Episode 31: #NotOnePenny
The GOP pivots to so-called “tax reform,” SCOTUS kicks off a new term, and the disaster many low-income Puerto Ricans were facing long before the storm. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.
The GOP is pivoting to what it’s calling “tax reform” (read: tax cuts for billionaires), with both the House and Senate moving budgets this week to kick off that process. We cut through the wonkery — and award well-deserved Pinocchios — with Harry Stein, CAP’s budget guru. Next we’re joined by Ian Millhiser, Justice Editor and Supreme Court watcher at Think Progress, for a rundown of the biggest cases to watch now in the Supreme Court’s new term. And don’t miss our bonus interview with Brenda Torres, an environmental justice advocate in Puerto Rico who sheds light on the disaster many low-income communities on the island were facing long before the storm.
This week’s guests:
- Harry Stein, Director of Fiscal Policy at the Center for American Progress
- Ian Millhiser, Justice Editor and Supreme Court watcher at Think Progress
- Brenda Torres, Executive Director of the San Juan Bay Estuary Program
For more on this week’s topics:
- Stay up to date on the budget fight with TrumpTaxToolKit.org, NotOnePenny.org, and HandsOff.org
- Follow Ian Millhiser’s work for all things SCOTUS
- Learn more about the San Juan Bay Estuary Program
This program aired on October 6, 2017.
Transcript of show:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. With the GOP pivoting to what it’s calling tax reform and both the house and senate moving their budgets this week to kick off that process, I sit down with Harry Stein, budget and tax guru at the Center for American Progress to cut through the wonkery and the many fallacious GOP talking points about the Republican budget and tax plan. Next, I’m joined by Ian Millhiser, justice editor and Supreme Court watcher at ThinkProgress for a roundup of the biggest SCOTUS cases to watch now that the Supreme Court has kicked off its new term. Don’t miss my bonus interview with Brenda Torres, an environmental justice advocate in Puerto Rico who sheds light on the disaster many low income communities on the island were facing long before the storm. But first, following this weeks horrific mass shooting, I’d like to share a powerful op-ed by a Las Vegas casino worker that ran in The New York Times, it’s titled “In Las Vegas, We Take Care of People” and it’s written Brittany Bronson.
Las Vegas is the entertainment capital of the world for many reasons. Those of us who work on the Strip have perfected the art of hospitality. We strive to make all of our guests feel like family.
We welcome everyone, and we are not easily shocked.
But Monday morning, residents, tourists, emergency medical workers, politicians and local reporters were in collective disbelief that our city had become the location of the most recent mass shooting in America.
Hours before the shots rang out, I’d finished a long day of work at my casino job, exhausted and eager to get to my home, which is just two miles from where the shooting took place. Throughout the day on Sunday, I’d served guests poolside. Many of them were looking forward to the country music concert being held near the Mandalay Bay Resort hotel. All of them were happy and carefree.
The feeling didn’t last. A gunman perched on the 32nd floor of the hotel fired into a crowd of 22,000 people gathered at the concert, the Route 91 Harvest Festival, killing more 50 and wounding hundreds. The venue was wedged between the Strip traffic clotting Las Vegas Boulevard and McCarran International Airport. It is an area of already limited access, in the heart of the city.
This could have happened from the window of any of the properties on the Strip. I’ve worked at many of them, and I know this: All of us who keep the casinos, bars, pools and hotels running deeply care about our visitors. We call them by name. We ask where they’re from, about their families, about their jobs. In our own small way, we take care of them. We sincerely want them to enjoy their time here and to feel joy, and we want them to be safe.
We have an excellent history of keeping our visitors secure. But there is only so much that care and hospitality can do. In the coming days, the city and the casino industry are likely to have many conversations about how this shooting could have been prevented.
At a briefing on Monday, Gov. Brian Sandoval offered his condolences to the victims and their families. He expressed his pride in Las Vegas law enforcement and emergency medical workers. “There is a lot to learn from all of this,” he said. “It was a cowardly, despicable act that I’m very angry about. There’s not much we can do, but we can learn.”
Whether there is much that can be done, policy-wise, is a conversation some will vehemently resist having and others will aggressively push for in the following days. The fact that the gunman has been identified as a Nevada resident is likely to make state gun regulations, or lack thereof, a topic of conversation. Despite the inevitable disagreements, I hope my city chooses to have this debate.
Those of us who live here know Nevada is an open-carry state with a Wild West past of loose gun laws and regulations. It’s where a Las Vegas city councilwoman’s Christmas card featured a picture of her family members, including a child, fully armed, and where a tourist can visit one of many machine-gun ranges and try out a semiautomatic weapon of the kind the killer may have used.
As per usual, state and federal politicians are sending their thoughts and prayers. Although heartfelt, they provide very little comfort or practical use if they aren’t followed by action.
Ordinary people have acted in heroic ways, like loading the wounded onto truck beds and trying to get friends and strangers to hospitals. Las Vegas’s two major trauma centers were at full capacity Monday treating the wounded. Workers at hotels that were under lockdown tried to calm startled guests and employees. In the hours after the shooting, people desperate to offer help lined up to donate blood.
As I write this, my co-workers and others are returning to work. The Strip is filling back up with tourists seeking a sense of safety along with the escape they came here in search of. In the ways we do every day, and in the heroic ways this terrible occasion calls for, I see those who live and work in Las Vegas taking care of people. It’s what we do best.
That’s by Brittany Bronson, she’s an instructor in English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, she’s a casino worker and she’s a contributing opinion writer to The New York Times and the article is titled, “In Las Vegas, We Take Care of People.” But doing go away, now the tax and budget fight and how you can fight back. Harry Stein is with me next up.
[MUSIC]
VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. After trying and failing to take healthcare away from tens of millions of Americans, Republicans leaders in congress have now turned their attention to what they’re calling tax reform. Big scare quotes on that. They claim what they’re proposing will help working class and middle class Americans, but it became clear that the emperor has no clothes when Trump and congressional Republicans put their cards on the table but releasing their tax plan last week. Meanwhile this week the house and senate both moved their budget proposals forward, the first step towards enacting the GOP’s Robin Hood in reverse agenda. Here to unpack all of this is Harry Stein, tax and budget guru and so much more at the Center for American Progress. Harry, it’s so great to have you back.
STEIN: It’s great to be here. I want so much more printed on my business card.
VALLAS: Well I know who you can talk to because I work down the hall from you. But you know, you didn’t wear your panda hat today.
STEIN: I think that’s Jeremy’s panda hat.
VALLAS: Oh, you’re right, that’s Jeremy’s.
STEIN: And I did not borrow it from him for today, I’m sorry about that.
[LAUGHTER]
VALLAS: Well I’ll have to just dry my tears later because we have a lot to talk about on the tax and budget front. So help me understand, before we get into all the process stuff, before we get into what’s happening this week, there was a quote that’s been making the rounds all week from Gary Cohn, he is a White House economic advisor, so he advises the president on economic policy and presumably should know what’s in their tax plan. And he said, and it’s been all over this week because it should be that, “Under our plan the wealthy won’t get a tax cut.” That’s a direct quote. How many pinocchios, Harry?
STEIN: Oh, that’s four pinocchios. The whole plan is designed around the goal of giving a tax cut to rich people. So the plan gets rid of the tax on estates worth more than 5 and a half million dollars, literally all that does is give a tax cut to very rich heirs, it’s not even about the people that earn the money in the first place. It’s about their heirs. It gets rid of the alternative minimum tax, which is really the main reason Donald Trump paid any taxes in 2005. The whole point of the AMT is basically to be a backstop for people who use enough loopholes and deductions to not hardly pay any taxes. It’s kind of like when people talk about the Buffett rule, making sure people pay some kind of minimum tax. We have that now with the AMT. They want to get rid of it. They want to cut the top rates that rich people have, that businesses have, it doesn’t do anything for real small businesses. This is a plan that’s really all about cutting taxes for rich people and by the way, the low and middle income people, that’s the ones where we don’t get enough information. So when the administration says we don’t have enough details yet, yeah that’s mostly true for the middle class.
VALLAS: Well let’s get to that in a second because I want to stay with the winners. The winners of this plan, I think they need to be talked about. So it sounds from what you just described like it’s rich people, richer people and the richest people and also the richest corporations who are the winners in this tax plan. Am I getting that right?
STEIN: That’s exactly it. If you’re a rich person, a very rich person or an extremely rich person, or if you’re a big corporation, you do very well under this plan, and I hesitated because people that are I’d guess you’d call upper middle class and like that $150 to $200, $300,000 range actually see potentially fairly large tax increases. So if you call that rich, then eh, maybe, maybe not. But once you’re like very rich, definitely.
VALLAS: And it’s not even just that the winners are overwhelmingly rich people, it’s also that the entire plan is basically actually a tax cut for millionaires, billionaires and corporations wrapped up with some other stuff is the way it looks, right? I mean you can’t ignore the numbers unless you’re Gary Cohn and you choose to ignore the numbers. Am I right in understanding that 80% of the tax benefits in this plan go to 1% over the next ten years?
STEIN: So that’s right. By the time that the plan is fully phased in, this is in 2027, the Tax Policy Center which is really the gold standard for non-partisan tax analysis in DC says that 80% goes to the top 1%. So everybody else, really if anything just gets left with scraps here while we’re seeing huge tax cuts for people at the top. There’s also analysis by another independent group in Washington called the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, and what they’ve done is break it out by all 50 states. And basically you get similar results for each state, but there’s some interesting variation. If you’re listening in Maryland, it’s a particularly bizarre but correct, I think, result. The top 1% get 120% of the tax cuts. I’m not misspeaking. 120%. How is that possible? Because the bottom 99% gets a net tax increase.
VALLAS: Oh, wow.
STEIN: So they get I guess -20% of the tax cuts.
VALLAS: So let’s get into that. So the winners are unmistakably unless you’re lying, which a lot of people have been over the course of the last week. I actually have to interrupt myself to say I loved, there was like a New York Times headline and I was scrolling through just seeing what I’d miss, it was late at night. And there was literally a New York Times headline that said something along the lines of “GOP finally acknowledges their tax plan benefits the wealthy”. And it had been like days after the plan had come out and like, many, many days and after Gary Cohn had lied on the Sunday shows and been duly pinocchio’d for it. Not just by you, Harry, but by many. But it was just amazing to actually see like that as a headline. That describes last week.
STEIN: It does but they’re not there yet. I was just watching the Senate Budget committee is marking up their budget and the whole point of this budget is to enable them to pass this huge tax cut.
VALLAS: Which we’ll talk about in just a second.
STEIN: And throughout, all of these Republicans are saying, “This doesn’t cut taxes on rich people. We haven’t even released our real plan yet. It’s not going to cut taxes on rich people.” I hope that they’re being sincere, of course they’re not because we’ve seen their plan and we know it’s a big tax cut for the rich. But it’s kind of bizarre then if they clearly are feeling the pressure not to cut taxes for rich people so just don’t cut taxes for rich people! Why do rich people, millionaires, billionaires and corporations need even a penny of tax cuts?
VALLAS: It’s pretty clear that they know how unpopular their plan is if people know what’s in it. If the only marketing plan they have for it is to lie about it.
STEIN: That is 100% their strategy on this plan.
VALLAS: So I want to get to now who the losers are. So obviously by not getting a tax cut people who are not the 1% and not the millionaires, the billionaires, the large corporations are relatively, losing out. But there are actually people who are going lose more than just a tax cut they didn’t get because they don’t have a yacht.
STEIN: Right, so I think it’s important kind of before you dive into the nitty, gritty here to just say at the outset that when you have these kinds of giant tax cuts for rich people, that everybody else does end up losing. And the reason is that those are cuts that are going to take money out of Medicare, Medicaid, food assistance, education, programs that we all need. So ultimately, no matter what the minor, whatever the tax change is this is not a good deal for anybody but the rich. But yes, there are people who absolutely we know get a tax increase. There’s details yet to be filled in but we have enough details to know that certain groups get tax increases and the two groups that we can say for sure are people that are 65 and older, and people who are blind. And the reason is that the plan gets rid of what’s called the additional standard deduction. So in addition to the standard deduction that everybody gets, if you’re over 65 or blind you can claim an additional standard deduction. By the way if you’re over 65 and blind you get to claim two additional standard deductions. And because the plan gets rid of that, moderate income seniors and people who are blind, we can say with certainly will get tax increases. You can calculate their taxes using the most generous assumptions possible for the Trump plan and just use the details that they’ve given and we know that they have tax increases.
Now beyond that group people who are single parents or people with children in general, people who itemize their deductions very well could see tax increases and I think it’s quite clear that they will. But that’s where you do need to make some amount of assumptions and I think we can make reasonable assumptions to see that they get tax increases. But that’s where you need to fill in some blanks that the Republicans have not yet filled in.
VALLAS: And some analysis I’ve seen starts to kind of try to put numbers to this where it gives you percentages of certain categories of people who are likely to see tax increases. Something like between 30 and 60% of people who make under $300,000 may see a tax increase. But that’s a huge share of people who are the people who could most use more income in their lives, contrary to the person who already has the first yacht and has been online shopping for the second yacht.
STEIN: Right.
VALLAS: Do you buy yachts online, actually now that I’m thinking about it?
STEIN: I’m sure you can. I don’t know if you can buy a yacht [INAUDIBLE] to put other yachts in.
VALLAS: Oh, online. The shipping must be expensive though.
STEIN: I mean these are things that people who pay the estate tax I’m sure would know.
VALLAS: But you didn’t get my pun here, the “shipping”
[LAUGHTER]
STEIN: There it is, there it is.
VALLAS: Come on, come on! Throw me a bone. Anyway, so point being, there are people in this country who could use more money in their lives and I would say maybe top of that list would be low income people, I would also say high on that list would be middle income people.
STEIN: So the Tax Policy Center analysis says that 1 out of 4 people eventually get a tax increase under this plan. And so there’s some uncertainty there. But it’s very clear a lot of people would see tax increases. But you mentioned low income people. Low income people can be sure that they will not get a tax cut because this does nothing for refundable tax credits. For people who are already, because of existing tax law, don’t have tax liability. But I should say they don’t have personal income tax liability. They do pay payroll taxes, they do pay other taxes. But once you’re at zero for income tax liability, the only way to get a tax cut is to increase the refundable credits. Things that are giving you money past that, once you don’t have any tax liability.
VALLAS: Something like the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit.
STEIN: Right but this plan makes clear it does not increase refundable tax credits. So at best, low income people get nothing and that’s the optimistic scenario for them.
VALLAS: So let’s go back to what you were saying just before. So that it’s not actually just if you lose the lottery here and end up getting a tax increase that you get screwed, there are a lot of other doors that you could walk through and also get screwed if you are not the absolute wealthiest people in this country or a large corporation. And that has to do with the connection between the tax plan and the budget. So help us understand what’s going on this week in terms of some of the procedural steps, the house and senate are taking to actually make their tax plan, vague as it may be in some places, into law and what’s the connection when it comes to why some of these programs might be cut to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy as you were describing before?
STEIN: Right, so the house and senate are both moving budget resolutions. And it’s important to know at the outset, a budget resolution isn’t a law itself. It doesn’t go to the president’s desk to be signed, it doesn’t actually change any law by itself. The main thing that the budget resolution does is it includes in it something called a reconciliation instruction and that’s an instruction to committees to write an actual law that meets the target in the instruction. So the instruction might say, and in fact the one senate budget says hey senate finance committee who is the tax writing committee, write us a bill that raises deficits by a trillion and a half dollars. And if they write a bill that does that then they get the fast track reconciliation process. The main thing that that gives you is that it doesn’t get filibustered in the senate.
VALLAS: So basically fast track authority for Republicans in congress to do just like they’ve been trying to do with health care ram through a piece of legislation if they want with no debate, with no opportunity for democrats to filibuster and without a single democratic vote in the end.
STEIN: Right, so this how ACA worked. They passed a budget resolution in January that had a reconcilation instruction to repeal ACA, which they’ve been trying to use ever since to repeal the ACA. That instruction expired on September 30th, they failed to repeal ACA because they couldn’t get Republicans to vote for it. But that they’re trying to bring back reconciliation both to pass their tax cuts and potentially to also cut spending. It’s a little bit unclear which committees are going to get instruction in the end but it’s important to know that the tax writing committees are not just tax writing committees. The Ways and Means committee in the house and the Finance Committee in the senate both have jurisdiction over a lot of important programs including a lot of healthcare programs. Medicare in the senate where this really matters, they also have Medicaid. So this is an instruction in the Senate budget that could actually be used to make huge Medicaid cuts. It’s not clear whether they’re going to do that or not but rest assured if they get the votes to do it, they’re going to do it. So the only thing that’s unclear is whether or not they’ll have the votes. But this is a budget that would enable huge Medicaid cuts in addition to these tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.
VALLAS: So we may be, at least for the moment, I’m knocking on all kinds of wooden surfaces, my head included for people who are listening and not seeing this, we may actually not be in the clear yet when it comes to fighting the fight on the Affordable Care Act and trying to keep that the law of the land. Republicans are still making noises that they’re not done with that fight. But even if they don’t get their way on actually repealing the Affordable Care Act, they could try and end Medicaid as we know it through this budget and tax process that you were just describing.
STEIN: That’s right. So this is a budget that if congress agrees to it lets them pass a bill that both makes huge tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and huge Medicaid cuts and they can do that without a single Democratic vote. This may sound familiar, by the way, because that also was their ACA repeal bills. They were huge tax cuts for the wealthy and then huge cuts to things like Medicaid and other things that help people buy health insurance. This is the same thing all over again. The bill could even be basically the same bill, they’re very similar. But this is the same dynamic. They want to cut taxes for rich people, they want to take services away from everybody else. They want to ram it through as quickly as they can. You know, the Senate budget takes away protections, takes away parliamentary protections to make sure you’re not increasing budget deficits, it takes away protections to make sure that there’s a CBO score in advance of the vote. This is the same playbook as health care. Stays sketchy on the details, push it through quickly and try to make sure nobody understands what’s going on.
VALLAS: So into my head has popped the image of the groundhog from the movie “Groundhog Day”, right, but it’s actually now wearing Groucho Marx glasses, like the one with the mustache attached and it’s like, “I’m not the same groundhog, I may still be tax cuts for rich people paid for by everybody else and taking away your healthcare but I’m not the same groundhog.” Sounds like it’s the same groundhog.
STEIN: It’s the same groundhog. Yeah, and maybe you could have Bill Murray on your show next week too.
VALLAS: Do not get my hopes up, you know that’s my dream.
STEIN: I don’t want to promise anything.
VALLAS: As someone who grew up on Ghostbusters and that actually is my favorite movie franchise, yes, yes that’s right Will, you learn something about me, looking at my producer over here who I think maybe actually just gained respect for me in that moment. Which you should, because I talked about Ghostbusters. Anyway, if you can get Bill Murray that’d be great.
STEIN: I’ll work on it.
VALLAS: You said something really important there. Well you did, I forgot what it was! [LAUGHTER] Because now all I can think about is groundhogs in Groucho Marx glasses. Oh you were talking about actually how this all kind of hangs together and you brought up deficits, you also brought up spending cuts and something I really want to go back do because I think this is a really important point. Is actually we don’t know how they’re going to move forward because right now the house and the senate Republicans are in different places. They’re sort of taking different tacks for how to pay for these tax cuts for rich people. But it sounds like either way, it’s going to be working families and middle class families holding the bag whether it’s because we’re seeing massive spending cuts like in these house and senate Republican budgets, you talked about Medicaid, but it’s also nutrition assistance. It’s housing, it’s education, it’s infrastructure. In the case of the House budget it’s actually even Social Security cuts targeting people with disabilities. Meals on Wheels, it goes on and on. So could be spending cuts paying for these tax cuts for rich people to buy their second and third yacht, online or not, but it could also be because they jack up the deficit, right?
STEIN: That’s right. But I don’t think we should look at these things as being terribly different in terms of what they’re ultimate goal is. Rest assured, if they jack up the deficit, which is a very likely outcome, they will turn around immediately and say, “Oh my goodness, look at these deficits, we really have to do something about Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security now, guys.” And this doesn’t take a great deal of imagination. Their budget resolutions, even though they’re not laws and they’re not binding, do say we want to make huge cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. They say we want to make cuts in transportation, nutrition assistance, education, this is their agenda. And so they can use, even if they just use the reconciliation instruction this time around, this is the 2018 budget to do tax cuts and jack up the deficit, if they were actually on time with budget process, the 2019 budget gets passed early next year, so they can turn around literally immediately. Well before the midterms and do all those cuts in the next budget resolution.
VALLAS: Don’t even start saying that, it’s too soon. It’s too soon. There’s no fighting this one, but point taken. I think your point about the deficit and their relationship to it I think is critical here. These are the people who claim to hate deficits. Literally every phrase out of their mouths sometimes it seems. And every phrase on their web pages on where they stand is all about deficit reduction and we can’t add to the deficit and actually point at Democrats and accuse Democrats of wanting to just jack up the deficit. But now they’re quietly saying, at least they’ve said this in the senate, that they’re totally fine with deficits if it’s to finance tax cuts for rich people and corporations.
STEIN: This is a dynamic I think that’s so important to understand. It’s really fundamental to the politics around the budget. The hysteria that Republicans whip up around the deficit is entirely instrumental. It’s not sincere. It’s entirely instrumental, it’s about attacking programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that they know are extremely popular.
VALLAS: It’s a ploy.
STEIN: Right, and the only way they can get people they think support cuts to the programs because they’re so popular and effective is to claim we have no choice. There’s this massive debt crisi otherwise. It’s a ploy. They don’t really care about the deficit. And if they do care about the deficit, then I hope they’ll prove me wrong by not supporting a budget that jacks up the deficit by one and a half trillion dollars to play for tax cuts for millionaires. But this is the game plan. You cut taxes, jack up the deficit and then you freak out about the deficit and insist that now we have to cut programs and it’s important for people that are not in on this ploy to not play into it. So we are on the verge of a looming debt crisis and when you play into the hysterical rhetoric that we hear about deficits from Republicans who just want to cut Medicare and Medicaid, it’s easier. We are a country that if we’re giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires and someone’s going to pay for that and that’s going to be everyone else, this is not a country that has unlimited fiscal resources and so we should use them effectively. But we are not in a place where we have no choice but to make huge Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security cuts or otherwise we’ll face a debt crisis. We’re a strong country that can take care of its citizens if we choose to do that.
VALLAS: We talk about limited resources, it makes me think of Ron Johnson who just last weekend was actually caught saying, not caught, he wasn’t on a hot mic. He said on purpose, heard and seen intentionally saying that we have limited resources when it comes to shelter and food and health care, that those are limited resources and only people who have earned the privilege and who can afford them should have them. That was almost a direct quote of what he said when he was speaking to a group of students. I’m sure did not appreciate hearing that. And that clip went viral. But what he’s actually saying is the things that we decide, we as people in power are going to be limited and restricted to those who can’t afford them are things that we would actually like to see be even more limited because we’d like the resources belonging to the top earners in this country to be even less limited. I mean that’s effectively what he’s saying. It’s a massive funneling of wealth upward and they’re not even really trying to hide it anymore.
STEIN: They’re not and I think that fundamentally that is right or wrong, at least that’s sincere. That’s their vision for the country is a place where the wealthy get all of, get even more wealth and get their hands on and everybody else, housing food, health care, some level of retirement security, those things that, you’re on your own.
VALLAS: Best of luck.
STEIN: Yeah you know by the way, Johnson, he’s on the budget committee and his whole advocacy around this budget, this budget that the whole point of the budget is to increase the deficit by a trillion and a half dollars to pass tax cuts, his whole presentation was my God look at these deficits. I said earlier they will turn around and say my God look at these deficits. They don’t even have to turn around. They can amazingly do both, we have to cut taxes and raise deficits and my God look at these deficits, Senator Johnson manages to say both of those things at the same time, it’s remarkable.
VALLAS: I don’t know which one is walking and which one is chewing gum but amen. So in the last minute or so that I have with you Harry, this isn’t just a fight that we’re going to sit idly by and watch and eat popcorn while we enjoy hypocrisy and point out lies and measure pinocchios. This is a fight that the American people are going to engage in and like with health care if people raise their voices they can stop this massive funneling upward of resources from everyday Americans up to the very top. How can people get involved, what do they need to know about how they can make this pivot from what has been originally framed as a health care fight and now is sort of refashioned with new Groucho Marx glasses as a tax and budget fight?
STEIN: We need the same mobilization that we had on health care. That’s what stopped health care was people saying no, and we need the same thing. We need people to say no to tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires paid for by everyone else. And so there are several resources that are real important here. Trumptaxtoolkit.org, this will be constantly updated with the most important targets in congress and with resources to reach them and tell them no. I would encourage people also to go to notonepenny.org which lays out a very simple request for members of congress — don’t give millionaires, billionaires and big corporation even a penny of tax cuts. Tax reform is great, let’s do real tax reform. That shouldn’t involve giving rich people and corporations a tax cut at all. And I would also encourage people to go to handsoff.org. Big thing you can do at handsoff.org, share your stories. Tell us how these kinds of cuts to things like disability programs or the environment or education. We’re all touched by the budget in some way. Tell us how that affects you because those personal stories are really what moves the debate. We talk about here in terms of numbers and big picture and percentages and those are important but really what I think moves the debate more than anything else is a personal stories that illustrate what is actually at stake here for Americans around the country.
VALLAS: And that’s something that we’ll be showcasing in the weeks and months ahead here on Off Kilter as we did throughout the healthcare fight. So again, trumptaxtoolkit.org if you liked the Trumpcare tool kit you’re going to love the tax toolkit and it’s got everything you need as Harry said but also notonepenny.org and handsoff.org. Harry Stein, panda hat or no, you’ve been a delight, thank you so much for coming on and helping unpack all of this very wonky but very important stuff and I can’t wait to have you back soon.
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. With the new Supreme Court term now underway I’ve brough in our SCOTUS correspondent Ian Millhiser to give us the big cases this term and what we should be watching. Ian Millhiser, who are you? You’re the Justice editor at ThinkProgress, you’re an author of a book that I can never remember the title of.
IAN MILLHISER: I’m so mad at you right now Rebecca.
VALLAS: You can’t stay mad at me for that long, Ian, don’t lie.
MILLHISER: I really can’t.
VALLAS: It’s “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted.”
MILLHISER: You are so hot right now.
VALLAS: I got it right!
MILLHISER: Well done.
VALLAS: Alright so anyway, that’s who Ian is, little fist bump there. Ian, what’s going on with the Supreme Court, what are the big cases this term?
MILLHISER: So the biggest case is the gerrymandering case that they just heard. So you know, the background here is that American democracy is a trash fire, we have a president who didn’t win the popular vote. We have a Republican majority in the senate that got, that represents 30 million fewer people than the Democratic minority. And we have a house where partially because of gerrymandering, partially because of geographic factors, Democrats would have to win the popular vote by something like 7 points in order to take back the house. So we’re barely a democracy. One of the ways that we’re barely a democracy, Wisconsin can’t really be called a democracy at all right now. This case involves Wisconsin. And they rigged their state assembly so bad that in 2012 Democrats actually won the popular vote and Republicans still got a 60 seat supermajority. They won more than 60% of the seats when they lost the popular vote thanks to this gerrymander.
VALLAS: I wish we had one of those Chuck Todd maps behind us right now that you could be showing.
MILLHISER: I wish I brought a white board.
VALLAS: Right that’s like to show how dramatic the point you just made is. So I’m just going to motion behind me without it like a weatherman.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: I could do it with my fingers, see this finger is bigger than that finger, that’s what the Democrats got and now this really high finger, yeah.
VALLAS: Right, so this is exhibit a of gerrymandering and what it does to what is left of democracy in this country.
MILLHISER: Right.
VALLAS: Ok, so what’s at issue in this case?
MILLHISER: So the issue is whether the gerrymandering is allowed under the constitution. Well actually, that’s not the issue.
VALLAS: OK, so maybe tell me what is the issue.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: So with the exception of Neil Gorsuch, no one seems to question that gerrymanders are unconstitutional. There was a 2004 Supreme Court case that refused to overturn a Pennsylvania map. But no one said yeah, yeah we think it’s totally cool just go ahead and gerrymander. Where the justices split was that a bunch of them said, well this is really hard. It’s hard to tell what’s a gerrymander, what isn’t a gerrymander, and in marginal cases I think that’s right. It’s not always, it’s not easy to sort each individual map to tell whether it’s a gerrymander or not.
VALLAS: So gerrymandering is kind of like porn.
MILLHISER: Yes, you know it when you see it.
VALLAS: You know it when you see it. And that’s a Supreme Court reference, I can say that.
MILLHISER: Yeah you can totally say that. So what Justice Kennedy said in the 2004 case is look, I’m not ready to start tossing out gerrymanders now but if you show me an objective way where courts can look at maps and assess whether they’re gerrymanders or not, they I can be ready to do it. And so for the last 13 years, that spawned an entire field of political science that basically devoted to answering that challenge that Justice Kennedy laid out and 13 years later they’ve come up with three mathematical formulas that can be used to [INAUDIBLE] gerrymanders. The Wisconsin map is so egregious that it’s off the scales on any of the tests. But the question is whether or not now that people stepped up and answered Kennedy’s challenge, whether he’s going to be willing to say OK fine, it’s time to stop this.
VALLAS: OK, so what do you expect to actually happen here? I always ask you to look in your crystal ball, sometimes I ask you to look in a magic 8 ball, sometimes we have different outcomes as a result of which ball you look into.
MILLHISER: Situation unclear.
VALLAS: Well but what do you expect here? This is a big deal considering, all eyes for the last several months really on the 2016 presidential election and a lot of discussion there, but really this means a lot potentially for 2018, doesn’t it?
MILLHISER: This is a huge deal because gerrymandering has become so sophisticated, like it’s easy to draw a map that will lock your party for like the next election and maybe the election after that. But it’s gotten so sophisticated now that people can draw a map that lock parties in for five elections in a row. And the thing about locking yourself for 5 elections in a row is after 5 elections, you have another redistricting cycle. So you can keep rinse, washing, repeating this and if this Wisconsin gerrymander is not struck down what it means is that the Republican party is likely to control the assembly forever. And so the good news for like people who actually like democracy is I think we’re going to get Kennedy and Kennedy can be a little hard to read but he seemed visibly angered that one of the pro-gerrymandering attorneys wasn’t answering his questions. He didn’t ask questions at all of Paul Smith, the voting rights attorney and that’s a good sign that he was just like sort of rolling along with what Paul was saying. So I’m optimistic. I think that if the good guys do win, it’s a 5 to 4, but I think that it is more likely than not that the courts are going to say OK, this is too far. At the very least, it can’t be the case that the party that won the 2010 elections gets to rule their state forever.
VALLAS: And this is a Wisconsin case but it potentially has huge implications nationally. And for elections for decades to come.
MILLHISER: Right. If the Wisconsin, I mean you’ve got a number of states, where gerrymandering is the worst tends to be closely divided states like Wisconsin and so you’ve got a number of states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, that are closely divided states. I mean I was chatting with a buddy of mine yesterday who’s one of Governor McAuliffe’s appointees in Virginia and he was telling me like, they think it is impossible for them to win the Virginia statehouse in this upcoming election in Virginia. They think they can hold the governorship but they think it is impossible because Virginia is so gerrymandered. And so in a lot of these states, not only do you suddenly have the chance of having a democracy in those states again but you could also potentially unravel a lot of congressional gerrymanders in these states and all the sudden the house becomes competitive and we’re not looking at Speaker Paul Ryan for the rest of our lives.
VALLAS: So really really huge potential implications here coming out of this case. And what’s the name of the case for folks who want to watch it?
MILLHISER: This is Gill v. Whitford.
VALLAS: So there’s another huge case that’s been getting a lot less attention and it’s because the issue of something called arbitration, it sounds wonky, it’s not like oh my, I mean gerrymandering, just the name, people understand what that means and they think oh that matters, I want to follow this. Arbitration, explain what it is and another Supreme Court case that actually has a lot to do with wage theft.
MILLHISER: This is one of those cases that’s really about how lawyers can make really simple issues sound really complicated. So like the way a lawyer would describe this case, it’s actually three consolidated cases, is it’s a case concerning whether a no-class clause can be inserted into a binding arbitration agreement between an employer and an employee.
VALLAS: Ian, I think you missed your calling as one of the people who does the fine print at the end of commercials.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: No, it really is. Side effects may include [INAUDIBLE]
VALLAS: Right? But unpack that. Put it in English for us.
MILLHISER: What it actually is about is whether or not to legalize wage theft. So what the issue is here is that employees at the three companies at issue in the case were told basically sign this or you will be fired. And the thing that they had to sign in order to keep their job, one thing is it locked them out of real courts, they had to go to a privatized arbitration if they have a dispute with their employers, and there’s all kinds of data showing that arbitrators are less kind to employees than courts are.
VALLAS: So to stop you there, before we even get to the implications for wage theft and what the documents were that these workers were signing, just the issue of arbitration alone, and in this case it would be forced arbitration, so the employer was actually making employees sign a document that would say I agree because I have a gun put to my head right now by my employer, I agree that I don’t have access to my day in court.
MILLHISER: Exactly.
VALLAS: The courthouse is barred to me and I’m going to be instead shuffled over to this other process that isn’t actually quite justice and it’s certainly isn’t a court and a judge because my employer has realized that that’s better for them if they don’t actually get to be brought to court.
MILLHISER: That’s exactly right. I mean one of the big problems with arbitration is that the, generally, especially if you have a large employer like large companies are in court all the time, or they’re in arbitration all the time. They know who the arbitrators are, they know who they want and generally there’s a process where the parties get to negotiate over who the arbitrator might be. But the employer is going to know who they want, they’re going to have a ton of information, they’re going to know who they want to veto, and the employees just not going to know that.
VALLAS: The employer has it down to a science and they’ve figured out how to work the system and the employee is sitting there going man, I really hope this is a good outcome for me and not knowing anything about what’s going on.
MILLHISER: Right, but that’s not actually the worst part of this case.
VALLAS: Oh well, let’s hear what’s worse.
MILLHISER: So the worst part is they want to insert a ban on class actions. And so what a class action is is that let’s say that your boss steals $300 from you. Your employer steals $300 from you. You’re not going to sue, and the reason you’re not going to sue is because the cost of actually litigating that case, whether you hire the lawyer or even the filing fee in court could potentially be a lot more than $300. So you’re just going to let it slide because it’s going to cost you more to get the money back than you actually stand to recover. Class actions allow a bunch of people who have the same basic dispute to join together under one lawsuit. So if you have an employer that steals $300 from 10,000 employees, they can all join together, now it’s a $3 million case, they’ll get one lawyer or one legal team to litigate it and because there’s a lot of money at stake the lawyers will work on a contingency fee basis, meaning they get paid out of the winnings. And so all of a sudden the employer realizes OK if I do this I’m going to get dragged into court and I’m going to lose so I’m just not going to do it in the first place. If you put in a no class clause, what that means is people can’t join together in these suits. And so your employers, they’re not going to steal $30,000 from you because that’s enough money that you’ll actually sue, but so long as they spread the pain across as many people as possible and so long as they keep it, I mean even like a few thousands bucks you might not sue because litigation is expensive and painful and it takes a lot of money to make it worth it.
VALLAS: To be clear, it’s not even just that the employee might not find it worth it, they might not be able to find a lawyer who will take their case and then boom again, doors to the courthouse close to them.
MILLHISER: Exactly because what’s going to happen if you come to a lawyer with a thousand dollar case? Is they’re going to say look, you can pay me $200 an hour to litigate this and by the time I’ve spent my afternoon figuring out what the heck is going on I’ve already run up $1,000 in legal fees for you. But I’m not going to take it on contingency fee because 30% of $1,000 isn’t worth my time. And so yeah, that’s the issue. Without the class action, you can’t get a lawyer, you get it litigated.
VALLAS: So if you’re an employer you could actually probably with a smart numbers person figure out exactly what is the amount of money that you can steal through wage theft from an employee, from any given employee and how many employees you need to spread that across so that you can increase your profits by X, knowing that those people won’t be able to get lawyers.
MILLHISER: That’s exactly right. You can imagine at say, Walmart is already doing this calculation.
VALLAS: There’s a formula.
MILLHISER: And of course the people that are going to be hurt the most, I mean I’m a lawyer, if someone steals $300 from me I’m not happy but I’m also not losing my home. But like the who people are going to be hit by this, are going to be the people where like a little bit of wage theft can —
VALLAS: Be absolutely devastated.
MILLHISER: Exactly.
VALLAS: And yet have no recourse. So this case has a lot wrapped up in it. So there’s both the forced arbitration piece and then there’s also the employers being able to say no, you actually don’t have access to class actions.
MILLHISER: It’s a terrible case and I’ll say one other thing, which is that it’s a case that arises from the court completely twisting the law. All of this arises out of something called the Federal Arbitration Act which was a law enacted in 1925 to allow sophisticated merchants to arbitrate disputes instead of going to litigate, which is fine. Two people who know what they’re doing with their eyes open who both agree to do it, no one’s forced into it, want to go into arbitration, that is their choice. But that law has been expanded often in ways that just cannot be resolved with a text. So the law says, for example, that workers in interstate commerce are not subject to the Federal Arbitration Act, except in a case called Circuit City v. Adams in 2001, the Supreme Court said that workers in interstate commerce are subject to the Federal Arbitration Act. They literally said that the law does the opposite of what it explicitly states.
VALLAS: I’m just processing that.
[LAUGHTER]
MILLHISER: No, I mean like it’s one of those things where, it goes back to, everyone understands gerrymandering and there’s a lot of stuff that happens in front of the Supreme Court where like people just intuitively get there. If the Supreme Court hands down an abortion decision, everyone knows right away how they know about it. One of the most radical lines of cases from the Supreme Court, the arbitration cases, because it cuts off millions of peoples’ rights at a time. It neutralizes many, many, laws because all of a sudden you can’t vindicate any of your rights in a real court.
VALLAS: It’s like pulling the thread from the blanket that the whole thing just unravels because all of a sudden through what sounds like a minor technical change, people all of a sudden have no rights and no recourse.
MILLHISER: Right and because it’s so complicated and because you know, even what I just said, the law says that workers in interstate commerce are exempted by the Supreme Court said in fact workers in interstate commerce aren’t —
VALLAS: It’s not even in English.
MILLHISER: It sounds like gobbledygook but what it means is that every single person who is an employee lost their right to go to a real court as long as their employer, and like literally that the employer has to do is say, here’s this agreement sign it or you’re fired.
VALLAS: So we’ve a couple more cases we need to talk about as well and our time is dwindling as it always does Ian. But what do you think happens with this arbitration case?
MILLHISER: It’s going to be bad. And how I know it’s going to be bad is that they didn’t schedule it until after Gorsuch was seated which meant that they were probably split 4 to 4 and since Gorsuch is an inhuman monster that means that he’s going to vote with the bad guys.
VALLAS: I think we have to say allegedly inhuman monster.
MILLHISER: No no, I’m willing to go out on a limb on this one.
VALLAS: Well only if you agree to represent me if there is a defamation suit. [LAUGHTER] So we’ve got a couple more cases we have to talk about Ian, I hope there’s some good news buried in here somewhere but I’d suspect that there isn’t. So just in a sort a lightening round there’s a case that we’ve talked about before on the show to do with public sector unions, a case that you have described as a case that could be the death of public sector unions and we have to talk about that but I also want to make sure that we have time to talk about what’s up with the Muslim ban and the case related to that as well as the latest in bakers who hate gay people cases to use your phrase.
MILLHISER: There’s a lot going on.
VALLAS: So start with public sector unions and take us through the other two as well.
MILLHISER: Sure, so this is something that the Republicans on the court have wanted to do for a really long time. They would’ve done it before Scalia died except that Scalia died and took away their fifth vote. It’s an effort to defund public sector unions. So the way that this works is that unions are required to bargain on behalf of everyone in a unionized shop. So whether you join the union or not, you still get all the benefit, you still get the higher wages and all of that stuff. And so what unions often do is they’ll stick a provision in the contract saying look, you don’t have to join if you don’t want to but if you don’t join you still have to pay your fair share of the cost of negotiating on your behalf so that way no one gets something for nothing. This case wants to say that those fees charged to non-members are unconstitutional, at least in the context of public sector unions. And the problem with getting something for nothing is that if you have the chance to do it most people will. And so you risk a situation where all of the sudden everyone quits the union because they can get all the benefits for free and then the union is starved for cash. Eventually it collapses and then no one gets the benefits of being in the union and eventually you just wind up having a bunch of unions dissolve. So it’s a really nasty case, again, one that I’m almost certain is going to go badly because it was split 4 to 4 before Scalia died and now Gorsuch who makes me miss Scalia is on the court.
VALLAS: These are strong words, Ian.
MILLHISER: Gorsuch is really bad.
VALLAS: Well yeah but missing Scalia for you?
MILLHISER: I mean Gorsuch is really bad.
VALLAS: So that’s the public sector unions case so really scary stuff for AFSCME, for all the unions out there that represent public sector workers. So take us next to the Muslim ban, what’s up there and is there any good news.
MILLHISER: Unclear. So the court was supposed to hear all arguments on the Muslim ban on Monday and they had telegraphed pretty clearly that at least some parts of it weren’t going to survive. Trump responded by making yet another set of tweaks in it’s like third or fourth round of tweaks for the Muslim ban and the Supreme Court canceled the oral arguments, said we want briefing on whether or not the case is now moved. I don’t know what they’re ultimately going to do. I think it would appropriate for them to send it down to the lower court because the Supreme Court’s the last court that’s supposed to hear things. You don’t want them to be the first ones to consider a policy because if they’re wrong no one can correct them. So normally they like to get advice from lower court judges before they do anything.
VALLAS: Sounds reasonable.
MILLHISER: So one way or another it’s getting sent back to the lower court. There’s some technical questions as to whether or not they do want is called a moot or a remand. A remand would be a better option because that would mean that all of the current orders restricting the ban would likely stay in place.
VALLAS: What would a moot be, by contrast?
MILLHISER: If the case is mooted that means that the entire thing is thrown out and people have to file a new lawsuit and start all over again. So it’s not clear what’s going to happen there. It is also, I guess looming over all of this is the big scary possibility that Justice Kennedy could retire before the case gets back up again and at that point it’s more of an open question whether we get a good decision on the ban.
VALLAS: And lastly, Masterpiece cake shop.
MILLHISER: Oh yes.
VALLAS: Because we weren’t done yet with cakes and people who make cakes who don’t like gay marriage.
MILLHISER: No, Masterpiece cake, he calls himself a cake artist.
VALLAS: Basically I think what that means is he trained at Subway and he started with sandwiches and he was a sandwich artist.
MILLHISER: You gotta work your way up to cake.
VALLAS: He worked his way up to cake and he retained the title.
MILLHISER: Yeah no, it’s important, it’s more of a legacy title. The fact that he calls himself a cake artist is actually kind of important.
VALLAS: It’s actually super important to the case.
MILLHISER: So the issue here is he didn’t want to serve a same sex couple. He refused to bake a wedding cake and he has two theories for why he should be allowed to get away with this even though Colorado where he lives has a law banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. One is that he thought that God told him to hate gay people and so his religion makes it all cool. And then the other theory is because he is an artist —
VALLAS: A cake artist.
MILLHISER: A cake artist you cannot force him to make art because that would violate the First Amendment. I think the problem with the second theory is I don’t see where the limiting principle is. So like the seminal cases that you read from the 1960s dealing with why we can have civil rights laws, many of them involve barbeque restaurants because it was the south and barbeque is a thing. I’m from the south, good barbeque is art. There’s no question that there is as much artistry that goes into producing a fine smoked meat with good sauce as there goes into whatever this guy is doing with his cakes.
VALLAS: I know I said that this was a lightening round and I’m about to destroy that by asking this question but I just have to know, if you’re from the south and I actually don’t know where you’re from in the south, so don’t tell me yet, what kind of barbeque do you like? Because you could go Memphis, you could go Texas, right, there’s a lot of different options.
MILLHISER: I like many kinds of barbeque.
VALLAS: You’re such a people pleaser, Ian.
MILLHISER: No, eastern Carolina barbecue is great, I grew up in Richmond and there’s this place called Buzzin’ Ned’s that I try to hit so they can go ahead and give you money for that plug I just gave them.
VALLAS: I’ll take it.
MILLHISER: Barbeque is great. And there’s a lot of artistry that goes into it.
VALLAS: You sound like you’re running for president, barbeque is great. That was your answer. You know what, we’re just going to move on.
MILLHISER: I will also have cheese whiz on my cheese steak.
VALLAS: I’m not even going to dignify that. [LAUGHTER] Alright so anyway, point is barbeque is artistry and where would the end be?
MILLHISER: You made the joke about a sandwich artist. But like the Trump administration’s proposal for what constitutes artistry is they said if it’s a custom order, then that’s artistry but if you’re just ordering off the rack then that isn’t.
VALLAS: So now we’re talking about, really we’re turning to pre-civil rights era which people at lunch counters could be denied service.
MILLHISER: Exactly, and if custom, I go to Subway and I say I want that kind of bread and I want those olives and none of those peppers, drawing the line, and the reason why I think this matters is because if I’m a lower court judge, and the Supreme Court hands me this garbage saying that ok now if you’re an artist you get to ignore civil rights laws, I don’t want that job. Really? You’re going to ask some guy with a J.D. and a black robe to answer the question what is art?
VALLAS: And now we’re back to porn, it all comes back to porn. So where does this case head, Ian?
MILLHISER: Unclear. I mean as with so many things it comes down to Justice Kennedy. There was a case a few years back called Christian Legal Society v. Martinez which basically involved the exact same issue. It was a law school group that didn’t want to admit what they called practicing homosexuals and the school had an anti-discrimination policy and Justice Kennedy joined with the liberals to say you’ve got to follow the anti-discrimination policy. So if he meant what he said in Christian Legal Society, I don’t see how this, you could do anything any differently here but who knows. I was, a lot of people were surprised when they took this case because the law here is pretty settled and most people didn’t think that there five votes to unsettle it. But who knows what’s going to happen once the argument is up.
VALLAS: Well Ian we’ve learned a lot today. I’d say at least three things; one, that Gorsuch actually makes you miss Scalia, and I’m going to take that with me and that means a lot.
MILLHISER: He’s that terrible.
VALLAS: Thing two, apparently you don’t actually know much about barbeque. And thing three, it all comes back to porn.
MILLHISER: It all comes back, the internet is for porn.
VALLAS: Ian, it is indeed and I have to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about Avenue Q lately because I’ve finally been watching “Big Little Lies” so now I think it’s actually time for me to see it again. Ian Millhiser is the Justice editor at ThinkProgress among many other things and a prolific author of books that I can’t remember the title of except when I’m forced to. And I feel like this is almost the arbitration clause that you’ve put into —
MILLHISER: I’m very disappointed in you right. “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted” available wherever great books are sold.
VALLAS: Just great books though. Ian you are truly an artist, thank you so much for being here and I’ll have you back soon, I’m sure
MILLHISER: I’ll look forward to it.
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.
Transcript of bonus interview:
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Hey Off Kilter listeners. This week we had too much great content to fit in one episode so we’re giving you a bonus. All eyes remain on Puerto Rico with recovery efforts underway to say nothing of Donald Trump’s twitter feed. But precious little attention has been paid to the disaster facing low income communities long before Hurricane Maria made landfall. For a look at what life was like before the storm and particularly longstanding environmental challenge that many on the island had been facing, I spoke by phone with Brenda Torres, she’s the Executive Director of the San Juan Bay Estuary Program. Let’s take a listen.
Brenda, you’re there in Puerto Rico on the ground right now. There’s a lot of news coverage swirling. There’s also been a lot of misinformation at points. What are you seeing? What stage is the recovery at, what is it actually like on the ground right now?
BRENDA TORRES: Well on the ground people are trying hard to forget about what happened yesterday and starting a new day every morning. Every morning everyone tries to find out exactly how your neighbors are doing, how everyone is doing and then after that is to go ahead and continue to clear the paths and trying to find the water, gas, everything that is needed. So we’re trying to be very patient at the moment and trying to understand exactly how long this will take and trying to make our kids busy as well. They don’t have school yet so that’s a big issue right now as we try to rebuild and continue to move forward. None of what’s surrounding us is normal at this point but we’re trying to face it in a very positive way as we always do in Puerto Rico.
VALLAS: And you’re doing that in many cases without even access to water or to power still at this point, is that right?
TORRES: That’s right, only 5% of the island has power at this point and some of them do have potable water. But we try to face it in a very positive way as I mentioned. What we’re seeing from outside is a lot of political discussion, but at the same time when you go back into your neighborhoods you see a lot of faces trying to see this in a very positive way.
VALLAS: So one of the things that really isn’t getting discussed and part of the reason I’m really glad to be speaking with you today is that the island of Puerto Rico has started to really garner a lot of attention in the wake of the storm. People are paying attention to the high poverty rate there, much higher than the national average. People are paying attention to the disastrous and dangerous and unsafe conditions that people are facing in the wake of the hurricane, but sort of lost in that discussion is what things were like before the storm. And many communities across Puerto Rico were facing literal disaster long before the hurricane blew through the island. Tell me what things were like before the hurricane and what folks in particular, low income communities were facing.
TORRES: The reality of the matter is that Puerto Rico is bankrupt. We are facing lots of fiscal struggles and trying to survive as it was prior to Hurricane Maria. Now after Hurricane Maria we’re seeing island-wide, what we were experiencing in pockets of the island. An example of this is the community of 23,000 right in the metropolitan in San Juan right next to one of the wealthiest neighborhoods and this community called the Caño Martín Peña has been facing poverty for many decades and they’ve been exposed to contaminants, raw sewage water flowing through their houses and facing high rates of asthma, high rates of gastrointestinal problems and it’s something that we’ve been trying hard enough to explain to those in charge of national policy so they can help us move forward with some of the solutions that have been developed by the community with the support from the local and federal governments. We just don’t have the funding to support those huge infrastructure projects which is kind of the problem here. We have a huge population living in vulnerable areas being supplied by infrastructure that is aging and we just don’t have the funding. The government doesn’t have the funding, the private sector cannot really do more and to support them. And so that’s the perfect storm right now. This is just a very bad situation and we’ve been trying hard enough to push this project, one of them is called the dredging of the Martín Peña channel. It’s $1.6 billion project so if you can imagine, it’s very ambitious but at the same time we have, [INAUDIBLE] and so we’re trying to continue to move forward that project even more.
VALLAS: Brenda, you were talking about just really dramatic negative health consequences that many particularly low income Puerto Ricans were facing as a result of really serious environmental injustices. Tell me a little bit more about kind of the state of things on the ground that was contributing to and has long been contributing to those types of adverse health effects.
TORRES: The problem is that this community that live right next to the Martín Peña channel, a channel that has been filled with trash and debris for many years, they do not have the right infrastructure to supply water and to discharge their sanitary sewage. So basically this community has been disposing directly into the channel and whenever it rains, even if it’s a light rain, it’s just floods their houses with this discharges and they obviously are exposed to this contaminants and it’s just making their lives more miserable right now.
VALLAS: And you’re describing the need for funding but this is not just the need for recovery funding, this is funding you were actually seeking and that the island has been in desperate need of long before the hurricane, is that right?
TORRES: That’s right. Of course we’re going to get support from FEMA, we’re going to get the support from the federal government but right now looking at this in a long term and a very sustainable way we need to continue to move this projects that were in place long before this hurricane hit the island. This one is the one that I was referring is the dredging of the Martín Peña channel. It’s a project that not only is focused on dredging but also in developing the right infrastructure in the area and also relocating the families to an area that is safe for them to live without moving them away from their community. So this project is very sensible to the fact that these people have been living in this community, 23,000 people for many years and they deserve a decent place to live. This project also does not want to displace these communities away from their homes. So that’s why we’re just staying very sensible when we say that we’re actually relocating them to the safest place but within the community.
VALLAS: So what is it that you would like people who are interesting in doing something to help or in trying to actually be knowledgeable about the situation on the ground and what’s needed. What is it that you would want listeners to hear?
TORRES: So I want them to understand the community, these communities, even though they are facing very dire conditions, these are low income communities, they’re very empowered, they know what they want for their future. They’ve been part of the process, of the revitalization process in their own communities. They can speak in front of everyone about this project, we just need support from the federal government and also from other elected officials that would like to support us in this, obtaining the right kind of funding for us to build in a very sustainable way but this is again, this is just one community. The entire island is now facing an environment injustice that we just need to pay attention and I don’t want this to end in one month, in two months, we’re in a long road right now and we need the support from the U.S. citizens, now more than ever.
VALLAS: Well here’s hoping that the silver lining of this disaster ends up being the attention and the support and the resources that the island has long needed in order to reverse these types of environmental injustices and to help the citizens who have been facing higher rates of poverty as well as all the adverse health effects that you’ve been describing because of conditions long predating this storm. Brenda Torres is the Executive Director of the San Juan Bay Estuary Program and Brenda I really deeply appreciate your taking the time especially in the midst of absolute chaos right now throughout the recovery to speak with us for the show.
TORRES: Great, thank you so much Rebecca.
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.
