Episode 10: Read My Lips: Tax Cuts for the Rich

President Trump’s so-called tax plan. Plus, immigration update and the unlikely movement to emerge from Occupy Wall Street. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week, President Trump released his long-awaited, so-called tax plan — er, page. Max Ehrenfreund of WonkBlog joins with the nitty-gritty. Also this week, a judge blocked Trump’s order targeting sanctuary cities, and the Department of Homeland Security had an epic X-Files moment. Esther Lee of ThinkProgress updates us on the latest on the immigration front. And finally, in the latest installment of our #ResistanceWorks series, two New York-based artists join to discuss Occupy Museums — and how artists are bringing resistance (and their debt) into their art.

This week’s guests:

Max Ehrenfreund, Washington Post
Esther Lee, ThinkProgress
Noah Fischer and Kenneth Pietrobono, Occupy Museums

For more in this week’s topics…

What Occupy Museums’ Debtfair initiative is all about.
Everything Max Ehrenfreund wrote about President Trump’s tax plan.
More deetz on how people are trolling the Department of Homeland Security.
What would happen if Trump had his way with sanctuary cities.

Transcript

[START]

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week, a judge blocked President Trump’s order targeting sanctuary cities and the Department of Homeland Security had an epic X-Files moment. Esther Lee of ThinkProgress updates on us on the latest on the immigration front. Next, in the latest installment of our “Resistance Works” series, two New York based artists join to discuss ‘Occupy Museums’, and how artists are bringing resistance and their debt into their art. But first, this week you may have noticed President Trump released his long awaited so-called tax plan. Maybe it’s generous to call it a plan, but Max Ehrenfreund of Wonkblog joins the show to share the nitty-gritty. Max, thanks so much for joining the show.

MAX EHRENFREUND: Thanks for having me in the studio.

VALLAS: So, the Trump administration insists that they’re not pushing tax cut for the wealthy. They’ve said this over and again. Multiple members of the cabinet have said it. But that’s not what this tax plan, and again, I think it’s probably over the top to call it a plan, and we’ll get into why that is, says what’s in the plan that they released this week?

EHRENFREUND: The main and most important part of this plan is a major tax cut on businesses, right now major corporations pay a tax rate of about 35 percent, at least officially. And President Trump wants to bring that down to 15 percent, so that’s a really big cut. There are also cuts for individual taxpayers and households, and also the plan calls for eliminating the estate tax which is a tax that the heirs of the wealthy pay when a member of their family passes away.

VALLAS: So does the claim hold water that they are not actually pushing tax cuts for the wealthy?

EHRENFREUND: It’s difficult to say because as we discussed earlier this is not really a plan and so it’s hard to say, you know, what it does and what it doesn’t do. But it is true that the plan contains quite a few tax cuts for the rich. And so in some unspecified way if the Trump administration is going to keep their promise of not increasing taxes on any group and not decreasing taxes on the wealthy, in particular, they will have to come up with some increase as yet undetermined in taxes of some kind for the rich, and we just don’t know what that is or what it could be at this point.

VALLAS: So I think what I’m hearing you say is that there would need to be new information and possibly changes from the plan that they put out this week in order for their claim that they’re not cutting taxes for the wealthy to be true.

EHRENFREUND: Yeah, a lot more new information and some pretty substantial changes because if you think about what this plan does, it reduces the tax on business from 35 percent to 15 percent, and that primarily benefits people who own business, either privately or in the form of stock in a publicly traded corporation and those people do tend to be richer and you’re also getting rid of the estate tax which is a major tax paid by the very rich and so what the Administration has said is they’re going to get rid of breaks and loopholes and little goodies in the tax code to make up for those reductions in taxes that would primarily benefit the rich but we just don’t know what exactly the Administration is planning on doing in that regard and the truth is there aren’t that many, there’s not that much fat to trim really in the tax code, in terms of deductions, loopholes and so on.

VALLAS: So, I’ve said a couple of times that it’s generous to call this a tax plan and part of what I mean when I say that is that it was a single page. It was one page of paper, 19 bullet points, and yet this was something that we’re told 100 people worked on. I want to credit my friend and colleague Harry Stein who is a friend of the show and who does fiscal policy at the Center for American Progress, for I think the best analysis on what this document was, which was that “it had more fonts than details.” Was this what you expected?

EHRENFREUND: It was a single page and they didn’t even print double-sided.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Wasn’t even double-sided, let’s be clear folks, it was one page on one side.

EHRENFREUND: What happened on Wednesday was the Administration passed out a single sheet of paper, printed only on one side, with 19 bullet points and several different fonts and very little in the way of concrete details, actual numbers, or really substantive proposals. And journalists receive that document and shortly thereafter, President Trump’s top economic advisers, Gary Cohn of the National Economic Council and Steven Mnuchin of the Treasury department gave a briefing at the White House.

VALLAS: Two former Goldman Sachs officials, I might add.

EHRENFREUND: Yes, both former bankers and they gave a briefing at the White House to journalists where they talked about the plan and they proceeded to give some contradictory information about what it said. So it is very unclear, you know, what the Administration wants to do on taxes. And I would say that it seems as though people in the Administration have been giving a lot of thought to taxes, and it is true that there are about a hundred or more than that staffers, very knowledgeable people, working in the Treasury department, trying to come up with a plan. People who know the tax code really well and have been there for a long time and are trying to make this thing work. But it also seems like different people in different agencies and different parts of Trump’s administration have different ideas about where this thing should go. And you know, Secretary Mnuchin in particular, has said repeatedly that this plan is not going to decrease taxes on the rich and the experts that I’ve spoken with have looked at what the Administration has put forward so far and they’re just scratching their heads. They’re saying, you know, “this really looks like a tax [inaudible] on the rich, I don’t really see how this math can add up.”

VALLAS: So one of the other claims that has been made repeatedly is that this is a tax plan, plan or a tax page, a tax page that will pay for itself. It’s revenue neutral, as they describe it, except that doesn’t seem to hold water because a lot of experts have looked at it and said it’s massively going to add to the deficit because it is cutting taxes on corporations and very wealthy folks as you’ve described. Unless further information breaks and they take it in a different direction with maybe a second page that they staple or put on the back of this one page. But they claim repeatedly, “No, no, no, it’s not going to add to the deficit because it’s going to pay for itself.” Does that claim hold up?

EHRENFREUND: Yeah well, let’s just take a step back. I mean, the federal government spends a lot of money everyday doing things that everyone thinks are very important, providing payments to retired folks and the elderly in the form of Social Security, paying the troops overseas and at home, providing social services, providing food stamps to people in need, all kinds of programs that have broad public support from the American people. And the truth is that all this costs a whole lot of money and the money has to come from somewhere. Typically, it comes from taxes but increasingly a large share of the money comes from the government borrowing, issuing bonds which must be paid back at some point in the future and so all else being equal, if the government reduces taxes then that means that the government has to borrow more to make up for the difference. And of course, Republicans in general, and in particular folks in the Trump administration, don’t want to be associated with an increase in the national debt and increased federal borrowing. So they’ve argued that this plan will not have that effect. That taxes will go down, but the revenues that the federal government collects and relies on to provide services and provide for the national defense will not decrease.

VALLAS: And we should probably call it what it is, right, I mean what they’re doing is to continue to push the theory of trickle down economics. If we cut taxes for the wealthy, we’re going to create jobs, we’re going to create all kinds of economic activity, we’re going to you know, the rising tide will lift all boats and on and on goes the rest of the theory. But this is not something that the numbers really bear out.

EHRENFREUND: Well, yeah, I think this is very much a trickle-down economics tax proposal or tax page if you like to call it that —

VALLAS: That’s what we’re going to call it from here on out, the tax page. The Trump tax page.

EHRENFREUND: It’s interesting, you know, a lot of Republicans these days have become skeptical, I think, of “trickle-down economics.” At least as traditionally interpreted or understood. The truth is there hasn’t really been a very effective tax cut for the economy and for ordinary Americans in a very long time. And so, I think a lot of Republicans right now are looking for other ways to use the tax code, according to conservative principles, to try to stimulate the economy, increase hiring, increase wages, get people back to work and earning more. And the Trump administration seems to be ignoring most of that new thinking from conservatives and from Republican lawmakers on taxes. And that was a little bit surprising to me.

VALLAS: So back to the kind of repeated reiteration by Trump officials and by Trump himself that this is not a tax plan or page that is going to cut taxes for the wealthy, do you believe that that continued claim and that the fervor with which we’re hearing it repeated is because there’s a realization on the part of Trump or on the part of his advisors that that was something that distinguished him throughout the campaign from the Republican opponents he faced in the primary? That they were traditional “trickle-down” Republicans who were looking to cut taxes for the wealthy and that he was someone different who was there to fight for forgotten man and the forgotten woman.

EHRENFREUND: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think that the president ran on an unconventional Republican platform in many ways, not just with respect to taxes but with respect to trade, with respect to immigration which many Republicans have traditionally favored. And now he’s putting out a plan that looks like a very conventional Republican proposal in that it focuses primarily on cutting taxes for the rich and I would add you know, the tax cuts are not designed in a way, in particular, to stimulate investment or stimulate hiring or anything along those lines. It really does look like an old fashioned GOP proposal and a lot of the new and interesting ideas from Republicans about how to encourage investment, how to stimulate the economy using taxes, those just don’t appear here. And so yeah, I think you know, Republicans especially those inside the White House recognize that part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s different, he’s new, he’s not like other Republicans, at least he doesn’t seem to be that way and he talks differently and he has different ideas. And so when you hear him talk about his plan, they also try to distinguish it from the existing Republican plans that are available, that are on the shelf, that are out there. And yet it’s not really all that different, at least in the broad strokes.

VALLAS: So we’ve talked a lot about what this plan would mean for folks at the top of the income ladder, also for corporations and for families who are subject to the estate tax, just as a nice little public service announcement, reminder that that’s two families out of every hundred who actually end up paying taxes on their estate and that ends up being a very small pie that we’re even starting with there. So very, very, very small share of folks who are even subject to that tax and they’re the absolutely wealthiest. But what does this tax plan mean for folks who are in the middle and for folks who are at the bottom?

EHRENFREUND: It is a tax cut for the middle-class, at least as far as we know. Again, with the caveat that this is only a single page and there are a lot of important details left to be filled out. But that is a contrast, I would say, from some of the other Republican plans that you’ve seen in the recent past. For example, in the spring of last year, about a year ago, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, and his colleagues put forward a plan that really would not have cut taxes significantly for the middle-class at all. And so this plan that Republicans ran on in the fall, I should say the plan that President Trump ran on in the fall, the plan that he as a candidate put forward would have cut taxes for a typical person of roughly average income by about $1,100 dollars a year, which is substantial. Now we don’t know exactly how that number will change and we don’t know what the number would be in the president’s new approach to taxes because as I said a moment ago, we don’t have a detailed plan yet from the Administration.

VALLAS: So, part of what you’ve done, switching gears just a little bit, is not just to look at this particular tax page and what it would mean and look at some of the statements that Trump’s officials have made and that Trump himself has made about this supposedly plan, but you’ve also taken a look back sort of at the history of tax policy and what presidents throughout the years have done when it comes to tax cuts, tax increases and the like. And in part this is particularly important work that you and your colleagues at Wonkblog have done because of how many times we’ve heard President Trump and his administration say again and again that this is the biggest tax cut in history that they are moving forward with, which seems a little bit out of step with some of their other assertions that they’ve made. I’ll put a little smiley, winky face next to what I just said and people can observe that for themselves. But that being said, what do we know about the last several presidents and what they’ve done on taxes, and help us put what we’re seeing here in context.

EHRENFREUND: Yeah, I think it’s important to note here that the first president to really cut taxes in a major way in modern times was President Johnson, a democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson whom many people associate with very progressive programs. The Great Society, Civil Rights, etc. And Johnson and his predecessor, President Kennedy, worked hard to reduce taxes on the wealthy as well and I think they believed, to some degree, that reducing taxes on the rich would pay for itself. And they also thought that putting more money in the pockets of ordinary Americans would stimulate the economy, which is, you know, a claim that you often hear these days as well. And when Reagan, when President Reagan famously cut taxes in 1981 soon after taking office, he was really just continuing the project that Kennedy and Johnson had begun. And so in that point in time it was not necessarily you could say, a partisan issue, this issue of cutting taxes or what’s the most efficient way to structure the tax system. What’s the most efficient way to raise revenue so that you don’t discourage people from putting their money in the stock market, investing in a new business, or going to work or what have you.

But since that time, taxes are, because of what Kennedy, Johnson and Reagan did, taxes are quite a bit lower now than they were in the past. And so now when you talk about cutting taxes, I mean you’re really talking about cutting it to the bone and you’re talking about doing something that many conservative economists feel is unnecessary. Democrats view it as extremely harmful and you know, it’s only really a minority of people in the Republican party who view this as important. In fact, I’d add that if you look at the polling data, there’s a great deal of support among ordinary Republican voters for increasing taxes on businesses, large corporations, and on wealthy Americans.

VALLAS: And an NPR poll that was released, I believe it was last week, actually found 75 percent support and that’s across party lines, across income levels and so forth, for raising taxes on millionaires.

EHRENFREUND: Yes, yeah, exactly, and I think that is, to go back to the earlier conversation, that’s an important part of the reason why Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Trump’s other advisors have been pitching this plan as primarily a tax cut for the middle-class, not a tax cut for the rich. They know that a tax cut for the rich is unpopular, they know that Trump was elected as a populist, as someone who would think different and act differently and govern differently from past Republican presidents and so they know that if he’s seen as cutting taxes for the rich, that could be very damaging for him politically. But you know, the fact is that, you know unless something really changes, that what the president is proposing to do is primarily, and most importantly, a tax cut for wealthy families and those are the individuals who would enjoy the greatest saving under Trump’s proposal so far.

VALLAS: And as we’re continuing with this history lesson, so folks are probably familiar, and you brought us up to Reagan there. Folks are probably familiar and often, sort of one of the only reference points that people remember if they’re not deep tax experts and it’s not something that they study day in and day out is quote, ‘the Bush tax cuts.’ What were those and how are those relevant today as we’re looking at the current tax landscape?

EHRENFREUND: The Bush tax cuts.

VALLAS: Yes.

EHRENFREUND: Yes. So President Bush, George W. Bush, cut taxes on three occasions: 2001, 2002 and again in 2003. And many people at the time said that President Bush was going to return to the legacy of President Reagan in cutting taxes and stimulating economic growth. It’s true that following President Reagan’s tax cuts the economy did quite well. And you know, there is a debate about how much of that is a result of the tax cuts and how much was the result of other factors but it does seem, I think most economists would agree that Reagan’s tax cuts did have some benefits for the economy and for ordinary people as well. But President Bush’s case was very different. He reduced taxes and basically nothing happened. The economy stagnated for six or seven years then it exploded spectacularly in the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. And the net result was that the federal government had to borrow a whole lot more money and ordinary Americans weren’t really any better off, at least as far as the data show.

VALLAS: And is it true, back to kind of, one of the other talking points that gets used, not just by Trump and his administration but by conservatives in Congress as well, is there a case to be made that the wealthy in this country are paying higher tax rates than has been true in history?

EHRENFREUND: No, the tax rate on the wealthy is historically low. I mean if you look back in the past it used to be that if you were extremely wealthy you would pay a tax rate of almost 90 percent. I mean, it was as though if you were to make more money, all of the additional money you would make you would pay in taxes to the government. And that’s just not the case anymore. If you are a wealthy person and you make a lot more money you keep most of it and so I think that there is a perception that taxes are high, and it’s partly because of I think the rhetoric surrounding President Obama’s years in office. He was often accused of raising taxes and you know, that was true in some senses and not true in other senses but yes. I think if we’re looking at the historical burden of taxes, not just on the rich, but also on Americans in general —

VALLAS: On corporations.

EHRENFREUND: Yeah, it’s relatively low. It’s not just low relative to history but also relative to other rich countries, other developed countries in Europe and Asia and elsewhere.

VALLAS: So in the last couple of minutes that I have with you, just because I’m curious and I’ve got you here, how was a one page, 19 bullet supposed tax plan received by reporters who maybe were expecting a little bit more?

EHRENFREUND: I don’t think that anyone was expecting a little bit more. I mean, we knew that the Administration was struggling to come up with a clear plan on taxes because of the differences of opinion among Republicans about what the right approach to take is. I think that even though it only was a single page, and even though it only had 19 bullet points on it, it was still useful because it gave, it gave reporters a little bit of a sense of where the Administration was heading, and I think most importantly of all, there wasn’t contained in that document an endorsement of a very controversial idea proposed by Republicans in the House to change how the country taxes imports and exports. And retailers have said that this “new tax” would raise prices on the shelf for people who buy goods from overseas and the proponents of the idea say that it would really stimulate American manufacturing and put people back to work in factories and so on by giving exports a boost.

VALLAS: So significant that we did not see that and hear, and perhaps indicative of not just differences of opinion within the Administration, but also across the Administration and Republicans in Congress.

EHRENFREUND: Yes, exactly.

VALLAS: Max Ehrenfreund is a reporter with Wonkblog and he is one of the nerds I knew I could go to for not just a history lesson on taxes, but also what’s in this plan. Max, thanks so much for joining Off-Kilter.

EHRENFREUND: It was a pleasure.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. It’s been a big week for immigration, first a California judge blocked the Trump administration from making good on its threat to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. The Department of Homeland Security also launched a new office aimed to serve victims of crimes committed by immigrants, or maybe space aliens, we’ll explore. Also President Trump walked back his demand for funding for his border wall in a short term spending bill. At least for now. Here to discuss these developments and more is Esther Lee, an immigration reporter with ThinkProgress. Esther, thanks for joining the show.

ESTHER LEE: Thank you so much for having me.

VALLAS: And I should say for coming back on this show. So, lots going on this week, but I want to start with sanctuary cities. What are sanctuary cities and what was Trump’s threat that had to do with federal funding?

LEE: So a sanctuary city is basically a place where local enforcement can choose to limit their cooperation with federal immigration detention officers. So basically, let’s say that you’re a police officer. You could, and you have an immigrant and you’re, who’s been arrested, and the federal government says, “Hey, can you please detain that person until I’m able to come over there to arrest them, to detain them for potential deportation proceedings.” And the local law enforcement officer can say, “no” or “yes”, depending on the severity of the crimes. Usually the local law enforcement would turn the immigrant over if there’s a very serious crime.

VALLAS: So, limit cooperation sounds like a bad thing. It sounds like cities are going rogue and not doing something that they’re supposed to do. Which depending on which side of the table you sit on could be an accurate description. But what it means is really saying, hey we value our immigrants, we value new Americans and we don’t believe that deportation is necessarily the right response. Am I getting that right?

LEE: That’s absolutely true. So, a lot of these law enforcement officers, especially in big metropolitan cities where you’ll see a lot of immigrant populations, what they’re saying is we really, like you said, we value our immigrants, we value public safety over some of these negative stereotypes of saying that immigrants are criminals and we should turn all of them over. So for some of these arrests that happen, it happens over minor issues. Perhaps like a lack of a driver’s license, which happens to a lot of immigrants. Because many of them cannot get driver’s licenses. Or it could happen over a parking ticket that you never paid but you still got arrested for. So, that doesn’t make them a criminal in the sense that we think of criminals, like murderers and rapists the way that Donald Trump has characterized these people. But it does show that law enforcement agencies, they do value public safety and that’s the point that we should keep remembering. Which is that if immigrants feel uncomfortable in reporting crimes, that not going to help anybody. It’s not going to help immigrants, it’s not going to help Americans.

VALLAS: So, and that actually brings us to the second point, and I do want to come back to sanctuary cities, but I feel like you just offered a really nice segway into this new office, launched by the Department of Homeland Security, this new office is called VOICE. I honestly don’t even know what it stands for, I’m assuming the ‘V’ is victims and then “of immigrant crimes,” don’t know what the ‘E’ is, is there an ‘E’?

LEE: Everything that you voiced, yes.

VALLAS: Everything I voiced, yes!

[LAUGHTER]

LEE: So it’s the Victims of Immigration Crimes Engagement office, VOICE. And this is basically a hotline for victims of crimes committed by immigrants to call into ICE, which is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, to tell them, “Hey, this is what happened to me. I want to know about the resources that I can access.” So this is a hotline that purported is for victims to feel safe. But this kind of also plays into the stereotype that President Trump has of immigrants, right? Which is that ‘they’re criminals, they’re rapists, they’re murderers.’ And this hotline doesn’t really do anything more than provide perhaps, like assistance or social services to these people and provide public information of these immigrants who are in custody. That’s all it does.

VALLAS: So obviously nothing wrong or bad inherently in providing services and resources for people who are victims of crimes, and I don’t want to suggest that that’s what you’re saying or that’s what I’m saying. But as you noted, very much just the creation and publicity around the creation of the office, feeds right into this narrative that Donald Trump has been pushing since he was a candidate that immigrants are, as you said, ‘murderers and rapists.’ Is there any evidence to back up that claim?

LEE: Most immigrants are good people. I know that’s like, a very broad statement but studies bear this point out.

VALLAS: And it sounds silly for you to say something as common sense and simple as that, and a blanket statement, but it is fair I think to bring back up Donald Trump’s own words from the campaign, when he said, something that was the exact opposite of that, which was “Mexicans are rapists,” and he was speaking specifically about Mexico, “Mexicans are rapists and criminals and murderers. I’m sure some of them are good people.” That’s actually a quote.

LEE: That’s correct. That was basically his exact words. And you know, studies show that first-generation immigrants do not commit crimes at the level of native born Americans. And there are many reasons to this. One of the main reasons that immigrants don’t commit crimes is because it is punishable by deportation. And it’s like, why would you risk deportation to commit a crime? And that’s why the crime level among the first-generation immigrants is so low. But for an office, for the Trump administration to come up with an office, a dedicated hotline, for you to report crimes committed by immigrants seems like an overreach in a way to fortify this point that immigrants are criminals. And that’s just simply not true. And all they’re try to do is pull together an aggregation of stories, of anecdotes of criminal immigrants so they could perhaps use it on the trail later on.

VALLAS: Not terribly dissimilar from conservative backed policies for, say, drug testing of public assistance applicants. People who turn to public assistances are statistically less likely to use illegal substances than people who are more well to do, but the establishment of these kinds of policies reinforces the notice that somehow, oh my God, all these people who are receiving public assistance are using illegal drugs.

LEE: Right, or buying lobster or whatever. Or in this case, that immigrants are criminals. Which they are not.

VALLAS: Now, some people got a little confused with the announcement of this office. And it wasn’t just me who didn’t know what VOICE stood for, although thank you for giving me some credit and validation for guessing not terribly wrongly. But some people thought that this was a little more X-Files than immigration related. Tell us that story.

LEE: So a lot of people went above and beyond their call of duty to go on Twitter, to ask people to call into this hotline with reports of extraterrestrial activity, or extraterrestrial encounters in a way.

VALLAS: A different kind of aliens.

LEE: So this hotline has been flooded with calls about space aliens or X-Files or the Jetsons or all these great shows that are out there. And Homeland Security is not happy.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well, Mulder if you’re listening, and I hope David Duchovny does listen to this show because that would be a total dream for me.

LEE: That’d be amazing.

VALLAS: I can trust that you called as well and that the truth is indeed out there. So obviously we’re making a little bit light and people made light of this, but really playing into the importance of language here —

LEE: That’s exactly true.

VALLAS: Which Donald Trump has really thrown out the window. The very use of the word ‘illegal alien,’ or the words ‘illegal alien’ which is something that a lot of folks who are critics of comprehensive immigration reform call folks who are undocumented immigrants or who are new Americans, often will say.

LEE: It’s certainly a term for us to ‘other-ize’ immigrants to make them feel like they’re less than Americans, that they’re not Americans. So that’s why we have this term ‘illegal aliens’, although there is really nothing alien about immigrants since we are a country built on immigrant labor, on the immigrant workforce. So there’s nothing alien about this population, but to fortify this notion that they are alien to this country really, again, plays into the stereotype that Trump and his administration has of not welcoming these people into our communities.

VALLAS: So Esther, getting back to sanctuary cities for a minute, so we mentioned the good news, that a judge did issue an order, an injunction blocking Trump’s executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities. What do we expect to happen next, is the Administration going to back down and say, guess we lost that one or do we expect them to fight this judge?

LEE: Knowing this very anti-immigrant Administration, the Trump administration will likely throw this case to Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The next case that they’re going to throw this case to. And from there it’s going to go on to SCOTUS, it’s going to go on to the Supreme Court.

VALLAS: So, and what the judge found to make it very concrete is he didn’t find that the entire policy was unconstitutional, he didn’t even strike the entire executive order, but what he did find was that key parts of it, and in particular the federal funding part of it, did violate the law and did violate the Constitution. And he found, and this is where as a recovering lawyer, I’ll get a little lawyerly, but good to sort of understand the nuts and bolts here if I’m getting this right, that the counties and the cities who had challenged the law had demonstrated that they could face immediate irreparable harm. And that’s why he jumped in, filed an injunction, said no, actually this policy is going to be stopped. And we’ll hear further argument. So I think what you’re saying then is that we’re going to expect this to move through the courts and we’ll see what happens from there.

LEE: Absolutely and here’s the thing. If you take away federal funding from these localities, you are going to affect core services that also many Americans use. So you wouldn’t just be causing harm to immigrants as Trump is hoping to intend to. But you will also pull services from like, the U.S. citizen kids of immigrants and also just Americans in general.

VALLAS: Well and it’s probably helpful to go into what some of those programs are. So you’ve done a lot of looking into sanctuary cities and also the Trump threats of what types of federal funding he would pull. The kinds of programs that fight poverty, programs that fight homelessness, programs that bolster entrepreneurship and business development.

LEE: There’s also grants that help only Americans like the Pell Grants, you know, that’s going to be pulled and immigrants can’t even access that. It’s not just an issue of pulling federal funding away from sanctuary cities, it’s also an issue of public safety. Going back to the issue of immigrants will be too afraid to report crimes and local law enforcement doesn’t benefit when people don’t report crimes.

VALLAS: And in fact, all the evidence is actually to the contrary as you noted. So sanctuary cities, there’s a wide body of literature finding that they have lower rates of crime and that they actually have better economic, higher levels of economic activity and other sorts of positive indicators as well. So we’ll have to leave it there but Esther Lee is a reporter who covers immigration with ThinkProgress. Thank you so much for joining Off-Kilter.

LEE: Thanks so much for having me.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Out of Occupy Wall Street emerged an unlikely movement known as Occupy Museums, a group of artists that saw a direct connection between the corruption of high finance and that of high culture. Here to discuss Occupy Museums and it’s ongoing ‘Debtfair’ project are Kenneth Pietrobono and Noah Fischer. They’re both New York based artists involved with Occupy Museums and ‘Debtfair.’ Guys, thanks so much for joining Off Kilter.

KENNETH PIETROBONO: Thanks for having us on.

NOAH FISCHER: Thanks for having us.

VALLAS: So Kenneth, maybe let’s start with you and can you help us understand a little bit about the formation and the goals of the Occupy Museums movement?

PIETROBONO: Sure, well as you said, I mean Occupy Museums really moved directly out of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. So essentially with that same notion, as you pointed out in your introduction of really trying to point out the kind of systems and structures of high finance and the ways that they were continuing this kind of class divide of you know, the ‘1 percent, 99 percent’ narrative and essentially as artists what we saw was this connection that the art world specifically has proximity to financial industries. You know, the financial industry is parking its wealth in contemporary art as investment, is supporting museums and cultural institutions in order to kind of create some kind of social equity, quote in their money. So essentially we really wanted to point out those relationships and the way that culture has a responsibility to speak to the 99 percent.

VALLAS: And art is definitely one means for communication but you also describe and I say you broadly in the sense that Occupy Museums and your movement in some of your writings and in some of your online literature about the movement. Describe your views as follows, and I want to quote, “We believe that the practices of painting, sculpture, performance, video, music and conceptual practice lie at the core of a progressive democratic society. Yet artists and culture workers face every more extractive economic burdens parallel to the booming wealth and financialization of the art market.” So it isn’t just art as a vehicle, or a means of activism, it also sort of is part of the problem. Noah, help us understand a little bit of that connection.

FISCHER: Definitely, yeah. Well first just to go back, mentally to Zuccotti Park and the Occupy Wall Street movement moment in 2011, it was such an amazing moment to experience because you know, it was like building a whole different culture, really. So it was a protest, but it was also like an occupation of space for months and so what we were doing in the park was building a culture. And many people who were occupying the park were artists of all kinds. Musicians, performance artists, you know, a whole bunch of artists in New York. And but people weren’t necessarily working as artists during that moment, they were sort of supporting the movement and the movement had cultural aspects but it was a very liberating thing for many of us to be part of a social movement in that way.

And I think it helped to sort of redefine art in a way that’s been hard to access because we’re in this moment of financialization where global financial corporations have so much power and in turn the art market and the way that art is bought and sold and the way that the one percent fund museums has such a big effect over art. We sort of forget that art is almost a separate value system, and that culture is something that in a way lies outside of capitalism. You know culture is kind of value that people can pass around and just in a way, outside of the financial way of thinking about the world. So that was going in the park, very strongly and I think that inspired a lot of us to try to create more of a context for this understanding of art out in the world. And that led to us creating these actions where we would sort of march up the museums and hold assemblies out on the street in front of MoMa or other big museums in New York. And sometimes we would even go inside the museum and hold big public and invited assemblies like in the room with big [INAUDIBLE ARTIST] paintings all around and just talk about in a way commune with the spirits of big [INAUDIBLE ARTIST] and the other political artists of the past and get to what they were really talking about which was you know, democratic principles and equality and justice.

VALLAS: I think when people think about the 1 percent and the 99 percent probably pretty rarely are museums the face of the one percent but that is a big part of what you guys are saying. Help me understand what, in concrete terms, it looks like for artists not to be able to access as you put it, these institutions that really are the entry points to being part of the art world. And Noah, you raised that so I’d love to hear your thoughts there.

FISCHER: Yeah, well, museums are very tricky institutions. And first we should say, I think as Occupy Museums, we in the very beginning of our protest there was a confusion, people thought you guys must hate museums, why are you occupying them? And in fact it’s exactly the opposite. We love museums and we feel that they’re really important kinds of institutions but they’re also sites of power and that’s been true for a long time. And in Western history, museums come out of royal collections. And so they also come out of the history of colonialism. France and England were colonizing other nations and then bringing the spoils back into the museums. And it’s really interesting to remember that the Louvre in Paris used to be the royal collection and then it was actually turned into a public museum during the French Revolution. And in fact they opened the museum on the one year anniversary of chopping off the king’s head. So it was kind of meant as a gesture of, now here’s a royal collection that is now available for the public.

And we try to remember that history but it also has that other side which is still true of it kind of being the domain of the upper-class and the royals of today who are the sort of one percent. And you can see that very clearly when it just came out that a whole bunch of major museum donors of the MoMa and the Met in New York were actually big supporters of Trump’s inauguration. Like, they gave millions of dollars, John Paulson at the Met and Sheldon Adelson, people like that, big collectors who are big museum people are also like behind Donald Trump. So you can sort of see the the connection there between museums and the one percent.

VALLAS: Well and I want to come back to Trump in just a minute but I feel like that’s a great segway into one of your recent and ongoing actions which is ‘Debtfair.’ ‘Debtfair’ is a project that has been in a number of museums and a number of cities but actually currently is at the Whitney in New York City and ‘Debtfair’ is described on the Debtfair.org website as “a means of exposing the hidden layer of debt within the art market and its institutions.” Kenneth, tell me a little bit about ‘Debtfair’ and the connection between art and the experience of being an artist and debt to institutions in the financial sense.

PIETROBONO: Sure, well one of the key components of ‘Debtfair’, we essentially ask artists how does your economic reality affect your art? And for many artists and people working in the cultural sphere, you know to be honest we kind of see this in the kind of gig economy that, you know, kind of, you know floating in the United States. One of the things you’re supposed to do is kind of hide your class reality. And that’s what allows you to participate. And I think what we’re trying to do is really like, essentially call bluff on that and just say that these huge economic [inaudible] require and actually are embedded with this huge layer of indebted people. People who have extreme debts from student loans, debts from living, debts from producing their work and this is actually the only way that these communities thrive is through this incredible amount of debt.

We did an open call to American artists to share with us their economic reality and their art and for the Whitney biennial we had over 500 people respond and those 500 people have $45 million dollars of collective debt. So that really formed the kind of core project that’s currently at the Whitney and in a lot of ways, what you kind of see is for example, on of the kinds of groups of artists we’re working with physically shown at the Whitney are ten artists that have debt to J.P. Morgan Chase. And J.P. Morgan is one of the main donors and supporters of the Whitney biennial. So what we’re really trying to point out is the kind of financial cyclical relationship that informs both the artists producing work, but then also the financial elites that shape the institutions that really have an amazing hand in controlling culture and really controlling what it is and what’s seen and what’s talked about. So Noah was saying earlier, the feeling in Zuccotti Park, the feeling from Occupy, in many ways artists are the community that are performing alternatives, that are searching for new models of working, new models of being, ways of seeing the world and these incredible high debt obligations really restrict this community from being able to do anything that’s not normative in these kind of elite structures.

VALLAS: And you both had art as part of the ‘Debtfair’ project. And actually your art can be found on Debtfair.org. Kenneth, tell me a little bit about the experience of how debt has influenced your art personally.

PIETROBONO: Well, in many ways debt, you know, it’s so funny because this whole project is really an incredible process of actually trying to understand and grapple with these questions. You know, for me personally debt has kept me from higher education and I think it’s really kept me from developing in ways that would provide entry to kind of academic communities and development in my own personal work. Which is a slightly different narrative than those who have gone through the process of higher education and have taken on that debt load. So, you know, it’s so hard to quantify but essentially it feels like kind of everything as far as materials you produce, what you’re thinking about, the scale of work that you make, what you feel capable of. It really puts a container on that and I think this is something Noah and I discuss often.

VALLAS: And Noah, same question to you.

FISCHER: Well, I did go to, I went to art school, and by the way I should say that one thing we learned about art school is that in the U.S., seven of the ten most expensive schools are art schools. Seven of the ten most expensive colleges of any kind are art schools, so art school is a very expensive luxury and you know, as people know, artists don’t earn that money back so it’s not like going to law school and you’re going to pay off the debt more likely. And what we learned from ‘Debtfair’ is that while people might think that artists come from sort of, wealthy or privileged backgrounds, that can be true but that’s often not true. It’s actually a very mixed picture, artists come from all over the place, all kinds of different backgrounds and ethnic and social and cultural you know, contexts.

I went to grad school, I went to Columbia MFA, the art market was really hot at the time. I got deep into debt and my professors told me I was probably going to sell a lot of art and pay it off and then a few years later 2008 happened and I actually had an exhibition up in Chelsea, like, while Lehman Brothers was falling apart in the fall. My art stopped selling, I wasn’t selling that much anyways actually, but my art career really changed at that point. And for me it was a real waking up moment, to see wow, like, it’s really the politics of big finance that’s the most important driving force of the whole definition of art today. And the whole definition of what artists is. It’s not about about like artists, as an artist, you might think it’s about what I produce in my studio and I came to think actually it’s more about what like, what stock traders are producing on their terminals that’s driving the meaning of art today. So I was personally really, I would say in a way not affected for the worse, because it was also a building of consciousness for me, you know, about a greater definition of art. Which is a more political definition.

VALLAS: Could you both tell me a little bit about the art that you have in this exhibit and how it’s connected to or an expression of the experience of having debt? And I’ll start with you, Kenneth.

PIETROBONO: Again, we have 509 artists in the project. You know, so within that group of people, I think the thing that we found really amazing is that you do have many people taking on question of economics and class. But the works themselves, just to describe briefly in the ‘Debtfair’ project, you know, we physically have 30 art works from ten artists that are Puerto Rican with debt to Banco Popular, First Bank of Puerto Rico; ten artists with student loan debt to Navient, ten artists with debt to J.P. Morgan Chase, and the art works themselves really take on so many topics. It’s so intersectional, we have works that’s dealing with incarceration, works that’s dealing with colonial histories, work that’s dealing with gentrification. You know in my own work, I definitely look to talk about the kind of unseen forces that shape our everyday realities. For example, I have a project called “Terms and Conditions” where for 30 days I wear 30 different shirts that have some kind of economic, political or social reality on them. So a shirt that might say, ‘disposable income’, you know is kind of forming the space that you’re in, but has no physical form as a concept. So works like that, we’ve including in the project, but I really think it’s important to think about collectively all of the artists that we’re working with.

VALLAS: So one of the things that to me, popped out from the materials about ‘Debtfair’ as being just particularly fascinating and also just kind of emblematic of how unconventional and interesting this whole project is, is that even down to the pricing, the way that the art that’s being sold at the ‘Debtfair’ exhibit, is priced, is not in the conventional way that art is sold. The art is bundled and then the prices are actually set in a way that’s directly connected to artists monthly debt payments. Noah tell us a little bit about how that works and the significance of pricing in that way.

FISCHER: Well yeah, the pricing you know, obviously at the end of the day the way that this could be potentially be bought is really the sort of central issue. And one decision we made with ‘Debtfair’ pretty early on was to consider the artists in our project not as individuals who are basically competing within each other in the market, which is kind of how the art market and most markets work, but rather, in collective. And we call them bundles. In the ‘Debtfair’ system you can’t buy an individual’s art work by themself, you have to buy a bundle of artworks and that kind of reflects the way that debt itself works. Where debt is bundled together and securitized by banks and then resold. And it’s actually, the bundles are actually not tied to the artist’s monthly debt payments, we decided in the end to have all the artists would receive the same amount of money if the bundle is sold.

And that money is basically their share of TARP, like the 2008 bailout. So that’s the current way that the bundle is sold. So we basically would sell a bundle for something like in the $30,000 range, that’s what they cost at the Whitney and of that, all the artists that are in debt would all get their TARP bailout which individuals never got, right, and then there would be another fund that would go towards basically debt resistance. Because there’s groups that are not just us, but there are groups like Debt Collective, the group behind pushing back against for-profit colleges like Corinthian College which, you know, did, basically gave odious loans to students that they never got credited for and we want to support groups that are doing debt justice work with also some of the sale. So in a way this is selling art, instead of just like competing in a market for who’s going to sink and who’s going to float, which is kind of how the art market works currently, we were trying to come up with a way of creating more solidarity and more justice the more that these bundles of art would be sold.

VALLAS: You have, in a couple of spots, this particularly powerful language around debt and the connection between art and solidarity. And as we sort of close, in the last couple of minutes that I have with you wanted to read it. You write, “Debt often elicits feelings of shame and alienation. It’s a hidden tool of economic, social, and racial division, yet in showing that we’re interconnected through it, ‘Debtfair’ mobilizes around the financial relationships that bind us to one another. Locating possibilities for solidarity in a global struggle and leveraging our collective power as debtors.” In the last maybe minute or so that I have with you guys, I would love to get back to Trump, which you raised earlier, and ask, the Occupy Museums movement has been around pre-dating Trump’s presidency by several years, it, as you mentioned was an outgrowth of Occupy in 2011. But Trump’s presidency has sparked a tremendous resistance movement in a range of sectors and I would love to hear you both speak a little bit to how your work and how the movement’s work has adjusted to the Trump administration and how artists are engaging as part of that resistance. Kenneth, I’ll start with you.

PIETROBONO: Sure, well you know, I think one thing to note here is that many of these structures have been ongoing, as you say, pre-Trump. And you know, we’re dealing with a reality where 80 percent of the country carries some kind of debt. You know, the average family is paying nine percent of their income on interest alone off of to some kind of debt. So in many ways, these kind of debt obligations and debt payments really become the make or break line for so many families and so many individuals in the country. And that’s just as true pre-Trump and post-Trump. But what we see is a kind of exposure, you know, a rupture of the system that must be reconciled. You know, one of the figures we point out in our project is Larry Fink who is the CEO of BlackRock. And BlackRock is the largest asset manager in the world and [inaudible] huge value during the 2008 crash. So it really profited off of the failure of millions of Americans. And essentially, you know the reason we really wanted to go after Fink was this idea that he was, he is a Democrat. He was supporting Hillary Clinton and essentially he’s now an economic advisor to Trump. And so for us this really solidifies the idea that money and the financial elites always win. It is beyond politics. They know how to hedge their bets. And so I think for us that has really cemented and directed our focus on this, the importance of this topic and the moment really being right now. Noah, if you want to continue on that.

FISCHER: Yeah well, I think that that’s the kind of key point is that understanding the power of money which is not a democratic power, it’s just their power, and we want to move towards more democracy and you know, one thing that Trump did so successfully and so painfully is really divide people over race. Used a lot of really you know, really nasty, race baiting language and appoint a lot of people with really you know, divisive horrible track records to important powerful positions in the government and that’s, you know, even the left is having a lot of problems over just having a discussion, you know, about race and background and the colonial histories. It can be very, very difficult and divisive. And debt is something that kind of bridges, we think that bridges a lot that, it’s kind of like this tissue that connects, connects a lot of issues around history, for example of slavery in the U.S. and also of colonialism, for example, of Puerto Rico, that like basically was a U.S. colony.

Right now there is incredible debts being leveraged against the people of Puerto Rico and this PROMESA bill, and we’re highlighting that. And we’re also highlighting, in some of our texts we’re talking about the need for reparations for people whose families faced slavery and we feel that that is at the heart of the sort of economic justice that needs to happen for everyone in the country to be able to rise out of, go forward, rise out of the Trump moment but also go forward from where we were before Trump. So we think that debt is a structural issue that also gets at a whole bunch of other issues that are sort of tearing people apart and that Trump is exploiting and we think that probably we can eventually get out of the issue by people remembering that the current Administration is just playing on fears. And eventually there needs to be like, a way of unifying ourselves in opposition, a powerful opposition that will sort of, regain power at some point.

VALLAS: Powerful words to end on. I’ve been speaking with Kenneth Pietrobono and Noah Fischer. They’re both New York based artists involved with Occupy Museums and an ongoing project sponsored by that movement called ‘Debtfair.’ ‘Debtfair is still at the Whitney in New York and there until June 11th if any listeners are around the New York Area and want to check it out. You can also find out more about the exhibit and the project at debtfair.org. But Kenneth and Noah, thanks so much for joining the show.

PIETROBONO: Thank you so much for having us.

FISCHER: Thank you for having us.

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 Eliza Schultz. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.