The Commonwealth February/March 2021

Special Reports: INSURRECTION IN WASHINGTON REP. JACKIE SPEIER • ON-THE-SCENE • A COMMONWEALTH CLUB SPECIAL MESSAGE

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

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FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

SAND DUNES, CANYONS & WILDFLOWERS

March 21-26, 2021 With our expert naturalist guide, explore Badwater Salt Flats and Ubehebe Crater.

Marvel at the panoramic views of Telescope Peak. Watch the sunrise at Zabriskie Point and walk between the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon. Learn about the resilient desert pupfish and wildflowers. Stay at the Oasis at Death Valley.

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INSIDE

Commonwealth The

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021 VOLUME 115, NUMBER 1

FEATURES 8 Jackie Speier The insurrection and the aftermath.

16 Health-Care Equity Addressing race-based system failures.

22 Biden’s Green Agenda Can the new president’s aggressive plans succeed?

26 Myth of Chinese Capitalism Inequality in the worker’s paradise.

32 Nancy Pelosi Plans for governing in the Biden era.

40 Annual Economic Forecast Dr. Michael Boskin and Dr. Laura Tyson talk dollars and cents.

48 John Brennan

The former CIA director defends spycraft.

“The pounding and the breaking of the glass kind of shocked us all. They told us to get down. I laid down on that cold marble, and then there was a shot that rang out. When that shot rang out, it really took me back in time. I laid my cheek on this cold marble. I’ll never forget that. There was almost a sense of resignation that overcame me. . . . The only thing between me and a gunman was the back of a chair. . . . I realized that this could in fact be the end.” —JACKIE SPEIER

DEPARTMENTS 4 Editor’s Desk

By John Zipperer 5 The Commons A Club statement on the insurrection and its aftermath; plus upcoming program highlights 54 InSight

By Dr. Gloria Duffy 55 Program Info ON THE COVER: The recovery from the COVID pandemic will play a significant role in shaping the performance of the economy in 2021. (Image by TayebMEZAHDIA.) ON THIS PAGE: Representative Jackie Speier discussed the Capitol insurrection just days after the experience. (Photo courtesy Rep. Jackie Speier.)

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Commonwealth The

February/March 2021 Volume 115, No.1

EDITOR’S DESK

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VICE PRESIDENT, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

FOLLOW US ONLINE facebook.com/thecommonwealthclub twitter.com/cwclub youtube.com/commonwealthclub commonwealthclub.org instagram.com/cwclub ADVERTISING INFORMATION John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2021 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

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Photo by James Meinerth

Our Brighter Future

F

rom February 1918 through April 1920, The Commonwealth Club presented 132 programs. This despite the Spanish Flu pandemic, which infected 500 million people—about one-third of the planet’s population. There was an estimated 17–100 million dead from the flu.

As you would expect for those years immediately following World War I, there were a lot of programs dealing with the war, the peace treaty, military policy, and the situation in Europe. In fact, by perusing a list of Club events from that time, it looks like WWI and its effects were the topic of most of the programs in the first couple years after the peace treaty. But still the Club found time to talk about Hetch Hetchy, budget problems, the “radio telephone,” and public health.

Now, in February 2021, we are nearing the one-year anniversary of the shutdown of large swaths of the economy and social space in this country. Yet the Club is on pace to have produced about 400 programs during the first year of the pandemic. In addition to many programs about COVID-19, we have also explored history, nuclear weapons, racial justice and economic inequities, the political scene, the environment, astronomy, and more.

Even on many of our programs that have nothing to do with the pandemic, we still get a sense of the personal impact it has had. Our speakers—whether they are former governors of California, presidents of universities, media personalities, musicians, authors, or anything

else—usually participate from their homes.

Even while they are juggling their jobs, family issues, health fears and more, they take the time to share their expertise on the important topics of the day. Occasionally their conversations are interrupted by their children climbing on them, their dog or cat walking into the video, or delivery people ringing doorbells.

And still the programs go on.

I’m proud of all of the programs we have presented this past year. So many great speakers, important (and sometimes fun) topics, and wonderful interaction with our online audiences. I even like those unplanned interruptions by children, dogs and whatever, because they underline how human and connected we all remain, even as we participate in these activities from our homes, sometimes isolated or with only close family nearby.

I’m even more excited about what we have coming up in the next few months and what we’ll be doing once we’re able to resume in-person programs safely. We’ll continue to innovate, bringing with us lessons from this online-only time and combining them with the best of what we’ve done in 118 years of in-person programs to make sure that you get the most out of your membership in this organization, and that we give you hundreds of reasons a year to watch, comment, think, smile and share.

JO H N Z IPPER ER VI C E PRESI DENT O F MEDI A & ED I T O RI AL

The Commons

TALK OF THE CLUB

Find Truth and Set It Loose in the World

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resident Joe Biden got to the heart of the matter when he said, in his inaugural address, that there is a difference between truth and lies. Lies, he said, told “for power and for profit.”

The “deep state,” the “election steal,” and the QAnon conspiracy are all lies. We have seen, in the terrible attack at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, how lies can be used to manipulate our citizens and to strike at the very foundation of our democracy.

When he wrote in 1903 that the Club would “propose to find the truth and set it loose in the world,” the Commonwealth Club’s founder Edward F. Adams set out the Club’s nonpartisan mission to present information and perspectives that would help citizens cooperate for the common good, despite inevitable differences over strategy and political affiliation.

Those words ring so true today, and the Club recommits itself to our purpose of educating, informing and stimulating dialogue, in the common interest. We are honored to answer President Biden’s call to “end this uncivil war,” including through the Club’s K–12 civics education project, which mentors a new generation of Americans to participate positively in civil society.

We are proud to be a progressive organization.

Progressivism is the idea that the human condition can be improved by human effort and public policy, based on facts, data, analysis and dialogue. It is a nonpartisan approach, originating in a movement originally led by Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt. To conflate progressivism with socialism or as somehow contrary to liberty and private enterprise is another lie.

Today, as never before, the Club seeks to present the truth, from a broad range of political and social perspectives. We will not be a platform for lies, even under the banner of free speech. Too much harm has been done by those who have manipulated lies.

The Commonwealth Club is a big tent, with room for many views. But we are a platform for free speech, not hate speech, and that is reflected in our choice of the people and issues we cover.

We look forward to an era now, as when the Club was founded 118 years ago, when Republicans and Democrats and those across a range of viewpoints will collaborate for the common good, and we commit to being an active part of the healing and progress our nation needs.

Gloria Duffy President and CEO The Commonwealth Club

LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair Martha Ryan Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston LaDoris Cordell Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley James Driscoll Joseph I. Epstein Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Michelle Meow Anna W.M. Mok DJ Patil Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Richard A. Rubin George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz Todd Silvia George D. Smith Jr. David Spencer

James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Marcel TenBerge Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Mark Zitter PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS * Past Chair ** Past President Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman* J. Dennis Bonney** Maryles Casto* Hon. Ming Chin** Mary B. Cranston* Joseph I. Epstein** John Farmer* Dr. Joseph R. Fink** Rose Guilbault* Claude B. Hutchison Jr.** Anna W.M. Mok* Richard Otter** Joseph Perrelli** Toni Rembe** Victor J. Revenko** Skip Rhodes** Renée Rubin** Richard Rubin* Connie Shapiro** Nelson Weller** Judith Wilbur** Dennis Wu** ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

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Upcoming Program Highlights TUE, FEB 16 / 6:00 PM PST WANT ME, WITH TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND PEGGY ORENSTEIN

New programs are added to The Commonwealth Club of California’s schedule every day. For the full list, event details, and to buy tickets, visit: commonwealthclub.org/events

MON, FEB 8 / 6:00 PM PST EVENING FROM THE ARCHIVES: BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPECIAL WITH STACEY ABRAMS TUE, FEB 9 / 10:00 AM PST AMERICA AND IRAN

TUE, FEB 9 / 12:00 PM PST STANFORD’S LARRY DIAMOND: NECESSARY ELECTORAL REFORMS TO KEEP OUR DEMOCRACY TUE, FEB 9 / 3:00 PM PST HIS VERY BEST: JIMMY CARTER, A LIFE TUE, FEB 9 / 5:00 PM PST READING CALIFORNIA BOOK DISCUSSION: THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE

WED, FEB 10 / 10:00 AM PST STEVE KETTMANN, ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI, CYNTHIA TUCKER: LIFE AFTER TRUMP WED, FEB 17 / 12:00 PM PST A CONVERSATION WITH CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WED, FEB 10 / 5:00 PM PST HEALTHY SOCIETY SERIES: COVID-19 VACCINES—WHAT WE KNOW AND WHAT WE DON’T KNOW THU, FEB 11 / 12:00 PM PST AMELIA PANG: MADE IN CHINA

THU, FEB 18 / 12:00 PM PST THE MAN WHO ATE TOO MUCH: THE LIFE OF JAMES BEARD

THU, FEB 11 / 3:00 PM PST ETHAN ZUCKERMAN WITH KARA SWISHER: THE AMERICAN TRUST CRISIS

THU, FEB 18 / 6:00 PM PST VIBRATE HIGHER WITH TALIB KWELI AND BOOTS RILEY

THU, FEB 11 / 6:00 PM PST AYAAN HIRSI ALI WITH BARI WEISS: ISLAM, IMMIGRATION AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS

FRI, FEB 19 / 3:00 PM PST PRESIDENT BIDEN’S FIRST 30 DAYS: A WEEK TO WEEK SPECIAL

TUE, FEB 9 / 6:00 PM PST WALTER MOSLEY: BLOOD GROVE TUE, FEB 16 / 10:00 AM PST DAN MORAIN: KAMALA’S WAY

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TUE, FEB 23 / 10:00 AM PST DAUGHTERS OF KOBANI: KURDISH WOMEN WARRIORS AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE

TUE, FEB 23 / 5:30 PM PST AGEMARCH/AGEMAGNIFICENT: EVERYONE AT EVERY AGE IS AGE MAGNIFICENT

THU, MAR 4 / 3:00 PM PST JONATHAN COHN: THE BATTLE FOR OBAMACARE AND UNIVERSAL COVERAGE THU, FEB 25 / 10:00 AM PST TICKING CLOCK: BEHIND THE SCENES AT ‘60 MINUTES’

THU, MAR 18 / 3:00 PM PDT SILICON VALLEY READS: CONNECTING WITH NATURE IN A PANDEMIC

TUE, MAR 9 / 3:00 PM PST INTELLIGENT DESIRING THU, MAR 11 / 10:00 AM PST 19TH CENTURY NEW ORLEANS’ FREE BLACK BROTHERHOOD

WED, MAR 24 / 10:00 AM PDT MARK BITTMAN: ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, JUNK

THU, FEB 25 / 12:00 PM PST FNNCH AND THE HONEY BEARS: STREET ART FOR ALL THU, MAR 11 / 3:00 PM PST LIFTOFF: INSIDE THE HISTORIC FLIGHTS THAT LAUNCHED ELON MUSK’S SPACEX

THU, APR 1 / 3:00 PM PDT SHANKAR VEDANTAM: USEFUL DELUSIONS

TUE, MAR 2 / 12:00 PM PST MICHAEL J. FOX: AN OPTIMIST CONSIDERS MORTALITY TUE, MAR 2 / 3:00 PM PST THE CASE FOR KETO

THU, MAR 11 / 6:00 PM PST SILICON VALLEY READS: ALWAYS HOME WITH FANNY SINGER AND ALICE WATERS

WED, MAR 3 / 3:00 PM PST FEARS OF A SETTING SUN: THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF AMERICA’S FOUNDERS

TUE, MAR 16 / 3:00 PM PDT MINE!—HOW THE HIDDEN RULES OF OWNERSHIP CONTROL OUR LIVES

THU, MAR 4 / 12:00 PM PST THE OTHER AMERICAN DREAM: HOW A GAY IMMIGRANT FOUGHT TO LIVE HIS TRUTH AND FOUND SUCCESS

WED, MAR 17 / 6:00 PM PDT HELP FROM ABROAD: CHINA-BASED DONORS AND INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS HELP U.S. HOSPITALS FIGHT COVID-19

THU, MAY 6 / 3:00 PM PDT COLLATERAL DAMAGE: CONNECTING THE DEATHS OF MARILYN MONROE, JFK AND DOROTHY KILGALLEN

TUE, MAY 11 / 10:00 AM PDT METABOLICAL: THE LURE AND THE LIES OF PROCESSED FOOD, NUTRITION AND MODERN MEDICINE

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After the Attack on the Capitol REP. JACKIE SPEIER REPORTS FROM WASHINGTON 8

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

MOB RULE WAS A BIG FEAR OF THE

American Founding Fathers. On January 6, 2021—almost 245 years after the country’s founding and 232 years since the Constitution came into force—a mob incited by the president attacked the U.S. Capitol, disrupting ratification of the Electoral College votes. Bay Area U.S. congresswoman Jackie Speier discusses the violent insurrection and the aftermath.

From the January 11, 2021, online program “Representative Jackie Speier: How Damaged Is Our Democracy?”

JACKIE SPEIER, U.S. Representative (CA 14th District) LADORIS CORDELL, Retired California Superior Court Judge; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Moderator

LADORIS CORDELL: The horrifying attack on the U.S. Capitol has raised many issues about American democracy and the state of the country. People are feeling stunned, scared and angry. What do we make of the attack and what it represents? How damaged is American democracy, and what needs to be fixed? What will America look like after January 20, and can the divisions in the country be mitigated?

We’re pleased to have Representative Speier with us to delve into these questions at this crucial point in history. She has served in Congress since 2008 and was present during the attack on the capitol.

My first question to you is how are you doing? In 1978, you were pinned down on a tarmac; you were shot five times when fleeing an attack by gunmen in Jonestown. And 43 years later—Wednesday, January 6—you were pinned down at our nation’s capitol during an armed insurrection. Was it deja vu all over again for you?

JACKIE SPEIER: Yeah. In many respects, it was. I was seated in the gallery

The storming of the U.S. Capitol was accompanied by a large rally on Capitol grounds. (Photo by Tyler Merbler.)

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and chose to hear the opening remarks and debate on the Arizona vote and whether or not it would be accepted, whether or not the resolution to overturn it would be accepted.

As we were sitting there, all of a sudden I saw the Speaker [of the House Nancy Pelosi] exit the chamber. Not that she hasn’t done that many times before, but there was an urgency to her walking out. Then shortly thereafter, the majority whip, Steny Hoyer, was escorted out. Then I knew that something was up.

Shortly thereafter, one of the sergeants of the capitol police stood at the podium and said, “The capitol has been breached.”

You know, even when I say that now, there’s kind of shivers that run down my spine, because it is such a desecration of the symbol of democracy in our country.

As we sat there, he said, “There’s a pouch underneath your chair.” Now, I’ve sat in the gallery many times. I never knew that there were canvas pouches under the chairs, but there was. We were told to unzip them.

There was then an aluminum foil type packet inside. You had to tear that open. There was the gas mask. As soon as you pulled it out, it started operating. We were told to not put it on, [to] wait. There was pounding on the doors. They locked all of the doors to the gallery. Then they asked us to start moving.

There’s brass railings on each of the galleries, so it’s intended that you can’t move from one to the other. We were bending down, kind of crouched, trying to get through. Then we finally got to the other side, and it seemed like the most secure place to be was up against that wall, so if they entered and were shooting, they would have to turn around to get to us. As we were over in that corner, the pounding and the breaking of the glass kind of shocked us all. They told us to get down. I laid down on that cold marble, and then there was a shot that rang out. When that shot rang out, it really took me back in time.

I laid my cheek on this cold marble. I’ll never forget that. There was almost a sense of resignation that overcame me, because I was crouched down not on the first level, where there was a wall of sorts, but on the second level, where the only thing between me and a gunman was the back of a chair, so some fabric and some wood. I realized that this could in fact be the end. It was traumatizing for all of us frankly that were in that gallery.

Since then, we’ve created a group of us called the Gallery Group, where we talk to each other. We actually had a conversation with

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“If you went on Parler . . . , you would see that it was not just a march that was contemplated, that they intended to do damage, that there was vengeance in their hearts, that they wanted to overthrow the election and actually our government.” a health-care professional on Sunday, who helped us observe what we should do in terms of the self-care necessary to overcome something as traumatic as that and the PTSD associated with it. We all process that kind of an experience differently.

I’ll tell you a funny story. I remember getting on the plane the next morning very early. The plane was packed, and it was packed with all of these Trump supporters, all of these members of that rally. I sort of sat meekly in my chair, kind of couched on the window side. As I got off that plane in Chicago, my thighs were aching. I thought to myself, “Did I sit improperly?” They ached all through the day. Then I realized, when I talked to some of my colleagues who were there as well, there was that adrenaline rush that happens. We were crouched down. We were moving through these various galleries, so our muscles were activated. It took a couple of doses of Ibuprofen to relieve that, but it was all part of the experience.

CORDELL: Wow. There is video of at least one police officer taking a selfie with the mob and another of officers removing barriers to allow the mob to freely enter the capitol. History is important. In Nazi Germany, a private security detail cleared the halls of Hitler’s opponents during his rallies, and those security forces became the Nazi Stormtroopers. There’s very strong implications that there are mob sympathizers, right-wing extremists, embedded in the

Capitol Police Department. This certainly doesn’t bode well for the inauguration.

In a letter dated January 8 to Speaker Pelosi, you have called for the creation of an independent commission to investigate the security failures at the U.S. Capitol. I read your letter, and it listed 18 areas of inquiry.

Can you tell us maybe what are some of those areas that you want looked into, and what is your take on the failure of security to protect the capitol?

SPEIER: Well, it’s a very serious question.

I think all of us have spent a fair amount of time conversing among ourselves about the lack of security. There was a decision made not to use lethal force. You saw officers being bludgeoned, one with a fire extinguisher, who ultimately died because of it. Murder took place in the capitol.

There is a need I believe to do an independent review of experts to look at what did take place. Now, as chair of the Military Personnel Subcommiteee, I had a hearing last year on violent extremism that has infiltrated the military. They not only recruit them; they also recruit veterans who have served, because they want the talent of those who have been trained in military activity, use of guns, use of various techniques, and plans to actually conduct missions.

I’m deeply concerned about potential infiltration. I’m concerned about the lack of sophistication in assessing what was going to take place. There was a person, actually

Even after the violent attack, some protestors remained into the evening, though they then faced beefed up security and riot police. (Photo by Tyler Merbler.)

a lawyer out of Florida, who tweeted the day after. He says, “I knew 17 days before the event what was taking place.” If you went on Parler just kind of casually, you would see that it was not just a march that was contemplated, that they intended to do damage, that there was vengeance in their hearts, that they wanted to overthrow the election and actually our government.

CORDELL: Who was it who said, “No lethal weapons. You’re not to be armed”? Do you know who gave that order?

SPEIER: I believe it was the sergeant of arms, who has now resigned. I think there was this sense that there was not an interest in wanting to create an environment much like existed when they were marching last year and tear gas was used on peaceful protesters. These were not peaceful protesters, as we saw. I mean, they defaced the House of Representatives. They broke glass. They stormed in. They went into the Speaker’s office and damaged parts of her office, and broke down doors, and sat at her desk, and took a laptop and also correspondence. This was not a peaceful protest. Now, many have also suggested because this was a group of white people, were they treated differently because they were white? I think that’s a question that has to be answered.

CORDELL: Yeah. There are a lot of people

who have been asking that question, and particularly those who have been involved in protests for Black Lives Matter. I, in my gut, say, yeah, there is a difference and there was a double standard. But as you said, you have a commission. Let’s hope they get into it. Do you know who is going to be on that commission and how that’s going to be put together?

SPEIER: Well, I don’t know if the Speaker has agreed to it. She has texted me that it is something that she wants to explore further.

I actually think we need two commissions.

I’ve written a letter on security asking for an independent commission. I think we have to do an independent commission on the domestic terrorism that took place and the groups associated with them. This is the beginning of an effort by these people to do harm to our country. This is their watershed moment.

CORDELL: Let’s pick up on that a little more. I looked up domestic terrorism as defined by federal law. It’s a long section, but let me just read you a part of it. It’s activities that involve acts of—the one section I want to get to—“they appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion or to affect the conduct of a government by mass

destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

That’s part of the federal definition. Now, what I was surprised to learn, however, is that domestic terrorism is not a federal crime.

International terrorism if a federal crime, but there is no crime for domestic terrorism.

Is it time to consider introducing legislation to make domestic terrorism a federal crime, or,. because there is an argument on the other side that says maybe it’s best not to, since if it’s a federal crime, a president could pardon anyone charged or convicted of domestic terrorism. Finally, do you think that there would even be Republican support for a law that made domestic terrorism a crime?

SPEIER: I don’t think there’s any question that we have to explore whether or not to make it a crime. I had attempted in the last National Defense Authorization Act to make violent extremism a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Now, ironically, that passed in the House and it was taken out in the Senate, in part at the request of the Department of Defense. I do believe that it is a serious offense, it is going to be with us for foreseeable future, and we have to be prepared to bring actions against those who engage in that conduct.

CORDELL: Wow. Would you be willing to put forward that kind of legislation?

SPEIER: I certainly will explore that effort.

CORDELL: Great. Impeachment, we know the resolution is officially on the table now. Things are moving. I’m wondering if there should be consideration of the 14th Amendment. It’s Article 3 in the 14th Amendment, the third clause, to expel lawmakers who fomented the insurrection.

I have a view that it’s important to work for unity, but with unity comes accountability.

There are people I believe, lawmakers, who should be held accountable. This idea has been floated by some progressives in the Democratic Party in the House. The section I’m talking about basically says, this is in the 14th Amendment, “No person should be a senator, or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, who shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion or given aid or comfort to the enemy.”

The question is, Is this something that should be talked about, utilizing the 14th Amendment? Laurence Tribe, who is an expert on constitutional law, has said, don’t do it. He has absolutely warned against it.

I’m not sure what his reasoning is, but I did see something this morning where he

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has weighed in and said, “That is not the direction that we should be going.” Do you have any thoughts about that?

SPEIER: Well, I think expelling members who are aiding and abetting would be hard to make the case for. Censure may be a more appropriate action to take.

Unfortunately, what we’re dealing with is the cult of personality of Donald Trump and the political and emotional control he has over not just the mob that we saw on Wednesday, but the members of Congress.

After that horrific act, we then came back to do our duty to ceremoniously accept the certificates of the election by the electors and to open them. That was our role under the Constitution. The Republicans in the House and again in the Senate wanted to challenge that resolution and did so, and outlined what they saw were all of these instances of fraud.

Two thirds of them, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, voted to overturn the election in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Can you censure two thirds of the members of the House? I don’t believe you can. You certainly I don’t believe can expel them. But I think what we’re seeing around the country is quite fascinating. You’ve seen Twitter shut down Trump. You’ve seen the apps for Parler in Google and Apple shut down. All of a sudden, that megaphone doesn’t exist, which really speaks to how social media has been used by this far-right minority to really overtake this country in a way that is truly profound. I think that watching all of that and then watching Goldman Sachs and some of the CEOs of these companies now contemplate not providing campaign contributions to these very people that would promote this falsehood—I mean, there is a big lie that has been promoted by this president for four years and actually been accepted and embraced by two thirds of the Republicans in the House.

CORDELL: You raise an interesting issue about how to maybe stop this craziness.

Yes. Trump has been banned from Twitter.

The Facebook ban is not permanent. I don’t know why they haven’t done that.

But you raise the issue that there are now these corporate executives that in response to all of this, are going to the wallet and saying, “Okay. We’re just going to withhold money from the very people who have been promoting this.” Maybe that’s the way that change happens, that we look at economic sanctions. I’m thinking analogously to South Africa, apartheid. Nothing worked,

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but then when sanctions were imposed and then when the U.S. came on-board and other countries [joined the effort], we saw an end to apartheid. I’m thinking maybe that’s what has to happen somehow to get those who have heretofore been funneling money to people promoting the big lie to get them to stop doing it. What do you think? Do you think this is something that it’s going to spread throughout the country?

SPEIER: I hope so, because it does not appear that we can heal ourselves within Congress. It’s a very sad thing to have to say, but what prompted these members to say and do what they said was personal. It was their interest in wanting to retain their positions, to be able to garner support from Donald Trump in the future, and to fundraise. They were using that opportunity to go to their bases and go to the Trump base generally and say, “See, I wanted to overthrow this fraudulent election.” If you get to the base, the real base of what we’re talking about, it’s self-preservation in office. That’s why you had so many members take the positions that they did.

You had great heroism by people like [Illinois Republican U.S. Representative] Adam Kinzinger, who said, “You know, you can’t do this.” Look at [Wyoming Republican U.S. Representative] Liz Cheney. I must tell you, I went to her and said, “Liz, I’m really impressed by your courage here and by your willingness to speak out.” I think there is some growing concern within the Republican caucus that the leadership, with Steve Scalise and Kevin McCarthy, did a great disservice to their brand and that they mishandled the situation on the 6th.

CORDELL: We’re getting some very good questions coming into the chatroom from those who are viewing. One question that has come through [involves] more security, so let’s talk about January 20. Do you think that the inauguration should happen in Washington or, as some people are saying, it should be in an undisclosed location and maybe just live streamed? What are your thoughts on that?

SPEIER: It’s a tough question to answer.

Certainly President Elect [Joe] Biden has the ultimate decision to make, but if we do this in an undisclosed location, isn’t the mob winning? Isn’t it showing them that we’re afraid of them? We can’t do that. What I believe will happen is that there’s going to be a hardening of the perimeter. We’re going to be prepared, the National Guard will be deployed, all the elements necessary

to protect the president-elect, and the vice president-elect, and the membership of Congress, as we witness what we intend to make sure is a peaceful transition of power.

CORDELL: What are your thoughts about after Donald Trump is out of the White House, of pursuing him for his behavior, either federal and/or state prosecutions? Do you think that should happen? There are others who say, “No. Maybe for the sake of unity we should just kind of move forward.”

What are your thoughts on going after Mr. Trump once he is out of office?

SPEIER: I think that those decisions will be made by state attorneys generals and U.S. attorney generals. I certainly get the impression from President-Elect Biden that he wants the country to heal. He wants to be able to move forward. We have such horrific issues separate and distinct from what just happened, with 375,000 Americans dead from COVID, that we’ve got to keep our eye on what’s the most important. While some of that may take place and nobody is above the law, and the president has for four years conducted himself as if he is, because he’s had the protection of an attorney general opinion some decades ago that you cannot charge a seated president, well, once he’s a regular U.S. citizen again, I think he’s going to be subject to the laws, just like everyone else.

I remember sitting in that committee hearing when [former Trump attorney] Michael Cohen testified, and I think Michael Cohen had it right. If you go back and listen to any of his testimony, it’s actually pretty prescient about how Donald Trump would not accept a peaceful transition of power, that he had engaged in tax evasion, insurance fraud, bank fraud. I think all of those will come true, that we will find all of that. He is who he is. Whether it’s being a charlatan and a barker for Trump University or his foundation, everything about him is fraudulent. We’ve got to be willing to come forward and say it.

CORDELL: We got another question in from the chatroom. It’s been suggested by congressman [James] Clyburn that the impeachment could be delayed until after the first 100 days of President Biden’s term. What do you think about delaying it, as opposed to moving forward now?

SPEIER: I actually think it’s an interesting idea. I think it’s our obligation to impeach.

We are taking that action. The Senate obligation is to try and convict if appropriate, and they can take that action when they

Above left: U.S. Rep. Alex Mooney tweeted this picture of himself holding the gas mask provided to members of Congress during the attack. (Photo

by Alex Mooney.) Above right: Thank yous to Capitol Police in a congressional hallway. (Photo by Steve Daines.) Left: In the days and weeks following the attack, the FBI sought information from the public on people involved in the violent attack. (Photo by Elvert Barnes.)

deem it’s appropriate. I think the transition of power, getting this new administration up, is really critical, so making sure that he can move forward with his appointments to the cabinet is very important. I would certainly be willing to see that step taken.

CORDELL: Let’s talk a little bit about the Electoral College. On January 6, [Congress] met to conclude the presidential election. Just as a reminder to the people that the Electoral College has 538 members, one for each U.S. senator and representative and three for the District of Columbia. The Electoral College indirectly elects the president of the United States. Just as a bit of history, the college was a compromise between those who wanted Congress to elect the president and those who wanted the popular vote to elect the president. But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state produced a divide between slave-owning

and non-slave-owning states. The result was the controversial Three Fifths Compromise that the enslaved would be counted as three fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes.

Recently, calls have been renewed to abolish the Electoral College and to elect the president with a direct popular vote. Do you think this is a good idea or not to get rid of the Electoral College? I’m wondering is it even possible to do so? What do you think?

SPEIER: As we were sitting there listening to the debate, the Republicans were making the case to get rid of the Electoral College and move to a popular vote election. If you look at it historically, there is only one election in which the Republicans were successful in both the Electoral College and the popular vote in the last 30 years. As populations move to each of the coasts and they get focused there, it means that many of these smaller states have a power that really violates this one-person, one-vote law that we’ve always embraced. But the problem is of course that these smaller states recognize this great power they have, and they’re not about to relinquish it. No one wants to relinquish power, so they’re unwilling. The only way you can really move forward I think with that is to dangle some carrot in front of them.

I don’t know what the carrot is; it’s always probably money. But that would be the only way I think we’re going to be successful in

the near term.

CORDELL: I think it’s an idea that should stay alive, and we should keep talking about it. Of course, I’m troubled more by the underpinnings of it, how it even came to be.

But I think it’s something that I know a lot of people now are writing about it, talking about it more, but it’s certainly a major issue as we go forward.

More than 70 million people voted for Donald Trump. Now, the big lie told by Trump, that the election was a fraud, has led to this armed insurrection. The divisions in our country are as stark as they were during the Civil War, maybe even more so.

There’s also this grand delusion that COVID-19 is a hoax. For example, it’s estimated that maybe only 5 percent of the mob wore masks on January 6. There’s also footage from the insurrection of a noose, Confederate flags, and let’s not forget some of those in the mob at the capitol wearing anti-Semitic shirts with “Camp Auschwitz” and one with “6MNE”—6 million Jews murdered, not enough. Trump’s endless repetition of lies has not only made fiction plausible, but made criminal conduct the norm.

My question to you, congresswoman, is, Should the focus be on mending fences and trying to engage with Trump supporters, or is this a divide too wide to bridge? Should we just focus on the Biden/Harris agenda full speed ahead and cross our fingers?

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ON THE SCENE

First-Person Report from the Capitol Attack Former Club staff member recounts the momentous events

W

hen rioters breached the security of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, one of the people inside was Haley Talbot, an NBC News associate producer covering Congress. Talbot served as Traverse Fellow at The Commonwealth Club before joining NBC. She says she knew it was going to be a “wild” day even before the tragic events, because of the unprecedented level of planned Electoral College objections; but as she prepared her team in the House of Representatives chamber, she learned how much “wild” was an understatement.

After the joint session of Congress was interrupted and then resumed, people in the chamber were “agitated and nervous. It was clear parts of the complex were not safe and the mob outside was more threatening than the police had anticipated,” Talbot wrote on NBCNews.com on January 9. She says she was still unaware of the extent of the threat, but that changed when everyone in the chamber was told to grab the gas masks.

“And then the glass shattered,” Talbot wrote. “A pane in the glass of the intricate doors to the Speaker’s Lobby were smashed through by rioters as they tried to make it onto the House floor and attack the very center of democracy in America. I caught glimpses of the standoff below as officers barricaded the door and drew their guns to defend the dozens of people inside. “I started to hear the quiet whispering of prayer. A congresswoman I often see but didn’t recognize was holding the hands of other members as she crouched down and was praying over the group.”

Eventually the members of Congress and the media Talbot was with were able to escape from the House gallery and found refuge in other parts of the building. Talbot and some other journalists were given refuge by Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) in his office, and there they spent the time until it was safe to return to the chamber. “I felt better once we were inside the congressman’s office. He did not need to help us like that, especially amid a raging pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands.

“Gallego entertained us with war stories, raided the cafeteria and vending machines for us and made us feel calm amidst the chaos that was still ensuing just outside the door. . . . For several hours we shared a single phone charger. I joked after the fact it only worked out because we were all women.

“Gallego and dozens of others made it very clear there was only one option: they had to return to work,” Talbot wrote. “He told us they couldn’t be intimidated and he was firm in that the American people must know the insurrectionists did not win that day.”

SPEIER: That’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? I would say this. If you look at who made up this mob, it was made up of anarchists, white supremacists and anti-Semitics. They used Donald Trump to give their voice amplification. He used them for his interest in wanting to retain power. It is a toxic brew that really needs to be diluted. I think that we need to move forward with the Biden/ Harris agenda. I also think that Democrats rightfully have been criticized for losing touch with working Americans. There was a book written by . . . Thomas Frank about Listen, Liberal. In it he talks about how during the Clinton administration, the president then became very infatuated with Wall Street. Then in the Obama administration, he became very infatuated

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with the Ivy League schools. Meanwhile, you have many Americans feeling that the Democratic Party that they once were proud members [of] had left them.

I do think we need to do some soul searching. I’m working with congresswoman Marcy Kaptur about what we do with what we used to call the Rust Belt, which is offensive to people that live in the Midwest, that we should call it the Opportunity Belt.

We need to reconnect with them. I’ve done some reading. There’s a great book by Arlie Hochschild called Strangers In Their Own Land. She’s a professor at UC Berkeley. After the Tea Party took hold [she] went and spent time in the St. Charles Parish in Louisiana, and spent Sunday dinners with them, and went to church with them, and over a course

of many months tried to get a sense of what was moving them into this Tea Party group, which I think has now evolved into the Trumps and this mob gathering. She talked about line cutters. Now, most of these people just thought that everyone else cut in line so they couldn’t get ahead. We’ve got to do a better job of connecting with rural America and working class Americans.

CORDELL: Here’s a question from one of our viewers. Will increasing the study of history and civics in this country make a difference going forward?

SPEIER: Boy, I think that is so important. I think that I’ve talked to many communities in San Mateo County on a call last week thinking we need to create Civics 101 on a community level and start having these conversations, so people understand what this democracy is and how to protect it.

We are very cavalier about our government somehow, that we think it’s just always going to be there. It is, as we know historically, not the case, that democracies fall, that they crumble sometimes from their own actions.

But we have a responsibility I think to reinvigorate civics as a community effort, not just in the schools, but for all of us as adults.

CORDELL: I have heard it said by some leaders—local, state, federal—that in the aftermath of the insurrection, I’ve heard this phrase, “This is not who we are. This is not America. This is not who we are.” I really take issue with that, because I think this is who we are, that when we say that, I think we’re kind of saying, going back, hearkening to this message of we here, the U.S., we have this standard of excellence. We’re just kind of above everybody, and so this is who we are versus this is not who we are. I really look at what happened on January the 6th and everything that has preceded it, going back to Memorial Day 2020, George Floyd, and way before that. I mean, I have parents who came up in the Great Migration and lived under Jim Crow. When I hear people say that, “This is not who we are,” I’m thinking, “This is not who we want to be, ought to be, but it is who we are.” I’d love to hear your thinking about that.

SPEIER: I bristle when we talk about the exceptionalism in the United States. There’s an arrogance to that that I find personally offensive. I mean, we are imperfect. It is an imperfect union, but one that we aspire to make more perfect. We’ve made many mistakes over the history of this country, obviously slavery being the most egregious.

But we can look even more recently to see how we [have done wrong]. How do you cage babies on the border? How do you do that? I made two trips to the border to try and shine a bright light on that kind of conduct. We have so much repairing to do. When you look at how willing we were to basically shut off any movement of refugees into this country, how do you have the Statue of Liberty and then cut the number of refugees per year from 120,000 down to 18,000? That’s what President Trump did.

I would agree with you, LaDoris. It is who we are. There’s a horrible video of [Democratic U.S. Representative] Lou Correa, who is a colleague from California, who was at the airport and was getting ready to get on a plane to come home right after the events of January 6. Listening to the voices of those men and women badgering him is worthy of all of us to view, because it is who we are, and we’ve got a lot of work to do.

CORDELL: Let’s talk about the Thomases.

There’s Clarence Thomas and there’s Ginni Thomas, his spouse. Recently, information has been disclosed that Ginni Thomas was a strong supporter of, if not actively involved in, this insurrection, this whole mob gathering.

I saw one thing on social media. Again, I don’t know if it’s true or not. There was one indication that she had actually financed and paid for some of the buses that brought some of these folks in to try to tear down the capitol. If indeed all of this were true . . . that she engaged in all these behaviors, the question is what does that mean with respect to Clarence Thomas’s tenure on the Supreme Court?

There are some people who may say, “Well, what do you mean? They’re two different things. She’s doing that. He’s on the court.”

But there are these rules about conflicts of interest that say, for example, if I were on the bench and I had a close relative who was doing something that had something to do with litigation coming into my court, I’d have to disclose that and then decide whether or not to recuse myself. There are these kinds of things, conflicts of interest, the appearance of conflicts of interest or actual conflict. Do you have any thoughts about that? She is, we all know, that’s pretty clear, that she’s on the extreme right. But if it’s the case that she was actively involved in promoting all this, do you think this should have any repercussions regarding Clarence Thomas’s tenure?

SPEIER: That is something that is subject to a factual review. If she was funding this,

Just days after the deadly attack, the U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump for the second time, citing his role in inciting the insurrection. (Photo by U.S. House of Representatives.)

“We need to create Civics 101 on a community level . . . so people understand what this democracy is and how to protect it.” then it would appear that he is conflicted and would at the very least have to recuse himself on cases that dealt with any of the conduct by these individuals. He has been a less than productive member of the Supreme Court. I certainly would like to see what his colleagues on the Supreme Court say and do about his conduct. I wonder to what extent they have the ability to provide some kind of regulatory function over his conduct moving forward.

CORDELL: If you were Joe Biden and you’re getting ready to be sworn in, what are among the first things you would do to ease the tensions in this country?

SPEIER: That’s a very good question. I think that Joe Biden is more prepared to do that than I am actually. I think that his 30-plus years in the Senate have given him great experiential abilities. By nature, he is a person

that wants to get to yes. We certainly should give him the opportunity to attempt it. I guess I’ve become more cynical in watching the Republicans generally to think that they’re not interested in that. Certainly in the House they can taste regaining the majority.

Much of what I think Kevin McCarthy was doing with his pugnacious nature when he introduced the Speaker on the day that we were sworn in was kind of messaging all of that to the base and to Donald Trump, so that they could move forward with that.

In terms of healing our country, I think we have to do a lot more listening. I mean, as much as I find everything that was done by that mob despicable, we’ve got to find out, what is it that motivates them, besides hatred, and bigotry, and anti-Semitism?

What is their core?

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EQUITY IN HEAL

Image by Elf-Moondance.

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LTH CARE

HOW CAN OUR HEALTH-CARE

system address the physical, psychological, economic and social impacts of inequity and systematic racism to foster more equitable and healthier communities? From the December 15, 2020, online program “Destination Health: Driving Equity in Health Care.” Part of The Commonwealth Club’s Thought Leadership series, Destination Health, underwritten by Kaiser Permanente.

JOSEPH BETANCOURT, M.D., MPH, Vice President, Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, Massachusetts General Hospital; Founder, Senior Advisor and Faculty, The Disparities Solutions Center; Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School ALETHA MAYBANK, M.D., MPH, Chief Health Equity Officer and Group Vice President, American Medical Association LEANA WEN, M.D., Emergency Physician and Visiting Professor of Health Policy and Management, George Washington University School of Public Health; Former Health Commissioner, City of Baltimore; CNN Medical Analyst RONALD WYATT, M.D., Vice-President and Patient Safety Officer, MCIC Vermont; Former Chief Quality and Patient Safety Officer, Cook County Health; Patient Safety Expert; Health Equity Champion APRIL DEMBOSKY, Health Correspondent, KQED Radio—Moderator APRIL DEMBOSKY: Dr. Betancourt, I’d like to start this conversation with you. Looking at the situation we are in right now with the pandemic, and you have been charged with the COVID-19 response at Mass. General, and from the very beginning before we really even understood how the coronavirus was transmitted, you anticipated that communities of color would be impacted disproportionately. How did you know this and how did you prepare your hospital?

JOSEPH BETANCOURT: I think history has been our best guide on how disasters, both manmade and natural, disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. Clearly I think we could just look no further [than] Hurricane Katrina and how that natural disaster disproportionately impacted communities of color, in low-lying areas, levies that weren’t kept up well. The impact of race, structural racism, what we call the social determinants of health, which really are vestiges not of choice of where people want to live, in the circumstances that put their health and wellness at risk, but really I think an evolution of a whole series of oftentimes very deliberate policies and practices that FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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lead to “the other side of the tracks.” And as history has told us time and time again, these populations suffer at much greater rates from these types of disasters.

We had our [COVID-19] surge quite early in March of this year, and we anticipated that this would impact communities of color disproportionately. We quickly tried to do things that I would argue brought together a doorstep-to-bedside approach to addressing the pandemic for communities of color, not just focusing on ventilators and bed capacity but really mitigating spread in the same communities that I think have these factors that create a perfect storm that had been talked about for months now, which include multi-generational housing, densely populated areas, essential workers, the need for public transportation before we were telling people to [wear] mask barriers, concerns around immigration, mistrust. These factors in many ways became instrumental. The proof is in the pudding.

We tried to address those in a variety of ways—through community health efforts, mitigating spread by delivering care kits and creating isolation sites for people to safely isolate, to increasing testing and broadening testing criteria when testing was a scarce resource. In our hospital, when we saw that 40 percent of our patients were Spanish speaking and outstripping our resources of interpreter services, [we set] up a group of 15 native Spanish speakers, including myself, who worked with our search teams to make sure that there was always a Spanish-speaking doctor with every interaction, with every patient; to providing information in multiple languages; to setting up a text messaging platform for patients and employees who have trouble getting information through some of the standard channels that we who are more privileged get them.

So those are just some of the things that we did. We tried to throw a lot of things on the wall and see what would stick, see where we could have impact. We use strong public health principles, and principles around the elimination of disparities to drive our work.

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And we did the best we could.

DEMBOSKY: Dr. Wen, we heard from Dr. Betancourt that his hospital was doing some of this community surveillance, some of the work that we typically think is for public health departments to do. We saw a lot of missteps in the early months of the pandemic around testing and contact tracing that in some ways perpetuated inequities rather than help to reduce them. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what some of these missteps were, and what were some of the lessons that we learned from them?

LEANA WEN: I think in time we are going to look back and do a proper analysis of all the many things that went wrong during our response. And I should say [of] all the things that went right, because there are so many institutions, including the one that Dr. Betancourt helps to lead, that did do so many things that set us on the other, right track.

But there were also many mistakes. I think one of the big mistakes is not having a national coordinated plan around many of these issues, including testing, contact tracing. I know that we can see now the importance of testing, that we had missed the early cases of coronavirus coming into the country. We were so narrowly focused, for example, on people coming in from Wuhan in China, that we missed all the cases that were coming from Europe, from other parts of China, because we didn’t have the testing, and, I should say, many months into the epidemic still don’t have sufficient testing.

One case was often the canary in the coal mine, and it often meant that there were many others that we just were not picking up on.

In fact, lack of testing and contact tracing was why we had to resort to the shutdowns in the first place. And because we were not able to ramp up testing and contact tracing enough, that’s also why we got to where we are. Every time you had mitigation measures that were able to suppress the level of community spread to a certain level, you’re supposed to get testing [and] contact tracing caught up to that point. But since

we didn’t, every time we ended up having a surge upon a surge, and that’s why we’re seeing the catastrophic numbers that we are now in terms of specifically the impact on communities of color.

As all my colleagues here know very well, this pandemic has hit certain communities harder than others. And we also know that whenever there are policies that are unfair, that hurts some in the community, those who are affected the most are always those who have the fewest resources, for whom social distancing is a privilege, who don’t always have the ability to quarantine and isolate because of fear of lost wages, because they live in crowded multi-generational housing, etc.

So I think the lessons that we take out of this, I’d say one key lesson—other than the obvious, which is having this national coordinated response and clear messaging, etc—is the importance of tracking and data, specifically making sure that we are reporting demographic data as well. If we had demographic data around testing early on, we might’ve seen them.

Let’s say a community overall appears to have an acceptable test positivity rate. Let’s say it’s 5 percent in the community, but if Latino Americans are testing at 30 percent positive and African-Americans are testing a 20 percent, that means that there needs to be much more concerted effort toward those communities. Having that kind of drill-down demographic information will be really important as we think through vaccine distribution as well, because we would not want for vaccines to be distributed only to the most privileged communities, and having that kind of data transparency is one way of holding people accountable.

DEMBOSKY: I had a follow-up question for you about testing. In California, in the San Francisco Bay area, we had an effort that was intended to increase the access to testing for low-income communities of color.

It was a project backed by a Google program.

Even though it was intended for low-income communities of color, they required people to register for an appointment online. And as a

result, all of those resources ended up going to white affluent people who came to make use of the testing. So even when we want to do a good job, they’re still these pitfalls, there are still mistakes that can get made.

How should we be on the lookout for those kinds of things?

WEN: I think it’s such a good point, and it actually brings up the point about telemedicine more broadly as well. I’m a big proponent of telemedicine and telehealth, having been a practitioner of it for years, but we also know that when things that are new and innovative come up, that despite the best intentions to make it about increasing access, sometimes it could further perpetuate disparities. So I think part of it is being attentive to each of these issues along the way, by speaking to the members of the community who need to be involved in crafting each of these plans that may sound good on paper and maybe with the best intentions in mind, but I think had community leaders been involved in some of these efforts, they probably would have pinpointed the problems.

For example, there have been other efforts across the country where getting a test may require a doctor’s note. But if you don’t have a physician, then you’re also going to be left behind. Or drive-in centers are great if you have a car, but if you don’t, might there be other settings in communities, like testing at churches that might actually get to that more.

DEMBOSKY: Dr. Wyatt, I’d like to talk a little bit about how we got here. You went to a segregated doctor’s office as a child, where Black patients could only get walk-in appointments. I’m hoping you can give us the historical perspective of how racism got baked into our health-care system.

RONALD WYATT: I think we have for too long been ahistorical, and we need to go back through—I would just describe it as the pain of history to understand where we are now.

When I talk about this then, I’m talking about going back to 1492, and I’m talking about going back to 1619. So when we think about pandemics, I would say the original pandemic in the U.S. started in 1492 and 1619. That was when Black and Indigenous people and other people of color became the essential workers. The idea of social distancing from my perspective started when Black people were chained in the bottom of a slave ship that sailed the Middle Passage, while millions of Black people died, and they became essential workers on sugar cane plantations in the Dominican Republic, the tobacco plantations in Virginia, the cotton plantations here where I am in Alabama.

So this pandemic that we’re in is not an anomaly for Black and Indigenous and people of color populations. That goes through the times of slavery, when Dr. [Samuel] Cartwright described a condition of Black people that he called drapetomania, which meant that you had to have a mental disorder as a slave to want to run away. That goes through the retribution peonage, Jim Crow, when W.E.B. Du Bois . . . described what he called a “peculiar indifference” to the Black populations in Philadelphia. And that goes up to . . . where we are up to mass incarceration, which is now called the new Jim Crow. So I would say that this pandemic that we talk about now should not come as any surprise.

All of the signals were there. They were not anomalies. From my perspective, it’s almost fatalistic to say, “Well, we have these Black, Indigenous and people of color populations who are at higher risk.” They were at higher risk before COVID came to the U.S., and we can use the data.

I so much appreciate Joe and Dr. Wen for the data work that they do to demonstrate this. That data was there and I think in many ways under-appreciated. Those were the signals that if we get hit with something like this, then there are populations that were already devalued, that were in many ways dehumanized, that there were resources that were allocated in an unjust and unfair way that then leads to these outcomes that we see. And these outcomes that we see now in this pandemic really are systematic and they’re systemic. They reflect institutional and structural racism that existed before COVID, and many organizations, institutions and dare I say leaders knew this pre-COVID. So it should not come as a surprise.

The canary in the coal mine for COVID was already deeply short of breath before COVID hit and was ignored. We have to understand why these signals were ignored.

Why were they treated with such indifference?

Why were there eight or so ZIP codes in New York City that stood out as very different when COVID hit New York City—I was there during that first surge of it—and then how it spread across the country? So back to

Joe’s point, then when we think about what we like to now call the social determinants of health, they are not new. This is the stuff that’s been killing us for hundreds of years. Those things have made Black and Indigenous and people of color populations disposable, people who live in sacrifice zones, who are impacted by environmental racism, segregated housing, under-appreciated jobs, and the list goes on.

I do believe that a core to this from our profession is a lack of respect, inadequate compassion, and the stripping of dignity from people of color, Black and Indigenous populations. So if anything, this has taught us, don’t ignore these signals and assume that they’re somehow anomalies. I was inside a federal [agency] that had a playbook to respond to a pandemic. We went through scenarios. Where would be the supply chains; these are the federal stockpiles; how to handle transportation distribution. That was a complete playbook that for some reason, I would say it’s systematic, was ignored. And now we’re playing catch up.

But if I began to think about what’s driving this [with] Black, Indigenous people of color populations, it is mistrust, it’s distrust, and it’s a lack of trust. That is historic. For us to move forward, we have to remove this ahistorical thinking. We have to remove what’s been called a myth of meritocracy. How will we, particularly now going forward, begin to allocate resources to the places where they’re most needed, not where they most wanted, but where they are most needed.

The data that Joe has, the data that Dr. Wynn has, the data that Aletha is working on at the AMA [American Medical Association], it’s just a road map to show you where to go to do work that can be sustainable, so that this is more than just a moment.

This has to be more than a moment.

ALETHA MAYBANK: [Let’s build] upon the history and the context of race and racism in this country, and getting asked about [how] medical students have been taught that race is a biological construct rather than a social one.

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that doctors and the health-care system use to determine how to deliver care or what types of care people should have. I would start off by saying that it’s not only medical students who have this notion that race is a biological construct. This is really an American belief and is also very much rooted in our history. It’s the belief and actions that races are biologically distinct groups that are determined by genes.

This is known as racial essentialism, but it really has no scientific basis. The Human Genome Project of 2003 told the science community that we are genetically more alike than there is variation. The variation is very small. But this belief has really gone across generations and it has really created harm.

Just a little more context, because I’m not sure how well-informed everyone is around the race conversation, I think one of the

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barriers that we have in this country is the analysis in terms of structures and systems of power. We have a hard time talking about race and racism, but what’s nice to see now—and hopeful we see now—is that more people are building that analysis.

But race really was documented as a concept developed in the 18th century to divide human beings into groups, typically based on their physical appearance, their skin color, but it also could be social cultural backgrounds.

For those who have been in data for a long time, when you look at old data sets, you will see Italian was a race, being Jewish was a race.

And so race actually has evolved over time.

It really has been used to establish English social hierarchy and at one point ultimately to enslave human beings. Race itself doesn’t describe the complexity of genetics or ancestry.

Genetics and ancestry are really very distinct terms. Ancestry more reflects our human variations that are due to kind of geographical origins of our ancestors. That’s different than race. Race is merely a social and political construct that, as I said, has changed through time. Even now our U.S. Census changes the definition of race every 10 years or so.

Race has use in the sense of what has been talked about so far and in describing what is happening to people [in terms of] race and ethnicity, and to communities. It’s not that we shouldn’t collect information on race, but we have to be very careful how we use that data to generate solutions as well as treatment.

We really have to look at the impacts of racism as a system. This is Camara Jones’ definition of [racism: It is a] system of power that structures opportunity and assigns value

based on skin color, advantaging whites and disadvantaging people color. It’s [with] that system that we have to have a better sense of what is happening—the impact of that system on race, what is happening to people we have to better understand in the health-care system. So the American Medical Association this past November passed a policy on racism as a public-health threat; the second policy was [to] actually rid health care of racial essentialism; and the third was to eliminate race as a proxy for genetics, ancestry and biology in medical education research and clinical practice. Because what medicine and the health community at large has really done, whether it’s intentional or not, it has made treatment decisions based on race, which again has no biological basis for disease.

What race-based medicine would tell me is that I, as a Black person, if I go into a health center and I need to do a test for my lung function—spirometry, as they call it—or my renal function, my kidney function, and they’re going to look at the rate of filtration. If I were to deliver a baby, I would be evaluated based on being Black and whether or not I had the ability to—if I had a C-section before—deliver that baby vaginally. So my treatment would actually be adjusted differently than that of a white person. What this says is that something that’s different about my lungs and my kidneys and my ability to have a baby, and that for some reason it’s a biological trait, but that’s just wrong. These tools are used on a daily basis to decide who gets medication and different treatment plans, and they’re just unintended

consequences that we know cause harm.

And we know as an example, going back to the filtration rates for kidneys, if I’m identified as a Black person, it could suggest a better kidney function. Therefore if I have a higher filtration rate, it may delay the kind of specialty care that I get, or delay me getting kidney transplantation.

These are the ways in which right now there’s much greater interrogation, and a lot really led by med students and residents, on how are we using race, how is it causing harm, what are the intended consequences and what do we need to dismantle this aspect of bias that is built into how we deliver care at the health-care system? And then how do we also better understand the impacts around the experience of racism and other forms of oppression in this country?

Image by Elf-Moondance.

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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN AND THE CLIMATE GREG DALTON: I [will full-throated the effort of begin] by asking Gina Mcaddressing climate, in his Carthy what lessons can engagement in it, and I’m the nations’ biggest environmental organizations be drawn from the failure really excited about it. It is respond to a year of race and health crises? ? From of Barack Obama and Joe by far and away the most the September 22, 2020, online Climate One program Biden to get a national cliaggressive climate plan of “Climate Ambition, with Gina McCarthy, Annie Leonard mate plan in place when any presidency. Can it get and Tamara Tolds O’Laughlin.” they were in office. better? Sure. You’re sitting GINA MCCARTHY: One with three women advoANNIE LEONARD, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA of the things that thankcates who are going to deGINA MCCARTHY, President & CEO, NRDC Action Fund fully I think Joe Biden did mand better, but we’ll alwhen he really was getting ways do that—because it’s TAMARA TOLES O’LAUGHLIN, North America Director, the nod for his nomination never going to be enough, 350.org and before that happened is because we got to act to do he spent a lot of time with it all now.

GREG DALTON, Founder and Host, Climate One environmental justice advoDALTON: Tamara Toles cates. He really is a person O’Laughlin, you say that who was engaged somewhat in climate, but ground improvements. So my hope is that when Joe Biden is fighting for real people I don’t think it was as yet sort of ingrained instead of running to new big solutions that he’s gutsy. How do you rate the Biden-Harinto him. Well, it is now, because they per- don’t dedicate real benefits to Black and ris plan for climate action? sonalize this for him. And he’s a very per- brown, Hispanic, Indigenous communities TAMARA TOLES O’LAUGHLIN: I’d say sonally wonderful human being, [which I first and foremost, that those are no longer it is the most ambitious plan to date. That know] just from knowing him. The lesson the thing to shoot for. We need two-fers. I actually says much more about the kind of for me has always been, Don’t talk about cli- don’t just want greenhouse gases; I want president than it does about this particular mate as a planetary problem. Don’t actually fossil fuels gone. I want fossil fuels out of moment that we’re in, to be fair. But I do dissect it from all the other systemic chal- products. I don’t want to help fossil fuel in- think there has been a real responsiveness to lenges we have with conventional pollution dustries to extend their life. I want them to what our demands are. and with systemic racism that has led to so recognize that this is bringing down comI’m here on behalf of young people, on many communities having disproportion- munities, most important, environmental behalf of people who wouldn’t consider ate impact. And then make sure you talk justice communities. And the best thing themselves young in any space. On behalf about it in relevant terms. about Biden’s plan is he senses justice and of that multiracial, multigenerational orgaI think way too much green groups really equity, and he indicates and commits to 40 nizing that really pushed us to this moment. just talk about the only thing we care about percent of the investments that we need to Recognizing that the establishment is not is birds and bunnies, who are lovely, but re- make to boost us out of our economic dol- going to get to where it’s going if business ally, we’re all talking about human beings drums are actually going to be invested in as usual is what’s on the menu. So it really does feel like we’re in a conversation about and human lives and [it] needs to be related environmental justice communities.

We [will] have a president I believe has climate ambition, because it was job one for to families. It needs to be related to on-the-

HOW DID THE LEADERS OF SOME OF

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all of us who care years. If you find about this work to me a roomful of semake sure that it niors, I’ve probably was as important as got the most reckany other issue. And less bunch you’ve really, the umbrella ever seen. that it is—because We’re not calling you can’t talk about for a referendum education or voting on business as usurights or any of the al; we’re calling for other things on a the end of business planet that does not as usual. We’re not exist. I have said it calling for a wrapbefore and I will say around plan where it again, until I see we figure out how a room full of bears to do a little bit sitting around trying of bad stuff. We’re to talk about how to calling for the end save us from climate of sacrifice zones, change, people and Clockwise from top right: Greg Dalton, Gina McCarthy, Annie Leonard and and that is about planet is where the Tamara Toles O’Laughlin. making sure nowork is happening. body feels safe conDALTON: Annie Leonard, presidents wildfires of biblical proportions and five tinuing to feed us a line instead of doing the typically have priorities and lots of people hurricanes spinning at the same time in the work. So there isn’t a single person in any pulling on them. How will climate rank in Atlantic. How’s the political calculus chang- committee who can hide out in their office the context of a global pandemic [and] re- ing, especially for young Americans? and not respond to that. cord unemployment? It’s one thing to have O’LAUGHLIN: I would say that we’re in DALTON: Gina McCarthy, speaking of a plan, it’s another thing to get it through the middle of a four-generation time peri- no one is safe, everything is on the table: Congress once in power. We saw last time od. There are four generations of people in There’s a class of people in America who live that health care went before climate. Will the workplace. There are four generations of on the coasts, who maybe they’re environthat happen again? advocates. Folks who started out at Wood- mentally oriented, they might write checks ANNIE LEONARD: Absolutely not. For stock with half an idea ended up with a job. to NRDC or The Commonwealth Club or a couple of reasons. One is we are not go- And I speak on behalf of 350.org, and [I’ll] Climate One. A lot of them want to keep ing to do that. The movement is so strong, just say that we’re middle-aged at 10 years mainly market structures in place and take so united. The context is different than old because some groups started exactly 2 out brown energy and put in green energy the last time Joe Biden was anywhere near minutes ago, and others have been around and keep everything else in place and keep the White House in that the science has for over 100 years. their comfortable life. Is that realistic? changed; climate crisis is here now. It is so We’re in a moment where we’re all push- MCCARTHY: No, I think life is changclear that it cannot be postponed at this ing for the same thing at once. Energy needs ing. You know the reason why we’re seeing point. With the timeframe we’re operating wisdom and vice versa. So we are in a time people my age on the streets is probably in, there’s no material difference between when the youth agenda is no different than because we were given the gift of having a climate denier and a climate delayer. We the Black agenda than the Indigenous agen- grandchildren. I’m not now worried about have to hit the ground running on day one. da. Because at the end of the day, we need to my sacrifice; I am worried about handing to We don’t have the luxury to solve one be in a space where we can move the needle them a future that I’m going to be proud problem at a time, but we don’t need to be- for change, because there is no separation of of. I’ve worked my entire life in this, and if cause the great thing is how much the solu- success here. you think I wouldn’t really talk turkey with tions are interconnected. We can do things We’re in a time test, as Bill McKibben some of these older people who think you like massive investment in clean energy, likes to call it. I assure you that at the end can still remain comfortable and that you infrastructure that addresses environmental when the buzzer is up, we’ll all be in the can sort of position yourself to get a little justice, disproportional harm; it addresses same boat, so we might as well be [rowing] done, but only have much meaning in my the economic doldrums Gina referred to. in the same direction. So for youth who life is just not right. Yes, I’m uncomfortable The same things can solve all of these all at are raising it, they are supported by mid- about all the change I need to do as quickonce if we have a comprehensive approach, dle-aged people who’ve been asking for it ly as people are demanding at NRDC and if we stay united, which I have total confi- and by the elderly who in my opinion are other places. Of course it’s uncomfortable, dence we’re going to do. frankly willing to sacrifice everything. I’ve but we’ve got to embrace it, right?

DALTON: Tamara, climate used to be seen more seasoned people running out on This is the time for change. The only about future generations. In recent weeks, the street to get arrested and putting their thing that gets me up in the morning is to we’ve seen climate crises on both coasts, bodies on the line than I have in the last 15 know that we are so bad off that change FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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is essential. You know, I love the idea that there are people who have been comfortable sitting in Congress for 40 years getting used to this little march of really pokey people.

If they just give a sense that they can’t be comfortable anymore, that they’re not gonna hang around, I really think that’s great.

It’s called democracy. You don’t do the will of the people and instead you want to maintain things as they are because it benefits you or because you don’t think you contributed to the problem, then I’m sorry it’s just not working anymore.

So we’ve got to get comfortable being uncomfortable. We’ve got to stop trying to make it go away in a flash and really make people go away in a flash out of government. We haven’t figured out that we don’t need little steady progress, but we need big leaps. We need those to be doable. We need them to bring people behind. We need them to shift jobs, not leave workers behind. We need labor engaged. We just have to be smart enough to recognize that this is a social system. When you fix the system, not a single thing in it—you fix it all at once.

And we can figure that out. This is not rocket science.

DALTON: The “crying Indian” TV ad, launched on Earth Day in 1971, is one of the most iconic advertisements of all time.

It is still shaping our conversations today about how to confront climate disruption.

The ad helped frame environmental issues as a matter of individual—as opposed to corporate—responsibility, as Annie Leonard explains.

LEONARD: That ad was very significant for me as a kid, you know. I was trying to explain to my 21-year old what a big impact it had on me. I remember back then there were only like four things you could watch at any time to choose from. So that means like a quarter of the population saw that at any time. It was constantly near. And I took it to heart. I thought people start pushing, people can stop it. So I picked up litter every day on the way to school. I did exactly what they wanted me to do, which was perfect my own individual action and focus on that.

There were a couple of things with that.

First of all, it’s not an Indian, it’s an Italian American, just to clear on that. Second of all, it was not created by a bunch of people; it was created by a full environmental group that was launched by a bunch of packaging companies. Plastic packaging producers and users. Their goal was to get us to stop put-

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ting the heat on them and to put the heat on us. It was enormously successful, and my entire generation took it to heart and thought that by perfecting our individual actions we can solve these problems.

I want to be clear and it’s really important that we recycle that we compost; all those things are the right things to do, but that’s not how we create a big, bold system of change. At this point with the scale of the problems that we have doing things like carrying your own bag to the grocery store and not littering—those fall in the category of flossing your teeth and washing your hands. Like this is basic adult hygiene. This is not deep political change. But it was so intentional because they know that when we come together, not as individuals, but working together as engaged civil society, that’s how we make change. And when I look at the climate movement now, we have every single thing we need.

Gina, you just said this is not rocket science. We know how to power our country.

We know how to meet people’s needs in an equitable just and sustainable way. We have model economic policies, we have innovative green technologies, we have common sense. We have every single thing we need except the power to make it so. That comes from people not focusing on perfecting your individual actions but working together. That’s where the movement is now and that’s why we’re going to see change. That’s why we’ve already seen Biden’s plan move so much and we’re going to move it even further.

DALTON: Also, in 2005, BP popularized the concept of a personal carbon footprint and launched an online calculator in conjunction with this “Beyond Petroleum Campaign” run by Ogilvy & Mather. So, the very notion of—I just learned this recently —a personal carbon footprint was popularized by an oil company that was again focusing action back on the individual. Tamara, how can people think more about systems than straws?

O’LAUGHLIN: Sure. Happy to jump in on that. But I just first want to flag that, one, it’s an entirely different [matter]. The conversation around how coal, oil and gas benefited from asbestos and trash’s legacy of creating the disinformation machine—we are not up against our individual choices for real, because we’ve been told that we are our own problem and we are our own solution, which allows us to overlook the 70

percent of things we could do together. So just want to flag that we’re not going to save the planet, the whales or any people if we’re not looking at the largest corporate actors.

Seven out of 10 of the biggest things we could do to save this planet involve shutting down fossil fuels, ending their reign on our democracy, taking their filthy money out of our conversations.

The way we talk about problems, the way we frame solutions, the kind of data that we use, they have so infiltrated every part of this. . . . If I talk about [how] plastic is so much a part of our lives that we forget that it’s another part of this conversation around what’s happening with coal, oil and gas.

Every single thing you could touch within 5 feet of you is somehow connected to this industry, and it did not happen by accident.

It happened because of a concentrated campaign to infiltrate your life with things you do not need and make you feel like you can’t make change. So getting together with other people to really focus on who the bad actors are—where the largest bang for our buck would be if we get together—leads you back to the same place: ending the reign of fossil fuels in the climate decade.

So we’re in the same conversation whether we talk about recycling, composting, plastic straws, personal behavior. I get so many questions around whether or not we should change our eating habits. Sure, go ahead and change it. I’m sure your health practitioner would be thrilled if you did. But the thing you could do for the planet is to really focus on loosening the grip of coal, oil and gas on our future and doing that with other people who agree to do the same.

I would argue that if the problem that we have all identified just in the beginning of this conversation are about design, the answer is redesign. I think that’s a lot scarier than people might think, because it involves making the change that Gina referred to.

But I can assure you redesign is what we know how to do best. We didn’t end up in this moment by accident. Roadways, airways, transportation, jobs, infrastructure, human health—we designed all of it and we designed the rest of the ecosystem and consigned it to our fate. It’s time for us to do the work of redesign by examining the premises underneath what we are talking about here.

You really pushed my big-ticket item as an advocate, but systems-level practice is about doing what you do as if you were everyone else and then asking for us to do more.

“It’s not like we want to shut down all of the coal mining and just leave people to their own devices. We’re talking about a just transition.”

—GINA MCCARTHY DALTON: Gina McCarthy you’ve locked horns with the powerful fossil fuel interests in Washington. Exxon was recently removed from the Dow [Jones], which is quite a symbolic measure in terms of its prominence in the American economy.

But the fossil fuel industry still has virtually endless amounts of money to defend their profit streams. Even if Joe Biden gets [into the White House], there are still coal-state Democrats, still lots of concentrated power defending those interests. How does that play out?

MCCARTHY: These fossil fuel companies are just literally shameless, to be honest with you. So they’ll never go away. I think one of the biggest challenges we have to face, and it was a challenge that was pretty much front and center in the Green New Deal and ends up being a significant sort of a push point in the Biden plan, is that these Democrats are worried about the economy in their states.

We have to acknowledge that we are worried about the economy in their states. I’m worried about jobs. That’s why if it’s a systemic issue, you worry about the economy and jobs. It’s not like we want to shut down all of the coal mining and just leave people to their own devices. We’re talking about a just transition. Will that make them happy?

Maybe not, but they have to get over the fact that the world is changing—it’s just how. And if you don’t want a world that is going to change and shut everything down, then we have to talk about transitioning the world we have to a new system.

Greg, can I just react to two things Tamara said, because it was pretty powerful.

The first thing is this plastics issue drives me crazy. If anything drives me crazy, it’s sort of this one, because the fossil fuel industry is sitting under the radar screen as if the problem with plastics wasn’t theirs. As soon as they realized they might be phasing out of some part of the power sector, they started building huge plastics factories. Where? In Cancer Alley. Because these people need

jobs. Nobody needs a new plastics factory.

Everybody needs a job, right? It’s just the shamelessness of this.

But the other issue that I want to hit is this. We are overtaken now by people who just talk about individual freedoms. It’s this whole mask thing, as if they’re exerting their own personal freedom. The United States was . . . built on the fact that every human being has a right to air, clean air, clean water, clean land, a safe place to live, a [roof ] over their heads, good food to be able to eat.

That’s individual freedom. Individual freedom isn’t about masquerading by getting rid of regulations that are solely in place because you stop other people from having those fundamental rights and so you have to be regulated.

So this is my life here. I don’t regulate to add burden. I regulate to allow people to have their lives. And because otherwise how was a single individual or community going to stand up to a coal producer or company in their midst if it wasn’t the government stepping in and doing its job to protect people? This whole sort of bastardization of the idea of individual freedom is really behind so much of the challenges we have today.

You have no right to kill other people. You have no right to do that.

DALTON: Tamara there’s often a narrative that our house is on fire, we’ve got to put out this fire—climate change. We can worry later about other things, like who has how many toys or racial justice, some of this wealth distribution stuff that can wait later.

Tell us about the lessons from Katrina and Flint and the idea that racial justice should somehow come later.

O’LAUGHLIN: Sure. I would say that that’s also a function of design. The work of environment, which began from the work of conservation, literally involved the murdering and displacement of tons of people and then we focused on a blade of grass or, pardon me—trigger warning—sage grouse and a lot of people fought and died for that. I just

want to flag that there are a lot of things that we have put into very slim and narrow conversations around what is the environment.

It’s actually quite revolutionary in this moment that we can talk about people and planet, because we wrote every law as though magic hands would make it happen. We didn’t factor any impacts on how any of this was going to focus on people.

We are in a moment where we really have a specific view of racial justice as a part of climate justice, because to do anything else is to completely [remove] the future from the conversation at our end. We can no longer pretend that parks will be great if there aren’t any people in them or that the next generation of people will be Black, Indigenous or people of color despite what’s going on in this country in so many spaces. The Census has projected that we will be a multicultural people sooner than we think. If that’s true, every part of conservation and environment and restoration practices for land, air, water, and all of that work comes together with the sacrifice zones that we have exiled our neighbors into. We have zoned people to death, and none of that is what the future looks like, because coming together for integrated solutions [requires] we do not accept people’s identity as a reason to exclude them from doing this work. Because the future is us doing this work together.

That sounds radical until you say it out loud and then it sounds ridiculous. Because what about being Black, Indigenous or a person of color would make you anything other than an original steward of what we have going here. We are the people of the global majority. If you cannot see me: I am a Black woman, so let me just put that out there. But we’re in a moment where doing this work authentically means making sure all the impacted folks are in the room not as a favor but because it gives us a strategic advantage on how to deal with the issues of our time.

The stewardship issues we are facing now are not new. The crises and the urgency of failing to do stewardship work for this long has delivered us to this moment. So whether we’re talking about standing up in an uprising with the movement for Black lives, recognizing that Latino votes are about Latino people, like raising our issues around our race consciousness is actually the only defense we had left for the world that we’re in.

We have to be in right relationship with each other as people before we can be a right relationship with the planet.

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THE MYTH OF CHIN SURGING INCOME INEQUALITY,

an unfair social welfare system, and rising social tensions block China’s continued economic rise, says Dexter Roberts, with implications for companies and countries around the world.

From the December 2, 2020, Humanities MemberLed Forum online program “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism.”

DEXTER “TIFF” ROBERTS, Adjunct Instructor of Political Science and Mansfield Fellow, University of Montana; Nonresident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative; Author, The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory, & the Future of the World MEI FONG, Director of Communications and Strategy, The Center for Public Integrity— Moderator DEXTER ROBERTS: I’d like to start by talking about how I came to write my book, and in order to do so, I have to take everyone back about 20 years to the year 2000. At that point, I had been in China for about five years and had been covering the business story, mainly working for BusinessWeek full-time at that point. I had been spending a lot of time for that reason in the big cities of Beijing, where I was based, and Shanghai and Shenzhen and places like that. But that year, 2000, I did two cover stories that took me to a part of China that I had never been to before. The first of those [articles] was called “China’s Wealth Gap.” This story was looking at the already then-fast growing gap between the coastal regions of China and the interior. I went for this reporting to the province of Guizhou in Southwestern China, then and unfortunately still today, one of the much poorer parts of China. At that point, we’d seen a couple of decades since [China’s leader] Deng Xiaoping opened the economy and started reform. We’d seen a rapid growth, but much of that concentrated on the coast. So there was a policy by the then-leader, Jiang Zemin, called Develop the West, which was an effort to try to address that already strong growing gap between the coast and the interior that same year.

[In] 2000, I went back for a second cover story, “The Great Migration.” I was looking at the already hundreds of millions of migrant workers that were, in response to this unequal

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NESE CAPITALISM

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development, leaving their homes in places like Guizhou and going to the coast to work in the factories.

So I focus my book by looking at two places in China representative of both the wealth gap and the tremendous growth that [moderator Mei Fong] and I both experienced and wrote about in our years in China. At an SUV factory, . . . I met Mo Rubo. I believe he was 21 when I met him.

He had already left his village for probably five years, and he had been a true migrant.

He had worked in Shanghai, he’d worked in a city called Ningbo, a big coastal city, not far from Shanghai, and then worked in a number of different jobs around Guangdong before I met him [when] he was working as a welder in a Taiwanese-owned electronic components factory in the city of Dongguan. [I took a] picture of Mo Rubo with his then-girlfriend, who also [was] a migrant worker in a different factory there.

Another person that I spent a lot of time with is . . . also surnamed Mo— most of the people in this small village of Binghuacun share the same surname and are distantly related, which is common in the smaller villages in China. I had met her in Dongguan, outside the factory she was working in several months earlier, and then when I visited the village of Binghuacun, I met her again. She had returned for two reasons. One was to help her parents with the rice harvest. And the other one, which was probably far more important, was to renew her identity card at that point.

Again, we’re going back to the year 2000; migrant workers in China were very vulnerable to local police authorities. One of the things that could happen to them was if they did not have all the proper documentation on them, and that included an up-to-date identity card, they could get picked up and put into what they called black jails, then effectively held for ransom where they would have to pay [the] equivalent to several months of their salary in order to get out. Something like this had happened to one of her distant relatives in the village there.

So she had gone back to make sure that she wouldn’t get in trouble with the local police because of this expired identity card. I visited Guizhou for the first time in the year 2000 [and] visited the village of Binghuacun in that year. This was actually before China was to enter the World Trade Organization, which came one year later.

At that point, people in China already knew that China was going to enter the World Trade Organization. These key bilateral agreements had been negotiated between the

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“Half of the population . . . is receiving much lower-quality health care, and their children are receiving a far inferior education.”

U.S. and China in late 1999, which was a big part of my early reporting in China. So even in this little village, they knew that China was going to, about a year later, enter the World Trade Organization. I remember talking to the village [Communist] Party chief, and he was very hopeful that with China’s entry into the World Trade Organization and, frankly, after talking to a foreign journalist, that this might bring investment to his village.

He was very hopeful that they would get a vegetable and fruit processing factory, so they could move beyond their reliance on subsistence agriculture and remittances from the migrants, the young people that left the village and became migrant workers.

So China enters the World Trade Organization. It brought literally tens of thousands of new investors into China, factories sprung up, even more throughout the Pearl River Delta up near Shanghai in the Yangtze River Delta. It created countless new jobs for these young people from the countryside. And we saw China’s economy grow very rapidly and the living standards of its people go up dramatically as well.

WTO brings tremendous progress to China, undeniable improvement in living standards across the board. It brings infrastructure throughout the country—the expressways, high-speed rail was built throughout China, including in remote places. And this indeed did help local economies.

So we saw infrastructure built throughout the country and also of course propaganda reach deep into China.

China has set some centennial goals. Next year will be the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, which was founded in 1921. And for that celebration, China has announced that they will end absolute poverty. As some of you may have seen recently, they have basically achieved that. So they’ve met that goal. They also, as part of the centennial goals, announced that they would double GDP—and also double disposable per capita income—between the years of 2010 and 2020. And even with COVID-19, which slowed the economy, it looks like they’re going to achieve that goal as well.

So, very impressive. I’d like to highlight

quickly, however, another statistic, which says a lot about the challenges that still lie ahead for China. When I first visited in 2000 and wrote about this effort to narrow the wealth gap, a statistic that I always heard about from local officials was the fact that rural incomes on average were about one-third that of urban incomes. That proportion is still roughly the same. So despite all the years of effort and the real growth in incomes, there’s still this about 1:3 gap between those people from the countryside and those people from the cities. At the same time we’ve seen an explosion in wealth inequality in China.

Thomas Piketty, the noted inequality expert, has found that the wealth gap in China is roughly comparable to that in Russia, which might come as a surprise to some people; even more, it’s growing at about the same speed as it’s growing in Russia, which is also very, very fast.

I think that there’s a couple of legacy policies in China that explain why this gap still exists today. Actually more important than any other policy that still exists in China today that has a very negative influence on income growth in rural China is something called the household registration policy, or in Chinese the hukou. This is a policy that was set up during the Mao era to keep rural people working in communes and therefore having adequate cheap food for people in the cities that were supposed to carry out the industrialization of China.

This policy still exists today. It has changed in that it used to bar people from rural China from coming to the cities; obviously that has been completely tossed out. Now we have maybe 300 million migrant workers that have left the countryside and come to work in the cities. But what the household registration policy still does today is tie every person’s access to social welfare, access to health care and education, to the place where they were born, or actually more specifically where their parents were born. What that means in effect for China’s people today is that half the population—of migrants and their relatives in the countryside—are receiving much lower-quality health care.

They’re supposed to be getting it from rural China. And their children are receiving a far

inferior education as well. It also is the source of [what is] really a human rights tragedy in China today, which is what they refer to as the “left behind children” phenomenon.

That is the reality that up to 100 million young people, the children of migrant workers, typically do not travel to the cities and live with their parents where their parents work, but stay behind in the countryside because of that restriction on where they can get educated. Many of them today live in large impersonal boarding schools and are not receiving very good education there and also face some really sad both physical and psychological issues related to growing up in these boarding schools. Typically they see their parents once a year, quickly.

The last policy that I talk about in my book, which I think is also key to explaining the continuing existence of this inequality, is the dual land system. It is again a policy that originated many years ago under Mao. What it does in effect is ensure that while people in the cities are able to buy and sell their apartments, and they’ve done it with great gusto and become very wealthy in many cases, most rural people—and that includes the migrant workers—are unable to actually buy and sell their property at market rates.

Many migrants now are returning to their villages to try to reinvent themselves, now that China’s factories are automating and also some manufacturing is moving overseas. So Mo Rubo and his wife—who is the same person who was his girlfriend earlier—they’re married, they run a small business sourcing athletic apparel, and they have their own small brand, which none of us would have ever heard of and not even

most people in Beijing and Shanghai would know about.

[It is] not very easy, struggling to get by there. They have their office in their small apartment, which they rent; they can’t afford to buy. During that visit, the big issue they were struggling with was what to do about their daughter, who was turning six—what to do about her education. And Mo was adamant that [his daughter] would not go back and become a left behind child in the villages or in the townships near where he had grown up, but instead would go to school and live with them there in the city.

That is very, very difficult, because he already knew she wouldn’t be able to go to the public schools and that the alternative then was a small private school, of which there are many that have been created to cater to the migrant workers’ kids. Not only do they typically have far poorer quality than the urban public schools, but they are also often very expensive.

MEI FONG: Just very quickly before we jump into the discussion, we had an interesting question from the audience that was asking if you spoke Mandarin and whether you had any issues with the language barrier. You’ve been in China for 20-plus years and you probably speak Mandarin way better now, but I was going to say part of venturing outside of Beijing and Shanghai, the big cities, is that it’s actually a different kind of Chinese spoken out there, right?

There’s all the different dialects and things; it’s actually a quite a difficult process.

ROBERTS: The village that I spent so much time in and that I write about in my book, Binghuacun, the people there are actually

not the majority Han Chinese. They’re an ethnic minority group, a very small one called Buyi, which many people have not heard of, and they have their own language.

But most of them do speak Mandarin. And there were several people, typically migrant workers who had spent years outside the village, that actually spoke quite standard Mandarin Chinese. So the fact that they had left as young people, had all that time in the factories, earned a little bit of money, but they’d actually also learned to speak Mandarin quite clearly. So that was not a challenge in that particular village.

[With] some of the elderly people, I would actually need someone to serve as my translator, because they would speak a very, very thick version of Mandarin Chinese and be more comfortable in their own language.

FONG: What I really found so fascinating about your book was the central tenet of [how] we were very used to—outside of China—seeing China as this great economic miracle, you know, the rising tides of 300-, 400-million people lifted out of poverty.

Your book sort of pulls back the curtain a little bit and shows that’s really quite not the case, because of these two fundamental, huge iron bands that sort of keep migrant folks tethered to the land that they might have left 30 years ago and probably don’t even know how to farm, but they can’t sell it. At the same time, they can’t fully assimilate into any of the bigger cities, because they can’t get any of the benefits that accrue as a city resident.

They can’t send their kids to school, they can’t into get the medical system. The message has been “Come here, work, power the economic engine, and then go back home.”

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But this situation as you describe it is to some extent changing. And that’s partly because the great economic engine that China has been powered on for a long time—which is cheap labor—is no longer the case. Automation is happening. So isn’t there some sort of a huge push to change the way things are, or is there some tension because of [a desire] to keep things the way they are?

ROBERTS: That’s a very good question. I think there is [a push to change]. Training is undergoing an economic shift that I would argue is probably as big as—you have to go back to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening to find such a big shift. That’s really this move from the factory-to-the-world model, based on low-cost labor producing goods mainly for export to the world, and now to a much more domestic market driven economy, and an economy driven by the service industries rather than manufacturing and investment.

This is happening very quickly in China.

I would say that the two-year trade war with the U.S. plus COVID-19 has really brought home to the Chinese officials that this transition needs to happen much more quickly than before. And they’ve been talking for probably at least a decade that they must undergo this transition.

They’ve seen wages go up; average manufacturing wages today in China are actually higher than in Mexico or Malaysia.

So on the one hand, they’ve tried to automate their factories, and they’ve been quite successful. On the other hand, they really are trying to push this much more domestic market driven economy. They face this until-today seemingly insurmountable obstacle, which is the fact that they have these policies in place that ensure that about one half of the population aren’t on a path to become middle-class consumers.

You have a situation that economists call precautionary savings, which is a big problem in China. Migrant workers in particular feel that their futures—and they’re right, I think—are precarious. They have to pay for their children to go to private schools that are expensive in the cities or [send] their children back to the countryside.

On the health-care side, they live in fear of having a medical emergency that they won’t necessarily get covered because they need to be back in their villages, where they probably couldn’t get good care, in order to get proper coverage. So what you see is a very high savings rate across China, and therefore the flip side of low domestic consumption.

China’s been struggling to lift domestic consumption as a proportion of its overall economy. For years now, it’s stuck just below

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“The myth is that the well-educated urban middle class is going to become a source of social change. There has been no evidence of that happening at all.”

40 percent. That’s far lower than the global average, so they know that they need to change that. Then you get to the issue of why aren’t they reforming these policies.

And there’s a bunch of different reasons.

FONG: I had an interesting question from [the audience] pertaining to the Mo family.

They had to send the little girl to a private school because she doesn’t have the residency papers to get into the local schools and that’s way more expensive. What would this cost be relative to income?

ROBERTS: Their income is very variable, because they have this small business and they have good months and they have bad months. I would have to say it’s been tough for them to ensure that they pay their rent, which is quite a modest apartment, which is where they have their office as well. But it’s expensive in [the city], far more expensive than when he went there as a young factory worker. So they have the rent, it’s variable depending on what sort of business they’ve done that particular month, but, the tuition could be a multiple of monthly rents.

FONG: It’s been a couple of years since I was in China reporting, but part of the problem isn’t so much the cost, but then you’re kind

of going into the under-the-table, not fully state-sanctioned school system. The problem that comes later on is they don’t have the right kind of school certification to progress at the higher levels and maybe even get into college, relative to if they were going to a state-sanctioned public school in the right areas. So that’s a problem; you’re paying through the nose for inferior education.

ROBERTS: The way the system works in China, those children that do stay with their parents in the cities pretty much have to go back to the countryside when they’re getting ready for a high school. That’s the requirement. that they take those tests.

China’s a very test-based system, as you know, and in order to get into a high school and then to get into a good college, you have to take the test where you’re officially registered.

So those children often right before high school will go back and try to get into a real rural high school. And interestingly, in some cases, they find that they’re actually not as well prepared as the children that have stayed behind, because they were in these private schools that aren’t very good. What it means in effect is there’s an extremely high dropout rate, much higher than the Chinese

government likes to admit.

FONG: For a long time, many people [believed] that once China opened up economically, China would become like the West; they would demand democratic reforms. They would want more freedoms.

Now we’re clearly seeing that that isn’t the case. China is going to be whatever China is going to be.

[These chronic problems we’re discussing] could result in social uprisings, but do you think that’s also a myth?

ROBERTS: I think the myth is that the well-educated urban middle-class is going to become a source of social change. This sort of the NIMBY idea—not in my backyard— that you do well; if you get educated, you buy an apartment and a factory goes up across the way. And you [respond], “There was no public consultation before this factory was built.

We need a real political system that doesn’t surprise us with things like that.” I think that is a myth. That was something that certainly in my earlier years in China seemed to be sort of a given, this idea that with economic growth, particularly urban China and welleducated China would become a source of political change. This is what we heard from U.S. politicians, Bill Clinton and others, when the decision was made to bring China into the World Trade Organization. This was quite explicit that with time, political change would follow economic change, and there has been no evidence of that happening at all.

I think one of the reasons we all got it wrong, and I put myself in that group as well, was that you miss this reality in China, defining a contract between the government and the party and the people has been not all of it said explicitly, but very important, which is “We, the party, will guarantee that your living standards will continue to rise and you, the people, will not demand real civil rights. You won’t demand a free press. And you will accept the fact that you have one party ruling all—the Chinese Communist Party.” That bargain has been very effective in buying off political aspirations or ideals of the better-off people in China.

That bargain was already frayed significantly for migrant workers and for rural people in China, for the reasons I just said. Migrant workers and rural people have done far more poorly than the rest of the population. I do think that there is a growing awareness that this is the case and that it’s happening because of a structural system, the hukou system and the land system. That’s something when I first started reporting, most rural people and migrants were unaware of, but I think today they are quite aware of it.

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MADAM SPEAKER DUFFY: Thank you so much for being with us, especially given all that is going on there in Washington and all that’s on your plate.

And welcome back to The Commonwealth Club, Madam Speaker.

PELOSI: Thank you very much, Madam President, Gloria Duffy. I’m honored to be at The Commonwealth Club, and it’s a perfect time in light of everything that is going on.

But I also want to congratulate them for having you as president. You mentioned that we’ve been friends for over 35 years.

I want everyone to know that we became friends on a trip to Central America that was sponsored by the Columbia Foundation’s Madeleine Haas Russell. Some of you may have known her.

She sponsored a California trip to Central America du r i n g t he C e nt r a l American wars, which I completely opposed.

But Gloria being the academic that she is, she went there a nd we watched her as she viewed things scientifically, academically. For example, if we visited an airfield, she would be writing down how

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ONE MONTH BEFORE THE U.S.

Capitol was sacked by rioters, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi returned to The Commonwealth Club for a virtual conversation about the election and priorities for 2021. From the December 9, 2020, online program “A Conversation with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”

NANCY PELOSI, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; Representative, California’s 12th District (D-San Francisco) In Conversation with Dr. GLORIA DUFFY, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club of California

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, wields the gavel. (Photo by Speaker Pelosi’s office.)

R FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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many Russian vehicles were there or Russian parts or this or that. She was [not doing] what we were doing, [which was] having an impression; but she was collecting data that would be very helpful in how we would go forward. So I’ve been in awe of her for decades, and I’m so proud that she’s at The Commonwealth Club.

Speaking of going back years, today, as many of you know, when we’re filming this—not maybe when you’re seeing it—is the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a date that would live in infamy, as president Roosevelt said following that.

It’s important to mention now, as the country came together and united to fight our foe and to win. In doing so, we lost about 291,000 [in combat]—that’s the number of record—Americans in World War II. Right now we’re over 280,000 people who have died of the coronavirus. Millions infected, but over 280,000 [dead], well on our way to surpass the number of Americans who died in World War II. It is absolutely essential that we come together in a united way to fight this virus, which has made such an assault on the lives and the livelihood of the American people.

And we must do it in the most sciencebased way. Science-based—not despising it as a hoax, or delay, denial, distortion or anything—but based on science. Right now in Congress, we’re working on legislation to take us into the next administration, which will be soon.

The whole dynamic of our debate has changed, because we have a new president who is interested in science, just scientific decisions and recommendations of “wear your masks,” socially distancing, testing, tracing, treatment, and the rest that have been ignored. Also we have a vaccine.

It’s pretty exciting. In a few days, the committee will . . . move forward the Pfizer vaccine, and in another week, the Moderna vaccine.

Before you know it, the governor has a plan on how we would receive what comes to California. But the vaccine is not an answer for everyone right now. We have to take science’s view on how we go forward.

Nancy Pelosi thanks members of the National Guard who were called in to protect the U.S. Capitol following the January 6, 2021, insurrection. (Photo by Speaker Pelosi’s office.)

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“We have a new president who does care about science; and we have a vaccine, which gives us hope.”

I’m so excited about the fact that whatever the party of a person, it’s about science. It’s about the future.

DUFFY: Thank you, Madam Speaker. And thank you for your kind words. I knew on that trip to Central America that you were headed for great things, and I could see the dedication, the grit, the intensity that you’ve brought to your job. So thank you for your service.

What do you think about American leadership? We’re a bit beaten down at the moment by this virus, and our political troubles and so on. What do you envision for American leadership, especially on the global scene?

PELOSI: Well, American leadership is absolutely essential in the world, because of who we are: this great country, an economic giant, of security, and the democracy, which is the strength of our country. The freedom of expression of ideas. [Former Secretary of State] George Shultz would say that in countries where you can have freedom of expression, you’ll have a better product than where it is suppressed.

Multilateralism has been central to our leadership in the world. Respect for NATO. Respect for all of the institutions that came forth at the end of World War II, but needing to be refreshed and reviewed to see how they meet the needs [of today].

Climate change is an issue that affects everything. It’s about our national security.

Our national security experts tell us we must address this issue if you’re going to be safe. Security-wise, you must address this issue if we’re going to [have] safe, clean air, clean water, protecting the planet physically. It’s about jobs, it’s about a green new technology—we must be preeminent in the world. So it’s clear in that issue where

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America has been so much in the lead in protecting the environment and now protecting the planet.

But it goes beyond that as well and to multilateralism being very important economically and [for] national security. So when we as congresspeople visit a country, we have a purpose. Our purpose is about our national security. It’s about economic security. And it’s about governance. It’s about being a good example to the world of governance, ending corruption, honoring democracy and the voice of all people.

So the values that we have in that respect are not by dictating to others how we think they should behave, but by the power of our example. We’ve been told over and over again—in the last year I’ve been to Normandy for the anniversary [of the D-Day invasion 75 years ago]; I’ve been to [commemorations of] the Battle of the Bulge, 75 years; I’ve been to [commemorations of] 75 years of the freeing of Auschwitz, to Israel to celebrate that; to Munich for the Munich Security Conference. In all of those places, those countries are saying America is essential to global security, to global peace.

DUFFY: It’s nice to have positive thoughts like that as we come out of this pandemic and this crisis.

We’re in an interim period right now with the election of [President-Elect Joe] Biden and [Vice President-Elect Kamala] Harris.

But with President Trump still in office, how do you feel about the state of the country right now in this interregnum?

PELOSI: Well, I’m counting the days until we have a new president. I’m disappointed that my colleagues in Congress have not had the patriotism to say the election is over. I think 27 of a couple hundred [Republican] members have said the election is over. But

anyway, putting that aside, one of the things we’re trying to do now is to keep government open. We’re in negotiation on an omnibus bill to do just that, as well as a COVID package to include in that, to take us into the future.

This COVID package is different, because we have a new president who does care about science, and we have a vaccine, which gives us hope. But in the meantime, we still have to take precautions. Again, part of what we want to do that is different from that is to return to [focusing on] better health care, lowering the cost of health care by lowering the cost of prescription drugs, honoring pre-existing condition benefits, etc. Bigger paychecks by building infrastructure; of American [leadership in environmental policy] to take us into the future; and cleaner government.

The public [should] have confidence that their voice is as important as anyone else’s, [so we are focusing on] reducing the role of big, dark money in politics.

So that’s the path that we’re on going into the next election. I’d really rather not spend too much time on the current, soon-to-be-ex, president of the United States. Upward and onward, let’s go into the future.

But right now, one of the fights that we have that is very important and relevant to this discussion is in our Appropriations Bill; we’re trying to stop the president from ending the civil service and firing the people who are not political appointees, just people who were at these agencies that he just doesn’t want to have there, replace them so that Biden’s opportunities are tied down. As I said, these are not political appointees. These are civil servants who are public servants, who’ve dedicated their lives to civic responsibility.

But he wants to end that, just another example of the disrespect.

“This is very undermining of our democracy and of our civil service; no president should go to that place.”

DUFFY: So what are the remedies to protect the civil service?

PELOSI: There are a certain number of employees that our new president hires.

But the scientists, for example, at the FDA, they’re not making political decisions.

They’re not hastening a process because the president wants a vaccine sooner, [before] it has gone through the clinical trials and passes all the tests that it’s safe and that people have confidence in it or they won’t take it. Just to use that as an example, and that’s one of the places that he wants to do this.

So the morale in the government—of people who are there, one administration to the next—again, scientists and the rest know that their jobs are protected as they are doing the right thing and not catering to one party or the other. We are trying to put in the Bill of Appropriations [something to prevent] the president [firing those civil servants].

Say you worked at one of these places and you’ve been a scientist there a long time or an economist at the Office of Management and Budget, or just name any place. You’re being told you’re going to be fired because we don’t like the decision of your department.

Well, you can lose your benefits. You can lose everything. You don’t want to quit your job, but you have a family to provide for. So this is very undermining of our democracy and of our civil service; no president should go to that place. But we’re trying to stop it in our Appropriations Bill really soon.

DUFFY: Terrific. I’ve had that experience myself coming in as a presidential appointee in the Clinton administration and into the Pentagon, where there was an attorney, there was a budget expert, there was a Navy commander. There were policy experts, all of whom were in place in the civil service for me to come in and work with them on

dismantling weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union.

And they did the bulk of the work. They had the history and they knew how to make the budget work and the Pentagon and so on. So these civil service employees are absolutely essential to the functioning of our government for big, bold projects too, where a new administration needs to come in, hit the ground running and try to get important things done. Just building on that, what are your legislative priorities in general between now and the inauguration?

PELOSI: I named some. Because our agenda, when we won the House in 2018 continues to be our agenda. For the people: lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks, building the infrastructure, cleaner government. In addition to that, though, and I’m not saying this is between now and the inauguration, but in the course of that time, we had passed all these bills in the House. Now they’re sitting on [then-Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell’s desk. Mostly all of them had bipartisan support.

And for the people: cleaner government, [the] Moving Forward Act, which is building the infrastructure in a green way. Lower drug costs, that’s H.R. 3. H.R. 4, Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act, why would they not pass the Voting Rights Act? The Equality Act. The Equality Act removes discrimination in everything in our lives for the LGBTQ community. It has bipartisan support.

Or the Dream and Promise Act to save our Dreamers, but also to go beyond that for a fair immigration policy, where everyone can reach his or her fulfillment.

Remembering that our immigrants are the constant reinvigoration of America. It’s who we are as a nation, a nation of immigrants.

Let’s appreciate that rather than denigrate it. Then the Paycheck Fairness Act, Women in the Workplace, all those things. The Violence Against Women Act. And then— very important to us—H.R. 1, which is the background check legislation we introduced on the eight-year anniversary of Gabby Giffords being shot in her district and people dying from that. Eighty-something percent of the American people support background checks, common sense background checks, including hunters and NRA members and the rest. It’s just some people in D.C. who were the handmaidens of the gun lobby that won’t let that go forward.

And then Climate Action Now. The Climate Action Now legislation we passed, and we have proposals to implement that.

So that was sort of an array. But really, all of it is about jobs. It’s about ending inequality in our country. It’s about good paying jobs, access to health care, ending disparities. And our overarching theme for all of us will be how do we make our system—our capitalist system, our free-market system—work for many more people in our country? Fairness in our economy in terms of opportunity and respect for the value of work.

DUFFY: So in the shorter term, as you know now with everything closing down again, at least out here in California, there’s a lot of suffering going on. Small businesses, employees, people laid off, etc. How are things looking for a package of assistance?

Is it likely? If so, when?

PELOSI: Well, we have to have something.

As I said, we’re viewing this in a different light now. We know that we’ll have to have a bigger bill in a matter of a month. So right now we can settle for a smaller package as we go forward that has recognition that on December 26, unemployment benefits will FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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“Address the virus and put money in the pockets of the American people. . . . Let’s move faster to get this done.”

stop. That can’t happen. We protect the American people from that.

The issues that relate to state and local government [include] . . . the providers of our existence, whether it’s health-care providers and public health facilities or police and fire, our first responders, who are some of the first on the scene for some with COVID. Teachers, transportation, sanitation, health, again, health and food workers who make our existence possible. We have to have those resources in the bill. So it’s honor our heroes.

They are our heroes.

Address the virus and put money in the pockets of the American people. We still have some opposition, because there are at least 25 senators of the 50 Republicans who do not want to spend one more penny on the COVID virus. So that’s a problem. But we’re trying to work it through and to do so in a way, again, that recognizes more help is on the way.

We need to have the money there to purchase the vaccine and to take it from the lab to [deployment], from vaccine to vaccination and the states getting what they need to facilitate that. Well, I just got off [a call] with Senator [Richard] Shelby, who’s the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee in the Senate and Nita Lowey is the Democratic chair in the House. [Lowey did not run for reelection in November 2020— Ed.] And basically we just said, let’s move faster to get this done and put some of our differences aside for another day.

DUFFY: That sounds wonderful. What about gridlock in general though? As we move forward, do you think we’ll continue in this situation of gridlock? Do you think that there are realistic ways to break it and nurture this idea, “Let’s work together for the common good”?

PELOSI: Well, let me just say—and this

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will sound the way it will sound—it isn’t about gridlock. It’s about obstruction. It has been about obstruction of whatever.

When President Obama was in office, the Republicans were going to obstruct whatever he did. When we were in power, we passed the Affordable Care Act. We did so many things. ARRA, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. We did so many things.

But they won the majority. They were anti-science, anti governance, because they don’t really believe in governance that much.

And [they were] anti-Barack Obama. So they had a trifecta going to make sure that there would be no scientific reason for them to act as a government, because they don’t believe in science and they don’t believe in governance. If Obama suggested, and he was very non-partisan, [the Republicans opposed it]. Why go to Washington to block what might be possible?

People say it’s gridlock. It’s gridlock because of obstruction. And you have to come respecting the institution that you serve in. That you’re there to make compromises, to be transparent and bipartisan, to have confidence in your ideas, but humble enough to listen to other people. I think Joe Biden is the perfect messenger for all of this.

He believes in reaching across the aisle.

He knows that if you’re going to have a longterm, sustainable solution, you should try to have as much support for it as possible. So he is our messenger of hope, of trust—the currency of the realm. And his authenticity, his connection to the American people, especially America’s working families, is such that I think that the antidote to gridlock is public involvement.

President Abraham Lincoln [said], “Public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish almost anything.

Without it, practically nothing.” I keep

saying this over and over. In order for public sentiment to weigh in, people have to know. And I hope that President Biden and Vice—are we excited about Kamala Harris?

I certainly will have the opportunity to share with the American people in a respectful way how we all need to work together for the people.

DUFFY: Let’s turn for a moment to racial justice. You talked about public support and so on. There’s a lot of pain and a lot of anger in the country about racial injustice.

What is on your agenda and the agenda of the Democratic Party to ameliorate racial injustice?

PELOSI: For the People Agenda and a cleaner government, that H.R. 1, part of that agenda is our George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, which captures some of what needs to be done. We believe that we have witnessed a lynching right before our very eyes in our country. We respect our men and women in blue who risk their lives to protect us, whether it’s police and fire, whatever. But we do know that there are some improvements that need to be made.

This legislation goes to that place. Karen Bass, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, honchoed this. We thought it was reasonable and would be accepted by the Senate. But the Republicans there just said, “We like the language, but we don’t like the execution.” So we couldn’t come to terms.

But hopefully we’ll be able to do that now with the idea that we would have a presidential signature. Because the issue of racial and criminal justice permeates our society. We have to address it. I’m just using one example that addresses the Justice and Policing Act. But this is an issue of the highest priority in our caucus.

And let me just say about [the Democratic] caucus: Our caucus is over 60 percent

“As we provide solutions, they have to start right at the kitchen table of America’s working families to address their needs.” women, people of color, LGBTQ. So when you look at our Congress and you look on one side, you see the beautiful diversity of America, and the other side, not quite so. But in our side, you have the intellectual resources of people who have worked these issues over the years. Again, issues of racial and criminal justice are very much on the forefront of their knowledge, their experience, and their suggestions on how to get the job done.

DUFFY: President Biden has made his bywords “Build Back Better.” What do you think that means? And what will America look like a year from now once the vaccine is widely distributed? How much different will it be and how can we Build Back Better?

PELOSI: Well, I love Build Back Better.

Our name for our bill, which is similar to his initiative, was called Moving America Forward. But in order to move America forward, you do have to build back better.

The essence of that is that as we build, we’re not replacing what was there. We’re taking it further down the road. It’s a perfect slogan.

The issue of rebuilding America in terms of our infrastructure has not been partisan.

That’s why when we did our three initiatives—lower health-care costs, bigger paychecks, building infrastructure—we thought we were going into nonpartisan issues. It didn’t work then, but now it should.

Because the American people in all of the country, they know that we need to build back better.

They need to know that we need not only roads and bridges, which have been the traditional infrastructure, we need mass transit. We need high-speed rail. We need infrastructure for communication. We need the water systems to be replaced. Some of them are a hundred years old, made of brick and wood. Would you like to have a drink of water from that? In order for us to have the

infrastructure that enables us to have remote learning, to have telemedicine, to have commercial transactions, to visit with family and friends, we need the infrastructure for broadband and the grid and the rest that goes with that.

So this is to take us into the future and to be benefiting from all that we had learned in technology and the rest on how to go forward. It’s a pretty exciting prospect. It shouldn’t be in any way partisan. They may not like the green aspect of it, but there are certainly plenty of other aspects of it that they know. In other words, we’re talking about driverless cars, things like that. And we have to engineer the roads in that way.

I want to just make this point about that.

When we do this, it is essential that we invest in our people to have the workforce development necessary. That has to be women, people of color, Native Americans, veterans, rural Americans, everybody pitching in so that they not only have better paying jobs, that they have equity.

So it’s a private sector initiative and a public-private cooperation as we go forward.

It’s pretty exciting. It’s all overdue. We tried to do it under President Obama, but we were restricted by a certain whatever on the other side. Now hopefully the American people, when they know how they can be benefited, will support that.

And again, it has to be paid for. We’re fiscally sound. How do we go forward in a way that does not further in-debt our children? But recognizing the most important investment we can make is education, early childhood, K-12, higher ed, post-grad, lifetime learning for our workers.

Nothing brings more to the Treasury than education. Nothing brings more to our economy than the fullest participation of everyone to his and her best advantage.

DUFFY: We’re so lucky to have some of your time on such a busy day. I just want to ask you one more question very briefly. We’re going into the holiday season, such a tough time for the American people. What words of hope or counsel do you have for the American public at this time?

PELOSI: It is a sad time. I mean, I miss hugging my grandchildren and I miss going to church. They’re my two main misses. So I know how sad it is for so many families across the country. But I want them to be hopeful, to know their power, to protect the power, to protect themselves. And again, to know that help is on the way. That’s for sure. I had always hoped that that would be the case.

Now I’m sure that it is.

You can’t possibly understand what goes on in a family’s home, but we have some appreciation of what the needs are. And again, as we go into that period of time, over 280,000 Americans have lost their lives, many unnecessarily to this virus. Our thoughts and prayers are with those families.

Millions of families affected by infection and hopefully not in the long haul of it all.

I want those families to know that if they’ve lost their loved ones, we’ve carried them in our hearts and our prayers. It’s about lives, livelihood and the life of our democracy. That is what this assault has been on. And as we provide solutions, they have to start right at the kitchen table of America’s working families to address their needs and their concerns.

That is the first and was first and foremost on our agenda as we have these debates.

That’s why sometimes it’s harder to reach conclusions if we’re not all sharing that perspective. But know your power to protect yourself. Know your power to make a difference in public policy so that this never happens again.

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THE ECONOMY IN Is it time to head to Wall Street or break the piggy bank? Our experts look at what to expect as a new administration in Washington tries to bring the country out of the pandemic crisis.

EVELYN DILSAVER: Every president assumes office with a crisis in hand, but nobody’s ever assumed it with maybe four or five crises at the same time, with COVID, the vaccine distribution, our economic devastation, especially with the small businesses, 10 million fewer Americans employed than before COVID, and two-thirds of our children cannot attend school in person. I would love to hear your perspective on a president coming in to that kind of a setting. And one other caveat: Most presidents only have 100 days to get something done before they run into the buzz saw, so if you were to give him advice today, what advice would you give him to try to accomplish in those first 100 days?

MICHAEL BOSKIN: Let me just start by saying that generally when there’s a party change, [the party that gets elected has] been running against a previous president and what he, or maybe eventually she, has done, they focus on what are perceived to be the weaknesses at targeting the voters they think they can get, and then they have many pronouncements of things they’re going to do, generally hyperbolic, to some extent. In this case, of course, Joe Biden, who was a moderate—a center-left candidate in the Democratic field—fended off the so-called progressives. I’m not sure I would [say] what they want to accomplish I would call progress, but in any event he fended them off, but he made a variety of accommodations with them. Most of his policies move—to oversimplify—halfway to some of their more extreme policies.

He did that and retained some strong unity, in addition to some voters voting because they didn’t want another four years of Trump, even if they didn’t particularly care for the policies [Biden] was proposing. He has to deal with that. He has to deal with a closely divided Congress and evenly split Senate, although Kamala Harris will be able to cast a tie-breaking vote in 50/50 votes. He will be able to get some things passed with 51 votes, the budget reconciliation [process], if he chooses to go that route, but there are a variety of ways he could work with Republicans on a

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N 2021

A LOOK AT WHERE THE U.S. AND

global economies are headed and what should be done to keep them on track. From the January 22, 2021, online program “Michael Boskin and Laura Tyson: Bank of America Annual Economic Forecast.” This program was underwritten by Bank of America.

Dr. MICHAEL BOSKIN, Ph.D., Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Chair, President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors Dr. LAURA TYSON, Ph. D., Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; Chair, President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors EVELYN DILSAVER, Chair, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Former Executive Vice President, Charles Schwab; Former President & CEO, Charles Schwab Investment Management— Moderator

Piggy bank photos by QuinceCreative

variety of things. That might have him settle for partial victories, but victories rather than having things blocked and debated for a long time and never passed.

Laura served with President Clinton, who did an admirable job of that in ’95, ’96, ’97, working with Republicans in the Congress to reform welfare and to balance the budget. That would be my advice to him. I don’t know if he’ll take it. He has this delicate political act to deal with with the left side of his party, but I think it’s also important to understand where we are, how we got here and what to do about it. We have an unprecedented economic situation brought on by a once-in-a-century [pandemic], hopefully it will be another century before anything like this again. We had a very, very sharp downturn.

The downturn was brief, but extremely sharp. There was a partial, rapid rebound that slowed late in the third quarter through the fourth quarter of this year, but still was fairly substantial. We have difficulties in figuring that out. For example, the New York Fed believes the fourth quarter, with the data we have ending in December, grew at 2.5 percent; the Atlanta Fed thinks it was 7 percent. There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what has happened. There’s optimism about the future. I think as a base case, it’s fairly well taken, but that doesn’t mean something else bad couldn’t happen that disrupts things independent of the evolution of the virus and the response to it.

But the economy is intimately intertwined with the evolution of the virus and the economic policy and public health response.

We’ve had a massive stimulus, both from a monetary and fiscal side. We’ll probably get an additional stimulus, probably less than President Biden would like and hopefully more carefully

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targeted to those really in need. But the hit was very uneven and the recovery has been very uneven, hitting particularly low-wage workers and service industries and retail and travel and leisure and hospitality and things of that sort—people who finally late in the last expansion actually saw their wages grow more rapidly than the general population and things pick up for them with very low unemployment.

There’s optimism warranted for the second half of this year and perhaps late in the spring if the virus vaccinations go according to plan. We have problems in the rest of the world, which is lagging behind us. They’ve had a larger hit to their GDPs. Most of the developing world and Europe, for example.

China has recovered a bit, growing very slowly, if you believe the data. Taiwan and South Korea weren’t hit nearly as hard and are

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recovering. But in general, the Europeans are lagging behind us in the virus vaccine rollout because they wanted to rely on European vaccines from AstraZeneca and Sanofi, so their ability to vaccinate the bulk of high-risk groups and the bulk of the general population is lagging a quarter or two behind ours. That’s late in the year rather than in mid-year.

That’s going to be a problem in the rest of the world, and the pressures that creates in a variety of ways. Then we have a variety of structural issues in the economy, some of which were revealed and heightened by the COVID crisis. For example, we revealed that more families than I think most people realize were living quite hand-to-mouth and had very few reserves even to be able to weather three months of disruption. The capacity of government, but especially state and local governments and sadly, perhaps

“We’ll have to deal with policy exits by the Fed and the federal government at some point to get back to some normalcy. I don’t think that’s in the cards in the short run, but in a year or so people are going to have to turn their attention to sensible policies to do that.”

—MICHAEL BOSKIN almost worst, California to actually do and exercise its most core responsibilities—we have a misnamed Employment Development Department [EDD] that still has 800,000 backlogged initial claims for unemployment insurance, which is 10 months after COVID. Obviously it takes some time to gear up, but it’s just remarkable.

There are many other examples, including our poor [vaccine] roll out. There’ll be a lot of issues that will have to be dealt with. An education deficit from kids who’ve been out of school, whether they can catch up, whether they would naturally or whether we can help them catch up. Fiscal deficits, which were already a big problem prior to COVID. President Obama ran the largest full-employment budget deficits of any administration since World War II until President Trump, who managed to top that in an even stronger economy. We’ve added a lot of debt now, and I think much of it was well-designed on a humanitarian and to some extent economic basis to try to weather this crisis and bridge to the other side.

We’ll have the future of work to deal with.

We’ll have to especially deal with policy exits by the Fed and the federal government at some point to get back to some normalcy. I don’t think that’s in the cards in the short run, but in a year or so people are going to have to turn their attention to sensible policies to do that, and the timing and the pace and the nature of that will really be a very large part of how the economy does in 2022 and [2023].

But for right now, I’m cautiously optimistic about later this year.

LAURA TYSON: I’ll start with a general statement that there’s much that Michael has said that I completely agree with. We had a strong U.S. economy going into the COVID recession. We had remarkable, unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, which helped us have a partial recovery into the fall of 2020. Then we saw that the recovery started to falter, and that led to the second stimulus, the $900 billion that

has been passed, and to now a proposal of an additional almost $2 trillion of emergency rescue. I wanted to emphasize the importance of those policies and emphasize the emergency rescue nature of this, because this was a very uneven recession—nothing like it in the past. This was not a recession that started in manufacturing. This started in services. Then you look within services, you see a tremendous number of low-wage workers in the service industries that were hit.

Related to services, you see the restaurants [and] all those small businesses that were actually involved in producing products and services for much of the workforce that was going into the urban centers to those office buildings. All that is gone. One of the questions is going to be, Does it come back? Anyway, there’s a very uneven nature.

[Governor Gavin Newsom’s former chief economic advisor] Lenny Mendonca and I called it a dual recession. Some people call it K-shaped recession. The bottom fell, the top didn’t fall. It actually stayed level and went up. I want to say, again, think about the emergency nature when you think about, “Well, what do we need to spend money on?

What do we need to continue government spending on?” Unemployment insurance, small business lending, PPP. We need to help state a nd loc a l governments, and this is actually where the Congress starts to divide. How can you have a national coordinated distribution plan for the vaccine without support for state and local governments? You can’t; they can’t do it. They don’t have the capacity to do it. I really want to emphasize a very important part of what the Biden administration is doing right as a beginning is to say we have this massive plan to distribute the vaccine; to make sure we don’t have any production shortfall, we will rely upon the possibility of using the Defense Production Act if we have to. We’ve got to deal with production; but distribution—that takes resources, that takes help to state and local governments. That’s been controversial.

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You said what would I think the Biden administration should do? I look at the stimulus package. I agree with Michael that maybe a little bit better targeting of some of this could be helpful, but the bulk of the money is related to this dual recession and to the emergency of getting COVID under control. The outlook for the second half of 2021 depends completely on getting the distribution of the vaccine right. Otherwise, it won’t happen. That wonderful recovery, which is sitting there waiting to happen if you can unleash the economy from the lockdowns, won’t happen.

Let me say a couple other things about where I disagree with Michael. I think he’s very unfair to the state of California. Yes, the state of California has had a significant problem and it recognizes it, with this Employment Development Division. It recognizes it. It is doing whatever it can to [deal with it]. But think about this: California went into the recession with a very significant reserve, a very healthy fiscal situation. I’ve been part of a massive set of grants and small business loan facilities. We are successfully rolling out to much of the small business community access to capital, which is essential for them to survive. I can talk about other things. . . . I could talk about the fact that in California we are running the biggest Medicaid establishment in the country, and we are doing it efficiently. Covered California is working for millions of Californians. I just feel it’s unfair to hit the state hard.

I’ll talk a little bit about the future, because this is an area where Michael and I could possibly disagree. I was struck by some recent numbers I saw. Public opinion polls—this was one that was done for a presentation, I think, at a JPMorgan event. There’s been a significant increase among Americans in their expectations of the role of government.

If you look at the situation in 2010, in the middle of the global recession, and you look now, good heavens, almost half of Americans think that government should be doing more to solve problems. Almost half of young Americans think that capitalism is a problem and socialism isn’t a problem. Almost half think that business should be more regulated, not less regulated.

I just want to say that when we’re thinking about policy, let’s think about the fact that people want [and] expect more from their government. They expect more from the public health delivery system, they expect more from the infrastructure, an area that probably Michael and I agree upon.

Democrats and Republicans have always disagreed on the size of government. I just

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want to say that these polls are suggesting that most Americans think, “We want highquality government. We want government that [successfully delivers] services. We are not so fixated anymore on just keeping government [small]. Small government is not the problem.”

I’ll say one other thing related to this, because again, both Michael and I, macroeconomists at heart, there is a debate among economists about what economists are now calling fiscal space. How much space does the federal government have—because at the state level, [there are] balanced budget constraints, so we can’t talk about fiscal constraints. At the level of the federal government, many economists are saying we have a huge amount of fiscal space. We can run these larger deficits. We can run this larger debt, because the real interest rates are negative. It’s better to borrow now and pay back later. We should use that fiscal space both to invest in our future—that’s the infrastructure, education, health care argument—and in the short run to create enough fiscal stimulus to get us out of this recession and vaccinate so we can get out of it for good. We could debate the size of the fiscal space, but it’s interesting to me that Americans in general think right now more government is probably something desirable.

DILSAVER: I’d love to hear from you, Dr. Boskin about— BOSKIN: Laura stated her case well, as usual.

I view the fact that so many young people prefer socialism to capitalism a problem in our education system, which also is a state and local responsibility. That’s number one.

Number two, anybody who thinks California and its cities are well-run should have walked down the street in San Francisco or Los Angeles. We have lots of problems. The problems are immense. What we’ve done thus far to deal with many of them—homelessness, for example—hasn’t worked. Perhaps some of it has been counterproductive. I could go on and on. With respect to the EDD and other failures, this isn’t just something that’s at the current governor and legislature’s doorstep, it’s gone on for a long time. We’ve greatly under-invested— TYSON: We’ve under-invested.

BOSKIN: —in infrastructure of computer systems, for example, in technical capability.

TYSON: I agree.

BOSKIN: There’s just an immense set of those things. Also, while you might believe, as Laura believes, that . . . all these things have done fabulously well, they’re modest in size compared to the federal government intervention. On the fiscal space issue, I’ve

written extensively on this; this is not going to end well. Yeah, I totally agree that right now there is not a fiscal capacity problem in a short run, so I support borrowing to make sensible spending decisions now, but every dollar of that, that isn’t sensible, that doesn’t have much of an effect to improve the economy or to greatly cushion people who are in desperate need, whether that’s small business owners or workers who are unemployed or whatever it happens to be, is something that will have to be dealt with later.

Everyone’s saying, “Interest rates are really low. They’re going to stay low.” Well, to give you an example of how poorly economists and private markets forecast interest rates, in the last crisis, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to zero, they were expected to stay there for nine months. They stayed there for seven years. I just think a sensible risk management would say, “We need to be a little cautious about telling our politicians, ‘There’s a free lunch, spend away, borrow all you want, the Fed will buy all the bonds, and there’ll never be any reckoning.” Well, the Federal Reserve buying all the bonds is just a way of avoiding the government sending it straight to the banks, because [it] winds up in the excess reserves in the banks.

[I would rather] we start thinking about that sometime this year, how we come out of this a year or two later, than just pretend that it won’t happen and just hope in a run of luck that nothing ever happens and somebody else will have to pay for it on someone else’s watch.

The last thing I would say is many of the same economists that Laura has been referring to say that the capacity of the economy is very, very modest and that growth is going to be

low for a long time because of all sorts of reasons they give. That may or may not be right, only time will tell, but it also suggests that if the growth of the economy is going to be low, each generation is going to be only a little bit wealthier than the one that preceded it, and therefore, piling on debt to them in the future that they’re going to have to wind up repaying is going to be less and less equitable [for the next] generation. Just FYI. A word of caution about running wild on debt.

DILSAVER: Americans have saved $1.6 trillion in excess savings at least as of midDecember. What happens to our economy when they start to unleash that and spend it, from an inflation point of view, if anything?

BOSKIN: I think inflation and inflation expectations are somewhat subdued right now, . . . but the fact of matter is there’s a pentup demand for lots. People haven’t been able to spend on lots of things. You haven’t been able to go out to have a meal in a restaurant with your friends, for example, or go to a movie theater safely, or get on an airplane and travel to Europe, for example, without having to worry about all the problems there and then coming back and having to quarantine.

There’s a pent-up demand that for a little bit of time, in a couple of quarters, would probably be good for the economy, but we do have to pay attention. The one thing that could cause the Fed to change its mind fairly abruptly about raising interest rates sooner than people expect right now would be an unexpected increase in inflation and inflation expectations. I’m not predicting that, I don’t think it’s in the cards this year, but it is something that we should have to pay attention to and keep an eye on, is all

I’m saying. I’m sure [Federal Reserve Chair] Jay Powell will.

DILSAVER: Dr. Tyson?

TYSON: I know that the Federal Reserve Board will. I know that there’s a large amount of uncertainty about inflation, certainly in the medium term. I don’t think there’s much in the short term, in the next few years, the next couple of years. I think the same is true of interest rates. I do agree with Michael.

The economist profession did not predict the trend in interest rates, for least the last decade.

Basically we better keep that in mind, because the trend could change in an unpredictable way. I want to emphasize that.

I will go back to your question of savings.

I want to go back to the dual nature of what we have been living through, because those savings are building up in the top—say, 40 percent—of the income distribution, not in the bottom 60 percent. Essentially, if you look at things like what happened to the cash stimulus payments that have been made already, what happened to the unemployment compensation payments that were made—if you were in the bottom 20 percent or the bottom 40 percent, those were consumed, those were spent because you know what?

These are necessities. They’re not taking those trips to restaurants. They’re not taking those vacations. They’re not going to the stadium for a big sporting event. They’re necessities.

Now we could very well see that there’s going to be an unleashing of some of the savings on demand. I would look to patterns of demand. What sectors? Are these all going to be a lot of luxury goods? Are they going to be a lot of luxury trips? I actually am worried. Let’s go to transportation.

The airlines have had to really reduce their capacity dramatically. What happens if all of a sudden people feel okay about jumping back on planes? Boy, the capacity constraint shortterm, and maybe the pricing that results from that. I think we have got to look at who has the savings, what are they likely to consume?

And think again about the dual nature of [the pandemic recession].

The relief here in the short run—we’ve got to help state and local governments get the vaccine distribution done. We’ve got to worry about small businesses through the PPP. In California, we have these great grant and loan programs. We have to help people who can’t get a job with unemployment compensation.

The cash assistance checks, I think we have to think about the targeting of those.

But now let’s go to the next range of things.

There’s a Biden agenda here which is longerterm. That emergency relief is not really the Build Back Better. The Build Back Better is

infrastructure. The Build Back Better is a climate policy. It’s green infrastructure. It’s climate change and what we do about that.

And what can we do to enhance our training and skill development and education system?

Usually what the federal government [says is] they work with the states, they’re not running the programs themselves.

But we have learned more and more about skill development programs that do work.

President Biden is committed to providing more federal funding for that. Build Back Better in the future. But those things all cost money. They are investments, they are more spending. Then the question becomes, does the U.S. government have the fiscal space? I believe it does. But the issue of keeping that question in mind is very important.

I just want to point out, a very unlikely group of economists agreeing, and I know because I work with all of them. Bob Rubin, Peter Orszag and Joe Stiglitz, you can not think of a combination like that. They just did a really interesting­— BOSKIN: [Mostly on the left] of the spectrum, sure. On the right of the spectrum, they won’t agree with any of them.

TYSON: Well, Bob Rubin to Joe Stiglitz, I think a pretty broad [range]. Anyway, I would say they came up with some really interesting things to think about going forward in fiscal policy, which is we really need to do much better with automatic stabilizers. We link much more of our relief, when it’s rescue or emergency, to the state of the economy. You could even do that with infrastructure plans.

You could make them contingent in a way so they’re counter-cyclical as opposed to procyclical. I think we’ve got to think about how we’re going to make fiscal policy. I personally have always thought there might be a value to taking at least the infrastructure budget and making that a capital budget taken out of the operational budget of the government.

But we are going to have to worry about those kinds of things.

DILSAVER: Great. Let’s turn to global for a second.

BOSKIN: Quickly—a couple of things about that. The nation and California certainly have infrastructure needs. Some of those are appropriately governmental, many are better private. For example, we have a cell phone infrastructure that [could be handled] privately much more efficiently than the government would ever do it. Some of that is appropriately federal; some of it probably [should stay] local.

But we’ve seen a lot of infrastructure spending that’s very poorly targeted and does poorly. California launched an idiotic, ex-ante FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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“We have huge economic interests in getting trade with China right and trying to get it on a sounder path than it has been on under the Trump administration, but this will be a massive negotiating challenge.”

—LAURA TYSON idiotic, so-called high-speed rail program that wound up becoming unfundable at three or four times the cost originally projected, and perhaps even distorted to the voters who approved the bonds. And it’s now mixedspeed rail, because it’s using a lot of existing rail, if it ever gets funded. Mr. Biden wants a national network of those. There’s probably in the Northeast quarter maybe dense-enough traffic that makes sense.

We have to be careful about just calling something infrastructure without doing a real careful cost-benefit analysis. The highspeed rail project thus far has been a negative return, not even zero return.

DILSAVER: Can we turn global for a second? What do you think is the outlook for trade policy in the coming year and the residual impact of Trump’s previous trade policies?

TYSON: I would say that the evidence which was there before us—these trends will continue. Before COVID, we had a slowdown in global trade relative to global output, so that very heady period of trade growing two, three times as fast as global GDP, I don’t think so anymore. We’ve also seen a shift in the growth dynamics of trade to Asia; so much more South- or inter-Asia trade going on. We’ve seen more near-shoring going on.

A lot of firms have gotten concerned—and COVID underscored these concerns—they didn’t have resilient supply chains. They were too concentrated. They were relying on a few suppliers, very concentrated in a few areas.

They’ve decided they need to diversify that.

There’ll be different patterns of trade.

[Regarding] U.S. trade relations, I would say the following. The U.S. is very intent—I know this, the Biden administration has been very clear about this—they would very much like to have trade negotiations going on with I would think we would call likeminded market trading nations. That means primarily with Europe. I think there will be trade negotiations going on. I think that you heard President Biden already indicate that there are still significant bipartisan

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concerns about trade with China. My sense is the patterns that existed pre-COVID have not been fundamentally changed, they’ve been reinforced, and all of those things are reinforced.

The China dilemma for the United States is that many of our companies have significant investments in China and they sell significant amounts of what they produce in China. Those are major markets for China.

Much of what China exports to us comes from quasi-private firms, where if you look at the underlying structure, the underlying structure oftentimes has a foreign firm and a U.S. firm involved. We have huge economic interests in getting trade with China right and trying to get it on a sounder path than it has been on under the Trump administration, but this will be a massive negotiating challenge.

Finally, I’m going to end on a positive note here. To go back to climate, there’s a real possibility here [with the] U.S. rejoining [the Paris Agreement]. A lot of the discussions around climate have to do with trade and what should be the case for dealing with carbon-intensive products as they move across borders. This is an area—and also on research and development in carbon—where I actually think we could work a lot with China. If you go back to the history of the Paris Agreement, it was first an agreement between the U.S. and China on climate that led to the unleashing of that agreement. I’m optimistic that we can find a way back to a healthier relationship with China, both on trade and on climate.

BOSKIN: My view is largely congruent with Laura’s on the trends, many of which go back prior to Trump, although everybody focused on the Trump tariffs part. I think that one of the big mistakes that President Trump made policy-wise was to draw attention to China and to confront some of China’s abuses [on our own]; I think he should have worked with our European allies, for example. That was something that didn’t happen, unfortunately.

I do think it’s worthwhile pointing out that

the global economy has changed a lot and countries that were very poor a long time ago aren’t so poor now. China’s GDP has quadrupled since it joined the World Trade Organization [WTO]. If you go back to why NAFTA occurred, I was involved with that, we wanted to help the reformers unleash prosperity on our Southern border for many reasons, including some on the far Right were worried about more mass immigration; but just in general, we thought we’d have a healthier hemisphere with a more prosperous Mexico. I think the gains from trade were there, some people were hurt by it, etc.

There were changes made in the [NAFTA replacement] USMCA; you can argue. I think in general, they were not large changes.

Going back to China though, when they were brought into the World Trade Organization, the going-in thought by economists and policymakers was, “If we help them, they will gradually adhere to the WTO rules. It won’t happen overnight, and they won’t be transformed necessarily into a parliamentary democracy like Canada or a totally free-market economy, but it will accelerate that trend, and that will also have internal political benefits in China and geopolitical benefits.”

It turns out that worked for a little bit [when] Zhu Rongji was premier, for example.

Definitely it stalled when Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao came to power. President Xi basically has reversed that. I think that’s why we have so many different constituencies focused on different issues—from human rights to defense, to trade abuse, to many other issues—forming a constituency to get tough on China that has little to do with Trump, that some people like what he did, some people don’t, some of it worked, some of it didn’t, etc. The question is how to manage

that relationship, including on climate. In 2015, the Paris climate accords gave China a 15-year pass. Of course, there’s no guarantee in 2030 that they’ll show up and say, “Okay, now we’re going to abide by [the rules].”

They’re doing some things, but they’re still generating a lot of coal. They’ve become by far the largest emitter. It’s a complicated question, but we should stop thinking about these other countries in the way we did when [we had] the immense, broad-based, bipartisan consensus that America should lead the world on reducing the immense barriers to trade after World War II, that it will be good for everybody, including the U.S. Access to U.S. markets is more important to other countries than [our access] to them, but generally we all prosper together. The world has changed a lot since then. It’s changed a lot since China joined the WTO. The WTO has been proved to be a pretty creaky organization.

It’s unclear how we’re going to be able to have a better trade relationship with China in some of these key areas—intellectual property theft and some other things. They’ve pledged to buy some more U.S. agricultural products, and bought some of them, but just in general.

The last thing I would say, it’s important to understand that there’s a big misunderstanding about the U.S. trade deficit, which focuses on unfair practices in other countries. Actually it’s mostly due to the difference between our production and our consumption in the United States. It’s basically the saving investment imbalance macroeconomically, as it’s a mirror image, our current account deficit. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be dealing with these problems. It doesn’t mean we should try to deal with them in a quick way, but in a civil and constructive way to the extent we can. I just don’t think it’s going

to be easy to manage this relationship in a constructive way that will yield large results quickly.

I think that there may be some agreements made, but we’ll see if they actually pan out. I think it’s a very, very deep structural problem inside China, politically and economically, and not easy to change given the Communist Party’s desire to maintain a very strong control over the economy, and their very large control over many businesses, which may be listed on the Stock Exchange but still have a majority of state ownership.

DILSAVER: Sure.

TYSON: I just want to add a few additional remarks on this. Look, the Europeans just negotiated a foreign direct investment deal with China. China just had all of the Asian economies, including South Korea, including Japan, sign up to their RCEP, their regional trade agreement. There is room for the U.S. to negotiate with China, to liberalize some trade and liberalize some foreign direct investment.

We haven’t done it. We focused on the U.S. alone. We basically focused on that trade deficit, which as Michael said, was the wrong measure of the relationship anyway. We didn’t even use the WTO. We did not. When we wrote our own rules for getting China into the WTO, we had the right to do a lot of adjustment assistance for those communities and firms in the United States that were hit by the China import surge that occurred. We didn’t do anything. That was our decision.

Yes, I completely agree that Xi has taken China in a different direction; there’s more state control, not less.

By the way, I think we should all recognize it from China’s point of view. When did this start to happen? It started to happen when the Western capitalist systems caved in the Great Recession. We brought that on. They saw the vulnerabilities of the capitalist financial system play out to a multi-year recession.

And they were able to use their own stimulus policy, their own protection from those capital markets disruptions, to continue to grow.

DILSAVER: Brexit—now that they have an agreement, how does that affect us?

BOSKIN: Very modestly. There’ll be some great diversion. We may or may not end up negotiating a treaty with the Brits. But I do think that Brexit is part of a very larger global trend that relates to some of the things we’re seeing, which is a tremendous growth in two things. One, a growth in the tensions among different levels of government. We’re all citizens of a city, a state, a country, the world, obviously. In the Brexit case, between a sovereign nation and a supranational identity organization, EU, but then they add

Scottish devolution and attempt a vote on secession; there may be another one so they can join the EU. You have the Catalans; you have Venice and Veneto saying they might exit. We’ve had Calexit desires off and on in California for many years, intensified during the Trump presidency. We have a lot of those same tensions here among different levels of government.

We have different areas of different sates with different laws, because on the one hand, cities and states have declared themselves sanctuary states, don’t cooperate with ICE. Some of the towns in those states said, “We’re going to cooperate with the federal government, not the state law.” Same thing with these gun-banning laws and the Second Amendment free zones and other cities and states, and cities inside of those states saying, “We’re not going to go through with the state rules.” One of the things that would be really, really good for American democracy would be to get a better sense of clarity about responsibilities and resources and rights between our national government and our sub-national governments.

TYSON: I completely agree, and as you may or may not know, for many years during the Trump administration, I was working a lot on federalism and the notion of what states can do if they want to strengthen their social safety net or they want to strengthen their community college system or they want to strengthen their worker training system. By the way, not all of this is in a “progressive” state like California. If you take a state like Indiana, for example, a lot of really interesting training stuff has gone on at the level of the state, because people look to the state governments for a lot of economic development issues, and those are related to talent issues and to training issues.

The federalism of the United States is actually a tremendous strength of the U.S. system. The problem is when you [need a national plan]. I have thought about COVID from the beginning as the best analogy, as it’s a war with a virus. In a war setting, you actually need a national response. You actually need the Defense Production Act. You actually need FEMA. You actually need [vaccine] distribution. One of the things that President Biden is proposing now, and I can’t imagine why we haven’t said this before, we’re going to have to set up major vaccination centers. We are going to have to have some of them be mobile to get to places in states where there is no vaccination center.

There are certain times you have a national challenge, and the national challenge requires a national solution.

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DECODING THE C WITH THREE DECADES OF EXPERIENCE IN

Washington, John Brennan makes the case for the importance of the work done by the nation’s intelligence officials. From the December 3, 2020, online program “John Brennan: Inside the CIA and the Fight for Intelligence.” Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

JOHN BRENNAN, Former Director, CIA; Author, Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad In Conversation with ELLEN NAKASHIMA, National Security Reporter, The Washington Post

ELLEN NAKASHIMA: With a total of 29 years at the CIA and the White House, Mr. Brennan has spent the bulk of his career in public service. From an analyst on near Eastern and South Asian issues to serving as Director [of Central Intelligence] George Tenet’s chief of staff, to heading the National Counterterrorism Center, and ultimately to working directly with President Barack Obama as homeland security advisor and then his CIA director, John Brennan has rare breadth and depth of experience. His book, Undaunted, offers a rich, personal perspective on the world of intelligence and national security and on Washington’s chaotic political environment. So thank you, John, for joining us. Let’s start with your title, Undaunted. What’s the significance behind it? What prompted you to write the memoir you said you never intended to write?

JOHN BRENNAN: Undaunted was my memoir, my first and so far only book that I wrote. I decided to put down my experiences, my recollections about my 33-plus years in government, as a way to lift the shroud a bit off of the intelligence and national security environment, which is filled with mystique to a lot of people.

But also, and I think more important, [I wrote it] to encourage young Americans to seriously consider a career in public service, whether it be in the intelligence community or the diplomatic corps or law enforcement. This is a great, wonderful country of ours. I’d like to think that most Americans want to give back to this country and to do what they can to help ensure that we remain free and safe and prosperous and do what they can to protect their fellow citizens.

The title, Undaunted, it’s a combination of things. I reference in the memoir times when there were strong headwinds blowing toward me. That I tried to persevere. And I guess most recently over the last four years when I have been a bit outspoken, and despite the efforts of some to try to stifle my voice, I like to think I have remained undaunted.

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CIA

John Brennan. Photo by Pete Souza/The White House FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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But also during the course of my nation- his pursuit of personal political agendas, as al security career, there were setbacks and well as other personal agendas, whether it be challenges that I faced. But I really believe financial or otherwise, I just felt was a real strongly in the national security mission aberration and disgraceful, quite frankly. and the intelligence mission. Despite some So I felt this obligation to speak out, as I concerns I had about some of the things have. I’m not the only person to do that with that maybe the United States was involved a national security background. Jim Clapper, in over the course of its history, as well as Mike Hayden, some very respected former during my tenure, I remained undaunted in military officers as well—Admiral [William] terms of being committed and dedicated to McRaven and others. So I think it’s the abthose missions normality of what we are experiencing these NAKASHIMA: That spirit really does come days that have led me and other people to through in your book and in what you say. adopt this rather public profile of criticism.

But as you mentioned, you have been quite I’m not a partisan. It’s really ironic, too, outspoken, fairly untraditional for a for- because I think people now think that I’m mer senior intelligence community leader. this anti-Trumper and this Democratic foil, You have called the current administration or the foil for the Democratic Party, whata kakistocracy, meaning governed by the ever. When I was the director of CIA under least competent, which has caused a surge in President Obama, most of those in Congress online searches for that term, I guess. You’ve who were calling for my firing or resignation called Trump a disgraced demagogue who were on the Democratic side of the aisle. So belongs in the dustbin of hisas I think I referenced in the tory. memoir, I’m an equal opporDo you think, in a sense, “I’m not a partitunity offender. speaking out so strongly at san. Under PresI tend to speak my mind times might undermine the and speak as forthrightly as I perception of the intelligence ident Obama, can. Maybe I’m not as politcommunity as an apolitical, most of those in ically sensitive or attuned as above-the-fray institution? some people would like me BRENNAN: Well, I know Congress who to be. But if I irritate some that a lot of people have crit- were calling for because of my outspokenicized my outspokenness, beness, well, so be it. cause they believe that once my firing or resNAKASHIMA: President a CIA director, always a CIA attacks on the inignation were on Trump’s director. But I have been a telligence community have private citizen since January the Democratic among other things lowered 20 of 2017. And for many morale in the agencies. How side of the aisle. years, I worked hard to probig a job will President-elect tect the right of freedom of I’m an equal Biden and his new DNI speech of American citizens. [director of national intelSo maybe now I’m reaping opportunity ligence] Avril Haines—a the benefits of the investment offender.” former deputy of yours—if that I made in that. she is confirmed, how big a I don’t enjoy speaking out so public- job will they have in repairing the damage ly and stridently and critically as I have of done internally and the damage to the relaan incumbent in the Oval Office. I served tionship between the White House and the six presidents, three Democrats and three community?

Republicans. And while I didn’t agree with BRENNAN: I know that there is a deep all of their policies and had some vigorous disappointment inside of CIA that Donald disagreements with some of them about it, Trump has denigrated and disparaged the I respected and admired all of them. I felt professionals in the intelligence community, that they all were trying to do their level best as well as their work. And a greater disapto advance the interests of the United States pointment that he is not using the intelliand not their own. gence to keep America safe. That said, I have It’s different with Donald Trump. I sensed tremendous respect and admiration for CIA early on that he was going to not fulfill the officers who continue to do their job to the obligations and responsibilities of the office best of their ability, despite the challenges, of the presidency. His dishonesty, his de- despite the criticisms that they have faced ceit, his demagoguery, his lack of integrity, over the years.

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CIA has been a target of criticism from all quarters. So it’s not as though it’s that unusual. It’s unusual that a sitting president of the United States of America would do something like that. That’s what’s I think very dismaying, disappointing to so many. But I think morale among CIA officers remains strong, even in these difficult times, because they know the importance of their work.

They know what they do is critically important to our national security. I am concerned though that the morale of family members, the ones who have to support their loved ones who deploy overseas quickly, or spend long, long days and nights in the office, as well as young Americans who may have been interested in pursuing a career at CIA and because of the disparaging remarks of the commander in chief about intelligence they just said, “Well, why should I do that?

The work is not appreciated or recognized or [considered] useful.”

So I do believe that the Biden administration is going to send strong signals, both inside of the intelligence community and more broadly, that intelligence is critically important to this country’s national security, and the intelligence professionals deserve our praise, our admiration and our appreciation. So it’s going to be a new day for them.

NAKASHIMA: I want to ask you one more question before we move to audience questions. This is something you feel very passionately about, which is the need for diversity in the ranks of the intelligence community. You walked the halls of the CIA with your rainbow lanyard in support of the LGBTQ community. Why is that so important? Why is diversity so important in the intelligence world and what can the next administration do to improve on it?

BRENNAN: I can think of no other institutions or profession that really is so dependent on diversity in order to achieve mission success than is the CIA. The CIA is supposed to be this country’s eyes and ears around the globe, all of those countries, all of those cultures and societies and ethnicities and languages and religions. The more that we can tap into the melting pot that exists here in the United States that is derived from all of those locations and societies and places around the world, the better able we are to operate overseas.

At one point, I was pretty good in Arabic. If I would wander down, which I did, among the tribes in Southwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Yemen, as good

as my Arabic might be, I still didn’t look like Washington Post journalist Ellen Nakashima interviews former CIA Director a local. I still didn’t understand the culture John Brennan for The Commonwealth Club. the way I needed to. So again, I think from a business case, you can make an exceptionally strong case for CIA officers to be that diverse effort of building upon the very good work BRENNAN: The only person who has been reflection of the United States, as well as of that my predecessors did. I’m not taking nominated at this point is Avril Haines. And the world. But also it’s the right thing to do. credit for this. These are things that are done I can’t say enough good things about her And there are some personal experienc- over time. And just like democratization in intellect, about her commitment, her work es of my own that really motivated me to the Middle East, diversity and inclusion is ethic, all of it. Joe Biden is somebody who take this very seriously. There were times something that takes time and requires a sus- understands intelligence and respects it and growing up in New Jertained effort over time, espe- values it, depends on it. So I know that it’s sey when I didn’t speak out “Just like democcially from leadership. going to have a very, very important place in when I should have, when NAKASHIMA: And you ex- the Biden administration.

I heard negative, pejorative ratization in the pect President Biden’s team The challenges that they face are going to comments about others. I Middle East, to continue that effort? be many, as the Biden administration tries to was part of that group that BRENNAN: Yes. First of all, implement its policy vision across the world snickered, whatever. But also diversity and if you look at the composi- to ensure that they’re able to provide the polwhen I was in CIA, I saw of it, it is a reflection of icymakers—Tony Blinken as the secretary of inclusion is some- tion the real struggle and pain diversity. I know my former state, Jake Sullivan as the national security that some of my fellow CIA thing that takes deputy at CIA, Avril Haines, advisor—the insights, the analysis, the intelofficers were going through who has been nominated to ligence that they need in order to make wise when they were hiding their time and requires be the director of national in- decisions about how we’re going to reassert sexual orientation, because a sustained effort, telligence, she is a very, very the U.S. leadership role on the world stage. it would’ve spelled a disaster strong advocate of diversity The challenge in the intelligence comand basically an end to their . . . especially and inclusion, and others munity leadership is that there are so many career if they were exposed. from leadership.” with whom I have worked things that the United States is involved in So I just felt a personal as previously and who are part around the world, [from countering] terrorwell as an institutional obligation to ensure of the Biden team feel very strongly about ism, to proliferation, to big power relationthat people of all colors, religions, sexual it. So it’s not going to be lip service. They’re ships—they have to deal with all these things orientations, ethnic, linguistic, whatever going to walk the talk. I think you’re going simultaneously, and they have to allocate background, see the CIA as a place of rich to see some real positive movement on this resources so that they’re going to be able to opportunity, where everybody can advance front. give the appropriate attention to all of these based on merit, and that there’s going to be NAKASHIMA: In fact, one of the questions different areas. no inhibition or no obstacle to advancement we’re getting from the audience is, What do NAKASHIMA: Yes. But in reality, they can’t because of who somebody is. you think about President-elect Biden’s in- give exactly equal amounts to each relationI was very pleased that along with senior telligence team? And what’s one piece of ad- ship or threat at the same time. You’ve menleaders of the CIA, we made it a really serious vice you’d give them for the journey ahead? tioned great power competition. There’s also FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021

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climate change and the continuing pandemic. How do you rack and stack these threats and the foreign policy challenges that President-elect Biden is inheriting, and specifically, how different will his approach be, do you think, from President Trump, versus China, beyond China and Russia?

BRENNAN: At the beginning of each new administration, they go through a process called the national intelligence priorities framework, which is to rack and stack all of the priorities from a policy perspective so that the intelligence community can use that framework [to] allocate their resources, their capabilities, accordingly. So I do think that the Biden administration is going to go through that.

Joe Biden and I worked [together] very closely for eight years. He is a very practical, pragmatic leader, who looks at these issues in a non-ideological fashion. So for example, dealing with China, he recognizes that there are many dimensions to the U.S.-China relationship. There’s trade, there’s economics, there’s proliferation, there’s cyber, there is the big power of the human rights. There’s primacy in the Western Pacific, the South China, East China sea. There are many, many different dimensions to it. In some areas I think Joe Biden and the team are going to recognize that there are areas for cooperation.

What can we do with China to try to address North Korea’s nuclear capability? China is not really pleased with what Kim Jong-un has been doing.

And there are areas where we’re going to be reaching some type of accommodation.

There will be areas of tension and also areas of confrontation. So unlike Donald Trump who tends to be absolutist in some of his approaches and characterizations, I think the Biden team is really going to try to dissect those dimensions and not just lump everything into confrontation.

The same thing is true with Russia. I think Donald Trump has had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin. He claims that he’s tougher on Russia than anybody else.

Well, it’s because of pressure from Congress and from others that he has been or has had to be. The Biden administration I think is going to look for ways to have a constructive dialogue with Russia on, for example, arms reduction talks and other types of things where we really need to engage in a constructive way with Russia.

But that doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore what Russia is doing in Ukraine or in Belarus or other areas. Again, there’s going to be

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Then-Vice President Joe Biden swearing in John Brennan as director of the CIA. (White House photo by David Lienemann.)

this pragmatic, measured approach to these ceptional country. I believe in American issues and challenges, because the Biden exceptionalism, not because we’re better or team recognizes the complexity of these is- smarter or bigger than anybody else. It’s besues. Same thing with Iran. Iran is not an cause we’ve had exceptional good fortune in evil empire, a monolith. It’s not. There are terms of this country with bountiful natural resources, arable land, navigable rivers, long many different components to Iran. sea coast, the melting pot of The way to address these the world. No other country problems in a constructive “Joe Biden and I has had all these benefits. way is to understand some of the underlying factors worked [together] And so as a result of this exceptional good fortune, I and to see whether or not we very closely for think we have exceptional can leverage some of the inresponsibilities on the global fluence, the capabilities that eight years. He is stage. we have to move things in a a very practical, I do think more Amerimore positive direction. cans should recognize that NAKASHIMA: We have pragmatic leadwe, the United States, are another question here that part of this global system. says public service is proba- er, who looks at Yes, we have to ensure that bly one of the most needed these issues in a our people are protected, elements in the formation are well-fed, are [taken] care of our youth to attain a feel- non-ideological of. Yes. Unfortunately, the ing of common purpose, fashion.” mantra of “America first” has responsibility and destiny. been shrill on the ears of so many people Hard question. Do you agree?

BRENNAN: Absolutely. I spend a lot of around the world who believe the United time talking with universities and colleges, States is using its muscularity and its power and I’m affiliated with my two alma ma- to advance itself at the cost of others.

I do think that the Biden administraters, Fordham University in New York and University of Texas at Austin. Just over the tion is going to send a different signal. It’s past couple weeks, I’ve [been] participating important for young Americans who are in seminars with students and trying to talk looking at public service, they should be about what it means to be an intelligence thinking about how they’re going to spend professional in national security, and really some time in their life for the betterment trying to encourage them to think seriously of not just their fellow citizens, but for the betterment of humankind. about these professions.

Because I do believe that we are an ex- NAKASHIMA: I have a question that sort

of meshes with one I wanted to ask you, so I’ll ask it like this. Talk a little bit about emerging [threats]; the coronavirus pandemic and climate change are threats to national and global security. How must the intelligence community adapt to confront those threats, do you think?

BRENNAN: Pandemics, climate change and some of these other areas that are sort of nontraditional intelligence areas, these phenomena really fundamentally affect the world in terms of governments’ ability to grapple with these problems, address them.

It has impact on the political, economic and social fronts, as governments can be weakened as a result of pandemics, as well as with climate change, as the seas rise and they reclaim coastal communities. These populations have to move inland or across borders and increase migration flows. These all have security implications.

So what CIA and other intelligence committee professionals need to do is to look at these phenomena that may have longer gestation periods and understand how they are going to affect the United State’s national security interests, as well as international security.

We’re going to get a handle on COVID-19, certainly, but it’s not going to be the last pandemic. What lessons have we learned and other countries have learned that can be incorporated into better preparedness and planning for the future? What are we learning about climate change in terms of the effect on agriculture, on economies, on employment, on migration that we really need to be considering? Because the effects of some of these things are much more insidious and much less visible and less urgent.

CIA officers in particular are worried certainly about the wolf at the door, and they’re worried about the wolf down the street and the wolf in the next neighborhood. Because if they’re coming to you, if you wait until they’re at the door, then your options are much more limited.

That’s where I think that the CIA and others have been rightly criticized in the past for not looking sufficiently at the over-thehorizon challenges that ultimately are going to come to our shores. That’s where I think the leadership of CIA, as well as leadership of the administration, really needs to be thinking about what are those near-term, medium-term and longer-term threats and challenges as well as opportunities that we need to work on?

NAKASHIMA: There were great concerns

that Russia might attempt to do a repeat of limits to that. You can’t go into a theater 2016 this year. And in fact, it didn’t mate- and yell “fire,” because you endanger folks. rialize. We were very concerned about for- Well, I do think that the next administraeign interference and foreign disinformation tion, future administrations, as well as the and misinformation. It turned out that do- Congress really needs to be thinking about mestic disinformation and misinformation, what are we going to do to try to prevent often fueled by the president himself, was just the wholesale kidnapping of the digthe greatest threat to the election. How do ital environment and our minds by those you think about that and what’s the most who want to put out disinformation and to effective way to deter or build resilience in mislead us. the American public against disinformation That’s why it’s not surprising at all that so threats, whether they be from Russia or Chi- many people believe the very malicious and na or the White House? false accusations [that were] made, including BRENNAN: I think professionals and the [about] myself. There are times that my wife government did a great job to prepare for looks on Twitter or something and she says, the 2020 election and to make it more dif- “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know you did ficult for actors, whether they be domestic that.” And I say, “Well, I didn’t do that.” But or foreign, to interfere technically in the it gains traction. election systems. There was still misinIt’s not an easy issue to address, but I do formation, disinformation that went out think we need to do it in a much more systhere, but I do think that the social media temic and strategic fashion. platforms and the leadership of them, those NAKASHIMA: I think you’re absolutely [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerbergs and right. That’s maybe the biggest challenge, [Twitter CEO Jack] Dorseys one of the biggest confrontand others, were much more ing us in the next five years. humble as well as aware this “Intelligence We’re now out of time, time that their platforms [professionals] are but I wanted to just give were being exploited. our thanks to you, John, for So I think they took steps. imperfect beings. sharing with us today and for But the question is a very . . . But they try writing this book. valid one, especially in a BRENNAN: Thank you, digital environment. What every day to do Ellen. I want to [take] one can the government do to to say to everybody what they can to moment monitor and try to prevent listening and all American the propagation of misin- keep this great citizens, that the work that formation, disinformation, done by the CIA profescountry safe and issionals, especially when a lot of that as well as other propropagation is coming from secure. They are fessionals in the intelligence, the senior-most government law enforcement, diplomatic, officials in the United States? working on your and military communities, I understand that hyper- behalf around the these are your fellow citizens bole is something that goes that are imperfect beings. along with politics. But globe 24/7, 365 They make mistakes. But outright lies, specious al- days a year.” they try every day to do what legations—I’ve never seen they can to keep this great anything like I’ve seen in the past several country of ours safe and secure. So I’m sure years. So I think as a society, we need to ask that throughout the course of your life, you ourselves the question, How are we going might have met somebody who had worked to try to ensure the continuation of free- for the CIA, but couldn’t acknowledge it bedom of speech, particularly in a digital en- cause so many of our professionals work in vironment, but at the same time, safeguard the shadows and cannot acknowledge their our security and the integrity of our societ- organizational affiliation. ies and that digital environment? What is But I think you should rest more assured the role of the FBI and CIA and NSA in at night that they are working on your bea digital domain to monitor, to check, to half around the globe, 24/7, 365 days a year. thwart efforts?

So again, thank you, Ellen. Thank you to Freedom of speech does not mean just The Commonwealth Club for this opportufreedom to put out facts. It means freedom nity to talk a little bit about national securito say what you want. There are certain ty and intelligence.

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INSIGHT

DR. GLORIA C. DUFFY, PRESIDENT AND CEO

Courts Should Not Be a Vehicle for Elder Financial Abuse Counties should require attorneys to justify how their fees protect a person or their estate

O

ver the past two decades, elder abuse has not only been recognized as an ethical problem in our society, but as a clear danger for some of our seniors. In California, if an elder is experiencing physical, emotional or financial abuse, family members or others may go to court to protect the senior.

County probate courts establish conservatorships for individuals who cannot look after themselves, appointing a person to watch over and care for them. Unfortunately, this system creates further ethical dilemmas and opportunities for abuse of seniors through the court system itself. Current law permits the senior’s funds to be tapped to pay for the legal fees of anyone who questions or objects to the protections. Without strong oversight from the courts, attorneys can profit from this by running up huge fees representing contrary family members and even financial abusers, depleting or exhausting the funds needed for the senior’s care.

In 2010, a sibling and I had to go to court, to obtain a conservatorship for my mom. There were serious issues with her health, medical care, hoarding, identity theft, tax payments and misappropriation of her funds. In 2013, the court appointed me as my mom’s Conservator. I serve without compensation and not only care for her but also attempt to “conserve” her assets by protecting her from financial abuse.

But protecting her assets has proved almost impossible, under current court rules. Over the past 10 years, 14 attorneys have exploited our need to go to court to protect my mom and comply with tax and other laws, running up large bills through specious legal activities.

This “elder financial abuse by other means” is particularly serious in counties that do not require attorneys to justify, and courts to examine, how their fees protect a person or their estate.

When a senior has some assets, and attorneys know their bills won’t be examined, two or three attorneys from the same firm may jump in, unethically inflating their legal bills. They charge fees for talking to one another, and for having multiple attorneys review the same documents.

In our case, even a non-family vexatious litigant got into the act, scamming the court and our family by posing as a paralegal and requesting compensation through the court. As with all the other legal bills, the court granted his request, because no justification of the fees was required.

All those attorneys have also run up bills for the court-appointed attorney representing my mom and for my attorney, who must respond to the abundant, spurious, and always unsuccessful liti-

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“Current law permits the senior’s funds to be tapped to pay for the legal fees of anyone who questions or objects to the protections.”

Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy

gation they file. My mom, a completely disabled 97-year-old with around-the-clock care needs, is responsible for paying all these bills.

To counteract this, judges can dismiss attorneys, as has happened twice in my mom’s case. But the best protection is strict “local rules of court” that require attorneys to justify their fees as benefitting the protected person’s estate.

Santa Clara County recognized this problem, after some notable cases a decade ago. Since 2012, local rules of court in Santa Clara County require that “a petition for compensation of a guardian, conservator, trustee, and counsel, or for counsel for a conservatee or ward, must be accompanied by a complete statement of the services rendered, an explanation of the value or benefit of those services to the estate, and the total amount requested for such services, made under penalty of perjury and executed by the person rendering the services.”

Then the judge must examine whether the fees actually benefit the protected person and their estate.

No such stringent local rules of court exist in Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco or San Mateo counties, or most other counties statewide. This must be corrected. To stop the kind of abuse that is occurring, County presiding judges, the statewide Judicial Council and the state Legislature must institute local rules of court that prevent financial exploitation through the courts, ideally creating a statewide standard.

From an ethical standpoint, one thing is clear. When they are called upon to protect vulnerable seniors, the courts should not be a vehicle for elder financial abuse.

Gloria Duffy is president and CEO of The Commonwealth Club.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Mercury News and the East Bay Times, and is based on a presentation to the Silicon Valley Ethics Roundtable, whose input informed and improved it.

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On the Road to Freedom Understanding the Civil Rights Movement June 20-27, 2021 • Travel to Jackson, Little Rock, Memphis, Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery.

• Visit important sites of the movement, from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to Little Rock High School.

• Meet with many figures who were involved, such as 16th Street Baptist Church bombing survivor Dr. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford.

• Experience the newly opened Memorial for Peace and Social Justice in Montgomery and the Civil Rights Museum in Jackson.

• Meet with members of the Equal Justice Initiative and learn about the work that is being done today to fight racial injustices in the legal system.

• Explore the Mississippi Delta, tour Malaco Records and the B.B. King Museum.

Cost: $3,995 per person, based on double occupancy

Details at commonwealthclub.org/travel | 415.597.6720 | travel@commonwealthclub.org CST: 2096889-40