Search Results for: Republican

House Un-American

Bettmann / Getty, House photo courtesy of Author, Collage by Homestead

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | June 2019 | 24 minutes (6,524 words)

 

They say you can’t go home again, but I never stop trying. Sometimes I conjure the scent of jacaranda trees mixed with swimming pool chlorine, the sweet-then-sour first bite of kumquats, the faces of the little foxes in the bushes, the gleam of their eyes in the dark. The longer I live outside of Los Angeles, the more its mysteries call to me, as though the city itself were a piece of unfinished business. Maybe “unfinished business” is the very definition of home.

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Born to Be Eaten

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Eva Holland | Longreads | May 30, 2019 | 26 minutes (7,122 words)

Calving

The caribou cow gives birth on her feet. She stands with legs wide apart, or turns on the spot, shuffling in slow circles, craning her long neck to watch as her calf emerges inch by inch from below her tail, between her hips. It’s oddly calm, this process — a strange thing to witness for us two-legged mammals, more accustomed to the stirrups and the struggle and the white-knuckled screaming of a Hollywood birth scene.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first…He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.

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Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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Glass, Pie, Candle, Gun

Henry Griffin / AP

Sean Howe | Longreads | May 2019 |  15 minutes (3,853 words)

In November 2018, after the Secret Service seized the security credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, the White House Press Secretary stated the reason for the revocation was that the administration would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” Within hours, attorney Ted Boutrous responded on Twitter:
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Take Me Out to the Ball Game: A Baseball Reading List

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When I was a kid, the world appeared most vivid to me during the longest days of summer: grass sprouted greener than ever before, my grandparents’ neighborhood pool shimmered cerulean, wisps of white-feathered clouds trailed across the sky. I can’t quite put my finger on what steeped those moments so much in the sensory — whether it was because I was younger and could give myself over more easily to sound and color, or if it was because I was only a visitor. Every June, I would travel with my family from Indonesia, where I lived, to the United States. Far from my normal routine, summer memories from the sleepy towns of extended family left distinct impressions.

In North Carolina, my grandparents took me and my brother to minor league baseball games. I don’t ever remember which team won or anything remarkable happening, but I hold a particular fondness for the solid thwack of a bat against ball, ice-cold drinks sweating in the heat, sepia-toned sand, the low rumble of an announcer’s voice, sunflower seed shells discarded on concrete, and pinstripes. Something about going to the games felt quintessentially American to me. Perhaps it was because we usually visited around the fourth of July, so some nights fireworks would light the sky. Or maybe it was the scene that reminded me of where I was: a baseball diamond dotted with American flags for a sport called the national pastime, my hand held to my chest during the anthem, brands like Minute Maid and Dippin’ Dots within grasp. Still now, when I go to baseball games, nostalgia pulls me back so that I’m somehow 10 again, perched at the edge of my plastic seat, hair sweaty against my neck, waiting for someone to call the kids out for a run around the bases.

My perspective is largely rooted in these personal memories, which hasn’t always allowed me to see the full texture of the sport. The following essays complicate my relationship to baseball in productive ways by revealing gender disparities, different culture’s approaches to the game, hidden histories, parallels to the craft of writing, and moments of trauma on and away from the field.

1. The Hidden Queer History Behind “A League of Their Own” (Britni de la Cretaz, May 5, 2018, Narratively)

With many men deployed in World War II, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (A.A.G.P.B.L.) was formed, in which women were told to, “‘Play like a man, look like a lady.’” Britni de la Cretaz, by sifting through obituaries and interviewing players, uncovers a fascinating hidden history within the league.

She understands today that talking about being a gay athlete is a double-edged sword, in a way. There’s the stereotype that women athletes are all lesbians, which is both inaccurate and unfair. And yet, there’s also the truth that there are many athletes who are also lesbians.

2. The 9 Minutes That Almost Changed America (Kate Nocera and Lissandra Villa, May 14, 2018, Buzzfeed News)

While practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual bipartisan event that takes place every summer between Republicans and Democrats, a man “fired 62 7.62 x 39mm rounds through a lawfully purchased Century International Arms SKS-style semiautomatic assault rifle” at members of the Republican team. Kate Nocera and Lissandra Villa, in this harrowing piece, reflect on the act of terrorism and how close the event came to changing modern politics and life as we know it.

 

It occurred to a few of them then that maybe the dugout wasn’t really that safe after all. And if you go to the field, you can see bullet holes through the top of the dugout, sheds, and metal poles on the fence.

 

3. This is why baseball is so white (Alvin Chang, October 24, 2017, Vox)

In this powerful collection of personal memory and demographic information related to baseball from the 1980’s to 2016, Alvin Chang writes that even though baseball teams have slowly become more diverse, the culture surrounding baseball has not.

 

But only looking at who’s on the field misses something very important: Baseball is still very white. The people who are in power are almost all white — and the cultural forces behind baseball are too.

4. He Was the Best We’d Ever Seen: On Baseball, Greatness, and Writing (Seth Sawyers, Lit Hub)

High school baseball up in the Appalachians is a rough red sleeve wiped against the nostrils four dozen times. It’s a Dan’s Mountain wind whistling your batting helmet’s ear hole. It’s a dozen scattered parents, wrapped in four, five layers, large cups of Sheetz coffee long gone cold on the warped bleachers etched: Sentinels Rule Campers Suck.

 

In this personal essay, Seth Sawyers reflects on playing baseball against Walker Chapman, a baseball legend in his hometown, and what it means to seek greatness in both writing and sport.

5. The Art of Letting Go (Mina Kimes, writer, with illustrator Mickey Duzyj, October 4, 2016, ESPN The Magazine)

As Major League Baseball struggles to overcome its staid image and lure younger fans — according to Nielsen, most of the sport’s TV viewers are over 50 — the simple bat flip has come to symbolize the culture war being waged within its ranks.

While bat-flipping is seen as disrespectful during baseball games in the U.S., it’s a celebrated part of baseball in Korea. Why? After finding no satisfying answer from American and Korean sports writers and historians, writer Mina Kimes, accompanied by illustrator Mickey Duzyj, traveled to Korea to learn more about why bat flipping is an integral part of the game.

6. How to make the Team USA women’s baseball team (Natalie Weiner, August 22, 2018, SB Nation)

While women in Japan, Australia, and Canada are encouraged to play baseball, the same does not happen in the U.S.

 

In the U.S., not only are there are no reliable opportunities for women to play professional baseball, but the sport is still considered taboo for women — even though they’ve been playing it for over a century.

Natalie Weiner explores the various factors — sexist societal expectations, lack of financial incentive, an uninformed public, funding from universities that prompts women to switch from playing baseball to softball — that make it difficult for women baseball players to commit to their craft.

Related Read: The Old Ball Game: 100 Years After Amanda Clement, Baseball Still Can’t Recruit Female Umpires (Britni de la Cretaz, February 12, 2018, Bitch Magazine)

7. Home Field Disadvantage (Kelsey McKinney, November 2018, Longreads)

Because of lack of general support for women’s baseball, the U.S. team only had the chance to train together for five days before the 10-day 2018 Women’s Baseball World Cup — and even at the World Cup, there was barely an audience for their games. Each player on the U.S. team, remarkably talented, had overcome a lifetime of disparaging attitudes toward their participation in the sport, as Kelsey McKinney makes clear through her research and wide range of personal interviews in this piece.

 

According to a survey of high school athletics conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, almost half a million boys play baseball at the high school level. In the 2017–2018 school year, only 1,762 girls played baseball.

 

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

 

 

This Is Why No One Answers the Phone Anymore

The hand set and computer control box of a phone bank system, Greenville, Ohio. (AP Photo/Skip Peterson)

Americans got 47.8 billion robocalls last year, many of them falsely claiming to be from well-known brands and sites like Marriott and Trip Advisor to get people to stay on the line. When Trip Advisor started getting complains about “their” sales tactics, they put internal investigator Fred Garvin on the case.

“This is TripAdvisor,” a chipper automated female voice said, and today was Garvin’s lucky day: He’d been awarded thousands of TripAdvisor credits for an exclusive vacation to the sunny Caribbean!

It was Garvin’s lucky day. He’d been collecting information for more than nine months, but everything he knew was secondhand. He had never heard the messages himself or been able to tie the Mexican resorts directly to the call centers and the fraudulent use of TripAdvisor’s name. Earlier in the summer, the complaints seemed to have stopped, and Garvin worried that the scammers had gone dark before he could pin them down. Now they were calling his cell phone.

Following the prompts, Garvin was transferred to a live agent, who asked his age range and if he made at least $60,000 a year. He passed the test and was quickly put on the line with a second live agent—the charmer. “You’ve won an all-inclusive trip to one of our fabulous resorts,” the agent said. “What do you like to do on vacation, Mr. Garvin?”

The calls were eventually traced to Adrian Abramovich, who the FCC identified as “the source of 96,758,223 illegal robocalls.” At Wired, Alex Palmer follows the VoIP trail, from the initial complaints against Trip Advisor to Abramovich’s downfall.

Abramovich arrived at the Russell Senate Office Building looking bewildered, as you might expect of someone compelled by congressional subpoena. In the past few years, there hadn’t been much that Democrats and Republicans in Congress could agree on. Health care, immigration, taxes, deficits—every debate, every topic and idea was us vs. them. Here, finally, was an issue that perfectly bridged the partisan divide: a burning hatred of robo­calls. As soon as the hearing began, the senators pounced, clearly relishing the chance to lay into the stout man at the witness table. Abramovich, wearing a suit and glasses and with his hair pulled back into a neat man bun, looked trapped. Senator Richard Blumenthal kicked things off. Abramovich, Blumenthal said, had assembled a “phenomenal record of consumer abuse.” Looking directly at him, he declared: “You have become the face of this problem.”

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The American Worth Ethic

Getty / Photo Illustration by Longreads

Bryce Covert | Longreads | April 2019 | 13 minutes (3,374 words)

“The American work ethic, the motivation that drives Americans to work longer hours each week and more weeks each year than any of our economic peers, is a long-standing contributor to America’s success.” Thus reads the first sentence of a massive report the Trump administration released in July 2018. Americans’ drive to work ever harder, longer, and faster is at the heart of the American Dream: the idea, which has become more mythology than reality in a country with yawning income inequality and stagnating upward economic mobility, that if an American works hard enough she can attain her every desire. And we really try: We put in between 30 to 90 minutes more each day than the typical European. We work 400 hours more annually than the high-output Germans and clock more office time than even the work-obsessed Japanese.

The story of individual hard work is embedded into the very founding of our country, from the supposedly self-made, entrepreneurial Founding Fathers to the pioneers who plotted the United States’ western expansion; little do we acknowledge that the riches of this country were built on the backs of African slaves, many owned by the Founding Fathers themselves, whose descendants live under oppressive policies that continue to leave them with lower incomes and overall wealth and in greater poverty. We — the “we” who write the history books — would rather tell ourselves that the people who shaped our country did it through their own hard work and not by standing on the shoulders, or stepping on the necks, of others. It’s an easier story to live with. It’s one where the people with power and money have it because they deserve it, not because they took it, and where we each have an equal shot at doing the same.

Because for all our national pride in our puritanical work ethic, the ethic doesn’t apply evenly. At the highest income levels, wealthy Americans are making money passively, through investments and inheritances, and doing little of what most would consider “work.” Basic subsistence may soon be predicated on whether and how much a poor person works, while the rich count on tax credits and carve-outs designed to protect stockpiles of wealth created by money begetting itself. It’s the poor who are expected to work the hardest to prove that they are worthy of Americanness, or a helping hand, or humanity. At the same time, we idolize and imitate the rich. If you’re rich, you must have worked hard. You must be someone to emulate. Maybe you should even be president.

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Trump has a long history of antipathy to the poor, a word which he uses as a synonym for “welfare,” which he understands only as a pejorative. When he and his father were sued by the Department of Justice in 1973 for discriminating against black tenants in their real estate business, he shot back that he was being forced to rent to “welfare recipients.” Nearly 40 years later, he called President Obama “our Welfare & Food Stamp President,” saying he “doesn’t believe in work.” He wrote in his 2011 book Time To Get Tough, “There’s nothing ‘compassionate’ about allowing welfare dependency to be passed from generation to generation.”

Perhaps. But Trump certainly knows about relying on things passed from generation to generation. His self-styled origin story is that he got his start with a “small” $1 million loan from his real estate tycoon father, Fred C. Trump, which he used to grow his own empire. “I built what I built myself,” he has claimed. “I did it by working long hours, and working hard and working smart.”

It’s an interesting interpretation of “myself”: A New York Times investigation in October reported that, instead, Trump has received at least $413 million from his father’s businesses over the course of his life. “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire. He was a millionaire by age 8. By the time he was 17, his father had given him part ownership of a 52-unit apartment building,” reporters David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner wrote. “Soon after Mr. Trump graduated from college, he was receiving the equivalent of $1 million a year from his father. The money increased with the years, to more than $5 million annually in his 40s and 50s.” The Times found 295 different streams of revenue Fred created to enrich his son — loans that weren’t repaid, three trust funds, shares in partnerships, lump-sum gifts — much of it further inflated by reducing how much went to the government. Donald and his siblings helped their parents dodge taxes with sham corporations, improper deductions, and undervalued assets, helping evade levies on gifts and inheritances.

If you’re rich, you must have worked hard. You must be someone to emulate. Maybe you should even be president.

Even the money that was made squarely owed a debt to the government. Fred Trump nimbly rode the rising wave of federal spending on housing that began with the New Deal and continued with the G.I. Bill. “Fred Trump would become a millionaire many times over by making himself one of the nation’s largest recipients of cheap government-backed building loans,” the Times reported. Donald carried on this tradition of milking government subsidies to accumulate fortunes. He obtained at least $885 million in perfectly legal grants, subsidies, and tax breaks from New York to build his real estate business.

Someone could have taken this largesse and worked hard to grow it into something more, but Donald Trump was not that someone. Much of his fortune comes not from the down and dirty work of running businesses, but from slapping his name on everything from golf courses to steaks. Many of these deals entail merely licensing his name while a developer actually runs things. And as president, he still doesn’t seem inclined to clock much time doing actual work.

That hasn’t stopped him from putting work at the center of his administration’s poverty-related policies. In the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ lengthy tome, it argued for adding work requirements to a new universe of public benefits. These requirements, which up until the Trump administration only existed for direct cash assistance and food stamps, require a recipient not just to put in a certain number of hours at a job or some other qualifying activity, but to amass paperwork to prove those hours each month. The CEA report is focused, supposedly, on “the importance and dignity of work.” But the benefits of engaging in labor are only deemed important for a particular population: “welfare recipients who society expects to work.” Over and over, it takes for granted that our country only expects the poorest to work in order to prove themselves worthy of government funds, specifically targeting those who get food stamps to feed their families, housing assistance to keep roofs over their heads, and Medicaid to stay healthy.

* * *

The report doesn’t just represent an ethos in the administration; it was also a justification for concrete actions it had already taken and more it would soon roll out. Last April, Trump signed an executive order that ordered federal agencies to review public assistance programs in order to see if they could impose work requirements unilaterally to “ensure that they are consistent with principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources,” as the document states, while also “reserving public assistance programs for those who are truly in need.”

The administration has also pushed forward on its own. In 2017, it announced that states could apply for waivers that would allow them to implement work requirements in Medicaid for the first time, and so far more than a dozen states have taken it up on the offer, with Arkansas’s rule in effect since June 2018. (It has now been halted by a federal judge.) In that state, Medicaid recipients had to spend 80 hours a month at work, school, or volunteering, and report those activities to the government in order to keep getting health insurance. And in April 2018, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson unveiled a proposal to let housing authorities implement work requirements for public housing residents and rental assistance recipients. Trump pushed Congress to include more stringent work requirements in the food stamp program as it debated the most recent farm bill, arguing it would “get America back to work.” When that effort failed, the Agriculture Department turned around and proposed a rule to impose the requirements by itself.

These aren’t fiscal necessities — they’re crackdowns on the poor, justified by the idea that they should prove themselves worthy of the benefits that help them survive, that are not just cruel but out of step with real life. Most people who turn to public programs already work, and those who don’t often have good reason. More than 60 percent of people on Medicaid are working. They remain on Medicaid because their pay isn’t enough to keep them out of poverty, and many of the low-wage jobs they work don’t offer health insurance they can afford. Of those not working, most either have a physical impairment or conflicting responsibilities like school or caregiving.

Enrollment in food stamps tells the same story. Among the “work-capable” adults on food stamps, about two thirds work at some point during the year, while 84 percent live in a household where someone works. But low-wage work is often chaotic and unpredictable. Recipients are more likely to turn to food stamps during a spell of unemployment or too few hours, then stop when they resume steadier employment. Many of those who are supposedly capable of work but don’t have a job have a health barrier or live with someone who has one; they’re in school, they’re caring for family, or they just can’t find work in their community.

Work requirements, then, fail to account for the reality of poor people’s lives. It’s not that there’s a widespread lack of work ethic among people who earn the least, but that there’s a lack of steady pay and consistent opportunities that allow someone to sustain herself and her family without assistance. We also know work requirements just don’t work. They’ve existed in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash-assistance program for decades, yet they don’t help people find meaningful, lasting work; instead they serve as a way to shove them out of programs they desperately need. The result is more poverty, not more jobs.

If this country were so concerned about helping people who might face barriers to working get jobs, we might not be the second-lowest among OECD member countries by percentage of GDP spent on labor-market programs like job-search assistance or retraining. The poor in particular face barriers like affordable childcare and reliable transportation, and could use education or training to reach for better-paid, more meaningful work. But we do little to extend these supports. Instead, we chastise them for not pulling on their frayed bootstraps hard enough.

We also seem content with the notion that a person who doesn’t work — either out of inability or refusal — doesn’t deserve the building blocks of staying alive. The programs Trump is targeting, after all, are about basic needs: housing to stay safe from the elements, food to keep from going hungry, healthcare to receive treatment and avoid dying of neglect. Even if it were true that there was a horde of poor people refusing to work, do we want to condemn them to starvation and likely death? In one of the world’s richest countries, do we really balk at spending money on keeping our people — even lazy ones — alive?

We also know work requirements just don’t work. They’ve existed in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash-assistance program for decades, yet they don’t help people find meaningful, lasting work; instead they serve as a way to shove them out of programs they desperately need. The result is more poverty, not more jobs.

Plenty of other countries don’t do so. Single mothers experience higher rates of destitution than coupled parents or people without children all over the world. But the higher poverty rate in the U.S. as compared to other developed countries isn’t because we have more single mothers; instead, it’s because we do so little to help them. Compare us to Denmark, which gives parents unconditional cash benefits for each of their children regardless of whether or how much they work, on top of generously subsidizing childcare, offering universal health coverage, and guaranteeing paid leave. It’s no coincidence that they also have a lower poverty rate, both generally and for single mothers specifically. A recent examination of poverty across countries found that children are at higher risk in the U.S because we have a sparse social safety net that’s so closely tied to demanding that people work. It makes us an international outlier, the world’s miser that only opens a clenched fist to the poor if they’re willing to demonstrate their worthiness first.

Here, too, America’s history of slavery and ongoing racism rears its head. According to a trio of renowned economists, we don’t have a European-style social safety net because “racial animosity in the U.S. makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters.” White people turn against funding public benefit programs when they feel their racial status threatened, particularly benefits they (falsely) believe mainly accrue to black people. The black poor are seen as the most undeserving of help and most in need of proving their worthiness to get it. States with larger percentages of black residents, for example, focus less on TANF’s goal of providing cash to the needy and have stingier benefits with higher hurdles to enrollment.

* * *

The CEA’s report on work requirements claimed that being an adult who doesn’t work is particularly prevalent among “those living in low-income households.” But that’s debatable. The more income someone has, the less likely he is to be getting it from wages. In 2012, those earning less than $25,000 a year made nearly three quarters of that money from a job. Those making more than $10 million, on the other hand, made about half of their money from capital gains — in other words, returns on investments. The bottom half of the country has, on average, just $826 in income from capital investments each; the average for those in the top 1 percent is more than $16 million.

The richest are the least likely to have their money come from hard labor — yet there’s no moral panic over whether they’re coddled or lacking in self reliance. Instead, government benefits help the rich protect and grow idle wealth. Capital gains and dividends are taxed at a lower rate than regular salaried income. Inheritances were taxed at an average rate of 4 percent in 2009, compared to the average rate of 18 percent for money earned by working and saving. When investments are bequeathed, the recipient owes no taxes on any asset appreciation.


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In fact, government tax benefits that increase people’s take-home money at the expense of what the government collects for its own coffers overwhelmingly benefit the rich over the poor (or even the middle class). More than 60 percent of the roughly $900 billion in annual tax expenditures goes to the richest 20 percent of American families. That figure dwarfs what the government expends on many public benefit programs. The government spends more than three times as much on tax subsidies for homeowners, mostly captured by the well-to-do, than it does on rental assistance for the poor. The three benefit programs the Trump administration is concerned with — Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance — come to about $705 billion in combined spending.

While the administration has been concerned with what it can do to compel the poor to work, it’s handed out more largesse to the idle rich. Its signature tax-cut package, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, offered an extra cut for so-called “pass-through” businesses, like law or real estate firms. But the fine print included a wrinkle: If someone is considered actively involved in his pass-through business, only 30 percent of his earnings could qualify for the new discount. If someone is passively involved, however — a shareholder who doesn’t do much about the day-to-day work of the company — then he gets 100 percent of the new benefit.

Then there’s the law’s significant lowering of the estate tax. The tax is levied on only the biggest, most valuable inheritances passed down from wealthy parent to newly wealthy child. Before the Republicans’ tax bill, only the richest 0.2 percent of estates had to pay the tax when fortunes changed hands. Now it’s just the richest 0.1 percent, or a mere 1,800 very wealthy families worth more than $22 million. The rest get to pass money to their heirs tax-free. Those who do pay it will be paying less when tax time comes due — $4.4 million less, to be exact.

Despite the Republican rhetoric that lowering the estate tax is about saving family farms, it’s really about allowing an aristocracy to calcify — one in which rich parents ensure their children are rich before they lift a single finger in work. As those heirs receive their fortunes, they also receive the blessing that comes with riches: the halo of success and, therefore, deservedness without having to work to prove it. Yet there’s evidence that increasing taxes on inheritances has the potentially salutary effect of getting heirs to work more. The more their inheritances are taxed, the more they end up paying in labor taxes — evidence that they’re working harder for their livings, not just coasting on generational wealth. Perhaps our tax code could encourage rich heirs to experience the dignity of work.

* * *

Trump’s CEA report is accurate about at least one thing: Our country has a history of only offering public benefits to the poor either deemed worthy through their work or exempt through old age or disability. An outlier was the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families after Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law in the ’90s. But the 1996 transformation of the program took what was a promise of cash for poor mothers and changed it into an obstacle course of proving a mother’s worth before she can get anywhere close to a check. It paved the way for the current administration’s obsession with work requirements.

Largesse for the rich, on the other hand, has rarely included such tests. No one has been made to pee in a cup for tax breaks on their mortgages, which cost as much as the food stamp program but overwhelmingly benefit families that earn more than $100,000. No one has had to prove a certain number of work hours to get a lower tax rate on investment income or an inheritance. They get that discount on their money without having to do any work at all.

We haven’t always been so extreme in our dichotomous treatment of the rich and poor; throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, we coupled high marginal taxes on the wealthy with a minimum wage that ensured that people who put in full-time work could rise out of poverty. The estate tax has been as high as 77 percent. As Dutch historian Rutger Bregman recently told an audience of the ultrawealthy at Davos, we’re living proof that high taxes can spread shared prosperity. “The United States, that’s where it has actually worked, in the 1950s, during Republican President Eisenhower,” he pointed out. “This is not rocket science.” It was during the same era that we also created significant anti-poverty programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, this country pioneered the idea of progressive taxation and has always had some form of tax on inheritance to avoid creating an aristocracy. But we’ve papered over that history as tax rates have cratered and poverty has climbed.

Instead, as Reaganomics and neoliberal ideas took hold of our politics, we turned back to the Horatio Alger myth that success is attained on an individual basis by hard work alone, and that riches are the proof of a dogged drive. Lower tax rates naturally follow under the theory that the rich should keep more of their deserved bounty. And if you’re poor, coming to the government seeking a helping hand up, you failed.

The country is due for a reckoning with our obsession with work. There are certainly financial and emotional benefits that come from having a job. But why are we only concerned with whether the poor reap those benefits? Is working ourselves to the bone the best signifier of our worth — and are there basic elements of life that we should guarantee regardless of work? It doesn’t mean dropping all emphasis on work ethic. But it does require a deeper examination of who we expect to work — and why.

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Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy and a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Fact checker: Ethan Chiel
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross   

Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Martinique to Merveilleuse

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | March 2019 | 22 minutes (5,569 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.

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In 1768, a 15-year-old girl traveled to the hills near her family home in Martinique to visit a local wise woman. Desperately curious to know what her future held, the girl handed a few coins to the Afro-Caribbean obeah, Euphémie David, in exchange for a palm reading. Euphémie obligingly delivered an impressive-sounding prediction: the girl would marry twice — first, unhappily, to a family connection in France, and later to a “dark man of little fortune.” This second husband would achieve undreamed of glory and triumph, rendering her “greater than a queen.” But before the girl had time to gloat over her thrilling fate, Euphémie delivered a parting blow: in spite of her incredible success, the girl would die miserable, filled with regret, pining for the “easy, pleasant life” of her childhood. This prophecy would stay with the girl for the rest of her life, and she would think of it often — sometimes with fervent hope, sometimes with despair, always with unwavering belief that it would come true.

That girl was the future Empress Josephine Bonaparte. Everything Euphémie predicted would come to pass, but young Josephine could not have imagined the events that would propel her to her zenith: the rise through Paris society, the cataclysm of the French Revolution, the brutal imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, the transformation into an infamous Merveilleuse, the pivotal dinner at her lover’s house where she would meet her second husband.

She wouldn’t even have recognized the name Josephine — that sobriquet would be bestowed by Napoleon some 18 years hence. The wide-eyed teenager who asked Euphémie to tell her fortune still went by her childhood nickname, Yeyette.

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Faith and Reproductive Justice Are Not in Opposition

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

Danielle A. Jackson | Longreads | March 2019 | 7 minutes (1,853 words)

“The patriarchy begins at home,” acclaimed Atlanta-based novelist Tayari Jones told the Atlantic last year. “They call it ‘patriarchy’ because it’s about your father and your brothers and your family.” My brother became a conservative Republican in the late ’80s due in part to a strong moral opposition to abortion. He’s 16 years older than me, and one of few men in our family. We were raised in the same missionary Baptist church in North Memphis our family belonged to for three generations. I was baptized and went to Sunday School there; my grandmother had been a white glove-wearing, note-taking member of the Baptist Training Union 50 years before. They taught Baptist doctrine to congregants. I found pages of her meticulous notes in a closet in my auntie’s house decades after she died. Despite years of service and prominent roles in the church, women couldn’t sit in its pulpit, much less aspire to ultimate leadership. In all of my time there, I can’t even recall having a woman from another congregation speak to us as visiting pastor.

The seeds of whatever belief system my brother came to uphold must have been planted in that sanctuary. Later, when I was a teenager who’d developed her own thoughts on the matter, we spoke about the biblical underpinnings of his values. We didn’t talk about our grandmother, who may have had an abortion in the ’50s when she became pregnant for the ninth time. Or our mother, who, with me, had a troubled delivery, with preeclampsia, induction, and a caesarian section. I spent my first days in a neonatal ICU. My mother was 21 when my brother was born and 37 with me — an “advanced maternal age.” By the time my brother and I were talking about the “sanctity of life,” it was the ’90s; yet, even now, when male pundits and politicians speak about pregnancy, abortion, and God, I do not hear a concern for the lives and experiences of would-be mothers, for women, that is as strong as their concern for the unborn.

Attorney and scholar of race, gender, and the law, Dorothy Roberts, describes “maternal-fetal conflict,” as “policies that seek to protect the fetus while disregarding the humanity of the mother.” It’s a concept that helps explain how many of the same states with the most restricted access to abortion care have also refused to expand Medicaid, denying uninsured, low income people access to contraceptives and other healthcare services. It helps explain how rates of maternal mortality have increased while rates of infant mortality have fallen.

It’s likely, since Brett Kavanaugh replaced Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court’s ideological balance shifted, that federal protections guaranteed with Roe vs. Wade will disappear. Several cases that would prompt its annulment could make it onto the Court’s docket. Many people already effectively live in a post-Roe future. In states throughout the South and Midwest, including my home state of Tennessee, more than 90% of counties have no clinics that provide abortion services. Mississippi and six other states are down to a single one. The Hyde Amendment prohibits use of federal Medicaid funds for elective abortions; 11 states restrict abortion coverage in private insurance. Twenty-seven require waiting periods of 24 to 72 hours, meaning two visits to a provider that is possibly already a prohibitive distance away.

New York’s Reproductive Health Act passed on January 22, 2019, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. It codified the Supreme Court decision into state law, removed abortion from the criminal code, and relaxed some restrictions on abortions after 24 weeks. Last month, Virginia’s legislature considered a bill that would also expand abortion access at the state level. Since then, the phrase “late term” abortion, an imprecise, lightning rod of a term used to describe a set of complicated procedures that account for less than 2% of abortions, shot through the discourse to, it seems, reignite a moral conversation about abortion in general. New York and Virginia are part of a rash of states that rushed to pass bills clarifying their positions. On February 20, the governor of Arkansas signed the “Human Life Protection Act”; it will “abolish abortion” in the state, except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. Tennessee’s legislature introduced a similar bill in February. Both would become effective should Roe v. Wade, or its supporting decisions, be nullified. Mississippi, Louisiana, North Dakota and South Dakota already have comparable “trigger laws” in place.


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“We lose people when we center and focus on abortion,” Jalessah Jackson told me on a phone call from Atlanta. She’s the Georgia Coordinator for SisterSong, a national, membership-based network of organizers focused on reproductive rights. Founded in 1997, one of SisterSong’s main aims is organizing in support of people all along the gender spectrum who are living in the South.

A major priority for SisterSong is “culture shift” campaigns, which develop partnerships with faith organizations and leaders. “We recognize the role of the church in people’s lives,” she said, so their organizers “meet with progressive church leaders to talk about their responsibility in making sure their congregation is living and thriving. They should attend to the part of their congregation that might want to have children as well as those that might not want to.”

Jackson and team hope to “change narratives,” because many people “think faith and reproductive justice are in opposition, and they’re not.” Indeed, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), started by a coalition of ministers after the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott and led, at one point, by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a policy document for the federal government’s family planning program in the mid-60s. Before that, in the ’30s, W.E.B. DuBois thought black churches should invite leaders of birth control organizations to speak to their congregations. DuBois had a progressive-era classism then, and believed in population control especially among the “least intelligent and fit.” But there’s something to his call for “a more liberal attitude” within the black church that remains salient. 

According to Loretta J. Ross, an activist and one of the pioneers of the concept, and historian Rickie Solinger, the core of reproductive justice is the right to have a child or not, and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments. Using reproductive justice as a frame for thinking about women’s health exposes the limits of the pro-life / pro-choice binary. It makes room for concerns about mass incarceration, public education, affordable housing, air pollution, and the ability to earn a living wage — all of which influence what choices people actually have, and determine whether the children they carry to term are able to thrive.

Nearly 60% of women who terminate pregnancies are already mothers. About half of patients seeking abortion care live below the poverty level. Black women in the US are almost three times more likely than white women to have abortions; Latinas have them nearly twice as often as whites. Since a growing majority of US blacks reside in the South, and poverty rates for blacks, Latinx, and indigenous people double that of whites, abortion access is a “race issue,” and a Roe annulment would disproportionately affect brown and black people. Many black pro-life organizations and church congregations have co-opted the language of progressive movements to buttress their opposition to abortion, linking reproductive rights and family planning with genocide. It’s an old but powerful strain of thinking that acknowledges medical racism and the early associations of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, with leading eugenicists. But it fails to note Sanger’s reliance on W.E.B. DuBois’ research, and it does not account for the lived experiences or needs of actual women.

Nikia Grayson, certified nurse midwife and director of midwifery care at Choices, a reproductive health center in downtown Memphis, told me their providers like to “talk about all of a woman’s options,” to unearth and address what kind of care she needs. They aim to provide “high quality, non-judgmental” healthcare in which they remove the stigma from abortion and serve the needs of the city’s LGBTIA population. They are one of few clinics providing the HIV preventative medications PrEP and PEP in a city that is eighth in the country for rates of new HIV diagnoses.

Choices is a model of full spectrum reproductive care, offering prenatal and postpartum care, pap smears, pelvic exams, STI screening and advice, and (through coordination with a local rape crisis center) treatment specifically for sexual assault survivors, all under one roof. It’s the midwifery model, in which women are attended to “from menarche to menopause.” Abortions are also provided at the facility. One of only two back certified nurse midwives in Memphis, Grayson said the majority of Choices’ patients pay for their services at least partially with Medicaid, and the center often raises funds to cover what the state will not. If all goes according to plan, later this year they’ll open the city’s first standalone birthing center, where women who could not otherwise afford a home birth can have an alternative to hospital delivery. Advisers to the World Health Organization and the UN Population Fund recommend “integrated comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services” like this “for women and girls to enjoy their human rights.” It decreases the likelihood of unintended pregnancies, addressing concerns about abortion closer to the root.

I asked Grayson about church groups, and she said Choices receives support from social justice oriented congregations, like Christ Missionary Baptist Church. “They understand that the work Choices does saves lives.” Christ Missionary’s senior pastor, Dr. Gina Stewart, is one of the first women to lead a Baptist congregation in the city and its surrounding areas.

If Roe is dying, it is, so far, a slow burning death, with gasps for breath and short, hopeful bouts of recovery. Several weeks ago, Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the decisive vote in blocking a law in Louisiana that would have further restricted abortion access in the state; the week after, the Trump administration published a “family planning rule” that would block providers who provide or counsel on abortions (such as Planned Parenthood and Choices) from access to certain federal funds. It is is helpful to note how institutions like Planned Parenthood, Choices and SisterSong already do their work in a climate of opposition and disinformation. “I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about abortion.” Jaleesah Jackson said. The disinformation comes from everywhere, nowhere, and the top — the president falsely claimed in his latest state of the union address that later term abortions “rip babies from the mother’s womb moments from birth.” As Jackson said, “SisterSong advocates for comprehensive sex education, and comprehensive sex education would cover abortion. All genders, all folks need access to this information because they’re all charged with the responsibility of making decisions about their reproductive lives.”

But abortion is, in many ways, beside the point. “We’re autonomous human beings.” Jackson told me. “And part of having bodily autonomy is being able to make whatever reproductive health decisions we deem fit for ourselves and our lives and for our families.”

Preparing for a Post-Roe America

Ralph Grunewald / Getty

Laura Barcella | Longreads | February 2019 | 13 minutes (3,517 words)

The 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade just occurred on January 22 — but the days of relatively uncomplicated American abortion access are, most likely, numbered. In fact, author Robin Marty believes it’s not a matter of if Roe will be overturned, it’s a matter of when.

For more than ten years, the Minneapolis-based freelance reporter and author of the new book Handbook for a Post-Roe America has been diligently chronicling the twists and turns of both the pro-choice and anti-abortion movements. Ever since Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, Marty — like many other pro-choice Americans — has been waiting for the proverbial pro-life shoe to drop. Losing Kennedy, the swing voter on a number of major abortion rulings, and gaining Brett Kavanaugh — a long-time pro-life ally — seems to all but ensure the end of Roe, as well as the downfall of abortion being considered a constitutional right.

Indeed, several weeks after Marty and I spoke in late January, Kavanaugh voted with a minority of Justices to overturn recent Court precedent in favor of a law that sought to impose a new form of undue burden on abortion-seekers in Louisiana. The Cut called Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion something verging on gaslighting. In it, he postulates that perhaps the undue burden — abortion providers being required to gain admitting privileges at local hospitals — could simply be met, when of course providers have already been trying to gain admitting privileges for years. The Court ultimately blocked the implementation of the law, but only because the conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts, voted with the liberals. The margin of safety has grown vanishingly thin.

Let’s consider what that means. If Roe were overturned, it wouldn’t necessarily make it impossible for a pregnant person to obtain an abortion, but it would potentially make an already challenging process even more daunting. As it stands, obtaining an abortion is already far from affordable or convenient for many women, even in blue states with a plethora of clinics. Despite Roe’s current status, and despite the fact that statistically, most Americans believe in a woman’s right to choose, abortion care is still often portrayed as a privilege instead of a right — or as a miserable “worst-case” scenario rather than a straightforward medical procedure. Read more…