The Poverty Trap

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

William Faulkner

A few days ago, I re-tweeted a piece by longtime contributing editor to Rolling Stone and now fellow Substack writer, Matt Taibbi, who interviewed author and activist, David Sirota, about his new podcast, “Meltdown”:

Today, CNN journalist and host of “Reliable Sources”, Brian Stelter, also interviewed David Sirota about his new podcast.

Sirota’s “Meltdown” draws a connection —a direct line, really— between the way the Democratic party handled the financial crisis in 2009-2010 when it had the presidency and both houses of Congress (with larger majorities than today), and the way Democrats currently are handling the negotiations on the Reconciliation bill.

In 2009, President Obama and the Congressional Democrats whittled down their stimulus bill, and rather than directly help the millions of individuals and small business owners devastated by the financial crisis, bowed to demands from Wall Street and the very banks that caused the meltdown of our economy, and bailed them out instead. I do understand that what happened was more complex than this summary, but I also know from first-hand experience, that the bailed out banks, in turn, did a terrible and slight-of-hand job of implementing the mortgage modification process intended to help homeowners. (I’ll write about this issue in a forthcoming post).

The people were promised help and they didn’t get it—the big companies got the help and it was supposed to “trickle down” to the regular folk, but it didn’t. And Democrats were whipped in the 2010 midterm elections and lost their majority by a humiliating margin. And now it looks like we’re repeating the same negative pattern: caving to the very industries that are causing our most pressing problems, like climate change, unaffordable health care and skyrocketing drug prices, just to get a deal of some sort, or worse, to appease large donors. And what both the President and Congress are doing is caving on the American people yet again, and the backlash likely will be the same in the 2022 midterms.

As a specific example, Sirota says that today, the mainstream media conveniently leaves out the money trail driving the negotiations on the Reconciliation bill: “Writing the money behind the Infrastructure bill out of the story of the bill is a huge problem and doesn’t give readers the context they need.”

Maybe that’s why we need independent Substack writers to bring up that very subject.

During this interview, Stelter specifically asks Sirota: “How can we infuse more historical context in today’s news coverage?” Stelter seems to answer his own question when he says: We need “Less of the hysterical minute-by-minute and more of the broader story, here.”

Watch the full segment with Stelter and Sirota:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/10/31/david-sirota-critiques-coverage-of-dc-budget-battles.cnn/video/playlists/reliable-sources-highlights/

I agree that there never seems to be much historical context provided for today’s issues, at least on television news, and Stelter is right that coverage tends to jump from the hottest and latest news story to the next, with hardly a breath in between. That’s why I enjoy reading those sprawling New Yorker pieces because I learn so much from the historical background each provides. And the writing is so good that it just weaves naturally into the story and supports its points without sounding like a history lecture. Not that there’s anything wrong with history lectures, of course.

But it seems that it is mostly independent journalists, like Taibbi, Sirota, Glen Greenwald, and historians like Heather Cox Richardson and others who are unafraid to draw comparisons with the past and show us that we’re repeating the same negative patterns, yet expecting a different result. I get angry, for example, when it looks like our country is repeating the same, unsuccessful response to our nation’s atrocious poverty rate; again focusing on the literal cost of a piece of legislation rather than its long term value; the roots of income inequality; and the history behind the creation of credit scores, pay day loans, and our country’s bankruptcy laws.

Yes, I’m tooting my own horn, here. Admittedly I haven’t done the in-depth historical research that many other writers have done, but I will. And I ask that you join me on this journey to learn from the past, and apply those lessons to solve today’s problems that so many of us believe are worthy of more research, like the economic, racial and environmental inequality that continues to plague the United States.

Speaking of learning from the past…check out this New Yorker article on the lessons to be learned from the 1968 Presidential campaign:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/08/lessons-from-the-election-of-1968?mbid=nl_Magazine%20010818&CNDID=7968747&spMailingID=12673065&spUserID=MTMzMTg1NTY2OTE0S0&spJobID=1320167355&spReportId=MTMyMDE2NzM1NQS2

Here’s an interesting opinion piece from The New York Times that reflects on the power of FDR’s New Deal policies to break up monopolies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/opinion/biden-fdr-antitrust-monopolies.html

And finally for this evening, a fascinating look into The New York Times “1619 Project”:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

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“How many times must a man look upBefore he can see the sky?Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man haveBefore he can hear people cry?Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knowsThat too many people have died?” Blowin’ in the Wind, Bob Dylan

Listen to “His Bobness” sing the full song here.

The words “moral document” have been used plenty of times before to refer to our budget, and most times that use has been focused on how our country allocates funds to help our poorest, versus the money to fund, say, our defense budget. This year, as we finally move to upgrade our traditional infrastructure, and fund “human infrastructure” by expanding our paltry social safety net to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world, and finally tackling climate change, it is crucial that we view these bills and the overall budget as a reflection of our country’s moral values. Remember those?

When I use the word “moral” I don’t necessarily mean values derived from organized religion, because I don’t believe you have to practice a religion to have a moral compass, and of course, our country has no central religious tenets. But I certainly welcome any derivation of values inserted into the budget making process.

In fact, it has been many of our country’s religious leaders who have most strongly advocated for more government intervention and help for the poor; in recent memory, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. announced his Poor People’s Campaign, in late 1967 at a staff retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

“…to plan for an initial group of 2,000 poor people to descend on Washington, D.C., southern states and northern cities to meet with government officials to demand jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children designed to improve their self-image and self-esteem” (King, 29 November 1967). 

A half century later, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, a minister and civil rights leader and the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a theologian, united to resurrect Dr. King’s Poor people’s campaign:

“They are aiming to redefine what constitutes a “moral agenda” in politics. Many on the right frame it in narrow terms of opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. By contrast, the poor people’s campaign’s sprawling agenda includes issues like wages, health care, immigrant rights, gay and transgender rights, criminal justice reform, and clean water and air.”

While most elected officials seem to barely acknowledge these protests, it doesn’t hurt to take a glimpse at who some of our legislators do pay attention to—and it is exactly who you think and why—just follow the money trail:

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has accepted over $400,000 in campaign donations in the last quarter from the fossil fuel industry, although not from coal, but from the oil and natural gas industries. And he is adamantly opposed to the provisions of the Reconcilation Bill which would create and incentivize the Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) to phase out the use of fossil fuels. At the moment, it looks like this program has been cut from the bill altogether, on Manchin’s insistence.

And Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refuses to allow any tax increases on wealthy individuals or wildly successful corporations to help pay for the expanded safety net and climate change programs in the Reconciliation Bill. One of the key measures pushed by progressives and originally included in this bill is allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and other measures to lower the price of prescription drugs. Predictably, lobbyists and CEO’s of the pharmaceutical industry have unleashed hundreds of lobbyists to fight this provision because, well, why would they want lower drug prices?

Her Senate campaign also had prolific fundraising numbers the last two quarters, even though she, like Manchin, is not up for re-election until 2024. Sinema received a generous $27,800 from pharmaceutical company PACs and thousands more from Pharma CEO’s.

I’m singling out Senators Manchin and Sinema because they are the only two Democratic senators insisting on slashing the original $3.5 billion budget package as much as they can wrangle, and their slashing seems to correlate with the campaign donations they each receive. The other 48 democratic Senators apparently are on board with the full $3.5 billion spending package. None of the Republican Senators or Republican House members will consider voting for this human infrastructure bill. Even though I can’t prove a direct causation between the donations these particular lawsmakers receive and their votes, it may help to at least know this information, and if the dots can be connected, all the better.

We probably each have our own definition of morality, and examples for ideas or acts that are moral or immoral. And it is subjective. But the United States is at least one of the richest countries on Earth, and yet we allow over 37 million of our people to live in poverty, and nearly 11 million of those are children—that’s one in seven children living in poverty in this country. So is it an immoral act to say, for example, that our budget should not include more money to help the poor in the form of direct aid, housing vouchers, food, and jobless benefits, and to affirmatively state, like Senator Manchin, that extra government funds to eliminate this suffering will lead to “an entitlement society”? And does leaving that money out of our nation’s budget make the budget an immoral document? I agree with those who would say “Yes”.

What’s your opinion on these issues? Let me know in the comment section below.

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Additional Reading:

Economic Policy Institute: Moral Policy = Good Economics

Budget Reconciliation: The Basics

Library of Congress, Federal Budgets: Understanding the Past

“The businessman wants to create something for everyone, which leads to products that are middle of the road,”… It becomes about consensus, and that’s why you rarely see the spark of genius.”

Robert Brunner, Apple’s director of Industrial design from 1989-1996

Sometime in the early 1990’s, I went to a talk hosted by our local Chamber of Commerce, featuring Steve Jobs as the guest speaker. He had been “ousted” as they used to describe it, from the company he founded, Apple Computer, in 1985, and had started a new computer company he called NEXT. I am guessing that the main reason he agreed to speak in Columbus, Ohio, was because our intellectual, foward thinking governor at the time, Richard Celeste, wanted to meet him and wooed him here (and Celeste’s oldest son was working for NEXT at the time). Jobs would not make his triumphant return to Apple until 1997.

I had already been following Jobs for a number of years and was giddy about this opportunity to see and hear him in person. Unfortunately, I don’t remember specifics of what he said during his talk, but I do remember his answer to an audience member’s question. He didn’t stand still behind a lectern or microphone, by the way, he paced back and forth across the stage as he was talking and fielding questions, less like a speaker for a chamber of commerce and more like a current TED talk.

A person in the audience, presumably a business person, asked him “what he did to relax”. Without a second’s hesitation, he answered simply: “I go to Italy”. I remember the audience let out a bit of nervous laughter at his answer—maybe they were thinking, “This guy has so much money he can just take off for Italy any time he wants”.

Jobs saw the need to expand on his answer, and what he said laid out his thinking on design, and what Apple was to become upon his return. He talked about how the beauty and history of Italy, and particularly its art, influenced his thinking on what makes a great product—that’s why he kept returning there again and again. He homed in on the incredible variety of art, visible everywhere in Florence, as inspirational to his thinking. Years later, after his return to Apple, he would use stone from a single quarry outside of Florence for the flooring in every Apple store. And Walter Issacson, who wrote Jobs’ biography based on interviews with him, explained the nature of his impact by saying, and I paraphrase, that Jobs’ direction of Apple hit the intersection of art and technology.

Reading about Apple’s design philosophy and process is a fascinating journey of a quest for superior quality, in both design and function, and how a leader ensures (or maybe demands, in Jobs case) that his or her vision manifests itself in a final product. It seems to me that Steve Jobs had no tolerance for mediocrity, and in fact, sneered at those companies and products he deemed inferior. He once famously said of Microsoft:

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."

While I get a kick out of his dissing Microsoft, it also is instructive in understanding what’s wrong with today’s political process. I am not advocating for a dictator who imposes his or her will on Congress and the citizenry, but this drive to reach a middle-ground consensus with the infrastructure packages, for example, is a drive toward mediocrity. If everyone gets their way in either adding or removing something from these bills, it will be a mediocre mush that in the end, pleases no one and gets very little of significance accomplished. Real leaders would set a strong, clear vision for the direction the country should go, and ensure that vision is implemented in some recognizable form. Is that what is happening as we speak with the infrastructure bill negotiations?

Read through these various pieces that compare and contrast how a creative culture, like Apple, develops and executes a design plan resulting in a superior product, and the current negotiation process of the infrastructure bills. Let me know if you think there’s a connection.

— A 2014 article from Fast Company that describes “Apple University” and the company’s design philosophy.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3034240/how-apple-uses-picasso-to-teach-employees-about-product-design

— A fascinating editorial from Artsy focusing on the lessons from Picasso’s bulls and their relation to Apple’s design process. Includes a neat slide show of the evolution of the Macintosh computer.

“You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.” Jony Ives, Apple’s lead industrial designer in 2007.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-picassos-drawings-bulls-inspired-apples-famously-simple-designs

— A Q&A by the Wharton School of Business with a former principal engineer for Apple, who describes a design process centered on empathy.

“Creative selection refers to this Darwinian process: You start with something and, hopefully, the end point is going to be a great product even if the beginnings were humble.”

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-an-insider-reveals-about-apples-design-process/

On to the negotiation of the infrastructure bills:

— An analysis published just today in The Guardian that seems to declare Senator Sanders a winner in this deal. But does the following quote sound like compromise on these bills will result in the “spark of genius” that our country so desparately needs right now?

“The senators have competing world views. Whereas Sanders believes the bill has the potential to be “one of the most important pieces of legislation since the New Deal”, Manchin has warned that the scale of it risks, “changing our whole society to an entitlement mentality”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/24/bernie-sanders-democrats-biden-spending-bill

— And finally for this evening… here we go again with a focus on the cost of the infrastructure plans rather than their true value. This CNN summary from just three days ago details what is most likely in and what’s out in the infrastructure bill negotiations. Again, this type of negotiation does not bode well to create a transformative, “insanely great”, infrastructure bill, just more mediocrity by consensus.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/12/politics/house-reconciliation-package-explainer/index.html

I’d love to hear your comments on this! Who uses Apple products and why? What do you think of the negotiation process on the Infrastructure Bills? Let me know in the comments below.

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“Universal basic income is not a solution in search of a problem - it is the obvious solution that has been in front of us for years. It only requires us to have the vision, empathy and courage to adopt it for the American people before it is too late.” Andrew Yang

“Vision, empathy and courage” are three hefty words when applied to our government, and perhaps their implementation involves more heavy lifting than our elected officials are willing to do. But their meaning embraces what values our government should have, and should use, to create programs to help its people thrive. If our country can summon a vision of our collective long-term future, demonstrate empathy in our reason for governing, and have the courage to stake out policies that shift the political winds rather than follow them, we might be able to finally unite to embrace programs for the common good.

But it is crucial to understand the message and the way the message is framed. I noticed that my esteemed fellow Substack writer and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, made a critical point in one of his posts that described how issues can be “framed” for us by the media. He mentioned his recent interview on CNN where he and a former Republican Governor were discussing the negotiations on the infrastructure and reconciliation plans. Reich pointed to the anchor’s first question as an example of framing the discussion in the direction the media wants the commentators and audience to be led: Her opening question was, “The big question is whether Democrats can afford all of this.”

As Reich noted, this opening query immediately framed the issue in terms of cost, and then made it a partisan issue by associating the democrats with the cost of the proposed legislation.

Similarly, most of the information I’ve read discussing both the idea and practical implementation of a Universal Basic Income uses as a justification for the plan the idea that technology and the use of mathematical algorithms will soon replace hundreds of thousands of human workers, and they’re going to need some (perhaps temporary) financial support. I think this “framing” of the need for a Universal Basic Income is way too narrow.

Don’t we all want to have that freedom to dream for a better life, not just for our children and grandchildren, but for us?

First, it is possible that we don’t need to point to a specific rationale to expand our country’s social safety net in that way, although offering logical reasons for spending taxpayer money doesn’t hurt. Even Andrew Yang, who made UBI a cornerstone of his presidential and New York mayoral campaigns used the robot and automation warnings as at least one reason to push for what he dubbed a “Freedom Dividend”. As Yang stated: “…a nationwide Universal Basic Income program would be the largest, most fundamental shift in modern history, and one that would finally unlock the potential of the American people."

What I love about this characterization is the importance placed on “unlocking the potential of the American people.” It seems that most elected officials, who perhaps have never had to scrape by to support themselves, to pay basic bills, to eat, don’t understand that even a small, additional monthly check can be freeing—lifting the burden of worry and shame from the backs of those struggling, so they might have a bit of energy left at the end of the day to perhaps dream, and then actually plan to turn those dreams into their future reality. Don’t we all want to have that freedom to dream for a better life, not just for our children and grandchildren, but for us? That’s what a UBI would do for millions of Americans—it would indeed be a freedom dividend.

Alaska’s nearly 40 year UBI program, funded by money from the oil and gas industry and dispersed in yearly checks to every resident, has been widely hailed as successful. And no, it hasn’t created a slacker state: recent studies have found that it has not discouraged Alaska’s population from working. In fact, there has been a 17% increase in part-time employment in the state, and it has also cut poverty levels.

Even the rock star French economist, Thomas Piketty, uses the automation rationale to push for EDI, but in his published tomes that discuss this issue, he also puts the need for a minimum guaranteed income into a detailed global and historical perspective, and is only one of many sweeping changes he proposes to remedy inequality.

The truth is that a guaranteed basic income is only one way to ease the raging economic inequality in out country, but by many accounts, it is a fair and effective way, and has the ability to virtually wipe out poverty if implemented along with subsidized food and housing programs for the elderly and disabled and for those who otherwise can’t work a full-time job.

“Povery is not a lack of character, poverty is a lack of cash.”

Interestingly, this wildly popular TED talk by the Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, is one of the few sources that proposes UBI, but does not also justify its need based on the idea that workers will lose their jobs to technology. Bregman has concluded, based on years of research, that a Universal Basic Income is simply the right thing to do. People are poor because of a lack of cash, not from a lack of intelligence or gumption, or even a “personality defect” as Margaret Thatcher once famously claimed. And the only solution that will help the poor is to give them cash in the form of a guaranteed income… and that is what will eliminate poverty. As Bregman emphasized, “Povery is not a lack of character, poverty is a lack of cash.”

Watch this fascinating talk here:

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/12/577436742/rutger-bregman-is-a-universal-basic-income-the-answer-to-ending-poverty

Maybe we can simply justify the need for UBI in our country because it is the right thing to do. As I mentioned in my first post, science has documented that communities of trees can exist, at least for awhile, as individual plantings, but will never thrive without a comprehensive system of support provided for all members of the community. In old-growth forests, this support system is an underground web of fungi providing nutrition and communication to even the weakest members of its community. Likewise, human communities can exist, but never thrive without a broad and deep support system that reaches everyone, including our most vulnerable.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Should we have a UBI? If we do, can we come close to eliminating poverty?

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