Archive for category: #Middleclass

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy thinks young people should earn the right to vote by joining the army, like in the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. It’s a political nonstarter, but it says a lot about how conservatives see the world.

A still from Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film Starship Troopers. (Tristar Pictures / Touchstone Pictures)

If you don’t know who Vivek Ramaswamy is, I don’t blame you. He’s currently hovering around third place in polls on the race for the Republican presidential nomination behind Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis — but it’s a distant third. And he’s been so reluctant to criticize the front-runner that I can’t help wondering if his real goal is to become Trump’s running mate.

Like Trump himself was in 2016, Ramaswamy is a wealthy businessman with no political experience. Like the rest of the Republican field, he wants to invade Mexico. The most distinctive thing about Ramaswamy is a policy position so extreme that his own campaign staff reportedly hates it. He wants to raise the minimum age for automatic voting rights to twenty-five.

That’s obviously pretty eyebrow-raising in itself, but what really caught my attention about Ramaswamy’s proposal is that it would allow some eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to get back their right to vote. They could earn it back by passing a civics test, becoming first responders, or joining the military.

The idea of earning the right to vote by joining the Army is hilariously reminiscent of Paul Verhoeven’s science-fiction classic Starship Troopers (1997). In the world of the movie, as viewers are told in bombastic public service announcements, “Service guarantees citizenship!”

Of course, Verhoeven knew he was making a dystopian satire. Ramaswamy is overruling his staffers’ concerns because this proposal represents his fondest political hope. And it’s one that reveals a lot about how the Right sees the world.

Ramaswamy vs. Young Voters

Plenty of Republican politicians have been willing to chip away at young people’s voting rights through such mechanisms as passing laws forcing college students to drive back to their hometowns if they want to register to vote. It’s not hard to see why — in the 2022 midterms, 63 percent of voters in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age range voted for Democrats.

But only a politician as eccentric as Ramaswamy would openly advocate the age group’s disenfranchisement. Actually implementing his proposal would take a constitutional amendment. It’s awfully hard to imagine that happening. And if there’s one thing that would get even fewer eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds to vote Republican, it would be nominating a candidate who openly said that he didn’t think they should be allowed to vote.

But as much of a nonstarter as it may be in those senses, so far it doesn’t seem to have disqualified him the eyes of Republican primary voters. Right now, Trump overwhelmingly dominates the race, with DeSantis coming in a distant second — but depending on which polls you’re looking at, Ramaswamy is doing about as well as or better than people like Nikki Haley, who used to be governor of South Carolina, and Mike Pence, who just three years ago was vice president of the United States. And it’s not impossible to imagine Ramaswamy actually getting Pence’s old spot on the 2024 Republican ticket. Stranger things have happened.

Whether his star continues to rise or not, though, so far other Republicans don’t seem to be treating Ramaswamy as a crank. And that’s interesting in itself.

Voting Rights and the Right

The majority of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds losing their voting rights is a stomach-churning idea. Millions of people who live on their own and work in workplaces regulated by labor laws and have their lives shaped by government policies in a thousand other ways would lose the right to shape those policies. But raising the age isn’t even the worst part of Ramaswamy’s proposal.

The idea that voting rights come with the transition from dependent childhood to relatively autonomous adulthood makes sense in a general way, but any specific cutoff is bound to feel a bit arbitrary. No one wants to extend the franchise to twelve-year-olds, and there has to be a cutoff somewhere, but there’s surely nothing magical about eighteen as opposed to, say, seventeen or nineteen. And the way we stagger the rights of adulthood in American society has little rhyme or reason to it — sixteen for driving, eighteen for voting, twenty-one for drinking or — in most states — renting a car. As much as twenty-five seems like an unreasonably late age for the most basic right of citizenship, I suppose I might feel differently if I hadn’t grown up in a society that set the bar seven years younger.

The part that’s much worse, and much more revealing about how many conservatives see the world, is that — starting with the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old age bracket — Ramaswamy’s fantasy is all about changing the way we think about voting rights. The fundamental premise of democracy is that everyone has a basic right to self-government.

Those of us on the socialist left take this idea to its logical conclusion. In the workplace no less than the political realm, we apply political theorist Michael Walzer’s maxim that what “touches all” should be “decided by all.” We don’t think some people should have more power over the shape of our collective existence than others just because they have enough money to own their own business.

But even more mainstream small-d democrats who wouldn’t go that far think that the right to have an input at least in political decisions is innate. Like, say, the right to free speech, you don’t need to do anything special to earn the right to have a say in decisions that impact you. It’s something everyone should have just for being a person.

The truth is that the Right, with its love of hierarchy and its instinct toward seeing politics through a prism of individual sin and individual virtue, has never been entirely comfortable with that idea. There’s something about the notion of making people jump through hoops to earn a right to have a say in their society’s collective decision-making that scratches a deep itch in the right-wing soul.

Robert Heinlein, Paul Verhoeven, and Vivek Ramaswamy

Science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein was certainly scratching that itch when he wrote the original Starship Troopers novel in 1959. Heinlein started out as a New Deal liberal, and even volunteered for democratic socialist Upton Sinclair’s campaign for governor of California in 1934. But he’d made a sharp turn to the right by the 1940s. He’s often thought of as a libertarian, which might imply anti-interventionism in foreign affairs. But in the 1950s, Heinlein was every inch a Cold Warrior, and that shows in Starship Troopers, where humans are engaged in a brutal and righteous war against an alien race of Arachnids (or “bugs”) who seem suspiciously, well, collectivist.

In the world of the novel, the only way for anyone — male or female, young or old — to become a citizen of the Terran Federation with a right to vote in the federation’s elections is through military service. The protagonist, Juan Rico, does exactly that, and the battle scenes make for a good read. But the lion’s share of the novel’s word count is taken up with lectures in which Heinlein’s ultra-militaristic ideology is put into the mouths of drill instructors, “History and Moral Philosophy” teachers, and other characters.

The genius of Verhoeven’s adaptation is that, first, he reverses this ratio, transforming his Starship Troopers into a much more entertaining story and, second, he brutally satirizes Heinlein’s militaristic authoritarianism even as he retains much of the original dialogue. Bombastic music, dark, over-the-top humor, and military imagery suspiciously reminiscent of the Third Reich make it abundantly clear what Verhoeven thinks of lines about how, for example, “the moral difference between a civilian and a citizen” is that a citizen “accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic.”

Vivek Ramaswamy would let civilians become citizens at the age of twenty-five — and even before then, he allows a couple of alternate routes to voting rights. A candidate for president, who may harbor real hopes for at least the VP slot and who in any case doesn’t want to be laughed off the debate stage, is bound to restrain his fantasies a bit more than a science-fiction novelist writing about warfare between humans and insect-like aliens seven centuries in the future.

But the instinct to see political power not as something everyone has a basic human claim to participate in, but a prize some are more worthy of than others, ties together Heinlein and Ramaswamy — and reflects a much deeper conservative impulse. So does the idea that warfare is a particularly worthy and virtuous activity.

Personally, I’ll take a hard pass on that vision. Peace and democracy may not stir the blood the way war and hierarchy do — but they’re infinitely better for us.

I love Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. And I’m sure a movie depicting a society where everyone’s needs are met and everyone has a meaningful say in collective decision-making would be far less entertaining to watch. But that’s the world I’d actually want to live in.

Jane Chung

Instead of perpetuating the Ponzi scheme of private property for some, we should be demanding economic security for all.

The post The Case Against Homeownership appeared first on The Nation.

William A. Galston

May 30, 2023 3:33 pm ET

Jake Sullivan speaks to the press at the White House, April 24.

Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press

Jake Sullivan,
President Biden’s national security adviser, delivered a speech in April about economic and foreign policy that deserves more attention. Mr. Sullivan crisply laid out a critique of what he regards as the excessively market-oriented policies of recent decades and offered an alternative, a “foreign policy for the middle class.”

His speech reflected fundamental changes in the American economy and political order over the past three decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, the Clinton administration (in which I served) was confident that the emerging global order of market economies and democratizing nations would benefit the U.S. and the world.

For a decade, events seemed to vindicate this view. The American economy grew vigorously, and the gains were shared broadly. U.S. manufacturing stabilized during the 1990s. Real wages grew, and, despite a surge in worker productivity, the U.S. ended the decade with as many manufacturing jobs as it had begun.

Then the bottom dropped out. Between January 2001 and the onset of the Great Recession in December 2007, the U.S. lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, about 20% of the total. By the end of the recession, another two million were lost. Most of these losses were permanent, devastating many small towns and rural areas.

These developments helped fuel the populist revolt that began with the tea party and culminated with
Donald Trump’s

election. They also challenged assumptions that had guided both political parties for a quarter-century. Support for free-trade agreements weakened, symbolized by Hillary Clinton’s shift on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an ambitious multinational pact she backed as secretary of state but repudiated during her presidential campaign. President Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese products entering the U.S. market.

With this history in mind, Mr. Sullivan led with a key assertion: Past policies have “hollowed out” America’s industrial base. At the heart of these policies were assumptions that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently, that the type of economic growth doesn’t matter, and that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open and the world more peaceful and cooperative.

Each assumption turned out to be partially false, he argued. When certain types of investments yield positive externalities—such as building an ecosystem of innovation—their benefits won’t be fully captured in market prices, which reduces investment in these sectors below optimal levels.

All growth is not created equal.

Michael Boskin,
chairman of George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, once said: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? A hundred dollars of one or a hundred dollars of the other is still a hundred dollars.” But the difference is obvious: Potato chips have consumer value but no strategic significance, and a sharp reduction in their availability would have no negative effect on other economic sectors.

Nor, Mr. Sullivan argued, had economic integration yielded the expected results. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization gave it all the advantages of access to America’s open markets without liberalization or democratization. The result: a “China shock” that hurt millions of American workers, the growth of China’s subsidized state sector, a turn back toward outright autocracy in Beijing—and a hardening of anti-Chinese sentiments across the American political spectrum.

At the heart of the response Mr. Sullivan proposed is a “modern American industrial strategy” that would invest public funds in sectors essential to economic innovation and national security—semiconductors, critical minerals and energy—as well as in traditional public goods such as infrastructure. “Our objective is not autarchy,” he said, “it’s resilience and security in our supply chains.” The point of new trade agreements is no longer tariff reduction but promoting national objectives—security, sustainable economic growth and the creation of good jobs that allow workers to support their families.

In effect, Mr. Sullivan has updated

Alexander Hamilton’s
1791 “Report on Manufactures,” adapting the first Treasury secretary’s strategy of promoting domestic manufacturing through protection for key industries, coupled with robust public investment.

The black population in the United States is roughly the size of the population of Spain. Yet too many ignore class differences and political complexities among millions of African Americans.

People participate in a march in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter and to commemorate the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth on June 19, 2020 in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

At forty-seven million, the African American population in the United States is roughly equivalent to that of Spain. Despite the size of one of America’s largest minorities, discussions of black politics tend to be reductive and ahistorical. In cavalier fashion, critics of racism chart a long line of oppression that has its origin in the United States’ earliest days. Similarly, the forces that have, according to the dominant view of American racism, sought to oppose this monolithic racial tyranny have all fought under the single banner of “the black liberation struggle.”

Admittedly, these attempts to examine the history of discrimination offer correctives to right-wing defenses of forms of ascriptive hierarchy. However, they do so at the cost of flattening the complexities of actually existing black politics. This approach ignores, the political theorist Adolph Reed Jr tells Jacobin, that black politics is not immune from the economic and class forces which have and continue to shape American politics more broadly.

Jennifer C. Pan

You’ve been a longtime critic of the notion of a cohesive or transhistorical “black freedom movement,” or the idea that one can trace an unbroken line from the fight to abolish slavery to the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. Why isn’t this framework helpful for understanding black politics either now or in the past?

Adolph Reed

When people talk about something called the “black freedom movement” or the “black liberation struggle” or the “long civil rights movement,” they’re rehashing an old trope that goes back to the beginnings of the study of black American political history and black American political thought. At that time, that construct was called something like the “Negro’s struggle for freedom” or “Negro’s quest for equality.” Both then and now, the construct presumes, first of all, that black people are a singular collective entity. It also presumes an overarching struggle where black people have always unanimously wanted the same thing, and that whatever disagreements you might encounter if you go through the archives of black politics are just disagreements within a fundamentally shared commitment.

Any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it obscures class differentiation among black Americans.

So the main problem with the idea of a timeless black freedom movement is that it’s a single-thread narrative and a reduction of a much more complex reality. The narrative posits racial unity as the essential foundation for understanding black people and constructs and imposes an anti-historical understanding of black people’s experiences in American political life. It defines black people as being somehow outside of history and collapses differences in historical moments by presuming that people are fighting for the same things in 2020 that they were fighting for in 1860 — or 1619, for God’s sake — which is absurd.

Jennifer C. Pan

Why do you think people find this idea of a singular and cohesive black freedom movement so compelling?

Adolph Reed

I think there are several reasons. One is simply that people have heard it over and over, so it seems to comport with commonsense knowledge. It’s a framework that gives you the familiar dyads of Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois, Du Bois versus Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr. That’s convenient for people who don’t think there’s anything complex that goes on among black people.

Then there are people who have an interest in propagating the narrative. The black freedom movement construct has always functioned to obscure real distinctions among black people. Fundamentally, the most aggressive and insistent proponents of this view have been people who are pushing a class program: any interpretation of black politics that doesn’t account for political conflict among black people — as opposed to politics between black people and everyone else — is intrinsically a class politics because it’s part of a discourse of what Barbara Fields and Karen Fields call racecraft, which obscures class differentiation among black Americans, with or without conscious intent. If the black freedom movement narrative were even a reasonably accurate account of black American political history, then you could say, okay, well, it doesn’t hurt to talk about it. But it’s not. It’s false and it works for the other side.

The alternative to this kind of simplistic approach is to recognize that black people, like all people, live within historical circumstances. They’re diverse and have different interests and perceptions, not only at different points in time, but also at the same point. That was true in the nineteenth century and even true to some extent in the eighteenth century. It’s certainly true after Emancipation and once black people were able to claim some kind of civic participation, however badly the deck may have been stacked against them. Eric Foner has compiled a list of black people who held elected office in the South by the end of Reconstruction, and there were hundreds of people who had been elected to all kinds of offices. And that suggests that there was a lively culture of political debate and struggle, and that blacks engaged with nonblacks, as they always have and continue to do today.

It really comes down to following an injunction from Ralph Ellison: he cautioned observers of American life against the tendency to believe things about black people that they would not believe about any other human beings.

Jennifer C. Pan

How, then, should we think about black politics now, particularly after the 2020 racial reckoning?

Adolph Reed

I’m probably getting more crotchety by the day, but I would almost argue at this point that the most crucial racial reckoning in US history was at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, in 1864.

Anyway, to answer your question, at the beginning of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, Touré [Reed] was talking to a mutual friend and colleague who was part of the campaign’s inner circle and encouraged the campaign not to concentrate on pursuing something called the “black vote” as much as they could possibly avoid it. His argument was that what we think of as “black politics” today is a class-specific interest-group politics that’s rooted entirely in the black professional and managerial strata, whose approach to political life is race reductionist. It’s an elite-driven activity that really has no base at all. And the reality is that once you start catering to the idea of a coherent “black vote” or “black community,” it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.

Once you start catering to the idea of a coherent ‘black vote’ or ‘black community,’ it’s going to drag you down and lead to demise.

And then there’s the Potemkin thing that happens whenever there’s a police atrocity or some other outrage: people respond to the outrage with protest actions, and then somebody who’s articulate and MSNBC-ready jumps out in front of the protest and talks to the media and is declared the new voice of the black youth or the rising wave of the future.

The dynamic of outrage and protests as a response is at least a half-century old. In fact, when Touré was an infant and we lived in Atlanta, I got to see that role acted out firsthand in the local political scene by Hosea Williams, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr whose political persona was all about being true to the activist roots of the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. Whenever there was something like a police shooting, Hosea would march it off — he’d jump out and lead a protest march someplace. And then he’d go inside and essentially negotiate payoffs with the people who were in charge. And I’d already seen the same thing happen when I lived in North Carolina before I went to graduate school. So it’s not anything new, but it’s hegemonic at this point.

There’s another tendency in this type of politics that I trace back to the buildup to the anti-WTO demos in Seattle in 1999. There were activists during that moment who complained that the movement was too white and wasn’t doing enough to reach out to affected “communities.” And I’d say to people, look, if there’s some constituency that isn’t involved that you think ought to be — and you purport to have connections to that constituency — then the thing to do is for you to go out and organize them and bring them into the movement.

Well, of course nobody who was complaining actually wanted that; what they wanted was just the opposite. They wanted to represent or embody the amorphous, voiceless masses. And that’s really the only context — that and nineteenth-century race theory — within which it makes sense to assume that the black American population, which is bigger than the entire population of Canada, can be spoken for in the first person plural.

Jennifer C. Pan

You and Walter Benn Michaels have a new book out, No Politics But Class Politics. Over the years you’ve both been sharply critical of the tendency to focus on racial disparities. While there do exist plenty of liberals whose idea of justice is a diverse ruling class, what would you tell leftists who oppose the capitalist order but also want to take racism seriously? What does it mean to fight racism today?

Adolph Reed

Of course we should do what we can to protect and buttress the antidiscrimination apparatus, which includes an affirmative dimension. But this might also be of interest to readers:

In 1945, when the Full Employment Bill was still in play in Congress, the civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray wrote an article in the California Law Review on employment discrimination. In the article, she addresses the argument that you have to fight racism or discrimination before you can win social democracy. She points out that the reality is that racism becomes most politically viable in conditions of scarcity: when jobs are scarce, that’s when people get anxious, and that’s when employers and right-wingers can mobilize the anxiety. And so Murray argues that because of that, the only way to move forward as black workers is to win the social democratic reforms — in particular, at that moment, the struggle for a real political commitment to ground national economic policy on the pursuit and maintenance of a full employment economy — and that those are ultimately even more important than the antidiscrimination measures themselves.

Most people in this country who work for a living need the same things, right? And we don’t necessarily need to have a fight over what happened in 1860, or a fight over what happened in 1890, or even 1920, or even 1960 to recognize that we all need economic security, health care, jobs, and education. And the way for us to get to those things is to articulate our needs and to come together around the things we have in common.

When the anti-racist sensibility now is that making a reference to the working class is somehow conceding to white racism, it’s pretty clear what the class character of this politics is. And this is even before you start counting up all the billions of corporate and investor-class dollars that have gone to Black Lives Matter and other nominal antiracist activist groups since the murder of George Floyd.

So it’s time for us to stop playing around and to be serious and hardheaded about this. Especially for those of us who are professors, part of our job is trying to get the story straight, to demystify the mystifications. That’s what we do for a living, right? Otherwise, we should all just go to church.

There’s no reason to venerate the framers of the US Constitution. The document they created was explicitly designed to check the democratic will of ordinary people and protect the plutocratic interests of the propertied elite.

The US Constitution was designed to protect capitalist social relations from democratic challenge. (Getty Images)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the notorious far-right congressperson from Georgia, recently made headlines for her call for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. This did not stop her, of course, from showing up in lower Manhattan to protest the arraignment of former president Donald Trump and to garner more media coverage for herself.

Whether the likes of Taylor Greene actually believe what they say is somewhat beside the point. Such calls for a national breakup are a recurrent feature of US politics — we fought one of history’s bloodiest civil wars in the 1860s — and remind us of the uneasy compromises that underpinned the drafting of the Constitution in 1787.

US political culture venerates the Constitution for its supposed genius in setting up a system of government that could last forever, if only we could abide by its timeless wisdom. The conflict and dysfunction that plagues our political system, in this view, stems from a heedless disregard of the framers’ intentions, not the system itself.

This view still predominates, but there seems to be a growing sense that a constitutional framework established in the late eighteenth century may not be up to dealing with the challenges of the twenty-first. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for example, has been writing a running commentary on our “constitutional stagnation” and what might be done to break out of it.

Robert Ovetz is a lecturer in political science at San José State University. His new book, We the Elites: Why the US Constitution Serves the Few, provides a detailed but accessible critique of the Constitution as a system designed to protect capitalist social relations from democratic challenge. Our constitutional system, Ovetz argues, cannot address the many crises we face because it was designed precisely to frustrate and contain collective action, not facilitate it.

He spoke to Jacobin’s Chris Maisano about the book, whether meaningful change can be achieved through the current political system, and potential alternatives rooted in decentralized, directly democratic political institutions.

Chris Maisano

There seems to be renewed interest in constitutional questions on the Left today. Why do you think that is?

Robert Ovetz

We’re seeing a resurgence of class struggle in the United States. I think there’s some dissatisfaction following the past two elections and the failure to get important legislation passed. Many of the people who have been involved with electing democratic socialists to Congress and trying to get Bernie Sanders the Democratic presidential nomination are turning toward labor organizing because they see things are blocked in terms of being able to elect the right person and having that result in meaningful changes in policy.

Also, the long-running crises we face continue to go unaddressed — gun violence, climate catastrophe, homelessness, explosion of housing costs, low wages, anti-union repression. As a result, people are looking for a more systematic explanation and analysis for why we can’t get things done. We’re starting to look at the design and organization of the political process itself.

Chris Maisano

Walk us through some of the main themes and arguments of your book.

Robert Ovetz

We can’t understand our undemocratic constitution without understanding our capitalist constitution. Many who write about the Constitution don’t take its political economy into account. As someone who teaches political science, we often focus on the rules, procedures, and processes.

But what I argue in the book is that the framers (who are also called the “Founders” or “Founding Fathers,” a term I greatly dislike) designed a system that protects the interest of property. There are what I call “minority checks” throughout the Constitution that constrain political democracy and prevent economic democracy. The “minority” they sought to protect are not who we think of today as ethnic, racial, and gender minorities, but the minority of the propertied elite.

We can’t understand our undemocratic constitution without understanding our capitalist constitution.

Chris Maisano

The Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, the country’s first system of government after the end of the Revolutionary War. Historians call the 1780s the “Critical Period” because there was a lot of social, economic, and political conflict that put the future of the new country in question. Why did the framers feel the need to come up with a new system to replace the Articles?

Robert Ovetz

The Critical Period was a time when economic elites were kicked back on their heels in many states. They were losing some significant battles in what I call the three insurrections.

First, there were slave rebellions, which escalated during the revolution. Remember that most of the slaves that ran away joined up with the loyalists and the British, and the rebellions continued when the fighting stopped. Next, there was organized Native resistance to white settler colonialism. Out in the West, Native peoples were getting organized into a confederation to resist the theft of land and genocidal attacks.

Finally, there were uprisings of small white subsistence farmers, who for the most part were outside the cash economy. They grew what they ate. They were in conflict with large commercial farmers, merchants, bankers, and traders. And in some states, they were a powerful force to be reckoned with.

They organized their own political parties, and if they could meet the property requirements to serve in office, they or their allies would get elected. They were able to pass some significant forms of economic democracy in their state legislatures under the Articles of Confederation — things like debt relief and land banks that provided cheap loans to small farmers using their land as collateral. They issued paper money and allowed it to be used to pay private and public debts. Some states taxed imported goods from other states to generate revenue and lower taxes on the local population.

The framers were extremely concerned about these three insurrections. They referred to the economic majority as the “meaner sort of people,” or my favorite phrase, the “people out of doors.” They thought the people who were literally outside working with their hands and getting them dirty should not be inside the meeting rooms with their hands on the levers of power.

The framers thought the people who were literally outside working with their hands and getting them dirty should not be inside the meeting rooms with their hands on the levers of power.

This was a short period after a revolutionary period of upheaval when ordinary people shared power with elites. Because some states were unicameral with short terms, few had an executive veto, and none had judicial review, it was easier to pass new laws quickly. State laws were the final word because Congress didn’t have “supremacy” power or judicial review. While they still had property requirements to run for and serve in office, these democratic elements are mostly missing from our current Constitution. This is not to idealize the states but to show how the Constitution was a reactionary outcome to the revolution.

Chris Maisano

People on the Left have usually seen the state and local governments as bastions of reactionary power and sought federal government intervention against them. The Constitution created the federal government that has often played a progressive role in US history, in relation to the states in particular.

Robert Ovetz

During the 1950 to 1960s, the center left looked to the courts and the federal government. But conservatives also used federal power to intervene against liberal or progressive states to shoot down what they were trying to do. Each side uses Article VI federal “supremacy” power when they have it to intervene and suppress any attempts at innovation by the other side.

We should forget about the partisan use of supremacy power and think about why the federal government has it at all. The center left sees supremacy power as something we can use to push our policy demands forward. But the reality is that the framers inserted the supremacy power into the Constitution because they wanted to give a minority check to propertied interests to block innovations at the state level that threatened property.

Instead of deciding which level of government is “best,” we need to look at why the federal government gets the final say in our system. This was intentional, because the framers wanted to have a brake on democracy from below to prevent any movement that today we would call socialism.

Chris Maisano

You briefly mentioned the national debt earlier, but it was such an important issue that we should talk about it in more depth. The country had huge debts coming out of the Revolutionary War and was having trouble paying them off. Why did the framers feel they needed an entirely new federal government to address the national debt?

Robert Ovetz

The revolution was very costly. They borrowed, by Alexander Hamilton’s estimates, several hundred million dollars — and that’s the valuation from the 1780s, not adjusted dollars.

The states and Congress issued multiple types of IOUs and paper money. They also borrowed money from the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French. The Confederation Congress actually defaulted on a loan by the French shortly after the revolution ended. Because there wasn’t enough gold and silver in circulation, paper money was needed to get economic activity going. Furthermore, economic elites were on a capital strike because they refused to borrow or invest, and foreign loans stopped. This was a period of deep fiscal and financial crisis.

An early 20th-century portrayal of Daniel Shays’s forces fleeing from federal troops after an attempt to lay siege to the Springfield Arsenal in Amherst, Massachusetts. (Wikimedia Commons)

Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress didn’t have the power to tax. So they would tell the states, this is how much you have to contribute to the national treasury — what was then called “requisitions.” They didn’t even have a good way of figuring out what each state’s share should be. Each of the states pretty much paid its share during the revolution, but when the fighting stopped, most stopped paying in full or at all. As a result, Congress couldn’t pay its debt and went into default with France. Only a few of the states were able to pay off all or some of the debts by using internal tariffs called “imposts.”

In some states, like Massachusetts, the conservatives tried to impose numerous taxes on the economic majority to generate the revenue to repay creditors. That triggered the famous Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, by small white subsistence farmers who were Revolutionary War veterans. When creditors tried to foreclose on their farms and meager possessions, they put on their old uniforms, took up arms, and marched on local courthouses in the western part of the state to shut them down.

The taxes were very unpopular because many farmers were mad they were never paid for fighting in the revolution — they were “paid” with those IOUs. Desperate for cash, many small creditors sold their IOUs to creditors, and soon most of those IOUs ended up in the hands of a very small number of rich speculators. One of the most famous speculators was Abigail Adams, the wife of soon-to-be-vice-president John Adams. Although they bought the IOUs for pennies on the dollar, the speculators demanded them to be paid at their face value from when they were originally issued, not at what they paid or their depreciated value.

There was a lot of political opposition to raising taxes to enrich the speculators. This was widely seen in class terms as an attempt to redistribute wealth upward that would result in many losing their land and being forced into wage work — what Karl Marx later called “primitive accumulation.” Also, the Congress was unable to pay not only rank-and-file soldiers but also officers, which almost resulted in an attempted coup by military officers when the fighting stopped.

This all leads to the Constitutional Convention, in which the issue that’s discussed over and over is how to address the demands of the creditors. This is achieved in the Constitution by establishing a stable government that can set up, manage, and protect the capitalist economy. In Article I, the regulation of interstate and foreign commerce and contracts and the establishment of bankruptcy laws are moved from state to federal authority. Now Congress exclusively has that power. Authority to repay debts and the power to issue money is taken from the states and given to Congress, preventing the states from printing or coining their own money anymore. Article VI says that all debts are the responsibility of the new federal government and must be paid by it.

Once Hamilton became the first secretary of the treasury, the national debt became the means of creating what he called the public credit system, which allowed the federal government to roll over outstanding debts. Hamilton received approval from Congress to consolidate the debt and roll it over into new interest-bearing bonds at very generous rates. This transformed the economic elites of the separate states with various competing interests into a single ruling class with shared economic interests.

The Act of the Maryland legislature to ratify the Articles of Confederation, February 2, 1781. (Wikimedia Commons)

Hamilton also got Congress to authorize the creation of the First Bank of the United States, a semiprivate bank that held all the federal revenue and debts of the federal government. The federal government would now collect taxes and use that revenue to pay the creditors — the same way it works today. From that revenue they also vastly expanded the military and ensured the consolidation of a stable national government.

And as Hamilton argued, this public credit system — in actuality, a publicly funded private financial system — was a prerequisite for creating a new empire. The first targets of the newly expanded, tax-funded military were the native peoples arming themselves in the West against genocidal settler colonialism and insurrectionary white subsistence farmers resisting primitive accumulation. To understand why the United States became the dominant economic and military power in the world, you have to understand how the Constitution provided the tools by which such power was created, and Hamilton immediately put them into action.

Chris Maisano

Every US movement for social change after the founding period has run into the question of what to do about the Constitution. There were huge debates, for example, in the abolitionist movement over whether the Constitution was a proslavery or antislavery document. People like William Lloyd Garrison denounced it as a “covenant with death,” but others like Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglass argued that it provided resources to restrict the growth of slavery and ultimately end it.

Robert Ovetz

The abolitionist debate is essentially repeated in every powerful movement of every generation: does the Constitution allow for systemic change, or tinkering around the edges with reforms that do not threaten the structure of political power and the capitalist economy? If the Constitution does not allow us to make the changes we need, should we try to bypass it and go a different direction?

Here I fall on Garrison’s side. He made the excellent point that slavery was well protected throughout the Constitution — it’s mentioned about twenty different times without actually using the word “slave” or “slavery” anywhere. They use all kinds of euphemisms, like “Person held to Service or Labour” in Article IV and “other persons” in other places.

This all leads to the Constitutional Convention, in which the issue that’s discussed over and over is how to address the demands of the creditors.

Remember that we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, when the Confederate states were outside the union. The film Lincoln gets a lot of things wrong, but it shows how hard it was to get the amendment through Congress even when most of the slave states weren’t in Congress. Abolition ultimately required this rupture that we call the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, many more maimed for life, and half of the country burned to the ground to overcome the impediments the Constitution put in the way of abolishing slavery.

Fast forward to today: when we attempt to change policy at the state level it’s overturned at the federal level because the courts use the supremacy clause. In the last two chapters of the book, I ask what we can do about the Constitution. We essentially have three choices. Two of the options are in the Constitution itself. Article V establishes the process for amending the Constitution and for calling a constitutional convention. But those are really long shots because of the high supermajority thresholds for all four methods. We’ve had over ten thousand officially introduced constitutional amendments in our country’s history, but only 27 of them were successful — about one-quarter of one percent. The extremely high threshold in the Article V amendment process is an effective minority check that has rarely been overcome.

The same goes for calling a constitutional convention. Right now, there’s an effort to call a constitutional convention backed by the last active living Koch brother. That’s very dangerous for the Left. If they succeed, we are likely to be beaten badly. They are outorganizing and certainly outspending us. A constitutional convention is not going to make any changes in our favor right now.

Instead, we need to use the same strategy the framers did when they bypassed the Articles of Confederation. We need to design a new system of direct democratic self-governance. Instead of creating a new constitutional system, I argue, we can design a decentralized confederation of local and regional worker-controlled economic democracies. It would involve people organizing themselves to take over the economy in a general strike and transform it through direct democracy to serve the interest and the needs of the many rather than the interest of property.

Abolition ultimately required this rupture that we call the Civil War, in which half of the country burned to the ground to overcome the impediments the Constitution put in the way of abolishing slavery.

Chris Maisano

I can imagine a reader agreeing with your critique of the Constitution while also being very skeptical of the alternative strategy you just proposed.

Robert Ovetz

It’s occasionally possible to make change under the Constitution if it doesn’t threaten the supremacy of property. We have to be careful about how our demands get diffused, diluted, and translated as they are transformed into regulations. When laws are passed, we tend to forget about them and move on to the next issue. But in the meantime, they get challenged in the courts and the regulatory bodies create new administrative law. And over time, those laws get transformed and turned into something very different.

Before we advocate for reform, we need to address the problem of why so many people become dissatisfied with the political process. Every election cycle we become hopeful and energetic. We get involved and we elect people to office who have the intention of doing many great things. And even if we do get good things done, they ultimately don’t turn out to be what we expected them to be.

The Constitution was designed with all these pitfalls and roadblocks that make it very difficult to get the changes we need unless we give the economic elites what they want so they no longer block it. This is how the economic minority is empowered by the Constitution to impede political democracy and prevent economic democracy.

I live in California, where we’ve been hit by several atmospheric rivers in the last few months. We don’t have time to negotiate with the fossil fuel companies, because they have blocked everything that has been proposed or gutted it when it gets passed. We have to understand the Constitution as the main impediment to making urgently needed systemic changes. We are long past due for a new political strategy that bypasses the constitutional system altogether if we are going to survive.

Sasha Abramsky

A new federal proposal mandates strict cuts on water usage in states reliant on the Colorado River.

The post The American West Is Running Out of Water appeared first on The Nation.

With the publication of “Organizing Against Autocracy in the US,” Convergence aimed to stimulate the conversation about just what this organizing would look like. Here Aditi Juneja, who has spent the last several years in democracy-protection work, asks us to widen the lens through which we view that task. The work of protecting liberal democracy has grown since the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Source

Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation’s fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking. “Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer’s…

Source

Labor leader Chris Smalls, president of Amazon Labor Union, speaks during the Labor Notes conference, in Chicago, Illinois. Smalls organized an Amazon Warehouse on Staten Island, New York, after being fired

Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

As tensions within the union grew, Smalls was caught on camera fighting an Amazon worker outside a warehouse last year.

On the night of December 5, the president of the Amazon Labor Union pummeled another union member. He did it in front of the only Amazon warehouse to vote in favor of unionization.

As Christian Smalls landed blows to James “Most” Daley’s upper body, Derrick Palmer, the union’s vice president, tried to hold Daley back, a video of the incident obtained by Insider shows.

“Ain’t that supposed to be our union rep, acting like a damn fool out there?” a bystander said as the fight broke up. “Did you all vote for the union? Really? Really?”

The whole thing had gone down in view of dozens of people standing at a bus stop outside of the JFK8 Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York.

The fight was the culmination of months of tension between Smalls and Daley, 37, a former Amazon Labor Union organizer whom Smalls had lauded earlier last year for convincing coworkers to vote in favor of unionization.

The men had a fraught history, and Daley had been threatening Smalls for months, according to messages Daley shared with Insider and interviews with two other ALU organizers. On that December day, Daley initiated physical contact with Smalls, Daley said in an interview with Insider. The video shows Daley moving aggressively toward Smalls. Daley can also be seen taking swings, though it’s not clear if he landed blows on Smalls.

The root of their disagreement, though, was related to Smalls’ ascendant fame — which many Amazon Labor Union organizers feel has overshadowed his responsibilities to the union he helped found.

That sentiment has contributed to a rift within the union that goes beyond the dramatic confrontation with Daley, pitting Smalls loyalists against those who believe the union would be better served without him. The fracture deepened after a December 9 meeting, The New York Times reported, in which Smalls told people who did not support him to leave.

“You got a problem with me? Deuces,” he told union organizers in that meeting, the Times reported. Some longtime Amazon Labor Union organizers decided to begin organizing on their own, without Smalls.

Since the union’s victory last April in Staten Island, Smalls has risen to celebrity status as the face of a newly resurgent labor movement. With a shoestring budget and little formal labor-organizing experience, the Amazon Labor Union had scored a rare victory against a corporate behemoth that has spent millions in an attempt to sway union votes.

The feat propelled Smalls onto magazine covers and red carpets. Smalls was invited to the White House to meet President Joe Biden, who told Smalls the labor leader was his “kind of trouble.” Smalls and Palmer were named two of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022. Both have received book deals, and Smalls has a Hollywood agent, according to IMDb Pro.

But as Smalls’ prominence has grown over the past three years, he has repeatedly come into conflict with fellow labor activists and has often responded to criticism by ostracizing his critics. Drawing on interviews, chat logs, and text exchanges, an Insider investigation found many organizers he has worked with view him as a threat to the success of the union and more focused on personal fame than the workers he represents. These incidents paint a portrait of Smalls’ leadership that is very different from his carefully cultivated image of a beloved labor leader with a unique ability to organize disenfranchised workers.

Over the past year Smalls has also dealt with personal issues that include failure to pay child support and spending a three-day stint in a New Jersey jail.

Workers who support Smalls say his fame is propelling the union’s success, not hampering it. To them, his critics are simply upset that their attempted “coup” didn’t work, and recent media coverage of union infighting is a last ditch attempt from a losing side. Smalls is “helping to inspire” workers to unionize, ALU staffer Evangeline Byars said, and his increased status is a byproduct of managing to take on Amazon when no one else could.

“Someone’s gotta be a potential star in this thing,” said Gerald Bryson, another of Smalls’ close allies. “It happens to be Chris. He’s the one who got us where he’s at.”

Smalls dismisses the notion that he is personally famous. Union organizing, he said, is grueling work. His union salary was less than $30,000 last year, financial disclosures show.

“Just because I meet celebrities don’t make me a celebrity,” he said in an interview surrounded by several of his supporters at the ALU’s union hall, a small suite of professional offices in a wooded area of Staten Island. “I don’t even have health insurance.”

‘We are starting a revolution’

Smalls, 34, rose to national prominence as the face of the fight against Amazon in 2020. During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, he organized a walkout of the Staten Island warehouse where he worked to protest what he said were Amazon’s lax safety measures.

Executives at Amazon’s highest levels took notice.

In one meeting, Amazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, derided Smalls as “not smart or articulate,” and proposed making him the face of labor activism at Amazon in order to weaken the legitimacy of workers’ demands, according to a meeting memo obtained by Vice. (Zapolsky later said his emotions got the better of him.)

joe biden christian smalls white house union meeting President Joe Biden invited Smalls to the White House last May.

The White House

Zapolsky’s remarks generated an outpouring of support for Smalls and his nascent workers’ movement. Smalls had just been fired by Amazon over what he said were his organizing efforts, and he seemed prepared to continue taking the fight to the corporate behemoth. (Amazon has said Smalls was fired for returning to work while in quarantine after having been exposed to a colleague who had coronavirus.)

“We are starting a revolution and people around the country support us,” Smalls wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian at the time.

Smalls founded a group called The Congress of Essential Workers that traveled from city to city to stage protests, including in front of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ homes in Beverly Hills, Seattle, and Washington, DC. Smalls’ courage in taking on one of the largest corporations in the world got him the attention of other labor groups and longtime activists, some of whom joined the Congress, which by the fall of 2020 numbered about 35 people.

Within that organization, though, concerns were growing about Smalls’ leadership.

In late 2020, a group of 15 people involved in the Congress published an open letter criticizing Smalls’ failure to file for nonprofit status, establish financial transparency, and take steps to ensure the safety of protesters at a rally, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Insider.

“Smalls has created a culture of resistance to infrastructure and documentation,” they wrote. “As a result of this avoidance, we have no organization. We have nothing tangible to offer essential workers — no financial assistance, no substantial legal aid, no resources. We cannot even help our own struggling Amazon employee members.”

Smalls told them to stand behind him or leave.

“I don’t owe anyone anything,” Smalls texted dozens of people in the organization’s group chat, according to a transcript of the chat obtained by Insider. He added he was not “obligated to show proof to those who’ve been conspiring behind my back.”

“Those who I hope to have helped turned on me for what is really nonsense,” he wrote, telling people who disagreed with him to “just simply dismiss yourself.”

The signatories, who were mostly women, queer people, and people of color, some with extensive organizing experience, quietly left the organization, according to interviews with three of them. All three said they believe in Smalls’ mission and support the goals of the Amazon Labor Union, but worry about Smalls’ ability to lead.

“To see someone who I believe to be abusing their power, an emperor with no clothes, continue to gain traction was not only painful, but also to see the Amazon Labor Union, or the movement in general continue to grow, I’m like how do I speak to what I experienced without discrediting the entire movement?” said one of the organizers who criticized Smalls in 2020.

Chris Smalls’ rise to fame

Smalls has placed himself at the center of the Amazon Labor Union and its success, a portrayal that has been amplified in the media.

“This movement started from what happened to me,” he wrote in a 2020 Congress of Essential Workers group chat. In Politico, he was “the ex-rapper who made unionizing cool again.” In the New York Times, Smalls and Palmer were “the two best friends who beat Amazon.” Time Magazine wondered if Smalls was the future of the labor movement.

Chris Smalls Smalls on the red carpet for an event honoring Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2022.

Angela Weiss/Getty Images

Those characterizations struck some ALU organizers as erasing their painstaking work building support for the union among Amazon employees. And while the ALU had scored one early, momentous success at JFK8, elsewhere, it appeared the union’s momentum was fizzling.

Losses at a warehouse next to JFK8, called LDJ5, and at another warehouse in Albany, where workers voted against joining the Amazon Labor union last year, exacerbated the sense among some ALU organizers that Smalls’ rising public profile was a double-edged sword.

The history of labor movements often includes charismatic figures who become celebrities in their own right, to both the benefit and detriment of their unions. Leaders like Smalls can bring momentum and attention to organizing efforts, but can also become untethered from the difficult work of securing contracts and sustaining organizing efforts, three labor experts and historians told Insider.

“It’s not uncommon that people who build something are not necessarily the most equipped to run it,” said Miriam Pawel, the author of books about labor leader Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

Among the organizers who bristled at Smalls’ increasing status, Daley was especially incensed. In a New York Magazine cover story profiling Smalls, Daley publicly criticized Smalls, saying he had become self-centered and suggesting he was unfit to lead.

Daley and Smalls had gotten along well until about a week after the election, Daley said. In a press conference on April 8, a week after the union won its historic vote at JFK8, Smalls introduced Daley by saying he’d seen Daley “call people on his damn phone and say, ‘You better get your butt down here and vote for this union.'” (Smalls has since downplayed his compliments for Daley, telling Insider, “I praise everybody.”)

The next day, Smalls, Daley, and a handful of other Amazon Labor Union organizers attended a luncheon in Albany hosted by state legislators to feature labor leaders. Daley took a photo with Mayor Eric Adams.

The Amazon Labor Union organizers returned to New York City that day. Smalls stayed behind. Daley and others later learned he had attended an exclusive after-party by himself. To them, it felt like Smalls was leaving them behind to enjoy the fruits of fame. Daley called Smalls out in an Instagram message. Smalls deflected. “What party?” Smalls wrote in a message to Daley. “Don’t make up shit bro if you don’t know.”

Smalls celebrates with Amazon Labor Union organizers after winning a unionization vote at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, the first and only Amazon warehouse to vote to unionize.

ANDREA RENAULT/AFP via Getty Images

Daley responded to Smalls with threats, two other ALU members said, and was kicked off the union’s messaging platforms and uninvited to meetings.

Over Instagram, Daley sent Smalls hostile messages over a period of several months, according to a messaging history Daley shared with Insider.

“Listen and listen real good,” Daley wrote, telling Smalls to “stop trying to play with my intelligence” and warning that “there won’t be any talking.” Daley also sent an Instagram reel of a person pretending to punch and kick the camera. “Finally caught up with my coworker that been talking sh*t about me,” text overlaying the video read. (Daley said he’d originally received that video from someone loyal to Smalls and sent it to Smalls as an example of the type of harassment he was receiving.)

Amazon suspended Palmer while investigating the fight, Palmer said, ultimately reinstating him. His supporters at the ALU offices pointed to Palmer’s reinstatement as proof he wasn’t in the wrong. Amazon declined to comment on their investigation.

In a text message, Smalls criticized Insider’s decision to report on the fight. There are “so many other things to report on with Amazon,” he wrote, including that the company spent $14.2 million on union-busting consultants last year.

The fight “isn’t news for the public,” he wrote. “It happened months ago and we’re not talking about it anymore.”

Some Amazon workers have problems with Smalls

While Daley’s animosity toward Smalls took on the air of a personal grudge, other Amazon Labor Union members had begun to have similar doubts about how Smalls was handling his newfound fame, according to interviews with four ALU organizers. They felt that the more prominent Smalls became, the less interested he seemed in directing his attention to securing union victories at other Amazon warehouses or building support for the type of actions that might force Amazon to the bargaining table at JFK8.

Last summer, some ALU organizers began publicly voicing concerns about the union’s lack of infrastructure. As the face of the movement, Smalls was essential to organizing efforts, workers told Bloomberg. But some also said he was a mercurial manager who could not be relied upon to do the day-to-day work of union organizing, such as showing up to rallies. (Smalls has said it is dangerous for him to trespass on Amazon’s property, where he is not a worker, because he could be arrested.)

Emails from workers at other Amazon warehouses seeking to start their own union went unanswered. The labor union yanked its support from a warehouse organizing in Kentucky last October, according to Payday Report. It’s still pushing for unionization at another Kentucky site, Amazon’s KCVG Air Hub.

The same month, workers organizing with the Amazon Labor Union at a warehouse in California withdrew their election petition. Byars, the ALU staffer, told Insider that workers at the California warehouse, known as ONT8, are still organizing and plan to seek an election, but she claimed Amazon inflated the number of eligible employees and began bombarding employees with anti-union messaging, prompting delays. (An Amazon spokesperson denied that the company inflated the number of employees at ONT8.)

In the year since the Amazon Labor Union won its election at JFK8, there have been few visible organizing gains affecting the nearly 6,000 workers in the facility. Several workers Insider spoke with outside the facility described feeling relatively disconnected from the union and unaware of the drama that was engulfing organizers. One worker, who had voted for unionization, felt not much had changed about her work since the vote and said she didn’t hear much from the union compared with the weekly texts and emails she received from local Amazon management.

Smalls said about 2,500 to 3,500 JFK8 workers open the regular emails the union sends out. Organizing within the warehouse, he said, had been hampered by a new Amazon policy that banned workers from warehouses when they weren’t scheduled to work. A federal labor agency directed Amazon last month to allow off-duty workers access to break rooms, which Smalls and Byars said will help the union by giving organizers more face time with colleagues.

The disputes came to a head at the December meeting, The New York Times reported last month, where some organizers were surprised to see that the ALU’s constitution had been amended to state that elections would be held only after a contract was reached at JFK8 — which could take years. Until then, Smalls and others close to him would remain at the helm of the organization. Many organizers walked out.

Smalls has partially characterized the rift along racial lines. Most of his critics in the union are white, while the union’s leadership is largely Black, he told Insider. In an interview, his supporter Gerald Bryson described the walkout as a coup: “They wanted more power,” he said.

Amazon Labor Union members consoled each other after the union lost the vote at its second warehouse, LDJ5, last April.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Heather Goodall, who led the Amazon Labor Union’s organizing efforts at an Albany warehouse last year, said Smalls’ constant travel and seeming disorganization derailed her attempts to plan events around him.

She was never sure when he would arrive at the warehouse, she said. Text messages between Goodall and Smalls show her repeatedly asking him to confirm when he would be in Albany.

During one tense exchange, after Smalls said he would be late to a union rally and would miss a call that night, Smalls sent Goodall cash to cover expenses for lunch.

“I just sent you $500 of my own money what else would you like me to do for you?” Smalls wrote.

“I don’t want you to send me your personal money. I just need to be organized,” Goodall replied, “but we will talk about that when I see you.”

The union lost in a landslide last October.

At that point, she said, she began losing faith in Smalls’ leadership.

“I started questioning Christian’s actions, his traveling,” she said. “We haven’t seen or heard from anyone since the election.”

Criticism of Smalls’ lack of involvement in union elections at warehouses outside JFK8 is misplaced, Bryson said. “You can’t have someone like me over in Western Virginia recruit people. You gotta have the people in the building run it,” he said. “It’s up to that person to give support to their building to unionize. It’s not up to us.”

Questions over ALU’s finances

Less than two weeks after the Albany warehouse lost its election, Smalls was at a Los Angeles gala hosted by Ebony magazine, which had named him one of its 100 most influential people of 2022. Since the start of the year, Smalls’ Instagram has shown him in Canada, the UK, and Kentucky.

Smalls told Goodall in late January that he needed to be constantly traveling in order to fundraise. “If I don’t get us money from elsewhere we go bankrupt,” he texted her in January.

Goodall was skeptical. She emailed the union’s executive board, asking for information about the union’s finances. The board declined to answer.

Goodall wasn’t the only person to have raised concerns about financial transparency.

“A lot of money was coming in once we won the first election, and a lot of money is going out,” said Mat Cusick, a former ALU organizer who has said he was pushed out in May. Cusick published a public resignation letter laying bare his concerns about Smalls’ leadership, including his perception that Smalls had launched “a secret consolidation of power.”

“There were not good accountability procedures in place at the time that I left, and there were serious concerns about embezzlement and misuse of funds at that point,” Cusick told Insider.

Cusick next encountered Smalls at a labor conference in June, where Cusick said Smalls pushed him. (Smalls denied doing so.) On Twitter the next day, Smalls accused Cusick of stealing money from workers. (Cusick has said that is false.)

Financial disclosures filed last week by the ALU show that the union raised more than $850,000 last year, more than half of it from just three donors — the American Federation of Teachers, the International Commission for Labor Rights, and the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) walks next to Amazon Labor Union leader Christian Smalls (R) during a rally outside the company building in Staten Island, New York City, on April 24, 2022. - A recent push for worker unionization has gained traction and found some major successes in the United States. (Photo by Kena Betancur / AFP) (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images) Smalls walks with Senator Bernie Sanders at a union rally last April.

KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images

The biggest single line item was $200,000 from the ALU’s GoFundMe. The GoFundMe, though, had raised more than $440,000 from small donors between February and July last year, when the union shut it down and moved the donation page to the ALU’s website.

The other $240,000 raised through the GoFundMe is not reflected in the union’s financial disclosures because it was spent on organizing activities before the union established a bank account last summer, said Connor Spence, who was previously the union’s treasurer. Spence broke with Smalls last year and resigned his role in the ALU.

That discrepancy is not necessarily an indicator of malfeasance, said John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University who has testified before Congress about unions’ required financial disclosures. It’s not uncommon for young labor organizations to struggle to adhere to strict federal financial reporting requirements, he said. And because GoFundMe campaigns are relatively new in the world of labor organizing, it may not be clear how unions should characterize revenue generated through GoFundMe in those required disclosures, he added.

“This is a cumbersome and unwieldy process,” he said. “But the most common thing is mistakes rather than any kind of nefarious activities going on.”

Spence acknowledged that the union should have established more formal accounting structures sooner than it did. “When you’re starting a new organization, no one tells you these things,” he said.

The union’s finances are now managed by an accounting firm, Smalls said in a text message.

Smalls has also said he needs to travel in order to book speaking gigs to pay his child support. Smalls failed to pay child support for nearly a year between September 2021 and August 2022, according to records provided by his ex-wife. He ultimately paid about $20,000 in child support arrears in two lump-sum payments, those records show, after he spent three days in jail last September. Smalls did not respond on the record to questions about his child support payments.

The circumstances of Smalls’ arrest are unclear. An electronic entry in the Bergen County jail’s online inmate finder indicates that Smalls was taken into custody by police in Hackensack for three days September 2022 for “simple assault” and “arrears,” the failure to pay money owed to another party. The Hackensack Police Department said it had no records of the arrest, and a clerk at the Hackensack Municipal Court said it had no records of a criminal charge against Smalls in 2022. A Bergen County Superior Court ombudsman said that records could only be obtained directly from the judge in the case.

Smalls did not respond on the record to questions about the arrest.

As the ALU rift grows, Smalls is eyeing a new project

Even as the Amazon Labor Union has splintered, Smalls and a core group of trusted lieutenants have begun turning their attention to new battles.

In February, Smalls, Palmer, Bryson and Jordan Flowers, who has also been involved in the union since its earliest days, registered a new nonprofit. They chose the same name as Smalls’ previous organization, The Congress of Essential Workers, where he had once fought over the open letter criticizing his leadership.

One purpose of the organization appears to be to raise funds for the Amazon Labor Union, according to its certificate of incorporation.

That would mean the new nonprofit would be the ALU’s fiscal sponsor — a 501(c)3 organization soliciting contributions on behalf of a union, which cannot accept tax-exempt donations. Such arrangements are not uncommon in the world of activism.

But the new Congress of Essential Workers nonprofit also has grander ambitions, according to its incorporation documents and an interview with Bryson.

Bryson said the new nonprofit will also support labor movements at other companies “whenever we finish with Amazon, whenever this whole ordeal is pretty much under control, and everyone’s falling in line.”

“We gotta deal with Jeff Bezos first. That was always the plan,” Bryson said. Then “it’s back to the next giant.”

Wooing philanthropists to fund new labor battles could pull the union’s focus from the ongoing contract fight with Amazon, warned the Rutgers labor professor Susan Schurman.

“The most important thing that the leadership of the ALU can do right now for the labor movement is to get a contract with Amazon at the warehouse,” she said. “There may be people who think it’s great that clearly this guy’s a charismatic leader, they’re thinking beyond organizing at Amazon, but the fact is a contract with Amazon at that warehouse would be a huge win for organizing everywhere.”

In the meantime, workers on both sides of the divide within the ALU say they’re intent on continuing to organize within Amazon warehouses.

Both Smalls’ backers and the organizers who disagree with his leadership are still trying to mobilize Amazon workers and address their concerns, according to Justine Medina, an ALU organizer in New York City who is hopeful that the two groups will reconcile. “Ultimately,” she said, “we’re all fighting against Bezos.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

Archive for category: #Middleclass

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