Yet they refuse to believe that while in office Trump put forth policies “designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.” Under Trump, the income gap between the richest and poorest income brackets grew by 9% annually, leaving those with stagnant wages in low-paying jobs with little prospect of upward mobility.

Political analysts have done a reasonably good job of identifying the factors that helped Trump to victory. Still, we are mystified by what drove so many working-class males, including a significantly large number of blacks and Latinos, to choose Trump, despite Bidden-Harris’s concrete policies to help working-class Americans. By voting for Trump, they were voting against their self-interest. Psychology can help us better understand the root cause of this puzzle. The place to begin is the provenance of the “rage” that Trump has so effectively capitalized upon. His unrelenting rageful rhetorics were not intended as a steppingstone to constructive solutions to address the grievances of the working class. It was rage for the sake of rage against all political and social institutions. These had to be destroyed with virtually no plans to replace them.

As a psychologist/psychoanalyst, I focus on important challenges besetting the development of normal masculinity that embraces the experiences of strength, generativity, relevance, productivity, and reasonable power. Usually, these experiences develop within a family setting in which the son successfully experiences himself as a chip off the old block through identification with a capable, loving father. However, despite the strong presence of the father within the family milieu, if the society at large does not treat the father’s role as a respectful equal, the son will experience a huge sense of shame which is channeled into anger and resentment resulting from his self-respect having been compromised. We know that poverty and the stress of incessant struggles for survival reduce the chance that the father could live up to the expectations of the son as a positive loving model of identification. Alcoholism, drug addiction, and domestic violence are some of the most damaging consequences resulting from the generational transmission of trauma within this group which society habitually neglects. America’s increasing wealth inequality exacerbates this dynamic.

“Insufficient Weight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024.

Over the long haul, with the untenability of strong identification with a solid father, the male grows up with a “father hunger” –a longing for a father figure who can make up for all the helplessness and humiliation he experienced as a child into adulthood. The unconscious wish is to have enough power to turn against the society that shamed him by depriving him of a father who could carry sufficient weight in society that could in turn fulfill the needs of the son to have a solid sense of himself as a man. The painful experience of shame and its annihilating impact is deeply damaging to the core of the sense of self. He feels broken and unfulfilled in an environment where he cannot be seen! The typical unconscious tit-for-tat solution to this loss is to hold society responsible for depriving him of his legitimate developmental needs. The expression of rage and retribution artificially rescues their damaged sense of self from the painful ravages of shame. Hence, here lies Donald Trump’s genius in mobilizing his unyielding supporters with the slogan “I’M YOUR RETRIBUTION”!

Through his audacious rebellion against the society that has deprived this disadvantaged group, Trump has become their Messiah. He is the only one who can restore their sense of self, repair their injured ego, and provide them with a new sense of self-respect and dignity through his crusade against all the societal norms that have excluded them. To them, Trump comes across as the powerful, fearless father figure that these “little boys” long for. His crusade against every norm of the “illegitimate” society helps heal and restore their deprived dignity. The society Trump has exposed is disqualified and no longer has the power to humiliate them. Hence, the more unconventional, the ruder, and cruder Trump becomes in shunning all the rules of civility, the more powerful his healing touch.

This idealization of a strong, fearless father figure is exactly what this population longs for to feel lifted and accepted. There is also a great vicarious pleasure from Trump’s unbending will and power. The society that disempowered them is being disempowered by the valiant father figure giving them a strong illusion that through this idealization everything that escaped them in the past has become within reach. If society and its norms are debunked, as Trump time and time again openly avows, then there’s no reason to feel deprived, unanchored, or adrift.

 Trump is the warrior/savior of this group; he gives them the gift of belonging and importance. His legal convictions are meaningless and/or false because society no longer carries any moral weight to pass judgments. Trump’s heroic stand against society is both edifying and offers them a newfound sense of belonging, respect, and trust in their idealized identification.

In the circumstances outlined above the primitive defenses of denial and disavowal aided by fake news and conspiracy theories inevitably produce a certain degree of disconnect with reality. Psychology can help us understand this and why some groups unwittingly work against their self-interest by abandoning reality.

Musk — owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter/X — had already endorsed the Tyrant and helped fuel his alternative reality, based on lies and fear. Throughout 2024, he amplified Trump’s xenophobia and election paranoia with a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation. Messaging his 202 million followers, Musk stoked panic about Haitian immigrants and spread debunked claims that FEMA failed to help victims of hurricane Helene and spent the money instead on migrants.

Regarding the election, Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election” and wove that lie into a false narrative about the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. He posted a vile, toxic, hate video that purports to lay bare the vast conspiracy: Democrats are expediting the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state.” Musk amplifies radical right propaganda to the masses that might otherwise languish in the darkest corners of the internet.

With his promotion of fascist fabrications, Musk channels Model-T owner and Hitler-apologist Henry Ford. In 1918 plutocrat Ford, who had just lost a Senate race, purchased a newspaper The Dearborn Independent — the 20^th century equivalent to Twitter/X. Convinced that victory had been stolen from him, Ford bought a platform for his self-promoting populist message, unfiltered by media skeptics and naysayers.

After purchasing the newspaper, Ford attacked the man who beat him in the Senate election and continuously harangued readers that the election had been stolen. Musk has feebly crawled onto Trump’s 2020 Big Lie bandwagon and is even helping set the stage for Big Lie 2.0 by spreading false claims that voting machines are programmed to rig the election against Trump.

One of the most successful industrialists on the planet, Ford became well-known for his anti-Semitic scapegoating of Jews that echoed Musk’s current scapegoating of immigrants. According to Rachel Maddow in her book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism: “Ford spewed anti-Semitism freely in private tirades among friends, family, business cohorts, newspaper reporters or anybody within earshot. He attributes all evil to Jews or to Jewish Communists.”

For Ford, Jews and Communists were interchangeable. He hated both equally and considered them synonymous. After Trump repeatedly called Kamala Harris a Communist and referred to her as “Comrade Kamala,” Musk amplified the Demagogue on Twitter/X. He posted an AI-generated image of Harris dressed as a “communist dictator,” wearing a red uniform complete with hammer-and-sickle emblazoned hat. Musk captioned the image with the false assertion, “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” A troll like Trump, neither Musk nor Trump ever says anything that is amusing, wry or witty.

Finding a new way to scapegoat Communists and “evil Jews,” Ford latched onto a newly translated tome called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The work of Russian fabulists and the Tsars’ secret police who were furious at the Bolsheviks’ overthrow of tsarist aristocracy, the screed purported to be the surreptitious “notes of a top-secret meeting wherein Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their strategy and tactics” to overthrow the regime. As Maddow says, “Ford unleashed a new era of anti-Semitism.”

Beginning in 1920, Ford’s newspaper published 149 articles, a multi-year series on the anti-Semitic hoax “proving” that a cabal of Jews were plotting to enslave the “goyim” and take over the world. The Protocols were debunked over and over. But that didn’t matter to Ford. Like Trump and Musk’s promotion of anti-immigrant lies, Ford’s unbounded hatred was not susceptible to facts.

Ford pressured his dealerships, which were selling the wildly popular Model-T at the time, to distribute his publication. It reached 900,000 copies at its peak in 1925 — the second largest newspaper circulation in the US. Ford also published the noxious series in book form, titled The International Jew. It ran to four volumes and contributed to the deaths of millions.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler — one of Trump’s favorite dictators according to his former chief of staff — lifted ideas, stereotypes, and whole passages from Ford’s publications. Hitler extolled Ford by name, singling out the American automobile baron for his steadfast courage in the face of assault by strikers or Communists or bankers, all of whom he asserted were Jews.

When Ford mulled running for president in 1923, Hitler wanted to deploy “some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections.” Hitler kept a large framed portrait of Ford in his office and told a reporter, “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.” Returning the adulation, Ford — who did extensive business in the Third Reich — was obsessed with Hitler and Nazism and throughout his life kept company with Nazi sympathizers and devout Hitlerites including Fritz Kuhn, the Nazi leader of the German American Bund.

Kuhn, who wanted to be the American Hitler prior to Trump, helped organize the 1939 Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden that championed Nazi ideals camouflaged as pro-American rhetoric. It presaged Trump’s recent MSG MAGA rally — an orgy of fascism, misogyny, racism, and grievances. The MAGA retribution list included Blacks, Latinos, Jews, women, and liberals and anyone who would even consider voting for Kamala Harris. To MAGA, all that matters is gaining power and then using it to crush anyone who would stand in their way. At the rally, Musk said nothing of consequence, but wore a black hat in which the MAGA lettering resembled the Nazi font Fraktur.

Like Ford did for Hitler, Musk has become a mouthpiece for Trump, turning Twitter/X into the 21^st century version of The Dearborn Independent — one that scapegoats immigrants, Muslims, and, more quietly, Jews. Musk praised the pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities are supporting “hordes of minorities” who are “flooding” into the country to replace white people. He further asserted that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.”

Musk has also re-instated Twitter/X accounts that are pro-Hitler Holocaust deniers, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis with a predictable surge in anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, according to reports in Media Matters. He allowed Nazis like Andrew Anglin and Nick Fuentes back on his Website along with Qanon supporter, pardoned-by-Trump criminal, and violence promoter Mike Flynn. The Twitter/X algorithm blocks left liberal views and clearly favors MAGA content, with the blatant goal of breeding extremism and radicalizing people against their own government — and against each other.

To help buy Twitter/X, Musk received funding from a Saudi conglomerate, the cryptocurrency firm Binance, entities associated with the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs — indicted recently for sex trafficking — and fellow apartheid veteran and PayPal Mafia associate Peter Thiel, who controls JD Vance. United in their formative white supremacist experience in South Africa, Musk and Thiel — in backing a racist for president, expressing xenophobic views, and opposing a Black presidential candidate — show that the old white South African mindset lives on in MAGA. Musk, like Ford, chooses to use the power gained through the labor of others to persecute and dehumanize those they consider lesser.

Musk, however, is going beyond Ford in his parasitical attachment to Trump and his manic pursuit of political power. The MAGA billionaire founded America PAC earlier this year so he and his like-minded, ultra-rich MAGA pals could dump tens of millions of their own wealth into registering and persuading voters on behalf of the criminal candidate.

“If the Blind Lead the Blind . . ,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Musk craves a techno-fascist fantasy of ultimate power. As a foreign-born South African, Musk cannot run for president, according to the Constitution — assuming that still matters. By attaching himself to Trump like a leech, he hopes to not only enrich himself but also seize power in the United States. The wannabe Dictator has explicitly invited Musk into the government as a social engineer to redesign America.

To reach that objective, Musk — a messianic narcissist — is pouring tons of personal attention and financial resources into the campaign. He has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. Last week, he rehashed the refuted assertion that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the vote count in 2020, a falsehood that resulted in a $787.5 million settlement paid by Fox News. “We should not allow voting machines of any kind,” he said in Pittsburgh. If Trump wins Pennsylvania and the presidency, it will be by a slight margin that could be attributed to Musk. He can boast that he was the critical variable in this success.

In another desperate attempt to elect the Insurrectionist and gain the approval of the MAGA pack, the socially inept Musk hosts his own rallies that turn into bacchanals of greed. In one instance, Musk stood stiffly before a huge US flag and told an assembled crowd that he loved them while promising one of them a million dollars. Like the audience at a giveaway gameshow, they howled in ravenous anticipation and chanted Musk’s name. He glowed amidst their purchased admiration.

“This kind of energy lights a fire in my soul,” Musk said, as he made one of the crowd a millionaire and pledged to do that daily. His love and the million-dollar-handouts were conditioned on their signing a petition tied to his PAC, which is devoted to returning the Madman to the White House. The spectacle was bizarre and potentially illegal — akin to buying votes. But no one, not least Musk himself, cared in the slightest.

Musk’s public adoration of the Bigot begins with his avaricious understanding of his own economic interests. A corporate welfare bum, he has turned the government into a spectacular money gusher. Tesla flourishes on tax credits for electric cars as well as subsidies for its charging stations. SpaceX heavily depends on contracts with the Department of Defense while taking over key roles previously handled by NASA. Both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just the beginning. SpaceX is designing a slew of new products with “national security customers in mind.”

While railing against alleged government giveaways to migrants, Musk himself has only begun to tap the financial benefits of the government. Trump will fulfill his ambitions. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who praise him, former opponents who genuflect before him, or supplicants who spend money at his resorts and hotels. In office, Trump gave some of his donors highly unusual and potent roles in government, despite conflicts of interest. The king of corruption, Trump knows that his party or even the Supreme Court will never punish him for his lawless transgressions.

Trump makes it easy to imagine how the Tesla car-baron will exploit this deal with the Devil. When Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he is pledging to bestow SpaceX with a gargantuan amount of money. He is talking about making the world’s richest man even richer.

Trump already announced that he will put Musk in charge of a murky new government-efficiency position — the “secretary of cost-cutting.” Hating regulation, Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing state functions to self-interested hustlers and his technologist pals. Musk would also reap one of the largest personalized tax breaks in American history — a tax benefit available to government employees. Further, by targeting regulators of his own companies, conflict of interest will be institutionalized as the normal method by which Musk does government business.

Project 2025 involves the dismantling of the federal government — eliminating entire agencies while sweeping out swaths of politically neutral civil servants. This kind of transformative change suits Musk’s grandiose dreams of world domination and his techno-authoritarian ideology. An exaltation of the narcissism encoded in the Silicon Valley Tech Bro’s pursuit of monopoly is the belief that concentrating power in the hands of self-described geniuses is the most desirable social organization. Musk agrees with his accomplice Pete Thiel, “Competition is for losers.” In this worldview, democratic restraints on absolute power must be eradicated as hindrances to “progress.”

While Henry Ford hung out with fascists back in the 1920s and 30s, and published anti-Semitic bilge, Musk has wealth and access to power that Ford could only dream of. A sniveling sidekick to the Despot who wants generals ”like Hitler had,” the raving reactionary Musk — out of rapacious greed — is doing everything in his power to get that maniac elected.

At Tesla, Musk crowned himself “technoking.” Following Trump’s example of malfeasance, Musk will not divest himself from his businesses — not even his social-media company. In a dictatorial regime of unchecked power, he would not need to fear congressional oversight. The risk posed by Musk running parts of the government will not be on the minds of most Americans voting in the election, given the myriad other potential horrors already promised by the delusional Authoritarian. Yet if Americans elect the Fascist or the Fascist steals the election and the ghastly Trump nightmare becomes real, Musk will be one of its hideous monsters — a vampire squid feeding on what remains of America’s lifeblood.

Hundreds are dead from that storm — the deadliest to hit the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — hundreds more are missing, and hundreds of thousands of residences are still without power or clean water. And in addition to the staggering human loss and physical damage, a hurricane of misinformation and division has continued to pummel the region.

There’s Elon Musk’s politicized deployment of Starlink satellite internet access, which he’s used to credit Donald Trump less than one month before the November election, while undermining the legitimacy of federal recovery efforts. Indeed, listen to Fox News or read Musk’s claims on his social media platform X, and there’s no mention of the pre-arrangements the federal government made with Starlink through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to provide internet access — for local governments and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation.

Then, of course, there’s Donald Trump falsely claiming that the federal government’s response to Helene was delayed and insufficient because the funds that might have gone to hurricane victims are instead being used to house undocumented immigrants. (FEMA does spend some money on migrant housing, but through an entirely different program.) With this outrageous fearmongering, he’s fanning the flames of anti-immigrant hate that are already raging during this election season. His racist and xenophobic rhetoric has also forced FEMA and the White House to spend precious time and energy trying to counter his lies, rather than focusing their full attention on saving lives and rebuilding broken communities.

And don’t forget Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who insisted that the government actually controls the weather. This ludicrous claim is taken from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (notorious for arguing that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax), who suggested that the government directed Helene towards North Carolina “to force people out of the region so it could mine the state’s large reserves of lithium, a key component in the batteries that power electric vehicles and store renewable energy.”

Such hateful lies and conspiracy theories (and there are more like them!) conveniently ignore the fact that conservative Republican lawmakers passed a funding bill that failed to allocate additional money to FEMA just days before Helene hit, even though the country was entering peak hurricane season in a time when the weather is growing ever more extreme. And it’s no surprise that these lawmakers are backed by billionaires who own some of the very companies most responsible for climate change. Through their scare tactics and anti-government misdirection, they have also provided rhetorical cover for the Christian nationalists and other extremists who were some of the first responders after the hurricane. The Southern Poverty Law Center confirms reports I’ve heard from local sources that “far-right militias and white supremacist organizations are moving into the region to provide assistance — and, if past disasters are any indication, drum up sympathy for their cause.”

Those Who Are Hit First and Worst

Hurricane Helene (like Hurricane Milton that followed it in a devastating fashion) should be a brutal reminder that none of us are truly safe from the worsening effects of the climate crisis. For years, local officials and real estate developers marketed Asheville, North Carolina, as a “climate haven.” With its temperate weather and mountain vistas 300 miles from the ocean, many falsely believed the area would be shielded from storms like Helene. No such luck.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks have also served as a stark reminder that the climate devastation increasingly coming for all of us is experienced most intensely by poor and low-income communities. Just look at the (lack of) full-scale evacuation plans for Hurricane Milton in Florida and it’s clear that those who cannot afford a $2,400 flight or have access to a car and enough gas money to wait out the massive traffic jams of those fleeing such storms may just be out of luck.

In western North Carolina, as rising waters from Helene consumed entire communities, many had nowhere to evacuate. Poor people living in rural areas, often with pre-existing health conditions and without health insurance, skipped hospital visits in the chaotic days immediately after the storm. Thankfully, some hospitals opened up beds for patients whose homes were destroyed. But those who don’t have flood insurance — and the residents of the areas hit hardest by Helene were the least likely to have such insurance — and can’t afford to rebuild may soon find themselves joining the many others who have been displaced and made homeless by the storm.

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Truly, as the experiences of Hurricane Helene — and now Hurricane Milton, Nadine, and potentially others, too — have proven, the economic disparities that are laid bare and intensified by the climate crisis are absent from the supposed “economic populism” of climate-change deniers like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. In fact, it was Vance who called the study and analysis of climate change “weird science” during the vice-presidential debate. He has also praised the lead author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which proposes gutting FEMA, making it harder for states to get disaster relief, and blocking federal agencies from fighting climate change (not to mention 400 pages of other suggested cuts to this country’s social safety net).

And although they claim that the Harris-Walz ticket is looking after the interests and profits of the wealthy, it’s Vance and Trump who have regularly belittled the poor and cozied up to venture capitalists, tech billionaires, and others among the nation’s corporate elite. In fact, the decades-old abandonment of rural Appalachian communities destroyed by Helene has long been justified by the patronizing and classist “culture of poverty” arguments that Vance himself helped keep alive with his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

Storms like Hurricane Helene are a force amplifier of deep societal inequities that will worsen if Trump and Vance are elected in November, but in truth the issue runs deeper than just one political party. Indeed, over the last few years, extreme weather events, pandemics, and other public emergencies have exposed a deep societal disease that has only grown worse after decades of neoliberal policies. Worsening poverty and widening economic inequality should be considered pre-existing conditions that are only magnified during moments of crisis. Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics at Virginia Tech, recently put it this way: “The tragic flood event in the southeast U.S. is a poignant example of the confluence of multiple factors, including development in floodplains, inadequate infrastructure maintenance and management, and the specter of climate change, whose compounding effect can amplify the disaster.”

From Mutual Aid to Community Power

In the face of so much loss and destruction, the heroism of impacted communities, which have joined together in extraordinary acts of solidarity, has been tragically underreported in mainstream media outlets. Much of the mutual aid and community support for those affected by the hurricane has come from community members themselves, who are working tirelessly to ensure that everyone in need is cared for. The streets of Asheville and neighboring towns have been filled with cars with out-of-state license plates, as everyday people with various skills have driven in from all over the country to lend a hand. On social media, it’s been heartening to see all of the love and support that has poured into these communities.

In Asheville, the stories of this local solidarity are many. There is the Asheville Tool Library, which, while officially closed, is supporting repair projects, including the fixing of generators and chainsaws. There are medics and doctors running free clinics. There are local breweries that are using their equipment to make sure desperate communities still have clean and safe water. There are young people passing out free gasoline to anyone who needs it and others who are writing out instructions in English and Spanish on how to make dry toilets.

These examples of grassroots leadership offer hope in hard times. After all, this is how bottom-up movements have so often begun throughout American history. In pre-Civil War America, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people smuggled themselves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, forcing the nation to confront the horrors of slavery and igniting a movement to end it. In the 1930s, the hungry and out-of-work began organizing unemployment councils and tenant-farmer unions even before President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal. In the decades before the Civil Rights Movement, Black communities organized themselves to oppose lynch mobs and other forms of state-sanctioned (or state-complicit) violence. And no one can deny the powerful example of the carpools and other community projects of the Montgomery, Alabama, freedom struggle during the 1950s.

Indeed, contrary to media narratives that often paint hard-pressed communities as dangerous and their members as only looking out for themselves, the truth is that people in crisis usually do whatever they can to provide for their communities and protect those around them. Dispossessed people care for one another, share what they have, and lend a hand through mutual-aid networks. Such survival struggles may not be enough on their own, but provide fertile ground for deeper organizing among widely disparate American communities that, through the experience of increasingly common mass crisis events, are being awakened to the need for deeper, systemic change.

The Black Panthers’ Projects of Survival

Consider the free breakfast program organized by the Black Panthers in the 1960s. For many Americans, the enduring image of the Black Panther Party is of Black men in berets and leather jackets carrying guns. The self-defense tactics of the Panthers were an emphatic rebuttal to a society that regularly dehumanized and exacted violence on Black Americans. But in truth, most of their time was spent then meeting the needs of their communities and building a movement that could transform the lives of poor Black people. The Panthers bravely stepped into a void left by the government to feed, educate, and care for the poor. But their survival programs weren’t just aimed at meeting immediate needs. For one thing, they purposefully used such programs to highlight the failures of government policymaking to deal with American poverty. By feeding tens of thousands of people, they also forged community-wide relationships and developed widespread trust among the poor, not just in Black communities but in poor white and Latino communities as well. The Panthers’ survival programs were always meant to be launchpads for a wider movement to end poverty and systemic racism.

Indeed, the Panthers consciously called out the grim paradox of a nation that claimed there was never enough money to fight poverty at home, while it spent billions of dollars fighting distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. (This paradox continues today, as the U.S. has been funding Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza, one of the poorest places on earth, and now its invasion of Lebanon). Their survival programs gave them a base of operations from which to organize new people into a human rights movement, interweaving all of their community work with political education and highly visible protest.

At the time, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI listed the Black Panthers and their breakfast program as “the greatest threat to internal security in the country.” Government officials feared that such organizing could potentially catch fire across far wider groups of poor Americans at a moment when the War on Poverty was being dismantled and the age of neoliberal economics was already on the rise. In that context, the ability of the Panthers to put the abandonment of poor Black people under a spotlight, unite leaders within their community, and develop relationships with other poor people across racial lines was a far more dangerous threat to the oppressive status quo than the guns they carried.

Solidarity Among the Poor

The experience of the Black Panthers features prominently in the anti-poverty organizing tradition that I come from. In fact, the National Union of the Homeless and the National Welfare Rights Union, sibling poor people’s movements that I was part of in the 1990s, used to teach new organizers the “Six Panther Ps” of poor people’s organizing: 1) Program, 2) Protest, 3) Projects of survival, 4) Publicity work, 5) Political education, and 6) Plans, not personalities. When combined, these six principles form a model for the poor organizing the poor that has been responsible for creative nonviolent action that has called America to conscience and for anti-poverty 
policies that have impacted millions.

Much like recent beautiful acts of local solidarity in the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee and in low-income communities across Florida reeling from Hurricane Milton, the significance of the historic work of the Black Panther Party or of unhoused leaders and welfare-rights activists across the decades begins within poor communities themselves, where people are already engaging in life-saving actions. Out of such depths, grassroots leaders find new and creative ways to connect survival strategies and projects of the poor to a wider movement focused on building and wielding political power. From such local struggles come the very policy solutions to a community’s (and even this country’s) varied problems. This is what it means to work bottom up, not top down!

In a world whose weather is growing grimmer by the year, such examples of mutual solidarity and mutual aid are perhaps the most concrete and material form of hope in these hard times. Such scrappy and life-giving action needs more than acknowledgment and appreciation. Those facing injustice, violence, and displacement need more than thoughts and prayers. Rather, to turn the tide on division and lies, as well as deeper impoverishment and pain, heroic and creative community-building — or what I like to call “lifting from the bottom so that everyone can rise” — must be spread, scaled up, and significantly supported by the larger society. Our politicians, news agencies, and larger population must stop paying homage to billionaires who will profit off our predicaments or politicians who will try to capitalize on any crisis. It’s time to see that projects of survival and solidarity among those struggling the most are our only true hope for a future that will otherwise be ever more perilous.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis

Via Tomdispatch.com

For much of our history, the American Dream was defined by a strong, thriving middle class. The ability to buy a home, raise a family, and retire comfortably was once within reach for the average American. From the time of Alexander Hamilton, who advocated for tariffs and protectionist policies to nurture American manufacturing, to the post-World War II boom, we saw how government action could create conditions for middle-class prosperity.

As I explore in my book, the middle class peaked during the post-war period, when policies like high unionization rates, affordable education, and government investment in infrastructure supported widespread economic mobility. By 1980, two-thirds of Americans were classified as middle class. But that all started to unravel with Ronald Reagan’s election.

Reagan’s presidency marked the beginning of a seismic shift in American economic policy, driven by neoliberal principles that favored deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and the weakening of labor unions. His administration’s assault on unions, beginning with the firing of air traffic controllers in 1981, sent a clear message to corporate America: workers’ bargaining power would no longer be protected. This was followed by free trade agreements and policies encouraging the outsourcing of millions of good-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs. The consequences have been devastating. Over the last 40 years, we’ve seen the hollowing out of the middle class and an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the top.

This economic shift didn’t just come from Republicans — Democrats like Bill Clinton embraced many of these neoliberal policies as well, mainly through trade agreements like NAFTA. These agreements promised prosperity but led to the decimation of our industrial base and the rise of low-wage service jobs. Today, the wealthiest 1% of Americans hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, while working-class families struggle to make ends meet.

Thom Hartmann, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class—and How to Rescue Our Future. Click here to buy.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 brought many of these issues to the forefront. Trump’s populist rhetoric tapped into the deep dissatisfaction many working-class Americans felt after decades of being ignored by both parties. He criticized free trade, imposed tariffs, and promised to return jobs to America. While I acknowledge that Trump’s critique of neoliberalism resonated with many voters, his execution was deeply flawed. His tariffs on Chinese goods were haphazard, and they backfired without a comprehensive plan to rebuild American manufacturing. Instead of restoring the middle class, his policies further enriched corporate interests while forcing the federal government to bail out farmers and other industries hurt by the tariffs.

As I argue in The Hidden History of the American Dream, the real solution lies in returning to the progressive values that once defined the Democratic Party. We need to look back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies and the New Deal, which created the most prosperous middle class in world history. By investing in infrastructure, implementing progressive taxation, and protecting workers’ rights, FDR’s administration built an economy that worked for everyone, not just the wealthy elite.

Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. We must commit to a comprehensive industrial policy revitalizing American manufacturing to rebuild the American Dream. I advocate for reintroducing tariffs and other protectionist measures, not as punitive measures against foreign nations but as a way to incentivize domestic production. Unlike Trump’s tariffs, which were politically motivated and poorly executed, we need a strategic, long-term approach that ensures economic stability while rebuilding our industrial base.

In addition to tariffs, we need a return to Keynesian economics, where the government actively ensures economic fairness. President Biden has quietly implemented policies, such as the Inflation Reduction Act and efforts to break up monopolies. These are steps in the right direction, but more needs to be done to reverse the damage wrought by neoliberalism over the past four decades.

Healthcare, education, and housing must be treated as public goods, not commodities to be exploited by profit-driven corporations. Our housing market, for example, has been overrun by speculators who treat homes as financial assets rather than places where people live. We need policies that make housing affordable and accessible to all Americans, not just the wealthy few. Similarly, the privatization of education and healthcare has left millions of Americans in debt and without access to essential services. Progressive taxation, along with increased public investment in these areas, can help create a more equitable society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

The American Dream isn’t dead—but it’s on life support. To revive it, we must reject neoliberalism’s failed policies and embrace a new economic vision rooted in fairness, opportunity, and shared prosperity. This election season allows us to set the country on a new path, one where the middle class can thrive once again. It’s time to take action and reclaim the American Dream for future generations.

Learn more about the Hidden History Series.

I’ve written before about how this works in the academic world, describing college and graduate school education as a classic pyramid scheme. Those who got in early got the big payoff — job security, a book-lined office, summers off, and a “sabbatical” every seven years (a concept rooted in the Jewish understanding of the sabbath as a holy time of rest). Those who came late to the party, however, have ended up in seemingly endless post-doctoral programs, if they’re lucky, and if not, as members of the part-time teaching corps.

Too Broke to Retire

For the most part, I’m sympathetic to Barton’s argument. There are too many people who are old and in the way at the top of various professional institutions — including our government (where an 81-year-old, under immense pressure, just reluctantly decided not to try for a second term as president, while a 77-year-old is still stubbornly running for that same office). But I think Barton misses an important point when he claims that “older workers are postponing retirement… because they simply don’t want to quit.” That may be true for high earners in white-collar jobs, but many other people continue working because they simply can’t afford to stop. Research described in Forbes magazine a few years ago showed that more than one-fifth of workers over age 55 were then among the working poor. The figure rose to 26% for women of that age, and 30% for women 65 and older. In other words, if you’re still working in your old age, the older you are, the more likely it is that you’re poor.

Older workers also tend to be over-represented in certain low-paying employment arenas like housecleaning and home and personal health care. As Teresa Ghilarducci reported in that Forbes article:

“Nearly one-third of home health and personal care workers are 55 or older. Another large category of workers employing a disproportionate share of older workers is maids and housekeeping cleaners, 29% of whom are 55 or older and 54% of whom are working poor. And older workers make up 34% of another hard job: janitorial services, about half of whom are working poor. (For a benchmark, 23% of all workers are 55 and up.)”

We used to worry about “children having children.” Maybe now we should be more concerned about old people taking care of old people.

Why are so many older workers struggling with poverty? It doesn’t take a doctorate in sociology to figure this one out. People who can afford to retire have that option for a couple of reasons. Either they’ve worked in high-salary, non-physical jobs that come with benefits like 401(k) accounts and gold-plated health insurance. Or they’ve been lucky enough to be represented by unions that fight for their members’ retirement benefits.

However, according to the Pension Rights Center, a non-profit organization working to expand financial security for retirees, just under half of those working in the private (non-governmental) sector have no employment-based retirement plan at all. They have only Social Security to depend on, which provides the average retiree with a measly $17,634 per year, or not much more than you’d earn working full-time at the current federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Worse yet, if you’ve worked at such low-paying jobs your entire life, you face multiple obstacles to a comfortable old age: pay too meager to allow you to save for retirement; lower Social Security benefits, because they’re based on your lifetime earnings; and, most likely, a body battered by decades of hard work.

Many millions of Americans in such situations work well past the retirement age, not because they “simply don’t want to quit,” but because they just can’t afford to do so.

On the Road Again

It’s autumn in an even-numbered year, which means I’m once again in Reno, Nevada, working on an electoral campaign, alongside canvassers from UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. This is my fourth stint in Washoe County, this time as the training coordinator for folks from Seed the Vote, the volunteer wing of this year’s political campaign. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in 2022, UNITE-HERE and Seed the Vote saved the Senate for the Democrats, re-electing Catherine Cortez Masto by fewer than 8,000 votes — all of them here in Washoe County.

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This is a presidential year, so we’re door-knocking for Kamala Harris, along with Jacky Rosen, who’s running for reelection to Nevada’s other Senate seat.

When I agreed to return to Reno, it was with a heavy heart. In my household, we’d taken to calling the effort to reelect Joe Biden “the death march.” The prospect of a contest between two elderly white men, the oldest ever to run for president, both of whom would be well over 80 by the time they finished a four-year term, was deeply depressing. While defeating Donald Trump was — and remains — an existential fight, a Biden-Trump contest was going to be hard for me to face.

Despite his age, Joe Biden has been an effective president in the domestic arena. (His refusal to take any meaningful action to restrain the Israeli military in Gaza is another story.) He made good use of Democratic strength in Congress to pass important legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act. That kitchen-sink law achieved many things, including potentially reducing this country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030, allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies (while putting a $2,000 annual cap on Medicare recipients’ outlays for drugs), and lowering the price of “Obamacare” premiums for many people.

Still, Biden’s advanced age made him a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” candidate for president. Admittedly, a win for 59-year-old Kamala Harris in Nevada won’t be a walk in the park, but neither will it be the death march I’d envisioned.

Old and In the Way?

Government, especially at the federal level, is clearly an arena where (to invert the pyramid metaphor) too many old people are clogging up the bottom of the funnel. Some of them, like House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi, remain in full possession of their considerable faculties. She’s also had the grace to pass the torch of Democratic leadership in the House to the very able (and much younger) Hakeem Jeffries, representing the 8th district of New York. Others, like former California Senator Dianne Feinstein, held on, to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling, long after they were gone. Had my own great heroine Ruth Bader Ginsberg had the grace to retire while Barack Obama was still president, we wouldn’t today be living under a Supreme Court with a six-to-three right-wing majority.

What about the situation closer to home? Have I also wedged myself into the bottom of the funnel, preventing the free flow of younger, more vigorous people? Or, to put the question differently, when is it my turn to retire?

I haven’t lived out the past three stints in Reno alone. My partner and I have always done them together, spending several months here working 18 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s what a campaign is, and it takes a lot out of you. I’m now 72 years old, while my partner is five years older. She was prepared to come to Reno again when we thought the contest would be Trump versus Biden. Once we knew that Harris would replace him, however, my partner felt enormous relief. Harris’s chances of beating Trump are — thank God — significantly better than Biden’s were. “I would have done it when it was the death march,” she told me, “but now I can be retired.”

Until Harris stepped up, neither of us could imagine avoiding the battle to keep Trump and his woman-hating, hard-right vice presidential pick out of office. We couldn’t face a Trump victory knowing we’d done nothing to prevent it. But now my 77-year-old partner feels differently. She’s at peace with retirement in a way that, I must admit, I still find hard to imagine for myself.

I haven’t taught a college class since the spring semester of 2021. For the last few years, I’ve been telling people, “I’m sort of retired.” The truth is that while you’re part of the vast army of contingent, part-time faculty who teach the majority of college courses, it’s hard to know when you’re retired. There’s no retirement party and no “emerita” status for part-timers. Your name simply disappears from the year’s teaching roster, while your employment status remains in a strange kind of limbo.

Admittedly, I’ve already passed a few landmarks on the road to retirement. At 65, I went on Medicare (thank you, LBJ!), though I held out until I reached 70 before maximizing my Social Security benefits. But I find it very hard to admit to anyone (even possibly myself) that I’m actually retired, at least when it comes to working for pay.

For almost two decades I could explain who I am this way: “I teach ethics at the University of San Francisco.” But now I have to tell people, “I’m not teaching anymore,” before rushing to add, “but I’m still working with my union.” And it’s true. I’m part of a “kitchen cabinet” that offers advice to the younger people leading my part-time faculty union. I also serve on our contract negotiations team and have a small gig with my statewide union, the California Federation of Teachers. But this year I chose not to run for the policy board (our local’s decision-making body), because I think those positions should go to people who are still actually teaching.

Those small pieces of work are almost enough to banish the shame I’d feel acknowledging that I’m already in some sense retired. I suspect my aversion to admitting that I don’t work for pay anymore has two sources: a family that prized professional work as a key to life satisfaction and — despite my well-developed critique of capitalism – a continuing infection with the productivity virus: the belief that a person’s value can only be measured in hours of “productive” labor.

Under capitalism, a person who has no work — compensated or otherwise — can easily end up marginalized and excluded from meaningful participation in society. The political philosopher Iris Marion Young considered marginalization one of the most ominous forms of oppression in a liberal society. “Marginals,” she wrote, “are people the system of labor cannot or will not use,” a dangerous condition under which a “whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination.”

Even when people’s material needs are met, as is the case for the luckiest retirees in this country, they can suffer profound loneliness and an unsettling disconnection from the social structures in which meaningful human activity takes place. I suspect it’s the fear of this kind of disconnection that keeps me from acknowledging that I might one day actually retire.

Jubilation and Passing the Torch

The other fear that keeps me working with my union, joining political campaigns, and writing articles like this one is the fear of the larger threats we humans face. We live in an age of catastrophes, present or potential. These include the possible annihilation of democratic systems in this country, the potential annihilation of whole peoples (Palestinians, for example, or Sudanese), or indeed, the annihilation of our species, whether quickly in a nuclear war or more slowly through the agonizing effects of climate change.

But even in such an age, I suspect that it’s time for many of my generation to trust those coming up behind us and pass the torch. They may not be ready, but neither were most of us when someone shoved that cone of flame into our hands.

Still, if I can bring myself to let go and trust those coming after me, then maybe I’ll be ready to embrace the idea behind one of my favorite Spanish words. In that language, you can say, “I’m retired” (“retirada”), and it literally means “pulled back” from life. But in Spanish, I can also joyfully call myself “jubilada,” a usage that (like “sabbatical”) also draws on a practice found in the Hebrew scriptures, the tradition of the jubilee, the sabbath of sabbaths, the time of emancipation of the enslaved, of debt relief, and the return of the land to those who work it.

Maybe it’s time to proudly accept not my retirement, but my future jubilation. But not quite yet. We still have an election to win.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

In 2019, a group of homeless folks were living on a deserted piece of land along the Chehalis River, a drainage basin that empties into Grays Harbor, an estuary of the Pacific Ocean, on the coast of the state of Washington. When the city of Aberdeen ordered the homeless encampment cleared out, some of those unhoused residents took the city to court, because they had nowhere else to go. Aberdeen finally settled the case by agreeing to provide alternative shelter for the residents since, the year before, a U.S. court of appeals had ruled in the case of Martin v. Boise that a city without sufficient shelter beds to accommodate homeless people encamped in their area couldn’t close the encampment.

Indeed, for years, homeless people on the West Coast have had one defense set by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Martin v. Boise, it ruled that criminalizing people who had nowhere else to sleep was indeed “cruel and unusual punishment.” However, a group of homeless folks in Grants Pass, Oregon, who had been fined and moved from place to place because they lacked shelter, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. And in June, it ruled against them, overturning Martin v. Boise and finding that punishing homeless people with fines and short stints in jail was neither cruel, nor unusual, because cities across the country had done it so often that it had become commonplace. 

Dozens of amicus briefs were filed around Grants Pass v. Johnson, including more than 40 friends of the court briefs against the city’s case. The Kairos Center for Religions, Rights & Social Justice (to which the authors of this piece are connected) submitted one such brief together with more than a dozen other religious denominations, historic houses of worship, and interfaith networks. The core assertion of that brief and the belief of hundreds of faith institutions and untold thousands of their adherents was that the Grants Pass ordinance violated our interfaith tradition’s directives on the moral treatment of the poor and unhoused. 

One notable amicus brief on the other side came from — be surprised, very surprised — supposedly liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom who argued that, rather than considering the poverty and homelessness, which reportedly kills 800 people every day in the United States, immoral and dangerous, “Encampments are dangerous.” Wasting no time after the Supreme Court ruling, Newsom directed local politicians to start demolishing the dwellings and communities of the unhoused. 

Since then, dozens of cities across California have been evicting the homeless from encampments. In Palm Springs, for instance, the city council chose to demolish homeless encampments and arrest the unhoused in bus shelters and on sidewalks, giving them just 72 hours’ notice before throwing out all their possessions. In the state capital of Sacramento, an encampment of mostly disabled residents had their lease with the city terminated and are now being forced into shelters that don’t even have the power to connect life-saving devices (leaving all too many homeless residents fearing death). The Sacramento Homeless Union filed a restraining order on behalf of such residents, but since Governor Newsom signed an executive order to clear homeless encampments statewide, the court refused to hear the case and other cities are following suit.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, such acts of demolition have spread from California across the country. In August alone, we at the Kairos Center have heard of such evictions being underway in places ranging from Aberdeen, Washington, to Elmira, New York, Lexington, Kentucky, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania — to name just a few of the communities where homeless residents are desperately organizing against the erasure of their lives.

Cruel but Not Unusual

However unintentionally, the six conservative Supreme Court justices who voted for that ruling called up the ghosts of seventeenth-century English law by arguing that the Constitution’s mention of “cruel and unusual punishment” was solely a reference to particularly grisly methods of execution. As it happens, though, that ruling unearthed more ghosts from early English law than anyone might have realized. After all, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasants in England lost their rights to land they had lived on and farmed for generations. During a process called “enclosure,” major landholders began fencing off fields for large-scale farming and wool and textile production, forcing many of those peasants to leave their lands. That mass displacement led to mass homelessness, which, in turn, led the crown to pass vagrancy laws, penalizing people for begging or simply drifting. It also gave rise to the English workhouse, forcing displaced peasants to labor in shelters, often under the supervision of the church.

To anyone who has been or is homeless in the United States today, the choice between criminalization and mandated shelters (often with religious requirements) should sound very familiar. In fact, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who delivered the majority opinion in the Grants Pass case, seemed incredulous that the lower court ruling they were overturning had not considered the Gospel Rescue Mission in that city sufficient shelter because of its religious requirements. In the process, he ignored the way so many private shelters like it demand that people commit to a particular religious practice, have curfews that make work inconceivable, exclude trans or gay people, and sometimes even require payment. He wrote that cities indeed needed criminalization as “a tool” to force homeless people to accept the services already offered. In addition to such insensitivity and undemocratic values, Gorsuch never addressed how clearly insufficient what Grants Pass had to offer actually was, since 600 people were listed as homeless there, while that city’s mission only had 138 beds. 

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Instead, the Supreme Court Justice sided with dozens of amicus briefs submitted by police and sheriff’s associations, cities and mayors across the West Coast (in addition to Governor Newsom), asking for a review of Martin v. Boise. In that majority opinion, Gorsuch also left out what his colleague, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, revealed in her fiery dissent: the stated goal of Grants Pass, according to its city council (and many towns and cities across the West), is to do everything possible to force homeless people to leave city limits. The reason is simple enough: most cities and towns just don’t have the resources to address the crisis of housing on their own. Their response: rather than deal better with the homelessness crisis, they punch down, attempting to label the unhoused a threat to public safety and simply drive them out. In Grants Pass, the council president said, in words typical of city officials across the country: “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city, so they will want to move on down the road.” 

The United States of Dispossession

This country, of course, has a long history of forcing people to go from one place to another, ranging from the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade to widespread vagrancy laws. From the very founding of the United States, as the government encountered Indigenous people who had held land in common since time immemorial, they forced them off those very lands. They also subjected generations of their children to Indian boarding schools patterned after English workhouses. In just a few hundred years, the government attempted to destroy a series of societies that provided for all their people and shared the land. Now, Indigenous people have the highest rates of homelessness in this country. And in the modern version of such homelessness, the West has become a region of stark inequality, where Bill Gates owns a quarter of a million acres of land, while millions of people struggle to find housing. Put another way, 1% of the American population now owns two thirds of the private land in the nation. Such inequality is virtually unfathomable!

In Trash: A Poor White Journey (a memoir by Monroe with a foreword by Theoharis), we argue that the homelessness crisis in this country reveals the chasm between those relative few of us who possess land and resources and those of us who have been dispossessed and are landless or homeless. There were indeed periods in our recent history — the New Deal of the 1930s and the War on Poverty of the 1960s — when government agencies built public housing and invested more in social welfare, greatly reducing the number of homeless people in America. However, this country largely stopped building public housing more than 40 years ago. Housing services have been reduced to the few Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) apartments still left and a tiny bit of money funding housing vouchers for landlords. Our cities are now full of people like Debra Black, who said in her statement in the Grants Pass case, “I am afraid at all times in Grants Pass that I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm.” She died while the case was being litigated, owing the city $5,000 in unpaid fines for the crime of sleeping outdoors.  

The Supreme Court ruled that ordinances against sleeping or camping outdoors or in a car applied equally “whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.” As Anatole France, the French poet and novelist, said so eloquently long ago, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” In this country, of course, everyone is forbidden from occupying space they don’t own.

After all, while the Bill of Rights offers civil rights, it offers no economic ones. And while the United States might indeed be the richest country in history, it hasn’t proven particularly rich in generosity. Even though there are far more empty homes than homeless people (28 for each homeless person HUD has counted on a single January night annually), they’re in the hands of the private market and developers looking to make fast cash. In short, privatizing land seems to have been bad for all too many of us. 

In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling proved short-sighted indeed. While it gave the cities of the West Coast what they thought they wanted, neither the court nor those cities are really planning for the repercussions of millions of people being forced from place to place. The magical thinking exhibited by Grants Pass officials — that people will just go down the road and essentially disappear — ignores the reality that the next city in line would prefer the same.

The Supreme Court opinion cited HUD’s Point in Time (PIT) counts (required for county funding for homeless services) that identified more than 650,000 homeless people in the United States in January 2023. That number is, however, a gross underestimate. Fourteen years ago, Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) issued a study suggesting that, while only 22,619 people had been found in the annual PIT count in that state, the total count using DSHS data proved to be 184,865, or eight times the number used for funding services.

A conservative estimate of actual post-pandemic homelessness in this country is closer to 8 to 11 million nationally. Worse yet, the effects of the pandemic on jobs, the subsequent loss of Covid era benefits, and crippling inflation and housing costs ensure that the number will continue to rise substantially. But even as homelessness surges, providing decent and affordable housing for everyone remains a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Consider, for instance, Brazil where, even today, 45% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. However, after authoritarian rule in that country ended in 1985, a new constitution was introduced that significantly changed the nature of land ownership. Afro-Brazilians were given the right to own land for the first time, although many barriers remain. Indigenous people’s rights as “the first and natural owners of the land” were affirmed, although they continue to find themselves in legal battles to retain or enforce those rights. And the country’s constitution now “requires rural property to fulfill a social function, be productive, and respect labor and environmental rights. The state has the right to expropriate landholdings that do not meet these criteria, though it must compensate the owner,” according to a report by the progressive think tank TriContinental: Institute for Social Research. 

That change to the constitution gave a tremendous boost to movements of landless peasants that had formed an organization called Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or the Landless Workers Movement. The MST created a popular land reform platform, organizing small groups of homeless people to occupy and settle unused vacant land. Because the constitution declared that land public, they could even sue for legal tenure. To date, 450,000 families have gained legal tenure of land using such tactics. 

If Not Here, Where?

Today, untold thousands of people in the United States are asking: “Where do we go?” In Aberdeen, Washington, people camping along the Chehalis River were given just 30 days to leave or face fines and arrests. 

Eventually, Americans will undoubtedly be forced to grapple with the unequal distribution of land in this country and its dire consequences for so many millions of us. Sooner or later, as Indigenous people and tribal nations fight for their sovereignty and as poor people struggle to survive a growing housing crisis, the tides are likely to shift. In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future. They may have lost this time around, but if history teaches us anything, they will find justice sooner or later.

Copyright 2024 Liz Theoharis and Cedar Monroe

After 11 months of war, Israel is facing its biggest economic challenge in years. Data shows that Israel’s economy is experiencing the sharpest slowdown among the wealthiest countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Its GDP contracted by 4.1% in the weeks after the October 7 Hamas-led attacks. And the downturn continued into 2024, falling by an additional 1.1% and 1.4% in the first two quarters.

This situation will not have been helped by a nationwide strike on September 1 that, albeit very briefly, brought the country’s economy to a standstill amid widespread public anger at the government’s handling of the war.

Israel’s economic challenges, of course, pale in comparison to the complete destruction of the economy in Gaza. But the prolonged war is still hurting Israeli finances, business investments and consumer confidence.

Israel’s economy was growing fast before the start of the war, thanks largely to its technology sector. The country’s annual GDP per capita rose by 6.8% in 2021 and 4.8% in 2022, much more than in most western countries.

But things have since changed dramatically. In its July 2024 forecast, the Bank of Israel revised its growth predictions to 1.5% for 2024, down from the 2.8% it had predicted earlier in the year.

With the fighting in Gaza showing no sign of letting up, and the conflict with Hezbollah on the Lebanese border intensifying, the Bank of Israel has estimated that the war’s cost will reach US$67 billion by 2025. Even with a US$14.5 billion military aid package from the US, Israel’s finances may not be enough to cover these expenses.

This means that Israel will face tough choices about how to allocate its resources. It might, for instance, need to cut spending in some areas of the economy or take on more debt. More borrowing will make loan repayments larger and more costly to service in the future.

Israel’s deteriorating fiscal situation has prompted big credit rating agencies to downgrade the country’s status. Fitch lowered Israel’s credit score from A+ to A in August on the grounds that an increase in its military spending had contributed to a widening of the fiscal deficit to 7.8% of GDP in 2024, up from 4.1% the year before.

It could also potentially jeopardise Israel’s ability to maintain its current military strategy. This strategy, which involves sustained operations in Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas, requires boots on the ground, advanced weaponry and constant logistical support – all of which come at a great financial cost.

Aside from macroeconomic indicators, the war has had a profound impact on specific sectors of Israel’s economy. The construction sector, for example, slowed down by nearly a third in the first two months of the war. And agriculture has taken a hit, too, with production down by a quarter in some areas.

Roughly 360,000 reservists were called up at the start of the war – though many have since returned home. More than 120,000 Israeli have been forced from their homes in border areas. And 140,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank have not been allowed to enter Israel since the October 7 attacks.

The Israeli government has sought to fill the gap by bringing in workers from India and Sri Lanka. However, many key jobs are bound to remain unfilled.

It is estimated that up to 60,000 Israeli companies may have to close in 2024 due to staff shortages, supply chain disruptions and waning business confidence, while many companies are postponing new projects.

Tourism, although not a key part of Israel’s economy, has also been severely affected. Tourist numbers have dropped dramatically since the start of the war, with one in ten hotels across the country now facing the prospect of shutting down.

How this war affects the wider region

The war may have battered Israel’s economy. But the effect on the Palestinian economy has been far worse and will take years to repair.

Many Palestinians living in the West Bank have lost their jobs in Israel. And Israel’s decision to hold back most of the tax revenue it collects on behalf of Palestinians has left the Palestinian Authority strapped for cash.

Trade in Gaza has also ground to a halt, which means many Palestinians now rely on aid. While, at the same time, vital communication channels have been cut off and crucial infrastructure has been destroyed.

The effects of the war have stretched beyond just Israel and Palestine. In April, the International Monetary Fund said it expected growth in the Middle East to be “lacklustre” in 2024, at just 2.6%. It cited the uncertainty triggered by the war in Gaza and the threat of a full-blown regional conflict as the reason.

A flare-up in violence in Gaza has inflicted economic damage on an even wider scale than this before. Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2008, for example, pushed up the price of oil by nearly 8% and caused concern for markets all over the world.

Israel’s war in Gaza, which is fast approaching its first anniversary, is taking a heavy economic toll. Only a permanent ceasefire can repair the damage and pave the way for recovery in Israel, Palestine and the wider region.

Amr Saber Algarhi, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Sheffield Hallam University and Konstantinos Lagos, Senior Lecturer in Business and Economics, Sheffield Hallam University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Amitav Ghosh is an internationally celebrated author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books. The Indian thinker and writer has written extensively on the legacies of colonialism, violence and extractivism. His most famous works explore migration, globalisation and commercial violence and conquest during the colonial period, against the backdrop of the opium trade in the 1800s.

Caroline Southey, from The Conversation Africa, asked economics professor Imraan Valodia and climate and inequality researcher Julia Taylor about the significance of his work.

What has Ghosh contributed to our understanding about the root causes of climate change?

Julia Taylor: In Ghosh’s recent non-fiction book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, he used his storytelling prowess to outline the roots of climate change within two systems of power and oppression: imperialism and capitalism.

Imperialism is the expansion of influence over other countries through military force and colonisation. It usually entails the destruction of the environment to support imperial interests.

Capitalism is the dominant economic system where ownership of the means of production (industry) is private. Private actors are driven by profit and growth, which has relied on combustion of fossil fuels.

What Ghosh makes clear is that violence and destruction of the environment are key to capitalism, as they were to colonialism.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh challenges us to think more deeply about the role of conquest and violence in shaping the planetary crisis we’re facing. And the need to reshape our economic and social relations to address climate change. He does this with remarkable acumen and clarity in another of his works of non-fiction, The Great Derangement. In the book he seeks to explain our failure to address the urgency of climate change. He asks very powerfully whether the current generation is deranged by our inability to grasp the scale, violence and urgency of climate change.

He uses the history of nutmeg to illustrate some of his main points. What does he draw from this history?

Julia Taylor: The story of the nutmeg is one among many of conquest of both people and land during colonisation which led to the industrial revolution and the explosion of greenhouse gas emissions.

In the present day these conquests take different forms. But they continue, particularly in the context of mining and extractivism.

Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. The University of Chicago Press. Click here to Buy.

Imraan Valodia: Ghosh traces the history of the household spice – nutmeg – all the way to its origins in the Banda Islands of Indonesia. He uses the analogy of the nutmeg to explain how colonisation of land and people has led to the climate disaster.

The nutmeg was harvested from trees in the Banda Islands and traded by the Bandanese for centuries. With the growth in value of spices, various European countries sought to claim exclusive rights to the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands. The local population resisted. However, in 1621, representatives of the Dutch East India Company chose to destroy the settlements of the Bandanese population and massacre or enslave anyone who could not escape, to gain control over the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh explains these horrifying events in the context of Anglo-Dutch tensions and the trend of empire in Europe, sanctioned by religious beliefs of racial superiority.

A major theme of his work is the link between imperialism and the planetary crisis. What’s his main line of argument?

Julia Taylor: Ghosh argues in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis that

the discussion of climate change, as of every aspect of the planetary crisis, tends to be dominated by the question of capitalism and other economic issues; geopolitics, empire, and questions of power figure in it far less. (p116)

However, he highlights that

the era of Western military conquests predates the emergence of capitalism by centuries. Indeed, it was these conquests, and the imperial systems that arose in their wake, that fostered and made possible the rise to dominance of what we now call capitalism … colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built. (p116)

Imraan Valodia: This argument forces us to grapple with both capitalism and the dominance of the west in our understanding of climate change. It highlights the power dynamics and violence which enabled the destruction of many lands in the form of deforestation, industrial agriculture, mining and more.

To respond to climate change, we need to rethink these dominant systems and relationships with land and the environment. This can be linked to the need to address inequality and power dynamics if we are to have any hope of addressing climate change.

Professor Valodia will be hosting Amitav Ghosh for a series of events at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa from 10 to 12 September 2024. The university has partnered with the Presidential Climate Commission, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the University of Pretoria to host the sessions.

Julia Taylor, Researcher: Climate and Inequality, University of the Witwatersrand and Imraan Valodia, Pro Vice-Chancellor: Climate, Sustainability and Inequality and Director: Southern Centre for Inequality Studies., University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Uphill Battle to Provide Affordable Mental Healthcare

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

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

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

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

The Change Healthcare Outage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deep Corporations

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

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

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

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com