The American Prospect #326

ALEXANDER SAMMON: THE GOP’S SECRET WEAPON MIDTERM MOBILIZATION: REPORTS FROM THE BATTLEGROUND

AFTER HYPERGLOBALIZATION

BY ROBERT KUTTNER

JUNE 2022 PROSPECT.ORG

It’s Time to Bring Manufacturing Back to America.

If the past two years have shown us anything, it’s that the United States can no longer depend on imports for the critical goods it needs.

We must strengthen U.S. manufacturing.

Let’s re-establish domestic supply chains, create millions of new well-paid jobs, and build a stronger, more secure America.

americanmanufacturing.org

June 2022 VOL 33 #3

Features

58

14 After Hyper-Globalization

What should the next trading system be? Can we restore the capacity of the U.S. to produce—and of all nations to regulate capitalism? By Robert Kuttner

24 The RNC’s Ground Game of Inches Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans By Alexander Sammon

32 City Limits

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s bold plans for affordable housing run into old-school politics, perverse regulations, and limited home rule. By Gabrielle Gurley

24 40

40 Blowing the Truck Whistle

A carbon dioxide delivery driver’s long journey to expose issues that he says put his safety and integrity at risk

By David Dayen

48 Therapy by and for Black Women

acial trauma research is having a new day as the scientific R community finally acknowledges the burden of being Black.

By Ramenda Cyrus

Prospects 04 A War to Prevent the Past From Becoming Our Future By Paul Starr

Notebook 06 In Pennsylvania, Democrats’ Suburban Strategy Is Being Put to the Test By Ryan Cooper 08 Can Democrats Keep Georgia Blue? By Eli Day 11 Inflation? Abortion? Which Matters More in Swing States? By Harold Meyerson

Culture 55 Lee Harris on The Case for a New Bretton Woods 58 Rhoda Feng on Sickening and Ethically Challenged 61 Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein on Pandemic, Inc. 64 Parting Shot: The GOP’s Great Replacement

By Francesca Fiorentini Cover art by Joseph Gough

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 1

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Paul Starr

CO-FOUNDER Robert B. Reich EDITOR AT LARGE Harold Meyerson SENIOR EDITOR Gabrielle Gurley MANAGING EDITOR Ryan Cooper ART DIRECTOR Jandos Rothstein ASSOCIATE EDITOR Susanna Beiser STAFF WRITER Alexander Sammon JOHN LEWIS WRITING FELLOW Ramenda Cyrus WRITING FELLOWS Jarod Facundo, Lee Harris INTERNS Aden Choate, Isabelle Gius, Ronald

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PAUL STARR

A War to Prevent the Past From Becoming Our Future The first issue of this

magazine, published in Spring 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing, carried an image on the cover of a new world being born, breaking out of its old shell. “It is a conceit of new publications that their appearance coincides with an historic change. By good fortune, ours does,” I wrote in the first of these columns. It was a heady time, with the Cold War coming to an end, Europe coming together, and democracy on the rise.

As Soviet power over Eastern Europe collapsed, the ghostly fear of nuclear war that had haunted our lives began to lift. We even savored the prospect of a “peace dividend” that could help finance long-neglected domestic priorities.

That new world lost its lustrous hopes a while ago, but no event has so definitively closed the era as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The invasion has taken us back not just to the Cold War but all the way to 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the last time a major power set off a largescale war in Europe with an unprovoked act of aggression. And once again the United States serves as the “arsenal of democracy,” providing weapons to stave off the Russian 4 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

assault on Ukraine as this country did under Franklin Roosevelt when it helped stave off the Nazi assault on Great Britain.

But not everyone is on board with this fight, which comes with costs and serious risks. In another throwback to the past, right-wingers rallying to the cry “America First” oppose our involvement or only grudgingly go along with it, hoping we forget the admiration they long expressed for Vladimir Putin. If Donald Trump had been re-elected, the odds are that he wouldn’t have rallied Western opposition to Putin and armed the Ukrainians. On the left, too, some have wanted no part in this war and called for immediate negotiations as though Putin had not made clear both his determination to pursue the war and his larger aim to restore Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe. The longer the war drags on—and it may well be prolonged—the more opposition to U.S. involvement is likely to grow on both sides of the political spectrum.

What stake do we have in the RussiaUkraine War? I would put it this way: This is a war to prevent the realities of the 20th century from becoming our future in the 21st century. Russia today is an Orwellian

nightmare, a dictatorship directly descended from the Soviet KGB that takes brutal retribution against its critics and hardly bothers to conceal it, the better to instill fear in others. It commits war crimes with the same moral indifference and the same strategic purpose. It is also an economically backward regime that has moved from communism to kleptocracy, and from left to right, without changing its basic character.

The Ukrainians have every reason to fear being dragged back under Moscow’s deadening control: Putin himself has said Ukraine has no right to exist, and he has put Moldova, the Baltic countries, and other former Soviet states on notice. No wonder the Swedes and Finns, who long preferred official neutrality, now want to join NATO. We too now have to weigh the prospect of being dragged back into a past when our friends feared for their freedom and the specter of nuclear annihilation made us all fear for our lives.

In Russia today, no lie is too fantastic to be fed to the public. In a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak, the “special military operation” in Ukraine is supposedly aimed at “de-Nazifying” the only country other than Israel with a Jewish head of government. (“So what if Zelensky is Jewish,” Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said recently in response to a question. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.”)

In its utter contempt for the truth, this kind of institutionalized lying has its parallel in the practiced deceit of Putin’s greatest American admirer, Donald Trump, and the debasement of Republican leaders and right-wing media that parrot Trump’s lies or stand silent, refusing to contradict them.

Resisting the extension of this kind of regime is what the struggle in Ukraine and the struggle at home are both about. In the world today, we are back to basics, the basics of liberal democracy. Both Putin’s Russia and Trump’s Republican Party are threats to freedom and democracy because they are threats to democracy’s elementary rules and the integrity of public life. The foundations of a free society rest on an array of institutions—including free and independent media and the sciences and professions— that are tethered to truth-seeking norms.

Without those institutions, we are lost in a hopelessly disorienting fog of deceit, as the Russian people appear to be now.

Although the Russian invasion of Ukraine has ended the era that began with the Soviet collapse, the project of a Europe whole and

BERLINER VERLAG/ARCHIV / AP PHOTO, ALEX CHAN / SIPA USA VIA AP

S T C E P PROS

free is endangered but not dead. If Russia had been able to march into Kyiv the way it marched into Crimea, it would have sent a clear signal to other countries in the region that they had best make their peace with Putin. We and the Europeans already owe a debt to the Ukrainians not only for resisting Russia but also for exposing its combination of brutality and incompetence. A Russian victory would still threaten a redivision and a remilitarization of Europe with global implications, but the world knows now that Russia can be beaten. Better to do everything possible to stop it in Ukraine than at points further west.

Yet the Russia-Ukraine War does have costs and risks for us, some of them immediate. Together with the COVID pandemic, the war has increased inflation and the risk of recession and thereby contributed to a climate of anxiety and fear. Both the economic and psychological effects are likely to hurt Democrats in the fall, and they may destabilize democratic governments elsewhere. The Russians may also retaliate directly against the United States and European countries: They are masters of poison and cyber, and the Russian media are abuzz with talk of nuclear weapons. We already have direct experience of their interference in our elec-

and lower prices, and those demands have seemed to validate the case for unleashing the fossil fuel industry. International climate agreements look to be more difficult as long as we treat Russia as a pariah state.

The war makes it harder, in addition, to focus attention and resources on all the domestic priorities that liberals and progressives care about. Many on the left understandably want to get the war over with and move on to America’s “real” problems—except that, alas, Russia and the threat it poses to peace, freedom, and security in Europe are a real problem for us too. The impatience with the failure to resolve the conflict through diplomacy is understandable too—but it was Putin’s decision to go to war, and if he expresses interest in negotiations, it must be Ukraine’s decision how to respond.

Like Roosevelt in 1939, Biden today has been forced to turn his attention from economic recovery at home to war in Europe.

No one will mistake him for FDR, much less for Winston Churchill, nor even for the unassuming Churchill of our time, Volodymyr Zelensky. But Americans have been lucky to have Biden as president after the damage Trump did to relations with our closest allies. At just the moment when NATO has again become indispensable, he

Meanwhile, Republicans wait in the wings, expecting to take control of Congress. Their strategy on Ukraine may be both to weaken Biden and to taunt him for being weak, claiming with a straight face that Putin would not have dared to invade Ukraine if Trump had still been president.

In fact, Trump had long threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO and, according to his former national security adviser John Bolton, might have done so if he had been re-elected. “I think Putin was waiting for that,” Bolton told The Washington Post in March. Blowing up NATO would obviously have emboldened Putin, not deterred him.

So let us not be surprised, the longer the war continues, if Trump presents himself as the anti-war candidate for 2024, claiming on the basis of his special relationship with Putin that “I alone can fix it” and achieve peace in our time with Russia.

There are no certainties in the course that Biden and other Western governments are following. The war is asymmetrical in the sense that Russia can throw more soldiers and arms into the fight, while the Western allies are committing themselves only to weapons.

That may be enough, or it may not. For Biden, the results are also likely to be asymmetrical.

Left: Bromberg, Poland, 1939.

Right: Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2022. tions. We don’t know how far they will go.

The war has also had a long-run cost in undermining the agenda for climate reform and transformative energy policies. To be sure, the Germans and other Europeans now recognize that they need to free themselves from dependence on Russian gas, which should strengthen their commitment to an accelerated clean-energy transition. But the immediate demands, here and abroad, are for increased oil and gas production

has reassembled a functioning alliance. He has understood that this country needs to do all it can to aid Ukraine while avoiding a wider and potentially catastrophic war.

That Biden would get no credit from Republicans is entirely predictable. At this point, though, he also appears to be getting little credit from voters—and that too is not wholly surprising in view of the public’s more immediate anxieties, particularly about inflation.

If it works, he will get little credit, but if it fails, he will be sure to get the blame.

On Ukraine, Biden and the Democrats confront the tragic necessity of doing the right thing when there is no guarantee that it will be the winning thing, militarily or electorally. But it is what we have to do, in the hope that it will work and that Americans recognize that it is the right thing, if we are to have any hope of preventing the terrors of the 20th century from revisiting us. n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

NOTEBOOK

In Pennsylvania, Democrats’ Suburban Strategy Is Being Put to the Test The party needs to turn out the suburbs and shore up its urban base.

Republican anti-abortion extremism might help.

By Ryan Cooper The fate of the Democratic Party’s national fortunes this year may well be decided in Pennsylvania. The state has been a bellwether for the last two presidential elections, which were decided by tiny margins—0.7 percentage points (for Trump) and 1.2 (for Biden), respectively. The governor’s race, state legislature, and a critical open Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Pat Toomey are all up for grabs.

In the pre-Trump days, these midterm races would have been a lock for Republicans. The party that wins the MIDTERM presidency has almost MOBILIZATION always lost power at all levels of government in the succeeding midterm—and the exceptions come during highly unusual circumstances, like the Great Depression or immediately after 9/11.

On the surface, the signs have not looked good for Democrats. Pennsylvania’s Republicans have recently had a big advantage in new party registrations, and they are energized around Donald Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Rank-and-file Democrats are demoralized about Joe Manchin blocking President Biden’s all-but-entire agenda, and Biden’s approval ratings are in bad shape.

But Trump also catalyzed a major demographic and regional realignment in Pennsylvania, and national politics is more unsettled than it’s been in years, especially thanks to a feral right-wing Supreme Court majority that appears to be on the verge of repealing Roe v. Wade. Democrats just might have a shot, if they can fix their lagging performance in Philadelphia and hold on to the suburbs, or even better their mar6 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

gins there by winning upscale Republican and independent women appalled at the prospect of outlawing abortion.

Let me first review recent Pennsylvania electoral history. In the 2012 election, Barack Obama ran a starkly populist campaign against a villainous Wall Street plutocrat (Mitt Romney). The result was a modest 5.2-point victory based on huge margins in the urban centers of Pittsburgh and (especially) Philadelphia, small victories in some wealthy suburbs, and small enough loss margins elsewhere to carry him over the line. Obama won 85 percent of the vote in Philadelphia County (which is coterminous with the city), but narrowly lost nearby suburban Chester County, and elsewhere lost by 10 to 30 points.

Four years later, Hillary Clinton ran a much less populist campaign, focused mainly on Trump’s unfitness for office. She won Chester County by a comfortable eight points—but slid to just 82 percent of the Philadelphia vote, got obliterated out in the hinterland by about 30 to 60 points, and lost the state.

The 2018 midterm was a great year for Democrats, but as a classic backlash election (where incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey won by more than 12 points) it is unlikely to provide much by way of lessons.

Without either Trump to rile up liberals or a Republican base caught napping, it simply won’t be repeated.

This November, a narrow victory along the lines of what happened in 2020 is likely the best Democrats can hope for. That year, Biden ran a campaign that was something of a hybrid between Obama’s and Clinton’s.

He assembled a broadly similar coalition to Clinton, except this time actually won a majority. He bested her vote total in both Montgomery County (a Philly suburb) and

Allegheny County (home of Pittsburgh and most of its suburbs) by over 60,000 each. The rest of the Philly suburbs rounded out his best performances in vote terms.

However, it would be wrong to pin Biden’s victory entirely on the suburbs. In terms of percentage increase in votes relative to Clinton, his best counties were a few semiurban or rural ones like Pike, Potter, and Montour. Bigger hinterland counties like Cumberland, Butler, and Monroe where Biden did well added substantial numbers of votes to his total.

A major contributor to that victory was PA Stands Up, a melding of progressive organizations that was formed in early 2020. “Not only were we helping our neighbors figure out the all-new voting system … we were mobilizing people on issues, and using those issues to make sure that folks were participating in the 2020 presidential election, which also included some downballot races that were very important,” says Ashleigh Strange, director of narrative and communications for the organization. In concrete terms, PA Stands Up says it recruited over 8,000 volunteers who made 6,869,934 calls, sent 1,803,935 texts, and had 407,913 conversations with voters.

On the other hand, Biden’s biggest weak spot by far was Philadelphia. Where he decisively won the city’s suburbs and Pittsburgh by a wider margin than Clinton, he got just 3.4 percent more votes than Clinton in Philly (his lowest improvement in any county), and actually lost ground relative to Trump, with just 81 percent of Philly’s vote. Conversely, the city was Trump’s best county relative to 2016, with nearly 24,000 more votes, or 22 percent more than his prior total.

All this suggests that Philadelphia will likely be the place where the statewide races

HEIDI K AYDEN / UNSPLASH

Pennsylvania has only elected two Democratic senators once in history, when Joseph Guffey and Francis Myers served from 1945 to 1947. Arlen Specter briefly switching parties gave the state two Democrats from 2009 to 2011.

are decided in 2022. It’s the largest county in the state by a big margin, containing about 12 percent of the population, it is majoritynonwhite—41 percent Black and 15 percent Latino—and it appears to be up for grabs like no other similarly sized pot of votes in the state. If Republicans can turn out the Trumpy hinterland and continue to make headway among the nonwhite urban working class, as they did in 2020, then Democrats are toast. But if Democrats can hold on to their suburban and rural margins, or better them in the Philly suburbs, and revitalize their performance in the urban core, then they’ve got a fighting chance.

Local progressive organizers argue that there were two major factors behind Biden’s weak Philly performance: the pandemic, and Biden himself. “Part of our strength has been in door-to-door conversations, which we had to shift during the pandemic,” says Sergio Cea, an electoral organizer for Reclaim Philadelphia, an organization that emerged from Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign and has helped elect several progressive members of the city council and state legislature. It is also a chapter affiliate of PA Stands Up. “The Republican Party didn’t care about the impact of the virus when they were campaigning, they were doing door-to-door knocking.”

Even when Reclaim volunteers were talking with Philly voters, it was an uphill battle.

“The other thing that we experienced was a lack of enthusiasm around Biden in general.

We had to do a lot of work of moving people to more wholeheartedly support Biden, because he was so out of step with our priorities,” says Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim’s co-founder and political director. They nevertheless put the work in, because the stakes were so high.

“We did a monumental amount of organizing for someone who was not deeply aligned with us. I think those numbers would have been a lot worse had the progressive community not really stepped up for Biden.”

A potential problem with mobilizing the base is the ongoing fight between progressives and the Democratic Party establishment. Local party committees have endorsed five different conservative challengers against progressive incumbents—a highly unusual move. At least two of those challengers have been funded by Jeff Yass, a notorious right-wing billionaire. Yass has long supported Republican state senator and gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, who spent campaign money busing people to the January 6 putsch and attended

it himself (Mastriano claims he didn’t enter the Capitol).

Similarly, as Alex Sammon has reported for the Prospect, in the Senate primary, moderately progressive John Fetterman (currently serving as lieutenant governor) faced blistering negative attacks from Rep. Conor Lamb—funded by the same hedge fund zillionaires who are backing Senate candidates on the Republican side. With Fetterman now the nominee, these attacks imperil Democrats’ chances in November.

In better news for Democrats’ chances (though not for the American people), the conservative movement has recently

Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania, is critical to Democratic hopes in the midterms. launched an all-out attack on reproductive freedom and LGBT rights that puts it on the wrong side of a supermajority of the American people. The draft version of an upcoming Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, which is reliably supported by about 60 percent of Americans, could tilt the electoral balance toward the Democrats.

“As someone who is capable of bearing children, if I got pregnant today, I would have an abortion, and that’s the case for the majority of my friends and family,” says McIllmurray. “Even that—just connecting people with their personal stake and their personal stories, whether or not they’ve had an abortion or would consider to have an abortion, I think will be a really important piece of this story too.”

“I helped do field organizing in West Philadelphia for the gubernatorial candidate Tom

Wolf [in 2018]. At the start of our canvasses we would ask all of the people that came out ‘what’s at stake for you in this election?’ Personally, for me, I would go to a story about how someone I care about and love almost died from an illegal abortion. I’m the son of Chilean immigrants where reproductive rights had not been legal for a long time,” says Cea. “It was something I would go to commonly four years ago, thinking that this is a grave threat that could happen—today we’re in a situation where it is happening.”

Sure enough, in a recent debate Mastriano said he favored banning all abortion at six weeks (which would mean virtually all of them), with no exception for rape, incest, or the life of the mother—a position supported by only about 15 percent of Pennsylvania residents.

These developments give state Democrats, particularly gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro, a powerful argument in their favor—especially in affluent suburbs, where this kind of gratuitous, atavistic cruelty drove voters away from Trump and where turnout is likely to be high. If Republicans take complete control of the state legislature and the governorship, they could well pass a total abortion ban, along with God knows what other deranged policy. A Governor Shapiro could at least block any such law.

Nevertheless, it would be helpful for Democrats to make a positive argument as well. One strong argument for Fetterman would be that he could add one more seat to Democrats’ Senate majority, meaning that the party would no longer need to keep both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on its side for every vote. A clear, explicit promise that should voters provide Democrats with control of the House and two more senators, they will pass a national legalization of abortion and gay marriage would fit the bill. Better still would be a credible plan to pass the Biden agenda on health care, family benefits, or climate change should Fetterman win—just as the promise to deliver $2,000 checks helped deliver two Senate seats to the Democrats in the Georgia runoffs in 2021.

Pennsylvania organizers aren’t waiting on such Democratic promises, though, to keep working as hard as they can. “We’re not stopping to rest on our laurels. As we are pushing Biden and other Democrats we elected … we’re making sure that they’re not going back to normal,” says Strange.

“Normal, pre-COVID, pre-Trump left a lot of people in the dark.” n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

NOTEBOOK

Can Democrats Keep Georgia Blue?

Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock, and Black Lives Matter activists are teaming up to consolidate Biden’s 2020 victory.

By Eli Day With a key Senate seat and the governor’s mansion on the table this year, Georgia is again at the center of the political universe.

For governor, Republican incumbent Brian Kemp is facing Stacey Abrams in a rematch of their explosive 2018 contest.

Over on the Senate line, the Rev. Raphael Warnock is defending the seat he narrowly won less than two years ago against HerMIDTERM MOBILIZATION schel Walker, the football icon reborn as a Trump-endorsed outsider with an extremely standard Republican worldview. It’s one of a handful of races that will determine control of the Senate, and thus any chance the Biden administration will have to accomplish anything of lasting significance.

All this makes the two contests blockbuster events, and with the ungodly spending to prove it.

For Georgia progressives, the task is mobilization. First, they must convince voters these races will have real consequences for people’s lives. More importantly, they must convince people to stick around and build popular power that will last longer than individual politicians, who come and go.

“We understand that if we don’t have a vehicle for the multiracial working class … then we won’t make the progress that we need to make even as we become a purple state and then trend blue,” Britney Whaley, the Southeast regional director for the Working Families Party (WFP), who’s based in Georgia, tells the Prospect. It’s an increasingly common progressive argument: Voting for the “right” people isn’t enough. Most Americans have seen how corporate lobbyists swarm Congress after every election 8 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

to block virtually anything good. The only way to make politicians reliably do things for ordinary people is through organized public pressure, progressive ones included.

“The approach is just to, quite frankly, keep it real with people,” Whaley says.

Instead of focusing solely on candidates, they’re pitching voters on “the power of us.

The power that we have if we take collective action.”

In a story on Georgia’s populist history, I boiled the remarkable 2020 and 2021 victories down to two core elements: aggressive outreach to Georgia’s younger and more diverse voters, plus plain economic populism that spoke to people’s desire for a fair and equal world.

The first half is well known. Back in 2014, Stacey Abrams began an uphill crusade to convince Democrats that they could win the state by tapping into the growing numbers of unregistered young people and people of color with a slightly more progressive message.

Few Democrats listened in the 2016 campaign. As Greg Bluestein writes in Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power, Abrams and other local Georgia leaders practically “begged Hillary Clinton’s campaign to take the state seriously” in 2016, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.

Four years later, nothing was the same.

Abrams’s strategy, plus suburban nausea with Trump, pushed Joe Biden to victory.

Then in the runoff elections in January 2021, Warnock and Jon Ossoff sent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler packing.

Importantly, in the crucial final days, their campaigns braided Abrams’s strategy together with a clear populist economic message. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” Biden said at a Georgia rally, “those $2,000 checks will go out

the door.” Around the same time, a real ad from the Warnock campaign read, “Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock.”

As a result, turnout nearly hit presidential levels. And Black voters came out in droves, proving that Democrats’ most reliable, neglected, and economically progressive voting bloc can flex real muscle when they’re given a compelling reason. For the first time in decades, Georgia was a solid shade of purple.

Despite enormous spending and outreach of their own, Democrats shared credit with a vast network of independent labor and racial justice groups that mobilized seas of volunteers to knock on doors, text, and call by the millions.

Among them was Black Voters Matter (BVM), a nonprofit that doesn’t campaign for candidates, but spent the campaign zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state doing voter education and outreach. They’re still there today, broadcasting that winning real change requires independent mass power.

“Voting is one way to do that. It is probably one of the most powerful tools that you can use, but it’s not the only tool,” Fenika Miller, BVM’s senior state organizing manager for Georgia, tells the Prospect. For BVM, the main event is “building power at the local level through grassroots activism.”

That’s how “[we] make sure our communities and our children have a good quality of life and get the justice they deserve.”

The national political climate will be very important.

For the moment, Donald Trump isn’t dominating national attention, so Democrats will be less able to leverage his unpopularity. Meanwhile, most of Biden’s promised change has stalled out due to either the petty sabotage of corporate Democrats, who killed his Build Back Better agenda, or the president’s own reluctance to use his executive power. As a result, organizers must keep voters engaged without a bogeyman to motivate them, or concrete progress on Democrats’ long-standing promises to strengthen the safety net, bolster voting rights, and avert climate catastrophe.

With such a pitiful offensive record, and the president’s deepening unpopularity, it may be hard to convince voters that defending Democrats’ fragile Senate majority is worth great effort.

But despite all this, the polls have Warnock

Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia in 2020 was the first Democratic presidential triumph since 1992 and the largest Democratic vote total in the state since favorite son Jimmy Carter in 1980.

UNSPLASH

The Atlanta metro area saw a burst of organizing in 2020, which Democrats hope to capitalize on.

basically deadlocked with Walker, who The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes “is on cruise control headed to the May 24 primary.”

Republican enthusiasm for Walker isn’t surprising. In Flipped, Bluestein covers Georgia Republicans’ desperation to “make a statement” with “a woman, a person of color, someone who could help broaden the party’s appeal.” As a Black man, Walker fits the bill. He’s also a beloved local icon and political outsider with ordinary conservative positions on immigration, the economy, and fossil fuels, which makes him a hit with both Trump’s base and the stuffier crowd horrified by Trump’s bad manners.

For his part, Warnock has focused tightly on classic pocketbook issues that got him elected last time. He’s pushing to cap the price of insulin, pass student loan debt relief, expand Medicaid, and chase after “pricegougers” in the fossil fuel and global shipping industries, with evident conviction.

Locally, Republicans have been swinging sledgehammers at voting rights, abortion rights, and health care, pitting them

squarely against the majority view of Georgians in almost every case. It’s deeply unsettling, but also illuminates the possibilities that lie on the other side of ejecting Republicans from power.

Georgia hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1999. And with Abrams gunning for the state’s highest office again, voters have a chance to send a powerful message about the direction they’d like to see the state go. Abrams’s pitch to voters has two tracks: a frank acknowledgment that times are hard, and a package of policy ideas to repair some of the damage.

“While we have to speak about a vision for the future,” she said on a recent episode of Pod Save America, “we have to acknowledge the real pain people are feeling” as they face economic, social, and health care crises.

“We’ve gotta give people permission to be worried and be unhappy, but to also know that that pain is being met with real plans for their success.”

Concretely, that means strengthening voting rights, expanding affordable hous-

ing, implementing a green-jobs program, and accepting Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid—political and moral no-brainers.

You can hear echoes of this from the Working Families Party, which endorsed Abrams, along with a road map for future change. “It feels like everyone is having a challenging time right now because we are,” Whaley says.

“We’re not at doors talking to people trying to sugarcoat it. There’s no great white hope.

We’re all we got. We have to organize and make demands of our government, or as we have seen, it won’t work for us.”

Alas, this expansive view of politics is all that progressive activists are left with, thanks to Democrats’ poor performance at the federal level. Organizers are thus making a different pitch. Whaley and Miller both use the word “365” to describe the time­ scale organizers need to work on—that is, every day of the year.

Since the last round of elections, WFP has hosted a handful of state-of-the-city and—county addresses to keep the flame JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 9

The Rev. Raphael Warnock has focused on pocketbook issues, like capping the price of insulin, to propel his re-election chances. lit on working-class issues and give people a “political home to continue organizing and asking tough questions,” Whaley says.

They’ve also hired a rural organizer, and plan to bring on more so that it “supports our ongoing effort” to “really make sure we engage folks 365.” That includes everything from their legislative agenda, which emphasizes education and criminal justice reform, to their endorsement process, to building a strong multiracial working-class majority.

These things understandably take time, and trust. Whaley goes on to stress the importance of building deep, lasting relationships and a spirit of collectivism “where we have an invitation.” “We are in metro Atlanta, Athens, Brunswick, Savannah, Albany, Columbus,” Whaley says. “The same places where we had a presence for the runoff is where we’ve continued to orga10 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

nize.” “The goal isn’t to double the number of places—it’s to double down in those places.”

Similarly, BVM is “engaging folks 365,” Miller says. Often led by their local partners in Black communities across the state, they’ve touched everything from voting rights, criminal justice reform, and housing rights to environmental damage, maternal health, and neighborhood recreation.

“There’s so many 365 issues,” Miller adds.

“The issues that affect Black votes don’t start or stop on Election Day.” That nonstop involvement showed up in the 2021 municipal elections. Miller cites that “Black voter turnout was up about 13 percent in some of the counties across rural Georgia. And so that was a good indicator of the strength of how we’re going to lean into these 2022 midterm elections.”

The idea is that if people have a real way to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, then they’ll recognize that voting is just one tool among many. Once it’s no longer viewed as some depressing occa-

sional obligation, and a majority is committed to organizing popular power with a vision for the future, they might also vote more consistently.

Whaley outlines some key features of the idea. The vast majority of multiracial working-class people “feel like you should be able to work 40 hours a week and take care of your family and have affordable housing and have an education that’s fully funded,” she says. “The majority of us want Medicaid expansion,” she continues. Instead of fighting the culture wars with Republicans on critical race theory and other shiny cultural objects that they’re hoping voters stay glued to, “we win by talking to people about how we make government work for them. Everyone has skin in the game. So how can you positively change the material conditions of people who are struggling?” n Eli Day is a Detroit native. He writes about politics, history, and racial and economic justice. Find him on Twitter @elihday.

BEN GR AY / AP PHOTO

NOTEBOOK

Inflation? Abortion? Which Matters More in Swing States?

In Nevada and Arizona, unions and progressive groups are beginning to walk precincts, and finding an electorate up for grabs.

Nevada Democrats have always been able to count on Las Vegas’s Culinary Workers union, the state’s number one door-knockers.

AMEER BASHEER / UNSPLASH

By Harold Meyerson The overriding issue that will bring voters t o t he polls t his November, Republicans say, will be inf lation—voters, in keeping with political history, will blame MIDTERM Biden for rising prices MOBILIZATION and cast their ballots for the GOP. The overriding issue, Demo-

crats contend, will be the Supreme Court’s revocation (still likely as I write this) of Roe v. Wade, which will enable Democrats to hold and win any number of seats they were expected to lose before the right-wing Supremes weighed in.

If there’s any state where this inf lation-vs.-abortion contest will play out most dramatically, it should be Nevada.

According to a New York Times compendium of state polls (all taken before the Alito bombshell was leaked), the num-

ber of pro-choice Nevadans exceeded the number of anti-choicers by a whopping 31 percentage points. Regulation of personal behavior has never been a feature of the state whose de facto motto has been “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Advantage, Democrats.

However, in Clark County, Nevada— which encompasses Las Vegas and its suburbs and is home to the majority of Nevadans—rents rose by 29 percent over the past three years. A separate survey JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 11

NOTEBOOK taken by the state’s largest union—UNITE HERE, which represents the workers in Vegas’s mammoth hotel-casinos—found that 20 percent of its members had experienced increases in their monthly rent of $500 or more during the past year. Advantage, Republicans.

Which means that this fall’s elections in Nevada will be “a fucking dogfight,” in the words of one veteran leader of statewide campaigns. “If the election were held today,” that leader told me in mid-May, “I think [incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve] Sisolak would win, but [incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Catherine] Cortez Masto would lose. Each probably by a margin of 15,000 votes or less.”

A loss by Cortez Masto, of course, would markedly lower the Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate. Whatever the outcome come November, what happens in Vegas won’t just stay there.

Nevada Democrats, and their counterparts in Arizona—the two Southwestern swing states—have a tried-and-true method of winning fucking dogfights: ground war.

Just as in the other 48 states, they also wage the hugely expensive air war of advertising, but more unusually, walking precincts and knocking on doors has made the difference in every recent Democratic victory in both states.

That’s especially true in Nevada, where several distinct efforts have accompanied recent campaigns. The state party apparatus put together by the late former senator (and former Senate Democratic leader) Harry Reid has waged ground games of its own in every election of the past two decades. This year, the Reid operatives set up their own operation after activists from the Democratic Socialists of America, who’d had signal successes winning votes for Bernie Sanders in the state caucuses of 2016 and 2020, won control of the state party.

Each faction will be on the ground for the remainder of the year.

Community and labor activists have a considerable ground game history of their own in the state, by far the largest of which has been that of UNITE HERE, whose 50,000-member local of Las Vegas hotel workers—Local 226, also known as the Culinary Workers—has long been the state’s number one door-knocker. In 2020, when the coronavirus limited every other group to phone-banking, UNITE HERE was 12 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

the only door-knocker on the Democratic side, as the union had already employed and engaged public-health experts to devise safety equipment (more than mere masks) for its members still encountering the public in hotels. Adhering to those protocols and encased in that equipment, UNITE HERE fielded roughly 500 canvassers, all members, who knocked on approximately 650,000 doors to talk to voters, chief ly about the differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the bread-and-butter issues that concerned voters most. In a state of just 3.1 million residents, that’s a lot of doors, and a lot of voters.

In Arizona, UNITE HERE has fewer members, but has established a beachhead in some Phoenix hotels. Its members there belong to a bistate local—Local 11, which is also the hotel worker union and a political powerhouse in Los Angeles. As such, UNITE HERE was able to field 400 door-knockers in Arizona in 2020—again, almost the only ones on the Democratic side—though a number came from Los Angeles, where the presidential election clearly wasn’t going to be close. In a state with more than double the population of Nevada—7.1 million—those canvassers were able to knock on 750,000 doors in 2020.

Those weren’t the only states where the union waged a huge ground game in 2020.

Their East Coast locals supplemented their Pennsylvania locals to amass hundreds of canvassers who focused on turning out the vote in Philadelphia, and experienced canvassers from across the country flocked to Georgia for the two Senate runoff elections in January 2021.

As should be obvious from the sheer volume of their efforts, UNITE HERE canvassers don’t limit their canvass to their fellow members or union members generally—but neither do they reach out to all registered Democrats. A number of those door-knocks are repeat engagements with their targeted audience. “The people that we target often don’t vote regularly,” says Susan Minato, the co-president of Local 11. That means the canvassers will be targeting the young, people of color, and suburban women whose votes may swing due to the abortion issue.

Accordingly, the canvassers will be talking not just about the party’s differences on economic policy but also about a woman’s right to choose, given the Court’s likely revocation of that right. As one union official points

Republicans in both Arizona and Nevada will have to figure out how to navigate the likely repeal of Roe. out, “a majority of our members are women, and their health and safety is a critical concern for us.”

In Arizona, according to the Times’ compendium of previous state polls, prochoice voters also outnumber their antichoice counterparts, but not as decisively as in Nevada—the margin in Arizona is 13 percentage points, which is significant but not as overwhelming as Nevada’s 31 points.

And this year, the union plans to field even more canvassers in these two swing states. “Our goal in Nevada this year is to knock on nearly twice as many doors as we did in 2020,” says Gwen Mills, who is the secretary-treasurer of the international union. “Though it’s a midterm, we will have the same number of canvassers on the ground as we had in 2020—500—but they’ll be putting in more hours. In fact, they’re already on the ground now.” In Arizona, says Brendan Walsh, who represents the union within Arizona Wins, a coalition of labor and community organizations, the union’s efforts this year will be augmented by Black, Latino, tribal, and other groups that confined their efforts largely to phone banks in 2020. That will mean, he estimates, that the number of face-toface voter encounters will rise from the roughly one million of 2020 to three million this year.

In both states, canvassing, though not yet on a massive scale, began in March of this year, to sound voters out on issues and hone the canvassers’ pitches.

In Arizona, incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly took office just two years ago after winning a special election. Polls show him with small leads over his Republican challengers, though most of these were taken before those challengers began their campaign advertising. (The primary won’t take place until early August.) The Republicans who seek to oust Kelly include Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who accused

MERIT T THOMAS / UNSPLASH

The last time all four senators from Arizona and Nevada were Democrats was 1947 (Ernest McFarland and Carl Hayden in Arizona, and Pat McCarran and Edward Carville in Nevada).

all five Maricopa County (Phoenix and its suburbs) supervisors of allowing 2020 election fraud to happen under their noses; and Blake Masters, who acclaimed the provisional Alito decision, has been endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene, and still hopes to get Donald Trump’s backing. A third candidate, Jim Lamon, is a businessman who’d spent $13 million of his own money on his campaign as of April, and thereafter saw a commensurate rise in the primary polling.

The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, is term-limited out of office. The leaders in the party’s respective gubernatorial primaries are Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Republican former local Fox news anchor Kari Lake, who comes off as the possible spawn of Ron Burgundy and a QAnon devotee. Last year, Lake quit her post at the Phoenix Fox station, citing liberal media bias, but also after she repeatedly crossed swords with management and viewers over her advocacy of right-wing conspiracy theories, which included her belief that Trump had actua lly carr ied Arizona. She’s been endorsed not only by Trump but by such key Trump retainers as Michael Flynn, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, and Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame. Lake has also called for the imprisonment of Hobbs for presumably helping to mastermind the theft of the state from Trump in 2020, which should make for interesting evenings if and when Lake and Hobbs meet to debate in the fall.

In Nevada, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak has led by roughly ten percentage points in most of the polls against his possible Republican opponents, while Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is in a tight race with Republican primary front-runner Adam Laxalt, trailing him in several polls. Six years ago, Cortez Masto was first elected to the Senate by a bare 2.4 percentage point margin.

Arizona Democrats hope that Lake’s

Trumpier-than-Trump politics will lead the state’s remaining McCain Republicans to vote for Hobbs. As Republicans hold just a two-seat majority in each house of the state legislature, Democrats also hope that they can win control there, though there are a

number of districts in each house for which no Democrat had filed to run as of mid-May (not all of them heavily Republican).

Hobbs will not only be harmed by the rate of inflation, but also by the ongoing influx of immigrants on the state’s southern border, and President Biden’s effort (currently blocked by a court) to rescind his predecessor’s order to block immigrant entry due to COVID. But Republicans in both Arizona and Nevada will have to figure out how to navigate the likely repeal of Roe. For her part, Lake has confined her campaign’s issue page statement on the question to ten words: “I am pro-life. Always have been and always will be.” (Most of her other issue statements are considerably longer.) In heavily pro-choice Nevada, the likely Republican Senate nominee, former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, has affirmed that he’s anti-abortion, but points out that the right to an abortion “is currently settled law in our state,” due to a 1990 voter referendum that can only be repealed by a further referendum—though that could be overridden by a federal ban by Congress or the Court.

So, come November, will the abortion question or the inflation question be the question of the day? Ermila Medina is a member of the Vegas Culinary local who’s been door-knocking since March of this year. On the one hand, she reports, the voters she’s encountered have expressed dismay about soaring rents and the price of gas and food. They blame Biden for this, even though, she adds, “I don’t think he’s to blame.” On the other hand, she says, “a lot of people I’ve spoken with agree with me that no one should get to decide for women whether we have an abortion or not. It’s a health issue that only the woman has the right to decide.”

Democrats have to hope that Medina and her fellow canvassers find many such determinedly pro-choice voters as they knock on the doors. n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 13

AFTER HYPER-GLOBALIZATION What should the next trading system be?

Can we restore the capacity of the U.S. to produce—and of all nations to regulate capitalism? By Robert Kuttner

H

trade will continue, under different rules.

The task of the next decade is to figure out what those rules will look like. Is there a path back to a trading system that allows nation-states more room to govern capitalism, as in the Bretton Woods era? Can the successor system offer a better deal to developing countries of the Global South?

Might a new trade regime give more weight to climate goals, labor rights, public health, or public provision of goods? And where does China fit in?

The next trade regime will not be a single universal set of rules, as the WTO’s spon-

sors imagined. It will be a hybrid that could provide more space to pursue progressive economic and social policies, nationally and globally, if we don’t succumb to the lingering influence of trade traditionalists in government and their allies on Wall Street.

Corrupted Ideology Meets Corrupted Institutions By hyper-globalization, I mean the premise that cross-border trade and capital movements should be free from regulatory restraints and national industrial policies.

This became the new definition of “free JOSEPH GOUGH

Hyper-globalization is dead, killed by the rise of China, the supply chain catastrophe, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the belated recognition that ultra-free trade was mainly designed to serve financial elites. The Biden administration is pursuing a course correction and looking inward for economic security. Many other nations are taking this approach. Even some businesses recognize that the risk of disruption brought about by extreme globalization doesn’t justify the allure of weak regulation and low labor costs.

Despite this shift, a great deal of global

14 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 15

trade” and the object of intense U.S. diplomacy beginning in the 1980s. After 1990, this vision was codified in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in dozens of bilateral deals. Promoters of the shift invoked economic theory, but in practice it was driven by the corporate push to use trade rules aggressively to undermine national regulation of capitalism, from banking (rebranded as “trade in financial services”) to industrycreated pollution.

NAFTA allowed corporations to sue in special courts to challenge health, safety, and environmental regulations as incursions on their trading rights. Within the EU, long-standing guarantees of collective bargaining were overturned as impinging on the cross-border rights of capital. WTO rules became obstacles to distributing free or cheap vaccines in a worldwide pandemic.

Hyper-globalization was the global face of neoliberalism, as well as its enforcer.

From the start, the system was a bun16 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

dle of contradictions. Western leaders who sponsored this shift knew from their national experience that unregulated markets are far from efficient. For almost a century, nations dealt with the anomalies of markets by regulating finance, labor, health, and the environment. They used industrial and research subsidies and public ownership to help their economies develop. Wherever nations failed to regulate, capitalism created gross inequality and environmental disasters, as well as periodic financial bubbles, systemic crashes, and prolonged depressions. But through some mysterious alchemy, when commerce crossed borders, unregulated markets were supposedly efficient after all. Free-traders never explained the inconsistency.

Under the dominant consensus toward “most favored nation” treatment, all nations were to get the same access to each other’s markets, with no special deals. But the principle of equal access was increasingly

honored in the breach. After the collapse of multilateral trade negotiations in Seattle in 1999, the U.S. moved increasingly to bilateral deals known as free trade agreements (FTAs), typically with export-dependent Third World countries. The basic template was to demand that the client country give U.S.-based corporations access on the terms they wanted, and in return the lucky country’s products got preferential entry to the U.S. market. This was the opposite of multilateralism.

The tip-off to who was really behind this push is the treatment of national sovereignty. In general, U.S. corporations and politicians, especially Republicans, have fiercely resisted signing all manner of global agreements on human rights and the environment, as an interference with American sovereignty. But when it comes to hamstringing the ability of the U.S. government to regulate capitalism, American elites are all too eager to cede sovereignty to the WTO. Since 2000, the global trade regime has

AP PHOTO

Allowing China into the WTO did not nudge them toward political democracy and a less statist economy.

BOB GALBR AITH / AP PHOTO

The pandemic and the related supply chain crisis put one more nail in the globalist coffin. also tolerated an extreme double standard for China. The Clinton administration believed that allowing China into the WTO with no enforceable quid pro quos would nudge China in the direction of political democracy and a less statist economy, as well as reducing the bilateral trade deficit.

The opposite has occurred on all fronts. But the opening to China has been extremely lucrative to U.S. corporations and banks, which were the prime promoters of the deal.

In the politics of trade, China now benefits by having politically powerful U.S. financiers and customers as a kind of Trojan horse that weakens any deviation from the status quo. There is no such foreign Trojan horse in Leninist China.

A Fragmented Trading System Today, the world economy has fragmented into different nations that play by entirely different rules. These include kleptocratic and extractive capitalist nations (Russia, Saudi Arabia); the Chinese hybrid of mercantilist state capitalism and Leninism;

major economies that use the state when expedient (Japan, Korea, India, and Brazil); and smaller nations that find themselves allied with trading blocs of one large player or another. The WTO got everyone to sing from the same hymnal but failed utterly to harmonize actual practices.

The pandemic and the related supply chain crisis put one more nail in the globalist coffin.

As the Prospect has documented, just-in-time production relying on far-flung sources of global supply was supposed to make production more efficient. But the enthusiasts of this model left the risk of disruption out of their calculations. The supply chain crisis also laid bare the extreme dependence of U.S. industry on China as a sole supplier.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a range of sanctions and embargoes that technically violate WTO rules, but are accepted as emergency measures of war.

Future threats to unfettered trade, from political unrest to the climate crisis, further informed the dire need to change this concentrated model, which now seems engineered for maximum risk.

It fell to Donald Trump to steal the Democrats’ clothes and jettison hyper-globalization. He did it in a way that was xenophobic and offensive to America’s allies. But once

Trump acted, it became impossible to put Humpty-Dumpty back together. President Biden has broken with the trade orthodoxy of his three Democratic predecessors and is acting to restore America’s capacity to regulate capitalism and to use industrial policies to reshore industries and jobs, and in a far more coherent and strategic fashion than Trump.

There are several possible paths going forward. We already have a rough template for a wholly different global trading order: the charter of the proposed International Trade Organization that 56 nations launched in 1948. The ITO was supposed to be the third of the Bretton Woods institutions, along with the World Bank and the IMF. But while the latter two went forward, the ITO was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, and was stillborn.

As originally conceived in the Roosevelt era, the three Bretton Woods institutions were understood as bulwarks against laissez-faire, the global counterpart to a domestic economy of managed capitalism and full employment.

The World Bank would supply public capital; the IMF would advance loans on generous terms to spare debtor nations the need to pursue perverse austerity; and the ITO would reconcile expanded trade with labor and social standards to prevent trade from creating a race to the bottom. Those were the days! When the ITO died, a much weaker body, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) served mainly as a venue for negotiations, but without the enforcement powers that were later given to the WTO. Today, there are calls for a new Bretton Woods. Draft legislation in the spirit of the ITO has been circulating among progressive members of Congress. Nations receiving barrier-free access to other markets would have to meet core labor, environmental, and consumer-protection standards. If they did not, nations that respected such standards would be free to impose social tariffs or other barriers.

But despite the disgrace of the current system, there is no politically feasible way of converting the WTO into something more like an ITO. Fundamental changes in the WTO require the assent of all its members.

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 17

Even if smaller members could be pressured into going along, there is no support among most of the larger member nations for anything like the ITO. A further problem is that there are no provisions for kicking a nation out of the WTO for even the most flagrant violations of its norms. So even as China chronically breaks the rules and Russia invades Ukraine, we are stuck with both China and Russia as members. The United States, as the world’s largest market, could threaten to leave the WTO unless fundamental changes were made. But though the Biden administration has been far more willing to challenge the orthodoxy than its Democratic predecessors, it’s hard to imagine Biden threatening to quit the WTO. That leaves two alternatives: incremental reform, or malign neglect.

WTO: The Case for Malign Neglect The current trade regime, though largely designed by U.S. administrations, has simply not served the U.S. national interest. “We have the world’s most open markets, we have a chronic trade deficit, and WTO dispute-resolution panels keep ruling against the U.S.,” says Robert Lighthizer, who served as Trump’s top trade official.

Though a nominal Republican, Lighthizer was no Trumper. He was the bestinformed critic of the hyper-global trading system on the scene. His views on economic nationalism were more those of a progressive Democrat when it came to industrial policy and good jobs. Through sheer luck, Trump decided to name him as U.S. trade representative.

Lighthizer came up with a bit of strategic genius mixed with diplomatic hardball: sidelining the WTO by having the U.S. veto any more appointments to the institution’s quasi-court, known as the appellate body. That body now lacks a quorum. With the U.S. blocking nominations, the WTO’s power to issue binding rulings is now kaput.

Letting the WTO wither on the vine opens up space to pursue industrial policies and impose countervailing tariffs that might otherwise fall afoul of WTO rules. In this moment, the U.S. can make free access to its markets conditional, while rebuilding domestic capacity.

If the U.S. were to instead seek some modest, incremental improvements at the WTO, it would come under pressure to start cooperating with the organization again, 18 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

beginning with restoring authority to the appellate body. In many ways, the U.S. is better off leaving the WTO sidelined. “The WTO can revert to being a standing body for trade negotiation, like the old GATT, but with no power of binding arbitration,” Light­hizer says.

One key area where even modest WTO reform has been blocked by industry power is the idea of waiving WTO rules on intellectual property, known by the acronym TRIPS, to expedite distribution of COVID vaccines.

Biden proposed a TRIPS waiver early in his administration. The most recent TRIPS proposal by WTO director-general Ngozi OkonjoIweala falls far short of what’s needed to treat vaccines as social goods. “If you can’t get a temporary, emergency TRIPS waiver in a global pandemic when millions of people have died and more will without access to effective vaccines and treatments, when are you going to get it?” says Lori Wallach, a prominent critic of the WTO trade regime.

Lighthizer’s other breakthrough, which also violated WTO rules, was to act unilaterally to defend U.S. economic interests.

The process for proving that China illicitly subsidized its industries, one case at a time, was impossibly cumbersome. So Lighthizer decided to levy a general tariff against China’s mercantilist system as a whole, averaging 25 percent. This was imprecise, but ballpark accurate. With WTO dispute settlement out of business, there was little China could do other than retaliate, leading Lighthizer to further increase tariffs on some sectors.

There was shock and dismay among freetraders. But “the Earth did not tilt off its axis, as confidently predicted,” as Wallach likes to say. Mostly, trade went on, just as it did in earlier eras when tariffs were the norm.

Indeed, China’s trade surplus with the U.S. has grown, though the tariffs did create some shelter for the U.S. to build key industries.

Trump did not grasp the details of Lighthizer’s trade diplomacy, but he liked the idea that the headline could be anti-China. In the infighting, Lighthizer won out over the administration’s corporate faction, led by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. When Biden came in, he fine-tuned the tariffs but retained Lighthizer’s overall strategy.

The tariffs do two things that are somewhat at odds with each other, a contradiction that Biden papers over. They are described as leverage against China—part of a broad diplomatic strategy for a reset

of the U.S.-China relationship. But they also create some space for industries that have been decimated by Chinese mercantilism to survive. In that respect, there is a case for making at least some of the tariffs permanent.

For example, China’s policy of subsidizing steel production led to a global supply glut, by dumping steel onto global markets at prices that make it impossible for U.S. integrated producers to compete. Since steel tariffs were imposed in 2018, America’s domestic steel industry has made a modest recovery. Tougher enforcement of Buy American laws would also help. Those laws are also a flagrant (yet salutary) violation of the WTO regime, whose rules on procurement ban domestic preference.

Textiles are another important example of the value of the tariffs. The United States no longer manufactures much apparel, but still has a viable textile industry with about 600,000 jobs. The raised consciousness about overreliance on China during a pandemic began with the shortage of PPE, which are of course textiles.

U.S.-made textiles also provide the materials for much of Central America’s apparel industry. Tariffs on Chinese textiles have been an important factor in keeping domestic textile production viable. Though enforcement has been far from perfect, the Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) does include labor rights, something entirely lacking in China trade. This supply chain of U.S. textiles providing material for Central American apparel is an example of regional trade arrangements with at least modestly better social standards. Such regional deals are likely to expand, as the dystopian idea of universal free trade fades.

The current trade regime, though largely designed

by U.S. administrations, has simply not served the U.S. national interest.

ANNA MONEYMAKER / AP PHOTO

Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s trade representative, used U.S. veto power over the WTO to block appointments to its appellate body, sidelining the organization.

The Sound of One Hand Clapping Assertive policies to contain the impact of China’s predatory trade policies are necessary if we are to restore domestic supply.

But they are far from sufficient. In industries where China dominates the entire supply chain as well as the finished product, the U.S. will not regain production capacity without a strategic government-wide industrial policy.

Exhibit A is the solar industry. China’s predatory pricing has been successful at driving out U.S. and other manufactures, not just of solar panels but of the multiple components that go into them. As a result, even domestic makers of solar panels depend on made-in-China inputs.

The issue is complicated by two overlapping U.S. policies. One is the tariff

on Chinese solar exports, which dates to the Obama presidency. The other is the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits imports of products made with slave labor. Much of China’s solar industry is based in the Uyghur heartland province of Xinjiang.

China has sought to avoid the tariffs by transshipping its solar products to other East Asian countries and pretending that the production originated there. The Commerce Department has launched a full-scale investigation of this subterfuge. But because of the dependence of U.S. solar producers on Chinese inputs, there has been tremendous pressure from both domestic manufacturers and solar panel installers to kill or water down the investigation or allow waivers.

Both the “domestic” manufacturers, rep-

resented by the Solar Energy Industries Association and including several companies that actually originate in China, and the installers, represented by the American Clean Power Association, and some of their allies in the environmental movement function as part of the China lobby. The New York Times recently ran a totally onesided piece telling the story of endangered solar supplies entirely from the viewpoint of these industries, without one word on the implications for trade policy. “Around the country,” according to the breathless article, “solar companies are delaying projects, scrambling for supplies, shutting down construction sites and warning that tens of billions of dollars—and tens of thousands of jobs—are at risk.”

The administration is divided on this JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

question. John Kerry, Biden’s presidential envoy for climate, has been lobbying to sideline the Commerce Department action, on the grounds that we need the solar panels to meet environmental goals. Kerry is also an enthusiast of the wishful premise that collaboration with China on climate generally should take priority over other goals.

The larger problem is that the U.S. government does not have a single senior official or office in charge of a comprehensive reshoring policy for solar, either at the Departments of Commerce, Energy, or the White House. If there were, a solar czar could fashion a coherent strategy, giving some temporary relief from tariffs to the extent that U.S. producers needed components to rebuild domestic supply chains.

But though the White House has published two superb and detailed reports on the need for reshoring supply, there is no program to implement it, because responsibility is fragmented.

The Undertow U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai is a resolute supporter of a heterodox approach to trade. Until Tai, the main job of USTR was to find new trade deals to negotiate, and to work with industry to dismantle supposed trade barriers. Tai has no interest in new deals and is working hard to retain the key China tariffs, in the face of corporate opposition and pushback from others in the administration.

As the Prospect has reported, pressure for tariff cuts originated in the desire of some White House staffers to be able to claim that Biden was working to reduce inflation. The problem with that is that the tariffs began in 2017–2018, and inflation did not spike until late 2021. Public pronouncements in mid-April from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and White House staffer Daleep Singh calling for tariff cuts produced serious pushback from inside, notably from Tai, and also from outside the administration, notably from labor.

A problem, however, is that unlike previous people who held the post of U.S. trade representative, Tai does not have a direct personal relationship with the president.

Biden has a very narrow inner circle of people with whom he goes back decades. Tai has to report (or complain) through them.

The old trade regime may be dead, but traditionalists keep trying to resuscitate it.

Not only is there continuing pressure to cut 20 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

or repeal the China tariffs and to freely let in components needed as part of the domestic supply chain. Free-trade careerists and corporate lobbyists also keep pushing for the U.S. to do more trade deals. “Big Tech is trying to hijack the trade agenda to undermine President Biden and Congress’s plans to combat Big Tech abuses and break their monopoly powers while simultaneously rolling back the best gig worker, privacy, and competition policies in other countries,” says Lori Wallach. “To try to evade detection, they are selling this whole operation as a new ‘digital trade’ initiative.”

One such deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was advertised as an agreement with other Pacific nations to link them more closely to the U.S. and to serve as a counterweight to Chinese regional influence. On closer inspection, the deal was mainly a corporate wish list led by pharma, tech, and Wall Street, which did nothing to contain China. Of the TPP’s 30 chapters, 24 impose limits on food, financial, and other regulations and provide drug firms new monopoly rights. TPP, like NAFTA, also created a special corporate-dominated court for foreign investors. TPP was to be the crowning achievement of Obama’s corporate free-traders, led by trade rep and former Citigroup executive Michael Froman. But Trump, whom nobody could accuse of being soft on China, pulled the U.S. out of the TPP. A version of the deal without the U.S. lives on as the rebranded Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trade traditionalists and corporate lobbyists want the Biden administration to join. There is, mercifully, little interest on the administration’s part.

Indeed, so useless is the revised TPP as an instrument to limit China that Beijing has raised the idea of joining it.

A more promising regional deal now under discussion, which could include labor and social rights, is called the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF). The devil is in the details, but the broad idea is that the U.S. and other nations in China’s neighborhood need a set of common principles.

But unlike the corporate-sponsored TPP, the IPEF could actually have labor, social, and environmental standards, and could reverse the corporate use of trade deals to undermine regulation.

Biden has embraced the idea of a “worker-centered trade policy.” The right brand of trade deal for the Indo-Pacific region

The next trade regime is likely to be a series of regional arrangements by nations with kindred policies. could inject those principles internationally. Katherine Tai supports that version.

But the administration is divided on goals for IPEF, with the State Department and the NSC giving priority to containment of China and the Commerce Department more inclined to promote industry agendas.

Trading Blocs as Democratic Collaboration The next trade regime is more likely to be a series of regional arrangements by nations with kindred policies rather than the universal system long sought by dystopian free-traders. Trading blocs were a widespread aspect of the global system that postwar multilateralism was supposed to end. Under Roosevelt, legislation gave the president the right to negotiate reciprocal tariff reductions, subject to ratification by Congress. This process became generalized with the creation of the GATT, and its successive rounds of multilateral negotiations, which reduced average tariffs on industrial goods from 22 percent in 1947 to less than 5 percent by 1994.

But preferential trading blocs never quite went away. When Britain’s colonies gained their independence, most remained part of the British Commonwealth, and enjoyed trade preferences. Likewise the former colonies of France. Many of these preferences have been continued by the European Union. The use of bilateral and multilateral special trade deals, like NAFTA and CAFTA-DR and dozens of similar deals sponsored by the EU, continued this process. China increasingly has its own special deals, often trading preferential access to scarce raw materials for investment in local infrastructure.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and a broad array of economic sanctions, there is talk of creating a concert of democracies that respect the rule of law, basic human

ADRIAN WYLD / AP PHOTO

U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai, a resolute supporter of a heterodox approach to trade, has tangled with traditionalists trying to resuscitate the status quo.

rights, and trade norms. Secretary Yellen has described this as “friendshoring,” as an antidote to offshoring. The core would be the U.S., the EU, and Japan, who would be free to impose trade restrictions against China and Russia. Their relatively minor trade conflicts with each other would be negotiated directly, as was the case in the GATT era, when its findings were merely advisory rather than binding. Last October, Biden announced a deal with the EU to give trade preference to steel imports made with clean, less-polluting technology.

Trading blocs, regional trade agreements, and kindred ad hoc arrangements are a violation of earlier ideals that were never fully carried out. But they have their benefits.

Harvard’s Dani Rodrik was one of the first

mainstream economists to break with the orthodoxy. In his pioneering 2011 book, The Globalization Paradox, Rodrik wrote, “[D]emocracy and national determination should trump hyper-globalization. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give way.”

These kinds of regimes can include labor, human rights, public-health, and antimonopoly provisions that have been conspicuously absent from the WTO because of its corporate parentage. They can even provide a kind of race to the top.

The EU, for instance, is worse than the U.S. in its enforcement of budgetary austerity, a requirement that was included in

the EU’s founding documents as a demand by the Germans in exchange for giving up the cherished deutsche mark in favor of the untested euro. But Europe is much better on issues like anti-monopoly policy, privacy, and restraint of excesses by giant platform companies. Collaboration with the EU on these fronts can produce global gains that are legislatively blocked by corporate influence in the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. example has helped push the EU to loosen the screws on fiscal and monetary austerity. The pressures of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are also pushing the U.S. and Europe to collaborate on a more rapid transition to renewable energy.

A not her ex a mple: W hen Tr ump scrapped NAFTA as a way of punishing JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

Most trade between the U.S. and China will continue, but the goal should be to bring more symmetry to the economic relationship.

22 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

fair elections displacing corrupt incumbent company unions.

A second key provision of USMCA almost entirely scrapped NAFTA’s chapter on investor-state dispute settlement, most dear to multinational corporations, allowing them to sue in special courts to challenge regulations as violations of their trading rights.

This doctrine has been disavowed by Biden for all future trade deals.

In this sense, what is conventionally termed trade policy is often actually about governance of capitalism. Whether it produces a race to the top or to the bottom depends on the balance of political forces.

But the practical collapse of the hyper-globalist regime under the weight of events has produced a new opening to constrain capi-

tal. We may not be able to negotiate a new ITO, but with the right vision and politics, we can get important elements of it piecemeal.

China: Decoupling or Constructive Engagement 2.0?

When the Clinton administration welcomed China into the WTO, the buzzword was “constructive engagement.” That strategy clearly failed. Now, the U.S. is willing to act unilaterally to defend its economic interests. But there is still a vast volume of trade between the U.S. and China, totaling $506 billion in U.S. imports in 2021 and just $151 billion in exports. Though many have called for a “decoupling” between the U.S. and China, most of that trade will continue. Nor is there any feasible way of forcing China to alter its

CENG SHOU YI / AP PHOTO

Mexico, a surprising coalition of Trump (actually Lighthizer), progressive Democrats in Congress (led by Tai, who was top trade counsel for the Democratic-majority House Ways and Means Committee), and trade unions negotiated a successor deal known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). Trump may not have quite appreciated what was in USMCA, but one key provision guaranteed the rights of workers in all three countries to freely organize, with real enforcement measures, very much in the spirit of the proposed 1948 ITO. The revised treaty gives outside monitors the power to order and monitor union representation elections and award backpay settlements. Thanks to USMCA, independent trade unions have begun to win

Since 1990, U.S.based multinationals have become more globally footloose. That makes the project of industrial policy that much harder. domestic model or preventing its rise as a global economic power.

The goal should be to bring more symmetry to the U.S.-China economic relationship, and to attempt some kind of modus vivendi with China globally. Rodrik suggests that the U.S. pursue areas where it can narrow its differences with China, but without being played for a sucker.

In an important recent paper with Stephen Walt, “How to Construct a New Global Order,” Rodrik warns of a military or geopolitical bipolarity between the U.S. and China, but urges “a more benign version of bipolarity, where the United States and China compete on a number of fronts, continue to trade with and invest in each other’s economies, [and] do not challenge the legitimacy of each other’s domestic systems.” The practical question is whether the U.S. and China could find enough areas of common interest to allow for some de-escalation.

“We need a thinner globalization, more in the spirit of the GATT,” Rodrik told me. “But in some areas we need more globalization, such as human rights, climate, and labor.”

The strategic and diplomatic challenge is to find those areas of common interest while still resolutely defending the U.S. economy against what is clearly Chinese predation.

We are not likely to alter China’s model or goals, but we can change our own. If we make it sufficiently costly for China to treat Uyghurs as slave labor, we might even alter China’s behavior, at least marginally. At the same time, there is a naïveté on the part of China doves such as John Kerry, who argue that other U.S. policies or goals should be subordinated or sacrificed to collaboration with China on climate, which is likely to be illusory.

The economic success of China as a nation that violated all the norms and rules of free trade is an acute embarrassment to the old guard. One of the leading freetraders, Fred Bergsten, admits in his new book, The United States vs. China, “China appears to believe that it is getting the best of both worlds from the present international economic order. It gains hugely from the order’s openness while cheating on the rules.” Like Rodrik, Bergsten calls for a mix of competition and collaboration.

There is an odd convergence between the trade traditionalists and radicals who either admire China’s system or see it as a valuable counterweight against an imperialist America. On the left, some have cited China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a blessing for the Third World, and even suggested that the U.S. seek to join it. The BRI is an effort to create a substantial Chinese global sphere of influence in which infrastructure investments are traded for preferential access to raw materials and other forms of subservience to China. And this challenges legitimate U.S. interests.

At the same time, U.S.-China competition for influence could be good for the Global South. The West will have to offer Third World nations a lot more than has been on offer in the past, if China is not to win this competition by default.

Who Is Us? In 1990, Robert Reich, one of the co-founders of this magazine, wrote an influential article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Who Is Us?” Reich’s point was that corporate identity should not be confused with national identity. Which corporation was more “American,” he asked: one domiciled in the U.S. that produced offshore, or a foreign-owned corporation with branch plants in the U.S.?

Reich was asking the right question, but at the time he was more of a neoliberal and his remedy was off. Reich argued that if the U.S. invested sufficiently in worker skills, corporations would beat a path to America’s door and the competitiveness problem would take care of itself. But the issue of corporate identity and loyalty is more complicated.

Since 1990, U.S.-based multinationals have become even more globally footloose.

And even though the Supreme Court has defined corporations as citizens, they are far from loyal citizens. That makes the project of industrial policy that much harder.

Other nations can have industrial policies based on “national champions” because Mitsubishi, Mercedes, or Huawei know without being told where their national loyalty lies.

That’s far less the case with U.S.-based or -owned corporations, from Apple to Intel, which take advantage of hyper-globalization to produce offshore.

In emerging industries such as solar, as China has underpriced U.S. domestic producers, the reaction of many has been to move production to China. More insidiously, when China moves some production to the U.S., it is in service not of minimizing labor costs or finding more skilled workers but to gain domestic clients as part of the China lobby.

This kind of strategic trade is the opposite of what the U.S. has been promoting.

So if the U.S. is to have an industrial policy, we need to be crystal clear about the goals. The object is not just to promote domestic production if it helps predatory foreign firms. Chinese-owned firms that do final fabrication in the U.S. should not automatically get made-in-America preferences.

And we can’t just assume that U.S.-based firms are loyal U.S. citizens.

Reshoring production means either subsidizing or creating U.S.-owned firms that have a commitment to U.S. output and U.S. workers. In the postwar era of collective bargaining, that reciprocal loyalty was taken for granted. Now it has to be rebuilt.

At a time of global pandemic and global climate catastrophe, we also need to ask “who is us” in a broader way. Us has to be all of humanity. The economist Branko Milanovic points out that if you look at the question of inequality nation by nation, most nations became more unequal over the past half-century. But if you look at the world as a whole, the global economy has become more equal, largely because China’s development policies have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty.

It ought to be possible for this achievement to not be a zero-sum game, at the expense of broad prosperity in the West.

In my lifetime, the gains to working people have been achieved within national polities, where national social compacts could be negotiated and enforced. Hyper-globalization deliberately undermined that project.

But we may be on the verge of a different form of globalization that could produce gains for social justice, conceived globally as well as nationally, and not just for rampant capitalism. n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

THE RNC’S GROUND GAME

In some sense, it was predictable that my search for any information about one of the Republican National Committee’s two dozen community centers would lead me back to Facebook. Years had passed since I’d vacated my account, a period during which the site had been annexed as the primary digital station for conservative messaging. If the party’s newest grassroots outreach initiative existed anywhere online, it had to be here.

I was in search of a contact or a programming schedule at the RNC’s Native American Community Center in Pembroke,

North Carolina, in the largely rural, poverty-addled county of Robeson, in the state’s southeast corner. Pembroke marked the 21st community center opened by the RNC of the 2022 election cycle, as part of an overt racial minority outreach program. At that point, in March, it was one of the party’s newest outposts, and the first specifically targeting Native Americans, hazy facts that I found out only because of some scattered local news coverage about its unveiling in late January. Since then, there’d been almost nothing written about it, not in sanguine

RNC press releases or small-bore local coverage. If it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t have been entirely sure it even existed.

Even then, I couldn’t find much. That the RNC Pembroke center had an infrequently updated Facebook page made it an exception; I couldn’t find active Facebook properties for the majority of the other RNC community centers that now dot the country, from Southern California to the Midwest to the South. Nor could I find the centers on Twitter or Instagram. A Google search yielded mostly local news coverage of ribbon-cuttings and noth-

Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans

By Alexander Sammon

24 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

The RNC Community Center in Pembroke, North Carolina ing more. There are no individual websites for each outpost, or even a collective website that lists them all; the RNC’s homepage features only a camouflaged search bar that can be prodded to give up the location of your nearest branch. Buried in an interactive map advertising various regional outreach events (including “Election Day”) are some of the addresses, but there is no contact information given—no phone numbers, no emails, no names, nothing.

The RNC community center model is the latest attempt by Republicans to court nonwhite voters, who have long eschewed the

party and been demonized by its leading representatives. But 2020’s frenzied election returns suggested an opportunity.

Joe Biden’s share of votes from Latinos decreased by eight percentage points compared to Hillary Clinton’s, according to a report from the progressive polling outfit Catalist. As Vox reported, this marked the “most dramatic shift in a four-year period among the major racial or ethnic groups seen.” The movement was stunning in areas like South Texas, where five heavily Latino counties flipped to Donald Trump.

Biden’s vote share of Black Americans also decreased by three points, and the GOP overperformed with Asian Americans and Native Americans as well. It was something less than a breakthrough with nonwhite voters; Republicans losing Asian Americans by a 27 percent margin exhibited their best performance with any major racial minority bloc. But given the huge turnout increase in 2020, in raw numbers, Republicans put up vote totals that once would’ve seemed impossible even to the Pollyannaish.

The community centers were established

OF INCHES

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

to bore the opening further, making the appeal directly to racial minorities inside their communities, with an extremely offline, grassroots offering. This wasn’t a soft sell: The centers beckon potential voters with everything from movie nights to free dinners to holiday parties to gun safety trainings, thrown by local organizers and paid for by your friends at the RNC, which has dedicated millions of dollars to the program. If those tactics sound familiar, that’s because they were once used to great effect, by groups as varied as the Black Panthers in Oakland or Democrats in New York’s Tammany Hall.

Many of these facilities are set up in places like Florida and Texas, where Republicans are already assured victory statewide and, thanks to vicious gerrymanders, in most congressional districts. But they’re also in places where the party aspires only to shrink the drastic margins by which they’re losing, places like Philadelphia. Performing better with minorities is an existential matter for Republicans, who cannot win popular elections in an increasingly nonwhite country if they don’t improve with these groups.

The Robeson County center, the RNC’s only outpost in North Carolina, is neither.

Republicans f lipped long-blue Robeson County to red with Trump on the ticket, but now face a much more onerous task of getting its residents to vote for replacementlevel Republicans in off years. Democrats, meanwhile, believed they would win statewide in North Carolina in 2020, in both the presidential election and the Senate, only to come up, in both cases, less than 100,000 votes short; they’re back at it this year to contest for another Senate vacancy.

All of which meant that the votes of North Carolina’s 55,000-member Lumbee Tribe that the RNC is aggressively pursuing could help decide a swing seat in a tied-up Senate, as well as one of the few competitive House races left in the country, NC-07. A majoritynonwhite, poverty-stricken region was the sort of place Democrats once dominated; you could also say it was exactly the sort of place they took for granted.

Multiple Democratic aides told me that they viewed the community center operation as a shambolic nonentity, a “nothingburger,” an earned media play at best, with the minimal online presence as proof.

But one local journalist, who covered the center’s unveiling, encouraged me to not mistake secrecy for inaction. “It’s just really, real26 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

ly boots on the ground,” she told me. “They were all over me when I was there, followed me around the entire time, and ushered me out right after it was over. They gave an award to this young woman for her work with them; they wouldn’t even give me her name.”

After forwarding me a contact for the state’s RNC representative, she added, “Good luck.”

The Facebook page featured a partial list of events, a handful of photos, and a phone number, which I called. At the other end was Cale Lowery, the center’s director. When I asked for the calendar, he steered me right back to Facebook. When I asked for a more detailed set of programming, he asked me if I was a reporter. “I am,” I said. “Press aren’t really allowed,” he told me, and said he’d convey my information to an RNC rep, who would set me up with some managed, limited viewing.

The promised RNC press person never called—in fact, repeated interview requests and requests for comment to multiple RNC representatives returned no response. “The biggest thing is to actually show up,” Democratic House candidate Dan McCready told Politico in a 2020 piece about Democrats’ fading fortunes in Robeson County. When I finally saw mention of an upcoming week of action, I decided I’d do just that.

Charles Graham first spotted the RNC Community Center in Pembroke just days after it opened in January. A colleague had mentioned it in passing, but he had to get to Main Street one Saturday afternoon to make sure it was real. “Wow,” he said to himself, “in a midterm election, what in the world?”

Graham, 71, is currently running for Congress in North Carolina’s Seventh District, which includes Robeson County. NC-07 leans Republican, but not by much, and Graham represents Democrats’ best hope in one of the few plausible red-to-blue flips left in the country in 2022. Locally, he’s best known as the six-term state representative from North Carolina’s 47th District, and the General Assembly’s only Native member.

I met Graham between campaign events in the back of his modest-looking office just off the highway, from which he runs his home health care business in Lumberton, the county seat. At the time, he was just a few months removed from a brush with virality. His first campaign ad went wild on Twitter, bagging 5.6 million views, an incipient national profile, and a laudatory

The RNC community center model is the latest attempt by Republicans to court nonwhite voters, who have long eschewed the party. interview with Don Lemon. The ad recounted the 1958 Battle of Hayes Pond, where a Lumbee contingent of 400 chased off a Ku Klux Klan rally, and repurposed it as a call for solidarity against Republican extremism. It resulted in almost $200,000 in donations in one quarter to a campaign based in a county routinely ranked as one of, if not the, poorest in North Carolina.

Graham, like everyone else in Robeson County, grew up as a Democrat, a trend that lasted well into his adult life. In his first general election, in 2010, he won by more than 33 points. By the time he ran for his sixth term in 2020, that margin had collapsed to five points, which actually made him the outstanding Democratic performer in the region. Barack Obama won Robeson twice, but in 2016 Trump eked out a victory with 50 percent. But in 2020, Trump romped, winning a shocking 59-40 victory over Joe Biden on the strength of a surge in Lumbee support. In fact, every statewide Republican carried the county as well. “I’m the only Democrat who won this county,” Graham told me.

How Democrats managed to alienate this once completely blue bloc, one of the most racially diverse counties in the entire country, became fodder for numerous national media pieces. Did the party alienate the culturally conservative Lumbee because of gun control? Was it the embrace of abortion?

“The first original sin for Democrats, and even though it’s not fair to put this on local folks, was NAFTA,” Emily Sharum, chair of the political science department at UNC Pembroke, told me. Robeson County, already reeling from the loss of tobacco, had come to rely economically on textiles and manufacturing, making shoes for Converse and shirts for Ralph Lauren. After NAFTA, none of that lasted long. “Unless you are really turning up to clean up the aftermath of that,” said Sharum, “it’s tough to survive.”

Charles Graham’s viral video gave Democrats some hope they could win a swing congressional seat this year.

The Lumbee, who would represent the largest Native tribe east of the Mississippi if they had federal recognition, started defecting like an Ernest Hemingway character going broke: gradually, then all at once.

Trump’s pledge to bring back manufacturing and renegotiate NAFTA piqued the community’s interest; his pledge to grant the Lumbee federal recognition, long sought for a tribe that has been unable to even set up a casino to bolster its economic condition, resonated. Joe Biden endorsed federal recognition as well, and actually, he did it first. But then came the decision that sealed it: Trump showed up.

Just two weeks before Election Day, in late October, Trump went to Lumberton for a rally, appealing to the Lumbee specifically on a policy promised equally by his opponent. Soon after, he was running up the score in Robeson. Only 30 percent white, Robeson represented the biggest increase in percentage and total votes of any county in the state. That result was evidence enough for the national Republican Party that with a little extra legwork, there were big results to be won among nonwhites by a party many Americans found patently racist. That thesis was verified in a lengthy Politico profile that sought to get to the bottom of the change.

Economic destitution wrought by trade policy and an absent Democratic Party offered an opening, but there was one other thing that the RNC would’ve noticed that made the region so promising that the Politico piece didn’t touch—accelerating racial tensions between the Black and Native populations. Months before Trump ever set foot in Robeson, the town was roiled by racial enmity.

In June 2020, a small Black Lives Matter protest took to the streets, beginning from the UNC Pembroke campus. Estimates put the march’s attendance at around 150 people, demonstrating, as thousands of American towns did, against police violence. The march didn’t get far before it was set upon by an armed and agitated Lumbee counterprotest, 300 strong, “probably more than that,” said the Rev. Tyrone Watson, president of the Robeson NAACP, who was among the demonstrators. “They had automatic rifles and handguns. It was something that you would see in the ’50s.” In a cruel inversion of the Battle of Hayes Pond, the protesters were pelted with bottles and rocks, menaced with knives and guns by Native counterprotesters beneath a large Trump flag.

The Republican Party’s active investJUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

ment in the region has preyed upon that racial tension, Watson told me, in many cases exacerbating it in an appeal to flip Lumbee voters. Not long ago, both the Black and Lumbee populations were united in voting almost uniformly for Democrats. Now, they have become political opponents. It’s a uniquely Republican way of attracting one racial minority group, by pitting them against another.

Add to that the community center’s outreach and its promise of free events. As of 2019, median household income in Robeson was less than $35,000, with 28 percent of people below the poverty line. “This is a poverty-stricken county,” Watson said. “Anything free is gonna draw a lot of attention.”

When the RNC set up its community center, it picked a location just two blocks from the site of that June confrontation.

“When you think of this county, the triracial makeup of it, a third being Native American, a third of them being Black, a third being white, this is just an absolute perfect place,” said Michael Whatley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, at the unveiling. There is not, it should be added, a Black American RNC community center in Robeson, though the Black community has faced similar economic challenges and political abandonment.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has done little to counter. “I just feel like they’ve given up on the Democratic voters of Robeson County. You don’t see that effort that you used to see,” added Watson.

“They’re turning Robeson County over to the Republican Party.”

Graham told me he was troubled, too, about the tactics he’s been hearing to court Lumbee voters. “I have some real concerns about some of the things they may be doing,” he mentioned. “I don’t want to say they’re buying people’s votes … but they’re trying to entice people.” And beyond the free dinners, Sharum stressed how the RNC was building a shared sense of community, a meeting space in a district without many of them. “There’s also the social element,” she said. “The entire family can go. Not just the nuclear family, I mean grandma, grandpa, everyone.”

I arrived at the Pembroke RNC Community Center on a Friday morning, the start of what I’d understood would be a busy weekend before early voting began. The one-story taupe brick building, located on a very sleepy Main Street, was flanked by an empty shoe 28 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

Robeson County swung hard to the right in 2020, on the strength of Trump’s promise to grant federal recognition to the local Native tribe. store on one side and a vacant lot with patchy grass on the other. The building had once been a drug rehab center; now, the round RNC Community Center logo adorned the facade. An American flag drooped to the building’s left.

Before I entered the facility, I called up Jarrod Lowery (no relation to Cale), a Republican member of the Lumbee Tribe (he’s the younger brother of the tribe’s chairman) and candidate for North Carolina House District 47, the seat currently held

by Charles Graham. Lowery and Graham

had squared off in 2018, and Graham had dispatched him easily, winning by 18 points.

Still, in the years since, Lowery had become the national face of the Lumbee’s Republican revolution, gleefully recounting his Republican coming-of-age story to Politico in 2020. Lowery’s campaign signs were ubiquitous on the drive over, more common even than the bootleg Trump 2024 flags.

Lowery and I agreed to meet up that afternoon in Lumberton, where the RNC Community Center had organized a voter

In just the first three months of 2022, 7,119 residents changed their party affiliation to become Republicans in North Carolina. registration door-knocking event. I’d shadow Lowery while he walked the neighborhood, getting a sense of the grassroots initiative and the strategy of the ground game. “I’ll be in campaign mode,” he warned me, “but we can talk.”

I walked into the center, which was sparsely furnished: a couple of easels sporting the RNC Community Center logo, stickers and flyers for GOP candidates, leaflets barking out the permanent collection of Republican messaging: “voter fraud,” supporting the troops, pro-policing. On the wall facing me hung a framed portrait of RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, with a quote proclaiming her commitment to the Native American community and its place in the Republican Party.

I asked at the desk for the rest of the weekend’s programming, which was written up for me on an index card. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday would feature doorknocking campaigns in Lumberton from 2 to 4 p.m., with a free pizza dinner back at the center Friday night. Saturday evening was a phone-banking event and cookout.

Sunday evening had another unspecified event as well. I was pained to find out I’d just missed the Easter egg hunt put on by the center the Saturday prior.

At that point, in walked Cale Lowery, the 20-year-old director of the center, who, with his wispy beard, jeans, and T-shirt, looked even younger. As it was described to me, Lowery was one of three Lumbee organizers employed by the RNC to run the operation, all of them in their teens or twenties. Alina Blue, 19, marked the youngest of the three.

Cale and I had spoken on the phone before when he warned me off attendance, and he approached me haltingly when I introduced myself. I told him of my plan to shadow Jarrod, and we sat down opposite each other. I asked him simple questions about the center—how long it had been open

(“since January”), if there was a certain profile of person they were trying to target for recruitment (“I wouldn’t say that”), how much autonomy they have in setting up the events (“the Easter egg hunt we did on our own, but there are some limits on what we can do”). He told me about the appeal of Trump, the frustration with Democrats over the lack of federal recognition of the Lumbee Tribe. I scribbled down some impressions of the room. “I’m not supposed to be talking to press,” he averred, tapping his leg nervously and keeping his eyes on his phone.

“How did you get involved in Republican politics?” I asked. “I’m not allowed to divulge that,” he responded. At that point, he got up to take a phone call and left the room. A minute passed, and he returned.

“That was my boss, I’m not allowed to be speaking to press, I’m gonna have to retract all of that,” he told me. “I don’t know if you’ve taken any pictures but please delete them.

And then: “I’m gonna have to ask you to give me over your notes.”

At this, of course, I balked. Lowery relented, but told me that an RNC representative would be reaching out to me. And then I was kindly asked to leave.

An hour later, I pulled into the parking lot of the Panera Bread in Lumberton, just a half-mile from Charles Graham’s office, expecting to meet Jarrod Lowery and the rest of the organizing team, which was off to register voters. I spotted three organizers from the center sitting in the corner of the restaurant, along with one volunteer. They spotted me. “We’re not allowed to speak with press,” said Abigail Blue (sister of Alina), who’d previously worked as the Robeson County Trump campaign coordinator during the past election cycle, before working in Georgia. “How did you know we were here?”

“I’m here to meet with Jarrod,” I said, as the other organizers hurried out of the restaurant’s side door. While I waited, I spoke with Curvis Thomas, pastor of the local Christian Faith Fellowship, who was sporting a Jarrod Lowery campaign T-shirt.

He agreed to give me his phone number and speak about the door-knocking after the fact. “I bet you’re a Republican superfan,” he quipped, before following the trio into the parking lot. At that point, I got a text from Lowery saying he’d have to reschedule.

I retreated to my rental car; they loaded into an SUV. Before they pulled out, Thomas tapped on my window. I rolled it down.

“Jarrod is on his way here to meet you,” he

said, assuring me that I should stay put. I watched them drive off, getting the feeling that they were trying to duck me. Sure enough, ten minutes later, I got another text from Lowery saying he wasn’t coming at all.

When I spoke with Thomas later, he told me they’d simply been engaged in breadand-butter political organizing, not the stuff of interesting copy. “I was out asking people if they’re registered, if we can get them to fill out a registration card.” When I asked him what they were telling voters at the doors, he was predictably tight-lipped: “I can’t speak on behalf of them.”

Later that evening, I went rifling through Facebook, to see if I could find anything else about where they’d been, or how they’d been hawking Republican politics. In a private post uploaded hours after they’d given me the slip, I saw Thomas, posing for a group photo alongside two of the organizers, all wearing the same outfits I’d seen them in, with Jarrod Lowery in the middle, flashing a fan of voter registration forms. “Within a week we registered more than 20 people! Today we did 150 doors, and we are going to have plenty of voter contact done over the weekend,” the post read. “Tonight at the RNC Community Center we are having a phone bank/pizza night!” At the pizza night, to which I was not invited, the attendees made 3,500 calls.

According to Lowery’s campaign, in just the first three months of 2022, 7,119 residents changed their party affiliation to become Republicans in North Carolina.

I texted and called Jarrod Lowery the next day; he never responded. I resolved to show up at the cookout anyway. The promised RNC representative never contacted me, so I figured I’d go make my case one more time.

I drove over to Main Street, where seven or eight cars were parked out front. Cale Lowery was manning a grill, roasting hotdogs over charcoal briquettes on the lawn next to the building, while attendees trickled inside. As I walked over to him, two people helped a grandmother out of a minivan and into the facility.

“It’s still a closed press event,” he told me straight away.

“You can’t talk to press, but I imagine your volunteers can, right?” I insisted. “No,” said Lowery. “It’s a closed event,” chimed in Abigail Blue. “You really don’t need to be talking to him,” she reminded Lowery.

Lowery turned his attention to the grill.

“I’m more than glad to feed you, but unfortunately I can’t get you anybody to talk to.”

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

I walked back to my rental car, watching as the center slowly filled up. A volunteer in a coral-colored shirt stapled a cardboard sign to the telephone pole at the corner.

“Free Hotdogs!” it read, with an arrow pointing to the community center. Then he walked another block, and stapled up another one. “FREE Hotdogs!”

Broadly speaking, there are two components to any political campaign: the air war, the barrage of paid media that fills up every TV, radio, and internet platform when Election Day grows near, and the ground game, the grassroots operations that pester people on phones and at front doors. To get some sense of how important and effective paid advertising is, consider this: The 2022 midterm cycle is currently forecast to bring a midterm record $8.9 billion in ad spend alone, a mind-blowing 130 percent increase over 2018.

Advertising is expensive because it works.

Republicans have long had an indomitable advantage in the air war, for good reason. Conservatives have a finely tuned, infinitely funded propaganda machine, with basically zero limitations or scruples.

Backed by corporations and billionaires, they blanket TV, radio, and all social media platforms, including places where Democrats don’t go. That doesn’t even account for the universe of conservative “news” sites, pop-up disinformation outlets, and more.

Democrats compete over the air, of course, but have historically earned their competitive advantage on the ground. The Obama campaign, famously, sported a massive grassroots apparatus, microtargeting millions of voters.

Democrats have strived to get better over the air; indeed, in 2020 more undisclosed outside money went toward electing Democrats than Republicans, which went straight into ad buys. But Republicans, too, have worked to close the gap on the ground. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential loss, where the party was mocked for its pitiful ground game, the RNC has set out to create a grassroots juggernaut.

The challenge with the ground game is that it’s effective but inefficient. According to an often-cited study from political scientists Alan Gerber and Don Green, one face-to-face conversation can boost a voter’s likelihood to go to the polls by up to 20 percent, which can plausibly change the outcome of a close election. The problem, of course, is getting people to open 30 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

their front doors and avail themselves of those conversations.

But the RNC’s community center model works year-round rather than just the month before the election, and doesn’t pester voters at home but lures them in. Given the astonishing costs of political advertising now, the cost per voter of renting a center and doling out free pizza is not as inefficient as it once seemed. It borrows, in many ways, from the sustained organizing model of the Bernie Sanders campaign.

“It’s really smart politics,” said Chuck Rocha, president of Solidarity Strategies, who ran the famously successful Latino outreach program for Sanders in 2020. “Because they have unlimited money and support … they can go in and put these community centers up with the facade that they care about the community. What they’re really trying to do is spend a bunch of money just to get three or four more percent of the Black or brown vote.”

One of the first RNC community centers, opened last August, is based in Laredo, a part of South Texas where Democratic support collapsed in 2020, an outcome often blamed on rampant misinformation. “People think because these folks have been nice enough to show up in the community, why would they be here to lie,” Rocha told me. “When, in fact, they’re misleading our community around issues that they stand against.” To my count, there are at least eight Hispanic community centers now in operation.

Democrats don’t have their own commu-

nity center model, but it’s not like they’ve ceded minority grassroots outreach. The Democratic National Committee has launched a $25 million nationwide initiative aimed at boosting voter protection and education among communities of color, and plans to spend nearly $5 million on a new voter registration program, which prioritizes minority outreach. Both the DNC and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee have been on the ground earlier and more actively during this cycle than in recent years, Rocha told me. But in my conversations with the DNC, the emphasis often returned to ad buys.

For smaller racial groups like Native Americans, even the solitary center I visited could upset the delicate balance in swing states. For example, Arizona’s 450,000 Native Americans make up just over 6 percent of the state’s population. The Navajo Nation has around 67,000 eligible voters, six times the number Biden beat Trump by in the state. Wisconsin, another closely watched swing state, went for Biden by some 20,000 votes. There, the Native population is 145,000 strong. Native votes in both states went overwhelmingly for Democrats.

If Republicans were to move into those communities, would those margins hold?

For both parties, now, minority communities present an existential quandary.

Democrats can’t realistically afford to do any worse with nonwhite voters than Joe Biden did and win the presidency. And even

Posters on display at the Black American (upper left) and Asian Pacific American (lower right) RNC Community Centers in Georgia with the protections of the Electoral College, Republicans must continue to grow nonwhite vote share to compete nationally.

The kicker, of course, is this: With nearinfinite resources, Republicans can afford to try almost anything.

I wanted to see if all the community centers operated under the same veil of secrecy, so I headed over to Georgia, where there were two RNC community centers in operation: an Asian American center in the northern Atlanta suburbs of Gwinnett County, and an African American one in Atlanta’s College Park neighborhood.

In Georgia, Republicans suffered narrow, startling losses in recent elections, resulting in Joe Biden taking the state and then Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock triumphing in special Senate races.

Though buoyed by anti-Trump revulsion in the suburbs and alienated Republican turnout for the Senate races because of an allegedly stolen election, Georgia was

an exemplar of Democratic ground game, thanks in part to Stacey Abrams’s turnout operation Fair Fight Action. Turnout shot up for Democrats across the state.

But the margins here were minuscule, and Georgia remains tightly contested. Joe Biden carried Georgia by not even 15,000 votes. Warnock is up for re-election in November, and Abrams herself has booked a rematch with Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.

Even a small marginal overperformance by Republicans in unfriendly demographics could change the outcome.

First, I stopped by the Asian Pacific American Community Center in Gwinnett’s Berkeley Lake, a location so minimally popularized that it didn’t even turn up in a Google Maps search. Sandwiched between a flower shop and a vape store in a mini-mall, the community center was closed for the weekend when I arrived. On the door was a phone number for the lead organizer, Chunghee. When I called, she gave me the same spiel: She would have to refer me to an RNC comms person for any official inquiries. Just as before, that comms person never called.

Peering through the glass, I could see a few of the same trappings as Robeson County’s center. Another framed portrait

of Ronna McDaniel, this time with a quote about the Asian American community having a home in the Republican Party; campaign literature; a handheld Korean flag.

With no one else to talk to, I went into Pipe Dreams, the vape shop, and asked the salesperson, Gregg, what he thought. He was not Asian himself, but sympathetic to the initiative—ex-military and “Republican as shit.” He wasn’t under the impression that they were making great inroads, but not for lack of trying. “Tuesday is their big day,” he told me. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be in town then.

The next day, I drove to the Black American Community Center in College Park. It was the same routine—referred to an RNC employee who never called me back. When I arrived, the center was also closed.

But the building’s landlord, a man who insisted I refer to him as Mr. David, was on hand. Clearly not briefed on the code of silence, Mr. David offered me a tour of the facility, taking me into its various offices, and its movie room. I crossed glances with that same framed portrait of Ronna McDaniel.

“Are they very active here?” I asked him.

“They do so much,” he said. “They’re always doing something. Tea for the women, Easter service, movie screenings … they’re doing something every day.”

He passed me a flyer announcing a doorknocking campaign, beginning that Tuesday and taking place “every Tuesday following starting at 11:00.” The flyer declared that the event was “Open to All”—except, of course, journalists.

Black voters have proven to be the single most reliable and dedicated Democratic voting bloc. In 2020, Biden won Black voters by an 81-point margin, with Black women voting Democratic at a roughly 93 percent clip. This was clearly not a group that was going to break Republican. But in an election tight enough that every vote can be credibly said to count, chipping away at those margins even a little bit could prove consequential, and Black voters have been defecting by a few percentage points a year since Obama’s re-election.

“This is such a Democratic neighborhood, do you think they’re actually getting through to people out here?” I asked Mr. David.

“Oh yeah,” he said without hesitation.

“They’re def initely getting through to people.” n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s bold plans for affordable housing run into old-school politics, perverse regulations, and limited home rule.

By Gabrielle Gurley

The downtown skyline view from LoPresti Park on the East Boston waterfront is worth lingering over despite a chilly, brisk wind.

On a Tuesday midafternoon, a bundledup person and a dog stroll around the new blocks of orange, white, and taupe condos, the soccer field, basketball and tennis courts. A few blocks away, mostly young commuters stream out of the MBTA Blue Line subway station to the buses upstairs in Maverick Square. Big banks share the square with check-cashing places, small restaurants, and the mandatory Dunkin’ Donuts outpost in this Latino neighborhood with deep Italian roots. Across the street from the police station is a vibrant mural: “You will always be welcome in the City of Boston/Siempre serán bienvenidos en la Cuidad de Boston/Saranno sempre benvenuti nella Città di Boston.”

32 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

If you can afford it. In 2015, a modest three-bedroom rowhouse on a corner in “Eastie” sold for $250,000. In March, it listed for $980,000. Lower-end waterfront condos go for a million-plus. Last year, the median rent for an Eastie one-bedroom apartment was $2,100. In April, the median rent for the city approached $3,000 for a one-bedroom, catapulting “the Hub” into New York/San Francisco unaffordability territory.

Joni DeMarzo sees luxury condos and thinks “social cleansing.” The third generation of her Italian/Austrian immigrant family to reside in the neighborhood, DeMarzo, who works as a nanny, lives with her mother in a “no-man’s-land,” as her sister calls it, near Logan International Airport. She founded Stand Up for Eastie, a local housing advocacy group, two years ago after tussles with developers building next to her home.

Most of her relatives still live in East Boston, but the friends she grew up with are long gone. Developers “are not building homes, they’re building investors’ dreams,” she says.

“Is there ever going to be a single-family house built ever again in East Boston or is it just units, units, units?”

In Boston’s current housing crisis, a fortunate few snatch up the available luxury units, while nearly everyone else gets dropkicked into the exurbs. Tens of thousands of people have left the metro area over the past decade, many of them working- and middle-class renters and homeowners. This situation is not unique to Boston. Longtime residents get forced out of attractive, popular cities everywhere, and modestly paid people look elsewhere. But the national housing affordability crisis affects this city’s residents in a uniquely Boston way.

PHILIP BURKE

City Limits T

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

In 2019, veteran city councilor Michelle Wu dropped a cinder block on the doorstep of the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA), which oversees some of the most atrocious planning and economic development regulations in the country. She laid the collapse of housing affordability on the agency in a white paper, “Fixing Boston’s Broken Development Process: Why and How to Abolish the BPDA.” “Without comprehensive planning and zoning to set clear, community-informed rules for development, Boston is setting citywide development policy through caseby-case exceptions,” Wu wrote, concluding, “The system lacks transparency, accountability, and predictability. Too many residents feel their voices are not heard, while 34 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

developers are unable to predictably estimate costs and community benefits.”

The BPDA is the gatekeeper for a system where nothing is permitted but everything is allowed—if you can win a variance— and what is allowed has changed from one mayor to the next for decades. Boston’s zoning regulations date back to 1964. The last comprehensive citywide master plan appeared in 1965. In short, big developers are BPDA’s main constituency, and development has suffocated planning.

Boston mayors have talked about abolishing the agency since before the 37-year-old Wu was born. But busting up the BPDA involved getting state approval and alienating big-dollar campaign donors. Today, Wu must prove that one of the biggest lifts in Boston politics—

restoring real planning to the conversations about development—was not just a rhetorical flex on her road to the mayor’s office.

Her steady ascent has confounded the white power brokers, accustomed to sidestepping people of color who are moving up the staircases of Boston institutions. What they saw was ivory tower–laced naïveté from a woman out of her political depth. What they got was a progressive politico with serious skills and deep-seated convictions about housing, climate, and transportation justice.

Boston’s first woman and first Asian American mayor has a hard slog ahead. “The most worrisome thing is just a very typical kind of Boston thing: You’ve got a nonwhite woman leading the city, so anything that happens, she’s going to get absolutely no lee-

FR ANI COLLECTION, THE WEST END MUSEUM ARCHIVES

Boston’s most controversial urban renewal project forced thousands of European immigrants and African Americans to leave their homes in the West End.

Wu’s steady ascent has confounded the white power brokers, accustomed to sidestepping people of color who are moving up the staircases of Boston institutions. way,” says John Walkey of GreenRoots, a regional environmental justice and publichealth organization. “Some of it is the sort of standard kind of cynicism that people have, especially in Boston, about local government.

But some of it is that special kind of racism and sexism that we specialize in so well.”

Wu’s choice to fill the position of chief of planning and head the BPDA, Arthur Jemison, has the Massachusetts savvy that makes a difference in a very parochial political culture that contradicts progressive stereotypes about the state. Last year, President Biden nominated Jemison, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) principal deputy assistant secretary, to serve as assistant secretary of public and Indian housing. Senate Republicans blocked the appointment.

Jemison grew up in public housing in the Western Massachusetts town of Amherst, has degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and MIT, and worked in state housing and development agencies, a Boston private development firm, and at Massport (which oversees Logan Airport); and he spent a couple of years at the BPDA’s predecessor, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) under Tom Menino, the city’s longest-serving mayor.

Under Wu’s 2019 blueprint, most BPDA operations would transfer to new city bureaus, including a planning department headed by Jemison. Currently, the BPDA executive director reports to a five-member board of directors. The mayor appoints four members; the governor appoints one.

Eliminating the BPDA and its board is one way for Wu to increase mayoral control and reduce the governor’s interference.

The mayor aims to toss out the city’s controversial urban renewal plans. Most cit-

ies have long since cast off urban renewal plans, but some of Boston’s plans remain in force. Earlier this year, the city council deferred action on dissolving the 12 remaining urban renewal plans for one year, so that the affected neighborhoods can discuss what the next citywide master plan entails on issues such as the community engagement processes and the sensitive issue of eminent domain in areas slated for development. Wu also envisions setting up a reliable citywide master-planning regime overseen by a new dedicated planning board to come to grips with zoning and other issues.

Right now, the mayor is tinkering around the edges; Wu could start moving BPDA employees onto the city’s books to pull together planning research, but the exercising of actual planning power and much else remains with the BPDA. Trying to tease out what Boston can do without state approval is a complex exercise that will not get Wu all the powers she needs to shake up the status quo, which is one reason why previous mayors avoided the heavy lifting altogether.

So, to regularize practices that many cities take for granted, much hinges on getting rid of the BPDA. Wu has limited room to maneuver in an overheated housing market with low inventory and strong demand. For starters, she has signed a home rule petition that would create a real estate transfer tax to levy a 2 percent fee on real estate transactions of $2 million or more that would generate an estimated $100 million annually to go into a city affordable-housing trust. A second plan, rent stabilization, would limit rent increases to a small annual percentage.

However, abolishing the BPDA, securing a transfer tax, and rent stabilization all require state approval. The Bay State has a perennial Democratic supermajority in the legislature, but that doesn’t translate into urgency, regardless of who the governor is.

Getting to yes breaks down along regional and ideological lines, with conservative and moderate Democratic lawmakers playing key roles in what gets done—or not.

Until that time, zoning in Boston is madness. Most multifamily developments are effectively prohibited under the city’s 58-year-old zoning regulations. So developers must master elaborate tango steps to secure dozens of waivers, known as variances, to allow parking, exceed height and density standards, and other workarounds they need to proceed with projects.

“Boston is passing them out, like no tomorrow, everything is getting approved,” DeMarzo claims when she complains about variances. “No matter how much they say the community process matters. You go [to meetings], you write in your letter, ‘We’re against this,’ they still approve it,” she says.

“It is really corrupt.”

To secure these waivers, everyone from developers to small-scale builders must secure buy-in from state lawmakers and city councilors, as well as participate in an extensive community engagement process that brings together local neighborhood groups, small businesses, abutters, and the NIMBY types who live for community meetings held at inconvenient hours. Then they appear before the Zoning Board of Appeal (ZBA), a separate body, housed under the city’s Inspectional Services Department, to secure its approval.

This leads to perverse situations where the BPDA can approve a housing development, but the ZBA can reject it because it does not comply with zoning regulations.

Recent ZBA housing development rejections have included a project next to a subway station that had fewer parking spaces than stipulated by city regulations and another that had a large percentage of affordable apartments near transit, but no parking.

Even with income-restricted dwellings included, says Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, “market-rate units in new developments are priced so incredibly high because the developers are recouping those costs because they know they can. There is a market of higher-income earners who will pay for this type of housing and it leaves low-income and middleincome families in the lurch.”

City and state officials established the BRA in 1957 to oversee federally funded urban renewal projects. They soon began planning the destruction of poor white and Black communities. The largest “project” involved the West End, a neighborhood of European immigrants and African Americans near the Charles River.

The BRA forced thousands of residents out of their homes, which were replaced by the luxury apartments of the era, retail shops, office buildings, and a highway. The parents of the late actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for his role as Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek television series, were some of the last residents to leave. The BRA issued a formal apology for the destruction in 2015 and was JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

36 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

“We are a state where the majority of people live in suburbs,” says Larry DiCara, a former Boston city councilor. “The majority of the legislature is white and suburban, and the majority of suburban families in Massachusetts are white two-income families. So, the reps are not really excited about somebody in Boston, who may have trouble paying their rent.”

Tom Menino lived his dream job, mayor of Boston, for 20 years. Beginning in the late 1990s, Menino enlisted his developer friends to turn a postindustrial marine wasteland of creepy parking lots and mysterious unmarked buildings into what it is today: the Seaport, one of the wealthiest white neighborhoods in the city, filled with more luxury condos, glass-fronted cubes, a convention center, and the Institute of Contemporary Art. There are no schools and no homes priced within reach of the average Bostonian. Few mortgages have been given to African Americans either.

“No one is satisfied with the Seaport,” says Wu. “We lost out on the chance for something truly spectacular to connect people to our waterfront, which should be a treasure.”

Fiscally, it is a treasure: The Seaport is a property tax–generating machine that powers triple-A bond ratings and property tax revenues to pay for municipal services in a city where 50 percent of the land area is tax-exempt—just as Menino, who died in 2014, intended. The downside is that instead of emphasizing climate-resilient features that might absorb floodwaters, like parks, there are thousands of vulnerable people and multibillions of dollars of infrastructure built at sea level.

Boston, like Miami and New York, is one of the most at-risk cities on the Atlantic Seaboard—and City Hall is just a short walk to the ocean. Hurricane Sandy would have hit Boston dead-on in 2012, but the superstorm’s path shifted toward New Jersey and New York. In Wu’s 2020 report “Planning for a Boston Green New Deal and Just Recovery,” she wrote, “Development along the waterfront is highly sought after, but there is a pressing need to balance flood resiliency and public access with development interest to ensure the benefits of the waterfront are not concentrated among a privileged few.” She also observed that there is a “potential need for managed retreat within the next decades,” a subject few people want to discuss.

Built on islands and landfill and yoked to

Boston, like Miami and New York, is one of the most at-risk cities on the Atlantic Seaboard—and City Hall is just a short walk to the ocean. the mainland by four tunnels, East Boston is uniquely vulnerable to storms and sea level rise. Historic flooding could put half the neighborhood underwater. An MIT-Tulane University analysis of impacts from storm surge (based on nine inches of sea level rise projected by 2030) indicates that it would shut down the six-mile-long Blue Line that serves East Boston and cause severe damage to the rest of the MBTA system.

Absent drastic changes, the capital and planning decisions needed to preserve the neighborhood are too late to make a difference, according to Philip Giffee of the Neighborhood of Affordable Housing, an East Boston community development organization. “One way or the other we’re going to pay with taxes and private financing or we’re going to pay by abandoning and just leaving it to the forces of nature, which is not what we want,” Giffee says.

In February, Wu announced that the city would begin to address East Boston’s climate issues through a new municipal harbor plan.

She has also set aside a downtown harbor plan supported by Gov. Charlie Baker, former Mayor Marty Walsh, and one of the city’s high-profile developers, who has been on a 15-year quest to build a 600-foot skyscraper almost on top of the New England Aquarium, a leading marine conservation facility.

Nothing says old-school Boston like fighting to build a tower on the edge of the ocean in an area that regularly floods during the severe storms of the climate crisis era.

The Chicago-born Wu embraced Boston as a Harvard undergraduate. The eldest daughter of four in a family of Taiwanese immigrants, she eased into rhythms of college life and found cheer and support in Boston’s Chinatown. After graduating in 2007, she landed a job at the Boston Consulting Group, a Big Three management consulting firm.

MICHAEL DWYER / AP PHOTO

rebranded as the BPDA the following year.

“We gave almost carte blanche powers to the newly created BRA to basically walk in to say that you’re blighted. Then, we’ll create the zoning that favors the developer to get what needs to be built, the tax incentives as well, barely enforce it, and forget half the promises made anyway,” says state Sen. Lydia Edwards, Wu’s former city council colleague and one of her progressive allies.

“For [the mayor] to say I’m getting a chief of planning, and I’m winding down this ‘development über alles’ tool, that’s a real shift in how we move Boston’s future.”

The West End disaster galvanized a multiracial anti-highway coalition that prevented another urban renewal calamity in the 1960s: running Interstate 95 through the inner suburbs and Black Boston neighborhoods. “I take great inspiration from the ‘People Before Highways’ movement that stopped what seemed inevitable,” Wu told the Prospect in a phone interview. “Agencies at every level of government, all the way up to the federal government, had decided and approved a major highway construction that would rip through our neighborhoods and displace many thousands of families. People refused to give up.”

Boston housing creation is hostage to a regional problem. Many suburban towns have effectively created municipal gated communities. In these places, there are fears that more newcomers—from Boston, no less—would strain municipal services like schools and lead to property tax hike battle royales. McMansions springing up like dandelions in crab grass are infinitely preferable to building more modest singlefamily or multifamily homes that attract people of color, low- to middle-income people, and families with children.

Last year, state lawmakers passed new “Housing Choice” regulations to allow communities to build multifamily dwellings in certain locations, relax permitting for accessory dwelling units, or ADUs (such as in-law apartments), reduce parking space requirements, and more. There are also funding carrots and sticks. Some provisions designed to increase multifamily home building in communities served by the MBTA however, have set off complaints.

None of these measures apply to Boston, however. But in March, the city launched its own ADU pilot program and has allocated millions of COVID relief dollars to financial assistance for first-generation homebuyers and other affordable-housing programs.

It was a brief detour. Soon after Wu started her new job, she dropped everything to return home to Barrington, the Chicago suburb where she grew up, to care for her younger sisters after her mother experienced a mental-health crisis; she was later diagnosed with late-onset schizophrenia.

To support the family, Wu opened Loose Leaf Tea Loft, a tea house on the North Side of Chicago.

The enterprise almost never got off the ground. It was impossible to get inspections and permits until she met with a sympathetic alderperson. “We waited in line in his office hours and talked to him, and then the next day we got our inspection scheduled,” she told Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet. But her mother’s condition was not improving and the café, Wu’s answer to one

of her mother’s fondest dreams, was not thriving. Wu moved her family back to Boston. With her younger sisters in school, she went to Harvard Law. “We were welcomed and embraced by the community and neighborhood, but it wasn’t easy. It was a good several years of survival mode every single day,” says Wu of the period. “My sisters and my mom are the strongest people I know. I truly owe everything I treasure in my life to this city: the health care that my mom was able to access, the schools that I was able to connect my sisters with, and the sense of community that we were able to build.”

One professor became a sounding board and a mentor. “She was dealing with a whole lot more than just learning the new way of thinking that first-year law school demands,

keeping up with the reading and the research,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told the Prospect. “She was also playing mother to her two younger sisters, and guardian and advocate to her own mother. She would sometimes have to miss classes, sometimes end up in an emergency room all night long, sometimes have to leave early to get to a parent-teacher conference for one of her sisters.

“A lot of other people would have looked at that and sat down on the side of the road and said I’m done.” Warren adds. “She always kept in mind what she was trying to accomplish and calmly take each step she needed to take to get there.”

Wu’s talent for making sense of bureaucratic nonsense crystalized during her fellowship in Mayor Menino’s office during law school. She embarked on research to find

While Wu studied at Harvard Law, then-professor Elizabeth Warren became a sounding board and a mentor.

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

out why food trucks, which had sprouted up in other cities, were so rare in Boston, and discovered a mind-numbing application process. Plowing through the regs, the law student designed a soup-to-nuts, plain-English, easy-to-find online application that demystified setting up the small mobile restaurants.

Wu volunteered for Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign. Giving Wu a crack at organizing Harvard Law students was the obvious way to put her to work, but she was already giving speeches to Harvard Democrats, and had reached out to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and her own Boston neighborhood. She spoke Spanish and had assisted on Latino outreach. Wu finally organized her way into a paid job doing outreach to communities of color as the campaign’s statewide constituency director.

Wu could have walked into a staff position with the new senator. Instead, in 2013, fresh out of law school at the age of 28, she 38 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

ran and won her first political campaign for one of the citywide council seats, coming in second; the incumbent, Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to the council, placed first. Together they signaled a new assertiveness from the historically weak, rubber-stamping city council. “The body is now more relevant than it’s ever been perhaps in recent years,” says Paul Watanabe, a University of Massachusetts Boston political science professor.

The council’s first Asian American woman jockeyed for advantage in a body where the route to the mayor’s office ran through Bill Linehan and the powerful conservative Democrats in South Boston, the traditional Irish stronghold. Linehan was a throwback, who marched in the neighborhood St. Patrick’s Day parades that excluded LGBTQ people at the time and tried to redistrict voters of color out of his political way.

Linehan wanted to be council president.

Several progressives also wanted the job,

including Pressley. Wu supported Linehan and progressives went ballistic. But after two years of championing issues like paid parental leave for city workers, she was elected council president unanimously in 2016, the first Asian American to hold the position.

When Wu informed Walsh that she planned to challenge him for mayor, she had gotten out in front on so many areas—the BPDA, free transit, climate and Green and Blue New Deals—that she had voters’ full attention. Her social presence is electric, and @wutrain regularly clapped back against critics like Airbnb, which lashed out at her on Twitter over a 2018 proposal to limit rentals.

But running against an incumbent is always a gamble. Unlike Menino, Walsh was not an automatic winner in the vastly changed political environment that opened up space for Wu’s candidacy. Wu was “somebody with a lot of guts,” says Watanabe.

“Part of the reason was because Pressley’s victory against former Rep. Michael Capua-

JOSH REYNOLDS / AP PHOTO

“Winding down this ‘development über alles’ tool” is a “real shift” for Boston, says state Sen. Lydia Edwards.

Affordable housing is Wu’s signature issue, but far from her only one. no indicated that the young guard could take on the old guard and win.” Instead of doing battle, Walsh opened the escape hatch provided by Biden for a soft landing as Biden’s secretary of labor.

The old guard came after Wu in the general election anyway, in the person of Annissa Essaibi George, another city councilor who tried “othering” Wu as a Chicago outsider and two-time Harvard graduate to appeal to a whiter and older electorate. But it was a strange move, considering the local politicians with Chicago roots (Pressley and former Gov. Deval Patrick) and the many more with Harvard Law connections (also Patrick). Housing was the top issue, and Wu crushed her challenger by nearly 30 percentage points. But turnout was abysmal: Only a third of the city’s eligible voters cast a ballot.

“In the limited cases where there have been young Asian women as mayors, whether it’s here or on the West Coast, there’s always an element of being a policy wonk coming in with energy and ideas, which in some ways feeds into the model minority myth,” says Lisa Wong, the former mayor of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and the state’s first Asian American mayor. “But it also has to be true, that young, nontraditional candidates have to come in sometimes with more ideas and more energy than anybody else, in order to break through the traditional norms of support, funding, and the other lanes in which people get into these positions.”

Affordable housing is Wu’s signature issue, but far from her only one. Inspired by a cycling tour of Copenhagen with Boston elected officials researching climate concerns in 2016, she commuted by bike and steered dollars to new bike lanes and redesigned intersections. But it was her relentlessness on public transit as a free public good that jolted the city.

Wu’s “Free the T” movement caught the imagination of riders, in part, because making a reliably unreliable system like the MBTA free feels like justice. She helped spearhead one fare-free bus pilot. As mayor,

she secured COVID relief funds for two more.

(Recent analyses by the city and the MBTA of the first pilot found that most people did not save money since they usually needed to make transfers.) Once COVID relief funds are exhausted, the best hope for the free-fare movement is a November vote on a constitutional amendment that would levy a four-percentage-point tax on the portion of an individual’s annual income above $1 million. The estimated $2 billion in new revenues would fund public higher and K-12 education and road, bridge, and transportation repair and maintenance.

Boston mayors and city councilors have long been content to let the MBTA, a state agency, be the governor’s headache. Wu has stepped into a transportation leadership vacuum that had existed since former Gov. Michael Dukakis, who continues to advocate for transportation upgrades, used the MBTA to commute to his State House office.

Only a public-transit superfan would haul their kids and their double stroller all over the MBTA network. Sometimes Wu takes a car when she heads to City Hall, but often enough she still takes the same bus and subway connections she used as a city councilor.

But first she has to get out of her neighborhood. For months, Wu has sailed past hapless protesters haplessly denouncing COVID policies that no one seems to care about anymore. In January, she refused to back down from her stance that all city employees get vaccinated. (She negotiated with the Boston Teachers Union to get their consent on vaccination policies; she dropped the ball by failing to do the same with the city employees’ union and walked straight into a court tussle, a rookie mistake.) Soon after, equipped with noisemakers and posters that mocked her heritage, people descended on the home where she lives with her husband Conor Pewarski (who had resigned from his banking job to take on more family responsibilities), her two young boys, and her mother.

The virulent racial harassment Wu, her family, and her neighbors have faced has produced a reaction of strong support across the city, and, at the mayor’s urging, the city council revamped Boston’s noise ordinance to move protests out of early-morning hours.

“Many of us in the Asian American community have known our whole lives what it feels like to be cast as ‘other’ even in the country that we grew up in,” says Wu. “Unfortunately, it’s not a new experience for me in

government or for women of color serving in leadership positions in our state.”

A half-year in, priorities pile up. It is not unusual for mayors to have to select a new police chief or school superintendent during their tenure. It is rare for a mayor to have to select two new leaders at the beginning of their first term. For Wu, the police chief could be the easier lift. One important factor in her favor is that Boston did not experience the sharp uptick in crime that struck other Northeast Corridor cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.

Boston has a long history of community policing and lower crime rates, elements that kept murder rates and petty crime at bay during the pandemic. But Wu trimmed the police budget by only 1 percent, which set progressives grumbling about her failure to redirect police budget dollars to other programs, and police shootings and union contract friction complicate matters as well.

Boston schools had five superintendents in 15 years. The outgoing superintendent, Brenda Cassellius, will leave after only three years, short even by the brief six-year average tenure for urban superintendents. The public schools are mired in debates that may deter national candidates. Declining test scores and possible receivership hang over the district, along with transportation and infrastructure issues.

There are controversies over prestigious exam school admissions policies, returning to an elected school board (the desegregation crisis stoked by an elected board led to the change), and a high-profile sexual abuse scandal at a K-8 school. All of these problems will complicate an already difficult search at a time when teachers are leaving the profession and families are leaving the school district in droves.

The deep systemic issues facing the schools and the police, ones unfolding in plain view of voters, have the potential to compete with and derail Wu’s housing and planning reform program. Moreover, the success of Wu’s economic development agenda runs through the state legislature. If Boston’s housing crisis fails to resonate with state lawmakers, she must consider what can get done in the next several years on her own political calendar.

Wu has picked up the tools to scrape out the mortar binding Boston’s old-school development sector together. Builders may want to fill up the city with luxury housing that looks like Legoland, but Michelle Wu is not here to play. n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

BLOWING THE TRUCK WHISTLE A carbon dioxide delivery driver’s long journey to expose issues that he says put his safety and integrity at risk

By David Dayen

ADDITIONAL REPORTING FROM JEFFREY DEWEY, ISABELLE GIUS, AND ALEX WEATHERHEAD

G

PHOTOGRAPH BY PABLO ROBLES

Globe, Arizona, is an old mining town in Gila County, about 90 miles east of Phoenix, dotted with canyons and gorges and 33 bridges, most constructed in or before the 1960s.

Last July, Cyrus Coron, a thin, bleachblond man with orange-tinted wraparound sunglasses, was about to pilot his Airgas National Carbonation (ANC) bulk gas truck onto a particularly skinny overpass, running downhill on an 8 percent grade. As he dropped in, a red light in the shape of an engine lit up on the dashboard, with one word superimposed on it: STOP. When that f lashed, drivers knew the truck would soon stall. The problem was a faulty engine sensor that would often trip in winding hills and valleys, forcing a restart 40 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

Cyrus Coron worked for Airgas National Carbonation in Phoenix for over five years.

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

of the truck. When Coron and his colleagues would tell the manager of their Airgas branch about the issue, he might schedule an inspection, but would almost never take the truck out of service. The branch had no backup vehicle, and between 30 and 45 deliveries of food-grade carbon dioxide had to be made throughout Arizona every day.

There was no shoulder on the downhill road, and orange cones narrowed the bridge to two lanes, with no space to pull over.

After crossing the V-shaped ravine, the road immediately veered to the right and climbed up the other side of the canyon. Coron was traveling at about 55 miles per hour. He figured he needed a working engine for eight more seconds to get over the bridge, make the right turn, and pull off onto the shoulder.

8, 7, 6 …

The stall would kill the power steering; Coron wouldn’t have the physical strength to negotiate that sharp right in a heavy truck.

5, 4, 3 …

He spun the wheel as the turn approached.

2, 1 …

The truck stalled just as Coron reached the shoulder. “If it happened literally one or two seconds earlier, I would not have been able to make that right-hand turn,” he told me over Zoom. “I don’t know if I would have had the physical ability to pull the steering wheel to stay in the lane, or if I would have actually entered into oncoming traffic and killed myself.”

He told the story with a flat tone; for Coron, the near-death experience was just another day exposed to risk. Heavy-duty trucking saw the second-most fatalities of any profession in 2020, the last year studied, only narrowly behind construction, a sector with three million more workers.

With nearly two decades of experience in the industry, Coron was used to being seen as a disposable part.

“People like me, we encounter that shit on a regular basis,” he said. “We have a nihilistic sense of humor about it. And it’s not a good thing. You shouldn’t be accustomed to what is not acceptable.”

What was really not acceptable to Coron was that he and his colleagues had been complaining for months to management about that STOP engine light. After reaching a safe spot to wait for a tow truck, Coron fired off an email with a picture of the scene. “Using a driver’s personal safety to test out whether or not the issue has been fixed is reckless,” he wrote.

42 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

This stop engine light, which signals an imminent stall, had been flashing on and off for months on the Airgas vehicle.

The engine wasn’t the only problem, Coron said. Years earlier, Coron’s truck failed a pre-trip brake inspection; a copy of the inspection records an “ongoing unaddressed air leak.” When he reported it, the manager instructed him to leave the truck running during deliveries, to keep the air pressure in the brakes from falling. At that point, Coron refused to drive the vehicle.

Drivers knew it often took that kind of escalation to get a mechanic.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration conducts three million truck inspections annually, and Airgas actually has a pretty good safety record by their metrics. But with hundreds of millions of truck trips, regulators see just a fraction of what’s on the road.

Coron said he was only pulled over for inspection with an Airgas vehicle twice in five years.

“A clean truck does not get inspected,” he told me. “Every weekend, every fucking truck in that yard gets fucking washed and cleaned. The ones that you’ll see with the

worst records are the smaller operations that don’t pay for their shit to get cleaned on a regular basis.”

In other words, Airgas literally whitewashed its safety issues. To hear Coron tell it, that wasn’t the only example.

Coron has done everything he can to raise attention to the problems at the company, from the inside and outside. Through emails, pictures, recordings of conference calls with upper management, and thousands of delivery tickets, Coron has captured a portrait of serious neglect at Airgas, the largest distributor of packaged gas in the United States, with over one million customers.

He also sent filings to three state and federal agencies, according to submissions reviewed by the Prospect and The Intercept: a regional office of the Food and Drug Administration, the Arizona Department of Agriculture, and the Arizona Department of Justice. All his documentation has now been posted at a website, Airgasfraud.com,

CORON HAS CAPTURED A PORTRAIT OF SERIOUS NEGLECT AT AIRGAS, THE LARGEST DISTRIBUTOR OF PACKAGED GAS IN THE UNITED STATES. as Coron goes public with what he has been trying to tell the government for years.

Based on Coron’s information, not only were ANC employees in Phoenix expected to drive dangerous vehicles; they were also delivering unknown quantities of gases to customers, while being ordered to issue inaccurate delivery tickets and purity tests to cover that up. In Coron’s retelling, these practices violated federal regulations and may have led to customers paying for products they did not receive.

Coron’s allegations were corroborated by another former ANC driver, Jim Bascone. “ANC was grossly understaffed and under-trucked, almost everywhere,” Bascone said in an interview. “That was the underlying issue.”

Though Coron’s evidence focuses mostly on carbon dioxide deliveries in Phoenix, there are several indications of wider problems. In a conference call last September, Eric Page, at the time Airgas’s senior compliance officer and today the chief financial officer for Airgas Safety, told Coron, “We have had conversations at the highest levels of leadership, the highest levels about this issue [with the truck equipment].” Two top executives, Dennis Harris and Matt Sebuck, were fired in 2020, “because they’re not watching the fundamentals of the business and that is the repair of the trucks.” But nothing changed, Coron said.

Airgas spokesperson Kimberly Menard confirmed that the company investigated some of Coron’s allegations last year and “took appropriate action in response.”

Menard said Airgas operates business “in accordance with high standards of professional and ethical conduct” and encourages whistleblowers to come forward with information about improper behavior, including through a confidential hotline. After

being told about the allegations in this story, Menard said some of them were new to the company and that they have initiated a new investigation to review the matter. “Any required actions to remedy issues will be promptly implemented,” Menard said.

The situation reflects the uneven power relationship between the roughly two million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the U.S. and the companies they work for.

Truckers who need steady work feel pressure to comply, no matter the repercussions to their safety or to customers. “The driver has the right to say no,” said Thomas Corsi, a professor of logistics at the University of Maryland. “But then the driver can be fired.”

Coron claims he was retaliated against for trying to bring issues to management’s attention, threatened with more hazardous shifts and written up for disciplinary action.

Airgas said it “does not permit any form of retaliation.” For unrelated reasons, Coron’s no longer at Airgas.

The documentary evidence, which spans five years of employment, is meticulously arranged. Coron sees it as his shield. “If I don’t have a record, it’s my word against their word,” he told me. “I’m white trash.

I’m not credentialed. I’m a liar until I can prove that I’m not lying.”

Coron started at Airgas in 2016, after jobs toiling in the oil fields for Halliburton in Wyoming, hauling diesel fuel to copper mines for Sinclair Oil in Utah, and managing hazardous waste disposal for Clean Harbors in Phoenix. For Airgas, he worked out of region W-6, which covered part or all of five states in the Southwest. Though his branch was in Phoenix, his manager supervised remotely from Las Vegas.

The job entailed delivering food-grade carbon dioxide (CO2). Restaurants and truck stops and breweries need CO2 for soda and beer, and it’s also used in water treatment, health care, manufacturing, and agriculture (particularly cannabis growing). Deliveries were made on demand and often guaranteed to customers within 24 hours. The Phoenix branch had just three drivers and two trucks to pull that off.

Coron expected Airgas to be hyper-professional. “I thought it would be buttoned up because it’s so damn big,” he said. Airgas was founded in 1982 and formed through over 500 mergers, as it boasts on its website. One division sells gases, another sells welding helmets and MIG guns, another sells saw blades and other construction products, and still another

sells safety items like first aid kits. In 2016, Airgas was purchased by a French conglomerate named Air Liquide, which vies with Linde for the title of the world’s largest industrial gas company. Air Liquide had 23.3 billion euros (about $24.6 billion) in revenues in 2021.

The corporation’s byzantine structure, with numerous divisions and management layers, meant that there were no standard protocols for workers, Coron said. Accounting procedures, software, maintenance rules, and compliance benchmarks were confused and inconsistent.

Coron quickly saw this play out with his CO2 deliveries. On a typical day, drivers were supposed to fill their trucks at a stand tank, which could hold up to 28,000 pounds of gas. They were to test the CO2 for purity and then drive out to service customers. At the delivery sites, they would measure totals in customer tanks through an electronic meter on the truck. They would take pictures of the meter at the beginning and end of delivery, placing those onto a digital ticket that was automatically forwarded to customers, who were charged per pound of CO2.

The problem, Coron explained, is that none of the equipment required to do this job functioned consistently—not the stand tanks, not the truck gauges or meters, and not the testing equipment.

“The meter stopped working,” Coron wrote in an email to his manager, Luis Reyes, on September 23, 2019. “The volume gauge on the truck has never worked.”

Four months later, he emailed again: “This meter is malfunctioning on a daily basis. What will it take to get the parts ordered & installed?”

Then, a month later: “Meter stopped working again for the umpteenth time.”

There are dozens of emails like this in Coron’s files: notices from Coron and his Phoenix branch colleague Bascone that the meters (which register how much gas is delivered to a customer) and volume gauges (which record how much gas is left in the truck) were faulty, uncalibrated, inaccurate, or just plain broken.

Last year, Coron took a video of a digital meter display on the truck showing 0 pounds of CO2 released, even as the hose connected from the truck to a tank is hopping, indicating gas moving through it.

The stand tank volume gauge was also broken, often reading as full regardless of the amount inside (“The Phoenix drivers have been complaining to Luis about this for JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

years,” Coron wrote in an August 2021 email).

One result was the branch periodically ran out of CO2, because their supplier wouldn’t deliver to the stand tank if it read as full. The only way to find out if it was empty was to run the pump dry and burn it out; replacement pumps cost thousands of dollars.

But inaccurate counts were not limited to Phoenix. Monthly loss reports from 2019 to 2021 show discrepancies of up to 200 percent between the amounts loaded onto trucks and the amounts delivered to customers. One November 2019 report showed an overall net loss of 37.9 percent. That’s well beyond normal boiloff rates in CO2 tanks.

In a separate report in February 2021, a 52,000-pound stand tank in San Diego was listed as being short by 37,450 pounds. A truck in Renton, Washington, with a 7,500pound capacity was short 17,061 pounds. A separate 7,000-pound truck in Oklahoma City was short 12,584 pounds. “Anything out of the main office was a mess,” Bascone said. “You had someone wearing six hats in charge of inventory.”

In demanding an explanation for these discrepancies, Reyes did not blame the broken equipment. “I understand truck meters need to be calibrated and Stand Tank gauges aren’t correct but I believe some amounts entered … are way off (Driver Error?),” he wrote in an August 2020 email.

“That’s literally corporate America all in one fucking short sentence,” Coron told me.

“Broken meter, broken gauge, nothing on the truck works—it’s your fault.”

The roots of the problem were illuminated in an August 2020 message sent to Airgas National Carbonation branches from Hubert Booth, a fleet and compliance manager. “I have received several requests for meters today,” Booth wrote. “New meters are $6,000 to $8,000 depending on how much of the system you replace and the labor.”

Instead of incurring that expense, Booth said, Airgas would repair broken parts— although he noted that some of the meters were so old that the parts “have been discontinued.” Even if the refurbished meters were fixed, they wouldn’t stay fixed; for example, the repaired turbines would “stick” instead of turning as gas is released.

“You would send them back the old meter, they would send back another one more beat up,” Bascone explained. “We got one meter in [that] hadn’t been calibrated in 11 years.”

Attached to Booth’s email were manuals directing drivers how to troubleshoot 44 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

and fix the meters themselves. But truckers aren’t certified mechanics, and expecting them to fix equipment didn’t work. In reply to Coron’s September 2019 email about the broken meter, Bascone, whose acerbic humor comes through, suggested, “maybe bang it with the orange hammer.” When Reyes directed instead to check the wiring connections, Bascone deadpanned, “I think the hammer is the better way to go.”

With no way to accurately gauge how much CO2 was being dispensed, the Phoenix branch had two options: take the trucks off the road until meters were fixed, or continue to deliver gas while guessing at the amounts. Which decision was made can be seen in over 2,800 delivery tickets from 2017 to 2021, which Coron kept.

All of them are missing the before-andafter meter pictures that confirm how much CO2 was delivered, and therefore the amount owed. Some tickets show the meter reading at 0 pounds before delivery, and a picture of a logbook after. Some have blank squares where the pictures should be. Coron and Bascone claim this was a widespread practice, and that Airgas would have “tens of thousands” more of these tickets from Phoenix deliveries.

According to them, drivers would make up numbers for the “total quantity delivered” line on the tickets, hypothesizing from past performance. If the meter was running 30 percent off, they would add 30 pounds per 100 to the order. Bascone once joked, “I hold the route sheets up to my forehead and come up with a number.” Reyes told drivers to use the volume gauges on the customer tanks, but they were often busted too.

The mismeasurement meant that thousands of customers were not necessarily getting what they were charged for. It’s impossible to know whether they were being overcharged or undercharged; that depends on how accurate the drivers’ guesses were.

Bascone believed that his figures were reasonably accurate. But one ticket, from February 2020, may be instructive. It shows that Airgas delivered 8,022 pounds of CO2 to Alsco, a large laundry services company in Phoenix. That’s impossible: The trucks only carried 7,000 pounds.

Airgas prices of CO2 were not consistent and depended on contracts struck between sales agents and customers. The gas could be less than $1 per pound or as high as $6.

As a dominant supplier of industrial gas, Airgas set the market rates themselves.

Airgas loss reports showed discrepancies of up to 200 percent between the amounts loaded onto trucks and the amounts delivered to customers.

So an overcharge of 1,022 pounds could translate to less than $1,000 in improper payment, or as much as $7,000. With tens of thousands of records over years, that could add up. In his complaint to the Arizona attorney general’s office, Coron estimated customer overpayments in Phoenix at above $500,000.

For the first couple of years, Coron says he received verbal instructions from his manager to estimate delivery tickets. But later on, there are specific instances of the supervisor telling him to do so in writing.

In September 2019, Coron told Reyes that he was “literally making up #’s on deliveries.” Reyes told the drivers to “estimate the amount and take a pic of the [customer] tank if possible.” In March 2020, Reyes said the same thing: “Estimate readings based on prior fills.” In a separate email, he said, “Don’t use the meter readings for now until we figure out how to correct this.” At no time did Reyes instruct drivers not to deliver until problems were fixed. Customers were not informed on delivery tickets that the totals were estimates.

Coron alleges that, on a March 2020 phone call, Reyes told him to put his finger in front of the camera lens he used to take a picture of the meters. Many of the delivery tickets going back to 2017 show black or red squares: If the flash was on, the finger over the lens would read as red. “It just looks like a glitch,” Coron said. “So that nobody can be blamed for what’s happening.” Bascone confirmed that “[drivers] just covered up the lens” to finish the delivery ticket.

There’s after-the-fact evidence of this happening in an August 2021 email, where Reyes tells drivers that meters were fixed for the time being. “In the future, if the meter goes out, don’t cover the screen when taking a picture of the meter but take a picture of the bulk tank contents gauge before and after a fill and note on the comments that the meter isn’t working properly,” Reyes wrote. (Reyes left the company last fall and could not be reached for comment.)

It was difficult for customers to notice what was going on, Coron explained. Deliveries were often made when businesses were closed, either early in the morning or late at night. Delivery tickets were supposed to be sent electronically to an email on file, but

CYRUS CORON

those emails were not regularly updated, and many companies didn’t have emails listed at all, Coron claimed.

Nevertheless, some customers did occasionally complain that their CO2 tanks would run out earlier than expected after a refill.

Coron told Airgas compliance officer Eric Page on their conference call that he heard from a couple of customers about this. Page responded unwittingly with a completely different issue, one that Coron says he never saw. “During COVID … some of the bars and restaurants on account were getting billed for the same amount but they weren’t open, they weren’t using CO2,” Page acknowledged.

The Prospect and The Intercept attempted to contact 70 businesses across Arizona that were listed on the delivery tickets, roughly 2.5 percent of the total Coron supplied. Most of the 11 businesses that responded said they rarely, if ever, saw delivery drivers.

One customer, a Shell gas station in Phoenix, said that Airgas prices had gone up recently, and that “we have had a couple of emergency deliveries because we’ve had our gas run out” faster than expected. A Chickfil-A in Prescott Valley also experienced shortages, overbilling, and under-delivery, to the extent that it found a different CO2 supplier. A McDonald’s in Florence, a Sonic in Phoenix, and a Fuddruckers in Mesa also

had CO2 run out suddenly. Another Fuddruckers in Phoenix talked about issues with overbilling and under-delivery, though both Fuddruckers employees chalked it up to internal issues at the restaurant.

An employee at Marco’s Pizza in Flagstaff said they experienced no problems, but that there wouldn’t be much recourse if they did. Speaking of Airgas, the employee said: “They’re the only game in town.”

Coron made other allegations related to federal regulations. For example, from 2019 to 2020, Reyes put Phoenix drivers “on call” for $21 per day, answering outage emails and calling customers to schedule deliveries. If this forced drivers to work during their mandated off-duty rest period, that would violate Department of Transportation Hours of Service guidelines. “You’re talking about office work, that would be a violation,” said Dale Watkins, a regulatory affairs manager with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. “When you’re off duty you’re not supposed to be doing anything.”

In addition, because some of the CO2 Airgas delivered was used in beverages, it fell under regulation from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Following the “good manufacturing practice” guidelines

for production and distribution, Airgas required food-grade CO2 to be tested for purity before delivery to customers. Drivers were instructed to hook up a Zahm & Nagel testing device as the truck was filled at the stand tank, and fill out a form confirming a successful test. Airgas had drivers sign annual forms that they were trained to do testing and that they followed all protocols.

But drivers never were given the proper equipment to perform the test, Coron said.

Sometimes the Zahm & Nagel kit was not in the truck. And the hose connecting the kit to the truck, an item that costs no more than $9, was lacking. A metal device that attaches to the testing port on the stand tank was also missing, so drivers couldn’t test at the stand tank.

“Phoenix does not and has not tested a single CO2 load on truck #303672 since it arrived in Phoenix,” Coron wrote in an email to superiors in January 2018. “Truck #307243 hasn’t tested a single CO2 load since it arrived in Phoenix … These are the only trucks we use.”

Bascone backed this up. “We were told it was Airgas’s policy to test each load,” he said. “But it ended there. They didn’t supply the equipment. Nobody was in charge of it.”

In September 2021, a regional operations manager, Vincent Wise, told drivers JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

that a new Zahm & Nagel device would soon be shipped to Phoenix. In the same email, however, he admits that other parts were not ordered, meaning tests still could not be conducted. “I ask that you work with the Ops Manager … to see if we can source one,” Wise, himself the operations manager, wrote.

Instead of shutting down deliveries until testing equipment was made available, drivers were instructed to fill out the testing forms anyway, according to Coron. “We always wrote down 99.9 percent (pure), always,” he told me. “If it was less than that then you couldn’t make the delivery.” Bascone said that drivers would just transfer the purity figures from the supplier to the Airgas form.

“Is it acceptable for me to continue not testing bulk CO2 loads & write on the loading document that the test was actually performed and document testing results that don’t actually exist?” Coron asked in a 2018 email. He did not receive an answer, and loads continued to be delivered.

There is no indication that impure CO2 was delivered, nor were there any complaints of illnesses from drinking impure soda.

When Coron told higher-ups at Airgas National Carbonation about this, some were unaware that purity testing was even done on the CO2 loads. “I know that we test shit because I’m the one that tests it,” Coron said.

“The people on top literally do not know the fundamentals about the business.”

The Airgas website touts that its foodgrade gases comply with the Food Safety Modernization Act and other purity specifications. It adds that food-grade gas is tested “throughout the supply chain—from production to delivery.”

The FDA food-grade gas recommendations include that “training be provided annually and that manufacturers keep training records.” Those records were kept by the Phoenix branch, and were available for review by FDA regional officers during audits. But in a 2018 email to a safety and compliance manager, Coron wrote, “All 3 of us drivers in Phoenix are untrained on the current testing protocol.” So for at least some of his employment, training wasn’t kept up.

Experts were unclear on the specifics of food-grade gas requirements, though Peter Lurie, a former FDA official who is now director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said that the internal training records would be key. “I would think fal46 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

sifying an attestation that ultimately came into the agency’s hands, that strikes me as criminal activity,” he said.

From his earliest days with Airgas, Coron attempted to get upper management interested in safety and compliance issues in Phoenix. He showed me email exchanges with eight different compliance managers, senior vice presidents, and even the former president of Airgas National Carbonation, Dennis Harris.

In late 2017, Coron approached ANC vice president Matt Sebuck and ANC safety compliance manager Scott Burgess. Coron was invited to a conference call with Harris and Burgess in early 2018, but after the call, Coron’s 2017 annual review asserted that he had “regress[ed]” over the year, and included a number of negative comments.

“Cyrus isn’t always content with management decisions on resolving issues … Cyrus spends too much time writing long emails to management and Customer care … Cyrus sought immediate resolution with upper management without consulting [Reyes, his supervisor] on several issues.” The review was signed by Reyes and Sebuck.

Coron added that Reyes made verbal threats to fire him, though the company never did so. I asked him why. “Those emails to corporate were crazy fucking detailed,” he responded. “Those weren’t like rando complaints. They knew that I had that.”

Despite the leverage, nothing changed in Phoenix. Years of back-and-forth complaints culminated in a phone call between Coron and Reyes in February 2020, which Coron memorialized in an email. “He gave me the ultimatum, if I did not stop questioning his judgment on safety issues … and ‘complaining’ about overcharging customers … then he would change my shift to a night shift, with the expectation that it would ‘force’ me to ‘quit.’” A night shift job is more dangerous, so Coron kept his mouth shut for a while.

But soon he started writing upper management again. Vincent Wise, Reyes’s supervisor, responded to specific concerns but never wrote Coron about his broader claims.

Sean Eggett, a safety and compliance official, never wrote back. Amber Vanderkooy, VP of operations at Airgas National Carbonation, never wrote back. Coron actually met with Mike Pelaez, another safety and compliance official, that June, and there were follow-up calls and emails. Pelaez thanked Coron for his feedback and ensured him it would remain confidential. “This helps, but

FROM HIS EARLIEST DAYS AT AIRGAS, CORON ATTEMPTED TO GET UPPER MANAGEMENT INTERESTED IN SAFETY AND COMPLIANCE ISSUES IN PHOENIX. a quick fix is never quick,” Pelaez said after one email in August, two months after the initial contact.

Around the same time, Reyes and Wise wrote up Coron over allegedly not following safety protocols during a CO2 delivery at a McDonald’s in Chandler, Arizona. An “anonymous source” sent photos of Coron “inside the truck cab” during delivery, they said, and with no safety cones around the truck. Coron disputes the characterization; how a random bystander would know to send photos of an Airgas employee in Arizona to a remote manager in Las Vegas was not explained.

Nevertheless, Reyes and Wise insisted that Coron sign a “coaching action form” confirming the write-up. The form was contradictory; it said that Coron acknowledged the failure to comply with protocols, yet added, “Your signature does not indicate that you agree with the statement made.”

Coron felt trapped. “I needed the job, my wife is in school full-time,” he said. “I don’t have the luxury of going two weeks without a paycheck.” He signed the form.

Finally, Coron escalated to Eric Page, Airgas’s senior director of compliance and controls, who got back immediately and promised to start an investigation. Coron gave him access to all of his files, and on September 3, 2021, Coron, Page, and Page’s colleague held an unusually candid hourlong conference call.

Page seemed aware of the meter calibration, inventory, and accounting issues.

“There is definitely a sentiment that you’re absolutely right,” he said. “That’s why a couple [senior managers] were fired last year.”

“Dennis Harris and Matt Sebuck?” asked Coron.

“Yeah,” Page confirmed.

One customer of Airgas said they wouldn’t have much recourse if they experienced problems. “They’re the only game in town.”

CYRUS CORON

Would an isolated problem at one branch bring down such senior officials?

“I guarantee you that this is not just a oneoff,” Coron told Page. “You’re only hearing from me because I’m a driver who comes from a highly regulated background where I’ve never seen this before so I’m not cool with it.”

Page did not question that assertion.

His message was that management was interested in shaping up the organization. He told Coron that they would finish their investigation and expose it publicly throughout Airgas National Carbonation within the next couple of weeks. “I can tell you that the leadership at National Carbonation, especially the new president,” Page said, “recognize that things were ignored and they’re playing catch-up. They don’t know what’s out there, they’re still uncovering kind of the hidden secrets and the mess … we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Page and his colleague asked Coron for emails and files for about three weeks.

Coron never heard anything after that.

Coron also went outside the organization.

Last September, he contacted the Denver FDA office that conducts compliance audits for the Phoenix branch. He spoke with Stephanie Chastagner, who confirmed some level of purity testing requirements and told Coron that the office would commence an inves-

tigation. The Prospect and The Intercept contacted the office, and FDA spokesperson Stephanie Caccomo replied, “The FDA does not confirm or comment on any potential investigations, per policy. We are not able to provide any information in this case.”

Coron then tried the Arizona Department of Agriculture’s Division of Weights and Measures. After an initial phone call, he sent them information about the faulty meters and inaccurate deliveries. Associate Director Kevin Allen told the Prospect and The Intercept that the department “attempted to reach out to Airgas to witness a meter test and calibration, however we were unable to coordinate due to COVID-19 protocols.”

Once Coron got back in touch, the department suggested that he contact the consumer fraud division in the state attorney general’s office. Coron filed an online complaint, citing consumer fraud of over $500,000, and followed up with a unit manager in the consumer information section. While the office declined to initiate a criminal investigation, the case was assigned to a special investigator with the consumer section, Richard Perez, whom Coron met with in October 2021, giving him all the files on a thumb drive. Perez promised to follow up, but Coron hasn’t heard from him since last fall.

The AG’s office hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

By this time, Coron was on long-term leave from Airgas. He picked up COVID from a co-worker and went on short-term disability when the symptoms didn’t go away.

“Straight up, I had long COVID,” he told me.

“I thought it was bogus until I actually had it.” He would get bouts of brain fog, and random spots in his body would suddenly go numb. Combined with the pressures of long workdays and the retaliation he was experiencing, it was too much. “I went to a neurologist,” Coron explained, “and the guy said, ‘You’ve got to get your ass out of a fucking truck, dude.’”

He never returned to Airgas. In January, he got a new job outside of the trucking industry.

Although removed from Airgas, Coron wants the public to understand what is happening there, and the structures that make corporate wrongdoing widespread.

“Because I’m white trash, I don’t like people who expect me to break the law, it makes me really mad,” he told me. He sketched a vision of business school graduates in suits seeking market share, making decisions that push criminality down the ladder.

“I swear to God it’s like a class thing,” he added. “The level of criminality from the college class, they’re taught to be predators. Lazyass predators but predators nonetheless.” n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

Black Women You’re quite assertive.

THERAPY BY AND FOR

R acial trauma research is having a new day as the scientific community finally acknowledges the burden of being Black.

Ebony Butler has wanted to be a psychologist since she was in high school. She pursued it through years of study, and then spent her entire career in the field, consulting for major hospitals and private health care companies. It’s an impressive résumé.

But it never stopped her clients and colleagues from periodically lobbing criticisms at her—about her hair, her social media presence, even her intelligence.

The microaggressions were commonplace and predictable, but not debilitating.

In 2020, however, a mass pandemic and a slew of racially charged murders upended Butler’s ability to practice psychology.

During this time, she experienced the same sleeplessness and hopelessness that millions felt. But as a Black woman at the professional and personal intersection of mental health, racism, and trauma, Butler had no moment of respite in her life.

Demand for therapy increased dramatically in 2020, and she soon realized how difficult it was to treat people when she struggled with the same emotions. Her solutions included persona l You are so therapeutic interventions such as talk articulate.

therapy and meditation, so that Butler could “show up genuinely” for her clients, who are mostly Black women.

Experiences like Butler’s are not uncommon. The dual pressures of being a Black woman in a systematically racist and sexist society mean that all Black women can require some sort of therapy or coping mechanism for the constant trauma inflicted. That includes even those who offer therapy to others for a living.

High-profile racist incidents of 2020, like the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the subsequent protests and trials that were mass-broadcast, made racism ubiquitous and unavoidable. It raised awareness of how these racist incidents impact not just the victim, but entire communities that feel kinship to the victim. Researchers and mental-health practitioners—especially BIPOC ones—have been aware of this phenomenon, known as racial trauma, for decades, but the events of 2020 increased interest among the scientific community.

The unique effects of racial trauma on Black women raise the need for therapeutic interventions on a significant portion of the population. The Black female practitioners at the forefront of understanding and devel-

BY RAMENDA CYRUS 48 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

oping this field know personally that racism and sexism compound and often bleed into everyday life, and they contour their treatment of other Black women accordingly. Left to neglect, racial trauma can spill over into physical health, as the burden of being Black wears down the body. That catastrophic consequence demands urgent, race-conscious treatment.

Racial trauma is the study of how racially sensitive incidents impart PTSD-like symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and anger—all of which spiked among Black Americans after George Floyd’s killing, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A 2021 study published in JAMA Psychiatry put some science behind the concept.

Black women who had self-reported racial discrimination showed a “disproportionately greater response in brain regions associated with emotion regulation and fear inhibition and visual attention.” Put another way, Black women with this experience may exhibit hypervigilance to sensitive situations, especially those with a racial component. This increased threat vigilance can

I wish I had your skin color.

You have a degree and everything?

Can I touch your hair?

You shouldn’t have been hired.

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

be tied to high anxiety, depression, or other PTSD-like symptoms.

The study also confirmed what Negar Fani, lead author on the study and professor at Emory University, has been observing in her career: Trauma does not necessarily lead, as researchers have long accepted, to less ability to pay attention. Instead, the study demonstrates that victims of racial trauma expend more resources to maintain a state of concentration when they are faced with racially triggering stimuli. Fani described it as “working twice as hard to get just as far.”

The JAMA study reflects part of a shift within the scientific community about both the concept of racial trauma and its realworld implications. As recently as 2020, studies like this were largely dismissed or ignored. “This work was really unpopular,” Fani said.

But over the past decade, as racially motivated events were repeatedly shared across social media and other channels, from Michael Brown to Philando Castile, it became harder to leave this area of psychology disregarded.

Thema Bryant-Davis, president-elect of the American Psychological Association (APA), noted how these early studies are important to spur further research, in terms of both funding opportunities and credibility. “It was important to document the neurological impact of racism,” she said, “to understand that stress and trauma include impacting the body [and] the brain.”

Bryant-Davis published an early explanatory study on racial trauma in 2005, just three years after Hugh F. Butts published “The Black Mask of Humanity,” his seminal piece on the topic. Butts and Bryant-Davis’s articles, along with subsequent studies in 2006 and 2007, formed the early frameworks for understanding racial trauma. Butts presented case-bycase examples from his years of practice, and Bryant-Davis and fellow researchers made parallels to other types of trauma, such as domestic violence.

The nature of racial trauma makes it a particularly sticky ailment. “Covert racist incidents form the social backdrop against which racially marginalized people must function day to day,” Bryant-Davis and Carlota Ocampo write in a 2005 article, “The Trauma of Racism: Implications for Counseling, Research, and Education.” “The incidents are never far from one’s conscious50 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

Racial trauma is the study of how racially sensitive incidents impart PTSD-like symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, and anger. ness and require expenditures of cognitive energy, hypervigilance, and coping.”

Mass broadcasting the murder of George Floyd was not only traumatic because Black people watched a man who looked like them be brutally murdered, but because Black people had to subsequently hear that murder justified relentlessly, even after the conviction of the police officer who did it.

Many Black people felt not only their fear, but their community’s fear. And racist incidents that do not happen to an individual directly can still trigger a PTSD-like response in that individual, simply through them remembering their own personal experiences with discrimination.

In an article titled “Racist Incident– Based Trauma,” Bryant-Davis and Ocampo also speak to the dismissal of racial trauma, arguing that it “relieves researchers, counselors, and educators of their responsibility to alleviate suffering.” Seventeen years later, Bryant-Davis, along with the researchers and mental-health practitioners who followed her lead, are finally having their voices heard. “People are saying, ‘Well, maybe we need a framework,’” she said. “But the work has already been done.”

In 2019, the APA published a special issue of American Psychologist entitled “Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing” to study “the consequences of racial discrimination and also the factors promoting healing from racial trauma,” acknowledging the growing field and the rise in hate crimes, along with research on how racial trauma has historically affected different BIPOC populations.

The publication featured multiple premiere researchers and psychologists with insight into racial trauma over the years, and was co-edited by Lillian Comas-Díaz, a leading psychologist and researcher on multiethnic issues. “Cumulative racial trauma can leave scars for those who are dehumanized,” Comas-Díaz and co-editors wrote in the issue’s introduction.

The issue included both empirical research on the links between PTSD and racial discrimination, along with newer

conceptual models for understanding racial trauma on a variety of populations, like interned Japanese Americans. One study detailed how the prevailing idea of “acculturation,” or how minority groups integrate, has led people of color to “avoid racial discourse” to minimize backlash, which is harmful when trying to treat racial trauma.

The recent acknowledgment of racial trauma as a scientific reality means that for decades upon decades, Black people have been coping with this incessantly racist society however they have been able to. And the effects are not just mental, but physical.

Early this year, Butler left the public sector, opening up a private practice in Austin, Texas. The Black women who see her express feeling undermined, dismissed, and consumed with fear, such as the fear of other people or the fear of saying no. Black women must also constantly field microaggressions about their hair, attire, and attitude.

But the most consistent issue Butler encounters involves Black women overcommitting and overextending themselves.

Researchers and practitioners have been positing that this “Strong Black Woman schema” contributes to a multitude of health disparities, especially through the mechanism of stress. Black women who internalize the need to do everything and take care of the community feel heightened stress, and they may neglect their physical or mental health.

“When people have experienced trauma, they’re more focused on the trauma that’s happening to somebody else rather than the trauma within themselves,” Butler said. “You don’t give yourself a lot of opportunity to deal with your stuff, especially as a therapist.”

This untreated stress manifests within the body and mind. “Racial discrimination is a toxic … stressor that is associated not only with poor physical health but also with psychological stress,” states an article in the Journal of Women’s Health, published in early 2021. “Chronic stressors reduce coping resources and increase vulnerability to mental health problems.”

The JAMA study concluded something

IMAGESPACE /MEDIAPUNCH/MEDIAPUNCH/ IPX

High-profile racial incidents like the murder of Breonna Taylor can often trigger memories of discrimination in others. similar, stating that frequent racism may “lead to heightened modulation of regulatory resources,” potentially representing an “important neurobiological pathway for race-related health disparities.”

What these studies indicate is that a person only has so many resources to allocate within a given period. When racial trauma is happening to an individual nearly every day, those resources may be directed that way instead of toward maintaining one’s health. This can be true whether a person is actively railing against racial stress, or if they are shielding themselves from it.

For many, the stress is constant, which can lead to elevated levels of the hormone cortisol. Elevated levels of this chemical are associated with various negative health outcomes, including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and mood issues.

The theory can help explain the high rates of physical ailments among Black women, such as heart disease or anemia. High blood pressure, a gateway to broader negative health conditions, is more commonly developed in Black people. One remarkable study

from 2018 showed women of color feeling discrimination during prenatal care, and passing that chronic stress on through the womb, resulting in higher rates of premature or underweight births.

The disparity in health outcomes was most conspicuous during the COVID pandemic, with one study finding non-Hispanic Black people suffering 34 percent of COVID deaths despite being 13 percent of the population. Researchers have connected higher COVID death rates in Black men to the cumulative effects of stress from being Black in America.

Butler has found that her clients complain of chronic pain and inflammation, along with mental issues such as anxiety, depression, and general stress on the nervous system. She has found that her own experiences with some of the same ailments help her connect with her patients, but also that sometimes it does not matter. Black people understand inhabiting a Black body in this world perhaps more than anything else.

“People feel like I would understand even if I don’t understand,” Butler said. “They

don’t have to explain nuances to me.”

This comfort cannot be overstated. It causes people to actively seek out therapists who will understand them—an issue for Black people, as only 4 percent of psychologists were Black as of 2015. It is why websites like therapyforblackgirls.com or blackfemaletherapists.com exist.

Therapy for Black Girls is where most of Alena Bell’s clients have found her. Bell is a licensed marriage and family therapist based out of the Bay Area, where she was born and raised. She has spent her entire career as a psychotherapist treating trauma in Black people—be it the Black youth she worked with in her practicum, or the formerly unhoused Black people she worked with at the University of California San Francisco at the beginning of her career.

She transitioned to the private sector in 2019. After a maternity leave, Bell is back to primarily serving Black people, especially professional Black women.

“Every client of mine has experienced some racial trauma, just by essence of being a Black person in [this] country,” Bell told me.

JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

The professional Black women Bell serves often deal with complex and developmental trauma on top of the racial trauma. Bell also finds that her clients, often in high-functioning positions, may find themselves the only Black woman, or even the only Black person, in the room, when they are not used to that.

This also leads to an unhealthy dose of self-doubt, according to Bell. Black women frequently find themselves questioning whether something was really profiling, or targeting, or just racist.

Most studies in racial trauma have focused on proving the phenomenon rather than determining a treatment. There are no tried-and-true models like the tactics used in treatment of PTSD. This is partially due to medical and scientific fields being infamously racist. Black women have been medical guinea pigs in America since the time when they had no bodily autonomy, and they still face inequitable treatment. Despite health disparities that require more medical attention, Black women consistently report being ignored and dismissed by their doctors.

“A lot of trauma psychologists were not even trained to conceptualize oppression as traumatizing,” Bryant-Davis told me. “That has been a major gap in the field that is really rooted in racism.”

Butler is well-versed in different modalities of therapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy and its offshoot dialectical behavioral therapy, forms of talk therapy that involve assessing triggers for mood and trauma disorders and developing coping strategies. “But a lot of those trauma modalities or treatment interventions have not been normed for Black folks,” she told me.

Butler’s approach often ends up being a “relational approach,” where she pulls from different methods to treat individual cases.

Sometimes this means helping a client develop mechanisms for diverting harmful thoughts; sometimes it means helping a client practice grounding techniques that bring them back to the present moment and away from reliving trauma. But it always involves validating a person’s experience.

Doubt is part of what makes racial trauma so insidious. Black people in America have been both constantly subjected to the racist nature of the country, while also being told that there is no racist nature. It is gaslighting at its finest, and it means that Black people who experience trauma must be vali52 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

dated before they can be properly treated.

Candice Hargons is an associate professor at the University of Kentucky and founding director of the Center for Healing Racial Trauma. She developed her own methodology for treating racial trauma, which includes validating racist experiences, affirming the humanity of her clients, and helping them develop a routine of self-care. In treating race-related stress, Hargons has “seen Black women come to realize a positive sense of themselves and gain more confidence, learn how to advocate for themselves intentionally, feel healthier, and act in ways that are healthier in their relationships.”

Therapy is often critical to self-care for Black women. While the National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that only 1 in 3 Black adults who need therapy receive it, Bryant-Davis told me that “Black women are more likely to seek therapy than Black men.”

With such a low incidence of Black therapists in the United States, Black women often find it difficult to find therapists who look like them, and end up settling for non-Black therapists who do not understand them on a fundamental level. A therapist who is unaware of their own biases and cultural blind spots might actually inflict more harm on a Black woman than they do to mitigate it.

The APA’s Race and Ethnicity Guidelines from 2019 say that in order to provide services without bias, psychologists need to consider “race, ethnicity and culture” in treatment and assessment. In 2021, the APA adopted a resolution to apologize for its legacy of promoting racism, stating, “APA acknowledges that recognition and apology only ring true when accompanied by action; by not only bringing awareness of the past into the present but in acting to ensure reconciliation, repair, and renewal.”

Non-Black therapists can be allies and advocates for Black women the same way that Black therapists can, if they are willing to put in the work to both understand their clients and be culturally and racially aware themselves.

Therapy still will not work for everyone, nor will everyone have access to it, especially given economic disparities among people of color. And many Black people must overcome a stigma perpetuated by both their communities and general cultural attitudes toward therapy.

Throughout history, Black women have had to advocate for themselves. Forgotten

from the civil rights movement and dropped from the women’s rights movement, Black women have consistently had to pave the way for rights for themselves and everyone.

Many Black women internalize this narrative and the idea that they should always be doing more; that’s part of the Strong Black Woman schema and the source of some stress. Black women who attend to their mental and physical needs as a priority are doing all that they should.

In Butler’s unique position, she has to constantly practice setting boundaries with people around her and listening to her body and mind signals. These are techniques that many Black women can benefit from, no matter their profession.

Treating racial trauma is not just a personal endeavor, but a communal one. Communal healing is impeded by the historical hurdles to get the public to internalize the harms of systemic racism. “People are willing to acknowledge an individual incident as traumatizing, but not the violation of an entire group of people,” Bryant-Davis told me.

Attitudes seem to be shifting in the past few years, with a rise in conversations about mental health and the need for self-care. As Comas-Díaz told me, “Self-care is collective care. You’re taking care of your community.”

It is perhaps not surprising that Black women and other women of color have led the research on racial trauma. They have worked relentlessly in what has been a thankless field for years, and only now are they starting to see Black women actually benefit from their work.

And there is still more work to do. The basic acknowledgment of the reality of their trauma is only the beginning. Most Black women cannot wait for scientific and medical communities to validate their experiences, as racism is ongoing, and racial trauma accumulative. That is why the BIPOC researchers and practitioners continue to dedicate energy to untangling this concept, while they advocate for their own health.

“Advocacy is a huge way I continue to take care of myself,” Butler told me. By being proactive with all aspects of health, Butler can hold an open and honest space for the Black women who come to her, especially the ones who have to start at square one. Racism may never end, but at least its harm to a Black woman’s mental and physical health can be mitigated. n

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JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

As national political fights are waged at the state level, democracy itself pays the price

A practical and compact guide to writing for professionals

“Grumbach brilliantly explains why states have transformed from political backwaters into major policymakers.”

“Offers keen insights and practical guidance for effective communication.”

—Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University

—Jacob J. Lew, former US Secretary of the Treasury

How the “First State” has enabled international crime, sheltered tax dodgers, and diverted hard-earned dollars from the rest of us

An energetic new translation of an ancient Roman masterpiece about a failed coup led by a corrupt and charismatic politician

“A must-read book for anyone who cares about the future of taxation and inequality.”

“[A] cautionary warning for our own volatile and perilous political moment.”

—Gabriel Zucman, coauthor of The Triumph of Injustice

—Emily Katz Anhalt, Arts Fuse

How Social Security has shaped American politics—and why it faces insolvency

“Masterful and authoritative.”

—Sarah Binder, George Washington University and the Brookings Institution

Prescient essays about the state of our politics from the philosopher who predicted that a populist demagogue would become president of the United States

“This inspiring collection of his political essays reminds us how prescient and humane Rorty’s thinking was, and how relevant it still is.”

—Brian Eno

CULTURE

The U.S. delegation to the Bretton Woods financial conference, 1944

The Vibe Shift to Stuff The real economy is resurgent, but the mood in Washington makes prioritizing goods over capital unlikely.

By Lee Harris

ABE FOX / AP PHOTO

The Case for a New Bretton Woods Kevin P. Gallagher and Richard Kozul-Wright Polity In 1978, facing inflation, unemployment, oil shortages, and a looming Third World debt crisis, Paul Volcker, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, described the “controlled disintegration of the world economy.”

When Volcker became chair of the U.S. Fed shortly thereafter, he hiked interest rates and slayed inflation. In the process, Volcker oversaw a debt crisis in Latin

America, a slowdown in productive invest- support for public investment and indusment, and a pivot to financial profits. If trial policy. Ahead of April’s meetings of the world economy did not quite disin- the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and tegrate in the 1980s, financial globaliza- World Bank, Treasury Secretary Janet Yeltion overtook bread-and-butter national len invoked the Bretton Woods Conference, where Treasury officials sat down to design investment priorities.

Today, the double whammy of virus and the postwar financial architecture even “as war has brought the world economy of World War II raged in Europe.”

Yet despite praising FDR’s geoeconomphysical goods back with a vengeance. The Odd Lots podcast, where nerdy analysts ic leadership during wartime, the Biden explain arcane movements in commodity administration has so far shown little intent markets, is all the rage. Talk of supply to reshape international finance in Books chains is commonplace. favor of working people. Two develPerhaps, then, we are looking at the opment researchers have published end of the 50-year period that subordinated a book outlining how this could be accomgoods and trade to the interests of capital. plished. But its lukewarm reception on the Policymakers in the West are showing new liberal left reveals a fatalism about the perJUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

CULTURE sistent dominance of finance—and a lack of imagination about political alternatives.

Plans for the IMF and World Bank to patrol roving capital and encourage state-led reconstruction were drawn up from a hotel in New Hampshire in July 1944. Richard KozulWright and Kevin Gallagher retell that history in The Case for a New Bretton Woods, their short and readable volume on the urgency of reforms to global finance and trade.

The authors draw on historical research by the political scientist Eric Helleiner, who uncovered the radical early vision for the Bretton Woods institutions. It turns out these were not intended to be the leg-breakers of international capital. The IMF was set up to provide short-term financing for states facing shocks under the new fixed exchange rate system, and the World Bank to promote investment, but both were conceived with heavy input from developing countries and meant to go far beyond immediate postwar reconstruction.

As the dominant industrial and creditor economy, the U.S. negotiated from a position of power but was wary of being accused of economic imperialism. Initial drafts of articles proposed by Harry Dexter White detailed the need to encourage capital movement from “capital-rich to capital-poor countries.” Business leaders, including the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also supported industrialization in the Global South to increase purchasing power and foreign demand for U.S. products.

And while “Good Neighbor” policies were sold domestically as serving American interests, there was also a streak of solidaristic radicalism in the wake of the Great Depression: an unusual coalition of liberals in the U.S. and U.K., interested in achieving social democracy at the international level.

The most radical development aims were shelved soon after the conference ended, however, and FDR’s death in 1945 triggered further shifts in foreign policy. Under the Truman administration, White was passed over as the first managing director of the IMF in favor of a more finance-friendly Belgian banker.

Still, the founding of the IMF and World Bank inaugurated a new era in which the interests of finance were made answerable to national priorities. To that end, one key achievement was the creation of capital controls. British negotiator John Maynard Keynes famously boasted: “Not merely as a feature of the transition, but as a perma56 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

nent arrangement, the plan accords to every member government the explicit right to control all capital movements. What used to be a heresy is now endorsed as orthodox.”

As with all uses of state power to check finance, this victory was neither absolute nor everlasting. In the 1960s, countries began to find their ways around controls with eurodollar markets, in which non-U.S. banks speculated in dollars outside American jurisdiction. And in the early 1970s, when officials in the U.S. and Germany decided to let the world’s major currencies float against each other, the IMF could no longer serve its original purpose—to ensure smooth functioning of the fixed exchange rate system.

Instead it became an enforcer of structural adjustment programs. Throughout the next decades, the function of the Bank and Fund would evolve further.

Following the 1973 oil shock, the Bretton Woods institutions began to be overtaken by private banking. High oil prices drove higher demand for capital, while “petrodollars” paid to oil-exporting countries caused a surge in roving dollars seeking investment opportunities, and banks stepped up as intermediaries. Writing in 1976, researchers at the IMF noticed in real time that they were being overtaken: “Commercial banks have been carrying out some of the functions which have often been thought of as more in the province of central banks, governments, and international organizations.”

Volcker then raised interest rates—necessary medicine perhaps, but a treatment that rewarded lenders at the expense of industrial investment, encouraging capital owners to pull back from building businesses and hiring workers and keep their money liquid. President Reagan’s concurrent efforts to crush labor only accelerated this shift.

Around the same time, surprisingly perhaps, the president could be found promoting more funding for the IMF. Stipulating that the money would not flow to “Communist dictatorships,” Reagan pushed for a more than $8 billion quota increase for the IMF. This wasn’t an act of international charity. After the Mexican sovereign debt crisis in 1982, more defaults were looming on the horizon, and American creditors like Bank of America and Citibank were getting jittery. All told, Mexico owed American banks some “$20 odd billion,” the Fed’s vice chairman estimated.

“Well, that’s big,” Volcker remarked.

That history doesn’t make it into Galla-

Kozul-Wright and Gallagher argue that the Bretton Woods institutions should abandon austerity lending conditions. gher and Kozul-Wright’s slim book, but they survey the ’80s and ’90s succinctly. Instead of serving their original purpose of enabling global economic growth and stability, over this period the Bank and Fund became the now-notorious enforcers of austerity in the Global South, demanding reforms compliant with the “Washington Consensus”: privatization, trade liberalization, and deregulation of finance and utilities. These measures largely failed to deliver growth (and even set off some financial crises).

Instead of development, poorer countries’ economic fortunes were increasingly tied to unpredictable commodity booms and the expansion of extractive industries.

Kozul-Wright and Gallagher skirt the controversial question of just how much the Bretton Woods institutions should carry forward their recent emphasis on attracting private capital to finance their undertakings—some of which is probably required to fund a green transition at the necessary scale. But they are emphatic that financial globalization has been a failure for the developing world and for workers in deindustrializing advanced economies alike.

Today, a rising debt burden in the developing world again threatens crisis. The war in Ukraine drove up prices for basic commodities like oil and grain, as rate hikes and controversial efforts to tamp down inflation in rich countries have raised the cost of debt servicing in countries such as Sri Lanka.

Officials in many emerging economies now fear a “taper tantrum” in which investors rapidly pull back from risky stakes overseas.

So far, that hasn’t happened; capital outflows are less than half of what they reached during the 2014 taper tantrum, according to Lazard. But even if we don’t see a similar exodus, Gallagher and Kozul-Wright’s point is that the unpredictable entry and exit of capital has prevented real growth. Instead, they write, “slower growth, weak overall

demand, and saturated markets led to new alliances between ever larger financial and industrial firms with unprecedented access to private credit and a growing propensity to replace long-term productive investment with rent-seeking behavior.”

Meanwhile, they say, trade deals are increasingly deals for finance instead.

“The contemporary trading system has become a shock absorber of the economic and political tensions originating from the unregulated flows of footloose capital,” they write. The authors propose to “make trade agreements about trade again” by enforcing antitrust laws, curbing abuses of intellectual-property rights, and using the WTO model of bilateral dispute settlement, rather than corporate dispute resolution in private shadow courts.

Kozul-Wright and Gallagher argue that the Bretton Woods institutions should abandon austerity lending conditions, rein in speculative finance, and boost capital available for the green transition. Their preferred means would be a central financing authority—perhaps a “remodeled” World Bank, or, drawing on an idea proposed by the international New Dealers, an agency modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority that would channel public capital into physical infrastructure for underdeveloped regions.

Liberal skeptics of Bretton Woods renewal find it distracting—if not faintly embarrassing—that some leftists keep bringing this up. Adam Tooze, an influential economic historian, has long opposed proposals to revive Bretton Woods, arguing that they miss where the action is really happening.

“There was no new Bretton Woods in 2008 and that absence is telling,” he wrote in 2019. “The world economy today is not divided up into national economic zones structured by the imperatives of mid-century total war. It really is the amorphous global conglomerate that we for so long have been saying it is. To hark back to earlier moments of concerted government-led cooperation under present circumstances is to indulge in gestural rather than real politics.”

That was then. In March, Treasury dispatched Wally Adeyemo to brag about the value of U.S.-led multilateral action and to assert that political will underpins the global financial system. It turns out that the only government that produces dollars can

Following the 1973 oil shock, the World Bank and the IMF began to be overtaken by private banking. still write the rules: When Russia launched a war of aggression in Ukraine, the U.S. moved swiftly to reshape the “amorphous global conglomerate.” Perhaps the Bretton Woods institutions would be blunt instruments for policing finance. But the extraordinary use of sanctions over the past several months has at least shown up the myth that Western governments can no longer reshape trade and capital flows at will.

What about the charge of “gestural” politics? Harking back to Bretton Woods sure is laying on the nostalgia thick. But if calls in the U.S. and U.K. for a Green New Deal have gone stale, there is plenty of energy behind popular yearning for the real economy of the mid-20th century. Everyone from JPMorgan’s CEO to a populist-protectionist Senate candidate in Missouri is calling for a new Marshall Plan. Left-realists should meet the moment and spell out their own visions for government-led redesign of capital, energy, and commodity flows. It is surprising, then, to find Tooze continuing to dismiss Gallagher and Kozul-Wright’s proposal as wellmeaning but geopolitically naïve.

War in Europe has upset elite expectations about the possibilities for “concerted government-led cooperation.” The IMF is now gesturing toward reforming finance and trade f lows, pointing out in its latest financial stability report that energytrading firms are “largely unregulated, mostly privately owned, and highly reliant on financing by dealer banks.” It has even introduced “capital flow management measures,” a rebrand meant to destigmatize capital controls, though it has not done

much with that guidance. Meanwhile, Wall Street openly acknowledges the metastasis of a private shadow banking system where private equity, hedge funds, asset managers, and unregulated fintech are edging out public companies and banks.

Why should reforms pursued through the Bretton Woods institutions be dismissed as dreamy idealism? These are precisely the sorts of institutions the U.S. could leverage to compete in the new cold war left-realists say should be harnessed to take on the climate crisis. Priorities at the Bank and Fund have always reflected the interests of the big shareholders—the U.S. above all—but could also be put toward the more radical objectives contemplated at their founding.

The Biden administration has so far shown little interest in leadership of multilateral financial institutions. Key posts at development banks and Treasury, such as the undersecretary for international affairs, have been left vacant, and the administration has instead appeared to prioritize bilateral lending through domestic agencies like the Export-Import Bank. It is an unforced error.

Left-realists who see competition as the most promising driver for sustainable development should take the IMF and World Bank seriously as a potential lever for enacting those ambitions. They might begin by pointing out that it is Chinese president Xi Jinping whom the Financial Times now quotes when warning about the coming crisis in emerging markets. “If major economies slam on the brakes or take a U-turn in their monetary policies,” Xi chided this year at Davos, “developing countries would bear the brunt of it.” n JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 57

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The Pain Profiteers

Two new books reveal the distortion of the U.S. health care system by financial operators.

Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

By John Abramson Mariner Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms US Health Care

By Laura Katz Olson Johns Hopkins University Press The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare major systemic problems in the U.S., nowhere more than in the cruelty and irrationality of our for-profit health care system.

Even though we spend 19.7 percent of GDP each year on health care (about $4.5 trillion), 11 other wealthy countries spend just over 10 percent and often deliver better results. The U.S. ranks 69th in the world when judged on “healthy life expectancy,” and for the first time in decades, American life spans dropped from 2014 to 2018.

Two new books pry even deeper into our dysfunctional health care system. One looks at the way that pharmaceutical companies exert enormous inf luence on the design, conduct, and analysis of clinical research. The other examines how private equity (PE) firms have lately been acquiring and streamlining health care companies in a way that Books siphons supersized profits for themselves, but undermines the right of all other Americans to have access to affordable, timely, and high-quality care.

In Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It, John Abramson, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, points out that over the past four decades, “the pharmaceutical industry has been able to achieve [a] ‘tail wags dog’ position” to tilt the playing field in its favor, at great cost to patients.

Its ruses include funding studies about its own drugs; distorting clinical trial data to increase drug sales; delaying publication of economically inconvenient findings; buying reprints of articles in prestigious medical 58 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

journals; cultivating relationships with doctors; running dubious ads; and more. The industry has also spent at least 50 percent more on lobbying since 1998 than any other individual sector.

Abramson draws from 22 years of experience as a family physician, a consultant to the Department of Justice, and an expert Vioxx’s increased cardiovascular risk was concealed by its manufacturer, Merck.

witness in several trials involving pharmaceutical companies. His book brims with arcana, from the Food and Drug Administration’s flawed approval process for drugs (and loopholes like the “501(k) pathway” for certain medical devices), to the problem with passing off post hoc findings as primary

learned about the risk until five years later.

And the FDA dragged its feet when it came to acting on the risks.

Each of these malefactors—the FDA, medical journals, and drug manufacturers—come under closer scrutiny in subsequent sections.

Pfizer, which has lately benefited from a pan-

DANIEL HULSHIZER / AP

By Rhoda Feng

ones, to the need for an independent federal health board, something with support from lawmakers in both parties.

One individual he writes about was prescribed Vioxx (“a safer version of ibuprofen”) for pain relief, only to experience debilitating headaches and eventually death from a massive stroke. “If it weren’t for the failure of three guardians of public safety,” Abramson writes, the death could have been prevented.

Merck, the manufacturer, had concealed Vioxx’s increased cardiovascular risk. The New England Journal of Medicine had published an article claiming the drug was safe to use, and failed to update readers when it

demic halo, is singled out for its role in an illegal off-label-marketing scheme involving Neurontin, a drug that had been approved by the FDA to treat epilepsy and a specific type of nerve pain. Abramson was an expert witness in the Neurontin case, where he explained Pfizer’s “statistical shenanigans,” including a “continuing medical education” meeting for doctors that presented favorable-looking results for only 15 patients, with no control group or comparison drug study.

The jury concluded that Pfizer had fraudulently marketed Neurontin to doctors, but the penalty it paid ($142 million) amounted to “less than half the revenues from one year of Neurontin sales.” Abramson was personally and professionally disheartened at the modus operandi for companies like Pfizer: “Under our current system, it is more profitable for large pharmaceutical companies to commit crimes and pay the fines than to obey the law.”

Abramson notes that standing up to Big Pharma and rapacious insurance companies and hospitals will require “a coalition of health-care professionals, purchasers (including non-health-care-related businesses, unions, and governments), and consumers.” But his call to “find a better balance bet ween c om merc ia l profit and public benefit” is too equivocal by half, stopping well short of an overhaul of the system.

One-third of the billions raised on GoFundMe is for essential medical services. Working out the mean between profit and the public interest would be like solving the SAT problem from hell. Every other industrialized country has figured out that a Medicare for All–style system allowing the government to negotiate for more affordable drugs would prevent consumer price-gouging, which Big Pharma has reliably done year after year despite national outcry.

However, this does not seriously mar a riveting, insider’s account of the medical guild, with its influential medical journals, clinical practice guidelines, and, inescapably, an avalanche of “expertly developed commercial propaganda, and, sometimes, simply lies.”

Abramson writes that, starting around 1980, “Companies moved from addressing the needs of a broad array of stakeholders … to focusing narrowly on maximizing financial return to shareholders.” This is about the same time that private equity firms began f lourishing by breaking up public companies in the pursuit of profit.

Abramson briefly gestures at the disemboweling of the welfare state and neoliberalism’s sculpting of the U.S. political economy to favor privatization, but he leaves out any mention of PE firms, whose buyouts have sprouted up in several health care sectors with rank luxuriance, valued at dozens of billions of dollars each year.

Private equity is largely responsible for the phenomenon of balance (or surprise) billing, which can ensnare patients who have health insurance but are treated by an out-of-network medical professional, like a physician in an emergency room who works for a third-party physician staffing company. Putting Americans in debt from surprise medical bills is nearly universally despised, yet, as Laura Katz Olson shows in her important and revealing new book Ethically Challenged: Private Equity Storms US Health Care, it’s a practice that became increasingly common after PE firms started taking over medical companies.

At the molten core of the private equity business model is the practice of accruing massive piles of debt to make investments, and requiring the companies they buy to pay it off. Drawing largely from state and local pension funds and endowments, private equity “is neoliberalism on steroids,” writes Olson. “Supersized earnings for PE and its shareholders are front and center, with no pretense otherwise.” The fact that it is accountable to no one other than its investors means that a great deal of its financial transactions are fogged in mystery.

Constantly selling off assets of a current buyout to finance future conquests, PE firms are a bit like the mythical ship of Theseus, forever being reconfigured with new parts— if Theseus were a plutocrat with a passion for dividend recapitalizations. Adding to the atmosphere of omertà, erstwhile founder-

owners who saw their practices acquired by PE and who were willing to be interviewed for Olson’s book could only disclose so much without running afoul of nondisclosure agreements. Still, there’s enough data for Olson to make a convincing case that PE has infiltrated almost all imaginable recesses of our lives, from the way we communicate to where we shop for groceries to how we charge our electronic widgets to—most worrying of all—where we get treated for medical emergencies or drug addiction.

Specialized establishments like home care and hospice centers, diagnostic labs and imaging centers, pharmaceutical companies, medical device businesses, dialysis facilities, fertility clinics, urgent care centers, and dermatologist offices have all been swallowed up by PE. Since 2011, reports Olson, the trend in many of these health sectors has been add-ons and mergers, with PE houses bundling acquisitions to “achieve scale” and “expand geographic reach” rather than selling off parts. According to Axios, in 2018 alone, there were nearly 800 private equity health care deals, nearly 15 percent of all PE acquisitions, yielding a total value of more than $100 billion.

It’s not uncommon for PE-held hospitals to pressure physicians to maximize “patient volume,” or to restrict the time they can spend with each patient, bilking people of proper care and attention. After Hospital Corporation of America was purchased

by Bain Capital, KKR, and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity in 2006, for instance, HCA engaged in a number of shady practices, including manipulating ER billing codes and turning away patients who failed to pay in advance. Physicians in other PEowned firms have been found to “hard-sell products and treatments (some of which may be unnecessary), and be parsimonious with medical and other supplies,” writes Olson. Managing directors are “not particularly concerned” about their acquisition’s long-term viability or performance; what interests them most is the quickest route to windfall profits.

PE-owned firms frequently put up a facade of catering to patients’ consumer preferences, through accoutrements like telemedicine and remote patient monitoring. Yet they often skimp on less tangible aspects of care, such as substituting lessertrained practitioners for more expensive physicians. As both Abramson and Olson point out, the very notion of “choice” in JUNE 2022 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 59

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Private equity has begun to consolidate segments of U.S. health care, at the expense of patients and workers. on fear-mongering ad campaigns painting a dystopian future if providers are restricted to charging market rates for their services.

The good news is that Congress did pass legislation, which then-President Trump signed into law, protecting patients from being socked with surprise bills from out-ofnetwork staffing companies and emergency air transit. The bad news—for everyone but PE’s financial puppeteers—is that the bill does not apply to public payers, and ground ambulances are also exempt, meaning sick and vulnerable people can still pay punitively high fees for out-of-network transport.

Private equity buyouts have been facing increasing scrutiny on Capitol Hill since the bankruptcy of stores like Toys ‘R’ Us and the outcry over surprise billing. As PE scoops up

more and more physician practices, with a perennial aim of double-digit returns, their pecuniary incentives will increasingly collide with the only thing that should matter: the health needs of patients. Call it the “Hypocritic Oath”: Their commitment is to making money hand over fist.

To rein in PE’s pernicious influence on health care, Olson calls for the removal of tax havens that enable its revenue-seeking behaviors and investing more in social services. Like Abramson, she thinks we currently spend too much on downstream health care costs and not enough on upstream nonmedical-care determinants of health. There is too much at stake to stand idly by as PE titans amalgamate even more health and medical services—the lives of disabled, sick, elderly, and other vulnerable people depend on putting an end to the rapaciousness of corporate medicine. n Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer living in New York whose work has appeared in 4Columns, The Baffler, BOMB, The New Republic, Jacobin, The White Review, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, and more.

Reps. Richard Neal (D-MA) and Kevin Brady (R-TX) initially frustrated efforts to rein in surprise medical billing.

TOM WILLIAMS / AP PHOTO

the context of health care is misleading: Patients rarely have a full picture of fees and are not positioned to “shop around” for services in an emergency as if choosing shoes. It would be more accurate to say that patients are not so much granted unfettered access to health care options as they are themselves instrumentalized, their health subordinated to profit motives.

PE has begun to consolidate segments of U.S. health care that lack clinical standardization and government oversight, such as eating disorder centers and autism treatment facilities. This allows owners to impose all sorts of cost-cutting and so-called “efficiency” standards at the expense of patients.

Workers at such enterprises also suffer under PE’s ruthless calculus: They often experience crushing workloads, earn lower wages than at comparable non-PE outfits, and have fewer benefits as PE focuses on retrenching operating expenses. Olson cites a study that shows that PE-controlled shops were responsible for over 1.3 million job losses since 2009.

When bankruptcies hit companies, workers bear the brunt of the impact, while general partners sail off with golden parachutes.

Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” As recently as 2019, the leadership of the House Ways and Means Committee, chair Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA) and ranking member Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), were intent on not understanding the need to protect unsuspecting patients from surprise medical bills. This was no surprise: Neal and Brady were bankrolled by the Blackstone Group and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe (WCAS), respectively, two private equity firms that own health care staffing companies.

Though Olson declines to provide precise figures in her book, a report from Public Citizen reveals that in 2019 alone—when congressional leaders started cottoning on to the outsized earnings flowing into PE coffers—employees or political action committees connected to Blackstone and WCAS contributed $63,600 to Brady and $32,700 to Neal. Private equity– backed groups like Doctor Patient Unity also spent millions of dollars

The private jet of Robert Stewart Jr., whose pandemic profiteering is chronicled in J. David McSwane’s new book

The Giant Pandemic Pool of Money

bound for Pittsburgh, one of the worst-hit cities. Brownlow, like a pirate on the high seas, commandeered the trains and rerouted them to the D.C. city hospital.

As prices kept climbing, an editorial in the Post noted that “the coffin trust is holding the people of the city by the throat and extorting from them outrageous prices for coffins and the disposal of the dead.”

The coffin controversy shows that, for certain people, a pandemic is a great time to make money. Our experience with COVID19 proved no exception, as ProPublica’s J. David McSwane chronicles in his new simply printing lists of names of noteworthy book Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalresidents. Before cremations were popular, ists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We so many people were dying so fast across Got Sick, a vigorous first-person account the country that many cities ran out of cof- of his myriad investigations into pandemic fins. In Connecticut, a woman lay dead in profiteers. McSwane shows how unprepared her house for seven days as the undertaker America was for any kind of public-health hunted fruitlessly for something to bury emergency, necessitating a system in which her in. In true supply-and-demand fashion, the American government blindly blasted billions out the door in an effort to coffin makers raised prices as high as possible. Quickly, the market devolved stem the mounting pile of body bags, Books into extortion, profiteering, and crime. enriching a group of impossibly shady Some of this was led by governcharacters—mask pirates, test tube ments themselves. Louis Brownlow, the fraudsters, small-business loan liars, nursD.C. commissioner, discovered two boxcars ing home vultures, vaccine barons—and full of 270 coffins on the Potomac Railroad often getting nothing to show for it.

A new book details the penny-ante crooks extracting federal cash during COVID, and the disastrous budget decisions that gave them the opportunity.

COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER

By Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick

By J. David McSwane Simon & Schuster The 1918 influenza pandemic hit Washington, D.C., like a hammer. On a single day that fall, more than a thousand people came down with the illness and over 90 people died. The Washington Post stopped running obituaries altogether and resorted to

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“I saw greed masquerading as entrepreneurial spirit, selfishness as rugged individualism, opportunism as patriotism, recklessness as bravery,” McSwane writes.

“Our obsession with unfettered capitalism hurt us every step of the way.” Pandemic, Inc. is also a story about the cost of austerity and the failures of private markets, propped up entirely by unscrupulous public money.

McSwane’s story begins in April 2020, when he began to look into a business called Federal Government Experts, which had received the largest first contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide masks. At least in its early days, masks were the coffins of the COVID pandemic: shockingly scarce, increasingly expensive, and the locus of price-gouging and fraud. McSwane called the owner of Federal Government 62 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022

Experts to learn about the business, and the owner, a man named Robert Stewart Jr., improbably and against the advice of his lawyer offered McSwane the chance to tag along as he endeavored to find and deliver six million N95 masks. The federal government had promised to pay Stewart almost $6 per mask, even though they typically retailed for about $1.

Ultimately, Stewart was guaranteed about $34.5 million in revenue, despite having no demonstrable experience procuring PPE or medical supplies. But this was fairly typical during that chaotic time. Many federal contracts were going to people who had formed their LLC just weeks, or even days, before submitting their applications.

Initially, Stewart told McSwane he already had possession of the masks at a

site in Los Angeles, and was taking a private jet to Chicago to oversee the transfer. To the surprise of McSwane, the plane diverted 600 miles and stopped off in Georgia to pick up Stewart’s parents and his human resources director. As they flew to Chicago, the human resources director flipped through a book called Strategic Staffing while Stewart brushed up on a federal contractor’s bible, the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and asked the pilot when it makes sense to buy a plane. (He was renting it for $22,000 a day.) McSwane began to suspect something was amiss.

Stewart would eventually change his story. The mask cache in Los Angeles didn’t exist anymore. McSwane was stunned. Why were they flying to Chicago then? “It comes down to me and my credibility,” Stewart

COURTESY OF SIMON & SCHUSTER

Stewart’s team had to desperately track down six million masks after making a deal with the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide them.

Decades of austerity coupled with crony capitalism on both sides of the aisle doomed tens of thousands of people. said. “Why would anybody pay $22,000 to have a ghost box delivery? It doesn’t make any sense.” True enough. It is the power of positive thinking taken to an extreme degree. McSwane thought of all the people dying on the ground below, writing, “There I was, a passenger aboard a delusion, floating over a nightmare.”

Arriving in Chicago, the group settled into an empty Hilton, where Stewart assembled a crew of brokers to desperately track down six million masks. Attempting to negotiate deals that included many other brokers looking to feed on his federal contract, he failed.

After this experience, McSwane raced around the country to report on other shady dealers, like the man in Texas who hires people on TaskRabbit to repackage nonmedical-grade masks into new boxes, or an alleged testing company called Fillakit, where supposed sterile vials were actually plastic mini-soda bottles loaded into bins with snow shovels and filled with saline solution. The government would later buy and then dispose of four million of these tests. In another instance, a man with 75 Twitter followers responded to one of President Trump’s tweets, claiming he had some ventilators, and was forwarded by a Jared Kushner–led task force to the state of New York. The state, assuming that the man was vetted (he wasn’t), awarded him an $85 million contract for 1,450 ventilators, with $69 million paid in advance. No ventilators were delivered.

“Was the plan,” McSwane wonders, “to cast money out indiscriminately, like chum into the sea, and just see what bites?”

Lurking behind all these revelations is a key question: Why did the government need to rely so heavily on private brokers to find PPE, tests, and vaccines in the first place? And why was there almost no time for oversight or vetting when it came to

these brokers, leaving the door wide open for fraudsters to come rushing in?

The reason, of course, was that the Strategic National Stockpile—an initiative housed deep within the Department of Health and Human Services created by President Bill Clinton after he read Richard Preston’s fictionalized account of a bioterror attack on the U.S. called The Cobra Event—was completely depleted. The SNS had been designed to have on hand all things necessary to quickly stem a pandemic, like pharmaceutical remedies, masks, respirators, and other medical supplies. But in 2009, the stockpile of N95 masks was 75 percent depleted, as supplies went out to aid states in the fight against swine flu. As the senseless budget battles of Obama’s first term heated up, fiscal brinkmanship hampered the ability to resupply the cache. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which established across-the-board “sequester” cuts throughout federal agencies, forced Congress to reduce HHS funding and halt funds intended to restock the SNS. Funding for the SNS was first reduced by 10 percent in 2011, then 9 percent a year later, and 8 percent in 2013. Moreover, the Obama administration chose to focus the reduced funds on preventative supplies for the very rare chance of smallpox and anthrax outbreaks, essentially plowing piles of money into a single company that monopolized the anthrax vaccine at the expense of masks.

McSwane profiles a domestic mask maker who tried in vain to warn the federal government that if more masks were not purchased and mask production was not ramped up in the United States, a disaster awaited. But instead of sending contracts to guarantee solvency for domestic mask makers with proven supplies and credentials—even large American manufacturer 3M had sent its mask production to China—Trump officials like Peter Navarro rushed out deals to unqualified and even delusional brokers across the country, wasting time, money, and most importantly human lives. The U.S. government’s deadly failure to respond to the pandemic has been well chronicled, but reading McSwane’s book it becomes very real why it failed. Decades of austerity coupled with crony capitalism on both sides of the aisle doomed tens of thousands of people.

In some regards, McSwane’s conclusion is multifaceted. Sometimes he blames “unfet-

tered capitalism,” sometimes he blames a shortsighted lack of preparedness, and sometimes he shruggingly suggests that this was our destiny as a country. “This is who we are,” he writes, “though I pray it is not all we can be.” It’s refreshing that he calls different schemes what they are, in one case referring to “an unmitigated bullshit bonanza.”

And while it’s comforting to progressive ideology that the private, unregulated market is a nightmare, it feels like most of the federal dysfunction when it comes to PPE distribution and federal money is simply a result of disastrous budgetary decisions. It opened the door for incompetent officials like Navarro to make ill-informed decisions in the name of expediency, to allow drug companies to keep profits from vaccines developed by the federal government, and to let criminally negligent nursing home owners off the hook. Austerity kills, and that’s the heart of the story.

Though Stewart, who was charged with federal fraud in relation to his mask contract, was McSwane’s entry into the story, the author soon moves on. But one day, while investigating the billions of dollars swindled from the government through the Paycheck Protection Program, a privately run lending operation to help pandemic-affected businesses keep their workers employed, McSwane decided to type “Federal Government Experts” into a database of businesses that received money. Sure enough, the company popped up. Stewart had received an $805,000 loan, dispersed the same week the company was targeted for investigation. In the application, Stewart claimed he had 37 employees and a payroll of $322,000, when his labor cost only amounted to $14,000, or less than one full-time employee.

Furthermore, it turned out that Stewart had been defrauding the VA since 2013, claiming to be a discharged corporal from the Marines when he was only an Air Force reservist. Prior to 2020, his scam had only netted tens of thousands of dollars. The pandemic was the real gold mine, and Stewart was quick to jump at the opportunity. Stewart applied for his mask contract in April, shortly after the pandemic started, suggesting that he knew how the federal government worked better than anyone else. n Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein is a freelance journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Baff ler.

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GreatReplacement The truth behind the overturning of Roe

By Francesca Fiorentini

It’s a strange thing to be pregnant while abortion rights are being axed. It’s like being sober on the brink of Prohibition, musing about how you’re “naturally drunk on life.”

My pregnancy is wanted. Sure, my child will be born into late-stage capitalism’s inferno, and sure, they’ll have to become a Twitch streamer or OnlyFans creator in order to even afford trade school. But damn it, the kid will have been wanted.

That will not always be the case with generations born in the coming dystopian dark ages ahead for American uteruses.

Thanks to the hollow-hearted fuckleheads on the Supreme Court and in state legislatures across the country, many children will now be born out of coercion. And unwanted kids face far more challenges than the average woes of growing up in the United States, with our lack of paid leave, unaffordable child care, unaffordable health care, unaffordable college, unaffordable housing, and other symptoms of living in … the richest country on Earth? Given that their parents’ needs were ignored and neglected, so too will these kids be susceptible to being ignored and neglected, and thereby all-around miserable people. In other words, more susceptible to becoming Republicans.

This makes it very clear what the goal of rolling back abortion rights is in the year 2022. Sure, it’s about making women second-class citizens and undoing decades of civil rights for them and inevitably the LGBTQ+ community. But for a party that governs thanks to minority rule, this is about something more. It’s about growing their ranks as that minority gets whittled down to a sliver. Justice Samuel Alito even bemoaned the dip in “the domestic supply of infants,” a turn of phrase that makes the harvesters in The Matrix seem benevolent.

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The GOP knows their current voter stock is depleting. Fox News understands that its average viewer is an octogenarian scammer’s mark who’s been robbed of at least a few thousand dollars because they couldn’t

locate their reading glasses before checking the box next to NO, I wouldn’t NOT want to make my donation monthly to help Donald Trump Make America Great Again, again.

They’re dying off and they need new recruits.

What are Republicans to do? Appeal to

the sensibilities of Catholic Latino immigrants? Never! Lift up young conservative women to nurture the next generation of Liz Cheneys and Meghan McCains? Gross!

Support workers and unions to finally make good on their faux populism? LOL. Soulless turds cannot be created or converted. They must be spawned from other soulless turds. (They are after all obsessed with pure bloodlines.) How else can they replenish not just the voter chanting “Jew S.A.!” at a Trump rally, but the majestic douchebaggery of a Ron DeSantis, the brute idiocy of a Sen. Tom Cotton, the glassyeyed contempt of one Stephen Miller? New generations of children who’ve never been hugged, replete with mommy issues and forever seeking daddy’s approval, inevitably mean new generations of Republicans.

This is the GOP’s Great Replacement, replacing wanted Americans with unwanted ones. They’ve already made so many in the country feel unwanted, why not start at the source?

Of course, Republicans like Tucker Carlson love to peddle a different “great replacement” theory, the one where Democrats pave an imaginary pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants out of homely green M&M’s. Immigrants who he imagines will then vote Democrat, a painful irony considering Democrats can’t even secure voting rights for current citizens. But that replacement theory, like everything the GOP says and does, has been nothing more than projection. It is they who want to hatch armies of failsons and faildaughters to perpetuate a Christian nationalist neofacist nightmare.

Look, I can’t guarantee my kid will turn out great. Maybe they’ll vote for Pete Buttigieg one day and I’ll have to sit there and take it. But as the one with the uterus here, at least it was my fucking choice. See you on the streets. n

GREG HOUSTON

THE GOP’S

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Ukraine’s iron will epidemic against America’s silent Putin’s barbarism

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS By Randi Weingarten, President

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS Concern for kids’ well-being—physical, emotional, a two-page text informing social and academic—is thestudents reason that that, just Russiaafter is currently “special the weeks the firstundertaking pandemic lockdowns, peacekeeping operation” and AFT started planning how in to Ukraine… return to in-person that thesafely.

Russian committed learning Wegovernment know that isremote and hybrid to “peace” and “is not for going schooling areand not“freedom,” adequate substitutes learning imposeTeachers anythinghave on anyone force.” to keep intoperson. workedbytirelessly students engaged, a recent NPR/Ipsos Countering that kindand of disinformation is partpoll of found percent of parents their the fightthat for 88 self-determination andbelieve democracy. “child’s teacher(s) have done the best they could, Amid and carnage of war, giventhe thechaos circumstances around theUkrainian pandemic.” teachers have continued teaching their students in We know kids’ online activity wasn’t restricted any way they can—in basements and subways as to learning during school closures. For many, it they seek refuge from bombings, using messaging was the only way to connect with their peers. apps like Telegram, and in refugee resettlement areas.

But social media can be like a mirror that According to the United Nations, nearly every second reflects one’s insecurities and anxieties. since the atrocities began, a Ukrainian child has Many tech executives limit and even prohibit their become a refugee. The teachers union in Poland has own children’s online activity. They are wellturned its conference center into a home for more versed in the research about the harms of social than 100 Ukrainian orphans and unaccompanied media—including negative effects on self-esteem children and converted its offices into temporary and self-image, and increases in anxiety, loneliness residences for women and children. Teachers and depression. Facebook’s own internal research in Poland, Germany, Romania and Slovakia are found that 13.5 percent of teen girls say Instagram preparing to integrate refugee children into their worsens their suicidal thoughts and 17 percent say that Instagram contributes to their eating disorders.

Democracy, independence and freedom School responders are not staff to beoften takenare forfirst granted. to students’ mental health needs.

Photo:Photo: AFT Michelle Ringuette

A U

lexandra Hinkson-Dutrevil was teaching kraine has always large in my life. a history lesson loomed to her fourth-grade Myclass grandfather fled near-certain when a student suddenlydeath burst from pogroms that sobs, massacred intothe tears.

Between he saidJews thatin Ukraine early in the last century, and his young cousin had COVID-19 and was on ahe was able toand bringhemost his and my grandmother’s ventilator, was of afraid his cousin was going family western Ukraine to America.

Many to die.from Hinkson-Dutrevil could have talked to the Jews whoalone survived those pogroms later perished student or referred him to another staff inmember the massacre Babicontinue Yar by Nazi and so sheatcould herforces lesson.

Instead, their collaborators.

2014, Ito went to Ukraine on a she invited all her In students discuss their emosolidarity missionthat, withespecially other labor leaders tions, knowing during theshortly pandemic, after dozens of demonstrators were shotof she “shouldn’t dismiss anything forfatally the sake there during a pro-democracy uprising. The uprising fulfilling a lesson plan.” The floodgates opened. ousted Ukraine’s Russian-backed president and Teachers’ sometimes have to ushered in daily a newlesson era ofplans freedom and democracy takethe a back seat to students’ needs— that Ukrainian people haveimmediate long wanted. whether physical, social or emotional. Every day, Like so many, I have watched with horror at Vladimir teachers and school staff help young people cope Putin’s barbarism and with awe at the Ukrainian with trauma caused by the pandemic, as well as people’s determination and will. Putin’s forces common banes of childhood like bullying and are now killing civilians—bombing kindergartens, the increasingly toxic effects of social media. hospitals, and people waiting in line for food or May istoMental trying flee to Health safety. Awareness But insteadMonth, of theseanRussian important opportunity to shine a light on people the assaults breaking their will, the Ukrainian “silent pandemic” in our mental have confronted them withcountry—the staunch resistance, health As a teacher, I know are thatmounting. school even as crisis. the carnage and suffering staffisoften arefor firstpeople’s responders students’ This a battle lives to and homes, and mental health needs, despite most being for freedom, self-determination and not democracy. trained to provide such specialized support.

Oleksandr Sushko, the executive director of the We need more school counselors, social workers, International Renaissance Foundation in Ukraine, psychologists andofnurses to support kids’sector wellurges, “The voices Ukraine’s civil society being. must also expand schools, must beWe protected, as we knowcommunity these defenders of which wrap services around schools and make democracy and freedom are high on Putin’s kill list.” them community hubs to better meet a full Teachers trade unionists are among range ofand students’ and families’ needs. President those “defenders of democracy.”

As Jeffrey Joe Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget includes C.significant Isaac, a professor of politicalfor science funding increases these at priorities.

Indiana University, Bloomington, writes mustShanker help the helpers.

Educators inAnd thewe Albert Institute blog: are experiencing severe stress and burnout Education is a dangerous thingshortages, for authoritarian due to the pandemic, staffing leaders and regimes, for it nurtures increasing attacks on teachers, and freeefforts to thinking individuals capable of asking mire schools in political and culture wars. questions and seeking their own answers. For Even before COVID-19 swept globe, many this reason, teachers have longthebeen on the young people were suffering from poor mental front line of the struggle for democracy. health. One in 5 adolescents suffered a mental In the condition.

U.S., teachers are facing a wellhealth Suicide was, and still is, the orchestrated political by the far-right second-leading cause campaign of death among 10- to to limit the teaching of certain subjects andGeneral 24-year-olds.

Last December, U.S. Surgeon perspectives in public schools, all in the Vivek Murthy issued a rare public health advisory name of a “patriotism” that istomanifestly highlighting the urgent need address the hostile to a multi-ethnic worsening mental healthand crisismulti-racial affecting young democracy andthe a well-educated citizenry. … deep people—from millions who experienced loneliness and anxiety during the pandemic … As Human Rights Watch reports, teachersto the 200,000 children in the United States [in Russia] will be required to read out loudwho have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

school systems, implementing a dual-language model used to educate students fleeing the war in Syria.

In light of these troubling trends, the AFT has teamed with Frances to support youth The AFT isupraising funds toHaugen help resettle teachers mental health and safebysocial media use. Haugen and children displaced the war in Ukraine.

The is a formerofFacebook product manager whoare not generosity our members, many of whom ripped back wage, the curtain to reveal how Facebook’s paid a living has been tremendous.

Every platforms hurtwill children, stoketodivision and threaten cent we raise go directly these refugee our democracy.

Shemany exposed the company’s efforts.

In addition, AFT how pension trustees are executivespension hide research about the social network’s divesting funds from Russian investments. risks because, as Haugen testified to Congress, “they Much of the world is in turmoil—from COVID-19, have put their astronomical profits before people.” to climate catastrophes, to humanitarian crises in In May, the AFT asked our union’s trustees Afghanistan, Central America, Haiti,pension South Sudan, to sanction Facebook’sAsparent company, Meta, citing Yemen and elsewhere.

Ukrainian President evidence ofZelenskyy the harmful Meta’s platforms Volodymyr saideffects in his address to the U.S. have on children.

Weweareneed alsonew calling on Congress Congress last week, alliances to stop to enactand legislation similar to theleaders European conflicts keep peace.

World mustUnion’s call Digital Services Act requiring socialand media companies for an end to hostilities in Ukraine other conflict to combat misinformation content. zones, and they must work and bothdivisive to stabilize countries so citizens are not forced to flee and to resettle The AFT has an array of programs to support refugees whose only recourse is to leave their homes. the mental health of students and school staff, a mental health benefit forthe AFTsurvival members, Iincluding think many Americans believe that and in social and emotional and of ourtraining democracy is a given.

But todaylearning democracy education.

Hinksonistrauma-informed imperiled not only in placesAlexandra like Ukraine, but by Dutrevil, thethat fourth-grade teacher whose forces here are working to limit votingstudent’s rights, worriesdisinformation, about his cousin sparked athe classwide spread manipulate outcome discussion, that the strategy just weeks of elections learned and prevent peaceful transferearlier at power an AFTafter grieflegitimate training program forZelenskyy teachers. of elections. reminded us that “democracy, independence and Our country faces many challenges. Improving freedom” are the foundation of the United States mental health is not just one of them, it is essential and are not to be taken for granted. Defending to nurturing a healthy country that is equipped democracy is not something we can leave to others, to meet all other challenges and opportunities. as Ukraine’s freedom fighters are showing us.

Creating safe and welcoming environments in every school is an important way to start.

Weingarten in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in March 2014, after pro-democracy Weingarten, left, with Frances Haugen, demonstrators an advocate forwere accountability in killed there. social media, May 3.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/RWeingarten Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: twitter.com/RWeingarten

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