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In Harahan, Louisiana, shock and sadness have reverberated through the community following the death of 6-year-old Bella Fontenelle.

On Wednesday, Hannah Landon, 43, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder for the child’s death. Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto stated that Landon is the girlfriend of Bella’s father. Preliminary autopsy results reported that Bella had died from both manual strangulation and blunt force injuries to her head.

According to Lopinto, investigators believe that Bella was killed at her father’s home and then transported to her mother’s residence which was about a block away. It was there that they found the girl’s body inside a closed, 10-gallon chlorine bucket on her mother’s lawn.

Although investigators have not yet speculated about a possible motive, they have stated that Fontenelle’s biological parents had no involvement in the homicide.

Neighbors, friends, and community members have been devastated by losing this young, vibrant girl who was described as “an itty-bitty princess.” Bella often rode her bicycle to the nearby levee or was seen playing with her 7-year-old sister.

At her court appearance, Landon was denied bond with the judgment determined by a judge. Acknowledging the heartbreaking incident, Harahan police Chief Ed Lepre stated that the department is offering its support and prayers to the family of Bella.

The sudden, tragic death of little Bella Fontenelle has left a deep hole in the hearts of those who knew her, sending ripples of sorrow through her family and community. The investigation is still underway as authorities work to uncover the circumstances that led to this incomprehensible crime.

In Different Speeds, Same Furies, Britain’s preeminent Marxist, Perry Anderson, produces an idiosyncratic but dazzling account of Anthony Powell and Marcel Proust, arguably the two greatest novelists of the 20th century.

Authors Anthony Powell (L) and Marcel Proust (R). (Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images; Wikimedia Commons)

The term “pro-war” must be one of the most abused epithets in our political language, but its use to describe Anthony Powell is undeniably apt. He was in favor of practically any war, provided it was fought for king and country. World War I formed his political consciousness, and he’d lash out at anyone who regretted Britain’s involvement in it — those, as he put it, “who waffle about war being avoidable in 1914.” He found the behavior of the Bloomsbury intellectuals outright shameful; in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon he sniffed the mawkish scent of “self-pity.” The son of a soldier who had fought to crush the cause of Irish independence, Powell, even late in life, disliked what he called Ireland’s “national egoism.”

Perry Anderson, in a lucid essay collected in Different Speeds, Same Furies, thus remarks on Powell’s indiscriminate support of British imperial campaigns:

Vindication of the cause of the Entente remains, of course, the standard reflex of official Anglo-Saxon historiography to this day. Less common is Powell’s projections of it backward to earlier conflicts. The Boer War? “Even now,” he complained of David Garnett’s autobiography, “he can produce a paean of praise for the pro-Boers.” The Crimean War? “‘We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do’ has managed to get a bad name but was a perfectly healthy instinct, especially in insisting that the Russians shall not have Constantinople.” The Napoleonic Wars? Whigs who opposed Pitt were “near Quislings.”

That kind of instinctive militarism served Powell in the sense that he, unlike Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honor, felt relieved when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact finally ruptured.

During World War II, Powell served in the War Office. There he liaised with exiled Polish forces, but he was eventually fired for reasons unclear: Powell’s biographer Hilary Spurling implies that it might’ve been because of his objections to British complicity in the Soviet cover-up of Katyn massacre. Before the end of the war, however, he had played (to his great pride) a small role in the neutralization of the Belgian Communist Party.

Though his anti-communism was, in Anderson’s words, “a conviction, not a passion,” he remained ever vigilant of tankie fellow travelers. Quoting Dostoevsky to the effect that liberalism in one generation produces nihilism in the next, Powell reserved his greatest opprobrium for that ideology’s organic intellectuals. “That historically for every British liberal who opposed an imperial war,” Anderson comments, “a hundred had usually supported it, only underlines how much a tiny scattering of literary dissent in August 1914 affected Powell’s angle of vision.”

A Literature of High Toryism

To many people’s minds, Powell came to epitomize what it meant to be High Tory. He came from privilege, belonging on both sides of his family to the minor gentry; he was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he frequented the Hypocrites’ Club. But his financial security shouldn’t be overstated, nor should his snobbishness. Unlike Marcel Proust — Anderson’s point of comparison throughout Furies — Powell had to work to pay his bills; though, as is so often the case for those raised adjacent to power, jobs fell his way without him even trying.

Still, Powell had no trouble socializing outside his class or portraying credible non-aristos in his fiction. Certain provisos notwithstanding — the lower middle class isn’t exactly prominent in the twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time — Powell, more than Proust, had an impressive social range. In Dance, he wrote that

All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.

Anderson, who finds Proust’s aphorisms both untenable and dogmatic, might’ve noticed that the same could be said of this one of Powell’s: behind the classical rhetoric hides the plain fact that everyone is not, in fact, “equally extraordinary” — that phrase, embraced with uncharacteristic credulity by Anderson, is more than a little self-contradictory. Nonetheless, Powell can rightly be called a democratic novelist. Those critics who have thought his use of recondite terms or his artistic references to be elitist or patrician only evince their own hauteur: they take for granted that learning, love of language, and an appreciation of art belongs to the bailiwick of the upper classes, where “ordinary” people can only be interlopers. Powell, by contrast, had no such sniffy conceits.

Powell can rightly be called a democratic novelist. Those critics who have thought his use of recondite terms or his artistic references to be elitist or patrician only evince their own hauteur.

Different Speeds, Same Furies collects four of Anderson’s literary essays: the first, roughly one hundred pages long, compares Powell to Proust; the second, originally a talk given to the Anthony Powell Society, is on Powell’s memoirs Keep the Ball Rolling, though in large part it merely restates the first rather less brilliantly; the third is a theory-laden reflection on the historical novel as a literary form; and the fourth treats Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. The chief subject of Different Speeds, Same Furies is the Powell-Proust comparison, with Powell often coming out better, especially in terms of characterology.

Powell, Anderson contends, took more interest than Proust in others, and it shows when one considers side by side the characters they created. Powell is the sharper social historian. Proust registers the passage of time merely by changing fashions and technological progress — electrical lights replace gas lights; motorcars take the place of coaches. His society is in stasis: time signifies only life’s slow crawl toward its terminus. Powell, however, captures how the structure of society changes from the interwar to the postwar era.

Anderson is capable of saying much in a few words — Powell fought a “battle against sonority”; nescience is “the natural epistemology of an artless narcissism” — but this fondness for the intricately coiled phrase can approach the ridiculous. In place of “Powell’s parents” one reads the ungainly, “the extraordinary union that produced Powell and shaped his infancy.” In another passage in the book’s third essay one reads the following pronouncement about the historical novel:

Properly aesthetic are not their referential dimensions, so often shabby ideological messages . . . but their reminders of the plenitude of all human impulses, which along with the blackest of these include the revolutionary-utopian and the temptation of the good.

For fans of Anderson passages like the above are all par for the course. So, too, is an iconoclastic dismissiveness. He is capable of incredible high-handedness toward even the most respected of writers. Philip Larkin and V.S. Naipaul are dismissed as stupid “right-wing cronies,” while “language sheds all compunction in the foul-mouth chic of the best literary periodicals.” I can’t say that I mind such condescension because I’m sure that, if pressed, he could marshal supporting evidence. There is something of a schoolboy’s playfulness in these remarks that is part and parcel of Anderson’s love of the baroque sentence.

Anderson is capable of incredible high-handedness toward even the most respected of writers. Philip Larkin and V. S. Naipaul are dismissed as stupid ‘right-wing cronies.’

For Anderson, Powell created characters that were far more complex and believable than Proust’s. Of course, several critics have found the narrator of the Dance, Jenkins, rather vapid. Anderson concedes that Jenkins may be no Marlow, but his personality is “inseparable” from the novel’s power. It is the wealth of his reflective mind that makes the novel feel so vivid. But he is by no means emotionally frigid, nor is he a mere cipher: the plot, Anderson observes, revolves around him, with the first four volumes of the series forming a classic bildungsroman. It is only in the postwar trilogy that he becomes a passive onlooker. “Prior to these,” Anderson notes, “a wide palette of feeling is at work.”

Round and Flat

Good literary criticism, I often think, requires little more than selecting the right passages to put in block quotes, and Anderson is a master of it. Anderson cites several examples that illustrate Powell’s remarkable talent for encapsulating characters with a few well-chosen words: isn’t, for instance, Powell’s one-sentence portrait of Sonny Farebrother just perfect?

There was a suggestion of boyishness — the word “sunny” would certainly be applicable — about his frank manner; but, in spite of this manifest desire to get along with everyone on their own terms, there was also something lonely and inaccessible about him.

That’s enough to tell us who Farebrother really is, and what it must feel like to be in the same room as him. Or take Powell’s sketch of Dicky Umfraville:

Trim, horsey, perfectly at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf him, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity when the crash came.

Powell also created memorable female characters. To take but one example, Moreland’s wife, Matilda, is sympathetically portrayed. But, as Anderson notes, it is only in the postwar trilogy that women are shown to be intellectually equal to the men. Emily Brightman, a historian of late antiquity, is the most erudite character in the whole novel, and Ada Leintwardine’s repartee is second to none; but in the preceding volumes, all professional women are either actors or models. They may be “tough” like Madam Leroy or Mrs Erdleigh, but they don’t discuss politics or art like the men. Anderson is at his best when he’s noticing such social markers. He observes that practically every man is referred to by his surname, while women of the narrator’s generation are addressed by their first names, and those of older generations invariably have their surnames escorted by honorifics. This does not, as Anderson writes, show the narrator’s informality with women but his reserve.

Visually, too, Powell is less sharp with women. To be sure, the male characters spend much time remarking on women’s looks, but their “beauty” stays vague. “Females are very hard to do,” Powell himself said. “I don’t think any male writer has ever done one right.” If every novelist is equally culpable, why single out Powell for criticism? But he couldn’t have believed his own excuse. The passages on women in the Dance can’t compare to the ones on men — even its most lively portraits of women feel blurred. Powell often likened his characters to paintings, usually with great precision, but when it comes to women, he seemed to struggle to pick the right one. Thus, he compares Jean Templer to a whole string of portraits that she can’t possibly resemble all at once. “Each vivid enough in itself,” Anderson writes, “the multiplication of it yields no cogent physical image: Rogier van der Weyden, Noël Coward, Rubens, Delacroix, Goya cancel each other out.”

Many of Proust’s characters do have a Dickensian vitality, but why should that make them improbable or uninteresting?

Anderson claims that Powell’s characters are “round” while Proust’s are “flat” — they may have “plenty of life, but they lack any depth.” They’re mere caricatures, “garish dummies that are a feature of Dickens more than anything in prior French fiction.” The Verdurin salon is full of caricatures repeating their taglines: there’s the poseur Bloch and the snob Legrandin. On the more elevated levels one finds Norpois and Madame de Villeparisis. But even Proust’s most vivid characters — Duc de Guermantes, the Verdurin couple, even the Baron de Charlus — can’t be said to be “credible” human beings, or so Anderson says.

Many of Proust’s characters do have a Dickensian vitality, but why should that make them improbable or uninteresting? Who hasn’t met a figure like Madame Verdurin, the social climber who speaks in clichés? Or seen a hanger-on of Dr. Cottard’s ilk, who’d gaze at Madame Verdurin “with open-mouthed admiration and studious zeal as she skipped lightly from one-stepping stone to another of her stock of ready-made phrases”? Caricature isn’t boring if it illustrates some essential human vice or folly. Personally, I find many “flat” characters more interesting and believable than round ones.

The essence of caricatures is that they do not change. “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” says Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield, and of course she doesn’t. But Proust’s characters keep surprising the reader. To Anderson’s mind, this mutability isn’t proof that they’re subtle; rather, it signifies “abrupt characterological capsizal.” Thus, he thinks that Saint-Loup, who goes from being the “impassioned lover of the actress Rachel” to a “brutish pursuer of men,” is totally incredible. But I, for one, see nothing fanciful in the idea that a man who likes a woman is sleeping with other men. Here the lack of imagination is Anderson’s and not Proust’s. Anderson misses the point: it’s not that Proust’s characters change their personalities ex nihilo but that the narrator’s image of them changes. Consider, for instance, Legrandin — whom Anderson calls one of many “grotesques pure and simple.” Legrandin is seen by the narrator bowing in a curious way:

This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave over Legrandin’s rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance . . . awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew.

The clumsy gesture collapses the narrator’s mental image of Legrandin. It reminds me of the moment in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, where Herzog’s hatred of Gersbach evanesces when he sees Gersbach, with his fleshy chest, bending over in the bathroom. If the shift seems abrupt, it is only because false impressions shatter abruptly: it is not that Legrandin has metamorphosed into something new; rather, the narrator had fooled himself into thinking that his image of Legrandin corresponded perfectly with the real Legrandin.

This is, of course, one of Proust’s leitmotifs — the risk of lulling ourselves into the belief that others are what we want them to be. Swann thus falls in love with Odette because she reminds him of a woman in a painting. He imposes his own misconceptions on her, and inevitably has to face the fact that she isn’t as he had imagined her. But it is precisely in moments like these, when I disagree with Anderson, that I enjoy reading him most. He is, consistently, one of our time’s most stimulating intellectuals.

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The Bronx’s Amalgamated Housing Cooperative opened in 1927 and has provided thousands of families with affordable housing since then. Now it’s facing an existential threat.

The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, New York, New York. (CEANYC / Twitter)

The North Bronx’s Amalgamated Housing Cooperative opened in 1927, developed and funded by the trade union movement. Today, it is the oldest limited equity housing co-op in the United States, providing thousands of New Yorkers with affordable homes.

Yet how long it’ll survive is now under question. Underinvestment and the current economic climate mean 1,482 households at the Amalgamated face an uncertain future — eight hundred of them could have their cooking gas shut off on June 30.

Addressing New York State politicians on March 1, the Amalgamated’s treasurer and lifelong resident, Ed Yaker, said the co-op is being driven toward bankruptcy by a perfect storm of rising costs, interest rates, and repair backlogs caused by historic underfunding. But he insisted the “cause of death” would be administrative negligence.

Yaker is referring to both the short and long-term reasons for this crisis. Although the Amalgamated recently undertook a $43.5-million improvement program, maintaining buildings approaching one hundred years old is a constant — and expensive — challenge. Some of its services don’t comply with current regulations. Bringing gas supply up to date will cost $9.8 million, a bill that has escalated since the hikes in interest rates and the Yaker says could have been avoided with quicker support from New York State. One of the knock-on effects is to the co-op’s insurance cover, which needs an additional $400,000 by June 1. The Amalgamated owes other creditors $1.5 million. But the organization’s capacity to pay the bills is limited by the fact that its residents are on a limited income. Raising rates isn’t an option at a place built explicitly for people of moderate means.

A Storied History

The Amalgamated was the product of collective organization, but the brainchild of one remarkable man. Abraham E. Kazan was born near Kyiv in 1888. He was raised in a shtetl, a Jewish community under the yoke of Imperial Russia. Like millions of others, Kazan was compelled to leave his home by the twin threats of poverty and discrimination. He arrived in the United States in 1904, found work in the Manhattan garment trade, and quickly got involved in the industry’s labor movement, working for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), the organization that gave the Bronx housing co-op its name.

Kazan absorbed an eclectic blend of radical politics, embracing anarchism and various strands of left-wing thought, at a time when socialist ideas were both growing in popularity and facing vicious repression. But it was cooperativism, based on the principles of the 1844 Rochdale Pioneers, that gave Kazan his lifelong method and motivation to end slum housing and build a more equitable society.

In a sentiment that rings down the ages and across continents, two years after the Amalgamated opened, Kazan wrote:

Housing for the wage earner and low paid worker is today as much of a problem as it was five or ten years ago. In the commercial field, there is no one who would undertake the building of low-priced apartments. There is not enough profit in that line of business. Philanthropic, socially minded, and charitable people have been talking about housing for a long time; as have city officials and candidates for public office, but very little has actually been done in a practical way to solve the problems.

His answer was for working-class people to “enter the field and try and help themselves” on the principle that “through cooperative efforts, we can better the lot of our co-workers (and) show that, where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater good can be accomplished for the benefit of all.”

At a time when the Bronx was still semirural and with the support of ACWA leader Sidney Hillman, Kazan was able to buy land for the first six buildings of the Amalgamated, comprising 303 apartments. The principles of limited equity required prospective residents to make a down payment to be admitted to the development, followed by a monthly “carrying charge,” but on an understanding that the value of the initial equity payment would not increase, regardless of the state of the housing market.

This founding principle has endured. I recently spoke to a current Amalgamated resident who explained that, in 2008, he paid $33,000 “down,” followed by monthly payments of $1,240 for a two-bedroom apartment. True to Kazan’s ideals, he feels no sense of deprivation that he won’t be able to sell his apartment for a profit, but instead, calculates the money he is saving compared with the extortionate private rented sector. Although there is a legitimate question — that was also there in 1927 — about whether the Amalgamated excludes people from the lowest income bracket, the working-class demand for housing there is reflected in a ten-year waiting list.

As Kazan makes clear in his memoirs, funding for the Amalgamated was precarious from the outset. It was only a loan from the Yiddish Daily Forward and its manager, the Bundist Baruch Charney Vladeck, that enabled the project to be completed. The community hall at the Amalgamated is named in Vladeck’s honor, typical of a legacy at the co-op that celebrates its radical origins.

An Uncertain Future

However, the key to the success of the Amalgamated and Kazan’s subsequent projects, was mainstream political support, starting with New York City mayor Al Smith in the 1920s and continuing after World War II with Governor Nelson Rockefeller and an unlikely alliance with Robert Moses, the controversial shaper of New York’s postwar urban policy. Kazan and his allies were able to persuade the establishment that cooperative housing was not a threat to their commercial interests and was a preferable alternative to more “socialistic” public housing. By the 1950s, Kazan had created the United Housing Foundation (UHF) as a development agency able to take on bigger and bolder projects, including Penn South in Central Manhattan and Rochdale Village in Queens.

UHF growth culminated in Co-Op City, a 15,372-home development in the East Bronx, the biggest housing cooperative in the world, completed in 1973. But, in a prefiguring of the current situation at the Amalgamated, Co-Op City hit a serious financial crisis. Residents were faced with rising charges as the UHF struggled with soaring costs and maintaining services. In response, in June 1975, Co-Op City residents called a rent strike, which continued for thirteen months, the longest in US history. It compelled politicians to bail out Co-Op City, but it also spelled the end of the UHF which, as historian Peter Eisenstein put it, “died of a broken heart.” No limited equity housing co-ops have been built in New York ever since.

Cooperative housing raises some fundamental questions for socialists, posed by Upton Sinclair in his 1935 novel Co-op: “It is a question of whether any co-operative can exist alongside a capitalist economy.” Even when they are able to survive, there are important issues of democracy, transparency, participation, and equity to consider. However, it will be a tragedy if the Amalgamated is allowed to fail, not least because the almost inevitable consequence will be privatization.

Abraham Kazan once said, “Housing should not be subject to politics,” but he was wrong. Housing is inherently political. The issues facing the Amalgamated are a version of those faced by all forms of nonmarket housing in an economy dominated by private landlordism and property speculation. Just as with council housing in the UK and public housing in the United States, political choices and arcane bureaucracy deliberately undermine any challenge to corporate real estate interests.

Good-quality homes for working-class people have never been won — and don’t survive — without a fight and constant vigilance to defend them. The relentless advance of the neoliberal city must be halted. Losing the Amalgamated will only deepen New York City’s housing inequality and erase a vital chapter in working-class and labor movement history.

Did the Teamsters just successfully negotiate the first tentative agreement for Amazon workers anywhere in America? The fact that the workers are subcontracted means the answer to that question isn’t cut and dry.

An Amazon worker walks past his Amazon Prime delivery truck in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds / AFP / Getty Images)

When Sean O’Brien ran for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, he vowed to unionize Amazon. Building on the Teamsters’ creation of an Amazon division in 2021, O’Brien, who won the union’s top leadership in 2022, promised to prioritize organizing one of the largest and most anti-union companies in the United States. Led by Amazon division director and Teamsters Joint Council 42 director of organizing Randy Korgan, Teamsters have since been building ties with Amazon workers, both in the company’s warehouses and among its delivery drivers, but no new bargaining units resulted.

That changed on Monday, when the Teamsters announced that eighty-four Amazon delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California, site of Amazon’s DAX8 facility, had unionized, and that the Teamsters Local 396 union had reached a tentative agreement, the first such agreement for any Amazon workers in the United States. The workers are employed by Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS), one of Amazon’s roughly three thousand delivery service partners (DSPs), which granted voluntary union recognition after a majority of workers signed union-authorization cards.

While the details of the contract won’t be released until members vote on whether to ratify the agreement, it “includes immediate pay increases, substantial hourly raises in the fall, provisions that hold Amazon accountable on health and safety standards, a grievance procedure, and other benefits,” said Korgan in a press release. Voting will take place over the coming weeks.

“We want fair pay and safe jobs, to be able to provide food for our families. We want to know we will make it home to our families at night after delivering Amazon packages in the extreme heat,” said Rajpal Singh, a forty-year-old Amazon driver in Palmdale. Singh was one of many BTS employees who marched on Amazon on Monday morning to demand that the company respect their right to organize.

But what followed the announcement wasn’t so straightforward. Shortly after the Teamsters went public with the campaign, Amazon said that BTS “had a track record of failing to perform and had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before today’s announcement.” The following day, in comments to the Guardian’s Michael Sainato, BTS owner Johnathan Ervin disputed Amazon’s claims, noting that the company’s current contract doesn’t expire until October 3 and that the newly unionized drivers are currently delivering Amazon packages.

It’s possible that Amazon is telling the truth, and BTS’s owner hid Amazon’s decision not to renew the contract from the workers and their union, hoping that his decision to grant voluntary recognition would result in good publicity; it’s also possible that Amazon’s decision to cancel the contract is retaliation against the workers. But the conflicting statements point to a key complication in organizing Amazon’s drivers.

Amazon’s DSP program launched in 2019, and DSPs are legally distinct companies from Amazon itself. That remove, an example of what David Weil has termed the “fissured workplace,” separates the e-commerce giant and the more than one hundred thousand workers it employs to transport goods to your doorstep. These drivers may wear Amazon-branded clothing, drive Amazon-branded vehicles, and in all meaningful senses of the term be laboring under Amazon’s edicts, but rather than taking workplace grievances to Amazon itself, those workers deal with DSP management. Amazon, in turn, gets millions of packages delivered, without the liability and responsibility that accompanies employer status.

Such a dynamic means that to avoid a union, Amazon can simply cancel the contracts of any DSPs whose workers organize — making organizing one shop at a time not only tremendously time consuming but potentially doomed from the start.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has been suspected of retaliating against delivery drivers. A group of forty-six Silver Star drivers unionized with the Teamsters in 2017, and the union said that Silver Star and Amazon responded by illegally firing the workers. Shortly after the campaign, Amazon held a meeting in Chicago with the management of some of the city’s DSPs. As one attendee told Buzzfeed News, “The whole purpose of the meeting was to say to you, ‘Here’s how to not get unionized. Because if you do, we pretty much don’t want anything to do with a union.’”

Many DSPs exist solely to service Amazon, leaving them beholden to the company’s changing expectations and directives. That means DSP management often has plenty of its own grievances against the company.

Stories of these owners racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt abound. In 2021, two DSPs in Portland, Oregon terminated their contracts after Amazon refused to agree to a set of conditions that the DSPs said would improve revenue and driver safety. A letter from the attorney representing the two DSPs stated that “Amazon’s conduct over the past two years has become intolerable, unconscionable, unsafe, and most importantly, unlawful.”

Such frustrations may explain why management at BTS, the California company, voluntarily recognized its workers’ union: some DSP owners might see a union as a useful bulwark against Amazon’s unilateral, unworkable dictates. (BTS’s owner couldn’t be reached for comment.)

It’s possible that the new BTS union will be a test case for determining whether Amazon’s control over its delivery workforce makes it a joint employer. Workers just won such a union at YouTube, with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determining that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is a joint employer and will have to bargain with the employees. In California, the threshold for being an independent contractor rather than a worker entitled to union protections requires meeting three conditions: the worker is free from the company’s “control and direction,” they perform work that is “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business,” and they are engaged in an independently established trade.

“If Amazon is able to get away with ignoring the workers’ decision and hiding behind the subcontractor relationships, then I’m afraid we’ll have yet another story of the failure of American labor law,” Benjamin Sachs, a labor scholar at Harvard Law School, told Vox. “If this leads to a recognition that these drivers are Amazon employees, joint employees, then this could be massively important.”

The timing of Amazon’s cancelation of BTS’s contract is a key question. If the NLRB finds that the company canceled the contract to avoid engaging with the union, that would be a violation of labor law. Amazon has yet to specify at what date it informed BTS that its contract would not be renewed, and the Teamsters say the BTS workers had been engaged in legally protected concerted activity for more than a year, raising the possibility that the cancelation of a contract during that period could have been a response to the organizing activity.

Should the Palmdale workers pursue the argument for joint-employer status, they’ll have plenty of evidence to draw from. The letter to Amazon from the attorney for the two former Portland DSPs contains a series of grievances: per Motherboard, they include “cutting routes from delivery companies without notice, unevenly distributing workloads among drivers, lowering reimbursement for drivers’ wages, accessing their employee’s records and personal information, firing their drivers without input from delivery companies,” and frequently changing “rules on a whim without notifying delivery service partners.” A 2016 Department of Labor investigation also bolsters the argument: in that case, the investigator found that the company’s control and supervision of the work and the delivery workforce constituted joint employment.

“We deliver in an Amazon van, wearing an Amazon uniform, but when we petition Amazon, they ignore us,” said Singh, the BTS employee. “We have a mass of support, we are a union, and now they need to listen.”

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Mental health care in the US is a disaster. The private insurance industry is a major reason why.

The current US health care system enables, encourages, and then ignores mass death on an unimaginable scale — but it’s every bit as changeable as it is brutal. (Getty Images)

At the end of 2022 Mental Health America released its annual study highlighting the harsh realities of the mental health crisis in our country. Of the many notable findings in the report, one statistic stands out: 15 percent of adults reported having a substance use disorder in the past year. Of them, 93.5 percent did not receive any form of treatment.

Couple that with the 105,000 overdose deaths in 2021, a nearly 69 percent increase over pre-pandemic levels, and we’re looking at a full-blown catastrophe.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The current US health care system enables, encourages, and then ignores mass death on an unimaginable scale — but it’s every bit as changeable as it is brutal. The only real obstacles to change are the private insurance industry and its allies in government. When we propose that the United States adopt universal health care, the solution that the rest of the world has already figured out, the response from politicians in both parties is that the cost of a comprehensive single-payer system outweighs its benefits, all while their loved ones easily access and afford adequate treatment. Of course, studies have shown that a single-payer system saves not only lives, but money too.

Of the fictions spread by insurance companies and associated health care racketeers to protect their profits, one of the greatest is that there is freedom in private insurance. The argument is that in the current system individuals, not government bureaucrats, can make choices that are appropriate for themselves. Are we to infer from this that the 93.5 percent of people not receiving treatment for their substance use disorder are making that choice on their own? Or that bureaucracy plays no part in corporate medicine? The argument falls apart under closer scrutiny, but that doesn’t stop politicians and the media from repeating these talking points ad nauseam.

Let’s take on the private insurance industry’s myth of freedom by following a hypothetical case from crisis to recovery — first from the vantage point of the existing system, then from a single-payer system.

Current-System Joe

Let’s call him Joe. Joe lives in a purple-ish state and works irregularly. Uncle Sam estimates he pulled in about $30,000 last year. It’s almost enough to get by. For the remainder, Joe is known to depend on the kindness of strangers. One stranger is President Obama, whose Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidizes Joe’s health insurance. Instead of paying an arm and a leg, Joe just pays his nondominant arm. His purple state expanded Medicaid, and if he was a little less industrious and decided not to work, perhaps he’d qualify. But Joe was raised to believe in the dignity of work. So he takes jobs where he can find them, and he buys into a private health care plan from a for-profit health insurance company with the help of the federal government.

Let’s paint Joe’s person with some broad strokes and common features. Joe just turned thirty. He’s unmarried, and has developed some unhealthy habits increasingly typical of his demographic. He prefers an opiate, but will settle for a benzo, line of coke, pipe of grass, or pack of smokes. Joe is, and he’d be the first to admit it, an addict. We won’t reduce him to just that, though. The trouble started earlier. It’s important to bear in mind the time Joe watched his mother die from cancer when he was fifteen, the two weeks he spent in the hospital at twenty-one after he was stabbed at a party for laying the mack down on the wrong guy’s girlfriend, and his six friends who have overdosed and died. These things weigh on Joe. The opiate helps soothe the pain. The cocaine helps him get through a long shift of dishwashing. And when he’s in the spirit, the grass helps to kick the dope.

But Joe has some fight left in him yet. Having just celebrated his thirtieth birthday, Joe decides to try and take this life straight. He gets through an opiate withdrawal on his own and decides to stop using cannabis. Seven days in, as sober as can be, Joe starts experiencing what the medical system calls “mental health symptoms.” He becomes obsessively fixated on a former friend who he swears is after him due to some unpaid debts. Joe stops eating and sleeping. A textbook psychosis sets in: hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking. Finally one day, while contemplating taking his own life, reason rears its lovely head and Joe presents himself at an emergency room. He is admitted to a psychiatric unit due to his being a harm to himself.

The modern inpatient psychiatric stay has one goal: psychiatric stabilization. So the first stop of Joe’s tour will focus on relieving the psychotic symptoms, ignoring almost entirely the history of substance use and trauma so essential to understanding Joe’s present condition. The hospital staff will treat Joe’s psychosis with an antipsychotic drug and perhaps a benzodiazepine to calm the nerves. After a few days of this, Joe’s delusions diminish and his hallucinations vanish. His thinking is still a bit disorganized — nonlinear, Godard might say — but after another day or two of meds, food, and some half-decent sleep, Joe becomes more stabilized.

The hospital starts to consider discharging Joe. After all, psychiatric beds are a hot commodity these days. Not to mention the insurance company has been hounding the hospital about Joe’s condition under the guise of a “utilization review.” So the social worker asks Joe what he wants to do next. Joe, after dreaming last night of his mother with knives for arms, says he wants to go to rehab.

“Rehab?” the social worker says. “Don’t you think you should focus on your mental health symptoms?” There is a wall in the health care system separating “mental health” and “chemical dependency/addiction.” It’s as if the two cannot exist on the same planet, let alone within the same person. Professionals are trained to distinguish between the two and steer the person in one direction or the other. Happily the ACA opened the floodgates for addiction treatment, but if the insurance company or medical system suspects even an ounce of “mental health symptoms,” then you’ll need to get your depression in order before they can help you with the needle poking out of your arm.

There is a wall in the health care system separating ‘mental health’ and ‘chemical dependency/addiction.’ It’s as if the two cannot exist on the same planet, let alone within the same person.

The social worker responds that Joe’s urinalysis upon admittance showed only a positive result for cannabis. Joe explains his history of substance use, saying that he only stopped using the harder stuff a week or two before he was admitted. The social worker is inclined to believe him, but again urges Joe to focus on his supposedly separate “mental health symptoms” instead. “Why not discharge from the hospital back to your studio apartment,” the social worker suggests, “and come to the hospital for an outpatient group to learn coping skills two hours a day three times a week? We’ll deal with the addiction after.”

But Joe stands his ground. Unlike so many patients stuck in psychiatric limbo, he advocates for himself and fights for prioritizing his substance use in the order of operations of treatment.

For the social worker, the hospital’s outpatient program as Joe’s next move is an easy and logical linkage, both bureaucratically and mentally. The hospital social worker is beyond overworked, and like the rest of us has fallen into patterns designed to make his workday easier. But now his job becomes much more difficult. He must find a rehab for Joe. Were Joe in sunny California or Florida, this would be an easier task. But Joe’s overcast purple state is not a prime rehab destination. There are far fewer facilities, and plenty of people lined up to get into them.

After finally finding a rehab with an open bed that accepts Joe’s insurance, the social worker sends over Joe’s clinical records. This creates a problem because the records present a psychotic patient who during his first week at the hospital showed no signs of drug addiction. The facility says they are not really equipped to take people with “mental health symptoms,” so they will need to interview Joe and talk to the attending physician.

This takes a few days. Hospitals make snails look like racehorses. Eventually Joe aces his interview and the physician reports a total remission of Joe’s psychotic symptoms. He is medically cleared to go to rehab. But at the final hour the insurance company relays to the hospital that there is a lack of “medical necessity” for a residential rehabilitation program because Joe’s drug test is clean, aside from the cannabis, and he reports that he has not taken a drug in several weeks. Residential rehab is for people trying to get off of drugs, and the insurance company is happy to report that it appears Joe has already kicked his habit.

Since Joe can’t afford it without insurance, rehab is now out of the question. So Joe is discharged back to his studio apartment with a plan to go to an outpatient group about “coping skills” at the hospital two hours a day three times a week, and to supplement that with some twelve-step meetings of his own finding.

“What about my medications?” says Joe. The hospital has put Joe on an antipsychotic, a sleeping aid, and a blood pressure medication. They tell him that he has an appointment in thirty days with an outpatient psychiatrist at the hospital, but after that he needs to find someone in-network with his insurance. They give him a list of providers. He calls all of them. The earliest appointment is four months out.

“How about a therapist?” They look at Joe as if he were a child who just asked for a lollipop with a side of world peace. He’s going to need to call his insurance company for that — which he does and is provided a list of therapists, each with a waitlist longer than the next.

Joe is out of luck. He returns home, and while the meds have stabilized his psychosis, his depression is worse than ever. He lost a decent job during his stay. The hospital brought back memories of his mom dying, and he can’t stop thinking about it. He’d sent some strange texts during his psychosis, and now feels isolated from what few friends he has.

Finally he screws up the courage to reach out to someone. He calls an old buddy he knows is holding, and asks for the one thing he’s certain can take the pain away.

Single-Payer Joe

Now let us look at Joe’s journey from the single-payer perspective. This story will be a lot shorter, because the insurance piece will be taken care of by a national plan that Joe pays taxes into and automatically receives like everyone else. In this scenario, only insurance has been fixed. The US health care system still has plenty of problems caused by for-profit actors like greedy hospital management companies and the pharmaceutical industry that flooded Joe’s town with his drug of choice in the first place.

Joe presents himself at the hospital for psychiatric stabilization. His hospital stay likely goes in a similar way. The tendency is still to tackle and focus first on the most serious presenting problem — and in Joe’s case, that is psychosis and suicidality. However, once he is stabilized and Joe starts asking for rehab, the social worker is presented with a different scenario. Without the interference of a third party, he has a more functional working relationship with rehabs and other resources. His job is guided by medically informed, not insurance-informed, options for Joe’s discharge. What’s more, with sourcing from one single entity, the wall between mental health and chemical dependency has begun to break down.

Joe successfully transfers from the hospital to a rehab, and begins a thirty-day residential treatment program. There is a psychiatrist on staff who starts to consider the effects of Joe’s hospital medications in the context of a less-intensive addiction treatment. The psychiatrist and other staff are afforded time when not pressed by “utilization reviews.” Treatment becomes more thoughtful, less formulaic. As he begins to tell his story and his history of depression rises to the surface, Joe is weaned off the antipsychotic in favor of a low dose of antidepressant.

Joe’s thirty days of rehab are filled with individual and group therapy. Because the rehabs have access to a large funding source, these sessions are run by trained therapists and professionals, not untrained technicians receiving an unlivable wage, as is currently the trend. Throw in some twelve-step or other community support group meetings in the evenings, some exercise in the mornings, and a community of equals all working toward the same goal: recovery. Joe’s starting to feel better, like the fog is finally lifting.

When it comes time to leave rehab, this is where a single-payer source can really revolutionize mental health treatment. After all, many insurances cover hospital stays, and the ACA has improved inpatient addiction-treatment access, albeit inadequately. But the inability for an average guy like Joe to get meaningful outpatient psychotherapy is the original and bigger problem.

In a single-payer system, when people need rehab there would be an accessible trained professional waiting for them on the other side to help them sustain their recovery.

Joe was self-medicating his trauma and depression with drugs. If he could drop $150 or $200 a session to see a therapist, then he might have been able to find some peace around his issues without his addiction spiraling out of control. But Joe didn’t have that kind of money, and his options through his insurance amounted to nothing. (The reasons why therapists avoid insurance panels in favor of private pay are outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that single-payer health care helps not only the patient, but the therapist too.) In a single-payer system, not only is it possible that far fewer people will need rehab at all, but when they do there would be an accessible trained professional waiting for them on the other side to help them sustain their recovery and address their emotional pain.

Joe leaves rehab and begins an intensive outpatient treatment program consisting of groups in the evenings, individual therapy weekly, and psychiatric appointments monthly. The latter two continue at length, but not ad nauseam, to work on addressing his underlying depression and trauma as Joe finds his footing. He enters his thirties full of dignity and hope.

The Way Forward

In the current system, health care is paid for by private companies that have a profit incentive to deny claims. This poses problems in all areas, but perhaps especially so in mental health care, where treatments are complex and outcomes are often less quantifiable. We want Joe to come to terms with the impact of his mother’s early death and other traumas on his ability to self-soothe without drugs. Talk therapy can absolutely help him heal, but it’s not always easy to prove the case to insurance companies.

If we were to smooth out the trajectory of treatment for someone like Joe, the chances of his recovery would increase exponentially. Single-payer health care is critical to accomplishing that. It would allow resources to be maximized, modernized, and localized. The effects would be profound at every juncture. The social worker at the hospital’s job becomes less stressful when he is not searching to match Joe with an insurance-appropriate resource. The rehab becomes more effective knowing that the aftercare Joe will receive will be sufficient and available. The ongoing therapy while Joe reintegrates into society becomes more available, less commodified, and more humanized. Joe’s psychiatric medications are viewed less as an insurance-approved “quick fix” than as supplemental to a more interconnected and holistic mode of treatment.

Medicare for All is the way forward for our country. The fight has fallen somewhat out of fashion on the US left in the wake of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, especially as our attentions turn to the momentum of the labor struggle. But these are interconnected issues, as unions are hog-tied by insurance concerns and spend much or even most of their energy fighting for benefits that should already be guaranteed. And millions of people like Joe have little hope of being able to work a unionized job unless they can receive the treatment they need.

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the grave inhumanity at the heart of our health care system. Ironically it also dampened the momentum of the movement, which had just been at its all-time peak, to transform that system. The time has come for a revival. Millions like Joe are suffering, spiraling, and falling through the cracks. Too many of them are dying. We don’t have any more time to waste.