It was. And suddenly it’s everywhere. A quick review of Google Trends confirms that searches for “house burping” were a flat line from 2004 until the end of 2025, when searches spiked almost 90 degrees between November 30 and December 31. By mid-January, the headlines had arrived: “What is house burping and why are some people doing it?” “Should we all be ‘house burping’?” “Should you ‘burp’ your house during winter?”, “House burping: a detox trend for your home?” and “House burping sounds absolutely wild, but it really works.”

All of them dangle the possibility that those who click will be rewarded with a jolt of esoteric, game-changing knowledge. The one headline that cut right to the chase, from “Today,” was “What is house burping? Inside the trend of airing out your home,” — the very wording of which points out that this process already has a recognizable name. It just isn’t one that’s likely to go viral on #TikTok: As YouTube creator Feli from Germany explains, lüften is an age-old practice that’s so ingrained within Germany’s public-health measures that not doing it can constitute a lease violation. Much of her video is just marveling that lüften is now a fact of everyday life in one country and hyped like the invention of fire in another. But ultimately, it makes sense. America’s Puritan origins entwined tidiness with morality, morality with aesthetics, aesthetics with value and value with purpose — in everything but name, house burping hits all the marks.

That said, if there’s one thing Americans do well, it’s rebranding. We’ve recast the torture of prisoners as “enhanced interrogation,” upgraded bog-standard reactionary beliefs to “dark enlightenment” and polished up precarious, poverty-wage work as a shiny gig economy. Social media’s co-optation of lüften wasn’t necessarily inevitable, but it fits seamlessly into TikTok’s paradigm of claiming a pre-existing phenomenon as a new discovery, giving it a cutesy name, and adding it to a list of trends, from product overloading (aka bulk buying) to laundry stripping (pre-treating stains) that never fail to aestheticize order, elevate hygiene and exalt productivity.

Cleaning hacks are an internet staple, so when #CleanTok became a thing, I assumed it was a repository of up-to-the-minute hot tips until one friend set me straight: “It’s about watching other people clean, seeing what products and tools they use,” and buying them via handy links. Going from viewing to buying is increasingly frictionless. Multinational hygiene and personal-care behemoth Unilever even joined forces with #CleanTok in 2023 to rebrand the soap opera.

The long, linked history of morality and cleanliness is rife with racism, misogyny and ableism. It’s also not history. The 2006 study “A clean self can render harsh moral judgment” by scientists as the University of Toronto concluded that because those preoccupied with cleanliness  “may not only feel dirt-free, but also morally untainted,” leading to an “elevated sense of moral self” that “can in turn license severe moral judgment.” American service media’s house burping hype might be less about trying to match TikTok’s relevance than about never missing an opportunity to reaffirm that cleanliness is next to godliness — and that neither is socially neutral.

This makes the sheer number of #CleanTok videos (roughly 3.5 million, with an estimated 95 billion views to date) and their prevailing aesthetic (beige-and-white IKEA minimalism) feel unsettling: Scrolling through so many videos that feature the same kind of woman (young, white, athleisure-clad) editing the same kind of cleaning regimens with the same kind of beats and captions that draw the same kinds of comments can feel like trying to escape an uncanny valley of Clean Girls. Isn’t there anyone out there in the wilds of #CleanTok dusting the cobwebbed eaves and re-grouting the bathroom of a dark, ancient, possibly haunted house?

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It happens, my friend assures me, but it requires some searching. In her experience, the #CleanTok viewing sessions most likely to result in actual cleaning are ones that reward a kind of interchangeable, mirror-image uniformity. “They’ve got the Scrub Daddy, I’ve got the Scrub Daddy. They’ve got the fridge penguin, I’ve got the fridge penguin.” Until recently, she stood on chairs to dust moldings, high shelves, and the tops of picture frames. #CleanTok reminded her that telescoping dusters exist, and she hasn’t stood on a chair since. “It’s just satisfying,” she concludes.

“Satisfying” is a recurring #CleanTok byword deployed in hashtags (like #satisfyingcleans) if not in the videos themselves (like “SATISFYING DOOR CLEAN HEYYYYY”). #CleanTok became one of TikTok’s most popular genres in part thanks to both the escalated hygiene measures and the necessity of dependable zone-out material required during COVID lockdown. But I’d also correlate it with the late-2010s emergence of the “oddly satisfying” genre of short-form social-media content in which close-ups of soap cutting, taffy pulling, pressure washing and more served as both visual nerve tonic and mesmerizing diversion. #CleanTok and #oddlysatisfying converge at the node of aesthetic rightness sometimes called the Goldilocks Effect: Individual tastes vary, but there’s a reason the show “How It’s Made” ran for 32 seasons.

“Satisfying” is also a common hashtag in the #CleanTok subgenre known as #sundayreset,” whose videos of laundry folding, mirror squeegeeing and rug-vacuuming might lead one to think they are just another flavor of cleaning video. Nope: According to a 2025 Good Housekeeping explainer, the Sunday reset is “more than just tackling routine chores: a Sunday reset can benefit you mentally and leave you feeling refreshed for the start of the week.” In other words, it’s more than cleaning. It’s a larger, more complex form of self-actualization that just happens to involve a lot of cleaning. It’s a day of rest rebranded as a productivity ritual with a checklist.

Scrolling through the #sundayreset hashtag is a lot like scrolling through regular #CleanTok: Beige-on-white interiors, decisive clips of vacuuming and dusting, breathy soundtracks (Olivia Dean’s “Baby Steps” appears to be the unofficial #sundayreset anthem) and narration/captions heavy on terms like “mindful,” “soft” and “self-care.” I ask my #CleanTok friend where #sundayreset” falls on the satisfaction continuum. “If everything is in its place, you’re not rushing around trying to find stuff you need.” (She also theorizes that the #sundayreset is itself a rebranding of the aggro, almost militaristic regimens that were once the province of productivity hackers like “The 4-Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss and an industry of techbros whose innovations in outsourcing Business Insider described in 2015 as “tech to replace their moms.”)

The #sundayreset, some of its proponents suggest, is a proactive framework that helps stave off the free-floating anxiety of the Sunday Scaries. But Julio Vincent Gambuto, author of the 2023 manifesto “Please Unsubscribe, Thanks! How to Take Back Our Time, Attention, and Purpose in a World Designed to Bury Us In Bullsh*t” thinks that resets are less about intent than about impact: “It’s important to draw a distinction between resetting that truly allows you to restore your mental, emotional, and physical energy, and resetting that zaps it or that actually winds you up to be more efficient and productive.”

Cheyenne Solis echoes the point in a recent essay, writing that “When social media works with hustle culture, we’re made to feel like we’re chronically behind. Every free moment is a chance to catch up to the pace of everyone else as the prevailing message rings, ‘I can rest when I’m done (or dead).’” An experiment in dedicating her Sundays to rest rather than playing catch-up led Solis to embrace anti-hustle, noting that “By taking a day of rest, whether or not everything on my to-do list is done, I’m engaging in a courageous act of detangling productivity from my self-worth.”

TikTok’s endlessly iterating rebrands distract from hidebound norms and expectations (say, that women are naturally drawn to the domestic realm in which love requires aesthetic perfection). Their vocabulary echoes corporate jargon because treating corporations like people inevitably means that actual people are treated like underperforming assets in perpetual need of optimization.

This hasn’t always been the case. There was a time when, for instance, people made fun of Martha Stewart because she and the media empire she built were so unashamed of suggesting that goodness was achieved by way of relentless tidiness and vigilant domesticity. The triumph of lifestyle branding that’s been normalized via Food Network superstars, celebrity wellness gurus and social-media cleanfluencers is our new normal, and the world is clamoring for the next Martha.

The reaction to Julia Fox’s impromptu 2023 video tour of her cluttered New York City apartment, by contrast, showed how quickly the pendulum swings: Some viewers appreciated the sight of a thoroughly un-zhuzhed celebrity apartment, but the ones who didn’t were quick to call Fox a neglectful mother, mentally ill and “a lowlife.” Did watching the video stress my #CleanTok pal out? “It did. But seeing the way people judge her character was actually worse.” Rebrands are always a compromise: Staking a claim to a new trend means disrespecting the generations-old custom it co-opts; tethering well-being to domestic productivity re-inscribes narrow gendered beliefs.

For Gambuto, the solution seems simple: “True wellness starts when we unsubscribe from the notion of ‘always on.’” A reset that’s more than performative will require that social-media producers aren’t expected to be social-media products. In the meantime, I’ll settle for more details about that fridge penguin. 

The post Why we’d rather watch strangers tidy than do it ourselves appeared first on Salon.com.

Altman claims the company knows how to “mitigate” the risks, but Adler noted they have not shown any data to prove it. This leaves the unfortunate possibility that Altman simply doesn’t care if ChatGPT is addictive. I can’t read Altman’s mind, but he has a strong financial incentive to go down this path. OpenAI continues to burn money without much promise that they’ll find legitimate pathways to profitability any time soon. But there is one way to get people, especially men, to pay for expensive subscriptions to ChatGPT: Get them so addicted to their imaginary girlfriends that they’re willing to dish out thousands to keep the experience going.

This isn’t just an expensive proposition — it’s also a psychological danger, constituting behavior that is likely to get men to withdraw from the real world and attachments to real people.

That may sound paranoid, but the grim truth is that this scenario reflects an alarming trend online: An increasing number of influencers, crypto grifters, “pick-up artists” and gambling websites have come to realize that male isolation creates incredible profit opportunities. It’s not just that they are making money off male loneliness. In many cases, capitalist predators are incentivizing young men to abandon the flesh-and-blood world in favor of staying online.

Acknowledging we have a male loneliness crisis is treacherous business. Many dispute there is such an epidemic. Others scoff at the idea that this is a problem worth caring about, especially when women still suffer from more serious problems due to persistent inequality. Others may acknowledge male loneliness as a serious issue, but then insist it’s self-inflicted — a failure of men to take personal responsibility.

All these responses may seem cold or shortsighted. After all, even if one doesn’t care about men’s loneliness in itself, there can be little doubt that it’s driving them into destructive behaviors — such as embracing fascism — that have negative impacts on everyone.

Still, the urge to roll one’s eyes and dismiss men’s social isolation is understandable. Implicit in many discussions of the issue is the notion that male loneliness is the fault of women — and their problem to solve. Last week, Ross Douthat of the New York Times hosted a pair of conservative female writers to argue that allowing women into the workplace drove men out and deprived them of meaning and connection. The #MeToo movement is blamed for allegedly making men too scared to date and inducing self-loathing. And, of course, women are endlessly scolded for refusing to marry men for reasons their critics deem unacceptable, such as expecting a baseline level of respect.

As Jessica Winter pointed out in a recent New Yorker article about the masculinity crisis, even centrist and liberal men seem to believe the only solution is to accede to the belief “that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before.” She’s right that these arguments dehumanize women, who are full human beings and not emotional support animals for men. But it’s also doing men no favors to pin the blame for their problems on women. The fantasy that men can be restored to “provider” status over women isn’t just immoral. It could actually make things worse, as modern women want men to be partners, not a boss with whom they live and have sex.

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Instead, it’s time to look at how male loneliness has been monetized by all manner of seedy actors who have every incentive to discourage men from making changes to improve their lives. Men’s ability to adapt to modernity is being stymied by propagandists and grifters, who persuade men to adopt anti-social behavior, because doing so is incredibly profitable.

The explosion of podcasters and social media influencers dubbed the “manosphere” has received a lot of attention in recent years, in no small part because it helped push young men toward voting for Donald Trump in 2024. It’s a diffuse category, to be certain, encompassing everyone from comedians like Joe Rogan and Theo Von to overtly nasty misogynists like the “Fresh & Fit” podcast. Across the board, however, these manosphere guys promote an anti-social view of masculinity that just so happens to make them a lot of money. Some sell supplements. Some sell online “courses.” Some simply sell their viewers to advertisers. All market themselves with the implicit promise that they’re helping men improve their lives. But instead they sell a view of masculinity that is cut off from emotions, valorizes “hustle” over having a well-balanced social life and encourages staying at home instead of taking the risk of getting out in the world to meet more people.

Entire cottage industries now exist to exploit men who don’t have enough social support to keep them sane and out of trouble. Both crypto and sports gambling would likely be much smaller, if not for men unmoored from family, friends, or partners to occupy their time and discourage risky behavior. The recent Major League Baseball gambling scandal exposed how ridiculous sports betting has become, drawing mostly men to impulsively wager often alarmingly large sums on “prop bets,” some as minor and disconnected from the sport as the coin flip at the beginning of a game. Many factors have contributed to online gambling spiraling out of control, but male loneliness is an under-discussed aspect of the conversation. Betting apps depend on a steady supply of bored guys watching games alone. While alcohol isn’t good for you, one does wonder if we wouldn’t all be healthier if more men watched sports with friends in bars, using the downtime to talk instead of idly tap at screens.

Even dating apps have fallen into this trap. As progressive dating coach Harris O’Malley lamented in a recent interview with Salon, “They’re all Candy Crush now. None of them are there to actually help you get introduced to people.” Instead, he explained, they “get you to be frustrated” by serving up poor matches or bots, and then promise that if you pay more money for premium benefits, you’ll start getting better results. But his clients find that even when they buy subscriptions, as well as “boosts, flowers, likes,” they are still “getting nothing,” because the app will lose a customer if they ever do find a girlfriend. 

So it’s really no wonder that Altman, desperate for some promise of revenue, may be looking at the same source that is making crypto grifters, pick-up artists and gambling apps so profitable: Lonely, bored men. Like all these other capitalist vultures, OpenAI’s plans wouldn’t just be exploiting lonely men, but would actively be making the problem worse.

Dating is hard, and if some of your needs are being met by a sycophantic AI girlfriend, it will feel easier, for some men, to stay at home and play with their toy rather than getting out into the real world. While that’s understandable in the short term, there’s a real threat of long-term damage from social isolation.

Ironically, the solution to the male loneliness epidemic is to refrain from the gendered talk that frames the situation as “men vs. women.” In reality, it’s being driven by capitalist vultures who have monetized people’s misery. By looking it as an economic and structural issue, we can find solutions — such as regulating online spaces and AI — that would work a lot better than just yelling at women to lower their marriage standards.

The post Don’t blame women for men’s loneliness. Blame capitalism appeared first on Salon.com.

This was a major gamble. To feed its propaganda apparatus and pay for the "brownshirts," Nazi militias who stalked Germany's streets "discouraging" opposition, the party needed money it didn't have.

"We are all very discouraged, particularly in the face of the present danger that the entire party may collapse," complained Joseph Goebbels, a party leader who later led the Reich's propaganda ministry and "total war" economy. "The financial situation of the Berlin organization is hopeless. Nothing but debts and obligations.”

The aid that Goebbels and other Nazi leaders needed soon arrived, along with 20 or so bankers and industrialists who arrived in chauffeured cars at the official residence of Reichstag president Hermann Göring on the night of Feb. 20. The agenda for the meeting was set: Hitler would assure this group of Germany's richest men that their fortunes would be preserved, or more likely multiplied, under Nazi rule. In return, they would offer Hitler the money he needed to destroy the political opposition — forever.

After more than a decade of Nazi ascendance, the party and the barons who would bail them out still distrusted one another. One can debate how seriously the Nazis took themselves as a "socialist" party, but it was right there in the name — they were aggressively nationalistic and racist but also, at least rhetorically, a working man's party. In addition to demanding land and territory to "settle our surplus population," barring Jews from German citizenship and deporting any non-Germans who had entered the country after 1914, the 25-point NSDAP program published in 1920, before Hitler took control of the party, also called for "the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations." 

The key word in that clause is "all," because it was entirely deceptive. In his own words, and as manifested later in actual Reich policy, Hitler believed in nationalizing only some businesses, or some parts of businesses — those owned by people he deemed undesirable and/or subhuman — and dividing their assets between the Nazi state and loyal businessmen. Empowering the workers? Not so much.

"We have to bring a process of selection into the matter in some way, if we want to come to a natural, healthy and also satisfying solution of the problem, a process of selection for those who should be entitled — and be at all permitted — to have a claim and the right to property and the ownership of companies," he told Otto Wagener, his economic policy advisor, in 1930.

At his core, Hitler despised Marxism, viewing it as an insidious Jewish conspiracy. The international class struggle predicted by Karl Marx directly contradicted the Nazis' racial-nationalist and decidedly anti-egalitarian weltanschauung, which championed welfare only for healthy, virtuous and "useful" members of the master race. The feeling was mutual; in 1932, Leon Trotsky rebuked the NSDAP as a socialist party in name only that "conducts terrorism against all socialist organizations … in its ranks one finds all classes except the proletariat." 

Hitler's avowed opposition to left-wing politics would later endear him to Germany's capitalists, though that moment had to wait for many years after he explained his beliefs in "Mein Kampf." Throughout the 1920s, most of Germany's wealthy industrialists preferred to support explicitly business-friendly conservative parties, who offered a less overtly destabilizing vision for the nation's future. At first, most wealthy Nazi supporters were a mixed bag of aimless socialites, heirs and heiresses who wanted to feel special (in this case, racially and culturally special; see Nordic Circle) and those who held antisemitic beliefs or were attracted to Hitler's call for national revanchism and perhaps to Hitler himself. But as the Weimar Republic's economy collapsed, so did the ruling coalition led by the center-left Social Democratic Party. Popular discontent emboldened both the Nazis and the Communists, and increasingly, industrial and banking leaders came to see Hitler as the weapon they could wield to crush the radical left.

"Not all capitalists were particularly enthusiastic about the Nazis, but their skepticism was relative and ended as soon as it became clear that Hitler was the only person capable of destroying the labor movement," recalled Albert Krebs, a Nazi Party official. That, of course, was not universally true; Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, a heavy industry magnate whose famous firm produced the bulk of German war materiél during World War I, was an enthusiastic Hitler backer well before the 1933 breakthrough, making large financial contributions to the party and distributing copies of "Mein Kampf" among his workers.

After the Nazis won a plurality of Reichstag seats in July 1932, a group of conservative elder statesmen from the Weimar government, largely representing business and aristocratic interests, collaborated to have Hitler appointed as chancellor the following January. In elevating Hitler as nominal government leader, while retaining 85-year-old military hero Paul von Hindenburg as president and Franz von Papen as vice chancellor (and presumed puppetmaster), the group hoped that Hitler would crush their opponents on the left and cede effective authority to them. He did the first, but not the second. 

A month later, Göring convened another group of leaders from Germany's capitalist class for an election fundraiser of sorts in his official residence. Among those who accepted the invitation were banker Hjalmar Schacht, who would later become the Third Reich's chief finance minister; Georg von Schnitzler, head of the chemical and pharmaceutical giant I.G. Farben; and industrialist Günther Quandt, who was also, oddly enough, the former husband of Goebbels' wife Magda. Krupp, the arms king, was also present.

Despite holding political power, the Nazis badly needed those men. The party's financial situation remained perilous, and they needed to assure the invited audience that their alliance would remain useful even after the Communists had been defeated or destroyed. Clad in a civilian suit and tie rather than his Nazi stormtrooper's uniform, Hitler outlined plans to purge the government of leftists and eliminate trade unions, arguing that the moneyed assemblage's economic interests were best served by assertive militarism and the outright destruction of Germany's parliamentary system. "Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy," he declared.

After Hitler departed, Schacht asked the other attendees to deposit as much money as they could into his private trust, which the Nazis could use however they liked heading into the March 5 election. Göring added that the election "will surely be the last one for the next 10 years, probably even for the next 100 years," a situation that would ease the "financial sacrifices" asked of them. In the end, the fundraiser generated 3 million reichsmarks, about $30 million in today's money.

Even if Göring was technically incorrect — the Nazis continued to stage elections, for a while — effective political opposition ceased to exist, and by July of 1933, all non-Nazi parties were banned. Two years later, the Nuremberg Race Laws, which designated Jews, Roma and Black people as "enemies of the race-based state," allowed the government to officially expropriate Jewish property and businesses and distribute the spoils to non-Jewish Germans. Adolf Rosenberger, the Jewish co-founder of Porsche, was convicted of "racial crimes" because of his relationship with a Gentile and stripped of his stake in the company. (Rosenberger was luckier than most other German Jews; he fled to the U.S. and spent the rest of his life in California under the name Alan Robert.) 

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Hitler, honoring the promises made at this "Secret Meeting," disbanded and outlawed all independent trade unions, then imposed a centralized, party-governed "union" called the German Labour Front, which was effectively an instrument for the Nazis to exert control over workers' lives. Strikes and collective bargaining were not permitted, and the union's primary purpose was to fuel the Nazi war economy, which was largely contracted out to private industry.

Indeed, it was these major capitalists who reaped the greatest rewards from Germany's early wartime victories. The conquest of Poland and several other territories in Eastern Europe brought to Germany an influx of slave laborers — drafted civilians, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates — who were forced to work dangerous machinery without protective clothing, denied medical attention and adequate food, and summarily executed for minor infractions. The life expectancy of slave laborers at the I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz was less than four months; more than 25,000 died at the construction site alone. That, of course, was the point — if someone was useful enough to work but not worthy of normal life, they were worked to death. Replacements were almost endlessly available; an estimated 12 to 20 million people were deported to Germany as laborers during the war, and at least 2.5 million died.

Under Nazi patronage, German corporations offered generous, bloody tribute, and were well compensated. Krupp supplied heavy armaments, including tanks, artillery and U-boats; Allianz provided insurance for the concentration camps; Hugo Boss furnished (but did not always design) the uniforms of the SS, SA, Wehrmacht and Hitler Youth; and Degussa, a subsidiary of I.G. Farben, produced and delivered more than 56 tons of the pesticide known as Zyklon B to Nazi extermination facilities from 1942 to 1944. Its only use was to fulfill the "Final Solution" as far as possible — that being the extermination of Europe's Jewish population — as well as to murder millions of other camp inmates.  

After the war, 24 I.G. Farben executives were put on trial for their role in the Holocaust. In his opening statement, prosecutor Telford Taylor declared that "they were the magicians who made the fantasies of 'Mein Kampf' come true … They were the guardians of the military and state secrets.” In this case, the stereotypical German penchant for record-keeping doomed the defendants; 6,384 documents submitted as evidence — purchase orders, meeting notes, inventories, internal letters and memos — indicated beyond doubt that they knew exactly how many Zyklon B canisters were sent to Auschwitz and what they were being used for. The defense argument that they were just bureaucrats punching the clock didn't fly, and 13 of them were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Some of them got off lightly. Schnitzler, one of the convicted I.G. Farben executives, was released after four years and returned to the business world. Quandt, the ex-husband of Goebbels' wife, was judged to be a Mitläufer, meaning someone who accepted Nazi ideology but did not directly partake in its crimes. Schacht, tried with other leading Nazis like Göring, Albert Speer and Joachim von Ribbentrop, was acquitted on charges of conspiracy and crimes against peace, largely because he'd been imprisoned by the Nazis after the July 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler (although Schacht was not involved).

The 75-year old Krupp was supposed to be tried alongside Schacht, but had become senile and was deemed medically unfit. His son Alfried and 11 other corporate directors faced charges in a later trial for participating in “the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians.” The younger Krupp was sentenced to 12 years in prison, but reportedly never expressed remorse during or after his detainment. When a Daily Mail journalist asked him in 1959 if he felt any guilt for his role, he responded: "What guilt? For what happened under Hitler? No. But it is regrettable that the German people themselves allowed themselves to be so deceived by him."

It was unclear from that phrasing whether Krupp considered himself to be among the deceived.

The post When big business rolled over for fascism — and cashed in: A lesson, or a warning? appeared first on Salon.com.

“Working at home has allowed women like me to have a thriving career that can easily coexist with my mission to be a full-time mom,” Davis said. “The school hours are simple, and there's no time wasted with commuting or making myself office ready. Sweatpants are fine, and I'm blasting off with my cuppa and emails earlier than I ever would [otherwise]. I'm not getting whatever virus is going around on a packed train, and my lunch hour is spent walking my dogs. By the time my kids get home, I take a 10-minute break to get them settled into whatever they have to do (homework, snacks, hand washing) and then I'm back at my desk.”

Despite such tangible benefits, remote work is under fire, including by two of the most powerful men in the world. President Donald Trump and his top adviser, billionaire Elon Musk, have repeatedly vowed to force as many public sector employees as possible to work in person, an ethos they hope to spread to the private sector. They argue those who work from home are lazy, and dismiss concerns that marginalized groups like disabled people may need to work from home.

“President Trump believes that federal hiring and promotion decisions should be based on merit and who will do the job best for American taxpayers, and that it cannot be based on DEI-related factors that favor some Americans over others and that are not connected with the job itself,” a White House spokesperson told Salon. “There are undoubtedly many quality federal employees with disabilities. The purpose of this order is that they should be hired and promoted based on that quality work — not based on the fact that they’re disabled.”

According to experts, these kinds of arguments ignore the data about the number of people who telework, why people work remotely in the first place and how telework often boosts productivity.

Even though more than three out of five federal employees work in person, Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa incorrectly claimed that only six percent do so regularly. Indeed, a 2022 survey by the Congressional Budget Office found 22 percent of federal workers teleworking, compared to 25 percent in the private sector. As late as August 2023, one out of five workers do their jobs remotely.

Martin O’Malley, who until recently served as Social Security Commissioner, witnessed that literal ignorance firsthand last month when the House Oversight Committee grilled him for allowing his employees to work remotely. Two days before leaving office, O’Malley signed an agreement with workers’ unions allowing a minimum amount of telework for 42,000 Social Security employees (98 percent of their staff). O’Malley has long championed improving staff morale at the agency, but congressional Republicans like Reps. Virginia Foxx of Virginia, Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin and Pat Fallon of Texas claimed that by doing so he encouraged laziness. Reps. Fallon, Foxx and Grothman did not respond to Salon’s request for comment.

O’Malley said that in spite of efforts to paint people who work remotely as lazy, working from home actually boosts productivity and keeps workers happy. For political reasons “they were just there to drive forward their false narrative, which is that federal employees are all lazy, that they don't show up for work,” O’Malley explained.

“That's their narrative: Equate telework, any telework, with ‘not showing up for work.’” O’Malley told Salon. “And if you are giving an answer that is a truthful answer, as I frequently did in that hearing, they would always try to cut me off when I made the truthful assertions before I could complete the sentence.”

According to Stanford University economist Nicholas A. Bloom, this opposition to remote working is partially rooted in a specific form of prejudice: ableism.

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“Employees with a disability face much higher costs for commuting,” Bloom said. “For example, one person who was paralyzed from the neck downwards after an accident told me it took him three hours to commute in the morning as his carer had to come in and bathe and dress him, and then his dad drove him to work. So he needed to wake at 5:30am to do this, while if he [worked from home], it was a 20 minute process.”

Bloom added, “It is also easier to work at home as you can more easily control your working environment including desk, chair, lighting, access to a bathroom, etc.”

While a 2021 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science showed remote workers can sometimes be less engaged, this has less to do with the practice of remote working itself and is rather “because workers are not all the same and we have to consider different dimensions of personality,” Margaça said.

Research bears this out over and over again. For example, a 2021 study in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that people who are naturally extroverted and conscientious report reduced productivity when they cannot work in person, but this is not true for more introverted, laid back workers. That survey was taken during the COVID-19 pandemic; by contrast, a 2013 study in the journal Industrial Relations (conducted seven years before the pandemic) found call center employees were more productive when able to work from home.

“Home working led to a 13% performance increase, of which 9% was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick days) and 4% from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter and more convenient working environment),” the authors reported.

More recently, a 2021 Uppsala University study comparing Chinese and Finnish workers during COVID-19 found that Chinese workers believed they were more productive in the office, while Finnish workers felt they were more productive at home. On both occasions, evidence found workers were more productive when it came to areas of their job that depended on being satisfied with their employment, but that work/family conflicts caused occasional drops in productivity.

Antonin Bergeaud, an associate professor in the Economic Department of HEC Paris who studied remote working both before and after the pandemic, listed a number of benefits to employers in encouraging remote working: The companies spend less on real estate, can hire a more diverse spectrum of employees and have workers who are more productive (because they spend less time commuting) and are happier. Although there are downsides, such as lack of direct interactions with coworkers and bad meeting management, Bergeaud concluded that there is “a positive overall effect using microdata on French firms and this was measured before the pandemics.”

Bloom added that, while workers may initially benefit from being in an office so they more easily collaborate, “once you get about three days a week, diminishing returns set in, and you lose some benefits of [working from home] which is generally quieter (so good for deep work) and saves about 1.5 hours a day for the typical person.” Although fully remote work may somewhat cut productivity, it can more than offset that by cutting “costs by 30% to 50% because of no office costs and lower salaries, so it can be hugely attractive to employers.”

The main challenge, Bloom and others argue, is the stigma associated with remote work, which isn’t helped by people like Trump and Musk. Psychologist and behavior studies expert Dr. Clara Margaça, who teaches at Portugal’s Lusofona University, says that people who oppose remote work for a mix of reasons that include not only ableism, but a need they feel to control their employees.

“From a psychological perspective (which is our area of expertise), this attitude is clearly the desire for control,” Margaça said. “Some leaders believe in the traditional in-office model where supervision ensures productivity and accountability.”

“These traditional/ideological perspectives tend to view remote work as a sign of laziness or lack of discipline, rather than an evolution in workforce management,” Margaça said.

While controlling their employees may seem ideal to these employers, it is unhealthy for their organization in precisely the ways in which remote working can be a boon. Sean O'Meara, the founder and managing director of content at design agency Essential Content and co-author of “Remote Workplace Culture” with organizational psychologist Professor Sir Cary Cooper, offered a specific example to illustrate the benefits of remote working.

“As someone who works remotely with a remote, globally distributed team, I've been able to integrate healthy habits into my workday in a way that would be impossible working from an office,” O’Meara said. For example, he now walks more often.

“When I worked in an office, I'd take a 30 minute stroll during my lunch hour most days, typically along a busy road with lots of car pollution,” O’Meara said. “Now, I walk approximately 17,000 steps every work day in the countryside near my home by doing walking meetings.” When he returns to work after brisk exercise, he finds that his mind is more clear.

“The secondary benefit is that I find I am far better able to focus and add value while walking because I am not at risk of being distracted by Slack, email or other notifications,” O’Meara said. “I am a far better active listener while walking. Nobody needs to take notes because we use an AI meeting transcriber which emails out a summary and transcript, with action points.”

Peter Shankman, the founder and CEO of Source of Sources (SOS), an online service for journalists to gather feedback from the public, echoed O’Meara’s perspective: He prefers remote working, both for himself and for his employees.

“I can tell you that as someone who has ADHD, if I ever had to go back into an office, my productivity would drop 95%,” Shankman said. “Being able to work from my apartment, an airport, an airplane, hell, the Boreal Forest, is one of the reasons I'm as successful as I am.”

Like O’Meara, Shankman points out the advantage of being able to regularly exercise, but he mentioned more as well. As Shankman pointed out, remote working allows him to control his environment, avoid unnecessary social interactions and work when his brain is most productive instead of according to someone else’s schedule. Contrary to the notion that people who work from home will get distracted, Shankman observed that he finds it easier to juggle many balls when he is not in an office.

“I’m less overwhelmed by multitasking,” Shankman said. “In an office, I’m constantly bombarded with interruptions — emails, Slack messages, people stopping by my desk. At home, I can structure my workday to minimize context switching and focus deeply on one task at a time.”

Dr. Nattha Wannissorn, who teaches molecular genetics at the University of Toronto and consults for the natural health and wellness industry, was able to further break the personal health benefits in working from home by drawing from her unique experiences.

“Working from home makes me healthier and more productive for so many reasons,” Wannissorn said. “As a former cancer researcher who's very into health, avoiding hormone disruptors and carcinogens is important to me. I cannot control these in an office setting, but when I work from home, I don't need to wear makeup or be exposed to various scented products, furniture off-gassing, or copy machine fumes. Also, not commuting can reduce my exposure to pollution.”

For his part, O’Malley is worried about the future of the agency he used to lead, one on which millions more people will need to rely if the new administration’s policies create mass poverty. It is cruelly ironic that an administration implementing work policies that disadvantage disabled people is in part doing so by criticizing the employees at Social Security, an agency that exists to help the economically underprivileged. O’Malley said he goes back and forth about whether the deeper agenda behind many of these policies is to destroy these safety nets for the American people.

“They could very well break Social Security,” O’Malley said. “I think I said that to them in the hearing. They could very well break it.”

If they do, many of the workers who currently depend on doing their jobs remotely may lack any financial safety net in the near future. For now, though, they embrace their ability to work remotely.

As Davis told Salon, “Remote work is really, truly a blessing for women like me — to be able to have a robust career and get it all done is a gift.”

The post Is telework really fostering laziness? Here’s why the opposite may be true appeared first on Salon.com.

For all the electoral postmortems about the desire for economic change, what’s unsurprisingly absent is what seems, to me, an obvious omission: an all-enveloping misunderstanding of American capitalism. 

I’m not dismissing the importance of anxiety about solvency, about the challenges that small businesses face (I’m a proprietor of one myself) and about the cost of future entitlements. (We’ll get to the problems of liberalism in a bit). Most of us in this country will worry about money for the duration of our lives.

One delusional mythology about American capitalism that has been instilled in We the People is that we somehow have a guaranteed right to prosperity; this imaginary right has been deployed by politicians who are afraid of educating their constituents about how our model of commerce actually works. Our national press has largely been lazy on this score as well. 

With due respect to the many Americans who voted for Donald Trump, their overwhelming sense of entitlement dwarfs that of the hard-working immigrants who cut their grass, scrub pots and pans in the restaurants they frequent, and care for their kids and elderly loved ones. Too many Americans have come to believe they are owed financial comfort and material abundance, not to mention eggs and gasoline at predictable prices.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Frankly, it’s an illogical question in a capitalist nation. Some people are of course worse off, and I don’t mean to make light of that. But in fact, many millions are better off; Joe Biden’s administration oversaw the recovery of millions of jobs lost during the COVID pandemic and the creation of millions more. Some people out there will be worse off by the time they finish this article than when they commenced reading it. I’m not being flippant; that’s reality. 

Welcome to capitalism, a system whose proponents always cite unequal outcomes as a reason for extolling it.

So eggs are expensive? Eat fewer of them. Cut down on egg whites. Let them eat yolks. 

Are gas prices high? Is insurance for health care, real estate and vehicles increasing? Are supply chain constraints harming your livelihood, or your quality of life? The person in the White House has very little to do with that. Let’s recall that gas prices steadily increased during George W. Bush’s second term. 

Gas was cheap in 2020 because — hello! — tens of millions of drivers weren’t driving. In fact, Trump threatened the Saudis, in the early days of the pandemic: Cut oil production, or lose U.S. military support. Why? More oil flooding the market would have driven prices still lower, and “cheap gas” does not sound like “ka-ching.” 

Welcome to the “laws” of supply and demand, which all of us must navigate on a daily basis. If you don’t know or don’t remember these details, ask yourself why you don’t. If you’re a Trump voter, then ask yourself whether you might have voted differently in November had you been aware. 

Meanwhile, we have endless debates about whether needs — access to medical care, food, affordable housing — should be rights, or should be left to the exigencies of good luck and near-perfect health.

Jeremiads about grocery prices are now an acceptable element of political discourse and, per GOP logic, we have a right to complain about them. Feeding the hungry, though? That edges too close to pinko communism. But the point our fellow countrymen and women should grasp is that presidents, whoever they are, have very little control over inflation.   

You know what my wife and I did when household costs became too onerous last year? We reduced our expenses, and adjusted our quality of life. 

That’s, you know, fiscal conservatism: Tightening the belts, practicing austerity, living within our means, limiting debt. We didn’t literally pull ourselves up by the bootstraps or walk to school through the snow without shoes. But isn’t that the American mythos? 

Deep-state capitalism 

In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing better financially than at any time in my life, Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew others who had lost their jobs and contracts to offshoring. Years before he ran for office, Trump talked about the dangers of competition with low-wage Asian nations, in particular; when I’d heard him speak, I nodded in concurrence. 

But here’s what I never thought about at the time: I and other angry Americans hadn’t grasped that offshoring to increase profits was a central feature of capitalism, as advocated by both parties — but in particular by the mythologizers of capitalism on the Republican side. 

So I’ll pose almost the same question nearly a decade later: What do Trump voters, and especially true believers in the MAGA community, of which I was once a full member, think capitalism is? 

We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (such as antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively and historically, have a high tolerance for greed. 

There’s the mythology of capitalist meritocracy at work, which is still championed by many people who’ve been failed by both major political parties. Their concerns have been exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, rather than capitalism, is the source of their ills; that because of the evil policies of liberals, they keep working harder and harder but never seem to break even, much less get ahead. 

Lest there be any confusion: I support capitalism. Entrepreneurship and innovation best advance in free markets. 

But still: The rage I felt, even more acutely experienced today among the MAGA faithful, was perhaps warranted but rooted in ignorance. Trump was not wrong when he lamented the once-thriving communities ravaged and hollowed out by outsourcing. But his solution was no solution at all.

Now he has persuaded millions into believing that only he can successfully stymie the global and domestic capitalist forces that he did essentially nothing about during his first administration. 

Why didn’t he do anything? Because Trump understands, in his own pedestrian way, that capitalism operates less on merit the higher one moves up in the hierarchy. 

Trump is the most devoted “deep state” capitalist in American history, given the millions his businesses have earned in foreign payments. So much for thwarting the globalists. Want an argument for why the über-wealthy should pay more in taxes? If these money-hoarders could have gotten so rich in another country, they most certainly would have. Do we really believe this doesn’t apply to Trump? 

Broadly speaking, the two core ideological dogmas within MAGA are: 1) liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (second come the RINOs, or Republicans in Name Only, although it’s not close); and 2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created. 

Most people who voted for Trump — especially the MAGA faithful — want and expect him, and by extension the federal government, to intervene in commerce. According to the classical definition, that would be socialism — or Marxism or communism, whichever epithet we are using today. The confusion is general, because it’s all mythological.

I cannot entirely fault those who are still looking for a hero or a superman who cuts through the noise and nonsense. The 2008 financial crisis and its brutal aftermath placed the ills of capitalism front and center, and begat an understandable skepticism in banks, government and other major institutions. What made that episode particularly deleterious, however, was not that we had too much regulation but too little; that laissez-faire ethos is rooted in the importance of land ownership, a central basis of American capitalism.  

In fact, the notion that a singular person can serve as an economic savior and, in messianic fashion, usher in utopia, is much closer to a socialist-communist notion than a capitalist one. That surely does not mean the government should play no role in our economy; as mentioned above, the Biden administration oversaw remarkable growth. Trump and the Republicans, however, didn't actually campaign on any policy ideas aimed to increase economic mobility and opportunity. They benefited instead from the profoundly human delusion known as nostalgia. 

People are looking for reasons why they seem to work more but keep falling behind. I sympathize; this resonates with me.  

The answer is in front of us, and it is called capitalism, or at least the romantic mythology of capitalism. Our species makes sense of the world, in large part, through the stories we tell, and no country in world history is more defined by myths than the United States of America. All kinds of emotions inform those myths. MAGA believers like to tell their foes, “F**k your feelings,” but as someone who spent seven years within the MAGA movement, I can attest it is almost entirely driven by feelings. There is no logic that determines the tides and currents within the MAGA community; it took me an entire year to come to that epiphany. 

Many on the political right choose to ignore that they already depend, or very soon will, on “socialist” safety-net programs such as Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. Some part of the MAGA community is aware that the reforms brought by liberalism help to keep them alive. 

In short, almost everyone is a liberal, when they need to be. Everyone is also a capitalist, or a socialist, when they need to be. 

So what now? 

There’s a lot of disbelief among liberals and Democrats about how so many Americans could simply overlook or ignore the public health crisis of gun violence, the loss of reproductive freedom (which affects men’s lives as well), the attacks on public education, and the marginalization and demonization of our LGBTQ+ population. 

I have a slightly nuanced take here: I do think most Americans really do care about these issues — but they were all perceived in competition with the mythology of capitalism as the always-most-important American doctrine.

Mythology tends to be more persuasive than discussion of policy, which brings me to something the Democratic Party should post in all their workplaces: Americans don’t vote based on policy. Sure, some liberals do, given what we know about their news and information consumption. Information bubbles exist on the Democratic side, too, but liberal voters are far more likely to encounter a diversity of sources. 

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MAGA culture, on the other hand, likes to espouse rugged individualism, but is wholly conformist: Anything that even remotely seems to refute the mythologies that permeate the MAGA congregation is shunned. I had a term, during my time as a MAGA pundit, for much of what we maligned as propaganda: It was the Democrat Media Industrial Complex. The lie we told ourselves, central to our myth, was that we were independent-minded, not susceptible to being influenced. 

MAGA’s ethos includes trauma, desperation, panic, despair, hopelessness and nihilism. What I want MAGA’s opponents to understand is that no one in the Trump movement came to imbibe that toxic mixture all on their own. I implore you to resist saying, “I told you so,” when Trump’s benefits are handed out exclusively to his rich buddies. 

I am helping to build a new community for those who leave MAGA. When many such people have their Road to Damascus moment about the betrayal of Trump, as I did, we want to offer them an exit ramp out of MAGA. Blaming or castigating them only offers more incentive to remain within the MAGA circle. It may feel gratifying in the short term, but only creates more damage. 

One of our biggest civic crises in America is that so many of our citizens lack basic comprehension of the governmental and economic model they live under, or, perhaps, they willfully deny it. This does not reflect a dearth of intelligence, and I would argue that it’s not even primarily a failure in education, although that’s part of it. More than anything, it reflects the fact that our actual elected representatives, at all levels, are petrified of their constituents and reluctant to have candid conversations about capitalism, for fear of losing their positions and being primaried out as communists, socialists, liberals and Marxists, or otherwise victimized by the toxic stew of GOP lies. 

The inherent flaw of mythology is that it offers its own evidence and its own truth to the believer, and anything that contradicts it is denied.

As he did in 2017,  Trump has been bequeathed a relatively stable economy, for now. Once he begins to destabilize it, which will adversely affect the working class, the middle class and small business owners, the falsehoods will only ramp up: Somehow, it was all Joe Biden’s fault. We can only hope the Democrats are ready for the onslaught of shameless absurdities.

I certainly don’t think that government can solve every problem, nor should try to. Perversely enough, Trump voters want it to try, although most would deny that or are not cognizant of it. The question we can keep posing to Trump voters is this: How much time does he get to fix your economic problems, and when will you understand that he never will? Expect no good answers; there aren’t any.

The post MAGA’s true believers don’t understand capitalism — Trump will teach them a hard lesson appeared first on Salon.com.

The Ravallion graph has gone viral since its inception, having been promoted by capitalists and capitalism sympathizers from Bill Gates to Steven Pinker. Yet despite its popularity, a new study in the journal World Development argues that the Ravallion graph's premise is fundamentally flawed — and, more importantly, that for the last 500 years unregulated capitalism has consistently worsened rather than improved living conditions.

The study — which was led by co-authors Dr. Dylan Sullivan of Macquarie University in Australia and Dr. Jason Hickel of Autonomous University of Barcelona and the London School of Economics and Political Science — concludes that extreme poverty was uncommon throughout history except when there were external causes of severe economic and social dislocation. Indeed, the rise of capitalism half a millennium ago led to a sharp uptick in human beings living below subsistence levels. When mass conditions began to improve around the turn of the 20th century, it was because of political movements that threw off colonialist regimes and used the government to redistribute wealth.

Sullivan and Hickel also pointedly critique the Ravillion graph, which Sullivan told Salon by email "suffers from several empirical flaws." By estimating poverty incomes with historical data about gross domestic product (GDP), the graph overlooks the suffering that occurs when people lose access to resources that they need but did not previously obtain as commodities. "If a forest is enclosed for timber, or subsistence farms are razed and replaced with cotton plantations, GDP goes up," Sullivan pointed out. "But this tells us nothing about what local communities lose in terms of their use of that forest or their access to food." In addition, the study relied on the World Bank's definition of the poverty line as being $1.90 purchasing power parity (PPP) per day, even though poverty is best assessed by determining whether wages are high enough and prices are affordable enough that the masses have easy access to essential goods like housing, food and fuel. Finally, Sullivan and Hickel criticize the graph for only going as far back as 1820, even though the current system of global capitalism began in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

That last criticism explains why, for their paper, Sullivan and Hickel started with the dawn of modern capitalism in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The scholars' research then spanned all over the globe while focusing on three data points linked to human welfare — real wages, height and mortality.

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"Thankfully, we were able to draw on the invaluable work of economic historians, who have painstakingly gathered historical data on real wages, human height, and mortality rates over several centuries," Sullivan wrote to Salon. Analyzing the data, Sullivan and Hickel found that any region of the world which developed a capitalist economic system — defined here as an economic system global in scale and that is predicated on what Sullivan described as "the ceaseless accumulation of private wealth" — soon suffered from a sharp decline in living standards for the masses.

"Everywhere capital goes, it leaves a footprint on the empirical indicators of human welfare," Sullivan told Salon. "The social dislocation associated with capitalism was so severe that, as of the most recent year of data, in many countries key welfare indicators remain lower than they were hundreds of years ago." As of the 2000s, an unskilled Mexican wage laborer earned on average 23% less than that person would have earned in 1700. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, real wages in India in the 2000s are lower than they had been more than 400 years earlier — in 1595.

There are documented physical consequences to this historic poverty. In Tanzania, heights were 0.67 inches lower in the 1980s than the 1880s. In Peru, a man born in the 1990s is on average 1.5 inches shorter than a man born in the 1750s. In the European nations of France, Germany, Italy and Poland, the average adult male height fluctuated wildly depending on whether the prevailing capitalist system provided for enough basic needs — which was often not the case. As such, Germans and Poles born in the 16th century were much taller than those born in the 1850s, and conditions (and height) did not improve until the 20th century.

Indeed, in every region of the world — the study looked at Europe, China, South Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa — the trend was the same: Capitalism led to declining standards of living, and only improved when progressive social movements implemented necessary reforms.

"Life expectancy is higher today everywhere than it was in the past, and infant mortality lower," Hickel wrote to Salon, attributing this progress primarily to improvements in quality and ease of access to healthcare, vaccines, public sanitation and other important goods that improve human health and previously did not exist. As a result, despite capitalism's negative effect on human welfare, in most areas of the world today standards of living are much better than they were prior to capitalism — although this is not universally the case.

"It's true that there are several cases in the global South where wages and/or heights have not recovered from the immiseration they suffered during the process of integration into the capitalist world-system," Hickel acknowledged. He pointed to India, where extreme poverty is worse than it was several centuries ago and 1 billion people live on wages that are no more effective at purchasing food and goods than the wages of a 16th century laborer. At the same time, Hickel distinguished these examples "from quality of life in a more general sense." In regions of the world that have redistributed wealth and shed the shackles of colonialism, human welfare has vastly improved.

"It is not only Western Europe that has experienced progress," Sullivan explained. "After the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, wages, height, and life expectancy improved rapidly. This is because the new government invested in public health care, education, and the universal distribution of food." Latin American wages and heights improved in the mid-20th century when political leaders in those nations began to focus on industrialization, Sullivan added, and during that same period living conditions improved in sub-Saharan Africa when anti-colonial leaders like the Congo's Patrice Lumumba and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah successfully fought for the rights of poor people. Conditions began to worsen in these regions in the 1980s and 1990s, however, when the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) began forcing countries to cut their social spending, deregulate their markets and privatize assets previously owned by the government.

This last development perhaps explains why, when Sullivan was asked about polices that could eliminate poverty, he started by suggesting that the World Bank and IMF be democratized. "In addition, we can establish universal public provisioning systems so that everyone can afford food, health care, and education," Sullivan added. "We can ensure all people's basic needs are met through a global universal basic income. And we can guarantee employment, as a basic right, in publicly owned enterprises. The history of the 20th century shows us that socialist policies like these can greatly improve human welfare."

Dr. Richard D. Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an expert on capitalism, responded in writing to a Salon inquiry about the new study by elaborating on exactly how capitalism as a system has led to a reduction in overall quality of life.

"Capitalist employers from the system's beginning to this present moment have striven mightily to oppose wage increases, improved job conditions, tax-based public services and all other mechanisms to improve living standards," Wolff explained. "Capitalists' opposition has always delayed and often destroyed working class efforts to improve their circumstances. The claimed improvements, when real, occurred despite and against capitalist's efforts, not because of them."

The post Unregulated capitalism makes you poor, miserable — and short: New study appeared first on Salon.com.

The MAGA movement’s recent embrace of crony capitalism is consequently just a symptom of a deeper historical trend. From the Medici and the Rockefellers to the Castors and the Gandhis, many powerful families throughout history have hitched their fortunes to those of the ruling class— or even transcended to become rulers themselves. The security, stability and influence that come with access to power has been a treasured asset for those brave enough to seek it, those fortunate enough to secure it and those skilled enough to sustain it. But it can also become a dangerous liability when regimes suddenly fall.

How these cronies move into positions of power ultimately depends on their core values and ideologies about the role of private enterprise in society — especially whether they are inclined to protect their own narrow interests or share the spoils more broadly. Their enduring success also depends on their ability to anticipate the winds of change, particularly in situations where greater political polarization inevitably is likely to produce larger ideological swings.

Countries where political elites have taken a more mutualistic approach to partnering with enterprising families (like the chaebol in South Korea) have achieved extraordinary economic and social progress. Those where the relationship is based on a more parasitic pay-to-play subservience (like the oligarchs in Russia) often flounder in arrested development, as the private benefits of increased commercial activity are captured by extractive elites, inhibiting more inclusive economic progress.

The more parasitic, pay-to-play form of political symbiosis is especially pervasive in emerging and frontier economies, where trust is elusive and institutions are ineffective. In these environments, oligarchic dynasties and familial networks create and sustain privileged microclimates of abundance — though mostly for their own exclusive benefit.

Contrast this with countries like the United States, where a more mutualistic species has dominated economic affairs since the end of World War II, contributing to one of the most dynamic and affluent societies in history. In fact, for nearly a century, the mutually beneficial relationship between business and government has been one of the defining features of the most advanced economies. 

Since the end of the Gilded Age over a century ago — back when the U.S. was still an emerging economy — Americans have been less exposed to the more parasitic form of cronyism than was rampant during the Industrial Revolution. Like many developing countries today, that era produced explosive innovation, economic progress and staggering degrees of inequality. It also led to persistent market failures and corporate abuses, triggering an age of widespread social activism and political reform.

Reacting to this concentration of wealth and power, a progressive movement emerged, advocating for new public “institutional” stabilizers like labor rights, women's suffrage, estate taxation, social security, antitrust legislation and effective regulation. These stabilizers were designed explicitly to constrain the dynastic families who ruled the commanding heights of America’s economy at the time — including the Vanderbilts in railroads, the Carnegies in steel, the Rockefellers in oil and the Guggenheims in mining, among others. 

Some of these families, like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, embraced these changes and became extraordinarily civic minded, creating national parks through massive donations of land, building universities and museums around the country and funding the national system of public libraries. Whether this philanthropy was designed to appease resentful citizens or motivated by genuine care for their communities is debatable. But their contributions to various critical public goods are undeniable, and they left behind many institutions dedicated to many noble ends.

Others, like the Vanderbilts, transitioned from industrial titans to social elites, focused more on maintaining their extensive real estate holdings, cultural patronage and social status rather than direct business expansion. Still others, like the Goulds, were more thoroughly displaced from their previous position of economic influence as a byproduct of market reforms.

In the decades that followed, as economic growth fueled greater tax revenues, increased funding for these public institutions helped to suppress market failures, address social tensions and invest in critical infrastructures that encouraged speculators to invest, businesses to grow and families to thrive. The shared prosperity generated by this unique mix of public and private sector forces made the American economy the envy of the world, lifting per capita incomes and general wellbeing, and exporting this stability globally.

However, over time the foundations of these critical stabilizers have been eroded by subsequent generations of policymakers and lobbyists, keen to extract greater private benefits from the system at the expense of the public good. Recent campaign promises from the MAGA movement echo earlier conservative slogans to “starve the beast.” They openly call for the defunding of public institutions that were responsible for stabilizing both domestic and international affairs —and for creating the conditions necessary for them to accumulate these vast fortunes in the first place. They essentially want to shut the gate behind them now that they’ve reached the promised land, and are now deploying their vast reserves of capital to remake the system in their own image — and mostly for their own benefit.

In many ways, we now appear to be approaching the end of a second Gilded Age, with ominous implications for stability in the years to come. Emboldened by these developments, a new generation of robber barons has recaptured the commanding heights of America’s economy, this time monopolizing information rather than industry. Elon Musk is the de facto leader of these so-called “broligarchs”, both in total wealth and proximity to power. His $259 million investment in building a cozy relationship with Donald Trump has already yielded billions in value for the companies he controls — and that’s before the new president even takes office. Others like Mark Zuckerberg are paying millions of dollars to attend the inauguration, in exchange for favors yet unspoken but which will undoubtedly arrive in the months to come. 

As American politicians increasingly look to tech titans and venture capitalists for leadership in economic and political affairs, we should all consider whether these symbiotic relationships are more likely to share prosperity with the many or consolidate it further in the hands of the few. The answer to that question will determine whether the U.S. continues to be a driver of economic development and social progress that sets an example for the rest of the world. Or whether we race toward another quarter century of depression and conflict — operating more like the emerging economy that prevailed at the turn of the 20th century, when stability was still elusive and cronyism was rampant.

Many leaders in New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney — who have been born and raised in a privileged bubble of stability and prosperity — are unfamiliar with how to operate under these more turbulent conditions. They’re accustomed to reliable access to capital, labor, justice and infrastructure, and have little intuition for how to survive and thrive without access to reliable public institutions.

Those looking for guidance and inspiration (or cautionary tales) would be wise to study other parts of the world where institutional voids are pervasive and consequently political symbiosis is commonplace. On the frontiers of capitalism, nurturing relationships with government officials is often a core competency, or even an existential imperative.

To be clear, under ideal conditions, these cozy relationships don’t need to be exclusively extractive — to borrow a term from Nobel laureates Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson. In these contexts, some enterprising families are also the primary drivers of inclusive economic development wherever they operate.

In South Korea, the country’s sprawling family-run conglomerates turbocharged the "Miracle on the Han River" by marshaling capital, technology and labor to industrialize the country at breakneck speed. Similar cases of enterprising families driving economic development can be found in every economy on the planet — from the Carvajals in Colombia to the Tatas in India to the Ayalas in the Philippines. These partnerships have not only generated enduring commercial success for the families themselves, but also accelerated economic development.

Naturally, these benefits are not free, and don’t last forever. Such Faustian bargains always come with strings attached. In South Korea, the collusive links between chaebol families and powerful politicians have recently triggered a string of scandals, culminating in the impeachment of a former president and the arrest of Samsung's family leader for bribery. As it did in America during the early 20th century, public discontent with flagrant corporate abuses often fuels tough new antitrust regimes, threatening the privileged status of these political symbionts after decades of partnership and growth. Well-connected elites like Musk and enabling politicians like Trump would be wise to take note.

As we enter a New Age of Uncertainty, with ominous parallels to the last era of sustained polycrisis a century ago, dynastic families and political elites will both be faced with a stark choice. Do they help to define a new social contract between private citizens, private businesses and public institutions? Or do they make hay while the sun is shining, and keep the firewood piled high, then brace for impact and wait for the long winter to pass?

In moments like this, our research suggests that leaders and organizations committed to continuity have much to learn from enterprising families in emerging and frontier economies, where uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. Their strong values-based cultures, deep commitment to their communities, and longer-term investment horizons, act like ballasts on a ship — working together to absorb shocks and navigate through treacherous waters. 

Any organization can embrace this same frontier mindset. The reward is not only a greater chance at long-term success, but also superior long-term performance. Unfortunately, many traditional corporations have forgotten that commercial success is fundamentally interconnected with community well-being. Or as one Latin American leader shared with us: “There cannot be a healthy business in a sick society.”

Public institutions must also do their part and learn to evolve with the times. There is no doubt that governments that effectively attend to the needs of their people and help solve tangible problems are better. Paying taxes is a demoralizing act when the general perception is that these vast resources are being squandered by inefficiency and graft. In that sense, Musk’s “DOGE” is a step in the right direction, though with many caveats. The work in making government more efficient needs to be done with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.

Most fundamentally, the private and public sectors must learn to coordinate and collaborate more effectively. Restoring trust requires capable, accountable institutions that can set fair rules, mobilize collective investments, encourage private risk taking and protect the common good. The business community also has a central role to play in rebuilding our collective faith in a more inclusive and sustainable form of capitalism — like the more enlightened robber barons at the end of the last Gilded Age.

After all, we all do best over the long-run when we’re aligned with our most important stakeholders — both private and public — in service of a common goal. In that sense, the most enduring enterprises, especially those that operate outside of advanced economies, are a natural role model for the type of organizational resilience and agility that we’ll all need to navigate the turbulent times that lay ahead.

The post The return of crony capitalism appeared first on Salon.com.

How bloody is it? By the end of the first episode more than 250 people are gunned down in an enclosed arena for losing a round of "Red Light, Green Light." Nobody who signed up to play realizes that being eliminated means death. They are all led believe they're partaking in simple playground games like this for a shot at winning 45.6 billion Korean won, the equivalent of around $39 million in U.S. currency. It sounds like buying a lottery ticket, only with improved odds since each challenge involves participating in simple childhood fun instead of leaving the outcome solely up to chance. But losers have zero chances of dodging a bullet to the brain or heart; that part of the deal takes people by surprise.

What follows is more shocking – or it would be, if every participant weren't being crushed under a mountain of debt. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the survivors vote on whether to leave the game. But their bleak financial circumstances lead many to reconsider and return, deciding that risk of a bloody, swift death is preferable to a hellish lifetime of digging out of an inescapable financial hole.

It really is an excellent distillation of how predatory capitalism works.

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Few people watching "Squid Game" are likely to be familiar with that term. (Heck, most of them probably don't even realize they're watching a K-drama.) But on a planet where the average income of the top 10 percent is 38 times higher than the average of the bottom half, plenty of folks are living with it. That counts anyone living paycheck to paycheck and doing their best to stay level on the rickety balance beam that is our economy, which is most people. Predatory capitalism is the beast snarling at their back and the one waiting at the bottom of the pit, jaws open wide.

Allegorizing this concept also distinguishes this series from other "deadly game" titles such as "Battle Royale" or "The Hunger Games." It's actually closer in spirit to Netflix's adaptation of "Alice in Borderland," although the terror at the center of that series and the manga it's based upon is existential. The enemy in "Squid Game" is material and relatable.

Series director and writer Hwang Dong-hyu has said in a previous interview that he designed the tale as a critique of capitalism, demonstrated by the desperation massive indebtedness stokes in each character. But for clarity's sake we should establish that predatory capitalism takes the principle to a darker place in that it accepts exploitation and brute domination as part of as necessary evils.

This encompasses so much more than simply owing money to a creditor, legal or otherwise. It normalizes a vicious kind of Darwinism in everyday interactions, driving our scramble to rise, increase our status and outdo others. Never does it acknowledge that very few people ever grow wealthy enough to achieve invulnerability, but maintaining that lie is necessary for predatory capitalism to continue feeding apex devourers.

Hwang writes this principle into each of his central characters, but it even informs the smallest details of the production. Even death, most often delivered by a faceless workers in pink jumpsuits who shoot losing contestants in the head, is packaged to resemble a gift: bodies are lifted into black coffins with pink bows on the lid before being anonymously disposed of.

Long before we see that, however, we meet lovable layabout Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae). Gi-hun is goofy and has a broad, friendly smile, but he's also a deadbeat dad who leeches money off of his elderly mother to sate his gambling addiction.

Emphatic capitalist striving has also ensnared Gi-hun's childhood pal Cho Sang-woo (Park Hae-soo), but Sang-woo had determination, intelligence and luck on his side, having attended a university to become an investment banker. Being 650 million in the red brings him to the games, the result of betting and losing his wealth alongside that of his clients . . . and his mother's.

Next to him North Korean defector Kang Sae-byeok (Jung Ho-yeon) looks virtuous, mostly because she has absolutely nothing to her name. Her goal is to make enough money to house her brother, who she's left at an orphanage, and to find her mother who was deported back to North Korea. She survives as a pickpocket, desperate to escape the gangster she used to work for, Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae). Even he owes other criminals who'd prefer to take their payments out of his flesh.

On and on it rolls, a wheel driven by a merciless system and steered by hidden forces. An entire episode is devoted to a group of hedonistic VIPs who bet on the players, each wearing golden masks shaped like a predatory mammal, a raptor, or an avatar of fortune (a stag) or strength (an oxen).  

A version of these heartless villains exists in every type of "deadly game" story, but Hwang intentionally plays up the callous stupidity of his shadowy titans. They spew terrible, obvious dialogue, misattribute cliched quotes and wager on the lives of others based on lewd jokes revolving around the number 69. Nothing about them indicates they deserve to be where they are more than the working class folks dying for their entertainment. 

But these puppet masters aren't the sole destroyers in this story. They're simply the ones too far removed from their humanity to care about what they're doing to the little folks, using the ones who share breathing space with them as refreshment dispensers or furniture.

Squid Game (YOUNGKYU PARK)

With few exceptions, each of the centrally developed characters is some form of low-level monetary carnivore or scavenger, showing how predatory capitalism encourages us to cannibalize each other – even family. Gi-hun doesn't only take the meager cash his mother offers him. He also guesses her PIN and drains her bank account. Sang-woo lies to his mother about his life and the fact that he's financially ruined her, leaving her under the impression that he's traveling for work when he's actually hiding out from the police after stealing from his own clients.

The only extensively developed main characters who don't appear to be preying on others are Abdul Ali (Tripathi Anupam), a Pakistani worker whose employer kept his wages from him and who steals back what he's owed, and Oh Il-Nam (Oh Young-soo), an elderly man with a brain tumor.

Just like the rest, they're also being stalked, and view the games as the only way to get clear of what's hunting them. Then again, the game-makers selected every participant for reasons beyond what they owe. They target their weakness. Before Gi-hun, Sang-woo and the other hundreds of contenders gain an invitation to the game they enter a contest with a mysterious man (Gong Yoo, "Train to Busan") who persuades them to let him slap their faces for a chance to win pocket change.

Being broke isn't enough, you see. In order to submit to the games, a person must also be broken.

And this makes Gi-hun's story much sadder. Later in the series we find that he was fired from a solid factory job, then wiped out when the small business he attempted to launch afterward collapsed. That means Gi-hun followed every line of in the bootstrapping myth to the letter by working hard and playing by the rules, and he ends up in serious hock anyway.

One of the darker observations I read online about the appeal of "Squid Game" theorizes that at some point in the pandemic, many people might have accepted such an offer. Who could blame them if they did? One of the half-truths the games' masked Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) promises is that everyone in these games receives a fair shot, that nobody is discriminated against due to age, class or gender.

It's the meritocracy lie, gamified. Everyone who isn't part of the 1% receives assurances that the system is fair, right? Few being mauled by its gears want to acknowledge or even understand how impressively rigged the system is. Centralizing that lie is the way this story depicts carnivorous financial systems working exactly as they're supposed to, by dangling the prize just out of reach but close enough to see it and keep telling ourselves we'll get there. Even Gi-hun tries to reassure Sang-woo that he can recover from his debt without risking his life, insisting that his business school degree means he can always earn money, that he's better off that most. That simply isn't the case out in these streets.

Inside the game, though, Sang-woo thinks has better a shot. The weird sets he and everyone else walk through are an aesthetic bonus, externalizing the nightmarishness of their excessive financial burden. Contestants pass restless nights in spartan quarters resembling a school gymnasium. The maze of hallways and pastel staircases dividing that place and competition staging areas marry the geometrics of an M.C. Escher drawing to the innocent pinks, yellows and blues of a Barbie Dream House.

Squid Game (YOUNGKYU PARK/Netflix)

Then there's the misdirect of the games' innocence: One might look at the competition mounted to entertain the VIPs  as a variation of "Floor Is Lava," except falling to the floor in this show actually kills people.

"Squid Game" refers to a South Korean playground contest that has specific rules, but whose play revolves around roughhousing and viciousness. Anyone who's played such games in childhood knows that making it past a goal line isn't always the point. Sometimes the object is to bruise the other kid – all in good fun, of course.

Upsizing that violence for adult players escalates the physical and psychological ruthlessness commensurate to the life and death stakes. To say a viewer learns to deal with the brutality of "Squid Game" is not a sufficient assurance for the squeamish, nor should it be.

But the bullets and blood may also obscure some of Hwang's key questions about humanity and societies, such as: Which is more dangerous to our collective health, desperation or greed? And which is more corrosive?

Hwang may have originally asked this in the context of South Korea's economic disparity, but the fact that the show is No. 1 the U.S., the U.K. and many other countries proves the universality of his message. Nothing is lost in the translation, whether you watch "Squid Game" with the subtitles on or dubbed. (Subs are the way to go, by the way.) And the director acknowledges this by having one of VIPs blithely mention in passing that the South Korean games are the best ones, implying similar lethal competitions are being played in other countries around the world.

Of course they are.

"Squid Game" is currently streaming on Netflix.

The post The allure of Netflix’s brutal “Squid Game” owes a debt to our predatory upbringing appeared first on Salon.com.

Writers like Rebecca Solnit and Junot Diaz have described the revelatory, and potentially revolutionary, nature of disasters. Not only can they bring out the best in us, and connect and empower us, but they also lay bare the social conditions and choices that often cause or contribute to disasters, delivering a societal shock that makes change possible. 

In the process of causing things to fall apart, Diaz says, apocalyptic catastrophes also give us “a chance to see aspects of our world that we as a society seek to run from, that we hide behind veils of denial." Apocalypses are also opportunities: “chances for us to see ourselves, to take responsibility for what we see, to change.”

The next 20 years will settle this issue. We will know by then the extent to which we are locked into global crises, and if so, what we can do to minimize their impacts and to shape the world that lies on the far side. 

I made these comments in a 2012 essay entitled “Whatever happened to Western civilization?” in the Futurist, the magazine of the U.S.-based World Future Society. The essay was itself a reflection on a 1993 Futurist essay, “The West’s deepening cultural crisis.”

So are disasters, piling one upon another, providing the moral force for urgent action? Well, we haven’t had to wait 20 years to see the choice we have made between deep systemic change and the management of specific calamities. As I feared, governments have become shockingly irrelevant in failing to match their responses to the magnitude of the challenges facing us (what I call a "scale anomaly" or "scale discrepancy"). 

This is despite the growing evidence and the insistent warnings by experts that we risk societal and civilizational collapse — and even evidence that collapse has already begun. Governments have, instead, become ever more preoccupied with trying to deal with a growing cascade of natural, social and political upheavals, some of their own making, others the result of intensifying global trends.

Running out of time to save the world

This situation has made me reconsider what we should do about our predicament. One theme of my work has been culture and its importance to human well-being and futures. (My 1993 Futurist essay focused on how modern Western culture is failing us, including arguing that the many serious problems we faced — seemingly intractable economic difficulties, a widening social gulf, worsening environmental degradation — were fundamentally problems of culture, of beliefs and moral priorities.) 

Cultures define and describe how we see the world and our place in it — and so how we live and behave. In a sense, cultures "permit," and so limit, what we can do. As I outlined in an earlier Salon essay, we need to remake Western culture if we are to meet the challenges confronting us. The magnitude of this transformation is akin to that from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the medieval mind to the modern mind. We face another rupture in our view of ourselves that will change profoundly how we live. 

I now accept, however, that that window has closed, at least for now. The shift in political consciousness to focus on dealing with specific disasters and calamities — fires, floods, wars, economic upheavals — means there is no longer the scope for a deep dialogue about cultural transformation.  We need a new emphasis.

I feel the same way about the recommendations of the recent roundtable report “A World Call to Action,” by the Club of Rome and the Council for the Human Future. It states, “Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks”; adds, “The crisis is already here, and will get worse”; and concludes, “Together, these risks endanger our ability to maintain a civilization, possibly even to survive as a species”.

The report says the crisis is vast, complex and interconnected. It will affect everyone on Earth for generations to come. There is at present no plan of action to resolve it, nor even a concerted effort to develop one:

This "polycrisis" is an interconnected web of challenges including climate change, biodiversity loss, global poisoning, food insecurity, resource depletion, retreat from democracy, nuclear proliferation, spread of war, uncontrolled use of AI, misinformation, economic, social and gender inequality, rising inequity, failing healthcare systems and geopolitical instability.

The report’s recommendations include a World Plan of Action, a U.N. People’s Assembly, an Earth System Council, an Earth System Treaty and an Alliance of Partners for the Planet, People and Peace.

However, the times are no longer conducive to such actions. And even if these structures were established, they would not be effective enough to avert our fate. Witness the current impotence of the United Nations in the face of the many global challenges, and the despair of its secretary-general, António Guterres, who has said that with climate change, “Humanity has opened the gates of hell.”

As one of the roundtable participants, Jem Bendell, a sustainability expert and author of "Breaking Together," puts it: "Convening elite collaboration accentuates the illegitimate and ill-informed agendas of corporate and bureaucratic officials…. Calling for action to prevent collapse requires ignoring or downplaying the last eight years of data, which indicate modern societies worldwide are already at various stages of fracture and there is a momentum in their trajectories."

Corporate crimes against humanity

The times now demand a much sharper, simpler, more radical focus: an all-out revolt against the power of corporations. Of course, many activists already see themselves doing this. But it is not the way debate and action are framed in mainstream politics, the media or science. For example, debate about climate change focuses on the science of global warming and international and national efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide.

A greater awareness of corporate power and its abuse has advantages: This awareness is already in the public mind and the structures and procedures of action already exist; they just need to be massively scaled up. The attention to corporate harm also brings into focus the wide range of societal changes that we need to improve and sustain the quality of human life, not just, for example, climate change. It allows us to target specific wrongdoing, while drawing attention to their common roots.

Many Industries have worked relentlessly and ruthlessly to defend themselves against evidence of harm by sowing scientific doubt about the evidence, buying influence and shifting blame. They use the tactics and strategies developed by tobacco companies in countering smoking restrictions.

Writer George Monbiot warns that we face the greatest predicament humankind has ever confronted: the erosion and possible collapse of our life support systems, the speed and scale of which have taken even scientists by surprise. Yet the effort to persuade people of the need for action is not working. One reason, he says, is those who job it is to do this are "massively outgunned":

For every pound or dollar spent on persuasion by an environmental charity or newspaper, the oil, chemicals, automotive, livestock and mining sectors will spend a thousand. They snap up the cleverest and most devious communicators to craft their messages, offering salaries no one else can afford.

Monbiot says that after retreating over the last decade or so, climate and environmental science denial is back with a vengeance, fueled by corporate and political campaigns — many of which operate below the radar — and amplified by social media. Governments sit and watch, he says, as tiny warriors flail in the face of the corporate army. “We cannot build social consensus without the state. Where is it?”

The fossil fuel industry knew about the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming decades ago but chose to spread lies so it could continue to make massive profits. It also opposed the introduction of unleaded gasoline (or "petrol," in much of the English-speaking world), causing untold harm to children in particular. (As a science journalist, I was involved in the campaign to remove lead from petrol in Australia in the 1980s.) The evidence that fossil fuel companies have been working behind the scenes to delay the transition to renewable energy, including spreading false stories about electric vehicles, is just the latest example of the subterfuge. 

The arms industry, through the military-industrial complex, promotes and profits hugely from war, including in Ukraine and Gaza. Chandran Nair, the founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, says the world needs to wake up to the fact that the global military-industrial complex poses a grave threat to civilization:

We have failed to keep in check an industry that needs wars, death, and destruction to grow.… It poses an existential threat to world peace because it has captured — at least partially — the political economy of the most powerful country on the planet: the United States, the modern-day military state.”

On a matter I don’t fully understand, the big banks (whose practices caused the global financial crisis of 2008, and which were bailed out by governments and largely escaped punishment) are contributing to what banking expert Ellen Brown has described as a “ticking time bomb” or “casino” based on financial derivatives valued as high as several quadrillion dollars. (A quadrillion is one thousand trillion.) This far exceeds global GDP, which amounted to about $100 trillion in 2022. Investor Warren Buffett famously labeled derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

More broadly, a massive and growing media marketing complex culturally "manufactures" modern high-consumption lifestyles, which are inimical to the environment and to human health and well-being. Increasingly, the mainstream media have become agents of propaganda for failed government, corporate excess and unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles. There is increasing surveillance, censorship (including self-censorship) and suppression of dissent.

The growing influence of social media and the tech billionaires who own them is another concern that is testing government power. As media scholars Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd warn:

Is the world better off with tech bros like [Elon] Musk who demand unlimited freedom and assert their influence brazenly, or old-style media moguls who spin fine-sounding rhetoric about freedom of the press and exert influence under the cover of journalism? That’s a question for our times that we should probably begin grappling with.

Nothing here is new. Corporate greed and ruthlessness have been around for centuries, including their role in colonization and the building of empires. The shocking history of the East India Company, which transformed itself from an international trading company into an aggressive colonial power between 1600 and 1874, is a classic example. And activists, journalists and academics have long worked to expose these corporate crimes.

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To cite one recent example, in “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” investigative journalists Claire Provost and Matt Kennard reveal how transnational companies have been able to challenge and even overrule various state actions — and threaten our ability to respond to existential threats like climate change and nuclear war. 

They explore the international investment treaties that protect corporate profits; the foreign aid and global welfare system that nourishes corporations and helps them expand; the special economic zones that exploit poor workers, especially women; and corporations’ use of private armies and security forces to get their way.

The critical need to tackle corporate power

We must, then, use every nonviolent means — legislation, legal action, protest, civil disobedience, public humiliation — to reduce or even eliminate the political power of corporations, especially the huge global corporations which hold so much sway over democracy, government and our lives, and so often act against our common interests.

Some of their actions should be considered crimes against humanity, in that the term has been used to condemn acts that “shock the conscience of mankind." These acts include human-made environmental disasters, with the intention behind such a definition being either to register moral outrage or to suggest that they be recognized formally as legal offenses.

The link between my interest in culture and corporate malfeasance is through ideology. Culture has been said to exert a pervasive but diffuse influence on actions, providing the underlying assumptions of an entire way of life. In unsettled times, cultural change can become focused into an ideological contest, in which ideologies exert a powerful, clearly articulated but more restricted basis for social action. Today we are dealing, in the West, with the dominant influence of neoliberalism (a form of capitalism), which has captured government in the interests of those with money and power.

My aim in this essay is to strengthen the message that the destructive behavior of global corporations, set within the context of this ideological dominance and the threat to human civilization, needs to become the focus of political debate and action. If I have been slow to come to this position it is because my background is in science, not politics, and I chose to focus my own work on the less discussed, more fundamental drivers of humanity’s predicament.

I watched the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. For me, the most striking feature was that neither candidate showed any awareness of the need for fundamental changes in American society and Western civilization (although Trump did mention America’s decline and the peril of nuclear war). Harris affirmed her support for the military several times, contrasting her position with Trump's. As a retired general has reportedly said, "She’s more hard-line than most people think."

No matter who the president or presidential aspirant, and no matter their politics, gender or race, American politics remains captured by the status quo, dominated by corporate interests. Corporations are so deeply embedded in all our lives, and we depend so much on them for jobs and consumer goods and services, it is nigh impossible to draw back far enough to see how much we are controlled, even enslaved, by them. Explanations for the growing institutional mistrust and political alienation dwell on specifics such as cost of living, not on this deep dependency.

Yet the dependency runs both ways, and is a means for challenging corporate abuses of power. A study of nonviolent action by Dalilah Shemia-Goeke finds that multinational corporations are deeply entangled with states in reciprocal relationships of dependence. While this puts constraints on the ability of states to regulate corporations, power imbalances between business and society can be redressed when people withdraw the support on which corporate entities depend.

Shemia-Goeke reports that corporations depend on workers, consumers, investors, insurers, legislators and others: “When these constituencies withdraw their consent and support … their ability to pursue their goals and their power erodes.” Her case studies show how civil society campaigns have tackled the dependence of corporations on people and activated the latent power of people.   

In "Silent Coup," Provost and Kennard conclude:

Overall what we uncovered was dark, and suggested that much less is up for grabs in national political debates and elections than we’re led to believe — and that many of the scandals that occupy our media may actually be quite small in comparison to the silent coup that has been enacted against our democracies. But we also saw light. Around the world — as well as in historical archives — we had met and learned about people resisting these trends, and pushing for safer, healthier and more democratic futures.

In a 2022 Salon essay, I argued that a deep and dangerous divide exists in liberal democracies between people’s concerns about their lives, their country and their future, and the proclivities and preoccupations of mainstream politics and news media. The cultures of politics and journalism are too short-sighted and narrow-minded to face up to our predicament. They can’t see it, or if they can see it, they can’t imagine what it takes to address it. The same can be said for corporate culture.

For all my working life of over 50 years, scientists and others have declared each decade to be a time of reckoning for human civilization and our planet. As each decade passes without the necessary action, we declare the next decade to be the decisive one; we are still doing it. Now it is the 2020s that we claim to be the last chance to avert catastrophic consequences, with climate change uppermost in our minds.

In my 2012 essay in the Futurist, I concluded that we might no longer be able to get out of the mess we were creating for ourselves, but we could get through it. There was still plenty to dream of, and to strive for. 

Today, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.

The post Can we still prevent global catastrophe? Yes — by fighting corporate power, now appeared first on Salon.com.

To take one example: at least in my state, Maryland, Tricare, if it pays at all, compensates clinicians like me far less for mental healthcare than Medicaid (government medical assistance for low-income Americans). It also misleads military patients by referring them to me even after Tricare has acknowledged that I’m unable to take more of them. Other healthcare plans serving Americans go months without reimbursing me for services they authorized.

Over the years, I’ve written for TomDispatch about many things that military families go through — most similar to what other Americans experience, although almost invariably a little more so. That includes the struggle to feed their families and stay out of debt, the search for childcare, a growing sense of loneliness and pain, and, of course (to mention something so many other Americans haven’t experienced) exposure to the violence of war and its weaponry.

Private companies — and not just medical ones — shape the contours of American life in so many ways, even if we don’t know those companies’ names. Take arms contractors who have contributed so much to the spillover of military-grade weaponry into the hands of civilian killers. Just as all too many Americans, including schoolchildren, have found themselves forced to stare into the barrel of an AR-15 rifle, so have distressed soldiers stared into the “barrels” of companies few of us have heard of that can decide whether they’ll ever get the opportunity for therapy.

Sadly, in my world, greed all too often shapes how we live, just as it’s shaped the world of… yes, the Supreme Court. And for that you can thank the magnates who so generously gifted lavish trips and perks to Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito while they handed down morally devastating decisions on so many issues, gun control and abortion among them, that will determine the nature of life and death in this country.

In a moment, I’ll tell you a bit about my own experiences as a clinician. But let me start by saying that, for me, as a therapist, wife, and mother, nowhere is the relationship between corporations and everyday life more impactful than in the ways our government allows health insurance companies of every kind to avoid truly paying for the care Americans need. (Ask me, for instance, whether Tricare paid for my family to get flu shots this year. I’ll bet you can guess the answer to that one.)

Americans, who are getting sicker, sadder, and ever more anxious, are so often unable to access necessities like healthcare because all too many legislators, judges and administration officials refuse to hold large companies accountable to the rule of law — when, that is, significant laws related to such corporations even exist.

An uphill battle to provide affordable mental health care

As a therapist, I accept most major insurance plans in the Washington, D.C., area, where I operate a small private practice out of my rural home. I set out to make care accessible to middle- and lower-income Americans, particularly those who fought in America’s wars, were impacted by them, or grew up in a military family — groups where suicide rates are significantly higher than in the general population and where depression, anxiety, and violence are rampant.

I have a social science PhD that has helped me figure out how complicated systems work, yet our insurance system (if it can even be called that) confounds me. I find myself turning away dozens of people every month because I can’t afford to lose more time and income dealing with the complications of their insurance.

My standard line for those who come to me seeking care is too often: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could help, but I’m unable to take any new patients with [insert here major healthcare plan, most of them state-sponsored or, in the case of Carefirst, D.C.’s version of Blue Cross Blue Shield, contracted by the federal government for its employees].” I then wonder what will happen to that suicidal three-times-deployed Afghanistan and Iraq veteran with young kids at home, who’s been referred to me by this country’s downsized, on-base healthcare system; or the single mother whose State Department job is supposed to offer her an insurance plan to help her manage the stress of aid work in combat zones; or unnerved asylum seekers from Russia, Ukraine, and so on (and on and on and on).

Meanwhile, in a separate area of my mind, I’m starting to try to lay the groundwork for a time when my own ability to support my family won’t suddenly be thwarted because one link in some part of our country’s fragile chain of companies that finance health care breaks for months on end.

The change health care outage

Most people I talk to around my affluent town aren’t aware that, in late February of this year, the U.S. healthcare system suffered a major setback: BlackCat, a ransomware group, hacked into Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of the corporate behemoth UnitedHealth Corporation, which (until recently at least) processed about 40% of the nation’s healthcare claims annually, including from therapists. For months after that, some major insurance companies lacked a clear route to receive medical claims from providers like me. They also lacked a way to transfer money from their own banks to doctors. Other claims payment systems take weeks or months to establish, because you have to make sure they’re in sync with the chain of companies you work with in healthcare (if you accept insurance). There’s your encrypted patient data system, your payment-processing system, the insurance company itself, and maybe a company you hire to help you with your billing. In short, the Change outage left many providers like me without a way to get paid for what we do.

Nationally, over these months, more than 90% of hospitals and many group practices (especially smaller ones) lost money — to the tune of somewhere between hundreds of millions of dollars and $1 billion daily. Tens of millions of dollars in insurance payments to providers were delayed indefinitely. Doctors, nurses, and therapists were forced to close their doors, cut staff, forego needed supplies such as chemotherapy drugs, for example, or stop seeing patients. A survey by the American Medical Association of 1,400 medical practices found that 80% had lost revenue, 55% had to use their own personal funds to cover practice expenses, and about a third were unable to pay staff. Eighty-five percent of those practices had to commit extra time to the revenue cycle. The only reason I was able to see patients is because I have a spouse with a job that covers some of our bills (as well as our mounting credit card debt).

I had a particularly difficult time getting the insurance companies that are supposed to cover the healthcare of our troops to cough up funds. Tricare took three months to begin paying me because the requirements of its subcontractor, Humana, Inc., to enroll with a new payment system were opaque even for my professional biller. Then, it took weeks more after they figured it out for Tricare to formally approve the new arrangement.

Johns Hopkins Family Health Plan, another insurance plan for military families sponsored by the Department of Defense, didn’t start paying me the thousands of dollars it owed me in backpay until late June. Maryland Medicaid went weeks or even months without covering services for three of my patients. (Lest anyone think this is unrelated to the way we treat our military families, note that Medicaid serves millions of troops, in addition to many other populations.) The only reason those patients of mine continued to receive care was because I volunteered to do it, a choice that a medical professional living in the largest economy on Earth shouldn’t have to make. A country of wealthy healthcare corporations enabled by the government, who let clinicians choose between volunteer work or turning sick people away is its own kind of banana republic.

Should we be surprised? Not in a for-profit healthcare system, where companies stand to gain by hoarding premiums long enough to garner yet more interest on them. Why would any of them feel compelled to fix such an outage in a timely fashion unless someone made them do it? — and no one did.

The Devil’s in the Details (and There Are So Many Details)

After the Change Healthcare outage, UnitedHealth’s CEO Andrew Witty testified before Congress for the first time in 15 years — a noteworthy (if insufficient) first step in raising public awareness and pressuring companies to improve their data security and prevent disruptions to healthcare. What I didn’t see was any significant discussion of why Americans need little-known companies like Change to begin with.

Change’s role is essentially to take the notes saying what we did that therapists and doctors like me write after we see patients and pass them on to insurance companies like Tricare/Humana, Medicaid/Optum, or D.C. Medicare (administered by the Pennsylvania-based Novitas, Inc.) in a format those payers are most likely to accept. If you ask me, were Change the character in the 1990s parody "Office Space" asked by downsizing consultants, “What would you say you do here?,” instead of responding, “I deal with the customers so the engineers don’t have to,” it might say, “I deal with the insurance companies so the providers don’t have to.” Essentially, Change takes my notes and sends them to the computer systems of insurers, which then (maybe) pay me. For a company that electronically dispatches healthcare claims from providers to payers, it’s done remarkably well. It was the most profitable of UnitedHealth’s thousands of subsidiaries and UnitedHealth was itself one of the Fortune 500’s top 25 companies in 2023.

So many cooks in the kitchen amount to confusion and lack of accountability for providers like me.

Prior to the Change outage, the reasons companies didn’t pay out to medical workers were often as arbitrary and unrelated to health care as you could imagine. UnitedHealth went months without paying me for therapy I did with several of its members because I wrote the number “11,” not “10,” on claim forms to indicate that I saw patients online. No matter that both numbers stood for the same thing. Worse yet, its representatives refused to tell me that this was the problem until government officials intervened on my behalf. Honestly, I don’t think we live in a “deep state” as much as in (and yes, I would capitalize it!) Deep Corporate America.

Deep corporations

Much is said these days by folks on the far right about the “deep state” and Donald Trump’s plans to gut it should he return to the White House in 2025. Speaking from the bowels of the healthcare industry, I’d say that what we have on our hands are many layers of companies (like those beneath Tricare, Medicaid, and Medicare) that decide whether and how to administer funds in ways too complicated and inhuman to truly explain. Consider it an irony then that, in 2022, the healthcare version of all of that was deepened by — yes! — a Trump-appointed judge who struck down a Justice Department lawsuit attempting to prevent UnitedHealth from acquiring Change.

Many failed states rot from the inside before they collapse, when people get so fed up with not having their basic needs met that they take to the streets. Maybe before something akin to another January 6th happens in America, more people should begin to question the assumption that private is better, that billionaires are the embodiment of the American dream, and that government, on principle, is not to be trusted. Instead, isn’t it time to hold the feet of government officials to the fire and begin a genuine crackdown on corporate greed in this country?

If that doesn’t happen, our healthcare system will prove to be just one disastrous layer in a genuine American house of cards. Unless our public officials begin to place our human rights and the rule of law first, count on one thing: somewhere along the line that house of cards, medical or otherwise, is headed for collapse.

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Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

The post America the unwell: The corporate greed threatening our stability appeared first on Salon.com.

When the income data is examined on a more granular level the divides between the poor, the working class, and the wealthy become even starker. The top 5 percent of individual earners had an average income of almost $336,000 in 2021. The same year, the top 1 percent had an average income of almost $820,000. The top .1% earned an average amount of approximately 3.3 million dollars.

Wealth is a much more revealing indicator of how extreme the levels of economic and social inequality really are in the United States. The top 1 percent of income earners now control approximately 26 percent of the country’s wealth. That amount of wealth is more than that owned by the entire American middle class. The poorest Americans by income (the bottom 20 percent) control only 3 percent of the country’s wealth.

Contrary to America’s dominant cultural myths about “bootstraps," wealth and income are selectively created (and in many ways directly subsidized) by the state through tax policy and other measures. To wit, Americans in the top 20 percent of income generally receive a much larger return from the federal government in terms of subsidies, credits, and other benefits than the amount of taxes they pay. Political scientist Suzanne Mettler has compelling described these benefits as “the submerged state”, i.e. “welfare for rich people." 

America’s elites (and especially the news media) love to tout the stock market as a barometer for the country’s economic health and prosperity. But that data is misleading: The top 1 percent of richest Americans by wealth control some 54% percent of stocks and mutual funds. Here, the American financier class benefits from the tax and other economic policies that they literally write, which are in turn passed by Congress and the president (who are also members of the financial elite).

In total, there is a set of perverse incentives built into this version of late-stage American capitalism, where private actors and other predatory gangster capitalists profit from the country’s extreme levels of wealth and income inequality — and are therefore incentivized to perpetuate such an unfair and ultimately anti-democratic system.

In her new book “Poverty for Profit”, lawyer and public policy expert Anne Kim documents this system and how it disproportionately targets Black and Brown communities. She is also a contributing editor at Washington Monthly, where she was a senior writer. 

In this conversation, Kim shows how predatory capitalism is preying on under-resourced black and brown communities and documents its real human cost. At the end of this conversation Kim, warns that the country’s extreme income inequality and the death of the American Dream are directly tied to the rise of Trumpism and the country’s democracy crisis.

This is the second part of a two-part conversation.

How does your research intervene against the many organizing myths of American society such as “individualism” and “meritocracy”?

There’s a huge body of work that pushes against these myths by illuminating the structural limitations so many Americans face. I aim to add one more dimension to this argument, by showing how the corporatization of poverty helps to perpetuate systemic disadvantage.

Of course, personal choices matter. But for too many people, these “choices” are limited or non-existent, or dictated by the industries that colonize low-income communities. Many people don’t have access to affordable healthy food, for instance, because dollar stores and bodegas control the food choices available in their neighborhoods. “Willpower” can’t overcome a diet where the only available options are ultra-processed foods high in fat and sodium – like much of what’s served in school lunches to poor children. Pizza Hut, for example, offers what it calls its “A+ Pizza Program” for school cafeterias. The company says its pizza crusts are made with “51 percent white whole wheat flour” to comply with federal nutrition standards for the National School Lunch Program.

“Personal responsibility” is a myth when the poverty industry controls the choices you have.

Which of the human stories – here I will use the language of tragedies and traps – struck you the hardest in researching and writing the book?

The person whose story has stayed with me the longest is Rafiq, a young man I met in Baltimore who was literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He was walking past a house in the middle of a raid and got picked up on basically trumped-up charges with no evidence. His lawyer said the jury acquitted him in less than half an hour.

By all rights, he should have been able to put this ordeal behind him. Instead, he owed his bail bondsman thousands of dollars because – it turns out – the “premium” that bondsmen charge for bail is non-refundable. It doesn’t matter if you get acquitted or the charges are dropped, the bondsman gets his money. So, Rafiq was in debt for an arrest that should never have happened, and in a system that not only punishes defendants for being poor but facilitates their exploitation by a predatory industry.

The moneyed classes and the corporatocracy privatize their gains and profits and externalize their losses.

In the context of the poverty industry, the profits businesses make exact a terrible toll on the people they purport to “serve.” The hundreds of dollars someone pays a tax preparer, for instance, means hundreds of dollars not spent on food or rent or to pay down debt. But it’s not like the tax prep industry will be held to account for the hunger a family might face because of their practices.

Ditto for bail bondsmen. In the case of Rafiq, whom I mentioned above, the debt he owes the bail bondsman was guaranteed by his mom, whose financial security was also put in jeopardy. Rafiq also has a family, which means the money going toward his unjust debt was money that wasn’t going toward diapers or baby food for his young daughter. But I doubt the bail bondsman feels any responsibility for the trauma he’s caused for Rafiq’s family.

“Poverty for Profit” is really a model of capitalism gone wrong – or is it precisely capitalism and markets and private interests working exactly as designed in the neoliberal regime and gangster capitalism?

I’m not anti-business. I respect business, and I admire the innovation and creativity of entrepreneurs. But I also think there are some realms that businesses just are not suited for, and that includes human services. I just don’t think that the motive for profit aligns very well with poverty reduction. Investing in human potential is expensive, the returns take a long time to accrue, and the results can’t always be measured in dollars. There have been some well-meaning efforts to “do well by doing good,” but as I mention in the book, those haven’t really panned out either.

How do you imagine that libertarians and other members of the right-wing (and yes, the corporate Democrats) who worship at the mantle of the “free market” and the neoliberal regime would respond to your book?

They’d dismiss it as liberal bellyaching about a problem they’d argue doesn’t exist. They’d say that government-run programs would be ten times less efficient than privatized ones, and they’d trot out extreme examples of government “waste” to prove their point, like the $600 hammer for the Pentagon that actually never existed.

They’d also argue that anti-poverty programs aren’t tough enough in demanding “personal responsibility” from poor Americans. That’s why they want draconian work requirements in every safety net program, including Medicaid, even though the research is clear that work requirements don’t do anything other than deprive people of the benefits they need. Some conservatives would be perfectly content for the government to have no role in poverty reduction – which means they’d likely applaud and even encourage the activities of the poverty industry.

Is Milton Friedman smiling or disgusted at the findings of your new book?

Actually, I think he’d be shrugging his shoulders with a big “so what?”

In a 1970 essay for the New York Times, Friedman wrote that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” I think he’d say that the companies engaged in the poverty industry are simply doing what they’re supposed to do. He does say companies should stay “within the rules of the game,” “in open and free competition without deception or fraud,” so perhaps he’d frown at some of the practices I’ve documented in the book. But I also think he'd be more likely to say the fraudsters are outliers, not a natural consequence of how the poverty market is structured.

There is the “Black and Brown tax”. There is also the “poverty tax” in America. What is the relationship between them?

They’re additive, and the cumulative result is a double disadvantage for Black and Brown people in poverty. The “Black and Brown tax” explains in part the massive racial wealth gap, which the Brookings Institution recently estimated to be more than $240,000. That’s the difference in wealth between a median white household and a median Black one, and it’s the result of systemic discrimination, lower wages, unequal access to education and a host of other factors.

The “poverty tax,” on the other hand, is the additional price poor people often pay for basic services. Many low-income Americans don’t have access to mainstream banking, for example, so they rely on check cashers, pawnshops, and other players in what the government euphemistically calls the “alternative financial services industry.” I’d argue that the tax prep fees I write about in my book are also part of this “poverty tax,” as are bail bond premiums. I’d also argue that some poverty taxes are non-monetary; rather the “price” is poorer health, substandard housing and education, greater exposure to environmental toxins, the list goes on. I have no doubt people pay the poverty tax with their lives as a result.

Please explain more about how there are dentists who are exploiting the poor. That is dystopian. 

Many mainstream dentists don’t treat patients on Medicaid, which created a market for some dentists and dental chains to specialize in these patients (mostly kids). These dentists then also realized they can make a ton of money on volume, because Medicaid pays by the procedure. The result has been a booming Medicaid dental industry that’s seen an outsized number of reported abuses by dentists and dental franchises performing unnecessary work to collect Medicaid dollars.

In one instance I wrote about, a North Carolina dentist reportedly performed 17 root canals on a three-year-old and was ordered to pay $10 million in penalties. In another case, a dental chain called Benevis agreed to pay $23.9 million to settle claims of Medicaid fraud brought by federal prosecutors. Some of these clinics have moreover been accused of using “papoose boards” to immobilize children for multiple procedures. The state of Colorado ended up banning papoose boards because of reported abuses involving Medicaid dental practices.

No doubt the vast majority of Medicaid dentists provide good quality care, so I’m not trying to tar and feather everyone. On the other hand, things have been bad enough that the U.S. senate held hearings on the damage done by  “corporate dentistry.”

There are also dialysis centers in the strip malls in poor communities where there are also dollar stores, check cashing businesses and tax return places. Again, this is like something out of the films “Idiocracy”, “Brazil” or something in a David Cronenberg film.

The “consumer” experience of living in a low-income community is nothing like the experience of people in the middle class and above. You get the feeling that everyone’s not so much a customer to be served than a potential target for exploitation. Instead of a Pottery Barn, you’ve got the rent-to-own store with crappy furniture at usurious rental rates. Instead of a Citibank, you’ve got a pawnshop.

District Heights, Maryland is one of several predominantly Black communities just across the river from D.C., minutes away from the U.S. Capitol. If you drive to the main crossroads in the area, at the intersection of Pennsylvania Ave. and Silver Hill Road, you’ll see a huge dialysis center and a drive-through liquor store, literally right next to each other facing traffic. That’s what you see sitting at the stoplight, and it tells you a lot about the quality of life for many in this community.

And if you go to Penn Station, which is one of the shopping centers nearby, you’ll find two more dialysis centers, and then a third one across the street. There are also a couple dollar stores,  a cash advance and check cashing place, another liquor store, a rent-to-own furniture outlet, and a discount clothing store. Down the road off Silver Hill, there are two pawnshops within about a block of each other.  There are, at least, several grocery stores nearby, which means the area isn’t also a “food desert.” According to the USDA, more than 39 million Americans live in low-income areas with limited access to supermarkets, many of which are disproportionately located in Black communities.

It's hard to overstate how huge the gaps have become in the amount of savings and wealth held by America’s wealthiest families versus households at the bottom. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median net worth of families in the bottom 20 percent by income was $14,000 in 2022 – compared to $2.56 million for families in the top 10 percent. People in the bottom half of the income distribution had an average of $54,700 saved up for their retirement – compared to $913,300 for those in the top 10 percent. The racial wealth gap is also appallingly vast. According to the Federal Reserve, the typical Black family’s wealth equals just 15 percent of the wealth held by a typical White household.

How do you want people to feel after reading your book? More importantly, what do you want them to do?

One of the reviews for my book called it “rage-inducing,” and more than one person has told me they’ve gotten progressively angrier with each chapter they’ve read.  The book isn’t, however, just a catalog of outrages, and I’m hoping that even if people end up angry, they also end up understanding how we got to where we are. I can’t tell people how to vote, but I think it’s pretty clear who’s responsible for the current state of public policy. I’d like people to use their voice and to use their vote.

America’s right-wing has become so odious that many people, including many progressives, are feeling practically nostalgic for Reagan-era conservatism. I totally get that – Reagan was no insurrectionist, at least!  But it’s crucial not to lose sight of just how destructive Reagan-era conservatism has been, especially for US social policy and how America treats its poor.

Reagan racialized poverty like no other politician before him. He popularized the idea of “welfare queens” sponging off government while living in luxury. His administration also presided over massive cuts to social programs while at the same time providing tax cuts to the rich that ballooned the federal deficit.  And as I write about in the book, he worked aggressively to outsource huge chunks of the government to the private sector, including social services. That’s why we have multi-billion-dollar corporations running state welfare and Medicaid programs and making enormously consequential decisions about access to benefits and people’s well-being. Reagan’s optimistic “Morning in America” image sugarcoated an ideology that was really quite cruel.

I know many progressives, and young progressives in particular, are disappointed by what the Obama and Biden presidencies failed to achieve and are thinking of sitting it out this fall. But is Trump 2.0 really what they’d prefer?  Though Trumpism is ten times more terrifying than Reaganism, they share the same DNA. That’s why Trump wanted work requirements in Medicaid and has no compassion for migrants seeking asylum. He’s beholden to billionaires and elevates white nationalists. His overtures to Black and Hispanic voters aren’t just clumsy – they’re sickeningly hypocritical.

What President Biden called the fight for the “soul of the country” has been going on for 40 years and it culminates this fall. Not to vote is to vote; let’s not lose the battle now.

The post The death of the American Dream birthed Trumpism appeared first on Salon.com.

America’s poverty tax takes many forms including how people who live in poor and other under-resourced communities pay more for a range of services, most of them low quality, such as food, housing, and healthcare. In fact, there is an entire industry that profits from exploiting poor people and others who are navigating economic precarity such as payday lenders and check cashing stores, rental properties that do not require credit checks, used car dealerships that charge usurious interest rates, pawn stores, rent-to-own stores, “health” providers (including dentists) that target Medicaid patients, and for-profit prisons.

America’s poverty tax also causes negative intergenerational economic, emotional, and health outcomes as well. Because they live in a state of economic precarity and day-to-day survival mode, poor people are unable to accrue wealth and income and other resources (such as social capital) to pass down to their children, which in turn deprives future generations of life opportunities.

The poverty tax does not exist in isolation: its negative impact (and literal cost) is amplified by racism and white supremacy, sexism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice and discrimination.

The many ways that America’s poverty tax keeps tens of millions of people in poverty and near poverty, is not a moral or character failing of those communities and individuals. Instead, America’s poverty tax is a lived example of how institutional and structural forces – in this context predatory and cannibal capitalism – create a trap that is very difficult if not almost impossible to escape.

Anne Kim is a writer, lawyer, and public policy expert with a long career in Washington, DC–based think tanks working in and around Capitol Hill. She is also a contributing editor at Washington Monthly, where she was a senior writer. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Governing, the Wall Street Journal, Democracy, and numerous other publications. Her new book is “Poverty for Profit.” Her previous book is “Abandoned: America’s Lost Youth” and the Crisis of Disconnection.”

In this conversation, Kim outlines how poor people are exploited for profit(s) by private and other self-interested actors across American society. Kim also explains how the American public’s understanding of poverty, specifically, and economic class, more generally, is in many ways incorrect.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length: 

Given the state of this country, how are you feeling?

How I’m feeling? I’m depressed and frightened, frankly, given the existential stakes we’re facing this fall. But ask me again after November, and I hope to be feeling differently! Relief, at least, if not optimism.

Even if we avert the catastrophe of a second Trump presidency, we’ve still lost our collective ability to solve big national problems – or even small ones. It’s hard to fathom today, but Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on a vote of 289-126 in the House and 73-27 in the Senate. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed the House 328-74! I’m struggling to remember the last time we’ve had a rational, fact-based, nonpartisan, good-faith debate on any topic, whether it’s climate change, abortion rights, or inequality.

I think the maldistribution of income, wealth and opportunity is a huge factor feeding the discontent driving our current politics, but there’s no shortage of bold ideas and great scholarship on how to fix this problem. Matthew Desmond’s "Poverty by America," Natalie Foster’s "The Guarantee," and Heather McGhee’s "The Sum of Us "are just a few recent examples of provocative and pathbreaking work. But every effort to start a sincere conversation on these topics gets shut down by politicians who’d prefer to activate and weaponize class, economic and racial divisions for their own gain.

I don’t know that I see more clearly on any of this than anyone else, and I am missing many lenses. I don’t presume to speak on behalf of the communities affected by the policies I write about, for instance – I can only do the best I can to bear witness. What I think I do have, though, is an inside perspective on the intersection of policy, politics and business. I’ve worked as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill, and I’ve worked in think tanks and at a nonprofit advocacy organization. I also spent six years as a corporate lawyer reading financial statements and learning corporate finance. One benefit of this scattershot career is that it helped me uncover what I call “Poverty, Inc.” in the book and to explain how it came about.

What does it mean to be poor in America?

The Census Bureau defines “poverty” solely as a measure of income – you’re “poor” if your household’s income falls below a certain level for any given year. We can all agree that’s way too narrow; you can’t reduce the experience of poverty to a dollar figure. 

To be poor in America is to be denied a chance to fulfill your potential because you lack access to the opportunities that money can buy. It means the inability to meet your basic needs – food, housing, and health care – or having access only to substandard versions of what’s available to everyone else. It means the inability to develop your human potential because of the structural limitations around you – lousy schools and indifferent teachers, violence, and discrimination. Some people call it “surviving” versus “thriving,” which I think is a pretty good description of what it means to be poor. 

What does the language of social science and public policy hide and/or obscure about poverty in America?

Social science research is meant to be objective. It’s supposed to be fact-based and logical so that policymakers take researchers’ conclusions seriously and formulate rational policies backed up by data. But the language of objectivity is also very objectifying. Take, for example, the tendency of academic researchers to use the acronym “LMI” for “low- and moderate-income.” Referring to people as “LMI households” sounds very clinical and detached and diminishes the humanity of the people defined this way.

There’s actually quite a bit of language in the discourse around poverty that is very “othering.” Even a reference to “the poor” lumps people with full lives and individual experiences into a single category defined solely by their income, and it becomes very easy to think of “the poor” as “them” versus “us.”

And then there’s language that carries implicit judgment, intended or not. A lot of research around program effectiveness, for instance, refers to “recipients,” which to me implies passivity and undeservedness.

What of lived experiences?

I think the world of social science and public policy is generally pretty sterile. There are “recipients” and “interventions” – meaning government programs – and no room for the complexity of lived experience. I’m not sure how current discourse can accommodate the reality of lived experience fairly and completely, but the failure to even acknowledge this dimension means all research is incomplete.

What does it mean to be “working poor?” Moreover, many if not most Americans who consider themselves “working class” or “middle class” are closer to actual poverty than they would ever admit or want to realize.

You make a good point that many Americans perceive themselves – or want to perceive themselves – as better off than they really are. According to an April 2024 survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education, for example, 68 percent of Americans rate the “current quality of their financial life” as “better than expected” or “about as expected.”

Nobody wants to admit they are struggling or, worse yet, that they are members of the stigmatized “poor.” In a society that equates success with money, poverty is failure.

The same goes for being “working poor.” Working gains you some measure of respect compared to the so-called “idle poor,” whom Elizabethan and colonial “poor laws” considered “unworthy” of help. But I think most people see “working poor” as a rung below “working class” – even if in reality the financial condition of people in both groups overlap. To be “working class” implies you have a steady job that demands skills, if not a college education. “Working poor,” on the other hand, implies you’re unskilled labor, maybe working in fast food or as a janitor. “Working class” implies the potential for upward mobility; “working poor” implies stagnation and struggle. I know I’m trafficking in stereotypes, but I think that’s how most Americans think about who is “deserving” of government help.

There is the repeated finding that many Americans identify as “middle class” regardless of income or wealth. First, is that still true? Second, what does that mean in terms of politics and the way our society deals with poverty and the poor?

Gallup just put out a survey finding that 54 percent of Americans identify as “middle class,” including 15 percent who say they are “upper middle class.” Just 12 percent, in contrast, call themselves “lower class.” The poll doesn’t correlate people’s answers with their actual financial circumstances, and there isn’t an official, government definition of “middle class.”

But it’s a pretty safe bet, as you posit, that many people who call themselves “middle class” don’t enjoy middle class security. Earlier this year, a Washington Post analysis found that only about a third of Americans meet all six hallmarks of what they defined as a “middle-class lifestyle,” including a steady job, health insurance, savings, the ability to afford emergency expenses and pay bills on time and the means for a comfortable retirement.

But as alluded to above, people identify as “middle class” not because it’s an accurate descriptor of their financial condition but because the term reflects a preferred set of norms for behavior, thought, and a minimum standard of living. A few years back, researchers at the Brookings Institution put out a really fascinating report on how to define the middle class through different lenses, including as a purely cultural construct. In their analysis, the researchers quoted a 2010 report by the US Commerce Department that defined the middle class as much by its aspirations as its achievements: They “strive for economic stability,” “are forward-looking,” and “must work, plan ahead and save for the future.” According to this Commerce Department report, “being middle class may be as much about setting goals and working to achieve them as it is about their attainment.” 

So, when you look at middle class identity this way – as a value system – you’re absolutely right that people’s self-identification with the “middle class” is hugely consequential for politics and the treatment of poverty.  Politicians pander to the middle class because that’s the group that “works hard and plays by the rules,” to borrow President Bill Clinton’s formulation, and they are the ones that embody American virtues and the American dream.

This means, by implication, that people not in the middle class – i.e. the poor – live outside this value system. They’ve presumably rejected the middle-class ethos and therefore also “deserve” to be excluded, marginalized and scapegoated – which is exactly what many politicians do.

So much of politics is about reinforcing people’s sense of identity. And one strategy some politicians use to make their base feel good is to elevate their membership in an “in” group (e.g., “the middle class”) while demonizing an “out” group (e.g. “the poor”).    

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What does it mean to be “a problem," to borrow the language that is often used to describe Black folks and the color line? In this context, what does it mean to be a poor person in America, and to be viewed as a member of a class that is a problem to be solved? 

First of all, viewing poverty and poor people as a “problem” to be solved limits the solutions on the table. It’s a very deficit-focused perspective, and the goal becomes eliminating the problem versus identifying and building on strengths. As a result, a lot of human potential gets overlooked. Poor people and communities are something to be “dealt with” rather than developed. (The “asset-based community development movement” is a fascinating counter-approach to this kind of thinking.) 

Second, the framing of poverty as a “problem” leads far too easily to analyses of poverty as the consequence of individual behavior rather than systemic barriers. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report helped cement this viewpoint – he popularized the idea of a “culture of poverty” and bemoaned the “tangle of pathology” in low-income Black communities.

There’s so much wrong with his analysis that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s focused on behaviors, not on systems. It’s dehumanizing, limiting and pessimistic. Moynihan assumes, for example, that everyone raised in a destructive environment will succumb to it, and he doesn’t perceive anyone’s potential for rising above their circumstances, which so many people obviously have done. It’s hard to overstate, however, how influential this report has been in shaping policymakers’ perceptions of poverty and of Americans who are poor.

Who profits from poverty in America?

In "Poverty, By America," Matthew Desmond argues that all non-poor Americans profit from poverty because our well-being has been achieved at the expense of people at the bottom of the ladder. Products and services are cheap, for instance, because someone else’s wages are low.

My book drills down on a narrower aspect of this question to look at the businesses that profit directly from poverty, either as government contractors paid to deliver social services or as “poverty entrepreneurs” exploiting government programs. The federal government spends at least $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact low-income Americans, so there’s a lot of profit to be made. 

Some industries, for instance, make their money by getting a cut of the government aid that low-income Americans receive. The paid tax prep industry, for instance, charges low-income taxpayers hundreds of dollars to file returns and to issue predatory “refund advance” products that are basically payday loans. Many low-income taxpayers are eligible for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which returned $57 billion to families in 2023 — a fat target for tax preparers. The fees they charge are deducted from people’s refunds, which for EITC filers averaged $2,541 last year.

Another category of poverty industrialists are the contractors hired by governments to deliver social services. This includes companies like the Management & Training Corporation, which runs 20 federal Job Corps centers for low-income young adults across the country, as well as detention centers, prisons, halfway houses and prison medical departments. It’s a private company, so there’s no public information available about its revenues or operations (despite the fact that it’s basically taxpayer-supported through government contracts). There are hundreds of these contractors, large and small, and some of them are running a state’s entire welfare or Medicaid system, including the calculation of benefits and eligibility – decisions you’d expect government workers to make. These contractors often deliver subpar services, and many of them have been targets of audits, investigations and claims of outright fraud.

And then there’s a third category of industries whose business model depends on the consequences of persistent poverty. The dialysis industry, for example, makes most of its money from Medicare, which guarantees coverage for patients with kidney failure. Kidney disease disproportionately strikes low-income and minority patients, the result of decades of inequitable access to quality health care, nutrition and other factors. If you map dialysis centers, you’ll see them clustered in low-income communities because that’s where their markets are. I write in the book about the terrible toll that dialysis takes on patients, along with some of the industry’s questionable practices to maximize its profits.

Reading your book, I kept thinking of the folk wisdom that the money is in the disease and not in the cure.

Yes, I think that’s right! As I noted above, the federal government spends a lot every year on social services, as do states. All of that money is a very attractive target for poverty profiteers.

It’s also definitely in the business interest of the poverty industry for poverty to persist, and my book documents a bunch of ways in which poverty-dependent industries lobby to preserve their markets, both in Congress and in the states. Private prison companies, for instance, have worked hard to get more “customers” within their walls. They’ve endorsed harsh sentencing laws, like mandatory minimums and the treatment of juveniles like adults. Some prison companies have also negotiated “lockup quotas” to guarantee revenues, according to a blockbuster 2013 expose by the nonprofit In the Public Interest. In Arizona, for example, the state has to guarantee 100 percent occupancy under some of its prison contracts — a pretty obvious incentive for mass incarceration.

Likewise, the tax prep industry has spent millions fighting efforts to simplify the tax code or to provide lower-income taxpayers with free filing options through the IRS. In 2017, ProPublica published an investigation describing how the tax prep industry lobbied for legislation to permanently bar the federal government from offering free pre-filled returns.

Sad to say, less poverty poses an existential threat to many of the players in Poverty, Inc., which is why they invest so much in maintaining the status quo.

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In the spirit of ruthless equity firms and asset-stripping hedge fund managers that dominates the financial realm, pedagogies of conformity, silencing and ethical abandonment now proliferate, either under the guise of budget cuts or as overt attempts to transform higher education into white nationalist indoctrination centers. Universities are now viewed as businesses, students as clients and faculty as a serf-like, casual labor force. Furthermore, administrative leadership has regressed, embracing a market-driven ideology that clings to the irrational belief that the market can solve all problems and should control not only the economy but all aspects of social life.

Central to this hedge-fund neoliberal ideology is a moral vacuity that separates economic activity from social costs. Fundamental to this educational/ideological mantra is the notion that  historical consciousness, critical thinking, informed faculty, social responsibility and critical pedagogy are at odds with the market. Consequently, it posits that government and institutions such as higher education only exist to further market interests and avoid holding the power of markets and the financial elite accountable. At its worse, it embraces a larger principle of authoritarian societies — what Evan Osnos in The New Yorker (writing about China) calls “governance by repression.”  

Pedagogies of repression now take place in the name of financial cuts, a politics of precarity and hollow appeals to efficiency or, as in the politics of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, outright calls for turning higher education into indoctrination centers. Moreover, this approach to administrative leadership embodies and legitimizes a reactionary ideological stance that mirrors the practices of hedge fund managers and the ruthless values of gangster capitalism. This model of leadership prioritizes the accumulation of capital over ethics, human needs and basic human rights. By shutting down freedom of speech on campuses and using the police to enforce such restrictions, it fuels a culture of unaccountability that  enables the Republican Party to prioritize threats of revenge and violence as part of its ruthless drive to amass political power. This is leadership in the service of authoritarianism.

University leaders now follow policies that resemble the suffocating profit-driven values of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, rather than the democratic values of John Dewey. At the same time, billionaires such as Bill Ackman, Leslie Wexner, Jon Huntsman and Robert Kraft now exercise extraordinary influence over higher education policy, particularly at the elite universities. They wield accusations of antisemitism and leverage the power of their wealth to silence criticism of the right-wing Israeli government, call for the firing of professors deemed too critical and outspoken regarding genocidal crimes, and dox and punish students for their criticism of scorched-earth Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

Furthermore, they advocate for silencing protests on campuses by calling in the police, effectively transforming higher education into a precinct of the police state. Certainly, Donald Trump echoes this authoritarian view, indicating his willingness to use military force to suppress student dissent if he is elected in 2024. He has referred to the protesters setting up encampments on college campuses as "radical-left lunatics" who must be vanquished, adding that "they've got to be stopped now." 

For a criminal defendant recently convicted of felonies, Trump's hardline stance on "law and order" is decidedly ironic, especially since he described the large-scale arrests of Columbia University students by New York police as "a beautiful thing to watch." In essence, what Trump and his followers are endorsing in these attacks on students is a broader view of policing as a vanguard of suppression and white supremacy. What we are witnessing here is the weaponization of authoritarianism: The punishing state has become the organizing force shaping a range of institutions, extending from university campuses to the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives. 

Refusing to acknowledge any moral responsibility for their investments in weapons of war and death, university administrators align with far-right political figures and the mainstream media. They divert the narrative away from the immense suffering and death inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, focusing instead on the weaponization of antisemitism and alleged widespread threats against Jewish students, marginalizing those Jewish protesters advocating for Palestinian freedom.

At the same time, when democracy is scorned and some political leaders call for illiberal alternatives — a society in which difference is feared and equality is disparaged — it is often forgotten that without informed and knowledgeable citizens, democracies die. Even more crucial is the recognition that democracy demands more than informed citizens; it also needs institutions fostering a “richly textured democratic culture," in the words of Eddie S. Glaude Jr., and that cultivates the “habits and dispositions necessary for its flourishing.” Amid mass conformity, standardization and repression, the conditions necessary to combat white supremacy, patriarchy and staggering levels of inequality are dwindling, and by suppressing dissent and freedom of expression, many powerful university administrators are contributing to the rise of authoritarianism.   

Hedge-fund politics and pedagogy exemplify gangster capitalism's destruction of institutions that champion free speech, social responsibility and strong democracy. This influence is pernicious, echoing fascist politics of the past, and undermines free speech and the critical role of higher education. What we are witnessing is a new form of McCarthyism, cloaked in the alleged wisdom of a ruthless billionaire elite. This ideology has been normalized, perceived by the public as a permanent social formation for which there is no alternative. The education promoted by the hedge-fund crowd aims to dismantle the university as a democratic public sphere and convert democracy itself into what one of their heroes, Viktor Orbán, calls "illiberal democracy" — one that, as he puts it, is free of mixed races and any vestige of liberal values.

What has become clear is that elite universities value big-money donors over students and are more than willing to clamp down on free speech and academic freedom, and to summon the police to do the bidding of the billionaire class. This display of cowardice is breathtaking. It symbolizes the death of the university as a democratic public sphere, as well as the willingness of its hedge-fund administrators to clamp down on student protesters in order to stay employed. Will Bunch observes that we are witnessing history repeat itself as tragedy:

The moral insanity of America's long war in Vietnam — protested by 1960s kids who were on the right side of history, even if the grown-ups didn't see it in real time. History doesn't repeat but it rhymes, gratingly. As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they'd sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world. They are destroying the American university in order to keep it "safe." In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony.

We get a glimpse of what Trump’s not-entirely-accidental call for a “unified Reich” portends in his call “to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses [and] expel student demonstrators from the United States.” Let me be clear in stating that the current war on campus protesters makes this fascist project all the easier to legitimize. In this self-cloning hedge-fund ideology, budget cuts become a cover for a discourse that reveals an astonishing vacancy of vision regarding the public and democratic purpose of education. Cuts are routinely made to valuable and critical educational programs in the name of economic expediency and fear of deficits, echoing the language of accountants in pencil factories. Under such circumstances, the liberal arts and humanities are disparaged either because they are labeled “woke”— an idiotic, self-serving label used to undermine the critical role of education — or because they do not serve the immediate interest  of creating depoliticized workers for a global economy marked by staggering inequities, increasing deregulation and exploitative working conditions. 

It is worth noting here that "punishment creep" has a long legacy in the U.S. and can be seen in the modeling of schools after prisons, the gradual hollowing-out of the welfare state, matched by an expansion of the state’s policing functions, and the increasing criminalization of social issues ranging from homelessness and truancy to poverty. The reach of the carceral state has now been expanded to include higher education.

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More is at risk in the current right-wing attacks on higher education, and potentially on dissent in general. While there has been considerable reporting on students' calls for a free Palestine, financial transparency and the severing of ties with industries that profit from and fuel Israel’s war and occupation, there has been little coverage of the plight of dissenting academics. As Natasha Lennard points out in The Intercept, professors and researchers in fields such as “politics, sociology, Japanese literature, public health, Latin American and Caribbean studies, Middle East and African studies, mathematics, education, and more have been fired, suspended, or removed from the classroom” for[expressing pro-Palestine speech. It would be wise to heed the words of Anita Levy, senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors, who states that “we are at the dawn of a new McCarthyism. This may be the tip of the iceberg.”

In an age when the landscape of tyranny casts a dark shadow across the globe, the weight of conscience carries both a burden and the potential for a profound moral and political awakening. This courageous generation of students exemplifies that when social responsibility is guided by the demands of moral witnessing, politics can effectively challenge the pervasive influence and grasp of an emerging authoritarianism. In such times, conscience emerges as an unwavering force, compelling individuals to stand firm and resist the rising tides of ultranationalism, racism, state violence and militarism. It urges them to resist the encroachment of oppression upon those individuals and groups who, in their struggle for freedom, are too often deemed disposable.   

Students across the country and indeed the globe are making it clear that if we wish to talk about democracy in the United States and other countries, we must confront the rise of authoritarianism. Only by awakening the stirrings of morality and embracing an emancipatory notion of politics can we envision a strong democracy that ignites, inspires and energizes the public imagination, galvanizing the burden of conscience to action. Today’s student protesters recognize that the military-industrial-academic complex, aligned with gangster capitalism, is writing them out of the script of democracy, while engaging in the slow cancelation of the future. Instead of vilifying campus protesters, as so many liberals and conservatives have done, we need to acknowledge that they represent the moral conscience of a new generation — one that is on the right side of history.  

The campus protesters exemplify the courage and moral conscience needed in times of crisis. By doing so, they direct their politics toward an imagined future where democracy is truly in the hands of the people. Their resistance to the genocide taking place in Gaza showcases the power of critical thought and analysis, as well as a commitment not only to think critically but also to transform consciousness and existing power structures. This protest represents both a courageous call to resistance and a crucial claim for justice.

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Like many people who pay attention to the overwhelming scientific evidence that humans are causing climate change by burning fossil fuels, as explored in his new book "Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We'll Win the Climate War," which was released this month. He sees climate changes as a multi-pronged menace, one that causes hardships from mass migration to extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts.

Yet unlike philosophers such as the University of Tokyo's Dr. Kohei Saito or the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Dr. Richard Wolff, Steyer is firmly convinced that climate change can be solved within the confines of capitalism. The solutions of the staunch left he describes as "panic."

"Cheaper, Faster, Better" is a testament to Steyer's conviction on all of these points. As the leader of a climate investment firm, he offers readers an entertaining and informative look into the world of green energy and the clean energy transition. He argues that capitalism can save the planet from the excesses of fossil fuel companies and provide people with the tools to better educate themselves. He is nothing if not an optimist.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

In your book, you discuss your realization that climate change is important during a 2006 trip to Alaska and you discovered that one of your favorite glaciers had melted. Do you have other harrowing experiences like that one, which have happened since and which have also influenced your views on climate change?

You mean where I've seen physical evidence of climate change in a way that's irrefutable and scary?

Precisely.

Around two years ago, I went on a trip. Originally it was supposed to be to Greenland to see what's going on from a climate standpoint, but because of [COVID-19], we weren't allowed to go in. So we went up to the coast of Iceland and went to a series of glaciers and fjords to see exactly how much the ice had moved and what the pace was. And of course that was something which was similar to Alaska in the sense of you could see where it had been quite recently. You could see how far it had moved and you could see where it was likely to move.

So that to a very large extent is one of the places in the world where it's most obvious: in the far north and the far south, partially because the ice is changing so fast and partially because the poles are heating up three or four times faster than the rest of the globe. But because the places where you can see in the natural world that the human impacts are most profound and most significant are at the poles, there aren't that many people who live in the way, way far north or the way, way far south.

As a climate change reporter, the risk that I run into is I'm giving a lot of statistics, a lot of data, and a lot of concepts, but people need to visualize these things. They need to see it and hear it, not simply know it intellectually. What reforms should be implemented to help the people who need it most when climate disasters happen?

Let's start with the basic rule of global climate change, which is the less that you've done to cause the problem, the more you're going to suffer.

If you look at the people of Pakistan last year, I think one-third of the people there were displaced by huge floods. And yet Pakistan had produced numbers as low as one 10th of 1% of the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions around the globe. When we think about what are the rules, the real question is that we don't have rules at this point to reflect the pain that is being inflicted on people around the globe, nor do we have rules in place to charge people for the pollution, for the global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the problems in the first place.

And so, before we even get to rules, one of the things that I think is absolutely critical for my standpoint is transparency. So that when we think about, how are we going to make this fair between peoples long before we get there, the question is, how are we going to measure emissions in a way that we now know what a specific company is doing?

We need a whole new information system so that we understand what's going on and can measure it. And then we need to say, under those circumstances, how are we going to make this in some way work for the people of the world in a way that's acceptable? 

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How does one implement that? Because the problem that I'm seeing is that there is massive resistance on both the political and corporate level to everything you've just proposed.

Of course, corporations are pushing back against transparency and information because they love plausible deniability. But if you will notice, California has passed laws that go into effect somewhere around 2027 asking that major corporations that do business in California actually measure and make public their emissions profile. I think the EU is also pushing a regime of transparency around emissions. You know the old saying: If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, whether that's the corporate level, the individual level or the governmental level.

When it comes to rules, don't forget, I am acting as an investor in this. And so from my standpoint, I can see business-related means of setting up fair measurements to turn into ways to reward people for sequestering carbon and charging people for emitting carbon in ways that are verifiable.

That is the beginning of a system to try to get back into the marketplace some sense of paying off the cost to people and also charging people for the cost that they're incurring for others. 

What about seemingly more radical approaches to deal with climate change? Dr. Kohei Saito is a Japanese scholar who wrote a book, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto," advocating for Marxism as a response to the climate change controversy. He argues that we need "degrowth" in our economy, that we need to stop with perpetual growth and re-orient our entire economic infrastructure because any consumption-based economic system he argues will inherently cause climate change. When people accuse him of being socialistic, he doesn't deny it. He argues that that's a good thing. What are your thoughts about those kinds of ideas?

I just don't believe that any of those systems has ever worked. I think the system that has worked for producing people's needs and desires at scale in the world has been a capitalist system. One of the things I always say is there's no such thing as a free market. All markets have rules. And in fact, going back to the earliest Greek marketplaces, there are always rules about who gets to put their stall where. When the market opens, where the market is physically located, there are always rules.

And one of the rules here is that people don't have to pay for their CO2 emissions. God didn't come down and say that; that was just something that people didn't understand, that there was inherent cost to emitting CO2. 

And over time we've come to understand that, but we are allowing people, in a sense, to pollute for free. They make a lot of money polluting for free, and they want to continue to pollute for free. The answer to that is not anti-capitalism. The answer is to actually put into capitalism, to undo the mistake. And so, to a very large extent, what I'm trying to do is to show that actually clean technologies winning in the marketplace is the way to affect change at scale, at speed, in a way that solves this problem and also does it in a way that solves the needs of people around the world. That's what I believe in.

You mentioned earlier that there will be political instability as climate migration worsens. Do you think that political instability will reflect itself in part in people embracing more radical ideologies?

When people are under pressure, you never know which way they're going to jump. They jump a lot of strange ways, but that's why it's so important to do what we're talking about: to be ahead of the game, actually solve problems, don't appeal to people's fear and panic, but actually do the smart things to prove that it works and make that happen.

And then make the argument and make it happen better and actually do the right thing, as opposed to trying to play off people's deepest fears, which honestly, if people are worried about the health and safety of their families, those fears run very deep and people can jump a lot of different ways. And that's why, to me, doing the right thing and building the right businesses and winning in a way that really takes care of people, I think is the only way to solve this.

The whole point about this book is, yes, we have a big problem, but that isn't all we have. We have an amazing opportunity to create something great, a better life than people have ever known on this planet. And so let's not get so freaked out about the challenge. Let's meet the challenge and create the opportunity.

Because if we in fact go to what you're talking about, which is kind of panic, you don't make your good decisions in fight or flight. Fight or flight is about not being able to see anything peripherally. Not being able to focus on anything but what's right in front of your face in an emotional way. What we're talking about is doing something that's much more responsible, much more optimistic, much more positive and will have a much better outcome.

As a billionaire, what would you say to people who are more critical of billionaires in general in terms of the issue of climate change? And what would you say to your fellow billionaires who could do more to assist with the problem? 

Look, I think [laughs], you know, the old saying: If you have a lot, you have a lot of responsibility too. 

Or as it goes in the "Spider-Man" movie: "With great power comes great responsibility."

Well, I don't know if it's great power, but I will say this: I think for the people who are lucky enough to have succeeded, particularly in our society where being just being part of the society is such a benefit, I think we have all have a responsibility to try and take care of the society that nurtured us, and the other people who are part of that and who help build this society. That's my basic going in philosophy.

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Decades ago, universities across the country began making cuts to the liberal arts. The humanities, fine arts and social sciences are endangered everywhere, as evident by the staggering variety of state colleges and private universities no longer invested in their survival. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated its world languages department, reduced its education department by a third and slashed its programs in art history, music, architecture and natural resource management. In the same year, Lasell University, a small private school in Massachusetts, killed five majors, including English and history. In Ohio, numerous of the state's best-known institutions of learning have announced cuts to the liberal arts, including Kent State, the University of Toledo, Miami University, Youngstown State, Baldwin Wallace University and Marietta College.

But the academic carnage in the Buckeye State is hardly an outlier. A quick Google search reveals intellectual wreckage piling up across the nation. The University of New Hampshire permanently closed its art museum, the University of Tulsa eliminated degrees in history, and the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin system has instructed all 25 of its campuses — which enroll more than 160,000 students every year — to prepare for reductions in liberal arts programs.

My alma mater, Valparaiso University, is now preparing to join in the self-destruction. A Lutheran liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan, 50 miles or so southeast of Chicago, Valparaiso recently announced that it is considering the “discontinuation” of 28 programs, including philosophy, public health, theology and the graduate program in English Studies and Communication, where I earned a master's degree. When I graduated in 2010, Valparaiso had a regional reputation as a small, private institution with excellent educational standards, bolstered by an emphasis on the arts and humanities.

The English Studies and Communication program was a hybrid, requiring study of creative writing, journalism, English literature and mass communication theory. Professors collaborated with the directors of the campus art museum and instructors in the social sciences and business departments, to demonstrate that knowledge is impossible to segregate or compartmentalize. A truly educated person should be adept at making connections across disciplines, cultures and different sectors of society.

Gore Vidal defined an intellectual as “someone who can deal with abstractions.” Valparaiso, at its best, did exactly that — equipping its graduates with an ability to handle abstractions, while showing that abstractions aren’t all that abstract. What might seem abstract in the academic context, as recent American history ought to have taught us, may soon transform into the concrete, creating situations of urgent social consequence. Arguments about democracy, disinformation, the public good and moral philosophy are inseparable from such issues as climate change, gun violence, the effects of new communication technology and the struggle to defeat autocracy.

In the 14 years since my graduation, Valparaiso has suffered from poor leadership that has caused consistent damage to its reputation. In 2020, it shut down its law school after years of lowering its standards to attract enough more students. Last year, the university's current president, José Padilla, launched a bizarre crusade to fund the renovation of a first-year dormitory by selling off a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, along with other signature works of art from the campus museum. Despite widespread opposition from students and faculty, and condemnation from the American Alliance of Museums, Padilla seems determined to proceed with this philistine maneuver (I wrote about the proposed sale for the New Republic.)

The potential gutting of Valparaiso's liberal arts programs is one small part of a much larger social and cultural trend of viewing education as nothing more than a business proposition. As Matthew Becker, a theology professor at Valparaiso, wrote, this decision, "if implemented, will completely dismantle the stated mission of the university":

Valpo will no longer be "grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith," nor will it really be preparing students "to serve in both church and society." With the elimination of foreign languages, music, the theology programs, and other programs in the humanities, Valpo will no longer be a liberal arts university.”

My nephew, Justin McClain, a recent graduate of the endangered public health program, stated the obvious: “On the heels of a pandemic that resulted in millions of lives lost and trillions in economic losses … educational institutions should be embracing students interested in joining a field that has proved far too valuable to the functioning of society at large yet remains chronically understaffed.”

Becker identified Valpo's plan of self-destruction as “completely market-driven,” and that's a critical point. Padilla and other university leaders have offered exclusively economic reasons to explain their agenda.

Time and again, college and university leaders across the country have cited financial justification and a business-model imperative for transforming their institutions into glorified vocational schools. And this wrecking-ball campaign runs in parallel with an ideologically motivated war on learning.

Right-wing governors and legislatures in many states, including Florida, Texas and Tennessee, have attempted to strip-mine universities, often by eliminating diversity, equity and Inclusion programs, prohibiting instruction in topics related to race and gender, and even threatening to deny loans to students who want to major in an “impractical” discipline.

This anti-intellectual campaign of destruction against higher education takes place alongside book-ban campaigns in many of the same states, where astroturf organizations funded by right-wing groups have worked to remove books from school curricula and libraries that focus on issues of racial justice or LGBTQ equality. 

It may be worth noting that many of those who claim to hate education are blatant hypocrites. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, a defender of book bans who routinely bashes institutions of learning, also has a Harvard Law degree, as well as a B.A. in public policy from Princeton. Even Donald Trump — despite his incoherent rambling and his impressive lack of knowledge on almost every conceivable topic — doesn't technically qualify as “poorly educated.” Although exactly how and why Trump was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania in the first place remains unclear, he holds a B.S. in real estate from Penn's Wharton School. 

For all their phony anti-educational posturing, Republican officials and pundits have succeeded in selling ignorance as virtuous to their voters and viewers. A 2022 Pew Research survey found that 76 percent of Republicans now believe that colleges “affect the country negatively,” while 76 percent of Democrats said they believe colleges “affect the country positively.”

A good rule to follow is never to trust highly educated people who tell you that education is a waste of time. A good question to ask, after that, is why they want so many people to remain ignorant.

If democracy is to function as intended, it demands a well-informed and reasonably sophisticated citizenry. Without an intelligent electorate, democratic governance is under threat from despots and demagogues who can acquire power by appealing to base emotions and instincts. Thomas Jefferson called information the “currency of democracy.” America is now at risk of bankruptcy.

Jefferson was also one of the founders of the University of Virginia, where organized a committee to develop a holistic program of learning that, in today’s ruthless, profit-obsessed climate, would not survive at Valparaiso, at West Virginia University or at countless other schools. Its program was to include “ancient and modern languages, mathematics, physio-mathematics, physics, botany and zoology, anatomy and medicine, government and political economy and history, municipal law, and Ideology (rhetoric, ethics, belles lettres, fine arts).”

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George Washington advocated for a national university that would teach the arts and natural sciences, along with literature, rhetoric and criticism. But the father of our country might now have pariah status on most campuses — perhaps as an adjunct instructor with no health benefits, begging for a summer course.

In an age of extreme partisan rancor, there is dispiriting bipartisan unity on one point: Most Americans are increasingly hostile to the liberal arts. While only Republicans are overtly hateful of higher education as a whole, many students and administrators no longer claim to see the value in programs that, according to their standards, lack immediate and practical application to the job market. Recent data indicate that only 10.2 percent of college students major in any humanities discipline, and barely over 1 percent major in history or political science.

High schools across the country, meanwhile, have been cutting courses in civics, the social sciences, humanities and fine arts for decades.

Richard Hofstadter, one of the premier historians and public intellectuals of the 20th century, explained in his 1963 classic, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” that most Americans view intelligence as merely functional. Brainpower, in this view, should serve some practical and tangible purpose, typically one that can be measured in dollars and cents. Abstractions, to return to Gore Vidal’s remark, are seen as irrelevant distractions from learning the skills that can earn a bigger paycheck.

One of the numerous things people seem to have forgotten amid this rat-race competition is the question of how to maintain a democratic system of governance. Representative government is complicated, and often moves slowly. It requires sustained wrestling with the complex and thorny questions of ethics, personal freedom versus social responsibility, and balancing the progress driven by new knowledge and new ideas with the benefits of existing norms and traditions.

That kind of intellectual labor is taxing enough for those with a decent formal education, but with no training in the study of government, culture or mass communication, Americans are increasingly likely to fall for bad arguments and stupid ideas. Divorcing education from philosophical, political and social ambitions creates a culture in which people view public-health measures during a pandemic as stepping stones to the gulag, convince themselves that a racist con man most famous for hosting a game show could not possibly have lost a free and fair election, or believe that information about transgender people is more dangerous than assault rifles.

Democratic voters hope — as should everyone else with a conscience — that Joe Biden can overcome his poor approval ratings and doubts about his age by appealing to Americans' belief in democracy. He will have to consistently remind the electorate that his opponent presents an unprecedented threat to the system that millions of voters take for granted. For many Americans, however, democracy is a hazy concept at best. Survey results consistently show that large proportions of the American public don't understand the Bill of Rights, cannot name the three branches of government and are unfamiliar with the most important and basic facts of U.S. history.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher, author of the new history and memoir “Burn Book,” recently observed that leading figures in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have "no sense of history." If so, they are little different from the average citizen in that regard, yet they are routinely heralded as geniuses. It is hardly surprising that they’ve allowed hate speech, deceitful propaganda and other harmful material to proliferate on their platforms.

A society actually grounded in the liberal arts might see Zuckerberg and Musk as allegorical characters, perhaps as archetypal warnings against the reckless pursuit of wealth and the refusal to balance technical wizardry with more mature forms of insight and wisdom. But that is not our society. The outsized influence of Zuckerberg and Musk — not to mention Donald Trump —makes clear that we are at risk of handing our country over to cynical, power-mad morons who are, at best, indifferent to hate, poverty and violence. A little education might help.

The post Ignorance and democracy: Capitalism’s long war against higher education appeared first on Salon.com.

A cult has the following features: It is a collective unhealthy relationship where individuals lose their sense of self to the larger group and where those new relationships supersede the other, presumably, more healthy relationships in a person’s life. In essence, the former person is replaced by the new cult identity. In this model, the cult leader exerts undue and harmful influence over the members. They, in turn, sacrifice their well-being and autonomy in service to the leader's wants and needs. In addition to emotional and psychological abuse, the cult leader usually engages in physical violence (including sexual abuse) and financial exploitation.

Donald Trump has apparently directly engaged in or encouraged all these behaviors to varying degrees. In a 2020 conversation with me here at Salon, Steven Hassan, who is a leading authority on the psychology of cults explained:

Donald Trump fits the stereotypical profile of all destructive cults. These traits include malignant narcissism. Trump can easily be compared to Jim Jones, Sun Myung Moon, and other cult leaders. Trump always had a cult of personality around him in terms of his businesses and his social interactions with people. But once Trump attained the presidency, he took over the Republican Party and instituted a fiefdom where he rewards loyalty and punishes anyone who displeases him.

As for definitions, a "destructive cult" is an authoritarian pyramid-structured group with someone at the top who claims to know all things and says God is working through him or her. Trump does that as well. Donald Trump is also trying to control people's behavior, the information they have access to, and their thoughts and emotions, to make them dependent and obedient and under his control. Consider the novel coronavirus pandemic and how Trump has all these followers who do not trust real experts and only take what Trump says to be true. Trump's followers also don't believe in science and medicine.

For decades, Donald Trump has shown himself to be especially adept and skilled at financially exploiting his followers and public through fraud and other such criminal behavior. In keeping with how he is a type of professional wrestling “heel” (villain), Trump is a type of confidence man huckster right out of “carnie” culture.

This “Trump merchandise industrial complex” has proven to be very lucrative and likely worth many millions of dollars. The Trump merchandise empire is part of a larger fundraising operation where the corrupt ex-president’s followers have given him many tens of millions of dollars. Trump, who claims to be a billionaire, is soliciting his MAGA people to give him money that will be used for his legal defense and fines in his civil case (that at this point now total almost 500 million dollars).

There is even a GoFundMe started by one of Trump’s loyalists to aid in his legal defense.

On an almost daily basis, Donald Trump and his campaign send out emails – sometimes several emails in one day – announcing the newest Trump merchandise, which his followers are encouraged to buy as a show of love for the Dear Leader. Like any fake “collectibles” business model, the goal is to produce an endless supply of items so that there is always something new, valuable, and more exclusive than the previous item.

For example, on Tuesday, Trump sent out an email proudly announcing a new “limited edition gold MAGA hat!”. The day before, Trump announced a new “exclusive” membership card:

I wanted to reach out to you personally to let you know that I’ve launched a prestigious membership program.

This membership is exclusive and spots are running out…

My Official Trump Gold Card is the key to unlocking your membership.

It's METAL!

The Trump merchandise machine is infinite. On Thursday, as I was writing this essay, I received an email announcing a new "limited edition" Trump MAGA hat — this time in black and white.

Trump is always selling special and “exclusive” trips to visit him at his Mar-a-Lago headquarters, as well as special “top secret” videos for his most loyal followers. And as though he is some type of saint or other holy man, Trump, who has declared himself “chosen by God” and a type of fascist messiah and prophet whose quest to take back the White House is preordained, is even selling pieces of the suit he wore during one of his criminal arraignments. 

And, of course, there are the Donald Trump sneakers, cologne, flags, stickers, NFT superhero trading cards and a seemingly endless variety of other merchandise.

Those outside of the MAGAverse and TrumpWorld laugh at Trump’s followers for being “stupid” because they give him money for such “junk”. Moreover, that the MAGA people would do such a thing is more proof of how “gullible” they are. The liberal schadenfreude in the Age of Trump knows no limits; liberal schadenfreude may feel good for those who bask in it, but it does and has done little to nothing to stop Donald Trump and the American neofascists and their assaults on democracy and freedom. If anything, Donald Trump and his MAGA people and the other neofascists feed off the disapproval and condemnation.

This signals a large failing of too many Democrats, liberals, progressives, and especially the professional centrists and hope peddlers in the mainstream news media and political class, even after more than seven years of experience in the Trumpocene. Too many still do not understand the power of emotion and identity in fascism and other forms of fake right-wing populism. These are political movements and belief systems – and in the case of Trump and the MAGA movement, they are best understood as charismatic personality cults – that exist outside of normal politics and its idealized assumptions about rational voters who act out of material self-interest. 

Trumpism, like fascism more broadly, is first and foremost a type of corrupt power. Fascism is not an ideology per se. It is an imagination based upon rage, anger, hatred, and where violence and destruction are viewed as legitimate if not preferred means of getting and keeping revolutionary power. Sadopolitics, necropolitics, the cult of personality and the will to power cohere the fascist imagination. In total, fascism is a force that gives its followers a sense of personal and collective meaning as they engage in violence and other forms of harm and suffering against “the enemy.” In many ways, fascism and other such political projects are “identity” politics in some of its worst forms.

Donald Trump and his MAGA merchandise and assorted regalia are a way of creating meaning and a sense of belonging – and of identifying one’s place in the hierarchy of that fascist movement and subculture relative to the Dear Leader and his or her own inner circle. In that way, the MAGA merchandise functions as a type of fascist uniform.

Are Trump’s sneakers “ugly” and an offense to the sneaker collecting subculture? Sure. But Trump’s MAGA people don’t care. Trump’s sneakers sold out almost immediately upon their release.

Trump’s hats and other clothing have been mocked as being “cheap looking” and “tacky.” OK. But again, Trump’s MAGA people don’t care. The MAGA people continue to buy these things because they make them feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves.

Are the MAGA people who purchased “Trump Bucks” because they thought they were real money and an “investment” gullible and apparently not very bright? Absolutely. But they will remain loyal to Donald Trump even though they were defrauded online by people who took advantage of their love for him. Business Insider provides these details:

Supporters of former President Donald Trump are reportedly being scammed out of thousands of dollars through the sale of commemorative "Trump Bucks" that fraudsters say can be exchanged for real cash.

Several companies are allegedly using advertising tactics including creating AI-generated videos of Trump…. to claim the worthless "Trump Bucks" will make them rich, according to a new report from NBC News.

Some of the people who bought the Trump memorabilia have attempted to exchange it for real US dollars at banks, and told NBC News that bank employees are reporting it as a growing issue. Several companies have been identified for marketing and selling the false currency, NBC News reported, including a number of businesses seemingly based in Colorado with names like Patriots Dynasty, Patriots Future, and USA Patriots.

"President Trump wants you to finally open your eyes and believe in his power for a better tomorrow!" reads a banner message on one of the sites advertising a "TRB Black Card," which sells as a single card for $90 or packs of up to 10 cards for $500.

As we try to escape the Trumpocene, fortunately, there are a few sharp voices and guides who correctly understand the power of emotion and identity and its role in the Trump MAGA fascist subculture and larger American (and global) fascist movement. We should listen very closely to these guides. In a very insightful essay at the Conversation, anthropologist Alexander Hinton traveled to this year’s CPAC event to better understand the enduring (and alluring) power (and dangers) of Trumpism and the MAGA subculture:

Everywhere I turned, people wore MAGA regalia – hats, pins, logos and patches, many with Trump's likeness. I spent breaks in the exhibition hall, which featured a Jan. 6 insurrection-themed pinball machine featuring "Stop the Steal," "Political Prisoners" and "Babbitt Murder" rally modes and a bus emblazoned with Trump's face. Admirers scribbled messages on the bus such as, "We have your back" and "You are anointed and appointed by God to be the President."

Those on the left who dismiss the CPAC as a gathering of MAGA crazies and racists who support a wannabe dictator do not understand that, from this far-right perspective, there are compelling and even urgent reasons to support Trump. Indeed, they believe, as conservative politician Tulsi Gabbard stated in her CPAC speech on Feb. 22, that the left's claims about Trump's authoritarianism are "laughable." This is because CPAC attendees falsely perceive President Joe Biden as the one who is attacking democracy.

At the New York Times, Vanessa Friedman locates Trump’s “Never Surrender sneakers” and other such merchandise relative to late-stage capitalism (what philosopher Nany Fraser has brilliantly described as “cannibal capitalism”), criminogenic politics, an American pathocracy, and a culture experiencing a deep crisis of meaning, community, and shared values that is “amusing itself to death”:

[T]he $399 Never Surrender sneakers unveiled over the weekend at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia? They are like a road map to Mr. Trump’s value system and electoral strategy in sartorial form.

Gilded hightops as shiny as the chandeliers at Mar-a-Lago, they have an American flag wrapping the ankle like the forest of flags that spring up behind Mr. Trump whenever he takes a stage. They have red soles made to match his trademark red ties (and the flag) and perhaps as a sly nod to Christian Louboutins and the semiology of luxury footwear. Also, there’s a large embossed “T” on the side and on the tongue.

While they are “bold, gold and tough, just like President Trump,” according to the Trump sneakers website, allowing potential owners to “be a part of history,” they boast zero technical performance attributes. While they have a shape similar to Nike Air Force 1s (get it? Air Force One!), they are unabashed imitations of the original….

Yet the merching of the moment is more dangerous than it may initially appear.

There has been a lot of eye-rolling since the sneakers’ debut, and jokes about the fact that, given the millions of dollars in penalties levied on Mr. Trump in his various civil cases, he has to make more money somewhere. And there was a lot of focus on the boos that met his appearance at Sneaker Con. (To be fair, the sneakerhead community is not the market for the kicks since there’s nothing original about them; it’s the MAGA market.)

It’s easy to get distracted by the sheer absurdity of it all — a former president, selling sneakers!

Friedman concludes:

Despite the fact that, as of Sunday, the website claimed that the 1,000 pairs of numbered Never Surrender sneakers had sold out, leaving the somewhat less exciting T-Red cherry knit sneaks and Potus 45 white knit sneaks available at $199 each, it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which the shoes provide any meaningful source of income.

What they offer is something else.

Like Mr. Trump’s tendency to turn every courtroom appearance into a form of entertainment that can be used as a campaign op, his effort to commoditize his legal jeopardy is a long-term strategic play. In reducing his indictments to a slogan on a consumer good, he is reducing their gravity.

It’s a form of insidious trivialization, the sort of tactic that plays perfectly in the landscape of late-stage capitalism in which everything is a product for sale. Oh, those old federal charges? They’re not serious; they’re a style choice. He’s transforming indictments into accessories, a language everyone speaks. The more product he sells, the more he makes a mockery of his situation. That’s where the real profit lies.

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Writing at the Nation, Chris Lehmann uses President Biden’s State of the Union address and the Trump regalia worn by some of the Republicans in attendance as a way of assessing the power of the MAGA movement:

The stable of imagery associated with the right-wing Trump insurgency is showing signs of wear and tear. Where Trump-branded messaging and merchandise once had the power to upend establishment mores and expectations, they now feel like the political equivalent of a rock ensemble’s county fair tour: a purely formalist effort to satisfy the nostalgic longings of a diminishing fan base.

What was most telling about Greene’s stunt wardrobe was the date on the hat: Instead of being minted for the looming 2024 general election, it came from Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, which—despite the lies of Trump, Greene, and other MAGA leaders— he lost decisively. And make no mistake: Greene, a perfect specimen of do-nothing right-wing congressional service, lives for these camera-ready moments of political theater. She certainly didn’t descend to the same level of sartorial carelessness back when she dressed as a Chinese spy balloon.

Amazingly, Greene’s get-up wasn’t even the most outlandish clothes-themed show of MAGA sympathies in the chamber. That honor fell to Texas Representative Troy Nehls, who wore a “Never Surrender” T-shirt featuring Trump’s mugshot and displayed a Laken Riley badge of his own on his lapel. To pull the look together, he sported an American flag bow tie. The outfit didn’t evoke a fearless mustering of Real American patriots so much as a Chippendale dancer gone to seed.

Lehman continues:

“Liberal commentators were put off by the vulgar display—which, of course, was part of the point. Democratic detractors of the hat typically fixated on the hypocrisy of its manufacture—like other Trump gear, it was made at least in part from materials sourced in China, the great bogeyman of Trumpian trade tirades and economic-nationalist appeals. But such caviling overlooked the broader, and pointedly inclusive, nature of the Trump campaign’s iconography. Where liberal critics read MAGA regalia as divisive and insular, it actually represented a welcoming gesture from the leaders of a right-wing movement who formerly telegraphed their ideological purity, during the Tea Party’s heyday, by cosplaying as colonial revolutionaries.

But just as Trumpism itself has curdled into a brackish series of glosses on its founding resentments, the MAGA aesthetic has gone sour.”

Donald Trump is 77 years old. He will not be the leader of the MAGA movement and the American neofascist cause forever. But in their obsessive focus on Donald Trump the man and the leader, the mainstream news media and the country’s mainstream political class have overlooked how he represents a force, a type of permission structure for authoritarianism and other antidemocratic values and beliefs that will far outlive him. The Trump merchandise empire will inevitably end but that energy will be transferred to the next Great Leader. At this point, MAGA is a brand, and like most lucrative brands, there will be someone waiting to leverage it for their own purposes.

The post Trump sneakers and the MAGA uniform: Merchandising fascism to the mainstream appeared first on Salon.com.

The 3,500-year-old holiday was celebrated over the weekend in China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and other diasporic communities. While each culture has their own traditions to honor the new year according to the lunisolar calendar, the holiday is largely about attracting luck, wealth and good health for the future. Unsurprisingly, the West has taken the holiday for itself and managed to use it to its own advantage. With brands dropping successful Lunar New Year collections, it’s predominantly white people who are raking in the cash for the holiday despite not finding any meaning in it.  

Gaining mainstream popularity in America, the holiday has prompted marketing that is rampant and omnipresent. Here Lunar New Year means simply reselling items in a new red colorway or slapping a zodiac animal on a bag and selling it for $895 (yes, this is real, and yes it is sold out at Coach). NBC has traced the commercialization of the holiday to the ‘90s when China became a powerful economic player, and the aggressive selling tactics have clearly paid off. Nike, Stanley cups, Barbie, H&M, Kate Spade – brands big or small, luxury or fast fashion have dropped collections for 2024’s Lunar New Year. 

The fashion industry in particular cashes in on the holiday — even Lululemon, the athletic apparel brand whose founder dismissed valuing diversity and chose the brand’s name in order to laugh at how Japanese people can’t pronounce the “L” sound. Their special Lunar New Year collection was just their pre-existing legging, puffers, and sweaters in . . . red. Maybe they’re also celebrating Valentine’s Day.

Judging by Lululemon, companies are able to put their anti-Asian racism aside for the blatant cash grab that is Lunar New Year. When considering fashion’s history with perpetuating Asian stereotypes, and in particular myths about Asian women, this phenomenon proves to be the rule rather than the exception. 

This history is unpacked in Anne Anlin Cheng’s “Ornamentalism,” a book that explores how the West’s notion of Asian women is constructed through a relation to objects, hence the title’s portmanteau of orientalism and ornament. Cheng's book begins on August 24, 1924 when a ship carrying almost 600 Chinese passengers landed at the San Francisco harbor and everyone was approved to disembark except 22 young Chinese women. The reason is a tale modern women know all too well: they were deemed “lewd” because of the way they were dressed. The women, including a woman named Chy Lung, were believed to be prostitutes despite carrying proper paperwork. What followed was the first time a Chinese litigant appeared before America’s highest courts. In Chy Lung v, Freeman, the defendants, lacking any real evidence for their decision or understanding of Chinese dress codes, used the women’s fashion as an argument as to why they are prostitutes. Floral patterns on clothes, accessories in the hair, silk fabric: the horror! Clothing-related condemnations created a lasting impression on the American people’s early understanding of the “dangerously immoral” Asian women, even after the court ruled in favor of Lung in the highly public trial.

The fashion industry has continued to hypersexualize Asian feminity, notably through the prevailing sexualization of traditional Asian dresses like China’s qipao or cheongsam. A 2022 article from Gal-Dem, “When will fashion brands stop sexualising the cheongsam?” notes that many are sold under the lingerie category but even before that, they were a site of sexual and fetish fantasies. In 1977, Yves Saint Laurent debuted a Chinese collection replete with cone-shaped hats, qipaos, and exposed midriffs and yet . . . no actual Asian women in sight. Jean Paul Gautier took a similar route in his 2001 collection, featuring see-through tops with Mandarin collars and pankou (the knotted fastenings used on qipaos), form-fitting cheongsams and skirts and dresses with slits aplenty. The models for the collection were not Asian yet Vogue still described them as “Gaultier’s Far-Eastern courtesans.” 

Fast forward to 2015 and things have only become more blatant. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “China: Through the Looking Glass” featured esteemed fashion houses — Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano — whose designs can only be called a feast of aesthetic Asian clichés. Roberto Cavalli’s evening dress is decked in porcelain-like patterns. Valentino’s evening dress from the Shanghai Collection deals in traditional Chinese brocade. Saint Laurent and Tom Ford continue to weave the same silk Lung and her contemporaries were condemned for. Elsewhere, dragons run amok. The introductory sign at the exhibit happily notes that these so-called Asian aesthetics are not meant to be authentic: “For the designers in this exhibition, China represents a land of free-floating symbols […] Like Marco Polo or Gulliver, they are itinerant travelers to another country, reflecting on its artistic and cultural traditions as an exoticized extension of their own . . .” 

The same introduction could hang in front of the 2024’s Lunar New Year collections. Authenticity is nowhere to be found in fashion’s take on the multicultural holiday which manages to be simultaneously marketed toward consumers of Asian descent yet does not engage in any real history or tradition. In making their products geared towards Asians, these brands reveal their own stereotypical beliefs. Fendi’s Asian-ification resulted in a Pokemon collab, while Loewe leaned into jade, and Nike delivered a garishly gold brocade sneaker, because anime for Asians? Groundbreaking.

When Cheng describes the Met collection — “ [It] rehearses [. . .] that opulence and sensuality are the signature components of Asiatic character; that Asia is always ancient, excessive, feminine, available, and decadent; that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room in the Orientalist imagination for national, ethnic, or historical specificities” — it’s easy to believe she’s describing the multitude of designers’ Lunar New Year collections today. The ultra-luxury nature of many of these holiday drops further the idea of Asian people as lavish, like everyone is a “Crazy Rich Asian.” Bottega’s Veneta’s Lunar New Year collection features a take on their Jodie bags with scale-like detailing to honor the year of the dragon, yet it’s noticeably more expensive than the bag’s regular price point. In the mid-size version, the Lunar New Year bag is $4,700, up from the regular bag of the same size’s $3,500. Loewe, on the other hand, partnered with Chinese jade masters to create pendants for the small price of $14,061 a piece. 

Hollywood taught us that characterizations can fall prey to stereotypes of Asian people, but so too can aesthetics. Not only are these visual motifs neither contextual nor representative of China, much less the many cultures that celebrate Lunar New Year, but they also perpetuate the “Asia is ancient” belief that Cheng describes. The multitude of centuries-old or traditional patterns and materials in the collection continues to depict Asia as a folkloric, kung fu land, perpetuating the idea that non-white cultures are stuck in the past, lagging behind the technologically advanced and oh-so-civilized West. 

While these collections may not be as engaged in the explicit hypersexual dress codes as the Met exhibit, they continue the Met's and fashion’s strategy of using fantasies of Asia to sell products, to literally objectify Asia. This is true even for the Asian collaborators of fashion’s holiday collections, where they come to serve a secondary purpose. Lululemon debuted their collection in collaboration with "Everything Everywhere All at Once" Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, as if to disguise the company’s racist history. Many brands, Aritzia for example, use this time as an opportunity to perform allyship by working with an Asian designer, nevermind that their clothing has been called out for misrepresenting Asian culture. Even in Aritzia’s own drop, people have called out how Chinese iconography and traditions are conflated with Korean culture. Once again, to be Asian is to be the accessory to a Western goal, to be put to use. 

These drops continue the idea that Asian people are exotic, decadent, and thus something to possess, which, as events from the past few years like 2021’s Atlanta spa shooting prove, create dangerous narratives. One in three Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders still reported facing racial abuse in 2023.

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The fashion industry’s commodification of a cultural holiday descends from a long lineage of crafting Asian personhood through objects. The Lunar New Year collections take this one step further, turning not just people but an entire swath of Asian cultures into its own monolithic aesthetic. When white consumers purchase these collections, they do so without knowing or caring about the holiday’s meanings and history, merely seeing the culture as a style that they want to try on. The marketing is so vast and popular, some Asian consumers can’t help but to buy into this fantasy of their own culture too, coughing up hundreds of dollars to brands who are exploiting them. The fashion industry has turned Lunar New Year into its own cruel joke: in giving these brands money, prosperity and blessings are the last things being bestowed on the people who actually celebrate the holiday .     

The post The cruel joke of cashing in on Lunar New Year appeared first on Salon.com.

The problem of sorting out the recent Nate fuss is that there’s already plenty of reason to survey the winding pipeline of his career. And there’s room for a sober assessment of his unique role in the landscape of digital journalism — from his days as the data-darling of baseball blogging, to his Twitter-hyped rise to fame on a lucky election prediction.

Mostly, it seems he was in the right place at the right time, or at least a product of it. He seemed to surf to success on the heady excitement of editors and reporters who thought data journalism could save newsrooms, the lucky beneficiary of the still-hopeful “pivot” era of journalism. It was back when a big chunk the country’s neo-liberal mainline Democrats believed most political problems could be solved with a West Wing walk-and-talk. Even “Orange is the New Black” intoned his name like a New Enlightenment saint in one 2013 episode.

“I believe in science. I believe in evolution. I believe in Nate Silver and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I do admit he could be a kind of an a**hole,” the protagonist chides in a plea for reason.

I bet it was a pretty plush gig, being Nate Silver back then.

For better or worse, it can’t be denied that his influence on a new wave of data-driven journalism may have actually helped fortify some of the more scurrilous parts of political coverage against the hemming and hawing of so much inflated punditry. (Not that we humans could ever fully root it out; and, God, who would even want to?) He’s not a political genius, nor is he all that great of a statistician — but for a while he was the biggest name in the game. And that name was the main reasons a lot of political journalists like me could make a little scratch freelancing roughly coded charts for embed into some aging news site’s gnarly old content management system.

But I’ll let proper cultural historians take it from there. Giving Silver his due props is not why I’m here. I’m here to collect. Not for myself, but for a few others to whom he is indebted as a self-professed honest thinker.

The precipitating event was as stupid and banal as you can imagine. On Tuesday, some podcast guy on Twitter pointed out a year-old academic analysis of some basic economic reforms that would be useful in shoring up social welfare and slowing climate-change impacts.

“The global economy is strictured around growth — the idea that firms, industries, and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whatever is needed,” reads the screenshot excerpt.

Apparently tripped up by the introductory paragraph of the analysis, the podcaster did not seem to grasp that infinite growth of any kind is not possible with finite resources.

“I didn’t find this article to be very convincing. But setting all that aside, I’ve always found this to be a weird framing. My sense is that growth or is just the normal byproduct of people going about their business as usual,” he tweeted.

Thankfully, Nate Silver was on hand to reassure the podcaster’s confidence.

"That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution,” Silver replied in a mystifying bolt of unintentional hilarity.

That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 26, 2023

It’s a shame Silver didn’t stick around to dispute the actual analysis. Hope he at least read it. As a self-described “elite,” it would be a good time for him to brush up on the current affairs of us common parsnips. And I think the paper’s authors — a group of eight professors at internationally renowned schools across Spain, the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Canada and the US — are more than capable of speaking for themselves should Silver find himself at all interested in what they have to say before he offers his further profundity to the class.

Of “the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed,” researchers said. “This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates.”

You know what? Say more, profs.

“Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”

The analysts add that this approach can not only “enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown” but argue that so-called degrowth strategies aim to “stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow.”

I may not be convinced that the strangling vines of kudzu-capitalism can be charmed back from their parasitic grasp on the poor by something that merits a polite euphemism like “degrowth.” But it seems to me, these professors are proposing one hell of a deal compared to the choppier alternatives that have worked in the past to bring down the rich.

That’s something the supposed elite often forget when they’re left to roast too long on the dais. Social-focused economic and health investment, strong labor and reproductive rights, transparent material assurance of their childrens’ safety and future — these things aren’t just some 21st-century vape-dreams of eccentric academic windbags. These are the handful of basic requirements for human survival that, historically speaking, poor people have routinely had to kill rich elites in order to secure for themselves and their families.

Sucks that every time some scant handful of blue-bloods goes too long without catching a good old fashioned beat-down, they have to learn that lesson all over again. But here we all are, entertaining pseudo-celebrity flirtations with played-out social Darwinist ideas, and wondering how anyone still has the energy to even say this dude’s name. For now, I think, we can stop. Until Nate can focus on the science again, it’s just too boring to focus on him.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.

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Eisner's rhetoric clashed with my biocentric view of the environment — and may have proved unnecessary. His small audience consisted of science professors, students, and alumni like me — presumably pre-sold on the idea of biological conservation. He was not tasked with convincing shareholders in the pharmaceutical industry or owners of cattle operations to allow some of the planet's living jewels, tropical rainforests, to keep on living. His appeal “to reason” lifted arguments straight out of the capitalism handbook.

Everyone from biodiversity prospectors to ecologists seeks to unveil the hidden value of everything in the natural world, with or without different ends in mind. Some things are considered goods, like the Madagascar periwinkle, source of vincristine, an alkaloid used for chemotherapy; others are services, like a mushroom's ability to detoxify soil.

In the decades since Eisner's talk, conservationists have drawn attention to the idea of ecosystem services, or ES, that they once directed to individual poster-child species. In the 1990s, the endangered spotted owl became an emblem of old-growth, West coast forests, with protesters trying to halt logging — and angry loggers putting a price of a different kind on the owl's feathered head. These days, the conservationist's greatest rhetorical weapon for garnering support for their causes tends to be the story of a whole ecosystem and its many wonders.

The argument goes as follows: When nature provides free of charge something humans need or want, that utility justifies losing any revenue earned from exploiting or even destroying the ecosystem in question. A good example might be deciding not to build a fancy beachside resort that would eventually ruin the nearest coral reef, home to a vibrant marine community that helps feed local people and attracts tourists. There is hardly anything more fundamental to economics than the cost-benefit analysis.

The field of study has branched out since the 1970s, when the concept of ES first appeared. The United Nations–affiliated Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, employs the contentious term "sustainable use" as it lists the ways humanity depends on the more-than-human world. Environmental scientist Gretchen Daily's work has given rise to the Natural Capital Project, an ambitious program that urges world leaders to appreciate nature — essentially by putting a monetary value on it. Then there's the catchy term “nature-based solutions,” which proposes ways to employ ES to improve human welfare. Its appeal lies in cases of immediate need, such as using green spaces to decrease urban heat-island effects.

Everyone from biodiversity prospectors to ecologists seeks to unveil the hidden value of everything in the natural world, with or without different ends in mind.

A recent editorial in Science admits that biodiversity credits — which provide a way for companies to finance activities that, on the whole, increase biodiversity — may sound like promising sources of conservation funds. But the authors contend that "the risk that trading ill-defined generic biodiversity credits will result in biodiversity loss, not conservation, should be considered. Scarce resources could be diverted to market regulation rather than conservation." Even The Economist Impact notes that the "difficulty of quantifying biodiversity units as opposed to carbon units renders impact assessment challenging."

And then there is the startling rise this century of green (or eco-) capitalism — to some, an oxymoron. Capitalism seeks endless growth. Ecology sees growth as part of a larger process. So why has conservation embraced capitalism so enthusiastically? The quick answer is that everyone understands money — how it changes hands, how it accumulates, what happens when it's scarce — and most realize that conservation can be extremely expensive. The typical nature-lover would save endangered species and spaces at almost any cost; after all, extinction is forever. As a result, those working to protect nature frame their efforts in language people grasp immediately. Unfortunately, that can mean mentioning, say, a mangrove swamp's amazing ability to absorb coastal storm surges in the same breath as the cost of real estate protected.

One recent opinion piece observed that "scientific articles increasingly highlight the benefits of, rather than the threats to, habitats," the latter being too gloomy, off-putting. Talking about how urban tree cover reduces the heat-island effect sounds positive. In contrast, describing yet another unfolding disaster will turn many people off.

Capitalism seeks endless growth. Ecology sees growth as part of a larger process. So why has conservation embraced capitalism so enthusiastically?

A team of environmental researchers in 2013 described several major metaphors for our actual or potential relationships with the rest of the living world. Of these, the researchers wrote, one predominates: economic production, meaning that humans treat nature like a warehouse and service center. I have found that the old idea of stewardship — which at least cautions the dominant species, us, to take good care of everything else — is about the best metaphor currently available. That isn't saying much. Anthropocentrism remains front and center, no matter how it's dressed up.

We certainly need to obtain raw materials from the geosphere and the biosphere, but other species do not exist for us. It can be a challenge to tease these realities apart, especially as many cultures condone human privilege to use "resources" as we see fit.

As I brashly pointed out to a respected scientist many years ago, whenever we call certain species or communities "valuable," we create de facto categories — in-groups and out-groups. This is profoundly arrogant and myopic. As the iconic 20th-century conservationist Aldo Leopold said, "To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." No one can deny that we are master tinkerers, but maybe not such intelligent ones. The species we end up devaluing could be linchpins for ecological processes yet to be comprehended.

As ES research continues, and persuasive examples accumulate, how do researchers, editors, and science journalists frame the results? Do they uncritically further the capitalist, everything-has-a-price agenda? Do they reinforce the idea that humanity possesses some right to pass judgment on which organisms best suit us and our chosen companions? Finally, when we discover these wonders and decide what to do with them — exploit or protect — do we ensure reparations to local peoples thereby avoiding charges of biopiracy or environmental injustice?

A recent article in Nature proposes taking neither an anthropocentric nor a purely biocentric approach to evaluating nature, but a diverse, "pluricentric" one. Instead of objectifying the natural world, we ought to see ourselves as part of it, a stance commonly associated with Indigenous peoples.

In the meantime, ignorance, arrogance, and stubborn adherence to outmoded capitalist mythologies — not to mention the climate crisis — almost ensure that threats to biodiversity will increase. We know far too little to make snap "Sophie's Choice" decisions about what to save, exploit, or merely leave to its fate. The market adds complications. Let's cultivate some humility, in both science and society. We clearly cannot save everything, but we must not believe that putting a price on nature's functions is the best way to save as much as possible.

Louise Fabiani’s science writing and critical essays have appeared previously in Undark, as well as in Sierra, JSTOR Daily, Aeon, Slate, Science, New Scientist, the TLS, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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As co-author Nick Hanauer, host of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast, writes in the preface, "while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness" — meaning corporate bullshit, of course — "there is a pattern.” Not only is this pattern simple, the authors argue, it’s remarkably comprehensive. Once you learn it, you'll see it everywhere. Better yet, you'll learn how to see through it systematically, through six categories that begin with denial, and then a series of fallback strategies and retreats ending in plaintive cries of catastrophe. 

Two things make "Corporate Bullsh*t" particularly compelling. The first is the wealth of illustrative quotes that are both hilarious and insightful, showing how those who deploy this kind of propaganda will use almost identical arguments generations or even centuries apart. I wasn't prepared for how much fun this would be, resulting in multiple LOL moments.

The second is the way the logic of the fallback strategies within corporate bullshit flow easily from one to the next, like a skillful salesperson's pitch. Seeing them explored in this serial fashion, with one failed argument giving way to the next, exposes the internal logic of corporate bullshit as essentially driven by desperation: Ultimately, there's no there there, and those who deploy these lies actually know it.

While co-authors Hanauer and Joan Walsh, the Nation columnist and former editor of Salon, are no doubt better known, it was the workhorse research of Donald Cohen, the founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, that laid the foundation for the book. Cohen shared some of what he learned from me in this interview, which has been edited for clarity and length. 

Corporate propaganda is such a vast and omnipresent phenomenon. How did you manage to identify a small set of categories that capture so much of it? 

Through a lot of research. The original idea, almost 10 years ago, where I started to see these arguments over and over again in the work I was doing. Then I started to look back and say, “Well, did we hear those same arguments when they passed the minimum wage, or the Clean Air Act?” 

So the project was really about collecting the quotes and then after getting a whole lot of quotes, probably a thousand, and then stepping back and saying, “OK, there's a pattern here.” So the pattern came from the assembly of quotes on dozens and dozens of different issues. I looked at every new regulatory law, starting with the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and it became clear that there's a game, there's a playbook.

So the first category you start with is denial. In other words, with the argument, “It's not a problem.” What's a common example of that?

Currently climate change, of course. Go back a little bit, it was tobacco: Not a problem, doesn't hurt anything. Go back a little further and you'll find the argument that lead is healthy. Lead is good for you! In all these cases — and there are many others — corporations and others already had research saying exactly the opposite, that these things were harmful. 

The most striking example you give goes back much longer, all the way to the era of slavery, which illustrates the tendency to go beyond denial, when some supporters of slavery argued it was a positive good. That seems like an extreme example, but how does it help us understand and respond to the pattern as a whole? 

Because at the core of the propaganda is self-interest. It was in the self-interest of the plantation owners and other folks in the South to defend slavery when it was under attack. So the best defense is an offense: This thing your attacking isn't only not bad, it's actually good.

So the next category is that if there is actually a problem, "the free market knows best" and will fix it. What's a common example of that one? 

There's so many. Think of auto safety. If people demand seat belts, then auto manufacturers will make cars with seat belts. If workplaces are unsafe, workers won't want to work there, unless they get paid more. So the market takes care of that, and people who are willing to do unsafe jobs can make their own decision in the market. 

There's a great quote on this from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: "Employers do not allow work conditions to exist which cause injury or illness. Safety is good business." So individual choice in the market takes care of things. If there is demand for healthier food or safer cars or drugs that don't have debilitating side effects, then the market will take care that because companies will just get it.

You cite civil rights legislation as providing a classic case study of the role this argument has played in our history. How prominent was this argument in response to civil rights laws. What's a particularly outrageous example?  

The market basically says we are all free agents and are able to negotiate with one another to buy and sell goods and services. So segregationists and racists who didn't want to serve Black people believed that was their right because this is a private business, a private lunch counter, I can decide who I will serve or not serve. That's freedom. That's how the market should work. Ayn Rand said, "Private racism is not a legal issue, it's a moral issue." People should be able to decide who they want or don't want to associate with. That's how the market works: We decide what we want to buy or don't want to buy, and that should be the same for who we serve and don't want to serve. 

This argument was central in the 1960s, wasn't it? 

Well, we have a quote from George Wallace and from folks who were opposing the Civil Rights Bill. It was very much about "freedom to choose," a phrase we know know from Milton Friedman's work. But the freedom to choose who you want to associate with, who you want to sell things to, who you go to school with, was very much part of the language of the segregationists and the racists in the '50s, '60s and '70s. And we're seeing the same arguments today. The "freedom to choose" is really about market fundamentalism. We're all individuals.As Margaret Thatcher said, there's no such thing as "society."

The next category is about shifting the blame: "It’s not our fault, it’s your fault." What's a common example of this? 

We see a lot of that in workplace safety. If there's a coal mining accident, it was because a miner made a mistake, so it's their fault, and the only solution is to educate the miners or fire the ones who don't do a good job. Which of course ignores the systems and the working conditions that are entirely within the control of the mining company. 

And we hear that a lot in auto safety: It's not unsafe cars, it's "the nut behind the wheel." That was the response when Ralph Nader showed up on the scene and wanted to create safer cars. There's a great quote I'll share when the loss of the ozone layer was first being recognized as a problem,and they were trying to regulate CFCs. Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior said in 1987, "Well, people who don't stand out in the sun, it doesn't affect them." Meaning that it's not our responsibility to save the planet: Just don't stand out in the sun! 

We heard the same thing with smokers and opioid use: Individual behavior is the problem here. As it was becoming clear that there was an opioid problem and there was an increasing numbers of addiction problems and overdoses and deaths, the Sackler family, who owned and created Purdue Pharma, made a conscious strategic decision to blame the victim: It's just people who become addicts because they have flawed characters. It's not our responsibility. We do all the right things. 

The case study for blame-shifting would tort reform, with the classic example of 79-year-old Stella Liebeck. For those who don't know that story, or may have forgotten the details, what happened to her and how was it spun to blame her?

She bought a cup of coffee at a McDonald's in 1992. McDonald's policy was to create very hot coffee, for whatever reason. She got in her car and put the coffee between her legs, it spilled and she got third-degree burns. The coffee was 180 to 190 degrees, super, super hot. She required skin grafts, had large hospital bills, it was serious, she was 79 years old. So what the joke, and the counterargument, became was that a 79-year-old lady couldn't manage her cup of coffee. She sued and won a substantial settlement but that was usedby McDonald's and various conservatives to argue, “Well, she should've known the coffee was hot.” 

What makes these arguments in the book so interesting to me is that there's a degree of plausibility with many of them, and that's the secret to their weaponry, the secret to their trade — semi-plausible arguments that at their core are ridiculous. So McDonald's had a responsibility not to make coffee that burned you, that scalded you. She certainly should not have held her coffee between her legs, no question about it. But she didn't make the coffee. I don't know anybody who makes their coffee at 190 degrees, that's nearly boiling. 

Also she didn't start off trying to sue McDonald's for millions. 

Yeah, actually she just wanted her hospital bills and medical bills paid. That's exactly right. She said, “You are responsible for this. I suffered, and I just want you to pay for it.” And they went to denial, “It is not our fault,” and then a bigger lawsuit happened. They were found guilty and the jury awarded her a sizable amount of money. 

That case was used as a poster child for "tort reform." How did they build on that?

Well, it became about how we're a litigious society. An old lady spilled her coffee and got a million bucks out of it. It's the lawyers' fault. The lawyers are ambulance chasers. Often things like this become tropes, the simple story that tells a bigger story. This is the one that said, “Lawyers are out of control, they're suing about everything and they're taking companies' money.” That became one of the emblematic stories that was used over and over" “A lady spills her coffee and gets a million bucks. That’s what’s wrong with America today!"

In your introduction, you refer to "threats masquerading as economic theories." With the last three categories, this really comes to the fore. The first of them is, "It’s a job killer." I’ve encountered this a lot as a journalist through the years, especially from the California Chamber of Commerce. What’s a common example more generally?

If you raise the minimum wage, it will be a job killer, thousands of people will lose their jobs. That's a super-common one. But I did a lot of work on this. Every law and regulation that would impose requirements on businesses — to raise wages, to provide health care, to spend money on safer jobs or products — pretty much everything gets this argument. 

This is not in the book, but in the '70s and '80s farmworkers in California were forced to use short-handled hoes because the growers said that was better for dealing with the crops. The farmworkers wanted long-handled hoes, because it hurt their backs to kneel down all day. I got the transcripts from the hearings and basically they said "This will kill jobs. This will destroy agriculture, if you create a long-handled hoe." Something that made it easier for workers to go home at night and still be healthy.

This comes up virtually everywhere — in drug safety laws, environmental laws, paid family leave, auto safety, auto emissions. We have Lee Iacocca talking about the Clean Air Act of 1970. He said, "This bill could prevent continued production of automobiles and is a threat to the entire economy and every person in America." That was the argument against making our air cleaner and building automobiles to produce less pollutants. 

The next threat is, "You’ll only make it worse." What's a common example of this one? 

I go back to the minimum wage again. The idea is that you hurt the very people you're trying to help by this law. Every time you try to pass a minimum wage, it would be, “Well, you'll hurt poor Black teenagers, because then if the wages are higher, no one will hire them.”  

Medicare or Medicaid will make the problem worse. You'll destroy private initiative. You actually hurt people if you give them free care because they become irresponsible. With unemployment insurance, you'll hurt those people because they will become dependent on the government and not only will that burden taxpayers, it will destroy their personal dignity. If you give people something you hurt them, because it weakens their dignity, it creates illegitimacy as they used to call it, it will make poor people poorer.

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Another example is that if you regulate auto emissions and make cars more efficient, people won't buy them. They'll be more expensive, and poor people will still buy dirtier polluting cars. So anti-pollution laws will actually create more pollution.

Let me read one about women's suffrage. "Women's participation in political life would involve the domestic calamity of a deserted home and the loss of womanly qualities for which we find men adore women and and marry them. Doctors tell us too that thousands of children would be harmed or killed before birth by the injurious effect of untimely political excitement on their mothers." 

"We cannot get rid of slavery without producing a greater injury to both the masters and the slaves." This stuff goes all the way back. 

In your case study on the welfare debate, what's an over-the-top example that people might not know about, and what's the reality? 

So here's one: "Concern for the poor is often equated with expanding government programs… The reality is that, in many cases, government policy can make it more difficult for those striving to make ends meet." That's from the Heritage Foundation. They're basically spelling out exactly the theme of this chapter. You provide welfare — they're talking about food stamps, Medicaid, services for lower-income people — that will make it harder for them to live a decent life. I actually don't understand that argument. It's crazy, to my mind.

In reality, people who receive benefits become less poor. It does not create dependency. People still go out and get jobs. Access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, and to an increase in economic self-sufficiency. If you feed children, they do better in life. If you give them health care, they are healthier and do better in life. There's common sense and there's tons of research that bears that out. 

The final threat is a familiar one: "It’s socialism!" What's a common example? 

The creation of an income tax. "It may be impracticable that our distinctively American experiment of individual freedom should go on." That's a quote from 1894, when they began trying to tax income. It's basically saying if you pass taxes, American freedom will disappear. "The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test." That was for Social Security. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the minimum wage, "is a step in the direction of communism, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism." That's from 1938.

Over and over again, government regulations that  require behaviors from businesses that ultimately cost them money are seen as state control, and anything that the state does is called socialist. Biden is called socialist now because of the infrastructure act and because of a set of policies which are decidedly not socialist. But that has been the attack line for over a century, and still is today, against everything we try to do that makes people's lives better, that reduces pollution, that eliminates structural discrimination and racism, virtually everything. 

You end the book with some recommendations about how to fight back. Can you briefly describe them?

The first thing is I would say is that the purpose of the book is to be a vaccine. Like I said earlier, these arguments often have a a patina of possibility, they sound good. They've been processed by PR professionals. So the first thing is to identify that the argument you're hearing is one of those six. That's the first thing we set out to do. 

Part of the way to do that is to figure out who's saying it. Is this coming from industry, is this coming from a PR company, a think tank, or Chamber of Commerce, or industry association, is it coming from a politician who is close to the business community or is a free market fundamentalist? That's the first thing. 

The second thing is to say, “OK, that's familiar. Have I heard it before?” And go back and look, so we can say, “Oh, they said that in 1906 and they said that in 1930, and the world didn't come to an end when our meat was safer or when our drugs are safer.” Then make that point in public: "Wait a second. You said it before, it didn't happen. You said again it, didn't happen. And now you're saying it now. Why should we take you seriously?” 

Of course, once you've done that, it's also really important to reassert why we want to do this thing in the first place. Why we want more people to have health care, why we want cleaner air. Those things are in the public interest and a vital, urgent public need that we need to attack together. It's really important always to assert those things. Because the arguments in this book are about self-interest, and we want to say, “No — we're concerned about the public interest, about everybody.” 

Finally, what's the most important question I didn't ask? And what’s the answer?

How come this works so well, over and over again? The answer would be because there's an enormous amount of money and self interest that is driving, influencing and impacting public decisions about public things, meaning health and safety and jobs and all that. It's about power. The book is about power, and propaganda, if you have resources — which corporate interests certainly do — is one of the key tools in the tool chest to maintain that power. 

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Flu is something I never took seriously growing up, despite some of the worst illnesses I’ve ever had being flu-related. I’m quite certain that without medical treatment, H1N1 would have killed me in 2013. Every year, thousands of Americans aren’t so lucky. An estimated 12,000 to 52,000 people die from flu each year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Those who die tend to be society’s most vulnerable: children, the elderly and immunocompromised people.

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The Korean union is attempting to meet with Netflix over labor concerns that are similar to the issues of currently striking actors. This includes the topic of pay and residuals. According to the union, Netflix does not pay its Korean actors any residuals whatsoever and pays its South Korean employees significantly less than their American counterparts. Union president Song Chang-gon says that Korean actors earn less when working on Netflix productions compared to Korean shows, as they are paid per episode (beginning at $300 for each) for fewer episodes — despite the work being more labor-intensive. 

The pay discrepancy is particularly foul given how much Netflix has benefited from its South Korean content. Around 60% of the platform’s streamers watch Korean titles, a fact that Netflix plans to capitalize on by investing $2.5 billion for South Korean content over the next four years. This is in addition to the $500 million it invested in Korean titles in 2021 and the $700 million it invested in 2016. 

“Squid Game” – the hit South Korean show that follows poor and financially challenged contestants competing in deadly children’s games for the chance to win $40 million cash prize – remains the platform’s most-watched show, bringing the streaming giant 4.38 million additional subscribers in its third quarter and rose revenue by 16% per The L.A. Times.

At least it made the show’s creator Hwang Dong-hyuk rich, right? Wrong.

In an interview, the director revealed that his contract forfeited intellectual property and residuals, making enough “to put food on the table,” but only a fraction of the wealth he garnered the platform and its executives. This means he’s also unlikely to profit from the show’s upcoming second season, which he never intended to create in the first place given that making the first season was so stressful he lost six teeth.

Squid Game (YOUNGKYU PARK/Netflix)A show about a capitalist hellscape is being exploited by a large corporation who is refusing to fairly pay its employees and creatives. Life really imitates art. Unfortunately, this is not a phenomenon confined to Netflix: America as a whole has been profiting off of South Korea’s on-screen depiction of anti-capitalism over the last couple of years, nevermind the fact that the U.S. played a crucial role in shaping the country’s corrupt economy.

After “Squid Game,” Bong Joon-Ho’s “Parasite” became the next big Korean title on U.S. screens. The tragicomedy follows the Kim family, a poor and scrappy bunch who seize an opportunity to con an uber-wealthy family, the Parks, after Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) gets a job tutoring the Parks’ young daughter. But as greed and lies catch up to the families, horror ensues. When the scathing depiction of South Korean capitalism won a slew of awards (including Golden Globe and Palme d’Or), America did what America does best: make money off of it. HBO confirmed it won the rights to the movie in order to create an American TV adaption of the film in 2020.

Enter America’s “Eat the rich” era. After the motion picture took home the Oscar for best picture in 2020, a slew of shows and movies released in the U.S. thereafter began to take its own shots at capitalism. Later that year, “White Lotus” began production. In 2022, “Triangle of Sadness,” “The Menu” and “Glass Onion” all debuted surrounding the same theme that rich people are evil. Is it a coincidence that after the standout success of “Squid Game” and “Parasite” so many U.S. shows would portray the same message? Maybe, maybe not.

The Kim Family (Woo-sik Choi, Kang-ho Song, Hye-jin Jang, So-dam Park) in Parasite. (Courtesy of NEON + CJ Entertainment)

Whether or not more and more directors jumped on South Korea’s anti-capitalism bandwagon, it’s clear that Hollywood has capitalized off of the success of productions that touch on this. The most glaring example of this being “Squid Game: The Challenge,” an upcoming reality TV show sequel to the original which not only capitalizes on the success of South Korea’s hit, but also misses the point of the show: to critique the ways capitalism has pushed people to desperate places for survival. The live action remake laughs in the face of this message by turning the dystopian game show premise into reality. 

Even Disney got in on this trend, releasing the surprisingly progressive “Andor.” As Patrick Sproull in The Face puts it, “The fact that a company worth $203.63 billion feels comfortable parroting anti-capitalist talking points shows that something has gone seriously wrong. Anti-capitalist art is now a genre, one safe enough to be reproduced by the very people it’s supposed to target.”

For America to capitalize off of South Korea’s onscreen struggles with capitalism is ironic considering how the U.S. played a role in creating the very economic situation the country finds itself in. Professor of economics at Lewis and Clark and author of The “Rush to Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea,” Martin Hart-Landsberg makes this argument, noting how the U.S. pressured South Korea to shift to a export-oriented growth strategy in place of a self-reliant economy in the mid ’60s. They backed this up with financial assistance (in the vein of almost $5 billion in the eights years South Korea helped support the U.S. in the Vietnam War), as well as provided an open market for South Korean exports. 

But just as Victor Frankenstein grew resentful of the product of his own making, so too did the U.S. who then had to compete with the now successful South Korean market. They proceed to bully South Korea back into an economically inferior position. In 1983, they pressed South Korea to drop its tariffs, began anti-dumping suits against their color TV exports and forced them to agree to restrictions on steel exports. When the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit South Korea, the U.S. took the opportunity to weaken them further. A team from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was sent to Seoul to discuss a bailout package in 1997, and the U.S.’s Treasury Undersecretary, David Lipton, went with them. Uncoincidentally, the agreed-upon package was favorable to the U.S., forcing South Korea to agree to open the country’s market up to foreign investors, deregulate the foreign exchange market, raise interest rates and slash labor rights in a way that allows companies more power in terminating its employees. 

All this set the stage for South Korea’s hypercapitalism. While the country is of course still responsible for their own actions and treatments of its workers, the U.S. has still played a significant role in manipulating this outcome. This result of which includes the current Hallyu, or Korean wave, of cultural exports like K-dramas and K-pop that have risen in popularity across the world stage, including in America. It makes sense that the country takes its shows and music so seriously, religiously churning out new pop bands (no, seriously, there are schools for it), because this provides them a hot, international commodity and lucrative market they crucially have control over.

It should come as no surprise then that the recently remastered and re-released 2003 film, “Oldboy” by Park Chan-wook, is back in theaters and absolutely killing it. According to Deadline, it slated to top $1 million in its first week back. Ironically, the gruesome revenge thriller is heralded by critics as an allegory of . . . wait for it . . . capitalism. 

Choi Min-sik “Oldboy” poster for 2023 re-release (Neon)The movie follows average salaryman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) after he’s kidnapped and imprisoned in a hotel room only to be released 15 years later, beginning his quest for vengeance. While this may not sound very capitalistic, the country’s deal with the IMF plays (literally) in the background of the movie as Dae-su watches the news in his room every day from 1988 to 2003, the same period of South Korea’s economic upheaval. 

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Just as the IMF deal sold false promises of financial freedom, Dae-su is released from his imprisonment only to find his release is part of a more elaborate and nefarious plan orchestrated by the American-educated and wealthy businessman, Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Yeon-seok). Woo-jin, who believes Dae-su spread a rumor about him having sex with his sister and thus inadvertently got her killed, has exported his imprisonment of Dae-su to a third-party company as a part of a grand plan to exact ultimate revenge.

In other words, Dae-su’s bleak fate is, as Annabelle Johnston writes, “an avatar for South Korea, a nation that has been pillaged, conquered, occupied and torn apart by regimes much larger and more developed than itself for centuries.” Countries like America – who unknowingly and unironically continue to rewatch – replay and repeat this exploitation again and again.

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Yet another pandemic rages on, one that consumed many Western countries, including the U.S., long before the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in late 2019. I’m referring to the “pandemic” of loneliness, that anguished feeling of being alone, isolated and forgotten in the world. As the psychologist Benedict McWhirter defines it, loneliness is “an enduring condition of emotional distress that arises when a person feels estranged from, misunderstood, or rejected by others and/or lacks appropriate social partners for desired activities, particularly activities that provide a sense of social integration and opportunities for emotional intimacy.”

The sad truth is that an unprecedented number of people today are lonely, and studies show that the percentage of folks who feel alone, have no one to talk to and lack any close friends has skyrocketed in recent decades. According to a 2018 survey, more than half of respondents in the U.S., or 54%, said they always or sometimes “feel as though no one knows them well.” Another 47% reported feeling “left out,” 46% are “sometimes or always feeling alone,” 43% “say they lack companionship” and “are isolated from others” and 39% are “no longer close to anyone” at all. In Australia, a 2016 study found that a staggering 60% of people “often feel lonely,” while in the U.K., loneliness has become so widespread that former Prime Minister Theresa May established a “minister of loneliness” in 2018. Consequently, some commentators have noted that we may well live in the loneliest societies in all of human history.

Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic made this situation much worse. For example, one study found a seven-point jump in the prevalence of loneliness between 2018 and 2019, from 54% to 61% of Americans who said they feel alone in the world. The data, however, reveals that loneliness has been steadily rising in some Western countries at least since the 1990s. According to one survey, only 3% of Americans had no close friends in 1990, while 33% said they had 10 or more. Compare this to 2021, when a shocking 12% reported having no close friends at all, with just 13% saying they have 10 or more. As the American Survey Center writes, “many Americans [now] do not have a large number of close friends,” adding that “the number of close friendships Americans have appears to have declined considerably over the past several decades” (italics mine).

A broader historical perspective suggests that the loneliness trend started long before this, going back to the 19th century. Why this period? There are several reasons, the most obvious being secularization: That was when Christianity began to decline in the Western world, due in part to scientific breakthroughs like Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which offered a radical new perspective on our origins and place within the universe. That dealt a major blow to traditional religion, and by the end of the 19th century many intellectuals no longer saw Christianity, at least in its conventional forms, as a tenable belief system. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared in 1882, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” (Nietzsche was a passionate atheist, but his point was less about whether God existed than about the fact that our confidence in his existence could no longer be justified.)

The connection between loneliness and secularization is that if one believes that God is omnipresent, always there watching over us, in a personal capacity as our lord and savior, how could one possibly feel lonely? If we take this worldview seriously, we are forever in the presence of God, and hence no one is ever alone. Secularization undermined this eternal source of comfort, which enabled the new “emotion” of loneliness to arise.

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Another contributing factor was capitalism and its associated ethos of individualism, which facilitated a reconceptualization of ourselves as independent, isolated agents in perpetual competition with others. Capitalism, in effect, tore apart the family: Adult children moved away from their parents, and spouses spent a growing portion of their waking lives separated from their significant others and children, occupied by the endless grind of work in the factory or cubicle. Society became atomized and alienated, as illustrated by the rise of the modern suburban neighborhood: Whereas in the past, towns and villages tended to be organized around a common space such as a town square, the suburb replaced these concentric designs with more linear arrangements or amorphous sprawl, which is far less conducive to a shared sense of community. The resulting isolation created a novel situation: It now required more effort to connect with others than to be alone, whereas in the past the opposite was true, and it took more effort to be alone than connected.

Hence, as many historians have argued, loneliness is a uniquely modern phenomenon. The experience of that “enduring condition of emotional distress,” in McWhirter’s phrase, is not something that most people would have experienced before the 19th century, and in some sense did not exist. Linguistic analyses support this contention. For example, although the word “lonely” was certainly used in English prior to the 19th century, it meant something like “being physically away from others.” It didn’t necessarily connote or imply a state of psychological unease. To be lonely was to be only by oneself.

Or consider that the noun “loneliness” rarely appears in English prose before 1800. As the Google Ngram Viewer results below indicate (tracking the frequency of words across time), however, it became far more common throughout the 19th century. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, our current sense of “loneliness” as the “feeling of being dejected from want of companionship or sympathy” dates back to 1814 — it’s just over two centuries old.

This brings us back to the 20th century, when loneliness became a widespread social and cultural phenomenon, especially after the Second World War. In their 1966 song “Eleanor Rigby,” the Beatles captured the resulting sense of unease when Paul McCartney sang: “All the lonely people/ Where do they all come from?” followed a line later with “Where do they all belong?” In the previous decade, one of the most influential philosophers of the century, Hannah Arendt, broached the topic in her famous book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” arguing that “what prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Yet the full-blown pandemic of loneliness that has emerged since the 1990s hasn’t affected every demographic in the same way. It’s not a “borderline experience” largely confined to the elderly, but an ailment that has hit Generation Z and marginalized groups especially hard. One recent study, for example, found that Gen Z individuals are “significantly more likely than any other generation to say they experience” feeling “alone, isolated, left out, that there is no one they can talk to” and so on. Another survey from 2022 reports that an incredible 75% of Hispanic adults and 68% of Black adults in the U.S. suffer from loneliness, compared to the total average of 58%.

This is alarming not just because the experience of being lonely causes psychological anguish, but because social isolation is “associated with about a 50% increased risk of dementia,” a “29% increased risk of heart disease, and a 32% increased risk of stroke.” Anxiety, depression and suicide are also linked to loneliness, and while suicide rates actually dropped during the pandemic, alcohol and drug-related deaths in the U.S. increased by 20% in just the first year, resulting in “the highest number of substance misuse deaths ever recorded for a single year.”

In fact, the situation is even worse than those statistics suggest. Many of the people we count within our circle of “friends” are not especially dependable in times of need or personal crisis. They are not what most of us would call “true” friends, but are instead more like fair-weather companions who take what they can and leave when it suits them. Perhaps capitalism is partly to blame, since it promotes a transactional model of interpersonal relations, whereby friendship becomes, essentially, a business venture and cost-benefit analyses determine the extent of one’s engagement with others. As Marx and Engels write in “The Communist Manifesto,” referring specifically to families and finances, “the bourgeoisie [capitalist class] has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

I think there’s something to this, and indeed I personally discovered the limits of friendship after becoming seriously ill some time ago: Although many friends rushed to my aid, some of the people I loved and cared about the most in the world simply vanished — yet another modern phenomenon called “ghosting.” When I mentioned this heartbreaking experience on social media, I was surprised by the number of people who reported similar experiences. One person wrote: “I got diagnosed with cancer a while back and entering that world made me see just how many people get abandoned during medical crises. … My spouse was dependable, but I lost several lifelong friendships because of it.” Another noted that their long-term partner left after they developed bipolar disorder, adding that “I don’t think people understand how extreme the multiplicative effects of (having serious illness) x (losing a main support system) can be.” Others spoke of friends and even family deserting them as they struggled with mental health, medical and substance abuse issues — precisely those moments in life when a robust social infrastructure is most desperately needed.

My own line of work — I have the cheerful job of studying global catastrophe scenarios, including human extinction — only underlines how disastrous the loneliness pandemic can be. Consider the fact that climate change will devastate the world. More than one billion people will be displaced, resulting in huge migrations of desperate climate refugees. Ecosystems will collapse. Food insecurity will rise. Large swaths of the U.S. will become arid land. Our economic and political systems will be thrown into unprecedented turmoil. Only last week came the announcement that there’s a greater than even chance that global surface temperatures on Earth will exceed the 1.5℃ threshold within the next five years. According to the 2015 Paris climate accords, keeping global temperatures below this threshold is crucial to “avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” Yet humanity — thanks specifically to nations like ours in the Global North — is well on its way to crossing that dire threshold before this decade is over.

As the world undergoes radical transformations unlike anything our species has encountered over the past 12,000 years, we will need each other more than ever before. The climate crisis and the loneliness pandemic are a perfect storm, with profound implications for our mental and physical health. I do not know how to fix this deplorable predicament — perhaps other countries, in addition to the U.K., need a “Minister of Loneliness.” In the meantime, expressions of care, compassion and kindness can go a long way. I’ve made it a habit over the years to send friends random messages simply asking how they’re doing, and to foster relationships where people I care about know that, no matter what personal crises might arise for them, I will be a dependable friend — offering them a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold, no matter what. Much more of that, I believe, will be necessary not just to survive our secular, capitalist era, but to navigate the catastrophes that inevitably lie ahead.

The post The COVID pandemic may be “over” — but the pandemic of loneliness is getting worse appeared first on Salon.com.

Among all seven city council seats that were up for election, there was a pro-Amazon candidate and a candidate that favored populist will over the needs of massive corporations.  Amazon spent money to support seven different candidates, one for each open seat. As you might expect, all of the candidates Amazon backed were neoliberals — an excellent, general political term to refer to these politicians’ collective belief in social liberalism (as long as it doesn’t interfere with the profit margins of corporations) and economic policy of deferring to the ruling elite and their consultant-class lackeys on such policy matters.

Neoliberalism is an anti-democratic political position; it presupposes that the liberal capitalist democratic order maintains some stable state when the ruling class pulls the levers that govern society, and keeps the pesky masses barred from interfering in their accumulation of capital. “[Neoliberalism] means the dismantling of publicly owned industry and deregulation of capital, especially finance capital; the elimination of public provisions and the idea of public goods; and the most basic submission of everything to markets and to unregulated markets,” scholar Wendy Brown told Salon in 2016.

Fortunately, Kshama Sawant, the socialist city council member who has been the target of most of Amazon’s ire, eked out a victory of just 1,500 votes, over her Amazon-favored competitor Egan Orion . Still, Amazon’s electioneering was partly successful: three pro-Amazon candidates seem all but certain to win election to city council, while three seemed destined to lose.

Yet three victories out of seven is still a good outcome for Amazon when you consider their bang-to-buck ratio. Amazon’s revenues last year were $232.8 billion; they spent about $1.5 million backing neoliberal candidates in Seattle, by way of donating to an Orwellian-named political action committee (PAC) called Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy. $1.5 million may sound like a lot to you or me, but it is pocket change for Amazon — 0.00064% of the company’s 2018 revenues. This is the equivalent of someone with a $100,000 annual salary donating 64 cents to a political cause. 

Had three-term Councilmember Kshama Sawant lost to Amazon-sponsored Egan Orion, that would have suited Amazon’s interests nicely: Sawant’s policy platform is that of a left-populist, and she, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, was working to build a democratic coalition to fight for the economic rights of the masses over the “rights” of corporations like Amazon. These include Seattle’s $15-an-hour minimum wage, which Sawant helped usher in; the ongoing fight for comprehensive rent control; and taxes on big corporations to help pay for housing and homelessness services. This kind of people power terrifies corporations and their CEOs, who prefer neoliberal candidates who believe in rule by the elite.

All of this is to say that a corporation’s massive sums of money, when invested in public relations firms to craft a propaganda message, work pretty well — not perfectly, but well enough to nab a few seats for friendly politicians, even in very liberal cities like Seattle. Modern corporations understand that people’s minds are malleable; one only needs the right dosage of industrial-psychological manipulation to sway public opinion. 

The fact that the amount of money that Amazon sank into the race spent was a pittance (to them) is important. It means that they know now how much it costs to manipulate public opinion for their own gain. Spending twice as much or even ten times as much on the next city council race would still constitute a rounding error to their accountants — as consequential to Amazon’s bank account as the loss of a single drop of blood is to a blue whale. 

Part of the philosophical justification for democracy is that the masses are clever enough to figure out what is best for them and what isn’t. But money is generally the determining factor in who wins an election — or more specifically, the ability of money to pay for propaganda. One of the most important yet under-appreciated academic studies of the past half-decade, a paper by Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen titled “How Money Drives US Congressional Elections,” found a linear correlation between a candidate’s war chest and their probability of victory for all Senate and House elections from 1980 through 2012. In this chart from their paper, the horizontal axis shows the difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates’ campaign money. The vertical axis shows the percentage of votes the Democrat won over their GOP opponent. The correlation is remarkable.

 “The conclusion has to be that spending by major political parties is indeed strongly related to the proportion of votes they win and has been for as long as we have data,” the authors write.

This is all to say that propaganda works incredibly well — and the kinds of propaganda that rich people and industry have the capacity to fund can sway people routinely to vote against their best interests. To use a loaded term, “brainwashing” is real, but it doesn’t look like we think it does, creating vortices over our eyes as we gaze at a candidate. It’s just a function of money.

When I was a kid, I remember my liberal family crowing about conservatives “voting against their best interest.” But it’s not merely conservatives that do this. There’s a selection bias for the kinds of liberal candidates that make it past the Democratic primaries, or the parties that we’re “allowed” to vote for; all of this is controlled, more or less, by the money and influence of these rich people. Industrial psychology is so sophisticated, so sinister, that it is not at all difficult (with money) to manipulate the populace en masse such that they vote for the ruling class’s preferred candidates, whether neoliberal liberals or neoliberal conservatives.

This all goes back to a phrase that’s become in vogue lately: post-truth. We are told we are in a new epoch of American civilization, the post-truth society, where many of us deny facts because we have chosen a different social media reality bubble, or because our dear leader tells us so. We often hear that this phenomenon was uniquely created by Trump and his underlings who aspire to be like him, but particularly by his unique ability to confidently fabricate facts, ideas and policies without blinking.

Yet this Trumpian trait, I think, is more a function of being a rich asshole who has been surrounded his entire life by yes-men than it is due to some kind of nascent political transformation. All billionaires and CEOs are uniquely convinced of their godliness and self-righteousness; just look at Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, who think that they alone have the fortitude and wisdom to lead humanity to the stars; or Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer, who feel they are uniquely situated to decide our political fortunes for us. No, the post-truth society precedes Trump, or any of these men who fund (or become) political candidates. It is something innate to capitalism itself.

Democracy and capitalism are incompatible inasmuch as the rich are given free license to employ public relations teams and marketers — propagandists, largely — to manipulate and dictate public opinion, and sway many to vote against their best interest. They, and their think tanks and assistants and firms, tell us what political positions are realistic, and which are impossible; which candidates are viable or not; which future paths are possible for humanity. It is very difficult to think beyond the specter of the future they set out for us through their media. This extends to art, particularly film and video games — but that story is one best saved for a different article.

In certain western democracies, there is marginally more control over the ability of the rich to influence elections. But the impact of said regulations are marginal at best; even when the rich can’t give to candidates, they often own papers or media outlets, and can, in other ways, subtly dictate the political reality of a nation-state. In other words, you can temper the ways in which capitalism and inequality distort and undermine democracy; but you cannot eliminate it completely so long as its innate class antagonisms remain intact. That means the post-truth society is with us now, as it has always been; it is intrinsic to our economic system.

The post Amazon’s electioneering in Seattle is more evidence that capitalism and democracy are incompatible appeared first on Salon.com.

In some ways, the sheer exuberance of these conversations-between-friends–style segments hints at a marked change in perspective. The frank discourse around women’s health issues — particularly that of older women — is long overdue.

Yet I can’t help but notice that the current dialogue is falling short. Too often, these orchestrated sit-downs become a jolly, we-got-this-girl bonding experience rather than a call for change within the healthcare industry, which is failing women who are going through menopause.

Having gone through premature induced menopause at thirty-seven years old due to hormonal treatments for breast cancer, I’ve been following these conversations closely. I watched as Drew Barrymore had her first perimenopausal hot flash on-air with Jennifer Aniston, and I listened intently to Maria Shriver talk about the correlation between anxiety and menopause. While I appreciate the courage of these women for speaking out about a topic that has long been shrouded in secrecy—their openness and honesty is even more impressive, considering they work in the youth-obsessed entertainment industry—it’s important to note that this natural biological process can also come with significant medical risks. 

When a life-saving hormone treatment hurtled me into premature induced menopause, I had no idea what to expect. At the time, I felt grateful to be alive. The consequences of sudden induced medical menopause weren’t my primary concern. Going into menopause sounded like an abstract concept meant for someone else—like trying to understand childbirth before entering labor. I knew I would no longer get my period (excellent!) and probably have a few hot flashes, as my mother did. I remember her driving me to high school in the dead of a Vermont winter with all the windows down while complaining she was overheating. Back then, I laughed at the absurdity of the situation. But now, twenty-five years later, I understand: hot flashes aren’t funny! They wake me up every night, and I feel like I’m cooking from the inside out.

I was woefully ill-prepared for the intensity of my symptoms, which include rapid mood swings, brain fog, insomnia, night sweats, and severe vaginal atrophy that wreaked havoc on my sex life. My oncologist, and my primary care doctor, failed to educate me about the significant health risks of entering into early menopause, such as the increased likelihood of osteoporosis, depression, stroke, heart disease, and early dementia, to name a few. I’m not blaming them for my symptoms, only for the lack of education and warning. 

Why aren’t doctors and oncologists better preparing us, their patients, for what to expect in menopause? I think telling me to “take an over-the-counter Vitamin D supplement” to treat my fragile bones is inadequate. Why didn’t anyone tell me about my increased risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s or the imminent metabolism meltdown? Menopause wreaked havoc on my physical and mental health, and the worst part was how unprepared I was for it. Each new symptom brought on many other health concerns and treating them became my full-time job. I couldn’t turn to my mother for answers because she had passed away from cancer five years before my diagnosis. I became confused, embarrassed, and ashamed about what was happening to my body and felt very alone. 

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Eventually, I took matters into my own hands. I sought information online and I found a supportive community of post-menopausal women who recommended different solutions for my ailments. Before I found these women, I spent hours lurking around random Facebook groups and Reddit threads, searching for advice from strangers. One woman from Ontario even mailed me her homemade lube recipe. It arrived wrapped in pink bubble wrap, inside a discreet package, with no return address. I tried it. (To paraphrase Michelle Obama, “There’s no shame in my menopause game!”) Over the years, I’ve found therapeutics and products that work for me—but none are doctor prescribed or covered by insurance.

The question remains: Why was I forced to become an internet menopause sleuth? In part because the medical community — oncologists, general practitioners, gynecologists, nurse practitioners, and nurses — are failing to address menopausal symptoms adequately with their patients. Why don’t professionals ask perimenopausal and postmenopausal persons about their vaginal symptoms the minute they enter the examination room? As many as 90% of postmenopausal women experience vaginal dryness, yet no medical practitioner has ever asked me about it. (The fact that Gayle King intoned dry vagina three times during her interview on CBS Mornings is groundbreaking. Seriously.)

Moreover, research shows that medical providers dismiss three out of four women who bring up their symptoms and concerns. While we could all use a little more education on how to be our own health advocates, medical professionals could be doing so much more to normalize these sometimes uncomfortable conversations and end the culture of silent suffering in menopause.

Most of us don’t have the time, money, or resources to research and experiment with various treatments to find the one that works best for them. Some of don’t even have access to decent healthcare. Not to mention the well-documented racial disparity in menopausal health. We need affordable, effective, and widely available therapies and educational resources for everyone going through menopause. We do not need more menopausal capitalism, i.e., celebrities hawking us their products. If anything, we’ve learned from the studies on heart disease, cancer, and exercise science that not enough medical research has gone into unlocking the mysteries of the female body.

Unfortunately, the number of individuals entering menopause at an earlier age keeps increasing. Cancer in young adults is also on the rise. As early detection and treatment continue to improve, more and more people are pushed into chemopause, along with the people who enter early menopause for other reasons. It’s time for more research on managing the symptoms of menopause and open communication about the health risks when estrogen levels radically decline.

Indeed, the public discourse and response around menopause has improved, thanks partly to the outspoken celebrities helping to change the paradigm. But all women, no matter who they are, deserve better and more, both in treatment plans and preventative care (not to mention job security and mental health services). We shouldn’t have to wait for Taylor Swift to enter menopause and write a song about it in order to get everyone’s attention. 

I know that when my two young sons become older adults, they will, provided they have health insurance, enter a favorable healthcare world: erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra are typically covered by insurers, as are vasectomies (which most state Medicaid plans cover). They will also benefit from decades of medical research on the aging male body. But I don’t want my three nieces to go through what I did — the helplessness and isolation of Googling answers about my own body in the dark of night.

I hope that by the time they enter menopause — naturally or medically induced — they’ll have educated themselves about the significant medical risks and symptoms. I want them to live in a world full of medical providers who serve up big helpings of information about their changing female bodies and what to expect once they reach the threshold of menopause. I wish that for them as much as I still wish it for myself and other women going through it.

It goes without saying that I’m grateful to these brave public figures for using their platforms to help change the narrative around menopausal health. But maybe it would also be helpful to create well-written, culturally competent, and widely distributed resources for medical providers along the lines of, “How to Talk to Your Patient Going Through Menopause.” I’m joking — kind of. After all, the conversations which hold the most influence — between doctors and patients —  don’t always happen on a stage. Rather, they take place in private examination rooms.

The post Celebrities are talking openly about menopause. Why won’t the healthcare industry? appeared first on Salon.com.

For the first two decades of the 21st century, not even a once-in-a-millennium drought could deter real estate developers from building vast suburban tracts on the wild edges of Western U.S. cities. But in 2021, a reckoning appeared on the horizon. The Colorado River sank to historic lows, winter rains never arrived, and communities from California to Texas found their groundwater wells going dry after decades of overuse.

Western officials had seldom let questions about water availability get in the way of population growth, but suddenly they seemed to have no other choice. Faced with an unprecedented shortage, many local governments tried to pump the brakes on new developments. A small town in Utah halted all new housing permits, fearful that more homes would sap a local river. A suburb of Colorado Springs, Colorado, told developers that it could no longer allow new subdivisions to connect to the city’s water system. Most significantly, the state of Arizona has all but paused new housing in some Phoenix suburbs, citing a shortage of groundwater.

This pivot to conservation was bad news for D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilding company. Buoyed by pandemic-induced demand for cheap, spacious housing across the West, Horton netted $6 billion constructing more than 80,000 homes last year alone. The company had long been able to assume that if it built a development, someone else would provide water for it — usually a local government eager for tax revenue. All of a sudden, Horton had to find the water itself.

Luckily, there was a third party who could help.

In April of last year, Horton acquired Vidler Water Company, a tiny outfit whose dozen employees worked out of an unassuming faux-Mediterranean office park in Carson City, Nevada. Though Vidler’s annual revenue was less than a tenth of a percent of Horton’s, the real estate titan spent big to snap it up: The price tag on the acquisition was an eye-popping $291 million.

Vidler Water Company’s offices in Carson City, Nevada. The homebuilder D.R. Horton purchased the company last year for almost $300 million. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Vidler is an unusual company. It doesn’t actually deliver water to people, nor does it own any facilities for water treatment or desalination. Instead the company functions as a broker for water rights, finding untapped water in rural communities and marketing it to developers and corporations in fast-growing cities and suburbs. For 20 years, the company has bought up remote farmland and drilled wells in bone-dry valleys to amass an enormous private water portfolio, then made tens of millions of dollars by selling that portfolio one piece at a time.

This kind of business inevitably involves some guesswork, and often that guesswork looks like classic real estate speculation: You can make money by bringing water to places where people already want it, but you can make even more money bringing it to places where people will want it in the future. This is exactly what Vidler has tried to do, and it has led the company’s critics to contend that its business model violates the anti-speculation spirit of Western water law.

Indeed, suspicions that Vidler is profiteering off a vulnerable public resource have made the company more than its share of enemies over the years: Top officials have been pilloried in courtrooms and threatened by rural residents, and an early executive once had to jump out a window to escape an angry crowd at a public meeting.

Horton’s purchase of Vidler has no real precedent, but it is a clear indication of where the West is headed. The region has grown twice as fast as the rest of the United States since the 1950s, and national builders like Horton are relying on it to fuel future profits. If these companies want to capitalize on migration to the booming suburbs of Phoenix and Las Vegas, they’ll need to find creative new water supplies that will allow them to keep building even as regulators try to clamp down on unsustainable growth.

A D.R. Horton housing development in the suburbs north of Reno, Nevada. Vidler owns a pipeline that will soon bring groundwater to the fast-growing area. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

In this regard, Vidler is a pioneer. The company was the first in the West to make a business model out of finding and flipping water. In the past few years, a new crop of upstarts has sought to mimic this model, buying up water rights in rural areas and marketing them to developers and suburbs that need them for future growth. These companies include Water Asset Management, which has bought up agricultural land in Colorado to secure water rights, and the investment firm Greenstone, which organized a first-of-its-kind deal to move Colorado River water from farms in western Arizona to a city near Phoenix. Both companies boast former Vidler executives in top leadership positions.

Vidler still stands at the front of the pack, tapping water in hard-to-reach aquifers and pursuing aggressive litigation to push new construction forward. If the company’s tactics become more common, the effects will be far-reaching — not only could rural areas and desert ecosystems see their precious water siphoned off, but thousands of people will buy and occupy homes fed by water sources that may turn out to be unreliable. A major part of Vidler’s strategy has been to pump water from small underground aquifers, squeezing every available drop from finite water banks that may someday run dry, especially as climate change contributes to the long-term aridification of the West. 

Kevin Brown is the manager of a water utility in the southern Nevada city of Mesquite, where Vidler has been trying for years to build a pipeline that could bring new water to the city. The company has proposed tapping a virgin aquifer and using the water to supply new housing developments on the edge of town, but Brown doubts the pipeline is a good idea. Instead he has focused on reducing water usage across the city and recycling water where he can.

Vacant land in Lincoln County, Nevada, near the city of Mesquite. Vidler owns a large portfolio of water assets in the area that could enable further development. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

“In the world we live in, and the market we live in, if you put enough money against it, someone will make it happen,” Brown told Grist. “If these developers aren’t building homes, then they’re going out of business. But at some point, somebody needs to say, ‘You know what, we can’t grow anymore. It’s not sustainable.'”

In most Western states, water is public property regardless of whose land it flows through or sits under. Private entities can only own the right to use that water for a specific purpose. Individuals and companies can apply to use any unclaimed water source, but they have to convince the state government that they plan to put the water to a productive use. By the same token, owners can sell or lease their existing water rights to each other as long as the buyers keep using the water for something.   

A drainpipe near a D.R. Horton housing development north of Reno, Nevada. Vidler is the first company to make a business out of buying and selling water rights for projects like these. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

In this arrangement, the new breed of water brokers has found an opportunity to accumulate assets and generate profits. But the law requires them to tread cautiously.

At the turn of the 20th century, a Transcontinental Mining executive named Rees Vidler tried to dig a tunnel through the heart of the Colorado Rockies. It was supposed to link the mineral-rich mountain towns around Breckenridge with the young Denver metro area, but Vidler never completed the project. The shaft sat unused until an engineer bought it in the 1950s and repurposed it to move water rather than ore. He acquired the rights to river water on the Breckinridge side of the tunnel, built a water pipeline through the shaft, and proposed to sell the river water to people in the fast-growing cities around Denver. The engineer didn’t have any confirmed buyers for the water, but he could store it in a reservoir until he made a sale.

In 1979, the Colorado Supreme Court dealt a blow to that scheme. A judge ruled that the engineer’s water purchases were “grounded on no interest beyond a desire to obtain water for sale.” If Colorado allowed such purchases, it would “encourage those with vast monetary resources to monopolize [water] for personal profit rather than beneficial use,” the court wrote. In other words, speculating on water was unacceptable. Judges in other states soon adopted similar rulings, creating a precedent that some legal scholars have called “the Vidler doctrine.”

About 15 years later, the Vidler tunnel and its water rights fell into the possession of one John Hart, a swashbuckling financier who was beginning a decades-long corporate takeover spree. Hart and his business partner had just taken over the Physicians Insurance Company of Ohio, or PICO. They transformed the moribund Midwestern insurance company into an umbrella corporation for buying and flipping distressed assets, including a Swiss railway operator, an Australian oil company, a million acres of rural land in Nevada, and a canola-seed crushing facility.

The Vidler tunnel’s history gave Hart an idea. He lived near San Diego, which relies in part on the Colorado River, and he could see that water was only going to get more valuable across the region, especially if real estate kept booming. Many farmers who had fallen on hard times were selling their irrigated land to developers, who repurposed irrigation water to supply new homes and golf courses. Hart wanted to profit from this slow transition away from agriculture, and he thought he saw a way to do it: Buy up water rights in the driest states, wait for the rights to rise in value, and sell them later on to developers that needed them for new housing. As long as the population of the West continued to increase, the price of water would increase as well — and with it PICO’s investment profits.  

By acting as a broker for water rights, the PICO subsidiary that Hart called Vidler Water Company could get around the anti-speculation doctrine invoked in its very name. The tunnel engineer had sought to hold onto his water rights and make money by selling water to people who needed it. Vidler would just buy and sell the water rights themselves. This amounted to an elegant form of arbitrage: If a water right was worth more to a developer than it was to a farmer, Vidler could profit by flipping the right from the latter to the former.

Water falls from a drainpipe at a D.R. Horton development near Reno, Nevada. Most Western states have strict restrictions on who can buy and sell water. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

The only problem was that Hart didn’t know very much about the nitty-gritty details of water law, and he knew even less about the science of hydrology. In order for his plan to work, he had to find someone who could handle both. That someone was Dorothy Timian-Palmer, an engineer who had been Carson City’s municipal utilities director for around a decade before Hart poached her in 1997. Timian-Palmer declined to speak with Grist, but several sources who worked with and against Vidler described her as one of the nation’s foremost water experts.

“She is the most knowledgeable person about water in the country,” insisted Hart in an interview. He recalled how he and Timian-Palmer used to attend investment conferences where skeptical audiences heard the legendary oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens talk in vague and confused terms about his water investments. But when Timian-Palmer took the stage, introduced herself as a water engineer, and started rattling off facts about hydrology and hydraulics, all the attendees perked up and started taking notes. 

“She’s very smart, very shrewd, and very tough,” said Paul Hultin, a lawyer who sued Vidler over one of its later projects in New Mexico.

Armed with an infusion of cash from PICO, Timian-Palmer and a small group of Nevada-based lawyers and engineers set about flipping water. They bought agricultural water rights along a river in Colorado and sold them to Denver-area developers. They bought tens of thousands of acres of farm- and ranchland in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and New Mexico and either sold the water rights to urban utilities, leased them back to farmers, or sold the land to developers. In one case the company made a fivefold profit after six years.

Grist / Jessie Blaeser

When developers wanted to use the water they’d just acquired on former farmland, they could fallow the irrigated fields and start pumping water into their subdivisions and power plants, fueling further housing expansion. Marc Reisner, the journalist who wrote that “water flows uphill towards money” in his seminal book Cadillac Desert, also joined Vidler for a few years as a part-time political consultant, believing the company’s projects could enable growth while avoiding the construction of harmful new reservoirs and dams.

In other cases, Vidler chose to sit on the water it acquired until its value went up. In California and Arizona, the company bought and stored water in so-called “underground storage facilities,” artificial aquifers that serve as subterranean reservoirs. The cities and farmers who typically use these kinds of water banks are usually trying to squirrel away water for use during dry years, but Vidler’s goal was to profit on the gradual increase in water prices. 

In California’s agriculture-heavy Central Valley, for instance, the company took partial ownership of an artificial aquifer, then flipped its share to real estate developers and water utilities, making $25 million off the transaction in just a few years. In Arizona, meanwhile, the company built its own large storage facility west of Phoenix and filled it with more than 250,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River. (An acre-foot is equivalent to around 326,000 gallons, or roughly enough water to supply two homes for a year.) Vidler executives wrote in a 2004 financial statement that “continued growth of the municipalities surrounding Phoenix” and “the low level of Lake Mead,” the largest Colorado River reservoir, were both “likely to increase demand” for the water.

No one has ever accused the company of breaking the law with these transactions, but its strategy clashed with the legal principles established in the 1979 ruling against the original Vidler tunnel scheme. In order for Vidler to secure new water rights, it had to identify a “beneficial use” for each water source it wanted to claim. The company would tell state regulators that it wanted to use each given water right to supply a power plant, or a suburban development, or a farm. In its own financial statements, though, the company made it clear that using water was merely incidental to the company’s mission.

“Vidler seeks to acquire water rights at prices consistent with their current use, with the expectation of an increase in value if the water right can be converted to a higher use,” the company said in a 2001 annual report. “Vidler’s priority is to develop recurring cash flow from these assets.”

Rural housing in Dayton, Nevada, east of Carson City. Vidler owns water rights in the area and has sought to market them to developers. Grist / Mikayla WhitmoreKyle Roerink, a water-conservation advocate who runs the nonprofit Great Basin Water Network, told Grist that he’s observed Vidler trying to find ways around the “beneficial use” doctrine for almost a decade.

“It’s a model where you’re trying to squeeze blood, profits, and water from stone, and they’ve been pretty successful at it,” he said. “[They’re] pushing the boundaries and testing the limits of what the foundational principles of Western water law are. It’s among the most dangerous elements of capitalism at play here.” 

Indeed, Vidler’s loose regard for beneficial-use requirements has sometimes landed the company in hot water. In 1999, Vidler asked Nevada officials for permission to pump around 2,000 acre-feet of groundwater in Sandy Valley, a remote community of trailers and tumbleweeds about an hour southwest of Las Vegas. Vidler claimed to be applying for the water on behalf of a real estate company in Primm, a casino town on the California border. It laid out a far-fetched plan to build a pipeline that would move Sandy Valley’s water down to Primm across 25 miles of mountains, allowing developers to build housing and a theme park. The state government gave Vidler only some of the rights it asked for — but it amounted to almost as much water as the entire town of Sandy Valley used at the time.

A windy day in Sandy Valley, Nevada, a rural community where Vidler tried and failed to export groundwater. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

 

Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

When Sandy Valley residents heard about the project, they were furious. The area’s aquifer was already overdrawn thanks to a number of irrigated farms nearby. Residents depended on shallow household wells for their water, and they were terrified that those wells would go dry if the state let Vidler take its share.

“Vidler is a four-letter word here in Sandy Valley,” Al Marquis told me when I visited the town in February. A retired real estate lawyer who sued to stop Vidler on behalf of his town, Marquis is a quintessential Sandy Valley personality: He wears a ten-gallon-hat, flies amateur planes, and writes books of what he calls “cowboy poetry.” He recalled that a Vidler representative who showed up at a public meeting about the application found himself greeted by shouts and death threats from angry residents, who reminded him in no uncertain terms that nearly everyone in the valley owned a firearm.

In 2006, a judge overturned the state government’s decision to grant Vidler’s application, ruling that the company hadn’t proven it could put Sandy Valley’s water to beneficial use. Vidler claimed that the Primm real estate company needed the water to build apartments and a theme park, but the company couldn’t demonstrate that any of that development was really going to happen — the main evidence it had was a one-page wishlist drafted by the real estate company itself. In the absence of a clear beneficial use, the judge wrote, Vidler had no claim to Sandy Valley’s water, and the state had erred in giving the company permission to pump.

A property in Sandy Valley, Nevada. Residents protested Vidler’s attempts to pump groundwater from the area, and a court later blocked the company’s project. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

“It appears to me that the company was formed for the sole purpose of speculating in and the hoarding of a public resource,” Marquis told Grist. He hypothesized that Vidler never wanted the water for Primm at all, and instead just wanted to flip it to someone else later on. “I gotta give them credit, in that they had foresight.”

Timian-Palmer and her fellow executives saw that the West didn’t have enough water, and they knew that was good news for Vidler: As drought got worse, the company’s assets would only get more valuable.

As the nation’s housing market boomed in the early 2000s, Vidler evolved. Instead of just buying and selling water rights that were already in use, the company began to search for unclaimed groundwater in remote parts of Nevada. It drilled new wells to bring that water to the surface, built new infrastructure to move it toward big cities like Reno and Las Vegas, and marketed it to developers and utilities. If Vidler could sell a new water source for more than it cost to develop and transport the water, the company would turn a profit. 

“There seemed to be a void in terms of developing new supplies of water,” said Hart, explaining the opportunity. “Governments don’t really like to spend money for future citizens or future residents, and developers don’t want the upfront risk of having to go out to develop water for projects somewhere down the road.” 

At the same time, major water sources like the Colorado River were showing signs of vulnerability as the region entered its current climate-fueled megadrought, lending more urgency to the search for untapped water. It could take years to secure regulatory approval for new groundwater pumping and even longer to build infrastructure to move that water around. Hart and Timian-Palmer were some of the only people in the West with the capital and expertise needed to pursue this kind of project.

The company’s first major experiment was a public-private partnership with a massive rural county about an hour north of Vegas. Lincoln County is one of the most sparsely populated counties in the nation — its population of 4,500 occupies a land area larger than Massachusetts — but it also boasted a hoard of untapped groundwater, most of which no one had ever tried to use. This water sits in some of the state’s shallowest and most remote aquifers, where it has accreted over thousands of years beneath chalk-white valleys.

A sign marks the border of Lincoln County, Nevada, where Vidler owns an enormous hoard of untapped groundwater rights. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

In the late 1980s, Las Vegas’s powerful water utility filed applications for almost all of Lincoln County’s unused water, more than 100,000 acre-feet in total, and proposed to build a pipeline that could bring it to Sin City. Officials in Lincoln County were still trying to fend off the big city when Vidler showed up and offered to act as a white knight. The company said it would invest millions of dollars to find and pump the county’s groundwater resources while also protecting those resources from Las Vegas. In exchange the company would get half the proceeds from any water the county sold. 

Depending on whom you ask, this was either a boon for an impoverished rural county or a corporate takeover of a public resource. Wade Poulsen, the county employee who runs the water partnership, told Grist that Vidler had been “fantastic” and claimed that the county “would be nowhere without them.” But conservationists allege that Vidler was mining Lincoln County’s resources for profit.

“Vidler has turned Lincoln County into a water colony,” said Patrick Donnelly, a conservation biologist with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity who has litigated against groundwater usage in Nevada. “They own some serious water up there, and there’s this ideology of, ‘This water exists for us to benefit economically from it.'”

A golf course in Mesquite, Nevada. Vidler and Lincoln County have sought to use the county’s water rights to build new suburban communities. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

The business thesis for the Lincoln-Vidler partnership was based on the assumption that the growth of Las Vegas would one day extend so far that it crossed the border into Lincoln County, more than 50 miles away from the city’s downtown. In the heady days of the early 2000s housing boom, this seemed like a real possibility; a number of real estate developers had staked out housing projects that could use Lincoln County’s water. 

Chief among them was Harvey Whittemore, a friend of the late Senator Harry Reid and powerful casino lobbyist, who agreed to buy 1,000 acre-feet of water rights from Vidler in 2005. Before he went to prison for campaign finance violations in 2014, Whittemore spent more than a decade trying to build a megadevelopment called Coyote Springs in Lincoln County, pitching it as a desert metropolis that would someday contain 160,000 homes.

Highway 93 near Coyote Springs, Nevada, where the casino lobbyist Harvey Whittemore tried to use Vidler’s water to build a massive desert city. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

He managed to build a golf course on the development site, but a regulatory battle subsequently derailed the project and Whittemore never used Vidler’s water. Whittemore’s green, which was designed by golf legend Jack Nicklaus, still stands by itself on an empty desert highway, flanked by a massive sign announcing the future site of Coyote Springs, which another company is still trying to push forward. A tortoise habitat sits just a few feet away.

“They said at first they were gonna provide water for everybody, but the only people that [the Lincoln County partnership] ever actually tried to develop water for were [real estate developers],” said Louis Benezet, a longtime county resident. He said the water district initially discussed agricultural projects and growth opportunities in the county’s small towns, which were more attractive to county residents, but later focused on exporting water toward Vegas. 

Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

New homes under construction in Mesquite, Nevada. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Future builders in the area will likely need to acquire water rights from Vidler. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

 

Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Timian-Palmer also pursued a similar strategy in fast-growing Reno in the early 2000s, targeting a property called Fish Springs Ranch about an hour north of the city. The land under the ranch contained enough groundwater for thousands of homes, and officials in the Reno area had long eyed it as a water source that could reduce the city’s reliance on the Truckee River, which drains out of Lake Tahoe. Instead of asking the local utility to help with the costs, as past entrepreneurs had, Vidler used private capital to push the project forward. The company built a pipeline that snaked through 28 miles of hilly terrain, ending in a cluster of valleys that were primed for future construction.

It was a transaction only Timian-Palmer could have managed, and one that demonstrated Vidler’s clout on water issues: Getting permission to build the project required conducting multiple federal environmental reviews, placating officials in multiple states, negotiating with the nearby Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and passing a bill to ratify the details in Congress. Even after spending almost $100 million to permit and build the project, Vidler still stood to profit by selling the water to developers in Reno’s suburbs — there were almost no alternative water sources in the valleys north of Reno, so Vidler would be able to set the price.

Alas, Hart and Timian-Palmer had terrible timing. Just as the company’s projects in Reno and Vegas seemed to be taking off, the U.S. housing market started to wobble, led by a wave of foreclosures in Nevada and other Western states. When the market collapsed, builders and developers nixed all their suburban development projects, sold off their land, and pulled out of their agreements to buy water from Vidler. The company had moved heaven and earth to secure water for Nevada’s future growth, but that growth seemed to evaporate overnight.

“When Vidler started construction on the pipeline project, essentially, all of the water was spoken for,” said John Enloe, an official at the water utility that serves the Reno area. Enloe worked with Vidler on the pipeline project. “By the time construction was completed, the Great Recession hit, and everyone backed out. There just wasn’t a need for the water.”

Undeveloped land in Lincoln County, Nevada. The Great Recession hit just as Vidler’s projects neared completion, and construction in Nevada stopped. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Even as the housing market started to rebound from the Great Recession, Vidler spent much of the next decade running up against a very simple problem: The company had spent millions of dollars to develop new water resources across the West, paying to drill test wells and fill out lengthy water-right applications with the state government, but it couldn’t find buyers for all the new water it had developed. 

That was in part because regulators had started to question the logic of growth. By the time the Western real estate market surged back to life in the late 2010s, the megadrought that gripped the region was well into its second decade. Major reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River were bottoming out, and many rural communities were starting to see their wells go dry. This shortage had begun to stoke new concerns about overreliance on groundwater, and Vidler soon found itself facing new opposition from courts and regulators. 

In a sign of its commitment to aiding development, Vidler fought back against these restrictions with a vengeance, litigating and lobbying to ensure its projects could move forward.

New homes at a D.R. Horton development north of Reno, Nevada. Vidler has fought in the courts to ensure that new housing can be built in dry areas. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

A case in New Mexico demonstrated how aggressive the company could be in snapping up water. In the early 2000s, as Vidler was looking to expand into the state, Timian-Palmer connected with a rancher named Rob Gately. Gately owned a large chunk of land in the mountains east of Albuquerque and was seeking to build a big suburban development on the empty parcel. The area was far from prime real estate: It boasted a few dozen houses scattered across a stretch of wind-blown desert, but nothing else in the way of commerce. At least one other proposed development had already fallen through. Even so, Vidler offered to help Gately secure water. It applied to the New Mexico state government for permission to pump 700 acre-feet of water from the area aquifer, spending almost $6 million during the application process.

But Vidler’s own models showed that water use from the new development would cause water levels in the aquifer to drop, endangering residential wells. “People are already having problems with water, and that’s well-known here,” said Joanne Hilton, a hydrologist who lives in the area around the proposed development site and relies on a household well.

During one deposition, the lawyer for the area residents asked Hartman if he could provide specifics about how Vidler wanted to use the water. Just what kind of development was Gately trying to build, and how much water would it need? Hartman struggled to answer.

“So assuming that you get the permit and the case becomes final, then at that point you and Mr. Gately are going to sit down and talk about what’s next, is that right?” the lawyer asked.

“Yes,” Hartman said.

“And at this point you have no idea what that is?” the lawyer asked.

“I do not,” Hartman replied.

Two years later, the court tossed out Vidler’s application, ruling that the project would have risked taking water away from area residents and would conflict with New Mexico’s statewide goals for water conservation.

A drainpipe near a D.R. Horton development in an area of Reno where Vidler has substantial water rights. The company has long been a major fixture in Nevada water politics. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Faced with obstacles like these, Vidler had to go on offense. The company donated more than $275,000 to Nevada political candidates between 2008 and 2022, increasing its annual contributions in the years that followed the Great Recession. Hartman became a fixture in the Nevada legislature, lobbying on dozens of water bills, many of them concerned with obscure points of water law. During the present legislative session, as the company prepares to defend its water interests in Lincoln County, it has hired Nevada’s premier lobbying firm, whose other clients include Amazon and Uber.

In recent years, Timian-Palmer and Hartman have tried to scrape value from Vidler’s water assets wherever they can. They sold off some of their banked Arizona water to a golf course in a Phoenix suburb, making a more than threefold profit. They returned to Sandy Valley in 2016 to apply for water on a different patch of land, only to run into trouble once again with Marquis, who discovered that the company hadn’t told an area landowner it was going to apply for the water under his land. In litigation over the Coyote Springs development in Lincoln County, they conducted geological testing to prove that they should be able to tap an aquifer the state had deemed too vulnerable, alleging the existence of an underground fault they named “Dorothy’s Fault,” apparently after Timian-Palmer. They even went so far as to demand that Nevada cut off water deliveries to a town near a basin where Vidler had been prevented from pumping water, arguing that the town shouldn’t get to use water, either.

“They’re engaging in these processes for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to one day make money,” said Roerink, the water conservation advocate.

A subdivision in Mesquite, Nevada, near the border with Lincoln County. Developers and homebuilders have always been Vidler’s best customers and allies. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Neither Vidler nor D.R. Horton responded to extensive requests for comment on this story. Dorothy Timian-Palmer initially agreed to an interview in response to a request from Grist, but a Horton spokesperson later said that the company wouldn’t be participating in the story. After Grist visited Vidler’s office in Carson City, a Horton spokesperson offered to respond to a list of questions, but company representatives failed to do so before publication.

Even as Vidler sought buyers for its water rights, PICO went through a shakeup: Shareholders grew dissatisfied with Hart’s high salary and with the slow return on their investments. They ousted Hart and replaced him with a new chairman who soon cut costs, selling off PICO subsidiaries. Vidler’s assets were more difficult to cash out: The company had spent tens of millions of dollars on water projects like the ones near Reno and Albuquerque, and it wasn’t clear when those projects would start making money. The easiest way to make the company’s shareholders whole was for another company to buy Vidler outright. 

Timian-Palmer and her fellow executives started trying to find a buyer as early as 2017, when they hired a bank to solicit potential offers, according to a corporate filing. The bank contacted more than 150 different potential buyers, but none of them showed much interest. The main problem was that nobody seemed to be interested in acquiring Vidler wholesale. As the search continued, it became clear that Vidler needed a company that wanted to use its executives’ water expertise, not just sell off the assets Timian-Palmer had acquired — in other words, a company that needed Vidler as much as Vidler needed it.

It took a few more years and a millennium-scale drought, but in the final months of 2021, Vidler found a company that could finally make its development dreams a reality.

D.R. Horton is a tight-lipped company, and it didn’t say much about its purchase of Vidler. In a press release published on the day of the acquisition, the company noted that “Vidler owns a portfolio of premium water rights and other water-related assets … in markets where D.R. Horton operates.” A few weeks later, when a stock analyst asked about the purchase on an earnings call, an executive replied that “we put out pretty much what we’re going to say about Vidler in the press release.” 

Even so, the logic of the transaction was apparent: The places where Vidler owned substantial water rights were also places where Horton was building homes. At a shareholder meeting in 2021, Timian-Palmer told investors that Horton was “moving like gangbusters” in the north suburbs of Reno, planning multiple subdivisions that could purchase water from Vidler’s long-dormant Fish Springs Ranch pipeline. The valleys north of Reno are now home to a horde of uniform subdivisions, most of them sandwiched against each other just off the freeway. Many of the largest belong to Horton. If the city’s recent growth spurt continues, Vidler’s pipeline will be the only available water source for future builders.

A culvert at a D.R. Horton development north of Reno, Nevada. Vidler owns significant water rights in parts of the West where Horton is building new homes. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

Horton is also building several developments east of Carson City on a fast-growing industrial corridor near a Tesla factory. In a 2021 financial statement, Vidler noted that “there are currently few existing sustainable water sources to support future growth and development” in that corridor, except for Vidler’s own supplies. Horton also has numerous active projects in central Arizona, where Vidler has banked almost 300,000 acre-feet of water underground. Together, the two companies have everything they need to capitalize on the West’s post-pandemic population boom.

Vidler has always operated more like a fixer than a financial trader, not just flipping assets but developing new water resources in the driest areas. Several sources who spoke to Grist theorized that this was why Horton paid so much to acquire the company.

A sign advertises new homes at D.R. Horton’s “Mahogany” development outside Reno, Nevada, where future developers will need to buy water from Vidler. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

“If you’re a homebuilder, your best option is to do what Horton has done — go out and find more supply,” said Grady Gammage, a real estate lawyer who has represented Greenstone, another water broker founded by a former Vidler employee, and several homebuilders. “What Horton is likely thinking is that you’re faced either with doing a deal [to get new water], or trying to build that expertise in-house.” 

The future of the West depends on whether, and to what extent, these companies can secure these deals and expertise in the face of new regulatory restrictions and supply constraints.

Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in the western suburbs of Phoenix, where developers and builders have thrown up tens of thousands of homes that rely on groundwater from fragile aquifers. Earlier this year, Arizona’s new governor released a study that showed the area has much less water available than was previously thought. State law requires developers to show that proposed homes have a hundred-year water supply, and officials have now decreed that there isn’t enough groundwater in the area to provide for any more new subdivisions in the southern and western outskirts of the city. 

This has left several gigantic development projects stuck in limbo, including ones with which Horton was involved. It has also forced developers and homebuilders to look for alternate sources of water, including from underground storage facilities like Vidler’s. The company’s biggest underground aquifer contains enough water to supply about 2,000 homes for a hundred years each.

A water drainage lid near Dayton, Nevada, one of the rural communities where Vidler wants to help enable new construction. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

“It’s a challenge to find other supplies right now, to say the least,” said Spencer Kamps, vice president of legislative affairs at the Central Arizona Home Builders Association, which advocates for builders and real estate. “A number of investments have been made out in the area under the assumption that there was water available for growth.” But many people in the industry now worry that those assumptions were mistaken.

You wouldn’t know it from visiting the area. Earlier this year, I presented myself as a potential home buyer in the Phoenix suburbs where the state has identified a groundwater shortage, touring several Horton developments. These developments are tight clusters of cookie-cutter homes, surrounded for the most part by empty desert or isolated alfalfa fields. Construction appears to happen rapidly: As I drove through the developments, I found myself slipping back and forth between streets full of finished homes with xeriscaped lawns and streets where construction crews were still hammering at open timber frames.

In speaking with Horton sales representatives on my tours, I asked about water access, saying I’d heard there were issues in the area. The representatives brushed off my concerns, saying they “try to stay out of politics,” or that they “don’t believe they would allow growth out here” if there wasn’t enough water.

A watering hole near a rural section of Dayton, Nevada. The future of the West depends on whether builders and developers can find more water. Grist / Mikayla Whitmore

That is far from certain. Timian-Palmer and her colleagues have spent decades finding water sources for suburban developments like these. While the homes they helped build will last for many decades, the water that supplies them may not. Without ample rain to replenish them, the small and fragile aquifers that Vidler has tapped could someday empty out, leaving future homeowners high and dry. This has already started to happen in rural parts of the West where agriculture is dominant, and it may ultimately happen to the suburban developments Vidler is now helping to build.

Mike Machado, a former California state senator who served on PICO’s board of directors between 2013 and 2017, said the company’s business model makes him worried for the future of those developments.

“The biggest challenge for Vidler is whether or not the resources they have are renewable,” he told Grist. “It’s great to be able to have these resources, but if all you’re doing is mining them, at some point in time, you’re not going to have them. So that is creating a false sense of security for those that are relying on the resource.”

Horton’s sales representatives in Arizona have no such misgivings. For the moment, at least, the building boom is very much alive.

“If we continue to grow out here, the people living here will have water,” one sales representative told me. “What, are we just not gonna have water when we turn our faucet on?”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity as an attorney.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/drought/vidler-water-company-housing-dr-horton-nevada-arizona/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post The water brokers appeared first on Salon.com.

Now, a new study has undermined the aforementioned “serotonin hypothesis” — namely that, as the American Psychiatric Association puts it, “differences in certain chemicals in the brain may contribute to symptoms of depression.” That hypothesis motivated the pharmaceutical industry’s drug formulations, and indeed, underpins the chemistry of their anti-depressant drugs (particularly SSRIs, or selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors), which were marketed to correct said imbalance. Neurologically speaking, these kinds of drugs perpetuate the presence of serotonin, a neurotransmitter with a wide variety of functions, in the brain; specifically, a “reuptake inhibitor” prevents the serotonin from being reabsorbed as quickly as it might naturally, meaning more of it circulates for longer. 

To determine whether SSRI medication was effective, researchers writing for the journal Molecular Psychiatry performed a systematic umbrella review of 17 studies to determine what the evidence says.

Their conclusion?

“The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations,” the researchers explained. “Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.”

That calls into question the chemical imbalance theory of depression. 

Salon spoke by email with corresponding author Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at the University College London. Moncrieff made it clear that the new paper does not definitively disprove the serotonin hypothesis, since it is impossible to prove a negative and future research can always alter present conclusions.

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“But there has been [three] decades of intense research on many aspects of the serotonin activity in depression and we found that it provides no support for the idea that depression is caused by low serotonin,” Moncrieff explained. “I think that is about as definitive proof that the theory is false as you can get.” Moncrieff also pointed out that although depression could be caused by a different biological mechanism, “no other testable hypotheses have been proven either.”

Jonathan Sadowsky, an award-winning historian at Case Western University who specializes in the history of psychiatry and recently wrote the book “The Empire of Depression,” criticized the paper when corresponding with Salon by email.

“The finding that there is little or no association between serotonin levels and depression is not a decisive blow against the SSRIs, because medicines should be evaluated primarily on their efficacy, not their theoretical premise,” Sadowsky wrote to Salon. “The authors of this study propose that the efficacy is based on an amplified placebo effect or blunting of emotion generally. These are possibilities and they should be studied.”

Moreover, Sadowsky argued that there could be other explanations, and ultimately “if something works to help treat it — whether it is psychodynamic therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychedelic drugs, or the drugs we call antidepressants — it should be considered as a treatment, whether the theory of causation that lies behind it is true or not.”

Perhaps anticipating this kind of feedback, Moncrieff shared an official set of responses with Salon that address this criticism of the study.

“The most common rejoinder to a widely reported study that antidepressants don’t act on the underlying chemical cause is that even if we don’t know what their mechanism of action is we know that they work,” Moncrieff explained. “But the authors of the original piece have countered that the evidence for the drugs working is not convincing, and argue that how we understand what antidepressants do has major implications for decisions people might make about whether to use them or not.”

For his part, Sadowsky (who is not a scientist) acknowledged that he believes the question of whether depression has environmental causes is “settled science.” The new study emphasizes the need to focus more on environmental factors, with Moncrieff telling Salon that there is a lot of research on that subject (including in their review) and “we know depression is strongly associated with adverse life events and circumstances — such as child abuse, divorce, poverty, loneliness etc.”

In addition to increasing our research on the role of environment in causing depression, Moncrieff argued that scientists need to learn more about the long-term effects of antidepressants that alter brain chemistry. 

“There is almost no research on the effects of long-term use at the moment even though millions of people use these drugs for years and decades,” Moncrieff told Salon. “We also need research into withdrawal effects and how to minimize these and how to treat people who suffer from severe and prolonged withdrawal and also from post SSRI sexual dysfunction.”

So if a chemical imbalance may not be the cause of depression, what is? For decades, numerous researchers and public intellectuals have noted the substantial evidence that depression and other mental illness are linked to capitalism, the dominant economic system in the Western World — and one which governs the way we relate to each other, our selves, and our hopes and dreams. Oliver James, a psychologist who authored the 2008 book “The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza,” argued that the materialistic, self-obsessed and competitive culture of neoliberal capitalist societies instill “emotional distress” in their populations. Some of his evidence comes from the impressive rise in SSRI prescriptions in western countries, which far outpace population growth. 

Likewise, the late Mark Fisher, a cultural critic and philosopher, argued in a 2011 essay, “The Privatization of Stress,” that precarious economic circumstances engendered by the inequality innate to capitalist economies generate depression and anxiety.

He gave an example from an interviewee, an underemployed man named Ivor who was relying on short-term temp contracts to eke out a living, and who went on a trip to the grocery store and missed a call from an employment agency offering him work for the day. When Ivor returned home, Fisher writes, the contract was already filled. 

“Such laborers are expected to be waiting outside the metaphorical factory gates with their boots on, every morning without fail,” Fisher said. “It is hardly surprising that people who live in such conditions — where their hours and pay can always be increased or decreased, and their terms of employment are extremely tenuous — should experience anxiety, depression and hopelessness. And it may at first seem remarkable that so many workers have been persuaded to accept such deteriorating conditions as ‘natural’, and to look inward — into their brain chemistry or into their personal history — for the sources of any stress they may be feeling.”

Mikkel Krause Frantzen, author of “Going Nowhere, Slow: The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression,” has described depression as “collective” and political problem. In a 2019 essay in Los Angeles Review of Books, Frantzen describes how many people are understandably depressed by the sad state of real-life events and politics — such as looming existential crises like climate change, and the way that neoliberal capitalism forecloses the possibility of any alternative future. In Frantzen’s narrative, these sad situations are very rightfully inducing depression; Frantzen borrows a term, “depressive realism,” to describe the relatable depression one might feel from observing the state of the world. 

If the “chemical imbalance” hypothesis is further undermined by future studies, it suggests that the cause of depression may indeed be political — as writers like Fisher have theorized for decades — and related to the social conditions engendered by capitalism and modernity, rather than mis-aligned brain chemistry. 

The post Depression may not stem from a “chemical imbalance” after all — suggesting the problem is social appeared first on Salon.com.

Long Island Minimally Invasive Surgery, which does business as the New York Bariatric Group, went on to accuse Wallace of “embezzlement,” alleging she kept insurance payments that should have been turned over to the practice.

Wallace denies the allegations, which the bariatric practice has leveled against patients in hundreds of debt-collection lawsuits filed over the past four years, court records in New York state show.

In about 60 cases, the lawsuits demanded $100,000 or more from patients. Some patients were found liable for tens of thousands of dollars in interest charges or wound up shackled with debt that could take a decade or more to shake. Others are facing the likely prospect of six-figure financial penalties, court records show.

Backed by a major private equity firm, the bariatric practice spends millions each year on advertisements featuring patients who have dropped 100 pounds or more after bariatric procedures, sometimes having had a portion of their stomachs removed. The ads have run on TV, online, and on New York City subway posters.

The online ads, often showcasing the slogan “Stop obesity for life,” appealed to Wallace, who lives in Brooklyn and works as a legal assistant for the state of New York. She said she turned over checks from her insurer to the bariatric group and was stunned when the medical practice hauled her into court citing an “out-of-network payment agreement” she had signed before her surgery.

“I really didn’t know what I was signing,” Wallace told KFF Health News. “I didn’t pay enough attention.”

Dr. Shawn Garber, a bariatric surgeon who founded the practice in 2000 on Long Island and serves as its CEO, said that “prior to rendering services” his office staff advises patients of the costs and their responsibility to pay the bill.

The bariatric group has cited these out-of-network payment agreements in at least 300 lawsuits filed against patients from January 2019 through 2022 demanding nearly $19 million to cover medical bills, interest charges, and attorney’s fees, a KFF Health News review of New York state court records found.

Danny De Voe, a partner at Sahn Ward Braff Koblenz law firm in Uniondale, New York, who filed many of those suits, declined to comment, citing attorney-client privilege.

In most cases, the medical practice had agreed to accept an insurance company’s out-of-network rate as full payment for its services — with caveats, according to court filings.

In the agreements they signed, patients promised to pay any coinsurance, meeting any deductible, and pass on to the medical practice any reimbursement checks they received from their health plans within seven days.

Patients who fail to do so “will be held responsible for the full amount charged for your surgery, plus the cost of legal fees,” the agreement states.

That “full amount” can be thousands of dollars higher than what insurers would likely pay, KFF Health News found — while legal fees and other costs can layer on thousands more.

Elisabeth Benjamin, a lawyer with the Community Service Society of New York, said conflicts can arise when insurers send checks to pay for out-of-network medical services to patients rather than reimbursing a medical provider directly.

“We would prefer to see regulators step in and stop that practice,” she said, adding it “causes tension between providers and patients.”

That’s certainly true for Wallace. The surgery practice sued her last August demanding $17,981 in fees it said remained unpaid after her January 2022 laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy, an operation in which much of the stomach is removed to assist weight loss.

The lawsuit also tacked on a demand for $5,993 in attorney’s fees, court records show.

The suit alleges Wallace signed the contract even though she “had no intention” of paying her bills. The complaint goes on to accuse her of “committing embezzlement” by “willfully, intentionally, deliberately and maliciously” depositing checks from her health plan into her personal account.

The suit doesn’t include details to substantiate these claims, and Wallace said in her court response they are not true. Wallace said she turned over checks for the charges.

“They billed the insurance for everything they possibly could,” Wallace said.

In September, Wallace filed for bankruptcy, hoping to discharge the bariatric care debt along with about $4,700 in unrelated credit card charges.

The medical practice fired back in November by filing an “adversary complaint” in her Brooklyn bankruptcy court proceeding that argues her medical debt should not be forgiven because Wallace committed fraud.

The adversary complaint, which is pending in the bankruptcy case, accuses Wallace of “fraudulently” inducing the surgery center to perform “elective medical procedures” without requiring payment upfront.

Both the harsh wording and claims of wrongdoing have infuriated Wallace and her attorney, Jacob Silver, of Brooklyn.

Silver wants the medical practice to turn over records of the payments received from Wallace. “There is no fraud here,” he said. “This is frivolous. We are taking a no-settlement position.”

Gaining Debt

Few patients sued by the bariatric practice mount a defense in court and those who do fight often lose, court records show.

The medical practice won default judgments totaling nearly $6 million in about 90 of the 300 cases in the sample reviewed by KFF Health News. Default judgments are entered when the defendant fails to respond.

Many cases either are pending, or it is not clear from court filings how they were resolved.

Some patients tried to argue that the fees were too high or that they didn’t understand going in how much they could owe. One woman, trying to push back against a demand for more than $100,000, said in a legal filing that she “was given numerous papers to sign without anyone of the staff members explaining to me what it actually meant.” Another patient, who was sued for more than $40,000, wrote: “I don’t have the means to pay this bill.”

Among the cases described in court records:

• A Westchester County, New York, woman was sued for $102,556 and settled for $72,000 in May 2021. She agreed to pay $7,500 upon signing the settlement and $500 a month from September 2021 through May 2032.
• A Peekskill, New York, woman in a December 2019 judgment was held liable for $384,092, which included $94,047 in interest.
• A Newburgh, New York, man was sued in 2021 for $252,309 in medical bills, 12% interest, and $84,103 in attorneys’ fees. The case is pending.

Robert Cohen, a longtime attorney for the bariatric practice, testified in a November 2021 hearing that the lawyers take “a contingency fee of one-third of our recovery” in these cases. In that case, Cohen had requested $13,578 based on his contingency fee arrangement. He testified that he spent 7.3 hours on the case and that his customary billing rate was $475 per hour, which came to $3,467.50. The judge awarded the lower amount, according to a transcript of the hearing.

Dr. Teresa LaMasters, president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, said suing patients for large sums “is not a common practice” among bariatric surgeons.

“This is not what the vast majority in the field would espouse,” she said.

But Garber, the NYBG’s chief executive, suggested patients deserve blame.

“These lawsuits stem from these patients stealing the insurance money rather than forwarding it onto NYBG as they are morally and contractually obligated to do,” Garber wrote in an email to KFF Health News.

Garber added: “The issue is not with what we bill, but rather with the fact that the insurance companies refuse to send payment directly to us.”

‘A Kooky System’

Defense attorneys argue that many patients don’t fully comprehend the perils of failing to pay on time — for whatever reason.

In a few cases, patients admitted pocketing checks they were obligated to turn over to the medical practice. But for the most part, court records don’t specify how many such checks were issued and for what amounts — or whether the patient improperly cashed them.

“It’s a kooky system,” said Paul Brite, an attorney who has faced off against the bariatric practice in court.

“You sign these documents that could cost you tons of money. It shouldn’t be that way,” he said. “This can ruin their financial life.”

New York lawmakers have acted to limit the damage from medical debt, including “surprise bills.”

In November, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation that prohibits health care providers from slapping liens on a primary residence or garnishing wages.

But contracts with onerous repayment terms represent an “evolving area of law” and an alarming “new twist” on concerns over medical debt, said Benjamin, the community service society lawyer.

She said contract “accelerator clauses” that trigger severe penalties if patients miss payments should not be permitted for medical debt.

“If you default, the full amount is due,” she said. “This is really a bummer.”

‘Fair Market Value’

The debt collection lawsuits argue that weight loss patients had agreed to pay “fair market value” for services — and the doctors are only trying to secure money they are due.

But some prices far exceed typical insurance payments for obesity treatments across the country, according to a medical billing data registry. Surgeons performed about 200,000 bariatric operations in 2020, according to the bariatric surgery society.

Wallace, the Brooklyn legal assistant, was billed $60,500 for her lap sleeve gastrectomy, though how much her insurance actually paid remains to be hashed out in court.

Michael Arrigo, a California medical billing expert at No World Borders, called the prices “outrageous” and “unreasonable and, in fact, likely unconscionable.”

“I disagree that these are fair market charges,” he said.

LaMasters, the bariatric society president, called the gastrectomy price billed to Wallace “really expensive” and “a severe outlier.” While charges vary by region, she quoted a typical price of around $22,000.

Garber said NYBG “bills at usual and customary rates” determined by Fair Health, a New York City-based repository of insurance claims data. Fair Health “sets these rates based upon the acceptable price for our geographic location,” he said.

But Rachel Kent, Fair Health’s senior director of marketing, told KFF Health News that the group “does not set rates, nor determine or take any position on what constitutes ‘usual and customary rates.'” Instead, it reports the prices providers are charging in a given area.

Overall, Fair Health data shows huge price variations even in adjacent ZIP codes in the metro area. In Long Island’s Roslyn Heights neighborhood, where NYBG is based, Fair Health lists the out-of-network price charged by providers in the area as $60,500, the figure Wallace was billed.

But in several other New York City-area ZIP codes the price charged for the gastrectomy procedure hovers around $20,000, according to the databank. The price in Manhattan is $17,500, for instance, according to Fair Health.

Nationwide, the average cost in 2021 for bariatric surgery done in a hospital was $32,868, according to a KFF analysis of health insurance claims.

Private Equity Arrives

Garber said in a court affidavit in May 2022 that he founded the bariatric practice “with a singular focus: providing safe, effective care to patients suffering from obesity and its resulting complications.”

Under his leadership, the practice has “developed into New York’s elite institution for obesity treatment,” Garber said. He said the group’s surgeons are “highly sought after to train other bariatric surgeons throughout the country and are active in the development of new, cutting-edge bariatric surgery techniques.”

In 2017, Garber and his partners agreed on a business plan to help spur growth and “attract private equity investment,” according to the affidavit.

They formed a separate company to handle the bariatric practice’s business side. Known as management services organizations, or MSOs, such companies provide a way for private equity investors to circumvent laws in some states that prohibit non-physicians from owning a stake in a medical practice.

In August 2019, the private equity firm Sentinel Capital Partners bought 65% of the MSO for $156.5 million, according to Garber’s affidavit. The management company is now known as New You Bariatric Group. The private equity firm did not respond to requests for comment.

Garber, in a September 2021 American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery webinar viewable online, said the weight loss practice spends $6 million a year on media and marketing directly to patients — and is on a roll. Nationally, bariatric surgery is growing 6% annually, he said. NYBG boasts two dozen offices in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and is poised to expand into more states.

“Since private equity, we’ve been growing at 30% to 40% year over year,” Garber said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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The post Lose weight, gain huge debt: NY provider has sued more than 300 patients who had bariatric surgery appeared first on Salon.com.

Here is who I did see. Leslieann Hobayan, a poet and single mother with three teenage daughters who makes $28,000 a year teaching creative writing as an adjunct professor and could not afford health insurance last year. Hank Kalet, who, by teaching seven courses a semester at Rutgers, Brookdale Community College and Middlesex College as an adjunct professor (a full course load for a semester is normally four courses) as well as teaching summer courses, can sometimes make $50,000 a year. But even he only has health insurance through his wife’s employer. Josh Anthony and Yazmin Gomez, graduate workers in the history department who serve as teaching assistants, and who each struggle to survive on $25,000 a year, $1,300 of which is deducted by the university for library, gym and computer fees.

Rutgers, like most American universities, operates as a corporation. Senior administrators, who often have MBA degrees but little or no experience in higher education, along with athletic coaches who have the potential to earn the university money, are highly compensated while thousands of poorly paid educators and staff are denied job security and benefits. Adjunct faculty and graduate workers are often forced to apply for Medicaid. They frequently take second jobs teaching at other colleges, driving for Uber or Lyft, working as cashiers, delivering food for Grubhub or DoorDash, walking dogs, house sitting, waiting on tables, bartending and living four or six to an apartment or camping out on a friend’s sofa. This inversion of values is destroying the nation’s educational system. 

Rutgers, in a questionable campaign to become a national powerhouse in sports, has an athletic department debt of more than $250 million with half of that being loans to cover operating deficits, according to an investigation by NorthJersey.com.

“Even as Rutgers athletics continued to rack up annual operating deficits of $73 million — covered in part by taxpayers and student tuition revenue — athletics showed little restraint as it dropped millions on credit cards to pay for Broadway shows, trips to Disney, meals at destination Manhattan restaurants and other perks for its coaches, athletes and recruits, including a luau and beach yoga at sunset in Hawaii, a guided snorkeling tour in Puerto Rico, ax throwing in Texas, luxury hotels in Paris and London, and chilled lobster, seafood towers and Delmonico steaks back home in New Brunswick,” the NorthJersey.com report reads. “For more than a year, Rutgers University football players enjoyed a pricey perk that few other students had access to — free DoorDash food deliveries from restaurants, convenience stores and pharmacies, paid for by the university, and ultimately by taxpayers and students. And the costs piled up. Football players ordered more than $450,000 [paid by the university] through DoorDash from May 2021 through June of this year, according to a review of invoices and other documents obtained by NorthJersey.com.” 

Rutgers’ football team, with a terrible win-loss record over the last decade, rarely fills its 52,454 seat stadium.

The members of Rutgers American Association of University Professors – American Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT), Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union (PTLFC-AAUP-AFT) and Rutgers American Association of University Professors – Biomedical and Health Sciences of New Jersey (AAUP-BHSNJ) represent more than 9,000 faculty, part-time lecturers, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and physicians. Union leaders, who shut down 70 percent of the university’s classes, are demanding increased pay, better job security and health benefits for part-time lecturers and graduate assistants. They’re also asking the university to freeze rents on housing for students and staff and extend graduate research funding for one year for students who were affected by the pandemic. Tenured professors, in an important show of solidarity, agreed not to accept a deal unless the lowest paid academic workers’ demands were addressed. Last weekend the unions called for a pause to the strike pending a possible agreement. Talks are continuing, but no resolution has been reached and some workers want to return to the picket line.

I have been teaching as a part-time lecturer, or adjunct, in the Rutgers college degree program in New Jersey prisons for a decade. I’m a member of the union and joined the strike. We have been without a contract for eight months. The 2,700 adjunct professors, who are usually informed only a few weeks in advance if they will be teaching a course, are responsible for 30 percent of the university’s classes. Adjuncts are paid about $6,000 a course. 

A little more than 10 percent of faculty positions in the U.S. were tenure-track in 2019 and 26.5 percent were tenured, according to a study last year by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Nearly 45 percent were contingent part-time employees or adjuncts. One in five were full-time, non-tenure-track positions. Universities, by radically reducing tenure-track and adequately paid positions, are becoming extensions of the gig economy. 

Rutgers laid off 5 percent of its workforce during the pandemic, throwing many into extreme distress, even as the university’s net financial position — total assets minus total liabilities — “increased by over half a billion dollars to $2.5 billion, a 26.7 percent rise in a single year,” according to Rutgers AAUP-AFT’s review of the university’s financial records. Rutgers’ savings, which can be used for financial emergencies, grew by 61.9 percent to $818.6 million. 

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Strikes are taking place at other universities, including at Governors State University in Illinois, the University of Michigan and Chicago State University, and are poised to take place at Northeastern Illinois University. The University of California, New York University and Temple University have also seen strikes. These labor actions are part of the fight to take back universities from corporate apparatchiks.

These institutions, including Rutgers, often have the funds to pay a living wage and provide benefits. By keeping faculty underpaid and refusing to provide job security, those who raise issues that challenge the dominant narrative, whether about social inequality, corporate abuse, the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and apartheid, or our regime of permanent war, can be instantly dismissed. Senior university administrators, awarded bonuses for “reducing expenses” by raising tuition and fees, cutting staff and suppressing wages, pay themselves obscene salaries. Wealthy donors are assured that the neoliberal ideology that is ravaging the country will not be questioned by academics fearful of losing their positions. The rich are lauded. The working poor, including those employed by the university, are forgotten.

“Rutgers sports programs lose more money than any of the other Big Ten schools,” Kalet, who teaches writing and journalism, said. “This says a lot about the priorities of this administration and previous administrations. It is a large part of the argument we’ve been making. We know you guys have the money, you’re running a big surplus, you have a huge $868 million reserve account which has been growing.’They’re taking in more money than they’re spending. They have a growing endowment. They’re giving money to the coaches, but refusing to pony up for adjuncts and grad workers who are paid poverty wages.”

And then there is the rank hypocrisy, with universities such as Rutgers purporting to defend values of equality, diversity and justice, while grinding its teaching and service staff into the dirt. Holloway, the university’s first African-American president and a labor historian, called the strike “unlawful” in a university-wide email sent out before the strike began. He has threatened to use the power of injunction to punish, impose fines and arrest those participating in the strike. The lead negotiator for the university is David Cohen, who was the head of labor relations when then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was engaged in open warfare with the state’s teachers’ unions. Christie referred to the teachers’ unions as “New Jersey’s version of the Corleones,” the Mafia family from “The Godfather,” and suggested that the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers “deserved a punch in the face.”

The nation’s universities have been deformed into playgrounds for billionaire hedge fund managers and corporate donors. Harvard University will rename its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences after the billionaire hedge fund executive and right-wing Republican donor Kenneth Griffin in honor of his $300 million donation. A decade ago, Harvard renamed the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research after Glenn Hutchins, a private equity oligarch who donated $15 million to the institute. Harvard, to save face, said the famed Du Bois Institute was subsumed into the new entity, but the fact that Du Bois, one of America’s greatest scholars and intellectuals, would have his name replaced by a white equity mogul lays bare the priorities of Harvard and most colleges and universities.

The public defunding of universities, along with their seizure by corporations and the über-rich, is part of the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. The goal is to enforce conformity and obedience, to train young people to fill their slots in the corporate machine and leave unquestioned the status quo. The accumulation of vast wealth, no matter how nefarious, is prized as the highest good. Those who mold, shape, inspire and educate the young are neglected. Rutgers, like most large universities, pours resources into Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) programs that “Corporate America” values. The fundamental aim of an education, to teach people how to think critically, to grasp and understand the systems of power that dominate our lives, to foster the common good, to construct a life of meaning and purpose, are sidelined, especially with the withering away of the humanities. 

“When I was applying to grad school and talking to my professors about getting a PhD, most of them told me not to do it,” said Anthony, bearded and wearing a black T-shirt with the word “Solidarity” and a logo with a raised fist clutching a pencil. “Almost all of them said, ‘This profession is dying, you’ll never get a job, you’re going to be paid so poorly while you’re in grad school’ and ‘Make sure you have your funding, what matters most is what your funding package is.’ I thought very, very seriously about not doing this, but I was in love with history. I’m good at it. It’s the thing I’m meant to do.”

“It’s really tough,” he added. “There are a lot of times when you’re looking at your bank account and trying to figure out what you can give up to pay the rent.” 

Most adjunct professors and graduate workers hang on because of their students, enduring economic instability and job insecurity for those sacred moments in the classroom.

“I feel like I need to be checked into a mental hospital because I keep teaching despite these poverty-level wages,” Hobayan said as she surveyed the picket lines where strikers were chanting, “We’re not a corporation! We’re here for education!”

“I love sharing the knowledge that I have gained with other people,” she went on. “I love seeing what happens when the lightbulb goes off in their head. You see it on their faces. They’re like, ‘Oh, this is possible! This is what can exist outside of my bubble of knowledge!’ I talk to them a lot about their bubble of knowledge because everyone is in their silos, right? And I say, ‘Have you considered this perspective, or have you considered trying this out?'”

She spoke about a student who was a talented writer but who studied engineering because he wanted a job where he could make money. Hobayan steered him towards his passion. He became an English major, got a masters degree and is now an ESL teacher in northern New Jersey.

“He’s happy,” she said. “It sucks that we don’t get compensated for the things we love, the things that change people’s lives, that change the world.”

The post Strikes on campus: A chance to take back college from the corporations appeared first on Salon.com.

The group found that the six biggest property management companies in the U.S. — Starwood Property Trust, Mid-America Apartment Communities (MAA), Invitation Homes, AvalonBay Communities Inc., AMH and Tricon Residential — brought in $4.3 billion in net income last year, an increase of more than $1.3 billion from 2021.

That financial windfall came as the companies were raising rents and engaging in what Accountable.US called “abusive tactics” to evict people, in some cases after they had applied for rental assistance.

Starwood Property Trust increased rent by 30% or more at some of its thousands of properties in 2022 and saw its net income skyrocket by 115% to more than $1 billion, $591 million of which it spent on dividend payments to shareholders.

AMH and Tricon Residential credited their “pricing power” and “strong rent growth” for helping them secure $310 million and nearly $780 million in net income last year, respectively. The former company recorded a 47% increase while the latter’s income grew by 70%.

MAA also reported that “higher fee income” and “continued growth in average rent per unit” were behind the ballooning of its net income, which grew by nearly 19% to more than $654 million.

“This is egregious,” said tenants’ rights organizer René Christian Moya of the report’s findings.

This is egregious. And it is something the @WhiteHouse and @POTUS should be thinking very clearly about as tenants across the country are being gouged by corporate landlords https://t.co/SrfaFlhfaF

— René #FreePalestine 🟥🚩🇵🇸 (@rcmoya84) April 17, 2023

Four of the companies included in the Accountable.US report are members of the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), which celebrated the omission of national rent control measures in the renter protections that President Biden proposed in January, while also claiming that the proposal’s recommended regulations would be too “onerous” on landlords and would “discourage much-needed investments in housing supply.”

Part of the companies’ financial windfall was driven not by rent increases but by fees the landlords have piled on top of rent, including late fees and extra charges for “smart locks,” pets and using online systems to pay rent.

“Corporate landlords ‘squeeze more revenues from portfolios’ by charging a range of ‘ancillary’ fees, resulting in ‘fee revenue vastly outpacing rental growth,'” said Accountable.US.

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Invitation Homes is one landlord that’s been accused in the past of “fee-stacking” by tenants who filed a class-action lawsuit in 2018 — all while providing tenants with homes where they face “leaky pipes, vermin, toxic mold, nonfunctioning appliances and months-long waits for repairs,” according to the report.

The record profits, dividend spending and poor service of the six companies, said Accountable.US — in addition to shelter costs rising by a “striking” 8.6% overall in the consumer price index last month — demonstrate that “aggressive interest rate hikes” imposed by the Federal Reserve “have done little to deter profiteering from corporate landlords.”

The group called on Congress to work with the Biden administration to “stabilize runaway housing costs,” for example by passing legislation proposed by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Grace Meng, D-N.Y., last month which would invest $200 billion in affordable housing, or a bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., to end rent-gouging by corporate landlords.

“The nation’s largest landlords have shown their burdensome rent hikes are based on greed, not need, after reporting billions of dollars in higher profits over the last year,” said Liz Zelnick, director of Accountable.US’ Economic Security and Corporate Power program. “These companies fueling the housing affordability crisis are among many corporations across industries that have shamelessly profiteered, undeterred by the Fed’s repeated interest rate hikes.”

“Higher interest rates have not curbed inflation sufficiently and have done nothing to combat corporate greed,” Zelnick added, “and instead are causing severe economic consequences for everyday Americans, from lower wages to lost jobs.”

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