been the subject of bad press nationwide that month, after the Steward estate had sued the REIT for sabotaging its attempts to sell off its hospitals by forcing bidders to accept the same “burdensome, significantly above-market and inflated leases” that had “crippled [Steward’s] operations for years.”

There was not much Frenchko, a lame duck whose own party successfully primaried her last spring and who was generally regarded as a “troublemaker,” could do. She wrote letters and emails and gave local news interviews, but she kept hearing information about the hospital that was not given to her directly. When she finally lined up a meeting with the state attorney general’s office and delivered her spiel on how much Steward and MPT had, in her words, “stolen” from the community, the staffer literally asked if she’d filed a police report.

And so she was dumbfounded when, on the morning of Tuesday, September 10, she received an email in her in-box from Dayne Walling, director of public policy and government relations for something called Insight Health Group. “We are getting DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

into a position of stepping in with hospital management,” he wrote. “We have been extremely impressed by the city and county commitment to saving the hospital.”

Walling, a Rhodes scholar who served as Flint’s mayor during its lead poisoning scandal, told Frenchko that he and Insight’s founder Jawad Shah had flown in to tour the hospital over the weekend in Dr. Shah’s BAE800 business jet, and MPT had decided to hand them the proverbial keys at midnight on September 11. Articulate and refreshingly non-condescending, Walling cut an impressive figure, but Frenchko was full of questions. What exactly was Insight? What had happened to Jack Diamond?

She wasn’t the only one who felt blindsided. A Florida investor and onetime resident at the Warren hospital named Benjamin Yates soon approached her to complain that he had been working with Warren City Hospital, Inc., since mid-July to—successfully, he claims—procure $30 million in loans to back a bid, only to find himself ghosted by everyone involved in the project. Yates told the Prospect that the group used his financing proof of funds documentation to stave off a planned closure of the hospital in July, only to drop him from the discussion when Insight stepped in. He added that the Trumbull hospital had reported healthy profits before it began slashing services in 2023.

Yates said he would have reopened Trumbull’s dormant maternity ward, along with a section of a massive shuttered hospital just south of Warren in Youngstown. But after Insight came along, MPT began trying to convince him to bid on another property that already had a bidder. (MPT did not comment.) Warren City Hospital, Inc., for its part, claims on its website to have disbanded because “Insight Health Care emerged with goals similar to ours.”

Yet one month into the Insight takeover, dozens of longtime employees had been terminated, the hospital’s dwindling supply of toilet paper had just about run out, and three patients had died in as many weeks, an unusually high number for a facility with 40 patients at most. Employees alleged that a post-op cardiac patient in his sixties had a heart attack in the service elevator after being taken off his morphine drip to go downstairs for an MRI. A 26-year-old psych patient was discovered by a fellow patient after dying from an apparent aneurysm.

And a patient in her seventies scheduled to undergo surgery apparently died shortly 30 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

after an EMT wheeled her into her pre-op room, according to an employee who discovered her body. Ohio regulators asked about the deaths told the Prospect to check inspection records, but none were available.

“I wanted this place to stay open so bad, but not if we’re not committed to giving the best care,” an employee told the Prospect. “It seems like everyone’s just given up.”

In public, Insight presents itself as a model corporate citizen and a driving force behind the revitalization of Flint, which Dr. Shah has told the local newspaper he wanted to transform into “the next medical ‘Silicon Valley.’”

City leaders bought into the hype. “When people hear Flint … before the water crisis, they

Insight was incorporated in 2008 as the Insight Institute for Neurosurgery and Neuroscience (IINN) by Shah and Amer Iqbal, childhood friends who grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, and reunited in Flint after the former completed his residency and married a local immigration attorney.

A 2010 newspaper story announcing the institute’s official launch mentions its plan to “invest $18 million” to expand the company into a “world class research incubator,” but the launch of IINN largely amounted to renaming Shah’s medical practice and moving it into a gargantuan building in a blighted section of town, which qualified for special tax breaks. Detroit-area real estate was so depressed that year that Shah told

A Michigan law requiring auto insurance policies to cover medical expenses for car accidents has created opportunities for fraud. thought of Roger & Me. You know, then they think of the water crisis … [Insight has] given them something else to think about,” said former Flint mayor Karen Weaver at a hearing about Insight’s acquisition of the Chicago hospital in 2021. “I cannot say enough about what they have done for this community.”

But a former Insight hospital administrator says matter-of-factly: “Dollar signs are what Insight sees. They do not know how to run a hospital, and they don’t care that they don’t know.”

Crain’s Detroit Business he purchased some 600,000 square feet of Class A office space for less than $200,000 cash.

When the water poisoning crisis struck a few years later, Shah bought the campus of a shuttered vocational school and opened a food pantry that distributed free bottled water. By 2018, the effort had blossomed into the Sylvester Broome Empowerment Village, an ambitious community center that touts on its website free classes in everything from journalism to violin to

skateboarding, though only four programs are currently listed on its registration app and all are wait-listed. In 2022, the most recent year for which figures are available, Sylvester Broome spent $2.1 million on its various programs, though roughly half of that budget was spent on “management fees” and “occupancy fees,” suggesting the charity may be empowering Insight and other affiliated entities as much as anyone else. (Sylvester Broome didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

By 2011, a former administrator claimed in a whistleblower lawsuit that the Insight Institute had been systematically upcoding and double-billing the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for years. The claim

Insight’s Jawad Shah has said that he wanted to transform Flint, Michigan, into “the next medical Silicon Valley.”

alleged that an administrator had collected a folder “more than an inch thick” of documented overpayments that Iqbal had warned not to bring up in company meetings. The Justice Department declined to intervene in the lawsuit, which was just seven pages long, and the whistleblower dismissed it voluntarily.

But two former employees of Insight’s emergency room in Chicago told the Prospect they were regularly pressured to admit Medicare patients to the hospital who did

not need inpatient care, using vague diagnosis codes like “failure to thrive” that had no connection to their symptoms. Separately, a former Insight neurologist named Shanele Vaughn alleged in a lawsuit last December that another unnamed physician had been filling up the operating room schedule with surgeries she viewed as unnecessary. (Vaughn refused to comment on her case to the Prospect.) Another physician told the Prospect that certain Insight-affiliated specialists troll nearby nursing homes for patients on whom they might perform lucrative but unnecessary procedures, “like stripping the varicose veins of a patient with kidney failure.” An Ohio clinician told the Prospect in early November that a new patient had said she’d been “recruited” from her nursing home by Insight to come to the hospital.

In Ohio, a 72-year-old heart patient named Linda Cool told the Prospect Insight had “held [her] hostage” for ten days in October and November after her physicians had told her she’d been cleared to return home. First, she says, a nurse explained that they needed approval from Medicare to order a portable ventilator; then they wanted to test her liver function. “But no one could tell me who ordered the liver test,” Cool said, “and I later learned from Medicare that the home ventilator they wanted cost $5,000 a month and they would never approve it without a sleep study first, which no one was asking to do.” Cool says the nurse then gave her a choice: stay in the hospital, get transferred to a rehab facility, or discharge herself but pay the bill in cash.

“That’s when I had a little fit and told them I was going to call the evening news,” she says. She was discharged.

Back home in Michigan, Insight has been accused of other schemes. State law requires drivers to buy auto insurance policies that cover virtually limitless medical expenses of anyone injured in a car accident, regardless of who caused it. Personal injury lawyers and individual drivers have long exploited those laws to extract windfall payments from car insurers, but a 2014 law banning attorneys from soliciting clients in the 30 days after a collision placed doctors at the center of the ecosystem.

“Michigan has built a big fraud industry around no-fault medical benefits,” a personal injury lawyer in the state told the Prospect. “Lots of people run bullshit chiropractors, physical therapy, MRI places,

that basically only provide fraudulent treatment to auto patients. They pay ‘marketers’ to listen to police scanners for car crashes, recruit patients at the accident scene, and pay the ‘patients’ to attend treatment.

Some of them are vertically integrated with the personal injury lawyers, where a lawyer secretly owns the MRI place or physical therapy practice through a friend or relative.

I know people in Detroit that pay $700 a month for minimum coverage auto insurance, because the insurers just pass the cost on to drivers in low-income areas.”

Shah leaned into the new law, filing hundreds of lawsuits against auto insurers that denied coverage for certain procedures, while casting himself in the press as a Robin Hood figure standing up to greedy insurance companies by treating patients on contingency. He sued the state over reforms the legislature passed to rein in the system’s abuse, and in 2018 he acquired a suburban Detroit surgery center with a robust auto accident business. Insight physicians or the company itself have filed or otherwise become involved in hundreds of lawsuits against insurance companies in Genesee, Macomb, and Oakland Counties in the decade since the state law originally passed, while Shah has personally filed more than 100 cases in those three counties.

In 2022, Allstate filed a civil racketeering lawsuit accusing Insight’s suburban Detroit surgery center of recruiting some of the most dubious doctors in the state, creating a kind of assembly line to exploit the auto insurance rules. There was Sam Hakki, who’d used two separate fake names to conceal his ownership stake in a urine testing clinic to which he was unnecessarily referring patients, as well as “conceal[ing] that he had pending disciplinary actions in other states”; David Jankowski, who is serving a 20-year sentence for using oxycodone prescriptions to lure drug addicts into participating in his elaborate $35 million insurance fraud scheme; Syed Moosavi, who had been under investigation by the state medical board for being one of Macomb County’s top five prescribers of commonly diverted controlled substances; and various affiliates of a clinic that got its patients from a lawyer who pled guilty in 2020 to stealing crash reports from the Detroit Police Department.

The case was settled in September.

Shah also had a 25 percent stake and a board seat at Pontiac General Hospital, about a half-hour west of Flint. In 2022, DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

Chicago’s oldest hospital sits in the city’s Fourth Ward, between the gleaming downtown Loop and the northernmost edge of 32 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Chicago’s oldest hospital, in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood, was taken over by Insight in 2021.

South Side, far enough from the center to have survived the Great Fire of 1871, close (and old) enough to have treated its victims.

“No other ward sees such wealth and such poverty in such proximity,” the Chicago historian David Fremon wrote in 1988.

Inequality may be great for restaurants and nail salons, but for hospital finances it has generally proven ruinous, because Medicaid recipients and uninsured people are inevitably far heavier users of hospital services than the luxury condo dwellers.

By the pandemic year of 2020, the hospital’s owner, suburban Detroit-based Trinity Health, said it was losing $4 million a month and would need to shut down unless the state stepped in.

A coalition of physicians and activists protested the closure and looked for new owners. A local Allstate insurance franchisee and state representative named Lamont Robinson emerged to broker talks between the Health Equity group and Trinity; the group was close to a deal to be acquired by another hospital on the northwest edge of town. But in March 2021, the advocacy group learned in a meeting with Gov. JB Pritzker’s staff that Trinity had decided to sell the hospital for $1 to Insight, a company no one in the room had ever heard of.

The ward alderman, Sophia King, who had organized many of the advocacy group’s meetings, was blindsided, and said as much

in a hearing that month to discuss the sale.

“I am curious why this meeting was called with such haste. I had to have the lobbyist for Insight inform me about it. Unfortunately, Insight and their team would not share much else with me,” she said, continuing that she wasn’t sure how “managing a 20-bed hospital for orthopedics and neurosurgery … translates into running a 400-bed hospital.” She pointed out that Insight had refused to agree to offer a seat on the hospital’s board to a member of the coalition, on grounds that they hadn’t done enough due diligence. “Well, that’s exactly how I feel here. It would be irresponsible for us to allow Insight to proceed without more due diligence.”

But proceed they did, and when King resigned from the alderman post to mount an ultimately unsuccessful mayoral bid, Robinson ran for her seat on the city council and won handily; Insight executives Atif Bawahab and Nadir Ijaz were two of the five biggest individual donors to his campaign.

Neither Robinson nor the area’s current state representative responded to a request for comment, though an anonymous tipster phoned the Prospect within an hour of our emailing certain local officials to advise that the hospital had retained a powerful lobbyist named Victor Reyes, who most recently made news for his appearance on a list of two dozen favored “magic lobbyists” pre-

ZOL87 / WIKMEDIA COMMONS CCBY

Allstate had filed a similar racketeering lawsuit against Pontiac and a group of doctors, including a business partner of Jankowski’s, allegedly operating a parallel scheme there with a shocking twist: In addition to recruiting patients under false pretenses, the hospital’s residency program was also recruiting unqualified medical students who’d failed to match into other programs to train at the hospital in exchange for “donations” that totaled $400,000 for one student who applied.

That case is ongoing, but one of the doctors who had to pay to be admitted to residency successfully sued Pontiac General. Shah’s name was never in the flurry of headlines, despite being a part owner.

Separately, a 2021 lawsuit filed by Genesis Alternative Finance, a shadow bank that apparently offers specialized “no fault” lending facilities for medical providers in Michigan, claimed that Insight had “deliberately withheld” settlement funds it had received from auto insurers to the tune of an unspecified amount over $75,000. The lawsuit was settled out of court a few months after it was filed.

The business model was a success, at any rate: After losing nearly $3 million in the year before it was acquired, Insight’s 20-bed surgery center in Warren, Michigan, generated some $13 million in management fees between 2019 and 2023, according to the hospital’s cost reports.

Insight might have stayed in that business but for the pandemic, which caused elective surgery volume to plunge and rained public funds on acute care hospitals. Early in the first COVID-19 surge, Shah brokered a deal with Steward landlord MPT and Wayne County to reopen a shuttered rehab hospital in the Detroit suburbs as an overflow facility. A photographer who specializes in exploring Detroit’s long-vacant commercial real estate told the Prospect that the hospital shut in early 2022; the Insight crew appears to have abruptly abandoned the property, leaving behind seemingly all of the hospital’s furniture and supplies, boxes full of personal protective equipment, even wastebaskets that remained full of trash earlier this year when he returned to film a video.

By then, Shah had become consumed with a more ambitious project.

Former employees say Insight used unethical and highly unusual means to increase elective surgeries at the Chicago hospital.

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Insight’s pitch made a certain kind of theoretical sense. The hospital needed to jump-start its volume of elective surgeries in order to offset losses from unprofitable specialties, and Insight was an elective surgery powerhouse. But ten former physicians and other employees, some of whom were fired and some who left voluntarily, say Insight used highly unusual means to this end.

Four former employees independently named one doctor who instructed his assistant to scour the emergency department waiting room and book consultations with any patient who complained of back or neck pain.

Separately, two former physicians and an administrator claimed that the hospital’s chief medical officer had performed hysterectomies on patients despite lacking board certification in obstetrics/gynecology. (This certification is not technically needed, though it’s unusual to practice without one.) Earlier this year, two of the hospital’s busiest pain physicians opened a handsomely appointed new practice on the 12th floor, where one administrator says both regularly see as many as 30 patients per day.

One clinician told the Prospect about a new patient who burst into the hallway one afternoon and shouted, “Why am I waiting here? [The doctor] keeps saying I need to get presurgical clearance because my legs are weak but look!” (The patient began doing squats and jumping up and down in the hallway.) “My legs work fine! And this guy is telling me my legs don’t work!”

Insight deployed unusual work-arounds to convince insurers to pay for questionable procedures, according to four former employees. Two former Insight physi-

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cians said that surgeons sometimes scheduled procedures in the emergency room in order to bypass prior authorization requirements, and a former administrator said specialists would sometimes scrub the results of tests and imaging, or the notes of other physicians, from patients’ medical records before they submitted them to insurers.

Meanwhile, outside the operating room, the Chicago hospital continued to deteriorate, employees say. A clinic that had been located in the building’s basement was forced to move upstairs due to a rat infestation. The hospital ran out of wheelchairs and lacked the funds to buy new ones; elevators are consistently out of service. A representative of one of Insight’s long-unpaid suppliers showed up in the ER one day and began repossessing all of the curtains separating the patient care areas; they were forced to make do with curtains borrowed from the old pediatric wing.

But Insight adamantly refused to refer ambulances to other hospitals, even when staffing and supply shortages and equipment malfunctions meant they couldn’t realistically treat patients, according to two physicians who no longer work at the hospital.

Despite prior promises, the only substantial renovation employees say Insight undertook entailed spending lavishly to convert the hospital’s old chapel into a miniature mosque to accommodate the prayer requirements of the company’s pious top brass and the expensively dressed foreigners who periodically flew in for investor meetings. This created something of a culture clash at the hospital. (“It’s absolutely beautiful,” a former administrator said of the prayer room.

“But … there just aren’t many Muslims in this neighborhood.”)

“They didn’t want to fix anything,” said a health care facilities consultant who worked on-site at the hospital briefly in 2023. “They have 12 floors of hospital and only five of them were at code. The air handlers, the boilers, the soft water systems are all shot.

Chunks of ceilings are falling on patients’ heads, climate control is nonexistent, and when it rains the 12th floor is like a sieve.

But they didn’t want to hear it; anything I told them to fix [an Insight official] would say, ‘That’s not in the budget.’ Finally I asked, ‘What is your budget?’ And he said they didn’t have one. What kind of hospital doesn’t have a maintenance budget?”

After two months of begging to bring the 34 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

hospital into compliance with the health code, the facilities consultant asked his company to put him on another account.

“If I stay here a minute longer this place will destroy my reputation,” he remembered saying. His company did not object; according to the consultant, Insight had been late to pay three invoices and they weren’t sure how much more of its business they wanted.

And then there was John Doe, the unidentified man whose body turned up in the morgue, according to six former employees. The body’s provenance was a mystery; everyone assumed it was a homeless gentleman who had come to the emergency room and been treated by one or two of the countless clinicians who had quit or been fired since Insight had taken possession of the hospital.

Insight refused to respond specifically to any of the allegations about which the Prospect inquired regarding the Chicago hospital or anywhere else, but a spokesman advised in an email that our questions contained “numerous inaccuracies and falsehoods in these accusations that misrepresent Insight’s positive impact on these facilities and the communities they serve—including Insight Chicago, where we not only kept the hospital’s doors open

three years ago, but have since reestablished its emergency department, expanded service offerings and implemented youth engagement and empowerment programs to promote health and wellbeing in the community.”

As the months wore on, employees say, Insight increasingly imported executives and administrators from Flint, many of them in their twenties and early thirties, and fired local hospital veterans who had pushed back against the company’s practices. “[Insight] doesn’t care how much experience anyone has, because if you know how to run a business you can run a radiology department, or an operating room,” said a former administrator with Insight Chicago.

“But there is a lot more than that to running a hospital.”

Insight also imported other “friends” to the hospital, albeit not to fill jobs but to fill beds on the old labor and delivery floor, which Trinity had shut down in 2019. “People were living on the second and third floors, and at night they would walk the halls and sometimes even walk into patients’ rooms,” said a former employee of the emergency room, whose account was corroborated by three other employees. Most of them were seemingly recent émigrés to the country

Growth Through Acquisition Insight Health hospital purchases in 2023–24: Date

Hospital

Location

Purchase Price

Status

March 2023

Keokuk Area Hospital

Keokuk, IA

$825,000

unopened

January 2024

Hazel Hawkins Community Hospital

Hollister, CA

$60 million

approved

March 2024

Christ Hospital, Bayonne Medical Center,

northern NJ

undisclosed

exited in October

Hoboken University Medical Center May 2024

Eight Steward Health hospitals

Massachusetts

undisclosed

offer rejected

September 2024

Trumbull Regional Medical Center,

Warren, OH

undisclosed

active

Coldwater, MI

undisclosed

in progress

Hillside Rehabilitation Hospital September 2024

Coldwater Regional Hospital

who only stayed for a week or two, but one bachelor who’d hauled a queen-sized bed and mini-fridge into his room appeared to live there for several months.

Nurses, surgical techs, and doctors said they repeatedly called federal and state regulatory agencies, officials, and the office of the new alderman, Robinson, to report the weird goings-on and deteriorating conditions within the Insight hospital. “They just did not want to hear it,” said a former employee who says they contacted numerous officials about the hospital.

Documents released to the Prospect in a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the Illinois Department of Public Health show that CMS inspectors have investigated at least fourteen complaints into the Insight Chicago hospital since Insight assumed leadership in mid-2021.

Those complaints alleged violations of health and safety codes, deficient emergency room operations, and patients rejected from receiving care. One 2022 survey found that seven of eleven sexual assault victims over a six-month period had been sent home without medical forensic services, because Insight either lacked the supplies or the staff to perform rape kits.

At one point in early spring 2023, inspectors following up on an incident in the behavioral health unit determined that the hospital had placed the lives of patients in “Immediate Jeopardy,” a status that can lead to the loss of a hospital’s Medicare billing privileges. The designation was removed following a follow-up inspection that April.

In July, complaints involving ER staff turning away patients with serious injuries (including atrial fibrillation and gastrointestinal bleeding) alleged potential noncompliance with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires acute care hospitals to treat all patients at the ER regardless of their insurance status.

The most recent financial statements available for the Chicago hospital are from the 2022 tax year, during which it reported booking $103 million in revenue and $110 million in expenses. But for the Insight corporate empire, the year was a success: Its IMCS staffing subsidiary collected $12.7 million in management fees from the facility, according to the hospital’s official cost reports.

Notably, that year the hospital also added a $19.75 million liability described

“What kind of hospital doesn’t have a maintenance budget?” asked a facilities consultant who worked on-site in Chicago.

as a “secured mortgage and notes payable to unrelated third parties” to its balance sheet, though Cook County records list no mortgages on the property. A search with the county treasurer’s department suggests Insight has not paid real estate taxes on the property since taking it over in 2021, and currently owes the county more than $10.3 million in property and assessment taxes.

Meanwhile in Flint, Insight executed a strategy of growth through acquisitions. In 2023, it bought a shuttered 49-bed hospital in tiny Keokuk, Iowa, a town of about 9,000 with a median household income of barely more than $30,000. The hospital had suffered from extremely low emergency room traffic and an estimated $20 million in debt due to facility upgrades; its owner had closed it just over a year after acquiring it from a previous owner. Insight’s business plan involved converting the facility to a Rural Emergency Hospital, a new CMS designation that boosts reimbursement to small-town hospitals that exclusively operate ERs. Insight is rumored to have this in mind for the Trumbull hospital. (Benjamin Yates, the investor who put together a competing offer for the hospital, said the designation is “highly inappropriate for a hospital like Trumbull.”)

In 2024, Insight brokered deals to take over similar small-town hospitals in central California and southern Michigan.

And in April, the company was reported to have assumed operations of the notorious for-profit CarePoint Health system in New Jersey, a three-hospital chain that made headlines in 2016 for charging $9,000 to bandage a wound that did not require stitches. A state investigation revealed in 2019 that the previous ownership had received $157 million in “management fees” from

the facilities over a four-year period. By the time Insight appeared, the hospitals were ghost towns with ERs attached to them, bereft of basic supplies and reliant on an $8 million-a-month bailout from the state of New Jersey to make payroll.

As with the Steward hospitals, staffers at CarePoint were initially elated to be welcoming new management, assuming nothing could be worse. But something about the New Jersey assignment did not agree with Dr. Shah, who abruptly resigned as CarePoint’s CEO on October 28 following a tense board meeting the night earlier in which he’d clashed with the mayors of Hoboken and Jersey City, the latter of whose super PAC had been the recipient of a $1 million donation from CarePoint’s founder in 2016. Two days later, yet another savior had swooped in to save the hospitals: Hudson Regional Hospital of nearby Secaucus, whose CEO Yan Moshe—a six-figure donor to Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop’s super PAC—had been attempting to merge his hospital into the CarePoint empire for years. Yet when CarePoint filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware on November 4, it maintained in its first-day motions that Insight was still the manager of the Hoboken and Jersey City hospitals.

It’s a shame Moshe and Shah couldn’t work out a deal: The two appear to have much in common. Like Shah, Moshe comes to the hospital business from a career spent in surgery centers; also like Shah, Moshe and his companies have been named in multiple lawsuits in which auto insurers allege he defrauded them of millions by referring patients who weren’t really injured for unnecessary procedures they sometimes did not even undergo. But in 2022, when the police visited Moshe’s hospital after someone called in a bomb threat, a bombsniffing dog led them to an unlocked closet containing 39 guns, including an assault rifle. They were apparently being stockpiled by the marketing guy, but a police report revealed that Moshe admitted he knew they were there. Why? The Hudson County prosecutor dropped the charges against the marketing guy last year without a plausible explanation. Moshe did not respond to a request for comment.

But if one day a harried hospital clinician rifling through supply closets for toilet paper or IV tubing instead finds a stockpile of guns and does something unwise, don’t say we didn’t warn you. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

Tackling the Housing Crisis

A symposium on how housing unaffordability happened and what can be done

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he easiest story to tell about the 2024 election is a tale of widespread anger at the cost of living. The main driver was the inflationary period after the pandemic, affecting the cost of groceries in particular. It also includes the supply shocks that caused shortages in things like semiconductors and baby formula and critical prescription drugs. It includes the climate change–induced skyrocketing of home and auto insurance. It includes the consequences of the Federal Reserve’s attempts to control inflation, raising the cost of borrowing on everything from mortgages to car loans. And it includes some aspects of daily life that have been seeing higher costs for decades, like child care and medical treatment.

But if you wanted to reveal the linchpin of the cost-of-living crisis, it would be the cost of housing. In fact, we have more of a housing inflation crisis than an inflation crisis overall. For quite a while now, housing has been the one aspect of the Consumer Price Index that has refused to be tamed, stubbornly affixed at higher levels while the cost of other goods and services has come down.

In fact, the greatest swing toward Donald Trump in the presidential election came in urban centers like Chicago and New York City, where rising housing prices and homelessness are most acute. Migration patterns away from expensive blue cities and states correspond mostly to housing affordability; even LGBT people and other threatened groups seeking to relocate from conservative areas struggle to move to safety, because of housing.

36 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

The pervasive unaffordability of housing will have massive political implications if not turned around. Left unchecked, the flight from our costly coasts will shrink the Democrats’ electoral vote base following the 2030 census. But it’s not just a political crisis, of course; it’s a social one. America’s mega-cities are the nation’s most dynamic, with the highest levels of economic growth.

Pricing out middle-class and working people means locking millions of Americans out of opportunity and a better future.

And homelessness is a moral scourge that demands better of policymakers.

Answering the question of what to do about all this too often devolves into a game of mutual recrimination on social media.

The truth is that the housing shortage has many causes, and just as many options for how to fix it. So we have assembled a symposium on housing, designed to highlight some of those solutions without getting into the tit for tat.

Before we get started, we have to go back in time. Decades ago, there was simply a greater variety of housing tailored to new arrivals in a city: modest starter homes, single room occupancy boarding houses, or other entry-level solutions. More important, housing production kept pace with population growth and household formation. The hinge point was 2006, the first year that the housing bubble began to collapse. We have been in a shortage spiral ever since.

Scarcity has been extremely lucrative for a privileged few. Twelve new billionaires have been created in the homebuilding industry over the past few years; these

homebuilders control more of the market and make more profit while building fewer homes. Financial engineers have used scarcity as a cover to correlate rent increases throughout markets, something that only dissipated somewhat due to state and federal price-fixing lawsuits. Corporate landlords use junk fees and outright thievery to enrich themselves at tenants’ expense. And the national program used to subsidize lowincome housing has become an enormous cash cow for housing conglomerates. The status quo is wildly inequitable.

Disparate camps review this state of affairs and promote narrow solutions, looking past how they can work together. In this symposium, we pair calls for relaxing zoning rules to expand supply with calls for building tenant power to fight landlord abuse. We have essays about the need to fill a financing gap in housing that’s ready to be built, and essays about the extraordinary recent consolidation in homebuilding, and how it has atrophied the entire process. It’s illegal to build some private housing, and it’s illegal to build most public housing. All these problems must be worked on.

Despite the new regime entering Washington, housing is typically regulated and overseen at the local level, so while no national fix is in the offing, there is no reason progress has to be stalled. In fact, there’s no alternative but to get started.

Our goal was to submit these various ideas in a public forum, to see if they are complementary, and whether they can ameliorate the terrible injustice of unaffordable housing. I hope readers, and policymakers, find them useful.—David Dayen

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

Make It Legal to Buıld

The Yes In My Backyard, or YIMBY, movement believes that solving the housing shortage entails removing impediments to adding supply.

By Robert Cruickshank

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his summer, the prohousing, pro - cities Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement won over the highest levels of the Democratic Party to our solutions for the country’s spiraling housing crisis. Former President Barack Obama said in his speech at the Democratic National Convention, “If we want to make it easier for young people to buy a home, we need to build more units—and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes for working people in this country.”

Vice President Kamala Harris made similar statements in her own speech to the DNC, vowing to “end America’s housing shortage.” In North Carolina a few days earlier, Harris said, “In many places … it’s too difficult to build, and it’s driving prices up … We will take down barriers and cut red tape, including at the state and local levels. And by the end of my first term, we will end America’s housing shortage by

38 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

building three million new homes and rentals that are affordable for the middle class.”

YIMBYs had already been gradually winning the argument in the lower levels of the Democratic Party before Obama and Harris came aboard. And not only Democrats have embraced this agenda. In fact, YIMBY legislation at the state level in Montana, Washington, and even California passed in large part due to Republican votes, sometimes when Democrats could not provide the votes to pass it in state legislatures where their party was in the majority.

Yet despite these successes, there is a long way to go toward changing the patterns of land use and housing markets in most of the country’s cities and states. Housing costs remain high, and only a handful of locations have implemented the true YIMBY agenda of making it legal to build the housing that people want to rent or buy.

Harris’s defeat in the November election is unlikely to cause Democrats to turn away from a YIMBY agenda. Instead, state and local Democrats will need to double down on housing abundance in order to address costof-living concerns, as well as stop the loss of voters fleeing high-cost blue states for low-cost red states.

Supply and Demand Matter At the heart of the YIMBY argument is the recognition that decades of deliberate policies to limit the supply of housing have caused housing to become scarce and expensive. YIMBYs believe that elected officials can end the affordability crisis by changing housing laws at the state and local level to enable more homebuilding.

In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) explained the simple logic behind this conclusion. “America is in the middle of a full-blown housing

crisis. There are a lot of ways to measure it, but I’ll start with the most basic: We are 7 million units short of what we need to house people. What can we do? Increase the housing supply. It’s plain old Econ 101.”

Evidence from cities that have made it easier to build new housing bears out Warren’s statement.

Minneapolis is a notable example.

Since 2009, the city has pursued many policy proposals core to the YIMBY agenda: making it easier to build multifamily housing, eliminating parking minimums, allowing taller buildings near transit stops, and more. This work culminated in Minneapolis 2040, which eliminated single-family zoning across the city.

As a result, Minneapolis built more housing and stopped the relentless rise in rents and prices. According to Pew, “From 2017 to 2022, Minneapolis increased its housing stock by 12% while rents grew by just 1%. Over the same period, the rest of Minnesota added only 4% to its housing stock while rents went up by 14%.”

Austin, Texas, is another supply success story, with rents falling 9.5 percent between June 2023 and June 2024. While other Sun Belt cities saw rents decline, Austin’s was the largest drop, and market observers attributed it to new supply.

These supply-driven declines also help contextualize monopolistic practices that capitalize on a housing shortage. In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice sued RealPage, a consulting and software firm that allegedly violated antitrust laws by collecting competitively sensitive data from all landlords within a metro area and feeding it into algorithms to fix rent prices higher.

“Americans should not have to pay more in rent simply because a company has found a new way to scheme with landlords to break the law,” said

Attorney General Merrick Garland when filing the suit.

Most YIMBYs support enforcing the law against bad actors. YIMBYs also point out that housing shortages empower these illegal practices, and that RealPage is preying on, not causing, a housing crisis. Without solving the underlying shortage, regulators and prosecutors will always be chasing the bad actors, rather than preventing it in the first place by building more homes.

Sometimes these bad actors will openly admit that their profits depend on a lack of housing supply. Blackstone, one of the nation’s largest private equity owners of rental housing stock, routinely uses the housing shortage as a selling point to its investors.

The Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT) touted on its own website in late October 2024 that “new construction starts in our key sectors are near 10-year lows, which we believe positions BREIT well for the future.” They cited a 39 percent decline in new multifamily construction starts since 2022 as further evidence. When housing is in short supply, they can charge more rent and pass along the profits to their investors. More supply, however, threatens their bottom line.

Supply, demand, and illegal pricefixing are well known to anyone who has had to evacuate their home to escape a hurricane. The supply of hotel rooms and gasoline along the interstate that leads away from the storm zone is limited. There are always more evacuees than there are hotel rooms to accommodate them. Anyone price-gouging should be prosecuted, but that’s cold comfort to the tired family that already had to keep driving when they couldn’t afford a place to stay.

G over n ment s c a n’t pred ic t with certainty where hurricanes

will strike in the future. But they can easily predict the locations of housing demand, and can proactively meet it with new supply.

The Revolution Won’t Save Us Critics of the YIMBY movement often charge that the real problem is that housing has become a commodity, rather than a human right, and that new supply will simply be commodified into unaffordability. The

and privilege. According to a recent study of Soviet housing policy, “demand greatly exceeded supply. As a result, price rationing was replaced by waiting lists and administrative decision-making.”

Anyone connected to political power, such as Communist Party members, or workers in industries like defense that were prioritized by the government, could find housing for their families. Workers in indus-

experience of Minneapolis and other cities described above suggests that new supply really does help housing become more affordable. Yet the experience of the Soviet Union, where housing was a human right, shows that supply and demand still exists outside of capitalism, and that a housing crisis will still result when supply is inadequate.

When an item is in short supply, access to it will be rationed somehow.

In capitalist countries, it is rationed by ability to pay. In the Soviet Union, it was rationed by access to power

tries that did not receive priority, such as consumer goods, were put on wait lists of ten years or more. In the meantime, Soviet workers were housed, and they did not live on the streets. But they often lived one family to a bedroom in a two- or threebedroom apartment, in substandard and dilapidated conditions.

With demand outstripping supply and the absence of a formal market, informal and illegal ways of obtaining housing spread rapidly. Bribery, threats, and other forms of corruption were common.

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

Without solving the underlying shortage, regulators and prosecutors will always be chasing the bad actors.

Not until Nikita Khrushchev took power in the 1950s did the Soviet Union embark upon a major housing construction effort. But this did not fully meet public demand. The lack of housing eroded public confidence in the Soviet system, particularly in Eastern Europe. Families looked to the capitalist West and saw housing abundance, at least in the 1970s and 1980s.

When he became leader, Mikhail Gorbachev pledged to build enough homes so that every family could have their own apartment by the year 2000. But the Soviet Union collapsed and Gorbachev was ousted from power before this could be achieved.

In Whose Backyard?

As YIMBYs increasingly find political and policy success here in the United States, battles continue over where new housing should be built.

Opponents claim to support additional housing supply, only “not in my backyard.” For example, NIMBYs in Minneapolis have won injunctions in lower courts against the city’s 2040 plan, though an appellate court lifted an injunction earlier this year.

Nowhere is this battle more deeply contested than California. The Golden State’s housing shortage stems from overtly segregationist policies of the past, including zoning changes in the 1960s and 1970s after the end of legal housing discrimination that made it difficult to build multifamily housing near the coast. As a result, California’s sprawl accelerated, intensifying class and racial segregation.

Priced out of owning or renting homes near coastal job centers in Silicon Valley or Los Angeles, service workers regularly drive several hours every day from inland cities such as Stockton and San Bernardino. Many of these workers are Lati-

40 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

no and Black. Those residents who can afford to live near the coast are predominantly white. As the state’s climate heats up, more Californians are unable to afford naturally cooler coastal locations, and are increasingly pushed into hotter, drier regions that are also more vulnerable to wildfire.

“Today, true access to the coast— which also means the opportunity to live on the coast—is very limited unless you are a rich person,” said Assemblymember David Alvarez (D) to The Sacramento Bee earlier this year. Alvarez represents low-income Latino cities in coastal San Diego County, and has become embroiled in a battle with the state’s powerful Coastal Commission over where new housing can be built near California’s beaches.

Alvarez and other legislators, along with groups such as California YIMBY (where I work), have encountered persistent opposition from the Coastal Commission in efforts to make it easier to build low-income and middle-income multifamily housing in the state’s Coastal Zone, even when environmentally sensitive and natural areas are excluded and protected.

A lvarez proposed a bill (A B 2560) that would have allowed developers to build denser, multifamily buildings in the urbanized areas of the Coastal Zone, in exchange for setting units aside for low-income residents. Strong opposition from the Coastal Commission and their allies in the state legislature led Alvarez to withdraw that bill shortly before the legislative deadline this August.

Despite this setback, YIMBYs have won other victories to make it easier to afford living on the coast. In 2024, legislators passed SB 1123, making it easier to build starter homes in existing urban single-family zones. This

bill was a top priority of California Community Builders, a BIPOC-led group committed to closing California’s racial wealth gap.

Bills like SB 1123, as well as YIMBYbacked bills that enabled California’s boom in accessory dwelling units— small homes, like a backyard cottage, built on existing single-family properties—are also effective at allowing homeowners, small builders, and others with smaller amounts of capital to add to the housing supply, striking a blow against the monopolization of large-scale homebuilding.

These battles don’t just matter for privately funded development.

Restrictive zoning rules in cities up and down California’s coast also limit where publicly funded affordable housing can be built. These restrictions, as well as high permitting fees, also drive up the cost of land and construction.

In July, Sen. Warren and dozens of colleagues proposed a major housing bill that includes reforming the estate tax to fund a federal subsidy for affordable-housing construction.

Her bill also includes “incentives for local governments to eliminate unnecessary land use restrictions that drive up costs,” including the costs of building the affordable housing her bill would subsidize.

The YIMBY movement stands ready to help turn bills like this into law, at the federal and state level. But without overcoming zoning codes that limit where this housing can be built, these bills and the strong support for housing supply from Obama and Harris will founder on the same rocks of NIMBY obstruction that created the country’s housing shortage in the first place. n Robert Cruickshank is the director of digital strategy at California YIMBY.

Why We Need a Homes Guarantee Our housing crisis is not going away, and it demands a comprehensive solution with one goal in mind: safe and affordable homes for all.

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By Sulma Arias want you to meet my friend Carlos. Carlos grew up in Chicago, but had to move when housing prices for renters like him went through the roof.

He’s visually impaired, so needs a familiar environment he can navigate with his cane, and supportive services. He found none of these in his new city but can’t move home, because there’s nothing he can afford, even in neighborhoods plagued with gun violence. Chicago is just too expensive now.

“I wish they’d make housing more affordable, so people don’t have to pay an arm, a leg, and their whole body in rental fees,” he told me. “They need to make things affordable for people with disabilities.”

Carlos’s dilemma is far from unique: Millions of us live on the brink of eviction and homelessness as we struggle to pay our rent or mortgage. We are in the midst of our country’s worst housing emergency since the Great Depression. Many of us have to choose daily between

housing and basic necessities like food and health care.

So when Carlos heard Tim Walz say during the vice-presidential debate that we need to stop treating housing as a commodity, it gave him hope. He volunteered to make calls with People’s Action Power to help Walz and Kamala Harris get elected, as one of the thousands of volunteers who joined us to make more than four million calls to battleground states.

Despite these efforts, voters ultimately directed their frustrations with the cost of living at the incumbent party instead of the true villain behind rising prices: unbridled corporate greed. So now we face the reality of a second, even more heartless Trump term, with trillions of dollars in potential cuts to social services and more giveaways to the billionaires and corporations that got us into this mess.

Trump’s solution for housing?

Deport millions of immigrants.

Trump blames immigrants for driving up housing prices. We have lived through eras of mass deportation before, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, and they did not have any meaningful effect on housing prices. In fact, since many immigrants work in the construction industry, deportation will make the cost of building new homes go up. A weaker economy with fewer immigrants will also be terrible for people struggling to afford housing today.

The blaming of immigrants diverts our attention from the corporate landlords who’ve been buying up properties since Trump gave $2 trillion in tax cuts to the richest of the rich in 2017. Trump’s tax cuts didn’t just throw away money that could have been invested in housing solutions; they concentrated wealth so much that speculators began to

seek out apartment buildings and single-family homes as new assets to commodify. From small towns to big cities, these investors are now buying up real estate, driving up the cost to rent or buy a home. Corporate landlords have even pushed rental prices upward by coordinating as a cartel through the RealPage algorithm.

Things got worse when the Trumpappointed conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gave municipalities free license to criminalize people for having nowhere to go, in their 2024 Grants Pass decision. Many local and state governments, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, now sweep encampments and enforce anti-loitering and anti-camping ordinances to keep people from sleeping on the street, even when a municipality has no alternatives to offer.

Throwing our fellow human beings in jail simply for being poor, mentally ill, or having substance use disorder is no solution for them, or for us. People feel abandoned by elected officials and despair for any change, while local governments lack the resources to fix this crisis on their own.

Evicting immigrants and jailing the homeless does nothing to help you, me, and Carlos afford homes. Our housing crisis is not going away. But the good news is that neither are we: My organization, People’s Action, will continue to organize and fight for the most effective solutions to this crisis.

At People’s Action, we always believe that the people closest to a problem are closest to its solution.

So our member organizations and their leaders, who include tenants, unhoused people, and homeowners from across the country in urban, rural, and suburban areas, came together to come up with a strategy.

Their solution? A Homes Guarantee, which would ensure everyone has a safe, accessible, sustainable,

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

A Homes Guarantee would ensure everyone has a safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable home.

and permanently affordable home.

It’s long past time the United States acknowledged that housing is a right, not a privilege. And there’s no reason why we, the richest country in the history of the world, can’t do this.

People’s Action has been organizing for housing justice for decades.

One of our founders, Gale Cincotta, was a Chicago housewife angered by the discrimination she saw in her neighborhood in the 1970s, when banks refused to lend to Black and brown families in a practice known as redlining. The nationwide movement Gale started with her neighbors spurred passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which forced banks to end redlining and to reinvest in long-neglected neighborhoods.

The Reagan Revolution chipped away at these victories, while the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 brought new challenges. That time, the big banks whose risky lending practices prompted the crisis got a big bailout from the federal government, while the victims of their predation simply lost their homes.

Yet despite these setbacks, People’s

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Action and our member groups have never, ever given up our fight to win protections for homeowners and tenants, and we have succeeded. We are as committed to organize for the safe and secure homes you, Carlos, and we all deserve.

There is no question that this election represents a fundamental setback in our ability to win the federal investments our country needs to create a system where everyone has a highquality home. Yet even in this bleak moment, we see signs of hope: We celebrate the victories of lawmakers who advance housing solutions like U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Rep. Omar authored the Homes for All Act, which would authorize construction of 12 million new public-housing and private, permanently affordable rental units. This would drive down costs throughout the market and create a new vision of what public housing looks like in the United States. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) introduced a great social-housing bill called the Homes Act. These bills include the kind of bold investments in building and restor-

ing homes our country needs, which must include repairing and converting old buildings into public housing and other forms of social housing. We must also organize to ensure that Trump and congressional Republicans do not reauthorize the trillions in tax cuts that are set to expire next year.

While the Homes Guarantee represents the North Star vision for our campaign, solving our housing crisis will require a comprehensive approach.

We’ll fight and win stepping stones at the state and local level that bring us closer to this vision, even when we face an uphill climb. People’s Action member groups will organize to win tenants’ rights like the right to counsel to address the immediate needs of getting people housed and keeping people in their homes, while we demand investments in new, permanently affordable housing where people can live with dignity.

Gale Cincotta never gave up her fight for housing justice for people like Carlos, and neither will we. Gale’s last words to People’s Action before she died in 2001?

“Get the crooks!” Yes, Gale, we will. n Sulma Arias is executive director for People’s Action Institute and People’s Action.

The Housing Industry Never Recovered From the Great Recession A decade of depression in construction led to a concentrated, sclerotic industry.

I

By Ryan Cooper

decade after the recession started, the industry was still depressed, and as a result a major housing shortage built up. Both the number of construction firms and construction laborers did not match their previous peak until 2022.

That shortage set the stage for an enormous spike in home prices and rents during and after the pandemic, as millions of Americans with savings and pandemic relief checks looked to buy or upgrade their home offices.

The median home price soared from $317,100 in 2020 to $442,600 in 2022; median rent climbed from just under $1,600 to over $2,000.

Yet even with the enticement of greater profits from selling homes, there was no building boom to make up lost ground. At the peak of the spike in 2022, the rate of new home starts was only at about the historical average—and only for a few months, as starts have fallen again thanks to the Federal Reserve raising interest rates.

Here’s a major reason why housing hasn’t come back: As industry collapsed and then very gradually recovered, it saw significant consolidation at all levels, and hence became sclerotic and unresponsive. High housing demand produced high profits rather than more homes.

(Units in Thousands) 2,400

400 2020

he figures above obscure the fact that disproportionately, smaller firms went belly-up after 2008. Larger companies tend to have the cash reserves, market power, and access to credit that make it easier to survive in hard times. There were also psychological scars—hysteresis—created by the Great Recession. The businesses that managed to survive tended to be cautious; they didn’t attempt ambitious growth targets or keep around a lot of inventory whose storage costs eat into margins.

It’s a chicken-or-egg scenario: Did

2010

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Housing Starts, 1994–2024

2000

n labor economics, there’s a concept called hysteresis. It means that severe economic downturns have lingering effects that go beyond the immediate pain. For example, high unemployment can cause people to lose skills, and cause employers to be more selective in who they hire.

When the labor market comes back, those workers scarred by the initial shock don’t benefit, and the unemployment rate overall can stay stubbornly higher.

The housing market has been subject to a form of hysteresis. It’s an underappreciated but important challenge to the crisis of undersupply and rising costs for shelter.

If you read the Prospect, you probably know something about the great housing bubble collapse. The rise of securitization spiked global demand for mortgages, which lenders satisfied with more exotic (and even ille-

gal) terms for borrowers. The bubble was unsustainable; homeowners were missing their first mortgage payment, which is impossible without something going deeply wrong with the market. The interconnection of these fraudulent bets meant that defaults on mortgages cascaded through the financial system and triggered a devastating collapse that hobbled the rest of the economy in what is now known as the Great Recession of 2008.

The crash badly hurt a variety of sectors, but it simply devastated the home construction industry, given that the crisis was directly centered there. The biggest thing is that, with a glut of foreclosures on the market and prices falling fast, America simply stopped building homes. New private home starts plummeted by almost 80 percent to the lowest level since 1959, the earliest year available in census data—and a year when the U.S. population was half what it is today—and stayed there for two years.

Across the entire housing supply chain, from the construction material manufacturers to wholesalers to building supply dealers to homebuilders, people were thrown out of work by the millions, and businesses went bust by the tens of thousands.

Private construction employment fell from 7.7 million in April 2006 to a low of 5.4 million in January 2011—a loss of 2.3 million jobs, the worst of any industry in percentage terms. The number of construction firms peaked at 896,000 in the third quarter of 2007, and bottomed out at 738,000— a figure that was not reached until the first quarter of 2013.

The industry recovered extremely slowly. A grinding increase in home starts began in 2011, but even the previous record low was not reached until 2012, six years after building levels started to fall in 2006. A

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

homebuilders fail to build because they were worried about creating another bubble, or because everyone was so tapped out from the last bubble collapse that demand was low?

At the same time, the building industry consolidated significantly.

The 100 largest homebuilders now account for half the market, up from about a third 20 years ago—which actually understates things because housing markets are highly local.

D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in the country, boasts to investors that it is now the largest player in three of the top five housing markets in the country. Thanks to this market power, in 2023 it made over three times the nominal profit it made in 2005, despite delivering about half

44 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

as many houses. As Matthew Stoller points out, these big firms have evolved into de facto financial middlemen, using their size and credit access to buy up the choicest land, planning projects slowly, and then farming out the actual work to subcontractors. Less work, more profits—a nice gig, if you can get it.

“The whole market is more consolidated every year,” said Stinson Dean, who runs a lumber trading company. “The mills are consolidated. Lumber yards, massive consolidation. And the homebuilders, same thing.” The rise of big-box hardware stores like Home Depot has helped drive this, as suppliers merge to gain their own market power, as well as private equity firms buying up com-

panies and cutting inventories to increase profits.

Johns Hopkins University business professor Luis Quintero recently published a paper examining concentration in the homebuilding industry. He found that 60 percent of American housing markets are “highly concentrated” today, a major increase since 2000. His statistical analysis finds that this has led to fewer homes being built, fewer homes in the production pipeline, and therefore greater price volatility, as housing dollars chase fewer units. All told, he estimates that these effects of market concentration have cut the value of housing production by $106 billion annually.

America was clubbed over the head with the problems created by these developments in 2021. Most construction and supply firms assumed that the pandemic was going to lead to another housing collapse, and therefore cut their already thin inventories to the bone. But as noted above, the opposite happened, with huge demand for homes and remodeling. High demand met tight supply in a systematically concentrated and low-capacity industry, and so prices went through the roof, as it were.

Lumber prices in particular went crazy in mid-2021, with wholesale prices more than doubling before collapsing a few months later. Consumers were agog at hardware stores, with an ordinary sheet of plywood sometimes going for over a hundred dollars.

In a well-organized market, 2021 and 2022 should have seen a giant home construction boom. With tons of money to be made, existing firms should have expanded operations, and new entrants should have flooded into the market and set to work making money. But thanks in part to industry consolidation, most of that

The effects of market concentration have cut the value of housing production by $106 billion annually. demand instead went into brief price spikes and enormous incumbent profits. That same home price inflation helped prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, which choked off housing demand by raising financing costs long before the shortage could be fixed.

Another reason for the housing shortage, of course, is the extreme difficulty of getting permits in many high-demand cities—the NIMBY (not in my backyard) problem. Historically, the entire state of California has routinely built fewer housing units than Tokyo, which has a third the population and 0.5 percent as much land, and not coincidentally, relatively cheap rents.

Conversely, the few hot American cities like Austin, Texas, that have managed to build have seen declining rents and prices. Hence the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement that argues for streamlined permitting rules.

However, the Y IMBY arg ument doesn’t contradict the antimonopoly argument here. Indeed, a highly concentrated construction sector tends to benefit from a NIMBY regime. A monopolist sitting on the choicest land can enjoy large and easy profits by dribbling out new homes into an artificially hot market, and those profits mean they can afford to develop the political connections necessary to navigate the arcane and often corrupt permitting bureaucracy. A huge building boom might theoretically mean even more profits, but at the cost of risky and painful competition.

It follows that if we restore competition, some of the political heft behind NIMBYism might dissolve.

W

hat is to be done? One solution is traditional antitrust. The Federal

Trade Commission could issue fair competition rules, and the Department of Justice could file lawsuits to break up companies to ensure that that, say, no builder has more than a 10 percent share in any housing market. Obviously, Donald Trump’s agencies aren’t likely to do this, but they should then be blamed for making housing more expensive.

Quintero further suggests removing a 2009 tax break whereby builders can write prior losses off their tax bill, because it benefits larger companies more.

Another important strategy would be to ensure steady high demand for housing construction over time. A major reason why industries of all kinds consolidated in the 2010s was systematically weak demand caused by the recession. When business is slack, smaller firms struggle more than larger ones, which are simultaneously incentivized to buy up their competitors to obtain a protective moat of market power rather than expanding existing operations.

When the market is hot, however, the dynamic is reversed. Smaller firms or startups can seek market share confident that if they succeed, they will make lots of money.

Monopolists that have gotten fat and lazy will tend to lose out over time.

Swimming over that market power moat, however, takes years—much longer than the short, moderate construction boom we saw in 20212022. We need sustained pressure for a decade to really bake in new market dynamics.

Economists have proposed various “automatic stabilizers” that would kick into action in case of recession, but one way to do this for homebuilding specifically would be social housing. Elsewhere, I have made this case—the idea that the government should build

and own a substantial portion of the national housing stock. Cities, for instance, could build housing projects in high-demand neighborhoods on land they already own, and set aside some units for lowincome residents. That would both provide units to the whole market simultaneously, and also allow for the market-rate units to subsidize the affordable ones, so no external funding would be needed, enabling the construction of many more units in turn.

This would weaken the impact of the Federal Reserve’s dampening effect on investment when it raises interest rates in a hot economy, something that makes it nearly impossible to catch up on a housing supply shortage. Done properly, a national social-housing program would provide a substantial anticoncentration effect. The ideal time to build would be during a recession, or when the private market is slack, both because labor and materials are cheaper, and because it would stabilize the whole economy in general and the construction industry in particular. Prolonged home construction depressions would be ended forever.

On the other hand, it would be very important for a social-housing agency to have access to a competent, competitive construction industry.

Many cities will naturally choose to hire private contractors to build their projects, and if they are getting ripped off by a monopolist, that means fewer units.

Homeownership has long been an American aspiration, and indeed today most Americans own their home. But if we want that to be broadly accessible for coming generations, we will need to restore vigorous competition to the homebuilding industry. n

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

Government housing interventions have taken the form of financing schemes that support private provision of housing.

Look for the Tenant Union

Those caught in the crossfire of corporate landlords and financial engineering need a regulatory agenda to protect them.

By Tara Raghuveer and Ruthy Gourevitch

D

erek Harris works two jobs to afford the onebedroom apartment in downtown Kansas City he’s lived in for ten years. During that time, the owners have changed and conditions have worsened. The kitchen he used to love to cook in is filled with mousetraps. The wall is streaked with dirty brown stains from plumbing leaks.

There is no vent, just a huge hole near the ceiling.

“I’m paying higher rent than I’ve ever paid for a place that feels more like a prison than a home,” Derek announced at a recent rally to launch his tenant union.

Derek’s experience, working multiple jobs and handing over the majority of his paycheck to live in squalor, is not an exception but the new normal for many poor and working-class Americans. Housing is most Americans’ biggest monthly bill. When families are forced to cut back on expenses, cutting back on housing is simply not an option.

Today, half of all tenants spend over 30 percent of their income on rent, with more than one-quarter spending over 70 percent. Evictions are at

46 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

a historic high, most often impacting Black women and their babies.

As landlords hike rent and evict tenants, more than 650,000 people sleep outside.

This election season, rent has emerged as a critical economic issue.

The national attention is overdue, but politicians are missing the mark on solutions. In the wake of the election, Biden officials themselves noted how the absence of tangible policy to decrease rents put Democrats in a bind. A postmortem reveals that there was “the economy” according to suits looking at charts, and then there was “the economy” according to working people paying their bills.

The level of real estate capital flowing from around the world and through financial investments has reached a historic scale. This flood of capital has concentrated the market and maximized landlords’ profits.

Private equity is the dominant form of financial backing for the 35 largest owners of multifamily properties, resulting in higher rents and worse conditions. During the pandemic, investors flocked to the multifamily rental market to capitalize on low interest rates and the promise of rising rents. Now, the multifamily market is in distress. Landlord business practices are unregulated, and tenants pay the price.

The federal government is in bed with our slumlords. Government housing interventions have taken the form of financing schemes that support private provision of housing.

The most significant such maneuver is obscured from public view: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provide upwards of $150 billion in annual loan backing to the multifamily rental market, guaranteeing landlords’ loans on lucrative terms and relieving their lenders of default risk, with few strings attached.

These loans back apartments owned by some of the most egregious rent-gougers, like Greystar, Starwood, and AvalonBay. One in four apartment units are financed through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac guarantees. When we study the numbers, a common story emerges: Landlords leverage favorable loans and relaxed regulations to acquire apartments, and depend on aggressive rent increases and deferred maintenance to pay their debts and turn a profit.

Derek, who lives in a federally backed building called Quality Hill Towers, is one of millions of tenants whose homes are financed this way; his landlord, Sentinel Real Estate Corporation, got $9 million in financing to purchase the property.

This building is in distress. Sentinel loses money on Quality Hill every month, but to keep up with mortgage payments, they regularly and aggressively hike rents.

Absent meaningful action from the government, the question is not whether tenants will revolt, but whether the revolt will be from a place of desperation or a place of power. To ensure the latter, tenants are organizing unions, from Bozeman, Montana, to Louisville, Kentucky. Unions are uniting across geography, and aligning through groups like the newly launched Tenant Union Federation, which we launched this year. Drawing inspiration from the labor movement and community organizing, tenant unions reflect the urgency to build a new kind of power to seriously contest the forces of real estate capital.

Tenant unions seek a different system entirely, where homes are not treated as commodities but guaranteed as public goods, and where our lives are not reduced to line items in a landlord’s budget. This vision

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isn’t a radical fever dream; it is the only way out of this mess. Ultimately, achieving this vision will require rejecting the market as we know it today and creating publicly backed, nonmarket alternatives.

Before we get there, tenants need protections. As tenants build local power within buildings and across neighborhoods, these unions are also demanding a regulatory agenda.

I

n Connecticut, tenants are organizing for “just cause” eviction protections. In Kansas City, tenants won protections against voucher discrimination. In Los Angeles, tenants are organizing to close eviction loopholes after renovations.

Prior to the election, the Tenant Union Federation released a National Tenant Policy Agenda, which includes national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action to prevent consolida-

48 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

tion and collusion in the rental market. Together, these actions would not only bring immediate stability to millions of tenants, but also correct the gross imbalance between landlords and tenants in the rental market. Just as federal agencies regulate food safety thresholds and medical prescription price-gouging, tenants want to see the government regulate the core necessity that is their home, and place limits on unchecked profits that drive bad behavior.

A regulatory agenda for housing is also essential for preserving an adequate supply of truly affordable housing. In the unregulated rental market, we are losing affordable housing faster than we can produce it. In recent years, landlords hiked rents at the fastest rate in decades, and converted affordable units to market-rate housing. Between 2019 and 2021, 14 states “lost” more than 15 percent of their affordable-

housing stock. These units were not demolished; landlords increased the rent, without improving the quality or conditions of the homes. And despite multifamily housing production experiencing its largest boom in 50 years, those units are inaccessible to the tenants who need them most.

Efforts to increase housing supply without accompanying regulations could fail to address the core drivers of the housing crisis. These efforts should be thought of as complementary rather than in tension. A regulatory agenda that includes rent caps should not be seen as a silver bullet, and it does not exclude other policy options; it’s a matter of priority and sequence.

Rent caps are the urgent solution that meets the scale of the crisis tenants face in their homes today. And they are also extremely popular, maybe the most unifying economic issue of our times. According to Red-

Tenant unions seek a system where homes are not treated as commodities but guaranteed as public goods.

fin, 82 percent of Americans, across age, geography, and political party, support rent caps.

The federal government has the power, even without congressional action, to take key steps toward a national regulatory agenda for housing, and tenants are already organizing toward this vision. The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which serves as regulator and conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, can condition enterprise-backed loans on rent caps and other tenant protections, providing immediate, material relief to millions of tenants and shaping the rental market in the longer term.

For years, tenants have organized to demand protections from FHFA, meeting with director Sandra Thompson again and again, bringing her to federally backed properties across the country to see the realities for herself. The tenants have argued

that if the government is in business with landlords like Sentinel, FHFA should be regulating the risk to protect tenants from the fallout.

In the last few months, other federal regulators have recognized their power to support tenants. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have taken important actions to crack down on corporate profiteering in the rental market. The DOJ sued RealPage for colluding to artificially increase rents using a price-setting algorithm, and the FTC issued a settlement with Invitation Homes, requiring this corporate landlord to halt unlawful eviction practices and pay tenants back for junk fees.

Those corporate offenders are not alone. Tenants need a regulatory agenda that takes on the full scope of the crisis, and takes seriously the reality that most landlords’ business models are predicated on tenant instability.

President-elect Trump, a real estate developer, will undoubtedly alter the federal housing finance landscape. The GOP may end the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac conservatorship, and the industry has called to privatize the enterprises altogether, which would remove potential pathways to regulation.

In the years ahead, tenant unionists will continue organizing, expanding the rigorous practice of building unions through which tenants can exercise their ultimate power: their rent. Those unions will continue demanding local and state protections and alternatives to the existing market; and the collective movement won’t abandon the call for the federal government to correct the imbalance of power between landlords and tenants, and to lower rents for poor and working-class people.

Organized people must determine the path forward. We find ourselves asking: What if tenants wield a new kind of power in this country? What if they do so alongside farmworkers, ratepayers, trade unionists? Could that be a winning team to take on organized real estate capital and all that hurts us? We have to try.

On October 1, as part of a campaign organized by the Tenant Union Federation, Derek Harris and over 200 of his neighbors launched coordinated rent strikes, targeting both their landlords and FHFA. The tenants are demanding national rent caps, new ownership, and collectively bargained leases. These are the first-ever strikes of their kind, and the tenants are already seeing results. Three weeks into the strike, the tenant unions won $1.35 million for long-needed repairs at Independence Towers, another federally backed building in the Kansas City area. On October 31, FHFA invited the unions for an engagement, but failed to commit to bargaining. The rent strikes resumed on November 1, and tenants are organizing in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and Illinois, prepared to expand the strikes to escalate the crisis for the owners, lenders, and regulators.

Derek is among the tenants withholding rent for another month. “My rent is my power, and I will use my power with my neighbors until we win what we are owed.” n Tara Raghuveer is the founding director of KC Tenants and the national Tenant Union Federation.

Ruthy Gourevitch is the housing policy director at Climate & Community Institute and leads the policy and research team supporting the Tenant Union Federation.

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

FIMBY: Finance in My Backyard

Local housing agencies can use revolving funds to fill financing gaps for homes that are cleared to be built but don’t have the capital investment to get it done.

By Paul Williams

I

grew up on a tree-lined street in Columbus, Ohio, a mile or two from the Ohio State University campus. It was populated mostly by single-family homes with nice-sized yards and driveways, and dotted with duplexes every few lots or so. At one corner, there were two small apartment buildings with six or eight homes each, and at the other, an elementary school. This always felt prototypically American to me—as anyone’s childhood neighborhood presumably feels. Color me surprised when I grew up and learned that such a street would be illegal to build in most cities in the country today.

Rewriting zoning laws to legalize such normal-seeming neighborhoods is core to any housing agenda. But even when it is legal to build, there are still hurdles—and beyond those, solutions. Right now in Massachusetts, there are 40,000 apartments ready to be built that haven’t yet put shovels in the ground. The tools are

50 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

there, as are the permits, the workers, and tenants ready to move in. What’s missing is capital investment.

Local governments can meet this urgent challenge. But before we get there, let’s start with a sketch of the past 20 years of the housing sector.

The Cliff and the Crater In 2006, after the collapse of the housing bubble that resulted in the Great Recession, homebuilding in America fell off a cliff. It had fallen off cliffs before, but never like this: Over the course of a few years, America went from building over two million homes per year to building half a million. The results were devastating for American workers and families: 500,000 people lost their jobs in the residential construction industry’s undoing.

The labor market eventually began to recover, as did household formation, particularly from young people in core urban areas. The share of homes available for rent gradually plummeted—falling from 7.6 percent to 3.6 percent over a few years in California.

This increase in housing demand without a concurrent increase in the supply of homes generated a slowmoving train wreck of rising costs.

Prices across the country—of both homes for sale and homes for rent— skyrocketed. It was all very predictable and happening right before our eyes. The places where the shortage was worst, like California, saw similarly predictable explosions in homelessness.

In the mid 2010s, some San Franciscans noticed the trend and formed a group called the Bay Area Renters’ Federation, organizing to demand the city change its laws governing which type, and how much, housing can be built. This group helped to spark the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement that now, ten years later, is having a national political moment.

While those restrictions were being loosened, a semblance of a recovery in the housing industry took a decade to materialize. It wasn’t until 2020 that America got back up even to mid-’90s levels of housing production. All that lost time of low building left us with a huge hole to fill. Most estimates peg us at somewhere between 1.5 million and 5.5 million below trend, meaning that we need to overshoot significantly to get out of this mess.

Luckily for us, the past four years in federal policymaking have been all about industrial strategy: driving investment toward sectors that are key to social and political goals. For example, we are currently in the midst of switching our collective 4,000 terawatt-hours of electricity to clean sources. We are also driving a major onshoring of advanced manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.

Building enough units to house Americans has at least the same level of social and political importance as the energy transition and onshoring industrial manufacturing, if not much more so. An industrial strategy for housing, then, makes perfect sense.

The barriers to creating sufficient affordable housing across the country are diverse—from architecture and construction to zoning and permits to financing and investment.

While hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of would-be homes across the country will, in fact, not be built due to exclusionary zoning policies that block certain types of building, we have another problem: housing that’s shovel-ready, but lacking investment.

This measure, authorized but notyet-started homes, is tracked by the same census survey that tracks completed housing units. Since the government began tracking it in the late 1990s, there have been around 50,000 homes per year in would-be apart-

We’re issuing permits for hundreds of thousands of apartments every year that are shovel-ready, but not getting built.

Multifamily Housing is Stalled: Units Authorized But Not Yet Started (Units in Thousands)

160

80

2020

ty has a pipeline of around 3,000 homes in the planning stages over the next several years, all using the new revolving loan fund.

Not long after construction finished on The Laureate, Atlanta took a stab at copying the approach, creating a nonprofit subsidiary of the city’s public-housing authority to manage the developments. And then Chattanooga did the same. Today, dozens of jurisdictions, including state governments themselves, are contemplating the programs.

In fact, this summer Massachusetts created a similar revolving loan fund for its state housing finance agency, which is the state agency that provides mortgages for federally supported affordable housing.

MassHousing’s new program, the Momentum Fund, serves a similar purpose: providing short-term construction investment to shovel-ready projects across the state. In the coming months, the Momentum Fund hopes to start making a dent in those 40,000 stalled projects.

2010

Enter the Construction Fund School of Thought In early 2021, Montgomery County, Maryland, gave their housing agency, which is called the Housing Opportunities Commission, a new tool to help build those shovel-ready projects.

Armed with a modest new $100 million investment fund, they went out and found a stalled project that had been proposed by a major East Coast developer, Bozzuto. This developer was ready to build, but was having trouble finding financing partners for the project, despite the fact that rates were at that point low, and local housing demand was through the roof.

The Housing Opportunities Commission effectively hired Bozzuto to build the apartments, while putting forward a short-term loan from its fund to help cover construction costs.

The project was a grand slam.

The Laureate, which is now built, leased its 268 units to full capacity within months of opening. And with the Housing Opportunities Commission as the permanent majority owner, about one-third of the apartments are set aside for low-income tenants—all without using a dollar of federal housing subsidies, just a loan that has been paid back. The regional housing industry took notice: Now, Montgomery Coun-

2000

ment buildings that fall to this fate.

Over the past couple of years, that figure has more than tripled, spiking to over 165,000, and now settling to 140,000.

There are a few reasons for this: Interest rate volatility, which we’ve seen with the Federal Reserve’s attempts to fight inflation, is bad for predictability. As rates began to rise, many projects fell into limbo. Supply chain challenges, which at the time included materials like lumber and steel, also had an impact.

So to recap, we’re a few million homes short, and we’re issuing permits for hundreds of thousands of apartments every year that are shovel-ready, but not getting built.

Well, most of them aren’t, anyway.

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

Local? Check. State?

Check. Federal …?

These promising programs are netting thousands of mixed-income housing units across the country in a short time, and perhaps more significantly, in a particularly difficult economic environment. But state and local governments are limited by the capital at their disposal. To get construction financing programs in the hands of every jurisdiction with shovel-ready projects and really jump-start housing production, it will have to be adopted at the federal level.

Providing support to states that want to establish their own funds is one approach, though it would require an act of Congress. Giving our government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the authority to participate in construction lending is another— and helpfully, that could be done with the stroke of a pen.

Fannie and Freddie are mainstays of the secondary market for housing; they buy loans and package them into securities to produce more capital for mortgage lending. They already purchase multifamily mortgages to assist apartment development, but they do not support construction loans to get projects built. (Freddie Mac is limited by its charter on construction loans, but Fannie Mae is not.) If they did, that would bring potentially trillions of dollars to the table to support shovel-ready projects.

This summer, my organization released a report on this topic, sketching out what a national construction fund program housed within the GSEs would look like and how it would work to hack away at the backlog of housing needed across the country.

Providing support to state and local agencies like Montgomery County already has some purchase.

52 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

In his 2025 budget proposal, President Biden put forward an idea for a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Innovation Fund for Housing Expansion, sized at $20 billion for one-time investment.

The proposal highlights numerous innovative ideas that need support to bolster America’s housing industry, including more domestic manufacturing investment in the form of modular housing to produce apartment units in factories and ship them out across the country, as well as support for “mixed-income public development,” a financing program like Montgomery County’s.

Vice President Harris campaigned on passing this fund, doubling the size from $20 billion to $40 billion.

But Donald Trump won the election, and his allies have talked about privatizing Fannie and Freddie. In the past, Trump has rallied against new housing, saying that further multifamily building would “abolish the suburbs.” That could limit this concept to cities and counties, but if it works, others will take notice.

The f inancing challenge that America’s housing industry faces demands to be met with the full force of the public sector’s balance sheet.

Only then will we get the housing abundance we need. n Paul Williams is the executive director of Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank that grows public-sector capacity for economic development.

CULTURE

Palestine, Writing, and Everything Else

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lovely little book on big, urgent matters

By Hassan Ali Kanu

JEHAD ALSHR AFI / AP PHOTO

The Message

By Ta-Nehisi Coates One World In the 1988 song “Lyrics of Fury,” hip-hop icons Eric B. and Rakim spend about four minutes performing an Olympic-caliber routine of verbal acrobatics, rapping a stream of incredibly dexterous rhymes, all about how incredibly dexterous their rhymes are.

Six years earlier, another legendary group, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, had released a song that was nearly the polar opposite, in terms of content.

“The Message” was one of the first popular hip-hop tracks whose lyrics went beyond exhortations to enjoyment and clever boasts about one’s prowess as a wordsmith. It also tried to tell you something.

The song is a critique, a lament and a warning about inner-city poverty, touching on issues like education, inflation, mental health, drug abuse, and labor strife. The lyrics are delivered over a funky, infectious bass-synthesizer beat, and, at times, with a playful diction and cadence that produces a rhythmic gallows humor.

(There are also some irreBooks sponsibly homophobic lines, especially considering the context.) It shot quickly to the top of the charts, and is still considered one of the greatest mainstream hip-hop records of all time.

The acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates considers himself primarily a disciple of that second practice: art, not just for art’s sake, or for your simple enjoyment, but also for politics. Writing should be crafted to evoke beauty, pain, and other human experience— making people feel some way—as a means toward clarification and persuasion, according to Coates. His latest book, which quotes lines from “Lyrics of Fury,” and is titled The Message, is a success on both counts.

The largest section of Coates’s book covers the on-the-ground reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Coates delivers a timely, moving meditation through four interrelated essays, informed by several reporting trips: an “ancestral journey” to Dakar, Senegal; a visit to small-town South Carolina, where teachers are being pressured to stop teaching Coates’s earlier work because it made some students feel “ashamed to be Caucasian”; and a trip alongside other writers, editors, and artists to experience East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Coates begins to grapple with a few of the most pressing questions facing the Black radical tradition and pan-Africanism today, and some of the most troublingly persistent. He calls out what has been termed “vindicationism”—a tendency on the part of oppressed peoples to respond to dehumanizing myths with their own myths, about their own glory—and criticizes the notion, with a respectful empathy. And he strives for atoneDECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

CULTURE

Of course, The Message has generated plenty of discourse since its release, virtually all surrounding the essay about the on-theground reality of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Some pro-Israel critics have implied that Coates’s description of Israel as a racist apartheid state reflects antisemitism. He was famously told that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” during an unusually confrontational television appearance.

The Israel-Palestine essay makes up the bulk of the book. And it’s remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is its timeliness and urgency, amid the events of October 7, 2023, and the consequent war in Gaza. The U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories recently described the siege as “the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians.”

Coates makes a similar argument, based on material from before October 7. It bears powerful, eyewitness testimony to what is described as a sophisticated, segregationist apartheid state: the cutting edge of oppression and the future of Jim Crow, all sponsored by Uncle Sam, and as told to you by an American reporter. The essay, given Coates’s stature and its execution, is therefore firmly within what he refers to throughout the book simply as “the tradition”—the political ideology and intellectual work undertaken by abolitionists, anti-colonialists, and civil rights activists since the 19th century and beyond, which includes a significant strain of anti-war arguments.

The Israel-Palestine essay draws links between the struggle of various “conquered peoples”: Palestinians, Black Americans, Native American tribes, Jews and Ukrainians under Hitler, and white serfs and peasants in medieval Europe (mentioned in the piece about book-banning). This approach has original revelatory power, even for a 54 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Coates’s belief that journalists wield the power to decide what stories get told is illustrated by the reception to his book.

subject as aged and all-encompassing as racial capitalism.

Coates also makes a searing and important critique of Zionism that also goes to the heart of pan-Africanism and the Black radical tradition, although hardly any major media have even touched on those linkages.

He points out that, in many respects, the grandest dreams of the most radical figures within that tradition, like Malcolm X or Martin Delany, have often imagined a mythic Black country that may not look much different from the Israel that he describes: a racial ethnostate whose people find discrimination against “others” to be almost unavoidable, perpetuating the very sin it was created to absolve.

“Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our Garvey dreams were made manifest,” Coates writes, before commenting on the fact that those dreams, for Black folks at least, have never actually manifested. “I think it’s best that way—for should that mythic Africa have ever descended out of the imagination and into the real, I shudder at what we might lose in realizing and defending it.”

Coates also displays commendable humility in this piece. The essay is itself a mea culpa, a “bid for reparation” for committing “the sin of abstraction.” When he argued for

reparations for Black Americans, he used as a model the reparations given to the Jewish state of Israel, rather than arguing for reparations to people, survivors and victims.

Nonetheless, the overwhelming focus on the Israel-Palestine essay has done readers and the audience a disservice, even as it may have done the author quite a favor, by way of publicity and book sales. There’s a lot more to be said about the other three essays, and the collective as a whole.

In the Palestine essay, Coates is simply adding his account to arguments that Palestinians themselves, their allies, and the international human rights community have been making for decades. The scholar Noura Erakat, who is quoted in the epigraph to the essay, wrote in The Nation in 2014 that Israel “dehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.” The piece ends with what is essentially a prediction of today’s situation in Gaza and beyond. And as Coates himself points out, leading international human rights organizations have also declared Israel an apartheid state. Amnesty International said the Israeli government is committing apartheid in 2022, for example.

This raises a question, even if we take for

CHERISS MAY / SIPA USA VIA AP

ment for failing to abide by his own stated principles in The Case for Reparations, one of his most acclaimed essays. The through line is racial capitalism, a conceptual framework that reinterprets capitalism as systems designed to extract economic value from marginalized groups, partly by dehumanizing and rendering them disposable.

The book ties all these ideas together neatly, with freshly evocative language, and Coates’s stylish arguments are all the more forceful because of it.

Coates is surprised when he encounters the vestiges of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa.

granted the fortuitous timing of the book’s release: Why has all the attention, and criticism, focused on this particular essay, which largely retreads old arguments?

As it happens, Coates’s book itself offers an answer. Journalists wield the power to decide “which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame,” Coates writes. That authority “is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”

It’s an astute point, and it’s well illustrated in the reception to The Message.

The first essay of the book, which is about writing, opens with epigraphs by George Orwell about feeling compelled to write because of the high stakes of the politics of his day; and by James Baldwin on the importance of “the interior life” and imagination, as a necessary precursor to change in the real world.

The essay is short, but thoroughly broad, seamlessly weaving autobiography, reporting, and polemic, exhorting writers—and especially young Black journalists—to write for the express purpose of politics, to explain and to compel people. It’s a lovely meditation on the art and politics of writing.

Coates talks of finding inspiration in rappers and Shakespeare, spoken-word poets, and Sports Illustrated articles, discovering how language could be deployed, artfully, to open whole new worlds in the mind, and to move people. He centers what he calls the “larger emancipatory mandate,” arguing that writers who belong to oppressed minority communities cannot separate their art, or work, from politics, and must instead “make people feel all that is now at stake.” And he leans into the moral underpinnings implied by his argument.

The second essay, “On Pharaohs,” about Coates’s ancestral pilgrimage back to Afri-

ca by way of Senegal, is in fact the most remarkable part of the book. And it makes significant contributions to the canon of “emancipatory” Black intellectual work that Coates aspires to.

The very notion of the journey “back to Africa”—wanting to make it, avoiding it, the feeling of arriving, of being there—is a universal, felt experience among the global African diaspora. Yet it’s a subject that remains underexplored within Coates’s “tradition”; that, and Coates’s vivid, evocative language, makes “On Pharaohs” a significant work.

Coates tells the story of a trip to a former slave fort in wrenching, thoughtfully beautiful passages—the anticipation, the mild but pleasant shocks, the surprising, vague pangs of loss, and the beauty of it all. “And now, approaching Gorée, I was a pilgrim on an ancestral journey, back to the beginning of time, not just to my own birth but to the birth of the modern world,” he writes, beginning to describe his feelings in a “moment I never thought I even needed.”

Like many of his fellow pilgrims, Coates is surprised when he encounters the vestiges of colonialism and neocolonialism in Africa, finding out that African Americans’ lighter skin tones—undeniable markers of the mass rape attendant to slavery—are treasured even across the Atlantic.

One of the masters of Coates’s “tradition,” W.E.B. Du Bois, expounded on that same subject in 1925, shortly after visiting Sierra Leone.

“Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely so that the Negroes themselves sometimes doubt the evidence of their own senses: segregation, disfranchisement, trial without jury, over-taxation, ‘Jim Crow’ cars, neglect of education, economic serfdom,” Du Bois wrote.

“Yet all this can be and is technically denied,” both by colonial officials and often by Black colonized people themselves.

Coates’s surprise at colorism in Africa, then, is a bit unexpected. Still, he notes that the idea isn’t new to him, as a Black American. It’s the fact of encountering this variety of anti-Blackness “back home,” in Africa itself, that “was chilling.” That, too, has something to do with certain stories remaining out of the frame, due to the choices of writers, network execs, producers, and the like.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Coates’s back-to-Africa essay is his confrontation with, and apparent rejection of,

vindicationism, a movement that gave him his African name. The term was coined by the historian and anthropologist St. Clair Drake, who explained that “a special genre of intellectual activity emerged among literate Blacks in the eighteenth-century,” geared explicitly toward constructing an intellectual defense and counternarrative to the racist myths of white supremacy. This included both legitimate science, history, and other scholarship, as well as quackery and myths.

“That explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms,” Coates writes. “The point was to tell a different story than the one imposed on us—an understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.”

Coates’s implication here is clear, and striking: The focus on countering a white supremacist narrative about being uncivilized can easily distract from other, potentially crucial considerations, like the inequality and tyranny that built most ancient kingdoms in Africa, as in Europe or any other continent.

Here, Coates grapples thoughtfully with an urgent and little-examined question about Black life and the lives of the marginalized in general. “We have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination,” he writes.

Coates’s piece about book-banning hits on many of the same themes and threads that tie the whole of The Message together. He draws connections, from “the book banners,” to the movement to protect Confederate monuments, to derogatory literature and film about Jews, and to European peasants under the forced labor of feudalism. The whole point, Coates argues, is to tell certain stories, and not others. All that is necessary prologue before Coates tells a final story about Israel, which is yet again something that mainstream guardians of the discourse would rather keep outside of the frame. And the mainstream reaction to the book, in large part, illustrates the author’s arguments.

The Message is a haunting, beautifully written little book about writing, and about truth-telling. It’s a timely and wellargued anti-war tract. And one of its greatest achievements is in threading together these seemingly disparate peoples, stories, and struggles so seamlessly. n DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

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Requiem for a Comedy Dream

Jason Reitman’s new film about the origins of Saturday Night Live forces a consideration of how the show turned into comfort food for its scared, self-satisfied liberal audiences.

By Siddhartha Mahanta What was Saturday Night Live? For Jason Reitman, it was an act of creative daring, a miracle of the countercultural fringe. Saturday Night, his frenetic film released this fall, depicts the 90 minutes preceding the 1975 premiere of the long-running sketch comedy show. Taking generous creative liberties, Reitman tells the story from the perspective of creator Lorne Michaels, then a nervy, 30-year-old would-be revolutionary on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Michaels, played by The Fabelmans star Gabriel LaBelle, spends the Movies and movie in a state of panic, Television reordering sketches, building the physical set, massaging volcanic egos, recruiting new writers and lighting technicians at the last minute, all to prove to the network—and himself—that the show must go on. Michaels and the young head of late-night programming Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) attempt to save SNL from the corporate suits while preserving Michaels’s vision: the 90 most subversive, groundbreaking minutes ever aired on television. Spoiler alert: He did it.

With its Aaron Sorkin–inflected “walk and talk” camera flourishes and rapid-fire overlapping dialogue, the movie wants the viewer to feel the cultural import about to burst forth. John Belushi rages against the very idea of acting on television; Garrett Morris wonders what he’s doing here; Chevy Chase pratfalls and deadpans his way to glory; writer (and Michaels’s wife) Rosie Shuster charms and coaxes these wild men into doing their jobs. Through the chaos, you try not to fixate on those who died far too soon: Belushi, Gilda Radner, Michael O’Donoghue, Andy Kaufman, and others.

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On November 2, 2024, three days before the U.S. presidential election, SNL kicked off the fifth episode of its 50th season on familiar territory: a cold open lampooning Donald Trump’s marathon campaign speeches. Decked out in an orange construction vest, resident Trump impersonator James Austin Johnson treats viewers to his version of the meandering, Dada-esque rhetorical “weave,” poking fun at the former president’s supposed exhaustion at the blasé never-ending charade of campaigning and contempt for the MAGA faithful.

The sketch then cuts to beloved SNL alums Maya Rudolph and Andy Samberg as Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff, respectively, alongside comedian Jim Gaffigan as VP nominee Tim Walz, watching Trump on TV with annoyance and disbelief.

Relying on outside help for political sketches—Dana Carvey, another legend, has also shuffled onto the scene as Joe Biden and Elon Musk—has become a go-to move for SNL to ensure must-see virality. Harris herself appeared in that same episode, projecting a sunny optimism while reminding viewers of the stakes of the election.

Nothing about the sketch felt groundbreaking or subversive. Politicians have appeared on SNL over the years to clarify they are in on the joke; even in that initial “radical” season, White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen hosted an episode, and President Gerald Ford uttered the famed slogan “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”

But Harris’s appearance invited viewers to laugh with rather than at her, with built-in assumptions that she was empathetic to their problems and fighting the good fight against America’s ongoing MAGAfication. Targeting the audience for its too-

cozy parasocial relationships with those in power was off the menu.

The Lorne Michaels who produced that sketch in 2024 was the very sort of out-oftouch, too-comfortable elitist the Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night was railing against.

While it’s hardly original to suggest that SNL has lost its fastball, its evolution from countercultural vanguard into comfort food for powerless liberals represents a wholesale reversal of the mission depicted in Reitman’s film. Once, viewers could tune in at 11:30 p.m. to see authority laid low and given the finger. Today, the program has become more reactive to the 24-hour cable news cycle and the never-ending stream of online commentary that forces viewers to choose a side first and be funny later.

As a consequence, the edge has dulled.

SNL’s broader approach to politics suggests something of a failure of comedy in an age of partisan uniform-wearing. Satire has become defined down to “my team’s better than your team”—an uninspired trend that infantilizes rather than challenges viewers.

For Michaels and his initial roster of writers, including Shuster, future senator Al Franken and his partner Tom Davis, and resident dark wizard O’Donoghue, there was no shortage of material. Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, oil embargos, urban disinvestment and white flight, and the rise of social conservatism and evangelical fervor had swirled into a miasma of cynicism, frustration, and paranoia. Trust in the federal government, or really any institution of significance, had crumbled. “They flirted with the margins of taste: a sketch about the Holocaust was rejected, but others about child abuse and the murder of lesbians made it onto the air,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary for Tom Davis.

In those early years, Chase played Gerald Ford as an inept, pratfalling doofus who was thrust into history without being ready for the task. Later, Dan Aykroyd played Jimmy Carter as a micromanaging genius, conversant about automatic letter sorter systems and how to come down from acid highs, and perhaps too buried in the details to see the big picture. Watching these bits now, one is struck by how little effort SNL made to help viewers feel better about their powerlessness.

Chase told Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller for Live From New York, their oral history of SNL’s first 40 years, that

Saturday Night depicts the panicky 90 minutes before the first episode of the long-running sketch comedy show.

following its first season, SNL ran the risk of becoming “solipsistic,” spurring his exit midway into Season 2. The rest of the cast should have joined him, he said, arguing that SNL had succeeded in its mission to become “a vehicle to take apart television.

Satirize it and rip it to pieces, show it for what it is.” Others involved with the program at the time say his motivations were much simpler: Hollywood paydays.

The election of Ronald Reagan brought “a kind of impending doom” across the country, as then-writer Barry Blaustein told Shales and Miller. Other writers sensed a conservative shift, with NBC shooting down politically sensitive sketches on topics like the Iran hostage crisis. Some would blame Ebersol, who ran SNL for a stretch in the early 1980s. “[Ebersol] tells me, ‘I don’t want to do political things, I don’t want to do controversial things,’” Tim Kazurinsky, a former writer and cast member, told Miller and Shales. “‘Who do you do impersonations of? Can you do Mickey Rooney?’”

Ebersol is also credited with instituting SNL’s enduring format, which foregrounded

star performers and familiar laugh lines.

Eddie Murphy, arguably the most significant American comic of the past 40 years, cultivated wildly popular characters like Gumby and Mr. Robinson, and his influential sketches like “White Like Me” saved SNL from cancellation, while poking at white liberal anxieties around race and class. Because of Murphy’s brazen honesty, the show was perhaps never as overtly confrontational in its politics as it was in that brief era.

After Michaels’s return to SNL in the mid-1980s, it leaned into impression and exaggeration, often to great effect. In a famous 1986 sketch written primarily by James Downey and Franken, Phil Hartman plays Reagan, deceptively switching between doddering old fool in public and Iran-Contra mastermind in private. With dark wit, the sketch calls bullshit on the White House’s insistence on treating the American public like fools, something of a throwback to the program’s early days with better mimicry. Carvey’s take on George H.W. Bush played up his oratorical tics

and awkwardness, while Hartman played Clinton as a randy good old boy, seducing and charming his way to the White House.

Arguably, this is when the program began to lean into the “point and laugh” style that sacrifices novelty in favor of flattering its young, educated audience about the correctness of their beliefs.

Where sexual impropriety and abuse of power are concerned, SNL’s contributions feel both dated and daring. In one sketch from the early 1990s, then-Sens. Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Strom Thurmond, and others trade tips on picking up women with Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Even as it disappeared the woman involved—Anita Hill, played by Ellen Cleghorne, has little to say or do—the satire focuses on prurient, exploitive obsessions of the powerful.

“Good political humor proceeds first from a funny idea, not from the editorial point you want to make. If the silliness makes a point, that’s fine, but secondary,” writer Jack Handey said of the sketch in an interview some years later.

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

CULTURE Will Ferrell’s himbo-in-chief George W. Bush was a genius blend of clownish buffoonery and bombast. But the way of telling the joke felt different from the past. Rather than delivering much satirical bite, Ferrell’s Bush, a character he would reprise intermittently even after his departure from SNL in 2002, reassured comfortable liberals that Republicans were indeed doomed by their cultural backwardism, social conservatism, and anti-intellectualism. But it seemed to suffer from breaking Handey’s first rule: The editorial point, that Republicans were morons and hicks, was in the foreground.

The 2008 cycle saw SNL further perfect the Ferrell formula, when former head writer and “Weekend Update” co-anchor Tina Fey returned to play Sarah Palin with a twangy, know-nothing swagger, somehow both clownish and deeply charming. The show benefited greatly from Fey’s star wattage, and the cultural feedback suggested that SNL had never been more relevant. But as funny as the interpretation was, it yet again gave the audience permission to smugly look down upon Palin and those she represented, a harbinger of electoral cycles to come.

The result was a program that seemed to fall in love with itself—and Barack Obama.

The culture finally had a generational avatar who synthesized what made celebrity so enticing and politics so enthralling, the very sort of concentration of power and influence SNL had been built to satirize. But writers apparently found the job impossible, comparing the task of caricaturing Obama as “like being a rock climber, looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey told Miller and Shales. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto.”

Of course, there was: Obama’s warmedover neoliberalism, his refusal to punish the architects of the Iraq War and the Great Financial Crisis, his condescending attitude toward bare-knuckle politics, the thrall in which the media held him. In Shales and Miller’s book, Michaels and beloved SNL writer Robert Smigel recall that Obama, slated to make a cameo appearance in an upcoming broadcast, effectively vetoed a risqué sketch about racial profiling.

Downey, who says he is politically moderate, lamented that SNL “stopped doing anything which could even be misinterpreted as a criticism of Obama … We were doing what we’d often been unfairly criticized of doing, but this time it was true.”

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The American electorate had delivered to the show the apotheosis of celebrity and political elitism. And yet SNL did nothing with the opportunity.

Eight years of failing to challenge power left SNL unready for the Trumpocene era.

Perhaps eager to dilute the stink of relentless lib-appeasing, SNL booked Donald Trump to host an episode several months after he declared his presidential candidacy. The decision drew heavy criticism for normalizing Trump, who’d already built his platform around nativist policies and racism.

claimed to dislike playing the role. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do it anymore,’ and people will go, ‘Don’t you dare give that up, we need you.’ Like I’ve gotten people through something in our nation’s history,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

The Trump era, with its unceasing psychodramas and emotional violence, became something of a never-ending political season, with SNL there to document it all. This has boosted the program’s relevance and helped it travel well across the web, even as it comes at the expense of its bloated cast

Eddie Murphy’s (left) honesty about race made SNL’s politics briefly confrontational. Dana Carvey, Tina Fey, and James Austin Johnson’s impressions reflect today’s “point and laugh” era.

After Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, Michaels featured a cold open of Kate McKinnon’s Clinton mournfully serenading the audience with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and exclaiming, “I’m not giving up, and neither should you!” He gave his shell-shocked, resistanceliberal audience what they craved: catharsis.

Taking its cues from breathless coverage of the constant swirl of chaos enveloping the White House, SNL re-enacted New York Times and Washington Post headlines with fervor. To bring it all to life, Michaels stunt-casted 17-time host Alec Baldwin as a domineering Trump, Ben Stiller as Michael Cohen, Larry David as Bernie Sanders, and Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller. Baldwin

of featured players, who get less and less to do each week.

But it came at a cost. Comedy as therapy loses something in the translation. SNL made little effort to tease its audience about its own pieties, blind spots, and misunderstandings about a country that voted Trump into office. The show did little to provoke viewers to consider how little they understood about the world beyond their own, instead reassuring them they could simply wait him out and laugh away the pain in the meantime.

Eventually, the task of playing Trump fell to Johnson, a master interpreter of his unconventional cadence and logorrheic vernacular. Yet despite this talent, the Trump

material rarely strays from grotesque caricature or rote repetition of oddball oneliners. A late-2022 sketch satirizing the January 6th Committee poked fun at the idea of Trump coming after Resistance Hero Liz Cheney for opposing him, with the conceit being that no one messes with the daughter of Dick Cheney. Arguably, this should have given Harris some pause before all but turning the Wyoming Republican into her running mate this year.

While it feels good to laugh at Trump’s brazen corruption, his still-shocking racism,

of American culture and will remain so, insiders say, as long as Michaels, still the most powerful force in American comedy, wants to keep at it.

Through it all, one can still detect a whiff of absurdist mischief running through the show. In fits and starts, its cast and writers’ room have become more diverse and eclectic, while the drug-fueled, abusive work environment of yore seems to be left in the past. If anything, SNL has proven itself to be remarkably consistent.

Yet consistency need not mean safe. Even

ble democracy. You don’t have to indulge racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and transphobes. But you do need to push your viewers to reckon with their fears and judgments about them.

While Saturday Night’s schmaltzy nostalgia, familiar anti-corporate moralizing, underwritten female characters, and banal “great man of history” framing ultimately make the film less than the sum of its parts, it is nevertheless a charming, energetic homage to the idea of SNL; its originality, craft, and showmanship.

his puerile fascism, one often feels exhausted or even haunted by these sketches. Part of the problem, of course, is that Trump’s entire schtick is that of the nightclub comic, for whom no laugh is too crass, racist, or cheap. His frequent hilarity, in itself, makes a mockery of any and all attempts to mock him. He will always be better at this than you—and with his victory over Harris, he’ll have ample opportunities to continue demonstrating why.

as SNL’s educated, cosmopolitan audience braces for the future, great satire can and should go beyond caricature. “I don’t see the courage … the experimental impulses,” original cast member Garrett Morris said of the program’s current incarnation in a recent interview with The Guardian. “That was the whole core of what happened the first 10 years … And nowadays, although people still check it out, I think they’re catering to too many people too much of the time.”

Comics cannot deny their own point of view, but neither should they neglect the hypocrisies, contradictions, and outright lies of those they admire, with the understanding that healthy skepticism gleaned through laughter may yet produce a dura-

Yet a great sadness hangs over the film. So many of the greats depicted, from Belushi to George Carlin to Radner, are dead, and history has proven them irreplaceable, at a time when we need jesters confronting our leaders more than ever. Reitman’s late father, Ivan, collaborated with many of those portrayed in the film, and one comes to feel he made it as a memorial to what’s been lost: a gentle yet fiery unpredictability. n

While Reitman does his best to boost the stakes of Saturday Night, history has rendered judgment. Even as the competition to definitively skewer politics and pop culture has never been fiercer, SNL is a fixture

Siddhartha Mahanta is a New York Citybased editor and writer. His work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere.

DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

CULTURE

The Movement to Free Schools of Smartphones Is Winning

Evidence shows that phones harm children and education. A growing number of schools are paying attention.

By Susan Linn The unprecedented and much publicized upswing of what advocates call “phone-free schools” is good news for anyone who cares about children. Scores of schools around the country now have, or are Education creating, rules to prevent students’ access to cellphones in classrooms and even throughout the day.

Elected officials are crafting policies that will have a broader reach. And there has been a slew of mainstream media coverage of schools pondering or making the switch. The normalization of policies that eliminate, or at least limit, phone use in schools will provide vital relief for millions of kids in thrall to potentially destructive digital distractions, designed by Silicon Valley’s smartest engineers to be as addictive as possible.

The news has even broader implications for advocates like me, who have spent decades building a movement to free kids from exploitation by tech companies and other corporate conglomerates. Almost 25 years ago, I and some colleagues formed the children’s advocacy organization Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now called Fairplay), where I served as founding director from 2000 to 2015. That school districts, cities, and states around the country are finally taking action is one of several signs of progress toward a goal that we were repeatedly told would be impossible to attain.

Advocates and administrators attribute the phone-free school movement’s growth spurt 60 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

to Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Anxious Generation, which has been on the New York Times best-seller list for months, and lays out an evidence-based argument not just for phone-free schools, but for a phone-free childhood characterized by, among other things, active and creative inperson experiences with friends and family.

Haidt points to substantial research linking digital media use, particularly social media, with an alarming rise in adolescents’ serious mental health problems including loneliness, depression, and suicide.

That Haidt is a visible and vocal supporter of banning phones in schools is a huge boon for the movement. At the same time, it’s important to recognize the years of effort by advocacy groups, parents, and teachers that make this moment possible. As Criscillia Benford, chair of Fairplay’s board, told me, “The tinder was laid, and Haidt lit the match.”

Laying tinder is a slog, but it’s essential to any kind of social change. It’s time spent articulating the problem, crafting a mission, raising awareness, honing arguments, building relationships with allies, creating a viable infrastructure, and identifying an organizational ethos. From its onset, Fairplay has maintained its independent voice by not taking funding from tech and media companies, or any corporation.

During my tenure, we did have some notable successes, including forcing Disney to offer refunds on its popular Baby Einstein videos, which the company was falsely marketing as educational for babies. Even at the time, however, we recognized that our primary

job was to raise public consciousness, and create a foundation for future activists to build upon. We needed to help people understand that the combination of increasingly sophisticated and seductive technologies with unregulated, child-targeted advertising was a factor in many of the problems facing children. Today’s accomplishments are the fruit of years of work.

The danger smartphones pose to children is steadily becoming clearer, thanks to advances in brain science and the study of human development. We now know a great deal about the needs and vulnerabilities of children from infancy through adolescence.

While there are vast differences between the capabilities and cognition of a toddler and a teenager, both need repeated, ongoing, positive, face-to-face interactions with other human beings, safe spaces to play, and opportunities to engage actively in learning.

And, while a person’s ability to assess risk and potential harms is significantly better at 16 years than at 16 months, the prefrontal cortex, where judgment sits, doesn’t fully develop until we’re in our mid-twenties.

It’s no longer news that, regardless of their age, kids are harmed by the prevailing business model of tech and social media giants like Google, Meta, Snap, Inc., and TikTok’s owner ByteDance. Children of all ages are casualties of the tech industry’s war for our attention, manifest in design features such as personalized advertising, alerts, likes, and autoplay, each designed to keep all of us and our kids glued to our screens.

Tech industry whistleblowers like Francis Haugen, the activism of parents mourning children whose deaths are linked to social media use, and reports from advocacy organizations like Fairplay have made this reality undeniable.

Even without the documented mental health harms associated with teens’ and preteens’ use of social media and phones, personal digital devices don’t belong in school. Dr. José Lebrón, principal of Kensington High School in Philadelphia, told me that students’ scores on standardized tests began to rise after he instituted a school-wide ban on cellphones nearly ten years ago. His experience echoes results and recommendations from a variety of studies and surveys. In 2023, a report from UNESCO was highly critical of overreliance on phones in schools and rebuked a technology-forward approach to learning. The

Digital distractions are designed by Silicon Valley’s smartest engineers to be as addictive as possible. most recent report from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that, around the world, students distracted by phones in schools score significantly lower on the PISA math assessment.

Other studies reflect these findings, including one from the London School of Economics showing that the rise in test scores was due to improved performance by students identified as low achievers. I’m not a fan of high-stakes testing, but given its current ubiquity and use as a measure to evaluate student learning, I think these results are a fair indication of the impact of cellphones on school performance.

We might, justifiably, bemoan the state of public education in this country, but there’s mounting evidence that learning suffers when schools allow students to carry around the digital equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a siren song sounding repeatedly in their head to prevent them from thinking. According to a recent sur-

vey by Common Sense Media, teens receive a median of over 50 notifications during the school day. No wonder 72 percent of high school teachers see phones as a major problem in the classroom.

It’s notable that Dr. Lebrón’s initial motivation for the ban had less to do with test scores and more to do with safety. He instituted the policy after a student used their phone to plan an assault on a fellow student.

While bullying among kids and teens was a problem long before the digital revolution, it’s easier to engage in cyber bullying than doing it face-to-face. Cyber bullying can be anonymous, relentless, publicly humiliating for the victims, and (for the perpetrators) one step removed. Online bullies don’t have to contend with immediately witnessing the terrible pain they inflict. There is plenty of evidence of kids being harmed even to the point of suicide by peers, acquaintances, and strangers using online platforms to inflict emotional and social harm.

It’s important to recognize that simply limiting school phone use isn’t the solution to what is a very serious and pervasive problem. But while eliminating phone use in school won’t eliminate bullying, it will reduce the amount of time available for cyber bullying, and it can make school feel safer for kids.

What phone-free rules won’t do is stop the online bullying that takes place after school.

We need to expand our focus beyond phonefree schools to (a) address larger cultural issues (a topic that goes beyond the scope of this article), (b) hold tech companies responsible for harms to children outside of school, and (c) force changes in persuasive design elements employed by app developers and social media companies.

Today, in response to the explosion of smart devices, the ubiquity of social media, and the mounting evidence of their harms, Fairplay’s staff has tripled in size and the DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

CULTURE organization has vastly expanded its reach.

One important way Fairplay supports and builds grassroots activism these days is through hosting working groups designed to encourage collaboration among advocates with similar interests. Working groups are organized around areas such as mental health, early childhood, kids and nature, and more.

A few years ago, Sabine Polak, Mileva Repasky, and Kim Whitman met through Fairplay’s Screens in Schools working group and bonded over their concerns about cellphones in school. In 2023, they founded their own nonprofit, the PhoneFree Schools Movement (PFSM), to ensure that schools allow students to “excel academically and develop socially without the pressures and harms of phones and social media during the school day.”

In partnership with Fairplay, one of PFSM’s first projects was to create a tool kit for school administrators. Their “Ambassador Toolkit” will help parents, teachers, and community members to advocate for schools going phone-free throughout the entire school day rather than just in class. Policies that allow students access to phones between classes and during lunch place a terrible burden on teachers, who must use precious class time to collect and redistribute devices. In addition, an all-day policy recognizes that, for their health and well-being, students need opportunities to explore real-life relationships with peers that are unmediated by tech companies.

And that brings me back to laying tinder.

Banning phones in schools is an important step to mitigating the harm tech companies foist on children, but it’s not the only step we need to take. Kids are being harmed outside of school as well. Last year, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general, issued an advisory warning about the risks that social media can pose for the mental health of children and teens, including body dissatisfaction, depression, and self-harm.

Tech companies won’t voluntarily stop generating persuasive design techniques, even if they know that they harm children. For the first time in decades, however, it’s possible that the government will step in. Two bills that would make children significantly safer online have been introduced in Congress with significant bipartisan support.

First, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) would, among other protections, require 62 PROSPECT.ORG DECEMBER 2024

Students need opportunities to explore real-life relationships with peers that are unmediated by tech companies. social media platforms to adopt a “duty of care” that will compel them to consider the impact of their product design and operations on children, including whether features such as algorithmic recommendations promote harms such as suicidal behavior, eating disorders, substance abuse, sexual exploitation, and others. Second, an update to the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (or COPPA 2.0) would prevent tech companies from collecting personal information such as phone location or websurfing history from kids under the age of 17, and prohibit individual-specific advertising to children and teens.

Both KOSA and COPPA 2.0 passed the Senate with only three no votes, thanks to the incredibly hard and painful work of parents whose children’s deaths have been linked to social media, in concert with over 200 children’s advocacy groups. The bills are having a harder time passing the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring the bills to a vote. While both bills passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee, KOSA was considerably weakened and, if it comes to a vote, it will be a battle to reverse those changes.

Whatever happens under the upcoming Trump administration, there’s more work to do. Huge amounts of money and power have been invested in ensuring that the interests of Big Tech and big business take precedence over what’s best for children.

We all know that social justice doesn’t come easy, and, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, constant vigilance is required. Even if all schools ban cellphones, and KOSA and COPPA 2.0 pass in meaningful forms, there’s going to be pushback. And besides, there’s a whole tech and media industry assault on babies and toddlers that neither of these efforts will address.

That said, let’s take a moment to celebrate. From the proliferation of phone-free schools to the Senate’s bipartisan support for KOSA and COPPA 2.0, 2024 has been a terrific year for efforts to disentangle children’s lives from tech industry profit-mongering. And after we take heart, let’s build on that momentum. We owe it to children to keep going. n Susan Linn is a writer, psychologist, and lecturer. She is the author of Who’s Raising the Kids: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.

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PARTINGSHOT AN OPEN LETTER TO JOE BIDEN

Mr. President, It’s Time to Do Crime Dear President Biden,

GREG HOUSTON

Respectfully, sir, you blew it. You arrived in the White House at the water aerobics age of 78, promising to be a transitional candidate for Democrats. And in that, you succeeded!

You successfully transitioned America from one Trump term to the next. Way to go, Jack.

While you did some good things in office, you were far from “the most progressive president since FDR,” or if you were then that’s such a low bar it’s lying on the ground. Honestly, the only thing you ever fully committed to was helping Israel ethnically cleanse Gaza, for reasons we’ll still never know.

My guess is Prime Minister Golda Meir rocked you like a baby on a picnic blanket on a hillside in Jerusalem and told you everything the light touches would be yours.

Something like that.

By the time your party finally was able to wrest away the keys of your re-election campaign, it was already too late. Vice President Harris was only able to make the loss a bit more dignified, rather than downright degrading.

Despite all of this, Mr. President, you still have a shot at resuscitating your legacy. It’s an opportunity handed to you from the highest court in the land, if you choose to accept it: Presidential Immunity. The Supreme Court effectively deemed presidents to be above the law. As a reminder, you are now president. So for the next two months, give or take, you can DO CRIME. Crime for good. You could be Batman, Mr. President. Only slower. Much slower.

Here are some ideas: • Commit light arson at a Cybertruck lot.

• Sell state secrets about unidentified aerial phenomena on eBay and use the money to buy the land around Joe Manchin’s West Virginia ranch. Begin fracking immediately. Create a sinkhole if you can.

• Steal White House presidential portraits

and artifacts like James Madison’s crystal flute and sell them to China. Use the money to buy Truth Social.

• Use the Defense Production Act to manufacture as many abortion pills as possible and direct the Air

Force to drop them like aid packages into states with abortion bans.

• Bug the Oval Office, Air Force One, and any and all vehicles to be used by the incoming president. Don’t wait for another Michael Wolff “tell-all” book about the chaos of Trumpworld; the intel will go straight to you.

You write the book and give it away for free.

Or just broadcast it live all day on a Discord server; your grandson will show you how.

• Set free Elon’s Neuralink chimps from their prison in Nevada and guide them to Kari Lake’s home.

• Get the NSA to break into Mike Johnson’s Pornhub account. Change the password and hold it hostage until he brings a minimumwage increase to a floor vote.

• For Christmas, rob a bank.

Rob THE bank, the Federal Reserve. Pack all the printed money you can into suitcases and hand-deliver them to the homes of students whose debt you weren’t able to cancel.

• Revoke FDA approval of ivermectin, Cialis, and Diet Coke, but only in the Palm Beach metropolitan area.

• Let’s cut to the chase. Go on YouTube, learn to make nnnnnnnnnnnn, and then wire it to nnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

• Release the photos of Donald Trump with underage girls that Epstein had in his safe.

You know the ones.

• Drive a rental car up to the airport dropoff and just leave it at passenger loading.

Suckers!

• STAY IN OFFICE. How are you even thinking of leaving?! You’re immune! Barricade yourself in the Oval surrounded by your most ferocious German shepherds.

This is the moment they’ve been training for. Take hostages, cause a constitutional crisis.

The liberals will do our own January 6th for you so long as we don’t splinter into different podcast listener factions first.

Mr. President, you owe the American people. You have been granted a gift.

You’re Mario who just nabbed a Super Star and now you’re invincible. So obtain your final form as the crime boss the right always painted you as, the Dark Brandon you were destined to become.

—Francesca Fiorentini DECEMBER 2024 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 64

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Fighting for a better future

By Randi Weingarten, President, AFT

The rush to explain the results of the 2024 presidential election is on. How did Donald Trump reclaim the White House? Was it gender divides? Swaying young voters? Culture wars? Winning more of the Hispanic vote? Elon Musk? Podcasts? The manoverse? All may have been factors, but we know that the economy was top of mind for most Americans— and that when voters feel the cost of housing, gas or eggs is too damn high, they traditionally punish the incumbent party. Despite all the Biden-Harris administration’s economic successes and Kamala Harris’ proposals to address the cost-of-living crisis, in the end, she could not overcome the fear and anxiety working families felt.

The Biden-Harris administration guided the country to the strongest post-COVID-19 economy in the world. Wages are up, inflation has cooled and most economic indicators are improving, yet many Americans are still feeling the aftershocks of the pandemic (and even the 2008 recession). The bottom line is that everyone is an expert on their own experience, and when people suffering economic stress hear how “good” the economy is, they feel gaslit and forsaken.

In the months leading up to the election, I crisscrossed the country, talking to people about their hopes and concerns. Many felt a loss of control and that things were getting worse, reflecting a long-standing trend: The percentage of Americans earning more than their parents has been steadily decreasing over the last 80 years, and wages for production jobs have sunk below other sectors for the last four decades. This has inflicted psychic wounds on a country that long believed each generation would do better than the last.

right out of high school. Eighty-two percent of voters support increasing government funding for skills training, and career and technical education programs are popular with both Democratic and Republican leaders, so it’s no wonder that Trump has made project-based learning, apprenticeships and career counseling a big part of his education program.

Americans support the two engines of opportunity at the core of my union—the labor movement and public education. Voters approved school funding measures across the country, and they rejected or repealed school voucher proposals everywhere they were on the ballot. Americans don’t need a strongman promising to “fix” their lives. They need a great education and a union contract so they can get ahead, build the middle class and ensure that communities can rise together.

We will soon see whether Trump follows through on his populist promises, or if he does the bidding of the billionaires whose shadow campaign helped put him back in office.

I know what we will be doing—fighting for commonsense solutions for a better life for America’s working and middle classes, striving to ensure that all of

God’s children are treated with respect and dignity, and working for safe and welcoming schools and for an economy that benefits all. We will be advocating for people to ensure they have decent healthcare, wages and retirement security, and are able to take care of their families—with child care, paid leave and home care for elderly parents. We will be fighting to strengthen public schools, for a new deal in higher education, and the right of Americans to belong to a union. And we will be pushing to lower everyday costs. That’s why we have been fighting for Social Security fairness through the repeal of the Windfall Elimination Provision and Government Pension Offset, which hurt so many retirees.

Americans need a great education and a union contract so they can get ahead and communities can rise together.

I worry about the country slipping backward to another Gilded Age, but I know our country can move forward to ensure every American can have a pathway to a better life. One thing is certain: Educators, healthcare professionals and public employees will continue doing everything they can to make a difference in the lives of the people they serve. Our guiding principle remains fighting for our children’s future and the promise of America.

Trump made gains with the majority of Americans who are not college graduates. Sixty percent of high school graduates in the U.S. don’t go to college, but that shouldn’t mean the American dream is out of their reach. The AFT is working to transform high schools and community colleges so all young people have pathways to highly skilled, high-wage careers

Photo: AFT Staff

Trump tapped into that anxiety with a shrewd ability to connect with voters and to expand beyond his base. He said he could fix people’s problems and promised voters that if they returned him to the White House, “inflation would vanish completely.” Yet most mainstream economists say that Trump’s proposals won’t conquer inflation, they will make it much worse.

Weingarten with students at a campaign event for Sen.-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) in Detroit on Oct. 18.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: threads.net/randiweingarten

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The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

—WILLIAM ARTHUR WARD

AUGUST 2023 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 1