Silicon Valley’s wealthy elites have been secretly buying up land in one of California’s poorest counties to build a new city from the ground up. Who will stop them?

What do billionaires do with all their money? Maybe they buy off a Supreme Court justice. Maybe they get their kicks from diving to the extreme depths of an ocean in a tiny metal capsule. Maybe they start a space company to fly into outer space for fun.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Or, perhaps they fantasize about building a brand-new California city from scratch, one with more housing than San Francisco and more walkability than Los Angeles. The billionaires have money to burn. And so, they pool together a few drops of their obscene wealth into realizing this wild fantasy.

It’s true. The New York Times, in a series of reports in late August 2023, revealed that a small group of white male billionaires—a “who’s who of Silicon Valley”—has been secretly buying up thousands of acres of rural land in northern California’s Solano County since 2017 to build a city from the ground up.

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The idea originated with a young Czech-born billionaire and former Goldman Sachs trader named Jan Sramek. When he was only 22 years old, a profile in New York Magazine quoted Sramek as having adopted libertarian writer Ayn Rand’s credo: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” That sentiment forms the throughline of his long-term Utopian plan to build his new, perfect city.

At 36, Sramek has succeeded in charming fellow billionaires into investing in a company that has been the face of his mysterious project. Flannery Associates LLC is now the largest landowner in Solano County. What he and his rich friends want is to transform the Bay Area’s poorest county into a bustling, cultured, walkable metropolis, running on green energy and self-driving cars, with thousands of well-paid jobs. And they apparently think they know how to do it.

For years, local residents of Solano County wondered who was buying up parcels of land. News outlets speculated that the Chinese government was behind the purchases that circled Travis Air Force Base.

Even elected officials became concerned, with Ronald Kott, the mayor of nearby city Rio Vista, telling the press, “Nobody can figure out who they are… Whatever they’re doing—this looks like a very long-term play.” California congressional Representative John Garamendi, whose district encompasses Solano County, wanted to know, “Who are these people?” More importantly, “Where did they get the money where they could pay five to ten times the normal value that others would pay for this farmland?”

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that aside from government entities, the only ones with the money and audacity to embark on such a project are elite billionaires. They have a slick new website labeled California Forever, complete with attractive renderings of an idyllic city and platitudes about “good paying local jobs,” “homes of different sizes and price points,” and “walkable neighborhoods,” all built from a “consensus-minded plan.”

Now that the secret is out, what will we do about it? The billionaires are deluded in thinking they have the know-how, foresight, and intelligence to build a new city. But perhaps we as a society are equally deluded in believing that billionaires are smart enough to deserve the preposterous wealth they have accumulated.

Take Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist billionaire and one of Flannery’s investors. In a rambling, off-the-cuff essay in April 2020, Andreessen attempted to make the case that the only answer to society’s problems is to “build.” Build what? Anything! Everything!

Andreessen wanted to build more universities, more K-12 schools, and more highly automated factories. He wanted supersonic aircraft and millions of delivery drones. And if they weren’t being built, he wanted society to “force the incumbents to build these things.” To him, “building is how we reboot the American dream.”

In his essay, Andreessen laid down a challenge, ostensibly to governments: “Demonstrate that the public sector can build better hospitals, better schools, better transportation, better cities, better housing.”

Andreessen doesn’t understand why we as a society don’t want the same things that he does. “The problem,” he wrote, “is desire,” or the lack thereof. “We need to want these things.” How frustrating to be an idealistic billionaire and not have one’s desire to build masses of random things on a whim be shared by the rest of society!

Another Flannery investor and venture capitalist billionaire, Michael Moritz, has been more honest—at least to fellow investors—that it’s not about idealism as much as it is about profits. He wrote a 2017 note pitching the idea of building the fantasy California city in which, as the New York Times paraphrased, “[t]he financial gains [from the project] could be huge.” In Moritz’s own words, “If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment.” Unsurprisingly, billionaires, even in their wildest, most idealistic-sounding dreams, want to always ensure they can reap financial rewards.

Solano County, in addition to being the Bay Area’s poorest, is home to the region’s largest Black population by percentage and also has the highest unemployment rate. In other words, it is ripe for capitalist exploitation.

On the surface, it seems as though California’s real-world problems are cramping the billionaires’ style and all they want to do is realize a Utopian vision. But in truth, the billionaires are the source of much of the state’s problems.

As their net worth has soared, billionaires have put upward pressure on the cost of living in cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, San Jose, and Mountain View. According to the 2023 Silicon Valley Index, “the San Francisco Bay Area is home to the greatest concentration of billionaires in the world.” The report also points out that Silicon Valley has the nation’s largest wealth gap, and, specifically, “the top 0.001 percent of Silicon Valley’s households [are] holding more wealth than the nearly 500,000 households in the bottom 50 percent.”

Rising housing prices, increased homelessness, traffic gridlock, and a generally higher cost of living are all the result of massive wealth differences—an inequality so deeply unnatural that it inevitably perverts the ability of cities to cope and skews the ability of ordinary people to survive and thrive.

The billionaires are steeped in so much hubris and so little wisdom that they don’t see beyond their own noses. Their answer to the problems they have created is to start from scratch and pour billions into a fantasy project whose details are so murky they won’t even share them with democratically elected representatives, and whose manifestation will likely replicate the same mess it is claiming to fix.

If their project fails, all they will lose is a few of their many billions.

What will the rest of us lose? Land, homes, resources, environmental regulations, tax revenues, and other perhaps things we cannot even foresee.

We need to have a good answer to the challenge that Sramek, Andreessen, Moritz, and their ilk have posed to the rest of us: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

Will we stop them?

AUTHOR BIO:

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The new country hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” embodies the GOP’s narrative of white male resentment. But collectivism and an embrace of racial diversity are far more powerful and popular.

American conservatism has always been excellent at storytelling. Convincing people to back regressive policies isn’t easy and therefore stories generating fear and resentment in particular work quite well to help garner support for lowering taxes on the wealthy or pouring money into militarism and policing instead of into healthcare and housing.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Effective storytelling is the reason why right-wing commentators like Joe Rogan and Laura Ingraham elevated “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a song with a simple message by a relatively unknown country artist, and helped boost it all the way to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The new song from country musician Oliver Anthony has suddenly become an anthem of the right, so much so that it was featured in the Republican Party’s first candidate debate for the 2024 presidential nomination.

Fox debate moderator Martha MacCallum asked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, “Why is this song striking such a nerve in this country right now?” DeSantis answered, it’s because “our country is in decline right now. This decline is not inevitable, it’s a choice.”

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Anthony’s song lyrics have a pithy answer to why the United States is apparently in decline: “We got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat.” He then pivots to the source of this injustice: “the obese milkin’ welfare.”

While he explicitly engages in fat shaming, he doesn’t spell out that he’s actually referencing people of color when he talks about people milking welfare. But that’s because he doesn’t have to. Welfare recipients have long been a dog whistle for Black Americans in particular, a trope that Ronald Reagan popularized all the way to the White House, building on white people’s resentment of Black people benefitting from tax-funded programs. The myth that Black people disproportionately use welfare programs has persisted within the American public, even though in reality, welfare programs have disproportionately benefited white people and even excluded Blacks.

No wonder Republican politicians and their voting base love Anthony’s song. It correctly identifies economic insecurity but instead of laying the blame at the feet of wealthy corporations who are hiking up food prices, or GOP representatives who are cutting food stamps, it instead scapegoats poor people of color and paints them as wily, greedy, fraudsters who take advantage of hardworking (read: white, male) Americans.

But, what about the “rich men” Anthony sings about? That too could be coded language for Democrats who are painted in the GOP’s worldview as well-educated, privileged liberal elites and embodied by people like Hunter Biden. These “rich men” are ensuring that welfare recipients (read: people of color) suck up all the resources, sending white men like Anthony to an early grave.

The victims of injustice in Anthony’s song are precisely the ones that the GOP has been trying to uplift: white men. “Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground, ‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down,” sings Anthony. He doesn’t explicitly say “white men,” because—again—he doesn’t have to. He signals it with his own demographic saying, “It’s a damn shame what the world’s gotten to for people like me… ” To be fair, he adds, “and people like you.”

Without actually spelling out the idea that people of color are taking over the nation and forcing white men to an early grave, Anthony’s song cleverly implies this powerful right-wing myth.

The narrative throughline of Republican ideology is the myth that America was a country built by white men but is now a nation where white men are deeply suffering. As America falls apart from this tragic turn of events, only white men can save it and can “Make America Great Again.”

Given how hard the GOP has beaten this drum it’s a wonder more Americans don’t buy this ludicrous, racist, and false idea. Just under a quarter of all Americans believe it. And nearly double that amount actively rejects it. And that is because the counternarrative to this grim world of white male resentment is a beautiful and far more seductive story: that America is a multi-hued nation where everyone has rights and everyone deserves freedom from hunger, homelessness, and illness. Although this is an ideal that has never been realized, especially for Black and Brown people, it remains an aspirational goal.

Indeed, even Anthony can’t help but embrace this collectivist idea. In an interview, the young singer identified “the roots of what made this country great in the first place,” as “our sense of community.”

He then said, “We are the melting pot of the world, that’s what makes us strong, is our diversity.” There’s no other way to interpret his words than the idea that the nation’s racial diversity is a good thing.

He then went further, saying, “We need to learn to harness that and appreciate it and not use it as a political tool to keep everyone separate.”

Whether or not Anthony actually believes such ideas that seem to be the opposite of his own hit song, or whether he was simply pandering to the cameras, is unclear. What is clear is that even the GOP’s newest poster boy, when asked to explain his position, publicly backed collectivism and embraced racial diversity.

In fact, in a video he released on YouTube, Anthony even disavowed being associated with the GOP, saying it was ironic that his song was played at the Republican debate. He “wrote that song about those people,” he said, adding, “I do hate to see that song being weaponized.”

The truth, of course, is that rich men from the Democratic Party, but even more so from the Republican Party, represent the wealthiest people in the nation and routinely use that power to make themselves and their ilk richer. When a reporter in May 2023 asked House Speaker Kevin McCarthy if his party would consider increasing taxes on the wealthy, he spat out “No” before the question was over.

The GOP’s cover story, to obscure its real agenda of making rich men richer, is one of white racial resentment. And to the party, Anthony’s song embodies this cover story. But his interview reveals what most Americans, given the chance to think for themselves, would embrace: that it’s rich men versus the rest of us.

British folk singer Billy Bragg attempted to rewrite the GOP’s new anthem to better reflect the sort of working-class ideals that are popular all over the world. He identified the true perpetrators of injustice as, “Rich men earning north of a million,” who “wanna keep the working folk down.”

Instead of fat shaming and echoing rightwing dog whistles about people of color, Bragg sang:

If you’re struggling with your health, and you’re putting on the pounds,
Doctor gives you opiates to help you get around,
Wouldn’t it be better for folks like you and me,
If medicine was subsidized and healthcare was free.

In a Facebook post, Oliver revealed that he has struggled with depression and anxiety. Clearly, he, like the rest of us, would benefit from tax-funded, free healthcare.

Anthony also laid out his financial troubles and struggle with unemployment, one that so many Americans can relate to. Again, Bragg had a good answer to this problem in his version of the country music hit: “Join a union, fight for better pay… join a union brother, organize today.” Given Anthony’s reluctance to be co-opted by the right, perhaps he may yet be convinced by this.

Editor's note: Clarifying language was added by the original publisher.

‘Slavery wasn’t so bad; white men are the real victims’: these are the messages that appear to stem from the right-wing war on history. It’s part of a bigger picture rooted in the politics of fear.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is waging a war on history. The GOP’s aspiring presidential candidate saw how effectively Donald Trump tapped into white conservatives’ fears of demographic change and seems to want to use that same tactic to catapult himself into the White House. In 2021 and 2022, DeSantis championed the smugly named “Stop WOKE Act,” to undermine—try not to laugh—“woke indoctrination” and a “Marxist-inspired curriculum” in schools. To top that, the Florida Board of Education this summer released new standards for teaching history in middle schools that whitewash slavery and uplift white supremacist patriarchy.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Florida students will now potentially be exposed to instruction that claims, “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The standards also emphasize that “trading in slaves developed in African lands,” to remind students that it was not an American invention. Further, it covers “the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries,” as well as, “how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures,” and “how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.”

In other words, American students of history will now be taught that slavery was so widespread that they surely can’t blame white American enslavers for engaging in what the rest of the world was doing, and that whites too, were victimized by the institution.

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It’s an increasingly popular idea among conservative whites that they have historically been the victims, not the perpetrators of racial oppression.

The Florida Board of Education also approved the use of videos created by PragerU, an outfit named after its co-creator, Christian-fundamentalism-peddling talk show host Dennis Prager. Dennis Prager. It is instructive to note that Prager once said, “If you see the n-word on a dormitory building, the odds are overwhelming that a Black student actually did that,” because they are engaging in “race hoaxes… to show how racist the country is.”

Again, a popular idea among conservative whites is that racism is so nonexistent in the U.S. today that overt acts of racism are surely hoaxes meant to defame white Americans—the real victims.

One of the Florida board’s spokespeople justified approval of PragerU’s videos for use in schools, saying that “the material aligns to [sic] Florida’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU describes its tools as “pro-American,” which is code for pro-white, pro-fundamentalist, pro-patriarchy.

In its videos, PragerU overtly promotes “Judeo-Christian values,” encourages women and girls to “embrace… [their] femininity,” and teaches boys to “embrace… [their] masculinity.” It upholds revisionist history claiming Thanksgiving arose from Indigenous Americans working in harmony with white settlers, puts words into the mouth of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass to claim that slavery had to continue in order to “achieve something great: the making of the United States,” and spouts pro-police propaganda that attempts to discredit the racial justice uprisings of 2020.

When Florida’s Lieutenant-Governor Jeanette Núñez defended her state’s “Stop WOKE Act,” she claimed that it was about, “prioritizing education[,] not indoctrination.” But in a speech to the hate group Moms for Liberty, Prager said, “We bring doctrines to children. That’s a very fair statement… But what is the bad of our indoctrination?”

The effort to clamp down on education is spreading. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who made a name for herself as Trump’s press secretary, has decided to use the DeSantis playbook in attacking the teaching of accurate history. Her state has decided that students will no longer receive credit for taking the AP African American history course because it violates the Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Readiness, Networking, and Safety (LEARNS) Act, which she promoted and signed into law earlier this year.

In defiance, every public school in the Little Rock school district announced it would continue to teach the AP course.

There is a harmful narrative that frames right-wing conservative thought, and it goes like this: “Intrepid white settlers discovered America, fought for its independence, and created the most powerful nation on earth. Now, uppity Black folks are asking for special treatment, illegals are cutting in line, and women and gays are threatening the natural order. We have to fight to preserve the sanctity of America against these predators.”

It’s a dangerous and powerful story, one that is rooted in the politics of fear. And it is an effective tool to rally voters to back regressive policies, laws, and candidates in the face of popular ideas of collectivism, of policies promoting equity to undo the damage of past and current racial and gender-based harms, of realizing the ideal of a multiracial democracy.

This fear-based story is the overarching framework for a reactionary backlash to the teaching of accurate history—precisely because such education has been so effective.

In my new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023), I cite the example of Brittany Murphree, a white Republican college student who took a Critical Race Theory (CRT) course at the University of Mississippi School of Law. When Republican lawmakers in her state passed a bill banning the teaching of such history in K-12 schools, she wrote to her representatives, “To date, this course has been the most impactful and enlightening course I have taken throughout my entire undergraduate career and graduate education at the State of Mississippi’s flagship university.”

Murphree added, “The prohibition of courses and teachings such as these is taking away the opportunity for people from every background and race to come together and discuss very important topics which would otherwise go undiscussed.”

It’s no wonder that the far right has taken aim at CRT, ethnic studies, and the teaching of accurate history saying they promote biased thinking and indoctrination. Indeed, such curricula are biased—toward truth, justice, and pluralism, and they have the potential to change the way young Americans think about race.

Murphree and the eye-opening education she benefitted from represent the worst nightmare of Prager, DeSantis, and Trump. Her education offers a powerful de-programming of archaic ideology and promotes a promise of a pluralistic future—one where white men like them no longer have a monopoly on power.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Like many cities with a serious housing problem, Portland is increasingly relying on private security to “clean up” the human debris of capitalism.

During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

As we responded to the assault against the unhoused man with an appropriate level of shock, the three white women who had also watched the incident unfold rushed to the guard’s defense. They seemed to know instinctively by our visible horror that we were visitors to the city, and informed us in no uncertain terms that the guard was simply doing his job. “Leave the poor man alone,” said one of them, sporting what appeared to be scrubs (I wondered, was she a health care worker?). She wasn’t referring to the victim, but rather his assaulter.

Meanwhile, an employee of prAna, the storefront where the attack took place, shooed us away from the still-wet blood spatters that now stained the sidewalk. He used a spray cleaner to wipe away the evidence, seconds after I photographed it. The yoga studio, which also sells high-end clothing, boasts on its website that the Sanskrit word for which it is named, is “the life-giving force, the universal energy that flows within and among us, connecting us with all other living beings.”

Although the unhoused man bled the same way as any of us would, he was not seen as a living being in the moment that the security guard brutally slammed him into the sidewalk. He was an inconvenient object, a nuisance, marring the enjoyment of consumers who simply wanted to practice their mindfulness without having to face the ugly underbelly of racial capitalism.

The consequences of private muscle are as serious and as potentially deadly as state power. In 2021, a private security guard named Logan Gimbel was sentenced to a life term in prison for fatally shooting a resident named Freddy Nelson with an unlicensed firearm. Ellis reported in the second piece of the OPB series that a private security guard working for a company named Echelon had engaged in a brutal assault on a 46-year-old unhoused woman named Katherine Hoffman. The assault sounded similar to what I had seen happen in Nob Hill. When speaking with police, the guard who beat Hoffman with his baton bizarrely claimed it was the baton that did it, not he. “I had it in my hand, I didn’t hit her with it,” he told police. “But it did hit her.”

The mercenary reliance on private security is embedded in a belief that Portland’s police have been “defunded.” But detailed analyses such as this one reveal that it is not true that the police force has been stripped of funding. As was the case in many American cities, Portland’s city council representatives initially paid lip service to racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020 by voting to make modest cuts to police budgets, only to restore them merely months later.

There is indeed a serious problem of homelessness in Portland and the business owners who have resorted to private security claim they simply want to “clean up” the problems that the city refuses to. A political battle is ensuing over allowing homelessness to flourish rather than cracking down on the unhoused.

But there is a glaring omission in the police-versus-private-security and violence-versus-the-unhoused fights, and that is the fact that Oregon is simply an unaffordable place to live. One economist told OPB’s April Ehrlich, “We have the worst affordability… Low vacancies and high prices… [are] indicative of a housing shortage.” According to Ehrlich, “Oregon is among states with the lowest supply of rentals that are affordable to people at or below poverty levels.”

When housing is in short supply and rents are out of reach, it’s inevitable that the number of people without homes will rise. Hiring private security firms to supplement policing does little to address this systemic cause of homelessness. Just as the yoga studio’s employee cleaned away the blood of the unhoused man from the sidewalk, the use of private security is intended to sweep away the human detritus of economic injustice.

About 30 minutes after the assault that I witnessed took place, the Portland police showed up, blocking the intersection outside the yoga storefront with a large patrol car. Were they on the scene to arrest the security guard, I wondered?

No. We spotted the guard walking freely on the sidewalk and then disappearing into a nearby store, which was presumably one of his employers. Meanwhile, the police officers had placed the unhoused assault victim in the back of their patrol car. We offered the cops our testimony, but they appeared uninterested. Ultimately, it was clear to us that the guard and the police were both paid to lock up the unhoused man (who clearly needed mental health treatment), in service of their wealthy white patrons—Nob Hill’s business owners and residents.

Unless city, state, or federal governments directly address the fact that the rent is too damn high and wages are too damn low, people will continue to lose access to housing and services and find themselves on the receiving end of blows and batons from either private guards or the police, as business owners and wealthier residents look on with approval.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the common root causes of (and solutions to) worker exploitation and climate change.

As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.”

What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions.

Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.”

The Times story quoted R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist, who was concerned that workers’ “performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat,” and therefore “hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy.”

How inconvenient the corporate-induced climate crisis has been to the performance standards of corporate-driven worker exploitation!

We oughtn’t to be surprised that in an economy designed to see workers as units of production for a profit-driven top-down system of exploitation, corporate media coverage would spout such callous narratives based on internalized capitalist values.

President Joe Biden’s administration, on the surface at least, appears to be centering worker safety and well-being. In late July the president asked the Department of Labor to “issue the first-ever Hazard Alert for heat,” and to increase enforcement of heat-related worker protections. “The Hazard Alert will reaffirm that workers have heat-related protections under federal law,” announced the White House. The Biden administration pointed out proudly that it “has continued to deliver on the most ambitious climate agenda in American history,” and that, in contrast, “many Republicans in Congress continue to deny the very existence of climate change.”

Yet, in its first two years, the Biden administration actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits than in the first two years of the previous Republican administration of Donald Trump. A 21-year-old climate activist, Elise Joshi, confronted White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in late July 2023, saying, “A million young people wrote to the administration pleading [for it] not to approve a disastrous oil-drilling project in Alaska and we were ignored.” The video of Joshi’s brave action has gone viral.

If Biden truly cares about the health and safety of working people in a warming climate, and about the future of young people like Joshi, he has the power to do much more than merely enforce safety standards—which is a band-aid solution and won’t do anything to stop global warming.

The Center for Biological Diversity has devoted an entire website, BidensClimatePowers.org, explaining what the president could do immediately, without needing congressional approval. The recommendations include refusing permits for fossil fuel projects, as Joshi pleaded for him to do.

Neither the corporate media nor our politicians who are beholden to corporate lobbyists honestly address the intersection of worker exploitation and climate change. They neither pinpoint the common cause—corporate greed—nor do they identify the common solution—ending corporate greed.

The early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a practice run for what is currently transpiring with the climate catastrophe enveloping the planet.

Even those who had the luxury of working from home during the lockdowns were measured by their productivity. At first corporate America celebrated because people worked harder from home than from their workplace, freed from time-consuming commutes and the distractions of in-person camaraderie. Now, as many workers are realizing they don’t want to be cogs in someone else’s wheel, Fortune.com blared the headline, “American Worker Productivity Is Declining at the Fastest Rate in 75 Years—and It Could See CEOs Go to War Against WFH [Work From Home].”

Meanwhile, those whose labor our society relies on were labeled “essential” and sent off to work, braving a killer virus, often without adequate safety measures in place. Even working in a grocery store during the lockdowns cost people their lives. A third of all workers in the U.S. were deemed essential. Unsurprisingly, they were disproportionately low-income and people of color. We can expect the same to transpire in a warming climate as people like Daniel Rivera, the Amazon warehouse worker in San Bernardino, toil in the burning heat in order to keep the wheels of productivity turning.

Just as corporations care little for worker lives, the climate crisis is the predictable outcome of an economy designed to maximize shareholder profit, not ensure a viable planet for future generations. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson connected the dots in his novel New York 2140. “We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who make the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth,” said Robinson. We cannot rely on fiction writers painting dystopian futures to be the only ones identifying the common root causes of climate change and labor abuse.

The current design of our economic system privileges the well-being of only 1 percent of all humans. Whether it’s a deadly virus or the deadly climate, unless we clearly identify the systemic problems and redesign our economic system to center the well-being of all human beings, the future will not be livable, rendering discussions of “productivity” moot in the deadliest possible way.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The UPS Teamsters’ negotiations with the world’s largest delivery company offer the American labor movement lessons in organizing.

Narrowly avoiding, for now, what might have been the largest strike in United States history of workers employed by a single corporation, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters came to a tentative agreement with the United Parcel Service (UPS) in late July 2023 over contract negotiations. While the union did not win everything it wanted, it secured a majority of its demands in what it called “the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS.” Union members will vote on whether to accept the deal between August 3 and 22.

There are numerous lessons to be learned from what has transpired between the Teamsters and UPS during this year’s #HotLaborSummer.

First, and most important: unions work, and not just for the workers being represented, but for all workers. Despite the UPS Teamsters’ checkered history under Jimmy Hoffa’s leadership, UPS’s delivery drivers today have significantly higher wages than their counterparts at competitors like FedEx and Amazon. This is consistent with what unions in general do for wages. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “non-union workers earn just 85 percent of what unionized workers earn.” Additionally, “When more workers have unions, wages rise for union and non-union workers.” There is an upward pressure on wages for all when groups of unionized workers win wage benefits for themselves.

Second, one of the most powerful responses to corporate monopolies is large unions. UPS is the world’s largest package delivery service and is the most dominant delivery company in the U.S., handling one out of four deliveries in a nation increasingly dependent on mail-order service. The majority of its workers are represented by a single union. This means that if the UPS Teamsters go on strike, it can utterly cripple the company. Indeed, media coverage has focused on this fact, as well as the damage to the entire U.S. economy in the event of a strike.

That kind of power is rare in our splintered labor movement. Take the entertainment industry. Film, television, and theater production intersects with many unions, among them DGA, IATSE Local 80, ICG Local 600, Actors’ Equity, and the two currently on strike: WGA and SAG-AFTRA. In late 2021, film and television crew workers agreed to a flawed contract and decided not to strike. Earlier this year, unionized Hollywood directors reached an agreement with the major production studios and signed a contract at the same time, writers whose scripts they bring to life, were striking. Then, actors also went on strike.

Now, a significant number of Hollywood workers remain on strike while others are working. The major studios are hoping to simply wait out the striking workers until their resolve withers. Meanwhile, workers creating unscripted television—known colloquially as reality TV—are not unionized and are “torn” about continuing to work while their colleagues are on strike.

While the workers are fractured, their bosses are united. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a single entity representing all the major studios such as Netflix, Apple, Amazon, and Disney. This single powerful entity boasts on its website that it “negotiates 58 industry-wide collective bargaining agreements.” If the majority of Hollywood’s workers were organized into a single union, they would have the kind of power that UPS Teamsters wields.

A third lesson from the UPS agreement is that labor militancy works. In September 2022, I pointed out that the UPS Teamsters launched a major public campaign for a fair contract a full year before their existing contract was set to expire, highlighting the dangerous summer conditions under which many UPS drivers were forced to work. The Teamsters’ new president, Sean O’Brien, did not mince words when he threatened that, “we’re not going to be afraid to pull that trigger [on a strike] if necessary.”

Then, this summer the union enacted “practice pickets,” saying, “The most powerful tool we have as Teamsters to win a historic contract at UPS is a credible strike threat.” This clever approach had an equally clever tagline: “Just practicing for a just contract.” The display of power was an intimidation tactic and a turning of the tables against corporate America, which has relied on armies of union-busting lawyers to quash labor movements.

A fourth lesson is that solidarity is critical. Although UPS accepted a majority of what the Teamsters demanded by early July 2023, the company held out on increasing wages for those part-time workers who had been hired a few years ago at lower starting salaries. Instead of giving in, UPS Teamsters walked away and began their practice strikes, likely betting that the company would cave. The company soon issued a statement saying, “We are prepared to increase our industry-leading pay and benefits, but need to work quickly to finalize a fair deal that provides certainty for our customers, our employees[,] and businesses across the country.” Instead of throwing their part-timers under the bus, the union held out for a better deal and won a starting pay of $21 an hour, up from $16.20 an hour.

A fifth lesson is that although unions help to boost wages and working conditions, they are not yet strong enough to undo the damage of unfettered capitalism. Wages continue to lag behind inflation. As worker productivity has risen, wages have fallen. The UPS Teamsters had initially demanded a starting salary of $25 an hour for its part-time workers, who are nearly half of all the company’s workers. Although $21 an hour is progress, some workers are unhappy. One UPS warehouse worker told the Washington Post, “Working this job, it feels like the good parts of life—like going out to dinner and taking a vacation—aren’t meant for us.”

He added, “I’m prepared to vote no,” and who could blame him? Throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, UPS delivery drivers risked their lives to bring us essential products. They braved heat waves, long hours, and heavy loads.

Today, they are continuing to offer a public service: showing the rest of the U.S. workforce how workers can find power in numbers, be militant, stand up for one another, stare down corporate greed, and demand our full suite of labor rights.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The highly anticipated live-action film starring Margot Robbie is an attempt to redeem the problematic toy. But it’s really just an expensive ad campaign for an outdated doll.

A few months ago, my two sons, aged 10 and 15, told me they were excited to see the new Barbie film. I was surprised. They are not interested in dolls, and, in spite of Barbie being the top-selling doll in the world, they were not very familiar with the iconic toy until they saw an online trailer of the live-action feature film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Although I had played with a much-loved Barbie doll as a child, I had grown up to hate everything the doll stood for: dangerously unattainable beauty standards, the deliberate vapidity of femininity and feminism, and the centering of whiteness.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

But, the clever marketing of the new film has people of all demographics eager to see it: “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you,” proclaimed the trailer. There should have been an addendum: “If you’re indifferent because you have no idea who or what Barbie is, this movie is also for you.” Because, ultimately the film is a giant commercial for an outdated toy. Its interminably long marketing campaign helped generate breathless anticipation for months.

Launched in 1959 and conceived by Ruth Handler, one of the co-founders of Mattel, Barbie was modeled on a German doll named Bild Lilli, marketed to adult men as a sort of gag gift. According to Brennan Kilbane, writing in Allure, “Bild Lilli was a single-panel comic character in a German tabloid—a sweet, ditzy, curvy figment of the male imagination, frequently losing her clothes and enjoying the company of men. Each punch line hinged on Bild Lilli’s hotness, her horniness, or her lack of common sense. When a police officer informed Bild Lilli that the two-piece swimsuit she was wearing was in violation of decency laws, she responded earnestly, ‘Which piece do you want me to take off?’”

Handler wanted to market an “adult” doll to little girls because the prevalent dolls of her time were either baby dolls or else they had, in her words, “flat chests, big bellies, and squatty legs—they were built like overweight 6- or 8-year-olds.” Apparently, Handler, who appears in the film as a wise elderly grandmother played by Rhea Perlman, felt that a doll with impossibly frail wrists and a thin waist was a more suitable aspiration.

Vox’s Constance Grady put it best, saying, “The plastic body little girls are given to practice being grown-up with is the same as the plastic body grown men hang from the rearview mirrors of their cars as a dirty joke,” referring to the Bild Lilli dolls. This point is especially disturbing when, as Grady also pointed out, the first commercial for the doll featured a girl singing “Someday I’m gonna be exactly like you… Barbie, beautiful Barbie, I’ll make believe that I am you.”

The doll has always been tone-deaf. A few years after it was launched, just as second-wave feminism was gaining ground, Mattel released Slumber Party Barbie, who “came with pink pajamas, a pink scale set at 110 lbs, and a diet book on how to lose weight, with only one instruction: DON’T EAT!”

Since then, the doll’s history has been marked by a constant tug-of-war as it has attempted to market misogyny to a world whose women are tired of being trodden upon. The film is a similar mess of contradictions, and as Andi Zeisler wrote in a New York Times op-ed, it is “one that acknowledges and embraces that weirdness under the vigilant gaze of a corporate chaperone.” Zeisler admitted how she didn’t realize that “the film’s narrative would essentially serve as a Mattel redemption arc,” turning her as a viewer into, “an unwitting Barbie P.R. booster.”

Now, just as Mattel managed to reinvent a male fantasy as a girl’s toy, the new Barbie movie is reinventing the doll as a universally beloved character in our imagination. Forget product placement—the insidious insertion of branded products into films and television shows as a sly form of advertising—the Barbie movie is one giant advertisement, the inaugural creation of Mattel Films. Rather than creating new characters to tell a story and then milking the profits from the resulting merchandise—as is the traditional marketing ploy popularized by films such as Toy Story—Mattel has followed in the footsteps of companies such as Lego and its popular 2015 Lego Movie.

There has been little mention of this as problematic within the slew of glowing reviews of the film. Is this to be the future of film? Indeed, filmmaker J.J. Abrams is working on a new Hot Wheels film.

Audiences are supposed to overlook the ethical conundrums presented by the Barbie film in part because the film’s creator, Greta Gerwig, apparently identifies as a feminist. But, she’s hardly a critic of the doll and its regressive representation. According to the film’s costume designer Jacqueline Durran, “Greta really liked… [the outfits in the film that had an ’80s aesthetic because] they chimed with the date of the Barbies that she used to play with… She was a great Barbie fan.”

Additionally, because the film validates the various criticisms leveled at the doll over the years, audiences are expected to embrace this bizarre brand-turned-film as entertainment. “The role comes with a lot of baggage. But with that comes a lot of exciting ways to attack it,” said Robbie, who was one of the initiators of the project and who stars as the main (white, blonde) Barbie protagonist (there are many other Barbies in supporting roles) in the film. But the film doesn’t truly attack Barbie’s baggage. The opening scene of the film, showcased in its first trailer, was a nod to the deeply problematic original Barbie, with Robbie appearing in the same black-and-white striped bathing suit worn by the first version of the dolls to hit store shelves in 1959.

In spite of the film’s clever marketing as a universal project, it does not challenge Barbie’s main function as a dress-up doll. Durran told British Vogue, “Barbie really is interlinked with fashion, because how you play with her is by dressing her,” and that aspect remains central in the film.

Audiences are being encouraged to wear the doll’s signature Pepto-Bismol pink to theaters—the same color associated with gender stereotyping of girls from birth into adulthood. It’s not enough anymore for little girls to aspire to Barbie’s standards; “Barbie will certainly strike a chord with adult women—even more so than with young girls,” explained a Harper’s Bazaar shopping guide for what to wear to the film.

One “trend expert” explained the push to wear pink to People Magazine, saying, “[w]ith many nostalgic for simpler, sunnier, and more carefree times, it only makes sense that this ’80s-inspired, unapologetically pink aesthetic is taking center stage as the ‘it’ style of the summer.”

So effective is the film’s branding campaign that there is now a massive social media fashion trend called #Barbiecore on TikTok garnering hundreds of millions of views for posts created by young women influencers heavily caking their faces with makeup to look like the doll, wearing pink tulle, batting fake eyelashes, and pursing plump glittery lips coyly. Their posts are tagged with the recognizable Barbie logo, fulfilling Mattel’s wildest marketing dreams while setting women back decades. This is apparently the new face of feminism.

The criticism that the film is a blow to feminism is not overblown. The Barbie movie has popularized the horrific-sounding label of “bimbo feminism” (really!). “Instead of abandoning femininity to succeed in a patriarchal society, bimbo feminism embraces femininity while supporting women’s advancement,” wrote Harriet Fletcher in the Conversation. In other words, women are supposed to attain career success while also shaping themselves to fit the male gaze.

There persists a belief that Barbie is indeed a feminist icon in spite of Mattel steering clear of embracing the f-word. Robbie Brenner, head of Mattel Films, has decided that his company’s film is “the ultimate female-empowerment movie.” This disturbing state of discourse on feminism is the direct result of relying on corporate America to define women’s rights and status. While America Ferrera’s character as a real-life woman struggling with the pressures of patriarchy is the film’s most refreshing and powerful aspect, she remains relegated to a supporting role.

Even the ridiculous right-wing backlash to the film, casting it as “anti-man,” is being touted as a measure of the film’s feminism. If it’s pissing off the misogynist incels, surely it’s on the feminist track, claim the film’s defenders. “[I]t’s not a Barbie doll that threatens women’s rights, opportunities, and safety—it’s the patriarchy,” wrote Fletcher in the Conversation. Really, though, both are true, just to different extents.

When I was about 8 or 9, my immigrant parents bought me a Barbie doll. They were proud to be able to (barely) afford a pricey Western toy for their daughter. My Barbie was blonde and blue-eyed, and I happily played with her for years, well before I ever met a blond, blue-eyed person in real life. My doll set the standard for feminine beauty—one that was out of reach of a brown-skinned, dark-haired kid like me whose body type was chubby in contrast to my Barbie, but typical for my age and size. In 2016, Mattel attempted to diversify the doll’s body types. But “curvy” Barbie was still thinner than most real-life women.

Defenders of the film also point to its racially diverse casting and its embrace of varying body types. After all, Issa Rae plays a Black Barbie, Simu Liu is cast as an Asian Ken, and Nicola Coughlan is a gorgeous plus-size version of the doll. But, as Kilbane explained in Allure, “The Barbieverse distinguishes between two Barbies. There’s Barbie ‘the icon,’ or ‘brand,’ who can be blonde and short, or Black and svelte, or Frida Kahlo and white. There’s Barbie ‘the character,’ who is exactly who you’re thinking of, and will be played by Margot Robbie.”

Unlike Disney’s recent reboot of The Little Mermaid, which actually dared to reimagine the central character as a young Black woman played by Halle Bailey, Barbie—the “real” Barbie—will remain white, blonde, skinny, and conventionally pretty, the ultimate aspiration. The rest of us are part of the supporting cast, as per usual.

Even though Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz said, “It’s not about making movies so that we can go and sell more toys,” that’s a misleading claim. Toy company executives are hoping that the movie renews interest in dolls to the tune of billions of dollars. It is an attempt to redeem Barbie and its problematic history so that people will go out and buy the doll. Ultimately the clearest description of the film—enjoyable and thought-provoking as it is—is that it is a $145 million ad campaign for a toy that should have faded away years ago.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Refusing to negotiate better compensation and fair working conditions for actors and writers, major film and television studios are to blame for the work stoppages afflicting their industry.

Hollywood has come to a standstill this summer as actors join their writer colleagues on the picket line. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced that it would be on strike starting July 14, 2023, over negotiations breaking down with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents most of the major studios in the film and television industry. That same body failed to negotiate in good faith with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which has been on strike since May 2, 2023. Together, writers and actors represent the majority of creative talent in the most influential film industry in the world.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Even before the SAG-AFTRA strike, labor activity had been surging across the board. Axios tallied the number of striking workers from January to May every year since 2021 and found that by the end of May 2023, there were 119,000 striking workers in the United States—far more than the number on strike during the same period in the previous two years.

Since May, the number of striking workers has surged even higher as 15,000 hotel workers employed by about 60 hotels in Los Angeles went on strike. This was quickly followed by SAG-AFTRA’s 160,000 actors launching their strike, and coming on their heels was the announcement that 340,000 UPS workers could be going on a nationwide strike in August in what would be “the largest strike against a single employer in U.S. history.”

Hollywood’s rank and file joins a phenomenon that has been dubbed #HotLaborSummer, a moment when workers in industries across the nation are making themselves heard about poor working conditions and low pay. Already, production on television shows has halted with the writers’ strike. Viewers anticipating the return of their favorite TV shows in September will likely be waiting a while. As highly anticipated summer movies like “Barbie” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” hit theaters, actors will not attend press junkets, San Diego Comic Con, or any other publicity-related events to promote their projects. The Emmy Awards Show will either be empty of actors and writers or have to be postponed altogether.

In spite of the power they wield in numbers, actors and writers are facing off against moneyed interests that are so flush with cash and other projects that they can afford to wait out the workers. A shocking report in Deadline on how AMPTP plans to drag its feet on negotiating with writers suggests that the same could be in store for actors: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” a studio executive told Deadline. Acknowledging the cold-as-ice approach, several other sources reiterated the statement. One insider called it “a cruel but necessary evil.” If the strike were an on-screen plot, AMPTP executives would be the undisputed villains.

Unlike a potential UPS strike, which could economically devastate the company within days and cost the entire U.S. economy more than $7 billion over 10 days, Hollywood studios feel they can dig in their heels. According to the Deadline report, “as network schedules shift to unscripted shows and streamers buy up foreign content, the studios and streamers have been saving money on shuttered productions and cost-cutting.”

Filmmaker Boots Riley, whose new “anti-capitalist” streaming series “I’m a Virgo” has garnered serious accolades, called it a “union-busting tactic” on Twitter and added, “they want 2break [sic] us.” He told the Hollywood Reporter that the studios are “trying to put forward… a message that you’re not going to be able to have a say in how we do things.”

Indeed, that’s precisely what the Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger seemed to be saying when he claimed that the actors on strike “have to be realistic about the business environment and what this business can deliver.” Iger and his fellow entertainment industry executives appear to be claiming that it’s simply impossible for companies like Disney to continue to remain viable and pay its writers and actors what they want.

But, consider the shocking disparity in pay between rank-and-file workers and their bosses. Actor Kendrick Sampson, who is known for his work on “The Vampire Diaries” and “Insecure,” and who is a common fixture at Black Lives Matter protests in Los Angeles, illustrated on his Instagram page just how poorly he is compensated in residuals, or royalty payments—a major point of contention in negotiations with AMPTP. From the 50 residual checks he opened, he counted a grand total of only $86 in residual payments. “This is why we strike,” explained Sampson.

Meanwhile, Disney CEO Iger recently spent $7 million in renovations alone on his lavish $33 million Los Angeles mansion. Forbes reported in 2019 that he was worth about $690 million—a figure so unimaginably large that he could afford to work for free and would never want for anything. In spite of this, he siphons off $27 million a year in compensation to run Disney.

What’s most potentially powerful about the actors’ strike is the narrative force it wields across the country and the world. Movies and television shows influence our thinking on so many social issues. In our celebrity-obsessed culture, actors are loved and lauded. Now, they’re under attack from greedy millionaires and billionaires.

“Abbott Elementary” star Sheryl Lee Ralph, a veteran, award-winning actor, explained it in plain terms: “We’re fighting for our art… We’re fighting for what we love, and what we know people love. We’re not big million-dollar companies. No, we’re people, and we want to enjoy what we do, and we want to make a living at it. That’s what this is about.”

The actors’ decision to strike could spark interest in labor issues and in the oppositional dynamic between bosses and workers that Ralph articulated. If our favorite movie stars are on a picket line demanding better pay and fairer working conditions just so they can survive doing what they love to do, it could have a ripple effect, inspiring others to make similar demands of their own employers.

In contrast to Ralph, AMPTP sounds heartless, responding to the SAG-AFTRA strike in a statement, saying, “The Union has regrettably chosen a path that will lead to financial hardship for countless thousands of people who depend on the industry.” There was no mention of the financial hardship that AMPTP has put union members through, as industry executives deflect blame on everyone but themselves, casting beloved actors as the villains.

Iger lamented that striking actors “are adding to a set of challenges that this business is already facing, that is quite frankly, very disruptive.” But disruption is precisely the point. If it were convenient, a worker strike would affect nothing.

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Our economic priorities have created a serious housing crisis and fueled homelessness. Solving the problem simply requires us to change our priorities from profits to people.

California is home to Hollywood and Disneyland, sun and sand, and… nearly one-third of all unhoused people in the entire nation. Compare this to the fact that 12 percent of the nation resides in the Golden State and it becomes clear that there is a serious problem of housing that undercuts the Left Coast’s liberal reputation.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

An extensive study of the state’s struggle with homelessness by the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) paints a detailed picture of the problem, and it’s not pretty. Homelessness is thriving at the intersections of racism, sexual violence, overpolicing, and more. The report’s authors explain, it “occurs in conjunction with structural conditions that produce and reproduce inequalities.”

Contrary to the popular perception that good weather fuels voluntary homelessness and consists largely of transplants from out of the state, the report points out that 90 percent of the unhoused had been living in California when they lost access to housing. And, three-quarters continue to remain in the same county.

The problem also manifests in systemic racism, with Black and Indigenous people overrepresented among the unhoused compared to their populations. More than a quarter of all unhoused people in California are Black, and yet only 5 percent of the state’s overall population is Black.

Homelessness also fuels sexual violence that disproportionately impacts unhoused LGBTQ people and women. More than one-third of transgender and nonbinary people experiencing homelessness reported being victims of sexual violence, while 16 percent of cisgender women did so as well.

And, nearly half of all the study’s participants (47 percent) report being harassed by police. Law enforcement routinely subjects California’s unhoused population to violent police raids, dehumanizing searches and seizures of property, forced relocation, and incarceration. The unhoused are disproportionately criminalized by a system that pours a significant amount of tax dollars into policing rather than into affordable housing. Increasingly, cities are simply making it illegal to live outdoors, as if criminalizing homelessness will magically make the math of housing affordability work out.

The UCSF report is neither the first, nor will it be the last one to explore the extent of homelessness in California. And while it makes clear how serious the problem is, the main question remains: how to solve it?

There are several policy solutions put forward including rental assistance in the form of housing vouchers, an exploration of shared housing models, mental health treatment, and even a progressive-sounding monthly income program. But these are merely metaphorical band-aids being applied to a gaping, bleeding wound. None of them address the fundamental reason of why there are more than 171,000 people without housing in California.

Interestingly, the UCSF study’s main author, Dr. Margot Kushel, honed in on the core issue in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle when she said, “We have got to bring housing costs down, and we’ve got to bring incomes up… We need to solve the fundamental problem—the rent is just too high.”

This is a nationwide problem and California is merely on the front lines.

So, how to bring housing costs down? The federal government sees a shortage of homes as the problem, treating it as an issue of supply and demand: increase the supply and the price will fall. But there is no shortage of housing in the nation. There is a shortage of affordable housing and as long as moneyed interests keep buying up housing, building more won’t be a fix.

Since at least 2008, hedge funds have been buying up single-family homes and rental units in California, throwing a bottomless well of cash at a resource that individuals need for their survival and pushing house prices and rents out of reach for most ordinary people. This too is a nationwide phenomenon, one that was extensively outlined in a 2018 report produced by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), Americans for Financial Reform, and Public Advocates.

That report makes it clear that Wall Street hedge funds see housing as the next frontier in profitable investing. Once these funds buy up homes and apartments to rent out, they cut the labor and material costs associated with maintenance, and routinely raise the rents.

And why wouldn’t they? Their bottom line is profits, not safe, clean, fair, affordable housing. In 2000, the average American renter spent just over 22 percent of their income on housing. Today that percentage has jumped to 30. Hedge fund landlords are likely celebrating their success at getting “consumers” to fork over a larger share of money for their “products.”

The only way to stop hedge funds from taking over the housing market is… [drumroll] to stop hedge funds from buying up homes. To that end, the ACCE report calls on local municipalities and state governments to offer tenants the first right of refusal in purchasing homes, along with appropriate supports, and then offer nonprofit institutions like community land trusts to have the second right of refusal to purchase. It also calls on the federal government to “not incentivize speculation, or act to favor Wall Street ownership of housing assets over other ownership structures.”

The other end of the problem is that incomes are too low. According to Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the federal minimum wage ought to be $21.50 an hour in order to keep up with the rise in productivity. But it’s not. It’s a horrifyingly low $7.25 an hour. And while nearly half of all states have pushed that wage floor far higher to about $15 an hour, it doesn’t come close to what’s needed. Even the few dozen cities that have forced the minimum wage past their state requirements don’t get to $21.50 an hour.

Yes, individual incomes are rising because of worker demands on employers, but they are not keeping up with inflation. And even though government officials admit that rising wages don’t fuel inflation, the Federal Reserve sees rising wages as the problem, countering them with higher interest rates.

Putting together these pieces of the puzzle, one can only conclude that our economy is designed to keep ordinary Americans living hand to mouth, running on an endless treadmill just to keep from falling into homelessness.

The rent is too damn high—to cite affordable housing activists—and wages are too damn low. That is the nutshell description of an economy that is simply not intended to center human needs.

Passing laws to prevent hedge funds and other large businesses from buying up homes and apartments and raising the minimum wage to at least $21.50 are hardly radical ideas, but they offer course corrections for an economy that is running roughshod over most of us. Rather than tinkering at the edges of the problem and putting forward complex-sounding solutions that don’t actually address the root of the issue, wouldn’t society be better served by redesigning our economy to make homelessness obsolete?

AUTHOR BIO: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

In its recent ruling on affirmative action in college admissions, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices squarely came down on the side of race and class-based preferences—for wealthy whites.

The United States Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down race as a factor in college and university admissions was in response to a case brought by a conservative organization claiming that Asian Americans are harmed by preferences for people of other nonwhite races. The case, which focused on Harvard University and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action policies, used Asian students as a wedge against Black, Latino, Indigenous, and other communities of color. More importantly, it left preferences for wealthy white students intact.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Justice Clarence Thomas, writing on behalf of the majority that voted in favor of ending affirmative action, said in response to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion, “How, for example, would Justice Jackson explain the need for race-based preferences to the Chinese student who has worked hard his whole life, only to be denied college admission in part because of his skin color?”

His concern for Chinese students would be touching were it not for the fact that, according to the New York Times, Thomas “was admitted to Yale Law School under an explicit affirmative action plan with the goal of having blacks and other minority members make up about 10 percent of the entering class.” Further, Thomas said in a 1983 speech, that affirmative action policies were of “paramount importance.” He added that “But for them, God only knows where I would be today… These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.” He has significantly changed his tune since then.

Janelle Wong, a professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, told NBC that the right uses fake concerns about Asian students to promote their goal of undermining racial equity policies, saying, “They weaponize concerns about anti-Asian attacks and violence against other minorities.” Wong added, “This is an old tactic in white supremacy’s playbook and should not be allowed to succeed.”

In using Asians to undermine the policies that offer equity-based redress for racially marginalized groups, Thomas and his conservative colleagues—the rest of whom are all white—left intact a crucial method from which wealthy white people benefit: so-called legacy admissions.

Journalist Michael Harriot put it this way on Twitter, “The Court struck down Affirmative Action For everyone except WHITE PEOPLE.”

By that, he meant that conservative Supreme Court justices did not restrict preferences for the children of alumni, employees, donors, and other similarly well-connected, privileged people.

Former president George W. Bush is a classic example of how legacy admissions are effectively a form of affirmative action for whites. How else would a mediocre student like him be admitted to Yale University? But because his father and grandfather were both Yale alumni, Bush was basically a nepo baby. Legacy admissions give people like him a leg-up in ensuring that generational wealth, privilege, and power remain in the family.

The origins of legacy admissions lie in antisemitism. According to a book by Jerome Karabel written nearly two decades ago, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, legacy admissions were a way to reduce the number of Jewish Americans who were increasingly academically qualified to win admission but who did not fit into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition that such schools uplifted. So, elite universities changed the goal posts, ensuring that family ties gave mediocre, but well-connected, Protestant whites an edge.

That preferential treatment continues today, reinforcing white supremacy. For example, according to one Ivy League college admissions consultation firm Admission Sight, legacy admissions are a way for universities to deepen “their economic and community-building contributions.” Such euphemistic language obscures the fact that the ugly practice of legacy admissions is in fact a race-based affirmative action policy—for wealthy whites—a community that needs no affirmation given the white supremacist society in which it flourishes.

Admission Sight also admitted that “According to the released Harvard legacy acceptance rate, more than 36 percent of the students in the Harvard Class of 2022 are descendants of previous Harvard students.” Those who cannot claim their parents attended Harvard, since 2015, “had a five times lower chance of being accepted than those who came from a Harvard family.”

There is another entry point for wealth and privilege if legacy admissions don’t apply—bribery. In a court case stemming from the college admissions scandal that broke in 2019, it was revealed that the University of Southern California was willing to consider applicants whose families offered large donations to the school. These “special interest” or “VIP” donors received preferential treatment. Even the University of California, a state university system, has been found to give preferential treatment to wealthy whites. A state audit found that at least 64 people, most of them wealthy and white, were admitted in recent years to UC schools solely because of their family connections and donations.

Whites have even used affirmative action policies intended for racial minorities whenever possible to access higher education, seeking to game the system by using genetic testing.

A 2006 New York Times story quoted the white father of adopted twins gleefully touting that newly available DNA tests showed his white-passing sons were “9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African.” The man admitted that the birth parents of the twins were white, but that “you can bet that any advantage we can take we will.”

But when a white woman named Nicole Katchur was told that she ought to take a genetic test to see if nonwhite ancestry could help her win admission, instead of calling out admissions officers for encouraging white people to game a system intended to promote racial equity, Katchur instead sued to end affirmative action. Rather than seeing her whiteness as a built-in advantage, she blamed policies that helped people of color obtain a level playing field. That same logic informed the 2016 lawsuit against affirmative action brought by another white woman, Abigail Fisher, in Texas. Indeed white women, who have been the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action policies in college admissions, have also led the charge to dismantle those policies.

The Supreme Court’s latest ruling on affirmative action doesn’t end race-based preference. It further entrenches white supremacist preferences.

The good news is that while one of the Supreme Court’s conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch, disagreed with his liberal colleague, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, on ending race-based admissions for nonwhite students, he agreed with her that legacy admissions had to end as well.

The ruling has also spurred President Joe Biden to go on the offensive. In a speech responding to the ruling, he said, “Today, I’m directing the Department of Education to analyze what practices help build… more inclusive and diverse student bodies and what practices hold that back, practices like legacy admissions and other systems that expand privilege instead of opportunity.”

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon told MarketWatch, “The longstanding use of legacy and donor preferences in admissions has unfairly elevated children of donors and alumni—who may be excellent students and well-qualified, but are the last people who need an extra leg up in the complicated and competitive college admissions process.” He explained that a policy like legacy admissions, “creates an unlevel playing field for students without those built-in advantages, especially minority and first-generation students.”

To that end, Merkley and Democratic Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York recently introduced the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, which would end preferential treatment for applications from wealthy, privileged families.

Whether or not the bill moves in Congress, the fact remains that college admissions are biased—toward wealthy white Americans. Those conservatives celebrating the end of affirmative action have exposed yet again how their real agenda is to ensure that white wealth continues to benefit from unfair advantages.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The doomed OceanGate submersible offers us many of the same lessons that the 1912 Titanic sinking did.

A hundred and eleven years ago, a ship considered to be “unsinkable” fell to the bottom of the ocean after hitting an iceberg. More than a thousand people died as the Titanic sank into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, among them the engineer who had warned against cutting corners and safety standards.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The parallels between the Titanic and the Titan—the tiny headline-garnering submersible that was lost while trying to view the sunken ship’s remains—would be laughably striking were it not for the fact that lives were lost.

Whereas the White Star Line company was focused on building luxury liners for the very wealthy, OceanGate, the company that owned the doomed submersible, runs a marine tourism business for people willing to pay $250,000 to dive more than 12,000 feet into the ocean inside a cramped tube to see the ruins of the Titanic.

There appears to be no end to the irony linking the Titanic to the Titan. OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who was piloting the submersible and is presumed dead along with his four passengers, once boasted about “breaking rules” to engineer a craft made of carbon fiber instead of steel to withstand the pressures of the deep ocean. According to the New York Times, his wife Wendy, “is a great-great-granddaughter of the retailing magnate Isidor Straus and his wife, Ida, two of the wealthiest people to die aboard the [Titanic] ocean liner.”

Hindsight is 20-20. The Titanic’s appeal endures in part because it offered a lesson in capitalist hubris as a ship deemed “unsinkable” sank on its maiden voyage in spite of warnings about safety standards. It also offered a stark lesson in how the wealthy were privileged over the poor before and during evacuation. But the Titan story suggests our values have not changed since 1912.

Like the Titanic, the Titan faced criticism over safety standards. In 2018, OceanGate’s own director of marine operations, David Lochridge warned of “potential dangers to passengers of the Titan.” That same year, several experts with the Marine Technology Society signed onto a letter warning Rush of potentially “catastrophic” consequences for forgoing safety certifications.

In a 2019 press release, OceanGate countered such criticisms saying, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” Just as the Titanic’s owners eschewed some safety standards in their eagerness to sell tickets to high-paying customers, the OceanGate CEO made it clear that he felt he was above the laws of physics. “At some point, safety just is pure waste,” he said a year before his death. Ouch.

Experts now believe it was Rush’s reliance on carbon fiber that likely caused the Titan to implode. Rapid innovation can cause rapid death.

The fate of the Titan also offers a warning against the arrogance of thrill-seeking billionaires. The “extreme tourism” industry has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions were eased. One of the five men who died on the Titan, Hamish Harding, a British billionaire based in Dubai, UAE, had a penchant for dangerous and expensive exploration and boasted recognition by the Guinness World Records Book. Just a year before he boarded the Titan to dive more than ten thousand feet below the ocean surface, he flew into space on board Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s vanity project, Blue Origin.

“What I’ve seen with the ultra-rich—money is no object when it comes to experiences,” remarked a public relations specialist to CNN. “They want something they’ll never forget.”

While the Guinness World Records eulogized the late Harding with words like “adventuring,” “pioneering,” and “entrepreneurial,” according to Newsweek, the type of extreme tourism that Harding and others like him are drawn to “can threaten the environment or lead to exorbitant rescue missions and, rarely and most recently, tragedy.”

Indeed, a massive amount of publicly funded infrastructure was mobilized in a days-long rescue operation for the doomed Titan before it was known that the submersible had imploded, killing everyone on board.

U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral John Mauger told CNN, “Teams were able to mobilize an immense amount of gear to the site in just really a remarkable amount of time… given the fact that we started without any sort of vessel response plan for this or any sort of pre-staged resources.” In response to a call for help from the U.S. Navy, even the French government sent a ship to help.

News stories breathlessly shared details of what it would be like to be lost in the deep sea inside a claustrophobically small metal tube floating in the ocean’s abyss, piloted only by a video game console. We were called upon to personally feel the pain of the wealthy explorers.

But there was little public discussion of the disaster that took place only a week before the Titan went missing when hundreds of migrants heading from Libya to Italy were presumed dead after their boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Writing for NBC, reporter Chantal Da Silva wrote one of the very few stories on what is likely to be among the worst such disasters in recent history and rightfully compared it to the response garnered by the Titan. She quoted Human Rights Watch’s Judith Sunderland, saying, “It’s a horrifying and disgusting contrast,” to see the difference in resources being mobilized for the Titan versus a boat of hundreds of desperate refugees. Sunderland added, “The willingness to allow certain people to die while every effort is made to save others… it’s a… really dark reflection on humanity.”

The Titan is what you get when a corporate cost-cutting mindset meets the lavish thrill-seeking, money-is-no-object ethos of billionaires—the same sort of people who espouse cost-cutting in the interest of profits. In his 1955 bestselling book about the Titanic, A Night to Remember, Walter Lord wrote, “The Titanic woke them up. Never again would they be quite so sure of themselves. In technology especially, the disaster was a terrible blow.” Will the Titan’s fate be a lesson to the so-called “innovators” who scoff at safety regulations as a waste of time?

Lord also wrote of the Titanic, “If this supreme achievement was so terribly fragile, what about everything else? If wealth meant so little on this cold April night, did it mean so much the rest of the year?” As the bodies of migrants whose names we will never know remain lost at sea, we are reminded that just like the billionaires who care more for the state of a rotting shipwreck than of humans fleeing violence, war, and poverty, our own collective values have been perverted to uplift elites over others. Will society rethink its faith in moneyed heroes?

As broken bits of the submersible lie on the ocean floor next to the equally doomed Titanic, when will we learn from the lessons in hubris offered by such disasters?

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and how it’s going to change the world is a popular topic of conversation these days. There is concern that it will generate ever-more deceptive imagery that can upend people’s lives or create propaganda that can fuel mass fear. There’s the ultimate fear of human extinction from the increasingly sophisticated evolution of AI. These are valid worries.

Then there’s the seemingly more mundane threat that AI poses to employment. It is expressed in the form of countless stories that have some iteration of the headline: which jobs are at most risk of being lost to AI?

Most analysts predict that AI will replace graphic designers, copywriters, customer service agents, and telemarketers. Some of the most dystopian of these listicles focus on teachers and psychologists being replaced by AI.

The stories are written with the intention of predicting the coming storm so that people can prepare themselves for the future. But the headlines are also intentionally designed as clickbait, likely fueling fear-based consumption of the stories by readers eager to find out if their own jobs are likely to be replaced by AI in the coming years. Indeed, I found several stories, like this one, where my own vocation of journalism was in the crosshairs of AI.

The framing of “Will AI replace your job?” obscures the bigger problem that has been at work for centuries: and that is how our jobs, and therefore our educations, careers, and livelihoods, are at the whims of a capitalist system intent on minimizing costs and maximizing profits.

Indeed, Mathias Doepfner, the CEO of the German media group that owns Politico, who warned that AI could replace journalism jobs, used Darwinian logic in saying, “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was—or simply replace it,” and therefore, “Only those [publishing houses] who create the best original content will survive.”

And while critics of AI counter that it could never replace humans because of our innate creativity and curiosity, the point that often gets missed is that humans are the ones engaging in the great AI replacement of jobs—a small handful of humans. They hail from the rarified group of elites who sit in corporate board rooms and deliver presentations to shareholders about how they plan to maximize dividends by replacing humans with AI.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether AI can replace humans. It should be: why are some humans so intent on replacing the jobs that the rest of us hold, with AI? Even further, why do we live in a world where we lack so much control over our destinies in the first place?

AI, like other innovations that have automated jobs, is simply a tool that can make life easier. I can use a machine to wash my clothes and another one to wash my dishes instead of wasting my time with handwashing. Graphic designers already use software to digitally paint images instead of painting them by hand. If AI is a tool that can make certain jobs easier and free up our time for relaxation and leisure while we reap the same or greater compensation then so be it. But it ought not to be inevitable that corporate employers will cut our salaries or entirely replace our jobs with AI. That is a choice being made in a system that relies on profit motives rather than human well-being.

What we consider a vocation, big business treats as a cog in a giant wheel called “the labor market.” Dire predictions of AI “disruptions” to this market cast the entire trend as almost a natural phenomenon, whose trajectory is simply out of human hands.

But the reason that AI is booming is because it translates into a giant windfall for corporations. One economic prediction concludes that “the market for artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to show strong growth in the coming decade. Its value of nearly [$100 billion] is expected to grow twentyfold by 2030, up to nearly [$2 trillion].”

AI is big business, perhaps the biggest of them all. The dystopia it promises is a natural endpoint—of unregulated capitalism. If the “man behind the curtain” is eager to replace us, why can we not rip the curtain down and replace him?

So, I asked ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot that is basically a smarter Google, the following question: “Does a capitalist economic model center human [well-being]?” The first sentence of a lengthy response was, “The capitalist economic model, in its purest form, does not explicitly center human well-being as its primary objective.”

ChatGPT proceeded to tell me that “Capitalism emphasizes individual economic freedom and the pursuit of self-interest, with the belief that this leads to overall economic growth and prosperity.”

“Belief” is the operative word here. It is a matter of faith that capitalism leads to prosperity for all. There is a religious fervor that was once popularly called “trickle-down economics,” underpinning a system where reality is at odds with the fantasy of capitalist wealth sharing.

When examining broad trends, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that wealth inequality in the U.S. grew significantly between 1979 and 2019. The CBO report, which is based on a nonpartisan analysis, concluded that “Increases in market income at the top of the distribution drove much of the rise in income inequality over that time.” In other words, the rich got richer because they hoarded more wealth.

It also found that “transfers increasingly lessened income inequality when transfer rates grew among households in the lowest quintile.” This technical language simply means that when people accessed government benefits their incomes increased. It’s like saying, “People benefitted when given benefits.”

There is no need for belief or faith in a system where the government is designed to directly help the people it represents. Belief and faith are required only to prop up the great lie that a capitalist economy helps everyone prosper. If we want people to prosper, we can make it so. There are many forms this can take: renewing the child tax credit, replacing private health care with a tax-funded Medicare for All system, increasing Social Security benefits, paying reparations to Black people, and even guaranteeing a basic income. None of them rely on faith. They help people because they are designed to help people.

I asked ChatGPT, “What sort of economic system can replace capitalism and ensure the [well-being] and prosperity of the vast majority of humans?” The machine spat out five different options ranging from socialism to a “resource-based” economy “where the allocation of resources is based on careful assessment and sustainable management of Earth’s resources.”

Even AI knows that there are alternatives to the current system that rules our lives. If capitalism can replace us, surely, we can replace capitalism?

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Donald Trump appeared in a Miami court on Tuesday, becoming the first former president ever to be arrested and arraigned on federal charges. He has been indicted on 37 counts, which include illegally holding on to national security documents after leaving office, blocking efforts to retrieve the documents, and lying about them. The indictment includes photographic images of documents haphazardly being stored in boxes in various unsecured locations at his Florida resort.

The judge that Trump faces, who was apparently randomly assigned to the case, is one Aileen Cannon, who made headlines last year for her pro-Trump interference when the former president requested the appointment of a “special master” in a case around the FBI’s seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago.

Retired judge, writer, and contributor to Truthdig.com, Bill Blum, spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on Rising Up With Sonali about the legal and political ramifications of Trump’s arrest and charges.

The views expressed here and on Rising Up With Sonali do not necessarily reflect the opinion of YES! Media.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Editor's note: This story's credit line was corrected with the original source.

Corporate media outlets have often furthered racist narratives, and do so even today. In contrast, independent media outlets have centered racial justice, offering platforms to marginalized communities.

Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News have long pushed racist narratives to further their goals. And, outlets like the New York Times—the so-called “liberal media”—do too little, too late, to push back; it falls to the ranks of independent media outlets to create and promote counternarratives based on racial justice.

This excerpt is adapted from chapter two of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice by Sonali Kolhatkar. Copyright © 2023 by Sonali Kolhatkar. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. www.citylights.com. It was produced for the web by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This is not a new phenomenon. Pacifica Radio, where I spent nearly two decades as a radio programmer, houses in its archive a rich library of recordings of civil rights leaders who are considered iconic heroes today, but who, during their lifetimes, were generally ignored or even vilified by the establishment press.

From talks by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to James Baldwin and Angela Davis, and almost everyone in between, Pacifica Radio’s journalists painstakingly recorded speeches and interviews featuring movement leaders and activists of color considered too controversial for the white-dominated press. Meanwhile, their mainstream counterparts only found the courage to do the same decades later, after society had concluded that the Black Freedom movement was on the right side of history.

That trend continues today.

Believing Black Accounts of Injustice

On December 22, 2014, I invited Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, for an interview on my live morning drive-time radio show on 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles (also televised on Free Speech TV). Together with her colleagues Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, Cullors had helped to coin and popularize the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” in summer 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida.

Cullors, now a best-selling author and a sought-after speaker, at that time was not as well known to corporate media outlets and was rarely offered a platform to discuss ideas that corporate media outlets felt uncomfortable tackling.

She told me the origin story of the simple, but powerful phrase “Black Lives Matter” in the aftermath of Zimmerman’s acquittal:

'I just lost it, I was crying and disturbed. We have all this evidence that this young man was hunted by George Zimmerman, and yet George Zimmerman still gets off the hook. So, what do our lives mean?… For me, it was this intense amount of grief that came over me. But I’m also an organizer, and so I quickly moved my grief into action, and I just started going on social media and started writing [to] Black people and saying that I love them and checking on other Black people.

'Myself and Alicia Garza got into a Facebook conversation and she said this thing—to Black folks in particular who were saying, ‘We should have known better, of course they were gonna treat us this way’—she started saying to folks, ‘You know, I’m always going to be surprised. I’m never going to let them numb me from saying that our lives don’t matter.’ And she said, ‘Our lives matter, Black lives matter.’

'And then under the Facebook thread, I hashtagged ‘Black Lives Matter.’ And so, from there, literally in that moment, it was like a light bulb for so many Black people, and on social media at that point. And I started tagging Black folks saying, ‘Your life matters, Black Lives Matter.’ I started tagging all my Black friends. I got on the phone with [Alicia] that night. We said we wanted this to be a project. And so, a couple of days later on July 15, riKu Matsuda from ‘Flip the Script’ here [on KPFK] called me up to be on the show and I was going to talk about Black Lives Matter. It happened very organically.'

When I asked her if there was a link between the police killings of Black people and the history of Black people being lynched in America, Cullors said, “I think Black Lives Matter [activists]… are making those connections. And I think mainstream media is not talking about this.”

Although most news media in 2020 temporarily and superficially embraced the idea behind Black Lives Matter—the simple notion that Black people are human—they largely ignored it for the first seven years. Luckily, in the meantime Cullors had a platform to speak about her crucial work: the independent press.

‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’

Cullors had brought with her to the 2014 interview a young woman named Jasmine Richards who had become newly politicized that summer when a white police officer named Darren Wilson killed a young Black teenager named Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Richards went on to lead a chapter of Black Lives Matter in Pasadena, California, where I live.

In what was one of her first live interviews, Richards made an astute observation about why protesters had engaged in property damage during the racial justice uprisings in Ferguson: “They weren’t looting and messing up things to take them. They were burning things and messing things up so people could pay attention, so CNN could pay attention, ’cause that’s the only way a Black life would matter, is if you mess up some stuff and go crazy… What you see on TV is not really what it is.”

The idea that “if it bleeds, it leads” has long been a corporate media mantra, one that activists have taken note of. But independent journalists have generally refused to succumb to such pressures. Freed from the yoke of ratings and market valuations, independent journalists were able to explore and embrace the idea behind “Black Lives Matter” years before the corporate media caught on.

Similarly, independent media did not need to see videotaped proof of racist police brutality to understand that it was a systemic problem. In the era before smartphones, police claims (“he reached for his gun!”) countered those of Black survivors, and corporate media readily accepted law enforcement’s word. But independent media outlets, understanding the power dynamic between police and their victims, did not require proof of Black people’s word. If Black folks said they experienced racist police brutality, that was reason enough to investigate and report.

Although there are exceptions, the narratives at work in independent media spaces have generally questioned authority and been mindful of Black people’s humanity and truthfulness, whereas corporate media outlets have tended to reproduce an internalized narrative that police—and all other authorities—are almost always right.

Connecting the Dots to Build Racial Justice Narratives

Reluctant to connect dots and identify patterns in the public interest, corporate media outlets have often presented stories as if they are isolated incidents unconnected from one another. Malkia Devich-Cyril, founding director of MediaJustice, noted, “In stories about people of color, about Black people, in particular, the [media] coverage ends up being episodic versus thematic. History and context are lost in these stories.” For consumers of this type of programming, the political landscape can appear bewildering and overwhelming, best left to the “experts” to make sense of.

But context matters, especially in the case of Black Lives Matter. When presented in isolation, the phrase can appear jarring to those who enjoy white racial privilege. It can suggest that Black people are asserting their sovereign right to live in a way that’s confrontational to notions of racial hierarchy. It should not have surprised us, then, that the defensive rejoinders of “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” emerged soon after #BlackLivesMatter was formulated.

When contextualized within the historical arc of racial violence facing Black America—tracing back to the barbarity of enslavement, the horrors of Jim Crow segregation, the systemic and institutional racist structures that persist—the meaning behind the phrase “Black Lives Matter” becomes crystal clear. Black Americans are demanding that the nation start valuing their lives, history, and rights, for it simply hasn’t done so.

It is common practice within independent media to invoke history, to link seemingly disparate phenomena via common threads, to see the patterns that emerge, and to be unafraid to craft narratives with long historical arcs. This is one aspect of what sets us apart from corporate media. And it is what helps readers and viewers of such media to make better sense of the world and its injustices.

In contrast, by reporting isolated stories with little background or historical framing, corporate media outlets rely on the internalized racist narratives promoted by right-wing media outlets to fill in the blanks for readers and viewers.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The Target company’s capitulation to homophobes and transphobes is a testament to the dangers of relying on corporations to uphold social justice.

Just days before the start of June, celebrated around the country and world as “Pride month,” Target corporation decided that proudly allying with the LGBTQIA+ community by selling Pride-themed merchandise was not worth the alienation of bigots. Facing rightwing violence and what it called “volatile circumstances,” the company pulled some of its rainbow-festooned products and moved pride-related displays to the back of stores in some locations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 2015, Caroline Wanga, then Target’s senior director of diversity and inclusion, said, “Target proudly stands with the LGBT community through all that we do.” But nearly eight years later, it didn’t take very much for the company to back off from such a bold statement via its actions.

As per AP, “Target said that customers knocked down Pride displays at some stores, angrily approached workers[,] and posted threatening videos on social media from inside the stores.” Unsurprisingly, the greatest backlash was centered on the company’s sales of “tuck-friendly” bathing suits aimed at adult transgender people. Conservative culture warriors falsely claimed that such bathing suits were being sold in the children’s section—a lie consistent with their claims that transgender people have an agenda of “grooming” children.

In addition to illustrating just how far homophobic and transphobic forces will go to dehumanize a significant swath of the population, the Target brouhaha is a testament to the dangers of relying on corporations to uphold social justice.

Corporations don’t have values—at least not ones centered on human rights anyway. Individuals at corporations may espouse values of social justice. Marketing departments may capitalize on public acceptance of social justice to sell their products. But the only values that corporations inherently hold are ones that maximize profits as voraciously as possible, bound only by the strictest regulations.

Take the advice that marketing expert Allen Adamson of Metaforce gave Target. According to ABC7, Adamson “said Target should have thought through the potential for backlash and taken steps to avoid it, like varying the products it sells by region.” In other words, Target should have been more careful about rearranging its products so as to avoid igniting the lynch mobs. “The country is far less homogenous than it ever was,” explained Adamson, euphemistically. “For any brand, it’s not ‘one size fits all’ anymore.” In other words, we surely can’t expect everyone in America to respect the rights of minorities!

For decades, “Pride month” has been an opportunity to celebrate the lives, rights, and achievements of the LGBTQIA+ community. Born out of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, and stemming from the (now-quaint-sounding because it leaves out other parts of the spectrum) label “gay pride,” the idea was for sexual minorities to come out of the shadows that society had long relegated them to, eschew the shame foisted upon them by rigid notions of heterosexuality and misogynist patriarchy and generations of toxic masculinity. For decades, Pride month celebrations and parades were, by their mere existence, political acts. Alongside the glitz and glamor as a way to take up space were such serious issues as the government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis.

Eventually, through concerted activism, narrative shifting, policy victories, and Supreme Court decisions, a community struggling for visibility and equal rights began enjoying greater acceptance. With that came companies like Target, ready to market Pride-themed products and eager to be seen by its customers as moving forward with the times. Pride had begun to go mainstream–until the right-wing mob amped up the hate.

An extensive 2019 report for the Washington Post titled “Pride for Sale,” pointedly claimed that the Pride month celebration now “sometimes seems more retail than riot.” Still, activist Evan Greer, in a video portion of the report said that corporations embracing Pride was “not wholly a bad thing,” rather it should be seen as “a symbol of our growing economic and political power.”

Greer was right. Corporate support of causes is simply public relations. It is a sign that the culture is shifting thanks to the hard work of those impacted. It does not mean the business actually cares. Target’s recent capitulation to right-wing bigots proves this point. And it’s not alone among companies facing pressure from bigots.

Anheuser-Busch also made headlines for trying to appease the right-wingers who took aim at transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s partnership promoting Bud Light beer. Instead of standing up for Mulvaney after she and the company faced backlash, a corporate spokesperson claimed that Anheuser-Busch, “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” In doing so, the company appeared to concede that Mulvaney’s right to exist was up for debate.

Right-wing culture wars have historically been highly effective at turning the tide of public opinion. CNN’s Oliver Darcy warns, “the supposedly anti-cancel culture crowd is leading the summer’s biggest cancel culture campaign” in targeting companies that have capitalized on Pride month. In addition to Target and Anheuser-Busch, conservative bigots and right-wing media outlets have taken aim at State Farm, Lego, Nike, and even the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Hyperfocus on Pride-themed campaigns enables conservative media companies like Fox News to whip up outrage against minorities, which they hope will translate into votes for the GOP, a party whose real agenda has focused on enriching billionaires. Those same wealthy elites are the ones who own and run companies like Target.

Vox’s Emily Stewart points out, “For many queer people, rainbow capitalism has always been a bit complicated—a sometimes-uncomfortable corporate bedfellow that nevertheless did confer a sense of social legitimacy.” But Target will not stand up for the rights of LGBTQIA+ folks. Corporations will run at the first sign of trouble to their bottom lines.

What the corporate decision-makers at Target and Anheuser-Busch are missing is that the cultural pendulum has not swung away from LGBTQIA+ rights—yet. GLAAD’s 2023 Accelerating Acceptance study found that among those who do not identify as LGBTQ support for equal rights is at an all-time high. According to the study, “An 84 [percent] supermajority of non-LGBTQ Americans support equal rights for the LGBTQ community,” and “A 91 [percent] supermajority of non-LGBTQ Americans agree that LGBTQ people should have the freedom to live their [lives] and not be discriminated against.”

These numbers are deeply heartening and reveal just how out-of-touch Republican and conservative leaders are in their attacks on queer Americans, and just how badly corporations who want to portray themselves as “allies” are missing the target—pun definitely intended.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Of course Americans deserve to work fewer hours. But unless the move to a four-day workweek is accompanied by a massive pay raise, it merely frees up time to work more.

Dolly Parton’s signature song “9 to 5,” and the 1980s sitcom of the same name reflect a quintessentially American hustle culture of working 40 hours a week in thankless jobs. Even though many people work even more than that—earning the U.S. the title of “the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World”—our expectations of the ideal work scenario are built on a hard-fought labor victory, one that was still not nearly enough to curb worker exploitation.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

In 1926, Henry Ford instituted a 40-hour workweek for his auto factory employees, perhaps because he truly believed workers needed more time for rest and leisure, but also because he expected they would be more productive if they worked less. The move paid off for Ford’s bottom line and also helped shift national culture toward working fewer hours.

A decade later, auto workers at General Motors in Flint, Michigan, went on strike protesting terrible working conditions. The 1936 labor action came to be known as “the strike heard around the world,” and in February 1937, General Motors conceded to worker demands, sending a powerful message across the nation that worker-led strikes can win. In 1937, about 1.9 million Americans participated in nearly 5,000 strikes—considered the most seminal year in U.S. labor history.

It’s no wonder then that a year later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 imposing a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour and a 44-hour workweek, as well as overtime pay. Two years later, in 1940, that act was amended to further reduce work hours to 40 per week. That should have been the beginning, not the end of improved labor conditions. The biggest failure of the Fair Labor Standards Act was that it did not link the minimum wage to inflation.

Now, more than 80 years later, Congress is considering a 32-hour workweek. Representative Mark Takano (D-CA), with the support of major labor unions like SEIU, introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to reduce the workweek to four days.

While on the surface a welcome move for labor rights, the problem is that unless corporate employers are forced to give people the same (or greater) annual take-home pay and preserve benefits, moving to a four-day workweek may not amount to much. According to a 2018 Economic Policy Institute report, because wage growth remained stagnant, “For most workers… annual earnings growth has been driven by their ability to work more hours.” Why would workers desire a reduction in work hours if it meant taking home less pay?

A recent Washington Post-Ipsos survey found that three-quarters of those polled preferred working 40 hours over four days—that is 10-hour days—to working 40 hours over five days. And, nearly as many said they would prefer working 40 hours over five days rather than lose a fifth of their salary. This is hardly surprising.

Strangely the poll did not ask whether workers would prefer working 32 hours over four days with no reduction in pay. Is it because the pollsters knew that reducing work hours without reducing pay would be so popular that it wasn’t worth asking? Or was it that corporate employers would consider such a question to be the height of worker hubris? By leaving out the question the pollsters tacitly embraced corporate profit-driven values.

Casting the idea of reducing work for the same pay as a novel notion, the Washington Post said, “[S]ome advocacy groups are pushing through pilots for a 32-hour, four-day workweek without decreasing pay.” The paper immediately followed that with corporate talking points: “Hurdles including concerns about staffing, lower productivity, increased costs, and complex changes to operations are keeping the shortened workweek from being widely adopted.” There was no mention of who views increased costs as “hurdles.”

The U.S. economy, valuing worker productivity in service of corporate profits over all else, has continued to push cultural attitudes toward more work, not less, with papers like the Washington Post doing their part. While 40 hours a week may be part of the cultural fabric, an unwritten rule of corporate America is that in exchange for job security, one is expected to work 60 or more hours a week.

Indeed.com’s pros-and-cons list of a 60-hour workweek opens with the sentence, “Working 60 hours a week can be one way to earn a higher salary, while also proving your dedication to your job and the company.” Further, with the rise of the gig economy, a significant number of workers in low-wage jobs have had to rely on unreliable work hours, low pay, and no benefits. They might work 9 to 5, or 5 to 9.

This economic status quo also fuels a stubborn gender pay gap. This year Equal Pay Day fell on March 14, which means that women would have had to work an extra three and a half months to make as much money as men did in 2022. For Black women, it falls far later, on September 21, 2023. A new study published by the American Sociological Association concluded that men’s overwork is contributing significantly to this gap. “The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations,” said the study’s authors, “where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures.”

Merely reducing work hours will not close the gender wage gap. It might even increase if women take on extra housework on their day off while men work extra jobs. In her new book The Good Enough Job, author Simone Stolzoff pointed out that, “Despite gains in wealth and productivity, many college-educated Americans—and especially college-educated men—have worked more than ever. Instead of trading wealth for leisure, American professionals began to trade leisure for more work.”

There’s a move to change U.S. culture to relinquish our attachment to work. Stolzoff’s book is one of several urging Americans to work less. In her new book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, best-selling author Jenny Odell views the current economic structures that we operate in as having arisen from European colonial culture. She urges people to reimagine our relationship with our time.

But is it that we are all trained to want to work, or that we don’t have the luxury to choose leisure? The problem is that overall pay is still so low compared to the cost of living that those who can work more—perhaps because they have partners willing to do more child care and housework—do so, earning overtime pay to ensure that their household’s needs are met. A four-day workweek is likely to do the same, freeing up an extra day merely to work more in a second job or take on more childcare or housework.

Trials of a four-day workweek by some companies have shown this is precisely what is happening. Some corporate heads love the idea of reducing work hours and salaries and are happy to have their workers take on side jobs to make up for the loss in salary on their day off. “[W]e believe that we’re providing value through flexibility,” said one startup CEO to Business Insider as justification for lower salaries. Another CEO touted how one of her employees now has the free time to work side jobs like Spanish translation and bartending.

If a four-day workweek comes with pay that’s still not enough to live well, then it is merely offering workers the freedom to work less in order for them to work more elsewhere. What is the point? The federal minimum wage remains stuck at an appallingly low $7.25 an hour, with tipped workers surviving in serfdom at $2.13 an hour.

I am writing this weekly column on my day off from a four-day job that pays a decent wage but is still not enough to provide for all my household expenses, and it is certainly not as much as my male spouse earns. To be fair, my main employer reduced work hours without reducing my salary—a wonderful step in the right direction. But the problem, again and again, is low pay. While I love writing a weekly column, I do it for the meaningful joy it brings and for the compensation. It’s a side hustle.

When Representative Takano was asked about the barriers to realizing his bill for a 32-hour workweek, he addressed the potential loss of pay by saying that, “We also have to pay attention to the ability of workers to unionize to bargain for higher wages.” In other words, workers and their unions (that is, if they are lucky enough to be among the minority of Americans represented by labor unions) have to fend for themselves in ensuring a living wage.

Senator Bernie Sanders has joined the call for a 32-hour workweek, emphasizing that such a move should come with “no loss of pay.” But even if that happened, wages still remain too low to live on and most workers might spend their free time on side hustles, like I do.

If workers were paid a minimum of $100 an hour (not unlike what most corporate executives get paid) and had the choice to work a 32-hour week versus a 40-hour week, I believe most would choose the former.

“It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it,” sang Dolly Parton. The real problem of overwork is underpay.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Claiming to protect children, Republicans are going after libraries and librarians instead of the police, gun manufacturers, and actual child sexual abusers.

Missouri Republicans in early April voted to cut all public funding for libraries as part of their state budget proposal.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Leading the move was Cody Smith, a top Republican lawmaker and chair of the state’s budget committee, who made no attempt to hide the fact that he was retaliating against librarians because they dared to join the ACLU in suing the state over a Republican-led book ban. Smith said, “I don’t think we should subsidize the attempts to overturn laws that we also created,” even though the ACLU is entirely funding the lawsuit.

Indeed, Republicans forced Missouri’s librarians into suing their state in what appears to be yet another flashpoint in the GOP’s increasingly desperate culture wars. In 2022 the GOP passed SB 775, criminalizing librarians for providing “sexually explicit” material to minors. They face a $2,000 fine or up to a year in jail if found in violation of the bizarre law.

Thankfully, the state Senate Appropriations Committee moved quickly to restore public library funding, with Senate Republican Lincoln Hough admitting, “I think it was kind of a punitive cut that the House made.”

But the threat still remains after Missouri’s Republican State Secretary Jay Ashcroft pushed through an administrative rule that threatens funding if libraries violate the book ban. He did so in an explicitly undemocratic manner, saying, “I have to figure out how to do this, because by rule I can get it done much more quickly than if I wait on the legislature.”

“Defund the Library” could be the GOP’s new slogan, succinctly encompassing a free-market agenda to destroy public funding of institutions that enlighten and educate, all under the disingenuous banner of “protecting children.”

Missouri’s library debacle isn’t an isolated incident. Patmos Library in Jamestown, Michigan, lost its public funding last November after it refused to ban books that conservative voters deemed objectionable.

Louisiana Republicans are also advancing a state bill that threatens library funding over material deemed objectionable.

And Texas Republicans voted to cut library funding in retaliation for “drag queen story hour” readings, again claiming to do so in order to protect children from being exposed to men and gender-nonconforming individuals wearing makeup and dresses with pride.

A Vox analysis of libraries under attack explained the disturbing trend: “Usually, lawmakers start with book bans. If the bans aren’t as effective as they’d hope, they escalate to threatening to defund local libraries.”

U.S. libraries have long been institutions embodying freedom: the freedom to learn, and to do so anonymously, without regard to one’s financial status. When Congress rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, librarians were among the first to counter the anti-democratic law, refusing to spy on their users for the government. They stood up to the federal government and even the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One Connecticut librarian named Peter Chase, who was bound by a government gag order over a requirement to turn over records, said, “As a librarian, I believe it is my duty and responsibility to speak out about any infringement to the intellectual freedom of library patrons.”

Libraries offer free use of computers and free internet service, an especially important service for people living in low-income neighborhoods, rural areas, and tribal communities. During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns forced children out of classrooms, many libraries created community hot spots and enabled Wi-Fi access in their parking lots so that kids without home internet could connect remotely with their classrooms.

Libraries do so much more than lend books. They offer passport services, help with job applications and school research, and provide low-cost or free spaces for community events. They promote local authors and participate in city-wide reading programs and book clubs. A 2021 California report on libraries in the state concluded that “Through digital labs, makerspaces, career centers and business resources, memory labs, public programs, community partnerships, and online resources, public libraries help communities explore, learn, connect, and have fun beyond their traditional ‘library’ brand.”

When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders ran for president in the 2016 election, he cited public funding of libraries as an example of democratic socialism in action, and libraries as “socialist institutions.”

Indeed, these socialist institutions are hugely popular. A Gallup poll of leisure activities conducted every 10 years found in 2019 that going to the library was “the most common cultural activity Americans engage in,” even more so than going to the movie theater. Libraries were far more popular among women than men, and low-income residents were far more likely to use their local library’s services than their higher-income neighbors.

In Michigan, where several libraries are dealing with book bans and where Patmos Library in Jamestown faced defunding, a March 2023 poll found broad support among the public, across party lines and political affiliations, to support libraries and the free dissemination of information.

These days it seems as though any public institution that actually helps and protects Americans is ripe for Republican-led destruction. It’s no wonder that conservatives are taking aim at this pillar of American democracy, deeming libraries “bastions of Marxism,” and “woke” purveyors of material that encourages racial justice and questions sexual orthodoxy. Not only have hundreds of books been banned across the country, but Republicans, like the ones in Missouri, are threatening librarians across the nation with fines and imprisonment. The Washington Post in a May 2023 analysis found that “[a]t least seven states have passed such laws in the last two years.”

Unlike police, who routinely kill and maim Americans, and who rightfully deserve to be targeted with defunding, and unlike gun manufacturers whose weapons continue to wreak constant violence and death across the country, librarians are the ones protecting and serving the public and its right to access information freely. But the GOP prefers to protect police and weapons makers while attacking librarians.

One New Jersey high school librarian named Martha Hickson was shocked to face unfounded accusations from a conservative of being “a pedophile, a pornographer, and a groomer of children,” during a heated debate over a book ban.

It turns out that not only do Republicans have a deep disdain for librarians, but also for children, the purported focus of their vociferous concerns.

Setting aside the GOP’s failure to protect children from mass shooters, Republican lawmakers have often shielded sexual predators. Pennsylvania Republicans refused to hold the church accountable for years of sexual abuse of children. Dozens of House Republicans refused to vote for the Respect for Child Survivors Act, a bill that would have protected child victims of sexual abuse. And Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert even praised a pastor friend and read his sermon on the House floor—a pastor who was a convicted child sexual abuser.

In fact, Daily Kos has a forum where readers submit news reports of “Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers.” The list is shockingly long.

Indeed, we should not be surprised to find out then that a Kansas City right-wing activist named Ryan Utterback, who pushed for Missouri’s book ban on the basis of protecting kids from LGBT-themed books, turned out to be an accused sexual predator. Utterback faces a felony charge of second-degree child sexual molestation.

In the battle over who really protects our children—librarians or Republicans—librarians are the ones who belong in our good books.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The U.S. appears likely to legalize over-the-counter contraception—a critical step in increasing women’s bodily autonomy and economic independence.

A committee of advisers recently recommended that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) begin allowing sales of an over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pill—the first of its kind in the nation. All 17 members of the committee voted to recommend sales of Opill to the public, at a time when the Republican Party has carried out a widespread assault on reproductive health care. Although the FDA can decide whether or not to follow the committee’s recommendations, it rarely overrides it, and is unlikely to do so given President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend against “politically-driven attacks on women’s health.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Margery Gass, one of the advisory committee members, who is an emerita professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told the Washington Post, “I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health.” Not only is the expected legalization of Opill a step toward bringing the United States up to international standards—currently such pills are available in more than 100 countries worldwide—but it is also a useful political counterattack against a party leading a full-scale assault on the rights of everyone but rich white men. And, most importantly, it has the potential to buttress women’s economic independence.

By making the purchase of a contraceptive pill as easy and affordable as a trip to the drug store, birth control can become more accessible to those who are uninsured or underinsured, who may not have the time and resources to make an appointment with their OB-GYN, or who may live in rural areas where Republican officials have decimated local free abortion clinics. It is also likely to increase accessibility to the pill among young people of color.

There have been many studies in the U.S. examining the impact of access to birth control on women’s independence and educational achievements. A report by Planned Parenthood concluded that “Being able to get the pill before age 21 has been found to be the most influential factor in enabling women already in college to stay in college.”

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reviewed the available evidence from many such studies and found that since prescription birth control pills began to be available in the U.S., they helped women stay out of poverty, enabled women to enter college and graduate in higher numbers, and empowered women to find jobs, keep them, and access more senior, higher-paying roles in their workplace.

It’s no wonder that a massive majority of women surveyed were in favor of an OTC pill being available in the U.S.—77 percent of women aged 18 to 49, as per a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in November 2022.

There was a time when Republicans were also fully in support of OTC birth control pills—in 2015 when they fought against the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance companies cover the cost of the pill. Seeing an OTC pill as a weapon against Obamacare, GOP lawmakers argued that people should simply be able to buy the pill on their own. Democrats countered that it might become too expensive if insured people were forced to pay out of pocket. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act made birth control pills more affordable for insured women.

Setting aside the idea that all health care and medication should be tax-funded and cost nothing at the point of access—a radical notion that Medicare should be for all—an OTC contraceptive pill should supplement, not supplant prescription birth control, which the FDA is expected to shortly allow.

Moreover, legalizing an OTC contraceptive pill does not undo the damage of the ongoing GOP assault on abortion access. Florida became the latest state to ban abortions past six weeks into pregnancy—a stage at which pregnant people barely realize what has happened to their bodies. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban even before an earlier ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could take effect while it is being challenged in court. The Associated Press explained his reasoning in plain language: “The ban gives DeSantis a key political victory among Republican primary voters as he prepares to launch an expected presidential candidacy built on his national brand as a conservative standard bearer.”

Privileging fetal cells over the autonomy of the living, breathing human hosting those cells is not the real reason for the GOP’s attacks on abortion. The real reason is to obtain the political allegiance of a reliable subsection of anti-abortion fanatics among the U.S. voting public.

How fanatical are they?

One organization peddling flat-out lies in order to pave the way for ending access to contraception is Pulse Life Advocates. On its website are claims that are so preposterous, they veer on comical, such as, “Contraception increases likelihood of divorce,” and “Contraception kills babies.”

These same sort of zealots want the GOP to attack access to prescription birth control pills, as well as Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. The popularity of such pills offers little political protection—a majority of Americans have continued to support access to abortion and yet it is no longer a right federally.

If the anti-abortionists were truly interested in protecting fetal cells, contraceptive pills would help ensure such cells were not generated in the first place. But of course, the ultimate agenda—usually couched in faux concern for women’s health—is to control women. Indeed, Pulse Life Advocates sees the birth control pill as akin to couples saying to god, “We want the physical pleasure of sex, but we want control, we want to leave you out of it.”

Um, yes. Wanting control over one’s body is a fundamental tenet of democracy. The anti-abortionists and their antiquated views on birth control represent medievalism, not modernity.

Mother Jones reported in May 2022 that such fundamentalist activists were plotting their next move against birth control pills and that one attendee at an anti-abortion conference called birth control, “Unbiblical and harmful to women’s bodies.”

Pregnancy is far more harmful to women’s bodies, education, careers, wages, and overall well-being than abortion or contraception. For those who choose to have children in spite of the disadvantages—people like me—the risks are worth the rewards. But the critical factor is choice.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

It seems unimaginable that we are backsliding into the era of exploiting child labor. But that’s precisely what the GOP appears to be doing.

Two recent exposés about child labor in the United States highlight how prevalent the once-outlawed practice has become. In February, the New York Times published an extensive investigative report by Hannah Dreier about scores of undocumented Central American children who were found to be working in food processing plants, construction projects, big farms, garment factories, and other job sites in 20 states around the country. Some were working 12 hours a day and many were not attending school.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

A second story, revealed in a press release in early May by the U.S. Department of Labor, found more than 300 children working for three McDonald’s franchises operating dozens of restaurants in Kentucky. The children were working longer hours than legally permitted and tasked with jobs that were prohibited. Some were as young as 10 years old.

If such stories are becoming increasingly common, it is not because there is more attention being paid. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis found a nearly fourfold increase in labor violations involving children from 2015 to 2022.

While this says volumes about existing loopholes in labor law and enforcement, and about the state of the U.S. capitalist economy more broadly, there is another, even more disturbing dimension to child labor in the U.S. Lawmakers, mostly Republican ones, increasingly want to deregulate laws governing children in the workplace. According to EPI, “at least 10 states introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections in the past two years.”

Among them is Arkansas, whose GOP governor is the former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In March, Sanders signed a new bill removing employer requirements to verify the age of children as young as 14 before hiring them, calling such protections “burdensome and obsolete.” Her Republican colleagues in Iowa and Wisconsin have passed similar laws. In Ohio, one Democrat even joined in to loosen the state’s child labor laws.

It’s already legal for teenagers to take on certain types of summer jobs and paid internships. In an ideal world, such employment can offer them valuable work experience in a safe environment and allow them to earn extra spending money to save up for nice things. Indeed, children from privileged backgrounds have traditionally been able to land such jobs over their less privileged counterparts, using family connections.

Republicans are invoking such benign jobs as babysitting or lifeguarding to claim that deregulation will help kids earn money to save up for a car or prom dress. But children’s well-being is not driving their desires to ease child labor laws. These lawmakers are hardly concerned about making it easier for teens to deliver newspapers or wash cars during summer vacation. We would be hard-pressed to imagine their 16-year-old children or grandchildren serving alcohol for six hours a day at a bar past 9 p.m. on a school night and letting the bar owner off the hook if that child gets injured on the job—which is what Iowa Republicans have now legalized.

What they appear to care about is businesses having a larger pool of vulnerable workers to exploit at a time when worker demands for higher wages and better working conditions are rising and strike activity has increased. Who’s more vulnerable than children, particularly undocumented and low-income ones?

The idea to undo labor laws protecting children goes back at least a decade when conservatives began dreaming about reviving the good old days of children being able to legally work tough jobs. The Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank that ought to be credited with saying the unthinkable out loud, published an essay in 2014 unironically titled, “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions.” In it, writer Benjamin Powell invokes an idea couched in the world of Charles Dickens’s dystopian literature: “Families who send their children to work in sweatshops do so because they are poor and it is the best available alternative open to them.” He added that the type of labor restrictions that protect children “only limits their options further and throws them into worse alternatives,” and that apparently “sweatshops play an important role” in the economic growth of societies.

Another right-wing think tank called the Acton Institute, one that obscures its agenda in religious thought, declared in 2016 that “Work is a gift our kids can handle.” The story is accompanied by a photo of a smiling, well-dressed, young white boy tending horses on a farm—a wholesome fantasy that is at odds with the abuse that Human Rights Watch researcher Margaret Wurth documented in a report on child labor in the U.S.: “a 17-year-old boy who had two fingers sliced off in an accident with a mowing machine. A 13-year-old girl felt so faint working 12-hour shifts in the heat that she had to hold herself up with a tobacco plant. An eighth grader said his eyes itched and burned when a farmer sprayed pesticides in a field near his worksite.” Wurth points out the “racist impacts” of labor law loopholes particularly on “Latinx children and families.”

The conservative organization Foundation for Government Accountability has also played a central role, taking the lead in convincing GOP lawmakers to loosen child labor laws. A Washington Post report credits the group for helping push through Arkansas’ new law and for lobbying Iowa and other states to do the same.

Now, advocates of fair labor standards are aghast, watching in horror at the Republican-led rollback of laws protecting children. Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO, told the Guardian newspaper, “It’s just crazy to me that we are re-litigating a lot of things that seem to have been settled 100, 120, or 140 years ago.”

Indeed, the past is precisely where grim lessons abound about how children suffer when there are no labor laws protecting them. One history article written in 2020 about the painstaking movement to regulate child labor begins optimistically: “At least in the United States, child labor is almost exclusively a thing of the past.” Stemming from a medieval mindset that children were the patriarchal property of their fathers, the young were pushed into servitude en masse during the Industrial Revolution where their small size and nimble fingers were as beneficial to employers as their inability to demand high wages or organize their workplace.

It was through the critical narrative work of a teacher and photographer named Lewis Hine, whose never-before-seen images of abused child workers between 1908 and 1924 helped to move public opinion, that labor laws were eventually changed. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act finally outlawed most child worker abuses at a federal level.

There was a time in the U.S. when, just a few decades ago, child labor was seen as a global problem of poorer nations where exploited children worked in unimaginable conditions making products for wealthy Westerners. A 1996 Life Magazine article famously offered a horrifying glimpse into the life of a Pakistani child making soccer balls for Nike. Child workers in Bangladeshi sweatshops making designer clothing spurred activism in the U.S. against such exploitation.

Garnering less attention were the loopholes in U.S. federal law allowing for child labor in the agricultural industry where hundreds of thousands of mostly immigrant children were found to be working on tobacco farms and elsewhere.

Rather than close these loopholes, like Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin wants to do with her newly introduced Child Labor Prevention Act, Republicans want to throw them wide open.

Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said, “The notion that we would be solving some economic turmoil by allowing the expansion of child labor hours, is at best, ridiculous, and at worst, very detrimental to young people.” There is no labor shortage. There is simply an unwillingness on the part of profit-seeking companies to pay workers enough.

Republicans claim they care about protecting children. But their actions speak louder than words: they have made it easier for mass shooters to kill children in schools, and they have attacked the rights of LGBTQ children to play sports, to use the bathrooms of their choice, to access gender-affirming care, and to learn about their community. They have barred children from learning accurate history about racism and white supremacy and unleashed police into schools in spite of evidence that school cops are targeting Black and Brown children.

Seen as part of this larger trend, the push to overturn laws protecting labor abuses of children is perfectly in line with the GOP’s agenda to harm kids.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is eager to cast himself as the new and improved Donald Trump. He has waged a relentless war against what he calls “woke ideology” by attacking the rights of vulnerable minorities to teach and learn history, to read literature, and to get life-saving medical care such as gender-affirming treatment and reproductive health care. Now, his attack on Florida’s largest corporation is being cast in the same vein of “good versus evil.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Except that the DeSantis-Disney war ought really to be viewed as an opportunity to call Republicans out on their slavish devotion to Big Business and dare them to follow through with stripping not just the Disney corporation, but all money-hungry companies of their dependence on public financing. Both DeSantis and Disney are predatory, albeit in different ways.

Disney, a company that has deep cultural sway over Americans for being a purveyor of “magic” and “happiness,” has enjoyed a very special and extremely unusual arrangement in Orlando, Florida, where its Walt Disney World Resort occupies tens of thousands of acres named the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Since 1967, the state of Florida has allowed the corporation to govern the area and even to issue tax bonds to residents in order to pay for municipal services while being exempt from certain regulations and taxes.

Rather than viewing Disney World as “the happiest place on earth,” Sophie Weiner, writing in Popular Mechanics in 2018, explained that, “Disney World is what it looks like if you give a corporation full control over an area of land as big as San Francisco. It’s worked out great for the company, which counts on the park for 14 percent of its $2 billion yearly earnings.” Further, in 2021, the state of Florida gifted the company a massive $580 million tax break in exchange for moving about 2,000 jobs from its California locations to Florida.

But in March 2022 Disney took a stand against the Parental Rights in Education Law, which has been dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” act, prompting DeSantis’s ire. A month later Florida’s Republican legislature dissolved Disney’s special status in a law that is to take effect on June 1, 2023. DeSantis explained the move saying, “I’m just not comfortable having that type of agenda get special treatment in my state.” In other words, Disney’s special corporate arrangement would not be tolerated if it challenged his homophobia.

Except that Disney had to be pushed hard into taking such a moral stand. For weeks after the bill was announced the company was perfectly content enjoying the largesse of Florida even as activists were demanding it speak out against a law prohibiting teachings that touch on gender identity and sexual orientation to kids in kindergarten through third grade. Disney’s own workers protested their employer’s lack of courage. The hashtag #BoycottDisney began trending. The company eventually, reluctantly, reacted by suspending all its political donations in the state of Florida to both parties—not exactly the most principled stand.

To his credit, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek also made public statements against the bill and offered a $5 million donation to the Human Rights Campaign (which the group rejected).

But earlier this year Florida, realizing that dissolving Disney’s tax status would end up dumping a billion-dollar bond debt onto the public, quickly scrambled to restore the special district while muzzling Disney. A new law will allow the governor to appoint leadership positions of Reedy Creek Improvement District instead of allowing Disney to do so.

Representative Anna Eskamani, a progressive Democrat in the state legislature, told the Hollywood Reporter, “The inner workings [of the special district] stay the same. The only difference is Disney won’t challenge the governor on anything anymore.” The company was initially happy and Disney World’s head Jeff Vahle said his company was “ready to work within this new framework.”

Testing this new arrangement DeSantis has revved up his culture war, approving a rule change to expand the Don’t Say Gay bill to all grades and sending a message to LGBTQ youth that their lives don’t matter. But the new board that he appointed to govern Disney’s special district voted to nullify a company plan to expand and develop the area. It was only then that Disney filed a lawsuit against DeSantis claiming he violated their first amendment rights over the homophobic law.

Every step of the way Disney was happy to suck up all the tax perks and financial autonomy it could get away with, regardless of whom its host was harming. Only when its financial status was threatened has it claimed to be on the side of LGBTQ communities.

Aside from Eskamani, few Democrats have called Disney out for its hypocrisy and for reaping special financial perks, instead supporting the corporation for being a job creator. Democratic Congressional representative Darren Soto chastised DeSantis, saying, “It’d be nice if he stopped attacking Central Florida’s top employer.” He added, “We’re talking about trying to get [Disney] to invest more money to create more jobs. And this is not helpful to those efforts.”

Soto’s words suggest that he sees Disney performing a massive favor to the state by operating its resort and parks there instead of the other way around. But the sort of jobs that Disney creates is precisely what has fueled deep income inequality in the U.S. Its presence in Florida has meant thousands of poorly paid jobs that keep Floridians in a hand-to-mouth existence, unable to cope with the rising cost of living. Aubrey Jewett, a University of Central Florida political science professor, told USA Today, “Yes, we have a lot of jobs. But they don’t pay very much. And we seem to have lost ground over time, especially when it comes to housing costs.”

One Disney worker told the Guardian, “We’re grossly, grossly underpaid for the hours that we work,” and that “[a] lot of Disney workers are barely squeaking by. You have workers with families sleeping in their car.”

Disney heiress Abigail Disney, who is an outspoken progressive, even made a documentary about the poor treatment of Disneyland workers in Anaheim, California, where the company also enjoys special tax benefits in exchange for creating jobs and where it was granted an exception to a voter-passed minimum wage increase. Just as in Florida, Disney’s California jobs are worth about as little as the taxes the company pays to the state.

In addition to constantly being granted exemptions for taxes and regulations, corporations like Disney enjoy a mythical status in the U.S. for being so massively profitable that their dollar signs obscure capitalism’s ugly underbelly.

Disney should not have control over land, resources, tax regulations, or wages. And lawmakers should not be allowed to trample over the rights of minorities. It’s not difficult to oppose both Disney’s power grab and DeSantis’s dangerous culture wars. Indeed, both positions are fully consistent with progressive ideals of protecting and furthering the rights of human beings.

A strike authorization by the Writers Guild of America is threatening the television industry’s corporate business model of relying on an underpaid workforce to pay for its mergers.

Television has been experiencing a boom in the United States, the likes of which has never been seen before. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there were 532 scripted TV shows that were broadcast or streamed the year before—an all-time high. In 2022, there were 599. In fact, according to FX Network Research, since 2012 there has been a steady increase in the number of scripted shows, except for a small dip due to the lockdown-related production halt in 2020.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

These new heights in television production can be attributed largely to streaming services such as Netflix—a company that has been offering up tantalizing on-screen fiction for the past decade since “House of Cards” first debuted as an exclusively streaming show on the platform. But the primacy of streaming is also the reason why TV writers are now threatening to go on strike. For years, streaming services have slashed residual payments, which writers rely on, prompting the Writers Guild of America (WGA) to vote to strike.

The turnout for the WGA vote strike, which took place on April 17, broke records, with nearly 80 percent of the union’s members casting ballots. Of that number, nearly 98 percent voted to strike. These numbers are significantly higher than in 2007, the last time WGA members voted to strike and actually carried out their threat (a 2017 strike was narrowly averted). The union, which represents more than 11,000 writers, has the potential to bring the TV industry to a screeching halt if negotiations with media companies, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), break down by May 1, the last day of WGA’s current contract.

Three major unions dominate Hollywood’s television industry, representing writers, directors, and actors: the WGA, the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), respectively. Both DGA and SAG-AFTRA will also start negotiations shortly with the AMPTP ahead of their contracts ending on June 30. There is potential for multiple overlapping strikes in the coming months, leaving Hollywood’s television industry on edge, even as most of the nation enjoys the fruits of its work, blissfully unaware of the tensions brewing between creators and corporate producers.

The stakes are high. Already Netflix is boasting that it can rely on foreign labor to weather a potential WGA strike. The company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said a day after the strike authorization vote that if writers went on strike, “we have a large base of upcoming shows and films from around the world,” adding, “We could probably serve our members better than most.” Networks are also stockpiling scripts in preparation for a potential writers’ strike.

TV producers hold massive financial power in an industry whose cultural influence sweeps across the world. While writers, directors, and actors are the ones whose creativity powers the direction of new, innovative content, their bosses—executives at Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney—have driven down the costs of labor to maximize profits.

Residuals, which are extra payments made to creative workers each time their shows re-air, used to provide stable incomes for TV workers in between jobs. Streaming services negotiated minuscule residuals years ago when they were minor players within the TV landscape. Now, although they dominate the scene, streaming producers are continuing to pay their workers insultingly low residuals. Worse, many creators are finding that platforms will disappear their projects altogether in order to get a tax write-off and avoid having to pay them.

TV producers are also cutting costs by canceling shows abruptly—a move that could disproportionately impact diversity on-screen. Television is one of the world’s most powerful narrative-setting industries, influencing culture in ways that can determine day-to-day policies. According to GLAAD, “For many Americans, it was television shows that gave them their first images of same-sex couples, and a chance to recognize the commonalities with their own lives.” This in turn helped lay the foundation for the legalization of same-sex marriage within years.

Television has the potential to do the same for racial justice issues. According to the latest Hollywood Diversity Report, “people of color have made tremendous advances among broadcast, cable, and digital leads in recent years,” and “Black and multiracial persons exceeded proportionate representation among leads in 2020-21 for cable and digital scripted shows.” Still, the report concludes that there is not enough parity overall.

Now, in search of profits, TV producers are cutting costs by canceling already green-lit projects. “[T]he streaming explosion has lost steam,” declared MarketWatch. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered nearly a quarter fewer shows in the second half of last year compared to the year before. John Landgraf, chairman of FX Networks, who is credited with coining the term “Peak TV,” worries that cost-cutting will impact the representation of racially diverse communities.

It appears as though, in addition to using foreign-sourced projects and stockpiling scripts as leverage, TV’s corporate executives plan to approach union negotiations by touting the notion that television output is peaking and therefore costs such as baseline pay and residuals cannot be increased.

Yet, media companies have enough money to buy one another, spending billions on mergers and acquisitions. A year ago, Amazon acquired MGM Studios for $8.5 billion; and Warner Brothers, which owned HBO Max, merged with Discovery to the tune of $43 billion. Earlier this year, Showtime announced a merger with Paramount+. Predictably, these companies are announcing cuts to their workforce to pay for such consolidation.

But workers still have leverage. David Slack, a WGA union member and a writer and consulting producer on “Magnum P.I.,” told the Washington Post, “The power to withhold our labor is the only tool we have to get the studios to pay us what’s fair.” He added, “Our products are the foundation for all the billions of dollars of revenue that these entertainment companies generate, and we need to be compensated for that.” Los Angeles Times columnist Mary McNamara distilled the dynamic succinctly: “If studios and platforms want to be in the original scripted content business, they need to make that business work for the people writing those scripts. It’s that simple.”

The last time TV writers went on strike, it lasted a whopping 100 days and cost the economy of Los Angeles more than $2 billion. If writers go on a prolonged strike, there will be a ripple effect, putting actors and directors out of work as well. There can be no scripted television if no one is writing the scripts.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected.

If justices can be bought by billionaires, lifetime terms only enable corruption rather than protect the U.S. Supreme Court from undue influence.

A pair of new investigative reports from ProPublica about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are a testament to not only the importance of good journalism in a democracy, but also Thomas’s unfitness on the court, and the need for better guard rails against moneyed influence. The first bombshell story, “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” highlighted how a wealthy man named Harlan Crow befriended Thomas after he became a Supreme Court justice and treated him (and often his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas) to luxurious vacations on a near-annual basis. Thomas did not disclose the trips as he was required to. Although he at first refused to speak with ProPublica about the initial story, he eventually made a statement saying he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the gifts.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

ProPublica followed that up just days later with another story whose title says it all: “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The property in question “wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road.” Like the vacations, Thomas also did not publicly disclose the sale. His mother has lived in the home and continues to do so after ownership passed to Crow. The billionaire has been busy making expensive renovations to it.

There is no question that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose his financial transactions with Crow. Every American should read the ProPublica reports on how one of the nine Supreme Court justices, whose jurisdiction covers the entire nation, appears to be in the pocket of a billionaire. The relationship between Crow and Thomas is a cozy one that has borne fruit for wealthy elites: the justice has routinely sided with moneyed interests and their influence on policymaking.

Before ProPublica’s April 2023 investigations, most reporting on the court’s justice had focused on his white conservative wife. Ginni Thomas has been an activist spouse, overtly reflecting the conservative political sensibility that her husband affirms in his judicial decisions. During Barack Obama’s presidency, she founded a “Tea Party” nonprofit called Liberty Central, a move the New York Times described as “the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court.”

She then went further, becoming a political lobbyist and leading a small and secretive organization called Liberty Consulting. A 2011 Politico report points out that she touted “her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients ‘with governmental affairs efforts.’” She made headlines last year for having pressured former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows via text messages to try to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Donald Trump. More recently, the Washington Post published an investigation into anonymous donations totaling $600,000 made to yet another organization she leads called Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty. The donations helped fund the right’s vicious culture wars.

When asked about the conflicts of interest that her activism present for her husband’s work on the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas has brushed them off, telling the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, “It’s laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence… The man is independent and stubborn.” She also said in an interview with the conservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.” She added, “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Well, that’s a relief. The sanctity of the nation’s highest court and its freedom from partisan influence rests on the word of a person who promises there’s no undue influence between a wife and her husband. This is a person who still believes that the 2020 election was stolen—a view that makes her even worse than Trump toady and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said he would vote for Trump in 2024 but was at least able to admit that his election fraud claims were false.

In 2021, when Chief Justice John Roberts filed his year-end report on the federal judiciary, he stressed the importance of “impartial decision-making,” and that “[t]he Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.” Apparently, Roberts was either ignorant of the Thomases’ doings or confident that Ginni’s promise of insulation from marital influence was good enough.

Although Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, offer arguably the most explicit examples of corruptive influence on the Supreme Court, they are not alone. In December 2022, the New York Times revealed that an innocently named charity called the Supreme Court Historical Society has “become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation.” The organization has raised millions of dollars from secret donors. The majority of the money that the New York Times was able to identify came from “corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court.” Justices attend the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner, offering a tantalizing chance for individual attendees to influence them—as the leader of an anti-abortion group apparently took advantage of.

Notwithstanding the liberal minority that includes Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is a court that loves wealth and has protected it for more than half a century. It’s no wonder there is growing public disapproval of a body that is so influential that its highly anticipated decisions impact nearly every aspect of our lives, from abortion to guns, to labor unions, to LGBTQ rights, and more.

Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure—ostensibly a mechanism to protect them from “partisan pressures.” But that only works if the regulations preventing corruptive influence are watertight and if there are actual consequences for violating such regulations. In the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) to ensure that officials like Supreme Court justices were independent of moneyed interests.

But even though Justice Thomas appears to have violated the EIGA, there is no direct mechanism to hold him accountable short of Congress starting impeachment proceedings against him—a move that has almost no precedent short of a House impeachment more than 200 years ago of a justice who was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.

No other democratically run nation on the planet gives its highest court justices lifetime tenure. Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices. This would mean that a new justice would replace one who was termed out every two years, and presidents would have two opportunities during each four-year tenure to appoint new justices.

In passing the TERM Act, the U.S. would join the rest of the world’s democratic nations in upholding an impartial judiciary, the Thomases could carry out their dystopian vision of the nation free from accusations of corruption—and billionaire Harlan Crow could even save himself some money.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

A massive three-day strike by school support staff and teachers recently shut down Los Angeles schools. They stand together to demand better wages and benefits for the school district's most vulnerable workers.

Tens of thousands of Los Angeles teachers went on strike March 21-23, 2023, for the first time in four years, shutting down the nation’s second-largest school district for three rain-soaked days. But this time the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) did not walk out in order to demand better working conditions for educators. Rather, they were engaging in a remarkable act of solidarity with their lesser-paid colleagues—the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)'s support staff of about 30,000 people who are in their own union, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99. It was the first time that the two unions—the largest two in Los Angeles—went on strike together.

SEIU Local 99's demands for the district to offer a 30 percent pay raise and health benefits may sound ambitious. But that's only because the district's campus aides, teaching assistants, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, gardeners, and other support staff make an average of only $25,000 a year with no benefits. In Southern California, where everything from housing costs, to healthcare, to groceries are far higher than the national average, this is an untenable wage. Although LAUSD is offering the workers a 23 percent salary raise along with a 3 percent bonus, the double-digit bump is not nearly enough to make ends meet relative to the appallingly low wages they currently earn.

On March 23, 2023, the third and final day of the three-day action, thousands of workers gathered in Los Angeles State Historic Park for a final joint rally. Among them was Maria, a campus aide at Eagle Rock High School, who spoke with me and preferred not to use her last name. She tells me, "we live paycheck to paycheck, and we have to work some days unpaid on top of it all."

Suraya Duran, a community parent representative at Eagle Rock High School and member of SEIU Local 99, was also at the rally. She says, "These essential employees worked through the pandemic with no raise, no benefits, and the uncertainty of stable hours." In contrast, Duran points out, "it's egregious to hear that the [school] superintendent makes more than the president of the United States." She's referring to LAUSD's latest head, Alberto Carvalho, who makes $440,000 annually, the most that's ever been paid to a district superintendent in LA.

It's not as if the district can't afford to pay its lowest-paid workers a living wage. It currently has at its disposal a $4.9 billion reserve fund, of which about $2.3 billion has not been spoken for. The unions argue that this money can and should be used to meet worker demands for higher wages. "There is money. It's whether they choose to invest in these workers. That's the bottom line," says Duran.

Superintendent Carvalho spun the strike to suggest the workers were letting down low-income students of color by walking out for three days. He released a statement on Twitter the day before the strike began, saying that the COVID-19 pandemic was particularly difficult for "kids who are English language learners, students in poverty and students with disabilities," who "cannot afford to be out of school."

But Duran, whose job involves liaising between a school and parents, points out that many of the support staff's own children attend schools in LAUSD. She says that it is common for workers to juggle multiple jobs in order to make ends meet. "They come to the school during the day, and then they're going to a graveyard shift." She adds, "They deserve to have a wage that is comparable to today's standards."

Maria says, "I feel that we are underpaid, and we feel unappreciated by the district. We are the ones that get paid less, but we are the ones that make sure the campus is safe, and, most important, that the kids are safe." The public generally considers educators as the only school workers worthy of compensation. The strike served to uplift the voices of support workers like Maria who often remain invisible, but whose jobs are essential to the functioning of schools.

UTLA secretary Arlene Inouye pointed out in an op-ed that "24 percent of SEIU 99 members report that they don't have enough to eat. One in three report that they have been homeless or at high risk of becoming homeless while working for LAUSD." This underscores the injustice of a district sitting on more than $2 billion while relying on severely underpaid workers to continue operations. If Carvalho is so concerned about children living in poverty, he could directly address some of that by meeting the wage demands of their parents who work in the district.

Instead, he ridiculed the unions in a now-deleted Tweet that SEIU Local 99 captured in a screen grab. "1,2,3…Circus = a predictable performance with a known outcome, desiring of nothing more than an applause, a coin, and a promise of a next show," wrote Carvalho in February 2023 after the strike was announced. He added, "Let's do right, for once, without circus, for kids, for community, for decency."

But strikes serve the explicit purpose of moving the ramifications of closed-door negotiations out into the open for all to see. Perhaps it is the visibility of LAUSD's refusal to meet the wage demands of its lowest-paid workers that Carvalho most objected to when he referred to the strike as a "circus." The UTLA-SEIU joint strike served a powerful narrative purpose: to highlight the appalling working conditions of tens of thousands of workers in LA public schools and to warn the district that workers have each other’s backs.

Although SEIU workers and their UTLA colleagues returned to school campuses after their three-day walkout, the district has, as of this writing, remained firm on its lowball offer. However, the strike did prompt LA's newly elected mayor Karen Bass, who initially remained on the sidelines, to get involved. Bass is now actively mediating between the district and unions.

Alejandra Sanchez, a special education assistant at Eagle Rock High School, has a message for the superintendent: "Mr. Carvahlo, we are not 'clowning around' as you implied [in your tweet]; we are here today as one, UTLA and SEIU, fighting together for a better future, for respect, better wages, and stable hours. Our work is not a joke."

Highlighting the solidarity between teachers and support staff and their refusal to stay silent, one teacher at Sanchez's school wore a rain poncho while picketing that sported the words, "Hey Carvalho, in our 'circus,' you're the saddest clown."

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of 'Rising Up With Sonali,' a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

For the first time in nearly 60 years, a state is poised to reverse its "right to work" law and begin to undo the damage of a corporate-driven anti-union trend.

Michigan is expected very soon to reverse its so-called "right-to-work" (RTW) law. The repeal, led by Democrats and passing along strictly partisan lines, is a concrete outcome of the liberal party winning a narrow majority of seats in the state's House and Senate last November and Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer winning reelection. Democrats managed to outdo Republican-led gerrymandering on Election Day and now hold a two-seat advantage in each chamber.

Showing more party discipline than their counterparts have tended to muster at the federal level in recent years, Michigan Democrats have wasted no time in using their slim legislative advantage in pushing through a repeal of their state's RTW law. Whitmer is expected to approve the repeal when it reaches her desk.

RTW laws are a particularly insidious conservative ploy to undermine unions. The idea, which conservatives glibly couch in terms of "freedom," is to prevent unions from collecting mandatory fees from members to sustain themselves. Unions require such fees in order to fund the operations of serving and representing their members. It's the same with any club that offers perks—membership dues fund operations.

Unions gained the right to do this under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. But less than a decade later, that right was eroded when Congress passed the 1947 Labor Management Relations Act, also known as Taft-Hartley, which first opened the door for RTW laws. In 2018, conservative justices at the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of such laws for public sector workers, adding momentum to the rightward shift.

The National Labor Relations Board explains the current state of the Republican-led anti-union trend in this way: "If you work in a state that bans union-security agreements, (27 states), each employee at a workplace must decide whether or not to join the union and pay dues, even though all workers are protected by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the union. The union is still required to represent all workers." Imagine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club's modest yearly fee.

Recognizing that dues are a source of unions' financial power, Republicans used every advantage, including ill-gotten ones like gerrymandered districts, to push through RTW laws in more than half of all states. They used deceptive language—who doesn't want the right to work?—and convinced voters it was in their interest to weaken unions without saying the laws were intended to weaken unions. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative pro-business think tank that we are expected to believe cares about workers' rights, claimed that RTW laws were about "permitting workers the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to join a union and pay dues."

For years, I was required to pay dues to my union, SAG-AFTRA, because California, where I live, is not an RTW state. I did so happily, because even at the nonprofit community radio station where I worked, management was continuously trying to lower operating costs at the expense of workers' wages and benefits. Union representation helped stave off staff cuts, represented workers in grievance filings, and became our collective voice during contract negotiations. Unions are not just for corporate or government workplaces. They are not just for poorly treated or underpaid workers at Amazon, Starbucks, or Walmart. All nonmanagement workers deserve the kind of power that a union brings. And it's precisely that power that conservative lawmakers have been (successfully) chipping away at.

The data is clear: those states where RTW laws have been on the books show lower rates of unionization and lower wages overall. A June 2022 paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research examined five states where such laws had been in effect since 2011. The researchers concluded unequivocally that, "RTW laws lower wages and unionization rates."

According to the Economic Policy Institute—which has come to similar data-driven conclusions as the aforementioned paper—Michigan's reversal of the GOP's anti-union statute would be "the first time a state has repealed a RTW law in nearly 60 years." The victory is all the more significant because of the state's historic position as having had "the highest unionization rate in the country" and correspondingly high median wages before Republicans passed an RTW law in 2012. But in the past decade, unionization rates and wages both fell in Michigan. In other words, the state's RTW law had its intended result.

Now, following Michigan, Democrats in other RTW states such as Arizona and Virginia have introduced laws to restore union power. At the federal level, Senator Elizabeth Warren has reintroduced the Nationwide Right to Unionize Act, which would repeal all RTW state laws. The PRO Act would similarly restore the right of unions to collect member dues nationally.

Conservative Republicans are likely terrified of how Michigan might embolden pro-union momentum across the country. Unsurprisingly, Fox News published an op-ed by billionaire Doug DeVos denouncing the repeal of Michigan's anti-union law. DeVos's Michigan-based family made its fortune on Amway, a business that Jacobin's Rachel T. Johnson called, "the world's biggest pyramid scheme." (If the name sounds familiar, he is indeed the brother-in-law of former Education Secretary under Donald Trump Betsy DeVos.)

Doug Devos's Fox News op-ed is titled, "I know firsthand how much right to work matters," which might be a true enough statement coming from a billionaire whose family made its fortune on the backs of workers. He also identified precisely that "What's happening in Michigan is the direct result of the November elections. Democrats won control of the legislature for the first time in nearly four decades."

But then he veered into the kind of unproven claims that only a pyramid schemer might have the gall to make openly, that "right-to-work states have seen faster job growth, faster income growth, and faster population growth." He also cited, without proof (after all, it's Fox News!), that Michigan's RTW law led to "rising incomes," and "falling unemployment and poverty."

Ultimately, DeVos is worried that "Repealing right to work will send a message that our state… will suffer from… less freedom." And there again is that vague buzzword, freedom. What DeVos really means but doesn't say is that he thinks workers deserve the freedom to live under the thumb of their corporate bosses, the freedom to remain in jobs that pay less and less, and the freedom to walk away from poorly paid jobs.

Freedom is the blank slate on which conservatives have projected their wildest profit-driven fantasies. But those fantasies are the flip side of their fears of worker power. It's no surprise that RTW laws stemmed from the Taft-Hartley Act, a pro-business law intended to curb the power of multiracial worker movements.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presciently said, "In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights." In the war of words over freedom, Dr. King beats DeVos any day.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The late civil rights activist and author didn't let elected officials off the hook, no matter how liberal. He understood the importance of intersectionality and what it takes to achieve progressive change.

In July 2015, when two Black Lives Matter activists challenged liberal candidates running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, the late Kevin Alexander Gray told me in an interview, "all candidates ought to have an agenda that deals with the issues that the Black community are grappling with right now, to include police violence, to include economics, to include all the issues that the Black Lives Matter activists raised."

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Gray didn't let anyone off the hook, including Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who had launched his first presidential campaign, and was considered the most left-leaning candidate. "They ought to hire Black people to advise them in their campaigns," he said, "instead of just organizing a group of white men, which Bernie Sanders is guilty of doing too, and letting those people try to filter what it is that the candidates get."

Gray was a longtime civil rights activist and the author of multiple books, including The Decline of Black Politics: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama (2008), Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics (2008), and Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (2014). He passed away on March 7, 2023, of a heart attack.

During the 2015 interview, Gray echoed what many Black thinkers of the time were demanding of Sanders: give racial justice as much weight as economic justice because the two are so intimately linked, and failing to do so means accepting a racist status quo.

It was typical of Gray to forcefully make such connections, to have an intersectional lens, and to choose his values and ideals over what pundits deemed was the practical thing to do. It's why I interviewed him many times over my journalism career, and it's what I'll miss most about him.

About a decade later, the idea of "racial capitalism" began to be taken more seriously. But it was the analysis of Black thinkers like Gray, who had the benefit of a long arc of political activism, that pushed the idea forward, and that uplifted the economic justice demands of younger Black activists like those leading the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, Senator Sanders routinely calls out structural racism. He and other white liberal leaders had to be pushed into doing so.

Gray, who was campaign manager in South Carolina for Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential run, had also been critical of the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama. The first time I spoke with Gray was in July 2010 when the Obama administration fired an African American official named Shirley Sherrod from her position at the Department of Agriculture because of a right-wing effort to misrepresent a speech she made.

As usual, Gray didn't mince words. He said to me, "I'm a Black man in America. This country is eaten up with racism and white supremacy—which is the other term no one ever seems to want to use." It would be at least six years before the phrase "white supremacy" finally became commonly used to explain the rise of Donald Trump's white nationalist leadership.

But in 2010, Gray decried what he said was being dubbed, "post-racialism," and "the sanitization of American history while Barack Obama is president."

His analysis was direct but also nuanced. "We should defend him [Barack Obama] when the attack is about him being Black and being Black as a disqualifier for being president or anything because that is structural racism and white supremacy, because that is an attack against us."

Gray was not swayed by grand rhetoric. When Obama won reelection in 2012, analysts and pundits regaled his 2013 inauguration speech as unleashed from the constraints of campaigning. The New York Times called it "evolved and unapologetic." But when I turned to Gray for analysis, he said, "I hear pundits and everyone lauding it as a progressive manifesto, but it's far from that."

"You've got the prison industrial complex being fed by poor people, poor Black kids… What the Black community needs and what poor people need are jobs programs," said Gray. "And those programs are not going to be forthcoming from this administration or this Congress just because they are talking about cutting."

In response to Obama uplifting sacrosanct government programs like Social Security and Medicare in his speech, Gray pointed out that the Bowles-Simpson commission—convened in 2010 by none other than Obama—had recommended cuts to such programs and recommended raising the eligibility age for Social Security to 67. Gray said, "I'm a 55-year-old Black man. The average lifespan of a Black man is 67. So why would you start there?"

(In fact, Gray was 65 when he died—a fact that hit me hard as I listened to his archival interview.)

Gray asked about Obama’s second term, "Is he going to affirmatively defend FDR's New Deal and Social Security, and a pension for people when they get old, or is he going to give it all up to the Republicans? That's the basic legislative and policy question before we cheer and celebrate a line in a speech!" In the end, Gray was right to question the president's motives. By 2016 it became clear that Obama's two-term legacy was less about progressive transformation and more about "the benefits of practicality and compromise," as one analyst pointed out in the Guardian.

Gray understood that change didn’t happen solely by electing Black people or even progressives of any race to positions of power. "People need to organize—poor people, working people—to put pressure on the government, at the local level and the congressional level," he said in 2013.

He pointed out that Obama had become more progressive on LGBTQ rights, for example, not because the president realized that equality was important on his own, but because he had been forced to evolve. Obama has "come a long way," said Gray. "And of course, the reason he's come so far on gay rights is because the gay community has worked its agenda—it's filed lawsuits, it's filed referendums, and it's moved the issue forward to where it is mainstream and it's… politically smart to be an advocate for equal rights."

Such powerful and elegant analyses were typical of Gray. He saw clearly the connections between grassroots pressure and politicians' PR moves.

"Movements are connected to something long-term," said Gray to me once. "We have to rebuild organizations, we have to rebuild networks… It's got to be led by young people, but it's got to include all people. It's got to be multiracial, it's got to be multi-issue. And that's when movements take place, and that's when change takes place."

As usual, he was right.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The right has narrowed the parameters of discussion on student debt forgiveness, and President Biden is not fighting back aggressively enough. We should, in fact, center the idea of fairness in this debate.

"Nobody's telling the person who is trying to set up the lawn service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan," said U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during oral arguments about President Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan. Roberts continued his logic on behalf of this hypothetical lawn service operator, saying, "he still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of the loan for… the college graduate, who's now going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime."

It's remarkable how concerned Roberts and other conservatives have been about the exploitation of the average American when it comes to loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court's chief imagines that college graduates will go on to make enough money to pay back their loans and they are choosing not to—apparently in order to take advantage of business owners like lawn care operators.

Does Roberts not think the lawn business operator may be college educated and have student debt? Or that perhaps a college graduate might like to open a business but is financially stuck paying off huge loans?

Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest member of the court and the first Black woman in the nation’s history to be appointed, had a very different take. She rightly asked, "I'm wondering whether or not the same fairness issue would arise with respect to any federal benefit program."

Indeed, why is it fair for only people over the age of 65 (and a few other categories of people such as veterans and very low-income people) to qualify for government-funded health care? Those who don't qualify for such government programs pay for others' benefits via our taxes because that's the point of taxes—to pool together a cut of everyone’s personal income and help pay for the things that make society better, fairer, more livable.

But it's this very point that conservatives see as anathema to their grim worldview, the one that Ayn Rand brought to life in her (unintentionally) dystopian novels.

Justice Jackson continued her thought process, saying, "I just don't know how far we can go with this notion of, to the extent that the government is providing much-needed assistance to people in an emergency, it's going to be unfair to those who don't get the same benefit."

Indeed, student debtors are in trouble precisely because they didn't get the same government benefits compared to their predecessors. According to Business Insider, "From fall 1973 to spring 1977, boomers paid around $39,780 in today's dollars for four years of public college. That's a little more than half the cost for millennials attending public college from fall 2006 to spring 2010: $70,000. And what Gen Z is paying today is more than double that: $90,875." This is directly the result of the federal and state governments paying less toward the cost of higher education and shifting more of the cost of college to individuals.

If Roberts's hypothetical lawn care business owner hails from the baby boomer generation, then the question of fairness is turned on its head: Why should older generations have benefitted from tax-subsidized college education (thereby helping them avoid debt), when younger generations have not had the same advantage?

If the Rand-ians could travel back decades in time to rectify this, they certainly would roll back all government benefits aimed at middle- and working-class boomers.

If Biden could go back a few months in time, he would have done better to be more aggressive in his approach to debt relief. In August 2022, after dragging his feet for years to make good on his campaign promise, the president invoked emergency powers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—a weak basis—for justifying debt cancellation.

Debt experts like Harvard Law School’s Eileen Connor make a persuasive case that Congress has given the secretary of education the authority to make—or waive—college loans. In other words, with the stroke of a pen, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona could forgive all student debt. According to Connor, he would have the legal right to do this under the 1965 Higher Education Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Instead of using the 1965 law as the legal basis for his actions, Biden chose the 2003 HEROES Act, saying that he had the authority to pause student loan repayment because of the emergency conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called this an "unsurprising compromise," and added that "[t]ime will tell if it was the right thing" to do.

Time will indeed tell. Emergencies are, by definition, temporary. In August 2022, Biden used the pandemic to make his case for debt cancellation. Then, in September, he declared the pandemic over. He ran out his own clock.

Nebraska's Republican attorney general, Mike Hilgers, pointed out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that, "The president can't have it both ways. He can't tell the country the pandemic is over while claiming that it justifies this unilateral action."

As I explained in an analysis last year when the president first announced his plan, it was a paltry gesture that could have gone so much further. Given that Biden would face the same stiff opposition whether he forgave $10,000 or $100,000, he should have aimed higher and been more aggressive. Instead, his actions indicate that he too may be unswayed by the unfairness of student loan burdens.

Conservatives are also predictably touting the high cost of debt relief—"We're talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans," reminded Justice Roberts during the February 28 oral arguments. Lawmakers, including most of the liberal ones, rarely balk at the much, much higher annual cost of funding the Defense Department.

Unlike the cost of maintaining a perpetual war machine, Biden's (far too modest) debt relief can impact the lives of 43 million living, breathing human beings. One debtor, 26-year-old Ella Azoulay, told Associated Press that her 2018 degree from New York University has left her with $40,000 of debt. Her father is even worse off, having taken out more than $400,000 in loans to educate his three children. For many borrowers, Biden’s plan would eliminate just a fraction of their debt.

What does $10,000 to $20,000 in debt forgiveness mean for an individual? For those people whose repayment plans were paused during the pandemic, a CNBC survey found that resuming payments would impact their ability to pay off other loans, as well as save for retirement or buy a home. A small minority said it would impact their decisions to get married or have a child. So, we're talking about serious life decisions.

Ayn Rand, near the end of her life, benefitted from the same welfare system she railed against. Government benefits are easy to dismiss and denounce—until you need them.

Meanwhile, what does $10,000 to $20,000 mean for the wealthiest Americans? So little that it would not even cover the price tag of this $32,500 Hermes handbag. According to the Financial Times, the market for luxury goods is booming. Further, "wealthy people have more time in which to spend their money, since they now live roughly a decade longer than their low-income counterparts, thanks to better health care, diet, nutrition and rest."

There you have it. If fairness is the basis for deciding whether or not to forgive student loans, conservatives would do well to examine such disparities.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

The billionaire CEO returned to Starbucks to curb union activity. His union-busting has been so egregious that the company's already poor reputation is now in tatters.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, in a recent interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow, proudly showed off his newest invention: a tablespoon of olive oil added to a cup of coffee to bring out rich, complex flavors. The conversation took place in Italy and was meant to showcase Schultz's commitment to the innovation and quality of Starbucks coffee as he gets ready to step down as CEO of the company for the third time.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

When Harlow asked him why he was in Italy doing interviews rather than sitting down with representatives from Starbucks Workers United (SWU) to negotiate a contract, he responded, "We want to and are willing to enter into bargaining, but we want to do it face to face. That's what we think is the right thing to do."

Schultz was referring to the fact that negotiating meetings were taking place virtually over Zoom—the way that most meetings took place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the way that many continue to be conducted. The union sees his demand for in-person meetings as an excuse to delay negotiations. According to Axios's Emily Peck, the issue could end up being decided by a court. However, she pointed out, "Arbitration is often done virtually, as are court hearings. It would be unusual for a court to prohibit this at the bargaining table."

Indeed, Schultz has been playing dirty during his latest tenure as CEO, operating as union-buster-in-chief of the iconic corporation while trying to paint himself as a sympathetic character.

Harlow's interview with Schultz began in Sicily and ended in Brooklyn, New York, at the public housing project where he grew up—an obvious juxtaposition intended to showcase how the CEO of one of the most well-known American brands knows what it's like to struggle in a working-class environment. CNN's camera remained trained on Schultz's face as he pointed out the stairwell in which he would hide from an abusive father. "I could almost cry, actually," he said.

This sort of sympathetic profiling of self-made billionaires—Schultz is worth $3.7 billion—is intentional. The implied narrative is that if someone from a low-income background who faced abuse at the hands of a parent could turn into a successful billionaire, surely Starbucks's young, educated workers could improve their circumstances on their own.

In fact, in Schultz's worldview, hardship was the impetus for his success. "I never would have had the drive to do what I've done and have the success I've enjoyed if I didn't come from this place," he said. There is, once again, an implied narrative: hardship builds character, and Starbucks workers ought to be grateful for the chance to struggle.

But workers, rightly, think they deserve better. Since the first group of Starbucks workers unionized a café in Buffalo, New York, in late 2021, more than 278 stores have done the same, according to SWU. Still, the number of unionized cafés remains a tiny fraction—about 3 percent—of all stores.

Apparently, Schultz takes even this tiny trend personally, as if Starbucks's failure to keep workers happy was a design flaw rather than an inherent characteristic of corporate America. He addressed workers early on in the union campaign and said that the company had failed to give them the tools they needed, such as better staffing and training, according to a New York Times report. Schultz admitted to Harlow that he returned to Starbucks as CEO in April 2022 directly in response to the wave of union activity at cafés across the United States.

But instead of responding to workers, Schultz's strategy was to create an uneven playing field and punish workers for daring to demand better conditions.

In 2022, Schultz reportedly rewarded nonunion workers with better wages and benefits, as well as credit card tipping, and denied the same to people working in union stores. As a result, the New York Times reported, "Filings for union elections dropped from more than 60 a month in March and April to under 10 in August."

In other words, the drive to unionize worked to improve conditions—at least for some workers. But Schultz's petty punishment also worked to slow down the union's momentum.

Starbucks's retaliation against workers has gone further than uneven benefits. The company is firing union leaders such as Starbucks worker Hannah Whitbeck in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her termination prompted a lawsuit and a federal judge's decision that, initially, prohibited Starbucks from firing workers for union activity nationwide. Shortly afterward, the judge in question, in a remarkable move, retroactively limited his ruling to just the one store where Whitbeck worked rather than applying it to all Starbucks stores nationwide.

The company has also been understaffing stores that are unionizing, a move that the union says is a deliberate ploy to make workers' lives more difficult.

Schultz has also been closing down entire stores that have dared to take up union activity, including the first store in Seattle to unionize (Seattle is the city where Starbucks was founded). The company is citing "safety issues," but SWU sees it as clearly retaliatory. "This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more," warned Schultz in July 2022.

Schultz is proving workers' point. As long as an employer can abuse workers as Starbucks is doing, there is a need for unions. And union activity is surging, with a 50 percent increase in strike activity in 2022 compared to the year before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The CEO sees himself as above the law. He refused to testify about his company's 75 documented violations of federal labor laws in front of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders responded to the refusal with a pithy observation: "Apparently, it is easier for Mr. Schultz to fire workers who are exercising their constitutional right to form unions, and to intimidate others who may be interested in joining a union than to answer questions from elected officials."

Sanders has now hinted that he may subpoena Schultz.

Indeed, companies like Starbucks won't voluntarily treat workers well. They have to be forced into doing so, and unions are a powerful way for workers to stand firm against abusive CEOs like Schultz.

There are lessons for workers and corporations in the recent union negotiation between Japanese automaker Toyota and the union representing Toyota workers. The union asked for its largest pay hike in 20 years. Remarkably, the company agreed to all the union’s demands in the very first round of negotiations.

Toyota's head Koji Sato said the move was intended as an example "for the industry as a whole," and that it reflected his "hope that it will lead to frank discussions between labor and management at each company." It worked. Hours after Toyota's announcement, Honda accepted its workers' union's demands in full.

Schultz has ruined Starbucks's reputation as a company that cares about its workers and become the poster child, even in the business world, of what not to do when faced with union activity.

Instead of fighting the union tooth and nail, Schultz could take a page out of Toyota's book and embrace worker demands. In his CNN interview, he admitted that what Starbucks workers want more than anything is "a seat at the table."

He also said, "It's hard to walk in someone else's shoes, but you've got to do that a little bit." Instead of experimenting with olive oil in coffee, he could try something else that’s new for him—treating workers with the same respect that he commands.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

It'

Tipping Is Not a Reward—It’s an Insult

s time to end our national reliance on tipped workers. The unhealthy dynamic created by tipping emerges from decades of legalized subminimum wages and keeps workers subservient to the whims of employers and customers.

One of the things that new visitors to the United States learn—but often don't understand—is that they are expected to tip nearly every service worker they encounter. The most obvious tipping expectation is at restaurants and bars, where they must gift an additional 18-25 percent of their total bill to their waitstaff or bartender.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Taxi and rideshare drivers also expect tips, as do hotel bellhops and cleaning staff, as well as hair stylists, and even babysitters. Delivery drivers, in the age of online shopping, expect tips—but only those delivering food via such services as DoorDash, and not, say, your Amazon package deliverer, and certainly not your local postal worker bringing you your daily dose of junk mail.

Forget those who are new to the U.S.—the expectations about when to tip and how much to tip are bewildering even for those of us who have lived here our whole lives. There are detailed guides now for the confused consumer, such as New York magazine's explaining-and-shaming approach to tipping etiquette after the COVID-19 pandemic changed the rules of "polite society," while exhorting readers to accept the status quo: "It's just the rules; don't complain." Real Simple magazine recently issued a primer that billed itself as the "Ultimate Guide" for the confused tipper. "Tipping used to be about showing appreciation for good service," lifestyle writer Julie Vadnal says in the Real Simple article. "[B]ut as the minimum wage has plateaued (the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009), workers have come to depend on it." The federal government’s baseline wage for tipped workers is an unimaginably low $2.13 an hour.

What we need is an "Ultimate Guide" on how to make our economy fairer so that ordinary people are not subsidizing the salaries of low-wage workers—because that's ultimately what tipping is. How—and why—do we tolerate it?

Think about the explicit requests for tips that are cropping up at walk-up cafes where the cashier taking your coffee order offers you a digital tablet to complete your cashless transaction and where you must choose a tip amount of anything between 10 and 22 percent in view of the worker. Sometimes the machine suggests even explicit dollar amounts—a $2 tip on a $4 coffee?—that obscures the tip percentage. If the worker you interacted with has been rude or cold, you can choose a low tip or no tip at all in retaliation. If they have been kind and you still tip frugally, you are the rude, cold one.

This quick interaction between customer and server is a veritable minefield of values, placing the onus of paying a worker directly on the person being served rather than on the worker's employer.

It’s a sly calculation on the part of business owners to ensure compliant workers while gouging customers: A worker’s take-home pay could be diminished simply if they had a bad day and didn't feel like smiling, while at the same time, the customer feels obligated to pay for their product, and then some. Tipping is just another way for businesses to pass their costs on to customers.

Worse, it encourages sexism and sexual harassment, especially for women workers who often lose out on tips if they snub sexual advances by male customers. According to One Fair Wage, nearly 7 out of 10 tipped workers are women.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) lays the blame for our national tipping culture on the 1966 amendments creating a so-called "tip credit" to the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to EPI, "The creation of the tip credit—the difference, paid for by customers' tips, between the regular minimum wage and the sub-wage for tipped workers—fundamentally changed the practice of tipping."

The National Restaurant Association, which is the major lobbying arm of an industry that disproportionately relies on tipped workers, has for years pressured lawmakers to keep the tip credit in place and enable the continued underpaying of workers. In a press release in November 2022, it denounced the successful Washington, D.C., vote to eliminate the tipped wage, claiming bizarrely that tipping is good for both workers and customers. The subtitle of the press release reads: "Current tipping system increases earning potential for tipped workers and allows operators to staff at levels needed for exceptional hospitality."

According to a National Restaurant Association executive, the vote to eliminate tipped wages means that "some operators will reduce their workforce." It's the same logic that fiscal conservatives use to counter an increase in the federal minimum wage: raising salaries will mean people will be fired because employers won't be able to afford to pay the higher wages. But EPI points out that "[p]aying tipped workers the regular minimum wage has had no discernable effect on leisure and hospitality employment growth in the seven states where tipped workers receive the full regular minimum wage."

The lobbyist also condescendingly claims that "[t]he tipped income system often comes under fire because there is widespread misunderstanding about how it works." Apparently, the rest of us ignoramuses don't get that "[e]very tipped restaurant employee earns at least their state's minimum wage" (emphasis in original) and that "[t]his amount is paid partly by the operator and partly by tips."

In truth, employers, especially corporate chains, don't always bother ensuring that their workers make at least the full minimum wage. Outback Steakhouse's workers, for example, are suing their boss over this very issue. And, if it were true that tipped workers actually take home what is owed to them, there wouldn't be a stark discrepancy in poverty levels between tipped workers and non-tipped workers. EPI points out that "in the states where tipped workers are paid the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour… 18.5 percent of waiters, waitresses, and bartenders are in poverty." But, "in the states where they are paid the regular minimum wage before tips… the poverty rate for waitstaff and bartenders is only 11.1 percent."

Not only is the National Restaurant Association obscuring the fact that subminimum wages are beneficial to employer profit margins, but it has even deceived workers into subsidizing the cost of the lobbying that keeps wages suppressed. The New York Times recently revealed how the National Restaurant Association runs a company called ServSafe, widely used by new workers for mandatory training on things like food safety. But ServSafe is also the association's fundraising arm.

In other words, workers are inadvertently paying to ensure their wages remain low. And the lobbying has been wildly successful.

For example, when Washington, D.C., voters passed Initiative 77 in 2018 to raise the tipped wage, the city council repealed it, instead passing a law raising awareness of the rights of tipped workers. But lawmakers never funded the law. Then, in November 2022, voters passed a similar measure, Initiative 82, with the support of nearly three-quarters of all voters (this was the vote that prompted the association's aforementioned defensive press release). The D.C. city council has again tried to thwart the measure, delaying its implementation by a few months. Activists for 82 say they believe the restaurant industry's lobbying has played a role.

Now, some New York lawmakers are getting ready to propose a similar bill that would phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers in their state. And, there is strong public will to do so. A survey by Data for Progress found robust bipartisan support among likely voters to do away with a system requiring workers to depend on tips. The progressive organization One Fair Wage has several campaigns—including in New York, Washington, D.C., Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, and Illinois—to eliminate the tipped wage system.

There are nations in the world where tipping is not only unusual, but considered downright rude. For example, according to one social media influencer of Japanese descent, tipping in Japan is frowned upon because it's seen as "petty," and akin to an insult. TikTok user Cyber Bunny compares a customer tipping a server in Japan to a parent giving a child an allowance.

Ouch.

Such a dynamic can develop here in the U.S. too, if we had a culture and set of laws that respected worker dignity. After all, money is power, and for a customer to wield power over a worker in such a direct manner ought to be considered unthinkable. Wages are not allowances, and workers are not children.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of "Rising Up With Sonali," a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women's Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

It’s time to take back our time and spend it on meaningful activities instead of succumbing to the futility and moral pressure of endlessly cleaning our homes.

My favorite chair is surrounded by piles of art supplies. There is yarn stacked high in baskets that I once aspired to organize. Metal boxes of paint and brushes are squashed next to jewelry supplies that are threatening to fall off the edge of a too-full shelf. I want so badly… to want to clean. But then I invariably set aside such desires and settle in to knit for the night.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This is not what the mini Marie Kondo inside my brain wants. But it’s what the giant beating hub of the artist inside my heart wants—perhaps inspired by the likes of Yayoi Kusama’s organized chaos. And, it’s what all women, indeed all people, ought to want as we aspire for a just world.

Cleaning is women’s work. This is not an assertion. It’s an observation. In spite of the rise of the stay-at-home dad—a trend that began in the mid-2010s—women still do most of the housework. According to a 2020 Gallup poll, women are “much more likely than their husbands to care for children on a daily basis, shop for groceries and wash dishes.”

Indeed, there has been relentless messaging pushing us to maintain clean homes. We may be appalled by the overt sexism of vintage advertising, but even modern commercials for cleaning products are often gendered.

Even when stripped of gender, today’s messaging about maintaining cleanliness pushes us to wage a losing battle against germs and clutter. At the doctor’s office, bathroom walls sport signs reminding us of just how many millions of fecal bacteria gather on the undersides of our shoes. News stories breathlessly report scientific findings of how disgustingly bacteria-ridden everything is, from door knobs to the lemon slices that restaurants serve on water glasses.

It’s enough to terrify us into submission and to go way past the commonsense practice of frequent handwashing with soap to using antibacterial spray cleaners on every surface. Indeed, the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic were a redemptive moment for the obsessive cleaners among us who already had a large stash of Lysol on our perfectly organized shelves.

There is a strong moral component to the obsession behind maintaining clean homes. We may harshly judge those people—especially the women—whose messy homes we step into, mentally running our fingers along dusty shelves and noting greasy prints on the metal refrigerator. We worry about being judged when people enter our messy homes. We are expected to feel shame over the clutter. Even our mental health suffers when we can’t keep up with cleaning, as per some studies, likely because we fear being judged for being messy.

Countless online cleaning guides offer “secrets” and “tips” to keeping a house clean. They rarely, if ever, account for the fact that there is no secret to house cleaning except 1) having the desire to do so, and 2) setting aside the time to make it happen. The former is achieved by the aforementioned societal messaging and moral pressure to clean. The latter is made nearly impossible by the demands of jobs, especially on working parents. And still, far too many of us waste our precious moments of free time endlessly cleaning our homes.

There is a third (dirty) secret: wealthy families simply outsource house cleaning to domestic help. The rich are so reliant on hired help that in the early months of the COVID-19 lockdowns, it was revealed just how helpless they are when forced to clean their own homes.

Few labor and legal protections exist for domestic workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrant women, and are often hired “under the table” or exploited. In California, domestic workers won a modest “bill of rights” in 2013. In 2016, that bill was updated with protections for overtime pay. In 2021, the state passed a law that current and former workers helped to craft, protecting them from dangerous working conditions. But the guidelines for protection remain voluntary. Domestic workers still suffer horrible treatment and even trafficking.

It turns out that the rest of us—Marie Kondo included—eventually succumb to the madness and mayhem of real life. Kondo, the queen of clean, in a recent Washington Post profile found that after having multiple children, balancing a life of work and child-rearing leaves little time—and, dare we say, desire—to maintain perfectly clean countertops: “The multitasker seems somewhat humbled by her growing family and her business success.” Kondo’s fame and fortune likely afford her the ability to hire cleaning help. Still, she revealed, “My home is messy, but the way I am spending my time is the right way for me at this time at this stage of my life.”

That should have been her message all along. And those of us in the know admired her charming cleaning ethos rather as we might view a stunning piece of performance art—envy-inducing, discipline-requiring, and fleeting.

As a person of Indian origin, I grew up in a sparkling clean home, where wearing shoes indoors was strictly forbidden. Both my grandmothers were relegated to the quiet submission of presenting perfectly clean homes and producing daily multi-dish family meals, while balancing paid jobs as teachers. The demand to clean is a direct descendant of the enslavement of women in the home. It’s no coincidence that the labor rights long denied to domestic workers also descended from the exploitation of the enslaved. House cleaning work is the worst sort of mind-numbing drudgery, of the type that we have been conditioned to believe is nonnegotiable and a precursor to domestic peace.

Today, I routinely reject the desire to clean and instead embrace all the possibilities of creativity that were denied to my female ancestors.

As for shoes in the home? There are plenty of studies one can look up to scare oneself into the submission of leaving shoes outside. But, as one infectious disease expert, Amesh Adalja of John Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Vice, “Just taking off your shoes isn’t really going to substantially diminish that microbial load you have in your house—nor would you want it to—because a lot of times, 99 percent of the microorganisms on the planet don’t do any harm.”

As a working woman with multiple jobs, responsibilities toward two children and two elderly parents, a home, and more, I am often asked how I do it all. How do I write, make dinner and shop for groceries, knit and paint, care for my community, agitate for political change, and still take time for self-care? My secret—one that is rarely revealed in moral exhortations against messy homes—is to not clean until it’s absolutely necessary. And, most importantly, to reject the sexist pressures of guilt and shame that are inflicted on women. It’s time to take back our time.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.

Republicans claim that in addition to protecting the life of a collection of fetal cells that they are determined to personify, they are working in the interests of women’s health. Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey explained his opposition to the abortion pill in a written statement, saying he was merely “protecting the health of women and their unborn children.”

However, not only are abortion pills safer than penicillin or Viagra, but going through pregnancy and childbirth is far more dangerous to women’s health than aborting a fetus. According to a New York Times report on one study of the effects of abortion restrictions on women, “Women who were denied an abortion and gave birth reported more chronic headaches or migraines, joint pain and gestational hypertension compared with those who had an abortion.” Furthermore, “They also reported more life-threatening complications like eclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage, and burdens that included higher exposure to domestic violence and increased poverty.” (It is a wonder that some of us choose to have children at all.)

The GOP’s war on transgender people has also gained steam. Just as Republicans are determined to control the bodies of people who want to terminate pregnancies, they are battling the right of transgender people to transition via surgeries, hormone supplements, or other gender-affirming medical treatments. It’s a shocking attack on people’s right to be who they want and need to be—one that targets young people in particular.

Again, the right wing uses concerns over health as cover for its attacks on human rights. For example, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced 35 anti-LGBTQ bills, three of which would view medical care as child abuse. But, even though the vast majority of the anti-LGBTQ bills that are introduced fail to become law, according to the Trevor Project, the debate itself is deeply traumatizing for young people. The organization found that “86% of transgender and nonbinary youth say recent debates around anti-trans bills have negatively impacted their mental health.” It has further encouraged bullying, and the risk of suicide.

Writing in the Nation, Amy Littlefield and Heron Greenesmith point out how “The right is deploying tactics against trans rights that are eerily similar to those mounted against abortion rights over the past five decades.” It’s the same Republican playbook over and over: claim that attacks on vulnerable people are in their own best interests to distract from the fact that the party has no actual plan to make people’s lives truly better.

Like the attacks on abortion and transgender rights, Republicans are also so worried about the supposed harm to students of American history that their third major battlefront is educational courses that question white supremacy and its impact. Claiming they are fighting a college-level academic approach to history called critical race theory, GOP leaders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are busy banning books and classes at all levels of education. DeSantis’s latest assault is a ban on a new AP-level high school African American studies course that the College Board spent years devising and is set to pilot in 60 schools across the country.

The pushback by DeSantis and his allies has already yielded results. The College Board seemingly capitulated and sanitized the AP course, paring back mentions of Black feminism, queer theory, and the Black Lives Matter movement and replacing it with a new section on Black conservatism.

The move came at the same time that congressional Republicans took aim at Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), unceremoniously stripping her of membership in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy justified his ousting of Omar from the committee over her alleged antisemitism because she has criticized the state of Israel. Never mind that criticism of Israel is not equivalent to racist attacks on Jews; two of the GOP’s own representatives, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), whose antisemitism is well documented, are now poised to regain their committee seats.

In a speech on the House floor, Omar rightly pointed out that the Republican attack was about “who gets to be an American.” She called out the GOP for its earlier culture war aimed at the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, and for spreading rumors that he was a secret Muslim and not a natural born U.S. citizen.

The message that emerges from the conservative party is that those who are not either straight, white, cisgender men, or in service of white supremacist patriarchy, had better fall in line or face prohibition and the threats of violence.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are busy readying their pitchforks over the federal government’s debt, hoping to extract austerity measures in exchange for their support to raise the debt ceiling. According to the Washington Post, “the party has focused its attention on slimming down federal health care, education, science and labor programs, perhaps by billions of dollars.” And, some have “pitched a deeper examination of entitlements,” which is a euphemistic way of saying they want cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Aggressively bombarding women, transgender people, Black people, immigrants, and people of color over their bodily autonomy and their gender and racial identity is a tactic that Republicans hope will keep conservative voters loyal to the GOP and lets them off the hook on regressive economic policies. It’s a classic bait and switch—one that we ought not to fall for.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Here’s one of many indicators about how broken the United States health care system is: Guns seem to be easier and cheaper to access than treatment for the wounds they cause. A survivor of the recent mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, California, reportedly said to Gov. Gavin Newsom that he needed to keep his hospital stay as short as possible in order to avoid a massive medical bill. Meanwhile, the suspected perpetrator seemed to have had few obstacles in his quest to legally obtain a semi-automatic weapon to commit deadly violence.

Americans are at the whim of a bewildering patchwork of employer-based private insurance plans, individual health plans via a government-run online marketplace, or government-run health care (for those lucky enough to be eligible). The coverage and costs of plans vary dramatically so that even if one has health insurance there is rarely a guarantee that there will be no out-of-pocket costs associated with accessing care.

It’s hardly surprising then that the latest Gallup poll about health care affirms what earlier polls have said: that a majority of Americans want their government to ensure health coverage for all. In fact, nearly three-quarters of all Democrats want a government-run system.

Gallup also found that a record high number of people put off addressing health concerns because of the cost of care. Thirty-eight percent of Americans said they delayed getting treatment in 2022—that’s 12 percentage points higher than the year before. Unsurprisingly, lower-income Americans were disproportionately affected.

Women are especially impacted, with more women than men delaying treatment as per the same Gallup poll. The findings were consistent with results published by researchers at New York University’s School of Global Public Health—that women’s health care was increasingly unaffordable, compared to men’s—in a study that solely focused on people with employer-based health coverage. Imagine how out-of-reach health care is for uninsured women.

Added to that, Republican-led abortion bans have made it even harder for American women to obtain reproductive health care. On the 50th anniversary of the recently overturned Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, abortion providers in Massachusetts, for example, reported a steady stream of people driving to their state—one where abortion remains legal—to access care.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party appear to think that this grim status quo is perfectly acceptable. Democrats’ reliance on the Obama-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a bulwark against Republican opposition to any government intervention in health care seems to be resoundingly successful—on paper. In December 2022, Biden touted the fact that 11.5 million Americans, a record high number, had signed up for ACA plans during the last enrollment period. He said, “Gains like these helped us drive down the uninsured rate to eight percent earlier this year, its lowest level in history.”

His administration, rather than working to fulfill what a majority of his party’s constituents want—a government-run health care system—has continued instead to tweak the ACA by extending a period of discounted monthly premiums for private insurance plans. Such tweaks are not permanent. Neither are they a panacea for accessing adequate care. If anything, they are a façade protecting profit-based private insurance companies.

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that although the number of insured Americans is now at an all-time high, more than 40 percent of those who bought ACA plans and nearly 30 percent of those with employer-based plans were underinsured—that is, the plans were inadequate to cover their health care needs.

By focusing solely on the number of people who had health plans as a measure of success, the White House is participating in a great coverup of the ongoing American health care tragedy.

Meanwhile, just over the horizon from Biden’s celebration of record numbers of ACA signups is the fact that millions of people currently enrolled in the Medicaid government health plan could lose access because of the end of an emergency provision that allowed for “continuous enrollment.” That provision expires at the end of March 2023. If all Americans were automatically enrolled in government-provided health care regardless of eligibility, this would not be a concern.

Right-wing sources, so terrified that too many Americans want a government-run health system, are busy shaping public opinion against it. The Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes published an op-ed about how Canada’s national health system was a good reason why the U.S. should not have a similar program. Using the deadly logic of a free marketeer, she wrote, “In Canada, health care is ‘free’ at the point of service. As a result, demand for care is sky-high.”

The implication is that charging people for service would reduce the demand, just as it would for, say, an electric vehicle. In Pipes’ world, people are accessing health care just for fun, and if they were charged money for it, their ailments might resolve themselves without treatment.

The Heritage Foundation also published an attack on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), gleefully claiming that it is “cratering,” and warning that it is a lesson for American liberals who might support a similar “single-payer” system in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a similar warning, claiming that the NHS was “failing patients, with deadly consequences.”

It’s puzzling why the Pacific Research Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Wall Street Journal appear unconcerned about the 330,000 Americans who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic simply because they don’t live in a nation with a universal health care program.

The U.S. spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care than other comparable high-income nations. According to Health Affairs, excessive administrative costs are the main reason for this discrepancy—these are nonmedical costs associated with delivering health care in a patchwork system of employer-based private health and publicly subsidized plans. In fact, “administrative spending accounts for 15–30 percent of health care spending.”

Again, right-wing media outlets and think tanks appear unconcerned by this disturbing fact. They only want to convince Americans that a government-run health plan is a bad idea. And, sadly, the Democratic Party leaders like Biden seem to agree implicitly.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers together with Healthy California Now created an online calculator for individuals to determine how much money they would save if the U.S. had a single-payer system.

I have an employer-based health care plan that is considered very good. Using the calculator, I determined that I would save more than $16,000 if California, the state where I live, had a single-payer system. That’s money I could be saving for my children’s higher education or for my retirement.

The victims of mass shootings, like the Half Moon Bay survivor, are saddled with high costs of care on top of the trauma of having been shot. Every year, there are more than 80,000 survivors of injuries from firearms in the United States. Having a single-payer health care system would not fix our epidemic of gun violence. But it would certainly make it easier to bear.

Canada and Britain’s state-run systems of health care may be imperfect, but they are a vast improvement on the survival-of-the-fittest approach that the U.S. takes.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.