U.N. v. Trump

The U.N. issues a scathing indictment of poverty and inequality in the U.S., how Uber and Lyft have adopted the gun lobby’s playbook to rewrite the laws in 41 states, plus the poverty news of the week ICYMI. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week on Off-Kilter, while Trump spent much of the week crowing about how he’s to thank for the so-called “best economy ever,” theUnited Nations released a scathing indictment of poverty and inequality in the U.S., finding that for all but the richest, “the American Dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” The report’s findings are damning and specifically call out Trump and the GOP for lavishing massive tax breaks on the wealthiest while 5.3 Americans live in “third world conditions of absolute poverty.” Rebecca speaks with Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who authored the fiery report.

Later in the show, ride-hailing corporations like Uber and Lyft have adopted the dirty tactics of the gun and tobacco industries to buy political influence and override local policies intended to protect consumers and drivers. In 2016, Uber and Lyft deployed a whopping 370 lobbyists around the country — more than Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined. To unpack how Uber and Lyft have rewritten state laws in a staggering 41 states to benefit their own bottom lines at the expense of their drivers and consumers, Rebecca talks with Rebecca Smith, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project, and one of the authors of the recent report, “Uber State Interference: How TNCs (Transportation Network Companies) Buy, Bully, and Bamboozle Their Way to Deregulation.”

But first, Michigan passes a slightly less racist but still awful bill jeopardizing Medicaid for 350,000 Michiganders; the story behind the “Save Our Tips” signs all over D.C.; the return of the Equal Rights Amendment; why did Trump try to hide the Social Security and Medicare Trustees Report? and more. Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week in poverty and inequality, In Case You Missed It.

This week’s guests:

• Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
• Rebecca Smith, director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project
• Jeremy Slevin, director of antipoverty advocacy at the Center for American Progress (and faithful sidekick)

For more on this week’s topics:

• Read the entire fiery U.N. report condemning America’s extreme levels of poverty and inequality (tl;dr? Check out Rebecca’s twitter rant with the highlights and Jeremy’s recap for TalkPoverty)
• Check out NELP’s report uncovering how Uber and Lyft are rewriting state laws to benefit themselves at their workers’ and customers’ expense

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

• Learn more about the slightly less racist but still really terrible attack on Medicaid that just passed Michigan’s House
• Best headline of the week goes to… Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress for this gem on the Masterpiece Cakeshop SCOTUS decision handed down this week
• Shout-out to @LOLGOP for the best take on the Social Security Trustees Report — and for a deeper dive, check out Michael Hiltzik’s spot-on analysis for the LA Times and Social Security Works’s explainer
• For more on how Initiative 77 would cut poverty for D.C.’s tipped workers, give this explainer by Rachel West and Kate Gallagher Robbins for TalkPoverty and this Washington Post op-ed by Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg a read — then learn more about “the other NRA” who’s behind the misinformation campaign about the ballot measure (and most importantly, if you’re a D.C. resident… don’t forget to VOTE!)
• Catch up on the return of the Equal Rights Amendment (all it needs is one more state to ratify!) — and watch Alyssa Milano’s testimony at the shadow hearing hosted in Congress this week

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, as Trump spent much of the week crowing about how he’s to thank for the so-called ‘best economy ever’, the United Nations released a scathing report on poverty and inequality in the U.S., finding that for all but the richest, the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion. The report’s findings are damning and specifically call out Trump and the GOP for lavishing massive tax breaks on the wealthiest people in this country while 5.3 million Americans live in Third World conditions of poverty. I speak with Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights who authored the fiery report. Later in the show, how ride hailing corporations like Uber and Lyft have taken on the dirty tactics of the gun and tobacco industries to override local policies intended to protect drivers and consumers such as minimum wage laws. I get the scoop from Rebecca Smith of the National Employment Law Project. But first, Jeremy Slevin returns with the news of the week in case you missed it. Also, he returns with his beard even longer than the last time I checked in on it, which is an update I felt everyone needed to have.

JEREMY SLEVIN: Every week, it’s the weekly beard update.

VALLAS: I didn’t mention it last week.

SLEVIN: Are you sure?

VALLAS: I’m pretty sure.

SLEVIN: We’ll have to check the tapes.

VALLAS: Will, did I mention it last week?

WILL URQUHART (PRODUCER): You did.

VALLAS: Will [is] saying, OK fact check we’ll check it out, we’ll see if I in fact did. I feel a little bit ganged up on here because I was pretty sure I didn’t but I’m mentioning it for —

SLEVIN: Ganged up on with the truth. OK.

VALLAS: So is this how Trump feels all the time?

SLEVIN: Exactly, exactly.

VALLAS: Ganged up on by facts. So Slevs, you brought a mix of good news, of bad news, of some weird news. It has been a weird week already and it’s only just Wednesday/Thursday if you’re in taping time versus real time.

SLEVIN: I’m in taping time so it’s Wednesday.

VALLAS: You’re always in taping time, yeah because you always give up when we tape. But let’s start with some of the bad news, which is hot off the presses and comes to us from Michigan.

SLEVIN: Yeah so folks may have heard a couple weeks ago there was a really awful bill in Michigan to institute these so-called Medicaid work requirements and this bill was especially bad because it was also racially discriminatory because it exempted counties with high unemployment, namely rural white counties and still had it in low-income urban places like Flint, Michigan. So now there’s an update. They fixed the bill slightly and made it slightly less racist but it’s still really awful.

VALLAS: And I would take issue with even calling this a fix.

SLEVIN: Yeah. Fix is generous.

VALLAS: And also Slevs, you gotta stop using the Republican talking points here. [LAUGHTER] This is a bill that would take away health insurance from people who can’t find work, who can’t get enough hours at their job, who are unable to work for various reasons so this is all about dismantling Medicaid under the guise of work which is what the author of the bill wants you to think it’s actually about.

SLEVIN: Right well, he sent me his talking points right before the taping.

VALLAS: So you’d be prepared for this.

SLEVIN: Exactly and that’s what journalists do. They give us the talking points and we repeat them. So we buried the lede here which is that it just passed the House, a slightly rolled back bill but still institutes these rules that if people can’t get enough hours at work or care takers or are part time workers they would lose their health care. So this implements it in 2020, it requires people to work 80 hours a month to get health care. It applies to people up to 62 years old and there’s a 48-month limit on it. That was a lot more details than folks needed but it’s now headed to the governor’s desk where it’s expected to be signed.

VALLAS: Well it has one more step it has to take, which is the senate has to pass this again because the senate as listeners of the show will know passed it’s own version of this bill some number of weeks ago. We actually had on this show a conversation with one of the leading champions against the bill who was railing against his Republican colleagues for trying to take health insurance away tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Michiganders in the process of moving forward this legislation. Now that it has passed the senate and now a version has passed the house the senate has to pass the house bill, it gets a little technical. So there is still a window to kill this thing.

SLEVIN: Absolutely, absolutely.

VALLAS: But Governor Snyder has made pretty clear he is fine with this new framework and so he wants it to hit his desk. If you don’t want to see this happen, now is the moment is to tell anyone you know in Michigan, hands off Medicaid. This is not the direction that we should be headed. I’ve stunned you into silence.

SLEVIN: That’s right. I agree [LAUGHTER] I have nothing else to say, it’s an awful bill.

VALLAS: Is that your new thing. When you agree you just sit there and look at me across the table and that’s how I know you agree?

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: That’s how you know.

VALLAS: This is going to be a really interesting radio show from here on out, alright.

SLEVIN: Oh, we’re supposed to talk?

VALLAS: I think that’s core to the job. I hate to tell you, that is core to the job, speaking audibly.

SLEVIN: Are we ready to move onto the next social insurance related news item?

[SILENT PAUSE]

VALLAS: That was just me agreeing with you.

[LAUGHTER]

SLEVIN: So we got the annual report from the trustees of Social Security and Medicare this year. It just came out yesterday.

VALLAS: Because you’re in taping time.

SLEVIN: Man, I’m really slow today.

VALLAS: You’re so getting fired after this episode. [LAUGHTER] Sorry to tell you while we’re taping.

SLEVIN: So this is the kind of the annual Washington fest of fretting about the state of Medicare and Social Security rather than talking about what we could do to make sure people have Medicare and Social Security. For example, the AP, the Associated Press tweeted out “BREAKING: Medicare will become insolvent by 2026, Social Security to follow in 2034” and below the headlines it’s a little more nuanced.

VALLAS: The media love to use the frame that oh my God, these programs are going bankrupt. That’s not at all what it means. These are programs that are extremely strong financial footing and are solvent to continue to keep their promises for decades to come but I actually feel like the best take I’ve seen came from @LOLGOP, a friend of the show in saying, I’ll paraphrase here, the only way these programs become insolvent is if Republicans in congress decide to break their promises to seniors and people with disabilities and other people for whom these programs are really important. so that’s the subtext here. But I have to say, one of the things that hasn’t gotten much attention yet but to me was the real story behind the story here was that every year this is a day that folks who care about Social Security and Medicare make on their calendars because they know that there will be a press conference, it’ll be where spokespeople for the trustees come out and reveal the findings. Medicare will continue to be solvent until ‘X’ year, Social Security will be solvent until ‘Y’ year, there’s a breakout for Social Security Disability Insurance which has it’s own trust fund and it’s a wonk day that everyone knows that they will see.

This year looked a lot different. Instead of doing a press conference, it appears that the Trump administration was trying to bury the report by instead hosting a small conversation on background that they allowed a handful of reporters to have with quote, unquote “senior government officials” who they couldn’t quote, they could not name in their news reports. You can’t make this stuff up and so here I am going what are they doing trying to hide this? What is in this report that they don’t want to get out and it looks pretty likely that it’s what the report tells us about Medicare which is that Medicare’s solvency is being stymied, the bottom line of the program is actively being hurt in real ways by Trump administration policies including their sabotage of the health care system. Folks will remember from this show and from news coverage that a big part of the tax law was actually repealing the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act and experts at the time said this isn’t going to be good for Medicare in it’s financial health and now the proof is actually there in the pudding and Trump doesn’t want us to find out.

SLEVIN: Right, exactly. The reason that this report was bad insofar it was bad, for Social Security it wasn’t. actually it’s unchanged. If anything, Social Security is on firmer financial footing but for Medicare the dismantling of the Affordable Care Act, repealing the individual mandate in the tax law will cause Medicare to pay a disproportionate portion of fees for hospitals. So it actually ends up hurting Medicare by repealing the Affordable Care Act.

VALLAS: So let’s go back to, we’ve done some weird news, we’ve done some bad news, I feel like maybe we’re going back to weird news, which is what’s going on with Initiative 77. So folks —

SLEVIN: I think it’s not good or bad yet because we don’t know what will happen. It’s weird.

VALLAS: That’s why I said it’s weird.

SLEVIN: It’s weird.

VALLAS: It’s weird news. So next up, moving into probably still the category of some weird news, I know I’ve been seeing a ton of signs around DC, in restaurants, in bars, that all say ‘Save Our Tips’, it certainly makes it seem like there’s some kind of threat to workers tips that’s going on. What is going on with this, Jeremy?

SLEVIN: Save our tips. So this is in reaction to a ballot initiative in DC, it’s called Initiative 77. And what it would do is it would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which is a great policy, which may sound really exciting.

VALLAS: I like raising the minimum wage.

SLEVIN: Now, yeah, me too.

VALLAS: That might shock you to hear that.

SLEVIN: The catch and the save our tips, ‘our’ is kind of suspect there because this campaign we’ve now learned is funded by the National Restaurant Association which is not the wage earners it’s the owners who don’t want to pay out as much to their workers.

VALLAS: So the other “NRA”.

SLEVIN: The other NRA. What the $15 minimum wage also does is it raises wages for tipped workers. Tipped workers are now paid cents on the dollar of the normal minimum wage. Because of that, there is wage theft [that] is rampant in the restaurant industry. So what this bill does is it eliminates the sub-poverty tipped minimum wage and puts that on par with what other workers earn.

VALLAS: And there’s a lot in here to do with reducing poverty because one of the things that isn’t getting any attention, we’re hearing all of this about how this is supposedly going to harm workers. Workers are literally being trotted out and handed misinformation as tokens in a campaign by, as you said, the restaurant lobby trying to protect their own bottom line and their profits instead of paying their workers. But when you actually look at the facts what you find is that tipped workers in DC are twice as likely to live in poverty as workers who earn the regular minimum wage or otherwise don’t work for tips. So a huge poverty reduction strategy here just by paying people fairly so that they aren’t having to live and die by the fluxuations in what they might make shift to shift like you were describing. There’s also a big piece here to do with sexual harassment.

SLEVIN: Right, it’s the industry that has the highest rate of sexual harassment. And a lot of people have looked into this and when you are working for tips you are less likely to report an instance of sexual harassment because your consumers, your bottom line is based on that.

VALLAS: I can say on a personal note, I was a server for a long time. In college, before that, after that, and I can say with first hand experience that when you are waiting on, when you’re a female server and you’re waiting on say male customers who might say some things that are deeply inappropriate you know you can’t push back, you can’t say anything and there’s all kinds of incentives not to do anything about it and just to let it go away because you’re working for those tips and you don’t want to harm what you might being able to take at the end of the shift. It’s really horrible incentives and really a structure that puts workers in a position with really no good options.

SLEVIN: That’s right. And I’ll add that the medium wage for a tipped worker in DC is about $11.86 [an hour]. It’s not like all of these workers are earning all this money in tips. It is indisputable that it would raise wages for people. The average wage is $11.86, this brings it up to $15 minimum wage.

VALLAS: And there’s no evidence that somehow tips are going to be substantially reduced. That’s not what we’ve seen in other cities. We’ve actually seen in cities that have brought the tipped minimum wage, which in DC right now is just $3.33 an hour up to the same minimum wage that other workers earn. You haven’t seen big changes in tipping behavior because frankly most people aren’t that in the weeds on all the differences in what people get paid for their base pay.

SLEVIN: And if you still have the tip line, and maybe you’re paying 50 cents extra on a cocktail, you’re still going to tip, especially at these high end downtown cocktail bars where you’re seeing a lot of these signs.

VALLAS: So important for folks to know, this is on the ballot. Early voting is underway in DC right now; it’s called Initiative 77. Don’t believe the hype that’s being fed to you by the restaurant industry, lots of facts on our nerdy syllabus page if you want to get up to speed on what Initiative 77 would really do and you got to vote before June 19th. So moving onto good news Slevs. There’s a reawakening of a really important movement that we haven’t heard much from since really the ‘70s.

SLEVIN: Amazing news, so Illinois last week became the 37th, yes 37th state to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment is an amendment to the Constitution that insures equal rights to Americans regardless of sex; it was a huge part of the women’s movement back in the ’70s. We are now one state short of ratifying this constitutional amendment, something that has not been done in decades. There are initiatives in several states. So there are 13 states still outstanding, that includes Virginia, which is now a blue state, wasn’t in the ’70s, Florida where there was an effort that failed earlier this year but is expected to pick back up, Arizona. So if just one more state ratifies this, this could become a constitutional amendment.

VALLAS: Shout out to Alyssa Milano who has been an active and vocal proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment and actually was in Washington this week for a shadow hearing hosted by Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York trying to raise awareness for this and say let’s get that one more state. I have to say Slevs, it is so cool not just to have some good news amid all of the darkness but to see this happening on Trump’s watch. It is such a fantastic —

SLEVIN: It is. What a rebuke.

VALLAS: It’s such a rebuke. It’s such a massive middle finger from America’s women saying this is not the country I want to live in, I’m going to show the country I want to live in. So very cool to see this happening. And we’ll close with one more piece of bad news that I will say at least is —

SLEVIN: Narrowly bad news let’s say. So shout out to Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress for the best headline of the week, which says that “Supreme Courts holds that religious conservatives are special snowflakes who need a safe space.” This was referring to the Masterpiece Cake Shop ruling that upheld a cake shop’s owners’ decision to deny cake to a same sex couple. This was a narrow ruling that doesn’t apply to other civil rights cases but nonetheless sided against the LGBTQ community in this case.

VALLAS: And you’re winking when you say narrow because a lot of conservatives when they saw this ruling and then they saw progressives coming out and saying don’t worry they didn’t throw the baby out —

SLEVIN: Or just reporters saying accurately it was narrow.

VALLAS: Well a lot of people were saying it was a narrow ruling and you had people like Donald Trump Jr. and others saying it wasn’t narrow, it was 7 to 2. Clearly showing they don’t understand what the use of the word narrow means. In this case it means it was just a specific set of circumstances where the ruling applied as it doesn’t totally throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to civil rights but I agree, absolute best headline of the week. Ian Millhiser you’re not just someone who needs to be —

SLEVIN: Best headlines on maybe worst ruling of the week.

VALLAS: Agree and I was going to say Ian, you’re not just someone who has to be bleeped when you come on this show, you are also a master of headlines. So with that we’ll just give a big thanks to everyone in California who came out to the polls this week. It was a massive, massive wave of Democratic votes. Hugely important because what that resulted in was making sure that Democrats on the ballot didn’t get locked out from three races they were in because some of how California’s rules work with the top two vote getters being the ones who advanced rather than just traditional party structures. But I have to say lots of good news that that seems to be portending for the blue wave that may be coming in November. Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break.

[MUSIC]

You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. “In a rich country like the United States, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.” So reads a scathing report by a special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights issued just this past week. The report condemns the nation’s policymakers for permitting not just 40 million Americans to live in poverty, but a staggering 5.3 million in Third World conditions of absolute poverty while giving massive tax cuts to the nation’s wealthiest and corporations. I’m pleased to speak with the special rapporteur, Philip Alston about this fiery report. Professor Alston, thank you so much for joining the show.

PHILIP ALSTON: My pleasure.

VALLAS: So extreme poverty, the very concept of extreme poverty is something that Americans generally think happens only in Third World countries. But you in taking a look at the United States and how we’re doing when it comes to extreme poverty, you found lots of it right here in the U.S. Were you surprised by what you found?

ALSTON: Let me say one thing that is kind to the United States which is that the great majority of societies don’t actually think that they have extreme poverty in their own backyard. It’s normally something that many of us want to associate with other countries. But I was certainly surprised by what I found in the United States. It’s not only the figures because it has to be acknowledged that the figures reflect the policies also of previous administrations and previous congresses. What’s most striking now I think is that rather than seeking to devise policies to create greater equality within the society and provide stronger social safety nets, the United States is actually moving the opposition direction and doing so at great speed. So an effort to increase inequality by giving the tax cuts to the very wealthy, an effort to diminish the social safety net very significantly across a range of areas, to make those who are dependent on benefits much worse off.

VALLAS: Now the concept of extreme poverty and Third World conditions of absolute poverty, there actual are technical terms in here that have very specific meanings. Would you unpack a little bit of what some of those concepts are and what it means to be seeing them here in the United States?

ALSTON: Well the concept of extreme poverty is not so difficult because that is based essentially on the United States’ census bureau figures where they calculate, they come up with the basis on which they estimate the number of Americans who are living in poverty and the number who are living in extreme poverty. But the more staggering figure of 5.3 million is one that was put forward analytically by Angus Deaton, the Princeton professor of economics who won the Nobel Prize for his work and what he said was that if we go to a very poor country we use a figure that the World Bank came up with which is a dollar ninety a day and if you’re living on a dollar ninety a day then you are living in absolute poverty or less than a dollar ninety a day. He argued that because of the way that it’s calculated, a dollar ninety a day makes no real sense in the United States because you can’t buy a decent cup of [INAUDIBLE] and the figure should be closers to six dollars a day which of course is already peanuts. But on that basis which he said would be the direct equivalent of a place like Nepal or Bangladesh, you would have 5.4 million people living in that degree of absolute poverty.

VALLAS: Now it isn’t just the existence of these rates of poverty and squalor and deprivation that your report condemns. It’s the collision of America’s immense wealth, how many very, very rich people we have in this country and how much we have in the way of resources in shocking contrast, as you put it, with the conditions in which vast numbers of our citizens live. This is something we don’t see at these levels in other countries and that’s something while that people may be familiar with the concept of the United States leading the world in so many different measures of inequality it’s something that perhaps bears repeating and perhaps some greater level of comparative explanation given that we truly are in our own category when it comes to the levels of excessive inequality we see here in the United States.

ALSTON: The United States has just surpassed a remarkable benchmark. The life expectancy for someone born today in the United States is now lower than that of someone born in China. And that is really staggering, given the difference in wealth between the two countries and one of the effects is that China for all of it’s problems, has made a very concerted effort to bring down maternal mortality rates, to bring down extreme poverty rates. Indeed, to eliminate extreme poverty whereas the United States, with all it’s highly sophisticated medical and other facilities have neglected large parts of the population. So you have African-American maternal mortality rates which is off the charts and nothing is being done about it. So the extreme inequality starts to manifest itself in the average figures that come out and it’s starting to drag the U.S. down very significantly.

VALLAS: Another way in which, and it very much intersects with the policy and practical outcomes that you’re describing, but another way in which the United States truly is unique is that as you know, we are alone among developed countries in as you put it, “insisting that will human rights are of fundamental importance they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, from a lack of access to affordable health care or growing up in a context of total depravation.” That’s a quote from the report. We really are the only country who does not view the right to survive, not to starve quite literally and these other rights that I’ve just described as human rights.

ALSTON: Yes, it’s true and it’s stunning. It’s stunning not just because of the ideology. So Americans might say well, that’s because we don’t believe in socialism or whatever. It’s the consequences that really count. As a result of not having some sort of universal health care available in the United States, the US economy losing immensely. There are many people who would want to be out working but who can’t because they don’t have the health care in order to enable them to be fit for work. So it’s a sort of counter productive policy being issued for essentially ideological reasons. At the same time as every other developed country in the world has concluded that is the, not just the humane but the best economic way to go.

VALLAS: A big part of what’s going on your report notes and I have to say how pleased I was to see this in there because of how much, we talk a lot about this on this show but how little recognition there often is in official reports and documents studying and discussing poverty and inequality in the United States that gets into the role of the media in allowing these and even encouraging these outcomes to exist and to persist. And you point out in your report how much weight is given, you actually point out that it’s striking, you call it striking how much weight is given to caricatured narratives as you put it, “the purported innate differences between rich and poor that are consistently peddled by some politicians and the media.” Is that something that you expected to find here and would you say a little more about what you found to be the role of the media in driving these types of myths that have a very heavy hand in impacting the types of policies that are advanced?

ALSTON: Well until I started actually looking closely at the literature I wasn’t, I must admit, aware of the extent to which this issue’s been studied. But there are really compelling and solid studies that show that the portrayal in the media of people living in poverty is of black families. They are the ones who are poor; they are the ones who need our help, et. Cetera. When in fact, that’s a very significant distortion of the situation. There are many millions of white people, many more millions of white people living in poverty but you get this racialized presentation, which makes it much easier to create some sort of ‘them’ and ‘us’ narrative. Why we should we, honest hard working whites be supporting those lazy blacks? When of course, that’s just not the reality. First of all, we’re supporting ourselves the rich whites more than any others because of all the tax breaks and exemptions that we reserve for ourselves. And secondly, an awful lot of the safety net protections are precisely for white people and not just for people of color.

VALLAS: And you found in speaking with policymakers here in the United States that many politicians are as you put it completely sold on this narrative that bears very little resemblance to reality.

ALSTON: It’s a convenient narrative. And as long as the efforts to discourage the poor from voting are as successful as they have been it’s one that doesn’t come at any electoral cost. The poor are not voting, partly because so many millions have been disenfranchised and partly because it’s been made much more difficult for many of them to get ID, to get to polling stations on time and so on. And so that just reainforces the elite orientation of a lot of the policies that are being pursued.

VALLAS: You mentioned disenfranchisement, which is another major finding of this report. Six million Americans with felony convictions, overtly disenfranchised. You also refer to covert disenfranchisement both through gerrymandering but also artificial barriers to voting such as voter ID laws and other types of barriers. Is this something that we see in other countries or is this something that the United States has found in terms of a path to hide what they’re doing and I’m speaking here, of course, about conservative elected officials in trying to further cement their solid majority and ownership of power in this country.

ALSTON: There are many dimensions to that. First of all, gerrymandering of course is something any politician in power would be delighted to do if they good. But what most countries have institutional checks and balances whether it’s the court, whether it’s electoral commissions or some other technique for making sure that blatant gerrymandering can’t go ahead. Those techniques haven’t worked in the United States and so we’ve got the situation where there really is very blatant gerrymandering. You have states where the governments have been elected by 40 percent of the population and so on. But I think in many ways, the most significant finding of my report actually is the extent to which the economic and social depravations have a major impact on the quality of American democracy. So the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system, the very low number of people who actually turn up at the polls, the formal deregistration, disenfranchisement of large numbers of them, all of these and of course the way in which American politics are increasingly heavily influenced by money, the capture of governmental agencies and departments by industry representatives and others is again, fairly extreme by comparison with most other countries, and that does I think have a major negative impact on the quality of the democracy.

VALLAS: While we’re talking about the intersection with the criminal justice system, you also point out and have some extensive discussion in this report that America has for a long time relied on criminalization to conceal our underlying poverty problem. You walk through something that is well known and well understood, that is the criminalization of homelessness in this country but you also expound on the reliance of fines and fees such as those that started to make headlines in Ferguson some number of years ago because America has begun using it’s criminal justice system as a system for keeping the poor in poverty while as you put it, generating revenue not just to fund the criminal justice system but actually many other components of government, something that has many, many layers to it but becomes very much a vicious cycle.

ALSTON: Yes, so there are intersection moves if you like. One of them is that as budgets at the state and country level have been increasingly restricted by amendments and other techniques the authorities have been forced to look for other sources of income because as some state authorities put it to me we couldn’t possibly go to the legislature and ask for more money even though we know there’s a dire need. It’s just off the table politically, can’t be done. And so then that they intersects with the punish the poor type narrative which we saw in Ferguson but I saw in California and various other places as well, which says that we have to crack down on these minor violations, homelessness or whatever it is. We have to find these people and we have to have a very aggressive system of collecting that money from the poor and so the fines will triple over time, eventually we will put them in prison, we will still have the debt and so on and so this is a way of raising money for the municipalities, for the counties, whatever in times of otherwise straightened budgets.

VALLAS: I mentioned up top in setting up this segment that you point out that because of America’s great resources, the fact that we have extreme poverty at the levels that we have it or even at all is a political choice made by people in power. You also noted early in our conversation that literally as you were researching and writing this report America’s political leaders who in this case are now Republicans in charge of not just the White House but both chambers of congress have been actively advancing a policy agenda including notably the tax law that took effect earlier this year that is making poverty and inequality in this country worse by the day. Would love to hear you speak a little bit about your experience in speaking with some of those elected officials and individuals in power. I understand some of them actually refused to speak with you when you were here for your visit for your report.

ALSTON: The Department of Justice systematically and consistently refused to speak with me despite a number of requests because obviously the areas that they are in charge of relate very closely to some of the issues that I’ve been discussing earlier. I think otherwise the general message that I got from people [INAUDIBLE] going to in government is the one which is really characterizing the current administration’s welfare policy if you can call it that. And that is back to work and off welfare and that of course sounds great. Who could oppose that? People who can work really should work but what we’re seeing is that the administration is proposing exactly the same remedy whether it’s Medicaid, whether it’s for SNAP, food stamps, whether it’s for housing subsidies and a range of other benefits where they’re simply saying these people don’t need the benefits. They can be out working and so we’re going to impose ever more putative policies that will force them into the labor force but of course that fundamentally misunderstands the actual nature of the poverty that these people are living in and the particular challenges that they’re confronting. There are lots of studies that show that very many of those who are receiving food stamps, for example are indeed in full time employment or at least to the greatest extent they can possibly get. But the income they’re getting is simply not enough. They and their families can’t provide so food stamps which gives them something like a dollar forty per meal per person are absolutely crucial in enabling them to survive. But turning to them and saying well you lazy good for nothings should get out and work more really is not an evidence based diagnosis of the problem. It’s an ideologically based one that essentially doesn’t believe that a society should provide an essential safety net for the worst off.

VALLAS: And in the last minute or so that I have with you, I wish we had many hours because there is so much in this report and I would urge our listeners to read it, to spend some time with it because of how much ground it covers. We’ll include a link in our nerdy syllabus page on Medium but among many recommendations, first of which you call for the decriminalization of poverty, noting that in the United States that it is poverty that needs to be arrested, not the poor simply for being poor. But among mnay recommendations you also, this being the flip side of the coin of what you were just speaking about, you call on America and American policymakers to quote “get real about taxes”. What do you mean when you say that?

ALSTON: I think both parties in fact have been very reluctant to grasp the mantle of taxation. We know from all societies that basic levels of government income are essential to enable the government to regulate an economy and to make sure that all of it’s members are not only socially protected but are able to become economically protected. That requires taxation. You can’t just keep cutting and cutting and cutting. You get the sort of problems that the United States has with teachers, where you’ve got extremely hard in some states to retain any of the teachers they get salaries that are a pittance compared to their qualifications. And as you drive down the overall quality of government services so the economy becomes less productive, infrastructure starts to decay, people can’t get access to the health care they need even to get out and do manual work or whatever and it’s a self defeating policy. So to keep saying that the answer to all problems is to drive taxes down is just self-defeating and that has to be grappled with.

VALLAS: What are you hoping comes of this report?

ALSTON: Well there’s nothing that the United Nations can do about this. There’s nothing I can do about it. The reason for the report is because the UN consistently evaluates the human rights policies of all of its members. I previously went to countries like China and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. By putting this on the table, one hopes that the United States will engage with some of the issues. One hopes that there’ll be more of a focused debate within the country but the solutions are all entirely up to Americans, not to outsiders.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Philip Alston, he’s a professor at NYU law school but he has written a massive and sweeping report in his role as the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Again, you can find it on our nerdy syllabus page, the whole thing is worth reading and there aren’t enough fire emojis to describe. Professor, thank you so much for taking the time and for this incredible important, if scating report.

ALSTON: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it.

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

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. If you’re like me, it’s hard to remember a day before ride hailing apps like Uber and Lyft. The convenience of being able to hail a ride nearly anywhere in the country at the push of a button has transformed how many of us get around in our day-to-day lives. But behind the curtain of all that convenience is a much darker story. Ride hailing corporations like Uber and Lyft have taken on the dirty tactics of the gun and tobacco industries to buy political influence and preempt or override local policies intended to protect consumers and drivers. Joining me to pull back the curtain and shine a light on how Uber and Lyft are rewriting state laws to benefit their own bottom lines at the expense of their drivers and consumers is Rebecca Smith. She is the director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project, better known as NELP. She’s also the author of a recent report on this subject titled “Uber State Interference: How TNCs Buy, Bully and Bamboozle Their Way to Deregulation”. Rebecca thanks so much for taking the time to join the show.

REBECCA SMITH: Thank you for having me Rebecca. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

VALLAS: So there’s a lot packed into even just what I’ve already said and I’m going to make you explain all of it. But before we even get into the report, at the heart of this is a concept that it’s important for folks to understand and that is something that sometimes is called ‘state interference’. Sometimes it’s called ‘preemption.’ So explain a little bit on what you guys were looking into and the story behind this report.

SMITH: OK, so we were looking at this concept where state legislators I should say override city authority to make policy or they just sort of say where cities haven’t made policy, the cities cannot enter into a certain area. And it’s been employed more and more in the last several years to erase progressive policy at the city level. So it’s been employed to override local legislation about LGBTQ rights, about minimum wage, about paid sick and paid family leave, so-called ‘ban the box’ laws that allow people with records to get jobs without suffering discrimination based on their record. So it’s a favorite tool really, of the right-wing to make sure that increasingly progressive cities cannot pass progressive legislation.

VALLAS: And I mentioned up top, this is maybe something people maybe generally familiar with as a concept because it’s been a time honored tradition and tactic used by the gun industry as well as the tobacco industry.

SMITH: That’s right. We say this was pioneered by the gun and tobacco industry and they probably have a few more states than Uber and Lyft in terms of overriding local legislation but Uber and Lyft has been able to get this state interference or preemption in 41 states in only about 4 years. And I think one of the things that makes this exercise of state interference especially egregious is that local transportation, transportation by bus and taxi and other public and private means is quintessentially a matter for local legislators, for local city council to take a look and decide how systems work together so that everybody in the city has access to public and private transportation. When states override the local authority then one of the people that we interviewed said it’s like having a whole new bus line that you never knew existed and can’t control jump into your city.

VALLAS: And another player that we need to add into the mix as we’re explaining the cast of characters here, it’s not just Uber and Lyft. There’s another entity involved that’s been core to this strategy involved with the National Rifle Association in terms of the gun lobby. They’ve also been involved when it comes to really other components of this like tobacco and that’s ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.

SMITH: That’s right, that’s right. ALEC is a corporate interest group that brings together state legislators and hands them legislation for them to pass. And we were able to partially trace some of the state legislation to model legislation that ALEC had put forward early on this process.

VALLAS: So let’s get back to —

SMITH: Much of it — sorry. Much of it sort of developed and got a little more sophisticated as the couple years went on.

VALLAS: So let’s get back to the report so that’s sort of the what’s been going on. You guys have been aware of this but it’s largely been flying under the radar. It’s not something people have been aware of. Certainly not something I’ve been aware of but it has been going on now for years. So what did you guys take a look at and what did you guys find in this report?

SMITH: Well as I said, we found that the TNCs in a very short period of time were able to get state preemption sometimes override local policies that have already been passed in about 41 states. And we found what we call their sort of barge, buy, bully and bamboozle tactics, what they use pretty uniformly in each of the states. They would, and I think people are familiar with this, they would barge into a market, sometimes that would be illegal at the time, they would spend large amounts of money to quickly develop a customer and driver base that they could then use to lobby on their behalf. They would secondly buy access that essentially what is really I would say unprecedented and overwhelming number of lobbyists, often very well connected lobbyists to do their work in the states. So in 2016 across the country Uber alone had 370 active lobbyists and Uber and Lyft together had more lobbyists than Microsoft, Amazon and Walmart combined. That’s stunning to me. They would often then bully elected officials by targeting them individually, sometimes with very misleading statements to the end that sometimes we would interview local legislators who would be calling on Uber and Lyft to quit misleading the public about what they were trying to do. And then finally we believe they’re bamboozling customers. Often to take political action, they would frequently mobilize their consumers and sometimes their drivers by telling them a local authority, a city councilor, a commission wanted to force them out of business when in reality what the local people were trying to do was just simply manage a transportation system and regulate reasonably the TNCs so that they would fit into their system so that they were sure that they were serving all neighborhoods, so that they could level playing fields between taxi and the TNCs. But they many policymakers were just subject to this barrage of oh you have to save Uber in Seattle or the Austin city council is trying to force Uber out. That was never the case anywhere that I’m aware of.

VALLAS: And TNC is just to unpack the acronym —

SMITH: Oh, sorry.

VALLAS: No, I used it too and I’m on a lifelong crusade not to use acronyms that I don’t explain.

SMITH: Good for you!

VALLAS: We should all be on it, I feel strongly, especially in Washington where I live and work. But transportation network companies, TNCs, that’s the term that gets applied to companies like Uber and Lyft that do that type of work. So to make this a little bit more concrete with that understanding of the barge, buy, bully and bamboozle framework that they have adopted from the gun lobby as well as from Big Tobacco, so help us understand a little bit, what are the policies that they are ramming through that benefit them, and how are they good for them while at the expense of their workers.

SMITH: Sure, so the big thing is that normally the TNC legislation at the state level includes a component that says that all of their drivers are independent contractors and not employees. And by all accounts they’ve been able to get that provision enacted into law in about half, a little over half of the states. And that’s important because it relieves the companies from having to pay any payroll taxes for those workers and it really pushes all sorts of risk onto the workers themselves so that they are paying for both the employer and the employee side of Social Security. They’re not covered by worker’s compensation in a very dangerous occupation. They get no unemployment insurance when they are deactivated or fired by the companies and they have no entitlement to minimum wage or anti-discrimination protections or any of the other protections and rights that we commonly associate with work. So that’s the big impact on workers. In addition they often, the state legislation says that rather complying with federal laws about access for people with disabilities to their services, they say oh, the TNC should have a policy around discrimination. Or when the TNCs get a call from a person who needs a wheelchair they should try to find someone who can come and serve them. So instead of being bound by the laws that all other employers are bound by, they get away with having some kind of very vague policy about discrimination.

VALLAS: Another type of state interference or preemption that they’ve been pushing through in this great number states also has some very specific consequences for people of color.

SMITH: Yes, so both Uber and Lyft talk about the fact their drivers are people of color, the majority of drivers who are working for them are people of color. So you have people who are least by the most recent data earning around $9 an hour which by the way is less than minimum wage in a number of states who are being regulated by normally white legislators. Who then are taking away any obligations by these companies to treat these workers fairly and to offer them a decent job at decent wages with decent benefits.

VALLAS: So what you’re describing is a landscape in which these companies have figured out how to manipulate state legislatures for their own bottom lines at the expense of workers but this also is a larger story about the erosion of democratic governance and the ability of local governments to actually meet the transportation needs of their residents. Help us understand a little bit about where things go from here and what that bigger picture looks like.

SMITH: So one of the primary duties of local government is to study and to understand the transportation needs of people who live in their jurisdiction and to really organize how these piece of taxi and bus and trolleys and subways fit together. And by overriding the local authority the states are taking away that ability. Democracy is local, local people ought to be able to decide what policies are important and are needed in their communities. And instead, the states barge in at the behest of the TNCs and just tell them they can’t. So cities are kind of blindsided, they may well have invested heavily into public transportation only to see it blown up by the TNCs.

VALLAS: And what does the picture look like in places where we haven’t seen this kind of state interference? You mentioned that they’re really blanketing the map when we’re talking about 41 states that they’ve been able to get into and to bring these strategies to but what is the flip side of the coin look like when you don’t have this kind of state interference?

SMITH: So it’s interesting. The companies talk about how innovative they are but through state interference they’re actually stifling innovation in the cities. So in places where there is not yet state interference at the behest of the TNC, we see some really creative things happening. So in Seattle of course, the city council passed a collective bargaining ordinance for TNC and taxi drivers. That is being challenged and I could talk more about that later but it was ground breaking. And other cities and now states are looking at that. Most recently Portland just passed an ordinance that will move towards creating a standard for TNCs that for the first time will incorporate TNC drivers themselves. In New York we’re seeing the Taxi and Limousine Commission look at minimum wage for drivers, a minimum fair that would level the playing field between TNC drivers and taxis and that would create what is essentially a portable benefits system for taxi drivers. I think the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance was the first organization in the country to try and create a benefit system for workers who are not employees and that they could use to have access to retirement and health care and other benefits that full time, regular, direct hire W-2 workers are entitled to or normally get in association with their work.

VALLAS: In the last couple of minutes that I have with you, are there efforts underway to try to roll back some of this state interference and protect and bring back the rights of workers in the places that Uber and Lyft have been successful at ramming through these policies?

SMITH: It’s been this year much more of an effort to put our finger in the dyke. And so in the 2018 session we did not see a single state enact a state interference law and I think in part is because cities and even states have had a few years of grappling now with the implications for workers and for planners and for consumers of this explosion of TNCs. And they’re seeing things that they don’t like very much about workers not making enough money to get by, about whether racial bias might be hardwired into these star ratings systems. Whether the TNCs contribute to congestion, whether, so on and on. And I think states are now a little more knowledgable about the TNCs and are looking a little more askance at these kinds of efforts.

VALLAS: I’ve been speaking with Rebecca Smith, she’s the director of work structures at the National Employment Law Project and one of the authors on a recent report called “Uber State Interference: How [Transportation Network Companies] Buy, Bully and Bamboozle Their Way to Deregulation”. You can find that report on our nerdy syllabus page on Medium. Rebecca thanks so much for this work and for shining a light on what’s going on and thank you for taking the time to join the show.

SMITH: Thanks very much Rebecca.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

This program aired on June 7th, 2018