Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 Why the Right Is Winning Its War on Unhoused Peoplehttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/unhoused-right-rhetoric-homelessness/Ned ResnikoffAug 24, 2023

Americans’ attitude toward people sleeping on the street has become angrier, crueler, and more overtly violent. Blame a right-wing propaganda campaign.

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August 24, 2023

Why the Right Is Winning Its War on Unhoused People

Americans’ attitude toward people sleeping on the street has become angrier, crueler, and more overtly violent. Blame a right-wing propaganda campaign.

Ned Resnikoff

Hundreds of demonstrators hold banners in Washington Square Park in New York City on May 5, 2023. Charges were called against the former US Marine who choked a homeless man, Jordan Neely, to death on the subway.

(Photo by Selcuk Acar / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

Something has shifted in how policy-makers and the public view homelessness: Our posture toward unhoused people has become angrier, crueler, more overtly violent and rancorous. Over the past couple of years, people have become more willing to say and do things to unhoused people that they might once have shied away from. And the social and legal sanction they receive for these things is perfunctory, as if accompanied by a collective shrug. What were they supposed to do? I probably would have done the same.

The killing of Jordan Neely this spring and the subsequent valorization of his killer, Daniel Penny, who was recorded choking Neely to death on a crowded subway car, dramatized a process that has been playing out in subtler ways across the country. In San Francisco, a man was recorded attacking random unhoused people with bear spray. Another San Franciscan, expressing frustration with a spate of car robberies, told the San Francisco Chronicle that he wanted to burn down the encampment where the alleged carjacker lives. Nationwide, murders of unhoused people are climbing; every week, this country is producing more Daniel Pennys.

The spike in violence against unhoused people has been accompanied by crackdowns. San Diego recently became the latest big city to pass an encampment ban; police in Houston have been ticketing activists for the crime of giving food to unhoused people. And, earlier this month, the City of Sacramento admitted that it has continued to clear encampments in defiance of a court order.

There are a few reasons for this grim trajectory. One is simply that American homelessness is getting worse. It increased nearly 30 percent between 2005 and 2022, according to regional point-in-time counts (annual census-style surveys that aim to count the number of unhoused people in a region on a single day out of the year). More people who have never personally experienced homelessness are seeing encampments in their neighborhoods. They are understandably aggrieved; in too many cases, that aggrievement has curdled into something far uglier.

But the rise of state and vigilante attacks on unhoused people isn’t an inevitable reaction to metastasizing homelessness; it’s at least in part the byproduct of a successful propaganda campaign. For years, a network of right-wing demagogues has been depicting unhoused people as subhuman, parasitical, and intrinsically criminal.

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Despite the fascist overtones in this message, they’ve been able to garner a sympathetic audience in the cultural mainstream. They’ve written opinion pieces in major newspapers; they’ve been profiled in glossy magazines and appeared on prime-time television; the Republican Party has embraced their ideas, and more than a few Democratic officials have nodded along. They’ve been winning the policy debate.

Disgust with unhoused people is at least as old as the modern American homelessness crisis, which emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as housing prices climbed and cities buckled under the long-term consequences of urban renewal. But the right’s recent efforts to capitalize on people’s revulsion of their unhoused neighbors are novel in their scope and intensity.

If any one person deserves credit for sensing the opportunity, it would have to be Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Though now best known for his crusades against “wokeness,” Rufo came to prominence as a pundit in Seattle, where he wrote a series of essays arguing that homelessness should be addressed through more aggressive policing, not more social services and housing subsidies. As he put it euphemistically in a 2021 Heritage Foundation report, homelessness is “a human problem, not a housing problem.”

As Rufo’s star rose, others joined in. Professional gadfly Michael Shellenberger, who had made his name through an association with the ecomodernism movement, took a hard pivot into urban policy with the 2021 book San Fransicko: Why Progressive Ruins Cities, which appropriated much of Rufo’s argument and extensively cited him. The message spread through other right-wing channels: the Cicero Institute, a think tank started by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale; Rufo’s colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, most notably Heather MacDonald; PragerU, which coproduced a 23-minute video on homelessness with the Cicero Institute; and, of course, Fox News.

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Characteristically, Tucker Carlson (then the top star at Fox) offered the clearest and most forthright account of the emerging reactionary consensus on homelessness. In a 2022 commentary on his show, Carlson described unhoused people as “the least productive, most antisocial parasites in our society.” He proposed the following solution to homelessness:

Stop putting up with it. Say no. No, you can’t smoke meth in the park. You’re not allowed to crap on the sidewalk. Pull up your pants and get the hell out of here.

Carlson stopped just short of calling for the violent eradication of unhoused people. A few months later, Fox News no longer felt the need to stop short; the network’s talent openly praised Daniel Penny for killing Jordan Neely. “This was not just reasonable behavior by Daniel Penny, but potentially heroic behavior by Daniel Penny,” said Will Cain, one of the weekend morning hosts, before adding, “Our society, to be absolutely clear, needs more Daniel Pennys.”

Why did Rufo and those who followed adopt homelessness as their pet issue? Partly because it was there: Widespread, visible homelessness in places like New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco was politically salient to the locals. And the right could plausibly argue that homelessness was especially prevalent in liberal cities because of progressive governance, not in spite of it.

But homelessness serves another purpose for the far right. Consider the other preoccupations of the San Fransicko crowd: Rufo went from fulminating against supportive housing programs to attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; Shellenberger has diversified into assaults on “trans ideology.” Tucker Carlson is, well, Tucker Carlson. And then there’s Richard Hanania, another celebrity of the online right, whom HuffPost recently outed as an (allegedly former) white supremacist. Here’s what Hanania had to say after New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Penny with manslaughter for killing Neely: “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”

Bragg is Black, and so was Neely. Both are “animals” in Hanania’s view, but Neely in particular was deserving of extrajudicial execution.

Racism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t incidental to the anti-homeless smear campaign; they’re part of the point. Disgust with unhoused people is a gateway into an entire politics built around the murderous contempt for subaltern groups. Conveniently, Black and queer people are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness in America; to reactionaries, homelessness becomes both a consequence of their subaltern status and an explanation for it.

Thus homelessness plays a central, underestimated role in the authoritarian right’s recruitment efforts. Mainstream news outlets continue to promote the views of Rufo, Shellenberger, Lonsdale, and their comrades. Rufo still gets his op-eds placed in The New York Times. Hanania suffered a career setback thanks to the HuffPost scoop, but he continues to have friends in high places. Shellenberger is now one of the marquee names at Bari Weiss’s news startup, The Free Press.

But the real marker of the campaign’s success is not the career fortunes of its chief ideologues. We should instead judge the campaign’s success by its effect on public policy. By that measure, San Fransicko is probably one of the more effective books on policy published in the past few years. It’s a testament to the visceral power of the far right’s message. (It’s certainly not a testament to the strength of Shellenberger’s argument; San Fransicko is riddled with factual errors and sloppy reasoning, some of which I identified here.)

The recent uptick in encampment bans and sweeps has been accompanied by a retreat from real solutions to homelessness. The main policy target of the far right’s campaign has been Housing First, a strategy that prioritizes moving unhoused people into subsidized permanent housing, along with social services as needed. The overwhelming consensus among researchers is that Housing First works; cities like Houston and Helsinki have used the strategy to dramatically cut rates of homelessness. But Housing First works only because it assumes that the cure for homelessness begins with an offer of housing; to invert Rufo’s formula, it stipulates that homelessness is a housing problem, not a human problem.

And as with so many policies, implementation is everything. Doing Housing First correctly requires extensive interdepartmental coordination and communication; city agencies, county offices, and nonprofit service providers all need to be working in the same direction. Perhaps most importantly, Housing First needs housing. Helsinki could rely on its extensive stock of social-housing units; Houston’s loose land-use rules meant the private market could generate a large supply of naturally affordable units. In places where housing is scarce, no amount of good intentions will generate the physical infrastructure necessary to make Housing First workable on a large scale.

California tried. Over the past five years, the state has allocated $20.6 billion to funding housing and homelessness programs, including $5 billion to local and regional agencies for fighting homelessness and $3.7 billion for Homekey, a program that creates homeless housing by converting motels, hotels, and residential properties. Meanwhile, cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles identified their own new funding streams for addressing homelessness.

And yet. Despite all that spending, California’s point-in-time homelessness counts recorded a 24 percent increase between 2018 and 2022.

There are several reasons California’s $20 billion investment did not lead to the desired result, most of them having to do with the state’s housing shortage. Persistently high rents continue to push Californians into homelessness faster than the state can rehouse them; meanwhile, the same land-use rules that constrain housing supply and push those rents to dizzying heights also drive up development costs and slow down the state’s efforts to build more housing for unhoused residents. The state’s billions could not go far enough or fast enough to stem the tide.

While California’s failure was the product of a broken housing market and limited state capacity, it looked from the outside like a failure of the Housing First strategy itself. The right used this to its advantage, going so far as to claim that supportive housing development encouraged homelessness by providing layabouts with cushy free apartments. Housing First “appears to attract more people from outside the homeless system, or keeps them in the homelessness system, because they are drawn to the promise of a permanent and usually rent-free room,” according to one Cicero Institute memo.

The gap between the state’s ambitions and what Californians saw firsthand seemed to support their argument.

Thus far, the response to the far right from Team Housing First has been muted. When San Fransicko was released, multiple homeless service providers and advocates told me that we shouldn’t respond to Shellenberger because it would only drive more media coverage of his obviously bogus arguments. As the weeks and months wore on, it became clear that he didn’t need our help generating media interest, but many prominent Housing Firsters remained strenuously committed to avoiding direct confrontation.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say definitively that nonconfrontation has failed. Instead of starving reactionaries of media attention, it allowed them to lie with impunity.

It’s time to go on the offensive. Instead of trying to ignore prominent reactionaries, advocates for unhoused people should review what they publish and say publicly; identify false or misleading utterances; and write reports, op-eds and blog posts that fact-check them. Make sure the journalists who cover this issue are aware of every falsehood. Because in the absence of any concerted pushback, even nominally progressive publications will accept some of the right’s claims about homelessness at face value; HuffPost, for example, once ran a flattering profile of Shellenberger, describing him as a moderate with a “brainy style and preference for policy discussion.” That piece might have turned out differently if advocates for the unhoused had been less diffident.

Second, advocates need to better acknowledge the anger felt by many residents of high-homelessness areas. Living near large concentrations of extreme poverty is unpleasant, and it can in some cases be unsafe. People have a right to be frustrated; the far right will have a significant advantage so long as it can claim that only it shares that frustration. Even worse, the far right’s proposed “solution”—dispersing encampments and rounding up their occupants—is more straightforward, despite its cruelty and its ineffectiveness. The only way to counter that advantage is by making disgruntled residents feel heard.

Third, advocates need to confront the reasons large investments in Housing First infrastructure haven’t led to corresponding declines in homelessness. A strategy based on requesting greater levels of public investment without delivering tangible results is doomed. A better approach would focus on securing those investments and fixing the broken housing policies that hinder their effectiveness. That’s one reason I moved from working in homelessness policy to a role at California YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”), an organization dedicated to relieving California’s housing shortage. YIMBYs and homeless nonprofits often work in silos, but they share a common mission. Just as YIMBYs should fight for Housing First, Housing Firsters should fight to make housing cheaper and more abundant.

Despite the noxious political climate and the successes of reactionary grifters, the homelessness crisis remains solvable. But the longer the crisis goes on, the more it will empower opportunists who will make things even worse. They’ve already made solving homelessness considerably harder by promulgating punitive, and even eliminationist ideas about what to do with unhoused people. If we’re going to build the political support to actually get people into housing, those ideas cannot be allowed to spread unchallenged. We need to confront them head-on.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/unhoused-right-rhetoric-homelessness/
How Houston Halved Homelessness—and What California Can Learn From Ithttps://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-houston-housing-homelessness/Ned Resnikoff,Ned ResnikoffDec 6, 2022

Every year, the regional bodies known as Continuums of Care (CoCs) conduct point-in-time counts, a census of the region’s homeless population at a particular moment. When California published its results earlier this year, it confirmed what most already suspected: Homelessness, already at emergency levels before the Covid-19 pandemic, had grown worse. Adding every regional count together, the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters found that the state’s homeless population had increased by more than 22,000 people—a nearly 15 percent jump—between 2020 and 2022. And that is almost certainly a significant undercount.

No wonder, then, that the prevailing mood in California is one of frustration—even rage. Over the past two years, the state has committed $14 billion to homelessness. Most of that money has gone to “Housing First” programs, which prioritize getting homeless people into permanent homes instead of mandatory treatment. But despite ample research demonstrating the efficacy of this model, homelessness in the state continues to rise.

The seeming intractability of the crisis has led to a degree of cynicism regarding Housing First policies. Some cities—Los Angeles and Sacramento among them—have returned to a policing-first strategy, trying to fight homelessness by making it illegal to camp in certain areas. Various reactionary elements have attempted to capitalize on the change in mood, arguing that Housing First is ineffective or even harmful.

To better understand why California hasn’t been able to reduce homelessness, it helps to look at a place that has. From 2011 to 2020, while major California cities were seeing catastrophic increases in homelessness, the most populous city in Texas cut its homelessness in half. Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless has placed more than 25,000 unhoused people into permanent housing; its success has turned it into a national model and the subject of a lengthy New York Times profile. After reading that article, I decided to research how Houston’s homelessness response has differed from what we’ve seen across California, to see where California went wrong.

The below chart displays Houston’s dramatic success over the past decade, compared to the consistent increases in homelessness experienced by San Francisco and Los Angeles. (As a reminder, “CoC” stands for continuum of care—the regional body that conducts the point-in-time count within its boundaries.)

The product of my research is a new report, out today, called “Housing Abundance as a Condition for Ending Homelessness: Lessons From Houston, Texas.” The title gives it away: Houston’s success was predicated on a vast supply of low-cost housing. As in much of California, Houston’s homeless services system follows the Housing First model. But because housing in Houston is cheaper and more plentiful, the city’s Housing First efforts are far more successful.

While California cities have spent decades throwing up obstacles to housing construction, Houston has declined to even impose a citywide zoning code. As a result, the city has built new housing units at an annual rate of nine or 10 per 1,000 residents, while development in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles has consistently failed to keep up with population growth.

The below figure, taken from my report, shows the stark difference in homebuilding between Houston and the two California cities. (“MSA” stands for metropolitan statistical area.)

Houston’s liberal land use policies and rapid housing construction have kept prices much lower than in much of California, even as the city’s population has grown significantly faster. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Houston, for example, is about one-third the median rent in San Francisco.

This has several implications for Houston’s homeless services system. The first is that it has kept homelessness from getting so bad that the Coalition for the Homeless can’t keep up. As a substantial body of research has demonstrated, housing unaffordability is the primary driver of homelessness, and because Houston is cheaper than San Francisco, low-income residents are less likely to fall into homelessness. In contrast, in San Francisco, residents become homeless at four times the rate that the city can place them back into housing.

The second implication is that Houston’s homeless services system has a much easier time developing and acquiring housing. The Housing First model can only work when homeless services agencies actually have enough units to meet their clients’ needs. This is a perennial issue in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where the housing shortage has made it harder for homeless services agencies to recruit eligible landlords, and anti-development rules have made it significantly harder and costlier to develop permanent supportive housing. Largely because of the difference in housing costs, San Francisco spends roughly three times as much as Houston to house a single homeless individual.

Lastly, Houston appears to face fewer challenges in recruiting and retaining direct service providers. Salaries for frontline workers vary surprisingly little between Houston and high-cost cities like San Francisco; a frontline worker may make between $40,000 and $55,000 per year in Houston, and between $51,840 and $57,600 in San Francisco, according to interviews with nonprofit officials in both cities. But these salaries go much further in Houston. In San Francisco, frontline workers are often severely rent-burdened, meaning that they need to pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent. Severe rent burden, ironically, is a risk factor for homelessness.

Abundant, low-cost housing in Houston is no accident. Besides lacking a traditional zoning code, the city allows most development through “by-right” instead of “discretionary” permitting—meaning that local officials don’t get veto power over individual projects that otherwise meet all the prerequisites for approval. California should follow Houston’s example and continue to legalize more housing development.

Granted, much of Houston’s development hasn’t been exactly climate friendly. A lot of the city is sprawl, locking in car dependence for too many residents.

But California doesn’t need to follow Houston’s precise development path in order to build more housing. Our cities can accommodate millions more residents without doubling down on car dependency. They just need to legalize more and denser housing while making that housing accessible by alternative modes of transportation. There is no need to sprawl out into previously undeveloped natural lands. California cities could unlock plenty of units within their existing limits if they reversed decades of increasingly draconian zoning maps.

California’s homelessness crisis has been festering for decades, and it will take years to bring the crisis to an end. But Houston’s example teaches us that progress is possible, and that Housing First works. California just needs housing abundance in order to make it work at the necessary scale. We won’t get there overnight, but we can get there; first, we need to make it legal to build enough housing for everyone.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-houston-housing-homelessness/
Does Building Luxury Condos Create More Affordable Housing?https://www.thenation.com/article/society/affordable-housing-debate/Ned Resnikoff,Ned Resnikoff,Brian Hanlon,Ned Resnikoff,John Washington,Tara RaghuveerJul 8, 2022

Yes

n good leftist fashion, we’ll first answer the question by challenging its premise. New market-rate homes are rarely “luxury condos.” Only 5 percent of multi­family homes are condos, about the lowest rate in 50 years. The issue at hand concerns housing

that does not receive subsidies to cover rent for low-income households. In California, nearly 90 percent of multifamily rental units are market-rate, and about 90 percent of low-income households live in market-rate homes.

As for “luxury”—don’t believe what the landlords tell you. The scarcity of available apartments is what drives high housing costs, not stainless-steel appliances or a small fitness room. And that scarcity is real; contrary to what you may have heard, American cities don’t have a vast supply of apartment towers held vacant as investment vehicles. In fact, our rental vacancy rate is at a historic low.

The best way to end a housing shortage is by building more. New research, made possible by previously unavailable, fine-grained data sets, shows that market-rate construction makes affordable housing available via “migration chains.” High-income people move into new housing, middle-income people move into the housing previously occupied by high-income residents, and so on—all the way down the income ladder. In this way, building more “luxury condos” frees up low-cost housing for low- and middle-income households.

Displacement is real, but building market-rate homes does not increase displacement pressures. While scholars have long known that building more homes reduces prices at the regional scale, more recent research reveals that market-rate home-building reduces rents and evictions even at the neighborhood level. Removing restrictions on home-building in urban areas also reduces racial and economic segregation, greenhouse gas emissions, and homelessness. Furthermore, landlords find it harder to discriminate against potential tenants with housing vouchers in a loose housing market.

While those members of the left who are opposed to building market-rate housing sometimes deride pro-development theories of affordability as “trickle-down economics,” they’ve got it exactly wrong. The bogus thesis of trickle-down economics says that by cutting taxes on the rich, you’ll spur economic growth that eventually benefits everyone. Trickle-down boosters believe that supply (of investment capital from cutting taxes) generates its own demand (for consumer goods and jobs). We’re saying the reverse: Demand (for homes) should drive a supply response (constructing more homes).

Building more market-rate housing is a necessary but not sufficient condition to create more inclusive, affordable, and sustainable communities. As California Assemblymember Alex Lee—the author of social housing legislation cosponsored by California YIMBY—put it, being pro-housing means taking a “yes, and” approach: Yes to more market-rate housing—and yes to more subsidized affordable housing, social housing, renter protections, renter subsidies, and paths to homeownership. And so on.

But why build more market-rate housing at all? Migration chains work, but wouldn’t permitting only affordable projects work even better? No, for a few reasons.

First, the choice between market-rate and subsidized affordable homes is a false one. Upzoning, or permitting builders to construct apartments in areas where only single-family homes had been allowed, reduces competition between for-profit and subsidized nonprofit developers for buildable land.

Second, while we must put more public dollars toward building affordable homes, it is impossible to meet our current housing needs with 100 percent subsidized affordable housing. Los Angeles, for instance, must plan for 456,643 new homes through 2029 to meet state-mandated affordability goals. At a cost of about $500,000 per unit, it would cost the city of Los Angeles $228 billion to meet its housing needs. The only solution for building at the necessary scale is to rely on private development, affordable housing developers, and—where possible—public agencies.

Third, more market-rate development means more taxes for cities, which can then be poured into rental subsidies and homeowner assistance, creating a more hospitable place for poor and working-class residents.

Lastly, we cannot let the continued existence of capitalism stop us from delivering relief to people who are currently housing-insecure or homeless. In the short to medium term, no viable path exists toward a world in which private real estate ceases to exist.

Abundant housing benefits everyone except landlords and private equity firms. And when paired with other policies aimed at reducing inequality and promoting inclusive growth, a pro-housing strategy can lead us to a more egalitarian, solidaristic, and sustainable future.

Brian Hanlon and Ned Resnikoff

No

e can’t rely on the private sector to solve a problem of its own making. We can’t just tweak a racist and failed system. We need a wholesale transformation.

Today’s housing market is a catastrophic failure, built through land theft and chattel slavery and shaped by the relentless prioritization of those who profit from our basic need for a home. Black incomes are 60 percent of white incomes, and Black families hold nearly 10 percent as much wealth as white families hold. Millions of tenants are forced to make the choice between paying the rent and feeding their kids. Two years of a pandemic and economic turmoil have inflicted more pain as tenants accrued rental debts, struggled to access inadequate federal assistance, and were evicted from their homes. Rents were up 17.5 percent over the course of 2021, squeezing Black and brown tenants the most.

The problem isn’t a lack of luxury condos; the problem is racial capitalism. Under this system, wealthy people, who are overwhelmingly white, gain profit and power from the exploitation and oppression of working-class and poor people of all colors. Our housing system was designed around an accumulation of capital that depends on severe inequality and, more specifically, on the subjugation of Black tenants.

Trickle-down housing policy is a farce. In a highly speculative housing market, increasing the supply does not automatically reduce housing costs. When cities permit more market-rate development, developers build more market-rate housing, because that is what will yield the highest return on investment. Especially when labor productivity lags in the construction sector, the profitability of housing production depends on rising rents. Rents are set not based on the quality of a home but on whatever the market will allow. This is why most “luxury” housing is so ugly and poorly built.

“Affordability” is an abused concept in development deals and local policy-making. Developers receive public subsidies and tax abatements to build market-rate apartments, sometimes with conditions to set aside “affordable” units. Those conditions rarely create truly affordable housing, because the definitions of “affordable” have more to do with what is affordable for the developer than with what is affordable for a working family. Affordability standards are determined by “area median income,” but the area isn’t a neighborhood; often it’s a county or a metro area, and the incomes aren’t limited to tenants but also include those of property owners.

Even if private development could solve the problem of housing supply, who benefits from the increased supply—and at what cost? Mac Properties, a Chicago developer that markets apartments to young professionals through pool parties and hashtags, began developing a corridor in the Midtown neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., in 2007. Between 2010 and 2021, the area’s Black population decreased by 21 percent. The only thing that trickled down to residents like Pat Lucas was a 30-day notice to leave her home of 17 years. After her eviction, Lucas described Mac’s impact on her neighborhood. “Mac thinks we’re degenerates,” she said. “They convince us that we aren’t worth anything. And you know that ain’t right.”

The most important question is: How can we guarantee that every person has a permanent, safe, accessible home? The answer isn’t zoning changes; it’s social housing. The government must guarantee housing as a public good and then construct or rehabilitate millions of homes that will be permanently off the private market and not available for speculation. A large-scale social housing program should be paired with strong, universal rent controls.

We have an obligation to reject cutesy, technocratic suggestions from advocates and instead follow the demands of organized tenants. They are the closest to the perils of racial capitalism and therefore the closest to the solutions—they are the experts of their own liberation.

Maya Neal, a tenant in Midtown and a leader of KC Tenants, called her fellow renters to unionize at a rally in May. “It can feel inevitable that gentrifiers are just gonna run us over, mow us down, push us out,” she said. “It can feel inevitable that they’ll pay off our city’s leaders and get their sweet little deals. It can feel inevitable that people like me will have to sacrifice our mental health, our physical health, our babies, and our humanity, all for this violent mess. It can feel inevitable that a gorgeous gathering like this won’t be possible in a few years because the profiteers will have turned us into ghosts. I refuse to become a ghost. And none of that is inevitable—not if we organize.”

John Washington and Tara Raghuveer



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/affordable-housing-debate/
From the Labor Question to the Housing Questionhttps://www.thenation.com/article/economy/housing-class-homelessness/Ned Resnikoff,Ned Resnikoff,Brian Hanlon,Ned Resnikoff,John Washington,Tara Raghuveer,Ned ResnikoffMar 28, 2022

A peculiar mix of political extremism and ideological malaise characterizes post-2016 American politics. While factions abound, few of them have anything new to say. Instead, the most outré cliques on both the left and the right have resorted to nostrums that reached the height of their appeal in the middle of the last century. It is as if everyone showed up to a party wearing their parents’ ill-fitting hand-me-downs.

Nowhere is this intellectual stagnation more obvious than in discussions of class. The only contemporary right-wing intellectuals to explicitly recognize the existence of an American class system—the nationalist conservatives—seem to have pillaged their rhetoric of globalist elites and common folk from anti-Dreyfusard pamphlets and even more unsavory German sources. Meanwhile, class discourse on the left tends to revolve around the categories inherited from Marx: proletariat and bourgeoisie, labor and capital.

To say that Marx’s class schema has lost some of its salience is not to suggest that class has become irrelevant. The economic class structure in the United States is more rigid—and the distance between the upper and lower classes vaster—than at any point in the past 80 years, if not longer. But the categories that the US left most often uses have lost some of their purchase. The connection between one’s class and one’s relationship to the means of production seems to have been partially severed, such that people with similar salaries and job descriptions—perhaps even colleagues performing equivalent functions in a shared workplace—may have dramatically different class backgrounds and economic prospects. We need new categories to explain why.

Here, Marx still has something timely to say—not so much in his typology of class as in the method he used to arrive at it. Recall that he developed his theory while watching the emergence of a new class, the urban industrial proletariat. By tracing the development of new social classes, we can better understand how our world has changed and what that means. Following Marx’s example, we should look for distinct social classes that have emerged in the postindustrial era. Doing so will help us identify the driving force behind modern inequality. An ideal subject for investigation would be one that, like the urban proletariat of the industrial age, sits near the bottom of the economic ladder but has become a major political concern for members of all other classes. Such a class would also need to be recognizably new. Our strongest candidate is a group that we have come to call the homeless.

Although poor Americans have always resided in substandard housing, street homelessness only became a large-scale urban phenomenon in the late 1970s. A relatively early study of the homelessness crisis, Peter Rossi’s Down and Out in America, distinguishes between “old” homelessness and contemporary “literal homelessness” by noting that in the decades prior to the rise of mass homelessness, “the homeless by and large were familyless persons living in very inexpensive (and often inadequate) housing, mainly cubicle and SRO [single-room-occupancy] hotels.” By 1979, Rossi wrote, “It became more and more difficult to ignore the evidence that some people had no shelter and lived on the streets.” (Under the current definition used by the federal government, many SRO and cubicle hotel residents would not be considered homeless.)

Homelessness is now a highly visible feature of nearly every major city in the United States, particularly those on the West Coast. And while it is difficult to track the country’s homeless population with any precision, we know it is a diverse bunch. A minority are chronically homeless, meaning that most unhoused people experience homelessness as either an intermittent calamity or as a transitional stage between precarious housing situations. And although unhoused people are disproportionately likely to suffer from severe mental health problems or substance use disorders, not everyone who is homeless has a mental illness or a drug habit. Even among those who do, many of them acquired these conditions only after losing their housing.

Under the old Marxist paradigm, what determines an individual’s class position is their relationship to the production process. In that regard, too, the homeless population is highly diverse. Many people experiencing homelessness have income, from either formal or informal sources. A share of this population—we are not sure how many, but certainly more than most people would expect—work in the gig economy or other low-wage service jobs. If you live in an expensive metropolitan area, it is likely that you have received an Uber ride, package delivery, or takeout order from someone who spent the previous night in a shelter, car, or tent.

It is not one’s psychiatric history or income source that makes one homeless. The one thing all homeless people share is that they are unable to buy or rent private housing. What determines the condition of their homelessness, in other words, is their relationship not to production but to real estate—that is to say, to a particular type of asset.

hat does a class system structured around asset ownership rather than production look like? That’s the question that Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, and Martijn Konings attempt to answer in their recent book, The Asset Economy. This slim, lucid volume argues that the “key element shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship, but rather whether one is able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages.” Because real estate is the asset class most crucial to building wealth for most non-billionaires, the authors center most of their class schema around the different relationships one can have to housing. At the very top of their class ladder are investors who hold vast, diversified asset portfolios; the options for everyone else are outright homeownership, homeownership with a mortgage, renting, or—for those at the very bottom of the asset economy’s class hierarchy—being unhoused.

Adkins, Cooper, and Konings date the origin of this class system to the 1970s, around the same time that modern homelessness began. The asset economy emerged from the wreckage of the New Deal system that had governed American class relations since World War II. This system was characterized by relatively low inequality, high union density, robust wage growth, and vigorous social spending, all underwritten by a prolonged economic boom. But as growth slowed, unions continued to secure wage increases for their members, which capital matched with price hikes, resulting in consumer price inflation. As Adkins et al. write, “The wage and consumer price spiral of the 1970s was the symptom of an undecided struggle between different social groups who sought to maintain their respective shares of the national income at a time when economic growth was faltering.”

The resulting inflation “seriously eroded the wealth of the top decile and centile of households—those whose wealth was invested in financial assets such as stocks, bonds, or Treasury bills and whose income derived primarily from interests, dividends, rents, and capital gains.” The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia eventually resolved the class conflict in favor of the wealthy. The model of economic governance that would replace the postwar Keynesian system tilted the balance toward asset price inflation by cutting taxes on investment income, slashing social spending, and prioritizing consumer price stability over labor market tightness. The result: Consumer price inflation slowed, and wages stagnated.

“These dynamics would very likely have generated significant social unrest had they not been accompanied by the promise that the gains on asset appreciation would be distributed among the wider population,” the three authors write. Workers were compensated for the loss of future wage growth with an opportunity to buy into the asset economy. For most people, this meant the promise of building wealth through faster home price inflation.

The rise of the asset economy was both a symptom and a cause of the New Deal order’s breakdown. Union density reached its zenith in the late 1950s and had already begun its steady decline by the 1960s. In the wake of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, the old New Deal coalition had fractured and given way to a new generation of Democrats, best exemplified by President Jimmy Carter, who were austerity-minded and ambivalent toward the labor movement. Making asset inflation rather than wage growth the primary end of public policy only further depleted the strength of organized labor and those who favored aggressive public spending to address social problems.

o social revolution totally overwrites the old order. Unions and New Deal–era social programs persist in a diminished form. Similarly, employment relations continue to play an important role in structuring class: A decent income can mean the difference between homelessness and renting an apartment, or between steady homeownership and foreclosure. But while variations in income are highly influential, they are not necessarily determinative; someone with access to equity will always have a firmer grip on their economic position than someone who does not. This is particularly true in the high-cost metropolitan areas that have most fully transitioned to an asset-based class system.

Asset-based stratification has also entrenched racial hierarchy. As Richard Rothstein has documented extensively in The Color of Law, white homeowners spent the century between emancipation and the civil rights era methodically segregating their neighborhoods and, through a combination of public policy and personal initiative, denying the gains of homeownership to Black and brown people. When the Jim Crow era came to an end shortly before the asset economy transition, it was succeeded in the housing market by what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion,” defined in her book Race for Profit as a system through which “African American homebuyers were granted access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing, but on more expensive and comparatively unequal terms.” Under predatory inclusion, Black homeownership is less a vehicle for building Black wealth than a mechanism for extracting it.

A feature of the asset-based class system is its relationship to time: Perpetual asset price inflation means that the cost of buying into the asset economy is always getting higher. Each successive generation of prospective homebuyers becomes more dependent on intergenerational transfers of wealth. Under such conditions, anyone whose parents are not affluent homeowners will find it increasingly difficult to become homeowners themselves. Thus, the gap in homeownership rates between Black and white households is close to its highest point in more than a century. Meanwhile, in a country where Black people comprise 12 percent of the total population, roughly 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness are Black.

It should be obvious that a system built on endless asset inflation is inherently unsustainable. As property get more expensive, homeownership will increasingly become concentrated in the hands of a hereditary caste that will monopolize the gains of asset inflation. Indeed, a recent report by the National Association of Realtors Research Group suggests we have been trending in that direction since at least the 2008 housing market crash. Between 2010 and 2020, the report finds, high-income homeowners’ share of housing wealth went from 28 percent to more than 42 percent.

In California, engorged housing costs have led to mass homelessness, social disorder, and a deepening crisis of political legitimacy; other high-cost regions of the country are not far behind. Left unchecked, the asset economy will continually swell the ranks of the homeless and consign what’s left of the middle class to permanent tenancy.

But while the asset economy may already be straining under the weight of its own contradictions, we should not underestimate its durability. Too many people are too invested in the logic of asset inflation—at least for now. Though it has declined from its pre-2008 peak, the American homeownership rate is nearly 66 percent; furthermore, most homeowners have mortgages. If asset inflation were to stop—or, worse, move in reverse—many of them would take a loss on the most important investment they ever made, with implications for not just their own economic security but also that of their descendants. As a result, homeowners as a class understandably tend to be protective of their home values. A substantial body of political science research has found that homeownership motivates far deeper engagement in local politics than can be found among renters. The homeowner class even has a radical vanguard, comprised of groups like the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association and the country’s extensive network of homeowner associations. These groups help structure public policy to safeguard homeowners’ investments against perceived threats—particularly measures to increase housing supply and make homes a less scarce (and therefore less precious) resource.

Critically, these groups have also managed to capture the instruments of state power to a remarkable degree. It was not the “1 percent” that, for example, amended the California Constitution to suppress property taxes and enrich homeowners at the expense of state spending capacity; it was a majority of the voters, led by a small number of organized and outraged suburbanites. To this day, Proposition 13 commands majority support in opinion polls and has withstood multiple attempts to tinker around its margins.

In contrast, the constellation of groups representing the interests of renters and homeless people is relatively weak and disorganized. This is partly for the obvious reason that homeowners are in the majority in the United States (65.5 percent, according to the latest Census), and carry greater economic clout. But there are two other important reasons that merit investigation.

he first reason is another great social transformation that was taking place in the 1970s—what political scientist Theda Skocpol calls the transition from membership to management. In Diminished Democracy, Skocpol writes: “Where once cross-class voluntary federations held sway, national public life is now dominated by professionally managed advocacy groups without chapters or members.” Prior generations saw their political preferences shaped, aggregated, and transmitted upward by membership in labor unions, business associations, religious organizations, and fraternal groups such as the Knights of Columbus and the Elks. Critically, because these were membership-based organizations, they could mobilize on a large scale for coordinated social action, including in electoral politics.

As membership in these organizations has decayed, they’ve been replaced by a vast network of nonprofits, advocacy groups, and political action committees. These groups have employees and donors, but they typically do not have members. They can lobby elected officials, and they can engage in public communications, but they cannot mobilize their base, for the simple reason that their base is comprised of donors rather than of members.

The membership-to-management transition has been asymmetrical. Homeowner associations are member-based organizations, and they can be highly disciplined. With private-sector union membership rates inching toward the single digits, groups such as the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association are the modern era’s superlative example of a class-conscious, organized movement bloc. America’s steadily rising housing costs and chronic underbuilding testify to their success.

The second reason is factionalization. There are, of course, some membership-based organizations that fight for housing affordability. The rise of local Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) chapters that agitate for more housing development in their communities has been an encouraging development. Many cities also have tenants’ unions, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapters that focus on housing, or organizations like San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness that seek to politically organize homeless communities. But the housing activism world is highly balkanized. While many of these groups share overarching goals in common, relations between them can range from frosty to overtly hostile. A combination of substantive complaints, stylistic differences, and personal enmities stand in the way of durable alliances.

A big part of the problem is that many people in the housing policy and activism world—including me—are far too online. A platform like Twitter incentivizes ideological differentiation over coalition-building; you’re encouraged to develop a strong individual voice rather than to craft a broadly appealing message. The quickest shortcut to building a following is rank unpleasantness toward anyone who differs with you even on trivial points. While I have interacted with lovely people from organizations that span the Housing Twitter spectrum, theirs are not the voices that predominate in social media.

Some of these groups have real disagreements with one another, and those disagreements can be profound. Many YIMBYs are skeptical of rent control; some tenants’ rights activists do not see the need for more market-rate housing development. But these differences should not prevent groups that represent those on the losing end of the asset economy from trying to find common ground and collaborating where possible. (Hardcore ideologues—including both free-market fundamentalists and people who oppose building any additional non-public housing—will probably resist any effort to be incorporated into a functional coalition. But these people are a tiny minority within activist networks.)

The membership-based organizations that Skocpol describes in Diminished Democracy often spanned social classes, and so should the broad pro-housing coalition of today. Renters have an obvious stake in bringing down housing costs; so do homeowners who recognize the toll that perpetual asset inflation and artificially constrained housing supply have taken on their communities. And so do institutions like labor unions, which have seen the income gains they fought for swallowed up by housing price inflation. As for homeless people, they should be viewed as neighbors and potential coalition partners instead of as passive recipients for aid. Housed people frequently use the language of compassion when calling for anti-homelessness measures; but compassion, while laudable, is a virtue for individuals. It is no substitute for solidarity.

There are some encouraging signs that housing activists are moving in the direction of broad-based coalition building. In California, Alex Lee, a state Assemblyman and DSA member, has introduced legislation that would create a state authority in charge of developing social housing—essentially mixed-income public housing. This legislation, which recognizes the need for both strong renter protections and for more housing at all income levels, commands support from a diverse coalition of organizations on the left, including both YIMBY chapters and the anti-YIMBY group Housing Is a Human Right.

The postwar, post–New Deal economic order was built through struggle. Though militant union members played the starring role in these efforts, they were aided by bohemian intellectuals, Washington technocrats, and even bourgeois Rotarians. Today’s struggle against the depredations of the asset economy is different in some ways, but the physics of social movements has not changed. Nor has the inexorable logic of wealth concentration and its grim implications for democracy. We cannot stay on our current trajectory; as the asset-based class system becomes more bifurcated, it will also become even more unstable. The result of this instability could be disaster, or it could be an orderly transition to a more just economic order. Perhaps it will be something in between. We will make the choice, or it will be made for us.



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What the US Can Learn From the Fall of the Roman Republichttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-the-us-can-learn-from-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic/Ned Resnikoff,Ned Resnikoff,Brian Hanlon,Ned Resnikoff,John Washington,Tara Raghuveer,Ned Resnikoff,Ned ResnikoffOct 24, 2017

Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar, and he probably won’t deal a death blow to the American republic. But that doesn’t mean our country’s system of government is stable, and it certainly doesn’t mean Rome can’t teach us about how societies collapse. To see the parallels between the contemporary United States and Ancient Rome clearly, says history podcaster Mike Duncan, you need to examine the generation before Caesar.

Duncan—creator of two of the most popular history podcasts ever created, The History of Rome and Revolutions—has done exactly that in his new book, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, out October 24 from PublicAffairs. The Nation sat down with Duncan to discuss the fall of the Roman Republic and whether the United States can avoid a similar fate.

Ned Resnikoff

Ned Resnikoff: For your first book, why did you choose to cover this particular period?

Mike Duncan: A literary agent got ahold of me. She contacted me while I was doing the French Revolution series, and we were originally talking about doing some material out of the French Revolution. But nothing that I was proposing caught either of us as particularly exciting.

So, almost as a throwaway, I tossed out this idea that I had put together for a lecture. It was about this question of where America is on the Roman timeline, if America is Rome. So I had this pile of notes, and was like, “Well listen, there’s this one particular 50-year period in Roman history which I think has a lot of contemporary parallels.” And I just rattled all those off, and when I sent her that e-mail, she said, “That’s the book. We should do that.”

I don’t know why nobody ever goes back to figure out why the Republic started falling apart in the first place, because if you ask that question, you wind up with Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, and Marius, and Sulla, who are some of the most fascinating figures in Roman history. Everything they went through sets up the great fall of the Roman Republic a generation or two later.

It was a really underserved part of Roman history and also something that I think sheds a lot of light on what the United States, and also what the West generally, is going through right now.

NR: Which elements of Roman politics do you think contemporary readers will find most alien, and which will they find most familiar?

MD: I think the thing that would be most alien is there’s a real small-c conservatism to the Roman political mentality. Today, we think of progress as an inherently good thing. Having come out of the Enlightenment, we have this whole theory of progress being something that we should always be pursuing.

The Romans were not really interested in any of that. They wanted today to be like yesterday, and they wanted tomorrow to be like today. They were really resistant to change in all facets of life. It’s even more hardcore than Burkean conservatism.

As to what we would find familiar: People are people. People can be motivated by greed. There’s bribery, corruption, and screwing somebody over because they happen to be your personal enemy. All those ways that humans interact with each other, especially in politics.

NR: Why was it so important when Roman politicians began to violate some of the unenforced norms that hadn’t been codified into law?

MD: Rome really didn’t need to have a big body of written law, because the way that things have always been done is the way they ought to continue to be done. That psychological power kept everyone in check. There were intense rivalries between various families and individuals, but those bonds would keep everyone from going too far.

When there’s no force keeping everyone in check beyond a social arrangement, the whole thing could collapse so quickly. It went from “I’m going to run for reelection” [in violation of custom] to, 50 years later, Pompey saying, “Who are you to quote laws to those with swords?” Which is what happens at the end of the book. Because at the end of the day, even respecting written law is merely a social custom.

NR: Tell me about the role economic inequality played in destabilizing Rome during the period you cover.

MD: At the beginning of the second century BCE, they were defeating Greece, they were defeating Carthage, and they rolled up into Spain and took over all these silver mines. You have this massive influx of wealth into Italy, and this very small group of people is getting all of it.

The vast majority of the people who are living in the Italian peninsula during these great wars of conquest are not really seeing a dime out of any of this. In the first chapter, there’s a great speech from [populist reformer] Tiberius Gracchus, where he says, “Though they are styled masters of the world—which the Romans were—they have not a single clod of earth to call their own.”

That’s the lot of the poor Romans. They’ve been away on a campaign for a long time. They come back, their farm has been ruined, and they basically have to sell it to their rich neighbor. We see this happen constantly in cycles throughout history, where the larger noble estates will start to acquire the smaller pieces that surround the estate, until the next thing you know there’s just one owner and everybody else is dispossessed.

So that transformation—bringing all that wealth in, concentrating it in the hands of a few, and the rich being able to leverage that wealth to acquire the possessions of all the poor people in Italy—completely dislocated the way of life that Italians had known going back to the to the misty ages before they were keeping records.

NR: Was the collapse of the Republic inevitable?

MD: When it comes to the Roman stuff, but also with Revolutions, this is a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot. I am somebody who thinks that the elites can make reforms to a system that is reaching terminal gridlock or is simply no longer servicing the needs of the polity. You can make sufficient reforms to head off a revolution.

I think there are things the Senate could have done to ameliorate the worst parts of the oligarchy that had set in. And if you look at what [populist leader, and ill-fated brother of Tiberius,] Gaius Gracchus was up to, I think his [land-redistribution] program could have gone a long way toward restoring the balance in time to keep the Republic going. But the Senate was wedded to this idea that these are our privileges, and we’re not going to give up our privileges.

NR: How worried are you about the present day?

MD: I’m personally very worried. The disclaimer is that I’m that guy who just wrote a book about the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. And I have been working for four years on a series where all I do is look at a situation to figure out all the things that are about to fall apart. So it feels like my brain and my imagination is now very primed to look around and be like, “Oh my God, this is the thing that’s happening.”

Take the Gorsuch thing, denying the Supreme Court seat for a whole year. You can’t undo something like that. From now on, it feels like if you don’t have the presidency and the Senate controlled by one party, we’re just going to have empty Supreme Court seats. Because neither party now has any incentive to give in. So what’s that going to start doing to the judiciary?

So yeah, I’m very worried. And if it does all fall apart, I can tell you that it will be very, very easy to write the first couple of episode of the Revolutions podcast on 21st-century America, because there’s so much tinder out there. The arrival of the Internet, which creates completely separate bubbles for people to live in, can feed into a real psychological polarization. So there’s a laundry list of 10 or 15 things that would be pretty easy to tick off and say, this is why it all fell apart right around the first third of the 21st century.

NR: So what do we do to avoid the same fate as the Roman republic?

MD: I’m not an expert in public policy, I’m just an historian coming at this from one side. But take the runaway economic inequality, where we just avoid dealing with the fact that a small minority of people are acquiring more and more wealth and the vast majority of people in the country are being shut out.

There is a reason, besides racism, why Trump was able to do what he did. And there was a reason why Bernie Sanders was able to do what he did. There are so many people in this country who are just absolutely convinced that the system is not working for them. So what do you say to the people in Washington, DC, or the people in the various state houses? They have to at least recognize that if they don’t make some reforms, they’re going to be dealing with the pitchforks.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-the-us-can-learn-from-the-fall-of-the-roman-republic/
Corporations Versus Democracyhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/corporations-versus-democracy/Ned Resnikoff,Ned Resnikoff,Brian Hanlon,Ned Resnikoff,John Washington,Tara Raghuveer,Ned Resnikoff,Ned Resnikoff,Ned ResnikoffOct 8, 2007

Editor’s Note

: Ned Resnikoff is one of five finalists in The Nation‘s 2007 Student Writing Contest. Read more about the competition on StudentNation.com.

The most important issue to young people in the 2008 campaign is one that no presidential candidate will discuss. In fact, even touching on this subject is taboo for anyone with aspirations to Congress or the White House. Anyone who has the temerity to mention this political third rail will almost certainly lose the campaign.

The issue is the curtailing of corporate power, and as long as corporations continue to finance major candidates, it will remain unspoken. No one running for office wants to be blacklisted by corporate lobbyists in Washington.

That’s a shame, because this issue is connected to almost every other problem facing America today. As long as corporations have no incentive to avoid polluting, we will continue to poison this planet at an alarming rate, and as long as corporate lobbyists hold an inordinate amount of influence in Washington, there will be no substantive solutions to problems like income inequality or our woefully inadequate healthcare system.

The unchecked power of American corporations does not just affect America, either. It is our corporations that are exploiting developing nations by employing their people at low wages in inhuman working conditions. The environment, obviously, is a global issue. And while some may scoff at the idea of the United States waging war for economic reasons, it is difficult to ignore the mounting evidence that we invaded Iraq, at least in part, to bring profit to American oil companies and defense contractors. What country is next? Iran?

If presidential candidates were willing to treat unchecked corporate power as an actual problem, we might be able to begin considering solutions. At a start, the regulations already in place to curtail corporate power could be enforced again.

More drastic measures need to be taken as well. I would start by changing the legal definition of a corporation. Currently, a corporation is legally defined as a human being, and therefore it possesses all the liberties that go along with being a member of the human race.

That definition is clearly absurd–a corporation is little more than a profit-making machine formed by a loose collective of human beings. It is not entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, or any other amendment of the Constitution for that matter.

Public financing of campaigns is also a central part of reducing corporate power in America. While public financing’s detractors argue that it is fundamentally undemocratic, it will in fact bring America closer to the democratic ideal we purport to hold so dear.

There is much about the current campaign model that is fundamentally undemocratic, but nowhere is that more true than in the field of campaign finance. It is virtually impossible to run for Congress or the White House without becoming a corporate-sponsored candidate, and corporate-sponsored candidates act more on behalf of the corporations that pay to put them in office than the actual human beings that vote for them.

Public campaign finance will fix this by leveling the playing field and ensuring that candidates are selected based on their ability to present their case, not how much money they can raise from GE or Bechtel.

Additional regulation on corporations is also a must. While this includes environmental statutes, something that nobody seems to be discussing is how to regulate corporate America’s human rights abuses abroad. In other words, if Nike is abusing workers in Indonesia, what can we in the United States do to make sure that ceases?

One possible solution is economic sanctions against our own corporations. America is a massive market, and many of the worst violators of human rights are based here, although their factories may be abroad. Why not close off the American market to these companies unless they adhere to some sort of international human rights standard?

One could argue that we have a moral obligation to do something like this, but it is not entirely without its own material rewards. This is a national security issue–to many developing nations, these corporations are the face of the United States, and the more people they abuse around the world, the worse the international perception of us becomes and the more potential terrorists and anti-American sentiment we breed.

In a campaign that is more about fundraising than real issues, unchecked corporate power is the elephant in the room. We cannot rely on the candidates to raise the issue–rather, we must raise awareness among Americans in the hopes that they will force the candidates to acknowledge this central problem in our democracy.



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