Poverty – Informed Comment

Human-Caused Climate Change will cut your Paycheck by a Fifth over the next 26 Years

Clean Energy Wire — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 04:04:03 +0000

By Julian Wettengel | –

Clean Energy Wire ) – The damaging effects of climate change are set to hit economic growth severely across most countries, said researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

With the climate change that is already locked-in through past and “plausible” future emissions, income will be 19 percent lower on average globally over the next 26 years than in a scenario without climate change, they said in an article in Nature.

This corresponds to global annual damages in 2049 of 38 trillion dollars (in 2005 dollars), said the researchers. They also compared these damages to the mitigation costs required to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goals and said that climate damages are larger than the mitigation costs in 2050 by a factor of approximately six.

Maximilian Kotz et al. wrote,

“Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity.”

The red shows decreases in income, the blue increases, caused by climate change. H/t Nature

Climate advocates and policymakers often emphasise that the cost of inaction on climate change is set to be much larger than the cost of efforts to mitigate the worst effects by introducing ambitious climate policy.

German government representatives have also said that climate mitigation is of the highest priority, because the less intense the impacts of climate change are, the less money needs to be spent adapting to them.

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)”. The text has been augmented by quotes from the original Nature article.

Tax Day: The America I wish my Taxes paid for

H. Patricia Hynes — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 04:02:07 +0000

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – In June 2023 Amanda Jones, an African American who had recently given birth to her second daughter Miranda, died from pregnancy-related causes. Her state, Georgia, ranks among the least safe states in the country for women to give birth; and the vast majority of women who die during and after pregnancy are poor and disproportionately African American. Though Amanda and her partner worked, they did not have health insurance and she was only eligible for Medicaid coverage for up to 12 months after the birth of her child, none for prenatal care and none after 12 months. The majority of the nearly 26 million uninsured people are low-income families with at least one worker, with no health care coverage through their job and who cannot afford the high cost of private insurance. Further, millions of Americans are losing Medicaid coverage as some states restrict eligibility that was expanded during the Covid pandemic. All the while, corporate healthcare capitalists are raking in record profits – the largest gaining $41 billion in profits in 2022.

I want my taxes to help fund universal health care for everyone in our country. All but 43 countries offer free healthcare or access to health care for at least 90% of their citizens. Why cannot we, the world’s wealthiest nation for over 60 years, divorce ourselves from corporate capitalist healthcare?

What of other social and economic issues as we near Tax Day? Take poverty: 140 million people – 40% of US people – are poor or near poor, defined as one emergency away from economic ruin, according to the Poor People’s Campaign. The “140 million” are people of every race, ethnicity, age, faith, sex and sexual orientation, while poverty is highest among Black, Latino and Indigenous peoples due to systemic racism. More women than men are poor due to systemic sexism. The pay gap between women and men – 21.8% on average – has persisted for 30 years, an injustice that deteriorates our democracy.

I want my federal and state taxes to lift people out of poverty and end inequality in income. It can be done. Cities are leading the way in raising minimum wage; and they outpace the best states, while the federal minimum wage languishes at a despicable $7.25 per hour

These 10 Cities have the Highest Minimum Wage in the U.S.

Tukwila, Washington: $20.29.
Seattle, Washington: $19.97.
SeaTac, Washington: $19.71.
West Hollywood, California: $19.08.
Mountain View, California: $18.75.
Emeryville, California: $18.67.
Sunnyvale, California: $18.55.
Denver, Colorado: $18.29.

Today, the highest minimum wages, by state and Washington, D.C., are in D.C., ($17), Washington ($16.28), California ($16), Connecticut ($15.69) and New Jersey ($15.13). New York has raised its minimum hourly wage in New York City and its suburbs to $16.

But we need to do better: A livable wage in Connecticut, that is, an hourly wage that enables a single adult to pay for necessities, including housing, food, utilities, transportation and health care, would be $24.13. Overall, most single Americans need to earn at least $20/hour to pay their bills, given cost of living where they live. More than 1/3 fall short.

I want my federal and state tax money used to raise minimum wage to a livable wage in the name of economic justice for everyone.

PBS NewsHour Video: “Families slip back into poverty after pandemic-era child tax credit expires”

In 2023, the Department of Defense (aka the Department of War) was allocated $816.7 billion dollars in our national budget, while failing to pass its sixth straight audit. US war spending in 2023 dwarfs that of other countries, totaling more than the next ten highest military budgets combined. Since October 7, the gunboat-diplomacy Biden administration has approved over 100 weapons sales to the government of Israel, an average of 1 every 36 hours.

I want my tax money to “beat swords into plowshares” by supplanting masculinist militarism with intelligent, committed, unrelenting diplomacy that lifts our country above our abject ranking of 131 least peaceful country out of 163 countries on the Global Peace Index.

Our arduous path back from flawed to healthy democracy will only be through engaged citizens, activist organizations and unions in cities and some states not shackled in the stranglehold of anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, Trumpian, and extreme religious right politics, nor held hostage by their weapons manufacturers.

“Voters inCalifornia, Vermont and Michigan in November 2023 adopted amendments to enshrine abortion protections into their respective state constitutions.” More states are expected to advance similar measures, because constitutional protections are considered the most ironclad and are very difficult to amend.
In February 2024 the city of Flint Michigan recently approved a universal cash program for babies, called Rx Kids, that provides new mothers $1,500 and $500 monthly for their child’s first year.
The same month, Detroit became the largest U.S. city so far to pass a “Move the Money” resolution, following the lead of neighboring city Hamtramck, Michigan. The measure, approved unanimously by the City Council, calls on the U.S. Congress and the president to shift public money away from the military to fund social services.
In June 2023 the US Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a resolution “Calling for Urgent Action to Avoid Nuclear War, Resolve the Ukraine Conflict, Lower Tensions with China, and Redirect Military Spending to Meet Human Needs.”
In March 2024 the New York State Appellate Court ruled unanimously to affirm Kingston, New York’s Rent Guidelines Board mandating 15% rent reduction, given the scarcity of rental units and tenant organizing for housing justice.
More than 100 US cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed resolutions on the genocidal Israel-Gaza war with most calling for a permanent ceasefire, exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian political prisoners and free flow of aid to the Gazan people.

I want my taxes to be used for our true national security: lifting people out of poverty, hunger and homelessness; providing universal health care; ensuring affordable housing for everyone needing it, assuring a livable wage, ending violence against women, affirming that Black Lives Matter, and fostering peace.

Republicans Plan to wage Class Warfare on Working People

Rebecca Gordon — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 04:02:50 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com) – Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a world record for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.

Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old, the very young, those of us who don’t have access to air conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose jobs require lengthy exposure to heat. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that about 40 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, although, as CNN reports, that’s probably a significant undercount. In February 2024, responding to this growing threat, a coalition of 10 state attorneys general petitioned the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement “a nationwide extreme heat emergency standard” to protect workers from the kinds of dangers that last year killed, among others, construction workers, farm workers, factory workers, and at least one employee who was laboring in an unairconditioned area of a warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee.

Facing the threat of overweening government interference from OSHA or state regulators, two brave Republican-run state governments have stepped in to protect employers from just such dangerous oversight. Florida and Texas have both passed laws prohibiting localities from mandating protections like rest breaks for, or even having to provide drinking water to, workers in extreme heat situations. Seriously, Florida and Texas have made it illegal for local cities to protect their workers from the direct effects of climate change. Apparently, being “woke” includes an absurd desire not to see workers die of heat exhaustion.

And those state laws are very much in keeping with the plans that the national right-wing has for workers, should the wholly-owned Trump subsidiary that is today’s Republican Party take control of the federal government this November.

We’ve Got a Plan for That!

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for — the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor — are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a “presidential transition” plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.

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As I’ve written before, the New York Times’s Carlos Lozada did us a favor by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single chapter of it focused on the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies.” Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.

First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex. Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution” under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second “necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all, “Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their “elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to the problem of racism does not categorize individuals at all, but instead describes structures — like corporate hiring practices based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage groups of people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue (mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project 2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country. It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or termination of employees.

Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in 2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy Initiative. In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially, about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of “driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the attendant risk of police violence or even death. Voters soundly defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access to the data to prove it.

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their “conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via executive order that religious employers are free to run their businesses according to their religious beliefs, general nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore anti-discrimination laws when it suits them.

But Wait, There’s More

Not content with gutting anti-discrimination protections, Project 2025 would also seek to rescind rights secured under the Fair Labor Standards Act, or FLSA, which workers have enjoyed for many decades. Originally passed in 1938, the FLSA “establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in Federal, State, and local governments,” according to the Department of Labor.

Perhaps because the federal minimum hourly wage has remained stuck at $7.25 for a decade and a half, Project 2025 doesn’t launch the typical conservative attack on the very concept of such a wage. It does, however, go after overtime pay (generally time-and-a-half for more than 40 hours of work a week), by proposing that employers be allowed to average time worked over a longer period. This would supposedly be a boon for workers, granting them the “flexibility” to labor fewer than 40 hours one week and more than 40 the next, without an employer having to pay overtime compensation for that second week. What such a change would actually do, of course, is give an employer the power to require overtime work during a crunch period while reducing hours at other times, thereby avoiding paying overtime often or at all.

Another supposedly family-friendly proposal would allow workers to choose to take their overtime compensation as paid time off, rather than in dollars and cents. Certainly, any change that would reduce workloads sounds enticing. But as the Pew Research Center reports, more than 40% of workers can’t afford to, and don’t, take all their paid time off now, so this measure could function as yet one more way to reduce the overtime costs of employers.

In contrast to the Heritage Foundation’s scheme, Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a genuinely family-friendly workload reduction plan: a gradual diminution of the standard work week from 40 to 32 hours at the same pay. Such proposals have been around (and ridiculed) for decades, but this one is finally receiving serious consideration in places like the New York Times.

In deference to the supposedly fierce spirit of “worker independence,” Project 2025 would also like to see many more workers classified not as employees at all but as independent contractors. And what would such workers gain from that “independence”? Well, as a start, freedom from those pesky minimum wage and overtime compensation regulations, not to speak of the loss of protections like disability insurance. And they’d be “free” to pay the whole tab (15.3% of their income) for their Social Security and Medicare taxes, unlike genuine employees, whose employers pick up half the cost.

Young people, too, would acquire more “independence” thanks to Project 2025 — at least if what they want to do is work in more dangerous jobs where they are presently banned. As Berry explains:

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking about is allowing adolescents to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an “interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry plant in Mississippi, where he died in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for everyone, not to hire children to do it.

We’re Gonna Roll the Union Over

Mind you, much to the displeasure of Project 2025 types, this country is experiencing a renaissance of union organizing. Companies that long thought they could avoid unionization, from Amazon to Starbucks, are now the subject of such drives. In my own world of higher education, new unions are popping up and established ones are demonstrating renewed vigor in both private and public universities. As the bumper-sticker puts it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.” They’re the reason we have laws on wages and hours, not to speak of on-the-job protections. So, it should be no surprise that Project 2025 wants to reduce the power of unions in a number of ways, including:

Amending the National Labor Relations Act to allow “Employee Involvement Organizations” to supplant unions. Such “worker-management councils” are presently forbidden for good reason. They replace real unions that have the power to bargain for wages and working conditions with toothless pseudo-unions.

Ending the use of “card-checks” and requiring elections to certify union representation. At the moment, the law still permits a union to present signed union-support cards from employees to the National Labor Relations Board and the employer. If both entities agree, the union wins legal recognition. The proposed change would make it significantly harder for unions to get certified, especially because cards can be collected without the employer’s knowledge, whereas a public election with a long lead time gives the employer ample scope for anti-union organizing activities, both legal and otherwise.

Allowing individual states to opt out of labor protections granted under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

The measures covered here are, believe it or not, just the highlights of that labor chapter of Project 2025. If put into practice, they would be an historically unprecedented dream come true for employers, and a genuine nightmare for working people.

Meanwhile, at the Trumpified and right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, there are signs that some justices are interested in entertaining a case brought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that adjudicates most labor disputes involving federal law. Without the NLRB, legal protections for workers, especially organizing or organized workers, would lose most of their bite. Despite the court’s claim to pay no attention to public opinion, its justices would certainly take note of a resounding defeat of Donald Trump, the Republicans, and Project 2025 at the polls.

A New “Contract on America?”

The last time the right wing was this organized was probably back in 1994, when Newt Gingrich published his “Contract with America.” Some of us were so appalled by its contents that we referred to it as a plan for a gangster hit, a “Contract on America.”

This year, they’re back with a vengeance. All of which is to say that if you work for a living, or if you know and love people who do, there’s a lot on the line in this year’s election. We can’t sit this one out.

Via Tomdispatch.com

The Failing Battle for Healthcare in the Dis-United States

Liz Theoharis — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 04:02:10 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The slang definition of “unwinding” means “to chill.” Other definitions include: to relax, disentangle, undo — all words that, on the surface, appear both passive and peaceful. And yet in Google searches involving such seemingly harmless definitions of decompressing and resting, news articles abound about the end of pandemic-era Medicaid expansion programs — a topic that, for the millions of people now without healthcare insurance, is anything but relaxing.

Imagine this: since March 2023, 16 million Americans — yes, that’s right, 16 million — have lost healthcare coverage, including four million children, as states redefine eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years. Worse yet, the nation is only halfway through the largest purge ever of Medicaid as the expansion and extension of healthcare to millions, brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, have ended, leaving some families no longer eligible, while others need to reapply through a new process in their state.

This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance corporations are making record profits has been termed “the great unwinding.” And it couldn’t be more cruelly ironic. After all, states have the power and authority to expand healthcare to all their residents; the federal government could similarly extend the declaration of a public health emergency that would let so many of us keep distinctly life-protecting access to healthcare. Yet millions have instead been pushed violently and rapidly from such life-saving care.

Some states are feeling the impact especially strongly. In Georgia, for instance, more than 149,000 children lost their pandemic Medicaid enrollment in just six months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Texas is the epicenter of Medicaid’s unwinding. There, more than two million Americans have been removed from the state’s Medicaid program since federal pandemic-era coverage protections were lifted last April. As Axios reported, new state data indicates “that’s the most of any state and nearly equivalent to all of Houston — Texas’ most populous city, with 2.3 million residents — losing coverage in less than a year.” In fact, 61% of enrollees in Texas have lost Medicaid since last April.

Death by Poverty and the Lack of Healthcare

In my home state, policy analysts predict that more than 1.1 million New Yorkers will be pushed off Medicaid roles in this same unwinding. Fortunately, people are organizing in response, calling for the right to healthcare, living wages, the abolition of poverty, and more.

On Saturday, March 2nd, I stood next to Becca Forsyth of Elmira, New York, at the Poor People’s Campaign’s Mass Poor People and Low Wage Workers Statehouse Assembly in Albany, New York. Becca was one of dozens of low-income people who testified at simultaneous assemblies held in 31 state capitals and Washington, D.C. These assemblies launched 40 weeks of the mobilizing and organizing of poor and low-income eligible voters in the lead-up to the 2024 elections, while challenging those running for office, as well as elected officials, to confront poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in America. Becca was not the only speaker to touch on the crisis of healthcare (and its connection to poverty and death), but her words stuck with me:

“Just since December 19th, I have lost more than a dozen people I loved dearly. In 74 days, I’ve watched as people I’ve known most of my life were literally squeezed to death by poverty and the catastrophic impact it has on our entire lives. People like Missy, a 47-year-old woman who was found lying beside the railroad tracks, dead… Or Gary, who died at the hands of the police while in a hospital for a mental breakdown. Or Loretta, a friend who was a friend before I even knew what the word friend meant, who is no longer with us because my community won’t spend money on substance-use treatment. Chemung County leads this state in way too many negative ways. We rank 59 out of the 62 counties in New York for health outcomes. We have outrageous homelessness, food insecurity, premature death rates, and lead poisoning. Our chances for getting out of poverty are extinguished before we even have a chance!”

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Just two days before I stood with Becca in Albany, the state capital, demanding the right to thrive and not just barely survive, I rallied with healthcare workers and community members at SUNY Downstate Hospital. With the support of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, SUNY Chancellor John King recently announced that his outfit may close SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, one of the few remaining public-safety-net hospitals in the state.

At that rally, community members, hospital workers, local politicians, and faith leaders shared information about the crucial role that hospital has played in the community. It served as a Covid refuge where thousands of lives were saved in the heat of the pandemic, as a critically safe birthing place for Black moms (crucial given the maternal health outcomes for so many women of color), as the only kidney transplant hospital in Brooklyn, and as one of the only remaining teaching hospitals in the area after the closure of such facilities, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods, across Brooklyn and the rest of New York.

Sadly, closing down hospitals or reducing their services in poorer neighborhoods is becoming all too typical of this nation. Big conglomerates are buying up chains of them and making decisions based only on their bottom lines, not the needs of our communities. In fact, more than 600 rural hospitals are now at risk of closing due to financial instability and that’s more than 30% of America’s rural facilities. For half of them, the possibility of closure is immediate, according to a new report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR).

Our Unwinding Health

Such Medicaid cuts and hospital closures are but two manifestations of a far larger attack on American health and healthcare in what’s fast being transformed into a death-dealing nation. They are but harbingers of an even larger “unwinding” of our health as a nation. Before the pandemic and the most recent cuts, 87 million Americans were already uninsured or underinsured. We’re talking about people sharing heart-attack medicine because they can’t afford their own prescriptions, burying their children for lack of healthcare, and relying on emergency rooms rather than preventative care, while going bankrupt in the process.

It’s simple enough. All too many of us are skipping needed care. In 2022, more than one of every four adults (28% of us) reported delaying or going without some combination of medical care, prescription drugs, mental healthcare, or dental care simply because they lacked the ability to pay.

Meanwhile, medical debt is growing all too rapidly. A Census Bureau analysis of such debt found that, in 2021, 15% of all American households owed medical debt — or 20 million people (nearly 1 in 12 adults). Indeed, the SIPP (Survey of Income and Program Participation) survey suggests that, in total, Americans owe at least $220 billion in medical debt, the biggest source of bankruptcy in the nation.

And of course, as I’ve written before, this is all connected to another reality: that life expectancy is down for everyone, while the poor can expect to die, on average, 12 to 13 years earlier than rich people. Worse yet, the death-rate gap between rich and poor in this country has risen by a staggering 570% since 1980. As the Washington Post reported, “America is increasingly a country of haves and have-nots, measured not just by bank accounts and property values but also by vital signs and grave markers. Dying prematurely has become the most telling measure of the nation’s growing inequality.”

Poor Health

In the face of all of this, you might wonder how things could get any worse. Recently, Congress announced potential cuts to another crucial food and health program for the poor. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC) is at risk of a $1 billion shortfall, essentially guaranteeing harmful cuts to that lifeline for low-income families and children. If Congress refuses to fully fund the program, current funding levels simply won’t cover all eligible participants.

In fact, the $1 billion shortfall now slated to occur equals 1.5 months of benefits for all program beneficiaries or six months of benefits for all pregnant women and infants participating in WIC. House Republicans are currently refusing to approve the budget for this vital program that helps mothers and children up to age five access staples like fruit, vegetables, and infant formula, and connects them to healthcare resources.

In a statement to NBC News, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called WIC, “one of the most consequential, evidence-based public health programs available.” He implored Congress to fully fund the program, which provides “life-changing benefits and services” to its participants.

And Vilsack is anything but wrong when he speaks of the importance of that pro-poor, pro-health program. An abundance of research suggests the critical role that WIC plays in “supporting maternal health and child development. WIC participation during pregnancy is associated with lower risk of preterm birth, lower risk of low birth weight, and lower risk of infant mortality.” Children on WIC are more likely to consume a healthier diet, and this impact only grows the longer a child stays in the program, which also has a significant reach. As the Department of Agriculture reports, “Nearly 40 percent of America’s infants participate in WIC, which is available only to pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and children who meet income guidelines and are determined to be at nutritional risk by a health professional.”

So Much More Is Needed

But as such programs are cut to the bone and more people experience a plethora of problems already plaguing the health of the nation, many are likely to give up entirely, assuming there’s nothing to be done and that it’s just too costly to address inequality and poor health. As someone who has been organizing among the poor for more than 30 years, however, I want to suggest that, as a nation, this just can’t be as “good” as it gets.

Across the span of my lifetime, there have been debates about how to address the larger health crisis in American society. When I was in high school, there was already debate about the effectiveness of establishing a national healthcare program, as President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton campaigned on expanding healthcare and actually proposed a new plan for it in 1993. At the time, I remember hearing criticism of the Canadian system of nationalized healthcare. People there, it was said, experienced long lines, way too much paperwork, and a lack of options for patients.

Today, considering the way our healthcare system is unwinding, I could almost laugh (however grimly) at what it would mean to have that Canadian system of years past. All too sadly, however, that country has followed the United States in cutting and privatizing its healthcare system.

Many consider the Affordable Care Act (ACA) one of the most important policies adopted under the presidency of Barack Obama, given that more than 20 million people gained health coverage through it and the ACA’s policies made it easier for eligible people to enroll in Medicaid. In particular, the ACA expanded Medicaid coverage to nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level ($20,783 in 2024) and helped states with matching federal dollars expand Medicaid to more of their residents. Yet the ACA didn’t go nearly far enough. To date, 40 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted Medicaid expansion, while 10 states have not. Even in states with Medicaid expansion, too many of us are still not covered. And now we’re witnessing one of the greatest attacks on health and healthcare in decades (and just imagine what we’re likely to face if Donald Trump becomes our next president and/or the MAGA Republicans take Congress).

What this nation truly needs is a complete overhaul of its healthcare system. As a start, Medicaid needs to be expanded, extended, and built into a single-payer, universal healthcare plan. Workers need the right to living-wage jobs with generous benefits, including guaranteed paid family sick leave. Social welfare programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, WIC, and the Child Tax Credit need to be strengthened so that the abundance of this society is experienced by everyone. Household and medical debt would have to be cancelled, while drug-recovery programs would need to be fully funded. And parks and recreation centers, as well as grocery stores with quality, affordable food, would have to proliferate, starting in poor communities.

It’s not enough to protest the unwinding of pandemic Medicaid programs. Even that classic protest chant — “They say cut back, we say fight back!” — doesn’t go far enough. Instead, the 135 million poor and low-income Americans, and for that matter, the rest of us, must make healthcare and so much more into basic human rights.

Let me end then not with words of mine but with Becca Forsyth’s challenge to Americans in her Poor People’s Campaign testimony that day in Albany. “We must stop this raging storm of policy violence that is killing our friends and neighbors,” she said movingly. “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can wield our votes as powerful demands. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over. We have to move forward together like our lives depend on it… the lives of our children! Because they do!!”

How right she is!

Via Tomdispatch.com

War is Bad for you — And the Economy: Biden touts the Alleged Benefits of the Arsenal of Democracy

William D. Hartung — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 05:02:20 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Joe Biden wants you to believe that spending money on weapons is good for the economy. That tired old myth — regularly repeated by the political leaders of both parties — could help create an even more militarized economy that could threaten our peace and prosperity for decades to come. Any short-term gains from pumping in more arms spending will be more than offset by the long-term damage caused by crowding out new industries and innovations, while vacuuming up funds needed to address other urgent national priorities.

The Biden administration’s sales pitch for the purported benefits of military outlays began in earnest last October, when the president gave a rare Oval Office address to promote a $106-billion emergency allocation that included tens of billions of dollars of weaponry for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. MAGA Republicans in Congress had been blocking the funding from going forward and the White House was searching for a new argument to win them over. The president and his advisers settled on an answer that could just as easily have come out of the mouth of Donald Trump: jobs, jobs, jobs. As Joe Biden put it:

“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores… equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country — in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas; and so much more.”

It should be noted that two of the four states he singled out (Arizona and Pennsylvania) are swing states crucial to his reelection bid, while the other two are red states with Republican senators he’s been trying to win over to vote for another round of military aid to Ukraine.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources.

Military Keynesianism and Cold War Fallacies

The official story about military spending and the economy starts like this: the massive buildup for World War II got America out of the Great Depression, sparked the development of key civilian technologies (from computers to the internet), and created a steady flow of well-paying manufacturing jobs that were part of the backbone of America’s industrial economy.

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There is indeed a grain of truth in each of those assertions, but they all ignore one key fact: the opportunity costs of throwing endless trillions of dollars at the military means far less is invested in other crucial American needs, ranging from housing and education to public health and environmental protection. Yes, military spending did indeed help America recover from the Great Depression but not because it was military spending. It helped because it was spending, period. Any kind of spending at the levels devoted to fighting World War II would have revived the economy. While in that era, such military spending was certainly a necessity, today similar spending is more a question of (corporate) politics and priorities than of economics.

In these years Pentagon spending has soared and the defense budget continues to head toward an annual trillion-dollar mark, while the prospects of tens of millions of Americans have plummeted. More than 140 million of us now fall into poor or low-income categories, including one out of every six children. More than 44 million of us suffer from hunger in any given year. An estimated 183,000 Americans died of poverty-related causes in 2019, more than from homicide, gun violence, diabetes, or obesity. Meanwhile, ever more Americans are living on the streets or in shelters as homeless people hit a record 650,000 in 2022.

Perhaps most shockingly, the United States now has the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized country, even as the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports that it now accounts for 40% of the world’s — yes, the whole world’s! — military spending. That’s four times more than its closest rival, China. In fact, it’s more than the next 15 countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies. It’s long past time for a reckoning about what kinds of investments truly make Americans safe and economically secure — a bloated military budget or those aimed at meeting people’s basic needs.

What will it take to get Washington to invest in addressing non-military needs at the levels routinely lavished on the Pentagon? For that, we would need presidential leadership and a new, more forward-looking Congress. That’s a tough, long-term goal to reach, but well worth pursuing. If a shift in budget priorities were to be implemented in Washington, the resulting spending could, for instance, create anywhere from 9% more jobs for wind and solar energy production to three times as many jobs in education.

As for the much-touted spinoffs from military research, investing directly in civilian activities rather than relying on a spillover from Pentagon spending would produce significantly more useful technologies far more quickly. In fact, for the past few decades, the civilian sector of the economy has been far nimbler and more innovative than Pentagon-funded initiatives, so — don’t be surprised — military spinoffs have greatly diminished. Instead, the Pentagon is desperately seeking to lure high-tech companies and talent back into its orbit, a gambit which, if successful, is likely to undermine the nation’s ability to create useful products that could push the civilian sector forward. Companies and workers who might otherwise be involved in developing vaccines, producing environmentally friendly technologies, or finding new sources of green energy will instead be put to work building a new generation of deadly weapons.

Diminishing Returns

In recent years, the Pentagon budget has approached its highest level since World War II: $886 billion and counting. That’s hundreds of billions more than was spent in the peak year of the Vietnam War or at the height of the Cold War. Nonetheless, the actual number of jobs in weapons manufacturing has plummeted dramatically from three million in the mid-1980s to 1.1 million now. Of course, a million jobs is nothing to sneeze at, but the downward trend in arms-related employment is likely to continue as automation and outsourcing grow. The process of reducing arms industry jobs will be accelerated by a greater reliance on software over hardware in the development of new weapons systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. Given the focus on emerging technologies, assembly line jobs will be reduced, while the number of scientists and engineers involved in weapons-related work will only grow.

In addition, as the journalist Taylor Barnes has pointed out, the arms industry jobs that do remain are likely to pay significantly less than in the past, as unionization rates at the major contractors continue to fall precipitously, while two-tier union contracts deny incoming workers the kind of pay and benefits their predecessors enjoyed. To cite two examples: in 1971, 69% of Lockheed Martin workers were unionized, while in 2022 that number was 19%; at Northrop Grumman today, a mere 4% of its employees are unionized. The very idea that weapons production provides high-paying manufacturing jobs with good benefits is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

More and better-paying jobs could be created by directing more spending to domestic needs, but that would require a dramatic change in the politics and composition of Congress.

The Military Is Not an “Anti-Poverty Program”

Members of Congress and the Washington elite continue to argue that the U.S. military is this country’s most effective anti-poverty program. While the pay, benefits, training, and educational funding available to members of that military have certainly helped some of them improve their lot, that’s hardly the full picture. The potential downside of military service puts the value of any financial benefits in grim perspective.

Many veterans of America’s disastrous post-9/11 wars, after all, risked their physical and mental health, not to speak of their lives, during their time in the military. After all, 40% of veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars have reported service-related disabilities. Physical and mental health problems suffered by veterans range from lost limbs to traumatic brain injuries to post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). They have also been at greater risk of homelessness than the population as a whole. Most tragically, four times as many veterans have committed suicide as the number of military personnel killed by enemy forces in any of the U.S. wars of this century.

The toll of such disastrous conflicts on veterans is one of many reasons that war should be the exception, not the rule, in U.S. foreign policy.

And in that context, there can be little doubt that the best way to fight poverty is by doing so directly, not as a side-effect of building an increasingly militarized society. If, to get a leg up in life, people need education and training, it should be provided to civilians and veterans alike.

Tradeoffs

Federal efforts to address the problems outlined above have been hamstrung by a combination of overspending on the Pentagon and the unwillingness of Congress to more seriously tax wealthy Americans to address poverty and inequality. (After all, the wealthiest 1% of us are now cumulatively worth more than the 291 million of us in the “bottom” 90%, which represents a massive redistribution of wealth in the last half-century.)

The tradeoffs are stark. The Pentagon’s annual budget is significantly more than 20 times the $37 billion the government now invests annually in reducing greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, spending on weapons production and research alone is more than eight times as high. The Pentagon puts out more each year for one combat aircraft — the overpriced, underperforming F-35 — than the entire budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, one $13 billion aircraft carrier costs more to produce than the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Similarly, in 2020, Lockheed Martin alone received $75 billion in federal contracts and that’s more than the budgets of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. In other words, the sum total of that company’s annual contracts adds up to the equivalent of the entire U.S. budget for diplomacy.

Simply shifting funds from the Pentagon to domestic programs wouldn’t, of course, be a magical solution to all of America’s economic problems. Just to achieve such a shift in the first place would, of course, be a major political undertaking and the funds being shifted would have to be spent effectively. Furthermore, even cutting the Pentagon budget in half wouldn’t be enough to take into account all of this country’s unmet needs. That would require a comprehensive package, including not just a change in budget priorities but an increase in federal revenues and a crackdown on waste, fraud, and abuse in the outlay of government loans and grants. It would also require the kind of attention and focus now reserved for planning to fund the military.

One comprehensive plan for remaking the economy to better serve all Americans is the moral budget of the Poor People’s Campaign, a national movement of low-income people inspired by the 1968 initiative of the same name spearheaded by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., before his assassination that April 4th. Its central issues are promoting racial justice, ending poverty, opposing militarism, and supporting environmental restoration. Its moral budget proposes investing more than $1.2 trillion in domestic needs, drawn from both cuts to Pentagon spending and increases in tax revenues from wealthy individuals and corporations. Achieving such a shift in American priorities is, at best, undoubtedly a long-term undertaking, but it does offer a better path forward than continuing to neglect basic needs to feed the war machine.

If current trends continue, the military economy will only keep on growing at the expense of so much else we need as a society, exacerbating inequality, stifling innovation, and perpetuating a policy of endless war. We can’t allow the illusion — and it is an illusion! — of military-fueled prosperity to allow us to neglect the needs of tens of millions of people or to hinder our ability to envision the kind of world we want to build for future generations. The next time you hear a politician, a Pentagon bureaucrat, or a corporate functionary tell you about the economic wonders of massive military budgets, don’t buy the hype.

Via Tomdispatch.com

Our World-Historical Turning Point – Kairos – is Now, and Everything Depends on the Youths

Liz Theoharis — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 05:02:01 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com) – “All Americans owe them a debt for — if nothing else — releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect.” That’s how Howard Zinn opened his book The New Abolitionists about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s. Zinn pointed out a truth from the Black freedom struggles of that era and earlier: that young people were often labeled aloof and apathetic, apolitical and uncommitted — until suddenly they were at the very forefront of justice struggles for themselves and for the larger society. Connected to that truth is the reality that, in the history of social-change movements in the United States and globally, young people almost invariably find themselves in the lead.

I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren’t more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing “family values” movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.

Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. “Theirs,” he wrote, “was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for… the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.”

And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it’s even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.

Don’t Look Up

Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it’s an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.

Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.

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When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers’ rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.

And don’t forget the movement to stop gun violence that, from the March for Our Lives in Florida to the protests leading to the expulsion and subsequent reinstatement of state legislators Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, galvanized millions across racial and political lines. Teenagers in striking numbers are challenging this society to value their futures more than guns. And most recently, calls for a #ceasefirenow and #freepalestine have heralded the birth of a new peace movement in the wake of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and the Israeli destruction of much of Gaza. Although university presidents have been getting more media attention, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim students have been the ones organizing and out there, insisting that indiscriminate violence perpetrated against Palestinians, especially children, will not happen “in our name.”

From Unexpected Places

An observation Zinn made so many years ago about young people in the 1960s may have lessons for movements today: “They came out of unexpected places; they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment.”

Today’s generation of activists are similarly committed and come from places as varied as Parkland, Florida, Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Durham, North Carolina. Below the surface, some deep stuff is brewing that could indeed continue to compel new generations of the young into action. As we approach the first quarter mark of the twenty-first century, we’re stepping firmly into a new technological era characterized by unparalleled levels of digital power. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, as elite economists and think-tankers like to call it, promises a technological revolution that, in the words of World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab, is likely to occur on a “scale, scope, and complexity” never before experienced. That revolution will, of course, include the integration of artificial intelligence and other labor-replacing technology into many kinds of in-person as well as remote work and is likely to involve the “deskilling” of our labor force from the point of production all the way to the market.

Residents of Detroit, once the Silicon Valley of auto manufacturing, understand this viscerally. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Ford River Rouge Plant was the largest, most productive factory in the world, a private city with 100,000 workers and its own municipal services. Today, the plant employs only a fraction of that number — about 10,000 people — and yet, thanks to a surge of robotic innovation, it produces even more cars than it did in the heady days of the 1930s. Consider such a shift just the tip of the spear of the kind of change “coming to a city near you,” as one veteran auto worker and union organizer once told me. All of this is impacting everything from wages to health-care plans, pensions to how workers organize. Indeed, some pushback to such revolutionary shifts in production can be seen in the labor strikes the United Auto Workers launched late in 2023.

Overall, such developments are deeply impacting young people. After all, workers are now generally making less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy. Growing parts of our workforce are increasingly non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. And not surprisingly, such workers struggle to afford housing, childcare, and other necessities, experiencing on the whole harsher lives than the generations that preceded them.

In addition, the last 40 years have done more than just transform work and daily life for younger generations. They have conditioned so many to lose faith in government as a site for struggle and change. Instead, Americans are increasingly dependent on private, market-based solutions that extol the wealthy for their humanitarianism (even as they reap the rewards from federal policymaking and an economy rigged in their favor).

Crises upon Crises

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. When compared to other advanced countries, the United States lags perilously behind in almost every important category. In this rich land, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured, close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while the education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And in all of this, young people are impacted disproportionately.

Perhaps most damning, ours is a society that has become terrifyingly tolerant of unnecessary death and suffering. Deaths by poverty are an increasingly all-American reality. Low-wage jobs that have been found to shorten lives are the norm. In 2023, researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that poverty was the fourth-leading cause of death in this country, right after heart disease, smoking, and cancer. While life expectancy continues to rise across the industrialized world, it’s stagnated in the U.S. since the 2010s and, during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, it dropped in a way that, according to experts, was unprecedented in modern world history. That marks us as unique not just among wealthy countries, but among poorer ones as well. And again, its impact was felt above all by the young. What we call “deaths of despair” are also accelerating, although the label is misleading, since so many overdoses and suicides are caused not by some amorphous social malaise but by medical neglect and lack of access to adequate care and mental-health treatment for the under- or uninsured.

Nor are low wages, crises of legitimacy, and falling life expectancy the only significant issues facing our younger generations. Just last week, the New York Times reported that 2023 was the hottest year on record (with climate chaos worsening yearly and little chance of the elimination of our reliance on fossil fuels in sight). Add to that the fact that anyone born in the last three decades can hardly remember a time when the United States was not in some fashion at war (whether declared or not) and pouring its taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget. In fact, according to the National Priorities Project, this country has spent a staggering $21 trillion on militarization since September 11, 2001, including increased border patrols, a rising police presence in our communities, and various aspects of the Global War on Terror that came home big-time. Add to all that, the rise of Trumpian-style authoritarianism and attacks on our democratic system more extreme than at any time since the Civil War.

What Time Is It?

Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks taught that there were two ways to understand time — and the times in which we live. Chronos was quantitative time, the measured chronological time of a clock. Kairos, on the other hand, was qualitative time: the special, even transformative, time of a specific moment (and possibly of a movement). Kairos is all about opportunity. In the days of antiquity, Greek archers were trained to recognize the brief kairos moment, the opening when their arrow had the best chance of reaching its target. In the Bible (and as a biblical scholar I run into this a lot), Kairos describes a moment when the eternal breaks into history.

German-American theologian Paul Tillich introduced the modern use of kairos in describing the period between the First World War and the rise of fascism. In retrospect, he recognized the existential stakes of that transitional moment and mourned the societal failure to stem the tide of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain. There was a similar kairos moment in apartheid South Africa when a group of mainly Black theologians wrote a Kairos Document noting that “for very many… in South Africa, this is the KAIROS, the moment of grace and opportunity… a challenge to decisive action. It is a dangerous time because, if this opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss… will be immeasurable.”

2024 may well be a kairos moment for us here in the United States. There’s so much at stake, so much to lose, but if Howard Zinn were with us today, I suspect he would look at the rise of bold and visionary organizing, led by generations of young leaders, and tell us that change, on a planet in deep distress, is coming soon.

Via Tomdispatch.com

We Deserve Medicare for All, But What We Get Is Medicare for Wall Street

Common Dreams — Sat, 06 Jan 2024 05:02:46 +0000

By Les Leopold | –

Creating a sane healthcare system will depend on building a massive common movement to free our economy from Wall Street’s wealth extraction.

( Commondreams.org ) – The United States health care system—more costly than any on earth—will become ever more so as Wall Street increasingly extracts money from it.

Private equity funds own approximately 9% of all private hospitals and 30% of all proprietary for-profit hospitals, including 34% that serve rural populations. They’ve also bought up nursing homes and doctors’ practices and are investing more year by year. The net impact? Medical costs to the government and to patients have gone up while patients have suffered more adverse medical results, according to two current studies.

The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a paper which found:

Private equity acquisition was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events, including falls and central line–associated bloodstream infections, along with a larger but less statistically precise increase in surgical site infections.

This should not come as a surprise. Private equity firms in general operate as follows: They raise funds from investors to purchase enterprises using as much borrowed money as possible. That debt does not fall on the private equity firm or its investors, however. Instead, all of it is placed on the books of the purchased entity. If a private equity firm borrows money and buys up a nursing home or hospital chain, the debt goes on the books of these healthcare facilities in what is called a leveraged buyout.

To service the debt, the enterprise’s management, directed by their private equity ownership, must reduce costs, and increase its cash flow. The first and easiest way to reduce costs is by reducing the number of staff and by decreasing services. Of course, the quality of care then suffers. Meanwhile, the private equity firm charges the company fees in order to secure its own profits.

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in.

An even larger study of private equity and health was completed this summer and published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). After reviewing 1,778 studies it concluded that after private equity firms purchased healthcare facilities, health outcomes deteriorated, costs to patients or payers increased, and overall quality declined.

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One former executive at a private equity firm that owns an assisted-living facility near Boulder, Colorado, candidly described why the firm was refusing to hire and retain high-quality caregivers: “Their position was: We are trying to increase our profitability. Care is an ancillary part of the conversation.”

Medicare Advantage Creates Wall Street Advantages

Congress passed the Medicare Advantage program in 2003. Its proponents claimed it would encourage competition and greater efficiency in the provision of health insurance for seniors. At the time, privatization was all the rage as the Democratic and Republican parties competed to please Wall Street donors. It was argued that Medicare, which was actually much more efficient than private insurance companies, needed the iron fist of profit-making to improve its services. These new private plans were permitted to compete with Medicare Part C (Medigap) supplemental insurance.

In 2007, 19% of Medicare recipients enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans. By 2023 enrollment had risen to 51%. These heavily marketed plans are attractive because many don’t charge additional monthly premiums, and they often include dental, vision, and hearing coverage, which Medicare does not. And in some plans, other perks get thrown in, like gym memberships and preloaded over-the-counter debit cards for use in pharmacies for health items.

How is it possible for Medical Advantage to do all this and still make a profit?

According to a report by the Physicians for a National Health Program, it’s very simple—they overcharge the government, that is we, the taxpayers, “by a minimum of $88 billion per year.” The report says it could be as much as $140 billion.

In addition to inflating their bills to the government, these HMO plans don’t pay doctors outside of their networks, deny or slow needed coverage to patients, and delay legitimate payments. As Dr. Kenneth Williams, CEO of Alliance HealthCare, said of Medicare Advantage plans, “They don’t want to reimburse for anything — deny, deny, deny. They are taking over Medicare and they are taking advantage of elderly patients.”

Enter Hedge Funds

With so much taxpayer money sloshing around in the system, hedge funds also are cashing in. They have bought large quantities of stock in the healthcare companies that are milking the government through their Medicare Advantage programs. They then insist that these healthcare companies initiate stock buybacks, inflating the price of their stock and the financial return to the hedge funds. Stock buybacks are a simple way to transfer corporate money to the largest stock-sellers.

(A stock buyback is when a corporation repurchases its own stock. The stock price invariably goes up because the company’s earnings are spread over a smaller number of shares. Until they were deregulated in 1982, stock buybacks were essentially outlawed because they were considered a form of stock price manipulation.)

United Healthcare, for example, is the largest player in the Medicare Advantage market, accounting for 29% of all enrollments in 2023. It also has handsomely rewarded its hedge fund stock-sellers to the tune of $45 billion in stock buybacks since 2007, with a third of that coming since March 2020. Cigna, another big Medicare Advantage player, just announced a $10 billion stock buyback.

These repurchases are also extremely lucrative for United Healthcare’s top executives, who receive most of their compensation through stock incentives. CEO Andrew Witty, for example, hauled in $20.9 million in 2022 compensation, of which $16.4 million came from stock and stock option awards.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

A look at the pharmaceutical industry shows where all this is heading. Between 2012 and 2021, fourteen of the largest publicly traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends, more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development, according to a report by economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum. Little wonder that drug prices are astronomically high in the U.S.

And so, the gravy train is loaded and rolling, delivering our tax dollars via Medicare Advantage reimbursements to companies like United Healthcare and Big Pharma, which pass it on to Wall Street private equity firms and hedge funds.

It’s Not Just Healthcare

In researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we found that private equity firms and hedge funds are undermining the working class through leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. When private equity moves in, mass layoffs (just like healthcare staff cuts and shortages) almost always follow so that the companies can service their debt and private equity can extract profits. When hedge funds insist on stock repurchases, mass layoffs are used to free up cash in order to buy back their shares. As a result, between 1996 and today, we estimate that more than 30 million workers have gone through mass layoffs.

Meanwhile, stock buybacks have metastasized throughout the economy. In 1982, before deregulation, only about 2% of all corporate profits went to stock buybacks. Today, it is nearly 70%.

Those of us fighting for Medicare for All, therefore, have much in common with every worker who is losing his or her job as a result of leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks. Every fight to stop a mass layoff is a fight against the same Wall Street forces that are attacking Medicare and trying to privatize it. Creating a sane healthcare system, therefore, will depend on building a massive common movement to free our economy from Wall Street’s wealth extraction.

To take the wind out of Medicare Advantage and Wall Street’s rapacious sail through our healthcare system, we don’t need more studies. It’s time to outlaw leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks.

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How Turning Gaza into a Hellhole is Costing Americans Billions as Child Poverty Spikes at Home

Liz Theoharis — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 05:02:07 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On September 19, 2001, eight days after 9/11, as the leaders of both parties were already pounding a frenzied drumbeat of war, a diverse group of concerned Americans released a warning about the long-term consequences of a military response. Among them were veteran civil rights activists, faith leaders, and public intellectuals, including Rosa Parks, Harry Belafonte, and Palestinian-American Edward Said. Rare public opponents of the drive to war at the time, they wrote with level-headed clarity:

“We foresee that a military response would not end the terror. Rather, it would spark a cycle of escalating violence, the loss of innocent lives, and new acts of terrorism… Our best chance for preventing such devastating acts of terror is to act decisively and cooperatively as part of a community of nations within the framework of international law… and work for justice at home and abroad.”

Twenty-three years and more than two wars later, this statement reads as a tragic footnote to America’s Global War on Terror that left an entire region of the planet immiserated. It contributed to the direct and indirect deaths of close to 4.5 million people, while costing Americans almost $9 trillion and counting.

The situation is certainly different today. Still, over the last few weeks, those prophetic words, now 22 years old, have been haunting me, as the U.S. war machine kicks into ever higher gear following the horrific Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians and the brutal intensification of the decades-long Israeli siege of civilians in Gaza. Sadly, the words and actions of our nation’s leaders have revealed a staggering, even willful, historical amnesia about the disastrous repercussions of America’s twenty-first-century war-mongering.

Case in point: recently, the United States was the only nation to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Instead, all but a few members of Congress are lining up to support billions more in military aid for Israel and the further mobilization of our armed forces in the Middle East. These moves, experts say, may only accelerate wider regional conflict (something we are already seeing glimmers of vis-à-vis Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) at a time of increasingly profound global instability. In the last few weeks, the U.S. Navy has “assembled one of the greatest concentrations of power in the Eastern Mediterranean in 40 years,” while the Department of Defense is readying thousands of troops for possible deployment. Meanwhile, college administrators are suggesting student-reservists be prepared in case they get called up in the coming weeks.

Amid this frenzy of American bluster and brawn, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees reports that Gaza is “fast becoming a hell hole,” riddled with death, disease, starvation, thirst, and displacement. Hundreds of scholars of international law and conflict studies have warned that the Israeli military may already have launched a “potential genocide” of Gazans. At the same time, within Israel, citizen-militias, armed by the far-right minister of national security, have escalated violent attacks on Palestinians, only worsened by the acts of armed Israeli settlers on the West Bank protected by that very military.

Finally allowing a tiny amount of aid across the Egypt-Gaza border, after shutting down all food, water, and fuel for Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant made it clear just how much power the United States wields over this unfolding humanitarian crisis. “The Americans insisted,” he reported, “and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”

As Gallant implied, the U.S. could use its influence not only to demand far more aid for Gazans, but to compel quite a different course of action. There should, after all, be no contradiction between condemning Hamas for its heinous slaughter in the south of Israel and denouncing Israel for its decades-old dispossession and oppression of the Palestinian people and its now-indiscriminate killing and destruction in Gaza. There need be no contradiction between decrying terrorism and demanding diplomacy over violence. In truth, the Biden administration could use every non-military tool at its disposal to pressure both Hamas and Israel to pursue an immediate ceasefire, the full release of all hostages, and whatever humanitarian assistance is now needed.

If only, rather than further militarizing the region or questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration were to focus on making this most recent and ever more ominous crisis a final turning point, not for yet more brutality, but for a long-term political solution focused on achieving real peace, human rights, and equality for everyone in the region. In this moment of grief and rage, when tensions are at a fever pitch and the wheel of history is turning around us, it’s time to demand peace above all else.

The Cruel Manipulation of the Poor

While the U.S. government refuses to use its considerable power as leverage for peace, ordinary Americans seem to know better. Unlike the days after 9/11, recent polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose sending more weapons to Israel and support delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, including a majority of people under the age of 44, as well as a majority of Democrats and independents and a significant minority of Republicans. While Representative Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, was made a pariah and is in the process of being censured by some of her colleagues after her plea for a ceasefire, she actually represents the popular will of a significant portion of the public.

And that, in turn, represents a generational shift from even a decade or two ago. In the wake of this country’s disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as dozens of other military conflicts globally, many Americans, especially Millennials and Gen Zers, see the U.S. military less as a defender of democracy than as a purveyor of death and chaos. Nearly second-by-second online coverage of the Israeli bombing campaign is offering Americans an unprecedented view into the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans, half of them 18 or younger. (Now, with limited Internet and communications, it’s unclear how word of what’s happening in Gaza will continue to get out.) Add to that the slow-burning pain that has marked life in the United States over the last 15 years — the Great Recession, the Covid-19 economic shock, the climate crisis, and the modern movement for racial justice — and the reasons for such a relatively widespread urge for peace become clearer.

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Today, half of all Americans are either impoverished or one emergency away from economic ruin. As younger generations face what often feels like a dead-end future, there’s a growing sense among those I speak to (as well as older folks) that the government has abandoned them. At a moment when the Republicans (and some Democrats) argue that we can’t afford universal healthcare or genuine living wages, the military budget for 2023 is $858 billion and the Pentagon still maintains 750 military bases globally. Last week, without a touch of irony, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who claimed last year that student debt relief would hurt the economy, insisted that the U.S. can “certainly afford two wars.”

Millions of us tuned into President Biden’s Oval Office speech on his return from Israel, only the second of his presidency. There, he asked Congress to earmark yet another $100 billion mainly for American military aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan (a boon to the war-profiteering weapons makers whose CEOs will grow even richer thanks to those new contracts). Just a year after Congress killed the Expanded Child Tax Credit, which had cut official child poverty in half, Biden’s speech represented a further pivot away from socially beneficial policymaking and toward further strengthening of the ravenous engine of our war economy. After the speech, the Nation‘s Katrina vanden Heuvel offered this compelling instant commentary: “Biden tonight rolled out a version of twenty-first-century military Keynesianism. Let’s call his policy just that. No more Bidenomics. And it consigns the U.S. to endless militarization of foreign policy.”

A decision to organize our economy yet more around war will also mean the further militarization of domestic policy, with dire consequences for poor and low-income people. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., once called such steps the “cruel manipulation of the poor,” a phrase he coined as part of his denunciation of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. King was then thinking about the American soldiers fighting and dying in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.”

Today, a similar “cruel manipulation” is playing out. For years, our leaders have invoked the myth of scarcity to justify inaction when it comes to widespread poverty, growing debt, and rising inequality in the United States. Now, some of them are calling for the spending of billions of dollars to functionally fund the bombardment and occupation of impoverished Gaza and a violent Israeli clampdown in the West Bank, not to speak of the possibility of a wider set of Middle Eastern wars. However, polling numbers suggest that a surprising number of Americans have seen through the fog of war and are perhaps coming to believe that our nation’s abundance should be used not as a tool of death but as a lifeline for poor and struggling people at home and abroad.

Not in Our Name

In a time of stifling darkness, one bright light over the last weeks has been the eruption of non-violent, pro-peace protests across the world. In Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, hundreds of thousands of people have hit the streets to demand a ceasefire, including possibly half a million people in London. Here in the U.S., tens of thousands of Americans have followed suit in dozens of cities, from New York to Washington, D.C., Chicago to San Francisco. No less important, those protest marches have been both multi-racial and multi-generational, much like the 2020 uprisings for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the countless other Black lives lost to police brutality.

Recently, close friends and colleagues sent me photos from a march in Washington where Jewish protesters demanded a ceasefire and held up signs with heartrending slogans like “Not in My Name,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “My Grief Is Not Your Weapon.” Ultimately, close to 400 people, including numerous rabbis, were arrested as they peacefully sang and prayed in a congressional office building, while David Friedman, ambassador to Israel under President Trump, hatefully tweeted: “Any American Jew attending this rally is not a Jew — yes I said it!” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia ludicrously claimed that they were leading an insurrection.

Two days later, my organization, the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, cosponsored a pro-peace march that drew a large crowd of Palestinians and Muslim-American families. At noon, about 500 protesters, a gorgeous, multicolored sea of humanity participated in the Jumma call to prayer in front of the U.S. Capitol. The following week, folks co-organized a pray-in at New York Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s office, using the phrase “ceasefire is the moral choice.” Faith and movement leaders offered prayers from their various religious traditions and displayed the names of people killed so far.

On October 27th, as Israel expanded its ground invasion of Gaza, I joined thousands of people in Grand Central Station to call for a #CeasefireNow, one of the largest demonstrations in New York since this most recent conflict broke out. Protests continued all week. And on November 4th, there was a mass rally and march in Washington, D.C., to call for an end to war and support the rights of Palestinians, with hundreds of organizations bridging a diversity of views and voices to plead for peace.

Those marches were an inspiring indication of the broad coalition of Americans who desperately want to prevent genocide in Gaza and dream of lasting peace and freedom in Israel/Palestine. At the lead are Palestinians and Jews who refuse to be used as pawns and prop-pieces by military hawks. Alongside them are many Americans all too aware that, though they might not be directly affected by the nightmarish events now unfolding in the Middle East, they are still implicated in the growing violence there thanks to their tax dollars and the actions of our government. Together, we are collectively crying out: “Not in Our Name.”

Such marches undoubtedly represent the largest antiwar mobilization since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and are weaving together diverse communities — young and old, Black, Brown, and White, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, poor and working-class — in a way that should prove encouraging indeed for a growing peace movement. Right now, there are new alliances and relationships being forged that will undoubtedly endure for years to come.

Yes, this remains a small victory in what’s likely to prove a terrifying global crisis, but it is a victory nonetheless.

Roses Dressed in Black

The last few weeks have resurrected traumatic memories for many Jews and Palestinians globally — of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the long history of Islamophobia, anti-Arab hate, anti-Jewish violence, and antisemitism. For many of us who are not Palestinian or Jewish, the recent mass death and violence have also triggered our own painful reckonings with the past.

I’m a descendant of Armenian genocide survivors. When I was a child growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I heard hushed tales of death marches, hunger, lack of water, barricaded roads, and harrowing escapes. Those stories remain etched into my consciousness, a mournful inheritance my dispossessed ancestors handed down.

My great-grandfather, Charles Ozun Artinian, fled his home in what is now Turkey’s Seyhan River valley after the 1909 Adana Massacre in which Ottoman militants killed 25,000 Armenian Christians. Part of his family escaped over the Caucasus Mountains into Western Europe. They then traveled halfway across the world to Argentina, because so many other nations, including the United States, had closed their borders to Armenian refugees and would only open them years later.

As he was fleeing Adana, Charles wrote a poem, one of the few surviving long-form poems from the region at the time. It begins:

“In the Seyhan valley there rises a smoke

Roses dressed in black, month of April cried

Cries of sadness and mourning were heard everywhere

Broken hearted and sad, everybody cried…”

My family taught my siblings and me that although the genocide against our people was carried out by the Ottoman Empire, it was made possible by the complicity and indifference of the international community, including the world’s richest and most powerful nations. Right now, the smoke rising over Gaza is suffocating and every additional hour the U.S. enables more bombs to fall and tanks to rumble, more roses will be, as my great-grandfather put it, dressed in black. Not only that, but with the detonation of each new American-made bomb, the conditions for the long-term freedom and safety of both Israelis and Palestinians are blasted ever more into rubble.

Let us honor the memories of our ancestors and finally learn the lesson of their many stolen lives: “Not In Our Name!,” “Peace and Justice for All!” and the pleas from Gaza, including “Ceasefire Now!,” “End the Siege,” “Protect Medical Facilities,” and “Gaza is Home!”

Via Tomdispatch.com

How America Abandoned our Poor: Confronting the Needless Scourge of Poverty

Liz Theoharis — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 04:02:55 +0000

( Tomdispatch.com ) – On the island of Manhattan, where I live, skyscrapers multiply like metal weeds, a vertical invasion of seemingly unstoppable force. For more than a century, they have risen as symbols of wealth and the promise of progress for a city and a nation. In movies and TV shows, those buildings churn with activity, offices full of important people doing work of global significance. The effect is a feeling of economic vitality made real by the sheer scale of the buildings themselves.

In stark contrast to those images of bustling productivity stands an outcropping of tall towers along the southern end of Manhattan’s Central Park. Built in the last 20 years, those ultra-luxury residential complexes make up what is unofficially known as “Billionaires’ Row.” The name is apt, considering that millionaires and billionaires have flocked to those buildings to buy apartments at unimaginably high prices.

In 2021, the penthouse on the 96th floor of 432 Park Avenue was listed at an astonishing $169 million (though its Saudi owner has since slashed the offering price to a mere $130 million). No less astonishing these days, such lavish, sky-high homes often sit empty. Rather than fulfilling any functional role, many serve as nothing more than speculative investments for buyers who hope, one day, to resell them for even higher prices, avoid taxes, or launder dirty money. For some among the super-rich, flush with more money than they know what to do with, Billionaires’ Row is simply an easy place to park their wealth.

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Those empty apartments cast a shadow over a city full of people in need of affordable housing and better wages. Reaching from the southern tip of Manhattan into Brooklyn lies the most economically unequal congressional district in the country. To the north, in the Bronx, sprawls the nation’s poorest district. Just last week, the New York Times reported that, based on 2022 census data, “the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites earned an average household income of $545,549, or more than 53 times as much as the bottom 20 percent, who earned an average of $10,259.”

In New York, where land is a finite resource and real estate determines so much, it is a cruel irony that the richest people in the world are using their capital to literally reach ever higher into the clouds, while back on earth, the average New Yorker, grimly ensconced in reality, lives paycheck to paycheck, navigating a constant storm of food, healthcare, housing, transportation and utility costs.

Abandonment Amid Abundance

Extreme economic inequality, characterized by a small class of the very wealthy and a broad base of poor and low-income people, may be particularly evident in cities like New York, but it’s a fact of life nationwide. In September 2023, the wealth of America’s 748 billionaires rose to $5 trillion, $2.2 trillion more than in 2017, the year the Trump administration passed massive tax changes favoring the rich. The new 2022 census data offers a very different picture of life for the nation’s poor in those same years. In fact, the numbers are eye-popping: between 2021 and 2022 alone, the overall Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) rose by nearly 5%, while child poverty doubled in size.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses two measurements of poverty: the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and that SPM. The OPM, it’s widely agreed, is shamefully feeble and outdated, while the Supplemental Poverty Measure casts a wider net, catching more of the nuances of impoverishment. Still, even that has its limitations, missing millions of people who flutter precariously just above the official threshold of poverty, constantly at risk of falling below it.

That said, the SPM remains a helpful barometer for this country’s attempts to address poverty. Shailly Gupta-Barnes, my colleague at the Kairos Center and a poverty policy expert, observes that, because the “SPM accounts for family income after taxes and transfers…, it shows the antipoverty effects of some of the largest federal support programs.” Considering that, it’s neither an accident, nor a fluke of the market that the SPM just skyrocketed at an historic rate.

The explanation isn’t even complicated. It’s because a number of highly effective Covid-era, anti-poverty programs were callously cut. (No matter that cases of Covid are again on the rise.) When the newest census figures were released in September 2023, Gupta-Barnes explained, “41% of Americans were poor or low-income in 2022, up significantly since 2021, mainly because of the failure to extend and expand tested anti-poverty programs including the child tax credit, stimulus checks, Medicaid expansion and more.”

The take-away from all of this seems clear enough. When the abundant resources of this society are mobilized to tackle poverty, it decreases; when we undermine those efforts, it increases. The more subtle, but equally important take-away: how we measure poverty has massive implications for how we understand human deprivation in our country. As it happens, tens of millions of people who live in regular economic peril are being made invisible by our very tools for measuring poverty. How, then, can we ever hope to address it in its entirety if we can’t even see the people suffering from its iron grip?

The View from the Bottom

In 2022, the official threshold for poverty was $13,590 per year for one person and $27,750 for a family of four — with about 38 million Americans falling below that threshold. That number alone should shock the conscience of a nation as wealthy and developed as ours. But the truth is that, from the beginning, the official poverty line has been based on an arbitrary and shallow understanding of human need.

First formulated in the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson’s administration introduced its War on Poverty, the Official Poverty Measure focuses primarily on access to food for its base line and doesn’t fully take into account other critical expenses like health care, housing, and transportation. It is based on an austere assessment of how much is too little for a person to meet all of his or her needs. Because of its inadequacy, millions of Americans badly in need of support have essentially been erased from the political calculus of poverty. More than half a century later, they still remain so, since the OPM has endured not only as a bureaucratic benchmark but as the authoritative reference point for poverty, influencing our conception of who is poor and, on a policy level, who actually qualifies for a range of public programs.

Since the 1960s, much has changed, even if the official poverty line has remained untouched. The food prices on which it’s based have skyrocketed beyond the rate of inflation, alongside a host of other expenses, including housing, gas, utilities, prescription medicine, college tuition, and now essential costs like internet and cell-phone plans.

Meanwhile, over the last four decades, wage growth has essentially stagnated. Since 1973, wages for the majority of workers have risen by just 9%, while actually falling for significant numbers of lower-income people. Productivity, on the other hand, continues to grow almost exponentially. As a result, workers are making comparatively less than their parents did, even though they may produce more for the economy.

This crisis of low pay is no accident. As a start, over the last 50 years, CEOs have taken ever bigger chunks for themselves out of their workers’ paychecks. In 1965, the average CEO made 21 times what his or her workers did. Today, that figure is 344 times more. The reason for such a dramatic polarization of wages and wealth (as so vividly on display in the current UAW strike) is a half-century of neoliberal policy-making intensely antagonistic to the poor and beneficial for the rich.

Over the decades, our economy has been completely reshaped, transforming the kinds of jobs most of us have and the ways we do them. Today, growing parts of our workforce are automated, non-unionized, low-wage, part-time and/or contracted out, often without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. No one, therefore, should be surprised to learn that such an increasingly stark division of labor and money is accompanied by an unprecedented $17 trillion in personal debt. (And now, with student debt repayments beginning again on October 1st, there is even more needless suffering for those so poor that their economic value is in the negatives.)

In 1995, the National Academy of Sciences recommended the Supplemental Poverty Measure as a new way of assessing poverty and, in 2011, the Census Bureau began to use the SPM. But even that is insufficient. As Gupta-Barnes explains, “Although a broader and preferred measure, the SPM poverty threshold still remains an incomplete estimate of poverty. For instance, according to the SPM, a four-person household with an income of $30,000 is not poor because they fall above the designated poverty threshold. This means that many households living just above the poverty threshold aren’t counted as poor, even though they will have a hard time meeting their basic needs.”

Indeed, right above the 38 million people in official poverty, there are at least 95 million to 105 million living in a state of chronic economic precariousness, just one pay cut, health crisis, or eviction from economic ruin. In other words, today, the low-wage, laid-off, and locked out can’t easily be separated from people of every walk of life who are being economically downsized and dislocated. The old language of social science bears little resemblance to the reality we now face. When the economically “marginalized” are being discussed, it’s all too easy to imagine small bands of people living in the shadows along the edges of society. Unfortunately, the marginalized are now a near-majority of this country.

Poverty Is a Policy Choice

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, even paralyzed, by such a reality. No one — billionaires aside — is immune from the dread-inducing gravity of the situation this country finds itself in. But here’s the strange thing: deep in the depths of such a monumental mess, it’s possible to discover genuine hope. For if our reality is human-made, as it surely is, then we also have the power to change it.

Ironically, during the pandemic years, before the poverty numbers rose dramatically again in 2022, it was possible to see a notable and noticeable reduction in the numbers of poor Americans exactly because of decisive government action. In 2021, for example, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) played leading roles in reducing child poverty to the lowest rates since the SPM was created. The protection and expansion of Medicaid and CHIP also helped mitigate food insecurity and hunger. The research firm KKF estimates that enrollment in those anti-poverty programs rose from “23.3 million to nearly 95 million from February 2020 to the end of March 2023.” And millions of families were able to stay in their homes and fight unlawful evictions during the first couple of years of the pandemic thanks to federal and state eviction moratoriums.

Unfortunately, these pandemic-era programs were sold to us as only temporary, emergency measures, though they were commonsensical policies that advanced the interests of millions of people who had been poor before Covid-19 struck. And unfortunately, alongside Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, congressional Republicans quickly rolled back some of the most striking advances, including letting CTC expire in 2022 (and they continue to advocate for ever greater cuts).

We are now in the midst of what pundits are calling the “great unwinding,” an awkward euphemism for deliberate, brutal reductions to Medicaid expansion in dozens of states. Since April, nearly six million people, including at least 1.2 million children, have been stripped of life-saving Medicaid coverage and estimates suggest that between 15 million and 24 million people may be disenrolled by next spring.

In (harsh) reality, there are at least these two interrelated ways in which poverty is a policy choice. How we choose to define poverty fundamentally shapes how we understand it, while how we govern has enormous consequences for the everyday lives of poor and low-income people. Right now, we’re either getting celebratory messages about the strength of our economy from Democrats or accusatory scapegoating from Republicans. In truth, though, the current bleak reality of poverty is the consequence of decades of neoliberal neglect and animus by both parties.

The pandemic years, sad as they have been, offered a small glimpse of what it would take to confront the needless scourge of poverty in a time of tremendous national wealth. Those investments could have been a first step in launching a full-scale assault on poverty, building off their embryonic success in the pandemic moment.

Instead, the consequences of the rollback of those programs and the threat of yet more cuts brings us to a potential turning point for the nation. Will we continue to condemn tens of millions of us to cruel and unnecessary poverty, while feeding the drive to authoritarianism or even an all-American version of fascism, or will we move swiftly and compassionately to begin lifting the load of poverty and so strengthen the very foundation of our democracy?

Tomdispatch.com