Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
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Protesters with the Congress of Essential Workers demonstrate outside Jeff Bezos’s mansion in Washington on August 27.
First Response
A decade ago, after the financial crisis, Stephen Lerner developed a theory about power and how to seize it. This wasn’t out of character for him. Lerner, now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, was the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign, SEIU’s successful campaign, despite beatings and repression, to win organizing for some of the most powerless people in our society.
Lerner’s idea after the financial crisis was similar to his idea to organize janitors: make power uncomfortable. “I said, ‘As long as the stock market goes up, nothing will change,’” Lerner tells me in an interview. “We have to confront the super-rich. I remember being in these huge fights, [critics] said it was so unfair and terrible and traumatizing. I thought, what do you think it’s like when a sheriff comes up and puts your stuff onto the street?”
You can repeat those lines without further context, and any reader would assume you were talking about the present day, not 2009 and 2010. And actually, things are worse. The rich took a hit in the financial crisis, only to clean up afterwards. We went right to the clean-up this time. The enormous support from the Federal Reserve has created a K-shaped recovery, with the wealthy pulling away from everyone else.
Stocks are up. Real estate is way up. Bidet sales are up. This is at a time of mass evictions, mass unemployment, mass use of food banks. We have a bubble economy, only I’m not talking about a financial bubble, I mean the bubble like what the NBA is using down in Orlando. A thin slice of Americans at the top are completely unaffected by this crisis, and they’ve isolated themselves from the rest of the country.
Read all of our Unsanitized reports
Lerner has gone back to his playbook when considering what to do about this. “We need to start to bring the crisis to their doorstep,” he says. No other way, he reasons, will allow the broad mass of the public to get the same kind of support from their government that the ultra-rich have gotten. In other words, you have to pierce the bubble.
The strategy has many parts to it. First, Lerner and his allies at various community organizations have been documenting corporate landlord profits and contrasting that with the precarity of renters, blocking housing courts, and building eviction defense units to physically block police from throwing out tenants. (The national organizing on September 1 was part of this.) Second, following on actions from the post-financial crisis years, they have taken car caravans to Greenwich, Connecticut and the Hamptons, marching through the streets and directly in front of the homes of rich people, sometimes with pitchforks, demanding progressive taxation to fill the severe budget shortfalls brought on by the pandemic, and detailing how those inside the mansions make their money. And they have a capital strategy, pressuring pension funds to divest from the type of investments like hedge funds and private equity, which bolster the ultra-rich.
Lerner highlighted hedge fund founder Daniel Kamensky, arrested for defrauding creditors of the department store chain Neiman Marcus. He mentioned Seth Klarman, the never Trump investor who won a $3 billion bet on insurance claims stemming from PG&E’s settlement over wildfires in 2018. “They make money off of money, and contribute nothing to the economy,” Lerner says. There is a plausible case to be made that the funding gap for states is equivalent to the boost in the fortunes of a fraction of the top 1 percent during the pandemic.
On top of all of these actions, there are union contract expirations involving five million workers over the next year and a half. At Bargaining for the Common Good, which Lerner is involved with, there’s a map of where these contract expirations are happening across the country. The concept behind Bargaining for the Common Good is to use the union negotiation process not just to win better terms for members, but to improve communities and expand benefits for everyone.
The confluence of union contracts and pandemic pain could create the kindling, Lerner believes, for a movement, overlapping with the budget cycle in the states, to create a more equitable set of solutions, to tax the rich, to rein in the K-shaped recovery. Working with the unhoused and evicted is a window into organizing the mass of unemployed, which has always been a difficult project given the atomized nature of unemployment. The goal is to forge a movement of jobless people, a modern antecedent to Coxey’s Army after the Panic of 1893.
There’s no single event here, just an ongoing building of power. “This is now the work of the day,” Lerner says. “We want to put the blame on those profiting in the pandemic. Our side needs to get comfortable with going where the bad guys are. The point of direct action is that it’s direct.”
Odds and Sods
Today I have a piece up about a quiet impediment to economic recovery. Small businesses, particularly restaurants, thought that when cities and states shut them down, they would be able to tap their business interruption insurance for protection. After all, their business was interrupted. But about a decade ago, insurance companies had quietly slipped exclusions for pandemics into the standard policies, after H1N1 caused some payouts related to lockdowns in Asia. So as of July, 184,000 businesses have filed business interruption insurance claims, and only 1,000 have been paid out. It’s a significant problem and the government should step in with a solution. Read the story here.
I got to talk to the legendary Robert Scheer about my book Monopolized for his KCRW podcast. Listen here.
Also I’m always happy to hear your tips and comments, send them to me via email.
Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair
169. Also I should start listing the days since Nancy Pelosi told Jake Tapper to “Just calm down… we will have state and local [fiscal aid] and we will have it in a significant way.” Been 137 days since that remark, with no state and local aid on the horizon. Will an error ever be admitted here?
Today I Learned
- Bad news for Unsanitized, people don’t want to hear about coronavirus anymore, or at least they don’t engage with stories about it on social media. (Axios)
- Smithfield Foods gets the lowest possible fine from OSHA for putting workers at risk from the virus. (SFGate)
- Florida reopening bars, as we go down the same path to another wave. (Politico)
- Nebraska reopening everything. (Associated Press)
- How a century-old rule about government cheese deprived low-income seniors of free food under COVID. (Los Angeles Times)
- Here’s a new one, a merger breakup (between Louis Vuitton’s parent company and Tiffany’s) because the company being purchased mismanaged the business during the pandemic. (Wall Street Journal)
- The public health damage from COVID has also come from people afraid to get routine preventive care. (New York Times)
- How pandemic-forced distance learning is hurting kids’ bodies ergonomically. (Washington Post)
