TO: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

FROM: Donald F. Kettl and Paul Glastris

DATE: July 1, 2021

RE: Only You Can Save the Federal Government

It may seem audacious, even patronizing, for two moderate-ish Baby Boomers like us to be offering advice to you, the most influential leader of the Millennial left. But we come in peace, with a message we urge you to consider because, as Princess Leia said to Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.

You and other progressive leaders have bold ideas for how government can help people and save the planet. The Green New Deal. Medicare for All. Free college. A massive investment in public housing. We aren’t in full agreement with that agenda, but that’s not our point. Our point is that to achieve your goals, you’re going to need a federal government as robust as your ideas. And right now, you don’t have it. 

Instead, the government agencies you’ll need to carry out your policies are a disaster waiting to happen. Like the infrastructure you and others rightly say needs rebuilding, our federal bureaucracies are a patched-together mess that can barely handle the weight of the burdens already placed on them. 

This is not your generation’s fault. It’s ours (though in fairness the two of us have long been sounding the alarm). For decades, leaders in Washington, led by conservatives but with acquiescence from liberals, have adopted an anti–civil servant mentality that has frozen the ranks of government workers while vastly expanding the role of private contractors. As a result, federal agencies have sunk deeper and deeper into dysfunction. 

Someone needs to challenge that broken political mind-set. No one has a better track record of changing such political paradigms than you. This memo is our attempt to convince you to make rebuilding the federal bureaucracy one of your core issues—and, by extension, central to the agenda of the progressive left. 

If you do, you’ll be able to highlight yet another sector of contemporary capitalism that is predatory and out of control: federal contracting. You’ll also create an opportunity to expand America’s unionized workforce by hiring hundreds of thousands of civil servants—jobs that by all rights should go to your generation of young Americans. And you’ll provide political space for Joe Biden to make needed reforms that can advance policies you and he agree on. 

But if you don’t, your policy vision for a better America will be deeply threatened, and possibly even doomed.

Consider your proposal to pay for the Green New Deal by raising marginal tax rates on high-income Americans. That’s the right tax policy. But we don’t have a bureaucracy now that can collect all the taxes you think should be due. 

The reason is a years-long assault by Republicans on the Internal Revenue Service. In 2004, George W. Bush’s administration turned the job of collecting the hundreds of billions of dollars that tax scofflaws owed Uncle Sam over to private collectors, with the idea that they could do a better job than federal workers. The private collectors brought in money—but just $86 million, and most of that was from easy-to-collect cases that began running out after just a few months. Then the IRS brought the work back in-house, and its agents collected almost two-thirds more money in just a few months, and it came from the harder cases the private companies had left behind. Relying on private tax collectors actually ended up costing the federal government money. 

But the Republicans weren’t done. They slashed 20 percent of the IRS’s budget and 22 percent of its staff from 2010 to 2018. For people making more than $1 million, the number of tax audits dropped by 72 percent—and the money the IRS collects from audits fell by 40 percent. 

In April, Biden’s new IRS commissioner, Charles Rettig, told Congress that the agency is leaving on the table $1 trillion a year in uncollected taxes because it doesn’t have enough staff. Fixing the problem, Rettig said, would require “consistent, timely, adequate, and multiyear funding,” especially for more staff. Otherwise, he admitted, “we do get outgunned. There’s no other way to say it.” 

The Biden administration supports an $80 billion boost to the IRS budget, to increase its staffing by two-thirds. That, administration officials hope, would help the agency collect perhaps $700 billion in taxes owed over the next 10 years. And if Congress doesn’t increase the IRS staff? A ProPublica story on the IRS budget cuts suggested that “now is a good time to cheat on your taxes.” 

In fact, just about every progressive aim will be weakened by a lack of skilled in-house personnel. Consider the government’s handling of the refugees who surged at the Mexican border this spring, treatment you called “barbaric and wrong.” The Office of Refugee Resettlement has the job of housing them. In 2019, it had only about a hundred employees working on refugee support services. Who does the frontline work—and who runs the shelters we see on television? Contractors, of course. It might not make sense to have government employees be in charge of all the shelters, but the office’s employees have been stretched to the limit in negotiating these contracts. In fact, administration sources told Reuters, the government’s response has been slowed by “an unwieldy bureaucracy of contractor-run sites.” The result has been clear for all to see.

How about Medicare and Medicaid? The Government Accountability Office estimates that the two programs accounted for $103.6 billion in improper payments in 2019. It’s little wonder that the federal government has such a hard time keeping the programs under control. The agency running them, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has about 6,200 employees, which might sound like a lot until you consider that they manage $1,081 billion, or about one-quarter of the entire federal budget. Divvied up, that’s about $174 million per CMS staffer. Who is responsible for paying the bills, monitoring the quality of care, and transmitting funds to state governments? Contractors, of course. The administrative labyrinth of these programs is one that very few people understand and almost no one can manage well. There can be no “Medicare for All” until we straighten out the problems in our current “Medicare for Some” program. 

Many of the agencies that manage the programs you care most about took big hits during the Trump administration. The number of employees in the Department of Labor is down 11 percent. In the State Department, the number of staff fell by 9 percent. Education shed about 8 percent. 

Major science research offices struggled to stem the hemorrhage of talent. The Agriculture Department’s research arm had only 50 percent of its funded positions filled after the Trump administration decided to move it to Kansas City. The shift, former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said in a moment of candor, proved a “wonderful way” to push the federal government’s scientific talent out the door. 

With luck, hard work, and the sizable budget increases he’s won, Biden may be able to replace most of the talent the government lost during the Trump years. But that will barely begin to solve the larger federal workforce problem. 

Federal civilian employment now stands at 2.1 million people, about the same as in 1966, and it hasn’t fluctuated much along the way. But over the same period, the U.S. population has grown by 68 percent and federal spending has quintupled, accounting for inflation. Meanwhile, government’s work has become far more complex. It has added entire agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. 

There are two reasons why the number of federal workers has flatlined over the past six decades. Republicans have been distinctly unsuccessful in cutting federal programs—and often have been complicit in increasing them—but they’ve found that attacking federal employees is a useful proxy battle in the war for controlling government. Democrats have been too afraid of being labeled as apologists of big government to fight back very hard. As a result, the two parties have reached a quiet understanding. Government can grow, as long as it doesn’t grow
its workforce. 

To make up for the artificially created shortfall in civil servants, the federal government has had to vastly expand its contractor workforce, not just to build hardware like rockets and fighter jets but also for services, ranging from security to program planning. Big firms like Booz Allen Hamilton and McKinsey, and a host of small companies most people have never heard of, provide this help. But a lack of transparency surrounding federal contractors means that the exact size of this workforce and how much taxpayer money it accounts for is impossible to measure precisely. 

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using contractors, within reason. Sometimes they can bring needed expertise, like the ability to design complicated information technology systems. It’s often valuable to bring them in for short spurts of intensive work. 

But we’ve long relied on service contractors beyond the point of reason. We now have contractors who do more or less the same work as civil servants, sitting in the same offices, for years on end, typically at far higher cost, often using government email addresses so it’s impossible for anyone on the outside to know whether they’re dealing with a government official or a contractor. We have contractors who oversee contractors, contractors who write policy for government officials, and federal contract managers who are too few in number and too outgunned in skills to manage it all. 

As ICE expanded its efforts to accelerate the deportation of refugees during the Trump administration, it turned to the global consulting firm McKinsey for help. The company proved enormously helpful, even ghostwriting a document extending its own $2.2 million contract with the agency, making the case for why it should continue in the role and outlining what its responsibilities would be. The New York Times reported that one ICE official, concerned about whether McKinsey’s role was stretching too far into work that government officials themselves should be doing, asked an agency contracting officer, “Can they do that?” The officer responded, “Well, it obviously isn’t ideal to have a contractor tell us what we want to ask them to do.”

And when a federal contracting officer in the General Services Administration raised questions about a Mc-
Kinsey contract, the company found a more accommodating GSA manager who not only approved the deal but increased it by tens of millions of dollars. The agency’s inspector general concluded that the second federal manager had “violated requirements governing ethical conduct.” And the top consulting companies are making billions in revenue. Booz Allen’s chief executive makes 20 times the salary of the president of the United States. That comes directly from American taxpayers, because 96 percent of the company’s revenue comes from U.S. government contracts. 

Contracting out can also be a costly decision. A 2010 study by the Project on Government Oversight looked at 35 different government occupations, and in 33 of them federal government employees were less expensive than comparable contractors, even accounting for federal benefits. In the case of “claims assistance and examining” work, contractor rates were almost five times higher than the cost of having federal employees do the job. 

After decades of the “no more bureaucrats” political feedback loop, private contractors working for the federal government now outnumber federal employees by a factor of more than two to one, as estimated by the New York University professor of public service Paul C. Light. That’s right: There are more than twice as many contractors working for the federal government as there are federal employees. The result has been an endless parade of stories about cost overruns and policy snafus, which get blamed on Washington—and on incompetent
federal bureaucrats. 

What we ultimately need is a massive increase in the number of civil servants in the federal government—
upward of one million more by 2035, according to the eminent political scientist and scholar of government John DiIulio. Exacerbating the hiring challenge is the fact that within the next few years, three in 10 federal employees will be eligible to retire. In some agencies, the problem will be much greater, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the EPA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Treasury Department, where the number will be more than 40 percent. In the federal government, there are more tech workers over the age of 60 than under 35. 

The real story is that the federal government struggles to deliver on its good intentions. And that’s the fate that awaits the programs you’re championing, unless we get our collective act together, and do so soon.

There’s no better example than the crash-on-launch of the Affordable Care Act website. The administration had hired a vast network of private firms, with 62 contracts and task orders, according to the GAO’s count, to build the site, but failed to connect them or oversee their work, despite early warnings (from another contractor, of course) that there would be trouble down the road. Democrats had fought for decades to expand health insurance to all Americans, and just six people—not six million, but six—were able to sign up on the first day.^. The site was eventually fixed, but Republicans have capitalized on its initial problems ever since. 

No one was killed or injured by the website crash, but the same can’t be said of the Trump administration’s disastrous response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico. There are many reasons why aid arrived so agonizingly slowly to the island, from bureaucratic hurdles the Trump administration deliberately put up to the territory’s lack of voting representatives in Congress who might have advocated on its behalf. But a major cause was staffing levels at the Federal Emergency Management Administration. On September 21, 2017, the president signed a disaster declaration putting FEMA to work delivering desperately needed supplies and equipment. But, as is usually the case in major disasters, FEMA didn’t actually do the work; it hired a private contractor. The result was a disaster within a disaster. Supplies that islanders needed within days took an average of 10 weeks to reach embattled citizens. Along the way, the agency at least temporarily lost track of 38 percent of the shipments, worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars. When food supplies eventually arrived, many of the boxes were full of junk food. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general concluded that the mess cost the government $179 million in cost overruns, with another $50 million in costs labeled “questionable.” 

Thanks to the hollowing out of the federal government’s talent and the outsourcing of work to contractors, the rate of highly visible breakdowns has increased, as Light, the NYU professor, has found, from 1.6 per year during the Reagan administration to 4.3 annually under Trump. That ratio is likely to rise under Biden and future administrations—unless we step in, now, to begin to address the underlying staffing issues. 

None of this is news to the Biden administration. Many of its key officials served under Barack Obama, who took a stab at fixing the problem. What they accomplished, and didn’t, provides cautionary lessons for the road ahead—and the vital role you can play. 

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Obama said he was “concerned by the rising number of government contractors that are often unaccountable and often less efficient than government workers.” As president, he pledged to “restore effective oversight of the government contracting process and reduce our nation’s increasing dependence on private contractors in sensitive or inherently governmental functions.” That last part was especially important. The GAO has warned for years that contractors were gradually taking on basic policy decisions that erode government’s basic ability to govern. 

After Obama won the election, his Office of Management and Budget came up with tougher language to define these “inherently governmental” services and to pull more work into government. The strategy reduced the ratio of contract and grant employees to federal civilian employees, from 3.38 to 1 to 2.34 to 1, Paul Light writes in his book The Government-Industrial Complex. Obama’s team found allies on Capitol Hill among the Democratic majority as well as pragmatic Republicans like Ohio Senator George Voinovich.

In 2010, however, Democrats lost their congressional majority, moderates like Voinovich retired, Tea Party crusaders took over, and the politics of in-sourcing got tougher. One reason was the ensuing budget standoffs and cuts (remember sequestration?). In theory, bringing more work in-house saves the government money. In practice, federal managers often prefer to hire contractors, especially at times of budget uncertainty, even though they are going to cost more money. Because the federal hiring process is so badly broken, bringing on new employees can take months, even years. So, too, with the process of getting rid of poor performers. When managers don’t know what their budget is going to be next year—and sometimes next month—they turn to contractors, who can be brought in and gotten rid of more quickly, regardless of whether they do a better or worse job. 

Another obstacle is that federal contractors have a great deal of clout in Washington, thanks especially to their campaign contributions. In 2011, the Sunlight Foundation found that, out of the 41 companies that had made the largest campaign contributions during the previous two decades, 33 had federal contracts. (The Center for Responsive Politics also discovered that more than half of the 63 contractors that made contributions to Trump’s inaugural won multimillion-dollar contracts during his first year in office. Six companies hadn’t received any contracts in 2016 but got new business following their donations. Even more dark campaign contributions undoubtedly flowed into the system.) 

These well-funded efforts slowed Obama’s in-sourcing efforts. The Defense Department, for instance, originally said it wanted to bring 10,000 workers back into the federal government. After hitting about 3,000 employees, it stopped. Needless to say, the Trump administration, reverting to GOP form, reversed the Obama policy and spent four years contracting more work out, with the contractor workforce growing by approximately 1.4 million people, Paul Light concludes. Meanwhile, the Trump administration worked aggressively to erode the bargaining rights and civil service protections of federal employees. 

While the Biden administration has jettisoned most of Trump’s anti-union executive orders, it hasn’t yet signaled whether it will take a run, as Obama did, at reducing the government’s dependence on contractors and significantly expanding the civil service workforce. With Democrats holding the narrowest of majorities in Congress, Republicans preparing a massive assault to take control of both houses in 2022, and the possibility that we’ll be right back to battles over government shutdowns and budgetary brinksmanship, the administration may decide that this is one battle it doesn’t want to fight. 

When it comes to the functioning of its agencies, the federal government is in a cyclical political rut. We’re dug in so deep that it’s going to take decades to get us out. But get out we must. And the key to doing so, we believe, is patient, visionary leadership from progressives like you.

Unlike moderate Democrats, you and your allies aren’t afraid of the “big government” label. You can use that freedom to advocate for the reforms—both short and long term—that we need.

You can begin by demanding that Biden take two executive actions without delay.

First, you should insist that Biden direct his agencies to calculate the total size of the workforce supporting the government’s work—federal government employees, along with those working on federal contracts and grants. Right now, we know a lot about federal employees, including how many people are on the payroll in every federal agency; what they’re paid; how many hours they work; their race, gender, and ethnicity; and more. However, we know very little about their contractor counterparts. 

Second, you should call on Biden to issue an executive order requiring that any company receiving 10 percent or more of its revenue from federal contracts or grants should disclose its dark money contributions, especially donations through super PACs and independent groups that skirt campaign contribution laws. The Obama administration considered just such a plan, and Biden supported it, but the president never pulled the trigger. Biden should, in order to bring more transparency to the business of government. 

Over time, these two simple and straightforward steps could have a significant impact. It’s a truism in politics that you can’t change what you can’t count. In any debate about what the right mix is between civil servants and contractors, the latter have an inherent advantage. It’s hard to even engage journalists, academics, elected officials, and citizens in a discussion if we don’t have reliable numbers for both sides of the civil servant/contractor divide. The same is true for dark money contributions from federal contractors. Only by revealing the extent to which these firms are funneling funds to independent expenditures, pay-for-play advocacy groups, and others can we begin to know who is manipulating whom behind the scenes. 

There are longer-term fixes that should be on your reform to-do list as well. We need a two-year budget cycle, so federal managers can better predict how much money they’ll have to spend down the road. They’ll be less prone to hiring contractors if they know they can count on being able to support more federal staffers over the long-
er term. 

We also need to make it easier for government managers to hire the best people—and let people go who don’t produce results. Almost everyone in Washington agrees that the federal hiring process is broken and that the government loses too many good applicants—especially eager young applicants—because job listings are impossible to navigate and because hiring officials take 100 days, on average, to hire new employees. The people that the federal government most needs, especially in information technology and contract management, have lots of other choices. We don’t want to lose the next generation of workers to other employers who can move more aggressively to hire talent. And we can’t avoid the problems of contracting without having enough workers, with the right skills, working in government to support the public’s mission.

The answer isn’t to expand government service contracting, as the private sector would like, or to scrap civil service protections, as many Republicans have long dreamed about and as many federal employees—and their unions—dread. The answer is for the Biden administration to solve three core government HR problems. 

First, put on a full-court press to fix the hiring process overseen by the Office of Personnel Management—a better website, faster processing, and more pooled announcements so the best candidates in any category are easy for hiring managers across the government to find—so that the government doesn’t drift into contracting because it’s simply the least painful option.

Second, create new avenues for bringing in needed talent. The problems the federal government is dealing with are changing so fast that federal managers often don’t want to be locked into permanent decisions about new employees’ skills. And, for that matter, many prospective employees, especially among Millennials and Gen Zers, can’t imagine working for life in any organization. You should sponsor a bill to create a pilot project to allow federal agencies to hire the employees the government needs the most, especially in information technology, customer service, and contract management, for five-year renewable terms. That would increase the flexibility of federal agencies, reduce the risk of budget uncertainties, and slash the incentives to hire contractors just because it’s easier and simpler (even if it’s often more expensive). 

Third, update the federal merit system in ways that are fair to employees and work for managers. The problem isn’t that federal employees have too many rights and protections; it’s that exercising these rights takes far too long. In the case of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which is charged with hearing appeals, exercising those rights is impossible, since the MSPB hasn’t had a quorum for four years and hasn’t had any members for two. The reason Republicans give for continuing this administrative blockade is that they want to make it easier to fire poor-performing feds. In fact, the federal government fires poor performers at roughly the same rate as—though far more slowly than—equivalent private-sector positions. We should follow the Partnership for Public Service’s recommendation: Improve the government’s system for assessing the performance of government employees and create a one-stop shop for grievances and appeals, to make it possible for the government to deal with all the issues on the table, swiftly and in one pass. 

Of course, federal unions won’t like this any more than private contractors will like the steps toward transparency. But perhaps, with your help, they can be convinced to accept these reforms as part of a deal that allows them to recruit new union members from the hundreds of thousands of new federal employees we desperately need. Biden has already issued an executive order encouraging union representation of government workers—and saying that federal agencies should be a “role model” for all employers. You have the chance to put that to work. 

In the end, what’s most important is that you personally embrace the goal of a bigger and better federal bureaucracy. Official Washington will see it as heresy. But your base of millions of young progressive voters could quickly come to see it for what it really is: common sense. And it could open the door for many of them who want to help as part of a new legion of public-spirited federal employees.

In recent years, the energy on the left has been all about big policy ideas, with very little thought given to their implementation. A century ago, that wasn’t the case. Progressive leaders in the early 1900s fought for the rights of workers, environmental protection, and better education. But they also focused, in equal measure, on making sure that the government was populated by experts and run well enough to make their programs work. Today’s progressives won’t have a chance of winning in the long run unless they embrace both parts of the progressive legacy. It’s up to you to lead the way.

The post Memo to AOC: Only You Can Save the Government appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Katie Toghramadjian thought she had found a job that would allow her to balance her burgeoning career as a civil engineer with the demands—and joys—of parenting. She had two boys under the age of four when she went to work at BRW, a Minneapolis-based company that offered roadway design services. She had negotiated to work remotely, and her schedule was her own. Toghramadjian would check in with her project manager each afternoon to see what assignments she’d have for the day. Then, after the kids went to bed, she would work from 8 p.m. until about 2 a.m., making sure her assignments were completed for the team to pick up in the morning. 

This meant Toghramadjian could care for her children while her husband worked a traditional nine-to-five job at another engineering firm. Despite not putting in the face time around the office, she was well regarded within the organization and did not find that her odd hours were a hurdle to getting plum assignments. It was a win-win-win: The company got critical tasks completed in a timely manner. Toghramadjian was able to keep working in her chosen field. And her young family had child care covered in a way that made sense for their finances. 

But about two years in, an international firm bought BRW and new management arrived. Toghramadjian was given a choice: Come into the office or lose your job. And there was another catch. She’d have to work during normal business hours. 

At first, she and her husband made it work by staggering their hours. He started his day at the office early, so he could pick up their children—by now they had three sons—after school. She shifted her schedule back an hour so she could drop off the boys in the morning. But asking for an hour of flexibility each day came at a cost. Toghramadjian often worked up to 60 hours a week, but she was not classified as a full-time employee. She stayed on for two more years, but eventually left the company and began consulting.

“Because I was part-time, the benefits and salary increases I received were not commensurate with how hard I had been working or the value I was bringing,” Toghramadjian told me. “I really felt that I was hitting barriers in my career, but they were artificial constraints. I had the time and capacity to work. It just would be better for me within my own structure.”

The trade-offs Toghramadjian faced are familiar to millions of American workers. White-collar employers in the U.S. by and large are set up to disproportionately reward employees who not only put in long hours but also work very specific hours during the day. Many have cultures that equate visibility in the office with value and see deviations from the norm as signs of lacking commitment. Caregivers are boxed into a series of difficult choices as they navigate their responsibilities to their jobs and families. And, because caregivers are predominantly women, the setup also creates structural barriers for women in the workforce: Jobs that pay a premium for employees who overwork, or who work very specific hours, are one of the largest driving forces of the contemporary gender wage gap.

Before the pandemic, only a select few—around 7 percent of civilian workers—had access to a “flexible workplace” or teleworking benefit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But COVID-19 forced a massive remote-work experiment. Companies shut down their offices, dispersing their employees to work at home indefinitely to slow the spread of the virus. In-person meetings were moved to Zoom. Business trips and client dinners were canceled. Industry leaders like JPMorgan Chase and Salesforce began rethinking the need for expansive (and expensive) offices. By May 2020, more than a third of employed adults were working from home. At the same time, school and day care closures meant that parents no longer had someone to watch their children during prime working hours, leaving them to fit in conference calls during naps and finish up projects after bedtime. As organizations settled into remote operations, the lack of face time and the need to accommodate caregivers made it hard for managers to impose the inflexible schedules that made work difficult for everyone—but especially difficult for working parents.

Yet while it’s clear that the vast majority of office work was happening remotely, productivity did not suffer to the extent businesses initially feared. The Pew Research Center released survey data last December showing that 80 percent of people working from home felt that it was “easy” to meet deadlines and complete projects on time. On the employer side, the results were similar. Roughly 83 percent of executives surveyed thought that telework had been a success, and more than half said that productivity actually rose, according to a report published by PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers) a month later. As the U.S. returns to some sense of normalcy, many workers are hoping that the option to work remotely and with a flexible schedule will become permanent office policy. That leaves company executives and industry leaders faced with a decision: Will they heed the lessons of the past 15 months or, as many are signaling they will do, revert to business as usual?

Economists established decades ago that women earn less than men, even when controlling for factors like educational attainment and experience level. But more recently, researchers have begun to tease out how that wage gap plays out over time and within occupations. These studies have produced a couple of key findings. First, the wage gap between men and women is actually quite small when they start their careers, but then widens considerably once they hit their late 20s and 30s. It starts to narrow again in their 40s and 50s.

The second key finding is why the wage gap gets bigger for women during their prime childbearing years. Claudia Goldin, a leading labor economist and Harvard professor, explains it as a function of employees looking for flexible work arrangements. People who work fewer hours or nontraditional hours see their wages go down disproportionately, according to her research. “Think of it this way,” Goldin said in a recent interview. “If you were working 40 hours a week and said, ‘I only want to work 20 hours a week,’ you might see your salary go from $100,000 to $20,000. The price of that flexibility is high.” It’s no coincidence that the divergence in wages comes at a time when women are starting to have children and need that flexibility. In fact, as Goldin noted, the wage gap between men and women without children is much smaller.

This dynamic is more pronounced in fields like finance and law, where putting in face time and being available when it’s convenient for clients—think early-morning breakfasts and late-evening dinners—are important parts of climbing the corporate ladder. The issue, according to Goldin, is that workers in these industries are not interchangeable and relationships with clients are key to the business model. A consultant, for example, builds trust with clients and over time learns their particular needs, which makes passing off meetings to colleagues difficult. 

At the other end of the spectrum are fields in which workers either have a lot of autonomy over when they work or are somewhat interchangeable. According to the Census Bureau, the pay gap between male and female pharmacists, for example, is close to zero thanks to increased standardization across the field—filling prescriptions is essentially the same from one pharmacy to the next—and the use of networked computers that allow patient information to be pulled up at any store. From the perspective of both the employer and the customer, pharmacists can easily swap shifts. It doesn’t really matter who is doing the work so long as the hours are covered. Similarly, for male and female software developers—who don’t need to be in an office at a specific time to write lines of code—the wage gap is less extreme. (Lower-wage shift workers, many of whom have their schedules set by algorithms, face a different but related problem: too few hours, combined with unpredictable changes to their shifts. That setup creates child care issues, takes a toll on workers’ health and financial stability, and makes it difficult for them to plan for the future. But, as Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America, chronicled for the January 2020 issue of this magazine, these problems can be greatly reduced by giving employees advance notice and input into their schedule.)

Goldin laid out her thesis in a 2014 paper titled “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter.” She argued that the solution to the wage gap isn’t necessarily government intervention or even getting men to split the housework evenly—though, of course, that has its own merits. Rather, it’s up to companies to change how they manage and pay their employees. “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might even vanish if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who worked long hours and who worked particular hours,” she wrote. 

But, at least for white-collar workers, the trend has been going in the opposite direction for the better part of the past half century. Starting in the 1970s, the share of highly educated, high-salaried men working more than 50 hours a week began increasing. Those hours, researchers have found, translated into a substantial bump in wages over time through bonuses and raises. At the same time, more mothers began entering the workforce—by 1980, roughly half of children under the age of 18 had mothers either working or seeking employment—but that didn’t mean couples split the responsibilities at home evenly. Women remained the primary caretakers, a role they disproportionately still fill today. 

“There are some couples that make enough money so they can outsource their child care in a way that allows them both to work demanding jobs, but it’s not typical,” says Kathryn Edwards, an economist with RAND. “We have this massive responsibility of caregiving that comes with being a parent. The school day ends at 2:30. The necessary conditions for dual-earning parents is that someone has to have the flexible job.”

The long-standing lack of investment in child care has made balancing work and family all the more tenuous. Analysts at the Pew Research Center released data in late 2015 showing that 42 percent of mothers have reduced their work hours and 39 percent have taken a “significant amount of time off” at some point in their careers to look after their children or tend to another family member. Those findings were reinforced by a January 2020 report from the Center for American Progress that estimated parents lose about $9.4 billion a year in wages because of child care issues. That was before the pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, which at its height pushed more than four million women out of the workforce, in part because of day care and school closures.

“Even in the best of circumstances, if someone has the economic privilege to pay for the child care and lives in a community where that child care is abundantly available, the system breaks for people on a regular basis,” says Leslie Forde, founder of Mom’s Hierarchy of Needs, an organization focused on helping parents in the workforce reduce stress and achieve work-life balance. “You could be heading to a big meeting, and you get a call that somebody needs to be picked up because they got sick. School could be closed, or it’s parent-teacher conference day. There are a lot of things that make child care fragile, and that has always been in direct conflict with this culture of overwork that puts an emphasis on face time.”

After Toghramadjian left her job, she quickly spun up a consulting business with a focus on helping roadway engineering firms adapt to computer-aided design and drafting technology. She had hoped that working on small projects for a handful of clients would give her time to be with her boys during the day. The contracts, however, came in quickly, and she found there was so much to do that she had to hire someone to keep up with the demand.

That was the beginning of Isthmus Engineering, which formally launched in the fall of 2002. Within the transportation engineering field, the company is something of an anomaly, in that it’s owned by a woman. And Toghramadjian gives her employees an unusual level of autonomy over their schedules. Each person sets the base number of hours they work per week—30 and above is considered full-time and qualifies for benefits—and designates the hours they are available so meetings can be planned. 

As the company grew and Toghramadjian gave birth to her fourth child, she was landing big projects in partnership with other firms for the Minnesota Department of Transportation to refurbish stretches of roadway and design better intersections. By 2021, her staff had expanded to 36 people, 19 of whom are women—an extraordinary ratio for the civil engineering industry, which is more than 80 percent male. (Isthmus’s retention rate has hovered around 96 percent.) Toghramadjian traces much of the growth back to her philosophy that employees who have balance between work and life are ultimately better for the bottom line. “When you are rested and relaxed, you do better work,” Toghramadjian said. “If you’re feeling at all pulled to be someplace else or if you’re stressed because you hit traffic and you’re going to be late, it takes you longer to get plugged into your work. You are not as productive.”

At Isthmus, salaries are based on core hours, but employees are compensated for any additional hours they work. Anyone can modify their schedules for any reason—aging parents, sick children, or hobbies—whenever they need or want to. “We don’t make a judgment call and say, ‘That’s not worth it,’ ” Toghramadjian said, noting that one engineer shifted his hours to make time to compete in a professional ultimate frisbee league. “One of the things I’ve observed is that when we apply flexibility across the board, young men take time to be with their children. That allows their spouse to have support and go back to work. I feel like we are helping the partners as well.” 

In the past couple of decades, other companies have begun experimenting with similar arrangements. The highest-profile example is Best Buy’s headquarters, which in the early 2000s embarked on a pilot program to rethink its “butts-in-seats” office culture. Around that time, the company had moved about 5,000 employees to a new corporate campus that had a number of amenities, including a coffee shop, a gym, and a state-of-the-art arcade. The common space was supposed to be a hub that brought everyone together to foster collaboration, but very few people were using any of it. “Going to the gym in the middle of the day doesn’t look like work. It looks like you are a slacker,” says Jody Thompson, a human resources manager with the company at the time. “Traditional office culture doesn’t reward that behavior.”

Thompson and her colleague Cali Ressler were tasked with developing a plan to help Best Buy increase productivity, improve retention, and facilitate better work-life balance for their employees. After conducting a series of interviews with employees at all levels of the company, they concluded that the problem boiled down to time—and, more specifically, who was managing it. Hours in the office remained an informal but important measure of productivity. Employees could negotiate for schedule changes and remote work on an individual basis, but the system fostered discontent because it was largely based on whether a supervisor would grant permission. What people wanted instead, Thompson and Ressler realized, was autonomy—the ability to determine where and when they worked—so they could make their jobs compatible with their other priorities.

Based on that feedback, the pair came up with a new management framework called the Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE. The idea was simple: Give employees the tools and coaching they need to produce the specific results the organization wants by the deadline it sets. Managers would focus on whether merchandising plans were fulfilled, for example, or whether contracts with suppliers were successfully executed. Those who failed to meet expectations could get more training or, in some cases, be fired. But at no point would managers have a say in a person’s hours or where they worked. It required a massive shift in corporate mind-set away from managing people and toward managing the work itself. 

As Thompson and Ressler began rolling out the program in 2004, they met resistance from factions who felt their staff needed to be physically present to maximize efficiency. One high-level executive who was there at the time described it to me as a fight between the progressives who embraced change and the traditionalists who did not want to give up their authority. 

The results, however, were hard to argue with. More than 60 percent of the departments at Best Buy’s headquarters adopted ROWE, and those that did beat their own productivity measures—by as much as 40 percent—across the board, according to the executive. Employee engagement scores, which had been stuck for years, began to rise too, he said. There was also encouraging data around quality-of-life measures. Researchers at the University of Minnesota assessed the program and found that by giving people more control over their schedules, ROWE led to an increase in the amount of sleep and exercise employees were getting and made it more likely that they visited the doctor when they were sick. For parents in particular, the changes were monumental, Thompson said—the perception that they were less committed because they didn’t work enough or were working odd hours began to fade. 

Despite these successes, Best Buy killed the program in 2013. The company was in financial turmoil, and the new chief executive who was brought in to turn things around thought ROWE was a flawed leadership model. But by then, Thompson and Ressler had left to launch their own consulting firm, CultureRx, with a goal to bring ROWE to more businesses. Much of the interest in the model has come from organizations based in other countries, especially Canada. American companies have been more reticent to sign on, Thompson said. She chalks that up to a fear of committing to such wholesale change. “ROWE is like being pregnant,” she said. “You either are or you aren’t. There isn’t a way to ease into it.” 

For most U.S. workers, the level of autonomy ROWE affords may feel out of reach. Only about 12 percent of civilian employees have access to flex time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even if a company does offer some flexibility, the programs are usually optional, and it is up to individuals to negotiate for alternate arrangements.

Over the past two decades, a number of studies have documented how the uneven application of these policies creates a stigma for those who reduce their hours or take time off from their job. The research is clear: Men and women who seek flexibility are considered less dedicated to their employer and fall short of the “ideal worker” archetype—a bias even more hazardous for people of color, who often have less support from their managers. 

The issue is further complicated by long-standing gender norms. A 2019 paper by researchers from Florida State, Harvard, and McMaster University explored how opt-in flexibility policies played out at a midsized global consulting firm. The company had brought in the researchers to make sense of why women weren’t advancing to leadership positions even though executives had invested in a number of family-support policies. The researchers found that while both men and women expressed frustration with the strain of juggling long work days and home life, women were almost exclusively the ones who switched from client- to internal-facing roles and ratcheted down their hours—an acceptable trade-off in a society that expects women to prioritize motherhood. Few men made the same choice because of the pressure they felt to put work above all else. These well-intentioned policies had the effect of solidifying gender norms, ultimately directing women off the path to senior roles and, in some cases, out of the workforce entirely. 

These entrenched norms have begun to clash with the way younger Americans see themselves and the way they expect to raise their families. Data shows that attitudes have shifted dramatically from the 1970s, when only about a quarter of Americans supported parity between the sexes. Now, more than two-thirds believe that men and women should have equal claim to both careers and parenting. Egalitarian values are especially common among Gen Xers and Millennials, many of whom grew up watching their mothers go to work and having their families depend on that income. 

Many men and women are looking for egalitarian relationships, says Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University, but because they expect long hours at the office and see a general lack of reliable child care options, men are falling back on a Plan B: putting work first and depending on their partners to deal with the bulk of responsibilities at home. The decision is often a pragmatic one: The premium one partner can earn for working long hours combined with the inflexibility of office culture typically makes the equitable division of labor at home difficult or financially impractical. 

Enter COVID-19, which exposed many of these fault lines and also forced many organizations to cede control over their employees—especially parents, many of whom had to balance Zoom meetings with Zoom school. For some, working from home had a silver lining: It allowed people to cut down on their commutes and spend more time with their families. One marketing executive who is a mother and works for a major financial services company in the Northeast explained it this way: “I’m not rushing to get my son from day care or leaving work to get him if he’s sick. I can actually enjoy time with my family.” As a manager herself, she made sure her team had the flexibility they needed to deal with the pandemic. “It really came down to, ‘I don’t care what you’re doing when, as long as you get your work done on time,’ ” she said. 

Whether changes like these stick remains an open question. As more Americans get vaccinated, a debate is unfolding around how much face time is really necessary for office workers. More than half of those surveyed in the January PwC report said they’d like to continue working remotely at least three days a week after the pandemic. Businesses including Google, Ford, and Target announced plans earlier this year that they will allow corporate employees to telework a portion of the week while requiring some of their time to be spent in the office. And for demanding jobs built around client relationships, the pandemic has proved that presentations can be made and deals can be struck over Zoom. “The horse is out of the barn, and this is a perk that will need to be offered to attract the best talent,” said Kathy Regan, chief operating officer of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation based in New York City that is also planning for a hybrid approach after Labor Day.

Even Toghramadjian will make adjustments at Isthmus based on what she learned during the pandemic. Her staff already had the option to work from home, but few took advantage of it. She wonders now if her employees sensed an unwritten rule around remote work, and she has begun choosing her words carefully to make sure she doesn’t send the wrong message. “Many of the companies in our industry are talking about going back to normal and back to the office, and we’re not using that language,” she said. “We don’t want to stop people from coming in, but I also don’t want them to be there just because they feel obligated.”

On the other end of the spectrum is Goldman Sachs, which sent a memo to its staff in early May announcing that its U.S.-based workforce would need to be back in the office by June 14 because the firm’s “culture of collaboration, innovation and apprenticeship thrives when our people come together.” WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani also made the argument that people need to be in the same space to be productive, saying at a Wall Street Journal conference, “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home.” (Mathrani, of course, is not an unbiased observer: He runs a company that leases office space.) Cathy Merrill, chief executive officer of Washingtonian Media, wrote an opinion piece for The Washington Post on May 6 warning that people who stay home may be downgraded from full-time employee to contractor status or lose their jobs altogether because “the hardest people to let go are the ones you know.”

Both Mathrani and Merrill wound up apologizing after an online backlash, but their comments highlighted why the movement toward remote work and hybrid schedules will face hurdles. For many, splitting working hours between home and the office is a reasonable compromise that allows for some flexibility without completely sacrificing the in-person interactions that create trust among colleagues and natural opportunities for mentorship, feedback, and collaboration. But optional work-from-home policies could create a new form of hierarchy, says Pooja Jain-Link, an executive vice president with Coqual, a think tank focused on addressing barriers to underrepresented groups in the workplace. If office culture hasn’t fundamentally changed and remote work remains a deviation from the norm, optional hybrid schedules could create two tiers of employees—the go-getters who choose to come into the office and the slackers who stay home—further stigmatizing caregivers. “Does this just become another way to penalize people?” she asked.

That’s a concern that Thompson, from CultureRx, is actively trying to address. Since the pandemic began, about 100 organizations—roughly 70 percent of which are based outside the United States—have approached her firm to learn more about ROWE. What she stresses with each of them is that they can’t just take traditional office schedules and apply them at home. Few at this point have decided to make the leap. COVID-19 may have bent workplaces toward more flexibility, but Thompson and others who embrace autonomy for their employees remain ahead of the curve. “What companies are doing now as they are pulling out of the pandemic is they are getting more and more granular on the hybrid approach, what job codes can work from home, how many days in the office do we need people,” she said. “It’s still about control of people instead of control over the result.”

Whether or not autonomous work models take hold over the long term, there may be some help from Washington on the way. As part of his infrastructure plan, President Joe Biden has proposed a number of initiatives designed to support working families. The investment would be substantial: His plan calls for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on free preschool, subsidies to help low- and middle-income families pay for child care, and 12 weeks of paid leave for all workers that could be used for a variety of reasons. It represents the first major attempt at the federal level to address the strain on families since Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993. 

That Biden is framing these policies as infrastructure is important in and of itself. It’s official recognition of what economists and activists have been saying for years: Policies that support families help move the economy forward. It’s a critical piece of the post-pandemic recovery, especially for women—nearly two million of whom remain out of the workforce and who disproportionately carry the weight of caregiving responsibilities. A large share of workers can’t return to their jobs until there is someone to watch their children.

As of this writing, Biden’s proposals were still working their way through Congress. But even if all of the measures sail through, it’s not the end of the story. When it comes to closing the gender wage gap, addressing overwork and the stigmatization of employees who ask for nontraditional schedules is key. 

The power to make that shift lies with managers and executives. The pandemic has proved that it’s not necessary to require employees to be at the office from nine to six each day. It’s clear now that if you give people flexibility, the work still gets done. The question is whether employers recognize this moment for what it is: an opportunity to make work and life radically better.

The post Can Working From Home Fix the Gender-Wage Gap? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On December 17, 2020, a group of mostly Indian American protestors gathered outside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. A pair of turban-clad men held up a banner telling the company to “STOP the suppression of freedom of speech.” Another protestor carried a poster exhorting passers to “honk for human rights.” Yet another waved a sign declaring, “We stand with farmers.” Three days later, demonstrators rallied outside Facebook’s Vancouver office with similar posters. “No Farmers No Food,” read several of the signs.

Protests against Facebook, one of the most controversial companies in the world, have become commonplace. But this was not your typical anti–Big Tech demonstration. The Indian Americans and Canadians gathered at the company’s gates weren’t there because of Facebook’s usual controversies—its surveillance of users or its role in spreading political mis-information. Instead, the immediate cause of their anger was that Facebook had taken down pages protesting India’s new agricultural acts.

Historically, Indian farmers have sold their crops through specialized markets where the government sets minimum prices. The new laws, hastily passed in September 2020, allow farmers to instead sell directly to corporate buyers. In theory, this change could help farmers by generating more competition for their products. But in practice, farmers and liberal economists believe that the laws, once fully implemented, will kill the price-supported marketplaces altogether. Farmers will then have to sell directly to corporations. This, they warn, will not look like a utopia of competitive bidding. India’s biggest food companies have tremendous market power, which they could use to force farmers to accept ever-lower prices. This could push many independent farmers out of business. It’s a possibility that has driven more than 250 million people around the world to strike, march, or otherwise demonstrate—making the movement, according to many observers, the largest protest in world history.

Facebook restored the pro-farmer pages and said that the suspensions were a mistake. But many of the protestors smell a deeper connection between the social media giant and India’s new laws. In April 2020, Facebook purchased a 10 percent stake in a company called Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecommunications provider. Jio is, in turn, controlled by Reliance Industries, India’s biggest overall corporation. In addition to dominating telecom, Reliance is the largest player in petrochemicals and in retail. When its latest acquisition is complete, the company will control 40 percent—a large plurality—of the country’s organized (formally incorporated) groceries sector. That could make it the biggest buyer of farmers’ products and, therefore, the biggest beneficiary of the right to negotiate directly. 

Protestors have been burning Jio SIM cards to express their anger. But they’ve also directed their ire at Reliance’s partners, including Facebook. In interviews with reporters, several demonstrators in California and Vancouver speculated that Facebook took down the protest pages as a favor to Mukesh Ambani, Reliance’s chairman and chief executive. At the Vancouver protest, one person held up a sign that declared: “Modi + Zuckerberg = Ambani’s puppets.”

Facebook, one of the world’s most powerful companies, is no one’s puppet. But through its partnership with Reliance, the social media giant could substantially gain from the agricultural laws. Facebook owns WhatsApp, which has more than 500 million users in India. It is currently rolling out WhatsApp Pay, a Venmo-like feature that will allow WhatsApp users to complete digital transactions without leaving the application. And it is integrating Reliance’s JioMart—an expanding, groceries-focused online marketplace—into its messaging service. It would be as if Americans could buy or sell products over Amazon while on Facebook Messenger, using Facebook Pay. It means that if Indian farmers begin selling more food directly to Reliance, as the laws would allow, there is a good chance they will do so via WhatsApp.

For Facebook, that presents enormous financial opportunities. For every sale or purchase made over WhatsApp, the company will receive valuable data on people’s needs, retail preferences, and finances. On May 15, Facebook updated WhatsApp’s privacy policy in a way that makes clear the broader Facebook empire can use this data as it sells microtargeted advertisements. 

The opportunities for Facebook extend beyond just ads. To make money in India, WhatsApp is trying to break down one of the most critical barriers found in healthy and equitable economies—the line between regular businesses and banks. In a filing with Indian regulators for WhatsApp Pay, the company said that selling loans and offering credit would be one of the “main objects to be pursued by it in the country.” It’s a troubling prospect. Banks already offer deeply extractive loans calculated to match what they know about an individual’s finances. When big communications companies enter banking, they can use their tremendous stores of other personal data to peddle even more exploitative arrangements. If banks double as retailers, they can use their lending power to help keep competitors, suppliers, and buyers weak or servile. In the case of WhatsApp, this could mean ensuring that any small business or farmer using its payment services remains financially subservient to its retail partner: Reliance.

For Reliance, piggybacking on WhatsApp comes with additional benefits. Given the app’s popularity, it could help make the company even more dominant in India’s food supply chain. It would also help Reliance acquire its own data set on farmer finances. Both would help the company procure goods from agricultural workers at the lowest possible cost. Reliance could likewise use this data to make sure that the agricultural inputs it helps manufacture, like tractors, sell at the highest possible price. WhatsApp Pay could meanwhile hand out high-interest loans to help farmers cover the gaps.

“It’s 360-degree control,” Parminder Jeet Singh, the executive director of IT for Change, a human rights–focused nonprofit in India, told me. He compared the possible arrangement to driving for Uber. Farmers, like drivers, would sell as much product (in the former case, food; in the latter, rides) as the corporations allow. They would be paid what the corporations dictate. And, much as Uber lends drivers money to purchase vehicles, these corporations could lend farmers money to buy raw inputs at highly unfavorable terms. 

This system is still a hypothetical. Reliance does not yet wholly control India’s food and retail economy, and WhatsApp Pay is still in its nascent stages. But India’s other largest retailers, Amazon and Walmart, loom in the wings. Each could establish similarly totalizing ecosystems. Walmart already owns PhonePe, one of India’s two biggest e-payment companies. And Reliance is willing to partner with these U.S. giants when convenient. The company, for example, works with PhonePe. And PhonePe is already operating as a financial services company. (It does not offer loans.) 

Whether the farmers can prevent a corporate takeover by integrated tech-banking-retail platforms has consequences that extend beyond just agriculture. Activists in India are worried that as these companies grow in size, they could also turn the country’s millions of neighborhood stores and small merchants into gig workers, wholly dependent on the whims of commerce giants. In fact, the conflict has global implications. The kinds of consolidation happening in India are already under way in many other parts of the world, including the United States. America has businesses, like Comcast, that control multiple parts of a supply chain, from television studios to stations to the cable lines that send programming to homes. It has retail companies, like Amazon, that both make products and own the marketplaces in which competitors must sell their own goods. It has businesses that double as banks. And it has plenty of tech companies that harvest data from individuals and sell it for ads, manipulating users in the process. 

This combination has pushed thousands of small businesses out of existence. It has left many localities without affordable access to capital. And the dominance of Facebook and Google over the ad market, in particular, has helped misinformation spread just as it has accelerated the decline of local journalism. 

Governments have been slow to act. It’s only within the last half decade that American policymakers have begun to really grasp the consequences of concentrated corporate power. Even in countries more progressive than the U.S., campaigns against monopolies have remained mostly an elite phenomenon. Unlike many other causes, antitrust has inspired limited grassroots activism. 

Until consolidation came for Indian farmers. A largely dispersed and already struggling lot, these workers—most of whom are effectively small business owners—understand far better than Westerners the risks posed by monopolies. Their protests are among the first modern efforts by everyday people to stop corporations from taking over an industry on unfair terms. They are the only grassroots campaign in memory to challenge corporate power across multiple continents, all at once.

It’s too early to say if Indian farmers and their allies will succeed. But if they do, it will send a powerful message. It will show that it’s possible for potential victims of consolidation, powerless as they may seem, to fend off economic giants. It will prove that it’s possible to make states safeguard even very small players. 

In late 2014, Mark Zuckerberg visited India to plot the rollout of Free Basics, his company’s plan to provide free, limited internet access to anyone with a cell phone. Zuckerberg was greeted by leading politicians, but his product quickly drew controversy. Free Basics restricted users to just 36 preselected websites, and the only available social media platform was Facebook. To many activists, this looked less like an act of charity and more like an attempt at dominance. “They wanted the whole internet to be Facebook,” says Osama Manzar, the founder of the Digital Empowerment Foundation, a Delhi-based nonprofit focused on providing information access to India’s poor.

Advocates launched an extensive public relations campaign against Free Basics, one that ignited a fierce debate about net neutrality. Facebook pushed back with its own PR crusade, reportedly spending $40 million on advertising. In billboards, the company pictured a farmer named Ganesh. Free Basics, they claimed, helped Ganesh learn “new farming techniques that doubled his crop yield.” In an op-ed for India’s largest newspaper, Zuckerberg declared that “everything we’re doing is about serving people like Ganesh.”

In the end, the critics won out. On February 8, 2016, Indian regulators prohibited telecommunications providers from restricting access to certain websites, rendering Free Basics illegal. Digital rights activists celebrated. In a toe-to-toe fight with one of the planet’s strongest companies, they were victorious.

Facebook, however, was hardly vanquished. At the time Free Basics was banned, WhatsApp had more than 150 million users across India. Over the next year, that number grew rapidly, to 200 million. Especially among the elite and middle class, it was the most popular messaging system in the country.

But WhatsApp, with its end-to-end encryption, offered very few opportunities for Facebook to make a profit. To change that, in April 2017, Facebook announced that it would roll out WhatsApp Pay. It was a ripe time for such an endeavor. Five months before, the Indian government abruptly declared that the existing 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes were no longer legal tender, pushing many Indians to use digital transactions as a substitute for cash. If successful, WhatsApp Pay could become a major player in India’s entire retail economy. But just like Free Basics, the e-payment enterprise ran into headwinds. In 2018, regulators froze the project over concerns that it would give a foreign company too much information about Indians.

Then, in April 2020, Facebook purchased its stake in Reliance Jio. In doing so, it made a powerful friend. Jio, which launched cellular services at the end of 2015, had already come to lead the Indian telecom market. That was thanks to both its parent company’s deep existing pockets and a series of fortuitous—or suspicious—regulatory changes that hurt Jio’s main competitors. It was not the first time that Reliance Industries, India’s biggest private company for decades, had benefited from the government’s decisions. In the world of Indian business, Reliance’s power with politicians is the stuff of legend. 

Seven months after Facebook announced its investment, the Indian government signed off on WhatsApp Pay. One month later, Zuckerberg and Ambani held a virtual, videotaped conversation to celebrate their partnership and explain how WhatsApp Pay would transform Indian retail. “WhatsApp, now with WhatsApp Pay, brings digital interactivity and the ability to move to close transactions and create value,” Ambani declared. JioMart, he said, would give small shops “a chance to digitize and be at par with anybody else in the world.”

The partnership represents a concentration of resources and power that has concerned even some advocates who are ambivalent about the agricultural reforms. Ajay Jakhar, the chairman of Farmers’ Forum India, and a farmer himself, told me he believed that the government meant well with the laws, and he was clear that he supports private markets. But he worried that the consolidation could breed economic disaster. “Without regulation,” Jakhar said, “I think millions of jobs could be lost in every street corner.”

Farming is the most common profession in India. Estimates vary widely, but research suggests that at least 100 million people work in agriculture. Some studies put the number closer to 150 million—more than 10 percent of the entire population.

For many, it is a brutal economic existence. Even with minimum guaranteed prices for crops, the country’s small farmers generally earn barely enough money to survive. Over the past several decades, thousands of financially distressed farmers have committed suicide by drinking pesticides. In 2019 alone, 10,000 agricultural workers killed themselves. In the northern Indian state of Punjab, considered the country’s breadbasket, farmer suicides have increased tenfold over the past five years.

There are many forces behind the suicide crisis, and they can vary widely by place and time. But a common theme is debt. Research suggests that roughly 90 percent of India’s farmers cannot cover the costs of fertilizer, seeds, pesticides, and other equipment. To cope, many turn to moneylenders, who can front the cash needed to plant and harvest. But it comes at a steep price.

“The lenders impose conditions, or they create an environment, where farmers are forced to buy pesticides and seeds and other stuff from dealers which are associated with the moneylender,” Jakhar explained. “They lock them into a closed loop where they buy pesticides from the same circle of people, and they pay interest to the same circle of people.”

Virtually no one in India thinks the status quo is working, including the millions of farmers now outraged about the reforms. But the protesters fear that opening the sector to corporate giants will lead to something even more exploitative. Existing lenders operate with imperfect knowledge about their clients’ earnings. This creates room for farmers to haggle and hunt for better deals. Grocery giants like Reliance and Walmart, working with tech outfits like WhatsApp and PhonePe, would possess far more financial information. As a result, they could dominate farmworkers in ways that today’s moneylenders can only dream of doing.

“Control over loans would completely be in the hands of these companies who would have microdata about all their transactions, about their livelihoods, and the harvests,” Jeet Singh, of IT for Change, said. Because of the information at their disposal, he continued, they could calculate the most extractive loan that individuals will still take.

And that’s before the monopoly power kicks in. Should one or a handful of India’s grocery giants succeed in conquering the food supply chain, they could milk farmers from both ends, dictating how much they pay for inputs and how much they make off sales. They could also tell farmers what kinds of crops they should grow, precisely when they should plant, and exactly when to harvest. Reliance has already created an app, JioKrishi, that uses data analytics to instruct farmers on when they should sow, irrigate, and fertilize their fields. 

Farming may not seem glamorous, but for India’s many small landowners, it provides a sense of professional identity and at least a degree of autonomy. Becoming corporate cogs would threaten both. “Work is what gives dignity,” says Arun Kumar, the Malcolm Adiseshiah Chair Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, a Delhi think tank, and a critic of the agricultural laws. “If people don’t have dignity, it creates social and political issues.”

Facebook did not respond to multiple interview requests. Reliance declined to speak. In a public statement, the latter company has denied that it will create any kind of gig-worker farming system. “Reliance Retail Limited (RRL), Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL), or any other affiliate of our parent company, i.e., Reliance Industries Limited have not done any ‘corporate’ or ‘contract’ farming in the past, and have absolutely no plans to enter this business,” the company said on January 4. “Reliance has nothing whatsoever to do with the three farm laws currently debated in the country, and in no way benefits from them.”

But six days later, and right after the laws took effect in the southern state of Karnataka, Reliance purchased more than 220,000 pounds of rice from a group of local farmers. In other public statements, the company has been clear that agriculture plays a major role in its overarching commerce plans. “Our focus will be India’s 60 million micro, small and medium businesses, 120 million farmers, 30 million small merchants and millions of small and medium enterprises in the informal sector,” Reliance said in April 2020, as it announced its partnership with Facebook.

What Reliance aims to do with these other merchants is also of critical importance. That’s particularly true for India’s millions of grocery corner stores, known as kiranas, which serve as the backbone of the country’s retail economy. They account for 75 to 78 percent of India’s consumer goods market. They are usually locally owned. Reliance, however, wants to bring them not just into its own orbit, but into Facebook’s as well. “India has more than 60 million small businesses, and millions of people around the country rely on them for jobs, and that’s a big part of what I hope that our partnership can serve here,” Zuckerberg said in his videotaped conversation with Ambani. “I couldn’t agree more,” Ambani replied.

Reliance and Facebook are not the only corporations who see potential in the corner store economy. “Kiranas is where the real challenge is and where the real opportunity is,” Priya Patankar, the head of communications for Walmart’s PhonePe, said. “Payments is going to be the underlying drug which gets the user through the app.” The company would then find multiple ways of monetizing its base. Google Pay, another popular e-payment platform, is also trying to reach these small businesses. It’s partnering with financial institutions to offer them loans.

In the abstract, there’s nothing wrong with digitizing the operations of kiranas and farmers. If Reliance, Walmart, or Amazon were operating truly neutral platforms, making no use of small merchants’ data, and not offering their own competing products, the systems they are developing would not be especially threatening. But that’s not what’s happening. These companies do make their own products; indeed, many kiranas already sell their goods. They will monetize data small businesses provide. As a result, rising digital commerce in India could lead to a repeat of what Amazon is doing to small retailers across the United States. As Amazon has grown into America’s dominant online marketplace, the company has pushed onerous, tax-like financial agreements on the many merchants who became dependent on its platform, forcing them to hand over large shares of their revenues. Amazon has also used its privileged look at these merchants’ sales data to manufacture copycats of their most popular products, which it then sells for lower prices. The result of this process has been small business closures and the steady draining of wealth from communities across America.

As some of imperialism’s foremost victims, Indians are quite attuned to the dangers of what academics and activists call “digital colonialism”: when foreign tech companies flood a market with their services, extract people’s data, and then profit off the information to the detriment of the local population. Concern about digital colonization was critical in killing Facebook’s Free Basics. The concept helped hold up approval of WhatsApp Pay. And many of India’s business leaders have, at various times, invoked it to advocate for restrictions on foreign companies. That includes Mukesh Ambani. In a December 2018 speech, Reliance’s CEO demanded that the Indian government prevent “corporates, especially global corporations,” from owning Indian data. “Data colonization is as bad as the previous forms of colonization,” he said. “Data freedom is as precious as the freedom we won in 1947.”

What Facebook is planning to do, with the help of Reliance, neatly fits the definition of digital colonization. It is a foreign company that controls India’s most popular messaging service. It is leveraging this service to shape and monitor Indian commerce. Selling microtargeted loans could easily become highly extractive. And its junior status in the relationship with Reliance could eventually change. When the British East India Company first began its missions to India, the subcontinent’s Mughal rulers were far wealthier and more formidable than any European state. Over time, the company became dominant anyway. 

But thinking of Facebook purely as a foreign conqueror, akin to past colonial regimes, obscures the grander dynamics at play. The East India Company’s scope was geographically limited. If you lived in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, you had relatively little to fear from the company. Indeed, its actions likely redounded to your benefit by bringing (ill-gotten) wealth into your state. That is not true for Facebook. It may be headquartered in Silicon Valley, but it is not extracting raw materials from India for the benefit of Americans. On the contrary, both Indians and Americans—specifically their data and their attention—are the company’s raw materials. 

To a certain extent, the onus for stopping this exploitation rests with U.S. regulators. It was, after all, America’s weak competition policies that allowed many tech and retail behemoths to emerge in the first place. But the cat is already out of the bag. The Biden administration could force Facebook to sell off WhatsApp, make Amazon stop manufacturing products for its U.S. marketplace, and shut down the domestic fintech company that Walmart just created. An independent WhatsApp could still enter banking and e-commerce in India. Amazon could still make goods for Indians. Walmart could still own PhonePe. As policymakers in a bigger market, Indian regulators may actually have more power to stop these businesses than do their American counterparts. (Although so far, Indian politicians seem mostly interested in using these powers to make tech companies silence government critics.) But ultimately, the problem is now larger than any one state. It will take international action to stop the endless consolidation. 

That’s part of why the agricultural protests are so significant. It’s the first transnational, grassroots movement against monopolization, and the tens of millions of people demonstrating around the world grasp the global stakes. There’s a reason protesters are outside Facebook offices thousands of miles from India, carrying posters that link Zuckerberg to Ambani. There’s a reason why they have slowed traffic in and out of major global cities, like London and San Francisco. And there’s a reason why—rather than sticking to tractor parades in Delhi—farmers are burning Jio SIM cards, destroying Jio telecommunications towers, and shuttering Walmart stores in Punjab. They can see that the exploitation extends beyond just their workplace. 

“What has shocked the nation is they normally believe farmers are illiterate, and that farmers are people who don’t understand all these things,” says Devinder Sharma, a leading agricultural analyst and a columnist. “But they know the nitty-gritty now. They understand the implications.”

The post The World’s Most Important War on Big Tech Comes from India appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Over the past two decades, as Big Tech has boomed, news organizations have been going bust. Between 2004 and 2019, one in every four U.S. newspapers shut down, and almost all the rest cut staff, for a total of 36,000 jobs lost between 2008 and 2019 alone. Local newspapers have been particularly devastated, making it ever more difficult for people to know what is happening in their communities.

Many factors contributed to this economic collapse, but none more so than the cornering of the digital advertising market by the duopoly of Facebook and Google. Facebook’s threat to a free press—and, by extension, to democracy—is especially pernicious. The social media company is financially asphyxiating the news industry even as it gives oxygen to conspiracy theories and lies. As a result of its many roles in degrading our democracy, it faces mounting scrutiny by politicians and regulators.

Facebook has responded to the negative attention by creating a highly sophisticated public relations effort, which includes becoming the number one corporate spender on federal lobbying and engaging in a massive advertising blitz aimed at the D.C. policy audience. Less well known, and potentially far more dangerous, is a secretive, multimillion-dollar-a-year payout scheme aimed at the most influential news outlets in America. Under the cover of launching a feature called Facebook News, Facebook has been funneling money to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News, Bloomberg, and other select paid partners since late 2019.

Participating in Facebook News doesn’t appear to deliver many new readers to outlets; the feature is very difficult to find, and it is not integrated into individuals’ newsfeeds. What Facebook News does deliver—though to only a handful of high-profile news organizations of its choosing—is serious amounts of cash. The exact terms of these deals remain secret, because Facebook insisted on nondisclosure and the news organizations agreed. The Wall Street Journal reported that the agreements were worth as much as $3 million a year, and a Facebook spokesperson told me that number is “not too far off at all.” But in at least one instance, the numbers are evidently much larger. In an interview last month, former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson said the Times is getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year—“very much so.”

For The New York Times, whose net income was $100 million in 2020, getting “far, far more” than $3 million a year with essentially no associated cost is significant. And once news outlets take any amount of money from Facebook, it becomes difficult for them to let it go, notes Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review. “It creates a hole in your balance sheet. You’re kind of beholden to them.” It’s not exactly payola, Ingram told me, searching for the right metaphor. Nor is it a protection racket. “It’s like you’re a kept person,” he said. “You’re Facebook’s mistress.”

There’s no evidence that the deal directly affects coverage in either the news or editorial departments. Before the Facebook News deal, the Times famously published an op-ed titled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” by Chris Hughes, a cofounder of Facebook turned critic. And since the deal, columns from Tim Wu and Kara Swisher, among others, have been similarly critical. In December, the editorial board welcomed a lawsuit calling for Facebook to be broken up.

And Facebook and Google money is, admittedly, all over journalism already. Virtually every major media nonprofit receives direct or indirect funding from Silicon Valley, including this one. When the Monthly gets grants from do-good organizations like NewsMatch, some of the funds originate with Facebook.

But these three points are beyond dispute.

First, the deals are a serious breach of traditional ethics. In the pre-internet days, independent newspapers wouldn’t have considered accepting gifts or sweetheart deals from entities they covered, under any circumstance. The Washington Post under the editor Leonard Downie Jr., for instance, wouldn’t even accept grants from nonprofits to underwrite reporting projects, for fear of losing the appearance of independence. Facebook, which took in $86 billion in revenue last year, is a hugely controversial behemoth having profound, highly newsworthy, and negative effects on society. Accepting money from them creates a conflict of interest.

Even for trusted news organizations whose audiences believe they can’t be bought outright, “it might come across as hypocrisy to heavily criticize an industry while also collaborating with them,” says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Agreeing to keep the terms of the deal confidential is also a mistake, Nielsen told me. “This sort of opacity I don’t think builds trust.”

Second, these deals help Facebook maintain the public appearance of legitimacy. Journalists, critics, and congressional investigators have amply documented how Facebook has become a vector of disinformation and hate speech that routinely invades our privacy and undermines our democracy. For The New York Times and other pillars of American journalism to effectively partner with Facebook creates the impression that Facebook is a normal, legitimate business rather than a monopolistic rogue corporation.

Finally, these agreements undermine industry-wide efforts that would help the smaller, ethnic, and local news organizations that are most desperately in need of help. One such effort would allow the industry to bargain collectively with Facebook and other tech giants by withholding content from the platforms unless they received a fair price for it. But for that to work, small newsrooms would need the biggest and most influential companies to sign on. With those organizations receiving millions of dollars from Facebook through their own side deals, the smaller publications could be left stranded and defenseless.

If Facebook’s intent were to save American journalism, it would be making generous offers to smaller, local news organizations that do original reporting, Damon Kiesow, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, told me. By contrast, Facebook News “doesn’t really help anyone in the industry except for the small select group of outlets that get paid,” he said. “These efforts are all flavored with a strong dose of crisis communication and regulation avoidance.”

If any major figure in the American media was going to say no to Mark Zuckerberg, it was Mark Thompson.

For most of his eight-year tenure as chief executive officer of the New York Times Company, Thompson was one of the industry’s most thoughtful, eloquent, and persuasive critics of Facebook and the danger it presents to journalism’s business models and essential role in a democracy.

“It makes my blood run cold, the idea of Facebook as a publisher,” he said at a June 2018 event convened by the Open Markets Institute. At a panel sponsored by the Tow Center later that month, he described that same affect when Zuckerberg “starts talking about how he thinks about community, and about what we trust.” Zuckerberg, he said, has a “terrifyingly naive perspective on news.”

During the OMI event, Thompson warned darkly about the “sinister” prospect “that Facebook’s catalog of missteps with data and extreme and hateful content” will lead it to try to “set itself up as the digital world’s editor in chief, prioritizing and presumably downgrading and rejecting content on a survey- and data-driven assessment of whether the provider of the content is ‘broadly trusted’ or not.”

Here was actual humility from the CEO of the paper of record: “Democracy depends in part on unbounded competition between different journalistic perspectives and the clash of different judgments and opinions,” he said. “History suggests that mainstream news organizations frequently get it right, but also that, not infrequently, it is the outliers who should be listened to.”

And he knew what needed to be done. An essential preliminary step was for Facebook and others to “engage with the collective industry bodies of the news business to arrive at shared principles both on the presentation and choice of news content, and on its monetization.” He called for “consistency and comparability in the treatment of news providers.”

This was not the language of shakedown. It was an impassioned and impressive philosophical argument about the survival of news—and democracy.

But then, all of a sudden, The New York Times and Facebook were making deals together. In October 2019, Facebook announced the launch of Facebook News, with The New York Times as a marquee paid partner, getting prime placement in a new vertical designated for “trusted” news sources.

What changed for Thompson between June 2018 and October 2019, such that the idea of Facebook picking which “trusted” news sources to pay went from sinister to “Sign here”?

“We always reserved our rights to do what we needed to do for our own business and to continue to fund our journalism in the interim,” Thompson insisted in a phone interview in March. “I’m a sort of pragmatist,” he said. “I don’t really see this as a conflict of interest or an issue of principle, it’s the real world.” He rejected the depiction of the payments as a gift or a payoff. “As far as I’m concerned, we were paid by a platform for access to our content.” Facebook, of course, does not pay The New York Times for access to its content when it is shared on regular newsfeeds.

And Thompson said that while he still thinks it would be sinister for Facebook to be making its own editorial decisions on a story-by-story basis, “Facebook making it easier for people to identify The New York Times and making it easier to access The New York Times is a good thing.”

What about his devotion to collective rather than individual action? It remains—in theory. “As it happens, I’m still very much in favor of broader agreements,” he told me. “Ideally,” he continued, such payments would be “not just available . . . to the handful of big players but broadly, in particular to local and regional journalism.”

So taking the deal wasn’t a betrayal of his principles, Thompson insisted. “I still fundamentally believe everything I said.” With any collective agreement years away at best, he said, “I don’t accept that our reaching it made it harder for the other publishers to get it—on the contrary . . . I don’t think you’ve got any evidence that a refusal to engage . . . would have helped them at all.” It actually sets a good precedent, he suggested. “It’s brilliant to have got a big digital platform to pay for the use of our content.”

But organizations that are favored by Facebook will obviously have different incentives going forward than those that are not. Unfavored outlets, if begging doesn’t work, may want to play hardball with Facebook to get their due—while the Timesand others will inevitably have qualms before blowing a hole in their budgets.

The Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha declined to address a long list of questions about the specifics of the relationship with Facebook, responding instead with general comments. “Quality journalism is expensive to produce and we believe quality publishers should be fairly compensated for creating valuable journalism,” she wrote in an email. The Times “does not disclose licensing and advertising terms,” she wrote, and “our licensing agreement with Facebook has no impact on our newsroom.”

Thompson stepped down as CEO in July 2020 and was replaced by his protégé, Meredith Kopit Levien, who may be even more committed to the deal than Thompson was. A few months after she took over, Levien expressed enthusiasm that Facebook had promised to create a space “for a particular level of quality news providers,” to pay the Times “a fair amount,” and to “feed your funnel.”

The Facebook News deal isn’t Facebook’s only, or first, inroad at the Times. The company already had a seat at the table—literally. The publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. installed the Facebook executive Rebecca Van Dyck on his 12-member board of directors in 2015. Van Dyck, who was Facebook’s global head of consumer and brand marketing at the time, now runs marketing for Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality labs.

Indeed, the Facebook News bounty might even be dwarfed by the undisclosed sum that Facebook is pouring into the Times’s new augmented reality efforts. The newsroom’s new “AR Lab,” a collaboration between Facebook and the Times, builds augmented reality filters and camera effects distributed on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram.

There are likely even more ties the public doesn’t know about. BuzzFeed News recently discovered that the Times columnist David Brooks had written a pro-Facebook blog post while on salary for a nonprofit partially funded by Facebook and hadn’t disclosed it to his current Times bosses or the readers.

Thompson would have been very much alone among his U.S. peers had he resisted Facebook’s inducements. He was also hardly the most enthusiastic Facebook partner—that would be News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson, who, after years of vituperative attacks on Big Tech, was grinning at Zuckerberg’s side at the Facebook News launch event and announcing a “new dawn” for journalists.

The rollout was undeniably a huge win for Facebook public relations. The Times story was headlined “Facebook Calls Truce With Publishers as It Unveils Facebook News.” What few negative headlines ensued were related to Facebook’s decision to include Breitbart, the far-right website known for spreading white-supremacist disinformation, among its cadre of “trusted” news sources—although, in Breitbart’s case, an unpaid one.

Months later, Joshua Benton, the director of the Neiman Journalism Lab, described the big downside: The Facebook News deal, he wrote, “lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like ‘Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,’ in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.” Facebook isn’t spending the money “because they think News Tab will be profitable,” Benton wrote. “It’s a way to solve a PR and policy problem.” The vaunted new product, he noted, consists of “a new tab buried so deep in Facebook’s interface you need a spelunker’s headlamp to find it.”

Facebook News only links to approved outlets, while in the actual News Feed, the algorithm spews out non-reputable clickbait based on what’s enticing the people, pages, and groups a user engages with the most. “The most notable thing about Facebook News is that it includes almost none of the stories that do well on the rest of Facebook,” observed the Nieman Journalism Lab editor Laura Hazard Owen.

Facebook is suspiciously evasive about how many people use Facebook News and how much traffic it generates for publishers, refusing to provide any indication of its scale at all. “We don’t have hard numbers,” the Facebook News spokesperson, Mari Melguizo, said when I asked for data on its performance. “It’s definitely grown and continues to grow. It is on an upward trajectory.”

Prior to Facebook News, the company had repeatedly proved to be an unreliable partner for news publishers. As Sarah Perez detailed for TechCrunch, the platform established an “Instant Articles” feature in 2015 that “restricted advertising, subscriptions and the recirculation modules publishers relied on” in exchange for a better user experience. It was a bad bargain, and, as a result, many outlets abandoned the feature. Facebook promoted a “shift to video” in 2016, but inflated its video use metrics and then refused to pay publishers. This prompted layoffs at many companies, including Vox, Vice, and Mic. Shortly before Facebook News launched, Joanne Lipman, a former editor in chief of USA Today, warned her colleagues that they had “been at the beck and call of these behemoths” for too long.

“I think it’s a dangerous situation for news organizations to count on anything when it comes to Facebook,” the Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy says. To Kennedy, Facebook lost any pretense of morality when, having tweaked its algorithms after the November 2020 election to favor authoritative news sources in the News Feed, it switched back—presumably to boost engagement, to placate right-wing publishers, or both. “You pull all this together, and Facebook is just the worst possible partner,” Kennedy says.

The world watched an extraordinary exercise of Facebook’s massive power in February when it stymied an Australian government attempt to force it to pay to link to news. First, Facebook temporarily banned Australian news sites from its platform. Then it did an end run around the regulators by agreeing to arrange multimillion-dollar deals with major news providers—on its terms, not the government’s. Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, described it as “an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to.” In Australia, the biggest recipient by far of Facebook’s largesse will be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns most of the country’s newspapers. News Corp also heavily lobbied for the new legislation. Facebook didn’t pay the country’s smaller outlets.

“In the end, Google & Facebook have a big bucket of baksheesh that will go to old proprietors and their shareholders,” Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York, tweeted in February.

As Facebook News continued to roll out across the globe in 2020 and 2021, someone did finally tell Facebook no. The German media giant Axel Springer rejected Facebook’s offer, describing it as both unseemly and insufficiently lucrative: “We consider the efforts of several platforms to become news brands themselves while at the same time compensating some publishers with inappropriately low remuneration for their content as problematic,” a spokesperson said. The company is now holding out for the passage of new copyright laws in Europe that it hopes will create revenue-sharing agreements “in which all publishers can transparently participate and receive reasonable compensation.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., Facebook’s need for allies in the press has taken on a particular urgency. In October 2020, a House judiciary subcommittee released a bold, agenda-setting report, alleging wide-ranging antitrust violations by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. In December, the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general, as well as the attorneys general for D.C. and Guam, brought an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the company is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.

Congress is currently holding hearings on the bipartisan Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2021, which would give news organizations of all shapes and sizes the ability to negotiate collectively with the big platforms. At a March 12 hearing, News Media Alliance CEO David Chavern noted that the larger media companies already have leverage with Facebook and others. “The ones most in need of collective action are small and community publishers, including most particularly publishers of color, who are suffering deeply in this broken marketplace for real quality journalism,” he said.

HD Media, which owns several West Virginia newspapers, filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google and Facebook in January, seeking damages from the duopoly. The suit charges that Google’s monopolistic control of digital advertising, along with a secret deal with Facebook not to compete against it, had strangled their source of revenue.

In the long run, reformers say, it will be necessary to break up the giant platforms, end their stranglehold on advertising dollars, and ban algorithms that incite outrage or even violence. In the nearer term, however, some observers support the idea of an independent journalistic fund, financed by Big Tech but operating at arm’s length, that could reward news organizations according to the resources they put into their reporting and the value they contribute to their communities.

Some sort of trusted intermediary or collective agreement seems necessary, because it’s hard to see direct handouts as anything more than a corrupt stopgap measure—especially when they’re mostly given to the news organizations that need the money the least. As Doug Reynolds, the managing partner for the West Virginia newspapers suing Facebook and Google for damages, told me, “If the future of this industry is that we’re dependent on their goodwill, then we don’t have an independent press anymore.”

The post Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Back in 2019 in Memphis, when Mia A. was beginning her freshman year at Southwest Tennessee Community College, she felt like she had unlimited opportunities. Yes, her parents weren’t particularly supportive of more schooling after high school. The biggest problem was Mia’s father. African American and raised in Chicago, he received disability assistance for his back and neck pain, a burden carried from his work as a custodian. Mia’s mother had immigrated from North Africa with a certificate in cosmetology. Both wanted Mia to work to help support the family. But from an early age, Mia was enchanted by learning. “Books, I loved books,” she told me. “I write poetry, and my teachers encouraged me, and I just want to write more.” She also had the good fortune to live in Tennessee, the first state in the nation to offer free tuition at community colleges for in-state high school graduates, save for the undocumented. So Mia had a chance to move forward despite any parental misgivings.

She attended classes at Southwest’s main campus and loved the grounds and the beautiful library. Mia was easily completing her college-level work. After beginning her studies in the fall of 2018, she not only learned to navigate the rules and requirements of the institution, but also qualified for the dean’s list thanks to her high grades.

The young woman had been accepted to the University of Memphis, a four-year public institution, back in high school. But Mia’s father hadn’t allowed her to attend straight from high school. Even if he had, her high school counselor had encouraged even top students like Mia to take the free ride at community college, which many students across the country are doing, hoping to save about half the college cost by getting a community college associate’s degree first before transferring to a four-year university. To Mia, the free tuition seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Fueled by her enthusiasm, she spent the summer before her first semester at Southwest commuting an hour by bus to attend college preparation courses.

Her ultimate goal was to earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology and begin a career helping school-age children make it through the same kinds of struggles, such as poverty, violence, and housing instability, that she had experienced growing up in Memphis. The road to transferring between Southwest and the University of Memphis, however, would be steep. The community college recorded a transfer-out rate of well below 10 percent.

In a poor, southern region like the Memphis metropolitan area, attending community college is a significant achievement. Among graduates of the local public school system, little more than half pursue any higher education. At Southwest, only 10 percent of those who enroll complete their associate’s degree, despite the free tuition. While Mia graduated fifth in her high school class, she tested below college level in reading and math.

President Joe Biden has proposed to guarantee two free years of community college nationwide, with costs shared between the federal government and the states. The first lady, Jill Biden, teaches at a community college and is committed to the plan, which is part of the massive infrastructure package the administration unveiled in March. Still, passage is uncertain in a Congress that Democrats control by only the slimmest of margins.

Importantly, the Biden administration’s free community college plan also calls for increased funding and incentives for so-called wraparound services such as counseling, child care, transportation assistance, and the like. Such services are hardly incidental. For at-risk students like Mia, they frequently turn out to make all the difference between success and failure. (I’m not identifying a few of the students and their families in this article to protect their privacy and encourage more openness. I used a similar technique in my book on Detroit, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises.)

Mia and her classmates need the new president’s help, because without more support, not only will students suffer, but the country will, too.

Access to the economic ladder provided by a community college degree has propelled graduates into higher-skilled jobs that generate higher tax revenues. Following the Great Recession, jobs for workers with post-secondary degrees led the recovery. In many ways, now that the country is emerging from the pandemic, it remains the community college moment.

When universal high school education was created early in the last century, there was a national recognition that the economy and the country demanded a workforce with those skills—math, literacy, writing, and so on. Today, it is increasingly accepted wisdom—rightfully so—that some kind of post-secondary education is just as vital and that community colleges have never been more important to all of our economic futures. This is the story of how hard it is to get that education, even with the promise of free tuition, and how the pandemic has made it more difficult still.

Though she had to continue living at home for college, Mia relished even limited freedom from her controlling father. After he dropped her off on campus each day, she would unspool her headscarf or remove her turban and tuck it away, letting her hair flow free.

For months, her dreams seemed boundless. She could envision an independent future for herself, with a professional credential and financial stability. Students from impoverished families, whose federal Pell Grants exceed the cost of community college tuition, receive the excess money as a refund check to use to support their basic needs. The students must complete their course work to retain the money. Mia planned to save up those refund checks to defray the costs of transferring to the University of Memphis and to buy herself a car so she wasn’t dependent on her father, who often drove her to class late and controlled her access to study groups and other important campus resources. But her plans went awry when he lost his disability benefits because he had not followed his treatment plan and trained his sights on Mia for financial help instead. She tried to explain that her refund money was essential to her ability to finish her degree, but her father yelled and guilt-tripped her, she said, for even considering turning her back on her family. Soon, Mia was paying the family’s rent.

“He was making me feel really bad, and I was just crying a lot,” Mia told me. Even her brother sided against her. “You’re just being selfish,” he said to her. “You don’t want to help your own family.”

Suffocated at home, Mia found refuge at the college and solace in her course work. She had friends who had already dropped out and she didn’t want that fate to befall her, so she stayed laser focused on the path before her.

Then the community college shut down last year because of COVID-19.

With Mia attending from home, easy classes became difficult. She had access to a free laptop through the community college, but she had no broadband internet at home. She found herself struggling to take exams using her father’s cell phone as a hotspot. Her siblings had to use the same hotspot to complete their schoolwork. As she tried to upload her answers, the system would crash.

Last year, with the spring semester finally completed and a long summer coping with COVID-19 restrictions before her, Mia hoped that the fall semester in 2020 would put her back on track. She wanted to find a summer job and save the salary, but her father forbade her from working. He wanted her to just stay home—an infuriating request. With college as a beacon, she spent the long months of June, July, and August trying to track down college advisers and struggling to select her classes. Warning signs appeared that her situation might not get better: She waited weeks for answers to her phone and email messages.

When it became clear that the fall semester would not begin in person, Mia felt a sinking sense of loss. Despite the technical deficiencies that had plagued her in the spring, she had earned top grades. But as the fall progressed, the achievements of the first year proved fragile. The previous year, just after arriving on campus as a new student, Mia had sniffed out an under-the-radar scholarship, which enabled her to gain free access to her textbooks. This year, with the changed financial climate, the scholarship seemed to no longer exist. In all her classes, she went without books, and, for the first time in her life, she earned Ds.

By the start of the new spring semester, Mia wondered how long she could continue.

Memphis ranks as one of the nation’s most impoverished urban communities. In this city, the childhood poverty rate approaches 45 percent, and 60 percent of public school students are considered economically disadvantaged by the school district. Even before the pandemic, Memphis community colleges were fighting to attract high school graduates, even though they were free.

Some of the shortage of applicants could be explained by a lack of a college-going culture and a deficit of understanding among students and families about why college would be worth sacrificing wages for a few years. This might sound shocking to families for whom getting their child into a good college is a years-long preoccupation. But one of the ironies of America today is that those who need higher education the most—people who are thinking of ending their learning years with high school—need to be convinced of the merits of more study, while those who are already in plum positions in life’s lottery know every distinction between the Ivy League schools.

A statewide report in Tennessee on bridging the gap between high school and college pointed to inadequate resources and guidance to set students on a college path. It recommended more college counselors and more advanced courses.Tennessee’s statewide free community college program, a model for programs across the country, appeared to be starting to achieve hard-fought gains. The promise of two free years of community college seemed to be creating a pathway into higher education for the most disadvantaged Memphis students. Many local public high schools like Mia’s made applying to the program a graduation requirement.

Now, however, the pandemic is crushing educational opportunities and thus economic mobility. First-time, full-time enrollment of Black male students in Tennessee’s free community college program, called Tennessee Promise, declined by 35 percent from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2020. But it’s also important to study what effects the virus is having on low-income students who were already attending community college when the pandemic hit.

In 2015, when the first cohort of students entered Tennessee Promise, Memphis struggled with historic poverty and low educational attainment in high school diplomas or any kind of post-secondary degree. A logistics hub nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River, Memphis reflected the poverty of Mississippi to the south and Arkansas to the west. It lacked skilled workers to fill open jobs at its port, its busy cargo airport, and trucking and rail nodes. (The city is home to Federal Express’s headquarters.)

Signed into law in 2014, Tennessee Promise offered two years of tuition-free attendance at a Tennessee community or technical college. Over the next four years, application rates to the program in Memphis rose to nearly 90 percent. The number of people in the program increased by 30 percent from 2015 to 2018.

Over that same period, cities and states across the country offered similar programs, recognizing that post-secondary education was vital for competing with other states, not to mention a skilled international workforce. Tennessee Promise provided a blueprint for a national proposal from President Barack Obama—which the GOP-controlled Congress ultimately rejected—and successful initiatives in more than a dozen states and hundreds of cities. These “promise” programs are rooted in economic development goals—the idea that investment in residents’ education will build a better-educated workforce and promote growth. The programs, therefore, award community college scholarships not based on merit or need but on local residency. Reducing inequality is implicit, however, as most programs service school districts with many low-income students. A majority of these students who go on to post-secondary education already begin at community colleges. Students from low-income schools complete community college degrees at less than half the rate of students who graduate from high-income schools.

Despite their socioeconomic status, low-income students at community colleges seemed poised to weather COVID-19’s impact on higher education better than students at other institutions. They already commuted from home and paid no tuition, so they didn’t miss dorms or suddenly have to come up with checks for the bursar’s office. Many had already taken a few online classes and were used to learning outside a traditional classroom. Instead, though, the pandemic exposed those students’ unique vulnerabilities. Whereas most four-year institutions have undergone little change in enrollment, and some have enjoyed increases, community college student counts have shrunk significantly during the pandemic. Even for those low-income students hanging on in community college, the likelihood of graduating seems more distant than ever.

In Memphis, Mia’s boyfriend, Rod, like many of her community college classmates, appeared to use the increased flexibility of the pandemic-driven shift to virtual learning to engage in behaviors that correlate with higher dropout rates.

Rod graduated from the same high school as Mia, also in the honors program. A lanky, sentimental jokester, he aspired to attend the University of Memphis, but it seemed too expensive. In fact, without encouragement from Mia, he probably would not have ended up going to college at all. His mother, who was raising five children on her own, counted on Rod to start earning money.

During his first year at Southwest Tennessee Community College, Rod realized that he enjoyed working with his hands and was interested in a career involving cars. Despite being in his high school honors program, Rod, like most Memphis public high school graduates entering the state’s public two- and four-year colleges, graduated with remedial needs in math, reading, and English. At Memphis’s Westwood High last year, just 20 graduates enrolled in a public in-state college, and all of them required remedial math. Even before the pandemic, Rod had been growing increasingly frustrated with his remedial courses. They repeated his high school curriculum, and he felt eager to leave high school behind and develop more advanced knowledge in engineering. He wanted more hands-on classes as soon as possible.

When college moved online, however, virtual courses put the kibosh on anything hands-on. As the 2020–21 school year began, promising only more remote learning, Rod decided to focus less on school and more on working, and found a job packing boxes at a local warehouse. Though he was saving money, he earned far less at the warehouse than he would if he finished community college, and still less than if he transferred and completed a four-year degree.

Research indicates that post-secondary students who work more than 15 hours a week are more likely to drop out. Fifty-nine percent of low-income students who work 15 hours or more, which leaves them with less time to study and complete assignments, have a C average or lower. Take the case of Linda, an adult returning student and Rod’s classmate. Throughout her first year of community college, she worked part-time at a free elementary after-school program. To arrive there punctually by public bus, she regularly left class early.

Faced with a virtual school year, Linda decided to pick up double shifts at nursing homes. Most days during the semester, she worked all day, moving from one job to the next and arriving home around 7 p.m. After dinner, before falling asleep, she watched as many online lectures and completed as many assignments as she could.

Two years earlier, Linda had returned to high school in her mid-50s, taking GED courses to earn her diploma, having dropped out of high school one course short. Representatives of Tennessee Promise visited her class, and she concluded that she had nothing to lose by continuing her education at community college. After enrolling, she joked about how she could still “smell the school lunch” on most of her young classmates.

During her first year at community college, Linda decided that she wanted to study for a bachelor’s degree after completing her associate’s degree. She took advantage of the supplemental supports available within the college and enrolled alongside Mia in the gateway summer program of preparation courses and workshops. Linda sought out mentors and regularly pounded on her adviser’s door, but she faced problems. It took awhile for her to hear that she might have free access to a school laptop. When she asked for one, the person behind the desk told her that only students with Pell Grants qualified. The woman assumed, wrongly, that if she had Tennessee Promise she was not receiving a Pell Grant, when, in fact, she was. (Linda continues to believe she is ineligible, and eventually found a used laptop to buy.)

For this reason, when the pandemic sent students scurrying online last spring, Linda found herself taking a statistics class on her cell phone. The class, required for graduation, seemed more like a program of work than a college course in the traditional sense. The professor did not give lectures or hold virtual class sessions. Instead, he provided a series of assignments and tests for students to work through on their own. Linda felt lost, and after emailing the professor questions and not receiving answers, she gave up.

She failed the course. And though Linda considered retaking it over the summer, her adviser returned her emails so slowly that she decided to take the summer off and wait for fall to work out what to do. When the next school year arrived, she did not enroll in statistics.

During the pandemic, the experience of students like Mia, Rod, and Linda has progressed differently from those living on four-year campuses who have endured outbreaks in their dorms and periodic isolation and quarantine. But the oversight of the free community college students and their ability to persist appears far more tenuous.

Studies show that along with too many hours working at jobs, low course loads also cost students their momentum, making them less likely to graduate. This may sound counterintuitive—surely, a low course load would make it easier to graduate, especially for those with other obligations. But studies show that the longer a degree takes, the greater the possibility for financial or family obstacles to get in the way. Fewer than a quarter of part-time students receive any kind of credential within eight years. Among first-time community college students, those who attend part-time find themselves half as likely to complete a credential within eight years as those who attend full-time.

In Memphis, another classmate of Mia’s, Yana, took community college classes toward a degree in radiation technology. Drawn to the stable, in-demand field, she could recite by heart various radiation technology career progression paths and their expected salary tiers. But her situation at home wasn’t exactly conducive to continuing education. She lived with four siblings—one still in middle school—and the twin babies of an absent older brother, plus two children of one of her sisters. Yana’s parents didn’t live with them. Her father left when she was a child, and her mother had moved out to be with a boyfriend. Like Mia, Yana had loved the college library, which offered her peace, quiet, and a respite from chores, including looking after the babies. Last spring, after the community college shut down, she failed three of her virtual classes.

Eventually, to avoid the chaos of her home, she moved in with her boyfriend, Kenny, who was still in high school. By fall, Yana had decided that she didn’t see herself as a “STEM person” after all, referring to the collective term for science, technology, engineering, and math. Without consulting anyone, she switched her major to dance and enrolled in only two classes. She supplemented the courses with two jobs, one at the same warehouse where Rod worked and another at a big-box store. She intended to add some non-college dance classes to her schedule eventually, but never did. As the spring semester began, she spoke openly about dropping out.

At least Yana no longer had to care for young children. Along with more work and fewer courses, child care increases the likelihood of dropping out. Because minding children takes time away from studying, most student parents leave college without obtaining a degree. However, research on student parents ignores the child care roles even nonparents perform by taking care of siblings, nieces and nephews, and other young relatives. During the pandemic, with public schools often closed and recreation limited, caretaking responsibilities among low-income community college students have increased.

Across town, another classmate, Tracy, lived at home with her mother and stepfather, her five-year-old sister, and five younger cousins whose mother had been deported. An uncle also moved in.

Tracy shared a bedroom with her sister and two of her cousins. When her sister and cousins were off at school all day, Tracy found the arrangements difficult but tenable. Now, with elementary school turned virtual and all the kids at home, Tracy has struggled to help her mother take care of the children while also keeping up with her course work. Because she lacks her own room, she has listened to online lectures and completed assignments late at night, once her roommates and the rest of the household have gone to sleep. The late nights provide quiet, but they have drained her motivation.

Tennessee’s free community college program enjoys a relatively stable financial position, even as the pandemic calls into question what the future of such programs across the country might look like. Tennessee funds Tennessee Promise with lottery revenues that the state has built into a robust endowment. Similar programs appear more dependent on general state and local income, and budget cuts, looming in the absence of further federal aid, could target the programs. Since the arrival of COVID-19, bills to establish or expand these programs in several states have stalled. In April 2020, Virginia’s governor put the commonwealth’s free community college program on hold.

Piecemeal budget cuts would seem to present a disaster scenario for low-income community college students, who have already been struggling. Students like Mia, Rod, Linda, Yana, and Tracy have depended on supports and services outside the formal classroom setting. Without family members who have trod the college path before them, they have relied on consistent advice from advisers and mentors. Without adequate preparation, they have needed tutors and time to focus on classes and study. And without spare cash or savings, they have required assistance beyond tuition for supplements like computers and textbooks that, in practice, have made the difference between passing or failing.

By the start of the spring 2021 semester, Mia and Rod had taken note of a pernicious rumor that free community college would not be free after all. Instead, the tuition subsidy constituted a loan, which they would have to repay. Terrified, Mia and Rod wondered how they would be able to pay back the tuition for the three semesters they had already completed. In reality, Tennessee Promise, like most other free community college programs, has offered last-dollar funding to participants. This has meant that the program first draws from students’ federal and state grant aid before accessing local scholarship funds, none of which students must repay. This is why Karen, though a Tennessee Promise student, received a Pell Grant and qualified for a free laptop. Federal grant aid likely covered all of Mia, Rod, Linda, Yana, and Tracy’s community college tuition. The maximum federal Pell Grant of $6,345 in the 2020–21 academic year easily covers their in-state local community college tuition of $4,352. For them, community college would have been accessible even in the absence of Tennessee Promise. They would not, however, have decided to attend college without it.

“If there hadn’t been Tennessee Promise, I would not be in school, because I could not afford it,” Linda told me. All of the students I interviewed echoed her understanding.

In 2015 when Obama proposed a federal initiative for free community college, he advocated for what’s known as a first-dollar program. Had his proposal passed, the federal government would have covered 75 percent of tuition and fees, with states covering the rest. Students who qualified for further federal and state aid would have been able to keep those funds. Instead of the money displacing the program’s tuition subsidy, as it has in programs including Tennessee Promise, low-income students would have retained the subsidy to spend on items such as rent and transportation that low-income students in last-dollar programs have struggled to pay for.

The experiences of these Tennessee students show how much they would have benefited from additional subsidies like those proposed by Obama and the need for the additional services the Biden administration supports. Even with free tuition, myriad other costs can knock students off track, leaving their dreams derailed. Money can help, so it’s worth applauding the $39 billion added to the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund as part of the president’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which will provide further financial aid for students affected by COVID-19.

This past year has been challenging for everyone, but more so for the students I spoke with. For them, trying to rise from poor and working-class homes, and dealing with family disputes and dysfunction, COVID-19 has both exacerbated their problems and shined a light on those that existed before the pandemic and will endure after it is over.

Financial woes afflict community college students even when their tuition is covered by programs like Tennessee Promise and a latticework of federal programs. More direct monies to students will help significantly, but they won’t solve the problem of keeping them in community college even after the pandemic has passed. The students I met have far less social capital—parents who attended college, familiarity with how to get assistance—that can help them at Southwest or other two-year schools. Their doggedness and ambition are admirable, but their study skills aren’t honed, and their burdens are serious.

Making it worse, community colleges don’t have the budgets to support their students the way other schools do. Indeed, public four-year schools, whose students tend to be wealthier and whiter, spend on average three times more per student each year than do community colleges.

The good news is that relatively modest infusions of funds can make a huge difference. Since 2007, for instance, the City University of New York’s community colleges have offered a program that provides full-time students with intensive wraparound supports, from textbook waivers to subway cards to greater access to academic advisers. The program, called ASAP, has been replicated in several Ohio two-year schools. Rigorous evaluations found that ASAP students graduated in three years at nearly double the rate of other full-time students at those colleges and were 50 percent more likely to transfer to a four-year college. Though ASAP costs around $3,000 more per student up front, it helped so many more students graduate that the overall cost per degree in the program was lower than it was for other students attending the community colleges.

COVID-19 has only intensified the need for these kinds of extra services.Mia, for instance, managed to pass her fall semester by fighting for extra credit, but without textbooks for the spring she is struggling again. She complains of learning nothing in virtual classes that don’t schedule any online meetings and of the difficulty of completing assignments correctly without more attention and instruction. After calling the Academic Counseling Center at the University of Memphis and learning that the advisers there could only help their current students, she has decided to wait and call back again over the summer when she finishes community college completely. Because the University of Memphis accepted her out of high school, she assumes that the phone call and an official transcript will be sufficient for her to enroll there in the fall. But she wonders how many of her community college credits will actually transfer.

With luck and persistence, Mia may well be on her way to earning her degree. That’s not the case, unfortunately, for many of her classmates. For them and millions of other community college students, the Biden plan can’t come soon enough.

The post Free Community College Is Great, But It Doesn’t Solve Everything appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One morning 20 years ago, while my wife Kukula and I were getting our kids ready for school, I got a call from a colleague at the Washington Monthly saying that our offices were violently shaking, as if hit by an earthquake. I jumped in the car and sped down Massachusetts Avenue, listening to the radio. There was no news of any seismic activity in the area.

I had taken over as the magazine’s editor in chief from founder Charlie Peters a couple of weeks before. The Washington Monthly was still producing great journalism and attracting world-class talent, but its finances, never good, were in the red zone. I knew that my most important job was to find a way to keep the doors open. I had not figured that this would also mean keeping the walls from collapsing.

I arrived at the old row office building north of Dupont Circle and, skipping the elevator (a tiny, unreliable contraption with one of those collapsible manual doors), climbed the stairs to the Monthly office—a warren of mismatched desks separated by rickety partitions with a single internet connection, shared with the environmental NGO upstairs, coming in through the window. The bohemian working conditions had descended into outright squalor thanks to a landlord who, eager to drive out the tenants in order to upgrade the building, had reduced trash pickup from weekly to monthly. This had greatly increased the population of roaches.

Upon arrival, our fresh-out-of-college associate publisher, Christina Larson (now an award-winning science writer and foreign correspondent), walked me through the damage. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling. Hairline cracks were spreading on the walls, fast enough to watch. The front-door frame was now so off-kilter that the door itself had to remain open (one problem solved!). We soon discovered the source of the trouble: A construction team had mistakenly removed a load-bearing wall beneath us.

We needed to get out of those offices immediately but didn’t have the spare funds to move. So I contacted the landlord, met him on the sidewalk in front of the building, and, at the suggestion of editor Stephanie Mencimer (now an investigative reporter at Mother Jones), offered not to call the city building inspectors if he would buy out the remaining months of our lease. There was a noticeable quaver in my voice—the guy had six inches and 75 pounds on me—but after angrily waving his finger in my face, he agreed.

The money he shelled out was enough to cover the security deposit and first month’s rent on a new office space and to hire a cut-rate moving company that editor Nick Thompson (now CEO of The Atlantic) had discovered from a handbill stapled to a nearby telephone pole. The movers turned out to be recently released inmates from the Lorton Correctional Facility. One of them had an angry meltdown and had to be summarily dismissed by the foreman, but the rest were very nice. After they finished hauling our furniture to the new offices, we paid them, then set off a couple of cans of insect fogger, locked the doors, and went home for the weekend. We came back on Monday, swept out the roach carcasses, and wiped down the furniture.

Our new digs were on the 10th floor of the Woodward Building at H and 15th. Though located only two blocks from the White House, where I had been working months before as a speechwriter for President Clinton, the building was famous in D.C. for its low rents. On the ground floor was a Croatian barber, a Christian bookstore, not one but two boutiques mysteriously selling only bikinis (we suspected they were recruiting offices for an escort service), and a liquor store—the only place within a mile of the White House where you could buy a cold 16-ounce Colt 45 to go. The offices above, with their dark wood doors, transoms, and frosted glass, had a Guy Noir vibe—the tenants in fact included a private eye along with a variety of lefty nonprofits.

Charlie had handed me control of the magazine on the condition that I would transform it into a nonprofit, the better to attract tax-deductible donations. I spent much of the following months reaching out to scores of Monthly investors and trying to convince them to donate their shares to the new 501(c)3 that my brother Bill, a private equity investor, and his lawyer were setting up for us pro bono. Business manager Claire Iseli and I had to do some detective-like sleuthing to track down the heirs of those who had died. Thankfully, the vast majority of the investors generously cooperated, especially once I explained that their shares were effectively worthless. One of them, the famed investor Warren Buffett, sent Charlie a cheeky letter noting that the magazine had, in effect, “always been a nonprofit.”

Though a lousy business, small magazines can be a great way to influence the world. That’s the case I made to Markos Kounalakis, a foreign correspondent turned tech executive whom I knew through Greek American political circles. Markos heartily agreed, and for the next six years he served as the magazine’s publisher, president, chief financial benefactor, and my intellectual partner. With his support I was able to recruit a string of brilliant young journalists—Josh Green, Nick Confessore, Josh Marshall, Amy Sullivan, and Ben Wallace-Wells—and set them loose on George W. Bush’s Washington.

During Bush’s first term, and especially after 9/11 when his popularity soared, the mainstream press was slow to grasp some of the new and alarming ways the administration was wielding power—and establishment Democrats seemed to have no idea how to fight back. That gave the Monthly the opportunity to publish a series of investigative and analytical scoops about the administration’s antiscientific and incompetent policymaking on everything from terrorism to stem cells; its strategy of overwhelming Americans and the press corps with sweeping, impossible to verify, and yet clearly false statements; and its transformation of K Street into a new kind of political machine. We were aided in this effort by a series of insightful bloggers we hired, like Kevin Drum, Steve Benen, and Ed Kilgore, who brought this critical approach to day-to-day debates in the news (a tradition carried on in later years by D. R. Tucker, Kathleen Geier, Daniel Luzer, Joshua Alvarez, Martin Longman, Nancy LeTourneau, and David Atkins).

Journalists and Democrats had begun to wise up to the GOP’s game by Bush’s second term. So the Monthly began to pivot to wonkier subjects we felt were of major importance but that the press and political class weren’t focused on or sometimes even aware of. These included the growing consolidation of the U.S. economy, the increasingly inegalitarian nature of American higher education, the hollowing out of expertise in Congress and federal agencies, and electoral reforms like vote by mail that held out the promise of reinvigorating democracy. These stories didn’t necessarily get us attention in outlets like The New York Times. But they found influential audiences in government, think tanks, and academia. They also attracted much-needed funding from forward-thinking foundations such as Lumina, Hewlett, Gates, Kauffman, and Arnold Ventures. And, over time, they pushed the issues we were writing about onto the front pages and into law.

The work of producing these policy stories was done by a constant flow of up-and-coming journalists who signed on for tough two-year stints as Monthly writer/editors before moving on to better-paying gigs at bigger enterprises—people like Charles Homans, Rachel Morris, Zach Roth, T. A. Frank, Mariah Blake, John Gravois, Haley Sweetland Edwards, Anne Kim, Gilad Edelman, Saahil Desai, Ryan Cooper, and Matt Connolly. The most enjoyable part of my job has been getting to work with these gifted young people. The most bittersweet has been watching them leave. I’ve long marveled at the insanity of the Washington Monthly business model: hire great people, train them in Monthly ways, and then hand them to your competitors.

In a way, the Monthly is a sort of uncredentialed grad school for policy journalism, and my role is thesis adviser. Fortunately, it’s not a job I have to do alone. There’s a whole brain trust of veteran journalists and academics associated with the magazine, many of whom I’ve worked with for decades, who both write for us and provide intellectual guidance to the editors and me. They include Phil Longman, Garrett Epps, Kevin Carey, Robert Kelchen, Shannon Brownlee, Phil Keisling, Tim Noah, Tom Toch, Keith Humphreys, Steve Teles, Barry Lynn, and J. J. Gould. Charlie Peters remains an inspiring presence—at 94, his health’s not great, but his mind still is. Contributing editors from Charlie’s era are also a constant source of support; three of them, Nick Lemann, Michelle Cottle, and Steve Waldman, serve on our board. Matt Cooper, with whom Steve and I worked as young editors under Charlie in the 1980s, is now our executive digital editor. He’s recruited an all-star cast of online writers like Bill Scher, Chris Matthews, Jodie Kirshner, Margaret Carlson, and Jennifer Taub. Longtime Art Director Amy Swan makes us look sharp, and veteran Managing Editor Amy Stackhouse not only keeps the trains running but our spirits high. And a seasoned group of colleagues on the business side, now led by our deputy director, Alice Gallin-Dwyer, continues to keep our doors open.

Doing so is not easy. Journalism is under immense stress from tech platforms that have monopolized our advertising dollars and from a Trump-controlled Republican Party that has trained nearly half the country not to believe the facts we present. Like you, I’m worried about the survival of our democracy.

But I’m luckier than most, because I have a job that gives me leverage to fight back. And I get to do so from pretty nice digs. After the Woodward Building went condo in 2005, we decamped to another affordable space, then another, and finally landed at our current location in a lovely old building south of Dupont Circle owned by a benevolent family that offers reasonable rents to nonprofits that don’t throw loud parties. The family even paid to have the whole office beautifully refurbished in 2019 in return for us signing a 10-year lease. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve hardly set foot in the place over the past year. But we’re looking forward to returning soon. I have no plans to leave my post before the lease runs out.

If you appreciate the Monthly’s unique brand of journalism, then please consider helping us by making a donation. Give whatever you can—$10, $20, $100, $1,000. If you donate $50 or more, you’ll receive a complimentary one-year subscription to our print edition. Your contributions to the Washington Monthly are vital, tax-deductible, and much appreciated.

The post Reflections on 20 Years of Editing the Washington Monthly appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In April, President Joe Biden proposed raising the federal corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent to help pay for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure program. That increase would only partially reverse Donald Trump’s 2017 epic slashing of corporate taxes from 35 to 21 percent, a policy most economists consider a flopin its intended effect of boosting business investment and economic growth. Yet limited as it is, Biden’s corporate tax hike is not getting enough love in Washington.

Senate Republicans who have expressed some interest in a bipartisan infrastructure bill have also said raising corporate taxes is a deal killer. Their votes might not be needed if Democrats decide to pass the infrastructure legislation through the congressional reconciliation process. But Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin are balking too, saying they’d only be comfortable raising the corporate tax rate modestly, to 25 percent.

At a time when average Americans are profoundly concerned about stagnant wages and strongly favor raising corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure—Democrats by 85 percent, independents by 60 percent, according to a recent Morning Consult poll—it’s more than a little dispiriting that Biden’s proposal isn’t getting more traction in Congress. What he needs is a smarter corporate tax plan, one that would be harder for the likes of Manchin, and maybe even some populist-leaning Republicans, to resist.

Fortunately, there is one—proposed by, of all people, Senator Bernie Sanders. But to grasp its advantages, you first have to understand why Biden’s plan is floundering.

The power of corporate lobbyists in Washington is one obvious reason. But just as important is the argument they make: that higher corporate taxes hurt the little guy. The Business Roundtable, a driving force behind the 2017 law when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was its chair, released a survey of CEOs in April saying that two-thirds of them believe raising the corporate tax rate would result in slower wage growth for American workers.

Of course, CEOs would say that. But they have some evidence on their side. The consensus view of economists is that shareholders take the largest hit when corporate taxes are raised, but that workers are hurt, too. According to an estimate by career Treasury Department officials in 2012 (a study the Trump administration quashed), shareholders paid 82 percent of the burden, with the rest coming out of lower employee salaries. The Tax Foundation, a centrist think tank, estimates that the split is closer to 50/50. Few economists, however, claim that higher corporate tax rates would have no downward pressure on wages. This fact makes raising corporate taxes a harder sell politically than it might otherwise be.

Sanders’s proposal turns that weakness into a strength. Legislation he introduced in March, along with cosponsors Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and Chris Van Hollen, would base a corporation’s tax rate on the ratio of its CEO compensation to the median wages of that company’s employees. The higher the ratio—that is, the more out of whack the CEO’s pay is to that of the firm’s workers—the higher the federal corporate tax rate that company would be subject to. If shareholders and board members want to lower the firm’s tax exposure—and no doubt they would—they’d have to pay their CEO less, their employees more, or both. Sanders’s plan, in other words, would flip the incentive structure of federal corporate taxes, from dampening the median worker wages to raising them.

The idea behind the Sanders plan was first pioneered in Portland, Oregon. In 2017, the city passed a law that levies a tax surcharge of 10 percent on companies that pay their CEOs 100 to 250 times more than the median worker, and 25 percent on those with a CEO pay ratio above 250. Though the Portland legislation was framed as a tax, it was really an attack on inequality using the lure of a lower tax rate.

“The goal was not to make money,” Steve Novick, a member of the Portland City Council at the time, told me. “The goal is to get employers to raise median wages. We didn’t want to simply punish inequality. We wanted to reduce it.” Nevertheless, the tax has been a modest revenue raiser of between $3.5 million and $4 million per year.

Novick and his fellow Portland councilmembers didn’t believe that the Rose City alone could change CEO or median worker pay. But they hoped that the idea would inspire others, and to an extent it did. Back in 2014, a majority of California state lawmakers had been ready to greenlight a statewide design of the tax, but it foundered on the legislature’s supermajority requirements for tax increases. However, San Francisco passed a similar version in November of last year that covered all companies, not only the publicly listed ones that Portland targeted.

Representative Mark DeSaulnier, a Democrat who championed the California bill when he was a state legislator, has sponsored federal legislation on this since 2016, when he introduced it with Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey. Sanders, with his talent for staking out the left flank in American politics, is now sponsoring his own version in the Senate.

We have the data points on which these proposals stand thanks to a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed after the 2008 financial crisis, that requires publicly listed companies to disclose the ratio of pay between the CEO and the median employee. The Securities and Exchange Commission implemented the provision by regulation in 2015. The idea was to facilitate a national conversation about pay scales. It worked.

Much to the chagrin of corporate America, journalists now write lots of stories about CEO pay, whether the 983-to-1 ratio at Walmart, or the $21.1 million that Boeing CEO David Calhoun raked in after a year in which he announced plans to lay off 30,000 employees amid a $12 billion loss. Local news outlets cover the hometown industry’s CEO pay, be it casinos in Las Vegas or health care in Minneapolis.

And much to the chagrin of most Americans, corporations keep giving people reasons to be outraged. The Institute for Policy Studies has just published a report on how the corporations with the lowest median wages found ways to juice CEO pay during the pandemic. The cruise industry virtually shut down thanks to Covid-19, but Carnival, the world’s largest operator, gave its CEO a $5 million bonus, for a total compensation that was 490 times the company’s median wage of $27,151. Investigations by The New York Times, the Center for American Progress, and the shareholder advocacy group As You Sow have come to similar conclusions.

In a letter endorsing the Sanders bill, a group of economists led by Robert Hockett of Cornell University focused their critiqueon how massive pay gaps are both a cause and a consequence of the decline in American executives’ willingness to invest in productive enterprises. The allure of outsize pay packages cause CEOs to act in ways that boost share prices or other short-term metrics, while the resulting compensation reinforces this behavior.

“Either firms act on the change to incentives that comes with this legislation—and they don’t pay CEOs as much—or they pay a premium to society when companies are not focused on productive activities,” Hockett told me.

Branco Milanovic, a visiting professor at the City University of New York and a specialist on inequality, sees this approach akin to a carbon tax—a penalty on an unwanted externality, in this case income inequality. In addition to the moral case, there’s a fiscal rationale: Low incomes force workers to rely on taxpayer-funded programs like food stamps and Medicaid in much the same the way polluters force the rest of us to clean up after them.

Another way to conceive of the legislation—as Portland’s Steve Novick does—is as a tool for raising median incomes at major corporations. A couple of factors suggest that it has the potential to do more than simply to push down CEO compensation to get the ratios in line.

The Sanders proposal could be calibrated for the purpose of incentivizing higher median worker pay, in the manner that large class-action penalties are designed to deter certain behaviors. Or money might be credited back if companies closed the gap in subsequent years. “You could even conceive of a revenue-neutral approach,” Novick said. “The goal is fairness, not simply to raise money.”

Under the current political circumstances, we could at least imagine that the political talking points would emphasize the voluntary nature of the higher corporate levy; the more company boards choose exorbitant compensation and low wages for their employees, the more money there is for infrastructure.

With a pay gap of 983 to 1, Walmart would have paid an additional $855 million in federal taxes under the Sanders proposal. Even for Walmart, which made a $14 billion profit in 2020, those kinds of tax penalties are big enough to affect wage-setting behavior.

CEO pay ratios are likely to continue to attract attention. A 2014 study about attitudes toward executive pay concluded that Americans underestimate the ratios that currently exist, and dramatically so. Their expectations are in the 30-to-1 range. The reserves of latent outrage about CEO compensation remain, without a doubt, enormous.

Remedying the problem would be very good politics, as Gallup has demonstrated. A year after Trump signed the tax cut into law, fully 62 percent of Americans said that “upper-income people” don’t pay enough; 69 percent said the same about corporations. Not many voters outside the 90210-esque zip codes are going to find much objectionable about taxes aimed at inflated CEO pay using the leverage of higher corporate taxes.

Also, these types of CEO pay measurements—the stark contrast between what the suits get paid and what the working stiffs take home—will remain a nettlesome point of bad public relations. As Steve Seelig, a senior regulatory adviser for the corporate risk management advisory firm Willis Towers Watson, observed, the public ratios have the merits of simplicity.

They will get “a lot of attention from the rank-and-file,” Seelig told The Guardian. “It’ll be in the local newspapers, talked about at the water cooler, and companies need to be poised to deal with their workforce.”

For now, Biden and Senate Democrats are struggling to figure out whether they need to negotiate with, fight, or ignore Republicans who want to pare down the president’s infrastructure plan into a small-ball program with no political impact. Rather than look for outside-the-box revenue raisers that might create some novel politics around taxes, they are haggling over how much to weaken Biden’s opening offer in order to bring all Democrats and at least some Republicans on board.

The slogging Senate talks give us all the more reason to have a national conversation now about how we can harness incentives in business taxation to reverse the decades-long trend of stagnant worker incomes. The laboratories of democracy have come up with a good idea for reducing inequality and penalizing bad corporate behavior. It’s time for Washington to seize the moment.

The post Why Joe Biden Should Listen to Bernie Sanders on Corporate Taxes appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If Anthony Comstock were alive today, he’d be a regular talking head on Fox News. 

Or it is perhaps more accurate to say that Comstock, in various reincarnations, is still alive today. Although he died more than a century ago, his obsessions—about the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the blasphemy of contraception, the heinousness of abortion, and the existential social threat of unfettered female sexuality—continue to revivify, like Halloween’s Michael Myers, to stalk and terrorize new generations of progressives. 

In his heyday, from about 1870 to 1910, Comstock was America’s most prominent (or as some might say, most loathed) defender of decency, especially when women’s chastity, fertility, or frigidity seemed to be in peril. Initially a self-appointed young anti-smut crusader, he rose to national prominence when he browbeat Congress into passing a federal anti-obscenity law, making it a felony to use the U.S. Postal Service to disseminate illicit materials of any kind. The 1873 law, later known as the Comstock Act, was eventually used to prosecute sellers of contraceptives, publishers of anatomy textbooks, free love advocates, and purveyors of calendars featuring copies of a gauzy French nude painting titled September Morn.

Comstock reveled in his power. He boasted about the thousands of porn vendors he had put behind bars, and he gleefully kept a running account of the many victims he had driven to suicide. 

In The Man Who Hated Women, the novelist Amy Sohn tells Comstock’s story through the lives of eight women—dubbed “sex radicals” by Sohn—whom Comstock singled out for persecution and prosecution. 

By any standard, this is a fascinating group of women. Sohn is a vivid writer with an eye for detail, and she is clearly inspired by her subjects’ fervent beliefs and dramatic lives. The stories of some of the women Comstock hated, such as Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, will be well known to many of Sohn’s readers—
although they may be surprised that Goldman rivaled Sanger as a fervent, nationally known advocate for birth control. Others will come as a shock to readers who think back on the primitive sexual mores of previous generations with pitying condescension (and who would flinch to think of the words orgasm and Grandma in the same sentence).

It’s not surprising that Comstock is better known to modern readers than most of the women he tormented. Partly, that’s our collective confirmation bias at work; most Americans view the arc of sexual history as a smooth, straightforward trajectory from repression to liberation. It’s unsettling, and vaguely threatening to our sense of ourselves as a new generation of sexual pioneers, to realize that Ida C. Craddock—a mystic, feminist, and putatively virginal sexologist—was writing highly detailed sex tips in 1904 that this publication would almost certainly blush to reprint today. 

But it’s also a reality that persecutors are often more vivid and memorable than their victims. Consider Rush Limbaugh’s rants about a Georgetown University law student who dared to testify to Congress about the need for all health insurance policies to cover contraception, even if the sponsoring organization was a religious institution. The student noted that birth control pills can cost students upward of $1,000 a year. Her fairly mild comments sent Limbaugh on a tirade; he called her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for “having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.” It was jaw-droppingly nasty, to the point that Limbaugh started bleeding advertisers until he wa forced to (halfheartedly) apologize. Yet today, we still remember Rush Limbaugh in all his fetid glory, while we struggle a bit to remember Sandra Fluke’s name. 

This discomfiting reality demonstrates the enduring power of the Comstock playbook. He dehumanized his victims, misrepresented their views, exaggerated their impact, and then encouraged newspapers to publicize their names and addresses, in a 19th-century version of doxxing. Comstock’s books would provide a thesaurus of steaming epithets for Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, et al. In Comstock’s world, free love advocates were “an enervated, lazy, shiftless, corrupt breed of human beings, devoid of common decency, not fit companions, in many cases, to run with swine.” Making contraceptives available to married couples would “debase sacred things, break down the health of women and disseminate a greater curse than the plagues and diseases of Europe.” One national group that opposed his efforts was “so liberal that it would give the vilest and lowest of criminals freedom to send their engines of moral death into your very families to destroy your children at your firesides.”

Comstock could have led webinars on staging outrageous media stunts for maximum political effect. In 1873, when he was lobbying for his federal anti-smut law, he took over the vice president’s office in the Capitol to display a curated exhibit of “contraceptives; obscene engravings, plates, woodcuts, photos, books, and playing cards; abortifacients; and ‘rubber articles,’ ” all lavishly presented on a mahogany table. Not surprisingly, the salacious display drew crowds of prurient legislators—and Comstock’s law slid through both the House and Senate in the last few moments of a lame-duck session. 

The sheer brute force—and effectiveness—of Comstock’s tactics can be seen in his harassment of Craddock, who was (depending on your point of view) either an intellectually frustrated, sex-obsessed, emotionally unstable crank or a self-educated sexology researcher who bravely risked public opprobrium and criminal prosecution to demand women’s God-given right to sexual fulfillment. Craddock first drew the unblinking eye of Comstock in 1893, when she self-published a short pamphlet: The Danse du Ventre (Dance of the Abdomen) as Performed in the Cairo Street Theatre, Midway Plaisance, Chicago: Its Value as an Educator in Marital Duties. Both Craddock and Comstock had been galvanized by the sight of “Little Egypt” (a stage name used interchangeably by three female performers) belly-dancing at the World’s Columbian Exposition. But where Comstock was filled with furious loathing by the sight of a writhing, partially clad female, Craddock saw an emotionally overwhelming fusion of sex and spirituality. That transformational experience led her to a career as a (verbal) sex therapist and writer of marriage manuals. For the next six years, she veered between small successes as a lecturer and private practitioner and terrifying encounters with postal inspectors and federal agents invoking Comstock against her. 

After two trips to federal court and three months in a mental institution (committed by her mother, in league with a Comstock-supporting district attorney), Craddock eventually abandoned her therapeutic efforts and set up as the head of a new “Church of Yoga,” which embraced sexuality as part of its doctrine. Assuming that this approach would protect her under the First Amendment, she republished one of her previously banned books, adding a new introduction that called Comstockism “an institution resembling the Holy Inquisition of mediaeval times.” Her provocation brought Comstock himself to her door in 1902, brandishing a warrant and accompanied by three deputies. In his record of her arrest on both state and federal charges, he described her as a “lecturer of filth,” and he told reporters that she had planned to distribute her books to girls’ high schools, and that she had even accosted two 16-year-old girls to force her books into their pure young hands. When Craddock was convicted on state charges after a salacious trial, Comstock “exulted with savage glee,” one onlooker reported. 

During her federal trial, Comstock falsely claimed under oath that Craddock gave her books to underage girls. His perjured testimony led to her conviction. Facing a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison, Craddock took her own life the night before her sentencing hearing. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote, “Perhaps it may be that in my death more than in my life, the American people may be shocked into investigating the dreadful state of affairs which permits that unctuous sexual hypocrite, Anthony Comstock, to wax fat and arrogant, and to trample upon the liberties of the people.” When a reporter informed him of her death, Comstock’s response was characteristically coldhearted and self-serving: He repeated the lie that she had sold her sex manuals to children. 

Sohn clearly revels in the double-sided shock value of the stories she tells, detailing both the audaciously explicit sexual advocacy of her heroines and Comstock’s ham-fisted retaliations. But her book would have been more powerful if she had pared down some of the lengthy (if spicy) details and instead offered readers a broader vision of the political landscape in which Comstock flourished for so long. As an example, consider Sohn’s description of Little Egypt—her dancing, her costume, and the sensation her performance provoked. Sohn’s discussion of the dancer’s scandalous performance never ventures beyond the Columbian Exposition’s Midway Plaisance, the fair’s mile-long stretch of “anthropological” exhibits and arcade attractions. Yet just a few short blocks away stood the other half of the fair, the Columbian Exposition’s massive Beaux Arts Court of Honor—better known as the White City—which celebrated the loftier aspects of culture and commerce. The Court of Honor included the Women’s Building, which showcased women’s art, literature, ingenuity, economic power, and rising political might and was commissioned by the fair’s wealthy and influential “Board of Lady Managers.” These ladies were likely revolted by Comstock’s tactics, but they shared his foundational view of Woman as the purifying and ennobling force that upholds all that is good in human society.

So the two halves of the Columbian Exposition, the White City and the Midway Plaisance, symbolized the tensions between two dueling visions of feminine power: Woman as Temptress versus Woman as Moral Guardian. These two enduring and dialectically opposed strains in American political thought stretch back deep into our history, and they continue to shape our politics and our worldviews today. 

Anthony Comstock was not merely a bitterly unhappy and misogynistic individual who somehow happened to persuade a group of wealthy, conservative New Yorkers to bankroll a quixotic crusade against smut. He was the fanatical champion of a large group of Americans whose conservatism was affronted by the idea that women might want to step off their pedestals, unlace their corsets, and enjoy every aspect of life, just as men did. Comstock’s backers may have chuckled inwardly at his ability to ferret out a single lewd passage in an otherwise mind-numbing spiritualist tract, and they may have felt a bit queasy when they saw the way he relished dismantling his victims’ livelihoods and destroying their lives. But for some 30 years, a good chunk of the American political establishment chose to countenance Comstock’s search-and-destroy censorship. His power was derived not from his extremism, but from his well-connected adherents, who viewed themselves as the vanguard of a silent, moral majority.

Similarly, it may be tempting for us to see Comstock’s stalwart female adversaries as women ahead of their time. But the true moral of Sohn’s story is that all of these women were absolutely of their own time, just as Comstock was. They served as the spearpoints of a radical political and social movement that drew hundreds of thousands of passionate supporters. These women may have been notorious in some social circles, but they were celebrated in others. Their insistence that women should make their own decisions about their own bodies and lives struck a deep chord with many Americans, both male and female, and their collective resistance to Comstockism eventually shifted the fulcrum of the nation’s political thought.

At least until it shifted back again. Because the lesson we should take from this book is that, in the American political world, no battle is ever permanently lost nor permanently won. Anthony Comstock versus Emma Goldman morphs into Phyllis Schlafly against Gloria Steinem, which devolves into Rush Limbaugh attacking Sandra Fluke, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Although we may prefer to see ourselves as warriors on the social vanguard, boldly going where no man (or woman) has gone before, history brusquely reminds us that we are mere foot soldiers in a political Hundred Years’ War, taking, losing, and retaking the same bloody disputed territory.

This is the reason that history matters—not as a pious genuflection to people who once were brave and now are dead, but as a reminder that the culture wars we fight today are deeply, perhaps permanently rooted in the American character. The principles that animated Comstock and his followers do not simply vanish. They fade, ebb, and dissipate, like viruses, only to resurge unexpectedly in a more contagious and virulent form.

Today, as I was writing this review, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed anti-abortion bills that would redefine most abortions as homicide and would strip doctors who perform abortions of their medical licenses. The New York Center for Reproductive Rights is considering legal action to overturn these new laws. 

Anthony Comstock lives. So does Emma Goldman.

The post The 20th Century Smut Shamer appeared first on Washington Monthly.

During his legal campaign to desegregate public schools, the lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had “a Bible, to which he turned during his most depressed moments,” recalled one of his colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund: Justice John Marshall Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. It reads, in part, “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” 

Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee to the Court, quoted the same words in a 2003 majority opinion, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which held that local officials may not take race-conscious steps to end or prevent segregation in their public schools. 

Marshall saw race-conscious policies as the remedy for the effects of generations of official racism. Roberts sees programs that open doors on the basis of race as immoral. Each claimed to live by the Plessy dissent. 

Among justices, Harlan, who served on the Court from 1877 to 1911, is what one biographer, Tinsley Yarbrough, called a “judicial enigma.” To Peter Canellos, the author of The Great Dissenter, he was “America’s Judicial Hero.” In this readable biography, Canellos argues that “Harlan didn’t merely predict the rights revolution of the twentieth century—the system of equal protection and due process of the laws that Americans rely upon today—he helped to inspire it. His philosophy, vision, and writings were the seeds from which the modern Constitution grew.”

Harlan’s life and opinions are well worth studying. But he may be easier to admire than to understand. His intellectual roots stretch back to antebellum America and even to the era of the country’s founding. In that sense, his jurisprudence is not so much a prophecy of the future as the dying gasp of Radical Republicanism—a political vision the nation had abandoned by 1896 in favor of the macabre splendor of the Gilded Age. 

Harlan’s life began in the slave South: He was born in 1833 to a prosperous, slave-owning Kentucky family. He came of age as a protégé of his father’s friend and ally Henry Clay, Kentucky’s on-and-off senator, one-time secretary of state, and perennial presidential aspirant. Like his own father, James, and Clay, Harlan valued the Union and was resistant to antislavery agitation that might imperil it. But as southern intransigence ripened into civil war (John Marshall Harlan became a colonel in the Union army), then into violent opposition to Reconstruction, Harlan moved, step by reluctant step, from Whig to Know-Nothing to Constitutional Unionist to Unionist Democrat. (In fact, he ran out of names for his careful steps; at one point in his career, his party was simply called “the Opposition.”) Along the way, though, he usually sought to slow, not hasten, change: He questioned the Emancipation Proclamation; he opposed the Thirteenth Amendment; and he supported the Democratic “peace candidate” George McClellan against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. 

But for Harlan, as for the nation, temporizing eventually failed. By 1867 he was forced to choose between a Democratic Party turning to white supremacy and violence, and a waning but still biracial Republican Party. He chose the latter. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in a gesture to the South, nominated Harlan to the Supreme Court. 

Beginning 30 years ago, scholars have found evidence that the Harlan family circle included two educated, prominent parents, John and his eight white siblings, and one Black slave. The latter, Robert James Harlan, shared the family surname and lived with the family. James Harlan, the paterfamilias, even tried to send Robert to the school his white children attended—and was outraged when he was turned away. The idea that James Harlan must have sired Robert Harlan seemed irresistible; in 2001, however, DNA testing suggested no father-son link between them. 

The issue of blood, however, is really irrelevant. What’s important is that the future justice was raised with an enslaved Black boy who was treated as a sibling. That in itself was not rare; many a southern planter had half-acknowledged mixed-race offspring living in a half-world between the slave quarters and the big house. But Robert Harlan, once freed, became a wealthy man, a prominent American with an international reputation. John Marshall Harlan and he were collaborators in Republican Party politics, and each relied on the other on occasion for political help.

In addition to Supreme Court history, The Great Dissenter offers a compulsively readable parallel biography of John Marshall and Robert Harlan. This part of the book offers the pleasures of a great 19th-century novel, like Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, and its most interesting character is not the towering white jurist but the resourceful Black entrepreneur. While still enslaved, Robert Harlan began his career as a barber in Kentucky. But once freed, he joined the California Gold Rush and went into business selling supplies to the prospectors. He returned to Kentucky with a considerable fortune, rich enough—and flamboyant enough—to send a handmade piano as a wedding gift for James Harlan’s daughter Lizzie. Next, he became a gambler and a successful breeder of racehorses. Racing took him and his family to England, where he rode out the Civil War staging widely publicized exhibition races between his horses and those of famous British stables.

After the war, Robert Harlan became a force in national Republican politics, consulted by luminaries like Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and President Ulysses S. Grant. When Hayes took office, Robert—with John’s knowledge—used his contacts to discreetly urge the president to nominate John. For his services to the party, President Benjamin Harrison later named Robert special inspector of the Customs Department. 

While Robert blazed his own trail, John followed a path laid out for him by his lawyer-politician father. James’s connections led to his son’s appointment as adjutant general of the state militia, then to his election as a county prosecutor, trial court judge, and finally state attorney general. After a discreet but pointed campaign for the office, John became, at 44, an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1877. 

In his 2015 book Dissent and the Supreme Court, the historian Melvin Urofsky calls John Marshall Harlan “the first great dissenter.” Harlan served for 34 years—more than half his adult life—at a time when the high court fiercely defended wealth and power; its majority was a relentless enemy of economic regulation, labor unions, progressive taxation, and civil rights. During that time, Urofsky writes, Harlan wrote 703 majority opinions and 316 dissents. To highlight just a few of these, he objected when the majority struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875; invalidated the income tax; curtailed the power of the federal government to rein in monopolies; denied full citizenship rights to residents of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines; and struck down a state law setting maximum hours of work for commercial bakers. 

Today, the civil rights dissent for which Harlan is best remembered is Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court upheld a Louisiana state law requiring racial segregation on passenger trains. In it he wrote his most famous words: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” Read today, those words seem to announce a charter for a multiracial democracy. 

But during his own lifetime, Harlan’s most famous dissent came during the Civil Rights Cases—five separate cases that the Court consolidated into one—and is less contemporary in its rationale. 

The Civil Rights Cases invalidated the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1875, a pioneering Reconstruction measure that forbade discrimination in public accommodations such as inns, theaters, and trains. The majority ruled that under the Civil War amendments—which banned slavery, overturned laws that restricted voting rights on the basis of race, and ensured equal protection of the laws—Congress could not ban discrimination by private parties like innkeepers or railroads. Enough already with Black people, the majority wrote: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” 

Harlan’s dissent in the Civil Rights Cases speaks less of broad principles of equality than of congressional authority; less of post-racialism than of the special relationship between American whites and Blacks. Its theme, in fact, is not “color-blindness” but clear sight: frank recognition that the United States had created and nurtured the “peculiar institution” of slavery, and that the Civil War amendments were “addressed primarily to the grievances” of Black Americans. The Constitution, he pointed out, had always singled out Black people for special treatment. The antebellum Supreme Court had found in the fugitive slave clause “implied” powers allowing the federal government to override state law when that was needed to pursue runaway slaves. Now the Court said the Civil War amendments were limited by “state rights.” “I venture,” Harlan wrote, “to insist that the national legislature may, without transcending the limits of the Constitution, do for human liberty and the fundamental rights of American citizenship, what it did, with the sanction of this court, for the protection of slavery and the rights of the masters of fugitive slaves.” After the dissent became public, the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote to Harlan that “if I had means, I would cause it to be published in every newspaper and magazine in the land.”

John Harlan was a man out of his time,” Canellos writes. He’s right; but the voice came not from the future but from the past. His is the lost voice of antislavery figures like Ohio Representative John Bingham, one of the principal authors of the Fourteenth Amendment. Like Harlan, Bingham was a conservative Presbyterian, steeped in a theological tradition that saw America as a sacred republic, instituted by God as part of His redemption of mankind. The nation, not the states, was the source of American identity; the fountainhead of rights was American citizenship, not state allegiance; the Bill of Rights bound the states as well as the federal government. The fruit of Civil War victory, to both Harlan and Bingham, was full citizenship for Black Americans. That was part of God’s plan. 

In her book The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan, the Notre Dame historian Linda Przybyszewski noted the centrality of Christian nationalism in Harlan’s thought as expressed in his lectures to law students at Columbia University:

Harlan used typology, the religious theory that events in the Old Testament foreshadow events in the New Testament, in order to explain American history . . . In Harlan’s hands, the Revolutionary War became a type for the Civil War. With the help of God, Americans had first overthrown the hierarchy of monarchy and nobility, then they overthrew the hierarchy of race. In this, they were divinely destined to serve as an example to the world. 

In this view, God had called Black people to the American continent precisely to create that “example to the world.” Their elevation to citizenship was a foreordained step on the road to national perfection. 

National citizenship was at the center of this tradition. A quarter century ago, the legal scholar Gabriel Chin pointed out that the majestic egalitarianism of Harlan’s Plessy dissent exists on the same pages as his open contempt for Chinese immigrants. “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States,” Harlan wrote. Yet,

a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union, who are entitled, by law, to participate in the political control of the state and nation . . . and who have all the legal rights that belong to white citizens, are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race.

Elevation of Black Americans was part of the plan; rights for Chinese Americans were not. In Wong Kim Ark v. United States in 1898, the Court held that, with a few exceptions, any child born in the U.S. is an American citizen. Harlan dissented; despite the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, he argued that the ban on Chinese naturalization (part of the law since 1790 and reaffirmed in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act) meant that not even American-born children of Chinese immigrants were citizens. 

The readability and richness of The Great Dissenter should inspire readers to dig even more deeply into Harlan’s history and thought. No one should be surprised that we the living fall into confusion when reading Harlan’s quotable but complex dissents. “The past is a foreign country,” the novelist L. P. Hartley wrote in 1953. “They do things differently there.” Try though we might, we can never truly know the minds of the dead; and when they speak to us, it is in their own language, which today we only dimly understand.

The post The Supreme Court Justice Who Stood Up in Plessy v. Ferguson appeared first on Washington Monthly.

No Washington columnist was more feared than Drew Pearson during the last century. In his “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, which was syndicated by more than 600 newspapers at his death in 1969, the man known as “the Scorpion on the Potomac” alternately entertained and outraged tens of millions of followers with scoops that consisted of an uneasy mixture of genuine information and stinging personal attacks. A profile of Pearson published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1945 described his journalistic strategy as “aggressive indiscretion.” More recently, Jack Shafer, writing in Slate, called him “one of the skuzziest journalists to ever write a story.” 

For political foes that he deemed beyond the pale, Pearson functioned as a deadly character assassin. But as unscrupulous as his methods may have been, they often bore fruit. He took credit for the indictment, imprisonment, censure, and expulsion of a half-dozen members of Congress and the defeat of many more. He was a staunch liberal, but prepared to target any politician. He uncovered that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. He exposed Dwight Eisenhower’s White House chief of staff, Sherman Adams, for accepting a valuable gift—a coat made out of luxurious vicuña wool. He reported on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demagoguery. And more. At a moment when the Washington press corps often printed what it was fed by government officials, Pearson stood out as a journalistic bloodhound. 

In The Columnist, Donald Ritchie, a former U.S. Senate historian, offers a comprehensive look at Pearson’s colorful career. He depicts him as essentially running a government within a government with a corps of agents who were constantly looking to solicit, or even bribe, any official for inside information about Washington politics and policy. His ability to break national security secrets was so formidable that the FBI gave up trying to track down the sources of his leaks. Ritchie, who has drawn heavily on Pearson’s diaries and private papers at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, provides a fascinating account. Throughout, he seeks to demonstrate that Pearson’s unfettered approach set the stage for the later exposure of Watergate and other Washington scandals.

Pearson’s righteous indignation about transgressions by the powerful has often been traced to his religious background. His father, Paul Pearson, was a Quaker and became a professor of public speaking at Swarthmore College. Drew, who was born in 1897, attended Phillips Exeter Academy for high school and, later, Swarthmore College. After graduation, he joined a small band of Quaker volunteers in 1919 to help build houses in the war-torn
Balkans—one grateful Serbian town even renamed itself “Pearsonovatz.” After returning to America in 1921, he aspired to join the foreign service, but was disappointed to learn that it depended on attracting wealthy young swells who could afford to cover the cost of living abroad themselves. The resourceful Pearson embarked on a personal world tour, funding his travel across Asia and Europe by writing freelance articles. 

But it was a book that he published anonymously in 1931 together with the Christian Science Monitor correspondent Robert S. Allen that truly launched his career. It was titled Washington Merry-Go-Round. “Pearson and Allen,” Ritchie writes, “shared a belief that the newspapers of their era were too timid to show how Washington really worked. They intended to present an uninhibited view of the political scene, revealing secrets and naming names.” Washington Merry-Go-Round sold like hotcakes. Insiders knew who the authors were, and an irate President Herbert Hoover, Ritchie reports, intervened to get Allen fired. A sequel, More Merry-Go-Round, led to Pearson being terminated as well from his post at The Baltimore Sun. 

But having successfully clambered aboard the carousel, Pearson was not about to get off it. In 1932, he and Allen, who referred to the Washington press corps as “trained seals,” began to collaborate on a column named after their first book. Anyone was fair game. They revealed that General Douglas MacArthur, then the Army’s chief of staff, had persuaded his father-in-law, a big contributor to the Republican Party, to pressure the secretary of war to speed up MacArthur’s promotion. MacArthur filed a libel suit against Pearson, but retreated after the journalist played hardball, obtaining letters MacArthur had sent his young lover. 

Pearson’s staunch support for the New Deal and denunciations of isolationism perturbed the conservative newspapers that syndicated him. But the only thing worse than running his popular column would have been not running it. He broke too many stories—including Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 plan to pack the Supreme Court—to be ignored. So successful was Pearson at disclosing tensions between the British and American governments and reporting on military waste during World War II that each government shadowed him and tapped his phone. Pearson was undeterred. He revealed that General George S. Patton had slapped a shell-shocked soldier in a hospital in Sicily. His report resulted in Patton’s temporary removal from the battlefield. 

Sometimes, Pearson printed rumors he wasn’t able to verify—with disastrous results. In the late 1940s, Pearson assailed the probity of Defense Secretary James Forrestal, accusing him, among other things, of fleeing from the scene when his wife was robbed of her jewels in front of their home. It was, as Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley note in their biography of Forrestal, Driven Patriot, “a totally false version” of events. His attacks on Forrestal were later indicted by Pearson’s own assistant, Jack Anderson, as a descent into “poison gas.” Pearson loathed Forrestal for his earlier career on Wall Street, for his opposition to the recognition of Israel in 1948, and for his staunch anti-communism. He viewed Forrestal as a “Trojan Horse of the Right” who had no business serving in a liberal Democratic administration. When a mentally tormented Forrestal committed suicide in May 1949, Pearson refused to accept any responsibility. 

But he fought good fights, too. His best one came in his courageous battle against McCarthy. Much of the press, not to mention Eisenhower himself, remained silent or cowered before the combative senator. Not Pearson. In February 1950, McCarthy traveled to Wheeling, West Virginia, and delivered a sinister speech on “enemies within,” launching a years-long anti-communist crusade. In the speech, McCarthy claimed to hold a piece of paper with the names of more than 200 communists working at the State Department. Pearson rebutted that claim in his column a few days later. “Senator McCarthy is way off base,” Pearson declared. “The alleged Communists which he claims are sheltered in the State Department just aren’t.” Ritchie writes, “Two of the people the senator named had resigned years earlier from the State Department; one never worked there; and another had been cleared and reinstated.”

In all, Pearson wrote 58 columns decrying McCarthy. He reported that the senator’s inspiration for his anti-communist push came during a dinner with Edmund Walsh, the founder of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, who advised that the issue could increase his popularity. When McCarthy encountered Pearson months later at the Sulgrave Club on Washington’s Dupont Circle, McCarthy kicked him in the groin and slapped him on the head in the cloakroom. California’s newly elected senator, Richard M. Nixon, intervened. After Pearson grabbed his coat and rushed from the room, McCarthy turned to Nixon and said, “You shouldn’t have stopped me, Dick.” Three days later, McCarthy dubbed Pearson the “voice of international Communism.” But even as advertisers fled his broadcasts and newspapers canceled his column, the columnist never buckled. 

Ritchie notes that Pearson never won the Pulitzer Prize that he coveted. Instead, his protégé Jack Anderson, who inherited the column after Pearson’s death, was awarded it in 1972 for exposing the Nixon administration’s secret tilt toward Pakistan during its war with India. Though Pearson’s name may have faded over the decades, Ritchie contends that “his influence persisted through the investigative reporters who followed him, in print, on air, and online.” But Pearson’s legacy probably cannot be tied up so neatly. In a twist that Pearson would doubtless have abhorred, his methods, if not his aims, can also be discerned in the rise of a right-wing media that specializes in hearsay, calumnies, and falsehoods. Washington Merry-Go-Round, indeed.

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