“It took a mass movement to win Roe,” said Seattle rally host and city lawmaker Kshama Sawant, “and it’ll take a mass movement to defend it.”

Harry Zehner urges the left to challenge the ideology of homeownership. 

“We want a nation of homeowners, not proletarians.”

A few years ago, I stumbled across this quote — attributed to Fransisco Franco’s housing minister, José Luis De Arrese — in Raquel Rolnik’s fantastic book, Urban Warfare. It’s important for two reasons: first, it demonstrates the very basic class-cleavaging role of homeownership. Secondly, it tells us that homeownership can be intentionally wielded by capitalists to specifically target and defeat class consciousness.

Homeownership is commonly understood through its economic functions. Capitalist economists think of homeownership as a significant driver of growth, debt-fueled consumer spending, and the basis of an asset-based social security system. Critiques of homeownership from the left are also generally grounded in economics, as Marxists highlight the dangerously speculative nature of homeownership, its integration of the working class into circuits of capital, and, as Maya Gonzalez writes, its role as a “material force representing and entrenching the divisions and inequalities within the working class.”

However, there is less debate regarding homeownership’s function on the ideological terrain. It is my belief that identifying and incorporating an analysis of the ideological role of homeownership into our organizing is crucial to building a successful communist tenant movement.

The modern history of homeownership in the US can be traced back to the late 1910s, within the context of an insurgent radical labor movement and the communist threat represented by the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 1910s and 1920s, local, state, and federal officials collaborated with civil society organizations to promote private homeownership as the bedrock of US capitalism. The prominent US senator William Calder argued nakedly: “Every assistance should be extended to enable our people to build or buy homes. Where there is a community of homeowners, no Bolshevists or anarchists can be found.” Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, commanded the massive “Better Homes in America” campaign, proclaimed: “There can be no fear for a democracy or self-government or for liberty or freedom from homeowners no matter how humble they may be,” proselytizing about “the primal instinct in us all for homeownership” as the foundation of a stable, patriarchal, capitalist society. 

This period can only be understood as a direct response to the threat of communism — and the accompanying threats to patriarchy and private property relations — presented by domestic radicals and the newly founded Soviet Union. It was defined by blatant US government propaganda like the Better Homes in America and the Own Your Own Home campaigns. 

Since Hoover’s heyday, the messaging may have gotten more subtle and implicit (ideology tends to do that, as the initial subjects of ideology become reproducers of that ideology). However, the result — mass homeownership as the unimpeachable, bipartisan goal of US housing policy — has been identical. 

Across the political spectrum, homeownership remains essentially unchallenged. It’s understood as superior to renting, as a way to realize your full personhood and US citizenship. It is intimately connected to chasing the American Dream of upward social mobility. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, homeownership is “reflexively advised as a way to emerge from poverty, develop assets, and build wealth more generally.” The idea of a housing system not structured around homeownership is completely beyond the horizons of US housing policy and discourse.

The US’s fanatical devotion to private homeownership is not a natural outcome, nor is it a politically neutral one. The US government and civil society have intentionally built this prevailing common sense understanding of homeownership through decades of propaganda and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded subsidies for homebuyers. This understanding argues that: the act of building individual wealth through home equity is a tool of social mobility; that ontological security can be found in the privately-owned home; that the gendered labor of social reproduction should be confined to the private home; and that citizenship resides in property ownership.

This understanding of homeownership does more than produce profits for the homebuilding industry. It is an important component of the US capitalist ideology that keeps the oppressed classes invested in the system and resistant to anti-capitalist critiques of that system.

If we are to take seriously the task of activating a revolutionary consciousness in the US, we must uncover the ways in which the development of that consciousness is stunted and subsumed within the ideology of the ruling classes. Then, we must work to build an alternative common sense understanding of US capitalism, while honestly and dynamically evaluating the ideological basis of our politics. We need to heed the lessons of a century of cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher, who have argued that capitalism is maintained not just by force, but by consent. Churches, schools, the family, and other institutions all disseminate the ideology of the ruling classes until it becomes common sense and the exploited masses come to believe that the social order created by capitalism is not only inevitable and unchallengeable but correct and just. 

As Hall always reminded us, we must purposefully engage with “the struggle to command the common sense of the age in order to educate and transform it, to make common sense, the ordinary everyday thoughts of the majority of the population, move in a socialist rather than a reactionary direction.” It is an understanding of this task that leads me to argue that the left must explicitly reject the ideology of homeownership in our work. It is essential for the left housing movement in the US to begin to think of the landscape it occupies as the terrain of ideology, and to build a counter-hegemonic housing movement, which explicitly constructs alternatives to the ideology of homeownership. We need to form a systemic critique of private homeownership that doesn’t stop at a discussion of uneven access to homeownership but attempts to smash the ideology entirely. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, our “emancipatory politics” must necessarily “destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”

All of which begs the question: how specifically does homeownership operate ideologically?

Instilling Capitalist Values

Fundamentally, homeownership (and the promise of homeownership) helps instill a belief that wealth is privately created and therefore should be privately controlled. When we accept the framing that homeownership is a primary means of economic mobility and wealth creation, we foreclose the horizons of socialism and obscure the reality that the capitalist distribution of wealth, property, and resources is structurally violent and unequal. 

Common sense understandings do not emerge out of thin air. They are intentionally constructed to benefit certain people and classes. Every presidential administration in the 20th century utilized public policy and propaganda tools to promote mass private homeownership as the path to social mobility. Throughout the neoliberal administrations of Reagan, Bush (twice), Clinton, Obama, Trump and now Biden, the promise of mass homeownership has been used to justify cuts to the welfare state in favor of an “asset-based welfare” system, wherein the growth of your home’s value replaces traditional forms of social welfare provision. As Gonzalez writes, “It became crucial to those with homes to protect their property, and to preserve or increase its value by all means possible. Homeowners thus had higher stakes in the perpetuation of the capitalist class relation … ” The pursuit and the material realization of homeownership for millions helps to cement the common sense understanding of oneself as an individual consumer and speculator in a market-based world, rather than a member of a collective capable of organizing for democratic, social ownership of wealth and property. 

Therefore, the ideology of homeownership, as both the ultimate form of privatized housing and the bedrock of the American Dream, has been essential to creating a mass common sense understanding that unabashed submission to the free market is the optimal (as well as natural, scientific, and post-ideological) method of structuring social and economic relations. 

There are serious consequences to a societal belief that wealth is an individual creation that is earned (or not earned) through hard work, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. A basic building block of Marxian economics — which has played a consequential role in essentially every insurgent left-wing movement — is the understanding that wealth is collectively created by the working classes, and therefore should be collectively controlled by the working classes. Capitalism is organized around private control of wealth, production, and the surplus value created by workers. It is therefore quite useful to any capitalist system to build a common sense understanding that wealth is a private — not social — creation, the end result being that the working classes consent to the private control of wealth and the means of production. Homeownership, as the primary point of contact between speculation, asset-building and wealth creation for Americans from all socio-economic and racial backgrounds, is central to the construction of this ideology. 

Domestic Bliss or Patriarchal Domination?

As Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, and legions of Marxist feminist scholars have argued, the unpaid reproductive and domestic labor performed by women in the home is essential to the reproduction of capitalism. In the words of Federici: “the exploitation of women has played a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation, insofar as women have been the producers and reproducers of the most essential capitalist commodity: labor-power.” Engels, in his landmark book The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State, powerfully links the development of private property and the patriarchal family unit, arguing that capitalism necessitates a union of the two in order to function.

Therefore, the ideological centering of homeownership as the site of domestic bliss and family life serves a very material purpose within US capitalism. Mass homeownership carries with it deeply held cultural beliefs about women’s role in society, specifically that women should be confined to their private homes in order to carry out the domestic labor and the duties of social reproduction. Of course, the significance and character of these meanings have changed over time. In the 1920s, when Hoover and his ilk were propagandizing the virtues of the owned home, they were responding directly to radical anarchist and Bolshevik ideas about reproductive freedom, free love and women’s labor. Homeownership was indelibly tied to the idealized vision of a (necessarily white) breadwinning father, domestic mother and obedient children. In the post-war period, domestic work was cast as a patriotic, anti-communist duty, coinciding with the rising prominence of homes-as-assets. As Gonzalez writes, “the home became not only the commodity which physically contained all the others, but was also a worker’s main asset — the commodity for which all others were sold, and eventually the one which also purchased all the others.”

In contrast, in the 1970s, as Black women became the targets of “predatory inclusion” and the unwitting owners of crumbling, debt-laden homes, their role as caretakers of these homes was emphasized in order to lay blame at their feet instead of with HUD and the structurally racist real estate industry. The mass media and government officials consistently emphasized the irresponsible nature of Black female homebuyers, creating, in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s words, a “dysfunction discourse” that helped engineer the persistent moral panic about the state of Black inner cities in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

Building on Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism, Helen Hunter argues that “domestic realism” —  wherein “the isolated and individualized small dwelling (and the concomitant privatization of household labor) becomes so accepted and commonplace that it is nearly impossible to imagine life being organized in any other way,” serves to reinforce gendered hierarchies and divisions of domestic labor. The practice of mass homeownership reifies the domestic sphere — a crucial site to imagine, reinvent and revolutionize gender roles in a collective and egalitarian manner — as the natural, post-ideological arrangement for social reproduction.

I’m not the person to sketch a socialist feminist vision of housing, but such a project certainly includes a radical break with the unpaid domestic labor in the home which is central to the ideology of homeownership. It is almost certainly a vision that demands cooperative, socialized domestic work and compensation for previously unpaid domestic labor. It is also almost certainly a vision that is incompatible with mass private homeownership, which necessarily confines domestic labor to the individual home, rather than socializing domestic labor.

Black Homeownership and The American Nightmare

There are two histories of homeownership in the United States: white homeownership, and homeownership for everyone else. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of the essential Race for Profit, puts it best: “The quality of life in U.S. society depends on the personal accumulation of wealth, and homeownership is the single largest investment that most families make to accrue this wealth. But when the housing market is fully formed by racial discrimination, there is deep, abiding inequality.”

In its modern form (roughly from the 20th century onwards), the public policy and propaganda supporting homeownership have been intentionally constructed to benefit white families. Hoover’s propaganda campaigns in the 1920s and 30s always depicted white families as the ideal, patriotic, capitalist homeowners. In the New Deal and post-war eras, subsidies for homeownership were granted to white families and excluded Black families. Redlining, restrictive covenants, and mob violence all kept neighborhoods segregated and severely devalued Black homes throughout the mid-20th century. When homeownership financing was finally extended to Black families en masse in the 1970s, it was structured in order to reap profits for realtors — in stark contrast with the white-wealth building intent of previous government homeownership programs. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Black homeowners were pulled into the maelstrom of debt-fueled neoliberal capitalism in order to be exploited by subprime loans and Wall St chicanery. The nature of the racially exploitative housing market was made clear once again in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash, as Black families were disproportionately impacted by foreclosures and subprime loans. The racial wealth gap widened in the aftermath of the crisis.

In 2021, 75.8% of white families owned their home, compared to just 46.4% of Black families. In 2019, the median white family was worth $188,200 while the median Black family was worth just $36,100. The racial wealth gap is an undisputable legacy of chattel slavery, redlining and Jim Crow capitalism. It is one of the clearest expressions of the structural deficiency of the American Dream. 

And yet, even as it is widely acknowledged on the liberal-left wing of the American political spectrum that unequal access to wealth-building through homeownership is at the core of the racial wealth gap, analysts consistently suggest further investment in homeownership as the only possible solution to the problem. For instance, in their highly influential 1995 work, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality, Oliver and Shapiro lay out, in extensive historical detail, the processes by which Black communities have been denied access to wealth-building through homeownership and then go on to argue that individualized asset-based welfare systems — primarily operationalized through homeownership — are a promising potential solution.

Major liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution or the Urban Institute will write extensively about the long history of racial exclusion from homeownership, and then conclude definitively that the only logical solution is to “ensure that millions of credit-worthy black renters can gain access to stable, affordable, and safe homeownership” and “improve opportunities for potential Black homebuyers and reduce the racial wealth gap.”

In 2020, Bernie Sanders ran on probably the most left-wing housing platform attributable to a popular, major party, presidential candidate in decades. He advocated for reinvesting in public housing, cracking down on racial discrimination and expanding community land trusts. Still, he argued that “the American dream of homeownership is simply out of reach,” and therefore “we need to substantially expand federal programs to make sure that Americans throughout the country have the ability to buy their first home.”

Rather than look to egalitarian horizons wherein racist private property relations are dismantled and land is redistributed — rather than challenge the notion that Americans should be constantly interpellated as consumers and speculators — further investment in capitalism is argued to be the only solution to the problems created by hundreds of years of capitalist exploitation. 

As Taylor writes, this outlook belies a “magical belief that homeownership will ever be a cornerstone of political, social, and economic freedom for African Americans.” It is a core component of the ideology of Black Capitalism, which James Baldwin once described as “a concept demanding yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin birth.” While the methods of extending homeownership opportunity may be critiqued, the underlying assumptions — that individual asset accumulation through homeownership is the key to social mobility and that private property (the basis of the US settler-colonial nation-state) is an inevitable feature of human social organization — are rarely, if ever, questioned.

Conclusions

I would argue that, even for most contemporary left activists and movements who do act on a theory of change grounded in a systemic analysis of US capitalism, it is typically seen as pointless to waste energy trying to contradict a deeply held American value like homeownership. The project of outright rejecting private homeownership is either considered not politically expedient or not considered at all. 

I don’t want to discount that the ideological terrain has shifted in the US left housing movement, especially since the 2008 housing crash. There has been an increasing emphasis on social housing, as exemplified by popular proposals like the “National Homes Guarantee,” or the Peoples Policy Project’s “A Plan to Solve the Housing Crisis Through Social Housing.” In these plans, private, speculative homeownership takes a backseat to decommodified, socialized conceptions of home and housing. In “The National Homes Guarantee,” the authors refer to homeowners as “bank tenants,” highlighting an increasingly mainstream skepticism about the liberatory promises of homeownership. In the past few years, the community land trust and cooperative housing models have gained prominence in cities and rural areas alike to combat rising housing costs, gentrification and speculation. The wave of insurgent tenant movements spurred on by the COVID-19-induced housing crisis and rising consciousness of private homeownership’s exploitative nature in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis also provide important context.

However, these developments alone do not constitute an intentional, counter-hegemonic, ideological thrust against homeownership and the American Dream. Socialized housing, after all, if promoted like many other goals of the US left — that is, alongside their antagonists — will always maintain a subordinate position. It is ultimately unproductive to shirk from direct confrontation with the ideology of private homeownership, in the same way that it is unproductive to argue for expanded public transit while refusing to attack highway funding or to argue for the deployment of renewable energy without tackling the systemized overconsumption at the root of the climate crisis.

So, despite the promising emergence of more radical challenges to the ideology of homeownership, the promotion of homeownership as a cure to wealth inequality, racial inequality and other social ills remains a near-hegemonic line of thinking. The acceptance of this thinking is fundamentally naive. It is naive to view private homeownership as a neutral concept, one that we can pluck from history and promote uncritically in the present day, while ignoring its historical role in maintaining race, gender and class domination. A continued uncritical embrace of homeownership in the rhetoric and praxis of the left — and in particular, the discourse which argues that homeownership can be a tool of social justice through wealth accumulation — does little to “destroy the appearance of a natural order.” Rather, it reinforces the common sense understanding that wealth should be built and controlled individually, that individual advancement is a preferable alternative to collective power-building, and that private property relations should reign supreme. 

Fundamentally, the ideology of homeownership disseminates and enforces the ideology of the ruling class and undermines any discussion of overturning private property relations. As a result, as the ever-relevant W.E.B. DuBois’ wrote, the US is “not simply fundamentally capitalistic,” — it has “no conception of any system except one in which capital was privately owned.” Homeownership, particularly within the neoliberal cultural hegemony that still holds so much sway over our lives, helps preclude the possibility of a collective political subject and instead interpellates each of us as consumers, speculators, and market subjects above all else. For women, private homeownership continues to promote a domestic-centered lifestyle, consigning them to do unpaid and underappreciated work. For poor immigrants, Black communities, women, and other economically marginalized groups, homeownership is central to the endurance of the American Dream, inducing buy-in to the system of US capitalism by arguing that anyone can make it in America — and if you fail, it’s your fault. 

 . . .

The urban rebellions which gripped the nation and incited a genuine ruling class crisis in the summer of 2020 illustrate that, despite what the suffocating, “pervasive atmosphere” of late capitalism may lead us to believe, it is indeed possible to smash common sense ideology like that of homeownership. The spontaneous rebellions which broke out in Minneapolis and spread quickly across the country thrust us headfirst into a radical political moment, where the shackled horizons of neoliberal capitalism melted away in the face of a mass movement. 

The various abolitionist currents and slogans present in May of 2020 went through complex processes of creation, co-option, revision, and moderation. But fundamentally, what emerged on the other side of the rebellions was a popular, revolutionary, if fractured, horizon. The ideology foundational to the neoliberal carceral state and its self-conception of social order — that social ills (particularly in Black and brown communities) cannot be solved through social and economic restructuring, but must instead be met with the violent force of prisons and policing — has become contested terrain. Many people who just weeks before the rebellions would scoff at the sheer lunacy of abolishing prisons or the police were suddenly proselytizing about the social causes of crime and the true role of the police and prisons in protecting property, whiteness, and US racial capitalism. 

I don’t mean to romanticize the moment. What I want to emphasize is that radical horizons are possible only if we challenge the entrenched common sense understandings that undergird US capitalism  — and crucially, that a large part of the ideological success of the abolitionist movement last summer was due to their preparation. Organic intellectuals like Mariama Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, and organizations like Critical Resistance and Black Lives Matter, had been building the foundations of an abolitionist movement for years and were therefore prepared to seize the moment. Contrast that with the extremely fractured and weak state of the US left during the 2008 financial crisis, where the left — and the housing movement in particular — was ill-prepared to offer a systemic critique of homeownership, the American Dream, and neoliberal capitalism more broadly. 

Homeownership must be connected to the broader political economy and ideology of contemporary capitalism. We need to assert that US capitalism’s ideological permanence draws strength from and is reproduced by housing systems and private homeownership in particular. What does this specifically entail for the left housing movement in the US?

We need a politics of housing that attacks capitalism at its roots in private property relations. A counter-hegemonic housing movement must be rooted in a radical turn towards socialized land, communal domestic labor and decommodified housing. Rather than continue to center private homeownership as the route toward social progress, we must reject private homeownership and embrace democratic, tenant-controlled social housing models like community land trusts, cooperative housing, Native American communal land holdings and public housing. Importantly, we have to actively work against the common sense understanding — which has been reinforced through the very real experiences of eviction, landlordism and poor housing quality within the rental market — that security of tenure, personal space and realization of citizenship can only be achieved through homeownership.

Through this radical break with the ideology of homeownership we can assist in forging a revolutionary common sense understanding, one which argues that: 

• the American Dream is a farce that only serves to reinvest potentially revolutionary energy back into the system;
• private property is inherently violent and anti-egalitarian; 
• wealth is socially created and therefore should be socially controlled; 
• poverty is endemic to capitalism, not individuals; 
• domestic labor should be socialized and women should not be consigned to unpaid labor in the home; 
• the persistence of a permanent, racialized underclass of the unemployed, drug addicts, “criminals” and homeless people is a consequence of systemic failure, not individual deficiency; 
• and in the final analysis, we are members of a collective subject that can and must organize for our collective present and future.

I neither have the space nor the wisdom to offer a concrete vision of what this actually looks like. This article is intended to be a suggestive intervention, a critique on the terrain of ideology. But, as Paulo Freire reminds us, praxis is more than critique. Praxis is “reflection and action upon the world in order to change it.” This is just a reflection — an important one, I believe, but one that means very little until it is translated into action.

One important and concrete step we can all take towards building this new politics is to join and commit ourselves to principled, revolutionary tenant organizations. I organize with Brooklyn Eviction Defense, a communist, autonomous tenant organization. Through a variety of tactics, we help stop evictions (legal and illegal, because all evictions are violent and unjust, regardless of whether the state has sanctioned them), intervene in cases of landlord harassment, help tenants organize their buildings and much more. Our organizing work is rooted in a material struggle against the everyday violence of private property and the intertwined ideological struggle to activate a revolutionary tenant consciousness. We struggle daily against entrenched common sense understandings of homeownership and private property. We believe it is critical to hold a strong political line in favor of abolishing rent and private property. We are far from perfect, but our commitments give me hope that through principled struggle, we can smash the old politics of housing and forge a new, revolutionary common sense.

 

The post Smashing the white picket fence: Why the left rejects homeownership appeared first on Cosmonaut.

The Ohio Model for Purging Progressives

Judy

Tue, 05/03/2022 – 20:25

Over the past week, PayPal canceled without explanation the accounts of two prominent independent news outlets. It escaped notice by the mainstream press, which spent the weekend congratulating itself over the freedom to criticize the powerful.

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Given how the history of tech censorship has gone, it would be surprising if PayPal’s censure of Consortium News and MintPress News is where the current trend ends. (Marques Thomas @querysprout.com / Unsplash)

Over the past few days, several independent news outlets and journalists have had their PayPal accounts abruptly canceled and their funds frozen by the company for unspecified offenses. These outlets also happened to have dissented in various ways from official orthodoxy on the Ukraine war. Since the Russian invasion, a series of extreme, wartime-like information-control policies had already been taken up in the West. The latest news suggests the trend is getting dramatically worse.

Consortium News, founded by the late Associated Press investigative legend Robert Parry in 1995 as one of the web’s very first independent, reader-funded news outlets, reported over the weekend that PayPal had “permanently limited” its account, just as it was launching its Spring Fund Drive. According to editor-in-chief Joe Lauria — a former longtime United Nations correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and others — the company said it would hold onto the thousands of dollars accumulated in the outlet’s account for 180 days and reserved the right to seize the money entirely to pay for unnamed “damages.”

According to Lauria, Consortium News was neither warned that they were at risk of censure nor given a reason for it in either PayPal’s initial email or a follow-up call with a customer service representative. PayPal’s back office didn’t give a reason for the action, and there was no existing case against the outlet. Lauria reported he was informed of the move by the customer agent, who only mentioned that an “investigation and review” revealed “some potential risk associated with this account.” Given the outlet’s critical coverage of the Ukraine war, and given the far-reaching steps already taken in the “information war” over the conflict, Lauria writes that it’s “more than conceivable” the outlet is being punished for its Ukraine coverage.

A few days earlier, MintPress News, a left-wing web-based outlet based out of Minnesota, had been similarly informed by PayPal that it was banned from the company after a review allegedly turned up an unspecified “potential risk” with its account. The outlet’s founder and executive editor, Mnar Adley, told Jacobin that, as with Consortium News, the outlet received no prior warning from PayPal and was told their existing balance would be held by the company for half a year. This isn’t the first time MintPress has been financially targeted, Adley says; GoFundMe terminated two different fundraisers she had been running for years, suddenly saying they had violated the site’s terms of service.

In this case, PayPal’s net went beyond the organization itself and targeted one of its journalists, too, with senior staff writer Alan MacLeod having his personal account canceled at the same time. PayPal told him it had detected “activity in your account that’s inconsistent with our User Agreement,” something he calls “patently absurd” because the last time he had used PayPal was to buy a £5 Christmas gift in December. MacLeod and Adley both say they had fortunately withdrawn funds shortly before the cancellations, but the loss will still have lingering effects. MintPress was pulling in roughly $1,000 a month from readers’ membership payments through the service, Adley says, while MacLeod notes it could hurt his ability to be paid for future reporting.

Like Consortium News, MintPress has been critical of US policy toward the Ukraine invasion. In recent days, MacLeod has published pieces scrutinizing the newly formed and popular-in-the-West Kyiv Independent, exposed TikTok’s hiring of numerous NATO and other national security personnel for top posts, and, ironically, criticized online censorship efforts to do with the war.

“The sanctions-regime war is coming home to hit the bank accounts of watchdog journalists,” says Adley.

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Seeds Long Planted

Regardless of what you might think about either publication’s output — like any publication, a reasonable reader will find pieces at both that they agree and disagree with — this is a frightening attack on press freedoms. Faceless tech bureaucrats have unilaterally cut two serious independent media outlets off from a vital source of funding with no prior warning, no ability to appeal, and no explanation besides a vague reference to “potential risk,” all at a time when critical debate about the most dangerous conflict in most Americans’ lifetimes is being stifled in a climate of fear and repression.

The seeds for this latest action were sown over a decade ago, when PayPal, under pressure from the US government, froze the account of WikiLeaks. At the time, the whistleblowing publisher had released a series of data troves revealing previously undisclosed Western war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, before releasing a searchable database of 250,000 State Department cables.

Commentators warned at the time that the move would set a dangerous precedent and would be used against other publishers in the future. Equally foreboding is PayPal’s partnership, announced last year, with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization with a history of hostility to the Left and pro-Palestinian advocacy, which it attacks under the guise of combating antisemitism. Eight months after announcing the two would work together on “uncovering and disrupting the financial pipelines that support extremist and hate movements,” ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt has announced the organization would put “more concentrated energy toward the threat of radical anti-Zionism” and declared, in what appears to be a hardening of its previous official line, that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” (It’s not.)

On other fronts, the ADL has recently relaxed its anti-extremist vigilance. Only two months ago, the group played down the threat of the far right in Ukraine, claiming it was a “very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews,” a claim that is, to put it mildly, questionable. PayPal’s moves against independent left-wing news outlets, coupled with its ongoing partnership with the ADL, is ominous, and may well foreshadow more targeting of independent media outlets and reporters who dissent from the ADL’s right-wing stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

All of this comes days after as the press indulged in its annual hobnobbing with government officials at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Host Trevor Noah has been widely applauded for his speech, marveling that despite lightly roasting the president — an unremarkable, mandatory feature of the annual event — he was “going to be fine” and that “in America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth, even if it makes people in power uncomfortable.” That right, apparently, doesn’t extend to the independent press.

Given how the history of tech censorship has gone, it would be surprising if the censure of Consortium News and MintPress News is where this ends, particularly with PayPal’s actions receiving no pushback, criticism, or even notice outside of independent media. But mainstream press outlets would be foolish to ignore the issue. Tech censorship may be overwhelmingly focused on independent outlets for now, but given recent precedents, it’s only a matter of time before a president — one less friendly toward the press — uses the union of tech companies and government power to train the crosshairs on them.

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After a draft opinion showing that the Supreme Court is prepared to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked on Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) warned that the conservative-dominated Court will go after gay marriage next as LGBTQ rights come under attack across the country.

The draft opinion, written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, criticizes Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage, and the Lawrence v. Texas opinion of 2003, which legalized sex between gay couples – though gay people have continued to face prosecution despite this ruling. These decisions aren’t “deeply rooted in history,” Alito wrote in the leaked draft opinion.

As anti-LGBTQ laws have spread across states and LGBTQ activists have sounded the alarm about their rights being taken away, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that these changes could soon be coming at a federal level.

“​​As we’ve warned, SCOTUS isn’t just coming for abortion – they’re coming for the right to privacy Roe rests on, which includes gay marriage + civil rights,” she said on Monday. “[Sen. Joe] Manchin is blocking Congress [from] codifying Roe. House has seemingly forgotten about Clarence Thomas. These two points must change”.

House Democrats have passed legislation that would effectively legalize abortion across the country, barring states from implementing abortion bans like Texas’s restrictive law that was upheld by the Supreme Court last year.

But Democrats don’t have the votes to pass the law in the Senate, nor do they have the votes to overturn the filibuster in order to pass the legislation through a simple majority vote. Progressive lawmakers say that the party has failed to whip Manchin in line with the rest of the party over the past year, and the fact that the West Virginia senator is anti-choice only exacerbates the issue.

Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign over his wife’s ties to the January 6 plot to overturn the certification of the 2020 election results. If Democrats don’t step up and vote to impeach Thomas, she said, there will be dire consequences for the party. Though Thomas is part of a conservative supermajority on the Court, replacing Thomas with a liberal justice would help to slightly balance the scales against far-right influence in the High Court.

Democrats have a mandate to act swiftly to protect reproductive rights and other civil liberties, the New York lawmaker wrote. “People elected Democrats precisely so we could lead in perilous moments like these– to codify Roe, hold corruption accountable, & have a President who uses his legal authority to break through Congressional gridlock,” Ocasio-Cortez continued on Monday.

“If we don’t, what message does that send? We can’t sit around, finger point, & hand wring as people’s futures + equality are on the line,” she said. “It’s time to be decisive, lead with confidence, fight for a prosperous future for all and protect the vulnerable. Leave it all on the field.”

Indeed, as law scholar Marjorie Cohn wrote for Truthout in December, overruling Roe could just be a starting point for the conservative justices seeking to outlaw rights at the federal level. “If the Supreme Court retracts the right to abortion, other rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution are also in jeopardy, including the rights to contraception, homosexual conduct and same-sex marriage,” Cohn wrote.

At the state level, LGBTQ rights are aleady being quickly eroded. Republicans, who have become nearly synonymous with fascists and the far right, filed nearly 200 bills in the first three months of this year clearly aimed at attacking trans and gay kids’ very right to exist and designed to restrict the teaching of LGBTQ-related topics in schools.

“If you are out here saying ‘marriage equality is next’ please do keep in mind that at least one state has made care for trans youth a felony right now and is currently in court defending that law,” wrote lawyer and trans activist Chase Strangio on Tuesday. “There is no ‘next’ – the horror is NOW.”

“The ‘Fox News-ization’ of the media poses a fatal danger for democracies because it undermines the basis of civil harmony and tolerant public debate,” said the leader of Reporters Without Borders.

Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that established a constitutional right to abortion, was decided 7-2.

According to Politico, the Supreme Court will soon strike down Roe v. Wade on a 5-4 vote.

While the U.S. right has organized for decades in hopes of this result, it would never have come close to success without one factor: the Electoral College. There have been eight presidential elections over the past 30 years, and also eight Supreme Court vacancies. The bizarre reality of the U.S. political system is that Republicans have won the popular vote in just one of the eight elections, but got to choose five of the eight new justices. Of these five GOP picks, four are reportedly voting to reverse Roe.

In an alternate history in which presidents were elected by a simple plurality of voters, Roe would likely soon be upheld in the relevant case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, by a 7-2 or even 8-1 margin — assuming that the court even heard Dobbs in the first place.

Here are the details of this history:

Politico’s article features a draft opinion striking down Roe, which was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Politico also reports that Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett will vote with Alito.

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were appointed by President Donald Trump. In 2016, Trump won the Electoral College 304-227, thanks to extremely narrow victories in key states. Yet Trump got just 46.1 percent of the popular vote, while Hillary Clinton received 48.2 percent. In numerical terms, 65.854 million Americans voted for Clinton, while 62.985 million voted for Trump — an almost 3 million margin for Clinton.

Moreover, voter turnout in 2016 was, by one way of measuring it, 59.2 percent. This means that just 27.3 percent of eligible voters chose Trump. Yet he was able to pick a third of the current Supreme Court. (And, of course, there were three vacancies for Trump rather than two because then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky refused to even allow a vote for the vacancy when Antonin Scalia died in 2016, during Barack Obama’s presidency.)

Then there’s Alito, who was nominated by George W. Bush in 2005. Officially, Bush won the Electoral College against then-Vice President Al Gore in 2000 by a margin of 271-266. In reality, a study of Florida ballots released in November 2001 found that Gore actually won the state, under any counting standard, and thus actually won the Electoral College vote. But since this was just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, no one dared bring it up.

Gore also won the popular vote, 48.4 percent to 47.9 percent. Over half a million more Americans voted for Gore than Bush. Voter turnout in 2000 was 54.3 percent, meaning Bush was the choice of 26.0 percent of eligible voters.

It is true that Bush won both the Electoral College and the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004. However, it’s extremely unlikely that Bush would have run again if he’d lost in 2000. The last time a president got his party’s nomination, lost, and then got the nomination again and won, was Richard Nixon 54 years ago in 1968. Perhaps another Republican would have beaten Gore in 2004, or perhaps not.

The remaining justice apparently poised to strike down Row is Thomas, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush. Bush won both the Electoral College and popular vote in 1988.

Of course, it’s impossible to know precisely how history would have played out if the United States had a system in which the candidate who got the most votes became president. But polls show that overturning Roe has been deeply unpopular for as long as the question’s been asked. So if the composition of the Supreme Court reflected anything close to the perspective of most Americans, this day would never have come. Now that it’s here, it’s hard to know whether the court will retain any legitimacy. The basic facts suggest that it should not.

The post Roe v. Wade Is About to Be Struck Down by the Electoral College appeared first on The Intercept.

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise its policy rate by 50 basis points on Wednesday, potentially kicking off a series of outsized hikes this summer.

According to a memo leaked to Politico yesterday, the Supreme Court has privately voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey — the first draft majority opinion in the modern history of the court to be disclosed publicly while a case was still pending. The draft opinion, purportedly written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., claims that Roe is constitutionally unsound — that there is no part of the nation’s founding document that guarantees the right to an abortion — and therefore should be overturned. Though the holding will not be final until it is published, likely in the next two months, if the Supreme Court were to limit or overturn Roe, abortion would remain legal in 21 states and could immediately be prohibited in 24 states and three territories.

Though Alito claims that overturning Roe is a democratic measure to correct federal overreach, Republicans are mobilizing to institute a federal ban on abortion in the event Roe is overturned. There is nothing democratic about the state impeding people’s bodily autonomy. And most people agree: 80 percent of people in the U.S. think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 19 percent who think abortion should be illegal.

Pro-abortion organizers have been pointing to the weaknesses of Roe — which included abortion in the constitutional right to privacy — for decades, but for precisely the opposite reasons as anti-abortioners. Roe never guaranteed our right to abortion, even when it was widely accepted, because, thanks to socioeconomic and political barriers, abortion and reproductive health care have been largely inaccessible for millions of people. (Some feminists have been calling instead, for example, for a federal abortion rights law.)

The memo also puts forward the view, echoed by Donald Trump appointee Justice Amy Coney Barrett as well as legislators earlier this year in Mississippi, that legal protections for pregnant people, including so-called “safe haven laws” and the increased acceptance of pregnancy outside of marriage, negate the necessity for abortion. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” Alito writes. “The percentage of women who register to vote and cast ballots is consistently higher than the percentage of men who do so.”

A recent study estimated that a total abortion ban in the U.S. would lead to a 21 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths overall, with a 33 percent increase among Black women. The draft opinion also comes as the United States faces some of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, as well as some of the highest health care costs and the least support for pregnant people, mothers, caregivers and families. The average cost of delivering a child in the U.S. was $233,610 in 2015; with inflation adjustment, Investopedia estimates that the cost of raising a child in 2022 is $272,049. According to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in February, the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. for 2020 was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from 20.1 the previous year. This is more than double the maternal mortality rate of other high-income countries, including the U.K., Canada and France.

In Mississippi, whose abortion ban is at issue in the pending Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, 33 childbearing people die per 100,000 pregnancies — one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country. For Black women in the U.S., rates of maternal mortality are even higher (55.3 for non-Hispanic Black women) and these rates are significantly increasing over time. This statistic is reflected in Mississippi as well, where Black childbearing people are three times as likely to die from a pregnancy when compared to people of other races.

Moreover, there is no federally mandated leave for expectant parents, further creating an environment that is unsupportive of parents’ ability to care for their children postpartum.

The claim that the United States has become a safe and dignified place for people to give birth and raise children is frankly absurd — especially given that the same right-wing lawmakers engineering abortion bans are also at the forefront of dismantling and obliterating any kind of social safety net which would actually uphold and affirm human life.

Abortion bans are deadly. The leaked Supreme Court memo comes in a context of mounting bans, including in Florida (bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy), Idaho (6 weeks), Kentucky (15 weeks), Oklahoma (almost entirely), Mississippi (15 weeks) and Texas (6 weeks) — some of the most draconian bans on abortion since Roe, adding even more onerous obstacles to those seeking care, such as traveling far away, increasing costs, and risk of deportation and incarceration. In April, 26-year-old Lizelle Herrera, for example, was arrested in Texas for an alleged “self-induced abortion,” with her bond set at $500,000. Abortion bans will disproportionately endanger poor people, people of color, Indigenous people, trans people, undocumented people, people who cannot travel to receive an abortion and people who cannot afford prenatal care.

The memo also claims that contraceptive access will not be endangered by striking down Roe — but the anti-abortion movement has claimed with increasing fervor that the morning-after pill, hormonal contraception and the copper IUD are abortifacients, tantamount to medical and surgical abortion.

Alito claims that there has been no historic right to abortion in the U.S., which is false. Though enslaved Black women were prohibited from having abortions because it decreased their owner’s profits, through 1861, abortion was permitted in all states, albeit socially “undesirable.” Efforts to professionalize the medical field and expand the political influence of physicians meant that by 1910, every state had anti-abortion laws, many of which provided exemptions to protect the life of the pregnant person. Abortion has been legal in this country far longer than not.

The leaked memo also echoes a frequent anti-abortion talking point painting abortion as a racist practice, obscuring that abortion bans are and have always been about instituting a racist, right-wing agenda. In the mid-20th century, as segregation ended and the civil rights movement changed the social and political landscape of the U.S., conservatives turned to abortion as an issue that would allow them to continue to galvanize support among white Americans. Additionally, further criminalization of abortion opens the door to even more intensified policing, surveillance and incarceration of immigrants and communities of color.

Many reproductive rights groups will seek to defend Roe in the courts in the coming weeks. But whether or not Roe has technical constitutional viability is besides the point. Abortion is a human right, one which the majority of Americans support, whether the U.S. constitution guarantees it or not. It will take a mobilized, militant grassroots movement to protect reproductive rights. There are people who have been helping others have abortions for a long time. Reproductive justice advocates, feminists and allies have always fought to protect that right, and this work continues despite whatever the Supreme Court may decide.

A list of abortion funds — which help abortion seekers travel to states where abortion is accessible — can be found here. You can find a guide to abortion pills and self-managed abortion here. You can also order abortion pills here before you’re pregnant. No matter what the Supreme Court decides in the coming weeks, we are going to keep having and providing abortion for all people who want or need them.

In 2016, J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy received an enthusiastic reception from liberal commentators, many of whom viewed it as a window into the white working-class voters who’d recently propelled Donald Trump to victory. 

One especially effusive New York Times review described the work as a “compassionate, discerning sociological analysis of the white underclass that has helped drive the politics of rebellion.” Vance was featured at a Brookings Institute event on social immobility alongside legendary sociologist William Julius Wilson. Vox founder Ezra Klein invited Vance on a podcast for a wide-ranging conversation, where, at one point, the two discussed classist “microaggressions.” 

During this period, Vance’s rhetorical style was classically academic—articulate, nuanced, and peppered with caveats. He was also a passionate anti-Trumper. He condemned the former president as “an idiot,” described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” and messaged a friend that he vacillated between thinking that Trump was a “cynical asshole” and “America’s Hitler.” 

Lots has changed since then—most notably Vance himself. One insurrection and polarizing film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy later, the Yale Law-graduate and former venture capitalist has grown out his beard and dived into an Ohio Senate run. He’s also adopted an explicitly Trumpy public persona: thundering against wokeness, the media, and the “childless left.” One particularly alarming Vanity Fair article depicted Vance palling around with radical right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin, who once wrote favorably of installing a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”

Vance also managed to secure a coveted endorsement from “America’s Hitler” himself: Donald Trump, who the candidate now calls “the best president” of his “lifetime.” 

With Vance the frontrunner for today’s GOP primary for the Ohio Senate, here’s a (non-exhaustive) recap of his most controversial comments: 

“The childless left”

During a conference at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on July 23, Vance lambasted the “childless left” who have no “physical commitment to the future of this country,” citing Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In another interview, Vance reasoned that these Democratic leaders “want to take our kids and brainwash them so that their ideas continue to exist in the next generation.” 

To encourage more Americans to form families, Vance has suggested passing policies similar to ones that autocrat Viktor Orbán has instituted in Hungary, which include tax breaks to families with multiple children and family housing subsidies. 

Proposing that Trump defy the Supreme Court 

In an interview last year with podcaster and men’s group leader Jack Murphy, Vance suggested that the right “seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left.”

“We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program,” he continued. 

In the interview, Vance also suggested that if Trump were to win the presidency again in 2024, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say—quoting Andrew Jackson—’the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

Saying that Indigenous People’s Day is a “fake holiday created to sow division”

“Indigenous Peoples’ Day” is a fake holiday created to sow division. Of course Joe Biden is the first president to pay it any attention. https://t.co/zyP18KJmy5

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) October 11, 2021

 

Saying that he “didn’t care what happen[ed] in Ukraine”

In February, during an episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Vance said that he cared more about the security of the US southern border than the Russian troop build-up near Ukraine. 

“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” Vance said. “I do care about the fact that in my community right now the leading cause of death among 18-45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl that’s coming across the southern border.”

A former marine, Vance also implied that the reason the Biden administration wanted to “to go and fight Vladmir Putin” was that Putin “didn’t believe in transgender rights.” 

Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine, displacing millions of people and thrusting that country into a state of catastrophe. 

Claiming the Biden administration was purposely flooding the US with fentanyl 

In an interview with Jim Hoft, the founder of far-right blog the Gateway Pundit, Vance echoed a conspiracy theory pushed by Tucker Carlson, implying that Joe Biden was purposely attempting to flood the heartland with fentanyl to “punish people who didn’t vote for him.” 

Vance says Biden is trying to kill MAGA voters: “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better to target them and their kids with this fentanyl .. It does look intentional. It’s like Biden wants to punish people who didn’t vote for him.” pic.twitter.com/5Yoh0CA44z

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 30, 2022