The Progressive magazine - February/March 2021 - Vol. 85, No. 1

JOHN NICHOLS ON WHAT DEMOCRATS MUST DO

A CALL TO ACTION FROM WILLIAM BARBER

DIANE RAVITCH TELLS HOW TO SAVE OUR SCHOOLS

AN INTERVIEW WITH AMY GOODMAN

February / March 2021

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CONTENTS

FEATURES

20

Why Biden Needs to Go Bold The worst mistake the Democrats could make is to seek the center—again.

John Nichols

28

Vaccinate This!

Addressing the deep inequalities exposed

by COVID-19 will probably prove more elusive than treating the disease.

Natalie Shure

42 A Chance for New Beginnings What Joe Biden could do to bring humanity and good sense to U.S. immigration policy.

47

Shelter from the Storm How the new administration can tackle the nation’s housing crisis.

Marisa Endicott

James Goodman

THE PROGRESSIVE | 3

not only undo Trump’s legacy but reverse two decades of a disastrous ‘reform’ movement.

25 Toward a More Equal Union

The new administration could take plenty of steps to address economic disparity.

Sam Pizzigati

31 The U.S. War Machine: Now

Under New Management Electing Joe Biden is not enough to ensure a saner and less belligerent foreign policy.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies

34 How Biden Can Tackle the

Climate Crisis Joe Biden has promised to ensure climate justice but will his administration rise to the challenge?

Tina Gerhardt

38 Taking Aim at Gun Violence There is much that the new administration can do to lessen the carnage.

Sharon Johnson

41 ONE QUESTION

Q: How Should Biden Address Racial Injustice?

Nadia E. Brown, Kevin Powell

50 Twenty Years of Failing the

Schools To fix education, Biden must

DEPARTMENTS

EDITOR’S NOTE A Time to Fight 6 COMMENT 5

Repairing the Breach The Reverend William J. Barber II

8 FURTHER COMMENT Give Biden a Push Bill Lueders

Diane Ravitch

52 Biden’s Challenge on Race Brian Gilmore

54

BOOK EXCERPTS

Service with a Smile A retail worker learns to fight for her rights.

Sarah Jaffe

Eric Gill and the Integrity of Work Wendell Berry

60 INTERVIEW

‘Go to Where the Silence Is’ An interview with Amy Goodman on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Democracy Now! Norman Stockwell

63 BOOKS

Apocalypse Forever

14 SMART ASS CRIPPLE

Biden’s Low Priority, Our High Hopes Mike Ervin

16 MIDDLE AMERICA How We Got Here Ruth Conniff

66 HEMMING AND HAWING America’s Pep Talk Negin Farsad

67 MAEVE IN AMERICA

A Miracle Worth Repeating Maeve Higgins

4 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

EDITOR Bill Lueders WEB EDITOR & AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT COORDINATOR Kassidy Tarala ASSOCIATE EDITOR Emilio Leanza EDITOR-AT-LARGE Ruth Conniff

DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Daniel K. Libby OFFICE MANAGER Elizabeth D. Miller POETRY EDITOR Jules Gibbs PROOFREADERS Diana Cook Catherine Cronin EDITORIAL INTERNS Nuha Dolby Molly Liebergall

ART DIRECTOR Kerstin Vogdes Diehn

The Progressive tackles the forces distorting our economy, corrupting our democracy, and imperiling our planet, and champions peace, civil liberties, equality, and justice.

Bill Lueders

The Life and Legacy of RBG Bill Blum

How Movements Are Made Two books bring the history of the civil rights struggle to a modern audience.

This issue of The Progressive, Volume 85, Number 1, went to press on January 20, 2021.

Norman Stockwell

9 NO COMMENT 10 LETTERS BLAST FROM THE PAST 11 12 ON THE LINE

Farmwork in the Era of COVID-19

David Bacon

18 SMOKING GUN

Say Their Names

VOICES

PUBLISHER Norman Stockwell

68 EDGE OF SPORTS

College Athletes in the Petri Dish Dave Zirin

69 POEMS

All My Friends Have Rent and Heartbreak and Facilities Should Restrict Visitation of All Visitors, Except for Certain Compassionate Care Situations Lauren Sanderson

70 VOX POPULIST

Lord of the Flies, Revisited Jim Hightower

Editorial correspondence should be addressed to The Progressive, 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703, or editorial@progressive.org.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

A TIME TO FIGHT

D

espite the familiar chaos and horrific violence that marks change, Marisa Endicott on housing policy, Brian Gilmore on the end of the Trump presidency, the Inauguration of Joe racism, Diane Ravitch on education, and James Goodman on Biden and Kamala Harris as the nation’s forty-sixth Pres- immigration.

We also proudly present an excerpt from the excellent new ident and forty-ninth Vice President, respectively, represents a book Work Won’t Love You Back, by frequent contributor Sarah tremendous opportunity for the progressive movement and The Jaffe, and a new piece of writing from our longtime friend WenProgressive magazine.

For the first time in what seems like an eternity, there is a dell Berry.

Elsewhere in this issue (on page 37), chance to move the needle in the direcwe make an appeal for your financial tion of a fairer, safer, and saner world. Our support, which I hope you will considinput and our advocacy matter more than er. It’s true that this magazine has always ever. depended on reader contributions, beThat is why, in this issue, we turn our yond subscriptions, to sustain itself. But attention to asking what the new adI am asking here for something else. I ministration can accomplish, and how am asking you to help spread the word political progressives can help make that about the vital work we’re doing. happen.

Be a part of that work by telling those Our good friend John Nichols spells you know that this is a magazine worth out, with crystal clarity, why retreatsubscribing to. Buy them gift subscriping from progressive ideals would be a tions. Sign up for our free newsletter, grave mistake for the new administrawhich highlights what we are doing ontion—similar to the mistakes that other line. And talk up our website, which ofDemocratic administrations have made fers not just timely and important pieces in the past: from diverse writers but also a welcome “If Biden and Congressional Demorespite from the constant interruption, crats do not reset their course quickly, hectoring, and ad bombardment of a toxic mix of centrist messaging and other websites. It is a refuge in an inpolicy compromises will prove to be a creasingly gnarly Internet wilderness. recipe for political disaster,” he writes. “It Our stiff-spined founder, Fighting Bob La Follette.

With this issue, The Progressive will cost the party control of the House marks its 112th birthday. The first issue and Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. It will also fail the American people at a time when there rolled off the presses on January 9, 1909. We believe the life of is a pressing, desperate need for bold responses to COVID-19, this magazine is a thing worth fighting for. Our founder would mass unemployment, the climate crisis, and the unanswered undoubtedly agree. cries for racial justice.”

The Reverend William J. Barber II gives his prescriptions for concrete steps that the country can take to address the problems Bill Lueders of economic disparity. As he puts it, “We cannot afford the exEditor treme inequality that is crippling American democracy.”

Other writers sound similar calls to action, zeroing in on how Biden and Harris can, by being pushed from the left, deliver meaningful and systemic progressive reform. Sam Pizzigati looks HOW YOU CAN HELP at how a President who wasn’t primarily interested in making Subscriptions: www.indiepublishers.org/subscribe/ the rich richer could reduce extreme economic inequity. Sharon Johnson explores the potential for curbing gun violence, at the Newsletters: tiny.cc/ProgressiveNewsletter federal level and in cities and states across the country. Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies see the possibility of a foreign Promotional Gift Items: indiepublishers.shop policy that isn’t driven by the Military-Industrial Complex.

Donations: https://www.indiepublishers.org/donate/ Plus, there are pieces by Natalie Shure on the fight against COVID-19, Tina Gerhardt on various ways to combat climate THE PROGRESSIVE | 5

COMMENT by THE REVEREND WILLIAM J. BARBER II

REPAIRING THE BREACH

W

hen then-candidate Joe Biden addressed sure the most vulnerable in our unequal society are a virtual assembly of the Poor People’s vaccinated first, health care is available to all, and Campaign last fall, he promised that end- debts are forgiven. ing poverty would be more than an aspiration if he Poor people are grieving the loved ones we have were to become the forty-sixth President of the United lost to this disease, even as millions of us worry how States; rather, he said, it would be a “theory of change we will pay the bills and avoid eviction. We know from to build a new economy that works for everyone.” personal experience that COVID-19 deaths have been When our campaign presented fourteen policy disproportionately Black, brown, Native, and poor. priorities to Biden’s transition team in December, the Poor and low-income Americans have been forced team reaffirmed this commitment. Reconstruction is to continue working in essential service jobs while not easy work, but millions of poor and low-income fellow citizens assert their “freedom” to shop and play Americans know from experience what it must mean without a mask. Like a contrast dye in our body politic, to “build back better.” The success of the Biden-Harris this pandemic has exposed how racism and poverty Administration will depend on its ability to work with intersect to lock nearly half of us into second-class the people for whom the system has not been working. citizenship.

As a preacher, I know this to be the moral vision in our ancient biblical texts. “If you get rid of unfair pracoor and low-income people also know that buildtices, quit blaming victims . . . and start giving youring back better must look beyond emergency relief selves to the down-and-out,” the prophet Isaiah says, to bold action that fosters greater equity. then “you’ll be known as the repairer of the breach.”

For too long, Democrats and Republicans have This basic insight is echoed in our Constitution’s accepted the neoliberal logic that says radical inequalcommitment to “a more perfect union” through, ity is a necessary byproduct of economic growth. For among other things, the establishment of justice. decades, we have watched the profits of the super-rich Repairing the breach and addressing the systemic soar while wages for most Americans have stagnated. wrongs we have inherited is the essential work of reDuring the same period, taxes of corporations and construction. the wealthiest Americans have steadily declined as the We cannot build back as a nation without confess- military budget has ballooned. Government action ing the ways we were uniquely unprepared for the to reverse the trend of increasing inequality will remultiple crises we continue to face. Building a more quire bold action. For starters, we must overhaul the just economy under the Biden-Harris Administration way we measure poverty in America. A new measure will require more than simply rejecting Trumpism or must replace the current poverty line to accurately restoring dignity to the highest offices in our land. reflect current conditions of poverty and economic While representation in presidential appoint- insecurity. It must take into account race, age, familial ments—and throughout the executive branch of gov- status, ability, geography, and sexual orientation and ernment—matters for the Black, white, brown, Asian, establish a new basis for eligibility, appropriations, and Native, female, and LGBTQ+ people who make up our allocations of resources. broad fusion movement, we need more than repreUntil we account for the fact that nearly half of sentative faces in high places. We need leaders who Americans cannot make ends meet, we will not be understand racism, poverty, the war economy, eco- able to build the collective will to address extreme logical devastation, and the distorted moral narrative inequality. of religious nationalism as interlocking injustices that But we know what the government can do to disproportionately impact poor communities, even fight poverty, and we have the resources to do it. The when people who look like us are in charge.

Biden-Harris Administration can and must champion It is not enough to have a seat at the tables of power. bold action to guarantee quality health care for all, We need policies that put food on the table. regardless of preexisting conditions. This begins with In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, “building expanding Medicaid in every state, securing Medicare, back better” means targeting emergency relief to make working toward enacting a public universal health

P

6 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

The Reverend William Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

His most recent book is We Are Called to Be a Movement.

care option, and building up our public health infrastructure. It also includes fully funding and expanding the Indian Health Service and ensuring quality health care for those who are incarcerated and detained.

We can also increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour and then commit to increase it annually until it reaches a true housing wage (estimated at $22 an hour in 2018). We can guarantee quality affordable housing to all Americans and enact a federal jobs program to build up investments, infrastructure, public institutions, climate resilience, energy efficiency, and socially beneficial industries and jobs in poor and low-income communities.

It is not enough to have a seat at the tables of power.

We need policies that put food on the table.

We can fight climate change by building a carbon neutral economy, ensure high-quality public education in every community, pass just immigration reform that creates a pathway to citizenship for undocumented neighbors, fulfill our commitments to sovereign Indigenous nations, and protect and expand voting rights for all Americans.

We know we can afford these investments if the wealthy pay their fair share and the defense budget is reallocated to address the most pressing security needs of poor and low-income Americans. The Poor People’s Campaign has shown how $350 billion may be moved away from the war economy and put to use to fight COVID-19 and poverty, invest in health care, jobs, infrastructure, education, and more.

There are, after all, real costs to maintaining a vastly unequal economy. Every year, we lose $1 trillion to child poverty costs and $2.6 trillion in lost earnings from gender and racial wage gaps; we have lost $1.3 trillion in government revenue by lowering the corporate tax rate in 2017 and $6.4 trillion in endless wars; inaction on climate change may cost close to $3.3 trillion annually, and 250,000 people die from poverty and inequality every year. The cumulative financial costs of the pandemic are estimated to be $16 trillion.

We cannot afford the extreme inequality that is crippling American democracy, and we already have the money we need to invest in reconstruction. Our problem is that we are investing it in growth of the stock market and increased capacity for nuclear annihilation rather than the health and well-being of our democracy.

M

any commentators have noted that Biden did not run as a progressive, and he beat opponents in the primary who advocated for more progressive policy positions. In the spirit of “bipartisan cooperation,” some have advised compromise and leadership that is not perceived to be too bold or “radical.”

But poor and low-income people cannot accept the assertion that basic equality and dignity are “radical” or “leftist” ideas. We have organized the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in the so-called deep red counties of Appalachia and the rural Midwest, as well as in the Black Belt of Alabama and the housing projects of Washington, D.C., and New York City. Among people who are struggling to survive, these are not “left” and “right” issues. They are life and death issues. Our call is not to compromise but to a revolution of values. The compromises we have made for too long have led to a “normal” that is unacceptable.

We are under no illusion that the gridlock which has been so carefully cultivated by partisan and corporate interests for decades can be overcome by presidential decree. But we do know that leadership matters, and leaders who have been willing to listen to movements for change in this nation’s history have been able to change the conversation.

When I spoke with President Biden on his podcast during the campaign last year, I told him we needed leadership that could face the pain this pandemic has inflicted and be honest about all that it has exposed.

President Lincoln was no radical, but the abolitionists’ struggle, paired with his commitment to preserve the Union in the midst of great suffering, ultimately defeated slavery.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was not a radical, but he was a man who had been shaped by personal suffering. The Social Gospel movement that refused to accept the inequality of the Gilded Age pushed him to support a bold New Deal to bring the United States out of the Great Depression and into an era of relative equality that we have not surpassed in more than half a century.

The Biden-Harris Administration has an opportunity to lead us from the disaster of 2020 toward a bold new era of freedom and justice for all. This is something it cannot do alone, which is why groups including the Poor People’s Campaign have a key role to play. We stand ready to push the nation toward a reconstruction which is not only possible, but also necessary for American democracy. ◆

THE PROGRESSIVE | 7

FURTHER COMMENT by BILL LUEDERS

GIVE BIDEN A PUSH

I

n a talk he gave between the election and the Inauguration, Joe Biden thanked health-care workers on the front lines of COVID-19. He empathized with families who have lost loved ones, as well as the many others “who have fallen on hard times, through no fault of your own.”

Biden gave some straight talk about the pandemic and what the nation must do about it. He predicted—accurately, it turns out—that “our darkest days in the battle against COVID are ahead of us, not behind us.” He urged everyone to “mask up, stay socially distanced, avoid large gatherings, particularly inside,” as a good leader should. He said he expected Democrats and Republicans would work together to get the nation vaccinated and address the suffering of people in need.

Welcome to the Biden era. It’s so nice to be here.

What a relief it is to hear decency and coherence from the nation’s chief executive. Around this same time, the defeated Donald Trump was raging like a mad King Lear, seriously discussing whether he should declare martial law, trying to coerce state elections officials into criminal conduct, and actively plotting and encouraging an assault on the Capitol. The violence and division he has fomented will burn long after his reign.

His casual incompetence has cost tens of thousands of lives, and his infectious disregard for truth will poison the nation’s politics for decades.

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. is, by all appearances, a different story. The nation’s forty-sixth President is not a lunatic. He is not a despicable human being. That this should be a cause for celebration shows how far the bar’s been lowered.

But there is something else that Biden is not: a true progressive. He is a mainstream corporate Democrat with a commitment to compromise. As a U.S. Senator and Vice President under Barack Obama, he was something of a hawk. While he opposed funding for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s and voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, Biden supported the war in Afghanistan, the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, at least initially, and even put in a good word for Britain’s 1982 war in the Falkland Islands.

As a candidate, Biden assured wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected. When Biden was attacked for suggesting he would end the earth-scarring excavation of fossil fuels known as fracking, his running mate, Kamala Harris, pointedly set the record straight: “Joe Biden will not end fracking, 8 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

he has been very clear about that.” The American Petroleum Institute responded with glee: “No exceptions, no qualifiers. Fracking can go ahead on private lands and areas under federal control.” It’s a wonder the writer didn’t use an exclamation point.

The problem with such equivocation is that this nation needs to end fracking, as soon as possible. It needs fundamental change in how the economy is structured and run. It needs bold and even radical ideas that happen to make sense—things like single-payer health care, a $15 national minimum wage, forgiveness of student debt, nuclear disarmament, a refocusing of law enforcement resources, a less belligerent foreign policy, and a humane and sane approach to immigration.

All of these ideas were lost causes under Trump but are at least possibly attainable under Biden. This would take a concerted push from the left—which,

Biden is not a lunatic. He is not a despicable human being. That this should be a cause for celebration shows how far the bar’s been lowered. actually, is in pretty good shape these days, thanks to the infrastructure of opposition that has grown and strengthened under Trump, from Black Lives Matter, to the Fight for $15, to the movements for immigrant and voter rights. There are networks of activists across the country eager to continue the fight now that change is possible.

Biden has shown a willingness to admit when he’s been wrong, as with his vote for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. He has been open to big ideas, especially with regard to fighting climate change. What’s needed, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson has counseled, is a plan to “create millions of jobs while addressing the climate crisis with a focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Biden should describe the program in bold strokes and summon the Congress to meet the challenge.”

The Biden Administration represents an opportunity that progressives have not had since the Obama Administration—and remember how that turned out.

Much of Obama’s promise and potential was not realized, both because of the sort of antipathy from Republicans that Biden is sure to also face and because Obama was not effectively pushed in a progressive direction. Joe Biden presents us with another chance. ◆ Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

NO COMMENT

It Was Here Just a Minute Ago!

Among the voter-fraud hotspots identified by lawyers supporting defeated President Donald Trump in his failed effort to steal the election was Edison County, Michigan. According to a witness statement submitted as evidence, Biden allegedly received 100 percent of the county’s votes, which gave “cause for concern and indicate fraud.” One sticking point: There is no Edison County, or anything close to that name, in Michigan.

All in Good Fun

Managers at a porkprocessing plant in Iowa set up a betting pool on how many of its workers would contract COVID19 during an outbreak last spring. The actual count, which may have been bolstered by management pressure to keep sick workers on the job, came to more than 1,000 workers, at least six of whom died. After an investigation, seven managers were fired. One later explained the pool “was spontaneous fun and intended to boost morale,” according to the Associated Press.

And You’ll Know They Are Christians . . . .

Hungary has amended its constitution to effectively ban gay and lesbian couples from adopting children and to explicitly declare that the nation’s “identity and values [are] based on our Christian culture.” The change under nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán follows the passage of an anti-trans law that bans changing gender pronouns in personal documents.

Anything’s Possible

Asked in a recent NPR/Ipsos poll whether “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media”—a core belief of the conspiracy group QAnon—17 percent of respondents said it was true, and another 37 percent said they didn’t know whether or not it was true.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY STUART GOLDENBERG

Extreme Prejudice

A prominent national police training group, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, has distributed a document that falsely accuses Black Lives Matter and the mostly nonexistent Antifa as “revolutionary movements whose aims are to overthrow the U.S. government” through the use of “extreme violence.” Harvey Hedden, the group’s executive director, defended the document. “We do not censor these ideas,” he said, while allowing that some of its criticisms of Black Lives Matter “might be overgeneralizations.”

Armed and Dangerous

Lauren Boebert, a newly elected Congressperson from Colorado, has insisted on carrying a firearm on U.S. Capitol grounds despite its dubious legality. Boebert, the owner of a gun-themed restaurant called Shooters Grill in, of all places, Rifle, Colorado, defeated a five-term Republican incumbent in a June primary, claiming he wasn’t a big-enough fan of then-President Donald Trump. Her defiance of security measures at the Capitol drew praise from fellow first-term Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who said in a statement, “I will work every day to end ALL gun-free zones.”

The Party of Insurrection

A poll taken by YouGov Direct just after the January 6 coup attempt at the U.S. Capitol building found that a majority of Republicans blamed Joe Biden for what happened and a large share of registered GOP voters—45 percent—said they supported the actions of the mob, compared to 43 percent who didn’t.

Readers are invited to submit No Comment items. Please send original links or clippings with the name and date of publication to editorial@progressive.org or 30 West Mifflin Street, Suite 703, Madison, WI 53703. Submissions cannot be acknowledged or returned.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 9

LETTERS

Saving the Red Wolf Thank you for running Stephen Nash’s article (“Red Alert”) on red wolves in your December/January issue. The failure of the Fish and Wildlife Service to prioritize conservation over the greed of landowners is clear. I hope to see more environmental coverage of this caliber in future issues of The Progressive.

— David Feldmann Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hooray for Higher Ed Thank you for the insightful focus on education in your December/January issue.

Both Eleanor Bader’s “My Students, the Police” and Lexi McMenamin’s “Students on Strike” brought to light important issues in higher education.

Bader’s “First-Person Singular” essay reminds us that there are many benefits to a liberal arts education, even for (or especially for) those who choose to pursue a career in law enforcement. A broad background in the humanities can give police “a better-developed ethical foundation on which to hook their badges,” as Bader notes.

Coupled with McMenamin’s report on student actions nationwide against tuition hikes, the issue reminds us how important it is to keep college affordable.

Students take knowledge from their campuses and into our communities in ways that we cannot always anticipate, but need to support and welcome.

—Linda Falkenstein Madison, Wisconsin

Fair and to the Left As an adult in custody, I am amazed at how many of my fellow prisoners have been radicalized by Fox News. It’s to the point where they stand by Trump and his words or actions no matter how senseless, destructive, or hateful they are.

Thank you for being a “fair and balanced” publication. While it’s no secret that The Progressive leans left, I know you will do for Biden what Fox News was (and still is) afraid to do for Trump: Hold the 10 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

The Secret Scarer “The New Green Scare,” an article by Elizabeth King published in the October/ November 2019 issue of The Progressive, was recently recognized as one of the top twenty-five important but underreported stories of 2019-2020 by Project Censored. It was ranked number eleven among the winners. “[W]hile the Trump Administration’s corporate-friendly policies dramatically endanger the health of our environment, those who take direct action in its defense are increasingly being framed as domestic terrorists,” wrote the project, which has been up and running since 1975. “Environmental protesters often risk incarceration and drawn-out legal battles for charges such as trespassing, sabotage, burglary, and terrorism.”

This story and others are examined in Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2021, a new book published in December.

Thomas and Samuel Alito complain that those who oppose same-sex marriage on the basis of their faith are unfairly called bigots by those who accept it.

If Thomas and Alito had lived a hundred years ago, I’m sure they’d have cenSay No to Compacts sured critics of interracial marriage as bigoted.

“Those against interracial marIn the December/January issue on page 7 you mention the National Popular Vote riages are not bigots,” they’d insist, “are Interstate Compact as a way to get rid of only defending a doctrine of their faith.”

Well, such marriages are legal now . . . the Electoral College (Comment: “The Damage Done, the Job Ahead”). I agree and only the bigoted long for a return to that it is vital to eliminate the Electoral the good old days when piety and reliCollege. However, the Interstate Com- gious fervor reigned supreme. The same pact as a way to get rid of the Electoral is true today with same-sex marriage. It’s College is unconstitutional—the states only the religious bigots who yearn for legal marriages to be exclusively between cannot make pacts with each other.

States can decide to give proportion- a man and a woman.

—David Quintero ate value in determining their ElectorMonrovia, California al College votes. And it is important to know that the votes are counted accurately. That means stopping the use of Abolition Never computer-counted votes—that is secret In the December/January edition, Bill vote counting. Please do not give this Lueders writes in favor of defunding the state pact any publicity. police (Comment: “The Damage Done, the —Judy Alter, director Job Ahead”), calling for the reallocation of Protect California Ballots funding “from one bucket to the other.”

President accountable for his words and actions.

—Toby Mendenhall Snake River Correctional Institution Ontario, Oregon

Victims of Bigotry Re “The Right to Prohibit Marriage” (No Comment, December/January issue): Some bigots are shrewd enough to argue that it is they who are the victims of bigotry. For example, Justices Clarence

Fine. Yet in the same issue (“One Question: How Have the Black Lives Matter Protests Impacted the Prison Abolition Movement?”) Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief at Truthout, says that “cutting police funding isn’t enough,” and calls for the “abolishing” of policing, not just the police.

Mmmm . . . seems like some in the Live Long and Prosper! socialist crowd aren’t being honest. First Bill Lueders: The fine and frightening of all, the dictionary meaning of defundphoto essay by Zach D. Roberts in the ing is to cut all funds, not to reallocate.

December/January issue (“On the Line: Second, I don’t doubt that Schenwar’s Armed and Dangerous”) is yet one more view is shared by many leftists, since I’ve reason I will tell you, as I have told at least seen photos of protesters/rioters with three prior editors (Conniff, Rothschild, placards calling for the abolition of not Knoll) that I will expire before my subjust the police, but prisons! Utopia anyscription to The Progressive does. one?

Keep up the great work!

—Vincent Hamon —Fred Glienna Los Angeles, California South Pasadena, California

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PROGRESSIVE From an article on the sixteenth President, written by journalist, author, and attorney Fred L. Holmes, in the February 1920 issue of La Follete’s Magazine (which became The Progressive in 1929). Two years later, the Lincoln Memorial was completed and dedicated in Washington, D.C.

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f Abraham Lincoln were to return to the United States today, he would quickly identify himself with the great body of progressives.

Looking down through the centuries, he saw the great issues which were to confront the people. No man of the century has had a clearer vision. No man has offered a better solution to these latter day problems.

Reforms always come from the common people— oftimes oppressed—and those who represent them.

The aristocratic and wealthy classes only urge changes which will result in greater opportunities to plunder and pillage the masses. Lincoln spoke for the plain people.

With the cycle sweep of years, men are becoming better acquainted with Lincoln’s homely ideals. Born of the people, sinew of the people, he stands as the truly great representative of progressive popular government. His battle under purgatorial fire against the evils of slavery, his undying devotion to the Union, have so haloed and over-shadowed his other

views that the public mind thinks of but one side of the principles enunciated by the saintly President.

But Lincoln was not a one-sided man. His other views on public questions when brought to light, mark him as truly a progressive leader today as he was in 1861.

Were Lincoln a leader in the political life of the United States today, he would stand for: The rights of labor.

The union of working people.

The right of labor to strike for better conditions.

For one day’s rest in seven.

For freedom of speech.

Against the spirit of mob rule.

For the rule of the people; the supremacy of ballots not bullets.

For amnesty of political prisoners.

For woman’s suffrage.

For broader education.

For good roads.

For the curbing of corporate rule.

These Lincolnian doctrines may still be found enunciated by all progressive platforms. Abraham Lincoln was outspoken in his views. He was no charlatan in political life. He voiced these principles, denounced slavery and disunion because they were right and eternal, not because they were popular.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 11

O N T H E L I N E by DAV I D B ACO N

FARMWORK IN THE ERA OF COVID-19 The infection rate from the coronavirus is much higher in the rural counties of California than it is in the cities. In Tulare County, more than 40,000 people had contracted the virus as of mid-January, and more than 500 people had died.

Yet throughout last summer and fall, farmworkers went into Tulare’s orchards to harvest fruit. These workers are essential, since if they didn’t do this work, the grapes, pluots (a plum and apricot hybrid), and persimmons would rot on the trees.

Supermarket shelves would be bare.

But being essential during the COVID-19 era also means

Teresita Mateo, a farmworker from the Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines, picks table grapes in a field in the San Joaquin Valley, near Poplar, California, on August 11, 2020.

Most farmworkers wear masks or bandanas, which can be hot and uncomfortable in the summer months as temperatures in the Tulare fields get up to 110 degrees.

Still, wearing protection and being uncomfortable—cold in November’s persimmon fields and hot in July’s pluots and August’s grapes—is not really a choice if you have a family to support.

Victor Tabino, also from Ilocos Norte, takes the picked bunches of grapes and puts them into a plastic bag, ready for the supermarket.

Maria Madrigal, a Mexican immigrant, picks persimmons with a crew in a field near Poplar, California, on November 21, 2020.

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that farmworkers are forced to put themselves at risk of infection in the orchards, if they want to pay rent or buy food.

Pedro Rodriguez, another member of the crew, cuts off each persimmon with a shear, placing them carefully in a box strapped to his shoulders.

At the delivery truck, a loader stacks boxes of persimmons, which can’t be filled to the top, or the soft fruit would be crushed.

Carmen, a pluot picker, fills her bag with fruit on July 13, 2020.

Sara Toledo reaches through the branches and leaves for the pluots she intends to pick.

A worker empties her bag of fruit into a delivery bin.

David Bacon is a former union organizer who photographs documentary projects about labor, the global economy, and human rights around the world.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 13

SMART ASS CRIPPLE by MIKE ERVIN

BIDEN’S LOW PRIORITY, OUR HIGH HOPES

W MIKE ERVIN, a writer and disability rights activist in Chicago, writes the blog Smart Ass Cripple at smartasscripple .blogspot.com and writes regularly at Progressive.org.

e’re entering the hashtag #AccesstoJoe on Twitter ADA jump at the chance to score Biden-Harris years, to amplify Biden’s failure and spur cheap points on the anniversary which—considering action. of its signing by singing its praises. how punch drunk we all are from Biden finally released a disabilBut anyway, based on the the last four years—are destined to ity plan on May 28. It was called promises in Biden’s plan, how someday be known as the Golden “The Biden Plan for Full Participa- much do I expect him to deliver Age of Basic Human Decency. tion and Equality for People With for disabled folks?

Things got so bad that the as- Disabilities.” The Hill called the cension of a candidate with basic plan “wide-ranging” and many irst off, I have to say I’m dismoral tenets makes a body buoy- disability activists were pleased turbed by his adamant rejecant with hope for a better future. with the final product. tion of the idea of defunding the However, for the sake of proDoes that make me feel better? police. This isn’t specifically a tecting my fragile heart, I’m trying Well, yes and no. It’s still disturb- disability issue, but it does have hard to keep in touch with reality ing that disability rights was an a major impact on us. and not let my euphoria over the afterthought for the Biden camThere are countless stories of eviction of the squatter who used people with disabilities, especially to occupy the White House inflate psychiatric and cognitive disabilmy expectations of what’s to come. ities, being killed in encounters Democrats are not automatic powith law enforcement. litical allies of disabled folks.

According to The Washington On November 7, after being dePost, between 2014 and 2020, poclared the winner by everyone exlice fatally shot 1,324 people, many cept the squatter and his followers, of whom the police admit were exBiden announced, “We must make periencing a mental health crisis at the promise of the country real for the time. These instances make up everybody—no matter their race, about 25 percent of all fatal police their ethnicity, their faith, their shootings during that period. identity, or their disability.”

In 2019, Stacy Kenny was killed That’s good because, when by police after being pulled over Democrats recite the list of newhile driving in Springfield, Oreglected people whom they assure paign. Again, we were last on the gon. According to the lawsuit filed will no longer be neglected, they list. But at least he did take some by her family, Kenny had a diagnooften forget to include disabled action. And it was far more than sis of schizophrenia. During the folks. Biden put us last but, oh well, just issuing some lame “I love the traffic stop, the suit says, Kenny— we made the list.

Americans with Disabilities Act” who was terrified and unarmed— But a few months earlier, when proclamation on the anniversary didn’t comply with being told to the great coalescence occurred and of the signing of that law. get out of her car. That’s when four Harris and other Democrat presThe annual celebration of the officers decided to shatter the car’s idential candidates dropped their ADA signing every July 26 is just driver and passenger-side wincampaigns and took up with Biden, like Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth- dows, as they tried to drag Kenny I saw it as a dreadful occurrence. day, in the sense that every snake out, beating and tasing her.

At the time, Biden was the only politician that spends the rest of After one of the officers got major Democratic candidate who the year upholding white suprem- into the car and Kenny started hadn’t put out a disability plan. acy crawls out from under their driving off, he shot her five times That said a lot about the impor- slimy rock on MLK Day to declare and killed her. Kenny’s family was tance the Biden campaign gave to their eternal love for him and his paid $4.55 million from the city of disability issues and courting our agenda. Likewise, the same forces Springfield last year as a settlement votes. Activists came up with the that do their best to undermine the for the lawsuit.

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This is a classic example of what defunding the police is all about.

It’s about not always sending police—who are trained to restore “order” by asserting their dominance—to respond to every conflict. Police are not mental health counselors, nor should that be expected of them. In situations like

Biden dismisses defunding the police as a dangerous anarchist slogan, making it much more likely that disabled people will continue to pay with their lives. these, patient deescalation is what’s often required, not brute force.

But Biden dismisses defunding the police as a dangerous anarchist slogan, rather than challenging Americans to grasp what it really means. That makes it much more likely that people like Stacy Kenny will continue to pay with their lives.

In his disability plan, Biden calls for ending the practice of paying disabled workers far less than the minimum wage. That’s good, because this is an abomination.

Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 allows bosses to petition the U.S. Department of Labor to pay a disabled worker less than minimum wage if the employer can prove that the employee is less productive than a nondisabled worker doing the same job.

There’s no limit to how low wages can go (except for, maybe, zero), so there have been many stories of disabled workers making pennies per hour.

Some states have abolished subminimum wages for disabled workers, and Biden says he wants to phase out 14(c). That would be great, but there have been several failed legislative attempts over many years to eliminate the deeply flawed provision. They have all

been beaten back by entities that regularly pay subminimum wages, such as Goodwill Industries.

If Biden intends to finally succeed in eliminating subminimum wages, he’ll have to be adamant and aggressive.

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he most important thing Biden can do for disabled folks is to support policy priorities that keep us out of nursing homes and other oppressive institutions. Take, for example, me.

I need help every day doing all the routine things everyone does, like getting dressed and taking a shower. But I live in a condo with my wife and dog because I receive help doing all of these things from a crew of people I’ve hired to assist me. I could never afford to pay for all this assistance out of my own pocket. But, fortunately, I don’t have to, because the wages of my workers are paid by public funds like Medicaid.

Without this program, Medicaid would probably be paying much more to warehouse me in some stinking nursing home somewhere, with no possibility of parole. I wouldn’t be able to get up, go to bed, or eat what I want, when I want. I couldn’t drink beer.

I couldn’t come and go and receive guests as I please. I’d be flat broke. I sure as hell wouldn’t have a condo, a wife, or a dog.

But I’m lucky. A lot of disabled folks who need the support of programs like these don’t have access to them because they aren’t adequately funded. Federal longterm care funding policy is rigged in favor of the nursing home industry and other forces that profit off of the captivity of disabled folks.

Who would willingly check themselves permanently into a nursing home if they had access to programs like the one that serves me?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted in bright, fluorescent colors the deadliness of this state of captivity. The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic points out that, even though less than 1 percent of the U.S. population resides in long-term care facilities, 38 percent of national deaths from the coronavirus have occurred in these facilities. That’s over a million COVID-19 cases and 126,773 deaths in 29,375 facilities, as of the end of 2020.

Is anyone surprised by this?

Nursing home residents have no control over who enters their living space, so the odds are exponentially greater that, sooner or later, someone will bring in something nasty.

Biden has proposed to do something about this, but not in his disability plan. It appears, instead, in his economic platform, where he says he wants to spend $450 billion over ten years on programs that empower disabled people to choose to receive care in community-based settings. Biden has pledged to provide states with enough money to allow the 800,000 people currently on waiting lists for these services to receive them.

The President has said he shoehorned this into his economic plan because investing in caregiving will create jobs and free up unpaid family caregivers to find work.

But again, this is an injustice that has existed for decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Waiting lists of 800,000 don’t just pop up overnight.

If Biden is to deliver on these or any of the big promises he’s made to disabled folks, he’ll have to do a whole lot more than just make proposals. Does he have it in him?

I don’t know. We’ll see. ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 15

MIDDLE AMERICA by RUTH CONNIFF

HOW WE GOT HERE

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RUTH CONNIFF is editor-at-large for The Progressive and editor-inchief of the state news website the Wisconsin Examiner.

fter the unprecedented crisis at the end of the Trump Administration, which devolved into chaos and violence at the U.S. Capitol, and a second impeachment, Republicans and Democrats alike are faced with stark choices.

For the Republicans, who enabled Trump for four years, right up until the very end, the choice is particularly clear: keep abetting conspiracy theories they know to be false, feeding the paranoia, division, and violence; or clearly and publicly reject Trump and his aggrieved supporters and their preposterous theories that the election, and indeed the country, has been “stolen” from them.

That means more than joining Mitch McConnell’s eleventh-hour declaration that “the United States Senate has a higher calling than an endless spiral of partisan vengeance”—as if McConnell himself had not been the chief architect of partisan divisiveness in the U.S. Senate these past ten years.

The Republicans, as a group, must look at how they have been using racism, hate, white grievance, and every other means they can find to suppress the votes of people of color and hold onto power. True, Trump replaced the GOP dog whistle with a bullhorn, calling on his white supremacist, Confederate-flag-waving supporters to storm the Capitol. But racism, misogyny, and the rigging of elections have been part of the Republican playbook for decades.

Take the nationwide push to “investigate” baseless claims of voter fraud. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, backed away from opposing Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory after

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the insurrectionists broke in. But Representative Tom Tiffany, Johnson continues to assert that another Wisconsin Republican the delusions of tens of thousands who objected to the results of the of Trump supporters that the elec- presidential election, condemned tion was stolen necessitates hear- the violence, but added that both ings on the matter—as if Trump sides need to calm down. “What and his campaign had not lost needs to happen is people on both nearly sixty lawsuits, many in front sides of the aisle, they need to start of Republican-appointed judges, calling this out and make people on so-called election fraud. stop it,” he said.

The disgraced ex-President’s But one side’s supporters were enablers have pivoted from ril- not breaking into the Capitol, ing up the base with lies about a egged on by Trump and his GOP stolen election to sober procla- enablers, carrying plastic handmations about the need to inves- cuffs and firearms, ready to make tigate those lies because people the “traitors” pay. believe them. State commissions In the “both sides,” “truth is are now looking at ways to elimi- in the middle” analysis, everyone nate opportunities for voter fraud agrees that murdering a Capitol in what was, by all official accounts, police officer by bashing in his a completely secure and remark- head with a fire extinguisher and ably trouble-free election. cooking up plans to kidnap, torRepresentative Mike Galla- ture, and execute Democrats is a gher, Republican of Wisconsin, bridge too far. But Republicans are denounced the Capitol break-in. still pushing for “investigations” But days earlier Gallagher, along of the “fraud” and “illegal” voting with six Republican colleagues in that motivated the rioters.

Congress, expressed “outrage” at the “reckless adoption of mail-in he violence at the Capitol on ballots” for the presidential elecJanuary 6 ripped the mask off tion during the pandemic as well the GOP’s more presentable face. as state election officials’ unspeci- All those suppression efforts aimed fied failures to make sure only “le- at people of color in Georgia were gitimate votes” would count. a continuation of Southern segreRepublican state legislators in gationist white-power politics.

Wisconsin have appointed a comIn his floor speech, Senator Ted mission to examine nonexistent Cruz brought home that connecvoter fraud. There is also a bill to tion. Cruz demanded a delay in the switch the method of choosing Electoral College tally and invoked electors. Under Wisconsin Repub- the Congress of 1876, which put an licans’ proposal, instead of assign- election on hold in a corrupt deal ing all ten of the state’s delegates to that also helped end Reconstructhe Electoral College to the winner tion, pulling the last federal troops of the popular vote, each Congres- out of the South and ushering in sional district would choose elec- the Jim Crow era. Cruz issued his tors based on who won—which, call just before the modern-day under the current gerrymandered soldiers of the Lost Cause broke map, would have resulted in a ma- down the door, carrying their jority for Trump. weapons and Confederate flags.

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As the Republicans wander in the wilderness of the post-Trump era, trying to figure out how to accommodate their violent racist base while currying favor with their wealthy establishment sponsors, what will the Democrats do?

The drive to impeach and convict Trump for his seditious incitement of the mob attack on the Capitol is a necessary start. It marks the extraordinary assault on our democracy as unacceptable, demanding serious consequences, and it will hopefully ensure that Trump never runs again. But it is only a bare beginning.

Brushing aside the entire Trump era as some sort of historic aberration will not help us move forward. Trying to “heal” the country by denying the deep roots of white supremacy won’t work.

The Democrats now control the White House and both chambers of Congress for the first time in ten years.

They must show some backbone and push back, not just against the malignant narcissist fired by the voters, but against the whole Republican program that brought him into office. The Democrats must reject the idea that “the truth is in the middle” between the perspective of the violent white racists fed on conspiracy theories and that of people who embrace justice, democracy, and reality.

They need to recognize the assault on the Capitol for what it is— an explosion of simmering hatred deliberately stoked by Republicans that dates back as far as the founding of the United States. Politicians of both parties are in the habit of sweeping this fact under the rug.

“Let me be very clear,” Biden said after the Capitol assault. “The

scenes of chaos at the Capitol do soff compared with 28 percent of not reflect the true America.” white voters.

“This is not who we are,” said It’s time for Democrats to recBiden. “We are the United States ognize and celebrate who they repof America!” he added, tossing in resent and stop leaning toward the a favorite line. “There’s never been “middle”— always with one eye on anything we can’t do, when we do peeling off angry white men and it together.” somehow bringing them back into But brushing aside the entire the fold. No more bashing progresTrump era as some sort of historic sives for daring to support Black aberration will not help us move Lives Matter, Fight for $15, and forward. Trying to “heal” the Medicare for All. No more jovial country by denying the deep roots accommodation of racism and the of white supremacy won’t work. sneering sexism that helped lead It’s offensive to Black and to the plots against House Majority brown people who watched in dis- Leader Nancy Pelosi and Michigan gust as the Capitol police opened Governor Gretchen Whitmer. doors for the looters, snapped selfThe Republicans are hopelessies with them, and allowed them ly lost. They have been aiding and to rampage, unchecked, for hours. abetting a criminal in the White The contrast with the militarized House, spreading his dangerous response to peaceful Black Lives lies, feeding his supporters’ worst Matter protesters, who were met impulses, and hoping not to pay with tear gas and tanks when they a price. Now is the time to make marched in the streets after the them pay. And to deliver on a real murder of George Floyd by Min- progressive vision for the great, dineapolis police, is overwhelming. verse coalition of Americans who are ready for a better future. oving forward, Democrats We need to confront the terriare going to have to develop ble history that brought us to this a better response than “this is not point. Biden’s patriotic boosterism who we are.” notwithstanding, there are many It was Black voters in Geor- things we have not been able to do gia who just handed their party as a country. Among them: ending control of the Senate in a historic racist police violence; recognizing election that represents a major the tremendous economic contrirepudiation of white supremacist butions of undocumented immipolitics in the South. grants who are the backbone of The attack on the Capitol cut many U.S. industries and creating short the celebration of Rapha- a path to citizenship; transitioning el Warnock’s victory as the first to a carbon-free economy before Black U.S. Senator ever elected the planet melts down; expanding from Georgia, and of the power- health-care access to every Ameriful organizing by Stacey Abrams can as a right; reducing our nation’s and LaTosha Brown, who helped grotesque economic inequality; turn out the vote to elect Warnock and making college attainable and and fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff, affordable for everyone.

Georgia’s first Jewish Senator.

Many of these goals are part of Nearly three-quarters of Black the Biden Administration’s rather voters backed Warnock, compared progressive platform. Now is the with 22 percent of whites, and nine time to fight for them—and for out of ten Black voters chose Os- us. ◆

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THE PROGRESSIVE | 17

SMOKING GUN

SAY THEIR NAMES

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n 2020, according to a database managed by The Washington Post, police officers shot and killed exactly 1,000 people in the line of duty, topping each of the previous five years, where the number of these deaths by cop ranged from 961 to 999.

Of these 1,000 people, 432 were white, 226 were Black, 156 were Hispanic, and 186 were “other” or “unknown.” Black people accounted for 23 percent of those killed, although they make up only about 13 percent of the population.

Overall, 376 of the people shot and killed by police between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2020, were unarmed, in-

cluding 128 Black people. Last year, seven years after the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, police shot and killed 13 people who were unarmed and Black.

It is a small subset of the large category of police violence, and it does not include people killed by means other than shooting, like George Floyd on May 25, or cases involving Black people legally licensed to carry a weapon, like Casey Goodson of Ohio, killed with three shots in his back on December 4.

Here are the names of the 13 unarmed Black people shot and killed by the cops last year.

ANDRE MAURICE HILL, forty-seven, shot on December 22 in Columbus, Ohio, by police responding to a nonemergency call while he was holding his cell phone and exiting a garage that he had every right to be in. Officer Adam Coy, who shot Hill and then failed to provide emergency assistance, was fired.

MARCELLIS STINNETTE, nineteen, shot in a car that had begun moving

on October 20, in Waukegan, Illinois. The officer who shot him, Dante Salinas, was terminated for “multiple policy and procedure violations” but has not been charged.

ANTHONY JONES, twenty-four, tased and then shot after exiting his car on

October 12 in Bethel Springs, Tennessee. The incident is still under investigation; no charges have been filed.

JULIAN EDWARD ROOSEVELT LEWIS, sixty, shot in his vehicle on August 7 in Sylvania, Georgia, after being stopped for a broken tail light. Officer Jacob Gordon Thompson has been charged with felony murder and aggravated assault.

ROBERT D’LON HARRIS, thirty-four, shot as a passenger in a stopped car on June 25 in Vinita, Oklahoma. The local district attorney deemed the killing justified.

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MAURICE S. GORDON, twenty-eight, pulled out of his car and shot six times by trooper Randall Wetzel after being stopped for speeding on May 23 in Bass River, New Jersey. No charges were filed; the troopers’ union has sued to block the release of names of officers in similar situations.

SHAUN LEE FUHR, twenty-four, shot while running from police in Seattle,

Washington, on April 29. Fuhr, who had allegedly been beating his girlfriend, was holding their baby at the time. The officer who killed him was not charged.

MYCHAEL JOHNSON, thirty-one, shot on March 20 in Tallahassee, Florida, while allegedly resisting arrest on the charge of car-jacking. The shooting was deemed justified.

BREONNA TAYLOR, twenty-six, shot March 13, during an early-morning raid on her home in Louisville, Kentucky. No one was charged in her killing, but one of the officers involved is suing her boyfriend, who was also present, for “severe trauma, mental anguish, and emotional distress.”

DONNIE SANDERS, forty-seven, shot in Kansas City, Missouri, on March 12, while running from his car after being pulled over by police. The officer, whose name was not released, was not charged. A memorial erected at the place where Sanders died was removed.

BARRY GEDEUS, twenty-seven, shot on March 8 in Fort Lauderdale,

Florida, while fleeing police. No charges have been brought against the officer responsible, Robert Morris, who has had eighty-two use-of-force incidents reviewed since 2006, none of which have led to disciplinary action.

JAQUYN O’NEILL LIGHT, twenty, shot “accidental or in self-defense,” on

January 29 in Graham, North Carolina, after he unintentionally collided with an officer who was entering his home. No charges were filed.

WILLIAM HOWARD GREEN, forty-three, shot on January 27 in Temple Hills,

Maryland, while handcuffed inside a patrol car after being stopped for erratic driving.

The officer responsible, Michael Owen Jr., who is Black, was arrested on multiple charges including second-degree murder. His trial is pending.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 19

o t s d e e N n e d i W hy B

D L O B GO HOLS

BY JOHN NIC

The worst mistake the Democrats could make is to seek the center—again.

ROBERT CARTER

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ven before Joe Biden was sworn in on January 20, many of the President-elect’s Congressional allies showed a willingness to embrace the same cautious approach to governing that had defined Biden’s fifty-year career as a centrist with a marked aversion to going big for economic and racial justice, for peace, or for the planet.

Throughout the fall campaign that culminated in his election, Biden made it a point to explain how he’d beaten the party’s progressive wing in securing the Democratic nomination to take on Donald Trump.

“I’m the guy who ran against the socialists,” he boasted.

Biden’s bid for the presidency was, too frequently, framed around the promise of a return to normalcy.

That was a predictably appealing campaign message after four years of racism, xenophobia, and neo-fascist scheming by a rogue President who would finish his term inciting a mob of supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol. Unfortunately, in the weeks after the campaign finished, the circumspect messaging continued. Indications from a bureaucratic Biden transition team—along with the Congressional leaders who would carry the new President’s agenda in the 20 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

House and Senate—suggested that Democrats were still seeking to manage the status quo rather than embrace fundamental change.

This tepid approach reflects a dangerous misread of the 2020 election results, as Biden begins his presidency with narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Polling data and election results—especially from referendums where progressive policies earned overwhelming support—bolster Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal’s argument that this is the morally, practically, and politically right time to fight for “a progressive agenda that makes a transformative difference in people’s lives.”

Yet caution prevails as the Democratic Party wrestles with whether to push for fundamental change

John Nichols, a contributing writer for The Progressive, writes about politics for The Nation and is associate editor of The Capital Times, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin.

He is the author of The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party (Verso). Find him on Twitter @NicholsUprising.

or beat a retreat toward what passed for “normalcy” They cannot afford to pay the rent. They cannot afford before Donald Trump and COVID-19 exposed the to put food on the table. And they are scared to death vulnerability of the American experiment. that any day now they will get a knock on the door If Biden and Congressional Democrats do not reset from the sheriff evicting them from their homes and their course quickly, a toxic mix of centrist messaging throwing them and their belongings out on the street.” and policy compromises will prove to be a recipe for To address the crisis, Sanders announced that he political disaster. It will cost the party control of the was introducing an amendment to provide every House and Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. working-class adult in the country with a $1,200 direct It will also fail the American people at a time when cash payment, plus $500 for each child. It was not a there is a pressing, desperate need for bold responses radical idea. A close ally of Sanders, California Repreto COVID-19, mass unemployment, the climate crisis, sentative Ro Khanna, had since April been advocating and the unanswered cries for racial justice. for a far bolder proposal to provide a $2,000 monthly The reality of the current crises—not a single crisis payment to every qualifying American over the age but many intersecting ones—make it absolutely clear of sixteen until the pandemic and the economic turthat Biden and the Democrats must learn from the bulence associated with it has passed.

Others on the left of the Democratic Party, particIf Biden and Congressional Democrats do ularly Jayapal, had outlined ambitious U.S. variations not reset their course quickly, a toxic mix of on the programs European countries used to keep workers on the job and businesses afloat. Meanwhile, centrist messaging and policy compromises Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar proposed a will prove to be a recipe for political disaster. moratorium on rent and mortgage payments to prevent evictions, and Michigan Representative Rashida past seventy-five years of Democratic missteps and Tlaib pushed to boost the maximum Supplemental adopt a boldly progressive approach capable of meet- Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit by 15 ing the challenges of the moment and capturing the percent to combat hunger. Sanders simply sought to imagination of a battered and beaten-down American do again what Democrats and Republicans had done electorate. in March.

Regrettably, there are signs that the Democrats As the negotiations on 2020’s final COVID-19 recould make the same mistake—again. lief bill proceeded, however, the plan to provide working Americans with stimulus checks was nowhere to In the waning days of the deeply divided and be found amid the slurry of bailouts for corporations often dysfunctional 116th Congress, top Democrats and benefits for the wealthy. Sanders pushed on, with stared into the face of the future and blinked. an unlikely Republican co-sponsor, Trump-aligned Three weeks before the end of a year that had im- Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a 2024 presidential posed untold pain on a great mass of Americans, the prospect who in January would help lead an attemptnation’s most prominent progressive, Bernie Sanders, ed coup against U.S. democracy. determined to make a last stand for families that were But top Democrats, in full compromise mode, restruggling to get by in the face of the coronavirus pan- fused to go big on payments, eventually settling for demic and the economic misery that extended from it. a stingy $600 payment and a constrained extension Sanders marched onto the floor of the United on unemployment benefits. Then Trump suddenly States Senate on December 10, 2020, and declared: proposed a $2,000 payment, and Democratic leaders, “Today, as a result of the horrific pandemic and eco- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of nomic meltdown, the American working class is hurt- California, and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck ing like they have never hurt before.” He noted that Schumer, Democrat of New York, took up the promore than 3,000 men, women, and children had died posal. from the virus the day before. “In other words,” he In the end, Democrats ended up supporting a comsaid, “more Americans were killed by the coronavirus promise plan for the $600 payments that then-Senyesterday than were killed on 9/11.” ate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of The democratic socialist from Vermont continued: Kentucky, had negotiated.

“The working class of this country is in the worst fiTrump’s motivation was easy to see. An embattled nancial shape since the Great Depression of the 1930s. and embarrassed President pursuing a futile attempt Tens of millions of our fellow citizens have lost their to overturn the presidential election results wanted to jobs. They have lost their incomes. They have lost their do something that was popular and broadly underhealth insurance. They have depleted their life savings. stood as necessary. No mystery there.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 21

But why hadn’t Biden and other Democratic leaders jumped to embrace the Sanders plan? Why hadn’t they used the interregnum between the election and the Inauguration to seize the moral and practical high ground with the boldest possible proposals and an uncompromising commitment to advance them?

Why didn’t Democrats embrace the progressive-populist agenda that polls show the American people want?

The answers to those questions can be found in the absolute determination of those who occupy the upper echelons of the Democratic Party to pull their punches.

Democratic Congressional leaders, Democratic National Committee chairs, consultants, strategists, and fundraisers practice a narrow-gauge politics that seeks to win on the margins rather than to win big. This approach appeals to wealthy campaign donors and corporate interests, which donate to both parties to maintain the neoliberal “consensus” that has held for much of the past forty years.

No one should underestimate the cynical motivations of party leaders who raise massive amounts of money for campaign treasuries that are now measured in the hundreds of millions and low billions.

But there is more to it than that. Wall Street Democrats, who cloak their allegiance to big business in the mild language of centrism, have battled for decades to claim control of the Democratic Party. They are not inclined to give it up to self-declared “outsiders” such as Sanders, nor to an upstart generation of progressives such as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (known as AOC) and the members of an ever-expanding “Squad” that now includes Omar, 22 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Tlaib, Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, Missouri Representative Cori Bush, New York Representative Jamaal Bowman, and a host of other challengers to the status quo.

The chaos in the Republican Party at the close of Trump’s brutal presidency has obscured the fact that the Democratic Party is deeply divided. On one side are the centrist stalwarts, many with their hands on the levers of power and determined to continue with the cautious politics of former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

On the other side are progressives who argue that the party must renew its commitment to the bolder vision of the Four Freedoms and an Economic Bill of Rights that former President Franklin D. Roosevelt amplified when the party gave the county a New Deal, a victory over fascism, and a twelve-year streak of presidential and midterm election wins for Democrats.

When AOC recalls the New Deal Democrats and says, “I want us to be that party again,” she is not proposing a repeat of policies from the 1930s and 1940s.

She is calling for a renewal of the old sense of possibility and the progressive-populist approach that extends from it.

The problem, as AOC explained after the 2020 election, is that the Democratic leadership keeps deferring to its most cautious members in a way that Republicans don’t. The major difference between the GOP and the Democrats, AOC has said, is that Republicans “leverage their right flank to gain policy concessions and generate enthusiasm, while Dems lock their left flank in the basement [because] they think that will make Republicans be nicer to them.”

This is what centrists demand.

AP IMAGES

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Progressive “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (left), Jamaal Bowman (middle), and Cori Bush (right) at a rally outside the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C., on November 19, 2020. The rally’s goal, in the words of the Indigenous Environmental Network, was to push President-elect Joe Biden to “appoint a corporate-free cabinet and an administration staffed with personnel committed to addressing the climate threat.”

Right after the 2020 election, when it became clear that Biden had won but that Democrats might not win in the Senate and have a narrower majority in the House, more-conservative Democrats raced to blame the left for the defeat of centrists running in so-called swing districts.

“We lost members who shouldn’t have lost,” Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA operative, reportedly said during a post-election call with House Democrats. “Don’t ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again,” she added. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a Congressional standpoint, we will get fucking torn apart in 2022.”

Fox News gleefully reported that a Democratic source who listened in on the exchange said numerous members on the call complained that progressive rallying cries cost moderates their seats. “There’s absolutely no accountability from the Speaker,” it quoted one frustrated Democrat as saying. “We should have won big but, you know, the ‘defund the police’ issue, the Green New Deal. Those issues killed our members.

Having everybody walk the plank on qualified immunity with the cops. That just hurt a lot of members.”

This narrative was amplified across major media outlets. Immediately after Biden was declared the winner, former Ohio Governor John Kasich, a “Never Trump” Republican, appeared on CNN to declare: “The best thing that’s happened to Joe Biden is the fact that the United States Senate is either going to be Republican or very close . . . . And the far left can push him as hard as they want. And frankly, the Democrats have to make it clear to the far left that they almost cost him this election.”

That’s nonsense. Yet, the argument persisted, as centrists and “Never Trump” Republicans kept complaining about the “damage” done to Democratic prospects by progressives who advocated for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and major reforms in policing. At the same time, a Fox News exit poll showed 70 percent of Americans favor “changing the health care system so that any American can buy into a government-run health care plan,” 67 percent favor “increasing federal government spending on green and renewable energy,” and 77 percent think racism in policing is a serious problem while 68 percent say the criminal justice system requires major changes—up to and including “a complete overhaul.”

The truth is that mixed signals from Biden and other top Democrats caused far more damage than their advocacy for progressive policies. Throughout 2020, the party focused so much of its messaging on the worthy goal of defeating Trump that it underemphasized—and in some cases distanced itself from— popular ideas long advanced by progressives.

Consider what happened in Florida on November 3. Biden lost a state many thought he would win by more than 370,000 votes. Two Democratic members of the U.S. House were defeated, as were five Democratic incumbents in the state’s lower house.

Yet on the same day, a Florida state initiative backed by unions and progressive groups to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour—a goal advanced by the left in states across the country over the past decade—won by almost 2.3 million votes, gaining support from nearly 61 percent of the electorate.

What explains this disconnect? Florida State Representative Anna Eskamani, a progressive Democrat from Orlando who took over a Republican-held seat in 2018 and was easily re-elected in 2020, noted that Democratic Party leaders failed to openly endorse the minimum-wage amendment, which was unpopular with corporate donors.

“If more Democrats ran with increasing the minimum wage, we would have won more seats,” Eskamani declared on election night. She expressed her frustration with a party “scared to stand with working people because then the corporations that fund @FlaDems and so many candidates will get mad and stop throwing crumbs at us while they throw a LOT more at Republican Party and caucuses. We lose, the people lose—corporations win.”

Eskamani’s assessment was right, as was her observation that “without a doubt the Democratic Party needs to clean house. We keep using the same consultants, and none of the consultants are going to say anything because they are making money.”

Yet Eskamani’s fact-based analysis didn’t get as much attention as Spanberger’s F-bomb-laced outburst. Nor did Jayapal’s observation that “progressive ballot initiatives also won across the country.”

In Colorado, she noted, voters “passed twelve weeks of paid family leave while also rejecting an abortion ban. Four states, red and blue, legalized recreational marijuana. And Arizona raised taxes on the rich to increase funding for public education. Make no mistake: Voters approved a progressive agenda.”

As AOC tweeted, “Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed #MedicareForAll won re-election or is on track to win re-election. Every.

Single. One.”

The pressure on Biden and the Democrats to curb their enthusiasm is immense. It comes from the special interests that fund both parties.

These are people who know that, while a Green New Deal is needed to save the planet, tackling climate change will diminish the fortunes of fossil-fuel THE PROGRESSIVE | 23

conglomerates. They know that, while Medicare for All is more necessary than ever in this COVID-19 moment, genuine health-care reform will undercut insurance- and pharmaceutical-industry profiteering.

They know that, while cutting Pentagon bloat will free up money for human needs, upending the Military-Industrial Complex will cut the cash flow to the defense contractors who write big checks at election time.

So it is that, when Abigail Spanberger warns that a progressive approach will cause Democrats to “get fucking torn apart in 2022,” there are legions of party insiders, donors, consultants, and pundits who are all too ready to amplify that message. As Sanders told me, “The establishment will use any and every reason to attack progressive ideas, even when those ideas are enormously popular.” But how should progressives respond?

Centrists start by saying that progressives must be realistic.

Fair enough. Let’s be realistic. Let’s talk about when Democrats have succeeded and when they have gotten torn apart over the past century.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the last Democratic President who went from strength to strength. He defeated Republican Herbert Hoover in 1932 and went on to be re-elected—as a steadily more progressive candidate—in 1936, 1940, and 1944. His Congressional allies won the midterm elections of 1934, 1938, and 1942.

That perfect record of election victories was broken in 1946, when Republicans took control of both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1930. What happened? When Roosevelt died in April of 1945, he was succeeded by Harry Truman, a favorite of the big-city machine Democrats who deposed FDR’s activist Vice President, Henry Wallace, at the 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

While Wallace had argued that the only way for Democrats to keep winning was to “go down the line” for progressive policies, Truman was more closely aligned with the centrists who sought to reassert themselves after the Roosevelt years. Truman purged progressives from the administration with a vengeance and, by 1946, the Chicago Tribune reported that “the New Dealers are out and the Wall Streeters are in.”

The Truman Administration’s tepid, unfocused initial approach failed to capture the imagination of Americans who wanted, and needed, a new New Deal in the aftermath of the home-front sacrifices that had helped secure the Allied victory in World War II. Democrats lost their governing majority and Republicans, along with Southern segregationist Democrats, 24 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

quickly began to undo the New Deal, starting with the Taft-Hartley Act’s attack on labor rights.

Truman would scramble back to win a plurality of the vote in 1948, but the Democratic Party would never get its groove back.

FDR was the last Democratic President to win more than one election until Bill Clinton, who won the presidency in 1992 with solid Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. Unlike Roosevelt, however, Clinton failed to keep Democratic control of the Congress. Instead of governing as a bold progressive, Clinton worked with Republicans to pass free trade deals, spoke of how the era of big government was over, and upended New Deal social welfare protections and banking regulations. The Democrats lost control of both the House and Senate in 1994 and did not regain full control of Congress until 2006.

Now is the time to write new rules, outline new policies, and dream new dreams.

The Democrats also suffered severe setbacks at the state and local levels, paving the way for Republican gerrymandering schemes following the 2010 Census.

When Obama won the presidency in 2008, he had solid Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

But the centrist approach he took—at the urging of Wall Street–aligned Democrats such as Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel—again undermined the Democratic coalition.

The party lost the House in the 2010 midterm election and the Senate in the 2014 midterm, denying Obama a Congress he could work with for six of his eight years in office.

Democrats cannot afford to repeat this pattern.

Neither can the country. The defeat of Trump has opened up a range of possibilities for Biden and his party.

Now is the time to write new rules, outline new policies, and dream new dreams. The Democratic Party can harness the energy of the moment and deliver the relief needed by tens of millions of Americans.

But Democrats won’t do that as cautious, compromising centrists. They can only do it with a bold progressive agenda that recognizes that health care is a right, that the planet must be saved, and that systemic racism must be eradicated.

As Sanders has said, “Maybe it’s a time for the working class of this country to have a little bit of power in Washington, rather than your billionaire campaign contributors.” ◆

Toward a More Equal

BY SAM PIZZIGATI

The new administration could take plenty of steps to address economic disparity.

How much more equitable can our nation become under President Joe Biden? Maybe more than we might have imagined just a year ago.

“It’s time we address the structural inequalities in our Meanwhile, the national poverty rate has regeconomy that the pandemic has laid bare,” Biden said istered the single largest annual jump in at least as he introduced his economic team on December 1. the past sixty years, almost double the previous The new President comes into office with a well- record hike. spring of public support for taking on plutocratic privEven with Georgia voting to give the Democrats ilege. Many of the nation’s wealthiest people haven’t a functional Senate majority, Biden will not have an just dodged the coronavirus bullet. They’ve vastly in- easy time advancing the bolder planks in his camcreased their personal fortunes during the crisis—and paign platform. No bill that backs his proposal to tax most Americans know it. millionaire capital gains at the same rates as wage In the nine months after COVID-19 shut down income, for instance, has a shot at passing in the normal life, the collective wealth of 651 U.S. billion- 117th Congress. Nor does any move to eliminate the aires soared by more than $1 trillion, a 36 percent “step-up” loophole that lets heirs to grand fortunes leap, according to Americans for Tax Fairness and the pocket every dollar, untaxed, of the unrealized capInstitute for Policy Studies. That $1 trillion boost in ital gains they inherit, as Biden has also advocated. billionaire fortunes would be enough to underwrite But the first President from the First State could $3,000 stimulus checks for every one of America’s still have a big impact on inequality, starting with taxroughly 330 million people. law reform.

Sam Pizzigati, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-edits the website Inequality.org. His latest book is The Case for a Maximum Wage.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 25

Most of the income our wealthiest Americans col- Corporations generate inequality on any number lect—everything from the profits on their wheeling of fronts. They regularly squeeze their workers to enand dealing to the dividends they harvest—faces no hance their own bottom lines. One example: their reautomatic withholding. That allows for income-un- fusal to make the investments necessary to maintain derreporting. In 2020, the Internal Revenue Service safe workplaces. We witnessed that phenomenon will fail to collect an estimated $600 billion in taxes most plainly last spring, when giant corporate meatdue, with the rich “disproportionately responsible” for packers brazenly exposed their workers to deadly this gap, finds a new Tax Notes federal analysis. Un- COVID-19 outbreaks. paid taxes now total more than all the income taxes Biden’s Department of Labor could earmark repaid by the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers. sources for identifying and prosecuting major corUnder a new administration, the IRS could sub- porate safety violators. It could also take the same ject the tax returns of America’s wealthiest people to approach to monitoring federal wage and hour laws more careful scrutiny. Over recent years, the oppo- to prevent the now-chronic wage theft that denies site has happened. The IRS has essentially stopped workers an estimated $17 billion a year, just on minauditing the tax returns filed by extraordinarily imum wage violations alone. wealthy people. In 2015, more than one of every The Trump Administration spent four years undothree taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 mil- ing collective bargaining rules that give unions a fair lion were audited by the IRS; the audit rate in 2018 shot at gaining a fair share of the wealth they create. was under 7 percent.

The Biden Administration needs to come out swingThe audit rates for business partnerships—the ing against all these moves to tilt the deck against source of the Trump family fortune—run even lower. labor’s capacity to organize and mobilize effectively.

Between 2015 and 2018, partnership audit rates fell Biden also has another mighty “big stick” to swing against corporate profiteering: federal government contracting, a $600 billion-a-year economic sector.

Biden has a mighty “big stick” to swing against His administration could deny contracts to compacorporate profiteering: federal government nies that violate worker rights to organize and bargain contracting. collectively. It could also, as Max Moran of the Center by half, to a miniscule 0.2 percent. for Economic and Policy Research’s Revolving Door Audits don’t just identify tax cheats, adds Victor Project has argued, bar any company that outsourcFleischer, a highly regarded tax analyst at the Univer- es jobs or pays less than a $15-per-hour minimum sity of California, Irvine School of Law. Audits also wage “from doing any business at all with the federal help the IRS identify and correct the imprecisions in government.” the tax code that the rich are exploiting to “legally” An even stronger step: The Biden Administration sidestep their full tax burden. could deny contracts to companies that compensate “These sorts of advances,” observes Fleischer, “can their top execs at jaw-dropping multiples of what their only happen by shifting IRS resources to where the typical workers earn. In 1965, major American corpomoney is.” rate CEOs on average received 21 times the pay of typThe new Biden Administration could do that ical workers in their industries. As late as 1989, CEOs shifting. According to the Tax Notes analysis, shift- were pocketing only 61 times typical worker pay. The ing less than $100 billion into the IRS enforcement 2019 average ratio: 320 times. In 2018, according to budget over the next decade would generate up to Institute for Policy Studies research documents, fifty $1.4 trillion in additional tax revenue, “primarily major U.S. CEOs “earned” more than 1,000 times their from high-income individuals.” median-worker pay.

Enforcing existing tax laws could, in short, deliver The United States already denies federal contracts much more than chump change. But it will fall far to companies that discriminate by race or gender in short of achieving the fundamental redistribution their employment practices. We’ve made it clear that of U.S. wealth we saw in the mid-twentieth centu- we don’t want our tax dollars subsidizing racial and ry, when tax rates on income above $200,000 ($2.5 gender inequality. Why should we let our tax dollars million in today’s dollars) ran above 90 percent. The subsidize economic inequality? current top rate sits at just 37 percent.

Upping that rate anytime soon may be legislative- In 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of ly next to impossible, but the Biden Administration Vermont, released a Workplace Democracy Plan that could focus instead on building an economy that included a ban on federal contracts to firms with generates less inequality in the first place.

CEO-worker pay ratios greater than 150 to one, a 26 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

standard that would exclude the nation’s five biggest defense contractors. In his 2020 presidential campaign, Sanders pledged to honor that commitment, via executive order, if elected.

The Biden Administration might find that denying contracts to firms with huge pay divides is too heavy a lift. A more modest step in this direction would require all contract bidders to reveal their CEO-worker pay ratio—only publicly traded companies must currently do so—and give low-ratio companies preferential treatment in the contract-bidding process.

And any move that elevates the importance of curbing the chasm between executive and worker pay would, in turn, help encourage pay-ratio organizing at the grassroots level. In 2018, Portland, Oregon, became the first jurisdiction in the United States to tax corporations with CEO-worker pay ratios over 100:1 at higher rates. This past November, voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly passed a similar measure.

Other Biden Administration executive actions could also help nurture and stoke grassroots energy. The Securities and Exchange Commission has the statutory power to kill the notorious “carried interest” loophole that lets hedge fund and private equity kingpins sidestep billions in taxes. The SEC could also require companies to set up “performance bonds,” notes Graham Steele, the director of Stanford’s Corporations and Society Initiative, which make their executives personally foot the cost of the fines and penalties that government agencies assess for corporate misbehaviors.

Major chunks of the windfalls that corporate execs pocket come from engaging in endless merger games that leave workers without jobs and consumers without choices. A Justice Department and a Federal Trade Commission so inclined, says Sandeep Vaheesan, a former regulations expert at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, could put the kibosh on mergers that only enrich the already rich.

Getting tough on billionaires with steps like these will determine just how much egalitarian progress the Biden Administration ends up achieving. The bolder Biden is, the more pressure he’ll feel from the grassroots to be bolder still.

Back in the New Deal era, Franklin Roosevelt faced constant grassroots pressure. And grassroots activists, in turn, had plenty of allies within the Roosevelt Administration. This inside-outside dynamic gave progressivism a powerful one-two punch throughout the New Deal years.

Today, a similar combo for the Biden years could be in the offing. His economic team includes Bharat Ramamurti, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s lead adviser on economic policy, as deputy director of the National Economic Council, and Joelle Gamble, a senior Roosevelt Institute adviser, as a special assistant to the President for economic policy.

“For almost every role so far,” The Intercept reports, “Biden has chosen someone more progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official under Obama.”

All we need now is that unrelenting outside pressure. ◆

Out with the old and in with the new.

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THE PROGRESSIVE | 27

VACCINATE THIS! Addressing the deep inequalities exposed

by COVID-19 will probably prove more elusive than treating the disease.

BY NATALIE SHURE

After a year of unfathomable bungling on COVID-19 from President Donald Trump and most everyone around him, the Biden Administration’s promise of a competent response to the pandemic is an undeniable relief. Trump’s mishandling of a crisis that has killed, as of press time, more than 400,000 people in the United States included feuding with experts, launching global wild goose chases after quack cures, sowing chaos with regard to messaging and coordination efforts, and modeling risky health behaviors.

Biden, instead, has assembled a competent coro- months if not checked by effective and coordinated navirus task force composed of medical and scientific mitigation measures—something that Trump and his professionals who, he’s assured the nation, he’ll actually allies could hardly have been worse at spearheading. be listening to.

Biden’s COVID-19 Task Force is co-chaired by David The Trump Administration’s embrace of scientifi- Kessler, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration cally discredited strategies like unmitigated “herd im- commissioner who helped introduce the ubiquitous munity” and inconsistent directives on measures like “nutrition facts” labeling system; Marcella Nunez-Smith, mask-wearing and school closures has been answered a professor of medicine and epidemiology and associate

by Biden’s thoughtful 100-day plan, which includes dean for health equity research at Yale School of Mediamped-up testing programs to facilitate safe school cine; and Vivek Murthy, a former U.S. Surgeon General reopenings, an executive order requiring masks on in- who zeroed in on issues like overprescription of opiates terstate transit, and a large-scale rollout of vaccine doses and e-cigarette use among teens while serving in the to be distributed by local communities.

Obama Administration.

This transition of power is especially reassuring conOther task force members include Rick Bright, the sidering the emergence of a more infectious strain of the nation’s former director of the Biomedical Advanced virus, which stands to drive up caseloads in the coming Research and Development Authority who filed a Natalie Shure is a writer and researcher in Boston, Massachusetts.

28 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

whistleblower complaint about the Trump Admin“It’s like Marie Antoinette, you know? ‘Let them istration’s coronavirus response; Zeke Emanuel, a eat $600.’ What the hell are they thinking?” Gregg former Obama Administration health policy advis- Gonsalves, a professor of public health at Yale Unier who helped design the Affordable Care Act; Atul versity, tells The Progessive. “The point is, there’s no Gawande, a writer, author, surgeon at Brigham and support in there for ordinary people, for public health Women’s Hospital, and professor at Harvard School of departments . . . . If you ask people to stay home, you Public Health; Julie Morita, a former Chicago public need to pay them to stay home. You need to give them health commissioner and advocate for equity issues; the resources.”

Jane Hopkins, a Seattle nurse and union activist with Though he argues that Democrats better underService Employees International Union; and Jill Jim, stand the political crisis we’re in, Gonsalves thinks executive director of the Navajo Nation Department there’s still too much timidity when it comes to spendof Health, who focuses on chronic illness and health ing. Even with the pathogen’s spread in check and a disparities among Native Americans. willingness to sign heftier stimulus bills, unless much But even presuming that Biden, with such com- more drastic action is taken, the root causes of so petent assistance, efficiently mitigates the spread of much of the harm wrought in 2020 will remain unCOVID-19 and its variants, it is an entirely different addressed. question whether or not he’ll be capable of grappling with the deep social inequalities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. However many people have “It’s like Marie Antoinette, you know? been infected and made severely ill by the virus, the ‘Let them eat $600.’ What the hell are complicated social experience of living through a they thinking?” pandemic has impacted millions more for reasons no pathogen alone could ever cause.

Even with the Democrats having won the two So-called essential workers expected to keep comGeorgia runoff elections (and with it effective control ing in to work during the pandemic are disproportionof both houses of Congress), the institutional and po- ately low-income, while wealthier college-educated litical constraints obstructing transformative change workers are largely able to work from home, hiding on the order necessary will be difficult to overcome. from the virus as precarious workers deliver packages And, given what we know about his decades of public to their doorsteps. service—largely marked by enthusiastic collaboration with Republicans—would Biden even want to? lthough not all essential workers had particularly high infection rates, certain sectors did: Amazon any Americans were rightfully relieved that 2020 warehouses reported some 20,000 infections. Meatgave way to a new year and new chances to get packing plants became superspreader locations, with the nation back on track. But the enormity of the chal- more than 40,000 infections and at least 200 deaths lenge ahead is daunting. nationwide. Well-resourced health-care settings have Most Americans have either received or are in routinely provided better personal protective equipline to get $600 stimulus checks, the most last year’s ment (PPE) than have providers in poor and rural Republican-controlled Senate was willing to approve. settings.

Additional assistance may be provided by the new adWhite-collar workers tend to have more flexibility ministration, under a new Congress, but the economic and paid leave, permitting them to more easily fit their deficit in which the nation finds itself is vast. work responsibilities around their home lives amid Some eight million Americans slid into poverty the upheaval caused by societal disruption. While between when the virus first reached our shores and the very top strata of Americans are richer than ever this past October. While unemployment has fallen before, organized labor is at its weakest point in nearly from a peak of nearly 15 percent in April, it remains a century. high at just under 7 percent, with entire sectors likely As such, relative levels of worker power have deto remain shuttered for many more months. fined how a given person has fared through the panMillions of newly qualified patients are enrolling demic. Unionized teachers have largely managed to in Medicaid, further stretching state budgets. And keep public schools closed, and unionized health-care millions face potential eviction and unpayable debt, workers were able to win more support, resources, and including student loans. In short, while the worst days safety for themselves and their patients. of COVID-19 may be behind us, a major recession Directives to “stay home” also relegated people could still be imminent. to vastly different spaces, with different levels of risk.

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THE PROGRESSIVE | 29

Home, after all, is where a majority of cases are report- benefits expired in July, poverty rates fell, and the benedly contracted, and where the sick are far more likely efits did not seem to reduce the recipients’ desire to to transmit the virus to others than they are through work. casual community contact.

Moreover, the payments had far-reaching impacts One Boston-area study found a strong correlation on well-being: As Annie Lowrey reported in The Atbetween overcrowded housing and case rates, which lantic, the extra cash helped people pay down utility weren’t found in richer districts with roughly simi- and credit card bills, and use the time to focus on their lar density. That’s because substandard housing and own needs. The weekly deposits, Lowrey concluded, multigenerational households—much more common painted a persuasive picture: “An extra $600 a week among poor communities and communities of color— buys freedom from fear.” drive transmission.

It’s language that echoes the words of a President Notably, detention facilities and nursing homes— who surely understood the sentiment: After Franklin each ranking among the riskiest settings in the coun- D. Roosevelt assured a despondent nation that “the try for transmission, severe illness, and death—are only thing we have to fear is fear itself ” during his first also forms of overcrowded housing, made more so inaugural address in 1933, he promised to take action by years of insufficient and poorly allocated funding. to help those struggling during the Great Depression.

Inadequate housing also causes overall health dete- Within a few years, the federal government would rioration—making vulnerable populations sicker to begin its dramatic expansion in the form of the New begin with.

Deal, entrenching robust social insurance programs Race and gender additionally shaped the ways peo- that still form the cornerstone of our welfare state ple have experienced the pandemic, particularly in the today. absence of robust public spending. DisproportionBut despite the New Deal’s legendary status—and ate rates of illness and death have been found among the more recent successes of the CARES Act—these Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations, who are sorts of interventions seem highly unlikely under also more likely to be poor, have comorbidities, and President Biden, who ideologically embraces the lack suitable housing. And while men are more likely austerity politics that made it so easy for a virus to to die of COVID-19, women have suffered a more ravage communities along race and class lines. And significant economic impact and shouldered heavier however welcome it has been to show Trump out the burdens caring for children without the relief of a White House door, Biden continues to tout bipartisan comprehensive public child-care sector. dealmaking, seek compromises, and chart a mostly Finally, and perhaps most obviously, income centrist course. largely determines health itself: resource deprivation In Gonsalves’s opinion, this represents a sorely is stressful and traumatic, which can erode well-be- missed opportunity. He laughs to think back to the ing and make people sick. It’s harder for low-income presidential primaries, and how it felt to gather with people to manage chronic conditions or plan for others in hopes that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Wartheir health long-term, as well as harder to exercise ren could push the country in a new direction, away and access, prepare, and store healthful food. Pov- from its rightwing trajectory. For forty years now, he erty can also exacerbate mental illness, substance explains, the rich have gotten richer; their prosperity use disorders, and self-harm. It can leave people hasn’t trickled down as promised. with fewer social supports and coping mechanisms, “The pandemic basically showed us what our sowhich have proven key for millions of people thrust cial experiments since Reagan have done,” Gonsalves into an unprecedented social experience that’s left reflects. “We were alone against the virus, we were us isolated and grieving. sitting ducks with a weak public health and healthEven though all of our lives have been disrupted care system.” by the coronavirus, it’s infinitely easier to endure with He’s right, and Biden probably won’t reverse the the sort of stability that money can buy. tide. But Gonsalves finds inspiration in the words of poet Paul Monette, who died of complications relating s Congress scrambled in March 2020 to cobble to AIDS in 1995 and called for action to save the lives together a relief bill amid staggering uncertain- of others in his community. ty and job loss, it crammed sizable unemployment “[We] died of the greed of power, because we were benefits into the package. These $600 weekly extra expendable,” Monette said. “Tell yourself: None of this payments proved to be substantial: two-thirds of the ever had to happen. And then go make it stop, with people who received them exceeded their previous whatever breath you have left. Grief is a sword, or it earnings; nearly 20 percent doubled them. Until these is nothing.” ◆

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n a s a e r u s n e o gh t u o n e t o n s i n ide B e o J g n . i t y c c i e l l o E p n g i e r o rent f e g i l l e b s s e l and IES OLAS J.S. DAV NIC NJAMIN AND

BY MEDEA BE

The failure of the United States to respond effectively to a global pandemic is a predictable result of a political and economic system in which the health and other unmet needs of poor, working Americans always take a back seat to militaristic priorities. As Martin Luther King Jr. lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”

On the first day of 2021, the Senate joined the House in voting to override President Donald Trump’s veto of a $740 billion military spending bill to pay for “counterterrorism” wars that rage on despite Trump’s promises to end them. The veto, the first in Trump’s presidency, allows for continued expansion of a war machine that the Trump Administration quietly but explicitly repurposed for a “new” Cold War and arms race against Russia and China.

Like Trump in 2016, nearly all of the 2020 Democratic candidates for President made vague promises to end the nation’s “endless” wars. President Biden was not the most hawkish member of Obama’s Cabinet—that distinction belongs to Hillary Clinton. But the militarized “counterterrorism” policy that Biden explicitly supported is precisely what keeps these conflicts raging.

U.S. “counterterrorism strategy” relies on airstrikes, special operations forces, and the use of proxy forces to

wage bloody wars with a minimum of politically sensitive U.S. casualties. What U.S. military strategists have called a “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” to war keeps these conflicts out-of-sight and out-of-mind of the American public.

Biden opposed Obama’s 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan, but after the surge failed, Obama reverted to the policy that Biden favored to begin with, which became the hallmark of their broader global war policy. In insider circles, this was referred to as “counterterrorism,” as opposed to “counterinsurgency.”

In Afghanistan, that meant abandoning large-scale deployments of U.S. forces and relying on air strikes, drone strikes, and “kill or capture” raids, while recruiting and training Afghan forces to do nearly all the ground fighting.

In the 2011 Libya intervention, the NATO-Arab monarchist coalition used a combination of proxy forces and

Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. She is a member of the writers’ group Collective 20. Nicolas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK, and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, a Progressive favorite book in 2011.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 31

airstrikes. They quietly embedded hundreds of Qatari special operations forces and Western mercenaries with the Libyan rebels to call in NATO airstrikes and train local militias, including Islamist groups with links to Al Qaeda. Ten years later, the forces NATO unleashed are still fighting over the spoils.

While Biden now takes credit for opposing the disastrous intervention in Libya, he was quick to hail its deceptive short-term success and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s gruesome assassination. “NATO got it right,” Biden said in a speech at Plymouth State University in October 2011, on the same day that President Obama announced Gaddafi’s death. “In this case, America spent $2 billion and didn’t lose a single life.” Biden added that this was a prescription for how to “deal with the world” going forward.

W

hile Biden tried to wash his hands of the debacle in Libya, that operation was emblematic of the doctrine of covert and proxy war that he supported. Biden has never disavowed the reliance on inherently indiscriminate airstrikes and drone strikes that is an integral part of that doctrine. In the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, U.S.-led forces dropped more than 118,000 bombs and missiles, reducing cities like Mosul and Raqqa to rubble and killing tens of thousands of civilians.

As Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the Associated Press during the “Shock and Awe” bombardment of Iraq in 2003, “In a war that’s being fought for the benefit of the Iraqi people, you can’t afford to kill any of them. But you can’t drop bombs and not kill people.

There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.”

The same is obviously true for the people of Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and wherever else American bombs keep falling. U.S. massacres have established a norm of crime and impunity that gives license to allies like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to emulate in Gaza, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Both Obama and Trump tried to “pivot” from the failed “global war on terrorism” to what the Trump Administration branded “great power competition,” or a reversion to the Cold War. But the “war on terror” stubbornly refused to exit on cue, as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and related groups spread to new countries and regions. The Islamic State currently occupies a swath of northern Mozambique, and has also taken root in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda affiliates are active across Africa, from Somalia and Kenya in East Africa to eleven countries in North and West Africa.

After nearly twenty years of the “war on terror,” there is a large body of research on what drives people to join these “terrorist” groups. While American poli32 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

ticians wring their hands over the baffling attraction of Islamist Salafi ideology, it turns out that it’s really not that complicated. A report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict, titled “The People’s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict,” found that most fighters are not motivated by religion or ideology as much as by a rational desire to protect themselves, their families, or their communities from violence inflicted by others.

Another study, “Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment” by the United Nations Development Programme, found that the tipping point or final straw that drives more than 70 percent of fighters to join armed groups is the killing or detention of a family member by so-called counterterrorism or security forces. The study exposes the U.S. brand of militarized counterterrorism as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that generates and replenishes an endless pool of “terrorists” as it destroys families, communities, and countries.

For example, the United States formed the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership with eleven Northwest African countries in 2005 and has so far sunk a billion dollars into this effort. In a recent report from Burkina Faso for Vice, Nick Turse cited U.S. government reports that describe how fifteen years of U.S.-led counterterrorism have fueled an explosion of violence across West Africa.

The Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies reported that about 1,000 violent incidents in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in the past year killed nearly 8,000 people and constituted a seven-fold increase in such incidents since 2017.

Héni Nsaibia, a senior researcher at ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), explained to Turse that focusing on Western concepts of “counterterrorism” and embracing a strictly military model has been a major mistake. Ignoring drivers of militancy, such as poverty and lack of social mobility, and failing to alleviate the conditions that foster insurgencies, like widespread human rights abuses by security forces, have caused irreparable harm.

Indeed, The New York Times reports that “counterterrorism” forces in Burkina Faso are killing as many civilians as the “terrorists” they are supposed to be fighting. Similarly, a 2019 U.S. State Department Country Report on Burkina Faso documented allegations of “hundreds of extrajudicial killings of civilians as part of its counterterrorism strategy,” mainly killing members of the Fulani ethnic group.

Souaibou Diallo, the president of a regional association of Muslim scholars, told Turse that these atrocities are the main factor driving Fulani people

to join militant groups. “Eighty percent of those who join terrorist groups told us that it isn’t because they support jihadism, it is because their father or mother or brother was killed by the armed forces,” said Diallo.

“So many people have been killed—assassinated—but there has been no justice.”

T

hroughout the “war on terror,” both sides have used their enemies’ violence to justify their own escalations, fueling a seemingly endless spiral of violence and chaos spreading from country to country and region to region. But the U.S. roots of this chaos run deeper than that. Both Al Qaeda and the Islamic

eed for a truly n t n e rg u e th t n o ve We must confr range of destructi le o h w e th t a k o fresh lo has pursued s te ta S d e it n U e policies th r decades. fo d rl o w e th d n u aro State evolved from groups recruited, trained, armed, and backed by the CIA to overthrow foreign governments: Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Syria since 2011.

If the Biden Administration wants to stop fueling chaos and terrorism, it must radically transform the CIA, whose role in supporting terrorism, spreading chaos, and creating false pretexts for war and hostility has been copiously documented since the 1970s by the Church and Pike Committees, William Blum, Gareth Porter, and other writers.

The United States will never have an objective, depoliticized national intelligence system, or therefore a reality-based, coherent foreign policy, until it exorcises this ghost in the machine. Biden has chosen Avril Haines, who crafted the secret quasi-legal basis for Obama’s drone killings and protected CIA torturers, to be his Director of National Intelligence. Is Haines up to the job of transforming these agencies of violence and chaos into a legitimate, working intelligence system? That seems unlikely, and a coalition of peace and anti-torture groups, including our own group, CODEPINK, oppose her confirmation.

Now that a new administration is in place, Americans must confront the urgent need for a truly fresh look at the whole range of destructive policies that the United States has pursued around the world for decades, and how these failed efforts to project and expand American power misappropriate and squander the resources we need to build a broadly prosperous and healthy society in the United States.

Just as it has taken a nationwide social movement to prioritize Black Lives Matter and stand up to police brutality, it will take the same kind of public outrage and organizing to transform our country’s militarized, coercive relationship with the rest of the world. U.S. wars and sanctions against Black and brown people overseas are driven by the same corrupt interests and the same racism and brutality as the killing and repression on America’s streets. They should therefore be equally unacceptable to Americans, despite the “disguised, quiet, media-free” way these overseas wars are currently being conducted.

Americans should reject harebrained, militarized policies that destroy societies and ruin people’s lives for the sake of unattainable geopolitical ambitions.

Instead of sending U.S. troops to train foreign recruits to kill their own people, we should support local and international efforts to reach out to marginalized communities and provide whatever help they need to live peaceful and prosperous lives, with due respect for the diverse cultures that make up our human family.

But a revitalized peace movement must also defund Trump’s pivot back to the Cold War. Only in the “tail wags dog” world of the Military-Industrial Complex does ending a war require trading it in for an even more expensive and dangerous new model. We must unequivocally reject this false choice between bloody, self-perpetuating “counterterrorism” wars and a suicidal high-tech arms race.

Progressives and peace activists, from Bernie Sanders’s Democratic Convention delegates to CODEPINK members, organized to successfully oppose the then widely expected nomination of Michèle Flournoy, an inveterate war-hawk, as Secretary of Defense. We take inspiration from this success, and we will keep working together to build a powerful peace movement to consistently oppose and neutralize the “unwarranted influence” of the destructive but profitable interests that Flournoy has so shamelessly served throughout her career.

We have real problems to confront in this century—existential problems that can be solved only by genuine international cooperation, from nuclear weapons to climate change to mass extinction. The powerful interests driving endless war and militarism and the diversion of 65 percent of federal discretionary spending to an insatiable, sociopathic war machine will not voluntarily release their grip on our country’s foreign policy or purse strings. But a powerful grassroots peace movement can succeed in challenging the dominance of the Military-Industrial Complex and building the better world we all know is possible. ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 33

How Biden Can Tackle the Climate Crisis Joe Biden has promised to ensure climate justice, but will his administration rise to the challenge?

BY TINA GERHARDT

A first auspicious sign was President Joe Biden’s creation of two new positions: the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, the first climate-focused appointment to the National Security Council, and the first National Climate Adviser, who will coordinate climate policy across the federal government. To the first post, Biden appointed John Kerry, former Secretary of State (2013-2017) and Senator from Massachusetts (1985-2013); and to the second, he appointed Gina McCarthy, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama Administration.

In addition to these two posts, Biden has rounded out his climate team with the following nominations: Jennifer Granholm for Secretary of Energy; Deb Haaland for Secretary of the Interior; Brenda Mallory for chair of the Council on Environmental Quality; and Michael S. Regan for head of the EPA. This team confirms that the administration will focus not only 34 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

on addressing climate change but also on ensuring climate justice.

Even before he was elected, Biden was already moving in this direction. After establishing the Biden-Sanders Climate Task Force, co-chaired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and John Kerry, he agreed to a wave of proposals, including a pledge to power the United States with carbon-free sources by 2035. The task force, which adopted many of the benchmarks of the Green New Deal, reflects Biden’s openness to working with the more progressive lawmakers and representatives from nongovernmental groups.

That said, the work ahead is enormous. The Biden Administration needs to ramp up action to cut emissions from vehicles, power plants, farms, and homes.

According to the EPA, the greenhouse gas emissions for 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, break down as follows: transportation (28 percent), electricity (27 percent), industry (22 percent), commercial and residential (12 percent), and agriculture (10 percent).

If Biden wants to fulfill his pre-election promises to address climate change, action in the following

AP IMAGES

AP IMAGES

With the Biden Administration pledging to take the climate crisis seriously, some grounds for optimism exist.

The Biden Administration has created two new climate posts, appointee for National Climate Adviser, Gina McCarthy (left), and climate envoy appointee former Secretary of State John Kerry (right).

Tina Gerhardt is an environmental journalist and academic. Her writing focuses on climate change, UN climate negotiations, energy policy, and sea level rise. She has been published in Grist, The Nation, The Progressive, Sierra, and Washington Monthly.

areas could facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy while also creating much-needed jobs.

on the East Coast but also in the so-called Heartland, on the West Coast, and cross-country.

Transportation: Not only could Biden undo Trump’s Renewable Energy: Of course, electric vehicles reduce rollback of the Obama Administration’s emissions CO₂ emissions only if the source of the electricity is targets for vehicles, he could also set a target year for carbon-neutral. Retooling the U.S. energy grid away ending the production of diesel- and gasoline-powered from fossil fuels, such as coal and gas (including frackvehicles. Canada, for example, declared in 2017 that, ing), is critical. starting in 2040, vehicles sold in the country should According to the U.S. Energy Information Adminproduce no emissions. In December, Canada’s Min- istration, energy use in 2019, the most recent year for ister of Environment and Climate Change, Jonathan which figures are available, broke down as follows: fossil Wilkinson, suggested a North America–wide ban on fuels, 62.6 percent (natural gas, 38.4 percent; coal, 23.4 new fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Japan announced percent; petroleum, 0.4 percent); nuclear (19.6 percent); recently that it plans to ban the sale of these vehicles and renewables (17.6 percent). Biden’s original plan, the by 2035. The United Kingdom, too, agreed to end the Biden-Sanders Task Force, and the Green New Deal sale of them by 2030. Norway, one of the world’s largest all have framed renewable energy as a job creator and exporters of oil, stated it would shift as early as 2025. stated their commitment to union jobs.

In total, more than a dozen countries have set targets The renewable energy transition would require into end the sale of vehicles powered by fossil fuels. For frastructure, specifically energy grid modernization.

Biden, ambitious targets here would go a long way.

Here, an opportunity for local, community-owned Granholm was involved with the U.S. bailout of the decentralized enterprises could also ensure energy automobile industry in 2008. That this bailout did not justice. A smart power grid could ensure afforddemand a more rigorous transition to electric vehicles able access to electricity. Biden has pledged to build was a missed opportunity. But Granholm’s previous 550,000 new electric vehicle charging stations. Their experience working with the automobile industry could availability could be increased at all public buildings. be a boon, and the transition could provide much-need- The European Union also recently announced plans ed jobs in the U.S. automobile industry. to have one million charging stations by 2025, setting National legislation would be essential to reducing the bar higher. carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. To that end, Representative Mike Levin, Democrat of California, and Environmental Justice: Michael Regan, North CaroliSenator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, introduced na’s environment secretary since 2017, was nominated the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act to the House in May to be head of the Environmental Protection Agency. He 2019, and reintroduced it in October 2020 to the 116th will be, if confirmed, the first African American man Congress. to head the EPA. Even without national legislation, further opporRegan would be in charge of regulating fuel-effitunities for transition exist. For example, all federally ciency standards, emissions from power plants, and owned and operated vehicles and public transportation fossil-fuel projects. Regan brings with him a commitcould be shifted to electric. ment to clean air and clean water, the lack of which disFunding for public transportation could also be proportionately affects people of color and poor people. ramped up dramatically, to make it both more acces- The shift to renewables will reduce many sources of air sible and more affordable. The recent relief package and water pollution. included $45 billion in transportation funding: $16 “While leading the Department of Environmental billion for airlines, $14 billion for transit systems, $10 Quality in North Carolina, Regan rightly pushed masbillion for state highways, $2 billion each for airports sive utility Duke Energy to clean up its toxic coal ash and intercity buses, and $1 billion for Amtrak. Like and fought Trump’s offshore oil drilling plans,” Lisa a food pyramid, this funding should be flipped on Ramsden, Greenpeace senior climate campaigner, tells its head.

The Progressive. “But he has a mixed record on enviAccording to the American Public Transporta- ronmental justice issues in the state, failing to protect tion Association, ridership has increased by 28 per- communities from the health impacts of living near cent since 1995. Public transportation systems could hog farms and approving multiple permits for the carbe overhauled to ensure smooth connections among bon-intensive wood pellet industry. Regan, and the rest trains, subways, and buses. Infrastructure for bicycling of the Biden-Harris Administration, need to pair their and walking could be expanded. For long distances, lofty rhetoric on environmental justice with consistent trains—a Biden favorite—could be supported, not only action.”

THE PROGRESSIVE | 35

Indigenous Rights: Biden’s nomination of Deb HaaMarcia Fudge, nominated as Secretary of Housing land as Secretary of the Interior is historic and it could and Urban Development, could leverage federal power prove pivotal. Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of to ensure that housing at all levels and for all financial Laguna. It is the first time an Indigenous person will income brackets is retooled to be both energy efficient serve in the Cabinet. An Indigenous-led, nationwide and powered by renewable energy. movement urged Biden to appoint Haaland. “[Haaland] will have the power to stand up to the Agriculture: Emissions from agriculture are often corporations who have been influencing the Depart- underestimated and might be as much as three times ment for generations and causing the destruction of higher than the most recent official figure. These emisIndigenous lands,” says Nick Tilsen, president and chief sions are easier to reduce, given that the technologies executive officer of the NDN Collective. “We look for- for doing so already exist. ward to having a representative who has insight into Investing in land-use practices that support susIndigenous issues and priorities, so that LANDBACK tainable farming, soil health, and family farms is key. organizers can uplift our policy solutions and help fuel Shifting from fertilizers and pesticides, which are carchange that benefits all people and the planet.” bon intensive to manufacture, to organic methods is The Department of the Interior stewards 500 mil- important. Livestock is a large contributor to global lion acres, or one fifth of the land in the United States, greenhouse gas emissions, so reducing the methane and 56 million acres of those lands are held in trust for emissions from cows could reduce overall emissions.

Native Americans. The land ranges from endangered A shift in agricultural practices could also ensure unispecies habitats to oil and gas drilling sites. Haaland versal access to fresh and healthful food. could place a moratorium on onshore and offshore In one of his weakest picks, Biden has tapped Tom drilling on public lands, including the Arctic National Vilsack, a well-known supporter of industrial farms, to Wildlife Refuge. be Secretary of Agriculture, a position he also held for eight years under Obama. But Vilsack could encourage Industry: Manufacturing, food processing, mining, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—which also manconstruction offer many opportunities for removing ages the U.S. Forest Service—to boost reforestation. He CO₂ emissions, such as shifting energy sources and could also strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assisensuring the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles. tance Program, run by the USDA, to meet the economic Brenda Mallory has been nominated to head the downturn and food insecurity caused by COVID-19 Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). Previously, (and the previous administration’s handling of it). she served as director of regulatory policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center. The council oversees Leadership: As the first chair of the newly created White House energy and environmental policies across position of National Climate Adviser, Biden picked federal agencies and monitors the environmental im- Gina McCarthy. While she headed the EPA during the pacts of federal infrastructure projects, such as high- Obama Administration, she put forward some of the ways, pipelines, and new buildings. The review process administration’s most ambitious climate policies, inis pivotal to ensuring the protection of public health and cluding the Clean Power Plan and rules to increase the environmental justice. fuel efficiency of vehicles.

“Mallory is now in a position to undo Trump’s gutting of the National Environmental Policy Act, which Most importantly, by centering the climate crisis the CEQ oversees, a move that made it easier for fossil-fuel Biden Administration makes clear it views it not as a infrastructure to get project approval,” says Natalie Me- single issue, narrowly construed, but as a lens through bane, associate director of 350.org. “She has signaled which to view all else. Being mindful of how the climate she will do so, and we expect her to follow through. crisis intersects with other issues—such as defense, edWe will work with her to ensure the administration ucation, foreign policy, health care, housing, and labor, delivers on their climate promises to the most impacted to name a few—will be key to addressing it. communities.”

The Green New Deal exemplifies this approach with a call to provide “all people of the United States with— Commercial and Residential: Energy efficiency in high-quality health care; affordable, safe, and adequate buildings is an often overlooked but crucial way to housing; economic security; and clean water, clean air, reduce CO₂ emissions. Existing commercial and resi- healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.” dential buildings would need to be upgraded, and new The Biden Administration has both the need and the buildings would need to ensure maximum energy and potential to move forward quickly on the climate crisis. water efficiency.

So much depends on how well it does. ◆ 36 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

“I think T h crucial jo e Progressive do e movemen b of reporting on s a t founding s for change. Sin grassroots b c 1909, The y Robert M. LaF e its o for a tru Progressive has llette in e s America. people’s democr tood up this need Independent jour acy in than eve s your support m nalism like ore now r - Mike Ko.” nopacki, Labor Ca rtoonist Please use the enclosed envelope or call 608-257-4626 to make a tax-deductible donation to support The Progressive. Thank you.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 37

TAKING AIM AT GUN VIOLENCE There is much that the new administration can do to lessen the carnage.

BY SHARON JOHNSON

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were elected with the most ambitious gun reform agenda in decades.

In addition to such long-sought goals as requiring universal background checks and banning the manufacture and sale of assault weapons, their plan calls for prohibiting ghost guns (unregistered and untraceable homemade weapons), creating a federal weapons buy-back program, and directing more than $900 million to community-based violence interruption programs.

“Biden’s plan is a strong statement of the importance of support for gun safety at both the federal and state levels,” says New York State Senator Brian Kavanagh, founder and chair of American State Legislators for Gun Violence Prevention, a nonprofit association of more than 200 Democratic and Republican members of legislatures from all fifty states.

But, like previous Democratic administrations, Biden and Harris face uphill battles in winning Congressional approval. The last major federal gun control bill, a ban on assault weapons, passed in 1994 and expired in 2004. Gaining Congressional support may be especially difficult this year, as lawmakers struggle to contain the pandemic and revive the economy.

Despite these challenges, advocates for gun control predict that Biden and Harris’s eighteen-point plan will reduce the nation’s grim toll of gun fatalities.

38 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Sharon Johnson, is a freelance writer based in New York City who contributes frequently to The Progressive.

Many of its proposed strategies and policies, they say, can be implemented by federal administrative agencies or state and local governments.

“It is one of the strongest proposals we have seen in years because it is based on the extensive experience [that] Biden and Harris have had in their earlier careers,” says Robin Lloyd, managing director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit center in San Francisco that tracks gun legislation.

As a Senator in 1993, Biden spearheaded the passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which established the federal background check system. The act has kept at least three million people who are legally prohibited from possessing a gun from obtaining one. But, Lloyd explains in a phone interview, some people with criminal records and other disqualifying conditions have been able to acquire weapons because the checks must be completed in three business days or else the sale automatically goes through.

To close this loophole, Biden intends to propose federal legislation to extend the timetable to ten business days. During his first 100 days as President, he will also order the FBI to prepare an analysis of steps that various federal agencies can take to ensure timely completion.

Executive actions like those recommended by a gun violence task force, which was led by Biden when he served as Vice President, can be very helpful when logjams occur in Congress, Lloyd says. President Barack Obama made extensive use of them when he

couldn’t get Congress to pass legislation after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

“To build on Biden’s experience,” Lloyd explains, the Giffords Law Center worked with groups including the nonprofit Center for American Progress “to come up with a roundup on how best to accomplish more than three dozen ideas for executive actions by the White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other Cabinet agencies.”

Lloyd lauds Harris’s credentials as a California prosecutor and attorney general who supported bans on assault weapons like those used in the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, which killed sixty people and wounded hundreds.

“Senator Kamala Harris has never held back from taking on the gun lobby and fighting for policies that save lives,” said the center’s namesake, former U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona and a gun violence survivor. She called Harris a “fierce, compassionate, and strong leader who is willing to fight for progress.”

Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, commends Biden and Harris for approaching the issue from a public-health perspective.

“This ensures that the role of guns in suicides, domestic violence, and accidental deaths of children in homes where firearms are present will be considered in designing solutions,” says Horwitz in a phone interview. “Although 24,432 Americans died of firearm suicide compared to 13,958 people who died of firearm homicide in 2018, suicides tend to be overlooked.”

Horwitz cites the example of Virginia, which in early 2020 became the nineteenth state to pass a “red flag” law—Washington, D.C., also has one. These laws allow law enforcement and family members to obtain a court order to temporarily remove firearms from loved ones who are suicidal, have expressed thoughts of harming others, have exhibited irrational behavior, or are abusing substances.

“More states may do so in 2021 because the Biden plan provides funds to states that have passed ‘red flag’ laws and directs the Department of Justice to provide technical assistance to states considering such legislation,” Horwitz says.

Besides federal legislation to prohibit individuals convicted of hate crimes from purchasing or owning firearms, the plan calls for $900 million to be spent on community-based, violence-prevention initiatives, which would target forty cities with high homicide rates. Biden cites estimates that more than 12,000 lives could be saved during the eight-year initiative.

Operation Ceasefire, a strategy for educating young people about the dangers of gun violence, has been used in Boston, Oakland, and other cities to reduce gun violence and illegal gun possession. After identifying young people who are at high risk for gun violence, prosecutors, police, and community leaders host meetings where the young people can meet with parents of children who have been killed by guns, crime victims, and formerly incarcerated individuals.

The young people are also offered job training, educational programs, and other support.

Another promising approach: hospital-based gun violence intervention programs, which regard hospitalization for violent injuries as an ideal time to intervene and seek to prevent future harm. Participants are given information on mental health programs, court advocacy, housing, and other services. Case managers follow up for several months, explains Horwitz.

Lawmakers may be more inclined to consider community-based violence prevention programs because the pandemic has devastated the economy, exacerbated poverty, left millions without jobs, and increased other risk factors that cause gun sales to soar, Horwitz says.

Almost 1.7 million guns were sold in the United States in November 2020, a 50 percent increase from November 2019, according to The Trace, a nonprofit online magazine that tracks firearm sales.

In 2020, the FBI conducted 39.7 million firearm background checks, a record high. But these numbers include various checks that did not lead to firearm buys. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, according to spokesperson Mark Oliva, applied a more limited criterion to come up with its own tally of 21.1 million checks in 2020, a 59 percent increase over 2019 and “by far a record” for U.S. gun sales.

Although the pandemic caused many state legislatures to adjourn early in 2020, forty-two bills to curb gun violence were passed in thirteen states and the District of Columbia, the Giffords Law Center reports. That brings the total number of laws passed since the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018 to 179. Measures include laws to combat domestic violence, improve gun safety technology, and eliminate ghost guns, all aspects that are included in the Biden plan.

“New York and four other states have taken the lead in passing legislation that will eliminate ghost guns, which have become a major problem for law enforcement agencies because they cannot be traced,” says Kavanagh, of American State Legislators for Gun Violence Prevention.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 39

Unlike traditional firearms, these homemade weapons are assembled from kits that are easily purchased online or from blueprints for 3D printers.

Criminals, drug traffickers, and gangs use them because they don’t have a serial number or other markings that identify the weapon’s creator, original owner, or first purchaser.

Gun trafficking, which allows guns to move from states with weak gun laws into states with strong laws, will be another priority of state legislatures, Kavanagh says. Studies of guns used in crimes in Chicago, New York, and other cities in states that have strong laws have found that a majority of the firearms were trafficked from other nearby states with weak laws.

Requiring background checks on gun sales can help states identify when one person buys a gun on behalf of someone else, a major method of trafficking.

Jacob D. Charles, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, notes that, if states pass key parts of the Biden plan, it may help secure federal legislation.

“State laws on assault weapons have been held Constitutional, but there may be a challenge if states pass a law stating that an individual must have a permit to carry a gun in public,” Charles says in a phone interview. “The Supreme Court’s decision in the Heller case established a Second Amendment right to use a gun for self-defense in the home in the federal enclave of Washington, D.C., but the Supreme Court has yet to rule conclusively whether openly carrying a gun in public falls within the Second Amendment.”

Traditionally, the gun debate has been controlled by the National Rifle Association, which has favored Republicans in Congress and the states. The NRA’s influence declined in 2020 after prosecutors in New York State and Washington, D.C., announced that they would seek to dissolve the organization because

its top leaders misused a charity fund, redirecting the money for lavish expenditures for themselves. In mid-January, the group filed for bankrupcy protection and announced plans to re-incorporate in Texas.

In 2020, the group spent $23 million on federal races, less than half its record-setting 2016 total, when it helped Donald Trump and other Republicans get elected.

“The NRA will continue to be a powerful lobby in Washington, D.C., and state capitals in 2021 because people who support gun rights are deeply committed to the cause,” Charles predicts. “Members who leave will join groups like Gun Owners of America and the National Association for Gun Rights that have increased in size and influence” under Trump.

To meet the challenge, gun-safety organizations are seeking to ensure that gun safety will be front and center during the Biden Administration. In December and January, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence sponsored a series of virtual events about data-driven solutions to gun suicides and other aspects of the Biden-Harris plan.

The Giffords Law Center and the Brady Campaign filed an amicus brief in December in support of a lawsuit brought by four cities and represented by Everytown for Gun Safety in federal court to compel the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to regulate the parts used to make ghost guns as firearms under the federal Gun Control Act. The lawsuit accuses the agency of “violating federal law and refusing to take action to protect the public” by failing to address “the unique threat posed by ghost guns.”

“This case is about keeping guns out of the hands of individuals with dangerous histories,” the complaint says. Maybe, under new federal leadership, this is something that could happen. ◆

Attacking Gun Violence on Many Fronts To decrease daily acts of gun violence as well as mass shootings, President Joe Biden’s plan, as outlined during his campaign, includes some bold proposals: Hold gun manufacturers accountable. Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects gun manufacturers from being civilly liable for their products.

Reduce the stockpiling of weapons. Restrict the number of firearms an individual may purchase to one per month.

Close the “fugitive from justice” loophole. Restore the records of almost 500,000 fugitives from justice who

40 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

were purposely deleted from the background check system. Biden would also seek to ensure that people facing arrest warrants are prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms.

Study the problem. Establish a new task force to explore the connection between mass shootings, online harassment, extremism, and violence against women.

Increase accountability. Enact legislation to hold adults criminally and civilly liable for directly or negligently giving a minor access to a firearm. And require firearms owners to inform law enforcement if their weapon is lost or stolen.

—Sharon Johnson

ONE QUESTION

Q: How Should Biden Address Racial Injustice?

NADIA E. BROWN

Associate professor of Political Science and African American Studies at Purdue University The Biden-Harris Administration owes a large part of their victory to Black womxn who overwhelmingly voted for them and mobilized others to do the same. Therefore, the administration should prioritize the policy concerns of Black womxn, and acknowledge that Black womxn and girls view racial justice as a set of human rights that affirms their lived experiences and challenges the structures that marginalize them.

Racial justice can only happen when community policing and defunding the police as we know it occur. This means justice for Breonna Taylor, who was denied dignity and honor when a grand jury refused to indict her killers. It means passing Medicare for All, along with other policies that keep Black womxn and our families healthy.

Black womxn should also have a healthy environment that is free of environmental racism. Passing the Green New Deal is essential. Lastly, Black womxn require financial opportunities and stability. The minimum wage needs to be raised.

These four policy prescriptions each fall under the umbrella of racial justice for Black womxn, who require more than a single axis approach to fixing race-based inequality.

KEVIN POWELL

U.S. civil and human rights activist and author of a new book, When We Free the World, about the present and future of the United States of America President Joe Biden needs to start with a national conversation on race and racism in America. Not just race, but the system of racism. In this country’s history, there have only been a couple of occasions where racism has even been discussed seriously, with an eye toward solutions: Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, and now in this era of Black Lives Matter.

Clearly, Black lives, Latinx lives, Asian lives, Native American lives, Arab lives, the lives of people of color, do not truly matter to many.

And, clearly, when you look at everything from COVID-19 disparities, to economic and educational opportunities, to the prison-industrial complex, to how police treated BLM protesters in Washington, D.C. (versus how they treated Trump loyalists), white supremacy and white privilege remain the norm in the United States.

So to me, before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can do anything else, a real and sustained conversation needs to be started on race and racism. And it should run throughout his term in office, because anything else would just be Band-Aids to the horrific cancer that is racism in America.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 41

A Chance for New Beginnings What Joe Biden could do to bring humanity and good sense to U.S. immigration policy.

BY JAMES GOODMAN

Stopping construction of the border wall, as President Joe Biden has promised, would be a step toward changing the mindset that treats immigrants as criminals. But it would only be a start.

James Goodman is a freelance writer based in Rochester, New York.

“The problem is not the folks who come from Alianza Comunitaria, a grassroots group, to alert other countries,” says immigrant rights activist Lil- the public to Border Patrol checkpoints that instill ian Serrano. “The problem is that, as a country, we fear in immigrant communities. are not treating them with dignity and humanity.”

Ending these checkpoints has not been part of Serrano, thirty, was born in the United States but Biden’s immigration policy reform agenda. But Serrano, spent most of her childhood in Tijuana because her chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium parents, who are from Mexico, did not want her to and co-chair of the Southern Border Communities face the same discrimination her father experienced Coalition, is urging him to do so, sending an important as a student in Los Angeles. In 2009, she started message on the need to demilitarize the border.

42 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Facing Page: Migrants on the Mexican side of the border wall in Nogales showing solidarity with activists on the U.S. side at a December 2, 2020, #SaveAsylum coalition protest. Bottom right: An asylum seeker from Honduras speaks at the protest. All photos courtesy of the Kino Border Initiative.

“We need to dismantle the structures that were established after 9/11. We are framing the issue of immigration and immigrant rights based on Homeland Security.”

Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director, Project South

Ernesto, an asylum seeker from Honduras who asked that his last name not be used to protect his safety, learned how hostile the border has become this past August. In a recent telephone interview, he tells how he fled his small town in Honduras after repeated threats from local police who objected to his efforts to expose government corruption.

But as soon as Ernesto crossed the border from Mexico into Arizona near Nogales last August, he was detained by Border Patrol agents. Within four hours, Ernesto was returned to Mexico. He is now back in Honduras, living in fear.

“They didn’t review my case,” says Ernesto, thirty-seven, a victim of Donald Trump’s March 2020 border closures. With the exception of unaccompanied minors, asylum seekers are being summarily rejected­— without judicial review—while “essential” commercial vehicles cross unimpeded.

Biden has called for an end to Trump’s draconian immigration policies, but some of the changes will be on a slower track. Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser, told the Spanish wire service EFE that the border will not be suddenly fully open.

And that statement only adds to the skepticism that already exists.

“He’s making a lot of promises. I’ll wait and see what he actually makes happen,” says Victor, a leader of Alianza Agrícola, a group of undocumented farmworkers in western New York.

Victor, who like other undocumented immigrants quoted in this story asked that his last name not be used, for fear of deportation, continues to work seventy-nine hours a week on a dairy farm, where he begins milking cows at four in the morning. He remains reluctant to venture into the community until he has legal status. “We will always have fear,” says Victor.

“No President will be able to protect us without a law.”

Schoenholtz, who co-directs the Center for Applied Legal Studies, a clinic in which students represent refugees seeking asylum, says the new regulations make it highly unlikely that Central Americans can pass the initial screening to determine if they have a “credible fear” of persecution. They would typically be disqualified from asylum if they had traveled through Mexico without seeking asylum there first.

This provision is repeated in another regulation recently finalized.

Immigrant activists have filed at least three lawsuits challenging these regulations, which also strictly limit what qualifies as persecution and allow immigration judges to dismiss cases without a hearing.

“Have they ended eligibility for most asylum seekers?” Schoenholtz asks. “Yes.” Team Biden must not only seek to repeal these regulations—a lengthy administrative process—but also join in the court challenges.

On January 8—three days before the new regulations were to take effect—a federal judge issued a nationwide preliminary injunction stopping them from being implemented.

Beyond simply reversing Trump, Biden must recast immigration more broadly. “We need to dismantle the structures that were established after 9/11,” says Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, an Atlanta-based social justice organization. “We are framing the issue of immigration and immigrant rights based on Homeland Security.”

Consider that the budget for Customs and Border Protection ballooned from $6.3 billion in fiscal year 2005 to $17.4 billion this past fiscal year, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot up from $3.1 to $8.4 billion, according to the Migration Policy Institute. What’s more, Congress approved roughly the same spending levels for fiscal year 2021.

High on Biden’s immigration agenda was ending Immigration policy in the United States has long Trump’s attempt to dismantle Deferred Action for been shaped by racism and xenophobia—trends that Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which has provided Trump took to a new low, with an unprecedented as- protection from deportation to almost 650,000 imsault on immigration. His more than 400 anti-immi- migrants. The “Muslim ban,” which restricts visas grant executive orders have left Biden with a tangled for thirteen nations, many predominantly Muslim, mess to undo. This includes a sweeping executive was also on Biden’s rescind list. And so was Trump’s action finalized in December that took a final shot expanded definition of “public charge”—a provision at the asylum system in more than 400 pages of new in immigration law denying permanent residency to regulations. people who have received public assistance.

Andrew Schoenholtz, a professor at Georgetown Biden has also promised less reliance on detention Law and a co-author of the forthcoming book The and an end to workplace raids. And he says he’ll inEnd of Asylum, sums up the Trump Administration’s troduce legislation to create a roadmap to citizenship thinking: “Hey, let’s create a high bar and that will for the nearly eleven million undocumented people eliminate most of these people because most of the now living in the United States. people do not come with evidence—notes from whoBut for any of this to happen, there needs to be ever is persecuting them.” a strong push from progressives. “They are going to THE PROGRESSIVE | 43

Mr. Biden, Tear Down This Wall

And while the wall construction goes back to the 1990s, Trump made it into a political prop and used existing laws in unprecedented ways, leaving what Southern Border Communities Coalition Director Vicki Gaubeca describes as a “monument to racism.” One dangerous weapon he used—and which must be taken off the books—is the REAL ID Act of 2005, which gives the Secretary of Homeland Security authority to waive all and any environmental protections.

“Essentially, all of the most important environmental and cultural resources protection laws have been brushed aside to make way for this project,” says Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity. Jordahl has documented with photos and videos the slicing of mountains, the bulldozing of hundreds if not thousands of saguaro cactuses, the destruction of habitat for wildlife—including endangered species—and a total disregard for the sacred lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation.

“Many of the sites have been desecrated, blasted, and destroyed,” Jordahl says.

LAIKEN JORDAHL

THE “GREAT WALL” that Donald Trump promised he would build, and Mexico would pay for, has taken a deadly toll on humans and the environment. Desperate asylum seekers have been forced to take more precarious routes. The remains of more than 600 people were found in Arizona desert terrain during Trump’s tenure, with the highest number ever recorded—227—being in 2020, according to Humane Borders, a nonprofit that tracks desert deaths.

Border wall construction creeps up Monument Hill, sacred site to the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, where remains have been laid to rest.

This same “build-at-any-cost” mindset prompted the Trump Administration to sue landowners—especially in Texas—who refuse to give up their land for wall construction. Since 2017, the government has filed 193 such lawsuits in Texas, three-fourths just in the past year, according to a December 23 report by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica.

“Biden should cancel the contracts. He should return the land to the owners,” border wall expert Scott Nicol tells The Progressive. Nicol, co-author of an ACLU report on the history of the wall, says Biden must be held to his commitment that there “will not be another foot of wall constructed” on his watch. If Biden sticks to his promise, taxpayers would save about $2.6 billion of the $15 billion Trump budgeted for wall construction and another $1.4 billion budgeted for the wall in the new fiscal year.

—James Goodman

have to make as much use of their pulpit as the Trump for the Kino Border Initiative, which operates in both Administration did in doing the harm,” says Jennifer Nogales, Mexico, and across the border in Nogales, Piper, program director for the American Friends Arizona.

Service Committee in Colorado.

The group helped Ernesto, the Honduran asylum Clearly, a return to pre-Trump days won’t suffice. seeker rejected by Border Patrol agents.

After all, more than three million deportations occurred when Biden was Vice President. And while Ernesto came to Kino with head wounds—inAlejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s choice to head Home- flicted, he says, by Mexican police after he was reland Security, wants the United States to be a “country turned by Border Patrol. Police in Mexico hounded of welcome,” he, too, can’t merely revert to the prac- him because he had filed a complaint about a Mextices in place when he held high-ranking Homeland ican migration station being involved in the prostiSecurity positions under President Barack Obama. tution of migrant women.

“A lot of the fear and racism that we see toward The border initiative, which is part of the #SaveAsymigrants started to ramp up in the 1990s, with this lum coalition, had asked Homeland Security to look policy of prevention through deterrence,” says Tracey into how Ernesto’s attempt at asylum was handled.

Horan, associate director of education and advocacy Homeland Security responded by saying the com44 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

plaint was registered in its database but no further action would be taken. Coalition members have protested the mistreatment of asylum seekers.

On the legislative front, an important bill, New Way Forward, will be reintroduced in the 117th Congress to take immigration out of the grip of criminal law. After all, it should not be a crime to seek safe haven in the United States.

First introduced this past Congress, New Way’s backers include Democratic Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Karen Bass of California, and Jesús García of Illinois. These and other representatives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also produced a Roadmap to Freedom Resolution setting forth a progressive vision on immigration.

A big problem is that undocumented immigrants charged with a crime or other violation, no matter how minor, are not only punished in the criminal justice system but also turned over to ICE for deportation.

Among other things, New Way Forward would: • • • •

Repeal federal laws that criminalize unauthorized entry or re-entry into the United States.

End mandatory immigration detention and mandatory deportation.

Restore judicial discretion, so that immigration judges can consider individual circumstances.

Phase out for-profit prisons and the use of county jails during immigrant deportation proceedings.

As of last May, more than 70 percent of ICE’s detained immigrants were in privately run prisons.

“The system does not recognize us as human beings [but] as commodities,” says Donald Anthonyson, director of Families for Freedom, the New York City– based group led by people directly affected by the detention system.

In 2004, Anthonyson found himself in a deportation proceeding for a 1986 misdemeanor conviction.

His court challenge to deportation restored his permanent residency status. The sixty-one-year-old Anthonyson went on to lead this group, which provides an important pipeline for detainees exposing abuses.

Biden calls for ending for-profit detention centers and long-term detention, as well as a greater use of alternatives. Now is the prime time to do that—and much more.

The ICE detention population has risen from a daily average of 6,785 in 1994 to about 54,000 in June of 2019. By early January, the detainee population had plummeted to about 16,000, largely as a result of Trump’s closing the borders last March and continued deportations.

Still, the ICE detention budget agreed to by Congress for this fiscal year provides funding for 34,000 detainees, according to Detention Watch Network.

“People should be able to go through their immigration cases with their loved ones, in their community, not behind bars,” says Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy manager for this network.

An example of unnecessary detention—and possible deportation—is Abigail Hernandez, twenty-four, now completing her third year of ICE detention in upstate New York.

In February 2018, when Hernandez was twenty-one, she made a big mistake. She posted a message on the Facebook page of the Rochester high school she had attended. It said: “I’m coming tomorrow morning and I’m going to shoot all of ya bitches.”

She did not pose a genuine threat. The local DA’s office let her plead guilty to third-degree falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor. County Court Judge Vincent Dinolfo, in delivering his sentence of three years of probation, said he hoped the resolution of this matter would help her immigration case.

“I hope it doesn’t cost you your place here among us, but we have no control of that,” the judge said.

But it has. Hernandez was snatched up by ICE agents from a jail on the outskirts of Rochester, New York, as she was about to be released in her criminal case, and taken to an ICE detention facility about forty miles away. She has been in ICE custody ever since. Now she is on her last leg of appeals. Because of intellectual disabilities, Hernandez could be especially vulnerable if deported to Mexico, which she left at the age of four.

Activists have rallied behind Hernandez and given her a support system. That would be lost if she were deported to Mexico. The Biden Administration should not allow such cruel detentions and deportations.

“The system does not recognize us as human beings [but] as commodities.”

Donald Anthonyson, director, Families for Freedom

Living in the shadows, as immigrants to the United States have been forced to do, has taken its toll in a variety of ways, all made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some undocumented immigrants have been reluctant to seek medical care after getting sick with COVID-19. Piper, the AFSC director in Colorado, tells how a longtime permanent resident was too scared to apply for benefits such as food stamps that she qualified for and needed. In Mississippi, Juana and her husband, Freddy, who are undocumented and from Mexico, both lost their jobs for about three months last year because of the pandemic. Nevertheless, they didn’t apply for the food stamps their three U.S.-born children could have received.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 45

Trump’s 2018 “public charge” rule created many “climate-displaced person”—at least 50,000 of whom more reasons to deny permanent residency for those would be allowed into the United States each year. immigrants who might need public assistance. But, As a candidate, Biden floated “a comprehensive Juana says, “Even if President Biden repeals the public four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address faccharge, I’d still have concerns.” tors driving migration from Central America.” He Victor, the western New York dairy farm worker must also consider how U.S. foreign policy and corand advocate, helps support his wife and three chil- porations have destabilized Central American nations, dren in Mexico by working long hours. He has not exploited natural resources, and contributed to cliseen his family in sixteen years. “We are working to mate change. support this country but don’t have any federal supJohn Walkey of the Massachusetts-based Greenport,” says Victor, forty-seven.

Roots environmental organization raised this issue Besides doing essential work, undocumented at a recent webinar about climate and migration conworkers contribute $11.7 billion a year in state and vened by Lawyers for Civil Rights. local taxes, according to a 2017 estimate by the Insti“It’s more about the United States accepting respontute on Taxation and Economic Policy. sibility for its hand, along with the global Washington In rethinking immigration, Biden must also con- consensus, about how resources have been used and sider how climate change has become a growing factor abused in the Global South,” said Walkey. “There is a in driving migrants from their homelands. Legislation big push to look out and receive the folks in need but introduced last Congress would amend the Immigra- there should also be a moment of reflection and how tion and Nationality Act to include the category of are we a part of that.” ◆

Complaints Allege Detention Abuse C.A., THE INITIALS OF an asylum seeker from the African nation of Cameroon, came to the United States, in search of safe haven. Instead, since he arrived at a port of entry on the Southern border in November 2019, he has only experienced detention.

“I never thought an immigrant could be kept in jail,” said C.A. in a recent telephone interview with The Progressive from the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi.

C.A., like the seven other Cameroonians in a complaint filed this past October by immigrant rights groups with the Department of Homeland Security, is identified by only his initials, for fear of repercussions in his homeland.

The month before this grievance was filed, the complaint says, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and security officers employed by the private prison company CoreCivic beat the Cameroonians in an attempt to force them to sign travel documents. If a detainee refused to sign, his thumbprint was forcibly taken as a signature.

C.A, twenty-seven, says ICE and security officers were so intent on getting his thumbprint that they broke three of his fingers and physically abused him, kneeling on his body. He was pepper sprayed as well.

Another of the detainees, B.J., tells The Progressive that he felt like security officers were trying to strangle him as they tried to get his fingerprint. He has no

46 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

doubt that being deported back to Cameroon could be deadly. Military police, he says, killed his cousin in B.J.’s house, in a case of mistaken identity.

The conflict in Cameroon stems from tensions between the English-speaking and the ruling French-speaking factions. But ICE has continued deportations, even after the Trump Administration admitted in October 2019 that Cameroonian security forces there committed “persistent human rights violations.”

On November 5, the immigrant rights groups filed a second complaint, which included accounts of abuse from Cameroonian detainees at a facility in Louisiana. The complaint tells of “the growing number of individuals reporting similar violence and coercion in the forced signing of their deportation documents within the New Orleans ICE office jurisdiction.”

John Sharby Guevara, an immigration lawyer who represents C.A. and B.J. at the Mississippi facility, as well as another Cameroonian recently released for health reasons, has been trying to reopen their deportation cases. He has succeeded in getting C.A. into an asylum proceeding.

The common threat in these cases, says Sharby Guevara, is “law enforcement, albeit federal law enforcement, using unnecessary force against people of color.”

—James Goodman

MARCY MILLER

Shelter from the Storm

Heidi Breaux helps her daughters with their homework in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

How the new administration can tackle the nation’s housing crisis.

BY MARISA ENDICOTT

Heidi Breaux didn’t want to send her two daughters back to school. Her eldest, who is thirteen, has asthma, putting her at greater risk of getting sick from COVID-19. But, with no childcare and facing eviction, Breaux had no choice but to return to work.

Marisa Endicott is a freelance reporter and investigator based in Oakland, California.

“I’m stuck because I should keep my kids home for the safety of my child, but for me to be able to pay bills and make money, I have to work,” Breaux tells The Progressive. “It’s scary because every three days you’re getting a text message or a letter from the school telling you a teacher got exposed to COVID-19 or somebody tested positive. What if my child catches it because I sent her to school?”

Last spring, Breaux, a thirty-five-year-old single mother, was working two jobs: entering data at the Louisiana Department of Revenue and clerking at a local grocery store. She worked 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Monday through Friday but made well over enough to cover the $750-a-month rent for her family’s two-bedroom apartment in East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana.

But Breaux, fearing the risk of exposing her daughter, quit the grocery store job at the end of May. A month later, after her babysitter got COVID-19, Breaux was forced to quit her second job. The unemployment she received was nowhere near enough to cover her costs. Eventually, she found a job as a

custodian at a nonprofit ministry making $10 an hour.

But by then, she’d fallen behind on rent.

“I’m paying as I can, but I’m playing catch-up with everybody,” Breaux says. “I’m behind on my car note, my electric bill—everything is behind.” Even with the temporary eviction moratorium established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Breaux says she’s being threatened with losing her apartment.

“I try not to let my kids know,” she says. “I don’t want them knowing anything of what we’re going through. I’m over $4,600 in the hole with my landlord, including all the late fees and everything else they added in. There’s really no way. I don’t know how I’m going to do it.”

Renters across the nation, who account for an increasing share of the population in recent years, are in similar situations. In August, the Aspen Institute reported that thirty to forty million Americans are at risk of being evicted. By late October, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 16 percent of tenants were behind on rent, and half of tenants had THE PROGRESSIVE | 47

less than full confidence in their ability to pay the next month’s rent on time. Economists estimate that the amount of back rent owed throughout the nation could already top $70 billion.

This is a problem for both renters and landlords, especially mom-and-pop operations. An October survey found that more than a third of landlords did not receive full rent payments from the month before.

T

Real estate prices and incomes have not kept pace with one another.

PRIYA JAYACHANDRAN

he United States has been struggling to keep its residents stably housed since long before the advent of COVID-19. Urban, suburban, and rural communities alike are suffering from a lack of affordable housing.

In 2019, nearly half of all renters were cost-burdened, meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing, and almost a quarter spent more than 50 percent. This lack of affordability has fueled evictions—3.7 million are filed every year— and exacerbated a homelessness crisis in which more than 500,000 people are homeless on any given night.

“Real estate prices and incomes have not kept pace with one another,” says Priya Jayachandran, who previously served at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under President Barack Obama and is now president of the National Housing Trust, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing development and policy. “You’ve had—just like you’ve seen with COVID-19—some people doing really well and others falling further and further behind.”

At the same time, Jayachandran adds, the federal government’s investment in housing has stayed “relatively flat or gone down as a percentage of GDP over the last thirty years.”

Indeed, three out of four low-income renters who qualify for federal rental assistance don’t get it because of budget constraints. Meanwhile, the United States is short millions of homes, and the situation is far worse for those who earn the least. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, there are only thirty-six affordable and available rental homes.

The good news is that housing has finally started to garner the national attention it has long deserved, becoming a top priority for voters and, as a consequence, politicians. Every major candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries released a housing plan, and the topic came up regularly on the campaign trail and debate stages.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly committed to making housing a priority, and Vice President Kamala Harris worked to tackle the issue as a California Senator and attorney general.

And while Biden’s pick of Representative Marcia

48 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, to lead HUD has alarmed some housing advocates, given her lack of experience in the field, others are comforted by her commitment to racial justice and poverty eradication.

Overall, Biden’s housing platform reveals a progressive vision that echoes much of what housing advocates have been calling for, including its declaration that “housing should be a right, not a privilege.”

This concept—that housing is as essential to life as food or education—has not been a key part of federal policy since President Franklin D. Roosevelt included the “right of every family to a decent home” as part of an “economic bill of rights” in 1944. Housing justice advocates and grassroots campaigns, led in large part by people of color, have pushed the idea back into the mainstream.

“Changing the framing from ‘housing is just a good, a commodity’ to ‘housing is a human right’ lays the rhetorical base to get the policies that actually implement that right,” says Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “It changes the conversation from one where every year housing advocates are feeling lucky if they’re able to maintain the existing HUD budget at its severely inadequate levels to one where it’s up to the federal government to make sure that that need is met.”

Tars compares this to Obama’s framing of healthcare access as a right. “Several years later we got Obamacare, which is not a full right to health care, but it was a major step beyond what had been done for decades prior,” he says. “That’s the kind of shift we need.”

To that end, Biden wants to make rental assistance an entitlement, like food stamps or Medicaid, by guaranteeing Section 8 housing choice vouchers—which subsidize a portion of low-income tenants’ rent—to every eligible household.

The Section 8 program, as it stands, is flawed. Millions of eligible participants are shut out due to the program’s underfunding, and those that do get vouchers often face discrimination (only fourteen states ban landlords from discriminating based on rental income source). Still, by fully funding the program, outcomes could be drastically improved, experts say.

And, for renters who don’t quite qualify for Section 8 but still struggle to cover housing costs, Biden has proposed a new renter’s tax credit that would limit their rent and utilities to 30 percent of their income.

E

ver since President Ronald Reagan slashed federal housing assistance in the 1980s, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have consistently underfunded HUD and housing programs managed by other agencies.

Today, public housing is in shambles. More than 10,000 units are demolished or offloaded to the private market every year because the government can’t afford to keep up with maintenance, a backlog that’s reached $70 billion. (For comparison, HUD’s entire annual budget was $49 billion for 2020.) The waiting list for public housing stretches 1.6 million families long, and the wait can take years.

To compensate, policymakers have increasingly entrusted housing to the market, incentivizing developers to step in. But private developers are largely “filling the gap at the top,” according to Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs for the National Housing Law Project. (Luxury units accounted for nearly 90 percent of new apartment construction in 2017 and 2018.)

“The deregulation of housing in America has led to a real boon for developers, and alongside that, we have an abdication of the federal government’s commitment to its role in affordable housing,” Porter says.

“It’s a continued investment in the rich with this belief in some sort of trickle down and a continued belief that the private market will do what the government stops doing, which we’ve proven is just not true.”

In contrast, advocates say, reinvestment in the lowest-income housing will reduce competition for middle-income housing and alleviate costs for Americans across the board. Biden has outlined a $100 billion Affordable Housing Fund, including $65 billion for state housing authorities and a $20 billion boost for affordable housing production and preservation.

Importantly, Biden’s housing platform also takes aim at the structural racism baked into U.S. housing policy. The racial wealth gap in this country can be traced back in part to a history of state-sanctioned discriminatory housing practices, like redlining, which shut Black people out of the housing market.

In a perverse twist, leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks and mortgage lenders explicitly targeted communities of color for exploitative loans (“reverse redlining”), leaving them with much higher foreclosure rates than their white counterparts. The ensuing mass buy-up by real estate conglomerates of foreclosed homes in predominantly low-income and Black and brown neighborhoods has been pointed to as a major factor in displacement and gentrification.

The legacy of these policies is also inextricably linked to health outcomes, in direct and indirect ways, as the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare.

“Think about the after-effects of redlining,” says Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “It really took away wealth and development in communities, which caused communities to lack the infrastructure in health care for

people to be able to maintain their health. It took away jobs, and because they don’t have jobs in their community, they have to travel to their jobs, which means they’re on public transportation and more exposed to COVID-19.”

On top of being more likely to both contract COVID-19 and die from it, Black and Latinx Americans have suffered higher rates of unemployment and housing instability than their white counterparts during the pandemic.

Biden, as part of his housing plan, wants to require any state or municipality receiving certain federal dollars to replace exclusionary zoning laws that discourage low-income housing with inclusive strategies to promote such development. The Administration also backs legislation introduced last year by Representative James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, and Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, that would provide low-income tenants facing eviction with free legal assistance. (Roughly 90 percent of landlords have legal representation during eviction proceedings compared to only 10 percent of renters.)

M

uch of Biden’s ambitious housing agenda will require the cooperation of a sharply divided Congress. Most recently, it took Congressional lawmakers eight months to pass a second desperately needed stimulus package. In the interim, city and state revenues plunged, and millions of Americans lost jobs, faced housing insecurity, and contracted COVID-19.

Still, there are steps Biden can take through executive action and other avenues, including closing loopholes in the CDC eviction moratorium and reversing the Trump Administration’s policies to strip formerly incarcerated, undocumented, transgender, and Black and brown people of housing protections.

While housing advocates are mostly buoyed by Biden’s plans, they’re well aware that a political platform is far from a guaranteed reality. In the midst of an economic recession, a public health disaster, and a climate crisis, housing may once again be relegated to a secondary issue with the administration opting for stopgap solutions instead of a complete overhaul.

The Biden housing agenda would cost an estimated $640 billion over ten years, a huge sum commensurate with the scope of the problem (and far less than Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts). For advocates and many struggling Americans, reimagining the nation’s approach to housing is an essential investment.

Back in Baton Rouge, Heidi Breaux constantly fears she’ll return home to another eviction letter on her door. “I break down daily,” she says quietly. “I don’t know if tomorrow we’ll be living in my car . . . and there’s no help, and no way to even get it.” ◆

We have an abdication of the federal government’s commitment to its role in affordable housing.

NOËLLE PORTER

THE PROGRESSIVE | 49

Twenty Years of Failing the Schools To fix education, Biden must not only undo Trump’s legacy but reverse two decades of a disastrous ‘reform’ movement.

BY DIANE RAVITCH

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN will have his work cut out in repairing the damage done to U.S. education caused by Donald Trump and his one-time Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. But Biden and his Secretary of Education nominee, Miguel Cardona, must also reverse at least twenty years of federal education policy, starting over with measures that allow teachers to teach and children to learn without fear of federal sanctions.

Since the enactment of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002, the nation’s public schools have been required to administer standardized tests in reading and mathematics to every student in grades three through eight, a practice unknown in any high-performing nation. These tests have high stakes for students (who might fail to be promoted), teachers (who might be fired if their students’ test scores don’t rise), and schools (which might be closed if test scores don’t go up).

In addition, three successive presidential administrations—Bush, Obama, and Trump—have pressured school districts to accept privately managed charter schools. Educators and parents have tried to fend off a powerful and well-funded privatization movement that promotes privately managed charter schools and vouchers as the cure for low test scores (which they are not). This so-called reform movement has paid little attention to the need for adequate and equitable resources.

U.S. education began a long slide into an abyss of testing and privatization in 1983, when the administration of Ronald Reagan issued a sensationalized report called “A Nation at Risk.” The report asserted that U.S. education was experiencing a “rising tide of mediocrity” and blamed the public schools for the loss of industries to Japan, South Korea, and Germany.

The report relied on cherry-picked data to create a false sense of crisis that demanded solutions.

50 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Governors across the nation met with business leaders and decided that education was too important to leave to educators. What was needed, instead, was corporate thinking. And the remedies they came up with were standards and accountability, based on data derived from annual tests.

The new “reform” movement conveniently ignored the responsibility of short-sighted corporate leaders for the flight of industries to other nations.

It was easier to blame schoolteachers and “low standards” in elementary and middle schools. The governors and corporate leaders also ignored the tight correlation between student test scores and family income, which would have led to unwanted discussions about income gaps, wealth gaps, and opportunity gaps—instead of test score gaps.

ix years after “A Nation at Risk” appeared, President George H.W. Bush sought to establish his credentials as “the education President” by calling a summit of the nation’s governors to fix the nation’s allegedly faltering public schools. The governors, led

by Bill Clinton of Arkansas, came up with six national goals for the year 2000. President Bush loved the national goals, as did President Clinton after his election in 1992 (he even added two more).

Goals cost nothing, and they give the illusion of activity. In his “Goals 2000” program, Clinton encouraged every state to write standards and give more tests.

George W. Bush topped his predecessors during the 2000 campaign when he claimed that his education plan had produced a “miracle” in Texas. Test every child every year, he said, and honor schools where scores go up and embarrass schools where they don’t. This simple, almost cost-free program, according to Bush, would lead to rising test scores and shrinking gaps between different races. He took office as President with a twenty-seven-page proposal for a new law called “No Child Left Behind.”

S

Diane Ravitch is a historian of education.

Her latest book is Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools (Knopf, 2020).

By the end of 2001, Congress had passed his law, expanded to more than 1,000 pages, and Bush signed it on January 8, 2002. A new era began. Henceforth, every student in grades three through eight would be tested in reading and mathematics every year. By 2014, the law said, every child in the nation would score “proficient” on standardized tests. Schools that failed to move toward that goal would face escalating punishments, with the ultimate punishment of being closed or turned over to the state or private management or a charter operator.

Twenty years later, we know that there was no “Texas miracle.” The law produced a bonanza for the testing industry, inspired districts to concentrate on test preparation and testing, and squeezed out untested subjects like the arts, civics, history, and even recess.

By 2014, few U.S. schools were on track to reach the law’s demand for 100 percent proficiency for their students. By then, Barack Obama was in office, and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, offered waivers to states from the law’s requirement. But Duncan had no objection to the principles behind NCLB; in fact, his own program, Race to the Top, was built on the foundation of NCLB. Duncan’s policy invited states to compete for a share of $4.35 billion in federal funds but only if they met certain conditions: They had to agree to increase the number of charter schools in their state, to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students, to adopt common national standards (which everyone understood was the Common Core), and to take swift punitive action against schools that did not raise their test scores.

The NCLB annual tests became even more consequential under Duncan and Obama. When civil rights groups, including the NAACP, objected to Race to the Top because it was a competition among states for untried policies, rather than a commitment to support early childhood education, experienced teachers, and adequate resources for the neediest schools, Obama and Duncan refused to change anything.

After nearly fifteen years of NCLB and Race to the Top, Congress revised the federal law and called it the Every Student Succeeds Act, a clever rephrasing of No Child Left Behind. But left intact was the regime of annual testing, despite the lack of any visible signs of improvement. For the past decade, scores on the federal test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been stagnant.

T

he challenge for Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Secretary of Education, will be to abandon two decades of high-stakes testing and accountability and to remove

We have poured billions of dollars into that fake corporatestyle reform and achieved little other than demoralized teachers. and students.

any federal incentives to create privately managed charter schools, which are typically no better than the democratically controlled public schools they replace and often far worse.

Cardona should begin by offering blanket waivers for the 2021 testing cycle. As the pandemic continues to rage, this is no time to require that students—who may have spent months learning entirely remotely—take a standardized test whose results will not be reported for four-to-six months. Teachers are not allowed to see the questions or to review their students’ answers. They learn nothing other than their students’ scores, which are of no practical value.

Instead, teachers should write their own tests, because they know what they’ve taught. Cardona should oversee a revision of the law and eliminate the requirement of annual testing, which serves no purpose.

Biden promised to eliminate federal aid to for-profit charters, but the larger question is why the federal government is funding charters at all. They receive regular funding as if they were public schools, and many of them also snared hundreds of millions of dollars from the CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection Program, which public schools were not allowed to apply to. Charters are amply funded by billionaires, including the Waltons, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, and dozens of others who believe in the efficacy of the free market.

Most of the money in the federal Charter Schools Program, which was launched in 1994 by the Clinton Administration to help start mom-and-pop or teacher-led charters, is now spent to enlarge corporate charter chains and help them dominate urban school districts. So why should the federal government spend $440 million each year to start new charters?

Instead, Cardona could help urban schools, which are underfunded, by ending the pretense that competition will make them better (it doesn’t). It starves them of needed resources.

Urban districts don’t need testing, standards, accountability, and competition. We have poured billions of dollars into that fake reform and achieved little other than demoralized teachers and students whose test-centric education robs them of motivation.

Why not try a radically different approach? Why not fully fund the schools where the needs of students are greatest? Give the schools that enroll students with disabilities the resources that Congress promised but never delivered. Make sure that schools that serve the neediest students have experienced teachers, small classes, and a full curriculum that includes the arts and time for play.

Now that would be a revolution! ◆ THE PROGRESSIVE | 51

First-Person Singular

BY BRIAN GILMORE

Biden’s Challenge on Race

I

n his recently released posthumous autobiography, I Came As a Shadow, longtime Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson recalls one of the many times when he was accused of playing the “race card.” Thompson, the first Black coach to win an NCAA Division I Men’s Championship, and an outspoken critic of racism in American society, answered the charges against him in typical Thompson fashion:

Brian Gilmore is a Washington-D.C.-based poet, writer, and public interest law professor.

His latest book is come see about me, marvin (Wayne State University Press), a Michigan Notable Book for 2020.

“Fuck that,” he said, “Y’all stacked the deck. I played the cards you dealt me.”

I grew up in the same Washington, D.C., as Coach Thompson and attended the same all-boys Catholic high school. By my time, the overt signs of our shared racially segregated capital were diminished, but the residual inequities remained.

By the time I was born, my neighborhood and most of the city was Black; whites had scattered to the suburbs, taking their wealth and tax revenue with them. The public schools in my city began to slowly descend into dysfunction due to lack of resources and entrenched racist policies.

Black families struggled to provide a safe and nurturing environment for their children amid growing poverty, drug addiction, and a constant lack of opportunity. Meanwhile, the “vanilla” suburbs, which whites had moved to in droves, flourished. Schools were plentiful and well funded. Civic resources were abundant, jobs and economic opportunities were everywhere.

Wealth, the silver bullet of upward mobility and equality in the United States, soared for whites in the mostly white affluent suburbs while many Black people in the city were left behind. While I did not grasp it at the time, I was living in the United States’ “stacked deck” of racial inequity. And my experience was similar to that of Black Americans all across the country.

Now that Joe Biden has taken office as the nation’s forty-sixth President, with Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black woman Vice President, at his side, it will be their turn to try redealing the cards. There is reason to hope—and reason to doubt—that they are up for the challenge.

“H

ow do we break the cycle?” Biden asked during a speech announcing his racial-equity agenda this past July. “In good times, communities of color still lag. In bad times, they get hit first and the hard-

52 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

est, and in recovery, they take the longest to bounce back. This is about justice.”

“The Biden Plan to Build Back Better by Advancing Racial Equity Across the American Economy,” on the Biden-Harris campaign website, contains an extensive wish list of ideas and proposals. Everything from investing in small businesses, opportunity zones, addressing “inequities in agriculture,” fair compensation for workers of color, assistance with retirement savings for Black and brown Americans, promoting affordable housing, entrepreneurship, a tenant’s bill of rights, educational assistance and support are all there. It is hard to be against most of these proposals, though few break new ground and most are market-based ideas.

And many of these ideas do not take aim at the real target: racial oppression, manifested as systemic economic inequity.

In 2019, according to the Brookings Institution, the typical white family had 7.8 times the wealth of a typical Black family ($188,200 to $24,100). This disparity has persisted for generations. In fact, Black people, 13 percent of the nation’s population, have only 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.

This is not because Black people are lazy; this is by design, through government-backed policies and practices that have disenfranchised Black people and rendered Black Amercians colonial subjects in their own country over the past 150 years.

Black people also suffer inequities in the labor market. For fifty years now, the unemployment rate of Black people has remained twice the rate of whites.

In Washington, D.C., the city where John Thompson and I were born and raised, the jobless rate for Black people was more than six times the rate of whites in 2019. And Black households in 2019 earned just 61 cents on the dollar when compared to white households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Racial disparities are also a central feature of

the criminal justice system. Black folks make up 40 percent of all incarcerated people in federal prisons (three times their share of the population) and are five times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons.

Black men are also more likely to be shot and killed by the police, and much more likely to be stopped and frisked.

I could go on and on.

Sure, people are sick of all of these racial inequities, and Biden has expressed his displeasure with them from time to time. But as my mother likes to say—if you toast your bread and keep burning it, you must really like burnt toast.

Biden needs to dig much deeper. And he should start with criminal justice.

P

oet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts, creator of the Million Book Project and a former member of President Barack Obama’s Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, has some specific ideas on things that Biden should do.

Betts says the new President should adopt his campaign proposal to create a “$20 billion competitive grant program to spur states to shift from incarceration to prevention.” This would address some of the underlying factors, such as child abuse and illiteracy, that lead to incarceration.

Biden could also reduce the number of people incarcerated in state prisons by calling on states to bring back parole. Truth-in-sentencing laws that deny prisoners the ability to obtain early release are a main driver of mass incarceration.

And finally, Betts keeps it simple: “You just have to decide to not put people in prison. I’d like to hear him say something like that rhetorically.”

Law school professor and attorney Mark Osler, a longtime champion for criminal justice and sentencing reform, takes Betts’s ideas further.

“The single most important thing [the Biden Administration] could do is to appoint a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet-level adviser on criminal justice who would be independent of the Department of Justice,” Osler says, adding that this “would make so many other reforms possible.” He suggests that this be “a high-profile person such as Rachel Barkow or Bryan Stevenson,” both of whom could be “a strong voice for change to counteract the DOJ’s constant resistance to reforms.”

On economic issues, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition believes the only solution for any President who wants to fix the wealth gap is to push for direct payments to Black Americans.

“The hard truth is that the United States—and its economy—is based on a white supremacist concentration of wealth and resources,” Asante-Muhammad has written. “To end this disparity, which rears its head in everything from the racial wealth divide to police brutality and mass incarceration, a massive redistribution of wealth and resources is required.”

As Michael Harriot, writer and activist, recently wrote: “Without restitution, there can be no justice.”

Vanessa Williamson, senior tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, concurs, saying “racial justice requires heavy taxes on wealth.” She refers to reparations as “an urgent economic necessity,” and “a moral imperative.”

And why not reparations? Why shouldn’t Biden support the bill (H.R. 40) sponsored by the late John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, that establishes a commission to at least study reparations for Black Americans?

Biden’s agenda on race is not bold enough. No one is against more home ownership, full employment promotion by the Federal Reserve, small business development, or financial support for more educational opportunities. But Black people want something affirming and aimed directly at the problems that impact outcomes for them and their children.

The COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to these issues. In an essay, “Stolen Breaths,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine, three researchers detail the path of destruction through Black America caused by the coronavirus, using it to demand a bigger agenda to address racism and racial inequity.

Rachel R. Hardeman, Eduardo M. Medina, and Rhea W. Boyd argue that all of the country’s racial inequities should be treated as health issues.

Government policies that promote, encourage, or turn a blind eye toward police violence, segregation, white flight, gentrification, environmental racism, and public health emergencies, they say, all maintain racial inequity. Improving the health of the Black community and the nation requires that “we address the social, economic, political, legal, educational, and healthcare systems that maintain structural racism.”

Ultimately, they demand that the country “divest from racial health inequities.” This approach could be applied to all institutions in the United States, from criminal justice and employment, to education and just about anything else.

The United States’ racial inequities have deep historical roots. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris acknowledge this fact but their plan does not address it. As Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, has written, “Racial justice demands action.

Racial equity is the goal. Passivity is not an option.” ◆

People are sick of all of these racial inequities, and Biden has expressed his displeasure from time to time. But as my mother likes to say—if you toast your bread and keep burning it, you must really like burnt toast.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 53

BOOK EXCERPT

Service with a Smile A retail worker learns to fight for her rights.

BY SARAH JAFFE

JEREMY M. LANGE

Ann Marie Reinhart in 2018 in Durham, North Carolina

Ann Marie Reinhart didn’t intend to spend half her life working in retail. It just sort of happened that way.

“I have always worked. I have worked two and three jobs,” she explains in a series of interviews. She had left her position in medical billing right before her first child was born, and hadn’t quite figured out what was next. A few months after her son’s birth, she stopped by a Toys “R” Us store and saw a “Now Hiring” sign. They hired her on the spot for the holidays. That was 1988.

“I had no aspirations of being a permanent cashier or working in retail. It was definitely not on my bucket list,” Reinhart says with a laugh. “The make-up of a part-timer today is either you are a mom, you are a student, or you are working a second job.” But she liked the idea of getting back to work, in part because she didn’t want to buy her husband a Christmas present using money from his job.

Reinhart is from Long Island, and you can hear it in her voice even though she’s been in North Carolina for years now; she is warm and motherly but with 54 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

From Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe, excerpted with permission from Bold Type Books.

Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) is a regular contributor to The Progressive and a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center, covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her previous book was Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt.

a mischievous twinkle in her eyes when she’s telling a funny story. She’d assumed her stint at Toys “R” Us would be over after the holidays, but instead the store started training her in customer service and how to keep track of the money. The pay wasn’t great, and retail could be stressful, but the company always gave her some flexibility in her schedule to be with her family. When both of her children were in school, she took the full-time position her managers offered her, moving into a supervisor’s role. It came along with a new benefit: health insurance, which made it worth her while to stay.

“Back then, Toys ‘R’ Us was very good to all of us,” Reinhart says. “It let me be the mom that I wanted to be.”

That’s not to say it was a perfect job, and Reinhart had thought seriously about leaving. The company allowed her time off for some of her kids’ activities, but she still worked long hours. “I think that nobody realizes all the sacrifices that are made by the people that work in retail. They sacrifice their families,” she says. “Almost the entire month of December, I didn’t see my husband. He got up early for work. I would come home and he would be sleeping. Then, he would leave for work and I would be sleeping.”

Then, of course, there were the customers, some of whom could be unbelievably nasty. “I have been called every name in the book,” says Reinhart, who brushes her brown bob off her forehead to show me the scar from a Green Power Ranger toy that a customer had thrown in her face. She recalled touching her forehead and feeling blood.

Another horror story involved Reinhart’s daughter-in-law, who also worked in customer service at the store. “[One] lady was so mad at her, she took her daughter’s wet panties off and threw them at my daughter-in-law,” Reinhart says. Her eyes welled up as she recalled her daughter-in-law’s scream.

Though she might have prided herself on her ability to manage difficult people, these memories clearly still stung. “Some days you go home feeling depleted,” she says.

And the worst part was that, after customers behaved horribly, management would often give in to keep them happy. “Not only are you insulted and berated by customers, you felt it double for your store manager to come out and give that customer what they wanted anyway.”

A

fter nearly ten years at the big Toys “R” Us store in Huntington, Long Island, Reinhart transferred to a new Babies “R” Us store. The holidays were calmer,

without the mad rush every year at the toy store, and she was able to spend more time with her kids.

“I came home and my house was decorated right after Thanksgiving,” she says. “All those years, I didn’t get to enjoy the holidays. My kids were like eight, nine, ten years old, and they appreciated it more, too.”

As her sons grew up, Reinhart and her husband considered moving South, following her sister and brother, who were already in North Carolina. She once again questioned whether she wanted to stay at Toys “R” Us, but since the company had nearly eight hundred stores, she could move and have a job already lined up—and keep the salary she was making in New York.

She noticed how, in her years at Toys “R” Us, retail had begun to change: all the ads she saw were for parttime jobs with no benefits. So she moved to Durham, North Carolina, and became store supervisor at a Babies “R” Us by the Southpoint Mall. The baby registries, in particular, made the job worth it—she enjoyed sitting down with new parents and helping them pick things out. Years later, at a different job, she ran into a former customer, who remembered her immediately.

“She says, ‘You did my whole registry with me. You sold me my furniture.’ ” It was moments like that that made her like the work.

Reinhart first heard mention of Bain Capital’s involvement with Toys “R” Us in 2005. As it was explained to the employees, Bain was investing money to help the company expand its baby stores into superstores. She didn’t think too much of it at first. As a human resources representative, she used to go to job fairs and talk up the company. “I would say things like, ‘It is a financially stable company. Toys “R” Us has been around forever.’ ” Those words haunt her now. In 2005, when Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), and Vornado Realty Trust took over the company, things began to change. Reinhart was shocked when she heard her store was being closed. It was shuttered in April 2018, and the company was liquidated shortly thereafter.

Private equity companies buy up firms that are wobbly through leveraged buyouts that put the debt used to buy them back on the company’s balance sheets; if any more trouble hits a company, whether it be increased competition, in the case of Toys “R” Us, or, more recently, the global pandemic, things can unravel quickly. Once iconic brands like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus have fallen into bankruptcy in this way.

Reinhart ended up losing a job she’d had for twenty-nine years, with no severance. “It was almost my THE PROGRESSIVE | 55

BOOK EXCERPT

entire adult life,” she says, shaking her head. “What was I thinking?”

But the time she’d put in at Toys “R” Us taught her to advocate for herself and for her colleagues, from those moments on the customer service desk to arguing for higher wages. “I am most proud, probably, of my work then,” she says. “It did prepare me to fight the company.”

W

hen Ann Marie Reinhart first heard that Toys “R” Us was going bankrupt, she says, “I think it was the seven stages of grief. I think we all went through them. It was mostly denial at first.”

The announcement came in September 2017. At first the company said it would keep operating as usual; then, Reinhart says, workers were told that more than one hundred stores were closing, including the superstore where she worked in North Carolina.

She tried to keep her hopes up by telling herself, “I had seen them close stores before.”

Since the leveraged buyout—one of a stack of fi-

“It was like, ‘Ding! Ding! Ding!’ I said to him, ‘Do you know what Bain Capital does to companies? Do you know anything about Bain Capital?’ ” nance terms Reinhart and her coworkers would learn in the ensuing years—“the whole mentality changed.”

Before, Toys “R” Us had a family atmosphere, she says, recalling how the company founder, Charles Lazarus, once arrived at her store for an unexpected visit, in jeans and a plaid shirt. The company, she says, “was his baby.” Lazarus died in March 2018, just as the company went into liquidation.

Reinhart had researched Bain Capital during the 2012 presidential race. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (now a U.S. Senator from Utah) was running, and he had been one of the firm’s founders. She read up on the candidates before making her choice, and Bain’s business model struck her as predatory well before she had any idea how much it would affect her life. So when her manager mentioned Bain’s involvement as they changed her Babies “R” Us to a superstore, she says, “It was like, ‘Ding!

Ding! Ding!’ I said to him, ‘Do you know what Bain Capital does to companies? Do you know anything about Bain Capital?’ ” The manager, she says, defended Bain at the time, but later messaged her to apologize for not listening.

“He was with the company maybe ten years, but they sucked thirty years out of me,” she says.

56 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Around this time, an advocacy group for retail workers called United for Respect was looking to expand its organizing. The group, originally a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers union to organize Walmart workers around the country, used social media to build a broad-based group of workers who could come together to improve conditions.

The organization’s founders had always thought of their work around Walmart as a way to affect the retail sector as a whole—as goes Walmart, so goes the low-wage job. But what was happening at Toys “R” Us seemed to be another piece of the retail story.

Here, the “retail apocalypse” wasn’t just because of the Internet, but because finance capital had gotten involved, attempting to wring every possible dollar out of retail firms before dropping them.

Toys “R” Us workers, like Walmart workers, had deeply identified with the company. They felt betrayed by the liquidation, and had felt the erosion of their working conditions as private equity turned up the heat. One of Reinhart’s coworkers told her about a Facebook group called the Dead Giraffe Society, but at first she wasn’t interested. When she took a look at it, she saw people sharing memories and pictures, mourning and remembering good times.

The society was also a space for a lot of anger, and the United for Respect organizers dove in, hoping to help. But how do you organize workers at a chain that is closing? Strikes don’t work—you can’t shut down a business to make demands if the business itself is closing down.

People would say to Reinhart, “It’s just a job,” she says, but “it is a job that I gave thirty years to, so I am willing to fight. We weren’t treated well.”

The stores weren’t all closed yet when Reinhart’s shut down, and lots of the workers in the Facebook group were nervous about making trouble. But Reinhart had had enough, and though the company had always warned workers about talking to reporters, she agreed to speak to a BuzzFeed reporter. “What are they going to do? They can’t fire me, I don’t have a job anymore.”

Reinhart’s first media interview took an hour, and she remembers being “very tearful. It was very, very raw.” The same organizer from United for Respect then wrote her to ask if she’d like to come to Washington, D.C., and meet with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “My daughter-in-law was like, ‘Are you crazy?! You are going to get on a plane with strangers.

You don’t know these people!’ Lo and behold, it was the best decision we ever made,” she recalls.

T

here were only six of them at the meeting in May 2018, out of more than thirty thousand workers losing their jobs. Reinhart was nervous—she’d never done anything like this before, and suddenly she was meeting a Senator and making her first picket signs.

“We didn’t think anybody cared about our story,” she says. “We made all these signs and I was like, ‘Yes, but we are six people.’ We went to Bain Capital. They have an office in D.C. We came around the corner and all of a sudden these two buses unloaded onto the streets of Washington, D.C., with signs and balloons, and they were all Walmart workers. This one lady, Donna, she said, ‘We got you. We’ve got your back.’ I looked at her tearing up like, ‘Oh my god.’ She hugged me and I will never forget that day.”

It was the beginning of the campaign that would be called Rise Up Retail, which brought the Walmart workers to support the Toys “R” Us workers and showed the Toys “R” Us workers that it was okay to make trouble. The video that Sanders put on his YouTube channel helped, Reinhart says. And then, as more workers came together, the campaign built momentum and power. Other stores joined in as the private equity apocalypse spread. “It is just sad that there are so many of us now,” Reinhart says.

She began volunteering to do civil disobedience.

Lily Wang of United for Respect remembers Reinhart looking at her and saying, “We’re not going to get severance, are we?” Wang said, “Probably not.” But Reinhart and the others were committed to raising hell to make sure that at least the people who came after them wouldn’t have to face what they had. Wang recalled, “They were like, ‘We are not going to hold out the hope that we are going to get it. What we really want to do is to change the law so that no one has to go through this.’ ” The stores were closing. The workers held press conferences—the next one had seventy-five workers, from the original six—and marched on Wall Street.

They learned to make their actions dramatic to draw press attention, and to hold them in stores as they closed, sharing videos online.

They had, too, their personal conversations, as they learned more about how private equity companies operated and the ins and outs of what had happened to their company. They learned that executives were getting “stay bonuses” while the workers got nothing; that Bain and KKR and Vornado had made something like $470 million in fees and payments from Toys “R” Us. “This has truly been an education and the more we

find out, the madder we get,” Reinhart says. “It just puts more fire in our belly to fight.”

From the low point—when Reinhart found herself, without her Toys “R” Us health insurance, literally choosing between her own asthma medication and her husband’s diabetes medication—she found her power. She’s now met Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as well as Sanders. She was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit asking for the bankruptcy court to take the workers’ claims seriously. She’s spoken before the Senate Financial Reform Committee. She pointed to New Jersey’s new labor law requiring severance payments for mass layoffs as a success of the campaign.

And then there was the settlement. KKR and Bain announced, in November 2018, a $20 million fund for the Toys “R” Us workers—less than the $75 million that Reinhart and her colleagues had asked for, but still a victory. Reinhart says she “got a check for $300 a week before Christmas. That was the last of the fund money.” The Dead Giraffe Society lives on.

The workers won another $2 million in bankruptcy court, Reinhart says. “Nothing but good has come out of it for me.” Not long ago, Reinhart was on the phone with a friend, who said to her, “You realize this is in the books now. You were the plaintiff.” In that moment, she realized the significance of her fight. “There was power in numbers, for sure. ◆

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THE PROGRESSIVE | 57

BOOK EXCERPT

Eric Gill and the Integrity of Work Eric Gill (1882-1940) was a versatile English sculptor, printmaker, typeface designer, and thinker who left a complex and troubling legacy.

His religious views were often at odds with his apparent inability to control his sexual appetites, which included incestuous relations with at least one of his sisters and the sexual abuse of his two oldest daughters, as revealed in a 1989 biography by Fiona MacCarthy.

Self portrait. Wood engraving on paper. 1927. Collection of Rye Art Gallery.

These revelations have exposed Gill’s bad character, but have not ended the urgency of his work. As Jeffrey Polet, a professor of political science at Hope College in Michigan, concluded in a lengthy essay, “The Problem of Eric Gill,” in the magazine Local Culture this past March, “Our sinfulness may taint our art or industry, but it doesn’t destroy it. The radiance of his sin should not blind us to the clarity of understanding he brought to the sins of modernity, nor to the plausibility of some of his creative responses.”

One of Gill’s preeminent concerns was the dehumanizing impact of industrial capitalism on workers, a theme explored at length in a collection of his writings, A Holy Tradition of Working: Passages from the Writings of Eric Gill, first published in 1983. A new edition of that book has just been published by Angelica Press, with a preface by Wendell Berry that finds a contemporary context for Gill’s ruminations. We present that preface here.

Carrying of the Cross. Wood engraving on paper. 1926. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery.

58 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Preface to a new edition of A Holy Tradition of Working: Passages from the Writings of Eric Gill, edited by Brian Keeble

BY WENDELL BERRY

W

e live in the age of scientific and techno- various kinds of wholeness. Such sciences as these, logical genius, as we have confirmed by a because they submit to a universal standard that is literature of self-congratulation. For the not merely technical, immediately verge upon art, sake of this—as a payment in advance—we had to for they imply and require right ways of working, overrule any concern for long-term consequences, or work done with love in the service of goodness, mainly because of our inability to foresee at any truth, and beauty. distance the consequences of the innovations made The manifest failure of the misdirected genius by this kind of genius. of industrialism, together with the consequently We have not yet measured the full extent of the enlarged need for good work, defines newly and results of the decision, hardly by plebiscite, to burn urgently the pertinence of the teachings of Eric Gill. the fossil fuels, which was the first step in our pres- Gill (1882-1940) was a Christian, a remarkably verent direction. The step beyond that was also taken, satile artist, and a philosopher remarkable for his on behalf of all of us, by a gifted few. The genius of willingness to carry principles to the test of practithe makers of the first atomic bomb was undoubted cality. As a thinker, we might say, his genius was for by themselves, and it was proven by their success: applied culture. Or it may have consisted simply of It worked! But it was soon evident from their very his ability to see what was perfectly obvious: that the success that they had worked with a radically fore- ways and values of the industrial world contradict shortened sense of time and history, and, except in at every point the traditionally prescribed ways of terms of the crudest, most immediate utilitarianism, giving honor to God and Nature and Humankind. they did not know what they were doing.

The requirements of industry, Gill said, reduce After seventy-five years, we can only fear any workers to performers of mechanical functions in further revelation of what they were doing. We the making of parts of products. They do not choose know moreover that we now are living generations their work, or work according to qualitative stanearlier in the just-begun histories of the computer dards of their own. They have no need even to know revolution and genetic engineering. The genius that what they are making, and often they do not know. has produced these inscrutable beginnings is itself They cannot show by their work their love of God or a product of industrialism, its fragmentation, and the world or the thing they are making or the user specialization of work. of the made thing. The working life of industrial Under the rule of specialization, people trained workers is thus rewarded, not by their work, but to do one thing or one kind of thing produce a merely by a paycheck and time off. technological solution to one problem: to win one In his life and work, Gill kept clear the connecwar, to speed one kind of thought, to protect one tion, on the one hand, between art (in the broadest crop from one kind of pest. The aim is to produce sense: a way of making anything) and economy, and, a partial result, which forbids any thought or any on the other hand, between art and religious faith. fear of what might be the whole result.

From so clarifying a standpoint, he saw plainly that, The nearest to a whole result so far of this kind of for the sake of the narrowest kind of efficiency rework is a calamity exactly the size of the world, the sulting in profit, industrialism destroyed the integevidence of which is the world’s rapid, increasing, rity of both work and workers. The working life of and measurable destruction. It is this immense fail- the industrial worker was entirely predetermined, ure of industrially directed, profit-oriented science choiceless, a kind of slavery. And so Gill’s thinking and technology that defines our need, and the ur- rests upon a principle that is fundamental and abgency of our need, for sciences that are limitable or solutely necessary: reasonably predictable in their effects, from which “The test of a man’s freedom is his responsibility we need not fear a chain reaction of ramifying and as a workman. Freedom is not incompatible with accumulating harms: the sciences, let us say, of ecol- discipline, it is only incompatible with irresponsiogy and of non-industrial agriculture and medicine, bility. He who is free is responsible for his work. He the aim of which is not victory or profit but health, who is not responsible for his work is not free.” ◆

Wendell Berry is a novelist, poet, essayist, and farmer who lives in Kentucky.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 59

INTERVIEW

‘Go to Where the Silence Is’ An interview with Amy Goodman on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Democracy Now!

BY NORMAN STOCKWELL

A

my Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, an award-winning daily news program now airing on more than 1,500 public and community radio and television stations around the world. Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers, most recently Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. We spoke by phone in early January.

Q: Democracy Now! is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary on February 19. Tell us where the program has gone during the past quarter-century.

Amy Goodman: When I first got the call to host Democracy Now!, I was at a safe house, covering the elections in Haiti. And there, people who announced for office would often be gunned down. People who went to the polls could be killed, but still the vast majority of Haitians would vote.

So when I got the call to host a daily election show, I was saying, “My God, we live in the most powerful country on Earth. But still most people do not vote.” I thought it would be fascinating to look at why people were not voting when their vote made a difference, not only in the United States but all over the world.

I never thought it was because of apathy. I wanted to find out what people were doing in their communities. That’s really what we did those nine months of the broadcast from just after Valentine’s Day in 1996.

I really think of it as news with a heart.

After the election, we were going to fold up. We’d done our project. We had been the only daily election 60 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

show in public media. We were broadcasting on nine community radio stations. But there was more demand for the show after the election, when President Bill Clinton was re-elected, than there was before. People really wanted to hear from the grassroots, those authentic voices, not those typical pundits you get on the networks who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.

Q: Tell us about a memorable moment.

Goodman: The week of the terrorist attack, September 11, 2001, we were the closest national broadcast to Ground Zero. We were broadcasting that day in the evacuation zone, and I knew if we went out, the police would make us leave. And we felt it was critical to continue to broadcast the voices of people like, well, the late great historian, Howard Zinn, as the battle cry was coming from the White House.

In New York City, where thousands died at the World Trade Center, people were comforting each other, putting up signs on park benches and lampposts. “Have you seen my brother last seen in Tower

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progrressive.

One?” “Have you seen my aunt last seen in Tower Two?” Q: Nowadays, there is talk about “citizen journalists” And I thought about how similar these signs were to and all the networks are using them. But Democracy those carried by the mothers of the disappeared in Ar- Now! was a pioneer in that as well, having people on gentina, also the victims of terror. “Have you seen my the ground in places where things were happening, granddaughter? Have you seen my grandson?” whether it be anti-globalization protests or the leadI thought about another 9/11, which we were going up to the Iraq War in 2003. to be doing a special on that day. On September 11, 1973, the forces of Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Goodman: That’s right. They weren’t getting past the Chile and Salvador Allende, the democratically elected corporate media gatekeepers, but on Democracy Now! leader, died in the [presidential] palace in Santiago and we were talking to people on the ground. After the the Pinochet forces rose to power. They would ultimate- terror attacks of 9/11, you have the U.S. bombing of ly kill thousands of Chileans in the coming years with Afghanistan. We were on the ground, covering the anhis iron-fisted rule. ti-war movements during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, So we were united with people around the world when millions of people rocked the globe for peace. who were victims of terror. And we just kept broad- And yet President George W. Bush decided to attack casting the voices of people who were calling for peace, Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. an end to the cycles of violence that were so destructive.

We were there, talking not only to people in the United States but around the world, talking to people Q: Can you talk about how Democracy Now! uses in Iraq at the target-end of U.S. policy, people who multi-platform distribution to reach people wherever were running from those bombs. they are, whether it be through TV, radio, email, or It is the role of the media to go to where the silence the web? is and, so often, it is not silent there. It is loud, it is raucous, people are organizing. It just doesn’t hit the Goodman: From the beginning, we had to use the In- corporate media radar screen, particularly in the United ternet because it was another means of communicating States. And that’s what we were trying to do, break the with people. I never felt, “Oh, people should flock to sound barrier. us.” We had to go to where they were. We didn’t have the resources that the networks had to send our show Q: How is Democracy Now!, as a news program, difthrough satellites. We needed the Internet, and we per- ferent from something like MSNBC? fected a way not only to send—this was before the word podcast—the radio show to different stations all over Goodman: Democracy Now! has been at the United the world.

Nations’ climate summits every year since 2009, from We also perfected a way for TV stations to run Copenhagen, to Durban, to Doha, to Peru, to Paris. We broadcast-quality video from our website. And that were there on the ground. Often the only daily national made an enormous difference. From the beginning, broadcast from the climate summit back to the United we had a website. Time magazine, I remember, in those States (and around the world because we’re a global years poured $20 million into a website, and put up a news organization). And it was absolutely critical to paywall. We were saying, “Steal this story, please.” bring out the voices of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, The whole idea was people speaking for themselves. and Pacific Islanders, and so many others who are on The media is a huge kitchen table that stretches across the front lines of the climate crisis and to project those the globe, that we all sit around and debate and discuss voices back to the United States. the most important issues of the day: war and peace, life And in 2016, in the United States, there was this and death, inequality, equality, racial economic justice, global movement happening in North Dakota. It was LGBTQ issues, the climate crisis. And of course, now, led by Indigenous people, it was the Standing Rock overall respect for science in dealing with the pandemic Sioux fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. And thouand issues of equity along the way. sands of people, particularly Indigenous people from I really did feel that those who care about war and Latin America, and from Canada, joined together with peace, those who care about social and economic justice, those in the United States and their non-Native allies all of these issues are not a fringe minority, not even a fighting against pipeline politics for a more sustainable silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by future. the corporate media, which is why we have to take the We went there on Labor Day to see this remarkable media back. We had to then, and we have to today. movement. And ultimately, after we left and showed THE PROGRESSIVE | 61

INTERVIEW

this horrific scene on Labor Day weekend—with Native Americans protesting the desecration of their grave sites for the pipeline to be built, standing in front of the bulldozers—we filmed when the Dakota Access Pipeline guards unleashed dogs on the protesters. We showed the dog with its mouth and its nose dripping with blood.

These images [drew] something like fourteen million views in twenty-four hours.

President Obama would soon call a halt to the building of that pipeline. When we came back to New York, the North Dakota authorities issued an arrest warrant for me. This was outrageous. I think it was a threat to journalists. It was a warning saying, “Do not come to North Dakota.” Which is why we had to challenge all of it and have it all dropped. But it is the job of journalists to go and show these battles over the critical issues of our day.

Look at what Trump managed to do with the networks. For a while, Fox News was “Trump TV.” Now it is not conservative enough for him, not rightwing enough for him. So he’s moved on to Newsmax and to One America Network. But what he did with CNN and MSNBC is he named them, as well as The New York Times. He named the reporters. He constantly attacked them. And so these networks found their backbone. They fought back. They defended themselves.

And that was extremely important. It started to sound like Democracy Now! under any administration.

We are not supposed to be on bended knee. When it comes to covering power, we are not a part of the parties, we are apart from them. It puts us in a very uncomfortable position, but that is our job as journalists. We have to hold those in power accountable. That’s the role of independent media. That’s the role of the media, protecting a democratic society.

Q: What does Democracy Now! plan to do in terms of holding the incoming Biden Administration accountable, particularly for the progressive promises in his platform?

Goodman: We will continue to give voice to the grassroots, to provide a forum for people to speak for themselves. The debate is not only between Republicans and Democrats, it’s within the parties. With the Democratic party, you have an extremely strong, progressive base.

One of the largest caucuses in the House of Representatives is the Progressive Caucus. You see it with the Biden Cabinet and the people he’s naming—when he succumbs to pressure, when he doesn’t.

62 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Biden said that he would veto a bill for Medicare for All. And now we have gone through the pandemic.

And what does the pandemic show us? It shows us that inequality kills. That people’s lack of access to health care kills. And that we have to have a system. When you look at the countries that have done better than us, let’s look at the industrialized countries. In each case, they have a universal health-care system.

And so I think we are operating in very different terrain right now. The issue of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on African Americans, on

What does the pandemic show us? It shows us that inequality kills. That people’s lack of access to health care kills. the Latinx population, on Native Americans, is extremely important. It is a flashing light for why it is essential that health care is guaranteed for everyone in this country, the most powerful country on Earth.

Q: What do you see as the future of independent media, in general, and what plans do you have for Democracy Now! in the coming year and beyond?

Goodman: It is more essential than ever to have these debates about another world being possible. And when we see the diversity, when we see the youth entering Congress and also leaders on the streets, not only of this country, but in movements all over the world, it is critical to give voice to them. I’m afraid the networks will shut down at this point, as that revolving door that we’re so familiar with continues in such a big way between the networks, the newspapers that have survived, and the administration.

We need something completely independent that grapples with the critical issues of the day and broadens the base of who is involved in those discussions.

There are so many solutions, creative answers out there, and we need to ensure that there is a broad, global forum for them to be debated. And I see Democracy Now!, this daily grassroots, global, unembedded, independent, international, investigative news hour in this way.

We are, right now, really at one of the strongest points when it comes to people turning to independent media for authentic voices, voices they can trust. And I encourage people to support Democracy Now!, to support The Progressive, and to support independent media in the United States and around the world. ◆

BOOKS

Apocalypse Forever

BY BILL LUEDERS

Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book on scientific responses to environmental crises is in many ways even more frightening than her last, as difficult as that is to fathom. Whereas The New Yorker writer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2014 tome, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, documented the wholesale eradication of species due to the heedlessness of human beings, Under a White Sky crushingly demonstrates how bereft we are of recourse that is not also potentially catastrophic.

It is, as she puts it, “a book about the world spinning out of control” amid earnest efforts by scientists to curb the damage as best they can. These efforts include electrifying waterways to block the spread of leaping invasive fish and splicing genes into living things to program them to self-destruct. (“What could possibly go wrong?” Kolbert wonders, facetiously.)

At this moment, people all over the world are staging massive interventions to save individual endangered species. Research teams are engaged in “assisted evolution” to breed coral that can withstand rising ocean acidity. Some scientists are working on ways to suck carbon from the air and inject it underground. Others are looking to blast particles into the atmosphere to block the sun to reduce global temperatures that are rising because of other gunk we’ve already put there.

All of these approaches are risky and none are elegant. They don’t represent progress so much as desperate attempts at coping. They are not, as Kolbert notes, “improvements on the originals.”

And yet, genetic engineering might be the only way to bring species back from the brink—if not the fact—of extinction. Virtually every positive scenario for the future conjured up by the Inter-

governmental Panel on Climate Change requires some negative emissions—that is, the removal of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. The problems created by technology will require technological solutions, at least to some extent, if they are to be solved at all.

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand wrote in the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. Others disagree. “We are not as gods,” replied biologist E.O. Wilson. British writer Paul Kingsnorth nailed it: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it, and now we have run out of time.”

This is the central conundrum that plays out in the pages of Under a White Sky. Kolbert, an excellent writer, travels the globe to look at cutting-edge efforts to mitigate the messes we’ve made. There is no introduction to map out the book’s concept, nothing to ease the shock of what’s to come in quixotic efforts balanced on the horrifying edge of futility.

Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring under the working title, The Control of Nature, which her book describes as “a phrase conceived in arrogance.” (This title was later used by John McPhee for his collection of stories about grand-scale attempts to bring technology to bear in

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

By Elizabeth Kolbert Crown, 256 pages Publication date: February 9, 2021 fights against flooding rivers, erupting volcanoes, and crumbling mountainsides.)

In fact, if you combat global warming by filtering out the sun, you have to do it year after year at ever-growing levels, likely disrupting rain patterns, exacerbating droughts, and, researchers say, turning the sky from blue to white—hence the title of Kolbert’s book.

Efforts to muscle the natural world into submission are, if not doomed to fail, at least wildly unlikely to work without a hitch. It’s a lot easier to wreck the environment than fix it.

But the most chilling thing about Kolbert’s new book is not that it shows how time-intensive, unpredictable, dangerous, and costly it will be to preserve biological diversity, survive climate change, and address other problems caused by previous attempts to solve problems. What is most chilling is that we have left ourselves with no other choice—except, perhaps, for the whole human race to take collective action to dramatically change our behavior in pursuit of common goals.

And everybody knows there is little chance of that. ◆

Bill Lueders is editor of The Progressive.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 63

BOOKS

The Life and Legacy of RBG

BY BILL BLUM

The U.S. Constitution vests enormous authority in the nine unelected individuals who sit on the Supreme Court. They alone have the last word in defining and applying U.S. law.

Unfortunately, most Supreme Court arguments Ginsburg presented before the Justices throughout our history have Supreme Court while she was a practicwielded their authority to maintain the ing attorney in the 1970s. It also includes social status quo on behalf of powerful four judicial opinions that Ginsburg wrote private interests. This can be seen time during her tenure on the Supreme Court. and again in cases affirming the constitu- Only one is a majority opinion—a 7–1 tionality of slavery (Dred Scott, 1857); the ruling that overturned the male-only adlegality of racial segregation (Plessy v. Fer- missions policy at the Virginia Military guson, 1896); the lawfulness of the death Institute (United States v. Virginia, 1996). penalty (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976); the right The other three are dissents: of corporations and the rich to spend unLedbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. limited sums on elections (Citizens United, (2007), which severely restricted the right 2010); and gutting the Voting Rights Act of female workers to file pay equity law(Shelby County v. Holder, 2013). suits (this ruling was later overturned by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009); September at age eighty-seven from comShelby County v. Holder (2013), which plications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, invalidated a key provision of the 1965 was one of the great exceptions. The “No- Voting Rights Act; and torious RBG,” as she became known in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), which popular culture, devoted her life to the let closely held corporations deny their struggle for individual rights, with a spe- workers coverage for birth control on recial emphasis on gender equality. ligious grounds.

The title of Ginsburg’s final book, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, is fittingly yler, in a touching introduction, emtaken from a passage in Deuteronomy that phasizes the late Justice’s extraorshe had inscribed on a piece of artwork dinary relationship with her husband, that hung in her Supreme Court chambers. Martin, whom she wed in 1954 and who Co-authored by Amanda L. Tyler, a law died in 2010. She also summarizes the professor at the University of California, highlights of Ginsburg’s formidable legal Berkeley, and one of Ginsburg’s former career, including her founding of the ACSupreme Court law clerks, the book was LU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1972 and submitted for publication shortly before her nomination to the Supreme Court in Ginsburg’s death, and includes a eulogistic 1993. Ginsburg was confirmed as only afterword written by Tyler. the second woman, after Justice Sandra At once a tribute and a mournful epi- Day O’Connor, to sit on the Court in a taph, the book consists of a collection of 96–3 Senate vote, a margin of approval Ginsburg’s speeches and interviews, as unthinkable in today’s hyper-partisan enwell as the transcripts from two of the oral vironment.

T

Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union

By Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler University of California Press, 288 pages Publication date: March 16, 2021 During the next twenty-seven years, Ginsburg established herself as one of the leading liberal Justices of the modern era.

Some court observers rank her alongside such legends as Louis Brandeis, John Marshall Harlan, Earl Warren, William Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall.

As comprehensive as this book aims to be, however, it falls short in a few key areas. First, there is no discussion of how much greater Ginsburg’s influence might have been had she not labored on a Court dominated by conservative jurists. Also missing is any examination of Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the bench despite repeated serious illnesses at a time when the Democrats held both the presidency and the Senate. The book similarly fails to mention Ginsburg’s public criticisms of Donald Trump, who rushed to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett, her polar opposite .

Still, despite these gaps in coverage, Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue is a worthy addition to the rich and ever-expanding lore and legacy of RBG. ◆

Bill Blum, a columnist with the Independent Media Institute and a regular contributor to The Progressive, is an attorney in Los Angeles and a former state of California administrative law judge.

64 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

How Movements Are Made Two books bring the history of the civil rights struggle to a modern audience.

BY NORMAN STOCKWELL

The deaths, on the same day this past July, of the Reverend C.T. Vivian and U.S. Representative John Lewis remind us that many of the leaders of past struggles for civil rights are passing away, just as a new generation of activists are reinvigorating these movements. Two new books bring this alive in a powerful and accessible way.

In W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found, a new monograph for the Polity series “Black Lives,” Elvira Basevich, a poet and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, puts the early twentieth-century writing of Du Bois in the context of twenty-first-century anti-racist work.

Sociologist and civil rights activist William Edward Burghardt Du Bois published his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk, more than a century ago. In a combination of analysis, storytelling, autobiography, and gospel song, Du Bois sought to address what he saw as the crucial issue of the time: “the color line.”

As Basevich writes, “Against this flood of ignorance, as a young journalist and social scientist, Du Bois set to work to find a meaningful way to talk about racial differences that was both scientifically objective and that empowered vulnerable racial groups.”

Du Bois, Basevich explains, “charted the historical legacy of slavery in the twentieth century and identified key goals for future social justice movements.”

Du Bois built his model of leadership around the ideal of “direct community engagement and representation.”

W.E.B. Du Bois: The Lost and the Found

By Elvira Basevich Polity, 288 pages Publication date: December 15, 2020

Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

By Julian Bond Beacon Press, 400 pages Publication date: January 12, 2021

He “remained absorbed with the Brooklyn College and a former student of same recurring questions that defined Bond’s at Harvard University, wrote that his storied life: How can the promise of he taught her that “freedom movements a brighter future be delivered to African don’t just happen, they are made—and and Afro-descendant peoples?” not by charismatic leaders, but by everySimilarly, Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: day people possessing great courage.”

A History of the Southern Civil Rights As Theoharis points out in her introMovement, a new collection of the leg- duction: “Across the political spectrum, endary activist and educator’s writing, many have held up the civil rights movecarefully compiled from Bond’s lecture ment to critique and chastise Black Lives notes and lightly edited for publication Matter. These framings misrepresent the

by Jeanne Theoharis and Bond’s widow, movements BLM activists are building Pamela Sue Horowitz, brings the wealth across the country . . . . Calling out these of his movement experience to the young myths, as Professor Bond would insist, is leaders of today. more than setting the historical record Horace Julian Bond died on August 15, straight.”

2015, seven months after his seventy-fifth Bond also saw many of the roots of the birthday. He helped found the Student 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in in the work of Du Bois, as he told his 1960, participated in the 1963 March on students, “We think of racism in terms Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and of individual behavior and individual became one of a group of African Amer- actions, but it is a complex set of societal icans elected to the Georgia State Legisla- actions and attitudes.” ture in 1965 following the passage of the This century-old understanding of Voting Rights Act. the impact of racism on both white and Equally important were Bond’s more Black communities is essential to our unthan twenty years as an educator at sev- derstanding of racial injustice today. It is eral universities. Following Bond’s death, teachers like Du Bois and Bond that give Theoharis, a professor of political sci- us the tools to dismantle those injustices ence at the City University of New York’s and build a new future. ◆

Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 65

HEMMING AND HAWING by NEGIN FARSAD

AMERICA’S PEP TALK

A

ll right, America, this is your pep talk. It’s the bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded. Is that when baseball coaches give pep talks? I need to rewatch A League of Their Own. Okay, scrap that. It’s just before the fourth quarter and a bunch of dudes are in a locker room, looking sweaty and defeated. Wait, is there usually a break before the fourth quarter when coaches do a pep talk? Ugh, I need to rewatch Rudy.

Okay, never mind, the score is love-love . . . er, no, it’s deuce but it’s the deuce right before match point. What I’m saying is, America, we’re at a sensitive point!

Liberals talk down to conservatives. Conservatives think liberals are evil. Someone is gonna be mean to me because I didn’t use the phrasing “some liberals” and “some conservatives.” But NEGIN FARSAD think about it: Was there not a (@NeginFarsad) moment when you, reading this is the host of the as a good liberal, weren’t at least political comedy talking down to conservatives in podcast Fake the your head? Everyone is mean.

Nation and author Lawn signs get stolen. Ralof the book How to lies—which are supposed to Make White People be fun and energizing—have Laugh. turned sinister. Everything is a signifier now. Going for a stroll might signify that you’re against climate-change-inducing cars.

Going for a drive might indicate that you’re against transportation alternatives. Turning up your heater might mean you’re It’s time for us to shut up and be nice. against energy efficiency. Taking We’ve got this vaccine and a your dog to the groomer might bunch of willing arm fat to jab. mean you’re an out-of-touch elitBut we don’t quite have enough ist. Eating a cupcake might mean of it, and we don’t have enough you’re against apple pie! actual physical locations where No one is allowed nuance, arm fat can get jabbed. (These, by and no one is allowed to deviate the way, are all technical vaccine from ideological purity. We’re all distribution terms.) sweaty and defeated in the lockWe’re worn out from tiresome er room that is America. Parts of elections that are getting more the locker room have prairie land, and more expensive. And yes, other parts have forests or strip there are so many more ways to malls, and some parts are Florispend that money—like on ed- da. We’re spread out over this vast ucation, or food, or cargo pants locker room, our heads held low, for everyone in America. (That’s our energy sapped, and our hope right, multitudinously pocketed dwindling. But, we need to take a pants for everyone in the country breather and rejoin the game with would be a better use of money a better attitude. than the hundreds of millions of Our attitude on the playing dollars spent on Georgia’s media field of American political and market during the special run-off cultural life has truly sucked. elections.)

That’s partly why we’re so sweaty Everyone is mean. Everyone. and defeated and breaking tennis

66 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

rackets. It’s time for us to shut up and be nice.

As Coach Bombay and the team said in D2: The Mighty Ducks: “We are ducks and ducks fly together. And just when you think they’re about to break apart . . . ducks fly together! And when the wind blows hard and the sky is black . . . ducks fly together!

And when the roosters are crowing and the cows are spinning circles in the pasture . . . ducks fly together! And when everyone says it can’t be done . . . ducks fly together.’’

So let’s do it, people. Of everyone in all the world, we know how to be nice. I once lived in France. I had a French boyfriend, ate baguettes, and gazed upon things. When I would meet French people, they would always say to me, “Americans are so nice.”

They found it odd that we were so warm, so welcoming, so chatty.

We used to be nice, and our niceness provided cover for an incredible amount of injustice with respect to race, class, and gender. That’s true. Nevertheless, we persisted in our nicety.

These people we’re not being nice to? They’re the same people we were nice to ten years ago.

We already know how to do this.

Things will look up if we start looking up.

We have a vaccine in record time! We have a new President!

We have the most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history! We have a Black bachelor on The Bachelor!

It’s time for us to take a swig of water, get back on that playing field, and play nice. ◆

MAEVE IN AMERICA by MAEVE HIGGINS

A MIRACLE WORTH REPEATING

O

n December 21, Clive and So the Thompsons, too afraid until September of last year, when Oneita Thompson, a mar- to return to Jamaica, waited. They they moved to Tabernacle Unitried couple from Jamaica, stayed and made a home for them- ed Church in the University City walked free after more than two selves and their seven children, neighborhood of Philadelphia. It years of taking sanctuary in a throughout their fourteen years is unclear why the administration Philadelphia church. The federal in the small New Jersey town of relinquished and allowed the cougovernment had finally dropped Cedarville. ple to walk free. That lack of clariits deportation case against them.

According to The Philadelphia ty adds to the “Christmas miracle” “When we got the letter from Inquirer, Clive was a heavy-equip- narrative, but is that right?

[U.S. Immigration and Customs ment operator at the BridgeStorytelling is how I frame Enforcement], I was just looking ton-based Cumberland Dairy, experiences and make sense of at it in shock,” Clive Thompson while Oneita, a certified nursing events. We all do the same, ever said in a statement. “It’s a big assistant, worked at Friends Vil- since our prehistoric ancestors breakthrough—after working so lage retirement home in a nearby were drawing on the walls of their long, this is a miracle. I feel like township. caves. “This happened,” we say in all the stress is drifting away, and The couple have always taken every art form and every language, everything is lighting up with joy.” pains to prove their worthiness: then “look out for dangers” and Because this happened during the Inquirer also printed photos “here is what to do.” Without stories, Christmas week, it’s tempting to of Clive holding up IRS docu- we don’t have meaning. frame their story as a Christmas ments—which proved he’d paid The story of how the Thompmiracle. And it has many elements tax throughout his years here— sons were banished and redeemed of the original Christmas story: and three of their children hold is a miracle, but it’s not enough to travelers fleeing danger in their U.S. citizenship. It was the Trump leave it at that. A miracle implies a homeland, looking to strangers Administration that ordered them long shot, a rarity, an exceptional in a strange land for help; parents deported. event. That’s not what the Thompdesperate for a better future for That is where the New Sanc- sons’ story should be. their children. tuary Movement of Philadelphia In each of the last six years, the The Thompson family fled came into play. The sanctuary number of people refused asylum Jamaica in 2004 after gang mem- group works to “end injustices in this country has grown, accordbers burned their farm and against immigrants regardless of ing to the Transactional Records threatened to kill them. The U.S. immigration status” by expressing Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse government denied them asylum radical welcome for all and ensur- University. In the 2020 fiscal year, at that time but allowed them to ing that “values of dignity, justice, only around 3,000 people were stay. and hospitality are lived out in granted asylum in the United This is not uncommon. Mi- practice and upheld in policy.”

States, an all-time low, according grants with no criminal record, U.S. Immigration and Customs to the U.S. Department of State. as well as strong community and Enforcement has said it generally The United States must exfamily ties, were, at least in the avoids making arrests at “sensi- tend sanctuary to all who need past, regularly granted stays of tive locations,” including places of it. As a signatory to the Unideportation. There are conditions, worship. But seeking sanctuary in versal Declaration of Human like check-ins with ICE, but ulti- a place of worship is a last resort, Rights, the United States reneged mately those stays allowed these reserved for the most desperate of on Article 14, which states: “Evmigrants to live and work (and to cases. It’s a difficult and lonely path, eryone has the right to seek pay taxes) in the United States as the ending unknowable. and to enjoy in other counthey awaited some path to citizenThe New Sanctuary Movement tries asylum from persecution.” ship, or for Congress to pass any placed the family in the safety of Instead, our government actively long-awaited national immigra- the First United Methodist Church punished those who did seek asytion reform. of Germantown, Pennsylvania, lum here. ◆

MAEVE HIGGINS writes for The New York Times and co-hosts the climate justice podcast Mothers of Invention.

Her most recent book is Maeve in America: Essays by a Girl from Somewhere Else.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 67

EDGE OF SPORTS by DAVE ZIRIN

COLLEGE ATHLETES IN THE PETRI DISH

A DAVE ZIRIN writes about sports for The Nation and The Progressive and hosts the Edge of Sports podcast.

groundbreaking study in given a warped version of an September of student ath- “education,” where they are told letes who had tested posi- what classes to take and that their tive for COVID-19 at Ohio State scholarship could be ended on University determined that 30 per- the whim of a coach. Even in the cent had cellular heart damage and best of times, college athletics is 15 percent showed signs of heart a rotten system—one that treats inflammation caused by a condi- these very young athletes like a tion known as myocarditis. combination of campus gods and This study, undertaken by re- corporate chattel. searchers at Ohio State, has massive implications for collegiate sports during the ongoing pandemic. And yet, at the time of its release, it stirred little to no reaction. Even many sports reporters, myself included, had never even heard of it.

But now, as the college football season has drawn to a close, the study has been picked up by major and minor news outlets. It was almost as if college football mavens and their stenographers on the sports pages chose to not address its findings until the season was done and all the billions of Keyontae Johnson dollars in broadcast rights checks were cashed.

Now, in the age of COVID-19, Revenue-producing sports like these “student athletes”—a term football and basketball are intrin- created by NCAA lawyers in 1957 sic to the running of the modern to avoid paying a settlement to the neoliberal university. They are the wife of a football player killed by rickety tentpole that keeps the injuries suffered on the field—are ceiling of athletic departments considered “essential workers.” from crashing down. They also They have somehow been placed underwrite the multimillion-dol- in the same category as frontline lar salaries of college football and health-care workers, meatpackbasketball coaching staff. ing-plant workers, and other peoIt’s a racket, and it’s the ath- ple deemed indispensable to the letes—disproportionately Black— economy. who carry the burden. They take The difference—aside from the weight of expectation, success, their lack of pay and workers’ and failure of a given program rights—is that college athletes without a salary, without a union, are not wearing any kind of perwithout guaranteed health care, sonal protective equipment (PPE). and without any of the other bene- They are expected, instead, to fits that most workers could expect. share locker rooms and fields Instead, they are paid by being with spitting, heaving teammates

68 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

and opponents, turning the field of play into a coronavirus Petri dish. As journalist Joel Anderson tweeted, “People don’t give a shit about the health risks to a largely Black (unpaid) labor force as long as it makes money and keeps them entertained.”

This was on display in shocking fashion in the case of Keyontae Johnson. The preseason Southeastern Conference basketball player of the year from Florida State University collapsed on the court in December and almost died, a casualty of heart inflammation caused by “acute myocarditis.” His one-time lucrative future in the sport is now in doubt.

As Johnson’s story reminds us, no one knows the long-term health effects of COVID-19.

Even people who are young and healthy—even healthy enough to be college athletes—may end up suffering well into their futures.

This is not a risk being borne by well-compensated professional athletes. It is being borne by unpaid eighteen- to twenty-twoyear-olds, many of them Black, while coaching contracts stay bloated and athletic departments, dominated by white coaches, remain flush.

COVID-19 has ripped the veil off of the NCAA; the solution requires a massive restructuring of college athletics. We need a serious reexamination of the role of revenue-producing sports on the college campus. Enough is enough. Teenagers with dreams of NFL glory should not have to risk dying for coaches’ high salaries. Pay the athletes. Give them a voice. And don’t treat them like cannon fodder against a deadly virus. ◆

POEMS by LAUREN SANDERSON

All My Friends Have Rent and Heartbreak Things are bad and yet already I’ve cracked A window, run the bath & ground the beans.

Through the window, beams run in & bathe the ground.

Sunny mornings as lonely as midnights.

Lonely mornings are just sunny midnights— Whoever is leaving is always leaving, Whoever’s been left has always been.

I tell everyone they did nothing wrong.

I say to anyone, “You’ve done nothing wrong!”

Today, two men fixing a power line.

Fixed, a line carries power two ways: I sit & the bath warms the coffee, I sit & the coffee warms the bath.

Things are bad. We’ve cracked. And yet —

Facilities Should Restrict Visitation of All Visitors, Except for Certain Compassionate Care Situations We sat still & straight so long that wakeful Autumn (mouths masked, death on all our minds)— (In the mouth of Autumn, death is what we mind)— We felt the chill of the first frosted morning.

We felt the chill before we felt the morning, Like my grandma woke before my mom’s water broke. Like my grandma knew before my mom: I was almost home. She stayed close and ready.

Now she’s close to ready, making her way home; Mom has dreams of water gushing through the house.

Mom has dreams of water. Meanwhile, in the house, I’ve been sleeping one floor underneath.

Or, one floor underneath my un-slept mother, I’ve been sitting still. Straight & long. Awake.

Lauren Sanderson is the author of Some of the Children Were Listening (Write Bloody Publishing, 2019). Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Beecher’s Magazine, Storm Cellar, and elsewhere.

THE PROGRESSIVE | 69

VOX POPULIST by JIM HIGHTOWER

LORD OF THE FLIES, REVISITED

M

any of us have read Wil- and they drifted for days before food stamps and encroaching on liam Golding’s Lord of the washing up on a desolate rocky “our beautiful suburbs!” Fear and Flies in high school—and islet, where they were stranded for loathing, indeed.

We shouldn’t be oblivious to it’s still being taught. The 1954 more than a year. novel depicts the gradual deFifty years later, the intrepid or uncaring about the wickedscent into barbaric darkness of Bregman spent months tracing ness, avarice, and violence that a group of English schoolboys multiple dead ends before at last obviously abound in society. It’s Populist author, shipwrecked on a small, desert- locating a few survivors. After there, inside corporations, police public speaker, and ed island. Its portrayal of innate traveling to Tonga to meet them and military complexes, lobbyradio commentator human depravity was hailed at the and hear the true story, he learned ist-controlled governments, many JIM HIGHTOWER writes The time for its unblinking “realism.” that, far from devolving into bar- religious organizations, and other Hightower Lowdown, Only . . . it was total bullshit. barism, the inventive teenagers top-down constructs that prioria monthly newsletter In his superb 2019 work, Hu- had set up a functioning democ- tize profit and institutional comchronicling the mand over democratic values and mankind: A Hopeful History, racy and communal economy. ongoing fights by the common good.

Dutch historian Rutger Bregman They split chores into teams America’s ordinary But in striving to institute documents that Golding had no of two, built sleeping huts and a people against a culture of justice, it’s self-deknowledge of behavioral science kitchen, tended a garden, stored rule by plutocratic and was hardly an impartial judge rainwater, created a gymnasium, feating to assume humankind is elites. Sign up at of children’s propensities. fashioned a badminton court. innately selfish, as Golding did HightowerLowdown “I have always understood the And whenever they started a fire, in Lord of the Flies. Rather, we .org.

Nazis,” Golding once said, “be- they took turns protecting it so it should shame the self-serving culprits as deviants and rally the cause I am of that sort by nature.” never died out. majority to common-good soluSo he made up the story, and it One boy even constructed a wasn’t about children’s dark na- rudimentary guitar to accom- tions by appealing directly to their ture, but his own. pany the castaways’ singing. Yes, impulse for an egalitarian society they had occasional arguments, that shares both responsibilities There’s the world we live in, and then but the rule was that the quarrel- and benefits like the young men ers had to go to opposite ends of from Tonga. there’s the frightening world we see In Humankind, Bregman cites the island to cool down for a few every hour on “the news.” a parable about the possibility of hours before they were brought achieving such a society: back to the group to apologize.

After learning about the man “That’s how we stayed friends,” one An old man says to his grandbehind the tale, Bregman became former castaway told Bregman. son: “There’s a fight going on curious about what would really When rescued by a passing inside me. It’s a terrible fight happen if children were left alone fishing crew after fifteen months between two wolves. One is on an island. He kept poking into on the island, the boys were exevil—angry, greedy, jealous, everything from scientific studies traordinarily healthy—physically, arrogant, and cowardly. The to news reports, and—amazing- socially, and spiritually. other is good—peaceful, lovly—finally unearthed an actual There’s the world we live in, and ing, modest, generous, honest, incident of shipwrecked children: then there’s the frightening world and trustworthy. These two In 1965, six bored schoolboys we see every hour on “the news” wolves are also fighting withfrom the Polynesian nation of and in social media: Invading in you and inside every other Tonga—all between thirteen and hordes of murderous immigrants! person, too.” After a moment, sixteen years old—took a small Black and brown rioters and lootthe boy asks, “Which wolf will fishing boat out on a lark, but they ers rampaging through city streets! win?” were caught in a sudden storm Organized squads of illegal voters and blown far from home. Their and ballot thieves stealing elecThe old man smiles. “The one boat’s mast and rudder broke, tions! Lazy bums mooching on you feed.” ◆ 70 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

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