The American Prospect

The Democratic Emergency Paul starr

Ceding Trade to Trump

Robert Kuttner

Lessons from MLK and RFK

Randall Kennedy | Peter Edelman

liberal intelligence

Tickets to Ride

special Report on Mobility

Spring 2018

How nOT to cover America As newspapers pull back, the journalists who do report on the heartland parachute into communities.

But even the best are likely to be a step behind events.

Michael Massing

contents

volume 29, number 2 Spring 2018

Columns 4 prospects the democratic Emergency by Paul Starr

notebook 7 What Now for Unions? by Harold Meyerson 9 Turning the Southwest Blue with “Brown and Beautiful” Millennials by cristina TzintzÚn and Manuel Pastor 11 Puerto Rican Refugees and the Elusive Blue Wave by Manuel Madrid

Features 14 Martin Luther King Jr.: The Prophet as Healer by Randall Kennedy 17 Robert F. Kennedy: Teachings for Today by Peter Edelman 21 How the Globalists Ceded the Field to Donald Trump by Robert Kuttner 24 Cover Story How Not to Cover America by Michael Massing 30 Catching a Breeze by Derrick Z. Jackson 36 special Report Mobility and Social Justice 37 Connecting Public Transit to Great Manufacturing Jobs by Steven Greenhouse 43 Moving People, Not Cars by Joan Fitzgerald 46 Ridesharing versus Public Transit by Steven Hill 52 Putting the Public First in Public-Private Partnerships by Gabrielle Gurley 56 Sharing the Tech Wealth by Jordan Ecker 62 Why America Needs More Social Housing by Peter Dreier 68 West Virginia Teachers Won their Strike. Now, they’re Rebuilding the Local Economy.

by Kalena Thomhave 74 How to Keep Social Security Secure by Henry J. Aaron

culture 79 Democracy and Its Discontents by Arthur Goldhammer 82 Corporate Power and the Unmaking of American Democracy by K. Sabeel Rahman Cover photo by Seb Ra / iStock by Getty

1

from the Editors

T

his spring is the 50th anniversary of the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. (April 4) and of Robert F. Kennedy (June 5). The killings were tragic on so many levels. King’s assassination deprived the nation of its most prophetic voice for racial and social justice, and also one of its shrewdest practical tacticians. Had Robert Kennedy not been murdered, he might well have won the Democratic nomination and then defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency, and the entire course of American history could have been different.

There is a second, profound sense in which we miss King and RFK . As Randall Kennedy and Peter Edelman recount in two essays in these pages, nobody was better at building racial bridges in a common cause for justice. King was, above all, a force for racial equality and the long overdue rights of black Americans. But he understood more than almost anyone that this project required both an alliance with whites and the redemption of whites.

Kennedy Robert Kennedy was the best white politician of his generation at reminding white and black audiences of their common interests. When he was killed, as Edelman reminds us, many of his white working-class supporters went over to support the racism of George Wallace. The lesson is all too contemporary.

At a moment when progressives are riven by conflicts over whether to emphasize the redress of black grievances, or the pain of downwardly mobile white working families, or the new demands for inclusion of other groups, we sorely miss the wisdom, Edelman the prophetic voices, and the political genius of MLK and RFK at reminding us of the need for solidarity and coalition. Randall Kennedy, professor of constitutional law at Harvard, and Peter Edelman, Georgetown law professor and one of Robert Kennedy’s senior aides, bring that wisdom to life. We would do well to learn from it.

This issue of the Prospect also includes a special package of articles under the heading “Mobility.” The word is meant as a pun. We mean mobility in the sense of decent public transit, but these articles also connect good transportation systems to the ability of working people to get jobs, and to get to their jobs.

There is a further connection between these two senses of mobility. As Steven Greenhouse recounts in the lead article, serious investment in public transit can also provide good manufacturing jobs. A public infrastructure program, at the needed scale, could modernize transportation systems and provide millions more jobs.

In companion pieces, Joan Fitzgerald explains why efforts to make cities more bikefriendly and bus-friendly are fool’s errands unless we also get serious about limiting cars.

There is only so much street space to go around. With cars dominating and alternatives inadequate, a vicious circle ensues in which people cling to their cars. And Steven Hill shows why alternatives like Uber and Lyft, far from reducing dependence on private cars, compound the problem.

In a piece about the much-touted public-private partnership option, Prospect Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley offers a guide for the wary, distinguishing what makes for a good partnership from what creates a private rip-off of taxpayers.

We thank the Barr Foundation for support that makes these Mobility articles possible.

They are part of a continuing series.

2 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

co-editors Robert Kuttner and Paul Starr co-founder Robert B. Reich Executive editor Harold Meyerson Deputy Editor Gabrielle Gurley art director Mary Parsons managing editor Amanda Teuscher associate Editor Sam Ross-Brown Writing Fellows Manuel Madrid, Justin Miller, Kalena Thomhave proofreader susanna Beiser editorial interns Jordan Ecker, Mark Ossolinski, Kaitlin Pickrell Digital Engagement intern Victoria Sheridan contributing editors Marcia Angell, Gabriel Arana, Jamelle Bouie, Heather Boushey, Alan Brinkley, Jonathan Cohn, Ann Crittenden, David Dayen, Garrett Epps, Jeff Faux, Michelle Goldberg, Gershom Gorenberg, E.J. Graff, Bob Herbert, Arlie Hochschild, Christopher Jencks, John B. Judis, Randall Kennedy, Bob Moser, Karen Paget, Sarah Posner, Jedediah Purdy, Robert D. Putnam, Richard Rothstein, Adele M. Stan, Deborah A. Stone, Michael Tomasky, Paul Waldman, Sam Wang, William Julius Wilson, Matthew Yglesias, Julian Zelizer Publisher Amy Marshall Lambrecht Director of Business Operations Ed Connors Comptroller Anne Beech Development Manager Justin Spees Publishing assistant Stephen Whiteside board of directors Michael Stern (Chair), Chuck Collins, Shanti Fry, Stanley B. Greenberg, Jacob s. Hacker, Robert Kuttner, Ronald B. Mincy, Miles Rapoport, Janet Shenk, Adele Simmons, Ganesh Sitaraman, William Spriggs, Paul Starr Fulfillment Palm Coast Data subscription customer service 1-888-MUST-READ (1-888-687-8732) subscription rates $19.95 (U.S.), $29.95 (Canada), and $34.95 (other International) reprints permissions@prospect.org

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The Democratic Emergency

by Paul Starr

I

‘‘

t now seems clear that the most frightening threats to ordinary politics in the United States are empty or easily contained. … The sky is not falling and no lights are flashing red.” So wrote two distinguished historians, Samuel Moyn and David Priestland, in an article in The New York Times last August. With surprising confidence only a halfyear into the Trump administration, they warned not against dangers to democracy, but against “tyrannophobia,” the irrational fear of tyrants.

Fourteen months into Trump’s presidency, it’s even more surprising to see that same view still being expressed in serious quarters. A few of the contributors to Can It Happen Here?—a new collection of essays about the potential for authoritarianism in America, edited by Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School—are also skeptical that Trump poses a danger to democracy.

One of the writers in the Sunstein collection, law professor Eric A. Posner, suggests tyrannophobia is a recurring panic in America. The not-to-worry camp is convinced that the nation’s institutions will hold extremist forces of any kind in check. Tyler Cowen, an economist, claims that extremists on the right “simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.” As he sees it, the courts, the Federal Reserve, and

4 WWW.Prospect.org spring 2018

even the intelligence services and other elements of the Deep State stand as firm obstacles to authoritarian rule. Regardless of what Trump says about the media, for example, the not-to-worriers are confident that the courts will uphold the First Amendment, and the public will continue to get the benefit of aggressive reporting and criticism.

I don’t find this confidence reassuring, and not because I claim any special insight into the future.

Something has already gone deeply wrong. When the greatest threats to democracy in the United States come from the man exercising the awesome powers of the presidency, our constitutional system has failed in a crucial sense. It has failed to protect America and the world from an erratic and impulsive demagogue who has no respect for democratic institutions, nor apparently much understanding of them.

The entire government, indeed, the whole direction of the country, now seems to revolve around one man and his whims, hatreds, and ignorance. When Trump named his first national security and economic advisers, some commentators assured us that the “adults” would prevent any calamity. But Trump can fire them with a tweet, as he did with former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and surround himself instead with people who share his instincts, feed his prejudices, and repeat his lies.

The Constitution provides no checks on the appointments to the national security apparatus and other operations within the White House—all enormously enlarged in the past century.

Nor has Congress created any effective check on the president’s power to make war and conduct foreign relations. Every day, it seems, we wake up to a new round of threats and insults hurled by Trump against sundry targets, often including America’s allies as well as the “shithole” countries with darker peoples Trump disdains, while he offers aid and comfort to dictators around the world. (Trump’s own disposition might aptly be described as tyrannophilia.) The damage to democracy and human rights is not speculative—it is an ongoing disaster that is making the world a more dangerous place.

And if those dangers lead to an international confrontation (think of a Cuban missile crisis), or we suffer a major terrorist strike (think of another September 11), or the nation’s energy and communications infrastructure experiences a catastrophic failure (possibly resulting from Russian hacking), we will all depend for our safety and security on Donald Trump’s snap decisions. Nothing about his behavior inspires confidence about what he would do or, for that matter, how others would respond. A man who has lied so blatantly and so often will not be

trusted by the public at the critical moments when trust is required.

The great worry about a crisis— the nightmare, Reichstag fire scenario—is that Trump would use a national emergency as a pretext for entrenching his own power, suspending civil liberties and elections. The U.S. Constitution, unlike some others, provides no clear guidance or limits on emergency powers, and as Judge Jed Rakoff argues in a recent article (“Don’t Count on the Courts”) in the New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court has a long history of according “near-total deference to the executive,” particularly when the government claims national security is at stake. In times of emergency, as in war, the law may well fall silent.

But even setting aside the possibility of a sudden seizure of power, the Constitution is not likely to provide adequate protection. It lacks the provisions that might stop “a would-be autocrat bent on the slow dismantling of democracy,” Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, two constitutional law professors, write in their contribution to the Sunstein volume. The Founders expected the separation of powers would enable Congress to act as a check on the president, but they didn’t anticipate polarized parties.

Congressional Republicans have been all in on Trump, and so Congress hasn’t been a check on

Prospects

the president, and it is unlikely to become one unless Democrats win control of at least one house.

Unlike other constitutional systems, Ginsburg and Huq point out, ours does not give minority parties in the legislature the right to demand information and make inquiries. Unlike other countries, we lack a well-insulated prosecutorial branch or ombudsman’s office to monitor corruption; the president can remove U.S. attorneys at his pleasure. (Indeed, he can remove the two officials at the top of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, and replace them with people who will do his bidding on Robert Mueller’s investigation.)

The independence of the civil service is only a matter of tradition, and if some agencies such as the FBI haven’t capitulated to Trump, it may just be a matter of time before he puts people in control who pledge their loyalty, as he asked of James Comey before firing him as FBI director. The U.S. Constitution, Ginsburg and Huq conclude, “is more vulnerable to backsliding than the regimes that failed in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela, Turkey, and elsewhere.”

Recent decades have seen a shift in patterns of democratic breakdown. Instead of generals seizing power in a coup, self-aggrandizing elected leaders have typically put an end to democracy in a gradual process that formally complies with law and avoids setting off “society’s alarm bells,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write in their new book How Democracies Die. The most disturbing part of that book’s analysis is how closely Trump’s actions parallel the undermining of democracy elsewhere.

In a key step, would-be authoritarians seek control of democracy’s “referees”— the judiciary, law enforcement, and tax and regulatory authorities that are supposed to be “neutral arbiters”—so as not only to shield themselves from investigation but also to acquire

the power to destroy their most effective opponents. Trump is well along in that effort and has not disguised his intentions about what he expects of loyal appointees. We cannot say we haven’t been warned.

Although we often attribute America’s success to the Constitution, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that democracy has worked in this country only because of unwritten norms that have demanded forbearance in the use of power and political gatekeepers who kept authoritarians out of national office. In the 1930s and at other times, popular authoritarian figures might have run for president, but party leaders kept them from getting close to the White

in their own favor. Today’s authoritarians also don’t need to shut down opposition media or subject them to prior restraint to ensure their dominance of communications. They often work together with cronies in business who benefit from the government’s largesse to bring about what scholars call “media capture,” the subordination of the media to oligarchic interests close to the regime.

Many newspapers and other publications have already been weakened financially as a result of diminished advertising and subscriptions; those financial pressures make them less capable of standing up to pressure. In addition, libel suits and hostile

Like the media, democracy’s other institutional referees are also subject to capture. Those who are counting on the federal bureaucracy and the courts ought to recognize that the time may be short before they are colonized by Trump appointees. Four years of Trump, possibly eight years, will be enough to put far-right majorities in control of the Supreme Court and to burrow deep down into the Deep State.

Trump is also transforming the Republican Party itself, as moderates and even traditional conservatives like Senator Jeff Flake no longer seek re-election and the party attracts candidates and voters comfortable with Trump’s authoritarianism. The longer this

The time may be short before the courts and the federal bureaucracy are colonized

by Trump appointees.

House. They no longer have the same gatekeeping powers, thanks to reforms to the nominating process adopted in the 1970s in the name of greater democracy.

To be sure, the responsibility for Trump’s election does lie in part with Republican party leaders and their billionaire backers, who could have waged more effective resistance to a demagogue.

But the party was well on its way to abandoning forbearance and other norms, a process that Trump has now pushed to the point where Republicans are nakedly using federal power (as they did in last year’s tax bill) to reward their friends and punish groups and even regions of the country they deem as their enemies.

Authoritarians don’t have to eliminate all political opposition or stop holding elections to consolidate power. Besides controlling the referees, they can rewrite the rules (for example, about voting) and gain enough of an advantage to tilt the game

regulatory decisions can chill criticism, put independent media out of business, or drive their owners to sell out to companies that reliably support the government. (The suit bankrolled by Trump supporter Peter Thiel that shut down Gawker is an American example of the strategy.)

Fox News already serves Trump as a state propaganda network, but Republicans are looking for more. Under its Trump-appointed chair Ajit Pai, the Federal Communications Commission is now engaged in abetting media capture, as it favors the interests of the Trumporiented network Sinclair Broadcasting, which is seeking to merge with Tribune Media. As Jessica Rosenworcel, one of the minority Democratic FCC commissioners, recently told Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast: “All of our media policy decisions have one thing in common: They are all custom built for the business plans of Sinclair Broadcasting.”

process continues, the less will be left of both moderation and conservatism in the Republican Party.

It might seem paradoxical, but it is true that only Trump’s failure and defeat can save the honor and the soul of the GOP. Before we have a full-blown national crisis, we need a vivid sense of emergency about the danger American democracy now faces. What is so maddening about the complacent talk about the genius of the Constitution and irrational “tyrannophobia” is that what we need now is realism about the Constitution’s limits and all the political alarm we can muster. There is no counting on the courts, much less the Deep State, to save us. The fate of our democracy is going to depend above all on what Americans do to organize at every level of society and whether they show up at the polls and perhaps in the streets. This is democracy’s stress test, and we only have a limited amount of time to pass it.

spring 2018 The American Prospect 5

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Sign of the times: One of the picketing teachers in West Virginia’s new-model strike

What Now for Unions?

Republicans on and off the bench are moving to kill unions. But millennials— the most pro-union generation since the 1930s—may yet find a way to organize.

by H a r o l d Mey erson

s c o t t h e i n s / b lo o m b e r g v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

F

or conservatives, the muchanticipated Supreme Court decision in the Janus v.

AFSCME case may be coming eight years too late. If, as expected, the five Republican justices on the Court rule for the plaintiff, which would end public employee unions’ ability to collect dues from all the workers they represent, they will significantly weaken the nation’s largest unions, among them the two teachers unions, as well as AFSCME and SEIU. These are also among the most significant organizations in Democrats’ votermobilization programs and, more generally, in supporting progressive groups and causes. Even more

fundamentally, the right plainly hopes such a ruling will also drive the final nail into the coffin of the American labor movement.

While a pro-Janus ruling could strengthen the Republicans electorally, when it comes to killing unions, the right is simply too late.

The current configurations of the union movement may well shift, but the growing public support for labor suggests that in one form or another, worker organizations are not going away.

Eight years ago, in the trough of the Great Recession, the nation’s view of unions was a good deal more negative than it is today. For the first time since it had begun

polling on the issue, the Gallup organization reported that support for unions had fallen below 50 percent. The United Auto Workers’ role in securing federal funds to bail out General Motors and Chrysler, and news reports that characterized UAW members as overpaid (which an inept UAW leadership did nothing to refute) contributed to a general decline in union support.

To many Americans, the movement was a dinosaur, a collection of cossetted workers in dying industries or on the public payroll, still collecting pensions while everyone else struggled to get by on 401(k)s or nothing at all.

That, however, was then. Today, both the Gallup and the Pew polls show public support for unions at its highest level in years: 61 percent at Gallup; 60 percent at Pew, a good 20 to 35 percentage points higher than the approval ratings of President Trump and the Republican Congress. Among Americans under 30, unions’ approval rating is a stratospheric 76 percent. As was the case in the 1930s, pro-union sentiment has grown only after the recovery was well under way.

At first glance, young people’s support for unions is puzzling: With union membership down to 10.7 percent of the workforce, and with many states having hardly any union presence, it’s a safe inference that most millennials have had no contact with a union at all. And yet, it’s young workers who are joining unions today, as the successful organizing drives among graduate students and the (disproportionately young) journalists at digital media outlets attest. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than three-quarters of new union members in 2017 were under 35.

Millennials’ support for unions, I’d argue, is of a piece with their 2016 support for the presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Both are rooted in the economic adversities afflicting the young, including employment insecurity, student debt, unaffordable housing, and more. These struggles feed millennials’ apprehensions that the middle class they seek to join is further out of reach for them than it was for their parents and grandparents.

Unions’ new members are not merely younger; they also are increasingly either professional or technical workers. In 2003, 34 percent of all union members were professionals or techs; today, that figure has risen to 42 percent. A recent analysis by The Boston Globe concludes that a

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 7

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majority—51 percent—of union members in the six New England states are professionals or technical workers.

These occupational numbers are not necessarily good news for unions.

Most likely, they reflect the fact that the only workers with the clout to organize are workers who cannot easily be fired for joining a union. It’s no accident that professional athletes and screen and television actors have some of the strongest unions; as is not the case with workers in fast-food outlets or on assembly lines, managers can’t sack professionals with the assurance that they can find a ready stream of plausible replacements.

This is one reason why West Virginia’s teachers won their strike: Even the Republicans who control that state’s government knew there was no way to easily replace them. Conversely, this is also one reason why the efforts of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to organize fast-food workers, while yielding landmark minimum-wage hikes in many cities and states, have yet to increase the union’s ranks by a single member. The bosses at McDonald’s and their peers know that they can fire their pro-union employees and replace them with no great difficulty, and that any sanctions imposed on them under an enfeebled National Labor Relations Act are negligible.

We have no basis for assuming that a young worker in a retail outlet is any less desirous of joining a union than, say, a young professor, but we know that management is emboldened to fire the former and constrained from firing the latter. That’s one reason why industrial unions like the UAW and the United Steelworkers have devoted resources to organizing— often successfully—at universities.

The growing share of union members who are both younger and professional is probably one reason why digital mobilization played such a key role in the West Virginia teachers strike, and is so crucial to similar labor actions in Oklahoma and elsewhere.

Nearly all of West Virginia’s 20,000 teachers were signed on to a strikeparticipation Facebook page leading up to their walkout, and when the two teachers unions in the state struck a

8 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

deal with the governor to end the strike in return for a promise of a 5 percent raise, it was the spontaneous Facebookpage resistance of teachers—some local union officials, some not—to going back to work before the deal was actually done that prevailed. Both the universal rank-and-file walkout and, then, the universal opposition to returning to work without a deal would have been impossible without Facebook.

Indeed, it’s clear that Facebook provides workers with a form of mobilization that both complements and eclipses unions’ own capacities. West Virginia has only 75,000 dues-paying members in all of its unions, and only a fraction of those are teachers—yet nearly every one of the state’s 20,000 teachers walked off their jobs. In Oklahoma, a state with a unionization rate of just 5.5 percent, and where all unions claim a bare 84,000 members, a Facebook page called “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now!,” started by one rank-and-file teacher, has 55,000 members and has been the key instrument for building support for a strike.

As University of North Carolina sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued in Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, the world-shaking mobilizations in New York’s Zuccotti Park, Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and Istanbul’s Gezi Park—all of which she attended— were inconceivable without social media. However, she argues, since the crowds they generated had no organizational structure or capacity to reach decisions, they were incapable of winning concessions from the powers they had assembled to oppose. In that sense, the West Virginia teachers strike occurred within what we might term the Tufekci Sweet Spot: It relied on social media to mobilize mass support, and had just enough decision-making structure provided by the teachers unions (and directed by bottom-up sentiment made clear through Facebook) to strike a deal with the state.

What, then, will the future of workers’ movements look like in a time of growing pro-union sentiment, mounting millennial militancy, enhanced mobilization capacity, and

Even as the Republican justices

threaten

unions’

existence,

public support for unions is the highest it’s been in many years.

the increasing impediments to union strength likely to be decreed by the Supreme Court? The immediate, and intended, effect of a pro-Janus, antiunion ruling will be to diminish and divert union resources, thereby constraining Democrats’ electoral capacities (though the anti-Trump surge may compensate for that). In the non-electoral sphere, West Virginia may provide us with something of a template, if chiefly for professional workers.

Teachers, not just in Oklahoma but in a range of states, are considering striking for higher pay and benefits.

Even where union membership isn’t strong, they clearly have the capacity to mobilize, and the material motivation as well: On average, teachers are making more than $3,000 less today than they made in 2009, while their family health insurance costs $1,400 more than it did a decade ago.

As with teachers, so with a rising number of other professional and technical workers whom management can’t readily replace—even if, as in West Virginia, the workers’ actions take place outside the legal framework of collective bargaining. Indeed, if the Court rules for Janus, which would diminish the number of union members, we may be in for a spate of professional-worker job actions among both members and non-members, in which unions (or, for a preponderantly non-union workforce, pop-up unions) chiefly help frame demands and negotiate the contract—serving less as the mobilizer and more as the closer.

For most American workers, however, the legal impediments to unionizing, already formidable, will grow even more so in a post-Janus world.

Should the Democrats recapture the federal government after the 2020 elections, they will need to do something that no Democratic Congress has mustered the will to do in the last 70 years: Change labor law to bolster workers’ right to organize—and, if the Democrats can figure out how to do so, do the same for workers who are independent contractors and temps.

They will have strong public backing to make such changes. The anti-plutocratic, pro-democratic politics of the young in particular apply not just to the polity, but to the workplace as well.

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Turning the Southwest Blue with “Brown and Beautiful” Millennials Want to flip Texas and Arizona? Nearly one million Latino citizens turn 18 every year.

by C r i s t i n a T z i nt z ú n a n d M a nu e l Pa s t o r

I

n January of this year, organizers of the first Women’s March on Washington, D.C., organized a mass rally entitled “Power to the Polls”—in Las Vegas, Nevada. The event promised to take the anti-Trump fervor of Women’s March participants across the country into battleground congressional races.

This second Women’s March came on the heels of Democrat Doug Jones’s victory in the December 2017 Senate race in Alabama, which has led to both high hopes and intense speculation about the Democrats’ 2018 prospects.

Was that triumph a one-off outcome due to a spectacularly bad Republican candidate—you don’t often get to run against a credibly accused child molester—or is there a new opportunity to make progress in some of the reddest states in America? The most optimistic analysts have suggested the latter, with some finding inspiration in the Jones campaign’s massive mobilization of the black vote, obtained in part through innovative grassroots approaches pioneered by younger African American organizers.

We wish the best of luck to those working in the South, but there’s also another grassroots play worthy of consideration: seriously mobilizing Latinos in the Southwest. After all, while many still focus on the narrow losses in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton lost by just 4 percentage points in Arizona, her bid significantly boosted by the community organizers who were working to defeat the re-election of notoriously anti-immigrant Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. For that matter, Texas and its 38 electoral votes received scant attention from the Clinton campaign and still came within single digits of flipping blue.

Given such results, it is perhaps no surprise that this year’s national Women’s March was not held in the nation’s capital but in Nevada, a swing

state with a statehouse and Senate seat in play in 2018. But as in Alabama, winning the Southwest will require a fresh approach to mobilizing voters of color. For Latinos, that means recognizing a key fact: While roughly 300,000 Latinos become naturalized citizens every year—a trend to be applauded and encouraged— there are nearly 900,000 already citizens who turn 18 each year.

So as much as we need to support those working to mobilize “New Americans” upset about the antiimmigrant policies of the Republican Congress and White House, the real prize to be won is the millennial vote, especially in places like Texas.

This year’s Texas primary saw an 87 percent increase in Democratic voter turnout over that in the 2014 primary.

This surge was due in large part to a growing electorate that is younger, more female, and more diverse.

Like others their age, these young voters of color are Trump-weary and media-savvy. In July 2017, for example, 15 young women decked out in pastel-colored quinceañera dresses and tiaras staged a protest against SB4, a “show me your papers” antiimmigrant bill then pending in the Texas legislature, on the steps of the state capitol. They performed choreographed dances to “Somos Más Americanos” (“We are more American”) by the Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte and “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” by Nuyorican Lin-Manuel Miranda. The protest was equal parts Latino pride, girl power, and performance art, and was aired on media reaching an estimated 50 million Americans, including 6.5 million views of an MTV News Facebook post covering the protest, making it one of the most viewed videos of the month on the youth-targeted network. As the young women held their fists high in the air, they chanted, “We are brown

As white nationalism surges,

winning

theof young votes

Latinos requires on-the-ground campaigns that affirm Latino culture.

and beautiful, and we won’t back down because we are Texas.”

Most of the young women, like 17-year-old protester Maggie Juarez, weren’t yet old enough to vote—but they soon will be. Within the Lone Star State, half of all those under the age of 19 are Latino—and nearly a fifth of the nation’s Latinos who are aging into voting hail from Texas. As evidenced by the quinceañera-themed protest, immigration is important, partly because over half of Texas Latino youth have at least one immigrant parent. But the economy, education, and racial justice matter, too, with the last increasingly salient because young Latinos know that the dogwhistle politics of the past have been replaced by the Trump bullhorn of white supremacy.

Capturing these young voters of color is critical for progressives in Texas and beyond—but such a development cannot be assumed. Latinos may vote progressive in Texas (one analysis of the 2016 election in Texas found that just 18 percent of Latinos cast their ballots for Trump), but a plurality see themselves as independent. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of Latinos and 51 percent of Latino millennials identified themselves as independents. These numbers have encouraged efforts backed by the Koch brothers, like the Libre Initiative, which are trying to make inroads into the Latino vote in such key states as Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. To combat these forces, progressives need to harness the power of young progressive voters of color by investing in grassroots efforts to engage young people and build a homegrown movement.

One such example was the Bazta Arpaio campaign in Arizona, which attracted legions of Latino youth, including 18-year-old Elisa Ávalos, who aptly summarized what was motivating her and her peers: “We should not be living in fear because he [Arpaio] is in office. … [H]e should be serving the community, not fighting against the community.” Organizers knocked on doors, organized at schools, and held rallies and block parties to get the vote out.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 9

At Jolt, an organization one of us heads in Texas, members represent a full spectrum of millennial Latinos, including Dreamers, children of immigrants, and fifth-generation Texans.

What they share aside from their ethnic identity is that most have never volunteered for a political party or a candidate.

Millennial Latinos are being drawn to organizations like Bazta Arpaio and Jolt because they dive head-first into organizing with a message that leverages the power of Latino culture, instead of running away from it. While many progressive organizations in Texas have focused on public safety for non-Latino and immigrant communities in an attempt to win the debate on immigration, Jolt organizers instead speak directly to young Latinos with messages like “SB4 wants to make being brown and undocumented a crime,” and “brown is beautiful, we are Texas.” In the words of Daniela Rojas, a 23-year-old Dreamer who is a Jolt activist: “I came to Jolt because I was tired of seeing my community attacked and feeling alone. Here I met a bunch of other people like me—and the work is fun.”

In just one year, Jolt has built a team of hundreds of young Latinos who are registering voters, organizing to defend Dreamers, and recruiting their peers to vote for candidates who stand up for immigrants, people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

Jolt’s best recruiting tools, however, are parties and cultural protest events, where young people like Rohas come to get their nails painted with brown-power fists and images of Frida Kahlo, have “DACA Now” buzzed into their head by a local barber, register to vote, get their picture taken in front of murals painted by other young Latino artists, and screen-print a Trump

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Latinas wearing tiaras and quinceañera dresses staged a performance art–style protest on the steps of the Texas state capitol last July.

Transforming California was a matter of demographic change, but also the result of a

great deal of work to expand the electorate.

resistance T-shirt. At Jolt, staff and volunteers spend as much time thinking about how a protest or event will make young Latinos feel empowered as they do thinking about how the event will serve as a catalyst to build the organization’s ranks, or to educate and turn out young Latino voters.

This line of messaging and organizing has broken through the national political noise, triggering requests from young Latinos across Texas who want to join Jolt and the fight. Similarly, the Bazta Arpaio campaign reached its target audience with the message: “For everyone who’s tired of Arpaio’s abuses, 2016 is the year we end his reign and prevent Trump’s rise.”

In short, to win the young, we need to go bold, not bland.

Movements matter because they can set the moral and political tone of a country. But ultimately, movement momentum must be translated into electoral power. That was the shortfall of the Obama presidency: The groundswell for hope and change was eclipsed by a Tea Party upsurge that helped Republicans capture nearly a thousand state legislative seats. The antidote to that dynamic is not to drift to the center but to capture the already animated anti-Trump coalition and to activate those Obama voters—younger, more diverse, and more liberal— who sat out the 2016 elections.

The possibility of that kind of progressive turnaround is illustrated by the arc of the state of California.

In the early 1990s, the Golden State looked much like red-state America

today: agitated by anti-immigrant sentiment, strained by the economic distress of deindustrialization, and riddled by political polarization (few remember that Rush Limbaugh actually got his bombastic start in talk radio in Sacramento just prior to that era of unease). Today’s California is very different, of course: protecting immigrants against federal overreach, raising (not cutting) taxes to provide services, and tackling disparities in education and the labor market.

Getting there was a matter of demographic change, to be sure, but it was also the result of a great deal of work to change the electorate. Efforts by groups like California Calls lured new and occasional voters to the polls by combining community organizing with electoral mobilization—a strategy called “integrated voter engagement.”

Such efforts have been crucial to winning state ballot measures to hike taxes on the well-off in both 2012 and 2016, and “de-felonize” drug use, effectively freeing many from state prison, in 2014.

Young people have been an important part of this change. Between 2004 and 2014, 18- to 24-year-olds constituted only about 3.6 percent of the voters in the state’s June primary elections (primary elections are a better marker of engagement, since this is usually where newer voters and some progressive constituencies—people of color and the young—slack off). In 2016, however, that same age group comprised 7.5 percent of all the votes cast—more than a doubling of the historic trend (and not entirely attributable to the Bernie Sanders surge among the young).

The slightly older group of millennial voters—critically important to the election of Obama—is fast becoming the largest and most diverse voting bloc in the country. In Virginia, for example, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam beat his Republican opponent by 39 percentage points with voters under age 30. And if Democrats want to take the Southwest, they will need to harness the power of young voters of color in those states, too.

And what a lock that could be on national politics! After all, Texas— which will be majority Latino by 2030—holds 36 congressional seats

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and 38 Electoral College votes. Once we add in Arizona (11 electoral votes) and California (55 electoral votes), the Latino vote could have the power to help deliver close to 40 percent of the electoral votes needed to win the White House, despite the fact that Latinos currently make up just 18 percent of the U.S. population.

But getting there will require new strategies and a new focus. Political analysts have frequently labeled the Latino vote a “sleeping giant” and wondered what it would take to fully move it into action. And although the Trump threat is generating a whole new pan-Latino unity—nothing like stripping DACA recipients of their protections to persuade voters that a lot is at stake—trolling the colonias of Texas and the barrios of California with traditional get-out-the-vote tactics will not be enough.

For while the Latino vote may have been sleeping, there’s a whole new generation of activists who are already “woke.” They are not likely to pin their hopes, however, on one party or political leader. Instead, they may find inspiration from young people like 17-year-old quinceañera protester Maggie Juarez, who showed more courage and leadership than many of Texas’s legislators when she opposed SB4 by saying: “We will resist through drawing on the power within our communities; we will resist through celebrating our families and our culture. We will resist through standing in unity and showing that we are not going to back down.”

Now the question is whether progressives and the Democratic Party will invest in young people of color like Maggie, who have the power to redraw the American political map.

Cristina Tzintzún was co-founder of the Workers Defense Project in Austin, Texas, and is currently executive director of Jolt, a new organization seeking to mobilize Latino voters in the Lone Star State. Manuel Pastor is a professor of sociology and is the Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change at the University of Southern California; his forthcoming book, State of Resistance, looks at political transformations in California.

Puerto Rican Refugees and the Elusive Blue Wave Emigres from the island are potential Democratic voters, but will progressive organizing defeat right-wing money that ties relief to political recruiting?

by M a nu e l M a d r i d

B

attered and bruised by Hurricane Maria and mired in a power crisis, Puerto Rico remains in shambles.

While economic strains on the island led to a painful, decade-long increase in migration to the mainland, the hurricane made the exodus spike, landing tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans in the perennial swing state of Florida.

As U.S. citizens, Puerto Ricans can vote as soon as they register in their new homes. Initially framed as a potential boon for Democrats in 2018, the new Puerto Rican arrivals are not firmly in either political camp. What’s unfolding is a high-stakes duel between progressive organizers and corporate money.

Puerto Ricans reliably vote for Democrats in states like New York, Connecticut, and Illinois, but not necessarily in Florida, where Hispanic and Spanish-speaking Republican politicians have had success over the years in Latino communities. “The assumption that Democrats are making is that the trend of young Americans voting blue combined with a disapproval of Trump among Hispanics will be enough to win the Puerto Rican vote,” says Susan MacManus, a political analyst and professor at the University of South Florida. But she is quick to add: “The keyword when it comes to the Puerto Rican vote in 2018 and 2020 is uncertainty.”

Clustered along Florida’s I-4 corridor, a political bellwether for the state, Puerto Ricans in central Florida are increasingly considered a counterweight to the state’s Republicanleaning Cuban American population, over half of whom voted for Donald Trump. In the wake of Hurricane Maria, a state-provided count claimed that the number of Puerto Ricans who had settled in Florida by December 2017 could be as high as 280,000—a figure that has since been questioned by experts. A newer estimate from

University of Florida economists, using school enrollments and requests for state aid as a guide, put the total closer to just 50,000. But this number could grow. Recently, the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York released a study projecting that Puerto Rico could lose as many as 470,335 residents between 2017 and 2019. If recent trends serve as any guide, many if not most of those migrants will end up in Florida.

Recent registration numbers in heavily Puerto Rican areas have also been ambiguous. Between September and January, more than 60 percent of new Hispanic voters in central Florida had registered as independents, with less than 30 percent registering as Democrats but only 8 percent as Republicans. Total registrations did see a slight bump in the last few months of 2017 compared with earlier months, but far short of the deluge that was once predicted.

Puerto Rican voter turnout rates, which historically have been far higher than those of electoral contests in the 50 states, tend to plummet upon reaching the mainland. This phenomenon is often attributed to the stark differences between island and mainland politics.

Puerto Ricans typically only vote once every four years; there is no Republican and Democrat dichotomy, rather a split among pro-independence, pro-statehood, and pro-commonwealth parties. A new political environment can be difficult to process, particularly for evacuees struggling to find schools for their children, to keep a roof over their heads, and put food on the table.

In this relative political vacuum,

corporate money is contending with on-the-ground progressive organizing. The LIBRE Initiative is the Hispanic outreach component of the Koch brothers’ vast political network.

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Technically a nonpartisan group, LIBRE—whose name means “free” in Spanish—stops short of registering people to vote, but proudly disseminates messages of “economic freedom,” school choice, and deregulation among Hispanics in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. Last year at a donor summit, the Koch network revealed plans to spend as much as $400 million during the 2018 election cycle, spreading the funds among a web of grassroots groups, including LIBRE . LIBRE groups funded by the Koch network operated with a combined budget of $13.5 million in 2016, according to The Boston Globe.

Over the years, LIBRE and its sister organization, the LIBRE Institute, have built goodwill in the Hispanic community in Florida, particularly among the poor, offering help with tax preparation, English and résumé-­ writing classes, food donations, backto-school events, scholarships, and health checkups. The group has set down roots quickly within these communities, building ties with local hospitals, churches, Spanish-language radio stations, and even the state Chamber of Commerce. Florida state officials welcoming Puerto Rican evacuees arriving at airports have been forwarding them to LIBRE’s offices for further assistance, according to the group’s deputy state director, David Velazquez.

In January, LIBRE’s Puerto Rican Outreach Project launched a series of “Welcome to Florida” classes at its offices in the Orlando area aimed at helping Puerto Rican new arrivals with job training, finding housing, and navigating school enrollment. Instructors used worksheets for attendees to calculate their savings from the recently enacted tax cut, and gave other lessons in free-market economics. Even before the hurricane, the group had been actively pursuing the Puerto Rican vote, sending a team to the island in 2016 to connect with islanders considering relocating to Florida.

Puerto Rican voters have diverse views, particularly on religious issues, but they have been overwhelmingly opposed to President Trump. In 2016, LIBRE itself decided to focus its

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get-out-the-vote efforts, consisting of staff- and volunteer-run phone banks and door-to-door outreach efforts using state voter files, on Senate races as a way to distance itself from the Republican presidential nominee.

Attempts by progressives to match LIBRE’s clout have been hobbled by a lack of comparable funding, according to groups on the ground. Betsy Franceschini, senior state director of the Hispanic Federation, says that LIBRE’s model of providing relief services as a way to connect with Hispanic communities was co-opted from groups like Hispanic Federation that offer English lessons, case-management services, and legal aid for Hispanics. “They’ve adopted a model that we’ve been using for decades and turned it around to their benefit,” Franceschini says.

Following Hurricane Maria, more than a dozen progressive groups in central Florida, including nonprofit Organize Florida and local union SEIU Orlando, partnered to collect food and household supplies for needy Puerto Ricans in the state and also to send back to the island, but without anything approaching the Koch resources. In the months since, groups have held community cookouts in low-income neighborhoods and organized around providing affordable housing for evacuees.

While the emphasis thus far has largely been on providing relief, organizers have also looked to the approaching November elections.

Groups like Mi Familia Vota, the League of Women Voters, Misión Boricua, SEIU Orlando, and Organize Florida have all begun or will soon begin voter-registration efforts in Puerto Rican communities.

Former SEIU political coordinator Jimmy Torres-Vélez believes that there should not only be more funding for progressive groups, but funding specifically for organizations that know intimately the communities they’re looking to get involved with. “In Northern states, there are organizations run entirely by Puerto Ricans: Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción in Boston, Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha in Pennsylvania—we need more of these programs in Florida,” says TorresVélez. “There are plenty of progressive

groups doing good work here, but they don’t have a dedicated Puerto Rico outreach program; they don’t have enough Puerto Ricans on staff.”

“These are my friends and good people, but it’s about the emphasis and the priority put on these communities.

It’s not effective as it could be,” TorresVélez adds. “When I go to bed, I lose sleep over Puerto Rico. Some of these people don’t.”

Right-wing LIBRE, aimed at Latino voters, received $15.6 million between 2011 and 2015 from the

Koch-

affiliated nonprofit Freedom Partners.

Florida Governor Rick Scott, one of Trump’s biggest surrogates, has done his best to distance himself from the White House over the past few months in preparation for what many expect to be a challenge to Democratic Senator Bill Nelson in November. Scott, who is term-limited from running for governor again this year, has visited Puerto Rico three times since the hurricane and taken numerous steps to aid evacuees. A Republican carrying the non-Cuban Latino vote in a top-ofthe-ticket contest would not be without precedent in Florida. Former Governor Jeb Bush did so in 1998 and Senator Marco Rubio after him in 2010, according to exit polls. Still, it’s hard to overlook the sheer size of Hillary Clinton’s victory over Trump among nonCuban Latinos in Florida, capturing nearly 70 percent of the vote.

Organizers say that issues like Medicaid expansion, raising the minimum wage, and education funding have resonated within Puerto Rican communities. “Florida Republicans like Governor Scott have historically voted against the interests of the Puerto Rican community, defunding programs that they rely on,” says Yulissa Arce, former regional director for Organize Florida. “Now he wants to extract their vote for his own political benefit.”

The Republican tax bill, which included a new 12.5 percent tax on profits derived from intellectual property held by companies in Puerto Rico, provides even more fodder for progressives. The bill wipes out special tax treatment that once lured pharmaceutical companies to manufacture in Puerto Rico, and adds further insult to the injury of Hurricane Maria and inadequate relief efforts.

According to Torres-Vélez, Democrats have an advantage over

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conservatives among Puerto Ricans when it comes to matters of substance and policy—the challenge is maintaining a presence within these communities long enough to disseminate that message.

“Part of the problem for Democrats these days is that the party has become so weak from the DNC down.

So much of our traditional organizing efforts have been outsourced,” argues Steve Schale, who directed Obama’s 2008 campaign in Florida. “It’s hard to say the Florida Democratic party should do more when they have so few people on staff. There’s a bandwidth problem here.”

But bandwidth problems are national. The Democratic National Committee raised a total of $67 million in 2017, lagging behind the Republican National Committee’s haul of $132.5 million. According to public filings, the RNC had $38.8 million in cash on hand at the end of January; the DNC, meanwhile, only had $6.5 million on hand and a debt of $6.2 million.

For Albert Morales, political director of the Latino Decisions polling firm and the former Hispanic engagement director of the DNC, the situation invokes a particularly uncomfortable sensation of déjà vu. While working on the 2016 presidential campaign, Morales proposed a $3 million plan to turn out Hispanic voters in states like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Florida.

He was given $300,000 instead. “The

Will they also line up to vote? Hurricane Maria caused an exodus from Puerto Rico, and many who fled have settled in Florida.

same mistakes are being made by progressives now, even more so within thirdparty organizations,” says Morales. “The DNC is fundamentally a presidential committee; it can’t be everything to everyone.”

DNC spokesman Francisco Pelayo says things are changing under new DNC leadership. “We’re no longer taking a four-year approach,” says Pelayo. “Before [Chair] Tom Perez, the DNC had an approach focused only on electing the president of the United States. … We’re now organizing 365 days a year.”

Under Perez, the party’s first-ever Latino leader, the DNC has taken a back-to-basics approach of focusing on state parties, resembling the 50-state strategy of former Chair Howard Dean. The DNC has pledged to give $10,000 per month to each state party through 2018, which is substantially more than investments made in recent years. Unlike during the Dean years, however, the DNC has yet to put state party staffers on payroll and instead has launched in July a $10 million competitive grant program. It wasn’t until January that the DNC began doling out grant money promised to 10 of 11 states. Florida was not among the states selected.

To date, the DNC has not sent any of its staff to Florida, according to Pelayo. It also has not yet begun to send funding to groups on the ground, though Pelayo says that Democrats are deep in talks with progressive organizations on how to best roll out their national Latino voter-outreach plan in Florida. Pelayo would not say when the plan would begin to be rolled out or how much would be invested, but highlighted the need to make outreach as efficient as possible.

“It just makes sense to have Puerto Ricans engaging with Puerto Ricans,” says Pelayo, who notes that his organization currently has Puerto Ricans on their political staff. “When we get to implementing outreach on the ground this year, we will make sure that we have people who represent these communities doing the actual outreach.”

It’s clear that if a breakthrough does come, it will not come in one election cycle.

Mi Familia Vota plans on ramping up voter-registration efforts in April, increasing their current staff of about ten employees to around 40, and then up to around 60 near November. “Depending on funding, we could even get bigger,” says Esteban Garces, the group’s Florida state director.

According to Garces, progressive funders have begun to come around to the idea of investing in long-term political infrastructure. For the sake of the tens of thousands of newly arrived Puerto Ricans, organizers in Florida hope that’s true. Maintaining a year-round presence, along with staffing their own organizations with Latinos who know these communities best, will be key for progressive groups looking to challenge organizations like LIBRE in years to come.

There is a confidence here that progressives have the other side beat on the issues that matter, and that’s no small thing. But as past elections have shown, voter outreach and registration don’t happen on their own. The tragic exodus caused by Hurricane Maria has created a unique opportunity for Democrats to fix their past mistakes—or repeat them.

“The GOP looks at Puerto Ricans and sees future Republicans, and rightly so,” says Anthony Suarez, a former state legislator and immediate past president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association of Florida.

Suarez, who was elected the first Puerto Rican member of the Florida House in 1999 as a Democrat, but later switched his party affiliation to Republican and then again to independent because of Trump, thinks the president will be a millstone around the necks of Republicans in Puerto Rican–heavy districts. “After Trump is gone, these voters will be up for grabs,” says Suarez.

“Very soon, the Puerto Rican vote will be in the driver’s seat in Florida,” says Garces of Mi Familia Vota, one of the Florida groups in discussion with the DNC. “But this work is year-round, it won’t be solved in one election cycle or just on even years.”

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Martin Luther King Jr.

The Prophet as Healer Whether by example or by strategy, Dr. King always looked for opportunities to build bridges.

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By Randall Ke nne dy

n August 1967, in a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, Martin Luther King Jr. observed that he and the congregation were living in “evil times.” His remark was brutally punctuated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, when King was assassinated. What should we focus upon in marking the 50th anniversary of this somber landmark?

I suggest three things: the particulars of King’s achievements as a liberal dissident; the trying circumstances he faced at the end of his life; and the virtues of his principal strategy and aim—coalition politics in the service of a decent, egalitarian, multiracial society.

King was a great man—not a pseudo-hero but the genuine article, one of the most remarkable dissidents in American, indeed world, history. He was at the forefront of three campaigns that defined the most consequential achievements of the Second Reconstruction. He gave voice to the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 when they successfully challenged racial segregation on the buses, thereby extending the writ of Brown v. Board of Education beyond public schooling. He rallied the blacks of Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963 in a rousing crusade that dramatized the need for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and much of the employment market.

He marshaled activists in Selma, Alabama, in the spring of 1965 to mount protests which, when savagely repressed, generated demands for what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and wrote several books, including Stride Toward Freedom, Why We Can’t Wait, and Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? He also joined the protest against the Vietnam War when most “responsible” civil rights leaders were too intimidated, confused, or misguided to do so. He packed all of this into a brief but gloriously full life.

King was only 39 years old when he was slain by a rifle shot.

At this moment of daily political peril, with Trumpian

lunacy ascendant, it is useful to recall the difficult circumstances in which King found himself in the years immediately preceding his death. Now widely canonized, he was then widely

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disparaged. Right-wingers detested him. Moderates viewed him with unease. In 1966, nearly two-thirds of those responding to a Gallup poll expressed an unfavorable impression of King.

Cold War liberals were appalled when King assailed the Vietnam War policies of President Lyndon Johnson. They were outraged when he said that he could no longer raise his voice against the rioting of the oppressed in the ghettos “without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.” The Washington Post editorialized that by repudiating LBJ’s war policy, King “has done grave injury to those who are his natural allies … and … an even greater injury to himself. Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence. He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country and to his people.”

Much of Middle America looked askance at King’s anti-war dissent. Polling at the time indicated that 73 percent of Americans disagreed with his opposition and that 60 percent believed that his stance would hurt the struggle for racial justice. Fellow civil rights leaders, including Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, also distanced themselves from him. They thought that he should abide by their hands-off attitude toward the war and bite his tongue, even if he thought that the war was unwise and immoral.

At the same time, with respect to the racial front, some in the Black Liberation Movement asserted that King’s appeal to conscience, his insistence upon nonviolence, and his embrace of integrationism were no longer tenable—if they had ever been.

Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown portrayed King as insufficiently militant and all too trusting and forgiving of white folks. At the end of his career, then, King found himself assailed from the right and the left, from those who resented him for challenging pigmentocracy effectively, from those who alleged (mistakenly) that the civil rights movement had changed little on the ground, from those who complained that he had shown too little gratitude and loyalty to LBJ, and from those who charged that he did not adequately condemn American society.

The most important lessons that King bequeathed to us stemmed from his peerless capacity to convey the spirit with which we ought to wage our struggles for justice. He comported

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tionist. That term is now seen in some left-liberal circles as quaint if not wrongheaded. But given the depth and influence of white supremacism, what is more radical in American racial politics than interracial empathy and yearnings to create a society free of racial impediments to well-being?

He maintained that “[w]ithin the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro.” He consistently recalled whites who, laboring for racial justice, earned the epithet “nigger lover”—whites who stood with their black Addressing the press in Chicago, March 24, 1967 comrades in the face of violence-prone, sometimes murderous, Negrophobes.

Over the past several years, insightful commentators includhimself in his public life with magnificent dignity and exhorted ing Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, Jeanne Theoharis, and his followers to do likewise. He did not always meet his own Brandon Terry have performed the useful task of seeking to save standards or those we would demand today. He exposed himthe public’s memory of King from various perversions. They have self and thus the civil rights movement to potentially crippling endeavored to save it from the incessant marketeering on the part embarrassment by indulging in extramarital affairs. Furtherof King’s notoriously mercenary family, which bilked exorbitant more, he was sexist and antigay in ways that were conventional fees from the charitable foundation behind the building of the for his time. Still, overall, he played a major role in creating an King Memorial in Washington, D.C. They have also sought to save admirable movement that served as a generative seedbed of dissent that flowered for decades. Veterans of the civil rights move- King’s memory from those who would make the most influential dissident of the civil rights movement into an anodyne figurehead. ment have contributed magnificently to the women’s liberation Some on the right have attempted to misappropriate King’s movement, the gay liberation movement, the free speech moveteachings by depicting them as complacent banalities that pose ment, and other worthy initiatives. no real challenge to the perpetuation of racial injustice. A vivid King was no naïf. He survived multiple bombings of his faminstance is the claim that King opposed affirmative action and ily’s home. He attended funerals of assassinated activists. He endured torments unleashed by J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal kindred efforts to assist racially identified groups. To substantiate this claim, they invoke King’s famous statement that he envisioned Bureau of Investigation. Recall that the FBI bugged his hotel rooms and with damning evidence thus tried to get King to com- a society in which his children would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. King, however, mit suicide. He appreciated the vile power of racial tyranny in was neither simplistic nor formulaic. He recognized that undoing its many guises. He also appreciated that high-mindedness and racism would necessarily entail active and ongoing attentiveness tough-mindedness were complementary, indeed essential for a to race. Belying those who allege that he opposed race-specific dissident movement seeking to advance the fortunes of an ostracized, oppressed racial minority. He understood that disclaiming remedies for social disadvantage, King declared unequivocally that “a society that has done something special against the Negro violence as a weapon of coercion was not only morally right but for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in strategically right. He understood that a black liberation strugorder to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” gle that was welcoming of whites and others that do not identify themselves as African American is both morally attractive and politically imperative. Some proponents of the “Black Power!”

King was killed in Memphis during a campaign on behalf of slogan repudiated coalition politics, deriding white liberals as black sanitation workers that sounded in demands for economic inevitably unreliable partners. King saw the matter differently. as well as racial justice. He had long been concerned about the “[T]he solution to our problem,” King declared, “will not come economics of racial subordination. Many of the marches, boythrough seeking to build a separate black nation within a nation, cotts, and other demonstrations that he inspired and guided were but by finding that creative minority of the concerned from the aimed at elevating blacks as workers as well as consumers. The ofttimes apathetic majority, and together moving toward that rally in Washington, D.C., in August 1963 at which King emerged colorless power that we all need for security and justice.” as the preeminent star of the civil rights movement was officially Throughout his career, King considered himself an integratitled the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” As the

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1960s wore on, King became even more insistent that economic fairness in general is essential to racial justice in particular since rising wages, low unemployment, and vigorous and fair unionization creates an environment that tends to be less susceptible than otherwise to the racial manias that have historically divided the American working classes. Promises of white power have been principal means of seducing poor whites and inducing them to eschew poor blacks. King strongly and persistently criticized the deceptions and betrayals of white racism. Responding to white reaction against the civil rights movement, King offered observations applicable to the eruption of white reaction against President Barack Obama. “[T]he white backlash is nothing new. It … is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.

The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race.”

King also criticized any reaction to white racism that smacked of retributive resentment or black chauvinism, or black bigotry. Part of his resistance was rooted in moralism. “I must oppose any attempts to gain our freedom by the methods … that have characterized our oppressors.” But part of his resistance was also rooted in pragmatism. “As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity include them.” The Black Power slogan, King complained, “gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike.”

He preferred the slogan “Power for poor people,” understanding and teaching that a common struggle for economic justice is key to suitably addressing the recalcitrant problem of racial injustice.

King gave up on hardly anyone—even initial enemies. He was committed to the power of persuasion and did all that he could, consistent with fundamental principles, to increase the possibility of attracting people of all sorts to his cause. A practical man, he knew that many of his fellow Americans of all complexions were unlikely to be persuadable—no matter what. A realistic man, he also understood that to stand any substantial chance for success he would have to reach many others who were persuadable.

He went about his task with care and verve, producing inspiring exhortation and a devoted followership that persists despite

“We must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken.”

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the dulling effects of time. It is hard to imagine him “writing off” even deplorable Trump voters. It is hard to imagine him damning people for failing to mouth the latest, hip buzzwords or committing minor linguistic faux pas. It is hard to imagine him preferring ideological purity over reasonable compromise on behalf of a net progressive gain (though with respect to certain issues, such as opposition to the Vietnam War, he was willing to adopt a posture that some allies denounced). King was a believer in a progressive big tent—a crucial lesson of vital importance.

Today, when the future of democracy itself depends on wresting the government from the far right, liberals are at risk of suffering disabling conflicts over whose grievances take priority and over who is “privileged” relative to others who have been oppressed. If King were alive, he would surely seek to find ways of addressing these internal disputes with candor and generosity, realism and graciousness, keeping in mind the immensity of the larger stakes.

Changing the world for the better even by a little bit is extraordinarily difficult. On this side of the Second Reconstruction, having enjoyed for a generation the benefits won with heart-rending sacrifice by King and company, it is all too easy to forget or overlook that prior to the invalidation of de jure segregation, governments could lawfully separate people on a racial basis (which almost always meant consigning people of color to inferior facilities); that prior to the Civil Rights Act, people of color could lawfully be excluded from “private” public accommodations, work sites, hospitals, and unions; that prior to the Voting Rights Act, black voting was openly and brutally nullified by chicanery and violence in many places, including the very state—Alabama—that black voters recently rescued from the clutches of Roy Moore; that prior to Loving v. Virginia in 1967, all of the states of the former Confederacy made it a felony for blacks and whites to intermarry.

We obviously continue to face racial inequity on a massive scale. The Economic Policy Institute reports that with respect to homeownership, for example, the situation for blacks has not changed much since 1968. Then, 41.1 percent of black households owned their own homes. Now it is 41.2 percent (while for whites, it is 71.1 percent). Still worse is the story of incarceration. In 1968, African Americans were about 5.4 times as likely to be confined to jail or prison as whites. Today they are 6.4 times as likely as whites to find themselves behind bars.

Plainly, there remains much work left to do. Our lives are daily diminished by the limitations and the defeats of the Second Reconstruction. But the struggles that Martin Luther King Jr. undertook did make a difference. He moved the world in a good direction to an appreciable extent. It is appropriate that we seek to learn from his example and salute his accomplishments.

Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. His several books include The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency.

Robert F. Kennedy

Teachings forToday

RFK had an uncanny capacity to reach across racial lines.

He learned by listening and empathizing.

A

By P e t e r E de lm an

n emblem of Robert Kennedy’s capacity to reach across racial lines was the way he campaigned in the steel town of Gary, Indiana, when he ran for president in 1968. He made a point to appear together with Mayor Richard Hatcher, the first post-Reconstruction African American mayor of a large city, and Tony Zale, a white local hero who was the middleweight boxing champion of the world. That reach has often been noted over the years, with the added note that many of the city’s white residents who voted for RFK went on to vote for Governor George Wallace in the general election after Kennedy died.

I start there because we have never more needed to bring our people together.

Of course, Robert Kennedy’s brother was the fallen president, and many of the whites who voted for RFK were Catholic. But there is much more to it.

He listened to people, including people who disagreed with him, and definitely of all races. He went to rural Oregon where some of the audience had signs saying, “Nixon’s the One.” He said, “The one what?” They laughed along with the people supporting RFK . He went to Ole Miss soon after the desegregation he had caused to take place, and the students welcomed him warmly. He began his presidential campaign in Kansas and filled football stadiums. He won the Nebraska primary. He went anywhere that would have him. And he pulled no punches.

He went to places where no United States senator had ever been, even the senators of that state. He visited people in their homes. In Mississippi, he met a man named Andrew Jackson, who had lost his job as a sharecropper because of technology changes in the growing of cotton. Kennedy walked into the house, shook hands with Mr. Jackson, and said, “So you’re Andrew Jackson.” Mr. Jackson looked him in the eye and said, “So you’re Robert Kennedy.” The room exploded with laughter.

He learned by listening and seeing with his own eyes. And then he told the rest of the nation what he had seen.

Campaigning for president, he told people everywhere, in big cities and small towns, that we had to end the war in Vietnam, to end the near starvation he had seen in rural black Missis-

sippi, and more broadly to end the poverty that should not exist in America. He talked about things that were not their priority, but they believed in his sincerity and respected his courage. He talked about the distance of Washington from the lives of real people and about empowering them, about bringing a sense of agency into their own lives. Regardless of their views on other issues, they agreed on this.

We hear words somewhat like those from Paul Ryan and others now, but their version means dismantling the federal programs for the poor, removing protections for the environment and for consumers, and cutting taxes not only to make the rich richer but also to make the government unable to act for the good.

RFK’s thinking was totally different. Underneath his words there was a concept of countervailing power, in favor of federal funding and strong regulation for good purposes to be sure, but combined with a commitment to accountability to the people and control over their own lives.

He said these things in speeches throughout his time as a senator. He talked not only of the power of the wealthy, but also of the lack of government accountability in many ways and of corporations, unions, elite universities, and the institutions of faith—the overreaching of bigness and of a stifling hierarchy wherever it was found.

In short, RFK was not a liberal, at least not a traditional liberal, in that he rejected the top-down attitudes and designs of much of liberalism. If anything, he was more like a progressive of today, but he always insisted he could not be identified with a label.

Running for president, he talked in Indiana about “law and order,” which annoyed some of his staff, but he knew what he meant. He meant justice and civil liberties and the Constitution as standing for those principles. But he wasn’t above expressing his view as “law and order.” He did want to win. He did understand politics. And he had the credibility of the prosecutorial part of his experience. One can be a prosecutor and do justice, after all.

People saw Kennedy as tough and deeply caring at the same time. The combination was real and it was part of the reason for the breadth of his following. People could see how much he loved children. I will never forget the child on the dirt floor by

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himself when we were in rural Mississippi to see directly the severe malnutrition that had been reported to the senators. The picture is in my mind’s album as if it is glued onto my glasses.

The child seemed not to be able to stand up. My wife-to-be and I were in the house, but RFK did not know that. He kneeled down for perhaps ten minutes to seek a response from the baby.

She has said repeatedly since then that this was the moment she knew he was the real thing.

On his first day as attorney general, he installed his high school friend David Hackett in an office that opened directly into RFK’s own cavernous office and told Hackett to work on juvenile delinquency. But for Kennedy, that meant opportunity for young people who were being left behind. Hackett put together a group of people made up of both government and outside experts, and their work became the planning that ended up as the War on Poverty. Kennedy made two contributions: one, a domestic Peace Corps which became VISTA , and two, a requirement that the governance of the new entities to be created in low-income communities would feature “maximum feasible participation.” The point was that, while there was federal funding, it would be spent largely through decisions made by local residents.

More pointedly, this meant that City Hall did not control how the federal funds would be spent. Mayors around the country, especially Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, hated it—so much so that it took only three years for the mayors to take “maximum feasible participation” out of the statute and transfer control to City Hall.

I went with Kennedy to Chicago one day in 1967 for hearings on the War on Poverty, and he told me to arrange a courtesy visit to the mayor. I went to Daley’s office and asked if I could see the mayor’s assistant to set up the visit. The next thing I knew I was being escorted into seeing the mayor himself. No, not me, I said, the senator. But there I was. “What brings you here?” Daley asked. I explained that we were looking into how the War on Poverty was going in Chicago. He said, “Oh yeah, that’s that community action thing, isn’t it? I never understood that. The people of Chicago elected me to be their mayor, and if they don’t like what I’m doing, they can throw me out of office.”

RFK’s idea of empowering the people, which he had expressed every day in his presidential campaign, had begun at least as early as 1961. And note as well that he was straddling two political frames on that day in Chicago, significant far beyond the incident itself. He was espousing the idea that the people should have greater control of their governance, and at the same time,

People saw RFK as tough and deeply caring at the same time.

The combination was real and it was part of the reason for the breadth of his following.

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he was staying on good terms with Mayor Daley and by extension the pols whose support he would need to get nominated and elected as president.

Bedford-Stuyvesant, a low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn that needed jobs, better housing, health care, public safety, and more, was another example of RFK’s pursuit of power for the people at the community level. Kennedy had given a speech in New York in January 1966 proposing a neighborhood redevelopment initiative to lift the neighborhood, and to do it with governance controlled by the residents themselves. Shortly after, he was meeting community leaders in Bed-Stuy, and they asked rather forcefully what he was going to do to help them with their problems.

Kennedy proposed the plan he had laid out in his speech, and they agreed. A year of planning ensued, with RFK flying up to Brooklyn, sometimes more than once in a single week, to thrash out the details. Ultimately, one corporation was created to run the initiative and another created to pursue outside resources, including both private and government funding at all levels, and give advice to the project—but it would be controlled by the residents.

Coupled with the inner-city revitalization speech was another speech the next day that called for desegregation so people in inner cities could move out to the suburbs if they wanted to. He had a multiple strategy in mind—the word “choice” was the crucial word. And “choice” means control for the people themselves.

When he talked about it as a candidate for president, he boiled it down to talking about people having far more control of their lives. But it wasn’t just talk. Kennedy had been thinking about it and actually doing it.

There is a sense in some of the books about RFK that he was not much interested in the day-to-day work of being a senator.

He would go to South Africa to support the anti-apartheid efforts when that was still a radical cause, and to the Yukon to be the first to climb the 14,000-foot peak named for his brother. And even his legislative work would get headlines, for his going to see Cesar Chavez in California or exposing the severe malnutrition in Mississippi, and for his deepening differences with President Johnson, not for his day-in, day-out work in the Senate.

All true, but he was an excellent senator in the conventional sense as well. In his first weeks as a senator he succeeded in adding the Southern Tier counties in New York to the Appalachian economic development program that was in the process of enactment. He added an important amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to require evaluation of what was done with the funds. He amended the Voting Rights Act to ensure that Puerto Ricans who had been educated on the island would not be required to take an English-language literacy test.

And he obtained funding for Bedford-Stuyvesant and community development corporations like it.

Bills he introduced often entailed major changes that would only be enacted with the passage of time. He had a bill to use revenues from income taxes to pay for a third of the cost of Social Security. The authors of Social Security had said that by 1965,

george brich / ap images

Campaigning at the Los Angeles Farmers’ Market, May 21, 1968

it would be necessary to use the income tax, or the payroll tax would have to be raised to high levels that would be a burden on lower-income workers. As another example, two bills—one for low-income urban neighborhoods and another for low-income rural areas—would have used tax subsidies to incentivize economic development in these high-poverty areas.

Especially important was a proposed amendment he offered to the 1967 reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act, the War on Poverty. With co-sponsors, RFK called for a major job-creation program for young people living in high-poverty neighborhoods and rural areas. President Johnson opposed it and it failed. Kennedy would have continued to push for it in subsequent years, but his death cut off the possibility. He had come to the Senate believing more effective education was the key to getting out of poverty, but his further experience told him that job creation was essential, too. It would have been a crucial building block for getting young people out of poverty.

He regularly partnered with his Republican senior senator, Jacob Javits, on anything that would specifically focus on New York, and he always found a Republican to be the lead cosponsor in other major bills he introduced. (Need I say that the Republicans of that time were quite different from the Republicans of our day.)

Kennedy continually added issues to his agenda as he encountered them, and my assignments as his legislative aide grew as well. Having gone to California for hearings to publicize Cesar Chavez and the organizing efforts of the farmwork-

ers’ union, RFK became the de facto go-between in Washington.

Having gotten first-page coverage in The New York Times of a speech on the faults in the welfare system, especially from the perspective of recipients, he told me to figure out how he could improve a bill then pending on the subject, even though he was not on the Finance Committee. Having gone to Mississippi and seen the severely malnourished children there, hunger was at the top of his list until he died. Having keynoted a global convening about cigarettes and health to wide approval, he took on efforts to keep cigarettes from children, including a push to get the National Football League to stop accepting ads from the tobacco companies. The list goes on.

In some ways, RFK’s temperament was not that of the culture of the Senate. He was definitely not the back-slapping type, and his wit could be cutting. At a hearing about auto safety, Ralph Nader was a witness and Senator Carl Curtis kept interrupting Nader’s delivery of his testimony. When Kennedy told Curtis to let the witness finish his remarks, Curtis replied, “I have no objection to hearing his testimony, but when he loses me with—,” Kennedy finished the sentence: “With big words?”

The welfare bill mentioned above ended up in a conference bill between the two houses that was unacceptable to Kennedy and others, so they decided to filibuster to block it. On the first morning of the filibuster, the senator guarding the floor did not pay attention to what three conservative senators were doing at the front of the chamber. One presided and the others stood nearby.

One whispered, “I move the passage of the bill.” The second said,

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 19

“I second the motion.” And the senator presiding said, “The ayes have it.” Kennedy was furious. He came to the floor and went up in smoke. I don’t remember his exact words, but he took his colleagues apart—shall we say, not collegially. In those days, the words were taken down in shorthand, written manually. Senators or staff could correct errors later in the day. Kennedy sent me to “correct” what he had said. His thought is still clearly there, but I removed the inappropriate language.

Two sets of hearings took up an extensive amount of Kennedy’s time, one regarding the Vietnam War and the other regarding issues of race and poverty in America’s large cities.

RFK was not a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, but the Fulbright hearings in 1966 were extremely important, and Kennedy sat in the back of the room day after day. He had already made a significant speech in February of that year, arguing that it was now crucial to begin negotiations for peace, and saying that for such talks to succeed, both sides would have to be prepared to compromise.

President Johnson attacked him viciously, and to make it especially unpleasant, LBJ made the ex-JFK people still in the government join in the attacking. Kennedy went to the hearings with regularity to help himself figure out his next moves. This was important substantively, but my point here is that this was a senator doing the work of a senator.

Kennedy was a member of the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization. In the wake of the civil unrest in South Los Angeles in 1965, he and the chair, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, decided to have hearings on race issues in the country’s large cities, which had recently seen so much violence. The hearings, titled the Federal Role in Urban Affairs, went on for months in 1966 and 1967, with high-level witnesses from all relevant walks of life. All of the national civil rights leaders were among them, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as public officials, corporation heads, foundation leaders, and more. The transcript takes up three very thick books.

Kennedy spent hours listening to the witnesses, asking many questions to amplify the prepared statements. The administration witnesses found their chairs to be hot seats, as did Mayor Sam Yorty, the mayor of Los Angeles, who had been mayor during the Watts rebellions. Kennedy made good use of his prosecutorial skills, skewering the mayor up and down.

Then there was Dr. Robert Coles, the child psychiatrist from Harvard. I remember the scene like it was yesterday—late in the afternoon, with sunshine coming in through the slats of the

Kennedy knew that for young black boys, the joy of childhood too often was gradually replaced with a consciousness of the barriers they would encounter.

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blinds, a beautiful color. Kennedy and Coles began a conversation about what happens to young black boys coming to age in the segregated inner city where they live. They took turns talking about how the joy of childhood too often was gradually replaced with a consciousness of the barriers they would encounter and the anger that would grow with it. The room was absolutely quiet. It was spellbinding. This was Kennedy as a senator—extraordinary.

Time passed. RFK had to decide whether to run for president.

He vacillated. In my view, this is the duality that was evident in the War on Poverty hearings and in the visit to Mayor Daley. Kennedy’s father taught him that you don’t get involved in something unless you know you are going to win. The new politics of Tom Hayden and other younger friends said you do it for the cause, win or lose. RFK had a foot in each set of politics. I’ve always thought that this was what was tearing at him. Once he decided to run, it was clear that he was liberated. The content of his campaign showed that he was moving more and more to the new politics, but it was on his terms—the terms that he had developed over the years he had been in the Senate, and before that.

There is a question among some as to when Kennedy decided to run for president. We still hear people who say that he did not decide to run until after the New Hampshire primary, when Senator Eugene McCarthy almost defeated President Johnson— that he only jumped in when he saw that the water was warm.

This is in significant part because some writers and documentary filmmakers have mistakenly said that RFK made the decision after the primary.

This is false. I was with RFK on March 10, 1968, two days before the primary, and he told me and his two close friends and associates, John Seigenthaler and Ed Guthman, that he was going to run. Cesar Chavez was on a hunger strike, and early in March his aide phoned and told me that Chavez would not end the hunger strike unless RFK would come and break bread with him. Kennedy was worried about Chavez’s health and he immediately told me he would come. He said he was already going to be in Des Moines, Iowa, on March 9 for the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, so it would be that much easier to go because we would already be halfway there.

I noted that Seigenthaler had joined us in Des Moines from Nashville, but I didn’t think much about it. Then Guthman joined us in Los Angeles, where we would be going to change planes to go to Delano. On the four-seat private plane, RFK told us he had decided to run. I was ecstatic.

People ask me whether there is a Robert Kennedy of today or one who might emerge, with that special set of leadership, values, and the ability to bridge the chasms of today. I don’t know, but I do know this: We can’t wait for a savior. We have to get to work. It is up to us.

Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He was a legislative assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

How the Globalists Ceded the Field to Donald Trump Unless the mainstream offers something better, he will be the voice of economic nationalism.

By Ro b e rt Ku t t ne r

W

hen it comes to grasping the dynamics of globalization and the backlash against it, the media depiction of Donald Trump’s tariff wars revealed that the trade mainstream is as crackpot in its own way as Trump is—and that Trump is the beneficiary of their myopia. Let me explain.

For three decades, the presidential wing of both U.S. parties, cheered on by orthodox economists and financial elites, has sponsored a brand of globalization that serves corporations and bankers but ignores the impact on regular people. This disparate impact is invariably swept aside with the usual platitudes about free trade being efficient and protectionism being narrowminded and economically irrational. We were treated to those homilies, ad nauseam, after Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum.

What’s forgotten is the fact that there is more than one form of globalism. In contrast to today’s brand, the global economic system devised at Bretton Woods in 1944 was a radical break with laissez-faire. The founders of the postwar system had vivid memories of the bitter fruits of rampant capitalism—depression, fascism, and war. They wanted to build a stable and egalitarian form of mixed economy, so that this history would never be repeated. But tragically, it is being repeated today, as global markets run riot and seed neo-fascist backlash.

It was no accident that the chief architect of Bretton Woods was John Maynard Keynes.

The global architecture invented at Bretton Woods was intended to complement and bolster high-growth, full-employment economies at home. Private financial speculation was contained and reconstruction funds were sub-

stantially public. For three decades, the West combined high rates of growth with increasing equality and security for ordinary citizens.

But a major shift in both power and dominant ideology has turned the global marketplace back into something more like the pre-Roosevelt system. “Trade” deals have been deployed to dismantle managed capitalism. Working people have not only suffered; they have lost confidence in globalist elites—and worse, in government itself and even in democracy.

This is a system-wide pathology. That’s why the backlash, and the embrace of ultra-nationalist strongmen, looks so similar throughout the West. The more that bien pensants double down on globalization, the more defections they invite and the more leaders like Trump we get.

This history is the subject of my recent

book, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? As I observe, the postwar social contract was unique in the history of capitalism—a combination of lucky accidents and power shifts.

These included the disgrace of laissez-faire and the Republican Party in the Great Crash; the radicalism of Franklin Roosevelt; the enhanced prestige of government in surmounting depression and winning World War II (in a country normally suspicious of the state); the legacy of wartime planning; the enhanced power of organized labor and the regulatory repression of organized capital; the role of the dollar in a fixed–exchange rate system; and the threat of Bolshevism, which made America urgently supportive of European reconstruction using substantial state-led planning.

The postwar experience demonstrated that a mixed economy can be more socially just and

more economically efficient than a laissez-faire one. We assumed that this revolution in economic theory and policy was permanent and the new normal. But we overlooked the latent power of capital in an economy that remains fundamentally capitalist. When bankers and corporations regained their usual political power in the aftermath of the economic turmoil of the 1970s, they were able to overturn much of managed capitalism.

The new globalism—the use of “trade” deals to undermine domestic regulation and worker protections—became a key instrument. Policy elites were oblivious to the slowly building political consequences, which culminated in the election of Trump and his counterparts.

Marxists used to assume that the excesses of capitalism would unite workers of the world.

History shows that the result is more typically an embrace of fascism.

In short, the entire paradigm of “free

trade” as optimum is wrong. No sane progressive has ever pursued the freest possible market as an end in itself.

The diatribes against “protectionism” are oblivious to economic history in another respect. Every major industrial power, including 19th-century America, has used flagrant departures from laissez-faire—protection—to develop its industrial base. These include subsidies, public investments, preferential procurement, and of course tariffs. The idea that a tariff is inefficient relies on a static snapshot, rather than an appreciation of the dynamic value of gaining industrial proficiency over time.

If Japan had followed the advice of freetraders in the 1950s, and exported products

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in which it then had an advantage (such as cheap toys) while purchasing industrial goods that it didn’t produce from the United States, Japan never would have developed its prodigious success in cars, steel, semiconductors, machine tools, and the entire range of advanced producer and consumer goods. All of these required protection. Japan used a system of cartels, subsidy of exports, restriction of imports and other devices to make it just about impossible for major U.S. producers to sell in Japan. But when Congressman Dick Gephardt complained about Japan’s protected economy, he was vilified as the protectionist.

What’s true of Japan (and to varying degrees Brazil, Korea, France, Germany, the United States, and even Britain) is true, in spades, of China. Beijing uses a system of state capitalism, also known as neo-mercantilism, that defies everything Western elites hold dear about the superiority of free markets. The Chinese government, working with friendly industrialists, provides cheap capital. It protects against imports, and subsidizes exports.

Western rivals are offered partnerships with Chinese counterparts, but on coercive terms that defy normal commerce.

Western companies get subsidized factories and cheap, competent, repressed Chinese labor. But the Western partner is often prohibited from selling in the domestic Chinese market, and is restricted to producing for export.

China openly coerces or covertly steals sensitive trade secrets from its partners.

With this system, China has gained commercial leadership in industry after industry, often using subsidies to underprice Western rivals and put them out of business. Just to be sure of its export success, China for prolonged periods intervened in money markets to keep its currency undervalued.

As a matter of economics, such a system is not supposed to work. For one thing, it flagrantly violates market pricing mechanisms.

For another, by relying on deals between a non-democratic Chinese state and Chinese entrepreneurs, the system invites corruption.

But whatever its impossibility in theory, the system works in practice, well enough to have propelled China to world economic leadership.

Unlike the Soviets, whose system of state enterprise produced shoddy goods in short

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supply, or the Argentines, whose efforts at protection resulted in non-competitive products, the Chinese got mercantilism right. Indeed, in just two decades, China has become the dominant producer not just in catch-up industries but in pioneering new technologies. It will soon be the leader in electric vehicles and 5G internet, and it runs a chronic trade surplus with the rest of the world.

China rapidly turned its economic gains into geopolitical strength, becoming the dominant economic partner with much of the developing world. As an autocracy, it has begun flexing its economic muscles geopolitically.

The rise of China has created a crisis of

ideology and policy for the American governing elite. The abject failure of America’s China policy was a blend of ideological blinders and conflicts of interest. Political leaders, seconded by orthodox economists, convinced themselves that by allowing China into the global system via the WTO, they would move China in the direction of liberal free-market democracy.

Key people on Wall Street, notably inhabitants of the revolving door such as Robert Rubin, may have had ideological qualms or geopolitical anxieties about the rise of still-communist China. But their firms were making a fortune brokering the deals. In the academy, to be an apologist for Beijing was to get nice lecture fees and generous support for research centers.

The claims of leading figures of that era are embarrassments. George W. Bush could insist: “Economic freedom creates habits of liberty. And habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. … Trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” Tom Friedman flatly predicted, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: “China’s going to have a free press. Globalization will drive it.”

None of these worthies seemed to notice that China’s state-led, semi-market economy was practicing something other than free trade.

But it was convenient to believe that it was, and that challenges to China’s protection were somehow themselves protectionist.

In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, flagship of the foreign policy establishment, two notables very belatedly admit that people such as themselves got China totally wrong.

Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and Ely

Ratner, a senior China expert, both serving under Barack Obama, write: Diplomatic and commercial engagement have not brought political and economic openness. Neither U.S. military power nor regional balancing has stopped Beijing from seeking to displace core components of the U.S.-led system. And the liberal international order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected.

Better late than never, I suppose, but massive damage has already been done. And if illusions about China are belatedly being shed, illusions about “free trade” are not.

Those knowledgeable about China who took a dissenting view were a tiny group. Writing in the Prospect in 2007, James Mann, former Beijing correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, warned: The fundamental problem with this strategy of integration is that it raises the obvious question: Who’s integrating whom? Is the United States now integrating China into a new international economic order based upon free-market principles? Or is China now integrating the United States into a new international political order where democracy is no longer favored, and where a government’s continuing eradication of all organized political opposition is accepted or ignored?

But people who held such views were simply not admitted to the foreign policy establishment. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body created by an act of Congress in 2000, has assembled encyclopedic evidence on the details of China’s state capitalism and the consequences for U.S. industry.

Its work has been widely ignored.

The failure to address China’s mercantilism was only part of the myopia surrounding the brand of globalism constructed by and for economic elites. There was a fundamental disconnect between the knee-jerk support for deregulated international commerce and the acceptance by even mainstream economists that markets are far from perfectly efficient. Labor markets need to be regulated to prevent exploi-

tation of workers; capital markets need to be regulated to prevent financial fraud and periodic depressions; the environment needs to be regulated to prevent industry from treating it as a free sink; and government needs public investment to bridge over shortfalls of demand and to develop regional economies. So if markets are far from perfect at home, why do they suddenly snap back to perfect efficiency just because commerce crosses borders? Obviously, they don’t.

Elites of both parties won the policy debates on trade, but lost the people. By 2016, millions of working people whose families had once reliably supported Democrats had defected to the Tea Party and then to Trump. Across the Atlantic, their counterparts were deserting social democrats to support far-right nationalist parties. Conflicts over refugees and over identity compounded the backlash, but it was basically economic.

There was—and is—a different way of conducting trade. The original International Trade Organization proposed at Bretton Woods called for a regime that would promote commerce but also defend enforceable labor standards. A treaty creating the ITO was negotiated in 1947, but never ratified. We need to revisit that approach.

A tax on financial transactions would slow down the global speculative financial casino.

A much tougher stance on China would make it clear that if China does not play by market rules, it cannot expect free-market entry of its products. A different set of trade norms would leave plenty of room for national industrial policies.

The overall goal should be to reclaim space for nations to protect social standards and restore a balanced social contract.

This is economic nationalism of a kind, but the sort of benign nationalism that prevailed during the postwar boom, and a form of legitimate patriotism reminiscent of the solidarity of World War II. It has little in common with Trump’s version of nationalism. Many Democrats in Congress have tried to pursue this approach, but they get shouted down by the presidential wing of the party and ridiculed by the press.

The bipartisan embrace of elite global-

ism, rejected on a gut level by tens of millions of citizens and contradicted by economic history, created a vacuum that was exploited by

Donald Trump. The trouble is that Trump may be good at channeling the discontent, but he is a failure and a faker at providing real remedies.

The recent dust-up over tariffs on steel and aluminum perfectly illustrates what Trump gets right and what he gets wrong, and how the trade establishment misses the point. When Trump ordered the tariffs, the response was an almost universal chorus of jeers. The man, obviously, was ignorant of basic economics.

The protection of a relatively small number of domestic jobs producing steel and aluminum would be dwarfed by the loss of far more jobs in industries that make products that use steel and aluminum—everything from cars to beer cans. Trump was setting off a trade war.

The bipartisan embrace of elite globalism, rejected by citizens and contradicted by economic history, created a vacuum to be exploited

by Trump.

Trump, impulsively, had announced these tariffs to the surprise of his closest advisers.

Most of this story was wrong. In fact, a voluminous technical report in January documented the worldwide glut in steel and aluminum, the existential threat to these two key domestic industries, and identified China as the prime culprit for its massive state-subsidized overproduction. U.S. steelmakers produce about 75 million metric tons a year. China’s overcapacity, which has grown from virtually nothing in two decades, is more than 300 million tons.

Nor did Trump order these tariffs impulsively or abruptly. His commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, presented him with a decision memo offering several options, including more narrowly targeted actions. Trump, being Trump, simply went with the dumbest alternative— tariffs against everyone.

The likelihood of a “trade war,” the subject of much press hysteria, is also vanishingly improbable. By the second week in March, Robert Light­hizer, Trump’s top trade official, was already in Brussels, meeting with his European and Japanese counterparts. Lighthizer is a serious, well-informed trade expert. He served as one of Ronald Reagan’s top trade officials, in the last administration that appreciated the mercantilism of other nations as a potential national security threat. Lighthizer then went on to be a respected trade lawyer in private practice, representing victims of other nations’ mercantilism.

The recent history of tariffs is not trade wars but bargaining chips. We can expect that negotiations in coming weeks will walk back the risk of a general tariff war, and if Trump listens to his trade advisers, the target of tariffs and other retaliatory threats will shift to China.

What’s needed is a general strategy in which the West will not tolerate China’s state capitalism as a tactic to dominate world production of key industries, even less so when economic mercantilism is weaponized as part of a geopolitical grand design.

In his initial tariff orders, Trump’s own ineptitude cut China far too much slack. But even Trump may stumble his way toward noticing the real problem. In March, the little-known Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) issued a report recommending that the government block, on national security grounds, a proposed hostile takeover of chip-maker Qualcomm by Broadcom, a Singapore-based company close to the government of China. Trump duly vetoed the takeover.

Trump’s version of economic nationalism is a blend of mistaken tactics, oversimplified nostrums, and remedies that will not rebuild American industry. Occasionally, as in the CFIUS order, Trump gets something right. Even his tariffs, though misdirected, blew open the door to what should be a much broader reappraisal of American geo-economic theories, goals, and policies. If the mainstream does not take this challenge seriously, and especially if Democrats fail to define a constructive form of economic nationalism in service of reclaiming managed capitalism, we will be left with Trump’s version—one that is uglier, more demagogic and less effective—but the only one on offer to a frustrated populace.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 23

How Not to Cover America

As local newspapers shrink and many of the national media close local bureaus, we depend increasingly on coverage by reporters who parachute into communities. But even the best are likely to be a step behind events.

By M ic hae l M as s ing

T

he election of Donald Trump came as such a shock to The New York Times that, a few days after it, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher, and Dean Baquet, its executive editor, sent subscribers an apologetic note. Wondering if Trump’s “sheer unconventionality” had led the paper to “underestimate his support among American voters,” they promised to rededicate themselves to the Times’s “fundamental mission” of reporting on America and the world “without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences.”

The letter carried unmistakable echoes of an earlier note—the mea culpa that the Times published in May 2004 acknowledging its failure to more aggressively question the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq. After the financial collapse of 2008, there was no note, but there was much discussion as to whether the paper had paid sufficient attention to the warning signs. Three times in 13 years, then, the Times has faltered badly on a story of critical importance.

And not just the Times. On all three of these key stories, the nation’s top news organizations have performed feebly. Clearly, something fundamental is amiss at the pinnacle of the profession. What is it? Is it being fixed? A

24 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

close examination of the media’s performance since the election suggests that it is not. Unless far-reaching changes are made, a future mea culpa seems likely.

After the election, national news editors

expressed a determination to get out of their coastal “bubble” and into Middle America.

In September, HuffPost began a seven-week “listening tour” to hear the stories of ordinary Americans in 25 communities. The New Yorkbased ProPublica set up a bureau in Chicago with a dozen editors, reporters, and technologists to do investigative work in the Midwest.

The New Yorker sent Peter Hessler to report on Trump supporters in Colorado, Larissa MacFarquhar to describe a model rural community in Iowa, and Eliza Griswold to profile an environmental activist in Pennsylvania’s coal country.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has worked hard to get outside Washington. A decade or so ago, the paper, looking inward, cast itself as being “for and about Washington,” and in 2009 it closed the last of its six national bureaus. This decision proved disastrous, both financially, by limiting the paper’s readership, and journalistically, by removing its eyes and ears on the ground. Since Marty Baron became its editor (in 2012) and Jeff Bezos bought it (in

2013), the Post has steadily sought to widen its scope. Even so, in the years leading up to the 2016 election, it did not report fully enough on “the depth of anxiety and grievance in large parts of the country,” Baron told me, and so the decision was made to spend more time outside Washington, “talking to people in all corners and walks of life and getting a sense of the issues important to them.”

While not reopening its bureaus, the Post added several reporters to its America desk, or “Team America,” as it is known in superhero style, bringing the total to about a dozen. The paper also has a “talent network” of several thousand writers and reporters around the country who can pitch stories to a team of editors and be called on when major stories like natural disasters or mass shootings break.

The fruits of these initiatives have periodically appeared in the paper. In “A Showdown over Sharia,” for instance, Robert Samuels reported on a meeting at a Dairy Queen in Ferris, Texas, between two gun-toting antiIslamic white activists and two local Muslims who try to resolve their clash of civilizations over onion rings and jalapeño bacon burgers.

In “Fear, Hope and Deportations,” Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan recounted the uneasy co-existence between Tamara Estes, a white school bus driver on the Texas prairie, and her

neighbors, a family of Mexican immigrants trying to achieve their dream; though Estes likes the Mexican children she transports, she resents paying for their safety net while she has none. That piece was part of a series by Jordan and Sullivan (a husband-and-wife team) on “the forgotten”—ordinary Americans often overlooked by journalists on the coasts.

The Times has made an equally strong push.

As Baquet told me, a few days after the election he organized a conference call with his national correspondents (based in 14 bureaus) to analyze how the paper could get “a better handle on what’s going on in the country.” The correspondents said that they did in fact have such a handle but that the editors did not fully grasp it. To help remedy that (as well as to cover the new administration), the paper has undertaken a thorough overhaul, posting job openings for hundreds of positions ranging from climate reporter and criminal justice correspondent to audio producer and audience engagement editor. An effort was launched to diversify the staff, with special priority given to people with military backgrounds. National correspondents were reassigned; Campbell Robertson, for instance, was moved from New Orleans to Pittsburgh to focus on Appalachia, and Jack Healy was assigned to cover rural America. In reporting on Trump’s supporters, correspondents were admonished not to turn them into “anthropological subjects,” as Baquet put it.

In addition, the Times created a special “Fault Lines” team, freeing a half-dozen or so correspondents to write stories seeking “to explain the divisions in the country” and “show our readers what is going on in America in a deep and descriptive way,” as national editor Marc Lacey puts it. Amy Harmon traveled to Wellston, Ohio, a “proud, struggling, Trumpsupporting town” in coal-mining country, to write about a high school science teacher who had come from Akron with a mission to teach, among other things, the realities of climate change; though many students were persuaded, one holdout bolts from the classroom, never to return. In “The Two Americans,” Sabrina Tavernise described the parallel lives of Abraham Davis, a troubled young white man in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Hisham Yasin, a Palestinian immigrant who had co-founded a local mosque. One night, Davis participated in the

vandalizing of the mosque and was eventually arrested for it. Yasin was overwhelmed with offers of solidarity and help; Davis, overcome with remorse, wrote a letter of apology to the mosque, which forgave him.

No “Fault Lines” story, however, has delivered more of a jolt than Farah Stockman’s 7,000-word profile of Shannon Mulcahy, a 43-year-old worker at an Indianapolis steel bearings plant. In October 2016, the owner of the plant, the Rexnord Corporation, announced that it was moving it to Monterrey, Mexico. During her nearly 18 years there, Mulcahy had worked her way up to operate a furnace at $25 an hour; when offered a $5,000 bonus to train her Mexican replacements, she accepts. In addition to describing Shannon’s easy interaction with the Mexicans, the article offered many rich details about her personal life, including her electric-blue eyeliner, her custody battle over her daughter Nicole, and

ing from the story. It offered just a few brief paragraphs on the owner of the plant, Rexnord, and its stated reason for the move to Mexico (reducing costs). A quick online search revealed that in November 2002, Rexnord had been bought by the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant, for about $900 million. Three and a half years later, Carlyle sold Rexnord’s corporate parent to Apollo Management, another private equity group, for $1.825 billion—a profit of more than $900 million. These companies specialize in leveraged buyouts, which, in the course of restructuring companies, greatly enrich their top executives. David Rubenstein, co-founder and co- CEO of Carlyle, has a fortune estimated at $2.8 billion; Leon Black, the head of Apollo, is worth more than $6 billion. Shannon Mulcahy, meanwhile, is out of a job.

What options are available to her? What effect did the factory’s closing have on the community? Did the closing result from the private

Beautifully written and deeply researched, the story vividly captured the crushing impact of the plant’s closing. Yet important elements seemed to be missing. the constant medical needs of her disabled four-year-old granddaughter.

The article exemplifies the type of storytelling that is now much in favor in journalism.

Beautifully written and deeply researched, it vividly captures the crushing impact the plant’s closing will have on Shannon and her family. In a separate “insider” account, Stockman described the eight trips she had made to Indianapolis over eight months to find and report on “my Rosie the Riveter.” “For those of us who are lucky enough to have graduated from good colleges,” she wrote, “globalization and unfettered trade have expanded our horizons and boosted our incomes, as the world opened up to our talent and capital. We rarely think about the downsides to our fellow Americans, the most vulnerable among us.”

To spring a journalist for eight months to report on a single factory worker shows the Times’s commitment to serious national reporting. Yet important elements seemed to be miss-

equity owners’ pressures? What public policies could perhaps have prevented the plant’s move to Mexico or helped its workers better bear the impact? The Times article had little to say on such matters.

I mentioned to Marc Lacey, the Times’s national editor, what I had learned about the plant’s ownership and asked whether the piece could have offered more about it. That was not its mission, he said; rather, it was to explain “some of the frustrations that everyday Americans are feeling. It was designed to take you into people’s lives, not into the boardroom.” Lacey did not, however, think my question was unfair; some readers, he said, no doubt would have liked to hear less about Mulcahy and her daughter and more about the decision to relocate.

He added, though, that the Times extensively covers business and economic policy through its business section and Washington bureau.

That it does. Reporters such as Binyamin Appelbaum, Patricia Cohen, Peter Goodman,

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 25

Natalie Kitroeff, and Nelson Schwartz, together with the “Upshot” team, have produced many excellent articles on the closing of plants, the changing nature of work, the stagnation of wages, and the uneven costs and benefits of trade. Thomas Edsall, in his weekly column, analyzes the political effects of these developments. Over the last five years, Schwartz says, he has spent so much time visiting plants in the Midwest that his wife wondered if he had a second family in Ohio.

It’s too bad the Times did not run follow-up pieces on Shannon and Rexnord, exploring the underlying structural reasons for the plant’s closure. Over the summer, the editor who helped create “Fault Lines,” David Halbfinger, was reassigned to Jerusalem, and the team has more or less faded away. That’s unfortunate, for, in my conversations with journalists outside the coastal bubble, I found a hunger for such deep reporting.

hell, with people walking around like zombies.

But what are people trying to do to fix that?

How is it going to be addressed? I’d like to see more of these types of stories.” In September, Between Coasts hosted a conference bringing together journalists from the Midwest and editors from the East Coast, and one of the panels discussed “What We’re Missing About the Opioid Epidemic.” It highlighted the need for more coverage of the acute shortages of detox facilities and rehab beds. In my own reading of the coverage of the epidemic, I’ve been dismayed by how little attention has been paid to the long waits for treatment in much of the country and the many people who relapse, overdose, and die as a result. (An exception is Margaret Talbot’s report in The New Yorker in June 2017 on the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, which dramatically captured the glaring gaps in the services available to the state’s addicted.)

Anna Clark, a writer in Michigan who is

Newspaper jobs were spread across the country, but internet jobs—freed from geographic constraints— are clustered in the East and West Coast corridors.

Jack Shuler is a writer and an associate professor of English at Denison University in central Ohio. For months before the election, he pitched story ideas to East Coast editors about the surprisingly high levels of support for Trump he saw in the area. None was interested.

In his frustration, he helped found Between Coasts, an online magazine offering a showcase for “stories from the flyover.” These have included pieces on a butcher in rural Pennsylvania who’s been cutting meat since he was 13, the increase in Confederate flag sales in Ohio, and a rural library’s struggles to survive in the face of declining population and uncertain funding.

Asked how the national press has performed since the election, Shuler said much better, citing the Times and Post in particular. There was much more coverage of Ohio, especially of the opioid epidemic that was causing such distress.

Yet he had some strong reservations about that coverage: “Most stories about heroin in Ohio are about how this place has gone all to

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completing a book on the Flint water crisis, laments the lack of in-depth reporting on midsized Michigan cities and counties, such as Saginaw and Jackson, that have become so hollowed out that the normal mechanisms no longer work. Despite a surplus of housing, for instance, people have a hard time getting mortgages, thus perpetuating the downward spiral. Though encouraged by the increased flow of reporters to the region, Clark thinks they suffer from the usual problems of parachute journalism—the lack of sustained coverage by reporters with close knowledge of the local scene. “There’s no substitute for having people on the ground covering stories in an ongoing way and developing sources over time,” she says. Clark rued the ongoing collapse of local news organizations; the whole western part of Michigan has gone dark. The number of reporters covering the statehouse in Lansing has drastically declined as well.

The calamitous effects of the cutbacks in

local news came up repeatedly in my conversations. The rise of the internet, the bottomless supply of free news, the difficulty local papers have in gaining subscribers, the takeover and stripping down of local papers by private equity firms, the devouring of ad revenues by Facebook and Google—all have led to massive layoffs and buyouts. “The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think,” declared a headline over an article by Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty in Politico in April 2017. As it observed, the number of reporters, designers, salespeople, and the like at daily and weekly newspaper publishers had declined from about 455,000 in 1990 to 173,900 at the start of 2017, while the number employed by digital publishing entities had risen from 77,900 in 2008 to 206,700 in 2017.

Where newspaper jobs were by nature spread across the country, internet jobs—freed from geographic constraints—are clustered in the East and West Coast corridors, insulated from the rest of the country. The impact can be seen in the reduced coverage of political corruption and corporate malpractice, environmental degradation and social displacement.

Anne Trubek, a writer and editor in Cleveland, became so disheartened by the declining coverage of the Rust Belt that in 2013 she helped found Belt, an online magazine and publishing house that specializes in regional voices; it has published a dozen urban anthologies on places like Cleveland, Buffalo, and Akron. Trubek was harshly critical of the postelection coverage. “There is so much going on that no one knows about,” she said. With the cutbacks in manufacturing, fields like retail, health care, and higher education have become more important sources of jobs. The largest employer in Cleveland is the Cleveland Clinic—an enormous economic engine whose relationship with its neighboring communities (mostly poor and African American) has been tense. (Last July, Politico ran an illuminating article about “how the Cleveland Clinic grows healthier while its neighbors stay sick.”) Trubek expressed impatience over “the whole genre of the white working class staring out into the distance with an occupied look. It’s a joke.”

She was one of several people who complained about the attention given to J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. How, they wonder, did this one individual who managed to make it to Yale Law

r i c k y c a r i o t i / t h e wa s h i n g t o n p o s t v i a g e t t y i m a g e s

School and who remains highly critical of the idea of public investment in needy communities become the great media oracle for such a large, diverse, and underserved region?

Stephen Henderson feels that reporting on the white working class is important but needs to be placed in a broader context. The longtime editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press and the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for commentary on the city’s financial crisis, Henderson told me that during the election nobody did a good job of reporting on the disaffection among workers in the Midwest. He felt bad that he had not spent more time in Macomb County, located just north of Detroit.

The country carries special symbolic value as the original home of the “Reagan Democrat” (a term arising from a study by Stanley Greenberg of the 1984 election). Since Macomb had twice gone for Obama, Henderson had assumed it would go for Clinton, but instead it went decisively for Trump. After the election, he began traveling to Macomb more frequently, often to hold sessions of the daily talk show he hosts on WDET, a public station. An African American, Henderson said that he did not think race was a central factor in the way Macomb had voted, given its past support for Obama, but even if it were, it was critical to talk to people there. “They are really eager to be heard. Their relation with the media is defined by the sense of being ignored and that their opinions don’t matter much. We have to make sure they’re not hidden.”

According to Henderson, the Free Press, which had 100 to 200 reporters when he first worked for it in the 1990s, now has fewer than 60. The Washington Post, which has 25 correspondents in 18 bureaus around the world, has no bureau in the Midwest. It’s not surprising, then, that a county like Macomb gets overlooked.

In Henderson’s conversations with Macomb residents, the subject that most often comes up is immigration. Demographically, the county is changing, with many people with Middle Eastern backgrounds moving in. To long-time residents, these newcomers often seem to be doing better than they are, stoking resentment. “A lot of people who don’t think of themselves as racist might qualify as that,” Henderson said, but, he added, many African American residents feel similarly. The “commonalities” between

working-class whites and blacks “never get discussed.” His comments reinforced my own sense that the press, in its commendable effort to interview white workers overlooked during the election, may be overcompensating and neglecting other important groups, such as black workers, who share similar concerns about pay, benefits, and upward mobility. As the Times’s Nelson Schwartz observes, “The media sometimes reports on manufacturing like it’s just white guys walking through the mill or factory gate with lunch pails” when, in fact, many of the workers at large Midwestern

The Washington Post has steadily widened its scope since Marty Baron became its editor in 2012.

plants are African Americans and women. “It’s not The Deer Hunter anymore.”

(Seven weeks after I spoke with Henderson, he was dismissed by the Free Press for “inappropriate behavior” toward female employees; he has retained his position at WDET.) Of all the analyses of the 2016 election that I read, the most authoritative was “Revenge of the Forgotten Class,” by Alec MacGillis of ProPublica. Drawing on his reporting in southwestern Ohio, MacGillis noted that many of the people he spoke with lacked strong party affiliations and had “profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their lives.” That class continues to be forgotten, he

told me. It’s important to send out reporters to find out not only how people feel politically but to chronicle “the actual lived experience of people”—to show how “messed up people’s lives are” and to describe the underlying political and economic causes. While the Times and Post are “head and shoulders above everyone else,” MacGillis says, they operate inside the same bubble as the rest of the national media.

“If you’re in Washington, it’s going to be reflected in your perspective. Things there are so hunky-dory that it’s easy to slip into thinking that everything is OK when it’s not.” MacGillis says he is grateful that ProPublica allows him to live and work in Baltimore, which, though only 40 miles from Washington, is outside the bubble. “It really helps my journalism to not be part of the insane prosperity of Washington.” (Four of the top five richest counties in America are Washington suburbs.)

During his time in Ohio, MacGillis grew despondent over the cutbacks in local news and the vacuum they have left in many communities, which was often filled by Fox News and “angry stuff on Facebook. If you don’t have local news, it’s going to make you feel isolated and adrift.” (The impact of the decline of local papers on how people get their news is a subject in urgent need of more reporting.) Most national journalists, MacGillis says, “are in places that are blue, and that feeds the general perception that the media is against Trump” and, in fact, “the media have been very tough on him.” Among the papers that have been eviscerated is The Baltimore Sun; once boasting bureaus around the world and in Washington, it is now as thin as a shopper. With so much going on in Baltimore that never comes to national attention, MacGillis acknowledges that he has become “a pain in the neck of reporters” at the Times and the Post who have the city in their territory, “asking them to please come and dig into X and Y.” MacGillis sent me a memo listing the many stories about Baltimore that he felt the Post has neglected. They included a massive police corruption scandal, revelations of Russian meddling via social media to stir racial discord in the city, and Governor Larry Hogan’s decision to kill a new transit line that would have traversed the city and better served the poor. With MacGillis’s permission, I sent the

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 27

memo to Marty Baron. Within hours, Baron sent back an equally detailed email with some two dozen links to stories about the subjects MacGillis had mentioned as well as to several others, including the demolition of a block in East Baltimore, the city’s horrific homicide rate, and a profile of a student who had managed to make it through the city’s troubled school system. Reading them, I was impressed by how much the Post has done on a city outside its immediate market. But I could also understand MacGillis’s frustration. As much as the Post has written about Baltimore’s many problems—transportation, violence, drugs, education, housing—it has not generally explored the connections between them nor offered the type of deeper political analysis MacGillis considers essential. “Why does Baltimore continue to face such seemingly intractable problems?” I wrote back to Baron. “What are their root causes, and what are possible solutions?” It would be interesting, I wrote, for the Post to adopt Baltimore or another similarly distressed city and report on it for a year or two, using it as a laboratory to figure out how to address the nation’s urban ills, much as the Times’s Jason DeParle did for welfare reform in Wisconsin in the late 1990s.

Baron was unmoved. “Would I love to have people in bureaus all over the country?” he said. “Sure, that would be great.” But, he added, the paper can’t afford it. (In 2016, the Post made a profit for the first time in years.) In the meantime, it must rely on Team America and its parachuting reporters. With the paper so anchored in Washington, however, ideas for that team are mostly generated from there rather than in the field, guaranteeing that it will remain a step behind.

Chris Arnade sees a deeper problem. Five years ago, he left his job as a Wall Street bond trader to document the lives of drug addicts and sex workers in the South Bronx. A good place to meet people, he found, is McDonald’s.

In addition to offering decent coffee and clean restrooms, it lets people linger for long periods, and communities take shape there. Traveling around the Midwest for a book project, Arnade began writing for The Guardian. During the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland, he spent time in its poorer white and black neighborhoods. There were 3,000 journalists in the city, “but I never saw any of them,” he

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told me. Since the election, he thinks the press has been doing better, singling out the Times for praise. Even so, he perceives “institutional biases and structural rigidities” in news organizations that prevent them from making the types of changes needed after missing “the biggest story of the last three decades.” Newsrooms, he says, remain too focused on what’s going on in Washington and who did what to whom. “The media is focused on the power centers, but the story is outside those centers.”

In addition to McDonald’s, Arnade likes to visit churches. The experience has convinced him that the biggest divide in the country is between those who have faith and those who don’t, and that religion remains one of the most under-covered precincts of American life. That’s especially true of American evangelicals, who make up a quarter of the population. Gary Abernathy, who is the publisher and editor of the Hillsboro, Ohio, Times-Gazette (and who writes a twice-monthly column for The Washington Post), says that reporters tend “to go to high-profile evangelical leaders—the Franklin Grahams, Jerry Falwells, and Ralph Reeds. But most evangelicals don’t follow people like that.” Rather, they follow ministers such as Tim Keller and Beth Moore, who tend to be less overtly political. Because journalists too rarely speak with people in the pews, they are generally unfamiliar with such figures.

National journalists’ aloofness from this community became painfully clear during the 2016 campaign, when much was written about the “decline of white Christian America” (as a widely read article in The Atlantic put it) and about how the traditional evangelical bloc was splintering, with many young people and women abandoning Trump. In fact, Trump ultimately took 81 percent of the white evangelical vote—more than even the born-again George W. Bush got.

Dean Baquet has frequently spoken of the need to boost the Times’s coverage of religion, and in January 2017 the paper posted a job opening for a “faith and values correspondent.”

Fourteen months later, it was finally filled.

“The Times has not paid enough attention or devoted enough resources to religion coverage for a long time,” says Laurie Goodstein, for years the paper’s lone religion reporter.

“They’ve talked about doing more, but it hasn’t

been a priority.” The Washington Post, with three religion reporters, has done better, but even so, says Marty Baron, “we could do more.

News organizations need to spend more time with people of faith—of all faiths.”

Overall, I’ve been dismayed at how the

national press, after an initial spurt in the coverage of Middle America, has generally lost interest. Though good stories still do appear— a piece in the Post about the effects of an immigration raid on the town of Cactus, Texas, for instance, and another in the Times about lowpaid workers at Disneyland struggling to make ends meet—news organizations have become so absorbed in covering all things Trump (as well as hurricanes, wildfires, and mass shootings) that more mundane happenings between the coasts can disappear from the news pages for days at a time.

How to fix things? There are two main challenges. One is bolstering local news. This is essential not only to keep citizens informed but also to uncover stories that can be picked up by national organizations. (The exposing of Larry Nassar owed much to the investigative work of The Indianapolis Star.) For years, local publishers have struggled to find a commercial business model to support quality journalism in the digital age—without success. And the prognosis is gloomy. As Joshua Benton observed in Nieman Lab in March 2016, “There’s little reason to believe news jobs will ever again be distributed as evenly around the country as they were a decade ago—the market forces are too strong.” It will “increasingly be up to non-market forces— nonprofits and public media—to fill local voids.”

On that front, many promising initiatives are afoot. ProPublica, in addition to the bureau it has opened in Illinois, has set aside $3 million to support six full-time investigative reporters over three years in communities with under one million people. The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, launched by Barbara Ehrenreich in 2012, provides grants to reporters to write about poverty and inequality and to “put a human face on financial instability,” as its site puts it. And the Poynter Institute has selected 21 news organizations to improve their digital operations so as to better serve their communities.

Most ambitious of all is Report for America.

It arose out of a 2011 FCC report that concluded that the commercial model isn’t going to resolve the crisis in local news. Modeled on Teach for America and the Peace Corps, it aims to support 1,000 reporters in poorly served communities over five years. So far, three reporters have been assigned to the Lexington HeraldLeader, The Charleston Gazette-Mail, and West Virginia Public Broadcasting (all in Appalachia), with nine more to be deployed to newsrooms in other parts of the country by June.

Reaching the full complement will require a tremendous expenditure of effort and money.

Yet even that number would represent but a small fraction of the jobs that have been lost.

Such realities have placed even greater pressure on a small number of national news organizations—the Times and the Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, NPR, Politico, and The Atlantic—to expand their coverage of the country. One obvious course would be to open more national bureaus. But the bureau system may be obsolete. Even the Times, with its 14 bureaus, missed the level of disruption and alienation in the land during the presidential election. As one reporter told me, “You can’t cover the Midwest from Chicago.”

It’s time for a radical rethinking of how to report on the country. Dean Baquet told me of a favorite saying of Gene Roberts, an esteemed editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The New York Times. The biggest stories, Roberts said, don’t break, they ooze, seeping up gradually from the ground. His prime example was the movement of African Americans from the South to the urban North, which gradually transformed the country—a story that had to be told over time. The widespread economic anxiety in the country after the 2007-2008 financial collapse and the resulting dissatisfaction with established institutions was another such story, says Baquet—one that the Times by its own admission largely missed.

In October 2008, I traveled to northwestern Ohio to report on the presidential election. I went out of frustration with the national coverage, which seemed so focused on the candidates and their campaigns that the concerns and views of ordinary voters were being overlooked. For five days I traveled along a 40-mile stretch of I-75 between Toledo and Findlay, talking to people at a high school football game,

a farmer’s market, a megachurch, a bowling alley, and a vintage car sale, as well as in bars, restaurants, and parking lots. The groundswell developing for Barack Obama quickly became apparent to me. What most struck me was the tide of popular anger over the region’s economic decline. People decried the endless march of mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, and plant closings. They denounced NAFTA , cursed the flow of jobs to Mexico and China, and inveighed against the corporations that were so pitilessly turning their back on their communities. This fury was shattering traditional allegiances and creating support for dramatic change. I concluded that if Obama were able to create good jobs in the Midwest through, say, a large-scale public works program, the Democrats might be able to win the Rust Belt for years to come.

Over the next eight years, however, factories continued to close, wages remained stagnant, and the resentment over trade and NAFTA

The Times currently has three special desks with a dedicated group of editors and reporters: race, gender, and climate. In all three areas, the paper has done admirable work that has had an impact. Perhaps the Times could convert its “Fault Lines” unit into a “Life in America” desk whose mission would be to uncover emerging trends in this diverse, fractured, combustible, and often crazy land of ours. The Times has three Styles sections, a Food section, a Travel section, a Real Estate section, a Home section, and T magazine. Last spring, the paper opened a new bureau in Australia. Maybe it could add a weekly “On the Ground” section, featuring dispatches from the nation’s four corners. (The Guardian currently runs a sporadic series about America under that slug.) A good model is “Divided Nation,” a 13-part series by Michael Kranish that—appearing in The Boston Globe over nine months in 2015—combined narrative with analysis to describe in dramatic

Dean Baquet told me of a favorite saying of Gene Roberts, an esteemed editor. The biggest stories, Roberts said, don’t break, they ooze, seeping up from the ground. grew. Yet press coverage of these developments was fleeting. During the 2016 campaign I felt the same frustration as I had in 2008, with the realities on the ground lost amid the crush of stories about primaries and caucuses, polls and political strategies.

How to avoid a repeat in 2020? Rather than rely on bureaus, news organizations could form a corps of roving correspondents who would take to the road to interview people in towns and factories, union halls and chambers of commerce, community colleges and public libraries, churches and synagogues, McDonald’s and Waffle Houses, looking for stories that ooze. Some of these correspondents could have a geographic beat, like Appalachia, Texas, the Rockies, the Plains. Others could be topical— blue-collar America and small-business America, urban America and evangelical America.

Reporters would try to show how ordinary people live their lives, lay bare the structural factors that shape them, and propose solutions.

fashion how decisions taken on Wall Street affect lives on Main Street.

I’m not optimistic, however. The coverage of fashion, interior decor, and art galleries generates ads; stories about Iowa, Missouri, and Idaho do not. With subscribers becoming an increasingly important source of revenue at papers like the Times and the Post, they are doing more to shape what gets into the paper; stories on red-state America simply can’t compete with red-meat stories about Trump. Even more important than financial considerations, however, are attitudinal ones. To many journalists in New York and Washington, Middle America remains a strange and alien place— full of Rosie the Riveters who are easily overlooked by the winners in the global economy.

Michael Massing is a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 29

Catching a Breeze America’s belated push to develop offshore wind energy

By Derrick Z. Jackson

T

hree years ago, after the collapse of Cape Wind off Nantucket Sound, renewable offshore wind energy in the United States was “a stone dead market,” according to Thomas Brostrøm, president of Ørsted North America.

His Danish parent company, formerly DONG Energy, has built more offshore wind farms than any country in the world.

Cape Wind, the 130-turbine, 468-megawatt brainchild of clean energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon, was litigated to the grave by local resi-

30 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

dents as too ruinous to the Cape Cod seascape.

It was resisted by liberal Kennedys and rightwing Kochs alike. Despite its environmental benefits, the project also was persistently criticized as a noncompetitive boondoggle with outrageous power costs.

The death knell of America’s first would-be offshore wind farm was arguably most felt in New Bedford, Massachusetts. That city, despite being the richest seafood port in the United States, has long been beset by high unemployment from the decline of its mills. Betting that

Cape Wind would help make Massachusetts the first American hub of the offshore wind industry, Governor Deval Patrick poured $113 million into a European-grade port terminal that could handle the massive size and weight of blades and foundations and the skyscraper height of towers.

When Patrick and a host of state officials came to New Bedford in May of 2013 to break ground for the terminal’s construction, the city’s mayor, Jon Mitchell, said, “For a corner of the state that has had its hopes dashed so many times in the past wanting transformative economic develop-

a mid-sized city, you have to take risks. I took this job not just to fill potholes and plant trees.”

Fortunately for Mitchell and for friends

photos by derrick jack son

This five-turbine project off Block Island, Rhode Island, is the first offshore wind farm in the U.S.

ment and not quite getting there, now it’s real.”

After the collapse of Cape Wind, Mitchell drew the ire of residents who felt set up and burned yet again. “I can remember allowing myself to listen to the radio chatter after the announcement [that the plan had collapsed],” he says. “The hosts and the audience wanted to pile on that I was putting all my eggs in one basket and made it like there was nothing left because they assumed Cape Wind was central to my economic strategy.

“It was painful. But when you’re the mayor of

of renewable energy, the stone-dead market has been reborn with a speed that has stunned offshore wind advocates. The United States may be an embarrassing quarter-century behind Denmark in putting its first offshore wind farm into the water—a five-turbine, 30-megawatt project off Block Island, Rhode Island, completed in late 2016—but it is still on the verge of that very transformative change Mitchell talked about a hopeful five years ago.

This year, the Bay State will select the developers for between 400 and 800 of the 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power mandated by Massachusetts. Based on the bids, 1,600 megawatts (or 1.6 gigawatts) would power up to one million homes, nearly a third of the households in the state. Projects are being announced, planned, and approved all the way from New England to the South Atlantic. As evidence that offshore wind is an unprecedented economic opportunity, even the Trump administration—no friend of green energy—has thus far continued the Obama-era program of competitive leasing for offshore wind projects in federal waters.

A year ago, the government awarded a lease of 122,000 acres of ocean off Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called the $9 million lease sale “a big win” for energy independence and economic boosting. In October, Zinke met with the energy minister of wind energy pioneer Denmark as the two nations signed an agreement to share information about the industry. In January, Zinke’s energy policy counselor, Vincent DeVito, traveled to Denmark, where Bloomberg quoted him as saying that the United States is working “quite aggressively” to pursue a “robust expansion of offshore wind.”

The Trump administration’s friendly curiosity about offshore wind is quite curious. Zinke is otherwise opening up public lands and waters for fossil fuel drilling and is slashing climate science at the Interior Department. His boss, President Donald Trump, wanders from fantastical romancing of coal, to fanatical ravaging of the Environmental Protection Agency, to giving the planet a sooty middle finger with his rejection of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and the Paris climate accords. The dabbling

with Denmark is stunning, considering how that nation has turned its back on fossil fuels. It is shooting for 50 percent wind energy by 2020 and 100 percent renewable energy by 2050.

Trump himself has had little good to say about wind, once tweeting, “Windmills are destroying every country they touch.” He failed to block a demonstration offshore wind farm in view from one of his Scottish golf courses.

He ridiculously claimed wind farms are “not working at large scale,” and when they do work, they “kill all the birds.” As president-elect, he told The New York Times, “We don’t make the windmills in the United States.”

One can only suppose that Trump publicly trashes wind to be in anachronistic sync with his climate-change denying base. Zinke has also jumped on the “turbinator” bandwagon, last year telling the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that turbines “chop” up to 750,000 birds a year. The risk of turbine-bird collisions was real enough for the George W. Bush and Obama administrations to devise voluntary guidelines for wind farm siting.

While there should continue to be studies as wind power proliferates on land and at sea, the political fixation on turbines is hilarious. Wind farms do kill up to 327,000 birds a year, but vehicle collisions, window crashes, and clawing cats respectively annihilate up to 1,000 times, 3,000 times, and 11,000 times as many birds, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A University of Vermont Law School study found that fossil fuel power plants kill 24 million birds a year.

As for Trump’s claims about the lack of scale and the United States supposedly not making windmills, the U.S. is merely the world’s second-leading wind market after China and has the third-most wind jobs in the world after China and Germany.

The American land-based wind industry

was launched by liberal California, but is surging in some of the reddest parts of Trump’s electoral landscape. The top six biggest installers of landbased wind in 2016 were all states he handily won to claim the White House: Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska.

The five states where wind energy is between 21.5 percent and 36.6 percent of electricity generation are all states Trump won: Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and both North and South Dakota.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 31

There no longer is any comparison with coal, which Trump touted as beautiful and clean in his January State of the Union address. While at most 1,000 coal jobs were added in Trump’s first year, the wind industry added 25,000 jobs in 2016, according to Trump’s own Department of Energy. In 2012, there were nearly 90,000 coalmining jobs and 80,000 wind energy jobs. Today, with cheap natural gas and the rapid advance of technology that makes renewable energy costcompetitive, there are more than 100,000 manufacturing, construction, and operations jobs in wind, nearly double coal’s now 52,000.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two fastest-growing jobs in the country are solar installer and wind-turbine technician, earning a respective median annual wage of $39,000 and $52,000 a year. While Trump has thrown the solar installation industry into a quandary with his new tariffs targeting Chineseand Korean-made panels, the entire supply chain for onshore wind is here in the United States.

The American Wind Energy Association, the trade group for the industry, claims more than 500 facilities in 41 states. Onshore wind is a bipartisan success that has survived fossil-fuel lobby attacks on renewable energy production tax credits. The original author of those credits is Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who warned Trump during the presidential campaign that any attempt to eliminate them would have to be done “over my dead body.” The two top manufacturers of giant towers, blades, and nacelles, according to the American Wind Energy Association, are blue-state Colorado and swing-state Iowa.

The three states with the most numerous wind subcomponent factories are swing-state Ohio, red-state Texas, and blue-state Illinois.

Offshore wind offers the opportunity to accelerate that story, and it appears that at least some people within the Trump administration realize it. While Trump generally delights his base by trying to erase the Obama legacy, the Department of Energy still maintains on its website the prior president’s ambitious hopes and strategies for wind power. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates that offshore wind off U.S. coasts could power the country twice over.

A 2015 Wind Vision report assumes that offshore wind will account for a quarter of all wind jobs by 2050, helping direct manufacturing,

32 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

construction, and operations wind jobs to at least triple to between 301,000 and 378,000.

To see what that future looks like, one

need only look at northern Europe. Eleven countries, led by the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, have 4,149 turbines spinning, mostly in the North, Irish, and Baltic Seas, churning out nearly 16 gigawatts of power. There are enough projects on the way for the continent to hit 25 gigawatts by 2020. Even the lowest projection for 2030

by WindEurope, the continent’s top industry advocacy group, is 50 gigawatts. The world’s

The stone-dead market for offshore wind in the U.S. has been reborn with a speed that has stunned renewable energy advocates. two biggest wind farms yet are being built over the next four years in England’s North Sea, near the Humber Estuary and the cities of Hull and Grimsby. When completed, they will provide 2.6 gigawatts of power for 2.3 million homes.

WindEurope anticipates that offshore wind will account for 7 percent to 11 percent of the EU’s electricity demand by 2030, and that all wind energy will provide between a quarter to nearly a third of demand. But with the cost of offshore wind dropping and technology improving so rapidly, the group said offshore wind could produce a quarter of EU demand on its own by 2030.

After launching the industry with heavy public subsidies to support the development of nascent green energy, governments are enjoying the fruits of innovation, approving projects with record-low subsidies or none at all. Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and two dozen top offshore wind companies last year pledged to add 60 gigawatts of offshore wind during the

2020s. In a joint statement, they said offshore wind should be “fully competitive with new conventional generation ahead of 2030.”

That means cleaner air and thousands of jobs. Germany had a 10 percent jump in 2015 alone and is today up to 20,500 offshore wind jobs, according to the German Wind Energy Association. Denmark’s offshore industrial sector, rapidly making the switch from oil and gas to offshore wind, is 13,000 strong. The Netherlands expects its offshore wind force to shoot from 4,000 in 2016 to 10,000 by 2020.

Most impressive at the moment, and perhaps the best model for the United States, is the United Kingdom. The U.K. was not as paralyzed over offshore wind as the United States, but did not embrace it the way Denmark and Germany did—and thus ceded to those two nations the original core of the industry. But the British have already made up for lost time as the world’s leader in installations. The United Kingdom is now up to more than 1,700 turbines in the water, accounting for 43 percent of the continent’s offshore power.

The United Kingdom should be at 10 gigawatts by 2020 and, depending on growth scenarios, could double, triple, or even quadruple that by 2040, according to the University of Hull.

That could mean more than doubling the nation’s current 17,500 jobs in planning, manufacturing, construction, transportation, and technical and business support. There is enough action to attract factories. Siemens Gamesa opened a giant blade plant in Hull a little over a year ago.

I reported from Hull last year for The Boston Globe. The Humber region is expected to grow from 1,500 jobs in the offshore industry to more than 6,000. Unemployment in Hull, nearly 16 percent in 2012, was 6.6 percent last September. I talked with former oil and gas workers who retooled. In an eerie parallel to onshore wind taking hold in the red states of America, two-thirds of Hull voters supported the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union out of anger that London left smaller cities behind. But when it comes to jobs, it does not matter that the companies behind the boom are Danish and German.

“It’s a little bonkers,” says David Laister, business editor of the Grimsby Telegraph.

“When you’ve got DONG [now Ørsted] and Siemens investing billions of dollars in the area,

Offshore wind ports like the UK’s Hull must be large enough to accommodate turbines half the height of the Empire State Building and blades nearly the length of a football field.

it’s hard to get mad at them. They’ve made the statement they’re not going away.”

I’ve also been to the city of Bremerhaven, Germany, where unemployment was nearly 24 percent in 2005, from the crash of the fishing industry, factory and shipping downturns, and the shuttering of a U.S. military base. Today, unemployment has been nearly halved to about 13 percent. The downtown has several museums for family tourism, a deluxe conference hotel, a beautiful ocean promenade, and local universities and vocational colleges with students training for blue-collar and white-collar offshore wind jobs.

That is significantly due to the vast nearby docks. In an industry where turbine heights now reach halfway up the Empire State Building, where single blades are nearly the length of a football field, and where the nacelle housings from which the blades spin and generate power are indeed the size of houses, the offshore wind ports of places like Bremerhaven and Cuxhaven in Germany or Hull in the U.K. are no less impressive than a visit to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. It is in fact a cliché for European offshore experts to call offshore wind their “moon shot.”

For all its sloth, America can still be a

celestial body in the offshore wind universe.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island can take particular credit. Even as Cape Wind was in limbo, state agencies such as the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center kept pushing for more investment. In 2013, the nation’s first competitive lease sale was held, won by Providence-based Deepwater Wind for $3.8 million for 164,750 acres of water known as the Massachusetts and Rhode Island Wind Areas.

Deepwater Wind is the developer of the fiveturbine Block Island project. CEO Jeff Grybowski was once a corporate lawyer and chief of staff to Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri. He said his first reaction to offshore wind was “What a ridiculous idea. You’re going to put wind turbines in the middle of the ocean?

How in the world would we get state and federal to all line up to support it? Then I thought, this is a fascinating puzzle to put together.”

He put the puzzle together to develop America’s inaugural wind farm off Block Island. The five turbines stand only three miles offshore, but this was an easier sell because residents have been using diesel generators—giving them some of the highest energy prices in the

country from one of the dirtiest of fuels. The emissions, which contribute to smog, had the Environmental Protection Agency charging the local power company with violations of the Clean Air Act in the 1990s.

That meant Grybowski had to do a lot less arm-twisting than in the case of Cape Wind.

But he still had to be careful because there was some skepticism among residents of claims that the project would save money on their bills. Part of staying in their favor required downsizing from an original eight turbines to five when the power of machines increased from 3.6 megawatts to 6.

On Grybowski’s first visit to scope out the island, he took the ferry from the mainland in the summer, in his regular business suit. “I realized we better take these ties off,” he said. “We had the cabbie take us to Southeast Light [off which the turbines can now be seen]. The cabbie was very inquisitive as to why we wanted to go there. We knew as soon as we left, the whole town would be talking. It was like Mayberry.”

Mayberry, for now, is the metropolis of American offshore wind. It forged ahead as Cape Wind lost its power contracts at the beginning of 2015, when the mood of investors plummet-

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 33

Wind power means cleaner air and thousands of jobs.

Germany today has an offshore wind workforce of 20,500.

investment firm and the wind division of Spanish energy giant Iberdrola, said, “When people see the prices that come out, I think the possibility will become real to them.” Brostrøm of Ørsted, which is partnering with New England’s top energy provider, Eversource, in a company called Bay State Wind, said, “It will absolutely be a price that will kick-start the industry aggressively.”

As an example of how the industry would be kick-started, Grybowski named eight U.S. ports involved in handling the components of just the five turbines of Block Island, including the loading dock in Houma, Louisiana, where the foundations were made.

If all goes well, there will be many proj-

ed. A federal lease auction held three weeks later drew only two developers from Europe out of a dozen that were qualified. They purchased only two out of four available parcels. Even though each parcel was about the size of Deepwater’s $3.8 million area, they got them for a depressing $281,285 and $150,197.

“Those were some very dark days,” says Bill White, the offshore wind director of Massachusetts’s clean energy economic agency. “I thought the collapse of Cape Wind would have pushed the industry back ten years.”

White is glad that he was wrong. When Cape Wind was planned, normal turbine power was 3.6 megawatts per machine. Now, turbine power in Europe is at 8 megawatts per machine and is about to hit 10 megawatts, 18 and 22 times more than when the industry started with .045-megawatt machines in Denmark in 1991. Along with transmission upgrades, new offshore wind energy costs are well below new nuclear power and are taking dead aim at natural gas.

Those developments have been seized upon by several U.S. states, which, in the absence of national energy policy from a conservative Congress, are acting like individual European nations to create their own renewable energy portfolios. For instance, as Massachusetts faced the rapid retirements of coal and nuclear power plants, serious legislative debate began on how to replace the energy while also meeting greenhouse gas reduction goals. The ultimate result was the 2016 bill that mandated offshore wind and hydroelectric power. A key proponent was State Representative Patricia Haddad, who represents a district near New

34 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

Bedford that is home to a 300-acre coal plant that was retired last year.

She once told me that people in her district used to “like our taxes low and our air dirty.”

But the dying coal industry made her see that transmission lines could go in more than one direction, and she swapped out her nickname as the Queen of Coal to the Witch of Wind. The coal plant was purchased in January by a firm that says its primary interest is in renewable energy development.

“I didn’t go into offshore wind to make history,” Haddad told me. “I got into it because there was a problem and you have to chip away at it. I had 300 acres about to go dark. Then I started hearing things about this industry and that there might be 10 gigawatts of power potential in our waters. Why not plug our old plant into this pipeline?”

Moderate Republican Governor Charlie Baker, who succeeded Democrat Deval Patrick, once criticized Cape Wind’s cost as a sweetheart deal. But he signed the 1.6-gigawatt mandate into law in the face of new economics. A study earlier in 2016 by University of Delaware researchers determined that an efficient 2-gigawatt pipeline of competitive offshore wind projects would deliver competitive energy prices within a decade.

The three entities bidding for the first 400 megawatts of offshore wind in Massachusetts certainly hint as much, along with one bidder promising nearly 11,000 direct and indirect jobs over the life of its projects. Erich Stephens, chief development officer of Vineyard Wind, a partnership of a Danish clean energy pension fund

ects to complete, as Massachusetts’s mandate for 1.6 gigawatts has already triggered a chain reaction. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pledged 2.4 gigawatts of offshore wind, shortly after Statoil of Norway plunked down $42.5 million for ocean rights off Jones Beach on Long Island. The new governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, pledges 3.5 gigawatts. Rhode Island is looking to offshore wind as part of its goal for a gigawatt of clean energy by 2020.

Connecticut is calling for up to 220 megawatts of offshore wind proposals.

Maryland has approved 368 megawatts worth of offshore wind, including a project being built by Deepwater Wind. That state’s energy administration anticipates $2 billion of economic activity, including nearly 10,000 full-time equivalent jobs. In an eye-opening sign that the biggest players in the industry see the United States as a mega-market, Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Denmark’s Vestas last year began a $35 million collaborative with Clemson University in South Carolina to stress-test the world’s most powerful 9.5-megawatt offshore wind turbine.

Proving that innovation comes with foresight, Clemson’s $98 million Energy Innovation Center, which can test turbines up to 15 megawatts, was built with $45 million of Obama-era Recovery Act federal grants from the Energy Department. The $40 million wind-blade testing facility in Boston was also partially built with federal stimulus money and state funds.

Clemson’s facility, in an unspoken show of bipartisanship, is proudly proclaimed as a “success story” by the Trump administration.

Somebody within the White House, despite the general environmental madness of the administration, does see renewable energy as a present and future economic engine. Perhaps they read last year’s report commissioned by the clean energy agencies of Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island and the Clean States Alliance.

That report found that a pipeline of offshore wind between Maine and Maryland ranging between 4 and 8 gigawatts could create 8,300 to 16,700 baseline jobs (work that is almost certain to be done in the United States) by 2028. If industry giants are convinced there are enough projects in the pipeline to build up a complete supply chain here for the 8,000 parts that go into each turbine, and build factories here instead of shipping nacelles and blades from countries such as Denmark, Germany, and France, the number of jobs could soar to more than 36,000.

That is no longer a fantasy, with more than 8 gigawatts of official state mandates and pledges. It may not be long before the United States returns the favor to Europe in technological progress. Deepwater Wind is working with Tesla on offshore wind battery storage. Boston-based General Electric recently announced the development of the world’s most powerful turbine yet, a 12-megawatt machine that will stand nearly 80 stories tall, with blades nearly 350 feet long.

“Many of us who’ve been at it for so long are kind of in disbelief that it’s happening so fast,” White says. “It’s taken so long, but the pipeline is emerging.”

For now, the East Coast owns the action, where ocean floors remain shallow enough for farms to be installed with traditional fix platforms, out of sight of coastal communities.

On the West Coast, California and Oregon have tremendous wind resources as well, but their much deeper waters must wait for floating technology. The first pilot floating farm began operating last year in Scotland.

But so much would have to be done to allow a full industry to blossom. Few singular U.S. ports have the vast space of top offshore wind facilities in Europe, and they would have to be expanded and reconfigured. For instance, the 26-acre, state-of-the-art New Bedford port terminal could hold one and a half modern pro football stadiums. But in Hull, the Siemens Gamesa blade facility could hold 13 Lincoln Financial Fields, where the Super

Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles play.

To borrow from Grybowski’s analogy of offshore wind being a puzzle, Massachusetts and New York are jockeying over where to put the pieces. The former has issued an assessment of its ports and the latter has published a master plan.

Maryland’s offshore wind developers, which include Deepwater Wind, have agreed to invest more than $100 million in port facilities in the Baltimore area. Political and civic leaders up and down the coast are throwing down boasts that they will be the Silicon Valley of offshore wind.

Even if the whole industry does not immediately come to the United States, there is plenty

A pipeline of offshore wind between Maine and Maryland ranging between 4 and 8 gigawatts could create 8,300 to 16,700 jobs. of opportunity in those 8,000 parts of a turbine. Mark O’Reilly, the CEO of the Team Humber Marine Alliance, the top advocate for port business in the Hull and Grimsby area, told me, “Do not get too hung up on getting the big stuff right away. There are actually probably many more jobs in the supply chain in making smaller parts, operations and management and marine specialist services. The most important thing is to build out a knowledgeable base full of expertise. You do that and local jobs will come.”

The University of Hull predicts that U.K. content in the supply chain of offshore wind projects, now just over 30 percent, will double to between 60 percent and 65 percent by 2032, and the value of British participation in offshore projects in the rest of the European Union in the same time period will grow from just over 5 percent to more than 20 percent.

In another analysis of big contracts of at least 10 million pounds, spending on British con-

struction firms shot up from 18 percent to 29 percent just from 2015 to 2017.

The RenewableUK report said offshore wind is now in the top ten of infrastructure spending in that nation, and “making a strong case for a central role in the government’s new industrial strategy.”

Back in New Bedford, the hopes of being

America’s first port hub remain alive. All three bidders for this year’s procurement of offshore wind in Massachusetts have agreed to use the $113 million port terminal. But Mayor Mitchell knows he is no longer alone for future business.

To be sure, he has not put all his eggs in one basket, as efforts to diversify the economy in a high-tech state helped give the city the nation’s biggest drop in unemployment last year. Offshore wind would now be a sweet icing.

“I always believed offshore wind would take off,” he says. “I just thought we’d have more of a lead. When I used to go to mayors conferences, I don’t think anyone paid attention to our ambitions.

“But now, when I talk offshore wind, the mayors of cities like Baltimore, Providence, Honolulu, and Charleston all nod their heads.

We know we have to position ourselves. The next couple of years will be pivotal.”

Mitchell’s thoughts were seconded a few blocks away by his former head of economic development and chief lobbyist for the wind industry. Now an executive at Deepwater Wind, Matthew Morrissey says he was one of the many who thought Cape Wind was too big to fail and would propel New Bedford into new prominence.

Now, he sees a measure of good fortune in waiting for this moment. “We know now that you can’t stand a whole industry on one project,” Morrissey says. “We now have so many projects up and down the coast that we’ll be able to get a fairly quick and rational handle on best practices, costs, and getting this industry right. We have the chance to move this industry faster in the U.S. than Europe. Given how far behind we started, that’s saying something.”

Derrick Z. Jackson is a 2001 Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and co-author of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 35

Mobility and Social Justice Transportation not only helps people get to jobs, it helps create jobs.

We thank the Barr Foundation for supporting this package of articles.

36 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

Connecting Public Transit to Great Manufacturing Jobs

Madeline Janis, who pioneered local hiring agreements, is now enlisting cities to have railcars and buses made in America—by union workers.

By St e v e n G re e nho u s e

ceba s / istock by get t y

A

fter 17 years heading a labor-community alliance in Los Angeles, Madeline Janis had developed a reputation as one of the nation’s most innovative strategists on behalf of workers.

Janis and her coalition had pushed through the nation’s broadest living wage law. She helped devise a strategy to get hundreds of minority workers hired on long-segregated construction projects. She helped invent the concept of “community benefits agreements,” which pressured real-estate and retail developers to hire workers from poor neighborhoods and to promise not to oppose unionization. And she spearheaded an effort that slashed truck pollution at the nation’s largest seaport, while making it easier for port truck drivers to unionize.

But notwithstanding her impressive track record, something was nagging at Janis, long the director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. After battling to help servicesector workers, truck drivers, and construction workers, Janis was eager to fight on a new front: manufacturing.

So she set out on a mission to create more factory jobs in the United States—and to make sure that those jobs were good jobs that employed women and people of color. What’s more, Janis had her eye on another prize: She wanted those jobs to be union jobs. (This was back in 2010, years before someone named Donald Trump hit the campaign trail, promising to bring back manufacturing jobs and make America great again.)

In her years heading the Los Angeles Alliance, Janis had repeatedly concocted ways to use government policies—including procurement policies—to help workers in a range of industries, from hotels to waste-hauling. “But the one area that eluded us was government procurement of manufactured goods,” Janis says. “This has been something I had been dreaming about for years.”

So she became a dreamer and schemer about manufacturing. She left the Los Angeles Alliance and, in 2013, founded Jobs to Move America (JMA), a nonprofit group that has been mighty impressive in bringing factory jobs back to the United States.

By alternately pressuring and working with transportation authorities in Los Angeles, New York, and other cities, Jobs to Move America has gotten foreign manufacturers to create more than 2,500 direct factory jobs in the United States—and several thousand more indirect jobs. Jobs to Move America played a pivotal role in getting Chinese rail and bus companies to build factories in California, Illinois, and Massachusetts. It has also gotten a Japanese company to build a light-rail factory in California, and a French company to add 500 jobs in upstate New York.

Jobs to Move America has been impressive in another way—it has spearheaded efforts that enabled labor unions to succeed in an area where they’ve stumbled badly: unionizing workers at foreign-owned factories in the United States.

“I like the old saying of a country being successful based on making things,” Janis says.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 37

“I always felt that globalization had caused progressives to give up on this huge sector of the economy. They’d say, ‘Manufacturing is globalized so there is nothing we can do. Let’s focus on other sectors of the economy that are sticky’”—meaning jobs in health care and hotels that need to stick to the United States and can’t be shipped overseas.

Soon after Janis turned her focus toward

manufacturing, she learned that the Los Angeles transportation authority, L.A. Metro, would soon put out an $890 million bid for 175 new light-rail cars.

A lightbulb suddenly went on. “We thought, ‘Local hire,’” Janis says. “And, ‘Let’s put in some good-jobs language.’” A native of Los Angeles who went to UCLA Law School, Janis is alternately low-key and intense—and an expert at devel-

with a plan that would give strong preferences to transportation-equipment bidders that promise to do much of their manufacturing in the United States—far more than what traditional Buy America policies call for—and to make those jobs good-paying jobs with solid benefits? (In Janis’s view, the nation’s existing Buy America policies are thin gruel—poorly enforced, with numerous loopholes and often leading to government agencies buying goods that have just 40 percent domestic content.)

So Janis, working with Rogoff, developed a “high road” plan that she hoped would become part of procurement procedures for rail cars and buses. Her plan called for bidders to detail how many factory jobs they would create in the United States, what the hourly pay would be for different jobs, what the benefits would be, and how many disadvantaged workers they

Thanks to JMA, New York, L.A., and Chicago have gotten foreign companies to build factories making their buses and rail cars in —of all places—New York, L.A., and Chicago. oping policies to address ten-sided problems.

So Janis went to meet with L.A. Metro officials to argue that in awarding this $890 million light-rail contract, they should give preferences to companies that promise to hire locally—which meant to pledge to open a lightrail factory in the L.A. area. But L.A. Metro officials told her that federal procurement rules prohibited giving preferences for local hiring.

“I told them, ‘We don’t take no for an answer,’” Janis says.

She decided to go over their heads and appeal to the U.S. Department of Transportation in the hope that officials in Washington would say L.A. Metro had misinterpreted the procurement rules or would grant some “local hiring” waiver on this $890 million bid. Janis discovered that a top DOT official had been a college classmate at Amherst.

But that official, Peter Rogoff—they lived in the same freshman dorm—told her that federal procurement rules simply did not permit local hiring preferences. The two then brainstormed, however, on an alternative: Why not come up

38 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

would hire—such as workers from povertystricken neighborhoods. The more jobs created and the higher the pay, the higher the score bidders would receive in their procurement applications. Janis called this supplement to bid applications the “U.S. Employment Plan.”

“Our thinking was how could we develop language that would get L.A. Metro to buy cars in a way that would create good jobs and provide community benefits,” Janis says. “What the U.S. Employment Plan creates is a competition upwards.”

Rogoff says, “It was largely her brainchild.”

Department of Transportation officials helped her, he said, “not just wade through the legal hurdles,” but in “wading through the pockets of opposition” that her Employment Plan faced from the industry and some cities’ transportation authorities.

Janis went to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington to seek support for her idea—to use transportation procurement dollars to bring more factory jobs to the United States.

Labor leaders loved the idea, and the steel-

workers, the sheet metal workers, and five other unions became partners in JMA’s effort.

Ed Wytkind, then the director of the AFLCIO ’s Transportation Trades Department, became one of the biggest champions of Janis’s idea. “It’s more than just a manufacturing proposition,” says Wytkind, who became chairman of JMA’s board. “It goes way beyond that. It’s a paradigm shift that helps stop a practice in which we squandered billions of procurement dollars by not only not supporting U.S. manufacturing, but also by not insisting on a high-road labor model. Procurement bidding shouldn’t just mean you submitted a cheaper bid. You should meet other criteria to create high-road jobs.”

Once the Department of Transportation had approved the U.S. Employment Plan, Janis went back to L.A. Metro, and she—with the help of her friend Maria Elena Durazo, then the powerful head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor—persuaded the agency to have manufacturers complete the employment plan when bidding for the light-rail contract.

The plan would be weighted significantly in the bid criteria.

This $890 million bid was L.A. Metro’s biggest in years and would be an initial part of some $120 billion that the Los Angeles area plans to spend in future decades to build out its mass transit infrastructure.

Three respected manufacturers—Kinki­ sharyo of Japan, Siemens of Germany, and CAF of Spain—submitted bids. Janis and her deputy, Linda Nguyen, met with all three companies, and they came away encouraged that Siemens and CAF said they would build sizable plants in L.A., each with more than 250 workers. Siemens also agreed to allow card check in any unionization drive—a streamlined unionization process in which companies are to recognize a union once a majority of workers sign pro-union cards. Janis had thought that even with local-hiring preferences prohibited, if an equipment order were large enough, a winning bidder would want to build a factory not far from the city awarding the contract.

But Kinkisharyo rejected card check and told JMA it would employ just 40 workers at a temporary plant near L.A., where there would be some final assembly on cars that had been largely assembled in Japan.

L.A. Metro awarded the contract to Kinki­

deanne fitzmaurice

Mobility sharyo, and Janis was furious. L.A. Metro chose Kinkisharyo because its bid was 5 percent lower than Siemens’s and because it had an excellent reputation for quality and ontime delivery. Its Osaka factory manufactures Japan’s high-speed trains.

Janis hadn’t realized, however, that Kinki­ sharyo, after talking with L.A. Metro officials, had improved its final offer, saying it would build a 250-employee factory in Los Angeles County.

That was a huge relief to Jobs to Move America. But relations soon soured between Kinkisharyo and JMA . When the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) announced plans to organize Kinkisharyo, the company opposed unionization and again refused to allow card check. With JMA’s backing, the electrical workers’ union filed a 588-page environmental challenge to Kinkisharyo’s plant, which was to be in Palmdale, in Los Angeles County, in the high desert 50 miles north of downtown L.A. The union’s challenge alleged violations of state environmental law, saying the project had not obtained needed water rights and could kick up spores that carry “valley fever.”

The Los Angeles Times wrote a blistering editorial attacking JMA and the union.

Angry about this environmental challenge, which could take several years to resolve, Kinki­ sharyo threatened to build the plant in another state. Now Kinkisharyo, JMA , the electrical workers’ union, and L.A. Metro were all frustrated, and in ways the feud made everyone look bad.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who controls several seats on L.A. Metro’s board, set out to fix the mess. After overseeing three weeks of negotiations, Garcetti—who essentially served as mediator—announced a settlement in November 2014. Kinkisharyo would build the plant in Palmdale, and JMA dropped a public records lawsuit against Kinkisharyo.

In return, the company agreed to card check and not to oppose unionization. Kinkisharyo also agreed to work with a coalition of community groups that JMA had brought together— minority groups, veterans’ groups, women’s groups—to assure a diverse workforce.

Now, three and a half years later, Kinki­ sharyo’s Palmdale plant is running at full tilt.

On a recent day, Janis took the 80-minute drive from L.A., through the San Fernando Valley and numerous mountain passes, to

visit the Kinkisharyo plant. It’s housed in two immense former airplane hangars, where nearly 400 unionized workers build the rail cars’ “shells” and install wires, ducts, windows, and fiberglass seats.

“Isn’t this great?” Janis said, surveying the scene. “Think of all the good jobs here.”

Three years ago, Amberrose Powers was

struggling to get by, making $11 an hour as a painter at a small factory near her home. Powers, a confident, talkative 23-year-old, recently began working as a welder at Kinkisharyo, having previously worked in the plant’s paint

theless says, “I love it here.” Lopez earns $26.89 an hour, down from the $41 he was making on a welding job for which he had to travel to other states, forcing him to leave his family for weeks at a time. “It’s great to have the opportunity to stay here in town and work,” says Lopez, 28, who is married with a six-year-old and oneyear-old. “It’s just a 15-minute drive from home.

I get to spend a lot more time with my family and still earn a pretty good living.”

Inside the plant, numerous welders are bent over, sparks flying, working on two dozen rail cars in varying states of completion. Thus far, the factory has delivered 130 rail cars to L.A. Metro,

The Kinkisharyo plant in Palmdale employs 390 unionized workers—including these women—to build rail cars for L.A. Metro.

shop, applying the cream, gold, and maroon colors to dozens of rail cars.

“The opportunities that have come to me because of Kinkisharyo have been endless,” says Powers, who earned $17.30 an hour as a painter.

“Now I can afford rent and school and life.”

Seizing on those opportunities, Powers recently completed the training to become a welder, which lifted her pay to $20.64 an hour.

For Powers, the difference between $11 an hour and $20.64 is the difference between scraping by and getting a foothold in the middle class. “I want to get a new car and then work on a new house,” she says.

Her friend Frank Lopez, a lead welder, took a pay cut in moving to Kinkisharyo, but he none-

which has expanded its order to 235 units. It’s the largest contract Kinkisharyo ever had.

Judy Hermosillo, an IBEW organizer, said it was a cinch to unionize the plant once Kinki­ sharyo agreed to card check. Hermosillo said several workers hesitated to sign cards because of bad experiences with unions, but most others were eager to sign because they thought a union would mean good-paying jobs with good benefits.

“You had the combination of an employer just starting up in a very old facility and a new workforce that was on this learning curve in a manufacturing setting—and no clear avenue to be able to say how to fix things,” Hermosillo said. Many workers had complained that Kinki­

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 39

sharyo was slow to fix one particularly big problem—on summer days, the temperature inside the plant sometimes climbed to 116 degrees.

Powers is a huge fan of the union. “At first, I didn’t even know what a union was,” she says.

“Now I support the union because it’s kind of like your backbone. It’s someone to talk to in a professional way to help you when you don’t know what’s going on.”

Powers says that many Kinkisharyo employees used to work seven days a week, sometimes 12-hour shifts. The union, she says, has helped get factory managers to reduce mandatory overtime and install swamp coolers to make the plant tolerable on torrid days.

Kris Mendoza, a tool crib coordinator, was one of the factory’s earliest union backers. “It gives us a voice,” says Mendoza, who recently moved to a union staff job. “Now we can hold management accountable.”

The Kinkisharyo plant is one of several that Jobs to Move America and the U.S. Employment Plan have helped bring to the United States.

40 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

After winning a $1.3 billion contract from the Chicago Transit Authority, the China Railroad Stock Corporation is building a plant in South Chicago to manufacture 840 rail cars for the city’s “L.” The plant is scheduled to begin production next year, with the company saying it will hire at least 170 permanent workers— and possibly 800 if it wins more work. The IBEW and sheet metal workers say they’re on track to unionizing the plant.

China Railroad also won more than $800 million in contracts from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to build 404 cars for Boston’s transit system. China Rail is building a $95 million, 150-employee plant in East Springfield. And there’s more on the job front. Amtrak awarded Alstom of France a $2 billion contract for 28 Acela trains, which will be built in an Alstom factory in Hornell in upstate New York. Alstom is expected to add more than 500 workers at the factory.

After Governor Andrew Cuomo persuaded New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority to use the U.S. Employment Plan, Kawasaki won a $1.45 billion order to build

535 subway cars at its plants in Yonkers and Lincoln, Nebraska.

City officials have hailed these new factories. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the China Rail factory “a classic win-win for Chicago.” Palmdale Mayor Jim Ledford called Kinkisharyo’s $60 million factory “a monumental project” for the area.

Ten miles north of the Kinkisharyo plant, in the L.A. County high-desert city of Lancaster, is a gigantic Chinese-owned bus factory—the size of eight football fields—that has a $45 million order to make 60 buses for L.A. Metro.

The plant, which makes zero-emissions electric buses, is owned by BYD—standing for Build Your Dreams—a Chinese company that is the world’s leading producer of such buses, having produced 39,000 of them over the past six years.

Thanks in part to Jobs to Move America, the factory has 600 well-paid unionized workers (and 200 white-collar workers). It produces one bus every three days, with plans to produce more than one a day.

“This has been the highlight of my career, being involved with this,” says Macy Neshati,

xinhua / al amy stock photo

BYD (Build Your Dream), a gigantic Chinese-owned factory in Lancaster, California, has a $45 million order to make 60 zero-emissions buses for Los Angeles.

jobs to move americ a

Mobility the plant’s manager and a senior vice president of BYD. “For once, jobs in China are being brought to America, rather than China taking them. That’s an irony, but a good irony.”

The factory—which BYD opened in 2014— makes buses for not just Los Angeles, but also Stanford University, UCLA , UC Irvine ,and the cities of Long Beach, Denver, and Albuquerque. “The U.S. is a very desirable market for BYD,” Neshati says.

Nowadays, Jobs to Move America and BYD seem like best buddies. But three years ago they were at war, partly because BYD was resisting a union and refusing to sign a community benefits agreement. A whistleblower told Janis that BYD had hired fewer than half the workers promised under its U.S. Employment Plan. The whistleblower also told Janis that BYD was employing five temporary workers from China who were being paid in yuan and receiving less than the minimum wage.

Janis took the story to the press, and BYD’s image took a beating. Seeing that BYD was eager to repair its reputation, Janis and a dozen L.A. community groups pressured BYD into signing a version of the community benefits agreements that Janis had formerly gotten real-estate developers to sign. BYD agreed to card check and neutrality (not to oppose a union) and to work with women’s, minority, veterans’, and ex-offenders’ groups to assure a diverse workforce.

The seven-union coalition working with JMA agreed that the sheet metal workers’ union should organize the plant, and the union—to the dismay of some labor leaders—agreed to BYD’s demand that it get 70 percent of the factory’s workers to sign cards to gain recognition.

But the union obtained the 70 percent without much of a strain.

“When we have a neutrality agreement, there isn’t some intimidation factor against being union, and that helps with the process immensely,” says Joseph Sellers, the president of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, known as SMART. Edward Seda, a strapping 28-year-old with a goatee, is a final assembly leader on windows and windshields at BYD. Before taking a job there two years ago, he worked a $13-an-hour roofing job that required a 50-minute drive

each way. “The money is much better here,” Pushed by his wife, Neshati, 63, had been says Seda, who now makes $19.08 an hour. planning to retire, but BYD’s worldwide chair“And now I have health care. The benefits are man, Wang Chuanfu, sold him on how electric a lot better.” He has four small children. buses would be great for the environment.

“I love it. I hardly have to commute anymore,” “I had goosebumps from that conversation,” he adds. “People are very excited. They’ve been says Neshati, who had been running a factory given a lot of job opportunities—something we’ve that refurbished old buses. “I got a lump in my been lacking here. A lot of people were working throat about building a green environment in in a local grocery store making minimum wage.” our country.”

Neshati informed his wife that he wasn’t Seda praised the union for bringing seniority and just-cause protections. “We have guar- going to retire—he now spends weeknights in anteed raises now,” he says with a smile. a hotel and returns home on weekends. He has Rex Parris, Lancaster’s mayor, says BYD overseen a fivefold expansion of the factory— has been a boon to his city. Some of his fellow from 90,000 square feet to 450,000.

Republicans have given him grief, however, “I have five grandchildren, from 12 through because the factory is unionized—they worry just-born,” he said. “My generation, we’ve done that having a union means more Democrats. a lot to muck up this planet. If I can spend the Parris is glad that the union has brought higher wages. “I can’t have a safe city unless people have living wages,” he says. He hopes the sheet metal workers’ union will work with the city to pressure health insurers to hold down costs and improve the quality of health care.

Willy Solorzano, an organizer with the union, says most of BYD’s workers had never been in a union or had little idea what benefits unions bring. “I had to walk the whole facility to give the Unions 101 explanation,” Solorzano says. “One worker asks, ‘Why do I have to pay out of pocket for representation?’ I said, ‘Do you Madeline Janis (center) at a transportation expo with Erika Patterson have a car? Do you put gas in your car? (left), California Director for JMA, and a representative from BYD Because it’s needed to get to this place.

Same thing with the union. You pay dues to get last two or three years of my career doing a few to what you have here.’” teardrops worth of good, I’ll go to my grave Plant manager Neshati, who has an encyclo- feeling I’ve done some good with my life and pedic knowledge of bus manufacturing, says the making things better for my grandkids.” union has been “tremendously helpful.” “Our negotiations ended up with cigars and wine on For Janis and Jobs to Move America, the patio,” he says. Neshati showed union nego- reeling in factories like Kinkisharyo and BYD tiators BYD’s financial statements so they could wasn’t easy. Far more than just developing the see that the plant was losing money.

U.S. Employment Plan, it required persuading “I put that on the board so they can see what transportation authorities in L.A., Chicago, we lost. We’re still struggling to get to a break- New York, and Boston to adopt it. That meant even point,” Neshati says. “They looked at the getting political friends, community groups, board, and said, ‘Holy crap.’ They came back labor unions, and environmental allies to push with a much more reasonable deal.” for the plan and for community benefits agree“I’d love to pay an extra $3 an hour,” Neshati ments. It also involved finding points of leveradds. But he says the company and union first age to get companies to agree to card check, needed to work together to make the plant to promise to hire more minority workers and women, and to create more apprenticeships— profitable.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 41

all to provide more opportunities for those underrepresented in manufacturing.

“It’s all about a comprehensive strategy,” Janis says—which includes researching an industry, doing policy analysis, building a political game plan and a communications strategy, having the right partners, and ultimately making JMA a powerful institution.

Financial backing from the Surdna, Annie E. Casey, Durfee, Kellogg, and Ford foundations helped transform JMA from a toddler into a force to be reckoned with.

One thing Janis doesn’t do is think small. She’s always looking for an angle to gain leverage, forever maneuvering to expand her field of play.

“Madeline is a force of nature,” says Scott Cummings, a UCLA law professor. “She’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve met in being able to identify an opportunity to make a difference

mental organization, and we want to also be a champion for good jobs. We couldn’t ask for a better partner than JMA .”

Janis acknowledges that JMA has made less and slower progress than she had hoped. By now, she had hoped to get 20 rail car and bus companies to adopt high-road practices, but thus far JMA has persuaded only a half-dozen to do so. “We haven’t gotten to the scale we’d like to get to,” she admits.

Over the past year, Janis has developed a more ambitious goal—not just to bring transportation manufacturing to the United States, but also to shape an industry. It’s no coincidence that JMA first targeted transit authorities in L.A, Chicago, New York, and Boston—they’re giants in the field. But Janis had an ulterior motive—she is seeking to ensure that those giants use their procurement power to assure

JMA hopes to ensure that every electric bus manufacturer has a highly paid, highly diverse workforce—with plenty of apprenticeships (and unionization, too). and then to tenaciously move forward in the face of opposition and multiple roadblocks to effectuate that opportunity.”

JMA has turned to a longtime ally, former Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis—now one of the five elected L.A. County Supervisors and an L.A. Metro board member—to push L.A. Metro to use the U.S. Employment Plan as much as possible. “I want to see jobs stay here,” Solis says. “Jobs to Move America has been bringing groups that don’t always talk to each other —the Teamsters, the machinists, blacks, Latinos—to fight to keep jobs here.”

JMA’s vision is very much about creating good union jobs, but it’s also about linking arms with community groups representing African Americans, Latinos, women, veterans, and former convicts to help find good factory jobs for them. And JMA is also about deepening ties with environmental groups.

“We share a core value—that the transition to a clean economy also builds a fair economy,” says Evan Gillespie, a deputy director of the Sierra Club. “We are primarily an environ-

42 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

a high-road, heavily unionized rail car and bus industry across the entire country.

With the electric bus industry exploding, as city after city wants these zero-emission vehicles, JMA hopes to use the U.S. Employment Plan as a sword—to assure that every electric bus company, whether BYD, New Flyer, Proterra, or others, has high-road, high-paid, highly diverse workforces, with plenty of apprenticeships (and, JMA hopes, unionization, too.)

“There is an emerging set of companies— we’re trying to shape the market,” Janis says.

“That’s been a big revelation for us in the past year. We think we’re part of the solution. …

What started as a certain idea has morphed into a bigger market-shaping, economyshaping idea.”

Janis hopes that JMA helps rebuild the union movement. She hopes that three strategies— government procurement, community benefit agreements, and building labor-communityenvironmental coalitions—can help create tens of thousands of union jobs and give unions new energy, momentum, and popularity.

Early on, Janis looked for advice from Robert Pollin, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts. He told her that the existing Buy America policies were inadequate, often falling far short of their goal of 60 percent domestic content.

“The U.S. federal, state, and local governments are the biggest purchasers of goods and services in the world. We can use that power,” Pollin says. “JMA takes the taxpayers’ own money to strengthen manufacturing, job opportunities, communities, and innovations in our economy. That seems like an entirely legitimate use of taxpayer funds. It allows us to rebuild manufacturing in an area where we’ve grown weak.”

Each year, the United States spends $4.6 billion on bus and rail car investments. JMA estimates that this should in theory be able to create 38,600 direct and indirect high-road transportation equipment jobs, far more jobs than JMA has already helped to create.

More broadly, federal, state, and local agencies spend $2 trillion a year all told on goods and services. In light of such huge numbers, Janis and JMA want to take their “high-road procurement” vision to a broader terrain—to school buses, communications equipment, and infrastructure equipment bought by agencies other than transportation agencies.

“We think with this approach, you can add criteria for food purchases by schools, jails, and hospitals,” Janis says. “You can think of a million things where these policies can be used.”

Janis says she turned her focus to manufacturing partly out of frustration that so many progressives had given up on it.

“I think an economy can’t work well if the economy doesn’t make things,” she says. “Manufacturing is the pillar of a healthy, successful, sustainable economy—and globalization shouldn’t change that. We needed to find a way to adapt to modern circumstances, to find a new way to revitalize manufacturing.”

Steven Greenhouse was a reporter at The New York Times for 31 years and was its labor and workplace reporter from 1995 to 2014. He is the author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker and is writing a book on the history—and future—of labor unions and worker advocacy in America.

Mobility

Moving People, Not Cars

Dedicated lanes for bikes and buses are a great idea. But there is only so much city street to go around. The missing link? Limiting cars.

B y Joan F i t z geral d

B

ike rentals are popping up in every major U.S. city, a harbinger of the desire of more and more people to break the car habit. Enthusiasts have visions of Copenhagen and Amsterdam, where about 40 percent of people commute to work and do many errands by bike. Yet few American cities have separate lanes in which bikes can safely travel. Meanwhile, bus rapid transit—buses moving in their own lanes that drive up to platforms and are boarded like trains—is catching on as a lower-cost alternative to expensive subways. But here’s the catch that is slowing the shift to both bikes and modern buses: There are only so many lanes on a given street, and at some point these uses compete with each other— unless cars are given less space to hog the road.

Unlike Europe, American cities tend to have a stunted, token version of these car-alternatives.

Instead of separated, dedicated lanes for bikes and buses, we get what transportation planners have dubbed “sharrows” (lanes that both cars and bikes use, marked confusingly with a bike symbol); and bus-rapid-transit “lite” (a lane seemingly reserved for buses, except when it isn’t). But there’s another option. If there were fewer cars permitted in center cities, and street parking were ended to open lanes for other uses, we could move more people through cities faster, more pleasantly, and with a lot less pollution.

This is not difficult as a matter of transportation planning. In a nation addicted to cars, the problem is politics. And the underdevelopment of mass transit creates a vicious circle. The less available and attractive the alternatives, the more people cling to their cars. And the more cars dominate, the less room there is for bikes and buses. But some cities are making headway

nonetheless. And the pioneers, from which we can learn, are mainly in Europe.

It’s hardly a new idea. Florence, Italy, has closed off its historic center, a 40-block area, to all but pedestrians, taxis, and buses for years, as have many other Tuscan towns. Venice is completely car-free. Freiburg, Germany, banned cars in its historic center in 1973 and built extensive bike and trolley infrastructure.

The list goes on.

There is renewed enthusiasm among urban planners for rethinking city streets to meet the goal of moving people—without the assumption that cars have priority while buses, trolleys, bikes, and pedestrians take the space that’s left. Some European cities are taking the idea a step further by discouraging or eliminating cars—truly reimagining cities. Berlin, Hamburg, Madrid, and Oslo are among the European cities currently taking comprehensive action to create car-free zones and bike “superhighways”—physically separated, uninterrupted bike lanes that traverse a city. To do this, they are de-privileging cars.

tric vehicles, tells me that expanding public transportation and making it cleaner are also key priorities. Transit ridership has been rising steadily, up 4.6 percent in 2016 alone.

Frequency of service on the tram system has been increased and in 2016, Ruter, Oslo’s public transportation company, announced an unprecedented 10 billion kroner ($1.3 billion) expansion to be built over eight years. Ruter also aims to be completely fossil-free by 2020.

The tram and metro run on renewable hydropower. About 35 percent of city buses are powered by biodiesel, hydrogen, and biogas, and the first battery electric buses are being piloted this year with major bus-charging infrastructure planned for next year. By 2025, 60 percent of the bus fleet will be fully electric.

Five hydrogen buses are being tested as part of a European hydrogen bus demonstration project. Portvik adds that more park-and-ride solutions are being developed to reduce the number of cars coming into the city. Combined with highly subsidized fares, he expects car traffic to be reduced significantly.

In 2015, citizens elected a progressive government made up of the Labour, Green, and Socialist Left parties. This coalition doubled down on efforts of the previous conservative city governments by proposing to create Europe’s largest car-free city center. The city’s announce-

The View from Oslo

With 61 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions from transportation and 39 percent from cars, Oslo has developed an integrated solution for reducing pollution and emissions that features more electric vehicles, better transit, fewer cars, and more bikes and walking.

Oslo has become the world’s capital for electric vehicles due to generous national subsidies, development of a charging infrastructure, and incentives such as free charging, exemption from tolls, and use of HOV lanes. In 2017, half the new-car purchases in Oslo were electric.

Sture Portvik, Oslo’s project leader on elec-

Since 2015, Oslo has been working on a plan to establish the largest car-free city center in Europe.

ment was met with considerable opposition from residents and businesses, which was a bit of a surprise to planners, given that only 12 percent of the area’s 1,000 residents owned a car and 93 percent commuted by public transit, bike, or on foot. But the business community was concerned about losing shoppers and street

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 43

life generally. Residents were concerned about their communities becoming isolated.

After several months of planning, the city council devised a three-phase plan to gradually work toward having as few cars as possible by 2019. The idea is to reduce cars by shrinking parking. As of June 2017, most cars (even electric) must park in garages outside of the city center. Spaces for the disabled and delivery vehicles are being preserved. To date, 362 parking spaces have been eliminated and another 405 will be removed by June.

The city plans to add 60 kilometers (nearly 40 miles) of bike lanes, on which construction has begun, as has closing off a few streets to cars. And Oslo is converting 35 streets to bike-only, on a path for the city to become car-free by 2019. With a recently improved city bike program, the added lanes will help the city to reach its goal of 25 percent of commuting by bike by 2025. Given that Oslo is hilly, the city council appropriated 5 million kroner ($645,800) to subsidize electric bike purchases, and is piloting a small freight terminal where goods are dropped off for distribution by electric bicycles.

Kari-Anne Isaksen, political adviser to Oslo’s vice mayor on environment and transport, told me that planners are also working on improving the pedestrian network by adding amenities such as playgrounds, trees and foliage, and cultural events in pilot areas in the zone. She says that in year three, the city will assess its progress and public opinion before committing to expanding the nearly car-free zone.

In Norway, where cars are taxed at 100 percent and government subsidies for transit are plentiful, cities don’t have to go it alone. But in the United States, cars rule, and historically federal transportation aid has supported highways more than public transit. So American cities that are trying to reduce car traffic and promote transit, walking, and biking have a far tougher job. Two East Coast cities that say they are trying are Cambridge and Boston— cities that both have high rankings for bikefriendliness and walkability.

Bike-Friendly Cambridge

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is well-situated for de-emphasizing cars. It is the nation’s top-

44 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

ranked medium-sized city for bike friendliness and walkability, with 24 percent of residents walking to work, and 77 percent getting to work by means other than a car. The MBTA Red Line subway serves every major square, and the city is developing more dedicated bus lanes.

With about 46 miles of bike facilities, bicycling has become a viable mode of transportation.

Tegin Teich, a transportation planner in Cambridge, says the actions the city is taking are like Oslo’s, with goals focused on emphasizing

rates. A community input process was essential, as creating the lane required removing 85 of 150 parking spots. And planners had to figure out how to have the protected lane while still accommodating bus pick-ups and drop-offs for the high school located on the street, handicapped parking and accessibility, and transit bus access. While residents and businesses expressed the same complaints as those in Oslo, overall response has been positive, particularly because a key

Cambridge, Massachusetts, is ranked number one in the nation for bike friendliness and walkability.

and enhancing the more sustainable modes of walking, bicycling, and transit, but without an ultimate “zero cars” goal.

The city has focused on de-privileging cars since its 1992 Vehicle Trip Reduction Ordinance, which established a transportation demand management plan and bicycle and pedestrian programs. The ordinance requires anyone adding vehicle parking spaces to commit to an approved plan to limit the number of single-occupancy vehicle trips. There is ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance.

The unfortunate occurrence of three bicyclist fatalities in Cambridge in 2015 and 2016 motivated strong political support to expedite separated bike lanes for safety. The most recent addition of protected lanes is on Cambridge Street, a major thoroughfare with high crash

motivator for creating the lanes was safety.

With an overall goal of reallocating road space to move people more sustainably, Teich and her team examined bus delays on heavily used routes. While dedicated bus lanes were an effective solution, the team had to figure out both the political and technical feasibility of creating them. And since bus corridors are often the same streets with bike lanes and heavy pedestrian use, Cara Seiderman, Cambridge’s transportation program manager, says they have been careful that the conversation not be about buses versus bikes, but about how to accommodate all modes safely.

A major bus rapid transit (BRT) project is underway on Mt. Auburn Street after it was determined that more than half of the people on the roadway during peak commute times

Mobility were traveling by bus. The project includes dedicated bus lanes, “queue jump” lanes that give buses priority at intersections, and transit signal priority for bus lanes. While eliminating cars is not on the agenda, they have been de-prioritized.

Boston: A Missed Opportunity

Across the river from Cambridge, Boston’s street network can’t accommodate dedicated bike and bus lanes without curbing the space claimed by cars, which the city does not seem willing or ready to do. The city does have a new transportation plan, Go Boston 2030, which identifies 58 action items including overhaul of bus routes, a citywide network of bike lanes and walking paths, and several “complete streets” projects to retrofit major thoroughfares for use by pedestrians and cyclists. The problem is that most projects are unfunded and thus the timeline for completion is, for the most part, 5 to 15-plus years out.

To many transit, bike, and pedestrian advocates, Go Boston tinkers at the edges of the city’s transportation problems, but comes nowhere close to de-prioritizing cars to make way for the proposed bike and bus lanes. This omission is painfully evident in the Seaport District, Boston’s fastest-growing area, where priorities are mostly being set by private developers.

Instead of a much-needed transit stop, the Seaport is getting two big government-subsidized parking garages. One of them, a project of the Boston Planning and Development Agency, is a $22 million extension of an existing garage.

The big one, a 1,550-space $85 million facility, referred to as the “Seaport Transportation Center” is being built by the Massachusetts Port Authority. In fairness, it is replacing lost surface parking. But a fair criticism is that including a shuttle bus stop, a Hubway bike rental station, and a taxi/Uber stand is hardly promoting public transit, walking, or biking, nor does it merit the title “transportation center.”

Instead of eliminating parking, Boston is only focused on making it more efficient. The Boston Transportation Department’s planning director, Vineet Gupta, told me of a recently completed year-long parking performance pilot in the Seaport that priced different blocks independently, changing the price every two months based on the number of available

spaces. The price would increase or decrease depending on availability. While the pricing scheme only resulted in a 1 percent increase in parking availability, illegal parking that clogs streets decreased substantially. But since curbside parking, at roughly $2 an hour, is still a bargain compared with off-street lots, where entry alone costs $15 or more, the pilot only nudged things slightly in the direction of market pricing. So, the pilot ends up being just one more strategy to make it easier to drive.

Despite a desire to attract young professionals to live in the Seaport District, there are no protected bike lanes. Go Boston 2030 calls for a protected bike lane in five years, but there is no funding for it or any of the bike lane projects in the plan. The Seaport’s only public transit is the Silver Line, Boston’s only BRT service, which is described as BRT “lite” at best because it doesn’t

free zones. What we see in Freiburg, Oslo, and other cities is that the public loves them.

Some U.S. cities have gotten serious about

funding the kind of transportation improvements necessary for real progress. In 2016, 70 percent of Los Angeles residents voted for Measure M, a permanent half-cent raise in the sales tax that will bring in $860 million a year for a subway line expansion, a new subway line, an airport connector, biking infrastructure, and greenways. Seattle residents voted for Proposition 1 in 2015, which is raising $930 million over nine years to fund transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian paths as part of the Move Seattle plan.

While Seattle doesn’t have the subway or commuter rail network of Cambridge and Boston, Move Seattle is significant because it has no goals or actions to accommodate cars. Its focus

Urban planners are rethinking city streets to meet the goal of moving people—without the assumption that cars have priority over buses, trolleys, bikes, and pedestrians. have dedicated lanes throughout, and where it does, there is little enforcement of vehicles parking in it. Silver Line buses serving the Seaport are overcrowded and, with no dedicated lanes, lumber along in car-congested streets.

Boston’s emphasis on cars and parking in the Seaport is creating what transportation planners call induced demand—the phenomenon in which providing more roads creates more traffic. Instead, the city could have proposed a grand vision for making the Seaport District car-free, say, by 2030, as Oslo and other cities are doing.

A key question is how to fund such a grand vision, and where leadership comes from. As several local experts and advocates told me, the current mayor, Marty Walsh, has not made transit a priority. When a distinct area like the Seaport grows, private developers should be made to contribute funding for the improvements needed within that district. Failing to do that has been an enormous planning failure. Paradoxically, its compact geography makes Boston the ideal city to establish car-

is on improving mobility by bus, transit, biking, and walking in key corridors of the city. Among its initiatives are adding seven to ten corridors with designated protected lanes for bikes, buses, and transit; seven BRT commuter corridors with designated lanes; 50 miles of new protected bike lanes, including bike routes to all schools; more frequent inner-city bus service; 100 blocks of new sidewalks; and improved crossings at 225 intersections. Most importantly, Seattle raised the funding to make it happen.

There is more to getting people out of cars than creating bike and bus lanes. De-prioritizing cars takes three things: political will, good urban planning, and ample funding for transit. We see all of these in Oslo, combined with a grand vision of a city designed to move people rather than cars. All three are still in short supply in too many U.S. cities.

Joan Fitzgerald is a professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. She is currently working on her next book, Greenovation: Urban Leadership on Climate Change.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 45

Ridesharing Versus PublicTransit

How Uber and Lyft tend to widen disparities of race and class in urban transportation systems B y St ev en Hi ll

M

any working people rely on public transportation to get to their jobs. Mass transit choices have often been entangled with racial politics as well. So not surprisingly, issues of race and class are reflected in the Uber-ization of our city streets.

Even in American cities with subways, public transportation has been poorly funded and provided sketchy service, compared with the efficient and highly functional mass transit systems in most major European or Japanese cities. Taxi service also has been deficient, with a medallion system in major cities that has constrained the supply of taxis and made it difficult to keep up with demand or provide quality service. Not surprisingly, the U.S. rate of private ownership of vehicles is one of the highest in the world. Cheap gas and relatively ample parking contribute to this tilt.

When Lyft, followed by Uber, provided an alternative, ridesharing quickly zoomed in popularity. The 15 percent to 20 percent of Americans who report using ride-hailing services are disproportionately urban. The impact has been mixed. Certainly, some people have gained a useful transportation option, but it comes with a high societal price. Ridesharing has contributed to increases in traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and has undermined mass public transportation. Its use reinforces and in some ways exacerbates existing racially discriminatory patterns in our transportation systems.

The legacy of these companies amounts to a warning to the public and policymakers: If you do not provide people with good transporta-

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tion options, they will take bad ones. In a time of an environmentally retrograde White House and Congress, when cities are supposed to be leaders in the effort to reduce carbon emissions and reduce the use of automobiles in general, ridesharing is taking us backward.

Ridesharing’s war against public transportation

Uber’s business model is to subsidize fares and flood streets with taxi-like cars in order to grab market share and eventually market pricing power. Most customers who love Uber don’t realize that the company actually subsidizes about 50 percent of the cost of every ride. So every time a passenger gets into the car, they are only paying half of the actual cost. The other half is paid by Uber’s wealthy venture capital funders.

As a result of these subsidies, the unprofitable Uber is bleeding money—its annual losses surged 61 percent in 2017 to $4.5 billion (after losing nearly $3 billion in 2016). In the ultimate irony, the more passengers use Uber, the more money it loses. Why would it do that? Because Uber is using its deep pockets to mount a predatory pricing war and drive off the competition. And that competition happens to be not only taxis and other ridesharing companies, but public transportation.

Who uses public transportation in the United States? Governing magazine summarizes the research, which shows that “in nearly all urban areas, data indicates public transportation commuters tend to be disproportionately poorer than those driving to work.” They also tend to be disproportionately people of color. In New

York City, the median earnings of public transit commuters is about $35,000 per year, and only a third of those commuters are white. In Los Angeles, the disparity is even greater. The median income of public transit commuters is only $15,000 per year, 71 percent Hispanic and only 11 percent white. Houston has a similar profile as L.A. So any new policy or technology that impacts public transportation always results in a vastly disproportionate impact on minority and working-class communities.

So it’s troubling that ridesharing appears to be delivering a body blow to public transportation. Ridership on public mass transit is down in nearly every major U.S. city, including in New York City (which recorded its first ridership dip since 2009), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin (a 12 percent decline), Washington, D.C. (10 percent decline), and more.

But can this ridership decline be attributed to ridesharing, even in part?

Most definitely. A study from the University of California Transportation Center found that nearly half of respondents said that if a ridesharing service hadn’t been available, they would have taken a bus, train, bike, or simply walked. Another study found that, if rideshare users did not have that option, up to 61 percent of their trips either wouldn’t have been made at all or would have been done via mass transit, bike, or foot. Still another study found that ridership declined significantly on San Francisco’s new BART train line to the airport as Uber and Lyft saw their ridership to the airport rise almost six-fold. The ridership decline led to BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit, the regional mass transit system) revenue falling under budget for the year by $3.6 million.

It took San Francisco a decade to secure the billions in state and federal funding to extend this line to the airport, and now its usage is being undermined by ridesharing.

Recently I asked a pro-environment person I know in San Francisco, who was about to take an Uber, why he didn’t use public transportation. He said that the bus would cost $2.25, and Uber—which subsidizes half of every fare— would cost about $5. The difference in price was not that great, and Uber was more convenient. Then I asked him, “What if the price for the Uber was double that—what if it was more like $10?” He said that then he would take the

tom williams / cq roll call via ap images

Mobility bus. So because he was only paying 50 percent of the cost of the ride, he used Uber.

He is not alone. Many people are turning away from forms of transportation that are better for the environment, that produce less carbon, and that result in less traffic congestion, and are jumping into an automobile with low-cost, subsidized Uber fares. Public transit consultant Jarrett Walker warns that ridesharing could dramatically undermine mass transit. That’s because the economics of public transit systems depend on revenue from the busiest bus lines, which are profitable, and which then subsidize the other routes. That equation is crucial in allowing a public transit system to extend to less-populated parts of the city, for late-night service, and more.

Losing ridership to subsidized ridesharing services is just the beginning. Public transportation advocates have feared that if private companies begin offering a “micro-transit service” that sprints up and down the busiest and most profitable routes, such passenger-poaching could destroy revenue for public transportation. Uber already is attempting this with its new Uber Express Pool service, which is not point-to-point transport but instead, like a bus, requires riders to walk a little, both to meet their driver and from their drop-off point. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently said he wants his company to run city bus systems, squarely taking aim at this competitor. Other private, for-profit companies have stuck a toe into these waters in various U.S. cities, including Lyft Line and another called Chariot, which is backed by Ford.

Chariot offers a private, plush shuttle service with Wi-Fi along preferred routes for subsidized fares as low as $3.80 per ride. Writing in CityLab, transit advocate and software developer Simon Berrebi said, “Microtransit takes away riders and revenue from transit agencies’ most popular routes.” Ridesharing is draining away the revenue that public transportation needs to sustain itself, and “as micro-transit grows,” Berrebi wrote, “it threatens to push public transportation further into decline.”

By all means, U.S. cities need micro-transport services, especially for targeted needs, but these need to be part of a comprehensive public transit system, like “The Ride,” Boston MBTA’s para-transit van service for the elderly and people with disabilities. If private ridesharing

services skim revenue from the busiest lines, or even from better-off special-needs customers, the overall public transit system will suffer from funding shortfalls.

The ridesharing chokehold on urban transportation

In addition to undermining public transportation, ridesharing is a major contributor to the snarled traffic congestion. In San Francisco, there are about 1,800 taxicabs, and 45,000

declined during that period. Schaller also found that from 2013 to 2016, ridesharing growth added 600 million miles of travel to city streets.

Meanwhile, in London, the number of privatehire vehicles like Uber has jumped 26 percent in the past few years, and is now nearly triple the number of London’s famous black cabs.

So even as the Uber or Lyft car shows up more quickly to pick up a passenger—usually within 5 to 15 minutes—more often now passengers are stuck in heavy traffic for longer time

A man waits for a ride-hailing service at Washington National Airport. Uber subsidizes its fares and thus competes unfairly with public transportation alternatives, ultimately jeopardizing their continued availability.

Uber and Lyft cars, with 9,000 of those on the road at any one time. In New York City, there are approximately 68,000 Uber and Lyft cars, about five times as many as yellow taxis, which has caused average speeds during business hours in Manhattan’s core to drop to a crawl—about 5 to 6 miles per hour, 15 percent to 23 percent slower than in 2010, before Uber.

A study by transportation consultant Bruce Schaller, a former commissioner at the New York City Department of Transportation, found that in Manhattan from 2013 through 2017, the combined number of ridesharing and taxi vehicles increased by 59 percent, the number of trips made in a taxi or ridesharing vehicle increased by 15 percent, and vehicle miles traveled increased by 36 percent. But all of this increase is attributable to ridesharing, since taxi use actually

periods, especially during rush hour, due to “Uber congestion.” Even though the percentage of Americans that use ridesharing is comparatively low, the impact is nevertheless large, with non-ridesharing vehicles stuck in the clogged traffic as well. But isn’t that a contradiction?

It’s a classic case of the straw breaking the camel’s back. The effects of congestion are felt at the margins—once a city has reached capacity, it takes only a few additional vehicles to suddenly turn a tolerable situation into one of desperate overcapacity. Urban cores cannot simply add thousands of additional cars to already-crowded streets and not expect dramatic knock-on effects.

Certainly ridesharing is not the only cause of urban traffic congestion. Transportation experts like David Levinson point out that the

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 47

economy has been expanding, oil prices have plunged, and in places like the Bay Area the hyperactivity of the current dot-com boom is a contributing factor. But I’ve lived in San Francisco for 20 years, and I’ve seen the city streets in both good and bad times, including through the last dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.

I’m not the only long-term resident who has observed that they’ve never seen traffic as bad as it is now. Uber and Lyft cars are everywhere, swarming like bees looking for the honey.

Uber’s new leadership, as well as Lyft’s, continues to deny these negative impacts, with Khosrowshahi even insisting that Uber can help solve congestion by increasing the number of electric cars, as well as rolling out flying taxis by 2020 (which is a preposterous distraction— Uber doesn’t even have a working prototype).

But the most ambitious study of ridesharing

Previously, ridesharing companies promised they would help people shed their expensive, carbon-belching private automobiles, but the ITS study found no evidence of that—just the opposite. The vast majority of ridesharing users (about three-quarters) still owned a car, and the small number of users who have eliminated their own vehicle (9 percent) have merely swapped it for increased ridesharing use. In short, now they use someone else’s car instead of their own. In fact, rather than cutting down on the number of autos, Uber and Lyft have prompted many customers to get rid of their memberships to car-sharing services like Zipcar or Car2Go. More than half of car-sharing users have dropped their membership, and 23 percent cite their use of ridesharing services as the top reason they have dropped car-sharing.

In fairness, some ridesharing customers,

Ridesharing has resulted in a reduction in Americans using bus and light rail services, and has not induced people to give up their own expensive private automobiles. impacts yet conducted, from researchers at the University of California, Davis’s Institute of Transportation Studies, found that ridesharing has resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of trips made and vehicle miles traveled in an automobile. The study, which looked at 4,000 users in seven major metro areas (Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.) between 2014 and 2016, also found a disturbing reduction in the use of public transportation that CityLab has described as “cannibalizing transit.” The ITS study found that ridesharing has resulted in a 6 percent reduction in Americans using bus services and a 3 percent drop in light rail services. This is during a time when use of mass transit needs to increase, if our society is going to get serious about reducing carbon emissions. The one positive was for commuter rail services, where ridesharing has positioned itself as the “last mile” option for riders, transporting them from the train stop to their homes.

That resulted in a 3 percent net increase in commuter rail services, according to the study.

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especially better-off urban dwellers, have gained a new and useful transportation option.

People who work late at night, when public transportation is infrequent, have found ridesharing to be a big help. I have listened to both women and men who think ridesharing service is higher-quality, or feel more comfortable in an Uber or Lyft car than in a taxi (though that sentiment could be racially loaded—ridesharing tends to have more white and fewer immigrant drivers than taxis. More on that below.)

But what about all the working people who still have to drive to work, or take public transit? They are now stuck in all that carbonchoked, congested traffic, taking longer to get to work, dealing with that frustration, so that others can take Uber and Lyft. Is the trade-off worth it? It depends greatly on the individual and her or his circumstances.

In short, ridesharing is like shopping at Walmart or Amazon—sure, you get cheap prices, and that’s good. But you are buying into a commercial ecosystem that undermines society in other ways.

Redlined ridesharing?

In 2016, the Pew Research Center surveyed nearly 4,800 randomly selected U.S. adults, and the study found that different races are using ridesharing in almost equal measures—14 percent of whites have used ridesharing, as have 15 percent of African Americans and 18 percent of Latinos. In sheer numbers, that would mean far more white people are using it than other racial groups. In addition, the Pew study found that a disproportionate percentage of affluent and university-educated Americans use ridesharing—26 percent of Americans who earn $75,000 or more, but only 10 percent of Americans who earn $30,000 or less. Between those two income brackets, 13 percent of Americans have used ridesharing. And 29 percent of college graduates have used it, but for those with a high school diploma or less, only 6 percent.

Younger people are using it more than older.

Also, it’s mainly a city phenomenon, with 35 percent of better-off city dwellers using ridesharing services, and an additional 9 percent doing so with friends (having not installed the app themselves). The UC Davis study found that only 7 percent of suburban Americans use ridesharing to travel around their home area, with another 7 percent using it when they are traveling away from home.

Taxi service has long been accused of discriminating against passengers and certain neighborhoods based on race. But ridesharing is getting its share of criticism as well. A study from 2016 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of Washington found that Uber and Lyft can be as bad as taxis when it comes to bias against minority passengers. The findings were based on nearly 1,500 rides in Seattle and Boston using three ride-hail apps: Uber, Lyft, and a traditional taxi service, Flywheel. The researchers found that Uber drivers in Boston were more than twice as likely to cancel rides for passengers with African American–sounding names. In Seattle, blackname-sounding passengers faced noticeably longer wait times (up to a third longer) for Uber and Lyft service than white passengers.

Allegations of racial discrimination by ridesharing services had been raised before these studies. Uber and Lyft drivers were accused of racial redlining in Dallas, with complaints that

Mobility

f lo r i a n f i l lo n n e a u / i s t o c k b y g e t t y

As a response to “Uber congestion,” cities could use ridesharing’s GPS tracking technology to create special zones that tax vehicles during rush hour and give priority to public transportation.

service was nonexistent in certain neighborhoods. In one exchange between an Uber driver and a potential passenger, the driver stated categorically that “I don’t pick up passengers from untrusted areas. … No fucking way am I going to pick people up in a crime-ridden area.”

Which is the very definition of redlining.

On the other hand, a Pew analysis found that a slight majority of those who live in minority communities say that ride-hailing companies serve neighborhoods that taxis won’t visit. But as taxi companies have suffered from competing against the heavily subsidized ridesharing competition, people living in the shunned neighborhoods are left with one less transportation option, and ridesharing has hardly made up for the gap.

Consider also the racial demographics of who drives traditional taxis versus ridesharing vehicles. According to Uber’s own internal study, 40 percent of its drivers are white, and

48 percent have college degrees. Most drive part-time, a good number of them as few as 10 hours per week to make some extra money in addition to their regular job. Lyft’s internal study found that 34 percent of its drivers do not self-identify as minority.

The driver demographics for traditional taxis are dramatically different, especially in major cities. One study of New York City taxi drivers found that the vast majority are immigrants from places like Bangladesh, India, Haiti; only 5.9 percent of yellow taxi drivers are from the United States. As one study wryly concluded, the most common New York cab driver name is Mohammed. Another study by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission found that 57 percent to 62 percent of drivers in the Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago metro areas were foreign-born by 2000, with those percentages undoubtedly increasing in recent years.

Taxis have long been recognized as a viable entry-level employment opportunity for lowskilled, English-limited immigrants. Traditionally, taxi drivers would work long hours, and some of them eventually were able to purchase their own medallion and start their own driving business. Numerous taxi drivers have told me how they were able to put their children through college, purchase a home, and enter the middle class. But those days are over. In New York, medallions in 2014 soared to a record $1.3 million, far beyond the means of most immigrants. Then, when the price crashed to as low as $150,000, in substantial part due to the competition from ridesharing, many drivers who had gone deeply into debt to invest in a medallion found themselves ruined.

So in essence, today you have two different taxi-type services in major urban areas, one providing work largely for men of color and immigrants with limited education, the other for a

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 49

leaders, to oppose a proposal by Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose new restrictions on ridesharing, including a proposed crackdown on the number of vehicles to reduce congestion. Plouffe was able to get a host of minority leaders to speak out against the de Blasio proposals. No question, racial discrimination has existed in transportation services long before Uber and Lyft. But with ridesharing, the discrimination has become more technologically agile: Rather than pretending they don’t see the black man

Traditional taxi services in major urban areas provide work for men of color and immigrants with limited education; ridesharing servces rely more heavily on better-educated white males who drive part-time.

the report. So that leaves minority communities triply aced out by this techno-transport “disruption,” i.e., losing taxi service as it declines visà-vis Uber; losing a once-viable occupation for low-skilled, English-limited immigrants; and sometimes having their neighborhoods redlined by ridesharing services.

The findings in these studies contradict the image both Uber and Lyft have been cultivating for themselves as antidotes to decades of discrimination by traditional taxis. David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, was hired by Uber as a public relations and strategy guru at a time when the Travis Kalanick–led company was going through one scandal after another. Plouffe mounted a brilliant campaign when he used his contacts developed during the Obama years to stage a press conference in Harlem, surrounded by African American

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on the curb with his hand in the air, the driver instead can discriminate against the passenger based on whether his name sounds black, or he can turn off the app when cruising through the wrong neighborhood.

When you compile these findings together with recent evidence of racial discrimination among Airbnb hosts, a disturbing pattern emerges of a gig economy with a sizable race problem. A study in November 2016 found that black gig workers on services like TaskRabbit and Fiverr received more negative reviews, and women gig workers were more likely not to be reviewed at all. The flexibility of the online platforms has many great advantages for certain types of workers, yet it also enhances the ability of service providers to pre-select drivers, customers, and workers using an impersonal techno-racial filter.

The future—thinking of our streets as a public utility

It may yet be possible to incorporate ridesharing along with existing modes of transportation into the overall transit matrix. But to do that fairly and efficiently, it is necessary to think of our streets as a public utility. We only have so many roads, and cannot build many more of them in dense urban areas. So we have to learn to share them. It is becoming urgently clear that we have to find the right mix of personal autos, buses, trains, delivery trucks, taxis, bicycles, pedestrian zones, and now ridesharing vehicles. Here are five conditions that Uber and Lyft should be required to follow: 1. A limit on the number of ridesharing cars.

Traditional taxis already have a limit, and for good reason—to reduce both congestion and ruinous competition. A balance must be found between having enough taxi-type vehicles to service demand but not so many that the streets are choked with traffic. Interestingly, regulators could use ridesharing’s GPS tracking technology to create congestion zones that limit vehicles and give priority to public transportation, especially during rush hours. Fix NYC, a traffic advisory panel appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has called for all taxis, Ubers, Lyfts, and other on-demand vehicles to be outfitted with GPS technology for not only the purpose of tracking congestion but also to slap a $2 to $5 fee (depending on location, time, and day of the week) on for-hire vehicles, which would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for public transportation. Chicago, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts already have more modest versions of such fees. London and Stockholm have successfully deployed such high-tech congestion zones for a number of years.

2. Don’t allow Uber and Lyft to subsidize their fares, since that violates a basic antitrust doctrine against “predatory pricing” and hurts competition. Require that they charge at least the full cost of each ride, or charge the same as taxis. If the companies refuse, slap a “fairness fee” on their fares to bring their prices into compliance.

3. In general, ridesharing companies and their vehicles should be required to follow all of the same laws that traditional taxis must follow, especially in terms of background checks of drivers, insurance requirements, reporting

robert willet t / the news & observer via ap images

larger number of better-educated white males who often drive part-time. The Eno Center for Transportation wrote a report that examined the impact of new technologies on transportation, and warned about the transit tragedy that will result from the weakening of traditional taxis and public transportation. “Lower-income travelers that do not have access to a smartphone or cannot afford the new services might be left worse off as the traditional transit services they rely upon lose market share,” concluded

Mobility data, and more. It creates too much regulatory confusion and enforcement headaches to have two sets of laws, one for ridesharing and another for traditional taxis.

4. Uber and Lyft must share their data with regulators about their drivers so that drivers can contact one another and organize collectively if they choose. Right now, drivers are a “distributed workforce,” operating in isolation from one another. The ridesharing companies use that condition to prevent organizing.

5. Regulations should ensure that Uber and Lyft treat their drivers fairly and pay them adequately. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has insisted that drivers’ wages are sufficient, but a new study from Stanford University researchers, published by MIT ’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), thoroughly debunks that claim. It found that the median profit for Uber and Lyft drivers is no more than $10 per hour, and that many drivers actually lose money once you subtract their considerable costs for driving their own vehicle (gasoline, insurance, vehicle wear and tear, etc.). Of the 1,100 drivers interviewed, around half earn less than the minimum wage in their state. But this study only reinforces what so many current and former drivers have been saying for years. And if any drivers complained too much, Uber has cut off many from its platform—“fired by algorithm.”

Khosrowshahi also continues to repeat the old Uber falsehood that by keeping fares low, drivers will wait less time between each fare and so they will earn more money. But as several studies have shown, oftentimes the reason drivers wait so long between fares is because there are so many ridesharing drivers on the road that there is not enough work for all of them. Traditional taxis and limousines have less work, too. A study in New York City found that the number of hours during which drivers did not have a passenger rose dramatically “from virtually zero in 2013 to 36,500 by 2017,” a reflection of the proliferation of the number of drivers and empty seats.

Sadly, this deterioration in working conditions was one of the reasons mentioned by livery driver Doug Schifter, a 30-year veteran of the industry, who in February killed himself with a shotgun in front of New York City Hall. Whatever else may have been troubling

him, Schifter used a lengthy Facebook post to articulately express many drivers’ desperation over trying to cope with a glut of drivers that he said forced him to work more than 100 hours a week to earn the same income he previously earned in 40 hours.

Not surprisingly, according to Uber’s own internal study, half of its drivers leave after working only a year on the platform. Other studies have found far higher driver burn rates.

The creation of so many low-paying, temporary, precarious jobs is not a good foundation for a strong economy.

No question, the United States is a severely transit-challenged country. I spend a lot of time in Berlin, and a transit stop is no more than an 8to 10-minute walk away, and you can get virtually anywhere in the city within 35 minutes (often much less). You can sit on the train or bus and

like Travis Kalanick have envisioned. That sounds like a formula for even greater gridlock.

Mass transit is the way we must go. There is simply no replacement for boosting major investment in mass transit and in the infrastructure to support it. The United States has fallen way behind other major powers, including Europe, Japan, and China, in that regard.

And mass transit does not have to be completely a public system—in Vienna, the Austrians have an efficient public-private hybrid mass transit system called Wiener Linien. But it does need to be subsidized, and it just so happens that government is the entity that usually has the financial resources and is not limited by for-profit incentives to invest in this badly needed infrastructure.

Some have argued that U.S. cities lack sufficient population density to support adequate

If we are to both cut carbon emissions and have efficient, affordable transportation for all, Americans will have to get out of their cars—whether their own or someone else’s. relax, read a newspaper or smartphone, or catch up on work, without dealing with the insanity of traffic. It’s a system that has succeeded for working people who are traveling here and there in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the United States does not have a transportation system that comes anywhere close to that standard.

Some have pointed to electric cars and automated vehicles as the solution to carbon emissions and congestion. But the United States has more than 265 million registered passenger vehicles, and there are more than 1.2 billion vehicles in the world. The production of one billion or more electric vehicles will also have direct and collateral costs—including congestion. And the overall emissions impact of electric cars is substantially a function of the fuels that generate the electric power. Automated vehicle transportation is being positioned as another potential savior, but it seems farfetched that one day we will all abandon our personal cars and depend on a dense transportation grid of self-driving vehicles that constantly troll the streets for passengers, as some

mass transportation systems. In fact, cities like San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami all have population densities similar to Stockholm and Madrid. None of these U.S. cities has mass transit systems close to their European counterparts.

The reality is, if the United States is going to cut carbon emissions and provide efficient, affordable transportation for everyday people, Americans will have to get out of their automobiles—whether their own, someone else’s, electric, or self-driving. And anything that gets in the way of Americans recognizing that, and acting on that recognition, is taking us down the wrong road.

Steven Hill is a journalist-in-residence at the Berlin Social Science Center and former senior fellow at New America. He is the author of seven books, most recently The Startup Illusion: How the Internet Economy Threatens Our Welfare (in German) and Raw Deal: How the “Uber Economy” and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 51

Putting the Public First in Public-Private Partnerships

Public-sector competence is needed to make sure citizens get a good deal—and private vendors are no substitute for adequate public funding.

B y G a br i elle Gurl ey

I

n a perfect world, a big-city mayor would not have to wrangle over how to finance a tunnel to the port. But Manny Diaz did not live in a perfect world: He lived in Miami. Port traffic clogging downtown was a decades-old problem. To realize his vision of a vibrant region showcased by a vital city center, Mayor Diaz had to get rumbling, port-bound 18-wheelers off downtown streets.

In 2007, with a plan and money on the table, the Florida Department of Transportation turned up the heat on the term-limited mayor to deliver the tunnel. So Diaz devised a strategy to gin up city and surrounding county support: He tossed a baseball stadium, museums, more funds for a performing arts center—and the tunnel—into one civic wish-list basket and made a successful appeal to regional pride for funding them all. Meanwhile, two multinational firms, Meridiam, a public infrastructure investor, and Bouygues Travaux Publics, a tunneling and engineering firm, arrived on the scene with the dollars to move the complex initiative forward after the Great Recession unspooled the original consortium. “It was perfect timing,” says Diaz.

More than a decade later, the Port of Miami Tunnel is the marquee example of a publicprivate transportation infrastructure partnership. The concessionaire’s financing sources totaled about $900 million. It gets back a revenue stream based on state and federal funding sources, so there are no tolls. The city now has several new amenities, as well as two tunnels with two lanes each that, shortly after opening, decreased the weekly average volume of all

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port-bound traffic in downtown Miami by 35 percent and reduced weekly commercial truck traffic by nearly 80 percent.

But the tunnel’s success is deceptive, since the unique factors that converged in South Florida cannot be replicated everywhere. For every Port of Miami Tunnel, scores of ill-conceived projects dot the American landscape.

The United States lags behind not only in basic maintenance of existing assets at the end of their life cycles but in building the next generation of roads, bridges, rail, tunnels, and aviation projects. With public funds scarce in a climate of tax-cutting and budgetary austerity, the risk is that the contactor/partner pays the up-front costs but sticks future generations of taxpayers and rate-payers with exorbitant charges.

That outcome can be the fruit of cynicism, corruption, naïveté, or fiscal desperation. But states and municipalities can learn to appreciate the differences between partnerships that put the public first and the rip-offs that erode public confidence in government and drain public coffers. A key is the competence of public officials to supervise private ones and negotiate smart contracts. That’s another basic public resource at risk in an age of fiscal scarcity.

In a sense, nearly all transportation projects are public-private partnerships. Public entities own most roads, tunnels, bridges, and subway systems, but private contractors invariably build them. The new wrinkle is the option of having contractors provide some or all of the up-front financing, often in exchange for either a long-term lease or a share of revenues.

The Trump administration’s version of an infrastructure initiative relies heavily on private financing, which may or may not materialize. Trump proposes to have the federal government contribute $200 billion, with the rest of the illusory $1.5 trillion coming from cash-strapped state and local governments and the private sector. This model is disingenuous, partly because not all public needs are profitable; partly because it also hides other cuts to the Highway Trust Fund, Federal Aviation Administration, Amtrak, transit programs, and other areas; and partly because state and local governments are strapped for funds to contribute their proposed share. But the Trump framework is only an exaggeration of recent trends.

At best, new fiscal pressures can lead public officials to get creative, seeking private partners who may bring superior engineering, financing, and legal expertise, and better attention to maintenance and operations. But private-sector involvement does not automatically mean a better outcome. Citizens and public officials often forget that the private sector’s prime motive is profit, not philanthropy. If a firm cannot clear a good return on an investment, either the deal will not materialize or the terms will be onerous to the public. Public debates can be marred by false expectations, and confusion or obfuscation of what distinguishes a good partnership from a rip-off.

A key question is the degree of risk assumed by the public sector or the private entity because of the unknown vagaries of construction. What would the unearthing of significant archeological artifacts do to a construction timetable? Who pays the cost if an underwater tunnel hits unforeseen obstacles?

What happens if there is unexpected community opposition and litigation? These factors and dozens more pose risks that must be assessed and calculated in the early planning stages on both sides.

“A strong contract lays out the performance metrics: who is accepting what kind of risk and what happens each step of the way with the meeting of those metrics or the failure to meet those metrics,” says Jim Aloisi, who was Massachusetts transportation secretary under former Democratic Governor Deval Patrick.

Mobility Massachusetts is infamous for the cost overruns associated with the Big Dig, which included a new tunnel linking the Massachusetts Turnpike to Logan International Airport and put the major north-south highway bisecting Boston underground. The project came in more than $20 billion over budget counting interest on the extra debt. Public planners erred in contracting out the project design, construction, and management. State lawmakers later intervened and turned management over to a public agency.

If it went massively over budget, it was no skin off the supervising contractors’ noses.

Instead of performing its own inspections along the way and holding the multiple vendors accountable, government ended up paying for the overruns after the fact.

A public-private partnership is a hybrid that exists along a continuum of risks. In traditional procurement, the public sector assumes the greater risk, turning over the design and construction to the private sector or consortium while the public agency secures financing, operates, maintains, and owns the completed project. This model is known as design-build.

Further along the risk continuum are longterm leases, known as DBFOM arrangements (for design, build, finance, operate, and maintain). Typically, the private sector takes on all the risks associated with unforeseen engineering issues, cost overruns, legal entanglements, or other issues. Those details, of course, depend on whether government negotiates a good contract. The private partner provides the bulk of the up-front dollars, in effect a loan to the public sector. Taxpayers or toll-payers eventually pay the cost one way or another.

“The whole business has matured and has changed the way [the] private sector and the public sector thinks about it,” says Aloisi. “People like me who are progressive … have looked at the direction this has moved in and are much more sanguine about it. I have seen too many examples of the public sector failing. I don’t think it’s appropriate to adhere to strict ideology at this point. I’m more ‘show me the facts’: Where are the risks, incentives, and what are you paying labor?”

Some municipalities have moved to get out of the business of owning and operating assets like parking garages or local roads and are sell-

ing these public assets outright to private companies—these are usual smaller deals. Under leasing deals, arrangements can run anywhere from roughly 30 to 50 years with the public entity maintaining ownership, but ceding functions like operation and maintenance to the private partner. Many public officials take a dim view of ceding public assets like roadways that are integral to a transportation network for longer periods, since that means giving up public stewardship, which is needed to respond to changing traffic and housing patterns.

Despite Trump administration hyperbole about encouraging private-sector participation in the country’s infrastructure enterprise, the majority of transportation infrastructure projects do not interest the private sector, since they do not have an associated revenue stream, such as tolls, or offer any other attractive features

79 design-build transportation projects (the more public variant) budgeted at $50 million or higher were launched in the United States, according to the “Public Works Financing” newsletter. Of the more complex DBFOM projects, only 13 projects of $50 million or more were built during that period. So P3s are no panacea, but just one tool among many.

A more fundamental problem is dwindling public capacity. For the past several decades, conservatives have so undermined citizens’ faith in the public sector and stripped it of resources that pursuing new taxes, tolls, or fees to build new bridges, tunnels, and subways can be a political nonstarter. But these attitudes could change, if voters realize that failure to countenance tax increases means many public agencies will no longer have the resources to hire well-trained planners and engineers to

Despite Trumpian hyperbole, the majority of transportation infrastructure projects do not interest the private sector, since they do not have an associated revenue stream. to tempt investors, particularly in rural areas.

To attract private-sector interest in rural projects, Pennsylvania, for example, bundled some 560 rural bridge-replacement projects into a nearly $1 billion, 25-year maintenance package, contracting with a private consortium to provide the funds and do the work. In its analysis of the project, the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research organization, noted that the consortium could increase its profit margins by skimping on longer-term quality. Which means that the Keystone State must have a strong inspection regime in place to monitor the spans.

When the public sector fails to transfer enough risk to private entities or fails in its own oversight obligations, a state can end up with a fiasco like the Big Dig. A key factor in a good public-private partnership, or P3, is whether the public entity has the expertise and integrity to keep the private partner honest.

Large P3s comprise only a fraction of the highway projects built in the United States.

In the 23-year period between 1989 and 2012,

keep up with maintenance demands, or to build new roads and bridges, or to keep contractors from passing hidden costs to the public.

Completed in 2014, the $1 billion Port

of Miami Tunnel involved a 35-year concession agreement. “When you have high-profile, expensive projects, you don’t have that kind of cash lying around,” says Diaz, now a senior partner at Lydecker Diaz, a Miami law firm.

“But you do have the ability to raise that cash over time; so it’s almost like a long-term loan that gives you access to capital that allows you to do those major projects.”

Florida benefited from exceptionally strong technical, commercial, legal, and financial advisers who were well-matched to their private-sector counterparts. Today, most states know that they must have first-caliber in-house experts and consultants if they intend to partner with a private company on a major project. “But back then, a lot of times when people said ‘public-private partnership,’ a governor or a mayor would hire their brother-in-law’s accounting firm and

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 53

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Regional Transportation District brought in a private consortium to build commuter rail lines connecting the city’s Union Station to outlying areas as well as a maintenance facility. The 34-year deal (which also survived the Great Recession) relied on $1 billion in federal funding, a regional sales tax, and $450 million in capital from Denver Transit Partners, the private consortium. For that, the private entity gets payments linked to meeting performance, operation, and maintenance metrics

“The key there is if you run into trouble [or] if your concessionaire creates a problem, [you know] who pays the freight,” says Hickenlooper. Apportionment of risk to the concessionaire has already protected area taxpayers.

When Denver Transit Partners determined that one of the bridges would not hold up to specified performance standards, the group demolished and rebuilt the span. The public Regional Transportation District was not liable for additional monies.

The billion-dollar Port of Miami Tunnel is a successful public-private infrastructure partnership completed in 2014.

and is responsible for keeping the commuter rail cars in good repair.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recalls that when he was mayor of Denver during the initial phases of the Eagle P3 project, he had to quell the “Hatfields and McCoys”– style feuding between Denver and its suburbs (much like Diaz did in Miami and its environs) to smooth the way for expanding the regional transit system and to persuade voters to back the network with a 0.4 percent sales tax increase in 2004. The regional transportation agency laid out the performance standards it expected the concessionaire to adhere to in cost-effectiveness, performance, safety, rider experience, and reliability and prioritized those standards over design and other aspects of the project.

Of the pitfalls that doom partnerships

with private vendors, the most damning is insufficient transparency. Ironically, when private contractors cheat the public, it is government rather than the privatization process that gets the blame—fueling a conservative narrative that the government is an unreliable guardian of public assets while corporations can parachute in better solutions. Some politicians feed this story when their desire for a quick cash infusion causes public officials to accept arrangements with little to no public oversight, unleashing a cascade of missteps that negate short-term fiscal benefits and reverberate years later.

Chicago’s 75-year lease for its 36,000 parking meters with a limited liability company headed by Morgan Stanley and others (among them a German financial firm and the govern-

j . pat c a r t e r / a p i m a g e s

say, ‘Figure out what this means for us,’” says Joe Aiello, a partner at Meridiam who helped steer the project. “But Florida and Miami-Dade [County] went out and got the best.”

Aiello concedes that it may “sound crazy” that an investor would prefer going up against seasoned public-sector officials who can pull together a solid procurement process. But he sees long-term benefits for the private partner.

“We want these deals to be rock solid and well thought-out because we are going to be there for 35 to 40 years,” he says.

A well-executed contract gives a public agency leverage when things go wrong. As long as the tunnel adheres to performance standards specified in the contract, the consortium continues to receive “availability” payments from the state. “The investor-developer in the private sector [is] in the world of noexcuses … so that the government is getting [the] best possible price,” Aiello says. “This is what astounded everybody … especially public officials who didn’t realize that you could transfer so much risk, especially long-term, to the private sector at a fixed cost.”

How labor fares should be key, especially in a right-to-work state like Florida. Some P3 deals try to save money by avoiding union contracts that would be required on explicitly public projects, as mandated by federal or state law.

Unions, including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Laborers’ International Union of North America, worked on the tunnel. But a 2013 Center for American Progress report found that the union representing workers who operate heavy equipment did not participate in creating the project’s hiring program. One union official also claimed that Bouygues “wouldn’t talk to us.”

Union representation in these arrangements hinges on the state labor climate. When the Maryland Port Administration decided to modernize the container berth at the Port of Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal to accommodate Super Post Panamax cargo ships, using a $1.3 billion, 50-year P3 contract with Ports America to operate the facility, the company preserved all union jobs.

State enabling legislation, experienced public agency procurement teams, and brokering of regional buy-in were also features of the Denver area’s $2 billion Eagle P3 Project. Its

Mobility ment of Abu Dhabi) was one of the worst, if not the worst, P3 deal in U.S. history. The slipshod agreement dented residents’ already low confidence in the city’s leaders and undermined the city’s fiscal health for decades.

In 2008, Mayor Richard M. Daley rammed the $1.1 billion plan through a quiescent city council in three days, refusing to divulge the bidders or detailed financial analyses. No municipal transportation officials or lawmakers ever studied the agreement. A deeper analysis would have shown that the deal called for additional payments to the concessionaire if parking meters came out of service for street fairs, repaving projects, or traffic circulation improvements. Daley used lump-sum payments to plug budget deficits. Residents went ballistic as rates exploded. The city now has the highest on-street parking fees in the country.

The Chicago inspector general found that the meters were worth at least twice as much as the lump-sum payment the city received for transferring them to the private consortium.

The city is stuck with the deal until 2083.

The current mayor, Rahm Emanuel, sided with the consortium in a 2014 lawsuit challenging the deal. The group’s lawyers had contributed to his re-election campaign. In 2018, along with turning over all of the revenue from the parking meters to the concessionaire, the city owes an additional $20 million, a nearly 20 percent increase over the previous year, to compensate for lost revenues from meters taken out of service.

The deal continues to undermine Chicago’s ability to plan for future transit improvements.

Instead of being able to consider bus, rapid transit, pedestrian safety improvements, or other projects on their merits, planners must consider how many parking meters must be taken out of service (with the attendant uptick in additional payments to the vendor), which may doom some of those projects.

Public accountability has also gone missing in St. Louis, where city officials continue to debate a proposal to lease the city-owned and -operated Lambert International Airport, a plan championed by former mayor Francis Slay and his successor Lyda Krewson. The airport director learned about the plan after the application had been filed with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airport Privatization Pilot

Program in 2017. The city’s board of aldermen were not consulted.

Missouri billionaire and Republican political donor Rex Sinquefield steered the escapade.

He funded the FAA application and will be reimbursed if an agreement is finalized, while his political action committee, Grow Missouri, advises the city on the agency’s process and pays the consultants. Meanwhile, the airport remains a valuable transportation asset, having retired and refinanced debt.

A recent In the Public Interest report, which conducts research on privatization and investigated the St. Louis plan, found: “The [request for proposals] for the advisory contract is structured in a way that will eliminate the city’s opportunity to fully evaluate options for the development of the airport. Since the contractor is only compensated if the airport is privatized, it will not be in their interest to provide full, independent and objective analysis that would benefit and serve the interests of the city. This contract should not be finalized under these conditions.”

“The advocates for privatizing the St. Louis airport are failing to heed important lessons from Chicago’s parking meter disaster,” says ITPI Executive Director Donald Cohen.

“They aren’t doing a rigorous fiscal and financial analysis to compare public versus private options that cost Chicago $1 billion. And they aren’t thinking long-term about what decisions city leaders won’t be able to make because [those decisions could] hurt the private operator’s bottom line.”

When a private-sector actor fails to live up

to the role of turnaround artist, it falls to public entities to pick up the pieces. To acquire Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York, in 2000, the National Express Group (NEG), a British rail, bus, and coach transit company that expanded into airport operations in Great Britain, paid $35 million to the New York State Department of Transportation for a 99-year lease to operate the facility under the FAA’s 1997 Airport Privatization Pilot Program.

The hope was that the new operator could improve the facility and attract more passengers to the lightly used airport north of New York City. Metro New York has long sought a fourth airport. The premise unraveled as

the fallout from September 11, 2001, rippled through the aviation industry. NEG also ran into legal opposition from local environmentalists opposed to the plan for a new access road to the airport.

NEG soon announced other priorities, and tried to relinquish the lease. But there were no offers. After seven years, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey acquired Stewart for nearly $80 million. A 20-year plan to upgrade the airport included a name change, renovations, and better transit connections.

Of the 12 airports that have pursued privatization through the FAA program since 1997, only one, the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, remains in the hands of a private operator. Currently, three airports (including Lambert) have submitted preliminary privatization applications. The FAA’s complex regulations make most privatization scenarios unappealing, especially since airlines have veto power over such transfers.

States and localities that pursue pub-

lic-private partnerships must do their homework. Public officials must determine whether involvement of the private sector is cost-effective, and they must engage highly experienced professionals who can run a transparent procurement process, particularly in the case of projects that a private entity wants to finance, operate, and maintain. Purely political considerations, especially ones predicated on general budgetary pressures rather than on the needs of the transportation sector, should be resisted.

The temptation to look for private-sector rescues is understandable. The United States is trillions of dollars short in funding to build the next generation of megaprojects. The bill is past due for repairs to transportation assets of the past century.

Public-private partnerships can play a role, but no one should exaggerate what they can achieve. “P3s are a very effective tool that helps communities build critical infrastructure, not the solution,” says Governor Hickenlooper. “We as a society are fighting over whether it’s federal, state, or local money. We’ve got to resolve the bickering and say, ‘This is the real infrastructure that we need, we can afford it, so let’s build.’”

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 55

Apple Inc., Cupertino, California

W

hen the Democratic “blue wall” stretching from Wisconsin through Michigan and Ohio to Pennsylvania fell on November 7, 2016, its breach reflected a growing socioeconomic gulf between the prosperous coastal states and depressed nonmetro America. The vast majority of economic growth since 2008 has flowed to the coasts, while the Midwest and rural America have seen spikes in deaths of despair, divorce, an opiate crisis, and a moribund economy.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, from roughly 1880 to 1980—an era Trump’s white supporters may have in mind when they demand America be Made Great Again— incomes of different regions more nearly converged. Much of U.S. manufacturing and its supply chain was based in the Midwest. Thanks to unionization, a good deal of basic industry paid decent wages. Meanwhile, other industries such as textiles and apparel migrated from

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Tech jobs tend to cluster geographically.

Can we spread the benefits around?

By Jo rdan E c ker

New England to the Southeast, raising earnings there. Regional development policies, everything from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the geographic dispersion of war production plants, tended to spread the wealth around.

But since 1980, that converging trend leveled off and then began to reverse. The Economic Innovation Group reported that

sparsely populated counties with fewer than 100,000 residents were home to 32 percent of new businesses founded in the wake of the 1991 recession, and 15 percent following the 2001 recession—but zero percent of all new businesses created in the recovery from the 2008 recession. The more rural states tend to be in the Midwest; the more urban states, with the stronger economies, tend to be on the coasts.

There is more to the story of Democratic regional decline, of course. It includes the gradual Republican takeover of the white South, reversal of voting rights, and the “sagebrush rebellion” in once strongly Democratic states of the mountain West. But the economic wipeout of the once-Democratic industrial heartland is a crucial and relatively recent element.

On its face, the story of declining middle America and the prospering coastal hubs is simple: As manufacturing jobs left the United States, economic growth was increasingly driven by a handful of sectors—notably tech

b e n n y m a r t y / i s p o t b y g e t t y ; (o p p o s i t e pa g e : c h a r l i e n e i b e r g a l l / a p i m a g e s

Sharing the

and finance—that have agglomerated in coastal metropolises and that look to global communities of interest and supply chains rather than domestic ones. Just Washington, D.C., New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, Boston, and Los Angeles account for nearly 70 percent of all IT-industry venture capital, for instance. AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that these cities have “accumulated a skill base with a depth unparalleled anywhere in the world.”

There, the economy is booming. Highly skilled workers spend locally the money that streams into their business from across the globe, with multiplier effects that benefit the entire region. In his book The New Geography of Jobs, Enrico Moretti estimates that while a traditional manufacturing job creates 1.6

service-sector jobs in the community around it, what he calls an “innovation job” creates about 5 service jobs in the community around it, and those tend to be higher-paying than the average service-sector job to boot!

But why this dense spatial concentration of advanced economic sectors? And can we do anything to spread the tech wealth around, or to promote more balanced regional development generally?

In the 1990s, there was some optimism that the internet and other digital technologies would lead to decentralization. Code can be written and delivered just as well from cheap rural Iowa as it can be from a Stanford University computer lab located in one of the world’s most expensive ZIP codes. A computer scientist living in astronomically expensive Palo Alto might telecommute from Santa

Rosa in Sonoma County, where a comparable house costs perhaps one-fourth of its Palo Alto equivalent. But most don’t. In Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, a charming and hip country town two hours away from downtown Boston, a beautiful four-bedroom home can be had for about $400,000, maybe one-fifth the cost of a comparable house in Newton. But for the most part, techies evidently like to live near other techies. And some of this reflects not just tastes but the economic benefit of a local, spatial network. The tech industry seems to depend on the regional concentration of highly specialized experts for its success.

“Tech,” Saxenian says, “is hard to define.” It refers to products and processes closest to the cutting edge of innovation, the ones that take the highest levels of education to design and the most precise expertise to produce. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet

Tech Wealth Main Street, Ottumwa, Iowa

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imaginechina via ap images

Scholars have disagreed over why tech has (Google’s parent) are part media company, part driven by automation. Others were the consequence of U.S. policy choices.

Free-trade refused to disperse, although they are unanisoftware innovator, part platform; Amazon is part delivery service and supermarket. All deals incentivized large corporations with mous in their assessment of its concentration. five have large and active merger and acquisi- activist shareholders to outsource their sup- Richard Florida famously argued that regional tion divisions and diversify their portfolios as ply chains and subcontract American jobs concentration is substantially due to the culquickly as new opportunities emerge. What overseas. Except for key defense industries, tural appeal of cosmopolitan, tolerant, and hip they have in common with computer-chip the United States disdained industrial policies cities. In his influential and best-selling 2002 manufacturer Qualcomm, the online messag- as a matter of ideology. book The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida ing platform Skype, or a startup that intends to The tech company is an avatar for post-man- defines the creative class as spanning from tech connect your at-home juice-maker to the inter- ufacturing America. Tech companies tend to professionals to artists to writers, who tend to net isn’t immediately obvious. But all these be more horizontally organized, in contrast cluster around cities like San Francisco, Seatcompanies spend a large portion of their bud- with the vertically integrated firms of yester- tle, Boston, and Minneapolis whose economic get on R&D, and they mostly outsource manu- year. With a few exceptions, such as medical strength depends on their presence. Of the top facturing. As technology advances, 20 cities with the largest creative class (Florida calls them “creative they all employ a hyper-educated, centers”), 13 are also among the hyper-specialized class of worktop 20 cities with the largest highers. What these companies have in tech industry. Technicians may be common is dependence on a skill geeks in some respects, but evibase that evolves very quickly. dently they like to live in the hipTech employees include computpest metropolises. er scientists in Silicon Valley, but Similar arguments have been also biomedical scientists in Boston made by other scholars observing or physicists employed by Raytheon the importance of the “marriage in Washington, D.C. The broader market” for young people. Tech ecology includes design and marworkers tend to be young because keting professionals, legions of of the need for up-to-date educafinanciers, merger-and-acquisition lawyers, and patent attorneys. All tion to succeed in the industry, and of these jobs that orbit around the so it follows that tech firms would American tech firms increasingly subcontract their manufacturing overseas, to places like locate in the densely populated tech industry require a high level of China’s Foxcomm Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contractor. areas that young people prefer. education and specialization. And But economic factors may well be more they tend to be located in a handful of metros devices and aircraft, they increasingly subconon the coasts of the United States. tract their manufacturing overseas. Foxconn is important in the clustering of tech, as even the best known of these subcontractors: Head- Florida has lately acknowledged. One of the Tech’s ascendance has occurred against quartered in Taipei, Foxconn workers assemble most persuasive of these factors is the nature the backdrop of manufacturing’s steady 40 percent of all consumer electronic goods, of what economists like Moretti call “thick decline. After holding relatively stable for a including the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, PlaySta- labor markets” and their appeal for tech. As number of decades, the number of Americans tion, Xbox, and Wii. Today, Apple employs the speed of technological advance has accelemployed in manufacturing declined precipi- around a hundred thousand people in the erated, so has the specialization of the experts tously after the 2001 recession and the entry United States; in 2012, the last year the data in the field. In the hunt for the self-driving of China into the World Trade Organization. was made publicly available, they had seven car, for example, there are only an estimated By 2010, a sector that in 1980 employed one times that number of subcontractors working 10,000 artificial intelligence and computer in every five Americans employed one in every for them, mostly in Southeast Asia. scientists in the world who have the requisite The tech jobs that do stay in America tend technical know-how to be of help to Google, ten, and one in three American manufacturing to be very good jobs.

The problem: They are Apple, and Uber as they frantically race to be jobs disappeared between 1997 and 2010. The decline was harshest in the Midwest and South. concentrated in a handful of metros, and don’t the first to reach what is sure to be a multibilThe decline of manufacturing, its causes seem likely to spread across the country any- lion-dollar market.

In a sector that requires a labor market and its consequences, has been expounded time soon. Those that do spread—like Amazon upon at length in the pages of this magazine warehouse jobs, or legal and financial back- to be both specialized and dense, it benefits and elsewhere. Some of its causes were inevi- room work—tend to be the least-desirable jobs, employer and employee alike for the market table and outside the power of the U.S. gov- the ones that carry the smallest multipliers to be geographically clustered. With a thick labor pool, the employee can shop the handernment to alter, like the productivity gains with them (if any at all).

ful of employers against one another, and the employer can do likewise with prospective employees. The marketing, legal, and financial expertise associated with tech specializes, too.

Biotech patent law requires a hyper-specialized skill set distinct from the law associated with Uber and Waymo’s recent intellectual property dispute. All of this encourages the formation of spatially concentrated thick pools of specialized labor. Even before its selection of a second headquarters, Amazon in late February added 2,000 jobs to its workforce in Boston, a center of specialized tech workers. Them that has, gets.

By contrast, the manufacturing economy relied mainly on semi-skilled assembly workers, who could be trained in a matter of weeks, some of them right off the farm. No specialized labor pool was needed. This meant factories could be built where it was cheap to do business, organically driving a convergence of wealth between the urban, expensive-to-dobusiness-in major metro areas and the rural, cheaper-to-do-business-in countryside. The more highly skilled workers, such as tool and die makers or engineers, went where the work was. But with tech, the pool needs to cluster, to keep replicating itself, and the virtuous cycle of regional dispersion has disappeared from the landscape of American life.

Rates of technological change are accelerating, notably in the consumer market: The telephone existed for 35 years before it was in a quarter of American households. The television, 26 years. The personal computer, 16.

The iPhone? Under ten. The ability of a firm to anticipate and adapt to technological change is essential to a firm’s success in the 21st century, and this is nowhere more true than in Silicon Valley, where the ability to conform to a trend and beat competitors to market is life or death for startups. A thick labor market, full of specialized tech workers and the lawyers or financiers who facilitate their work, all living within miles of each other, is necessary for flexible firms to retool at the drop of a hat.

Another non-cultural factor that may

be contributing to the regional concentration of tech industries is more pernicious: the use of monopoly power to crush rivals and potential ones. The “big five” tech companies are infa-

mous for buying out or driving out competitors. Some of those potential challengers would be located outside the top tech hubs.

In her book Profit Cycles, Oligopoly, and Regional Development, Ann Markusen describes how industrial cycles interact with geographic dispersion. After a first moment of innovation and high profits where industry leaders dominate the competition, an industry tends to be regionally concentrated. It’s in the second phase of the profit cycle, where normal competition sets in, that the industry disperses geographically. Significantly, if the first moment doesn’t transition into normal competition where new firms enter the market and drive profits down, and instead a few firms oligopolize the industry, there is less of an incentive for the industry to disperse geographically. This may be occurring in tech.

The big five have come under antitrust scru-

is at a 30-year low. Oligopolization has set in, and it’s fair to assume that some of those new businesses that the big five’s anti-competitive behavior is keeping locked out of the market would have been born in metros less expensive than San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle.

Instead, as there are fewer and fewer tech IPOs and more and more acquisitions by the big five, it seems as though many startups angle to be acquired by those super-rich companies located in those super-rich metros.

Another oft-cited factor is the role of a handful of universities. Elite research universities like MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, or Caltech are important both in concentrating those specialized labor pools and in replenishing them with federal research and development dollars that in turn help incubate advanced tech companies. A great many startups are spinoffs from these and a few other universities. Silicon

In a sector that requires a labor market to be both specialized and dense, it benefits employer and employee alike for the market to be geographically clustered. tiny over the past year. Google controls more than 60 percent of desktop online searches and 94 percent of mobile online searches. Half of all online commerce happens through Amazon. Facebook and Google split online advertising; Apple and Google split the smartphone market. When a new company with promise emerges in tech, it’s either swallowed or smothered. Snapchat is an instructive example: After Facebook offered to acquire the company for several billion dollars and was rebuffed, the half-trillion-dollar super-company with two billion monthly active users cloned Snapchat’s features and depressed their market share.

Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz explained to The Guardian that the big five were “financing the next generation [of] research at a scale that no one else can afford.” Remember those artificial intelligence computer scientists working on the self-driving car? Their average salary at Google is $345,000. Good luck holding onto specialists with expertise in a market the big five is interested in controlling.

Today, the number of new tech businesses

Valley is where it is today in large part because William Shockley chose to open his silicon semiconductor firm near Stanford.

But initial locations also reflect chance.

Enrico Moretti estimates that Microsoft alumni have created some 4,000 businesses in the greater Seattle area. But why did Bill Gates and Paul Allen move their young company from cheap New Mexico to Seattle? In part because that’s where they were born. And once a city has gotten that first foothold in the tech world, agglomeration is soon to follow. Seattle’s population has boomed over the last few decades and its per capita GDP has soared—even as inequality and housing prices have grown, too.

Today, cities from Memphis to New York to a small community in Georgia that offered to rename itself after Amazon are offering billions in subsidies and whole departments of city employees dedicated just to servicing Amazon’s needs in the hope of becoming home to Amazon’s “HQ 2.” Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, offered Amazon $5 billion in

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incentives and called HQ 2 “the single greatest economic development opportunity in a generation.” This is what a winner-take-all economic geography looks like: When the most important and valuable industry in the country agglomerates in just a handful of metros, cities are more than willing to race to the bottom in the hope of getting to join the chosen few.

Like tech, finance has also tended to cluster. As the banking industry has become more concentrated, more and more of its wealth has been located in a few ZIP codes.

Manhattan, despite its astronomical rents, is still home to most investment banking.

Hedge fund moguls flock together in places like Greenwich, Connecticut. America, with its long-standing hostility to financial concentration, once prohibited interstate banking and even discouraged branch banking. In

Our relatively equitable regional past wasn’t the result of an economy behaving according to its own whims. In preceding centuries of American life, the country embarked on huge, centrally planned, regional development projects sponsored by state and national government. In the early 19th century, the Hamilton-Clay “American System” combined a high tariff on foreign imports with investments on infrastructure projects like roads and canals to improve the American economy. In 1862, the Homestead Act incentivized thousands of American families to move west.

This was also the era of government-subsidized land-grant colleges under the 1862 Morrill Act, plus transcontinental rail lines underwritten by cheap public land, all of which served to spread economic activity.

At the turn of the 20th century, the Populist Party represented a new regional conscious-

Germany’s regional inequality, despite the challenge of reunification with the much poorer East since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is much lower than that of the United States.

1966, the United States was home to almost 14,000 banks, more than 10,000 of which had only a single branch. By 2014, there were fewer than 6,000 banks and fewer than 1,000 of them were single-branch banks. The five largest institutions have nearly 50 percent of all banking assets. And while there are financial services operations scattered throughout the country, they often take the form of badly paid back-office operations.

When South Dakota agreed to end its usury laws in the 1970s, the big New York banks moved their back-office operations there, keeping the executive jobs in New York, close to other bankers and an ecology of specialized law and accounting firms. As with tech, financial market concentration has led to geographic concentration—making the world of 21st-century finance Thomas Jefferson’s nightmare: As bankers cluster around the Big Apple, Midwestern and rural America has fewer small, regional banks geographically proximate and culturally sympathetic to the small businesses that need investment and lines of credit.

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ness in rural America. Framing their arguments in the language of anti-monopoly, they argued that wealthy city dwellers controlled and drained the wealth from rural America.

They won victories that saw Congress regulate the railroad, an industry that played an important role in defining the economic geography of the country. Government efforts to spread economic activity expanded in the New Deal.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was an explicit regional development program to bring electrification and economic opportunity to a neglected rural region of the country. Likewise the public dams of the Northwest. Eisenhower’s Federal Highway Act, along with being the largest public works program in American history, made it cheaper and easier to do business in parts of the country that were formerly geographically isolated. And airline regulation assured that isolated regions and small cities would have affordable air transport.

Since then, America hasn’t lacked regional development aid. Instead, we’ve had a patchwork of poorly coordinated measures. Trade

Adjustment Assistance, intermittently available to workers whose jobs are lost to trade, offers skills retraining to move workers into more-competitive sectors. But the program is flawed: Not only is it underfunded, but as layoffs happen in waves, retrained workers flood the employment market and many are still left unemployed even after the retraining.

Reacting to trade deals like this, instead of proactively investing in regional development, leaves many workers and regions behind.

One of the largest disguised regional investment programs is federal Defense Department spending, which funnels hundreds of billions of dollars into procurement, manufacturing, research, and development projects across the country. In the 1940s and 1950s, this money was dispersed in a pattern that followed the spread of manufacturing across the United States: The biggest recipients were in a belt stretching from Pennsylvania to Michigan. But from the 1950s to the 1980s, American defense spending shifted focus from tanks and shipbuilding to aeronautics and high-tech research, and defense spending began to redistribute in a pattern eerily similar to contemporary distributions of high-tech metropoles. By the 1990s, states in New England received a disproportionate share of defense contracts, with Massachusetts receiving twice the national average per capita, and Connecticut receiving triple. Reagan’s military buildup deliberately favored his (mostly non-union) political base in the Sun Belt. Because it’s not thought of as an explicit regional development program, defense spending has often mirrored trends in the distributions of high-tech research, development, and production.

Bringing growth back to rural America will not be easy. But many Midwestern American cities have competitive advantages that smart regional development policies could build on.

Toledo was once the world leader in the production of glass, and was on the verge of becoming a global leader in solar panel manufacturing too—until China entered the market, producing subsidized solar panels much cheaper on a per watt basis than American brands, eventually forcing the closure of a Toledo-area solar panel factory. Rochester, New York, is home to Xerox—which has been acquired by Fujifilm Holdings, a photography and multimedia

company headquartered in Tokyo. Rochester, like Toledo, feels like a missed opportunity.

Both were R&D leaders in distinct fields, and both had manufacturing plants in the United States.

Many close observers of industrial development have argued that R&D benefits from being close to manufacturing—managers learn how to efficiently design a product from watching it be made regularly. Given Apple’s success in outsourcing to East Asia, other students of design and supply chains contend otherwise.

Yet there are missed opportunities here. While Toledo and Rochester will never be able to compete with San Francisco and Boston in the most prosperous areas of the tech economy, they could leverage their particular competitive advantages in their specific fields into vibrant local economies, with spillover to the surrounding rural areas, given more supportive trade and regional development policies.

It’s not enough to say, as our president has, that rural Americans “can leave” and move somewhere else. Investment and industrial policy could save the regions of the country those Americans grew up in from economic decline.

Other countries with robust regional

development strategies offer useful examples.

Germany’s regional inequality, despite the challenge of reunification with the much poorer East since the fall of the Berlin Wall, is much lower than that of the United States. A number of factors contribute to this. Offshoring and subcontracting have been resisted, both by corporate leaders and by national policy. Germany, despite high labor costs, has the world’s largest trade surplus.

Germany also has smart regional development policies that earmark funds for economically underdeveloped regions, helping those regions invest in infrastructure and leverage local competitive advantages into vibrant economies, spreading economic growth across the country. This commitment to regional equality is enshrined in the German constitution itself, which grants the federal government the right to provide the states funding to “equalize differing economic capacities.”

This constitutional commitment has been put into practice by a variety of policy tools.

At the federal level, Germany after unification

instituted what’s called in German the “Länderfinanzausgleich” or a nationwide pool of tax money that poorer states can draw on for the purposes of regional development. Since 1989, Germany has spent more than 1.3 trillion euros on the development and integration of the former DDR . The sum of money available is enormous—about 5 percent of all German taxes—and is earmarked for use only by poor states to invest locally to make their regions more competitive. These funds flow into both infrastructure and innovation, spreading the wealth. This tax system is joined with the Joint Federal Government/Länder Scheme for the Improvement of Regional Economic Structures, a pool of funding instruments put at the disposal of weaker regions that present concrete plans for economic development.

Another tool Germany uses to foster regionally equitable growth is its development bank, the “Kreditanstalt für Wiederauf bau,” or Reconstruction Credit Institute. Formed with funding from the United States as part of the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II, the bank is publicly owned and controls assets valued at around $500 billion. The bank makes loans with an eye toward regional development and equity. It has played an essential role in Germany’s energy transition from coal to cleaner energies, providing funding for energyefficient technologies and housing. Similar banks exist in China, South Korea, and Japan.

Ironically, each of these was set up initially by the United States, with an eye toward the threat that regional inequality could pose to postwar political stability, in an era when planning was not a dirty word. We have been more willing to create regionally equitable development strategies for countries around the world than we are here at home.

Germany is also home to a complex network of publicly owned banks with public service mandates. “Landesbanken” are regional staterun banks that boast annual investment budgets in the hundreds of millions. There are eight Landesbanken operating at the federal state level. On an even more local level are the “Sparkassen,” 386 publicly owned banks that together control more than 1.1 trillion euros in assets, and that loan only to local businesses and customers. This network of banks has kept finance decentralized and diffused across Ger-

many. In contrast to the United States, where finance is increasingly concentrated in New York, banks in Germany are geographically proximate to the small businesses they service.

Germany’s economy, in short, is regionally equitable by design, not chance. In addition to all of the above tools, Germany also benefits from the European Union’s regional policy, which aims to avoid regional disparities within the EU, and an active and strong labor movement (that recently won the right to a shorter work week). Dr. Philipp Steinberg, the director general for economic policy in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, says the whole cluster of different tools Germany uses to stave off regional inequality is essential to “keeping everyone on board. As we adjust to globalization, regional economic policies give everyone in Germany the feeling that the state really cares for them.”

If America, instead of sending jobs overseas, took inspiration from other countries’ programs to invest in regional competitive advantages, it could embark on another grand regional development program for the 21st century. The U.S. government could use any number of those tools—a development bank, a network of small publicly owned banks, a tax set-aside explicitly for regional development—to direct a flow of investment toward regions with potential competitive advantages that are now being smothered in the crib. Not only would this broaden America’s economic prosperity, it would go a long way toward reknitting America’s social fabric, which was torn long before the election of Donald Trump, and further torn afterward.

Rural America, especially in the Midwest, is in a crisis driven in part by the agglomeration of the most prosperous sectors of the American economy. That crisis won’t solve itself: The speed at which tech develops demands thick labor pools concentrated around a handful of cities. And it doesn’t look likely that tech’s prominence will fade in the coming years. But that doesn’t mean the economy is condemned to soaring rates of regional inequality. Smart policy, using tools both from America’s own experience and from models in other countries, can help alleviate the pain and spread some of that prosperity—but only if voters demand that elected leaders choose to do so.

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Why America Needs More

Social Housing Subsidizing market prices to make housing affordable is a losing strategy.

There’s a better way—on display for a century in Vienna.

By P e t e r Dre ie r

T

he quest to provide what has come to be called “affordable housing” in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality. Too much housing is in the market sector and too little is in a social sector permanently protected from rising prices. The result is that supply and demand relentlessly bids up market prices. Government is required to provide deeper and deeper subsidies to keep rents within the bounds of incomes, so fewer and fewer people get any kind of help. This is true whether the form of public subsidy is tax breaks, direct subsidies, vouchers, or deals with developers to set aside some percent of units as affordable. In most cities, the median rent far exceeds what median incomes can afford. In cities with hot housing markets, homeownership is even further beyond reach for those who do not already own homes, exacerbating competition for scarce apartments.

The idea of having a permanent sector of social housing, protected in perpetuity from market pressures, has a bad reputation in the United States, in part because of misleading stereotypes about public housing. But other forms of social housing are being depleted as well, including middle-income projects built with tax breaks, such as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, which were sold to the highest bidder and converted to market housing; and government-subsidized buildings from the 1960s through the 1980s, built under federal housing programs but allowed to be converted to market-rate apartments once their original mortgages were paid

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off or the 20-year subsidy contract expired.

Government policymakers have made almost no provision to protect the stunted social sector that exists, much less add to it.

There are some exceptions to this dismal pattern, such as land trusts that preserve a social housing sector in perpetuity, in cities like Burlington, Vermont. But for the most part, the place to look for models is abroad. And no place does it better than Vienna.

American visitors to Vienna are typically

struck by the absence of homeless people on the streets. And if they ventured around the city, they’d discover that there are no neighborhoods comparable to the distressed ghettos in America’s cities, where high concentrations of poor people live in areas characterized by high levels of crime, inadequate public services, and a paucity of grocery stores, banks, and other retail outlets.

Since the 1920s, Vienna has made large investments in social housing owned or financed by the government. But unlike public housing in the United States, Vienna’s social housing serves the middle class as well as the poor, and has thus avoided the stigma of being either vertical ghettos or housing of last resort.

Every country in Western Europe has some version of social housing, but Vienna’s is by far the largest and most successful. It is typically ranked as one of the world’s most livable cities.

In comparison, the United States has a tiny proportion of government-subsidized or government-owned housing. About 60 percent

of Vienna’s 1.8 million people live in government-subsidized apartment buildings. In Philadelphia, with 1.6 million residents, at most 9 percent of residents live in low-rent subsidized homes, and one-third of those families rely on housing vouchers to rent private apartments.

In most American cities, the proportion of subsidized housing is even lower. Nationwide, direct government subsidies cover less than 4 percent of America’s housing stock in contrast to 15 percent to 40 percent in Western Europe.

The consequences are evident in every American city and many suburbs—an increasing number of households paying more than half their incomes just to put a roof over their heads; young families who can’t afford the American dream of homeownership; an ongoing wave of owners facing eviction and foreclosure; and a growing epidemic of homelessness, including among many people with jobs and children.

At the start of the 20th century, Vienna was overwhelmed with immigrants from different corners of the Habsburg Empire seeking work in the burgeoning factories. The city’s working class lived in extremely overcrowded, unsafe, dreary privately owned buildings and paid exorbitant rents that exacerbated their misery. Few apartments had indoor toilets, running water, decent ventilation, or sunlight.

In many units, more than ten people—often several families and assorted strangers leasing beds—crowded into tiny flats consisting of a single room and a kitchen. Not surprisingly, tuberculosis was widespread.

In 1910, a radical protest movement of “set-

Alt-Erlaa, built between 1973 and 1985, is one of Vienna’s largest social housing complexes, with 3,172 apartments and close to 11,000 residents.

tlers” emerged to demand that the municipal and national governments address the housing crisis, but the conservative Christian Social government responded with indifference and violent repression. After World War I, the settlers began squatting in vacant buildings. In 1919, the workers movement elected the left-wing Social Democratic Workers’ Party to govern Austria’s capital city. For a few years, the Social Democrats provided the settlers’ self-help movement with building materials, land, and loans to allow workers’ groups to construct nonprofit housing cooperatives that incorporated theaters and concert halls, recreation facilities, adult education centers, and other amenities.

Constitutional reforms in 1922 made Vienna its own state, allowing it to adopt local taxes— including a housing tax on luxury apartments— to carry out its ambitious reform agenda. Until the fascists took power in 1934, Vienna’s Social Democrats introduced a wave of reforms— including progressive taxes, universal public education, and government-sponsored health

care—that garnered the loyalty of its workingclass supporters. Despite severe economic hard times, the Social Democrats also built tens of thousands of government-owned apartment units for the city’s lowest-income and out-ofwork residents, charging them less than 4 percent of their incomes for rent. “Red Vienna” became known throughout Europe as a laboratory for innovative municipal socialism.

The city government made it easier to construct workers’ housing projects by purchasing land, removing it from the speculative market.

Private landowners who kept their property vacant were subject to high taxes, giving the city more leverage to acquire the land. By 1931, the municipality owned almost one-third of Vienna’s land. The city commissioned some of Europe’s most well-known architects to design these projects, including Richard Neutra, who later gained fame in America as an innovator in progressive housing design.

By 1934, the city had financed and owned 61,175 apartments in 348 projects, housing

one-tenth of Vienna’s inhabitants. Although modest in size, the apartments were roomier than what families were used to, with toilets and running water, a kitchen, a living room, and natural light. Residents looked out their windows at gardens and playgrounds. The developments included kindergartens, nurseries, mothers’ advice centers, courtyards, health clinics, libraries, sports facilities, post offices, cooperative stores, bathhouses, cafes, pharmacies, meeting rooms, and gardens (where residents could grow their own food). All this was intended to promote better living conditions and foster a sense of working-class solidarity initially imagined by the self-help settlers movement. Many of them contained works of art—statues, mosaics, fountains, and sculptures—and were named for prominent artistic, political, and intellectual figures. The communal facilities—including child-care centers and laundries—were also intended to encourage the “liberation of housewives.”

Of course, the Red Vienna program was

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devised not only to provide housing and promote socialist consciousness but also to create jobs in construction and in enterprises that manufactured the windows, doors, sinks, and other building materials.

The fascist takeover of Austria in 1934 ended Red Vienna’s social reforms. After free elections resumed in 1945, however, Vienna’s citizens sought a resurgence of the Social Democratic policies. The demand for housing was dire.

During World War II, 87,000 apartments— one-fifth of the city’s housing—were destroyed.

Between 1947 and 1969, the city built about 100,000 apartments, using a wider variety of design types than during the earlier Red Vienna period, including duplexes, terraced houses, and garden apartment complexes that incorporated kindergartens, schools, multipurpose meeting rooms, health centers, and shops. By the late 1960s, Vienna had solved its most urgent housing problems, including overcrowding and affordability, but the city continued to expand the inventory of social housing.

The apartments were spacious, but the communal schools, meeting rooms, health centers, and even swimming pools were still a key component of the program. During the 1960s and 1970s, Vienna’s social housing building spree added about 10,000 apartments a year, although many were built without convenient access to public transit, resulting in a significant increase in traffic congestion.

Over the next two decades, Vienna’s version of urban renewal meant rehabilitating— instead of razing—the city’s oldest apartment buildings. More than 170,000 units—an average of 10,000 a year—were upgraded with central heating, bathrooms, insulation, larger rooms, and elevators. Funding from the national government paid for most of the renovations, which largely took place without having to displace the tenants.

The dismantling of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s triggered a large influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe into Vienna. During the next decade, to accommodate the more than 100,000 new arrivals, the city added 10,000 units a year. Once Vienna built sufficient units to address the influx of immigrants, it continued to expand its social housing stock.

Reflecting Austria’s increasing affluence, the average size of Vienna’s apartments has steadi-

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Set on 59 lushly landscaped acres, the Alt-Erlaa complex has 14 swimming pools. Every unit has at least one balcony.

ly increased, from 237 square feet per person in 1961 to 430 square feet per person today.

The city has significantly expanded its public transit system, which is now inexpensive and comprehensive, linking its pre-war inner-city areas and its outlying neighborhoods. Seventyfour percent of Vienna’s residents commute by public transit—the highest in Europe. Bike and pedestrian lanes are safe and widely used. Sound planning has kept Vienna from the catastrophe of suburban sprawl. Austrians want to live in their capital city, which now houses 1.8 million of the metropolitan area’s 2.6 million people.

The legacy of Red Vienna, providing decent, affordable housing for all its citizens, regardless of income, persists. Vienna today has about 800,000 housing units. The municipality is Vienna’s largest landlord. It owns about 1,800 apartment complexes with 220,000 rental apartments, housing over 500,000 people, more than one-quarter of the city’s population. In recent years, the city has also nurtured the growth of private nonprofit and limited-profit housing associations, which account for most of the increase in new government-subsidized housing. These associations now own and manage another 140,000 apartments. Most housing complexes are six

to eight stories, well-designed, colorful, and filled with communal amenities. Zoning laws and municipal ownership of much of Vienna’s land limits speculation and makes housing construction less expensive.

Vienna spends about 600 million euros ($682 million) a year on social housing, twothirds of it from national government coffers.

In contrast, London spends slightly less, even though its population of 8.7 million is almost five times the size of Vienna.

The nonprofit and limited-profit developers compete for city subsidies and are required to reinvest profits back into the housing. Committees comprised of city officials, community residents, architects, and others decide which projects will receive permits and subsidies based on what Wolfgang Förster, a Vienna resident who chairs the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s housing committee, calls the “four pillars” of social housing—good design, strict constructioncost controls, energy-efficient and environmental requirements (such as solar energy and recycling of “gray” water and rainwater), and income mixing. In the United States, politically connected for-profit developers often get favorable treatment in the allocation of government housing subsidies and permits, but

Vienna has not experienced such cronyism.

About 5,000 Vienna residents are homeless, but “none of them are on the street,” explains Förster, one of Vienna’s most eminent housing experts. Instead, Förster proudly notes, “We make sure they can stay in temporary housing, where they get the help they need to reintegrate into society so they can live in their own apartments.” (In contrast, Los Angeles, whose population of four million is twice that of Vienna, has 34,189 homeless people, threequarters of them without any shelter.)

Alt-Erlaa, built between 1973 and 1985, is one of Vienna’s largest social housing complexes, with 3,172 apartments and close to 11,000 residents, a mix of low-income workers, shopkeepers, and affluent professionals, including politicians and professional sports stars. Twothirds of the apartments have at least three bedrooms. Set on 59 acres, the buildings rise to 27 stories. Lush green spaces and woods keep it from feeling like a fortress. Each unit has at least one balcony. The complex includes two health clinics, three schools, two day-care centers, a gym and fitness center, a church, a shopping mall, a sauna, a solarium, tennis courts, soccer fields, playgrounds, seven indoor swimming pools (located in the basements), seven outdoor swimming pools (on the roofs), two monthly newspapers, a TV station, and a nearby rail station. Owned by a nonprofit association, the complex includes a tenants’ council to represent residents’ interests.

Because social housing is so popular, only one-fifth of Vienna’s homes are owner-occupied. Renting remains attractive in Vienna because tenants have significant rights and control over their housing. Unlike low-income subsidized housing in the United States, residents are not asked to leave if their incomes go up. Tenants do not rent their homes on a month-to-month or even year-to-year basis.

Instead, they enjoy unlimited tenure and can even pass on their apartments to their children.

Tenants who lose their jobs or have to miss work because of an illness get housing allowances so they can remain in their apartments.

“It’s a cultural thing,” explains Förster. “We don’t think of rental housing as just being for the poor.”

Viennese who live in apartments owned by the municipality or nonprofit associations pay

about 25 percent of their household incomes in rent. The typical rent is about $650 a month.

These payments do not constitute the same burden they often do in the United States, because other basic services—health care, child care, university tuition, and retirement pensions—are universal and heavily subsidized by the government.

Vienna’s city planners insist that the different kinds of housing exist in the same neighborhoods, guaranteeing a mix of incomes.

Thanks to enlightened planning, Vienna has managed to revitalize its older housing, and construct new housing, without triggering either gentrification or suburban sprawl.

Other Western European nations have adopted different versions of social housing,

Vienna’s social housing caters to the middle class as well as the poor, and thus has avoided the stigma of either being vertical ghettos or housing of last resort. combining municipal ownership, subsidies to nonprofit and limited-profit developers, and rent controls. Some nations have put greater emphasis than others on homeownership, but social housing remains popular and widespread. Denmark and Sweden share more in common with Austria than England and Italy.

Countries under conservative governments have reduced government subsidies for housing and encouraged privatization. As a result, in some countries families are paying more for rent and the number of homeless people has surged among both native citizens and recent immigrants. (In the countries of the former Soviet Union, ownership accounts for more than three-quarters of all homes, most of them in large fortress-like complexes with small units and few of the communal amenities found in Western Europe.)

But Austria—and particularly Vienna—is

in a league of its own when it comes to social housing. Why do the Viennese support such a robust mixed-income social housing program?

Austria’s relatively equal income distribution and low level of poverty (its poverty rate is half that of the United States and its poor are less poor than their American counterparts)—plus low unemployment and crime rates—help create cross-class empathy. But political factors are crucial. Vienna’s housing policy has benefited from the steady leadership of the Social Democratic Party, which has governed the city for most of the past 70 years, even while the federal government has occasionally shifted to the right. Even Austria’s current conservative farright coalition wouldn’t dare cut federal housing subsidies to Vienna and other regions. Most important, Vienna’s residents are pleased with the results of the city’s century-long social housing program and see no reason to change course.

More than any other aff luent nation,

the United States relies most heavily on private market forces to house its population.

Government’s role dates primarily from three turning points. In the late 1800s, local governments began adopting tenement reform laws in order to set building-code standards and regulate housing safety. In the 1920s, cities began adopting local zoning laws to regulate land use. The federal role in housing began during the Depression, when reformers recognized that the private market and philanthropy could not solve the nation’s housing problems. The New Deal adopted policies to regulate banks and support mortgages in order to expand homeownership. It also created the first public housing program to stimulate jobs and provide subsidies to the working class.

Housing reformers and union leaders envisioned that public housing would be for the middle class as well as the poor. They pushed for well-designed, mixed-income, governmentsubsidized housing projects, sponsored by unions, church groups, and other nonprofit organizations as well as government agencies.

During its first few years, the New Deal built a few model developments that reflected this vision. They included day-care centers and playgrounds, involved residents in cultural and educational activities, and were physically attractive enough that upwardly mobile

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 65

working-class families wanted to live there.

But the reformers were soon outmaneuvered by the real-estate industry. Developers, real-estate agents, and bankers worried that well-designed and affordable governmentsponsored housing would compete with the private sector for middle-class consumers, and warned about the specter of socialism.

After World War II, recognizing the pent-up demand for housing and fearing competition from public housing, the industry mobilized a major campaign against the program, promoting government-insured suburban housing instead. With the federal Housing Act of 1949, the industry sabotaged public housing by pressuring Congress to restrict its funding, give local governments discretion over whether and where to locate developments, and limit them to the very poor. Southern senators made sure that local governments had the authority to keep public housing racially segregated.

With limited budgets, and requirements that the cheapest materials be used, many projects were poorly constructed and badly designed— ugly warehouses for the poor that stigmatized “government housing” as housing of last resort.

The local housing authorities—owned by local governments but with boards dominated by business and real-estate representatives—often sited public housing developments in areas without adequate stores, transportation, or schools. The sites were often isolated from middle-class neighborhoods, contributing to the concentration of poor people in cities. Few suburbs wanted public housing at all.

In other words, the problems we now associate with public housing were not inevitable.

They were due to political choices made in Congress and by local power brokers. Even so, the best-kept secret about public housing is that it actually provides decent, affordable housing for many people. In most cities, there are long waiting lists to get into public housing, which is more affordable than apartments available to the poor in the private housing market.

The high-rise projects, most of them in the largest cities, accounted for many of the most problematic developments and cast a giant shadow on the whole program. Many have been torn down. Most public housing developments today are garden apartments, low-rise walkups, and single-family homes or townhouses.

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Right-wing politicians nevertheless have used misleading stereotypes about public housing. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration wanted to sell off public housing. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Republican Representative Richard Baker was overheard telling lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”

Today, public housing—1.1 million apartments that house about 2.1 million low-income people—constitutes less than 1 percent of the nation’s housing stock. Local housing agencies are required to house the most vulnerable people in their public housing. The average annual income for a public-housing household is $14,753. Without public housing—for which residents pay 30 percent of their incomes, with

No other major industrial nation has permitted the level of destitution found in the United States, and few have allowed decent housing to get so far beyond the reach of so many. the federal government paying the rest—they would be living in awful substandard privatesector homes, paying half or more of their income just to keep a roof over their heads, and constantly under the threat of eviction.

The Nixon administration ended construction of new public housing. Since then, the federal government has relied on two other approaches to house the poor—private-sector projects and housing vouchers, often used in tandem in order to get close to the deep affordability provided by traditional public housing.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) began giving subsidies to private developers to construct low-income housing, but limited the subsidies to 20 years. That initiative added another two million apartments, but some developers subsequently converted these projects to market-rate apartments, so only about one million of them

still provide low-income housing. Starting in 1986, Congress invented a new way to bribe the rich to help house the poor—the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which gives corporations and wealthy individuals tax breaks to invest in low-income housing projects. The program has added about three million new units in roughly 46,000 projects, but many are ticking time bombs, because the tax breaks end after 15 years.

Housing vouchers have become, by far, the largest federal subsidy program. HUD now provides 2.2 million vouchers to low-income families, who use them to find apartments in the private market. The families pay 30 percent of their income and HUD pays the rest.

But HUD puts a ceiling on voucher payments, which leaves many decent apartments in better neighborhoods off-limits to voucher holders.

Federal housing programs tend to concentrate the poor in low-income ghettos in the nation’s cities, since most suburban governments have resisted efforts to spread lowincome housing more evenly. Unlike food stamps, housing subsidies are not an entitlement program for the poor. In total, federal housing subsidies provide help to only five million low-income families—about one-fifth of families who are eligible for assistance.

In the past two decades, America’s housing situation has gotten much worse, not only for the poor but also for the middle class. The nation’s homeownership rate is now 64 percent, down from the all-time high of 69 percent in 2004.

Millions of homeowners have still not recovered from the 2007 mortgage meltdown created by reckless and abusive Wall Street practices that resulted in an epidemic of foreclosures and huge loss in wealth for many families. The homeownership rate for millennials is much lower than it was for the members of older generations when they were in their twenties and thirties.

The decline in homeownership has increased demand for apartments, but most new rental housing built in recent years has been high-end luxury units. In 2016, the median rent of newly constructed units was $1,478, about half the median renter’s monthly income, but in many metro areas rents are much higher. Nearly half of renters now spend 30 percent or more of their income on rent. More than one in four renters pay over half their incomes just to keep a roof over their heads.

This housing/income squeeze is particularly onerous for the poor. A report by Chris Salviati, “Rental Insecurity: The Threat of Evictions to America’s Renters,” reveals that more than one in four renters with incomes below $30,000 were unable to pay their full rent in at least one of the previous three months.

There is no state in the country where a minimum-wage worker working full-time can afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s “Out of Reach” report. In order to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment, renters need to earn a wage of $21.21 an hour. This “housing wage” is much higher in some areas.

Since Reagan began slashing federal housing assistance for the poor, it has been difficult for housing advocates to convince Congress to maintain, much less increase, HUD’s budget for subsidized housing. But it turns out that the Internal Revenue Service, not HUD, is the nation’s largest housing assistance agency. In 2017, the federal government provided about $130 billion in tax breaks for homeowners— almost twice the size of HUD’s total budget.

That includes about $64 billion in tax deductions for mortgage interest, $33 billion for local property taxes, and $32 billion on the capital gains when these homeowners sell their houses.

These tax breaks primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans with the most expensive homes. More than four-fifths of the value of these homeowner tax breaks goes to households with incomes of more than $100,000, and more than two-fifths goes to families with incomes above $200,000. Most low-income and working-class homeowners get crumbs— a few hundred dollars a year in tax breaks.

Overall, in other words, federal housing subsidies disproportionately help rich investors and homeowners, not the poor or the middle class.

Housing activists have called on Congress to limit housing tax breaks for the wealthy and redirect those funds to expand social housing.

Americans’ preference for homeownership is not only a legacy of the Founders’ strong belief in property ownership, but also the result of our nation’s weak tenants’ rights laws. For the almost two-thirds of Americans who own their own homes, it is their major asset and principal source of wealth. They view their

home as an investment that will appreciate as housing prices rise. In the absence of a strong welfare state like those in Western Europe, they consider their homes a buffer for when they retire, face extraordinary medical bills, lose their job, or need to borrow money to pay for their children’s college education. But as we’ve seen in the wake of the mortgage meltdown, there’s no guarantee that home prices will always rise; in fact, they can plummet.

Public policies can shift the relative attractiveness of owning and renting. American homeowners take for granted that they can make a profit from the sale of their homes.

Landlords assume that they can raise rents to any level if there are desperate consumers willing to pay. We associate the problem of eviction with renters. Yet if homeowners do not fulfill their obligation to pay their mortgage, they can lose their homes to banks.

But, as Vienna’s example shows, laws can confer on renters many of the benefits that we typically associate with ownership. For example, cities with rent-control laws bestow additional rights on tenants in terms of security and affordability.

Housing need not be a simple choice

between homeownership and renting. Even in the United States, there are embryonic variants of social housing—such as limitedequity cooperatives, mutual housing associations, and homes built as part of community land trusts—that eliminate or dramatically reduce profit-taking, viewing housing as a social provision rather than as a commodity.

Residents trade secure tenure and affordable costs in exchange for giving up the opportunity to speculate on the value of their homes.

Social housing involves long-term affordability, government subsidies, and, in the best-case scenarios, mixed-income projects.

Housing cooperatives, for example, share many attributes of homeownership. In a co-op, the residents hold shares in a corporation that owns the building(s). The shareholders enjoy the same benefits as traditional homeowners. But in limited-equity cooperatives, the corporation limits the extent to which shareholders may profit from the sale of their units.

Emily Thaden, director of national policy for Grounded Solutions Network, estimates that

the United States has between 165,000 and 225,000 units of resident-owned limited-equity housing. About 165 community land trusts sponsor another 32,000 units of rental and ownership housing with similar provisions.

Many local governments provide subsidies to help low-income families purchase homes, but impose “deed restrictions” that limit how much owners can sell these units for and require them to sell to other low-income households—provisions meant to limit speculation and preserve long-term affordability.

According to Thaden, local governments have imposed deed restrictions on about 200,000 to 250,000 units to ensure long-term affordability. Many of these are the result of local inclusionary zoning laws that require developers of market-rate associations to set aside some units—rental and for-sale—for low- and moderate-income households.

Social housing is much more widespread in Europe than in the United States. In this country, between 600,000 and 750,000 sharedequity or deed-restricted units, plus the 1.1 million units of public housing, can be called social housing. “They represent an innovation that can become a foundation for a new direction in national housing policy,” says Thaden.

Rent control is a key feature of social housing in Europe, but only a handful of American cities—mostly in New York, California, and New Jersey—have some form of rent control, protecting between five million and ten million tenants from arbitrary rent hikes and evictions.

This may soon change. Because more Americans view homeownership as increasingly out of reach, there’s now a burgeoning new renters’rights movement spreading across the country, demanding “less rent, more control.”

No other major industrial nation has permitted the level of destitution and decay found in the United States, and few have allowed decent housing to get so far beyond the economic reach of so many families. The Vienna experience can teach us that there is a better way, and that social housing should be a big part of the solution.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. Jake Blumgart provided research support for this article.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 67

West VirginiaTeachers Won Their Strike.

Now,They’re Rebuilding the Local Economy.

How the American Federation of Teachers has taken the lead in reinvigorating the poorest county in the state

By Kale na T ho m hav e

68 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

jenny tot ten

I

ing the high tunnel: spread out some t’s early January, but the high mulch and plant more raised beds, tunnel at Mount View High to protect the produce from harsh School in McDowell County, chemicals that could exist beneath West Virginia, is sweltering. the surface, because the high tunnel High tunnels are inexpensive is built on reclaimed coal mine land. greenhouses, unheated but covered in The whole school is. plastic, that make it easier for farmers to extend the growing season for their Ideally, Totten says, students could fruits and vegetables. In this case, it’s eventually sell fruits and vegetables to strawberries: About 300 strawberry the county school system so that the plants, donated by a McDowell farmfoods that they and other students eat er, are growing in raised beds. are from their own county. There are The students at Mount View chose three high tunnels in total at schools to plant the strawberries, says Jenny across the county, and plans for more.

Totten, who works with the high school McDowell is the poorest county in West Virginia—a distinction that students as the McDowell County Community Development Coordina- Mount View High School students tend strawberries in their high tunnel greenhouse. comes with high rates of food insecurity and high joblessness. That’s tor at the West Virginia CommuniBecause it’s winter, the strawberry plants what the high tunnel projects are intended ty Development Hub. The students don’t get to make a lot of their own decisions, she says. haven’t borne fruit yet. When they do, the stu- to mitigate: Students can not only grow food So she lets them choose what they want to do, dents intend to make—and sell—strawberry to sell but also to feed themselves and their whether it’s the work that they’ll do in the high jam. With other fruits and vegetables that they’ll families. And encouraging agriculture, says tunnel or what they’ll make with the harvested grow, the students have chosen to make and sell Totten, “[helps] build an economy not based plants. The kids don’t just learn gardening and smoothies, jams and jellies, and ready-to-sell on a single industry anymore. If we can spend cultivating, but also how to make their own vegetable boxes. To make even more growing just a piece of our money in the county, we products from the crop, and how to sell them. space, Totten has plans for the land surround- help build that local economy.”

A mural celebrating the town’s history decorates a building in Welch’s business district, a sign of local efforts to revitalize McDowell County’s post-coal economy.

There are also plans to install a high tunnel project at a drug rehabilitation home—because agriculture can also be used as therapy for people fighting addiction.

d av i d g o l d m a n / a p i m a g e s

The high tunnels are just one example

among many innovative projects happening across McDowell County that are part of a six-year-old initiative called “Reconnecting McDowell.” Perhaps surprisingly, it is coordinated by a labor union, the American Federation of Teachers. Reconnecting McDowell—a partnership of community members, nonprofits, and public and private organizations—has a mission that’s nothing if not ambitious: essentially, eradicating poverty in the county. It focuses on education, but also on providing wraparound services and economic development. When the project began, 40 partners joined the AFT—a list that has grown to about 125 today.

They face a daunting challenge. Fully one in three McDowell residents live in poverty.

Median household income is $25,206. Life expectancies are some of the lowest in the nation: In 2014, the average life expectancy

was just 70 years; the national average was 79. McDowell has high rates of opioid addiction, and one of the highest rates nationally of prescription drug overdose deaths. The county’s unemployment rate is 8.1 percent, nearly double the national rate.

McDowell’s poverty, and its consequences, are exacerbated by the county’s distance from other communities and their goods and services. McDowell is the state’s southernmost county, and the failure of the state government to extend the long-promised King Coal Highway into McDowell and other southern counties has clearly taken a toll. Doctors, dentists, and mental health providers—as well as the grocery store—are more than an hour’s drive away for many residents. (McDowell’s Walmart, which once provided jobs, groceries, and other necessities, closed in 2016.)

Reconnecting McDowell—often called just “Reconnecting”—is looking to reverse these statistics. To staff Reconnecting, the AFT hired three project coordinators to work within McDowell, in addition to a team in Washington, D.C., to organize the partners and help connect residents to, as Washington-based Reconnect-

ing Project Manager Leah Daughtry says, “the resources … that they should, by right, have.”

McDowell’s decline began many decades ago. The elimination of coal jobs—where unionized miners could expect to earn betterthan-decent wages—hit McDowell hard. At the county’s height in 1950, nearly 100,000 people lived in McDowell. But as the number of coal jobs decreased due to both increased automation and the rise of cheaper substitutes like natural gas, residents seeking work were forced to look elsewhere. Today, McDowell’s population hovers around 20,000.

With this loss of jobs and population came a loss of civic infrastructure. “A lot of our big civil institutions bringing people together and working on problems … those institutions are gone,” says Chad Webb, who coordinates Reconnecting’s projects within McDowell.

Now and then, McDowell surfaces in national media coverage, generally in stories that blame the victims for their poverty. During the 2016 election, journalists flocked to Appalachia, and McDowell County in particular, “to illuminate the values of Trump supporters,” writes Elizabeth Catte, a historian and author of What You

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 69

Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. On her blog, Catte chronicled how various journalists referred to McDowell County as “the forgotten tribe,” “the most pro-Trump county in America,” and “down-and-out coal country.”

Those stories left out a lot. While it’s true there was, and is, clear support for Trump in the area, just 6,179 votes were cast in McDowell County in the 2016 election, with 4,614 going to Trump. More tellingly, though, the county’s voter turnout was the lowest in the state, at 36 percent. Those pieces also tended to leave out the support Bernie Sanders won in McDowell during the 2016 primaries— receiving 1,488 votes on the Democratic line to Trump’s 785 on the Republican. Sanders was the only presidential candidate to visit McDowell County in 2016.

McDowell and Appalachia are in fact not “other.” Like so many places across the United

for education and children” when she had visited West Virginia.

Rather than put the state board of education in charge of the initiative, Manchin says, “I thought we needed a national partner that could be kind of the umbrella … [and the partners] would be peers under the umbrella.” Though teachers unions in West Virginia lack collective-bargaining rights, Manchin recognized the strength that the AFT and its organization of teachers had. So Manchin approached Weingarten about the AFT serving as the “umbrella.”

After further researching the problems facing the county, Weingarten agreed that the AFT should try to work with the McDowell community to help implement changes. And just like that, a labor union—not the state education officials, or a chain of charter schools with its “education reformers”—was launching

Reconnecting McDowell has an ambitious mission that focuses on education, but also on providing wraparound services and economic development to eradicate poverty.

States—the Delta region in the South, many Native American reservations in the West, the borderlands of Texas—Appalachia’s McDowell County is a place of deep, generational, rural poverty, much of it the result of economic exploitation. Though the mountains of McDowell are isolated in the southern coalfields of West Virginia, McDowell’s problems are not.

These problems are what motivated Gayle

Manchin, who was appointed to the state board of education while serving as the state’s first lady, to approach the AFT in 2011 to do something about McDowell County Schools.

The county’s public schools had been turned over to the state in 2001—and a decade had passed without improvement.

As Manchin recounts it, she thought, “If we could start a group and start talking about how could we make a difference in McDowell County, not only would it be good for McDowell … but we have other counties that certainly need help.” AFT President Randi Weingarten “really impressed” Manchin “with her passion

70 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

an initiative to improve a county school system—and, in short order, the county as a whole.

Since Reconnecting’s beginnings in late

2011, more and more partners, including residents, community groups, nonprofits, churches, businesses, and government agencies, have joined the effort. Reconnecting originally made a five-year commitment to the county, but renewed that commitment for another five years in 2017.

Twice a year, Reconnecting hosts a meeting for its partners from across the state and the country. One meeting is in the state capital of Charleston, the other in McDowell County itself. At the January meeting in a Charleston hotel, the McDowell partners discussed the county’s most pressing needs and brainstormed new solutions. Many pointed to McDowell’s teacher shortage; others highlighted the lack of a highway that could more easily connect McDowell to other communities. The problems intertwine: The inability to get to McDowell contributes to the substantial teacher short-

age—the schools needed to fill more than two dozen positions in January. Adequate housing for new teachers—or anyone—in McDowell has been hard to find or build. The land is rocky and mountainous, often with limited infrastructure for water and sewage.

At our table, Weingarten picked up a handful of the hotel’s sugar packets to illustrate a point about unions. “This is not just a fight for your little piece of the economic pie,” she said, picking up one sugar packet. “It is a fight to create the bigger economic pie,” she added as she grabbed the lot.

Since Reconnecting’s beginnings, the pie has begun to grow: Partners have donated millions of dollars for new programs, services, and resources for the schools. As Reconnecting has expanded, it has “gotten better at leveraging our relationships across the state and bringing in national partners when needed,” says Daughtry. Consequently, Reconnecting has taken on bigger projects—instituting community schools, starting a large-scale mentoring program, and helping to redefine the function of the county’s juvenile drug courts.

What may be the biggest—and surely most concrete—project of all has been building an apartment complex for teachers and other professionals. That’s a project, however, that has yet to come to fruition.

A major focus of Reconnecting is providing wraparound programs and services within the schools themselves. Because the county lacks health professionals, mobile dental offices visit the schools to provide care, and nearly all provide mental health services. Reconnecting is currently working to expand access to dental care for adults in the county as well. Two of the high schools have medical clinics, and two high schools also have graduation coordinators to work with the students, not necessarily just to help students get a diploma, but to build relationships with them, says Ingrida Barker, the director of secondary education on McDowell’s board of education. The county has instituted a home visiting program, where K–12 teachers meet with children and their families in their homes.

Many of these wraparound services are hallmarks of “community schools,” which provide extensive and comprehensive services to students and their families. Two of the county’s

elementary schools, Southside K-8 and Welch ceration and the criminal court system and into histories built on each other to help create the Elementary, are currently community schools. treatment, so that they can get back to school. places of deep poverty where mining and manuOutside of the wraparound services that nearly Reconnecting has clearly had a positive facturing have all but disappeared, but where, all the schools provide—like medical care and effect on student success. Between 2011 and as of 2013, ten out-of-state corporations still after school activities—Southside also provides 2016, the high school graduation rate increased own 63 percent of the land in McDowell County. programs and classes that involve a student’s 14 percent, from 74 percent to 88 percent. The Today, it has fallen to a union—not the United whole family. The school offers computer classes dropout rate decreased, from 4.5 percent to Mine Workers, a union made small and weak by and GED classes to parents and guardians, as 1.6 percent. More high school graduates are the same factors that have devastated McDowwell as classes like Zumba and painting for kids enrolling in college and technical programs: ell, but the nearly two million–member AFT—to and their families. Welch Elementary is in its 40 percent of graduates went to college in 2016, rebuild what those market forces and political infancy as a community school; its main plan is compared with just a quarter in 2011. And, says reactions have wrecked. Stephen Lerner, a longto teach the students hydroponic gardening. The Barker, through surveys, the kids are reporting time labor organizer, says that to “capture what school is reaching out to community members that they’re happier. The state returned the made the labor movement so vibrant in the past and organizations to bring in their agricultural county schools to local control in 2013. and how we can make it vibrant in the future” demands that unions connect with knowledge and build hydroponic towtheir communities. “One part is lifters—and these gardens can become ing up the wages and benefits of our community gardens. members, but the other part is being Reconnecting’s goal is to make a transformative agent to win justice all McDowell schools community at every level. [That’s] how unions schools—hubs for the entire McDowreturn to their roots—as a mission ell community. “We are slowly plugof winning social and economic and ging in these supports for everybody,” racial justice.” says Barker. “We have bits and pieces in every single school.”

Joseph McCartin, executive direc“Before, I was all about academtor of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at ics,” says Barker. “But when you look Georgetown University, says that at different circumstances … you initiatives like Reconnecting allow start looking at … what makes that unions to “expand beyond the workfinal outcome of academics: healthy place” and “approach the issues in relationships, overall happiness. As terms of thinking about people as an educator now, I’m not just thinkGayle Manchin (right) wanted a national partner to improve McDowell County schools, whole people—not just the lens of ing As, Bs, and Cs. I’m thinking, so she approached Randi Weingarten (left) and the American Federation of Teachers. their connection to the workplace.”

‘Have you had a meal? Have you had your dental check-up?’”

It may seem odd to some that a labor To do that, McCartin says, “What has to hapStudents and their families have also been union would get involved with community and pen is a cultivation of trust between the union able to access the internet and expanded economic development, but Weingarten would and the community allies and potential allies.” libraries. Partners Shentel and Frontier Com- disagree. “It is unique for these times, but it That trust was much in evidence this winter, munications expanded broadband access to is not unique in the historical context of who when teachers across the state’s 55 counties homes as well as the schools. A literacy orga- unions are,” she says. “Unions are about mak- went on strike, demanding higher pay and betnization, First Book, donated thousands of ing things better for the people they represent ter health insurance. (The low pay is a major books to McDowell children and literacy cen- and the people they serve.” reason why the teacher shortage that plagues ters around the county.

That was clearly once the case in McDowell, a McDowell County is a common feature across One program, which Chad Webb describes coal mining community with a unionized work- the state.) The two teachers unions in West as “the best thing we do,” is a mentoring pro- force. Throughout the partnership meeting, Virginia, the state branches of AFT and the gram called Broader Horizons, which pairs high Weingarten frequently reminded everyone of National Education Association, both helped school students who are dealing with difficult how McDowell, after its resources were extract- coordinate the strike, though much of the issues with mentors that help them plan their ed by corporations, was “abandoned by market impetus for the action bubbled up from below. futures. Through the program, the students forces”—which in turn led to the decimation of Chad Webb says that there was massive suptake trips to both Charleston and Washington, organized labor there. Both the decline of coal port across McDowell for the striking teachers.

D.C. Reconnecting also worked with the West in West Virginia and Appalachia, and attacks Local businesses put up signs that read, “We Virginia Supreme Court to create a juvenile from the right on unions across the country, support our teachers,” and community memdrug court to divert students away from incar- have weakened the power of labor. These dual bers brought food and coffee to the picket lines.

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 71

Webb says that it could seem like Reconnecting is “just another example. Delays that we’ve had in the building project ha[ve] been translated into people skeptical of our work. And I understand why they feel that way.”

A portion of the apartment complex’s funding has been secured from the Abandoned Mine Lands fund (the site of the future complex is on an old coal mine). The rest of the funding and the timeline are yet to be determined.

As the long wait for the apartment building has demonstrated, the AFT has needed to prove to the community that this time would be dif-

ney runs the only food bank in the county. And running the food bank is volunteer work—there are no paid employees. She says she feeds anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 people a month. Five Loaves & Two Fishes has its largest food distribution once a month, and some people come the night before, sleeping in their cars in the parking lot to ensure that they’re first in line.

According to Preston Pace, who has two children in a McDowell elementary school, The most ambitious project that ReconReconnecting is “doing a good job with whatnecting has proposed is to build an apartment complex for teachers and other professionever they have to work with. They’ve been kind als in downtown Welch, which is McDowell’s of humble about it. It’s like somebody giving an county seat. anonymous donation—you don’t know who they are, you One of the problems plagujust got a donation.” ing McDowell is a lack of housing, and a lack of land Stephanie Addair, another on which to build new houslong-time McDowell resident ing. For educators, that’s and head of McDowell’s Ecoespecially tough. Just 56 nomic Development Authorpercent of McDowell school ity, says, “They’re boots on the employees live in the counground. They’re here with us ty. Many teachers live outand working with us and not side the county, in cities like coming in to save us. … With Beckley and Bluefield, which them [being] with us, it’s can be about an hour’s drive different.” from work. But once a job Jina Belcher, who grew up opens up in Beckley or Bluein McDowell (and is McKfield, those teachers may inney’s daughter), says that leave to work closer to home. “one of the things that I In order to build what it appreciate most about [Chad termed “Renaissance VilWebb] is that he recognized lage,” AFT tore down the early on … that he needed to The AFT tore down an abandoned “Best Furniture” building in downtown Welch as part of a plan to build abandoned eyesore building develop the trust in the commuch-needed teacher housing on the site. But amid financing problems, the project is in limbo. that was once Best Furniture munity in McDowell Counin 2016. But funding troubles have meant that ferent—that Reconnecting could be trusted ty.” Belcher says that previous organizations now, instead of an empty building in down- even when its plans for economic development failed because “they didn’t enter into the comtown Welch, there’s an empty lot. By the nor- didn’t yield quick results. munity correctly.” mal criteria of market forces, teacher housing Linda McKinney, who runs the Five Loaves Belcher, who is the director of business develin McDowell isn’t a high-yield investment. & Two Fishes Food Bank, a partner of Recon- opment at Coalfield Development Corporation, In getting into the building business—and necting, has lived in McDowell County all an economic development nonprofit, says that by extension, the economic development busi- her life. She says that when she first heard before the January partners meeting, she didn’t ness—Reconnecting has entered a minefield. of the Reconnecting McDowell project, she realize some of the positive results that ReconMcDowell residents have heard the promises joked with friends who had also witnessed necting was achieving within the school system. before. Many organizations and initiatives well-intentioned groups come and go, “Are we When Webb was growing up in southern have made their way into McDowell to try to ‘disconnected’?”

West Virginia, he figured he would leave the alleviate the county’s poverty, with little to McKinney’s remark points to a possible com- area when he grew up. After all, that’s part of show for it. Sometimes it’s a way for organi- munication problem between Reconnecting a common narrative: Successful kids leave— zations to win grants—they use McDowell’s McDowell and the rest of the McDowell com- and they can only be successful if they leave. statistics, but then the money for the county munity: The top-down approach isn’t neces- But when Webb was at law school at West itself never comes. Other times, the funding sarily welcome.

Virginia University, he “fell back in love with dries up, and then the commitment does, too.

Without any federal or state help, McKin- West Virginia.”

After nine days of walkouts, the teachers won: The legislature approved a 5 percent raise for teachers as well as all state employees.

In undertaking to rebuild McDowell’s engines of growth and civic infrastructure, though, Reconnnecting needs to win even more trust than West Virginians showed their teachers during the strike.

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“I never thought of myself as a West Virginian when I was younger,” says Webb. “[But] then it became a part of my identity.” So he came home.

Reconnecting works to establish its commitment in many ways. Webb routinely hosts community conversations in different towns across McDowell, alongside others like Belcher and Totten. These informal listening sessions allow residents to discuss what they’d like to see in their communities, and they also allow Webb to figure out how he can help connect them to the resources that could make their plans happen. At one January listening session in Davy, the residents said they wanted to build a playground and splash park in one of their neighborhood green spaces. Webb mentions an organization, called KaBOOM!, that specifically funds playground equipment, and says that Reconnecting is looking into working with them to connect those resources to Davy.

And every month, Webb, Totten, and others from a county health group host a 5k race with a cheeky name to benefit different local charities. January’s chilly Saturday morning race was called “Freezin’ 4A Reason.”

“You have to have a physical and interpersonal presence,” Webb says.

Reconnecting’s most ambitious initia-

tives—revitalizing McDowell’s economy—inevitably involve diversifying it away from coal.

“When you talk about economic development,” says Totten, “you want to work with what’s already there.” McDowell has a lot to offer. Many people talk about how West Virginia, with its rivers and mountains, could be like Colorado in terms of attracting young people who want recreational activities.

The mountains surrounding the Welch town center rise up like the sides of a bowl.

During most of the year, the town is framed with foliage that’s lush and green. It doesn’t look like a different America—it looks like rural America, but a place ravaged by a postindustrial economy.

Last summer, the McDowell County Convention and Visitors Bureau began operating in Welch. It’s headed by Betty Jones. When I sat with Jones in her office, she had notes in front of her as she carefully told me about her projects. But it’s not long before the paper lay

forgotten and she was telling me about what McDowell used to be like, and her hopes for it. Like many, including those at the January partners meeting, she points to the prospect of tourism, such as trout-fishing in local Elkhorn Creek.

(The story of how the creek became a popular destination is the stuff of folktales. As the story goes, a truck carrying trout broke down along the highway near Elkhorn. All the fish would die if they remained in the truck, and though they’d probably die in the creek too, the driver took a risk and dumped them in the creek, where they prospered. Unfortunately, the creek is blighted by trash and sewage—but that doesn’t stop fishers from visiting “worldclass” Elkhorn, says Jones.)

People also come to ride the Hatfield-McCoy trail system in all-terrain vehicles and on dirt bikes—a large sign in Welch welcomes them.

it have come up short. Reconnecting could ultimately become a way to get those resources to the state’s poorest county. But as Weingarten points out, Reconnecting is an important effort that in itself will never be enough.

Taking this kind of economic revival to scale, Weingarten says, requires the federal government to step in. “Shouldn’t taxes be actually funding the human infrastructure, not tax cuts for the rich?” she asks.

Currently, however, we have President Donald Trump and a government that would never consider that kind of infrastructure investment. Private grants “are Band-Aids,” Weingarten concedes, “but you can’t have an either/or strategy. You have to have a both/and strategy: At the same time that you’re fighting austerity and fighting privatization … you have to try to figure out how you can get other means—it’s kids’ lives at stake!”

Taking this kind of economic revival to scale, Weingarten says, requires the federal government to step in. “Shouldn’t taxes be funding human infrastructure?” she asks.

The McDowell woods are there to be explored too, and plans for lake houses and cabins, where families can relax, are in the works.

Many point to the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial character of Appalachians as a way to revive not just McDowell but the entire region. Among them is Brandon Dennison, head of Coalfield Development Corporation, a partner of Reconnecting that uses social enterprises to help West Virginians learn new skills and open their own businesses.

“Appalachian culture,” Dennison stresses, “is creative and gritty. There’s this closeness to the land. Hunting, building, planting and growing, harvesting. [There’s an] ability to fix things, to understand equipment.”

Dennison’s organization has created jobs across West Virginia in sustainable agriculture, solar energy, sustainable construction, arts and culture, and mine land reclamation (training people to make mine sites usable for the community). His vision may well be a viable one, but as the general condition of West Virginia’s economy makes clear, the resources to realize

Reconnecting McDowell, she says, could be a template—not a replicable formula, as every place is different—but a template for other rural areas across the country suffering from similar problems: poverty, the loss of industry, and the consequences of exploitation. An initiative inspired by Reconnecting has already begun in St. Lawrence County in upstate New York.

What really matters to a depressed community, Weingarten continues, is an advocate, with roots in the community, focusing on issues of community concern. “Reconnecting should be advocating, I think now, for the [King] Coal Highway to be built. It sounded from [the partnership] meeting that that was a high-priority issue. So that should be part of the plan we advocate for.”

If Reconnecting can make a meaningful difference in McDowell, Webb says he’d want to take the model “to where I grew up and other communities around McDowell.”

“If we can fix this here,” he says, “we can fix this anywhere.”

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 73

How to Keep Social Security Secure Here’s a plan that eliminates the long-term shortfall in its finances and updates the system for the 21st century.

By He nry J. Aa ro n

F

or the last 35 years, official government projections have reported that Social Security will be unable to pay some scheduled benefits sometime in the middle third of this century.

For almost as long, the Congressional Budget Office has annually warned that the overall federal budget is on an unsustainable trajectory.

Conservatives, some of whom still yearn to roll back the New Deal and Great Society, point to these projections as support for their claim that we can no longer afford Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called “entitlements.” Their declared strategy involves sowing doubts about the sustainability of these programs and creating a coalition to scale back or replace them.

So far, this campaign has enjoyed little legislative success, but the talk of crisis has made many people very nervous. Roughly two-thirds of the American public tell pollsters that Social Security is already in crisis or faces major problems.

Smaller majorities say that they don’t expect to receive some or all of the benefits they’re due.

Nervousness has not eroded Social Security’s popularity. Solid majorities of liberals, conservatives, and independents alike say that Social Security is important and that they are willing to pay more in taxes to sustain it. The last major assault on the program, George W. Bush’s 2005 proposal to replace Social Security by diverting revenues into private accounts, turned into a political train wreck when members of the president’s own party shunned his plan.

The chief, indeed the only, argument for scaling back Social Security is that current Social Security taxes plus accumulated reserves are insufficient to pay all scheduled benefits beyond 2034, if current projections turn out to be exactly correct—or a few years earlier

74 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

or later, if they are a bit off. In 2018, Social Security will channel more than $1 trillion in pension benefits to more than 62 million beneficiaries; by 2035, 88.4 million beneficiaries are projected to have earned entitlement to $1.672 trillion in benefits (in 2017 dollars). Revenues in 2034 are now expected to cover just threequarters of scheduled benefits. If Congress makes no changes in the program, benefits will fall automatically by approximately one-fourth.

To avoid benefit cuts altogether at that point, Congress would have to raise taxes earmarked for Social Security by approximately one-third.

So, if the financial hole is as big as projections indicate, and if the program is as important to people as they say it is, why hasn’t Congress closed the gap? The answer is simple: Closing the gap requires members of Congress to subject themselves to political pain—raising taxes people would rather not pay or cutting benefits people want to keep. Few current elected officials will be around in the 2030s when the pain becomes inescapable. Rather than endure political pain now, senior members of each party are quite willing to wait, while graciously inviting their counterparts across the aisle to “show leadership” by proposing measures they know are unpopular.

The chair and ranking member of the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Committee on Ways and Means have each introduced plans that would restore Social Security to sustainable solvency. But that is where their similarity ends. The plan proposed by Chairman Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican, would close the funding gap by cutting benefits—so much, in fact, that the cuts would allow cuts in the payroll tax. The plan proposed by the ranking Democrat, John Larson of Connecticut,

would raise taxes more than enough to close the projected long-term funding gap and pay for benefit increases. Unsurprisingly, congressional leaders have shown no interest in pressing matters. As yet.

Such gracious procrastination will likely continue throughout the current presidential term. After cutting taxes and raising defense and domestic discretionary spending, Republican leaders have made clear that they would like to help offset projected budget deficits by cutting so-called entitlements, the largest of which is Social Security. But under Senate rules, changes to Social Security require 60 votes. No sentient being expects bipartisan collaboration to blossom in 2018, an election year. Or in 2019, when the next presidential campaign will be getting under way. Or in 2020, when the campaign will be in full swing. But major legislation on Social Security is possible in 2021, provided that there is a president and enough members of Congress who are prepared to negotiate constructive reforms. So, it is not too soon for progressives to think through the shape of a plan to restore Social Security to sustainable balance and modify it to take account of economic and social changes since 1983, when the last major legislation was passed.

The Social Security Financial Challenge

The challenge of Social Security reform is to close the long-term funding shortfall, while protecting the people of low and average means whose economic security depends on Social Security benefits, and adjusting the program to fit the changing conditions of American life.

A few numbers convey most of what one needs to know about Social Security’s financial future.

According to current projections by its trustees, Social Security revenues will cover 84 percent of expenditures averaged over the next 75 years.

An increase in revenues now of about one-fifth (16/84) or a cut in benefits of about one-sixth would close the projected gap. During those 75 years, however, the funding gap is projected to grow. Consequently, closing the average gap with adjustments that are more or less proportional over time would have an unfortunate side effect—after a few years, a new funding gap would emerge. That is just what happened after 1983 when a Democratic Congress and a Republican administration cut spending and raised taxes to close the funding gap projected over the next 75 years. Balance lasted exactly one year. The gap has grown primarily because of the passage of time, as later years with higher deficits entered the projection window. So, looking ahead today, fiscal balance in the 75th year will require somewhat more than the adjustments required to close the average gap.

Although progressives agree on the need to close Social Security’s long-term financial imbalance, many favor delay on the grounds that Congress will be forced to avoid benefit cuts and rely mostly on tax increases if it has to act on the eve of insolvency. At that time, they reason, a 3 or 4 percentage-point increase in payroll taxes for workers will be easier to pass than cuts of 20 percent or more for beneficiaries.

This view is both dangerously short-sighted and wrong. It is short-sighted because no one can reliably forecast the future balance of political forces, as recent events have reminded us. It is wrong because whenever Congress acts, it can make deep long-run cuts while sparing current beneficiaries and those soon to become beneficiaries. How? By borrowing to permit benefit reductions to be phased in over many years. The partial-privatization plans fashioned during the George W. Bush administration would have done just that, using government borrowing to sustain current benefits while payroll taxes were diverted into private accounts. But one need not point to defeated proposals. The current administration and Congress just showered generous payments— called tax cuts—mostly on the comparatively well-to-do, financed by borrowing.

Rather than passively waiting until the trust

fund reserve is depleted, progressives should actively urge action to restore long-term financial balance as soon as the opportunity to negotiate a decent deal arises. Progressives cannot count on winning every element of their opening bid. So, they should start with a proposal that allows give and take while preserving a non-negotiable progressive core.

The current retirement income sys-

tem enables most retired people to live with resources approximating what they had before retirement—an achievement, however, that will be at growing risk because of changes in private pensions. Social Security is the linchpin of the retirement system, the largest income source for most retirees, their survivors, and people with disabilities. Some retirees continue to work part-time, and some with low incomes also receive support from other fed-

led companies to abandon them entirely. By March 2017, traditional plans covered only 15 percent of all private industry workers, and the number was falling. Furthermore, many surviving plans were “frozen,” meaning that newly hired workers could not join them and many covered workers could no longer accrue credits. Instead, many employers established so-called 401(k) plans—essentially workerowned savings accounts to which employers made a “defined contribution.” If the investments in 401(k) plans do poorly, the risk now falls on the employee, not the employer.

Roughly 70 percent of people age 65 or older have some sort of pension other than Social Security, which means, of course, that 30 percent of households have no private pension at all. Most benefits are not large. The median value of all defined-contribution pension accumulations for people over age 65 in 2013 was

Social Security is the linchpin of the retirement system, the largest income source for most retirees, their survivors, and people with disabilities. eral programs, notably Supplemental Security Income and SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly Food Stamps).

Medicare remains the main defense against the financial catastrophe of serious illnesses for all seniors, while Medicaid assists many with low incomes. Private pensions and personal savings are the largest sources of retirement income for higher earners.

Social Security offers a unique service: It is the only readily available source of fairly priced lifetime annuities, a stream of guaranteed income that will last as long as the beneficiary lives. Its benefits are fully protected from erosion by inflation. Traditional pensions with “defined benefits” (a specific monthly retirement benefit) also offer lifetime annuities, albeit with financial market risk and less complete inflation protection than Social Security’s or none at all. But traditional pensions started to disappear from private-sector jobs after 1974 when Congress, with the best of intentions, enacted legislation strengthening requirements for such plans that inadvertently

$118,000, enough to pay an annuity of $581 per month to a 65-year-old woman. But such benefits are not indexed for inflation. (The mean 401(k)/IRA balance was more than three times the median, which indicates that some of the elderly had much larger accumulations.) In contrast, the median Social Security benefit for a single worker, $1,294, was more than twice as high as the median for private accounts.

Furthermore, Social Security benefits are not only fully indexed for inflation but also paid out in case of disability before retirement and to surviving spouses and children. Given the meagerness of other sources of retirement income for most workers, reforms should not reduce the proportion of their earnings that Social Security replaces.

In fact, because of economic and demographic developments, Social Security is not as progressive as it was. Benefit checks are net of Medicare premiums, which are uniform for most beneficiaries and have grown faster than benefits since the 1983 reforms. The 1983 legislation directly cut the ratio of retirement

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 75

and survivor benefits to earnings. And even then, benefits were low compared with those of other developed nations.

In addition, demographic trends have made Social Security less progressive than in the past, measured by the lifetime value of benefits. Average life expectancies at birth rose from 74.7 years in 1985 to 79.2 years in 2017.

But this gift of added life has accrued mostly to people with high earnings. The life expectancy of those born in 1920 who survived to age 50 was about five years longer for people in the top 10 percent in income than that for people in the bottom income decile. Among those born two decades later, in 1940, the gap in life expectancy widened to approximately 11 years. For those in the bottom income decile, life expectancy remained approximately flat.

The story that these numbers tell is complex, but clear. Social Security is and will almost

over the next 75 years and align revenues and expenditures through the end of the projection period, without cuts for most workers.

Second, it should restore the progressivity of Social Security that economic and demographic trends have eroded. And third, to the extent feasible, it should adjust to ongoing economic and social changes. Here is an outline of how to accomplish those goals.

Restoring and Sustaining Balance. The key to putting Social Security back in longterm balance is to recognize that reforms need to correct for the diminishing proportion of employee compensation subject to Social Security taxes. That share has fallen for two reasons: growing income inequality and increases in non-cash compensation.

Since its inception, Social Security taxes have applied to a capped earnings base. The reason for the cap remains compelling. When workers

The key to putting the system back in longterm balance is to correct for the diminishing proportion of employee compensation subject to Social Security taxes. certainly remain the foundation of income for low- and moderate-earning workers, people with disabilities, and survivors of deceased workers. When they retire, those with comparatively high incomes in the future will, as now, have to rely on income sources other than Social Security to sustain living standards. For the mass of the population, and especially for those with below-average earnings, current trends do not indicate that private pensions will significantly supplement Social Security.

But Social Security itself needs improvement— low-income people aren’t benefiting as much as they did in the past. So, while addressing the financial shortfall, Congress should make other changes to help Social Security continue to provide continuity of income for retirees, surviving dependents, and the disabled.

A Progressive Social Security Agenda

A progressive agenda for Social Security reform should achieve three core goals. First, it should restore actuarial balance averaged

76 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

have paid taxes on the earnings used to compute their benefits, they feel they have earned their benefits through work. Benefits come without the stigma attached to “welfare.” Furthermore, the full progressive legislative agenda contains much in addition to Social Security, and the government’s taxable capacity is limited. That taxable capacity should be devoted to assuring basic income, not spent on meeting all pension needs of the highly compensated. Applying the payroll tax to all of the earnings of most workers, but not to all earnings of the highly compensated, achieves these purposes.

On average, however, only the top 10 percent of earners have seen significant earnings growth in recent decades, which means that most increases in real earnings have flowed to those who earn more than the Social Security payroll tax ceiling. Although the wage ceiling does rise, the proportion of total earnings above it has nonetheless increased since 1983 from 10 percent to 17 percent, thereby eroding the tax base available to fund Social Security. Raising the payroll tax ceiling somewhat faster than cur-

rent annual adjustments would gradually undo the erosion of the tax base due to growing earnings inequality. Such an increase in the tax base, combined with changes in the benefit formula to make it more progressive, would close more than one-third of the long-term funding gap.

Since the Social Security payroll tax applies only to cash earnings, it does not cover employer contributions to health insurance, nor does it apply to compensation under certain “salary-reduction agreements” that pay for health care or child care. These once-minor forms of compensation have grown much faster than cash wages. The result is a widening divergence between the taxable wage base and total worker compensation. Excluding fringe benefits and salary-reduction agreements from tax is also inequitable. Two workers with identical total compensation face different taxes and will receive different Social Security benefits depending on whether they receive health insurance as a fringe benefit or buy coverage themselves. Broadening the tax base would align treatment of similarly compensated workers. This step would close nearly one-third of the currently projected average funding gap.

An additional step that will help close the funding gap is to make Social Security genuinely universal. For a variety of political and administrative reasons, the program initially covered barely half of the workforce. Gradually, Congress extended Social Security so that now almost all jobs are covered. The major remaining exceptions are roughly six million state and local government job slots in four states. Most workers in those jobs are thought to eventually earn Social Security coverage in other jobs.

But the remaining exclusions produce needless complexity and leave some gaps in coverage.

Bringing those excluded jobs into the system will help the program’s finances.

Restoring Social Security’s Progressivity.

Several changes would partially offset the recent trends eroding the progressivity of Social Security benefits. The most direct step is to change the basic benefit formula to increase generosity at the bottom of the earnings scale.

A second step is to liberalize a provision enacted in 1972 to award a special minimum benefit, higher than that produced by the basic benefit formula, to workers with lengthy, low-earning careers. Over time, the real value of the spe-

cial minimum has remained constant, while average real earnings and monthly benefits for new retirees have increased. Consequently, the special minimum no longer provides extra assistance to the groups it was intended to help. Boosting the special minimum benefit to restore its availability to workers with lengthy low-wage careers is overdue.

Different versions of these two changes have been part of proposals introduced as draft legislation by both conservatives and progressives. Unsurprisingly, conservatives have opted for smaller “tilts” in the formula for low earners and smaller increases in the special minimum benefit than progressives do. But joint interest in these proposals by members of both parties is a favorable augury for future negotiations.

An additional change ought to address the difficulties facing many people who start retirement with adequate resources but after many years find their income eroding. They may cease to be able to work part-time for pay, use up their personal savings, and see inflation erode the purchasing power of their private pensions.

For long-term retirees with limited incomes, therefore, some increase in Social Security benefits is warranted. Various commissions have suggested a bump up in benefits for people over a particular age—say, age 85. This approach, however, would do nothing for long-term Disability Insurance beneficiaries, while raising benefits even for the more affluent. A better approach would be to raise benefits for those who have been on the rolls for more than a certain period—say, 20 years. The increase could be proportional to initial benefits or capped.

Or the bump in benefits could be set at a flat dollar amount and phased out for those with high benefits or high current income.

Another progressive step would help children who receive support as dependents of deceased or disabled Social Security beneficiaries. Those benefits now end at either age 18 or age 19 if the child is a full-time student who has not graduated high school. Given the importance of post-secondary education, eligibility should continue for children up to age 22 if they are in school.

Responding to Economic and Social Trends.

Several other changes in Social Security are desirable, particularly to reflect changes in family life. When Social Security benefits

Meeting the Social Security Challenge Change in actuarial deficit over 75 years*

Change in deficit in 75th year*

1. Gradually raise limit on earnings subject to payroll tax ($128,400 in 2018) by an additional 2 percent per year starting in 2018 until the cap includes 90 percent of earnings. The cap would be increased to about double the level under current law for 2053 and later.

+0.63

+0.66

2. Gradually include employer contributions to health insurance and voluntary salary reduction plans in taxable wage base: Employer-sponsored group health insurance (+0.70) Voluntary salary reduction plans (+0.28)

+0.98

+0.62

3. Change current benefit formula, which sets benefits to 90 percent of average earnings up to first bendpoint ($880 in 2017), 32 percent of earnings between first and second bendpoint ($880 to $5,300), and 15 percent on higher earnings. New benefit formula would provide benefits equal to 93 percent of earnings up to $1,000, 29.8 percent of earnings between $1,000 and $5,336, 15 percent of earnings between $5,500 and $8,300, and 5 percent on higher earnings.

+0.37

+0.37

4. Update special minimum to provide a benefit at least equal to the federal poverty threshold for a single person to workers with at least thirty years of positive earnings, with a reduced special minimum for workers with fewer years of positive earnings.

–0.10

–0.16

5. Cover all newly hired state and local government employees.

+0.17

–0.18

6. Allow one parent of children to drop out up to three years from the computation of average lifetime earnings for children under age 5. The parent can claim no more than six drop-out years, in each of which the parent must have earnings under $5,000.

–0.05

–0.05

7. Gradually reduce spouse benefit from half to one-third of the benefit of the higher-earning spouse; gradually impose a cap on the spouse benefit equal to the spouse benefit of a worker at the 50th percentile career average worker.

+0.15

+0.20

8. Increase benefits for retired or disabled workers and survivors who have reached a certain age or been on the rolls for an extended period, by adding to annual cost of living adjustments or by adding a flat dollar amount (which may be capped or phased out for those with high benefits).

–0.15

–0.15

9. Children of survivors and disabled workers are now counted in determining family benefits until they reach age 18 (19, if they are in elementary or secondary school). Retain eligibility until children reach age 22, if they are in pre-college, college, or vocational institutions starting in 2018.

–0.06

–0.06

10. Dedicate estate and gift tax revenues to Social Security (approximation based on estate and gift tax effective in 2017).

+0.40

+0.40

11. Raise payroll taxes equally on employees and employers by 0.5 percentage points in 2060, 0.85 percentage points in 2080.

+0.40

+2.85

Total of lines 1–11

+2.74

+4.50

Shortfall as estimated in 2017 Report of social Security Trustees

-2.83

-4.55

Balance Under Proposal

– 0.09 – 0.05

Proposed Changes

+ Reduction – Increase

*Preliminary estimates based on “Summary of Provisions that Would Change the Social Security Program,” Office of the Chief Actuary, Social Security Administration

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 77

began, the one-earner couple was an American norm. Most husbands worked for pay outside the home, and most wives did not. Because two cannot live as cheaply as one, Congress awarded one-earner couples a benefit half again larger than that paid to a single person with the same earnings. Each member of a married couple is entitled to the larger of a pension based on his or her earnings or a “spouse benefit” equal to half of the benefit of his or her married partner. This provision produces an unwanted side effect: Work of the lesser earner in a couple does not increase the couple’s pension until the lesser earner’s benefit exceeds half of the greater earner’s benefit.

Work for pay by both spouses is now the norm. As a result, retirement benefits for an increasing proportion of women are based on their own earnings histories—63.5 percent of women age 65 to 69 in 2016, up 20 percentage

is costly, and the nation has not adopted it.

Allowing people to omit years spent out of the labor force rearing young children when computing their lifetime average earnings would help. So would awarding a notional wage for years spent out of the labor force caring for children. Both approaches would help maintain Social Security benefits for those who leave the labor force to care for children.

Designing such provisions is tricky, but neither is costly, and both somewhat lighten the longterm financial burden of parenting.

Promoting Long-term Stability

The measures I’ve outlined, taken together, will eliminate most of the average funding gap for the next 75 years. But the financial impact of these measures is spread roughly proportionately over the period, while Social Security spending will rise faster than rev-

To delay restoring Social Security to longterm sustainability is to play Russian roulette with the keystone of progressive social policy in America. points since 1998. This trend is certain to continue. Spouse benefits are rapidly becoming a reflection of a bygone male-breadwinner world.

These trends in no way diminish the continued importance of survivor benefits, which remain important for both men and women.

With men and women now working at similar rates, if not yet at equal average wages, it is time to reduce reliance on the spouse benefit. Capping the spouse benefit and indexing it only for inflation would preserve it in the near-term for couples with one low-earner but would allow a gradual transition to a system where eventually everyone’s benefit would depend on what he or she has earned.

Social Security should, however, also be adjusted to reflect unpaid labor in the home.

Parents, especially those with modest incomes, often face wrenching choices about whether to sacrifice earned income to care for young children. Under current law, earnings loss also lowers future Social Security benefits. Publicly financed day care is probably the best solution to both of these problems. But that approach

78 WWW.Prospect.org Spring 2018

enues. If nothing else is done, a small average gap would remain, which will tend to grow as the 75-year projection windows advance, as it did after the 1983 legislation. So, other steps should be taken to achieve continued balance.

Two additional measures would balance Social Security for the indefinite future under the economic and demographic assumptions the trustees now project. The first is an increase in the payroll tax levied on both workers and employers (0.5 percentage points in 2060 and 0.85 percentage points in 2080, or phased in as needed) to assure that the Social Security trust fund maintains adequate balances indefinitely.

Revenue from the estate and gift tax under provisions prevailing before enactment of the 2018 tax law should also be dedicated to the Social Security trust fund.

Many conservatives oppose any tax increases, favoring instead a gradual increase in the normal retirement age. The average increase in life expectancy gives this change some surface appeal. But it is ill-conceived because lessaff luent Americans haven’t seen increases

in longevity. Another superficially attractive alternative would be to raise the age at which workers can first claim Social Security retirement benefits—currently age 62. This step seems in accord with the increase in labor force participation by people over age 65, up by half between 1994 and 2014. Most of this increase, however, has been among the well-compensated and better-educated, who comprise a growing share of the workforce. Raising the age for early retirement would impose unmistakable hardship on older workers for whom work has become too demanding, physically or mentally, who are sick, or who do not have long to live.

And contrary to what one might think, raising the age of initial entitlement slightly worsens Social Security’s long-term financial condition. Because benefits are scaled to the age at which benefits are claimed, no longterm savings result from raising the age at which retirement benefits can be claimed. But blocking early retirement benefits would cause some affected to apply for and be approved for disability benefits, increasing overall program costs for this group. In addition, rising average life expectancies have made the increment in benefits for delayed retirement a bit more than actuarially fair. For the average worker, it pays to wait to claim benefits as long as possible.

So by forcing some people to claim benefits at a later age, raising the age of initial eligibility boosts average lifetime benefits.

Together, the various benefit and revenue changes I have outlined would place Social Security on solid financial footing for the foreseeable future. Of equal importance, they would respond to demographic, social, and economic developments that have emerged since Congress last enacted major Social Security legislation a generation ago. To delay restoring Social Security to long-term sustainability is to play Russian roulette with the keystone of progressive social policy in America. The time to restore the program’s finance balance will come when political balance is restored. That won’t be until at least 2021. But now is the time to think through the alternatives, to be clear about priorities, and to design a practical plan for the future.

Henry J. Aaron is the Bruce and Virginia MacLaury Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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Democracy and Its Discontents Populism, nationalism, and the threats to a liberal society By Arthur Goldhammer b

o l i v i e r d o u l i e r y / a b a c a p r e s s / s i pa v i a a p i m a g e s

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hroughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War, the consoling myth of the self-styled Free World was that democratic politics constituted the end point of political evolution. It was an article of faith that once the blighted societies on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain attained democracy, the “end of history” would commence, as Francis Fukuyama memorably put it in 1989. Political contestation would not disappear, but the battle henceforth would be about mere “economic calculation” and “the endless solving of technical problems” rather than fundamental political ideology.

That things haven’t worked out quite as Fukuyama imagined is the common theme of the three books under review. All three take as their fundamental premise the idea that democracy, far from being a stable and all-but-irreversible

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political regime, is instead fragile, perpetually vulnerable, and prey to both internal pathologies and external enemies.

It is no mystery why anxiety about the stability of democracy is rampant today. Throughout the West, countries that used to think of themselves as paragons of “advanced democracy” are facing challenges to their established political systems—challenges mounted not by restive militaries or militant revolutionaries but by broad segments of their own citizenry.

These challenges are often grouped under the label “populist” or “populist-authoritarian” or “nationalist-populist” or “far-right populist.” None of these terms is quite satisfactory. After all, the foundation of democracy is what Tocqueville called “the dogma of popular sovereignty.” Populists claim to speak for the People while denouncing the rest as “elites” or

“aliens” or both. If a populist movement succeeds in attracting a majority of adherents, does it not have the right to rule as it sees fit? Is that not the very meaning of democracy?

No, reply the proponents of liberal democracy. Unfettered majority rule can all too easily turn into majoritarian tyranny, as Tocqueville warned (and as our constitutional Founders appreciated); or, worse, it can become a mask for the rule of a ruthless minority cloaking itself in a popular mantle. Democracy thus threatens to sap its own foundation, since a sovereign free to do as it pleases—even to the point of tampering with the rules of the electoral system by gerrymandering districts and disqualifying potential voters, appointing biased judges, and silencing critics of its policies—cannot hope to win the acquiescence of the defeated minority. Unless there exists a

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possibility of alternation between those momentarily in power and those excluded from it, democracy forfeits its legitimacy, even if certain of its outward forms, such as elections, are retained.

Democracy therefore rests on a contradiction. If a democratic system of government is to endure, all parties must acknowledge that the imperative of preserving the rules that define and protect that system takes precedence over the goal of achieving power. Yet at the same time, the quest for power is the parties’ very raison d’être. Somehow the thirst for power must be restrained sufficiently to preserve the system itself. For as long as the system survives, the defeated can live to fight another day, but if the system itself is subverted the losers can be deprived of their very right to participate in politics. Hence when the Republicans gathered at their party’s 2016 nominating convention indulged their hatred of the opposing party’s candidate by shouting in unison, “Lock her up!” many Americans began for the first time in their lives to tremble for the future of their republic, which Benjamin Franklin had warned was theirs only so long as they knew how to keep it.

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt set out to examine just how shaky the foundations of American democracy might be by studying the ways in which democracy has failed in other countries. Their bravura tour d’horizon covers two centuries of democratic histories in all corners of the globe. They find that the preservation of democracy requires two things. First, the political parties that constitute the system need to act as gatekeepers.

Men and women who would vie for high office must first be vetted by their collaborators and competitors, people in a position to scrutinize their character and capacity for governance more closely and intimately than the average voter

Spring 2018 The American Prospect 79

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can, at least in the abstract ideal. Parties can also be the locus of corrupt bargains and often were, or they can simply fail in their role as gatekeepers: “When fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.”

Precisely because the parties sometimes fail in their gatekeeping role, a second line of defense is needed. Even if unscrupulous actors circumvent the gatekeepers and succeed in gaining power, they must not be free to change the rules and norms that govern the operation of the system and protect the minority from the arbitrariness of the majority. Without such constraints on the will of the majority, democracy may exist but not liberal democracy.

Significantly, the rules that Levitsky and Ziblatt regard as crucial are not the rules and procedures written into the U.S. Constitution, the muchvaunted system of checks and balances in which many Americans, vaguely remembering what they learned in civics class, are wont to place their faith. After detailing the ways in which explicit constitutional safeguards identical to those found in the U.S. Constitution have broken down elsewhere, the authors conclude that something more is needed. “Democracies work best,” they write, “where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms.” Two such norms stand out: “mutual toleration,” or recognition of the legitimacy of the opposition, and “forbearance,” defined as “restraint” in the exercise of institutional powers.

The two Harvard political scientists are not sanguine about the robustness of these norms in the current political moment. Why not? Because the rot stems, they say, from “extreme partisan polarization” growing out of “an existential conflict over race and culture.” Now, any political conflict that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as “existential” runs the risk of turning catastrophic, because rule-breaking is licensed by the assumed imperative of self-preservation.

For right-populist parties today, and not only in the United States, the perceived existential threat is primarily a consequence of demographic change. People fear disruption of the

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prevailing racial or ethnic hierarchy.

In the United States it was Trump adviser Steve Bannon who, more clearly perhaps than the candidate himself, saw the potential of this issue in a country where one party, the Republican, is sustained largely by white votes, while the nonwhite share of the Democratic vote has increased sharply over the past half-century.

There is a tension in the LevitskyZiblatt book between these two strands of the argument, norm-breaking on the one hand and existential crisis on the other. “Existential” issues of race and culture will always entail norm-breaking in the name of self-preservation, or else lead to compromise at the expense of minority groups. In the past, the parties have opted to preserve tolerance of opposing views and forbearance in the use of the powers of office, to be sure, but arguably at the expense of democratic fairness rather than in support of it.

As Levitsky and Ziblatt duly note, this was the case at the end of the 19th century, when Reconstruction was ended by a tacit agreement between Northern politicians prepared to tolerate Jim Crow in the South and Southern conservatives prepared to compromise on economic questions in return for the opportunity to restore the racial and class hierarchies they believed fundamental to their way of life. In the same period, similar unwritten norms countered the democratic thrust of the nascent workers’ movement. This was reinforced by Supreme Court majorities wedded to a concept of “freedom of contract” inimical to organized labor and law enforcement policies with similar effect.

Like Levitsky and Ziblatt, Alexis de Tocqueville knew that the survival of democracy depended on more than written constitutions and formal legislation. “Laws matter less than mores,” he wrote. Mores: an interesting choice of word (the French is moeurs). By it, Tocqueville meant not just “habits of the heart,” such as the mutual toleration and forbearance invoked by the two scholars, but “the whole range of ideas that shape habits of mind … the whole moral and intellectual state of a people.”

Tocqueville’s notion of mores, while capacious enough to encompass

How Democracies Die

By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

Crown

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic

By David Frum

Harper

Levitsky and Ziblatt’s tacit norms, is really far broader. The two political scientists focus narrowly on the behavior of politicians and officials, whereas Tocqueville weighed the “whole moral and intellectual state of a people.” How Democracies Die is a book with many strengths, but its single-minded focus on norms leaves out other parts of the story. The authors highlight numerous instances in which democracy has been threatened by the trespasses of officials but say little about the moral condition to which a nation must sink in order to tolerate and even incite such misbehavior in high places.

Toward the end of their book, Levitsky and Ziblatt do broaden the focus somewhat to include not just American officialdom but the American people as well. Pessimistically, they quote their Harvard colleague Danielle Allen: “The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority.” Undeterred by the absence of precedent, they resolutely insist, to their credit, that there can be no retreat from efforts to make the American political system more inclusive, no matter how much resentment of demographic change has contributed to the erosion of norms. They observe, further, that “slowed economic growth” has only compounded the anxieties attendant upon the loss of white ethnic superiority. Whatever optimism they can muster then comes down to the hope that by restoring growth and spreading its fruits more equally, racial anxieties can somehow be laid to rest. Weighed against the bleak historical record they set forth in the preceding pages, this seems a thin reed on which to rest the fate of the Republic.

David Frum, a journalist and for-

The People vs.

Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It

By Yascha Mounk

Harvard University Press

mer conservative movement operative turned apostate, has more to say about the decay of American mores in Tocqueville’s broad sense of the term. Like Levitsky and Ziblatt, he blames political actors, whose pursuit of power leads to disdain for the norms that sustain the system: “Where constitutional democracy has been lost, it has

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been lost because political actors have broken its rules … to achieve some immediately urgent goal.” But he also blames the “enablers” and “appeasers” of those actors, including a “conservative entertainment complex” that propagandized for an extremist candidate and “a donor elite who funded him” for reasons of self-interest or, as Frum prefers to put it, “plunder.” Levitsky and Ziblatt have little to say about the odd symbiosis between plutocracy and populism, which is central to Frum’s analysis. As a conservative keen to limit the role of the state, he is appalled by the use of state power for private gain: “Costly as the Trump family was to the presidency, the presidency was correspondingly lucrative to the Trump family” and its friends.

Frum does not stop with the class of wealthy buccaneers keen to fill their own pockets, however. They would have been satisfied with any of the Republican hopefuls. To explain why the party went instead for the one candidate who broke the mold, the former Bush speechwriter must look to the base of his own conservative movement. He excoriates the “millions of rank-and-file Republicans” who embraced the norm-busting frontrunner. This readiness to acknowledge the alarming decay of “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people” sets Frum apart from the value-neutrality to which political science aspires, and which tends to stress self-interest rather than democratic passions such as the envy and resentment of elites. If this concern with the moral foundations of democracy rather than with its formal and informal institutional arrangements reflects Frum’s conservative roots, it also does honor to them.

Among the many sources of resentment that fed 2016’s revolt of the masses, Frum singles out a ferocious rejection of political correctness.

According to candidate Trump, political correctness “cripples our ability to talk and think and act clearly.” The once-silent majority had never really been silent about its disdain for elitist “snowflakes” who refuse to call a terrorist an “Islamic terrorist” or an undocumented immigrant an “illegal alien.”

In speech where some saw only rank prejudice, others saw a willingness to

grapple frankly with salient realities of the day. It proved surprisingly easy to persuade people who felt disrespected for candidly speaking their minds that “liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood.”

The two books discussed thus far

have both centered on the dilemma of American democracy in the era of Donald Trump. Levitsky and Ziblatt take an admirably comparative approach, but their primary concern is with the fate of American democracy in light of what has happened elsewhere. Frum writes of American politics with an insider’s intimacy.

Yascha Mounk’s book is different.

Born in Germany but now a citizen of the United States, Mounk sees the Trump catastrophe as but the latest in a series of populist uprisings against the status quo ante. Hence the title of his book: The People vs. Democracy.

Since this opposition has sprung up in many countries, there must, Mounk reasons, be a cause common to all.

He finds the cause he is seeking in the concept of undemocratic liberalism: “Unnoticed by most political scientists, a form of undemocratic liberalism has taken root in North America and Western Europe. In this form of government, procedural niceties are carefully followed (most of the time) and individual rights are respected (much of the time). But voters have long since concluded that they have little influence on public policy.” Provocatively, he adds, “They aren’t altogether wrong.”

One way of reading this is to take Mounk as seizing the other horn of the dilemma identified by Levitsky and Ziblatt. They worry about what happens to democracy when “procedural niceties”—that is, democratic norms, both formal and informal—are not respected. He worries about what happens when respect for norms serves to mask the denial of democratic voice.

Why has this happened? Mounk singles out three changes in the environment in which liberal democracy flourished after World War II. First, the economic growth that sustained the expansion of the welfare state has ended. Wages have stagnated across the developed world, and inequality has increased. Globalization has

Lobbying by economic interests has infiltrated key institutions, whose decisions are increasingly captive to

powerful economic players rather than responsive to the will of the people.

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limited the ability of nation-states to deliver healthy growth. Legislative bodies have been reduced to impotence as what limited economic sovereignty remains has been shifted to the executive or to supposedly independent entities such as central banks when not simply ceded to supranational bodies such as the European Commission. Furthermore, lobbying by economic interests has infiltrated all these institutions, whose decisions are increasingly captive to the will of powerful economic actors rather than responsive to the will of the people.

All these changes have undermined liberal democracy from within, yielding what Mounk dubs, with appealing symmetry, undemocratic liberalism.

Abetting the corrosive effects of undemocratic liberalism is what the author calls illiberal democracy. This is the cultural side of the reaction to globalization. If undemocratic liberalism thrives on the free movement of goods and capital, illiberal democracy stems from the free movement of people, which forces once-homogenous nations to contend with the influx of people whose language, religion, culture, and habits of mind and heart— Tocqueville’s mores—are unlike those of the native population.

The final threat to liberal democracy comes, according to Mounk, from the internet. Democratic politics flourishes best where there is a shared civic culture. The rapid spread of social media via the internet has meant that people no longer need expose themselves to views not consonant with their own. Their prejudices, never challenged, grow unimpeded in this hothouse environment.

This picture of what has happened to Western democracy is no less dire for being familiar. Mounk may concede more to the populist critique than he has to or should, however. For example, he acknowledges that “the case for taking so many policy decisions out of democratic contestation may be perfectly sound. … [U]ndemocratic liberalism may have great benefits—but that doesn’t give us a good reason to blind ourselves to its nature.” But what is its nature, exactly? Surely the reliance—and perhaps over-reliance—on technocracy stems

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in part from the recognition that the democratic will is often as inscrutable as the Delphic oracle when it is not outright self-contradictory. People want their medical costs to be paid for when they are sick but don’t want to pay insurance premiums when they are healthy. They want excellent schools yet resist paying taxes to support them. They want the benefits of low-cost imports yet also want jobs in industries that shift production to low-wage countries in order to remain competitive (as well as line the pockets of their shareholders).

Especially in Europe, the rise of technocracy was in part a response to the previous wave of populism, fueled by the perception that the European economy could continue to compete globally only if it could achieve economies of scale engineered by experts in Brussels. Mounk’s category of undemocratic liberalism leaves no room for distinguishing between the more social democratic European Commission of Jacques Delors and the conservative one of José Manuel Barroso.

During what the book portrays as the golden age of liberal democracy, which coincides with the 30 years after World War II to which the French refer as les trente glorieuses, France was arguably the very embodiment of undemocratic liberalism: a dirigiste state run by a technocratic elite guided by a strong executive with little input from a docile and subservient parliament. In retrospect, the considerable opposition that this regime aroused at the time can be portrayed as reasonable and constrained, democratic and rational rather than populist and irrational. But only in retrospect—at the time, it was denounced by opponents as authoritarian and hypernationalist and contested vigorously in the streets in May 1968. Mounk concludes with a series of policy recommendations that he believes will assist in re-asserting democratic control over the technocrats without ceding too much ground to their critics. Liberal democrats should confront populists on their home terrain. As an expatriate and citizen of the world, he formerly thought that nationalism’s virulence could be quelled, but he has come to see nationalism as a powerful and permanent influence

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Liberal democrats should embrace

“inclusive

patriotism,” to use the powerful emotions and symbols associated with the nation-state to advance their cause.

in human affairs. Liberal democrats should therefore embrace what he calls “inclusive patriotism,” seeking to use the powerful emotions and symbols associated with the nation-state to advance their cause. Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama serve as examples of how this can be done. So does Emmanuel Macron, whose Marseille speech extolling the composite nature of the French nation Mounk salutes. Unmentioned, however, is the policy line that Macron has followed since that speech, which emphasizes more stringent conditions on political asylum and accelerated deportation proceedings for immigrants who do not meet the requirements.

Indeed, Macron is a good test case for Mounk’s nostrums. Is he a liberal democrat or rather a complex blend of technocrat, pragmatic politician, and skilled rhetorician capable of mobilizing the rhetoric of inclusive patriotism on one occasion, of entrepreneurial capitalism on another, and of national grandeur on still another? There is a danger, I think, of allowing “liberal

democracy” to become a value-laden term conveying broad approval without analytical purchase. What the current moment demands is insight like Tocqueville’s into the way in which successful democracies rely on a blend of contradictory ingredients, not all of which can be labeled “democratic.” Indeed, it was the heart of Tocqueville’s argument that a successful democracy must incorporate elements of its opposite, which he called “the aristocratic social state.” Conditions have changed since Tocqueville’s time, and so has the precise blend of contrary components required to hold the centrifugal forces of the democratic social state in check. Each of these books reveals in its own way a part of democracy’s contemporary predicament, but much work remains to be done to elucidate the conundrum of the present moment.

Arthur Goldhammer is a writer, translator, and affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard. He blogs at French Politics.

Corporate Power and the Unmaking of American Democracy How corporations became legal “persons” and how we the people might regain sovereignty By K. Sabeel Rahman b

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ith the passage of a massive corporate tax cut, a billionaire’s cabinet in Washington, and rising corporate profits amidst worsening economic inequality and insecurity, the problem of corporate power is justifiably at the forefront of political debate. A pair of new books provide a rich historical context for understanding these tensions between corporate power, democracy, and inequality: legal scholar Adam Winkler’s We the Corporations, and a volume edited by historians Naomi Lamoreaux and William Novak called Corporations and American Democracy. Taken together, these volumes show how corporations have historically leveraged law and public policy to

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secure far greater rights and influence.

Winkler, a constitutional law scholar at UCLA Law School, offers a comprehensive account of how corporate legal rights emerged, from the colonial era to Citizens United and the contemporary battles over corporate speech and campaign spending. Winkler’s account makes clear that corporate powers have always been a legal construction. The question is not whether corporations should have “more” or “less” power; rather it is about what rights and powers corporations should have, for what purposes.

In the colonial era, corporate entities like the Massachusetts Bay Company were central to facilitating collective action, association, and economic

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activity. Winkler’s book then narrates key historical turning points where a combination of corporate actors, lawyers, and judges made crucial decisions establishing corporate rights, and transforming the nature of both the corporation and the American polity itself.

The first key turning point came in the 1809 case of Bank of the United States v. Deveaux, in which Chief Justice John Marshall held that corporations were to be understood as associations of persons. In this view, corporate rights were limited, and ultimately derivative of the rights of their (human) members. It wasn’t until 1886 in the famous case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad that the Supreme Court established the legal fiction of corporate personhood itself.

But as Winkler argues, these advances in corporate rights, perhaps paradoxically, served more than the narrow interests of corporate litigants. Corporations and the lawyers representing them, in Winkler’s account, have been at the vanguard of legal innovation and transformation, often forging property and liberty rights that have sometimes advanced as well as narrowed American democracy. Both the associative and personhood views of the corporation served as grounding for subsequent cases finding specific property rights and protections against government pressure, and later liberty rights including speech rights for corporations.

Crucially, these rights emerged from “liberal” and “conservative” courts alike, and often served a variety of social purposes. Corporate property interests were key to the emergence of early Fourth and Fifth Amendment criminal procedure protections against search and seizure and on due process grounds. Similarly, speech rights were key to protecting media companies from threats of censorship and attack by state actors—including demagogues like Huey Long.

The NAACP leveraged corporate association arguments to protect its membership from state-sanctioned harassment and pressure as Southern governments sought to criminalize the civil rights movement activists.

Winkler’s account is thus partly a powerful theory of legal change and

societal transformation. Through strategic litigation motivated by corporate self-interest, corporations—and their representatives in the legal profession—worked massive transformations in American law, public policy, and democracy itself. As Winkler argues, corporations have been adept at harnessing the top legal talent—from the days of Daniel Webster to the present— and pursuing risky, innovative legal claims. Corporations are thus, for Winkler, “constitutional leveragers” and “constitutional first movers.”

Winkler is admirably balanced in his account, adding nuance to the conventional right/left debates by avoiding simple pro- or anti-corporate power narratives. But even as these corporate rights often have afterlives that cut in a variety of directions, on net the story of corporate-driven legal innovation is not a neutral one.

It is not a coincidence that corporate rights gained traction in our legal jurisprudence well before equal rights for African Americans or women— Winkler notes that the 1809 corporate rights cases predate by decades cases like Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), which considered and ultimately ruled against legal rights for enslaved persons and women, respectively.

After the passage of the 14th Amendment, aimed at overturning Dred Scott and ensuring birthright citizenship, more than 300 of the roughly 600 cases brought under the amendment from 1868 to 1912 addressed the rights of corporations; only 28 were about the rights of African American persons. Furthermore, corporate rights were implicated in decisions that reaffirmed racial and economic inequalities—like Plessy v. Ferguson maintaining segregation—and Lochner-era cases striking down labor and economic regulations advanced by the emerging labor movement in the face of the inequities of industrialization.

As Winkler suggests, the result was to transform the 14th Amendment into what one observer at the time called “the Magna Charta of accumulated and organized capital.”

Even more galling are the episodes recounted by Winkler in which corporate interests and their allies in the

We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights

By Adam Winkler

Liveright

Corporations and American Democracy By naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak, eds.

Harvard University Press

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legal profession and the judiciary constructed these favorable regimes using legal sleights of hand. Winkler uncovers how the Santa Clara decision, cited by hundreds of cases as precedent for assuring corporate personhood and the legal rights that follow, in fact held no such thing. Rather, through the combined efforts of railroad magnate Leland Stanford, his legal team, and a favorably inclined Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, the case was improperly summarized in a Court report—and then cited for this holding that Field (and Stanford) supported but had been unable to actually secure in the original case itself.

In the modern era, the turning point came in the 1970s, when Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, himself a former lobbyist with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and architect of the chamber’s deliberate strategy of dismantling New Deal economic regulations through a litigation strategy aimed at the courts, was able to put his views into practice in a series of decisions that formed the foundations for modern corporate speech doctrine—and ultimately Citizens United. Indeed, Winkler’s book is in part an important reminder that the levers for corporate influence extend far beyond the familiar realm of campaign financing and lobbying; if anything, the most valuable vector for the construction of corporate power has been their skilled leveraging of law, litigation, and the judiciary itself. Corporate rights may have been central to forging many of our vital legal precedents, but we the people have still been junior partners at best in this trajectory, in a legal history that has largely been driven by and for those corporate interests.

In Corporations and American Democracy, historians Naomi Lamoreaux, William Novak, and their colleagues offer an equally sweeping and compelling account of these tensions between corporate power, law, inequality, and democracy. The volume includes a number of important contributions in the legal history of corporate rights and corporate personhood, including essays

by Margaret Blair, Elizabeth Pollman, Ruth Bloch, Naomi Lamoreaux, and

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Winkler himself. These essays as a whole deepen some of the themes from Winkler’s book: that corporate rights have been products of legal contestation; that those rights have at times been secured through theories of corporations-as-association as well as theories of corporations-as-persons. Indeed, the modern view of corporate personhood with thick legal rights is, as these essays suggest, built on a dual misapprehension. On the one hand, there is a danger to having a monolithic view of corporate legal rights when the history of the corporation reveals a stunning multiplicity of corporate forms and purposes, each warranting wildly different kinds of protections and limits. On the other hand, the modern legal regime around corporate rights, including Citizens United, significantly underplays the very real concentrations of economic and political power that these corporations exercise, often without regard to the interests of all of their supposed (human) members.

As the editors argue, the tensions around corporate power also stem from the dual nature of corporations themselves: “On the one hand, the corporation has long been seen as a useful and alluring vehicle for harnessing and distributing the collective energies of individuals—an engine of economic growth.” Yet at the same time, corporations have also been “viewed with suspicion as a potentially dangerous threat … a site of coercion, monopoly, and the agglomeration of excessive social, economic, and political power.” Where Winkler’s book tells the story of modern legal rights being constructed in large part through corporate-driven litigation, the Corporations volume tells a similar story on a much broader canvas: These essays suggest that the very institutions of American democracy themselves are products of battles over corporate power—both the efforts to defend them, and the efforts to rein them in.

Thus, essays like those by Eric Hilt, Jessica Hennessey, and John Wallis suggest that early legal battles establishing general incorporation laws were more than a power grab by

The modern legal regime around corporate rights, including Citizens United, significantly underplays

the real

concentrations of economic and political power that these corporations exercise.

corporate entities. Rather, this shift was crucial for reining in rampant corruption in the patronage-based granting of special charters by state officials.

Corporate rights, in this domain, were vital to creating a foundation for economic dynamism and genuine political liberty. But this was not always the case. Essays like those by Daniel Crane, Ajay Mehrotra, Novak, and Steven Bank shift to the industrial era of the late 19th and early 20th century, and together paint a different picture.

Here, as corporate power magnified in the era of trusts, monopolies, and the specter of industrialized production, the challenge was not how to protect corporations and people from a corrupt state, but rather how to use the state to protect people against arbitrary and exploitative corporations. Thus, efforts by reformers to impose legal limits on corporate power led to the emergence of modern democratic institutions, from the tax regime to the regulatory state—public-sector instrumentalities that did not exist previously. These institutions, so central to modern democratic governance, emerged out of the urgent struggle by reformers to create new institutions and laws that could provide a countervailing balance against corporate behemoths, from the trusts to the industrialized workplace.

The volume concludes by suggesting that this struggle over protecting the socially valuable activities of corporations while limiting the dangerous excesses of corporate power will continue, sometimes in new forms. Nelson Lichtenstein’s essay notes that the shift from large vertically integrated firms to more diffuse supply chains has been central to the erosion of the safety net and the increasingly precarious forms of modern work, undermining those turn-of-the-century protections for workers and consumers even as corporations are able to centralize greater power through strategic use of outsourcing, franchising, and platforms. Winkler’s own contribution to the volume returns to the Citizens United decision as an example of how a 19th-century vision of corporationsas-association has helped sanction

dangerous new forms of 21st-century corporate power in the political arena.

Indeed, while both books are

framed as historical accounts of the rise of corporate power, these volumes can also be read as telling a vital parallel narrative: not of “we the corporations” but of “we the people” developing new movements, laws, rights, and institutions to contain corporate power, and channel it productively. Winkler touches on the importance of figures like Louis Brandeis, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Ralph Nader, to name a few—all lawyers who saw a valuable role for corporations and leveraged corporate rights strategically to serve larger visions of equality and democracy. But they also worked to establish vital guardrails, ways of limiting corporate power to prevent overreach. Similarly, the essays in the Corporations volume paint a similar picture, as the rise of antitrust law, public utility regulation, labor rights, and general forms of state taxation and regulation in the late 19th century were crucial in reining in the excesses of the first Gilded Age, and setting up the potential for a more egalitarian economy in the decades to come. As we struggle with new forms of corporate power, radical transformations to the nature of work, and growing inequities in our politics, these volumes offer invaluable reminders: that corporations ultimately are instruments whose powers and limits can serve a variety of economic, social, and political purposes; that corporations have been adept at shaping law and institutions—and that the prospect for a more inclusive economy and polity have always depended on the ability of reformers to mobilize and assert their own vision of appropriately contained corporate power.

K. Sabeel Rahman teaches administrative and constitutional law at Brooklyn Law School and is a fellow at New America and the Roosevelt Institute. He is the author of Democracy Against Domination.

volume 29, number 2. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2018 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. printed in the u.s.a.

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Fighting for the Right to Rise

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS other Jones’ plea to “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” feels especially apt today. The horror of yet another gun massacre in an American school elicits “thoughts and prayers” from politicians who then “fight like hell”—not for the living, but against any restrictions on even the deadliest firearms. It’s clear who is fighting for the living: young people like the survivors of the rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who are insisting that there can be no return to business as usual for anyone doing the gun lobby’s bidding.

Americans must share these kids’ determination to do everything possible to prevent further carnage.

My union—from our colleagues at Sandy Hook Elementary to those at Stoneman Douglas, including responsible gun owners—is renewing our commitment to end the scourge of gun violence and ensure schools and colleges are safe havens. That includes opposing President Trump’s reckless, National Rifle Association-inspired call to arm teachers. Teachers’ first instinct is to protect kids, not engage in a shootout that would put children in danger.

Photo by Michael Campbell

Why hasn’t more been done to prevent mass shootings? The appalling answer is that, like so much in America, there is a huge power imbalance. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics estimates that during the 2016 election, NRA-related groups spent $54 million to secure Republican control of the White House and Congress. The gun lobby’s power is magnified by its ties to right-wing groups.

For example, the Los Angeles Times reports that, in 2014, the Koch-backed Freedom Partners gave the NRA Institute for Legislative Action $4.9 million. The president of Freedom Partners at the time now serves as President Trump’s director of legislative affairs.

The Supreme Court has long upheld that states can decide how they handle their labor relations, including explicitly allowing unions to represent employees, and that public employees who do not want to join the union that represents them may instead pay a “fair share” fee. This fee is meant to compensate the union for bargaining contracts and other services; nonmembers are not required to pay anything toward any political activity by the union.

Twenty-three states have opted to do this, because collective bargaining has proven to lead to more efficient state services and a better quality of life.

Janus’ backers argue, with no evidence, that this 40-year precedent violates nonmembers’ right to free speech. The current ideological composition of the Supreme Court suggests that this one complaint could undercut the interests of millions of workers by depriving their unions of funds they need to function. That’s not an unintended consequence—it’s the entire point of these assaults on unions. Unions fight for a better life for working people, and the right wing sees that as a threat.

Unions help make possible what would be impossible for individuals acting alone. It’s how we were able to lift teachers’ salaries in New York City by double

digits before the 2008 recession, so they were in line with surrounding suburbs, and how teachers and their unions in West Virginia are fighting for a living wage. Unions advocate for good public schools for all our kids, affordable higher education and healthcare, and a voice at our jobs and in our democracy. Right now we are fighting for the school safety and mental health funds Trump’s new budget eliminates.

When Mother Jones began organizing workers, during the so-called Gilded Age, employers’ power was virtually unchecked, the economic supremacy of the elite was entrenched, and the aspiration that Abraham Lincoln had advanced—“the right to rise”—was routinely denied to working people. The labor movement helped tilt the scales of oppression, and, by midcentury, American workers enjoyed safer workplaces and far better standards of living. That’s the movement the right wing wants to “defund and defang.”

“Never again” has been the cri de coeur for many—those opposing genocide, of course, and more recently, those decrying mass gun violence.

It is also fitting for those who insist that our country must not revert to a time when workers were systematically denied even the most fundamental rights—a voice and a better life.

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living” feels especially apt today.

Like the NRA, the Kochs, DeVoses and spinoffs like the right-wing State Policy Network want to eliminate any challenge to their political and economic power.

What’s their No. 1 target? Unions. SPN has pledged $80 million to “defund and defang” unions. The Kochs, after receiving the Trump tax cut, upped the ante with $400 million to undermine public education and “break” the teachers unions. Why? Because we oppose efforts to defund and privatize public education.

Their plan to bankrupt unions is taking center stage at the U.S. Supreme Court, which is considering the case Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. Once Trump’s nominee to the court, Neil Gorsuch, was confirmed, anti-union activists swiftly moved the Janus case onto the docket, knowing Gorsuch’s long history of siding with corporations over workers.

Photo courtesy of Brett Sherman

Weingarten at a rally with students and educators from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 17.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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