The untold story of why the American Rescue Plan is SO damn progressive + a tribute to the welfare rights movement
+ a workshop on building power through policy + Lula returns + Kobe Bryant + AOC
The American Rescue Plan Act that President Biden signed into law on Thursday is a huge victory that progressives should own and celebrate. This chart from the Tax Policy Center dramatically illustrates the sea change in policy from the Trump to the Biden administrations.
As a result of the Rescue Plan, the lowest quintile of American households will get a 20% increase in their incomes, compared to a 0% increase for the top 1%. The bill will reduce child poverty by half, and poverty overall from 12.3% to 8.3%. Beyond the scale and distributional impact of the legislation, the bill includes paradigm shifts in policy – especially the refundable child tax credit, which breaks the pernicious link between work and income that has defined policymaking for the generations. New York Times reporter Jason DeParle rightly called this a “policy revolution.”
A lot of people are mystified about why the bill is so progressive. Paul Krugman wrote
Clearly, something has changed in American politics. To be honest, I’m not sure what provoked this change. Many expected major change under President Barack Obama, elected in the wake of a financial crisis that should have discredited free-market orthodoxy. But although he achieved a lot — especially Obamacare! — there wasn’t a big paradigm shift. But now that shift seems to have arrived.
How did this happen? Today’s issue makes the case that while leadership on the inside played an important role, the ideological earthquakes brought about by the Movement for Black Lives and the Fight for 15 were the critical factors – ones that have been neglected in nearly all the press coverage of the bills so far.
President Biden and his team deserve enormous credit for meeting the moment with a plan at the scale of the problem. In the mid-1990s, Biden was in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. He supported punitive crime, welfare, and immigration bills that were the signature “accomplishments” of the Clinton years. But, just as LBJ abandoned his segregationist past to champion civil rights, President Biden has dropped the baggage of triangulation and dog-whistling he picked up earlier in his career.
Biden’s team is vastly different than Obama’s: Chief of Staff Ron Klain is no Rahm Emmanuel, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is no Tim Geithner. A pathetic Larry Summers, leader of the team that decided to bail out the banks rather than working-class homeowners facing foreclosure in the Obama years, has been reduced to writing petulant and widely ignored op-eds that reinforce his own deserved marginalization. And, less well noticed, there are progressive, creative, effective people – many of them people of color and women – in key positions all over the White House and the agencies. And that didn’t happen by accident – there’s a story begging to be written about the exceptional transition team that established a new model for how to set up a new administration for success.
One exception in the Biden White House may prove the rule: Bruce Reed, Deputy Chief of Staff in the Biden White House, was the architect of Clinton’s horrendous welfare bill, whose basic logic Biden’s American Rescue Plan reverses. Deepak remembers making the case against time limits and work requirements during a fruitless meeting with Reed in the White House in the mid-90s. In 2002, when he headed the corporate-backed Democratic Leadership Council, Reed was himself the target of a protest by hundreds, mostly women of color, angry his stance on welfare. Perhaps Reed has also “evolved” as the times have changed, or perhaps his views are irrelevant in a new era.
Many progressives I’ve talked to have been reluctant to believe that a Biden Presidency could be the vehicle for dramatic change. This is the understandable result of having experienced so much abuse for so long at the hands of neoliberal Democrats. And, to be sure, there are many tests and traps in the months to come – with decisive questions of voting rights, democracy, worker rights, immigration, and the filibuster ahead. But while many progressives might be surprised how progressive Biden has been so far, they should be unafraid to celebrate and appreciate it – and to credit our own role in it, because the shift at the top flows from shifts made on the ground.
Organizers and grassroots movements played a crucial role: progressive electoral organizers and grassroots leaders all over the country moved heaven and earth to deliver a narrow election last fall; visionary Black women led a political revolution in Georgia without which this bill would never have even been considered in the Senate; workers who have been on the move in the Fight for 15 and in other battles all over the country made inequality a front-page issue; tenants organized escalating actions to demand that we “cancel rent”; the Movement for Black Lives redefined the entire terrain of politics; and the movements around Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren propelled left ideas from the fringe to the mainstream. Many more movement progressives are now in Congress, and that too is a marked difference from the Obama years. The center of gravity didn’t move all by itself – organizers and movements moved it. There was a response from Biden and the Democrats because there was an organized call from the country. You can trace a direct line between movement activity and the wins in the bill through two big changes – in Democratic ideology and Democratic politics.
Ideologically, these movements together forced a change in mainstream Democratic thought on race and poverty that have delimited the bounds of policy for decades. Race-baiting welfare and crime tropes have been staples of Democratic Party discourse. You probably remember Hillary Clinton warning about “super-predators” and Bill Clinton promising to “end welfare as we know it,” but reading Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s brilliant From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is a painful reminder of just how often Obama’s discourse employed these same tropes, too.
The Movement for Black Lives has made race-baiting by Democrats much harder now. The mainstreaming of discussion of “white supremacy” and “structural racism” is a tectonic change in the discourse. Simultaneously, the Fight for 15 made it much harder for politicians to make a “culture of poverty” argument that blames poor people for their own poverty. This vibrant workers’ movement has made rampant exploitation and abuse in the low-wage economy plain to workers and the country. We tend to associate ideological revolutions with policy papers, think tanks, and media—and they are important. But social movements play a more crucial role in defining what ideas can be thought and expressed in politics. The Movement for Black Lives and Fight for 15 laid the predicate for Biden’s extraordinary bill. Democrats can no longer easily deploy tropes of “personal responsibility” and “colorblindness” that blame poor people for poverty and elide the role of racism and plutocracy in creating poverty.
But further gains will likely depend on sustained and escalating movement activity. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor discusses the victories won by the Black freedom struggle in the 1960s—including the massive expansion of the welfare state—and notes that “this demand was only enforceable when the movement was in the streets. As the movement receded in the 1970s and a bipartisan attack on the welfare state gained traction, the mantras of the ‘culture of poverty’ and ‘personal responsibility’ reemerged as popular explanations for Black deprivation.” The extent to which Democrats continue to deliver big results for working-class people, therefore, will have less to do with machinations in the Beltway and more to do with continued movement on the streets.
Politically, the fact that Sanders and Warren received a majority of support in the early Democratic primaries showed the electoral potency of redistributionist politics among a broad swath of the party’s voters. It is also possible that the election results, in a paradoxical way, have rewritten the Democratic policy playbook, which has historically been to rely on Black voters and other voters of color to save them at election time while catering to white swing voters in policymaking. For upscale suburban voters, Biden is delivering what they most want: competence and civility. Biden is not only not Trump – he is modeling the kind of decent, effective government that these multiple crises demand. But in order to keep the other crucial part of the Democratic coalition, working-class people of color, Democrats may have finally realized that just invoking fear of Trump and the Republicans isn’t enough. This appeal to fear obviously failed in 2016 (for reasons we discussed in the last issue of The Platypus), and there were some sobering disappointments among voters of color in 2020, too. But Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff showed a different path for Democrats to win allegiance among working-class voters of color: promise a tangible, specific result in the form of a $2000 check, and then fight like hell to deliver it. Based on historic experience, it’s hard to say with any confidence that the Democratic Party will continue to center working-class communities of color in policymaking. But something new is afoot, and the movement and political dynamics underneath will not likely go away anytime soon—especially if workers and people of color are emboldened by their victories to push for even more.
The rescue bill certainly has flaws, including cruel exclusions of many immigrants and the $15 per hour minimum wage. Much more is needed, particularly policy changes that redistribute power as well as income downwards. Those changes will be far harder to win than the rescue act because they will directly challenge corporate power and animate far more opposition, including from some Democrats.
FDR’s improvised relief programs began as temporary ones, just like the programs in the American Rescue Plan. We will have to fight to make the refundable child tax credit and other changes permanent. But before cataloging all that must be done in the future —and there is a lot—it is crucial that movement activists savor an extraordinary victory. There’s so much good in the bill—from expanded childcare, housing, healthcare, food assistance, and Unemployment Insurance to five billion dollars for Black farmers harmed by longstanding discrimination by the federal government.
It’s important that progressives not reenact our usual script of betrayal (appropriate in previous periods, to be sure) or reflexively adopt a stance of powerlessness. Elites, like the narcissist in Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain,” always believe that policy change comes about because of what they did—but we don’t have to sing that tune. Our interpretation matters because the indispensable condition for further change is the belief by everyday people and movement activists that they can have an impact. This bill is evidence of that impact, laying in plain unobstructed view. We must remember to tell the story that way. We hope that this victory inspires even more organizing outside the Beltway, to let people know about the benefits they have won, to help them claim them, and to fight for them to become bigger and permanent.
The Welfare Rights Movement: An Appreciation
There is an older lineage of movement that deserves much more credit than it gets. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), led by Black women, championed the idea of a guaranteed annual income and ending the connection between work and benefits 50 years ago. Strangely neglected today by progressives today, it’s moving to see NWRO’s vision become the law of the land in the form of the refundable child tax credit. NWRO President Johnnie Tillmon wrote a classic article in Ms. Magazine, “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” that I urge you to read. It is a compelling social vision that begins
I'm a woman. I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things – poor, black, fat, female, middle-aged, on welfare – you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all. Except as a statistic.
In her fascinating article “Forgotten Feminisms: Johnnie Tillmon’s Battle Against ‘The Man’,” Judith Shulevitz rightly credits the leaders of the welfare rights movement as the first modern proponents of the universal basic income idea. (Those tech boys in Silicon Valley get way too much attention.) They pushed back against both white feminists and male civil rights leaders.
Yet the reasons the women of the NWRO faded from view are the very reasons to resurrect their legacy now. These activists were black and broke and older, and their experiences and desires had few points of intersection with those of the young, white, well-educated women who strode confidently into the spotlight and defined feminism then—and define it even still now. Race and poverty made the welfare rights movement’s critique of work and motherhood relevant today. We who strive and fail to master the so-called work-life divide; who watch as the gig economy and artificial intelligence deprive us of jobs, steady income, and health care; who live in the industrialized nation with the worst caregiver policies in the world; who watch the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—we need to hear what the NWRO, and Tillmon in particular, had to say . . .
Over time, the National Welfare Rights Organization began to focus less on welfare rights and more on a guaranteed minimum income. Minimum income was meant to be a lifeline for all, stripped of any eligibility requirement other than straight-up economic need. This particular emphasis owed much to two Columbia University professors, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, who in the early 1960s developed some unusual theories about fighting poverty.
Milton Friedman famously said that “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Deepak was part of a later generation of welfare activism that put the refundable child tax credit on the table in the early 2000s, with the hope that it might get traction as the next incarnation of a guaranteed annual income. A broad coalition of grassroots groups in the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, working with the Children’s Defense Fund and others, actually succeeded in substantially improving the credit in 2001, delivering $8 billion per year to low-income families—a big accomplishment in a very conservative era. But the effort to make the credit fully refundable failed, due in large part to opposition from Democrats, which you can read about here. In 2002, Harry and Joshua Davis produced a 24-minute video about the National Campaign that conveys some of the feistiness, ferocity, smarts, and integrity of the welfare movement, which confronted both Democrats and the Republicans, and got the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Max Baucus, to come to their mass action and make public commitments. It also includes some moving clips of Sen. Paul Wellstone, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, and others. (A few of The Platypus’s readers will see younger versions of themselves.)
Reading Recommendations
In addition to the above, here are a few more recommendations on the theme of welfare movements and income support.
Mimi Abramovitz and Deepak wrote a piece in The American Prospect last fall entitled “Social Security for All”that proposes an even more far-reaching plan for guaranteed income—delinked from work, parenthood, and immigration status—which builds on the beloved, widely understood, and efficient Social Security system. As part of The Thought Project of the CUNY Graduate Center, we published a blog post in Medium this week, “A Real Chance to End Poverty,” that argues that the refundable child tax credit expansion should be the momentous beginning, not the end, of a bold reimagining of the welfare state.
A Passion for Equality: George Wiley and the Movement, by Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz is not a perfect book, but George Wiley, who led the NWRO, was an amazing visionary, and like Johnnie Tillmon, he is under-appreciated in the lineage of today’s left. Some of his genius and charm comes through here. (His daughter, Maya Wiley, is also an amazing visionary, and we’re thrilled to be supporting her candidacy for Mayor in NYC. Shameless plug).
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. I teach it and read it every year. It’s still a classic, and it is very relevant to understanding our current conjuncture.
Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward.
An excellent collection of essays in the Boston Review, debating UBI, including useful commentary from Brishen Rogers, Dorian Warren, Connie Razza, Philippe van Parijs and others
Annie Lowrey's Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work and Remake the World.
And for you wonks, check out this rigorous, careful report by National Academy for Social Insurance arguing for "assured income" through social security to supplement "insured income."
Savvy Corner
Social and Economic Justice leaders’ group and CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies will be hosting a workshop on “policy feedback loops”—how to use policy to alter relations of power in society—for 20 experienced organizers and policy analysts in labor, racial justice, women’s, immigrant, environmental, and other movements on Saturday, April 10th from 1-5 pm. It’s going to be hot! The class will be taught by Jamila Michener (Cornell), Stephanie Luce (CUNY, School of Labor and Urban Studies) and Deepak. Applications are due March 15th. See below for more details, including the link to the application.
We’re excited that CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies will be hosting the conference “Working Class New York—Revisited: The Past and Future of Struggles for Social Change,” honoring historian Joshua Freeman and featuring an all-star cast of movement academics. You can see the program and register here.
350.org is hosting a Global Just Recovery Gathering April 9 – 11 with an incredible lineup of speakers leading the fight against climate change and for social justice. You can register here.
Delights and Provocations
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up the week pretty well:
We’re listening to Bill Withers (yes, we are unapologetically OG) and Tommy Guerrero.
The most important thing happening in America right now might be the fight for a union at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama. The 80%+ Black workforce has weathered a tenacious anti-union campaign by the company. We were moved by this Vox interview with Darryl Richardson, the courageous worker at the warehouse who initiated the union drive.
We were also moved by Mansoor Khan’s personal meditation on the meaning of basketball in his life in the LA Review of Books: “Nothing Gold Can Stay: Reflecting on the Legacy of Kobe Bryant”:
Until I moved to New York City after college, I lived what I consider an itinerant life. Partly because of my shy disposition but mostly because of my history of migration, I have always felt liminal and a little alienated no matter where I am living. However, two deeply held passions, outside of my family, have given me a sense of rootedness whether I am in Karachi or Los Angeles — my work in leftist politics and my love of basketball.
We’re delighted that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) has been cleared to run for President by the Brazilian Supreme Court against the monstrous Jair Bolsonaro. He has an excellent interview with Anand Giridharadas in The Ink. We love the moral clarity of this provocative quotation:
LULA: When I was at the federal police cell, I was thinking a lot, and I was thinking about a phrase, a sentence, that Victor Hugo, the French writer, said long ago. He said, “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.” And this sentence today is even stronger than it was then, because we never have had so many people living disenfranchised on planet earth. And there's no explanation to justify the difference between the poor and the rich in the world. There's no explanation to convince people why someone can have ten meals a day and other people have to go ten days without a meal.
So the only blame that I could assign is to the ruling class in the world, those who are in charge of the politics in the developed countries, those who run the world. They have no concern for poor people. They have no concern for the number of people who die every day. For them, the poor are just a number.
But those people, those numbers, have grandsons, mothers, sons, daughters. They want to live with dignity. So I was thinking about that when I was in prison.
How is it possible for someone to be proud to say that they have a hundred hotels, or $1 billion in a bank account? How can someone build a foundation that gives out a little bit of charity, a little bit of money here and there, but then, when it comes to actually solving the problem, they refuse to take responsibility that no one should be so rich. So we have to think about a world that is more fair and more human.
Policy Feedbacks Workshops: Building Power Through Policy
April 10th, 1:00 – 5:00 (EST)
Taught by Jamila Michener (Cornell University)
and
Stephanie Luce and Deepak Bhargava (SLU/CUNY)
Sponsored by CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and
Social and Economic Justice Leaders Group
This four-hour workshop will explore the history and theory of policy feedback loops and concrete historical and contemporary examples. We will provide concrete tools for organizers, policy specialists and other practitioners to develop feedback loops in the context of active or potential issue campaigns to advance economic, racial and social justice.
Applying for the course:
The class will be limited to 20 students in order to ensure a robust learning experience. It is the first time this workshop has been offered, and we are seeking participants who are eager to explore this topic with us. Participation will be limited to practitioners with significant progressive policy, organizing or campaign experience (5+ years). We will ask all participants to do some pre-reading, and to develop a case from their current experience that might benefit from a policy feedback loop approach. Because participation is limited, we are asking each prospective student to tell us in a page or less about your experience, your interest in the course and what policy issue or campaign you might bring into the workshop.
Please submit your application by March 15th
Background: When conservatives have held governing power in recent decades, they have prioritized what are known as “policy feedback loops” – measures designed to alter and then reinforce relations of power in society. They have pursued policies to weaken the influence of specific social groups (especially people of color, workers, women, and immigrants) and to strengthen the hand of corporations and white supremacist and anti-choice groups and constituencies. One conservative mastermind behind this strategy, which crippled progressive governance in the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, observed that:
Regardless of what the campaign that brought them into office was about, conservatives invariably attend to policy initiatives designed to cripple Democratic power. Right-to-work statutes, public-employee contracts, campaign finance regulation, the promotion of conservative judges: all are top priorities for a right that understands the long-term political advantages that accrue from hobbling muscular Democratic constituencies and the future scope of liberal lawmaking.
Democrats, on the other hand, rarely spend political capital on these matters. And when they do, they lack the infrastructure to execute those operations . . . Too many liberals seem to think that good ideas sell themselves, and that the political terrain is far more conducive to their agendas than it actually is. They assume political power the same way one might assume a can opener.
Racial justice, labor, and other progressive forces are working to reverse this asymmetry and to find ways to both disrupt conservative feedback loops and to create ones of our own. Indeed, progressives—both inside and outside government—have a rich tradition of consciously creating feedback loops, and a growing academic literature identifies promising approaches and potential pitfalls.
About the Faculty:
Jamila Michener is Associate Professor in the Cornell University Department of Government and Co-Director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity. She engages extensively with policymakers and organizations at the state, local, and national levels, advising on issues related to racism, poverty, and public policy.
Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is a member of the PSC-CUNY/AFT faculty staff union and has spent many years working with unions and labor community coalitions on living wage campaigns, policy fights and organizing projects.
Deepak Bhargava is Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies and has been involved in social change movements and organizations for over 30 years, including 16 years leading Community Change.