Banks and the Rich

 

Putting the bank bailout in context

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-undeserving-rich?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=365422&post_id=108471930&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

The undeserving rich Putting the bank bailout in context robertreich.substack.com

Wealth and Power

<h1>Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”</h1>

<p>by Andy Kroll and Andrea Bernstein, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented</p><p><em>ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

A few months ago, Leonard Leo laid out his next audacious project.</p><p>Ever since the longtime Federalist Society leader helped create a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, and then received more than a billion dollars from a wealthy Chicago business owner to disburse to conservative causes, Leo’s next moves had been the subject of speculation.</p>

<p>Now, Leo declared in a slick but private video to potential donors, he planned to “crush liberal dominance” across American life. The country was plagued by “woke-ism” in corporations and education, “one-sided journalism” and “entertainment that’s really corrupting our youth,” said Leo amid snippets of cheery music and shots of sunsets and American flags.</p>

<p>Sitting tucked into a couch, with wire-rimmed glasses and hair gone to gray, Leo conveyed his inspiration and intentions: “I just said to myself, ‘Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?’”</p><p>Leo revealed his latest battle plan in the previously unreported video for the Teneo Network, a little-known group he called “a tremendously important resource for the future of our country.”</p>

<p>Teneo is building what Leo called in the video “networks of conservatives that can roll back” liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, among authors and academics, with pro athletes and Hollywood producers. A Federalist Society for everything.</p>

<p>Despite its linchpin role in Leo’s plans, Teneo (which is not the <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/teneo-final-221807">similarly named consulting firm</a> associated with former officials in the Bill Clinton administration) has kept a low public profile. It's <a href="https://www.teneonetwork.com/">one-page website</a> includes bland slogans — “Timeless ideas. Fresh approach” — and scant details. Its co-founder described Teneo as “private and confidential” in one presentation, and the group doesn’t disclose the vast majority of its members or its funders.</p>

<p>But ProPublica and Documented have obtained more than 50 hours of internal Teneo videos and hundreds of pages of documents that reveal the organization’s ambitious agenda, influential membership and burgeoning clout. We have also interviewed Teneo members and people familiar with the group’s activities. The videos, documents and interviews provide an unfiltered look at the lens through which the group views the power of the left — and how it plans to combat it.</p>

<p>In response to questions for this story, Leo said in a statement: “Teneo’s young membership proves that the conservative movement is poised to be even more talented, driven, and successful in the future. This is a group that knows how to build winning teams.”</p>

<p>The records show Teneo’s members have included a host of prominent names from the conservative vanguard, including such elected officials as U.S. Sens. <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/V000137-jd-vance">J.D. Vance</a> of Ohio and Missouri’s <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/H001089-joshua-hawley">Josh Hawley</a>, a co-founder of the group. Other members have included Rep. <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/S001196-elise-stefanik">Elise Stefanik</a> of New York, now the fourth-ranking House Republican, as well as Nebraska’s attorney general and Virginia’s solicitor general. 

Three senior aides to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, are members. Another is the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093566982/florida-mask-mandate-judge-kathryn-mizelle">federal judge who struck down</a> a Biden administration mask mandate. The heads of the Republican Attorneys General Association, Republican State Leadership Committee and Turning Point USA — all key cogs in the world of national conservative politics — have been listed as Teneo members.</p>

<p>Conservative media figures like Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire, several pro athletes and dozens of executives and senior figures in the worlds of finance, energy and beyond have also been members.</p><p>Leo joined Teneo’s board of directors as chairman in 2021 and has since become a driving force.</p><p>Teneo co-founder Evan Baehr, a tech entrepreneur and veteran of conservative activism, said in a 2019 video for new members that Teneo had “many, many, many dozens” of members working in the Trump administration, including in the White House, State Department, Justice Department and Pentagon. “They’re everywhere.”</p><p>The goal, Baehr said in another video, was “a world in which Teneans serve in the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”</p>

The Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Didn’t Need to Happen

The Silicon Valley Bank Bailout Didn’t Need to Happen: The debate over protecting all deposits in a blink looks past the incompetence that got us here.

Private equity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html?auth=login-email&login=email

Climate Reality - Training

 

Welcome to the March 2023 edition of Reality Now.   With spring right around the corner, we can’t help but feel so proud of what we’ve achieved already this winter. Alongside thousands of grassroots activists, we’ve called for stronger emission standards, supported environmental justice legislation, and demanded accountability from global finance institutions.     And our momentum is continuing to build!     In just a couple of weeks, we’ll launch our free Power Up Training: From Acts to Action. Let's Leverage the IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for climate action now! Former Vice President Al Gore and an all-star lineup of government leaders (including Senior White House Advisors John Podesta and Mitch Landrieu!) and experts will lead attendees in learning how to take advantage of new climate laws. Join us to learn how you can bring clean energy to your home and community, create good paying jobs, and advance environmental justice.

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/

Go to Climate Reality Now.  

Crypto Bank Bailouts _ Krugman

Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; images by Igor Vershinsky and Ed Freeman/Getty Images

Is there moral hazard if no one was paying attention?

By Paul Krugman Opinion Columnist

So the Feds stepped in to protect all deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, even though the law says that deposits only up to $250,000 are insured and even though there was a pretty good case that allowing big depositors to take a haircut wouldn’t have created a systemic crisis. S.V.B. was pretty sui generis, far more exposed both to interest risk and to potential runs than any other significant bank, so even some losses for larger depositors may not have caused much contagion.

Still, I understand the logic: If I were a policymaker, I’d be reluctant to let S.V.B. fail, merely because while it probably wouldn’t have caused a wider crisis, one can’t be completely certain and the risks of erring in doing too much were far smaller than the risks of doing too little.

That said, there are good reasons to feel uncomfortable about this bailout. And yes, it was a bailout. The fact that the funds will come from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — which will make up any losses with increased fees on banks — rather than directly from the Treasury doesn’t change the reality that the government came in to rescue depositors who had no legal right to demand such a rescue.

Furthermore, having to rescue this particular bank and this particular group of depositors is infuriating: Just a few years ago, S.V.B. was one of the midsize banks that lobbied successfully for the removal of regulations that might have prevented this disaster, and the tech sector is famously full of libertarians who like to denounce big government right up to the minute they themselves needed government aid.

But both the money and the unfairness are really secondary concerns. The bigger question is whether, by saving big depositors from their own fecklessness, policymakers have encouraged future bad behavior. In particular, businesses that placed large sums with S.V.B. without asking whether the bank was sound are paying no price (aside from a few days of anxiety). Will this lead to more irresponsible behavior? That is, has the S.V.B. bailout created moral hazard?

Moral hazard is a familiar concept in the economics of insurance: When people are guaranteed compensation for losses, they have no incentive to act prudently and in some cases may engage in deliberate acts of destruction. During the 1970s, when New York, in general, was at a low point and property values were depressed, the Bronx was wracked by fires, at least some of which may have been deliberately set by landlords who expected to receive more from insurers than their buildings were worth.

In banking, insuring deposits means that depositors have no reason to concern themselves with how the banks are using their money. This in turn creates an incentive for banks to engage in bad behavior, such as making highly risky but high-yielding loans. If the loans pay off, the bank makes a lot of money; if they don’t, the owners just walk away. Heads, they win; tails, the taxpayers lose.

This isn’t a hypothetical case; it’s pretty much what happened during the S.&L. crisis of the 1980s, when savings and loan associations, especially but not only in Texas, effectively gambled on a huge scale with other people’s money. When the bets went bad, taxpayers had to compensate depositors, with the total cost amounting to as much as $124 billion — which, as an equivalent share of gross domestic product, would be something like $500 billion today.

The thing is, it’s not news that guaranteeing depositors creates moral hazard. That moral hazard is one of the reasons banks are regulated — required to keep a fair bit of cash on hand, limited in the kind of risks they can take, required to have assets that exceed their deposits by a significant amount (a.k.a. capital requirements). This last requirement is intended not just to provide a cushion against possible losses but also to give bank owners skin in the game, an incentive to avoid risking depositors’ funds, since they will have to bear many of the losses, via their capital, if they lose money.

The savings and loan crisis had a lot to do with the very bad decision by Congress to relax regulations on those associations, which were in financial trouble as a result of high interest rates. There are obvious parallels to the crisis at Silicon Valley Bank, which also hit a wall because of rising interest rates and was able to take such big risks in part because the Trump administration and Congress had relaxed regulations on midsize banks.

But here’s the thing: The vast bulk of deposits at S.V.B. weren’t insured, because deposit insurance is capped at $250,000. Depositors who had given the bank more than that didn’t fail to do due diligence on the bank’s risky strategy because they thought that the government would bail them out; everyone knows about the F.D.I.C. insurance limit, after all.

They failed to do due diligence because, well, it never occurred to them that bankers who seemed so solid, so sympatico with the whole venture capital ethos, actually had no idea what to do with the money placed in their care.

Now, you could argue that S.V.B.’s depositors felt safe because they somewhat cynically believed that they would be bailed out if things went bad even if they weren’t entitled to any help — which is exactly what just happened. And if you believe that argument, the feds, by making all depositors whole, have confirmed that belief, creating more moral hazard.

The logic of this view is impeccable. And I don’t believe it for a minute, because it gives depositors too much credit.

I don’t believe that S.V.B.’s depositors were making careful, rational calculations about risks and likely policy responses, because I don’t believe that they understood how banking works in the first place. For heaven’s sake, some of S.V.B.’s biggest clients were in crypto. Need we say more?

And just in general, asking investors — not just small investors, who are formally insured, but even businesses with millions or hundreds of millions in the bank — to evaluate the soundness of the banks where they park their funds is expecting too much from people who are, after all, trying to run their own businesses.

The lesson I would take from S.V.B. is that banks need to be strongly regulated whether or not their deposits are insured. The bailout won’t change that fact, and following that wisdom should prevent more bailouts.

And you know who would have agreed? Adam Smith, who in “The Wealth of Nations” called for bank regulation, which he compared to the requirement that urban buildings have walls that limit the spread of fire. Wouldn’t we all, even the ultrarich and large companies, be happier if we didn’t have to worry about our banks going down in flames? And, Elizabeth Warrens view. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/opinion/elizabeth-warren-silicon-valley-bank.html

 

Farmworkers Union Seeks A California Revival

antiracismdsa: Farmworkers Union Seeks A California Revival:       Farmworkers Union, a ’60s Liberal Icon, Seeks a California Revival Decades after Cesar Chavez made the union a power, it has lost much...

Why Poverty Exists in the U.S.

 

Why Poverty Persists in America

 

A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.

 

By Matthew Desmond

The New York Times

 

March 9, 2023 - In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.

 

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement — just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government’s poverty line, 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.

 

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.

 

The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most.

 

Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn’t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that “access to certain consumer goods,” like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that “the poor are not quite so poor after all.”

 

No, it doesn’t. You can’t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn’t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life’s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn’t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: “It is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.”

 

Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.

Bankers and Finance Seek a Bail Out

While Austerity is urged for you and I. ( see prior post on Social Security)s.

The Well Off seek a bank bail out for themselves.

Dayen on TAP

The Fed-Induced Bank Wobble

Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse is a function of the Fed rate spike, and will surely trigger calls for its well-heeled tech and venture capital clients to get a bailout.

On Thursday, officials at Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th-largest, were urging clients to "stay calm" after a run of depositor withdrawals amid loud calls from venture capital firms (including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund) for companies to move their money. On Friday, the bank collapsed, taken into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It was the first FDIC-led bank failure in the U.S. since late 2020, but a significant one, with approximately $175 billion in customer deposits, making it the second-largest bank collapse in U.S. history, rivaled only by Washington Mutual in 2008. The vast majority of them are business accounts, mostly from tech and bioscience startups, as well as personal accounts for founders and executives of those companies. While the typical bank has something between 40 and 60 percent of assets above the $250,000 limit for FDIC insurance, at SVB it was an incredible 93 percent, meaning that over $150 billion is not government-guaranteed. SVB was mostly invested in long-term government bonds, which are normally pretty safe. (They also had a large batch of those mortgage-backed securities, which you might remember from 2008.) The bank really succumbed to the wild swings in the tech industry, which soared in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic but has plummeted recently, as rising Federal Reserve interest rates put cheap money out of reach. SVB grew massively in 2020 and 2021, but with tech startups suffering, its customers pulled their money, and because of the interest rate spike, those government bonds were worth less. When SVB conducted a fire sale of some of those assets to cover the depositor losses, it came up $2 billion short. In total, the bank was underwater by around $15 billion, according to the Financial Times. The bank run from the startup world forced the realization of some of those losses. There are a couple of important lessons here. First and foremost, the Fed’s rapid pivot on interest rates couldn’t help but spill over into the broader economy. As Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, who sees this as just the beginning, explained, banks had no time to adjust to the rate changes, which caused mismatches between the expected and real value of their assets. Indeed, stock in First Republic Bank, a regional lender in California and elsewhere, plunged 50 percent in Friday trading. "The Fed’s actions to fight increasing inflation will need to be materially adjusted, which it should be anyway because inflation is driven by many factors that are beyond the Fed’s control," Kelleher said. "Causing financial instability and a recession (of any depth and length) while missing the mark on inflation should cause a fundamental rethinking of the Fed’s powers, authorities, and role." Second, because the depositors holding the bag at SVB are Very Important People, there’s going to be intense pressure for a bailout. Hedge fund titan Bill Ackman is already calling for one. Larry Summers told Bloomberg that the financial system should be fine, as long as depositors get every penny of their money back, which would be a $150 billion bailout. The character of the depositors as "job creators" will be used to push this narrative, as Atrios points out. We just had a crisis where government stepped in to protect regular people; the job market roared back to life. The employment-population ratio for prime-age workers passed the pre-pandemic peak in today’s jobs report in just three years. In the 2008 crisis, predicated on bailing out banks and the rich, it took 12 years to hit that milestone. Let that be a warning as we brace for the fallout.

~ DAVID DAYEN Follow David Dayen on Twitter

 

Austerity Policy and Social Security

 Republicans in the House of Representatives are preparing a vote on the Orwellian-ly named Fair Tax Act, which would eliminate Social Security and Medicare’s dedicated funding, abolish the IRS, and levy a 30% sales tax on everything. 

This proposal is bad bad bad bad bad. Let me count the ways:

• Replacing federal income, corporate, and property taxes shifts the tax burden away from the wealthy to people who actually have to spend all of their money―especially seniors. With rising prices all over, the last thing seniors need is to pay an extra 30% on everything they buy.

• Abolishing Social Security and Medicare’s dedicated funding would bring us one step closer to Wall Street’s goal of destroying Social Security and Medicare. As FDR said of the dedicated funding: “We put those pay roll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

• The proposal calls on the Social Security Administration to figure out how much income it would have collected from payroll contributions, but provides the Social Security Administration no additional funding to effectively replace the IRS as a clearing-house of employment and wage data.

This bill is an attack on our Social Security system and a huge handout to millionaires and billionaires. It’s just the latest stage of the Republican war on seniors.

Sign now: Tell Congress to REJECT the so-called Fair Tax Act and protect Social Security!

Fox News and the election

 ‘The Whole Thing Seems Insane’: New Documents on Fox and the Election

Messages and depositions from stars like Tucker Carlson revealed serious misgivings about claims of fraud even as some hosts told millions of viewers a very differen

Fox News headquarters in New York. The latest release of documents in a defamation suit shed more light on the misgivings that many inside the network shared about claims of election fraud. Credit...Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson

March 7, 2023Updated 8:57 p.m. ET

6 MIN READ

It had been more than a week since the news networks projected that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would become the next president. And Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were at a loss about what to say on the air.

“What are we all going to do tmrw night?” Ms. Ingraham, the host of the 10 p.m. show on Fox News, asked her colleagues in a text message chain on Nov. 16, 2020.

Mr. Carlson responded that he planned to devote a significant chunk of his program to a little-known voting technology company that had become a target of Trump supporters who suspected the election had been rigged: Dominion Voting Systems.

“Haven’t said a word about it so far,” Mr. Carlson said, acknowledging that the conspiracy theories about Dominion’s purported role in a fictitious plot to siphon away votes from President Donald J. Trump were making him uneasy.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/media/fox-dominion-2020-election.html?\

 

Republican Votes Helped Create the National Debt

  

 

 

Republican Votes Helped Washington Pile Up Debt

As they escalate a debt-limit standoff, House Republicans blame President Biden’s spending bills for an increase in deficits. Voting records show otherwise.

Republicans, who are demanding deep spending cuts in exchange for raising the nation’s borrowing cap, will almost certainly greet that proposal with a familiar refrain: Mr. Biden and his party are to blame for ballooning the debt.

But an analysis of House and Senate voting records, and of fiscal estimates of legislation prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, shows that Republicans bear at least equal blame as Democrats for the biggest drivers of federal debt growth that passed Congress over the last two presidential administrations.

The national debt has grown to $31.4 trillion from just under $6 trillion in 2000, bumping against the statutory limit on federal borrowing. That increase, which spanned the presidential administrations of two Republicans and two Democrats, has been fueled by tax cuts, wars, economic stimulus and the growing costs of retirement and health programs. Since 2017, when Donald J. Trump took the White House, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have joined together to pass a series of spending increases and tax cuts that the budget office projects will add trillions to the debt.

 

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/06/us/politics/federal-debt-republicans-democrats.html?

 

 

We are not a nation divided by ideology, Rev. William Barber

 

Here’s The Ultimate Truth About Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘National Divorce’ Myth   Far too many Americans accept the premise that we are a country divided between red states and blue states.   By The Rev. Dr. William Barber MSNBC   Feb 24, 2023 - One hundred and sixty-three years after the South tried to secede from the Union, starting a war that killed more Americans than all other U.S. wars combined, it is troubling to hear Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene propose a “national divorce” of red states from blue states.    In the wake of Jan. 6, we know that talk of insurrection is more than mere rhetoric for a minority of Americans who’ve been radicalized by the lies of right-wing extremism. But Greene’s call for secession depends on a lie that’s far more widespread than the propaganda of insurrectionists. From leaders who bemoan that we’re “more divided than ever” to political operatives who insist that Democrats simply can’t win in the deep South or the Midwest, far too many Americans accept the premise that we are a country divided between red states and blue states.    This dichotomy is a myth. We are not a nation divided by political ideology. We are, instead, a people who have been pitted against one another by politicians who depend on the poorest among us not showing up to the polls.   We are not a nation divided by political ideology.   Even with record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, 80 million eligible voters did not vote, more than those who backed former President Donald Trump, and only slightly less than those who turned out for President Biden. Lower-income voters were three times more likely to sit out the election than higher-income voters.   Maps that show “red” counties and “blue” counties are representations of election results that have important implications for our government’s capacity to pass legislation that would benefit the American people. But we know from survey data and experience that those maps do not represent most Americans. They are a myth in the truest sense — a story told to us in order to reinforce the values of the storytellers.    Why a national divorce wouldn't work out well for red states   The political strategy we are seeing from Greene to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' war on "wokeness" is not simply an effort to imitate Donald Trump. It is the Southern strategy, whose origins trace back to the post-Civil War South.    From 1865 until the 1890s, trans-racial fusion movements were able to exercise political power in parts of the South. Scared, the white establishment fought back. The tactic of “positive polarization” was identified by Richard Nixon’s campaign strategists and has been used since 1980 by those who wanted to roll back voting rights, labor rights, and living wages while increasing corporate power. These are the values the myth of red states versus blue states reinforces. The story of our division is told to persuade us that things could not be otherwise.    Monied interests in the United States have long understood that their power depends on maintaining division in public life.   For the past five years, the Poor People’s Campaign — which both of us have been part of — connected with poor and low-wage people in every U.S. state, listening to the issues that matter most to them. Whether we have been among white millennials who are unhoused in Aberdeen, Black folks struggling to survive in Alabama, Native Americans fighting for their lands in Arizona, or Latinos facing evictions in Southern California, poor and low-wage people in this country are clear about the burdens they face. The cost of housing, transportation, education and health care have soared while wages have stagnated for most Americans.    This is as true in counties that elect Democrats as it is in those represented by Republicans. In a national audit we published in 2018, we found that there wasn’t a single county in the country where someone working full time at minimum wage could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Poor and low-wage people are not divided on this basic fact: It’s gotten harder to get by for most folks in America.    The vast majority of Americans not only agree on the problem, but also on some basic solutions. In survey after survey, most Americans support raising the minimum wage and making sure everyone has access to health care, a safe place to live and quality public education. In the 2022 midterms, ballot measures to raise the minimum wage passed not just in the District of Columbia, where a majority of voters elected Democrats, but in Nebraska, where most voters elected Republicans.    So if we are not as divided as the “red state/blue state” myth would have us believe, how do we explain the extreme polarization in American politics? The short answer is that monied interests in the United States have long understood that their power depends on maintaining division in public life. This is at the root of the long story of race in America, as well as the overlapping anti-immigrant narratives, culture wars and voter suppression tactics. When the Poor People's Campaign surveyed poor and low-income eligible voters to ask why they often do not participate in elections, the No. 1 answer was that they do not hear politicians campaigning on issues that would benefit them. Almost every other reason is some barrier of timing, location or documentation that makes casting their vote one more thing they don’t have time to do.    Even still, we have watched poor and low-income people invest thousands of hours to organize themselves and their neighbors, increasing turnout in the 2020 and 2022 elections in key areas that made a difference in terms of federal policy. Though the impact was only temporary, the legislation that Congress passed and President Biden signed in 2021 did more to reduce poverty in America than anything we’ve witnessed in over 50 years. We did not do that because we were a nation “more divided than ever” during the worst pandemic in a century. We did it because poor and low-income people stood together with people of conscience and produced an electoral majority that passed some of the things most Americans agree would be best for all of us. This recent history makes clear that we don’t need a divorce; we need, instead, to fire the home-wreckers who aren’t representing our interests and reconstruct an America that works for all of us.    The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale University.  ...Read More