Trump’s Poverty Denial

Move over, climate change… Trump just issued a sweeping denial of poverty in America. PLUS: What Kavanaugh’s deregulatory agenda would mean for workers (and consumers); why SNAP recipients are losing access to farmer’s markets; and more. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

Almost immediately after President Trump announced the nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, his administration sent out a list of talking points to business-friendly surrogates. Headlined “Judge Brett Kavanaugh On Overregulation,” it elaborated how Kavanaugh “protects American businesses from job-killing regulation.” That pleasant pablum disguises what Kavanaugh really thinks of regulations protecting all of us. So writes Helaine Olen, in a column for the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog. She joins the show to unpack what Kavanaugh’s deregulatory ideology could mean for workers — and consumers — should he join the high court.

Later in the show, amid the ongoing Farm Bill debate, which has nutrition assistance for some 2 million Americans squarely in the cross-hairs, another threat to struggling families’ nutrition is largely flying under the radar. Last week it came to light that a program that enables low-income families to purchase fresh produce at farmers markets with their SNAP benefits is in jeopardy — due to a change in contractors initiated by the Trump administration, which is raising all kinds of red flags. To unpack what’s going on — and what’s at stake for families struggling to put food on the table — Rebecca speaks with Jane Black, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Washington Post.

But first… Move over, climate change. Late last week, the White House issued a sweeping denial of poverty. A major report released by Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers brazenly declared the War on Poverty “largely over and a success.” As Rebecca and Jeremy explain, the report is literally page after page of gaslighting the very real hardship faced by tens of millions of Americans struggling to afford food, housing, health care and more — all for the purpose of justifying Trump’s quest to dismantle Medicaid, nutrition assistance, and other programs that help families get by (to pay for his millionaire tax cuts). PLUS: More evidence that workers’ wages are down, 6 months after Trump’s tax law took effect; Amazon Prime Day strikes; President Obama calls for a Universal Basic Income; and other news of the week, ICYMI.

This week’s guests:

• Helaine Olen, opinion writer, PostPartisan blog
• Jane Black, freelance food writer
• Jeremy Slevin, director of antipoverty advocacy, Center for American Progress (and faithful sidekick)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read Helaine Olen’s take on what Kavanaugh’s extremist deregulatory agenda would mean for workers — and consumers
• Dig into Jane Black’s scoop on why SNAP recipients are losing access to farmer’s markets benefits

For more on the headlines from this week’s ICYMI topics:

• Wonk out with Rebecca’s tweet thread on the White House’s sweeping denial of poverty
• Check out Noah Smith’s explainer for Bloomberg on workers’ falling wages in the wake of Trump’s tax law
• Get up to speed on the Amazon Prime Day strikes
• Read the full text of Obama’s speech where he called for a UBI

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week on Off Kilter, apart from the threats to Roe, pre-existing conditions and more, I talk with Helaine Olen, columnist for the Post Partisan blog about what Brett Kavanaugh’s deregulatory ideology could mean for workers and consumers should he join the high court. Later in the show, while congress continues to debate the farm bill, last week it came to light that a program that helps low income families purchase fresh produce at farmer’s markets with their SNAP benefits is in jeopardy due to a change in contractors initiated by the Trump administration, which smells more than a little fishy. I talk with Jane Black, one of the reporters who broke the story for The Washington Post. But first, Jeremy Slevin, the Slevs, the Slevinator haven’t called you that in a while.

JEREMY SLEVIN: I know it kind of faded from view.

VALLAS: Were you excited about that or have you been secretly upset and not letting me know?

SLEVIN: Quiet indifference.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Really? That’s not something I would ever use to describe you and how you feel about anything.

SLEVIN: That’s fair, that’s fair, yeah, except the Slevinator.

VALLAS: Except the Slevinator.

SLEVIN: Except that.

VALLAS: With all credit to who it is due, Keith Ellison who made that name for you stick a long time ago. So I should probably keep it up. So there’s a lot going on in the world right now Jeremy, and I feel like a deep sigh, even a few minutes of meditation, you and me, might be the appropriate way to start this episode.

SLEVIN: Five minutes of silence and just beautiful Tibetan throat music.

VALLAS: I don’t know why we didn’t discuss this beforehand because frankly, I would have been totally down for that and I know that Will, our producer would have brought some relaxing music. You know what we actually really need is one of those bowls, you know when you like —

SLEVIN: Singing bowls.

VALLAS: The singing bowl where you go around the edge and it hums. Next week, I’m bringing one for ‘In Case You Missed It’.

SLEVIN: And that it will be the whole ‘In Case You Missed It’, just five minutes of that.

VALLAS: Because that would be a break from everything that is crumbling and burning around us as we live in an actual dumpster fire.

SLEVIN: But it’s important self-care.

VALLAS: But this show is not going to focus on what everyone else is talking about right now, making us feel that way, we’re going to talk about some very specific dumpster fires that matter a lot for low income people and the first is a report that was released by the Trump White House, actually the Council of Economic Advisers, so basically the head economists for the White House, that was basically a sweeping denial of poverty in America.

SLEVIN: They literally said and I quote, that the war on poverty is quote, “largely over and a success”, end quote. And notably this after for years conservatives tried to say the war on poverty was a failure, now they’re say it’s done we can move on. And the message of this report and I’ll let you go into the details is basically that poverty in essense does not exist and is not a major problem in America today and therefore we can begin rolling back all of these programs that help people, whether it’s help people get health care through Medicaid or help people access food through SNAP or whether it’s housing assistance, but that is the broad frame of the report.

VALLAS: I want to get a little bit wonky in a second because I think it’s actually really important for people to understand how dishonest, how intellectually dishonest and how manipulative of statistics this White House is willing to be to try to whitewash the existence of poverty in America. But I think the first thing just to reflect on having read this report so you don’t have to, is that it basically reads like page after page of gaslighting the reality that is facing tens of millions of Americans in this country. There are pages and pages of all kinds of statements about how for example, homelessness isn’t really a meaningful problem in this country. They try to do these funny things with stats where they’re like, well I don’t know, doesn’t seem like a problem because throughout the year, 99.6% of people won’t spend a single night in a homeless shelter.

SLEVIN: Oh, the majority of people are not homeless, some homelessness doesn’t exist?

VALLAS: That is literally their case, that’s the evidence that they mount. Just you know, erasing the plight over half a million Americans without shelter on any given night, which I will note includes 58,000 families with children but hey, you guys are not the majority of people so I guess you don’t count. That’s basically the logic. And it does the same thing with hunger. There are about 40 plus million Americans who struggle with hunger in any given month and the report basically tells them to man up because the types of struggles that they face that are counted as hunger by the way that the government counts it, they say aren’t really all that bad, like quote “difficulty obtaining food” or “reduced diet quality as a consequence of limited resources,” the report literally says sorry to you folks who are hungry, that’s not good enough for us. We think you should actually be starving in a way that might put in a commercial that would be asking for money for a third world country that’s trying to erase say child hunger with distended bellies and what not.

SLEVIN: And I think what’s fascinating is they start with this premise that oh you know what, really extreme suffering doesn’t exist in this country when it does. They’re like oh you know what, a majority of people aren’t homeless, so poverty doesn’t exist but then they use that to smear programs in addition to homelessness, which is a real problem, to smear programs that help a much broader swath of people, who may not be homeless but don’t have access to health care if they didn’t have Medicaid or maybe their paychecks are too low so they need a little extra help through SNAP to put food on the table. And it continues the other-ization of poverty. Not only does it continue the other-ization, it goes a step further and say this doesn’t exist. So the millions and millions of people who are struggling day to day, who may not consider themselves in deep poverty but have some real needs and use help from Medicaid or food stamps, your suffering doesn’t count, it’s a bait and switch.

VALLAS: It’s also, and it is, and it’s trying to have it both ways and in weird ways like you describe but it’s also and I said this on twitter, it’s basically treating poverty like this administration has treated climate change. if you just deny that it’s really a problem, then that justifies your agenda which in the case of poverty is trying to dismantle the programs that as you describe help people have health care and food and everything else. I’m going to throw in one more choice gem from this report, which I think shows just how unbelievably out of touch and full on ostrich this report and people who wrote it and this administration are, which is the report even brags that almost all, I’m quoting, “almost all Americans have access to clean water.” As though this is yet again something to —

SLEVIN: A banner year for us.

VALLAS: Right?!

SLEVIN: Only some people don’t have drinking water.

VALLAS: In 2018 in the richest nation on earth. And by the way, they don’t even mention Flint, Flint doesn’t even merit a footnote as they describe that almost all Americans have clean water and therefore we’re fine. So anyway, ridiculous report.

SLEVIN: Guys, nothing to see here, only half a million homeless people and only led in several communities of poisonous water, we’re good, don’t worry about it.

VALLAS: Not a thing we need to be worrying about as the federal government. So now this is where I want to get a little wonky for a second because the report doesn’t just actively deny these kinds of poverty and hardship and I want to say before I get to this wonky part, I think important to mention too, as I was tweeting a little bit about some of my reactions to this, the number of responses that I got from people who themselves are struggling, who said I can’t tell you how painful it is to know that and to read these words from the White House that what I am experiencing right now isn’t real. That is what this report and that is why I don’t think it’s unfair at all to describe it as gaslighting. And the number of people I had reaching out to me and saying thank you for acknowledging that what we experience every day really is actually happening, that is what this White House doesn’t want to do. It wants to white wash it, it wants to erase it. And here is how desperate the White House under Trump is to erase poverty as an excuse or justification to dismantle programs that mitigate it. They are so desperate the erase poverty that they actually went to the following lengths to try to add the appearance of intellectual rigor to the gas lighting that you and I were describing. so there’s a whole bunch of fancy looking graphs throughout the report and all kinds of what looks like serious analysis trying to show; look at the decline in poverty over the years and it’s showing at these historic lows. And if you knew nothing else, that might sound pretty good and you might go huh, maybe poverty really is over in the United States in 2018.

But here is where I need to get wonky to help people understand how intellectually dishonest this really was and how desperate they were to try to make the case that poverty is over. So in keeping with the Trump administration’s penitent for alternative facts, the White House cherry-picked, I’m going to use the word alternative somewhat charitably here, an alternative measure of poverty that is basically a poverty denial measure. They found a way to measure poverty that is based not on how much people have in resources, but based on consumption, how much people spend. And so when you actually look at how this measure does at assessing poverty and hardship, you find and this is all credit to Luke Schaefer at the University of Michigan who runs their Poverty Solutions program over there, he’s done some really important analysis that I am here relying heavily on.

When you look at how this consumption based measure they chose does at assessing poverty and hardship you find that it is wildly out of step with basically every other indicator of poverty that’s available. Whether that’s the federal government’s official poverty measure, whether that’s the federal government’s supplemental poverty measure, which counts assistance from anti-poverty programs, whether that’s food insecurity, whether that is falling behind on rent mortgage, trouble paying utility bills, unmet medical needs due to cost. You can line it up against any other indicator of poverty and hardship in the United States and you find that it is wildly out of step. And here just to put one final point on it because I’m wonk-ing out and Jeremy even your eyes are glazing over.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: I’m with you.

VALLAS: Alright, I’ll take you at face value. You looked bored briefly and that’s OK, I won’t take it personally, the measure that the White House cherry-picked as it’s poverty denial measure is so epically bad at assessing poverty and hardship as Luke Schaefer whom I cited before points out, if we use this measure we would be forced to conclude that the economy was doing way better at the height of the Great Recession than it was in the year 2000 following a booming economy for several years. So that is how bizarrely bad this measure is at assessing poverty and hardship and that is the lengths that the Trump administration went to to try to make their case that poverty is over so that they could say cool, let’s take away all these programs that people need.

SLEVIN: So basically it’s saying people are spending money, correct me if I’m wrong, they’re spending money, they may be going into debt, they may be filing for bankruptcy later on, they may have unmet medical expenses because they aren’t able to access medical care but they’re spending money so they’re ok.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right. So people can be spending money they don’t actually have and going deep into debt or taking out payday loans to pay their rent. People could be 60 or 70% of their income on rent, just to get by. This kind of a measure doesn’t consider any of that, it just looks at people’s spending habits as they struggle to get by.

SLEVIN: Which makes sense, of course people were spending money during the Great Recession. There were a lot of problems going on. So of course this makes no sense as a way to measure people’s actual material wellbeing.

VALLAS: That’s exactly right. And so Trump doesn’t care, it served the purpose here, which was to make it look like poverty doesn’t really exist when in reality nearly half of American households are struggling to afford basics like food and housing and health care as we’ve said many times on this show. Four in ten Americans don’t even have $400 in the bank and as the UN pointed out recently and spoke at length with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston who authored the report. According to the UN, 5.3 million Americans are living in third world conditions of poverty. Yet Trump wants us to believe that poverty is over so that he can take away pretty much every program that helps people make ends meet and say that that’s somehow what’s called for by the booming economy that he has created. But Jeremy, I want to leave the CEA report there because there’s a few other things to get to.

SLEVIN: Might as well be called the CEO report because that’s who it’s designed to help.

VALLAS: That’s true, we’ll call it the CEO report. But that actually takes us into a couple of the other things that happened this week that offer some interesting contrasts.

SLEVIN: Well speaking of CEOs, I want to get this in real quickly because we’d be remiss not to mention this, weekly earnings came out for this week, it turns out we knew wages were down for what’s called non-supervisory workers this year and now turns out weekly earnings are down for full-time workers overall over the past year. So adjusting for inflation, basically rising prices wiped out any wage gains and there’s a great piece by Noah Smith today basically titled literally “Trump’s tax cut hasn’t done anything for workers”. And it walks through tons and tons of public and private data that basically shows that wages are deteriorating.

VALLAS: But Jeremy, I’m so confused because wasn’t Trump’s tax plan supposed to result in a $4,000 wage increase for workers? Wasn’t that the plan?

SLEVIN: Oh, yeah, yeah was that from the same people who wrote that CEA report that if you’re in debt you must be really rich?

VALLAS: It must be, that’s a funny coincidence there that you’ve pointed out. So these new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about wages declining for all full time workers, comes on the heels, and we’ve talked about this on this show repeatedly now of multiple other reports from BLS in the past several weeks and months finding that wages are down for non-supervisory workers, wages are done for production workers, so this yet another shoe to drop in telling the story of who Trump’s economy really is helping and it’s the absolute ultra rich and corporations, it’s not translating into wage gains, it’s actually loses for workers despite what he used to sell that plan to people who were not trying to purchase it as members of the donor class.

SLEVIN: The only discernable effect we’ve seen from the tax cut is a huge immediate gain, and this is from Smith’s piece for wealthy shareholders combined with tepid increases in business investment and decreases in real wages. Wages down, money up for shareholders, growth has actually slowed since 2017 so they’re not going to pay for themselves, shocker, so there you go. The wealth doesn’t trickle down.

VALLAS: And the numbers are there to prove it. So we mentioned CEOs before, and there’s a particular CEO who we’ve learned —

SLEVIN: I liked this segue.

VALLAS: I liked my segue, you liked it?

SLEVIN: Yeah, are you talking about Barack Obama?

VALLAS: No.

SLEVIN: Oh [LAUGHTER] You’re talking about Bezos.

VALLAS: Yeah.

SLEVIN: Oh that’s a much more salient transition. I was like oh, Obama was the CEO of the country.

VALLAS: Why would you assume that my segue was going to be bad. [LAUGHTER] I am a great seque-er.

SLEVIN: The best segue-er.

VALLAS: I actually am.

SLEVIN: I have the best segues.

VALLAS: I pride myself on having strong segues and I feel like you don’t appreciate that fully.

SLEVIN: I fully appreciate it now.

VALLAS: I mean now we don’t have time to talk about this more.

SLEVIN: Let’s talk about prime day.

VALLAS: The CEO I was about to refer to in my artful segue that you completely threw in the trash was Jeff Bezos.

SLEVIN: So Bezos, well yesterday or Monday was prime day, which was a huge sale that generates billions of dollars for Amazon, they have deals, I don’t participate I don’t know, but I guess products are cheaper. Literally the same day as prime day, it was made public that Jeff Bezos is now official the richest person in modern history. He’s worth $150 billion. Meanwhile, on prime day there was strikes in Europe of Amazon employees alleging dismal labor conditions. And there’s a worldwide campaign to boycott prime day because it is such an emblem for extreme inequality, dismal worker conditions combined with exorbitant profits and wealth for the CEO of the company. You’re nodding.

VALLAS: Yeah.

SLEVIN: You agree.

VALLAS: Yeah, I mean, oh I’m sorry, I thought that we agreed in a past episode that the way that I agree with you was just to look at you and quietly nod.

SLEVIN: I thought that was mine.

VALLAS: It was, I took it from you.

SLEVIN: Oh, OK.

VALLAS: Right? And then I did it back to you and you didn’t know what to do with it, which apparently is what happened again here. No, that’s right and the strikes have been really amazing to watch but they also coincide with a lot we’ve been hearing from workers as people continue to talk about the dramatic gap between CEO pay and Bezos is a great example of that and workers who are struggling to make ends meet. And Bernie Sanders recently hosted a big conversation that actually titled “CEOs versus workers”, Amazon was part of that, so was McDonalds, so was Disney.

SLEVIN: Bob Iger, who makes $400 million this year in his pay package, meanwhile Disney workers often rely on food assistance, there have been reports of workers at Disneyland who are homeless, it’s not just Amazon. This is a economy wide problem.

VALLAS: Nope, that’s exactly right, and one that is very real. I’d like to cc: Donald Trump and his council of economic advisers on all of this as they continue to think these problems don’t really exist while they are impacting huge swaths of the American economy. So you thought I was going to bring up Obama because Obama gave a big speech this week that actually had poverty and inequality and the economy as a big part of it and I think we have what, one minute left, so you can do your one minute on that knowing we’re going to come back and do another segment.

SLEVIN: I think it’s a big deal. Obama has been relatively quiet trying to maintain the tradition of president letting their successors lead the country. But this was his first major speech. And it focused heavily not just on poverty but on globalization and inequality. And whatever one says about Obama’s record on these issues, he was pretty forthright in critiquing what he called a global elite and I quote, “In every country just about, the disproportionate economic clout of those at the top has provided this individuals,” referring to the global elite, “with wildly disproportionate influence on this country’s political life and on it’s media, on what policies are pursued and whose interested end up being ignored. But what’s never the less true in their business dealings, many titans of industry and finance are increasingly detached from any single local or nation-state. They live lives more insolated from the struggles of ordinary people in their countries of origin.” He also endorsed some pretty sweeping proposals, he mentioned a universal basic income, something that people should be considering, which is a pretty radical step for a former president to take. So I think we would be remiss not to contrast the CEA report with the former president’s shift towards a more populist I would say and anti-globalization critique.

VALLAS: And a lot more to dig into there, something we’ll come back to in a future episode given that a universal basic income or a UBI is a topic that I think it’s been a long time coming, it’s something we need to dig into. Jeremy Slevin, the Slevinator, thank you for coming back. I didn’t even mention your beard, because there was so much to get through.

SLEVIN: Because it’s trimmed!

VALLAS: Yeah, also that. Because it’s not in my face right now. [LAUGHTER] Oh wait, that means I did just mention your beard, oops, oh well. So you’ll be back lots more next week so we don’t miss things that we otherwise would have. Don’t go away, talking with Helaine Olen at The Washington Post Post Partisan blog about what Kavanaugh would mean for workers given his massive, sweeping deregulatory ideology that’s getting a lot less attention than where he might stand on Roe and healthcare and more. Don’t go away, more on that after the break.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Almost immediately after President Trump announced the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, his administration sent out a list of talking points to business friendly surrogates headlined: “Judge Brett Kavanaugh on overregulation”, it elaborated how Kavanaugh quote “protects American businesses from job killing regulation. That’s pleasant pabulum disguises what Kavanaugh really thinks about protecting all of us. So writes Helaine Olen at The Washington Post’s Post Partisan blog. I’m thrilled to have her join the show to unpack what Kavanaugh’s deregulatory ideology could mean for workers and consumers should he join the high court. Helaine, thank you so much for talking the time to join the show.

HELAINE OLEN: Thank you for having me on.

VALLAS: So any conversation about what Kavanaugh thinks about regulations, and we’ll dig into a lot here, but has to start with SeaWorld.

OLEN: SeaWorld is a major one. Essentially the SeaWorld case is this famous example. A few ago, listeners might remember a trainer was killed, a woman named Dawn Brancheau, was killed when she was working with one of the killer whales at Orlando SeaWorld. And it was in front of a bunch of kids and parents and it was a fairly horrifying event. [The Occupational Safety and Health Administration] (OSHA) subsequently fined SeaWorld the grand sum of $75,000 over this. The whale had killed before and in addition they felt that, they didn’t feel, they produced quite a bit of evidence that SeaWorld had not taken proper precautions in this case and in many others where either incidents occurred or did not occur but they should have taken these precautions. SeaWorld would not accept this and appealed. And they took it to court and they landed in front of Kavanaugh at one point and in what was a mercifully a minority opinion, Kavanaugh said that SeaWorld should not pay this and the reason why is that Brancheau should have known that this job was risky, like playing sports. And if you get a concussion playing football, you don’t have a case, and here you don’t have a case either. Mercifully as I said, he was overruled by other members of the panel at the DC Circuit including one Merrick Garland.

VALLAS: Another interesting detail and name people will remember in this case, SeaWorld as it was appealing to the Supreme Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit where Kavanaugh was the dissenting voice, SeaWorld was actually represented by former Justice Antonin Scalia’s son.

OLEN: Right, on the off chance you guys don’t think we live in a oligarchy.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Right.

OLEN: It was kind of, it’s one of these cases that you read going, I can’t believe this. And then you see this nice guy turning up of Donald Trump at the press conference and he seems like such a nice guy, and people are writing pieces about how when my husband died he helped me, and he got my daughter a clerkship and all of this wonderful stuff. And I’m sure he’s a really super nice guy, he looks like a really nice guy. I’ve never met him but it sort of reminds me of the reverse of the old joke about how liberals are people who like people in general but not specific.

VALLAS: Right.

OLEN: I think Kavanaugh is kind of the opposite. And while we always want in theory people to like us in specific, in fact we’re mostly governed by people who don’t know us specifically and only know us generally and we really need people who like us generally. And Kavanaugh frankly doesn’t appear to like us generally, does he?

VALLAS: And just to put a finer point on how extreme this view is that he put forth in this dissent that you wrote about, he basically was saying as you explain in your column that as he views it, having a job as an animal trainer is just as dangerous as say, being an NFL player, football player, or being a NASCAR racer and so on this basis, nope, I don’t think the federal government has a place to regulate something like SeaWorld, because these are just dangerous jobs and we should just leave it there.

OLEN: Right and it’s just horrifying. And it speaks to what his view of his role is going to be, because he apparently as far as I can tell not met many regulations that he’s ever liked. And this brings us to the broader topic; regulation is in American political talk a bad word, people, Reagan campaigned for president against regulation, he called it burdensome. Remember the great last line, I’m here from the government, I’m here to help you. And everybody laughed at that because of course the government would never help us. Trump for that matter campaigned against regulation, promising to take away two government regulations for everyone one that’s enacted and one of the few promises of course he did not keep, surprise right. But [INAUDIBLE] to be grateful he did not keep, but in fact when you look at it people actually like regulation. When polling is done, and lots of polling is out there, on specific regulatory topics people love actually government rules. Most people are in favor of net neutrality, which is probably why the Federal Communications Commission got over a million notes after John Oliver took it on famously a few years ago. People really like the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] (CFPB), which we can talk about more in a minute because Kavanaugh’s got a role there too.

VALLAS: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

OLEN: People really like environmental regulations, they think this stuff is great, it’s just the word itself that seems to sometimes attract less than positive attention. And I think truthfully part of that is it’s just one of those words you sound like you’re being called on to eat your peas basically. When you write about finances, you talk about a lot of technical terms a lot and regulation seems to be up there with stuff like the fiduciary standard, which is also not the sexiest term but is incredibly important, and is something that people really like.

VALLAS: And bringing up a really important point, the very word regulation, just even describing the thing has almost become a loaded term because Republicans have been so effective at smearing regulations as something that should make our skin crawl.

OLEN: Right, it’s been demonized. An interesting light digretion, an interesting conversation I had on twitter with somebody last week, is somebody pointed out to me that one of the reasons Republicans were so successful at doing this is because most people think regulation and they think local government. So they think the cop who gave them a ticket when they were going one mile over the speed limit. Or in New York City is notorious that small store owners are fined the second they don’t pick up a scrap of litter in front of their store or something. And so that this is what they’re thinking of but in fact the word, what we talk about, so they say regulation and go oh yes, we have to do something about that. But in fact what regulation is basically the modern government state that exists to protect us. And it exists to protect us from wage theft, it exists to protect us from corporate power, it exists to protect us from environment damage and so on. And everybody supports that pretty much.

VALLAS: Yeah and back to your very good point about how effective Republicans have been at evoking a certain type of example or putting a certain face on the concept of regulations, which then leaves everyone with a bad taste in their mouth when they’re thinking about it as a general topic and hear the ‘R’ word. Another example that Paul Ryan is completely obsessed with is the hairbraiders, people who are trying to make a living braiding hair but who run into regulations that stop them from being able to work in their chosen field. There’s all kinds of examples of what Republicans point to when they’re trying to say regulations are bad and they’re actually bad for workers. But they’re completely white washing all of the ways in which modern society has developed to and our laws have developed to protect workers and consumers from all kinds of terrible and dangerous and unfair thing. Should we just start calling them protections?

OLEN: We should call them protections, we should call them modern protections, so that it feels like this something 21st century protections. It really does feel like we need a new word for the subject. I also think regulations, four syllables here, reg-u-la-tions. It’s long and it feels vaguely technical and people generally start to shut their eyes when you use a word like that. I think that’s just a certain amount of common sense. But to go back to what you’re saying, it goes back to what Republicans cherry pick. They deliberately lead us to get lost in the details so that we don’t see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that regulations or protections or 21st century protections will protect us. They keep us healthy, they keep us safe. They keep us proseperous, they allow us to go about our lives in freedom frankly, freedom of fear of wondering if we’re going to get our wages taken away, be victims of wage theft, if our credit card company is going to take advantage of us, if we’re going to go to SeaWorld and watch a trainer get killed in front of our children for that matter.

VALLAS: Or if we’re going to have an environment that’s actually safe for human habitation, one of the points that you make in your column, looking at Kavanaugh’s record he actually argued that the environmental protection agency, the EPA overstepped when in the Obama years, it enacted protections that were about combatting greenhouse gas emissions.

OLEN: Right, to get very specific for a minute, one of the things that Kavanaugh is arguing is, and this is the broader point, is that when congress passes a regulation, they obviously can’t get into the weeds on every issue. Nothing would ever pass, nothing would ever happen. And so we give agencies, cabinet agencies, government agencies, federal government agencies the latitude to then make rules based on these rules that have been passed. And essentially Kavanaugh has taken an extremely narrow position on this and basically in most cases these agencies are overstepping their boundaries. And this is something that would, should he be able to do this at the court level and if he’s approved he likely will be able to get this out there at the court, at the Supreme Court level would put a stop to a huge amount of regulation and possible lead to a lot of regulations being overturned. And of course, industry as we know as we can see already is just chomping at the bit to do that.

VALLAS: So, and also just to keep making this a little bit more concrete, you named a few very important examples of areas where we expect Kavanaugh to be incredibly extreme in saying that the federal government does not have the authority to protect people in the ways that our laws have evolved over the decades and the generations. And at the heart of that, and this one I think really deserves it’s own discussion is that he has asserted that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, which was the brain child of Senator Elizabeth Warren, it’s all about protecting consumers was itself unconstitutional.

OLEN: Right, and this is important because this case is probably going to land in front of the Supreme Court in the next year or two. There are a number of cases winding their way through the courts about the CFPB, Kavanaugh ruled on one of them, which was brought by a mortgage company that the CFPB fined for misbehavior towards people they were supposed to be serving. And essentially Kavanaugh said the entire agency is unconstitutional because of the way the directorship is structured. As you know, the director of the CFPB is five years and it can only be fired as of right now for cause by the president. And this is done the ensure independence of the agency, that why it wasn’t done as a panel like the FCC, it’s why the president can’t just call up and fire the guy. And anyway, the Kavanaugh decision in this case, which was eventually overruled I should say, was that the CFPB structure, because the head can only be fired for cause, is essentially unaccountable to the president and he made the claim that in relative terms, the position is more powerful than almost any other position in government and therefore this is unconstitutional.

This was also overturned. However, there’s chance that this might come back up before the Supreme Court if the case is not done, and at that point does Kavanaugh recuse himself? Does he have a conflict of interest? That’s a good question, you tell me. Seems like he’s got a vested interest in keeping this opinion going.

VALLAS: I think that’s right and I’ve talked at length with Ian Millhiser of Think Progress on this show before about exactly where the logical conclusion of all of this heads, it is a terrifying picture. It’s a return to what legal scholars often refer to as the Lochner era of the Supreme Court, a time years and years ago where the court repeatedly struck down legislation that was intended to prevent such horrors as child labor and to ensure that workers have a reasonable work week and have protections like minimum wages and on and on. All kinds of things that we take for granted these days as the law of the land and things people might not even think about in the context of regulation or the ways in which workers are protected because they don’t even remember a time where there was a Supreme Court that didn’t agree that that’s the way that life should be.

OLEN: Right, pretty much at this point, if you’re under the age of 50 you have very little memory of a time when everybody took this stuff for granted, which is unreal at this point. This era has been going on really since the late 1970s, early 1980s, and I mean that generally in terms of government, not just the Supreme Court and our society. But this year in particular really brought this home for many of us on the left. The Supreme Court, with the stolen seat from Merrick Garland that was given to Neil Gorsuch, promptly overturned precedents that in previous years under previous courts, perhaps the most famous being the Janus ruling, which after 40 years said that public service unions need to get the permission, the opt in permission of their membership for taking money from them for collective bargaining, which is going to severely undercut their ability to bargain for their workers. And the way they made the ruling was sort of horrific. It wasn’t just that people could come in and say no I don’t want to give my money anymore, they actually made it so that everyone has to opt in, which will as we know from covering other areas of finance makes it much harder to get people to pay up basically.

VALLAS: So a terrifying potential coming assault on workers, on consumers, on many, many different fronts. Of course in addition to all of the other terrible things that we can expect if Kavanaugh is confirmed to this court, ranging from pre-existing conditions to abortion rights and more, all being wiped off of the map. I’ve been speaking with Helaine Olen, she’s a columnist for The Washington Post’s Post Partisan blog, Helaine thank you so much for your reporting and for taking the time to join the show.

OLEN: Thank you for having me on.

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. Amid the ongoing farm bill debate, which was nutrition assistance from some 2 million Americans squarely in the crosshairs, another threat to struggling families’ nutrition is largely flying under the radar. Last week it came to light that a program that enables low income families to purchase fresh produce at farmers markets with their SNAP benefits is in jeopardy due to a change in contractors initiated by the Trump administration, which is raising all kinds of red flags. To unpack what’s going on here and what’s at stake for families struggling to put food on the table, I’m joined by Jane Black, one of the reports who broke the story for The Washington Post. Jane, thanks so much for joining the show.

JANE BLACK: Thanks for having me.

VALLAS: So before we get into the news and the potential scandal here, I think it’s probably helpful for people to understand a little bit about the program we’re talking about that enables families to use SNAP to purchase food at farmers markets.

BLACK: Yeah, so let’s start there and what I’m going to do is give an example of how it would work because this is super wonky and arcane. So I went a week ago to my local famers market, which is in Washington DC and there was a woman who showed up with an EBT card, an EBT card is an Electronic Benefits Transfer card, which means that’s where her SNAP benefits or formerly known as food stamps are there and she swipes them. She takes them, they have a card reader, they swipe them, they say OK how much would you like to spend, she says “$10”, they give her tokens, which she then can go and use with the different vendors at the market. Now that all seems fairly straightforward except that it’s not. So the way that SNAP benefits were set up to work at grocery stores is you would go in and you would swipe this and that information goes directly to the state agencies that manages SNAP.

When you try to do that at a farmers market, in a parking lot or in a field, you need a mobile transaction. And for whatever reason in our digital age, that is relatively complicated and relatively expensive. And so what happens here was that the company that processes those transactions at 1,700 markets across the United States and even thought that’s only 25% of markets, they’ve accounted for 40% of the transactions, announced it was going out of business and within a week or two they would no longer be available and that means that people who want to buy fresh food at farmers markets, and that money that was previously going directly to small farmers within the region will no longer be going to them and they simply won’t be able to use it because of essentially a technical glitch.

VALLAS: Now it turns out as your reporting uncovered that it isn’t quite so simple as a company going out of business.

BLACK: Yeah, it isn’t. So again, bear with me it’s a long story. There are two pieces of this. The first piece is there is a contract. In order to support farmers markets, the USDA has a program that provides free equipment to these markets. So you’re a market, you put in an application, you say I’d like to get either a card reader or an iPhone or an iPad to swipe these cards. That is the contract that is at issue. The USDA has a contract that asks somebody to manage that program, figure out who needs equipment, make sure that they get it. Take control of this situation and give out the money. Until last year, that had been run over the years since 2012 by a series of non-profits. One was the Farmers Market Coalition and another one was an acronym I couldn’t possible remember. In November they were informed that they weren’t going to be able to simply auto renew the contract and it was going to have to go through a bidding process. And the bidding process itself took six months. And so even if the farmers market coalition had gotten it before, it would have dramatically delayed their ability to do the work, which meant that markets that wanted to get that equipment would not be able to get it until the summer, which is halfway through the growing seasons, which means they’ve missed half the number of people that they want to be able to use.

So that was one problem. The second problem, which was this company, which is called the Novo Dia Group, this is the one that does the transactions that said that they were going to have to close down, the person who took over that free equipment program decided I’m not going to work with them anymore. And when she said I’m not going to work with them anymore, suddenly sort of the economics of their business became kind of shakey because it’s a very expensive cumbersome process and they were counting on constantly being able to grow their network every year, achieving these economies of scale and at some point becoming profitable. And when this woman took over the contracts said yeah, I’m not going to work with you, they suddenly said we can’t make this work anymore and we’re shutting down.

VALLAS: Now, rewinding the clock just a little bit, the story gets even, the plot thickens is sort of what I want to say here.

BLACK: Right, exactly.

VALLAS: The story gets even more complicated, which is actually that it wasn’t just a lengthy bidding process, it actually was a bidding process that raises some real red flags.

BLACK: Yeah, so as I said, before this year, it has always been run by a farmers market organization, by a non-profit, who to be honest wasn’t an expert in electronic payments, to be honest was sort of cobbling this together. But had this soft skills, they knew what farmers needed, they understood how markets worked, they were connected to the actual people in the community and they were able to put together a system that has been hugely successful. In a country where no one agrees on anything, letting people spend their money at a farmers market was a happy story. The contract went to a woman named Angela Sparrow, and to be honest, this is how we got onto the story. I got a tip that there was something fishy going on that the USDA had award the contract to this business called Financial Transaction Management, run by one Angela Sparrow. You look her up, the company only came into existence weeks or months before she was given the contract. It had an annual revenue of $1, it had no website. We found a resume on LinkedIn, she had some experience working at First Data, which is one of the largest economic payment companies in the country, probably in the world. But she didn’t know anybody and who was she and no one had ever heard of her.

And of course after the story was published, I got all of these emails from readers, saying do you know there was an Angela Sparrow who was Miss Illinois in the Miss USA contest that was owned by Trump. Well anyway, it turned out that wasn’t her. But it was, there were question marks. Like, who is this person and how did she get this contract and why did she get this contract when the program has been chugging along?

VALLAS: And an important piece of this that we would be remiss not to mention is that part of what even initiated this change in practice from what had been happening for a number of years while this program was in existence that moved away from this auto-renewal of the contract and towards this lengthy bidding process as you describe was that the Trump administration had basically decided that they didn’t want to move forward with these non-profits in the driver’s seat anymore. They wanted to shift to something that felt a little more business-y and that appears to be what Angela Sparrow cooked up for them.

BLACK: Yeah, I don’t have a smoking gun for you on that. I think it is clear that the USDA wrote the request for proposal in a way that made it seem like they were looking for a business. I have to talked to a number of people whose lives revolves around this. And they said while it smells awfully fishy, there’s no evidence that the department within the USDA who gave out the contract did anything wrong. That in fact the woman may have gotten over the top if you will and won the contract because she was a woman, owned a business, she’s a minority woman in business, but certainly the way the [Request for Proposal] (RFP) was written it was clear that they were trying to move it in a direction where a business or a commercial business would take over and move it out of the non-profit space.

VALLAS: Which is in keeping with an emphasis that we’ve seen from not just this administration but from Republicans when it comes to anti-poverty programs like SNAP. We need an emphasis on payment accuracy and on and on as opposed to people who might know the program or advocates who are experts. There’s a greater trust that they seem to place in business being in the drivers seat and yet this is what we’re watching happen. Take us a little bit now to what happens moving forward and what this means for families who want to be able to use their food stamps at farmers markets as they have been doing.

BLACK: Yeah, well OK, so certainly I would agree there’s definitely a war on expertise. And then that raises all kinds of questions, whether this is the worst example of it I’m not sure. I would like to say, we have sent in Freedom of Information requests for the contract and the adjudication process in the hopes that we can have a better understanding of exactly what happened. Regardless of whether there’s anything sinister going on it’s a really sad situation. And the way one person described it to me is it’s everybody’s problem and no one’s responsibility. And the issue is that without this program, without Novo Dia Group, none of these markets can use their equipment. It was the only processing system that allows you to use Apple products, it was the only processing system that included something for incentives. So say you were a SNAP user and you went to the market and you could get your money doubled. It would process that and account for it.

So in Massachusetts, almost every farmers market system is going to be wiped out, in New York a huge number of them are, in Washington DC where I live, the main set of markets are having the same problem. California has a different solution, which is something that I’m looking into this week where they decided we’re going to opt out of this free equipment program, which is as I said, cumbersome and complicated and create our own system where we’re just going to give all of the markets their equipment and we’re going to run our own program. And so California has found it’s own way. And one thing I’d really like to look into this week is whether that is a model for the rest of the country. So in sum, I think a lot of people are going to be stuck without that benefit this summer at least. It’s going to take a long time to unravel or to replace it. And I think what advocates really would like is to look at the system as a whole and say this is pretty screwed up, how can we rebuild a very strong foundation and something that’s going to work for a long time going forward in the future and how much help the Trump administration is going be in that process I certainly can’t say.

VALLAS: And just stepping back and looking at this set of issues that this connects with, I’m struck that if this were Bank of America, if this were Target, if this were some large company or financial company that many families across the income spectrum interacted with and that was going to impact middle class families, more well to do families, we would hear people screaming from the rooftops about this kind of lack of customer service and this kind of an interruption of people being able to access their own resources. It would never be tolerated. There would be hearings in congress, there would be news stories dominating the talk shows and mainstream media. But in this case your story, which thank you for covering this and for bringing it to The Washington Post really was all that we ended up hearing about this. Just a handful of news stories, everyone moves on because it’s fine and tolerated if this happens to low income families.

BLACK: I hate to agree with you, this really effects people who don’t have a voice, who don’t have a lot of power, who are already on the defensive, why aren’t you working more and the like. And it’s easy for people to construct a narrative that’s like oh sorry you can’t shop at the farmers market, poor you. But it is, in certain places there are farmers markets on the south side of Chicago and in Los Angeles where they are in food deserts, they are there because they are a place that people can shop and they survive there because people can use those benefits. They would not exist were it not for the ability use SNAP at those markets. So it is a real problem. It isn’t just some silly thing and while I would love this to get more attention, I actually am surprised that it picked up as much traction as it has given all the other things that are going on in the world. There has been quite a reaction, people at the [Agriculture] committee and various congressional offices have reached out to me, they’re very concerned about it, I think they’re trying to keep something going on it, which given what’s happening on the world stage, is something. So I hope there are people, maybe I’m an optimist, but I hope there are people out there who care.

VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you, where do things go from here and what questions are you hoping to get answered as you continue to look into this story?

BLACK: Well, I think there are two paths. One is to find out once and for all and uncover or put to rest this idea that there is something sinister going on with the way that this contract was awarded and we’re hoping to get some documents that we can get our hands on and actually read and figure out if it as fishy as it originally smelled. As I said, we do not have any proof of that at the moment. But I think the main thing, what I’m sort of hoping is that we can look to California as a model or that a payments company like Square or Apple or someone will say this is something that’s really important and we’re going to bring our resources to bear on it. Not because it is their responsibility and not the government’s, but just to get something solved quickly so that people can get access to their benefits again.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Jane Black, she’s one of the reporters who broke this story on this questionable contract process and the implications for low income families and using their SNAP benefits at farmers markets for The Washington Post, Jane thanks so much for your reporting, for shining a light on this important issue that otherwise I think would largely have been ignored and flown under the radar and I look forward to hearing where things go from here.

BLACK: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

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.

This program aired on July 19th, 2018