2018’s Most Under-covered Stories
A roundup of some of the year’s most under-covered stories on poverty and inequality, with special guest Mara Pellittieri, editor-in-chief of TalkPoverty.org — and a teary goodbye to our own Jeremy Slevin.
As we say goodbye to 2018 — and our own Jeremy Slevin — Off-Kilter’s final episode of the year rounds up some of the year’s most under-reported stories for a mega-ICYMI, with special guest Mara Pellittieri, editor in chief of TalkPoverty.org (and Jeremy’s long-time office mate at the Center for American Progress).
PLUS: In the spirit of under-covered stories from the past year, we bring back one of our favorite interviews from 2018: Rebecca’s conversation with Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, whose fiery report condemning America’s levels of poverty and inequality pissed the Trump administration off so much that it may actually have played a role in Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Human Rights Council.
This week’s guests:
- Mara Pellittieri, editor-in-chief, TalkPoverty.org
- Jeremy Slevin, sadly outgoing director of antipoverty advocacy at the Center for American Progress
- Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
For more on the under-covered stories:
- Learn more about the farm crisis that’s causing so much hurt to American farmers that some dairy co-ops now include suicide hotline numbers with farmers’ milk checks, in this piece by TalkPoverty fellow Debbie Weingarten
- Read Elizabeth Brico on how Hepatitis C patients are being forced into underground buyers’ clubs because of price-gouging by big pharma
- Dig into “the other side of the opioid epidemic” (living with chronic pain) in this essay by Kate Nicholson
- Get up to speed on the unfair scheduling practices that have become the new normal for low-wage workers — and how Philly just passed the strongest fair scheduling law in the nation
- Remember when Trump’s Labor Department got caught burying evidence that it was stealing billions in workers’ wages?
- Here’s more on the fiery U.N. report on America’s appalling levels of poverty and inequality
- And last but certainly not least, no Paul Ryan is not an antipoverty warrior, nor is he a deficit hawk.
- BONUS: Stay up to date on the latest music and upcoming shows from Jeremy’s band Yesferatu and check out their latest single By Design
This week’s transcript:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas and this week on Off Kilter, for our last episode of 2018 we have a very important send off and that is, and this deeply saddens me to say this outloud, to Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator, the Slevs, Slevs this is your last episode of Off Kilter.
JEREMY SLEVIN: Sad, but true. My last official episode.
VALLAS: Well, I don’t even know what that –
SLEVIN: In my official capacity.
VALLAS: I don’t even know what that means because you told me –
SLEVIN: That was me angling to be invited ack.
VALLAS: Well didn’t you, we talked about this and you were like no I can’t because I’m going to be working on the hill.
SLEVIN: I know but you never know. [LAUGHTER] Hope springs eternal.
VALLAS: Oh, indeed. Well so Slevs, to send you off right I’m brining in Mara Pellittieri, who has been on this show before several times. She of course is the Editor In Chief of TalkPoverty.org but she’s also here because she is your former office mate and perhaps knows you better than almost anyone else.
SLEVIN: Better than I know myself, that’s for sure.
VALLAS: So hi, Mara.
PELLITTIERI: Hi, I mean I know that I will take comfort in the fact that long after Jeremy is gone his breakfast spoon will be around to remind me of his past.
VALLAS: I would just like acknowledge that at Jeremy’s going away party at CAP Mara, I think, won the roasting that happened and of course there was –
PELLITTIERI: Not on purpose, I want to go on the record in advance and say I thought this was a nice thing to say about him.
VALLAS: And what Mara said about Jeremy is that what did you say? You said to share an office with him is to know that he is a high functioning raccoon?
PELLITTIERI: Yeah I stand by that.
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: Raccoons are great animals!
VALLAS: People who listen to this show will remember fondly, I’m sure, Jeremy’s episodes where he’s eaten entire containers of peanut butter crackers on air.
SLEVIN: As if there are multiple.
VALLAS: Well right now you’re doing that with chips which are also not a radio friendly food and yet that is what you decided to do.
SLEVIN: I have some carrots coming up after this.
[BAG RUSTLING]
VALLAS: There we have it!
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: As loud as possible food.
[LAUGHTER]
PELLITTIERI: I’m so excited for –
SLEVIN: To be fair, I started to eat them before we taped and you said save those for air because that is too good.
VALLAS: Uh, well I wanted this to be the right kind of send off and Jeremy you also, you showed up to send yourself off in style because rather than just any of your old sweaters that we’ve gotten so used to on this show you actually wore this delightful, is that a Hawaiian shirt? What do we call that?
SLEVIN: I don’t know. It’s polyester, I don’t know, it’s a blouse? [LAUGHTER] I just learned the difference between different types of shirts.
PELLITTIERI: I mean it’s kind of what would happen if you gave a Hawaiian shirt to Andy Warhol when he was in his Marilyn repeating images phase.
VALLAS: Uh huh.
PELLITTIERI: I think that’s what we have here.
VALLAS: So and actually as we were starting to tape Mara pointed out, and I’d just like to ask this question because I think it does bear asking, does the shirt have buttons?
SLEVIN: It did, it did have buttons last time I wore it and I put it on today and I don’t know where the buttons are except there’s one left, it also had shoulder pads, which I took out.
VALLAS: Why did you take out the shoulder pads?
SLEVIN: You know, I’ve got shoulders enough,
[LAUGHTER]
PELLITTIERI: That’s true you can see that little bit of ruching from a puffed sleeve.
SLEVIN: You can.
PELLITTIERI: That’s nice.
VALLAS: It sort of has the shape of the puffy shirt from Seinfeld except with a lot more flair.
SLEVIN: Yes.
VALLAS: And fewer buttons. So on that note –
SLEVIN: It’s going to be a hard turn to Alex Acosta’s labor department.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Is it though? Or are we going to find a way to segue? So Jeremy, the other reason that I wanted to bring in Mara to help us send you off right and to really wrap up the year right is because over at TalkPoverty.org a big part of what you guys do, the amazing Talk Poverty team that is Mara, as well as Pat Garofalo, the managing editor and s.e. smith who was actually on last week’s episode, the new deputy editor and honorary member of the Disability Justice Initiative at CAP. A lot of what Talk Poverty does is to really tell stories that otherwise aren’t getting told, stories that the mainstream media is missing that have to do with poverty and inequality and everything that they intersect with. and Mara you actually brought wit hyou a handful of some of your favorite stories from the year that got the least attention in the mainstream media. And so with that, [DRUM ROLL] was that a drum roll?
SLEVIN: That was a drum roll, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: I was confused it looked briefly like you were just randomly hitting things and not even –
SLEVIN: It was a brief drum roll.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: I feel like a drum roll has a minimum length requirement.
SLEVIN: Yeah.
[DRUM ROLL]
VALLAS: There we go! Much better, and so Mara the first one that you actually came with, a lot of the conversation we’ve had on this show over the year has had to do with the farm bill debate around the Republican crusade to cut nutrition assistance but you brought with you another side of the story to do with farming and that’s the farm crisis. Tell us about that.
PELLITTIERI: So farms are in a whole world of trouble. It’s particularly bad for dairy farms but the short term problem is basically that Trump’s trade war has been truly awful for farmers and even with the bailouts that he’s been offering to folk, farmers are still not really able to break even and then for certain industries that’s been a lot worse than others. So dairy and grain, for example, have these cyclical debts where they take out a bunch of debt in the beginning of the season and then at the end of the season when they can sell all of their product they can pay off the debt at the beginning of the season. They have not been able to do that and in the case of dairy have not been able to do that for the past four consecutive years. So dairy farms are in this very precarious position and they would be if that was the only thing that was happening here.
VALLAS: But it’s not.
PELLITTIERI: It’s not. We’re also layering this on top of decades worth of deregulation. So towards the end of the Nixon administration his [agriculture] secretary imposed a new policy that he referred to as “Get Big or Get Out”, so all of these family farms, if they wanted to stay in business had to rapidly expand. They took on a lot of debt to be able to do so. So that’s one of the reasons that we’re seeing a lot of farmers age out and not be able to sell their family farms because the people who would be buying their farms can’t afford to take on the amount of debt that the generation before them has. And that combination of this decades worth of debt up against four years of low prices we’re just seeing farm after farm buckle. I mean in Wisconsin the closures of dairy farms have increased 30 percent just in the past year and that’s a place that we think of being an epicenter of Untied States dairy production. And the fallout is just getting wider and wider to such a degree that my least favorite slash more horrifying part of this is one of the coops in upstate New York that is in charge of actually selling all of the dairy product once the farmers produce it started enclosing flyers for a suicide hotline along with the milk checks that it was sending to farmers. And that’s because the farming situation is so dire that United States farmers are twice as likely to commit suicide as veterans.
VALLAS: I just want to let folks sit with that for a second because that’s a statistic I had no idea about until some of TalkPoverty’s coverage on this subject and giving a shout out to Debbie Weingarten, this year’s TalkPoverty fellow who’s actually done a tremendous amount of really important coverage for TalkPoverty as well as other outlets on this issue. Jeremy you were about to say something.
SLEVIN: So a lot of the themes you touched on are true across the American farming industry. Why is it so acute in the dairy industry? Is it just because of price fluctuations? Is it because consolidation is worse?
PELLITTIERI: So it’s partly because of price fluctuations in that the price for dairy has been extremely low for the past four years. It’s also been, just to give you context for that the dairy prices are so low right now that it actually costs 30 percent more to produce it than you can sell it for. And that’s layered on top of the fact that the farming industry and dairy and soy in particular had been really used to exporting any kind of surplus as a way to control what goes into the market. But because we have imposed a lot of tariffs on our trade partners, our trader partners have responded by imposing tariffs largely on U.S. agriculture products. So the tariffs are hitting dairy farmers particularly hard.
VALLAS: So where does the conversation go from here? What are the solutions, what are the policy changes that we could see that would make a difference here, the problem itself is not getting the attention it deserves but by comparison I would assume the solution is getting even less attention.
PELLITTIERI: Yeah so the solution is messy, it took us 40 years to get into this mess and it’s going to take some time to get back out of it. Part of the solution has to do with support for smaller farmers rather than for major agribusiness. There are a lot of different industries including seed, including beef where 80% of the industry is controlled by four or fewer companies. And that means that having these small companies go under, the big companies can afford to basically just buy them up. The other thing that we can look at is that Canada in particular has a really interesting solution for this that controls some of the pricing for dairy products. The United States had been really resistant to that for a long time because socialism! But I think we’re at a point where it’s really worth looking into how Canada has been able to stabilize their market so that they don’t face the same kind of dairy stress that the United State is looking at right now.
VALLAS: Now another story that you came in with and that was one of the most powerful piece of coverage that Talk Poverty is responsible for this year has to do with prescription drugs. Now folks are probably listening going, man prescription drug prices skyrocketing, that’s not an undercovered story because we hear about it all the time and as we should and now we are heading into a new congress that is, we’ve got Democrats pledging to address that as one of their first orders of business particularly Democrats in the House. But there’s another piece to this story that has to do with Hep-C.
PELLITTIERI: Yeah so I think we’ll probably get a little bit more into the opioid crisis in a minute but one of the offshoots of the opioid crisis that we haven’t really talked a whole lot about is the increase in Hepatitis C infections. So there are more than 3 million people in the United States who have Hepatitis C and the price for treatment for Hepatitis C has been set at between $70,000 an $90,000 per person. That pricing is unique to the United States, the pricing for the same medication in other countries does not look the same but the result is that state level Medicaid programs cannot afford to give this medication to everyone who needs it. so there are a lot of restrictions on who can and cannot get Hepatitis C medication which include things like not having a history of injection drug use which is a problem since that’s where these infections are coming from or it includes being so sick with Hepatitis C that you have irreversible liver damage. So you have to wait for so long that getting the medication, you’re still living with a shortened life when this could otherwise be really curable. So something that we’re starting to see is a resurgence in old school buyers clubs like we saw during the AIDS crisis. So because people can’t access these drugs in the United States they’re getting them for India and from Australia and having the exact same medication shipped to them which obviously is extremely risky because these things have not been tested, they have not been approved by the FDA. The ability for someone to test to make sure they’re actually getting what it is that they think they purchased, it’s really dangerous but at the same time people are desperate to try and get this medication before their lives end.
VALLAS: And again there are obviously, this is a major policy problem that’s not being talked about and a policy failure, what is the solution? What would actually address this problem?
PELLITTIERI: It’s truly price gouging controls. These are not medicines that need to be priced in this way and we know they don’t have to be priced in this way because they aren’t priced in this way in other countries, the exact same corporation charges people in other places dramatically less than they get charged in the United States.
VALLAS: And the piece I want to give a shout out to here, lots more where this came from is called “Hepatitis C Patients are Being Forced into Underground Buyers Clubs” it’s by Elizabeth Brico who is a regular Talk Poverty contributor. So from there you mentioned the opioid crisis as being another conversation that’s definitely, lots of that in the mainstream media and there absolutely needs to be. But almost all that you ever hear about it is oh my God, people all of a sudden becoming addicted to opioids. Now that is obviously a very real problem, it is one that policymakers are starting to take very seriously and that we’re hearing a lot about on both sides of the aisle, although I think we’re seeing less action on the conservative side of the aisle, particularly among the Trump administration and its folks than we are hearing rhetoric. But a piece of the conversation that you almost never hear has to do with people who live with chronic pain and what opioids mean to them in terms of quality of life. So what is that other side of the opioid epidemic.
PELLITTIERI: You tee’d it up really well which is a lot concern about access to opioids, most of which is being focused on oral pain medication rather than heroin and fentanyl, which is where we’re seeing a lot of the deaths come from. So this focus on oral medication has been restricting access to opioids that a lot of people actually really desperately need for chronic pain management and I think this is something — Jeremy were you ready to jump in on this?
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Mara’s like and Jeremy you too have things to say!
PELLITTIERI: I have been talking super actively and I know that Jeremy’s been researching this.
VALLAS: Basically what you’re saying is it’s unusual and awkward to sit here and have Jeremy be quiet because that’s not something you or I have ever experienced, is that what you were trying to say as his former office mate?
PELLITTIERI: I mean at least he normally sings me a song.
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: It would be a little strange to be singing during the opioid segment. No I was just going to say, I didn’t want to interrupt what you were saying that people who are in severe pain, which is an important side but I think another side and The Washington Post actually this week is doing a great series on this that doesn’t get covered in the opioid crisis is it’s largely covered as a suburban/rural, which phenomenon. And actually between 2014 and 2017 the fatal overdose rate among African-Americans went up a lot more than among anyone else. It shot up by over 94% and a lot of the reason for that, just like in the opioid crisis writ large is because of Fentanyl. So there are people who may have been using heroin in the past and were surviving and suddenly Fentanyl is flooding the markets and it’s being mixed in with heroin and is causing all these overdoses. So the opioid crisis that gets portrayed in the media is not always the opioid crisis as it’s happening and I think the Trump administration frames it a certain way and that’s not the reality.
VALLAS: And Jeremy you made a really important point and I want to give a shout out as we’re giving shout outs to Kate Nicholson who has been a contributor to this show, actually talking about this topic and as she has pointed out, you just mentioned Fentanyl, that’s a big driver of the overdoses that we’re seeing today, that’s not what you hear about. There’s the impression that it’s all about new prescriptions to opioids and yet missing from the conversation is the role of illegal substances like Fentanyl, like heroin that are actually driving overdoses and have a lot to do with people not being able to access pain medications through legal means. So Mara another story that you came with today actually has to do with unfair scheduling and scheduling practice, we hear a lot as we should and the conversation has around poverty and around economic opportunity in this country, rightly centers the minimum wage for example, wages not paying enough for people to be able to afford to basics. We often on this actually bring up statistics how even in what many people are calling a strong economy, we’ve got almost half of households in this country struggling to afford basics like food and housing and healthcare. But missing from the conversation almost all the time is any discussion about not just wages but actually the scheduling practices that we’re increasingly seeing become the norm in the low wage workforce.
PELLITTIERI: Yeah so there was a great piece from our managing editor Pat about this right before Black Friday but what he really dove into was this idea around income volatility. So we know that the minimum wage is a poverty wage but what we don’t really talk about is the fact that a workers schedule can shift dramatically from week to week or even from month to month. So your income is not necessarily steady if you’re given enough hours to work then you can scrape by but if you for example get in a fight with your manager who has a tremendous amount of control over what your work schedule looks like and your hours get cut back all of the sudden you’re not making the amount of money that you need. There are a lot of other practices that go into this like giving people less than 24 hours notice if they need to work so that they can’t get childcare or about on call workers where they tell someone that they won’t necessarily be working and getting paid for the time but they need to be ready to get called in which means that anyone who is on call cannot go work another job like so many low wage workers do, stack two or three jobs. This volatility stops them from being able to schedule the work that they would need to actually be able to make ends meet.
VALLAS: And we have all kinds of research telling us not just how widespread these practices are increasingly, people not knowing their schedule two weeks in advance or even worse and constantly fluctuating schedules, making it really hard for people to balance their work and their care giving. Also making it really hard for people to take a second job or a third job, which of course we know is increasingly what people are having to do to try to make ends meet when wages are so low. But we also actually have some really good news out of Philadelphia taking a really important step towards addressing unfair schedule practices and a huge deal coming out of Philly because it’s the second biggest U.S. city after New York to approve a scheduling law ensuring fair scheduling practices. It’s also the poorest big city in the U.S. so a shout out to one of my favorite places listeners will know for really taking us into a better place and something for other cities across the country to learn from and to model themselves. So Mara, another story that you brought with you has to do with the Department of Labor, people may remember quite the scandal breaking early this year when we found out that the Department of Labor was hiding things that did not look so great for the Trump administration.
PELLITTIERI: Yeah, this one was a real gem and it happened so early in the year that I feel like we let it slip by the wayside. But basically the Department of Labor put out a new rule around tip pooling that would allow employers basically to lay claim over their tips that their sub minimum wage wait staff were making. And they said that they were unable to quantify the rules of facts. But we found out shortly afterwards that they super could quantify it! They knew exactly what the rule was going to do and it was going to cost workers a ton of money and they just hid that because it was inconvenient for them.
VALLAS: And so when that came to light we actually ended up watching the Department of Labor realize that it needed to reverse course. This was a big deal when we actually saw the scandal be exposed and all kinds of credit to the Economic Policy Institute, our friends over at EPI for being among those to really push on this. And actually had Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist from the Department of Labor under the Obama administration on this show earlier this year around this news, but active proof of the Trump administration hiding information that would have shown that they were trying to steal workers’ wages.
SLEVIN: By the same this is the same Department of Labor whose leader Alex Acosta, is currently in hot water for giving known sex offenders slaps on the wrist. So while he is letting rich hedge fund managers like Jeffrey Epstein who was a hedge fund manager off, he is trying to make life impossible for workers.
VALLAS: Now the last story that you came with and it’s not just you, Mara, it’s also Jeremy is perhaps the one that is the right one to close on here and Jeremy, I know one of your favorite topics to opine on, Jeremy’s not the only person that we are sending off this week. We are also sending off, get out your tiny violins, no wait, make them smaller, Paul Ryan, soon to be, very soon to be former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and so our through line here has been under reported, under covered stories of 2018 and boy is it an underreported story who Paul Ryan really is. And in his send off moment all these stories, yet again, and boy did I think that I couldn’t get even more nauseated by coverage of Paul Ryan than I have during his tenure in the house. But lauding him as a poverty warrior yet again, lauding him and quoting him about how –
SLEVIN: A debt warrior.
VALLAS: A deficit hawk, right, ugh, what is the actual story here?
SLEVIN: If it hadn’t been for Trump, Ryan’s GOP would have been perfectly OK to solve poverty and solve the debt instead of passing the tax cuts that he’s openly bragging about. He gave a speech today, a farewell speech.
VALLAS: Oh good Jeremy, you’re giving away when we’re taping one last time! [LAUGHTER] Good times, guys, good times. If you hadn’t done that it wouldn’t have felt right.
WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): We actually have a little bit of audio from that I think.
SLEVIN: Oo, yay Will!
[YES FERATUS (JEREMY SLEVIN’S BAND) MUSIC PLAYING]
VALLAS: Oh what’s that? That sounds like Yes Feratu.
URQUHART: This was the other best story of 2018!
SLEVIN: Is this a live version? This was recorded by Will.
VALLAS: I know!
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: Oh man.
VALLAS: Definitely one of the most underreported stories of the year.
SLEVIN: More important than Paul Ryan’s farewell. How do we go back on track after that?
VALLAS: If anyone can, it’s you Slevs.
SLEVIN: Well we’ll be playing at DC Nine, January 17th thank you. [LAUGHTER] Back to Paul Ryan, his speech focused on the current state of U.S. politics and calling for an end of the politics of outrage in addition to taking venom out of the discourse. This is the same Paul Ryan, of course not only does this fly in the face of his own policy agenda, he spent the entire campaign with his own super PAC putting out blatantly racist ads supporting Steve King, a known white supremacist who still has his committee seat as chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution. Putting close ups of candidates tattoos and accusing the Maine legislature of allowing people to buy tattoos with welfare funds. Paul Ryan, he will say he wants to improve the discourse with one hand and on the other hand is putting out ads and no one calls him out for it.
PELLITTIERI: Well white dudes telling everyone to calm down is really a time honored tradition in U.S. politics.
VALLAS: And Paul Ryan on his way out has been just doubling down on so many of these absurdist things to be expressing all kinds of concerns and disappointment that one of the things he really wanted to get done, the direct quote is “one of the things I wish we could have gotten done was debt reduction.” [LAUGHTER] How sad that he feels that way.
SLEVIN: You passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut, there’s no, really, shucks, I really made it my mission to do the opposite of what I actually did and openly brag about. If only I could have done the opposite of everything that I did.
VALLAS: It’s been interesting to watch. I think some reporters who initially and for a long time were really taken by Paul Ryan, one of them is Ezra Klien and he actually wrote a big self-flagellation post for Vox saying I was one of the people who got taken in by Ryan’s long con as he describes it and has since seen the light about who he really is and what he’s actually about.
SLEVIN: But unfortunately many are still taken by the long con.
VALLAS: That’s right.
SLEVIN: As evidenced by the fawning coverage of his farewell speech today. I think NBC his morning their lead story was on how it’s no longer Ryan’s party, I’m going to pull up a quote right now. “He called for the government to respond to the growing deficit/debt, he advocated for fundamental restructuring of Medicare and entitlements,” i.e. cuts, “He pushed for tax reform and he demanded an improvement of the nation’s political discourse.” That’s how NBC led their coverage of Paul Ryan today.
VALLAS: Aaaaaaack. That was me being really nautious, that was me being audibly nautious.
SLEVIN: This guy probably will run for president in the next couple years and no one has woken up or few have woken up to his actual agenda.
VALLAS: So I think we’re going to have to leave it there but in the last couple of seconds that we have with you Slevs, I just want to say how much I’m going to miss you, how much I know our listeners are going to miss you, we’re going to have to figure out a new opening concept or else find someone to fill your shoes for “In Case You Missed It”, you’re looking dramatic over at Mara wondering if that’s going to be her.
PELLITTIERI: I’m looking pointedly in a different direction.
[LAUGHTER]
SLEVIN: I’ll just use one of those voice disguise things, I shouldn’t give that away, I can’t do it.
VALLAS: No, now you can’t do it. You actually just took away your own — I feel like the note to go out on is probably to let you sing “One Day More” which was your refrain on your way out of the office.
SLEVIN: You’re not going to make me.
VALLAS: I mean I might.
SLEVIN: I need the music though to be tee’d up.
PELLITTIERI: You have never needed the music before.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Will is helping by the way just because we can’t leave you with any excuse for why you wouldn’t be doing this.
[PAUSE]
SLEVIN: Love me some dead air.
[“ONE DAY MORE” PLAYING]
SLEVIN: Ooh the movie version, [SINGING] Another day, another destiny. [LAUGHTER]
You guys gotta come in with me.
VALLAS: Oh no we don’t.
URQUHART: Point out that he knew that was the movie version.
SLEVIN: This is Hugh Jackman. [“ONE DAY MORE” CONTINUES PLAYING] I’m too shy, I’m too shy.
VALLAS: Lip syncing doesn’t work for radio.
UQRUHART: And I’m going to cut that before we get dinged for copyright.
VALLAS: Yup, yup. Slevs, it’s been real, I’m going to miss the sweaters, I’m going to miss the Hawaiian shirts without buttons, I’m going to miss the peanut butter crackers and most of all I’m going to miss being able to rag on you quite as much as I do every single week on this show but thank you for everything, we’ve had some good times and I look forward to working with you in your new role even though it won’t be on this show unless you figure out the voice disguise and then we edit that part out.
SLEVIN: Thank you, I will be here in spirit if not in person and I look forward to joining as a listener now.
VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.
[MUSIC]
You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. In the spirit of undercovered stories from the past year, next we’re bringing back one of my favorite interviews from 2018, my conversation with Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights whose fiery report condemning America’s levels of poverty and inequality pissed the Trump administration off so much that it may actually have played a role in the administration’s decision to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council. Let’s take a listen.
I’m pleased to speak with the special rapporteur, Philip Alston about this fiery report. Professor Alston, thank you so much for joining the show.
PHILIP ALSTON: My pleasure.
VALLAS: So extreme poverty, the very concept of extreme poverty is something that Americans generally think happens only in Third World countries. But you in taking a look at the United States and how we’re doing when it comes to extreme poverty, you found lots of it right here in the U.S. Were you surprised by what you found?
ALSTON: Let me say one thing that is kind to the United States which is that the great majority of societies don’t actually think that they have extreme poverty in their own backyard. It’s normally something that many of us want to associate with other countries. But I was certainly surprised by what I found in the United States. It’s not only the figures because it has to be acknowledged that the figures reflect the policies also of previous administrations and previous congresses. What’s most striking now I think is that rather than seeking to devise policies to create greater equality within the society and provide stronger social safety nets, the United States is actually moving the opposition direction and doing so at great speed. So an effort to increase inequality by giving the tax cuts to the very wealthy, an effort to diminish the social safety net very significantly across a range of areas, to make those who are dependent on benefits much worse off.
VALLAS: Now the concept of extreme poverty and Third World conditions of absolute poverty, there actual are technical terms in here that have very specific meanings. Would you unpack a little bit of what some of those concepts are and what it means to be seeing them here in the United States?
ALSTON: Well the concept of extreme poverty is not so difficult because that is based essentially on the United States’ census bureau figures where they calculate, they come up with the basis on which they estimate the number of Americans who are living in poverty and the number who are living in extreme poverty. But the more staggering figure of 5.3 million is one that was put forward analytically by Angus Deaton, the Princeton professor of economics who won the Nobel Prize for his work and what he said was that if we go to a very poor country we use a figure that the World Bank came up with which is a dollar ninety a day and if you’re living on a dollar ninety a day then you are living in absolute poverty or less than a dollar ninety a day. He argued that because of the way that it’s calculated, a dollar ninety a day makes no real sense in the United States because you can’t buy a decent cup of [INAUDIBLE] and the figure should be closers to six dollars a day which of course is already peanuts. But on that basis which he said would be the direct equivalent of a place like Nepal or Bangladesh, you would have 5.4 million people living in that degree of absolute poverty.
VALLAS: Now it isn’t just the existence of these rates of poverty and squalor and deprivation that your report condemns. It’s the collision of America’s immense wealth, how many very, very rich people we have in this country and how much we have in the way of resources in shocking contrast, as you put it, with the conditions in which vast numbers of our citizens live. This is something we don’t see at these levels in other countries and that’s something while that people may be familiar with the concept of the United States leading the world in so many different measures of inequality it’s something that perhaps bears repeating and perhaps some greater level of comparative explanation given that we truly are in our own category when it comes to the levels of excessive inequality we see here in the United States.
ALSTON: The United States has just surpassed a remarkable benchmark. The life expectancy for someone born today in the United States is now lower than that of someone born in China. And that is really staggering, given the difference in wealth between the two countries and one of the effects is that China for all of it’s problems, has made a very concerted effort to bring down maternal mortality rates, to bring down extreme poverty rates. Indeed, to eliminate extreme poverty whereas the United States, with all it’s highly sophisticated medical and other facilities have neglected large parts of the population. So you have African-American maternal mortality rates which is off the charts and nothing is being done about it. So the extreme inequality starts to manifest itself in the average figures that come out and it’s starting to drag the U.S. down very significantly.
VALLAS: Another way in which, and it very much intersects with the policy and practical outcomes that you’re describing, but another way in which the United States truly is unique is that as you know, we are alone among developed countries in as you put it, “insisting that will human rights are of fundamental importance they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, from a lack of access to affordable health care or growing up in a context of total depravation.” That’s a quote from the report. We really are the only country who does not view the right to survive, not to starve quite literally and these other rights that I’ve just described as human rights.
ALSTON: Yes, it’s true and it’s stunning. It’s stunning not just because of the ideology. So Americans might say well, that’s because we don’t believe in socialism or whatever. It’s the consequences that really count. As a result of not having some sort of universal health care available in the United States, the US economy losing immensely. There are many people who would want to be out working but who can’t because they don’t have the health care in order to enable them to be fit for work. So it’s a sort of counter productive policy being issued for essentially ideological reasons. At the same time as every other developed country in the world has concluded that is the, not just the humane but the best economic way to go.
VALLAS: A big part of what’s going on your report notes and I have to say how pleased I was to see this in there because of how much, we talk a lot about this on this show but how little recognition there often is in official reports and documents studying and discussing poverty and inequality in the United States that gets into the role of the media in allowing these and even encouraging these outcomes to exist and to persist. And you point out in your report how much weight is given, you actually point out that it’s striking, you call it striking how much weight is given to caricatured narratives as you put it, “the purported innate differences between rich and poor that are consistently peddled by some politicians and the media.” Is that something that you expected to find here and would you say a little more about what you found to be the role of the media in driving these types of myths that have a very heavy hand in impacting the types of policies that are advanced?
ALSTON: Well until I started actually looking closely at the literature I wasn’t, I must admit, aware of the extent to which this issue’s been studied. But there are really compelling and solid studies that show that the portrayal in the media of people living in poverty is of black families. They are the ones who are poor; they are the ones who need our help, et. Cetera. When in fact, that’s a very significant distortion of the situation. There are many millions of white people, many more millions of white people living in poverty but you get this racialized presentation, which makes it much easier to create some sort of ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative. Why we should we, honest hard working whites be supporting those lazy blacks? When of course, that’s just not the reality. First of all, we’re supporting ourselves the rich whites more than any others because of all the tax breaks and exemptions that we reserve for ourselves. And secondly, an awful lot of the safety net protections are precisely for white people and not just for people of color.
VALLAS: And you found in speaking with policymakers here in the United States that many politicians are as you put it completely sold on this narrative that bears very little resemblance to reality.
ALSTON: It’s a convenient narrative. And as long as the efforts to discourage the poor from voting are as successful as they have been it’s one that doesn’t come at any electoral cost. The poor are not voting, partly because so many millions have been disenfranchised and partly because it’s been made much more difficult for many of them to get ID, to get to polling stations on time and so on. And so that just reainforces the elite orientation of a lot of the policies that are being pursued.
VALLAS: You mentioned disenfranchisement, which is another major finding of this report. Six million Americans with felony convictions, overtly disenfranchised. You also refer to covert disenfranchisement both through gerrymandering but also artificial barriers to voting such as voter ID laws and other types of barriers. Is this something that we see in other countries or is this something that the United States has found in terms of a path to hide what they’re doing and I’m speaking here, of course, about conservative elected officials in trying to further cement their solid majority and ownership of power in this country.
ALSTON: There are many dimensions to that. First of all, gerrymandering of course is something any politician in power would be delighted to do if they good. But what most countries have institutional checks and balances whether it’s the court, whether it’s electoral commissions or some other technique for making sure that blatant gerrymandering can’t go ahead. Those techniques haven’t worked in the United States and so we’ve got the situation where there really is very blatant gerrymandering. You have states where the governments have been elected by 40 percent of the population and so on. But I think in many ways, the most significant finding of my report actually is the extent to which the economic and social depravations have a major impact on the quality of American democracy. So the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system, the very low number of people who actually turn up at the polls, the formal deregistration, disenfranchisement of large numbers of them, all of these and of course the way in which American politics are increasingly heavily influenced by money, the capture of governmental agencies and departments by industry representatives and others is again, fairly extreme by comparison with most other countries, and that does I think have a major negative impact on the quality of the democracy.
VALLAS: While we’re talking about the intersection with the criminal justice system, you also point out and have some extensive discussion in this report that America has for a long time relied on criminalization to conceal our underlying poverty problem. You walk through something that is well known and well understood, that is the criminalization of homelessness in this country but you also expound on the reliance of fines and fees such as those that started to make headlines in Ferguson some number of years ago because America has begun using it’s criminal justice system as a system for keeping the poor in poverty while as you put it, generating revenue not just to fund the criminal justice system but actually many other components of government, something that has many, many layers to it but becomes very much a vicious cycle.
ALSTON: Yes, so there are intersection moves if you like. One of them is that as budgets at the state and country level have been increasingly restricted by amendments and other techniques the authorities have been forced to look for other sources of income because as some state authorities put it to me we couldn’t possibly go to the legislature and ask for more money even though we know there’s a dire need. It’s just off the table politically, can’t be done. And so then that they intersects with the punish the poor type narrative which we saw in Ferguson but I saw in California and various other places as well, which says that we have to crack down on these minor violations, homelessness or whatever it is. We have to find these people and we have to have a very aggressive system of collecting that money from the poor and so the fines will triple over time, eventually we will put them in prison, we will still have the debt and so on and so this is a way of raising money for the municipalities, for the counties, whatever in times of otherwise straightened budgets.
VALLAS: I mentioned up top in setting up this segment that you point out that because of America’s great resources, the fact that we have extreme poverty at the levels that we have it or even at all is a political choice made by people in power. You also noted early in our conversation that literally as you were researching and writing this report America’s political leaders who in this case are now Republicans in charge of not just the White House but both chambers of congress have been actively advancing a policy agenda including notably the tax law that took effect earlier this year that is making poverty and inequality in this country worse by the day. Would love to hear you speak a little bit about your experience in speaking with some of those elected officials and individuals in power. I understand some of them actually refused to speak with you when you were here for your visit for your report.
ALSTON: The Department of Justice systematically and consistently refused to speak with me despite a number of requests because obviously the areas that they are in charge of relate very closely to some of the issues that I’ve been discussing earlier. I think otherwise the general message that I got from people [INAUDIBLE] going to in government is the one which is really characterizing the current administration’s welfare policy if you can call it that. And that is back to work and off welfare and that of course sounds great. Who could oppose that? People who can work really should work but what we’re seeing is that the administration is proposing exactly the same remedy whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s for SNAP, food stamps, whether it’s for housing subsidies and a range of other benefits where they’re simply saying these people don’t need the benefits. They can be out working and so we’re going to impose ever more putative policies that will force them into the labor force but of course that fundamentally misunderstands the actual nature of the poverty that these people are living in and the particular challenges that they’re confronting. There are lots of studies that show that very many of those who are receiving food stamps, for example are indeed in full time employment or at least to the greatest extent they can possibly get. But the income they’re getting is simply not enough. They and their families can’t provide so food stamps which gives them something like a dollar forty per meal per person are absolutely crucial in enabling them to survive. But turning to them and saying well you lazy good for nothings should get out and work more really is not an evidence based diagnosis of the problem. It’s an ideologically based one that essentially doesn’t believe that a society should provide an essential safety net for the worst off.
VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you, I wish we had many hours because there is so much in this report and I would urge our listeners to read it, to spend some time with it because of how much ground it covers. We’ll include a link in our nerdy syllabus page on Medium but among many recommendations, first of which you call for the decriminalization of poverty, noting that in the United States that it is poverty that needs to be arrested, not the poor simply for being poor. But among mnay recommendations you also, this being the flip side of the coin of what you were just speaking about, you call on America and American policymakers to quote “get real about taxes”. What do you mean when you say that?
ALSTON: I think both parties in fact have been very reluctant to grasp the mantle of taxation. We know from all societies that basic levels of government income are essential to enable the government to regulate an economy and to make sure that all of it’s members are not only socially protected but are able to become economically protected. That requires taxation. You can’t just keep cutting and cutting and cutting. You get the sort of problems that the United States has with teachers, where you’ve got extremely hard in some states to retain any of the teachers they get salaries that are a pittance compared to their qualifications. And as you drive down the overall quality of government services so the economy becomes less productive, infrastructure starts to decay, people can’t get access to the health care they need even to get out and do manual work or whatever and it’s a self defeating policy. So to keep saying that the answer to all problems is to drive taxes down is just self-defeating and that has to be grappled with.
VALLAS: What are you hoping comes of this report?
ALSTON: Well there’s nothing that the United Nations can do about this. There’s nothing I can do about it. The reason for the report is because the UN consistently evaluates the human rights policies of all of its members. I previously went to countries like China and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. By putting this on the table, one hopes that the United States will engage with some of the issues. One hopes that there’ll be more of a focused debate within the country but the solutions are all entirely up to Americans, not to outsiders.
VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Philip Alston, he’s a professor at NYU law school but he has written a massive and sweeping report in his role as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Again, you can find it on our nerdy syllabus page, the whole thing is worth reading and there aren’t enough fire emojis to describe. Professor, thank you so much for taking the time and for this incredibly important, if scathing report.
ALSTON: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it.
VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.
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And to close us out and to send Jeremy off right, Off Kilter’s holiday gift to you, dear listeners, Yes Feratu’s first single, “By Design”. We’re going to miss you Slevs.
[YES FERATU’S “BY DESIGN” PLAYS]
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.
