Episode 33: We Could Have Ponies

What the GOP’s tax plan has to do with ponies, how 21st c. slavery is playing out in America’s prisons, and a new book explores how poor people have basically no privacy rights. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week Congressional Republicans took the next step towards enacting Trump’s Robin Hood in reverse agenda, when Senate Republicans passed a budget giving them fast-track authority to slash taxes for billionaires. In the process, the GOP proved they don’t actually care at all about deficits — if it’s tax cuts for the wealthy on the line. Harry Stein and Rachel West, two of CAP’s budget nerds, join the show to discuss the latest in the tax and budget fight — and what Trump’s tax plan has to do with ponies. Later in the show, prisoners are being paid less than $2 an hour to fight the raging California wildfires. Rebecca speaks with Angela Hanks, CAP’s workforce development expert, about the ethics of prison labor. And finally, Rebecca speaks with Khiara Bridges, whose new book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights, investigates how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers’ privacy.

This week’s guests:

• Harry Stein, Director of Fiscal Policy at the Center for American Progress
• Rachel West, Associate Director, Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress
• Angela Hanks, Associate Director, Workforce Development Policy at the Center for American Progress
• Khiara Bridges, Author of The Poverty of Privacy Rights

For more on this week’s topics:

• Follow Harry Stein and Rachel West on twitter to keep up to date on the budget fight
• Read Angela Hanks’ piece on the use of prisoners for slave labor
• Check out Khiara Bridges book, The Poverty of Privacy Rights

This program aired on October 20, 2017.

Transcript of show:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. Guess who’s been on the front lines fighting the raging California wildfires? Prisoners being paid less than $2 an hour, which as my guest Angela Hanks notes is essentially 21st century slavery by another name. Next, I talk with Khiara Bridges whose new book “The Poverty of Privacy Rights” investigates how low-income people possess much weaker privacy rights than other Americans. But first this week congressional Republicans took the next step towards enacting Trump’s Robin Hood in reverse agenda when senate Republicans passed a budget giving them fast track authority to slash taxes for billionaires. In the progress the GOP proved they don’t actually care at all about deficits if it’s tax cuts for the wealthy on the line. Harry Stein, CAP’s chief budget nerd joins the show to discuss the latest in the tax and budget fight and what Trump’s tax plan has to do with ponies.

This week congressional Republicans took the next step towards enacting Trump’s Robin Hood in reverse agenda when senate Republicans passed a budget giving them fast track authority to slash taxes for billionaires. In the progress the GOP proved they don’t actually care at all about deficits if it’s tax cuts for the wealthy on the line. Harry Stein, our budget guru and many other things guru but usually budget is back to join the show to discuss what the latest is in the tax and budget fight and what Trump’s tax plan has to do with ponies. Harry, thanks you for spending your last day at the Center for American Progress with me.

HARRY STEIN: Good to be on, let’s talk taxes and ponies.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well I say that because I feel the need to send you off properly in style. You’ve been on this show probably more than anybody else here at CAP, you can take that badge of honor with you and we’re really going to miss you but you’re headed on to bigger and better things.

STEIN: Yeah so it’s my last day at CAP. I’m going back to where I came to CAP from, going back to the senate, very excited about it but very sad to be leaving staff because congressional staff are not to be seen nor heard. I probably won’t be able to do radio shows very often.

VALLAS: Well I will miss you. We’ll have to find somebody else who will explain this stuff in English but let’s take that as a segue to what’s going on in the tax and budget fight. A lot happened this week, I mentioned that the senate Republicans actually just passed a budget that basically paves a way for tax cuts for the wealthy. Help us understand what happened this week.

STEIN: Right so the whole point of the budget is to set this fast track process called reconciliation where they can pass a bill through the senate with a simple majority instead of 60 votes. This is how they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they passed a budget resolution in January and kept trying and failing to actually pass the reconciliation bill to repeal ACA. This is the next budget resolution that is now passing to pass huge tax cuts. What matters in here most is that this is a budget that would let them increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion, trillion over 10 years to pass tax cuts that from all indications, from every plan that we’ve seen would go to the wealthiest Americans and big corporations and might even end up raising taxes on a lot of regular people.

VALLAS: And I feel like I’ve been using the talking point for a while now that it’s all about billionaires being able to buy their second yacht. Actually this week we learned it’s not just about second yachts anymore, it’s about second jets because the former CEO of General Electric was exposed, Jeffrey Immelt was exposed for having flown routinely with a second empty jet behind his first jet just in case he needed a second jet. Right so just to be clear, it’s not just second yachts anymore folks, it’s second jets too on the line here. But Harry getting back to kind of the process here there was a lot that happened that senate Republicans and really all the senate took but it was senate Republican votes that were really clarifying about what they really believe and there were in particular a couple of votes that they took as part of this vote-a-rama that happened earlier this week on Thursday night. Help us understand what you think some of the most important votes were that they took on amendments as part of vote-a-rama and what that shows us about what they really believe in this fight.

STEIN: Right so budget resolution does give an opportunity for any senator tog et a vote on their amendment and so it’s a time, it’s very clarifying opportunity to see where people stand. And so we had during the Obama administration just years and years of hysterical warnings that a looming debt crisis was right around the corner and we had to get serious about deficits and debt and reduce deficits and these warnings, you would think that this was actually important to Republican senators, you would think. But like I said this budget allows $1.5 trillion in tax cuts and there were amendments to fix that. There used to be a rule called the Conrad Rule, named for Senator Kent Conrad that said that you couldn’t increase the deficit with reconciliation. The whole point of reconciliation initially was to reduce the deficit. It created a fast track process meant to reduce the deficit. It’s been since under the Bush tax cuts was really when you saw it used in the opposite direction and then to stop that they had the Conrad Rule. Well Senator Baldwin offered an amendment to reinstate the Conrad Rule, got defeated on a party line vote.

VALLAS: So essentially what her amendment would have done is to say actually what we shouldn’t be doing is increasing the deficit with this huge package of tax cuts for the wealthy and how did Republicans vote on that?

STEIN: They all opposed that. And I think what you’re seeing here is that they want their fast track process, they want it for tax cuts for the wealthy and they don’t want anything to get in the way of that.

VALLAS: And they’re fine jacking up the deficit if it means tax cuts for rich people.

STEIN: Right and they really want to hide that from you because the other big amendment was the budget resolution that they’re passing strikes a rule, eliminates a rule that requires a CBO score to be published 28 hours before the senate votes. And you know, we saw this, this was a problem during health care. They’d try to rush these things through. Well the budget’s going to make that even easier because it’s going to eliminate this procedural break requiring a CBO score. And remember, CBO doesn’t just tell you here’s how much it costs. And that’s important too, they ask tell you who wins and who loses. On a tax bill CBO will tell you how much do corporations get, how much does the top 1% get, how many people get tax cuts. Just like with health care, when they wanted those coverage estimates to be as quiet as possible, they wanted to rush the bill through without really having it clear how many people would lose coverage, they’re going to do the same thing on tax cuts. And again, there was an amendment offered by Senator Kaine that would’ve not only taken out the elimination of the rule that would’ve put back the rule for the CBO score but would’ve actually strengthened the requirement. And again, knocked down on a party line vote. I mean this is not a budget that’s about budgeting. This is a budget that’s just about cutting taxes for rich people and corporations.

VALLAS: So really, really clarifying votes that they took showing not just who they’re trying to help but what they’re willing to do in the process which involves throwing all of their apparent principles out the window in service of fast tracking these tax cuts for rich people. Now you mentioned that there is a huge price tag on all of this and I see actually walking by the radio studio as we speak, what good timing, someone who knows a little something about how big that price tag is. There she is, she’s coming in, Rachel West, one of the fabulous budget nerds here at CAP who happens to be on my team, the best team, the poverty team at the Center for American Progress. Rachel thanks so much for stepping in and joining us.

RACHEL WEST: Hi Rebecca, thanks so much for having me.

VALLAS: Well it’s perfect timing for you to jump in on this because we were just talking about how enormous the price tag is on the tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires that Trump and his colleagues in Congress are trying to ram through using this reconciliation process. You’ve actually done a lot of thinking about what we can do with that amount of money.

WEST: So we were just blown away when Trump came out with his tax plan and a $2.4 trillion loss over the next ten years is just unthinkable. How do you conceptualize that? We did a lot of analysis to try to put it in kitchen table terms for people. But I finally sort of threw up my hands and thought well crap, with this amount of money you could literally do something outlandish like buy every single one of the 325 [million] Americans a pony. Well so turns out Harry and I kind of ran the numbers around this and in fact it’s just one of Trump’s many tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires and corporations that could allow us to buy every single American a nice little Shetland pony. They cost about $800 on average, we looked into, we scoured the sites like equinenow.com.

VALLAS: Gotta set your sources Rachel.

WEST: There are a lot of ponies for sale out there but you can get yourself a really decent little Shetland, lives about 30 years on average for the nice price of $800, cheaper than Trump’s estate tax cut, which would cost almost $270 billion over ten years. So at a time when inequality is so very high, it makes just about as much sense we thought to give this kind of a tax cut to millionaires and corporations than it does to buy every American a pony.

STEIN: And can I just add to that because as we looked into this more, it really makes a lot more sense right now to give everyone a pony. My Little Pony the Movie is now in theaters.

VALLAS: It is in theaters.

STEIN: If there was ever a time give everyone a pony and not to repeal the estate tax it’s now.

WEST: Yeah.

VALLAS: Well it sounds like you guys are joking right. It’s funny oh, you buy every American a pony, that’s not something policy makers would do but it sort of again, clarifying because it helps us understand now just what that price tag could buy but also the seriousness with which we should really take the Trump tax package because of how imprudent its proposed spending really is. So just this is part of what I love about this analysis though, I want to take you guys to the next step of what you did, you didn’t just stop at quantifying the fact that for the price of the estate tax repeal for millionaires, Trump could buy literally every American a pony. You took it one step farther and said you know what though, if we were to go this pony route we would want to be responsible about it. And so you looked not just at the price of purchasing the pony but also pony upkeep, Rachel.

WEST: That’s right, it turns out that ponies are pretty expensive to maintain and keep them happy and healthy and thriving. It takes a fair amount of money. So we looked into food costs, lodging costs, farrier costs, you got to keep their nice little heels in good shape, their hooves. And all of that adds up to about $4,500 per year or about $45,000 over ten years so really that $800 cost of the pony, that upfront cost of buying it is just the tip of the iceberg. So it turns out that for just the cost of the senate budget proposal that Harry was just talking about $1.5 trillion, you could literally get a pony and keep it and maintain it in good shape for ten years for every child under the age of 8 in the country. That’s a lot of ponies and that’s a lot of expense. But really it just goes to show just how massive these tax cuts really are.

VALLAS: But you were very responsible in thinking that through. So you’ve created effectively a ten year pony window, right Harry?

STEIN: Right. And this is the important thing to remember, right, unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy we actually want to be responsible and think about, as parents would think about when their kids want a pony. But what’s this actually going to cost? And so we held ourselves to a higher standard than the U.S. Senate. The thing to keep in mind here is that ten year budget window. And we were asked after we published this, what happens to the ponies after ten years?

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Harry, do I want to know?

STEIN: So –

WEST: It’s not pretty.

STEIN: Don’t tell your children about the Byrd Rule, generally that’s good advice. [LAUGHTER] What the Byrd rule says and this will be important in the tax debate too is that you can’t, using reconciliation use the deficits in years outside of the budget window. So they can increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion in the first ten years but not after that and the way that they might have to end up doing that with their tax bill is sunsetting a number of the tax cuts so that they would go away. And this is where it really kind of gets tricky with the ponies because we, certainly no one wants to see that happen with the ponies after ten years. So that sets up the pony cliff.

VALLAS: The pony cliff.

STEIN: The pony cliff, which means that after ten years you have this cliff and congress is going to have to figure out under our plan, like they’re going to have to extend this pony care somehow. And you know if pony cliff sounds familiar this is not the first cliff that congress has dealt with. We had back in 2012 what they called the fiscal cliff. And the fiscal cliff was among other things, when all of the Bush tax cuts which were sunset because of reconciliation and the Byrd Rule, all of those were set to expire at the end of 2012 and Congress had to figure out what to do with them. They ultimately let some of them expire but extended most of them. But they were, they expired to get them through under reconciliation. And so we face the same challenge with the Byrd rule with our pony plan but just like the Republican intention with the tax cuts if they have to sunset them is to then in 10 years pressure a future congress to make them permanent and so really the cost is quite a lot larger. Our pony plan does have a similar plan built into it.

VALLAS: Well you heard it here first, Byrds, ponies, lots to take in about what happened this week on the tax and budget front but really appreciate the work that you guys did on something that is obviously a lot of fun and it’s intended to be funny but really helps us understand the seriousness with which Republicans are not taking the fiscal pocketbook. So guys thank you so much. Harry thank you for coming back on for one last time but I hope that after your next chapter at the Senate you’ll be back here by my side being able to do this show on the regular in the meantime, we’ll miss you.

WEST: We’ll miss you, Harry.

VALLAS: Rachel, take care of those ponies, OK?

WEST: I will.

STEIN: Thank you.

WEST: Thanks, Rebecca.

VALLAS: Don’t go away more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Last week a Louisiana sheriff gave a press conference railing against a new prisoner release program because it cost him free labor from quote, “some good inmates that we use everyday to wash cars, change oil in the cars and to cook in the kitchen,” unquote. Two days later news broke that up to 40% of the firefighters battling California’s outbreak of forest fires are prison inmates working for $2 an hour. So writes Angela Hanks and Annie McGrew in a new piece up at TalkPoverty.org. Angela joins me in studio, thanks so much for being on the show.

ANGELA HANKS: Thanks for having me on.

VALLAS: So Angela I was horrified when I read that the share was actually as high as 40% as I said of the people on the front lines battling these raging forest fires in California are actually inmates who have no choice but to be there because they’re being used for their labor and it’s practically free labor. How is this even legal?

HANKS: It certainly is shocking and as much news and there’s been about the devastating fires in California this is something that’s really been underreported. These are people who are incarcerated, who are making $2 an hour for what are completely dangerous jobs. I mean ultimately they’re risking their lives for pay that no other worker outside of the prison system earns. It is unbelievably true that this is actually legal. The Fair Labor Standards Act does not cover, which says that people should be paid at least the federal minimum wages does not cover prisoners. So if you are incarcerated and you are working you are not afforded the same rights that people who are not incarcerated are, yet the prison system can put in in this incredibly dangerous job and say well, we’ll give you $2 an hour which is a higher wage than most other prisoners get, but it still is $2 an hour.

VALLAS: So effectively it is the law of the land in 2017 in the United States of America that prisoners can actually have their labor exploited practically for free, including in incredibly dangerous work like fighting fires.

HANKS: Yes, and California is far from the outlier here. The California program has been around since the 1940s but prison labor has existed in one form or another in this country beginning after slavery with convict leasing to chain gangs to the modern prison work system that we have today. So this is something that is not new and it’s always been built on this system of exploitation and on punishment.

VALLAS: Given the disproportionate representation of people of color and particularly men of color behind bars this, since you mentioned slavery it feels evocative of literally legalized slavery persisting in 2017. Am I overreaching here?

HANKS: When you look at the Louisiana example for instance, 66% of Louisiana’s inmates are African-American so this is certainly when you look at their program and you look at the history of Louisiana, both with slavery and with convict leasing, and the ACLU has drawn this line in Louisiana as well, it’s not hard to get there that this is something that’s taken on a modern form but it’s ultimately the same type of exploitation that that state and many others have seen since the beginning of this country.

VALLAS: Now you mention that the California inmates who have been on the front lines fighting those forest fires have been paid a whopping $2 an hour, right, if they’re lucky but they actually seem to be some of the lucky ones here. The piece that you wrote for TalkPoverty notes, most inmates are actually paid far less for their labor.

HANKS: Yes, so the average wage for an incarcerated person is 86 cents an hour.

VALLAS: 86, I just want to pause there for a second because I want people to take that in. You said 86 cents an hour is the average wage.

HANKS: Yes, 86 cents is less than $1. In some states, inmates are not paid for their work at all so they are essentially performing slavery and this is something that is happening all across the country. There are 1 and a half million people in state and federal prisons and more than half of those individuals are working for cents on the dollar in really difficult jobs too. I mean obviously in California the example of fighting fires is one where you’re literally thinking about people putting their lives on the line but you know they’re also doing all kinds of work around the prisons, they’re working for outside for-profit and non-profit organizations. They’re building goods for the state that the state will eventually sell, I mean, they’re doing real work and they’re not getting wages and someone else is profiting off of their labor.

VALLAS: Your piece names a few of the types of work that people behind bars, with no choice, are being paid almost nothing to do. Some of those examples include grinding meat, producing Starbucks holiday products, you can think about that when you go get your pumpkin spice latte today and even uniforms for workers at McDonalds but one stood out to me in particular as some of the most twisted irony I can remember reading. And that’s that some inmates are actually being charged with producing body armor for police officers who in many cases have been involved in police involved killings and maybe otherwise have put the safety of people who have come into contact with the criminal justice system at risk. They’re even, if I’m understanding this correctly, making the targets that cops use in target practice. Like literally the piece of paper that has that body outline on it that cops shoot at when they’re practicing. Prison inmates are making those for the cops. Am I getting this right?

HANKS: Yep, that’s exactly right. They make the paper fire arm targets, they make body armor. They make targets to practice shooting at vehicles, basically all of these instruments that the police and the military use to practice for the field. People who have been incarcerated by that same group of people are developing the products that they’ll use to provide that training.

VALLAS: We were talking a little bit about this before we started taping and actually my producer Will noted, and I think he’s right to say this, it’s reminiscent, we mentioned the slavery connection here, this part of reminiscent to me as well of the holocaust. Do you feel that’s an apt comparison?

HANKS: You know I mean I think that we’re looking at a system that is honestly I mean devastatingly exploitative and there’s no way to really separate this from the ugly history both in this country and others of exploiting marginalize people for the gain of others who have some political and social power. And so it’s hard to say this is exactly like this other situation but ultimately the structures around this are the same that we see on a lot of kind of exploitative and dark areas of our past.

VALLAS: You actually put a quote in your piece that I feel is worth reading. Shaka Senghor who has come into contact with the criminal justice system and reflects on those experiences in a memoir. He was also featured in Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed documentary released a couple of years back called 13th. And he notes in that documentary and you quote him saying this, “The 13th amendment says, ‘no involuntary servitude except for those who have been dually convicted of a crime.’” So effectively there we go, if you’ve convicted of a crime our society has decided we’re going to throw you back to the days of slavery or possibly even worse. So I want to not just focus on the horrible shocking pieces that have come to light as you’ve done this work and as the forest fires have raged on, drawing national headlines, what are the solutions here? How do we actually move into what I would view as modern society that doesn’t have slavery by another name?

HANKS: You know if you buy the argument, which I think we all should that prison is about rehabilitation then we should actually be trying to prepare people for a life outside of prisons and jails. So that means actually taking it seriously and trying to put in place policies that will actually help people find a job, help people pay off their debts, help people reenter their communities and the labor market and so one of the things that we landed on was taking these prison programs and turning them into apprenticeship programs that provide some vocational training which has shown to increase the likelihood of employment upon release and turn it into something where inmates are not only getting paid a wage but they’re also getting a credential at the end of the program that’s valuable outside of the confines of a prison and will also help them get a job when they’re released.

VALLAS: Is it a crazy thought that maybe we should just say prisoners should get the minimum wage because they’re doing work?

HANKS: At a minimum if nothing else happens on this topic, prisoners should be paid at least the minimum wage. That is where we have to begin. There are different ways to build programs to make them more socially useful for people who are incarcerated but ultimately if they don’t pay a fair wage they are not worth doing.

VALLAS: Angela Hanks is the workforce development guru among many other things at the Center for American Progress and you can find her piece on California firefighters who are actually inmates not having a choice as to whether they want to fight these fires and how that’s just the tip of the iceberg over at TalkPoverty.org. Her coauthor is Annie McGrew on that piece. Angela thanks so much for joining the show and we’ll have to have you back soon.

HANKS: Thanks again for having me.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. The U.S. Constitution is supposed to bestow rights equally, yet courts have routinely upheld the constitutionality of privacy invasions on poor people and as legal scholars have noted over the years, low income people generally possess much weaker privacy rights than other Americans. In a new book, “The Poverty of Privacy Rights”, Khiara Bridges investigates how the state intervenes in all facets of poor mothers’ privacy. She joins me in studio. Khiara, thanks so much for joining the show.

KHIARA BRIDGES: Thanks for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to talk about my new book.

VALLAS: So what got you interested? I think before we even get into any of the details of what you found, how you did the work, what got you interested in the intersection of poverty and privacy rights?

BRIDGES: So this work, all of my work really is just a product of, I went to law school in the first instance because I was interested in something that I thought of as social justice. And as a person of color I’ve always been away of racial injustice in a way that’s probably not at all unique to people of color so I’ve always been interested in race, there’s a strong relationship, undeniable relationship between race privilege and class privilege in this country so being interested in racial minorities means also being interested in poor people. And then I’ve also always been interested in pregnancy and motherhood. And part of that is some weird, psychological thing because I come from a family of obstetricians and so I’ve been interested in pregnancy as a physiological state but also as this time that kind of destroy the dichotomies that we’ve created in American life or in just the way we think about things. So like self and other, pregnancy sort of dissolves that dichotomy. The sacred and the profane, science and religion, so pregnancy implicates all of those things and so I just came to want to explore pregnancy, race, class during one event all at the same time. So I was led to do research with poor mothers and poor pregnant women. My first book was the product of 18 months of field work, working with poor mothers and poor pregnant women and this book is an outgrowth of that first book.

VALLAS: To make the jump to privacy your work is ethnographic, you mentioned you’ve worked directly with poor mothers and that’s what informed the direction of this particular book as an outgrowth from previous work. How did you go about the research? It’s one thing to say it’s ethnographic, it’s one thing to say you worked with poor mothers. How did that actually play out, what does your research look like here.

BRIDGES: So actually let me tie it together, the privacy question as a lawyer. One knows that we have come to understand pregnancy and motherhood as an issue of privacy. So I came to the issue of privacy and privacy rights because I was interested in pregnancy and motherhood. And so reproductive privacy is really my initial entre into the world of privacy but after working with poor mothers for half a day you learn that reproductive privacy is only one aspect of their lives that are not respected, right. So we’re talking, in the book we’re talking family privacy which is the ability or inability to raise ones children without state intervention and regulation, as well as informational privacy. And that’s the ability to keep private information to oneself or to prevent the aggregation and dissemination of the information that you are compelled under various circumstances to share with others. So privacy, reproductive privacy was my entry point and then it became this opportunity to investigate all aspects of privacy and we can also, I don’t explore in the book but spatial privacy, the ability to keep the state out of your home. Poor mothers have a very weakened ability to enjoy that type of privacy.

VALLAS: In a whole variety of ways and I do want to get into all of that. So how did you find the women you were going to work with and maybe tell a little bit, maybe a few of those stories of the women who became the research for this book.

BRIDGES: Sure yeah, so I ended up finding the site for my first book which was the ethnography, I was, I basically did a plea to all hospitals in New York City which is where I conducted my research, just a letter to the heads of obstetrics and gynecology departments to let me in, to let me observe and I got no takers so I ended up sending an email to a wonderful anthropologist, Rayna Rapp who’s at NYU and it seemed like she would know people because she conducted ethnography amongst obstetricians years before and she was able to get me a contact at the hospital where I conducted my research which I call Alpha Hospital just to protect the identity and I was just there for 18 months. I got IRB clearance so I was able to participate, observe, I conducted over 120 hours of interviews with poor patients, poor mothers, I conducted 50 hours of interviews with staff and providers and I got the opportunity to just really experience first hard, like viscerally first of all what it’s like to work in an overburdened, underfunded public institution.

But then also what it’s like to have to navigate these incredibly intrusive bureaucracies just to get a service or a good that wealthier folks can access with little to no issue. And so I walked away profoundly affected by the difference in my experience with accessing healthcare as a person with good insurance, you know and some class privilege, and the difference between that experience and the experiences that poor people have to endure so I actually have this interview that I observed when I was conducting research for my first book and one thing about the Medicaid program which is not at all unique to New York state, but is the New York state Medicaid program is that they require these interviews with various professionals, they’re all state actors mind you before one even gets to see an obstetrician or a midwife or a nurse practitioner who’s actually going to assess your physical health.

VALLAS: What kind of interviews?

BRIDGES: So we’re talking about social workers, financial aid, financial advisers really, nutritionists, health educators, geneticists, HIV counselor, right. So it’s a lot, I call it informational canvassing. Like by the end of the day, all of your information is shared. You know and as a condition of pre-natal care assistance. So I actually was able to sit in on the one of the interviews that a social worker conducted with a patient and it’s really quite remarkable, especially when one compares it to an interview that one, if a wealthier person were to be interviewed at the beginning of a prenatal care program —

VALLAS: I think you have a portion you want to read.

BRIDGES: Yeah, yeah, so it says, where do I start? OK so, “How much does the state give you for rent?” “Um, well I don’t pay rent.” And the social worker says, “You don’t pay rent?” And she says, “I live in a shelter.” Social worker says, “What shelter do you live in?” She responds, “Beta houses.” And then she gives her case worker’s name as well as her case worker’s number. And the social worker says, “How long have you been there?” She responds, “Almost 4 months.” And she says, “And can you tell me what the circumstances were that put you in the shelter?” And she says, “Domestic violence.” And the social worker says, “And how long did the domestic violence last?” She says, “Two months.” And she responds, “So you were in a domestic violence relationship for about two months and then you moved to a shelter.” And she says, “Mhm.” And she says, “How long was your relationship?” “It wasn’t really a relationship, it was like I would say, 3 months.” And she says, “I’m sorry?” And the woman responds, “3 months, it was like a 3 month relationship.” And the social worker says, “It was a 3 month relationship. And do you have a police report and an order of protection?” And she says, “The police report yes, not the order of protection, still didn’t get it.”

And it goes on and on, she asks about the nature of her relationship that she has with her father of her children, she asks how old the father of her child is, what’s his name, what does he do for work, is he going to help you when the baby comes, how does he support himself, what is he studying in college, right. So it’s this really intense, really invasive interview that this woman has to experience if she wants to get prenatal care.

VALLAS: I’m putting myself in her shoes right now thinking about that right, and the last time I went to the doctor and how I you know, never have time and I’m always working too much and it’s enough to even find the half hour window to go and get, you know a visit with a primary care physician and that the types of questions that they ask me and I’m comparing. It’s my height, my weight, it’s all medically related because I’m there for medical care. I’m just thinking about if I were to sit there and have gatekeepers before I could even access the medical care that I’m very bad at accessing for myself already that are asking me questions about my personal life, my dating history, how I would feel. On the flipside, one could argue that all of the infrastructure that you’ve just described is really, it’s got the best interests of the mother and her in this case future child at heart. How do you respond when people say, well isn’t that what’s going on here?

BRIDGES: Right, first I just want to back up and say I am totally with you when it comes to, as a person with admitted class privilege the umbrage I would experience if I were to be asked questions that seemingly had nothing to do with my medical care. For example I recently went to the doctor, I recently started a new doctor and I had to fill out the medical history forms and it was a fancy doctor so it was on an iPad. So I was you know flipping through the forms filling things out and I get this one page that says, “Intimate violence can affect your health, your provider should know if you’re experiencing intimate violence because it will help him or her provide you with better care. That is the reason why we’re asking you the following questions.” And then there’s a box that says, “Click here if you prefer not to answer.”

VALLAS: So you actually had the option not to answer which the mother you were describing didn’t have.

BRIDGES: Absolutely. If this mother were to say, “I’d really rather not talk about this intimate violence that I experienced that left me homeless and in a shelter that I’m still recovering from,” a relationship that kind of took place, you know within some sort of proximity to the relationship that she actually had been with the father of her children before this relationship, she remained with him. So it’s like a really personal, if she had said, “No thank you” that’s just like a red flag for a social worker.

VALLAS: Yeah, how would it play out and did you actually watch any of these situations play out where there was a person who declined to answer these types of questions on the grounds that it was too invasive?

BRIDGES: Right, yeah so the women with whom I worked at this hospital were very aware of their vulnerable and marginalized station in life and so they, I didn’t see resistance. I like to think of that as resistance, I didn’t see resistance on that level, a level of no thank you I don’t want to be a part of this. Because they knew the consequences are. I interviewed this one woman who missed a doctor’s appointment. Her son was born with some developmental disabilities and so he had to go to a pediatrician, a specialists to learn how to walk. She missed an appointment, it’s really hard to keep a lot of appointments when you’re poor and have to work and have other children, et cetera so she missed an appointment. Her doctor called Child Protective Services on her. And then now she has an open case, somebody came to her house, looked around, check you know how much food is in the fridge. Did she have milk, is she clean? So her house is opened up merely because she was unable to make an appointment. So women know, when you’re poor you’re educated about what it means to be poor and the consequence of any type of insubordination. So I didn’t see —

VALLAS: And it’s interesting the word choice, “insubordination” right which is not the word I would use if I were describing my own decision not to answer questions I view as invasive.

BRIDGES: Right, absolutely but the poor are disciplined to understand exactly how one needs to behave in order to retain some semblance of autonomy, privacy, dignity, et cetera.

VALLAS: Or even keeping your kids in your home.

BRIDGES: Or even keeping your kids in your home so yeah. But I definitely, which is not to say I didn’t see any resistance at all. I saw people who refused, the nutritionist would call their name out and they would refuse to answer because they don’t want to talk about their diets with someone who is not really, their loyalties are not really to the women, right. Like if I have a nutritionist, I’d love to talk am I eating too many carbs, am I eating too few carbs, too much alcohol you know love to, that person has a loyalty to me they actually have a fiduciary duty if they’re a medical doctor to me. If you’re poor and you end up in a public hospital or any hospital with Medicaid those persons with whom you have to divulge that information have no loyalty to you, they’re actually a state actor and so they are bound to the state to report things that raise red flags. It’s a very precarious existence and women, poor people learn how to navigate it.

VALLAS: So in a lot of people’s minds, myself included, the intersection of poverty and poverty rights conjures up the case worker from the 1970s, 1960s looking for shoes under the bed or how many, are there men’s clothes in the closet right and those stories often got told as people started to become more aware over the decades of the complete lack of privacy rights that people who interact with the government for purposes of public assistance receive, has historically faced and have been upheld over the years and I want to get into some of the history here. But you’re describing is much more than just asking questions about a person’s living situation and family structure that might be financially relevant to whether they’re even eligible for benefits. You’re talking about nearly every aspect of a young mother’s life.

BRIDGES: Absolutely so these questions go beyond the simple question of whether you actually qualify for these benefits. As a Medicaid recipient, I did my research in New York, you actually prequalify, the assumption is that you meet the eligibility limits because they want to help you start prenatal care, right.

VALLAS: Good for the woman, good for the baby.

BRIDGES: Good for everybody, right? It’s a win-win. But these questions go beyond first do you qualify and then second are you going to be able to meet the material needs of your children. To back up to a question that you were beginning to ask and then I didn’t answer it but you know, some people might respond this is really about caring for the mother and caring for the child. This might even be about screening parents for, who might be abusive or neglectful. So that really why, this is the argument, that’s really why privacy is invaded, it’s all for a social good. It’s for the good for the kid, good for the woman, good for society. I first respond to that, these questions of course go beyond that basic are you so poor that you’re not going to be able to provide your child with food, shelter, clothing, healthcare. It’s very easy to establish that. And also we can take steps to help people meet their food, clothing, shelter and health care needs. So these questions go beyond that. They are talking about intimate violence, sexual violence, use, abuse of any sort of controlled substance, smoking, alcohol, who you’re living with, how long you’ve been in a relationship with that person, how many sexual partners have you had, you know these questions are much more than checking to see if there’s a man in the house.

It’s really an investigation into the entirety of a person’s life. Now in the book I make an argument that the reason why these questions are being asked is premised on an assumption about why people are poor. And the assumption is that people are poor because there is something wrong with them. It’s because they’re lazy, it’s because they are just you know criminally inclined or they feel entitled to hand outs or they’re sexually promiscuous and they had a baby. So if people are poor because there’s something wrong with them, either behaviorally or ethically then their behavior and ethical deficiencies are going to effect the children that they are giving birth to and raising. And so the state actually has a great reason for denying them privacy because now the state can protect their children from these behaviorally and ethically deficient people. Now if we have told different stories about why people are poor, if we say well people are poor because there are macro large scale processes at work. Because middle wage, middle skill jobs have basically you know disappeared from the economy and now we just have this polarized high skill, high wage and low skill low wages jobs and so those middle skill workers are now working on the lower wage and lower skill jobs. Because people are poor because we pursue mass incarceration as a way of addressing our social ills. People are poor because of our inhumane immigration policies.

VALLAS: People are poor because their wages don’t pay enough because we won’t raise the minimum wage.

BRIDGES: People are poor because women don’t get paid the same as men. So if we told those stories about why people are poor then we wouldn’t presume that there’s actually something wrong with a person who finds themselves poor and pregnant. We actually might treat them the same way that we treat those who are wealthier. We would give them a box to check that says if you choose not to answer these question check here. And so I’m very skeptical of the argument that asking these questions helps the state screen people who might be abusive or neglectful for their children because if that’s what the state was actually interested in doing then wealthier people would be subjected to those same questions. If it was such a great mechanism for finding the abusers and the neglecters out there then we would ask the same questions of everyone.

VALLAS: Yeah that’s what I was literally about to bring up and when you were walking through the types of information that the state seeks to garner from people who are receiving Medicaid and that’s what’s covering them and providing health insurance for purposes of prenatal care there’s a, I think in theory I could stretch my brain and say that if you make a case in one way or the other that pretty much everything you listed could be explained as something that’s connected to the well being of the mother and the child if you really want to come from that perspective but the piece that doesn’t fit is OK so why aren’t we asking those same questions of all mothers who are expecting and we simply aren’t, or at least if we are we’re giving them the option not to answer and we’re still giving them their care, it’s so completely connected to and parallel the fact of drug testing public assistance applicants and recipients in so many states. Restricting how much they can have in the bank and then doing all kinds of financial jujitsu to find out what we expect they’re hiding. It all comes down to that fundamental point that you just made so well about our assumptions as a society about poor people and why they find themselves in those situations. It’s because there’s something wrong with them that causes them not to be trustworthy.

BRIDGES: Absolutely and the point deserves underscoring. It’s not, if poor people uniquely engaged in these behaviors or if they uniquely had compromised ethics or values it would make sense to just screen poor people and just serveil poor people and just you know deny poor people privacy rights and privacy. But the reality is that there are you know, non-poor people, wealthier poor engaged in the same things that the social worker was asking of this client. They’ve been in abusive relationships, they’ve been not married to the fathers of their children. They’ve been, they’ve missed prenatal care appointments and nobody ever calls the Child Protective Services on them. So there is a shared experience or shared behaviors, shared values across class but only those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum are subjected to very particular state interventions.

VALLAS: Was there anything that you found in your research that jumped out to you as particularly shocking? You shared one story and I actually find that the sort of play by play transcript to be incredibly helpful because it helps people really sit in the seat that that woman was sitting in as she was being interrogated along those lines and effectively with a gun to her head because she didn’t have the choice not to respond. At least not a meaningful choice. Were there other areas where you were surprised that there were these types of privacy invasions that you hadn’t been aware of before?

BRIDGES: So one story always just jumps out at me and I still sort of react, I still can’t believe. So I interviewed, when I was in the hospital researching my first book. I interviewed this one woman before she, she’s still pregnant, before she gave birth and she was really excited about her new baby. She had an older, she had two other children, I think like an 8 year old and a 6 year old. So the next time I see her is at her post partum appointment and I’m like, “How did the birth go? I’m sorry I missed it.” Because when I like a woman I like to be in labor and delivery when she’s delivering. And she was like “It was terrible.” And I was like “What happened?” And she said, “Well I went into labor at night,” Her partner was working. And so when you’re a low wage worker you can’t say I have take off sorry, my girlfriend is in labor. So he’s working she goes into labor with her 8 year old and her 6 year old in the house. So she’s like, alright guys we’re going to the hospital mommy’s about to give birth. She goes to the hospital. They’re like alright so we’re going to admit you, we don’t allow minors in the L and D, we don’t allow them in labor and delivery. And so the woman says well are they supposed [to go]? The hospital responds by taking custody of her children.

VALLAS: They actually took custody of her kids.

BRIDGES: They took custody of her children.

VALLAS: Oh dear lord.

BRIDGES: They said first, red flags are raised. They’re like oh you’re coming in to give birth and there’s nobody with you like, why are you alone? Wealthier people show up at the hospital with you know a whole tribe behind them. And so it becomes constructed as that’s is deviance when one shows up at the hospital in labor with one’s minor children. So she lost physical custody of her children and at this post partum appointment she was still struggling to get, and this was like 6 weeks after the birth of her child, she was still fighting to get her kids back in her home.

VALLAS: And no evidence of any kind of actual abuse or neglect. It was really just the hospital saying oh, we see all kinds of red flags because you happen to have children and no one to care for them right now.

BRIDGES: Right so yes that was one shocking story. I mean there are less shocking stories about parents not being allowed to take their babies home from the hospital because they don’t have a child seat, or sorry a car seat. And it sort of makes sense like, OK if you’re going to put the baby in the car. But in New York, this hospital was across the street from a public housing project so women were literally just going to walk across the street.

VALLAS: So the question was actually posed do you have a car seat, and if they didn’t have a car and weren’t going to even get into a car it could still be a barrier.

BRIDGES: Right, it could still be a barrier.

VALLAS: So effectively you have to go buy that car seat for the car you don’t own to have the hospital satisfied.

BRIDGES: Right, so this is New York state policy mind you.

VALLAS: Amazing.

BRIDGES: So this applies to, actually I don’t know if it’s New York state policy or New York City policy but this is a blanket policy. It’s not just for that hospital. But it makes sense for, it’s not a barrier actually for the wealthier. For wealthier people it’s like fine, what’s $250 for a car seat? I have already bought so much stuff for my baby anyway.

VALLAS: Well you can think, I’m thinking about friends of mine who have financial means who don’t have cars. Now we’re having this conversation in D.C., where a lot of people, myself included, don’t have cars. And I’m picturing them in that interaction with the hospital, they wouldn’t stand for that. They wouldn’t say oh, hang on, hold please let me go buy a car seat. They would say no, and the hospital would, I’m assuming, back they would be wrapped in a different set of privilege would probably say oh cool, we actually don’t distrust you. Do you have the same expectation?

BRIDGES: I definitely, so I’ve talked to enough people in New York state, in New York City or who have delivered in New York who have been confronted. These are people with class privilege who have been confronted with this policy and they’re like so we just bought the car seat. But you’re absolutely right to have this sense that intuitively doctors are treating, in hospitals and medical providers and health care providers are treating their class privilege patients a little differently. In other research I actually don’t explore in this book but there’s a whole literature around it. Doctors have discretion to say, a wealthier mother is addicted to something. It could be prescription pills, it could be marijuana, it could be alcohol. That doctor is more inclined or that health care provider is more inclined to work with the wealthier client, get her into counseling. Make sure her family is there to support her through this difficult time. When we’re dealing with poor people that presumption isn’t there. That presumption that this is a person who is going through a private crisis and that we don’t need to involve the state in it, we can sort of involve the community, that presumption don’t hold. And so what you see instead is Child Protective Services and foster care.

VALLAS: Which ends up being the gun to the head of the women who have to jump through all these hoops to satisfy the state. So we’ve talked a lot of really negative, horrible experiences that the women you profile in this book have gone through and who haven’t had a choice but to go through them. But I want to talk about solutions. What is it that you would take away from your research, ethnographic, qualitative and otherwise about how we could actually begin to change a system that is thoroughly imbued with distrust of people who don’t have class privilege.

BRIDGES: So my solution in this book, “The Poverty of Privacy Rights” doesn’t lie only in the law. So what happens when one goes to law school and one’s a lawyer? One tends to be, one tends to lead with the law. So we tend to think, oh we just need to right argument to the Supreme Court.

VALLAS: Everything looks like a nail.

BRIDGES: Right, exactly. We just need to get the right legislator to listen to us and then we’ll get the legislation. And I don’t think that that is what we should lead with. I think that the answer lies in changing the stories that we tell about why people are poor. So let’s be clear. The text of the Constitution hasn’t changed in a very long time. And the text could just as easily be interpreted to provide for robust privacy rights. We don’t need to alter the text in order for it to be interpreted to provide robust privacy rights. Whereas at present privacy, I argue in the book, is non-existent. So it’s not like we need a different text, it’s all there. What we need is a different understanding of why people are poor. I think that if we rejected the ideas that people are poor because there’s something wrong with them then we wouldn’t look at a poor person who insists upon her fertility and her motherhood while poor as a deviant person. We would look at that person as just like us, she’s just poor. I don’t think that we presume that folks with class privilege are, have some sort of deficiency. I think that we, our assumption is you’re find until proven otherwise.

So I think that if we change culture then we would have a different interpretation of our laws and our due process clause could be interpreted such that it provides for robust privacy for everyone. Now the question is how are we going to change culture. It’s, I think social movements are incredibly important in that. I actually look in the book to the movement for marriage equality and that definitely, a lot of that happened in the courts and litigation. But at the same time as there was litigation occurring there was cultural change. we saw you know social movements organized around this question. We saw the visibility or the dawn of the visibility of out people in public life and popular culture. And so all of those things helped to shape a litigation strategy that ultimately concluded in Obergefell and we have now the right to marry for people of the same sex so I imagine something similar happening if we are ever to arrive at a day where the right to privacy means something for poor people.

VALLAS: And the Supreme Court has throughout history often been catching up with culture change and with the way that our society understands things as sort of not the leading edge but whatever the opposing would be, clean up as we make progress. I’ve been speaking with Khiara Bridges, she’s the author of “The Poverty of Privacy Rights”, a new book based on her ethnographic research with mothers who have no privacy rights to speak of during their pregnancies and there after. Khiara thank you so much for joining the show and thank you so much for doing this work.

BRIDGES: Thank you so much, it has been a pleasure and it’s definitely important work, not my work, but this work of transforming culture, transforming law, because we’re living a time where we’re not living up to the promises that we made in our founding documents so it’s time to change that.

VALLAS: A lot of what we try to do with the show and with TalkPoverty.org. Khiara Bridges and you can find her book on Amazon or anywhere book are sold, I’m sure.

BRIDGES: Thank you.

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.