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The US and other Western governments cozied up to the Sudanese coup leaders who have now plunged the country into violent chaos. The only true hope for peace and democracy in Sudan lies with the popular resistance committees that are organizing against war.

People fleeing war-torn Sudan queue to board a boat from Port Sudan on April 28, 2023. (AFP via Getty Images)

Over the last month, Sudan has been convulsed with violence as a power struggle between two rival military leaders erupted into full-scale warfare. Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands more injured, with more than three hundred thousand Sudanese displaced from their homes.

The rival claimants to power are Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. The two men previously joined forces in October 2021 to stage a military coup and clamp down brutally on Sudan’s revolutionary movement that was struggling for democracy. Now they have turned their guns on each other.

The descent into violence discredits the approach of the US and other Western governments that legitimized the coup instigators and sought to build a negotiating process around them. This did not begin after the coup: since 2019, international diplomats had strongly supported a partnership setup that kept the two generals in power, claiming that it would result in a transition to civilian rule.

But the resistance committees that brought down the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir are organizing on the ground to protect communities from the ravages of the latest conflict. It is their efforts that are sowing the seeds of a better future for the people of Sudan.

Descent Into War

For weeks, the militarization of the Sudanese capital Khartoum had been escalating significantly. Soldiers and military vehicles belonging to the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were already a familiar sight in the capital and many other Sudanese cities, even before the coup of 2021 took place. The RSF is a paramilitary force that has its origins in the Janjaweed militias deployed in Darfur.

The descent into violence discredits the approach of the US and other Western governments that legitimized the coup instigators in Sudan.

Yet the recent escalation was different. It stood in stark contrast to the official news of progress in negotiations between the military and civilian ex-partners of the failed transitional government. The key matters for discussion included the issue of merging the SAF and the RSF.

On the morning of April 15, fighting broke out between the SAF, under al-Burhan’s command, and Hemeti’s RSF. In less than four hours, the army’s fighter jets were bombing the capital. It is important to understand that both parties to the fighting have their buildings located in the middle of residential areas. That includes the army headquarters and several RSF buildings that had been turned into barracks, which made the capital a ticking time bomb.

The slogan of the protesters, “army to the barricades, RSF to be dissolved,” was no longer simply a call for the military factions to be removed from political decision-making. It was a demand for the physical removal of the military and all militias from residential areas as well.

Popular Power

For more than a year, since the coup on October 25, 2021, the Sudanese resistance front has organized weekly protests led by neighborhood resistance committees. The demonstrators chant slogans calling for free education and health care, public safety, the army’s return to barracks, and the dissolution of the RSF (in Arabic: صحة تعليم مجان والشعب يعيش في امان والعسكر للثكنات والجنجويد ينحل).

The international diplomats who invested their efforts in advocating and facilitating talks and agreements with the coup perpetrators judged these demands to be unrealistic and immature. However, the resistance committees continued their work on the ground, protesting in the streets to reduce the ability of the coup regime to legitimize itself, as well as engaging in a countrywide deliberation process charting the future they seek for Sudan.

Since the coup, the Sudanese resistance front has organized weekly protests led by neighborhood resistance committees.

More than eight thousand neighborhood resistance committees engaged in the process that produced the Revolutionary Charter for the Establishment of People’s Power. This was a document that included a road map for rebuilding the government from the bottom up, starting from local councils, all the way to a national legislative body that would select and oversee the executive.

The committees presented this agenda as a path to sustainable peace that would address the core issues of the Sudanese people and allow them equal access to political decision-making. Career politicians from the national and international elites ignored or even ridiculed their vision.

Self-Aid

When the fighting broke out, it was the experiences and tools of popular organizing that came to the rescue of the Sudanese people. Khartoum’s neighborhood resistance committees issued a joint statement on the second day clarifying their position: “We are not impartial as we are engaged in peaceful struggle against the militarization of our country.”

The SAF and the RSF have both engaged in propaganda campaigns to equate their own cause with that of the Sudanese people and their revolution.

The statement branded al-Burhan and Hemeti as enemies of the Sudanese revolution and urged the people to organize to provide for themselves. This remains the popular view, even though the SAF and the RSF have both engaged in propaganda campaigns to equate their own cause with that of the Sudanese people and their revolution.

The fact that the SAF and the RSF have borrowed the language and slogans of the revolution to advocate for their war is a clear sign of how the revolutionary organizations, while ignored by most international bodies, have transformed politics in Sudan. Yet these propaganda campaigns have encountered little success, as the reality of people’s needs on the ground remained the priority for the resistance front.

No Quick Victory

Fighting continued despite SAF statements promising a quick win over the “rebels,” while the RSF boasted about its progress against the “coup forces.” In reality, there was no speedy end to the fighting in sight.

The Sudanese army has controlled the lion’s share of the country’s budget and resources for decades.

The RSF took over more areas in the capital, including hospitals, areas where medical supplies were being stored, and power-supply stations. The SAF showed minimum regard for human life as it focused on the use of air strikes, with homes and schools bearing the brunt of the war.

The army’s priority was to regain control over the presidential palace and the national radio station. It did not make the same effort to evict RSF forces from hospitals, power stations, or other institutions that actually have a direct impact on people’s lives and well-being.

The Sudanese army has controlled the lion’s share of the country’s budget and resources for decades. It has revealed itself to be yet another governmental institution weakened by corruption, inefficiency, and the rise of a private sector substitute — in this case, the RSF militia.

“No to War, Yes to the People”

On the ground, neighborhood groups were created on messaging apps such as WhatsApp, focusing on the provision of services for the residents of their neighborhoods. This work included providing updates on what shops and bakeries were open and the availability of water and electricity sources, as well as information on safe routes and assistance with evacuations from high-risk areas.

Resistance committees have combined the slogan ‘no to war’ with practical assistance for the Sudanese people, relying on their own power.

As the fighting continued and the fragile infrastructure of Khartoum collapsed, these groups started operating previously closed health centers as a substitute for hospitals that were now impossible to reach. As the capital’s residents fled to other regions, similar groups and neighborhood resistance committees around the country set about organizing to provide the displaced people with housing, food, and medication when needed.

Along the roads linking Khartoum to other states, groups of youngsters stationed themselves offering water and snacks for travelers and inviting them to stay in their villages. When thousands of displaced Sudanese found themselves stuck at the Egyptian border in the north with no international organizations present to assist them, several popular initiatives came to their support. The resistance committee of the nearest city, Dongola, organized a convoy to reach the border and provide for them.

Back in Khartoum, the newly formed emergency rooms communicated with technicians to restore power supply in areas damaged by the war. These examples and many others show that on the ground, resistance committees have combined the slogan “no to war” with practical assistance for the Sudanese people, relying on their own power.

Diplomatic Disasters

International diplomats also fled the city, moving to the new temporary capital of Port Sudan. Without having critically examined their previous efforts, they continued talks with both combatants, announcing one failed ceasefire after another. The Sudanese people ridiculed their efforts, joking about how each “ceasefire” simply resulted in more violence than the previous one.

A truly realistic and sustainable approach is being created by the people of Sudan in the face of the war.

It was the very same diplomats who foisted a failed “partnership agreement” with the military upon the Sudanese people, as well as the Juba peace agreement, from which we can draw direct links to the coup. Having legitimized the generals with their coups and wars, they still somehow consider themselves experts with the capacity to end the violence, although they have never been held accountable for their previous failures. This makes any hope for a positive intervention from the international community tenuous to say the least.

This statement holds true not only for Sudan but also for many other conflict zones where the corrupt logic of international diplomacy has prioritized deals with war criminals over addressing the root causes of injustice and conflict. In the name of “realism,” diplomats supported a setup that left the leaders of the SAF and the RSF in control of Sudan’s weapons and wealth while somehow expecting that they would not utilize that control to expand their power.

A truly realistic and sustainable approach is being created by the people of Sudan in the face of the war. As the Sudanese people take control of their own lives and resources, the power and wealth available for the generals to fight over will diminish. In this revolutionary scenario, there can be an end to the war as popular power organizes itself into a countrywide resistance front.

Support for the Sudanese people in this struggle will never come from the existing international organizations, which have no interest in real democracy that serves the popular will. The people of Sudan can only ask for help from fellow revolutionaries and fighters for peace and justice, demanding accountability and ethical guidelines for the work of international diplomacy. The backing of our comrades around the world is vital to ensure that no international intervention imposes further destruction on Sudan. The central slogan remains “no to war, yes to the people.”

Working at Amazon isn’t just physically taxing, it’s dangerous. Despite years of scrutiny and years of company spin, Amazon still has a serious injury rate more than double the rest of the industry.

Workers sort out parcels in the outbound dock at an Amazon fulfillment center in Eastvale, California on August 31, 2021. (Watchara Phomicinda / MediaNews Group / The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)

May is here, which for the investor class means the return of the annual shareholder meeting, in which the leadership of public corporations addresses the one group to which they are theoretically answerable. For Amazon investors, at least during the long reign of founder Jeff Bezos, a highlight of the season has always been the CEO’s letter to shareholders, typically issued in April. Not at all content to offer up the usual anodyne reassurances to investors, Bezos regularly exceeded expectations, dispensing savory bits of execupreneurial wisdom eagerly consumed by the business press and by fellow strivers the world over.

This began to change two years ago, for an ominous cloud had appeared over the company’s carefully managed reputation. A September 2020 exposé by journalist Will Evans had revealed to the public what had long been apparent to the hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s warehouse workers: the firm’s novel techniques of labor extraction were inflicting a terrible toll on the health and well-being of its legions of pickers and packers.

As Evans reported, the rate of serious injury in the warehouses had steadily climbed in recent years, reaching an unprecedented peak of 7.7 per hundred workers in 2019, nearly double that of the industry standard. A second independent analysis, released by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) in June 2021, further demonstrated that the company’s extraordinarily high clip of worker injury is directly related to the punishing work rate inflicted on its workers.

Thus Bezos’s 2021 letter, his last as CEO, as well as Andy Jassy’s first effort as new CEO, issued last April, were distinguished by a new tone of defensiveness, as company leadership attempted to respond to a gathering storm of negative press.

Over the past two years, Amazon has focused its defense on three particular arguments, none of which stand up to even casual scrutiny.

“We Don’t Set Unreasonable Performance Goals”

First, the firm simply disputes the statistics compiled by the SOC, instead providing its own set of alternative facts. A particularly clumsy example is that the company includes its own workforce when computing the “industry average,” permitting Jassy to insist that the firm’s injury rates are “about average.” In 2022, for example, Amazon employed 36 percent of US warehouse workers, yet was responsible for no less than 53 percent of recordable injuries. A far more honest assessment would compare Amazon’s serious injury rate (6.6) and that of the remainder of the industry (3.2).

Second, when the company does acknowledge the safety problem, it brazenly denies what is obviously its source: “we don’t set unreasonable performance goals,” Bezos claimed in his April 2021 letter. And even more counterintuitively, the company has consistently maintained that the solution to a problem caused by innovative techniques of labor extraction is . . . more innovation. Thus Jassy, in his 2022 letter, asserts that what is needed is “rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent,” and further reassures investors that the firm will continue “learning, inventing, and iterating” until the problem is resolved. What he did not own up to is that Amazon’s rate of serious injury actually rose in 2022 by 13 percent.

Amazon has resorted to blaming workers themselves, in particular the hundreds of thousands of new people brought on during the past few years of rapid expansion.

Third, and most invidiously, Amazon has resorted to blaming workers themselves, in particular the hundreds of thousands of new people brought on during the past few years of rapid expansion. Since the great majority of the new hires are “new to this sort of work,” and since Amazon’s number crunchers have determined that most injuries occur within the first six months of employment, it is only natural that, as Jassy informed shareholders at the 2022 meeting, “your rates tend to go up.”

If this is indeed true, then it would seem that the company would have every incentive to retain as many of its warehouse workers as possible. Why expend so much effort to train up “industrial athletes” if most of them don’t stick around for the long haul? And yet turnover rates in the warehouses are astronomical; as the New York Times reported in 2021, even before the so-called Great Resignation, the company’s rate reached as high as 150 percent annually, meaning the entire workforce is replaced every eight months.

A measure of Amazon’s commitment to “Burn and Churn” is the “Pay to Quit” program that Bezos introduced in 2014, in which hourly employees are annually offered a payout — $1,000 initially, increased yearly up to a maximum of $5,000 after five years — to move along. (Facing the prospect of running out of human fuel, Jassy suspended the program for most employees in January 2022.)

Profits Over Safety

In retrospect, the May 2022 Amazon shareholder meeting probably represents the high tide of criticism of the firm’s labor practices. The blowback had reached such intensity that Amazon faced a record fifteen shareholder proposals, many of which concerned labor and safety issues. These included a call for board representation from an hourly worker, a request for a report on the company’s compliance with freedom of association standards as established by the International Labor Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a proposal for an independent audit of working conditions in Amazon warehouses, and something of a Hail Mary demand from an enterprising Texas warehouse worker for the immediate suspension of all productivity quotas in the interest of safety.

But all fifteen proposals, each vigorously opposed by company leadership, were comfortably defeated — the demand to overturn the whole system of labor extraction was voted down by no less than 99.8 percent of Amazon investors.

If a solid majority of Amazon shareholders were untroubled by the company’s disgraceful safety record, they found the matter of the stock price more concerning. Although the firm had posted record profits for 2021 — more than $33 billion — disturbing trends had begun to appear in the second half of the year, triggering a precipitous fall in the stock price, from a peak of $186.12 in July 2021 to $104.10 by the May 24, 2022 meeting.

If a solid majority of Amazon shareholders were untroubled by the company’s disgraceful safety record, they found the matter of the stock price more concerning.

While there were many reasons for the plunge, much of it can be attributed to the lifting of COVID restrictions. Company leadership appears to have presumed that the meteoric, lockdown-driven growth in its consumer division was here to stay — that US consumers would not return to Walmart or Kroger. When the opposite happened, retail sales plummeted, and suddenly all that feverish expansion in the fulfillment network had become a burdensome drain on profits.

It should be stressed that criticism of the company’s injury mills has hardly abated in the twelve months since the May 2021 meeting, generating increased scrutiny from the government. At present, the company is under investigation from an unprecedented array of state institutions, including numerous state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) branches, the federal OSHA office under the Department of Labor, and the Southern District of New York. Wherever these agencies have looked they have found an abundance of violations; federal investigations in five states between December 2021 and February 2022 netted the company a raft of citations, but Amazon has dug in its heels, appealing each and every one of them.

While all this was dutifully reported by the business press, the orientation of coverage began to change in the second half of 2022, as more and more reports of the company’s falling profitability began to appear. Shortly after the meeting, for example, Amazon announced a net loss of $2 billion for Q2, compared to a 2021 Q2 profit of $7.8 billion. With little improvement in the third and fourth quarters — the firm would reveal a net loss of $2.7 billion for 2022 as a whole — rumors began to swirl that Bezos himself would soon return to save the day.

Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon. (Lisi Mezistrano Wolf / Wikimedia Commons)

Somehow, some way, mighty Amazon had become a money-losing operation again, and it was Jassy himself bearing the brunt of the blame. But at the same time, all the bad financial news served to distract from the issue of injuries, and if he had failed spectacularly in resolving the latter, there were many relatively easy measures he could take to address the former.

Like so many of his fellow tech chieftains, Jassy began to respond in November by announcing a plan for mass layoffs in the corporate sector: by April 2023, the company had eliminated no less than twenty-seven thousand employees, and a new round is currently underway. Wildly cheered on by Wall Street, the stock price — which in December had dipped all the way into the eighties — began to recover, and by the end of March it was back above $100, where it remains as of this writing.

“In Denial”

And yet the matter of the company’s shameful injury record was still out there, and given how poorly the firm had responded the past two years, a new strategy was needed. One of the cleverer moves of the SOC had been releasing its 2022 report on April 13, thereby preempting Jassy’s first shareholder letter, published the following day. Learning from its mistakes, this year Amazon preempted the preemptor, issuing a new edition of its own safety report on March 14. An exercise in spin, statistical manipulation, and outright lying, the “Delivered With Care” report managed to garner little if any attention, although as shall be discussed, this was probably the intention.

The SOC responded on April 13 with its own annual report, “In Denial: Amazon’s Continuing Failure to Fix Its Injury Crisis,” providing a comprehensive critique of “Delivered With Care” and managing to drum up at least some interest from the business press. Based on its own analysis, the SOC had to concede that Amazon can claim a reduction in its rate of serious injury, from 6.8 in 2021 to 6.6 in 2022 — a little less than 3 percent lower.

But there is significant reason to be skeptical of even this modest improvement, since the joint federal OSHA/Southern District of New York investigations found significant evidence of underreporting, resulting in a raft of subpoenas for documents relating to potential fraud (Amazon continues to fight the subpoenas in court). And even if the 6.6 figure holds up, it is still more than double than the rest of the industry.

Even if the 6.6 figure holds up, it is still more than double than the rest of the industry.

Meanwhile, the content of Jassy’s second shareholder letter, published on April 14, suggests that the CEO has moved on to other concerns. Nowhere does the matter of workplace safety appear, nor does any mention of employee relations in general, save for an announcement that corporate employees must return to the office for a minimum of three days a week. First come the excuses: souring macroeconomic conditions, heightened competition, headwinds over at Amazon Web Services, etc. Then come the typical reassurances that company leadership is on top of things, that every effort is underway to return the firm to profitability.

As always, the emphasis is on “invention,” on the new sectors the company will soon come to dominate. Amazon is getting in on the chip boom. Advertising revenues are about to explode, as the firm’s ingenious algorithms outpace those of its competitors. Our own satellites will soon illuminate the not-yet-wired world.

Rather more concerning, at least to the multitude of warehouse workers, is the other side of the profitability equation, i.e. the reduction of costs. A year ago all the talk was of the herculean efforts — backed by $1 billion of new investment — to address safety issues. Here’s Jassy, summarizing his obsessive commitment to task:

When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team. . . . At our scale . . . it takes rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent to get to where you want. We’ve been dissecting every process path to discern how we can further improve. . . . we’ll keep learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results. We won’t be satisfied until we do.

One year later, priorities have clearly changed. All that energy is now to be devoted to a very different enterprise, that of restoring profitability:

Over the last several months, we took a deep look across the company, business by business, invention by invention, and asked ourselves whether we had conviction about each initiative’s long-term potential to drive enough revenue, operating income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital.

The deep look certainly did not spare the warehouses, which are singled out as particularly egregious offenders:

A critical challenge we’ve continued to tackle is the rising cost to serve in our Stores fulfillment network (i.e. the cost to get a product from Amazon to a customer) — and we’ve made several changes that we believe will meaningfully improve our fulfillment costs and speed of delivery. . . . Over the last several months, we’ve scrutinized every process path in our fulfillment centers and transportation network and redesigned scores of processes and mechanisms, resulting in steady productivity gains and cost reductions over the last few quarters. There’s more work to do, but we’re pleased with our trajectory and the meaningful upside in front of us.

Another Year

That these efforts to boost productivity might conflict with the firm’s purported number-one priority in its warehouses — the safety of its workers — is a question no longer of concern to Jassy. If at the upcoming shareholder meeting, scheduled for May 26, he is once again asked about the matter, he’ll surely say something like this: “The safety team is all over that. See their recent report.”

Herein lies the heart of the problem: even operating a fulfillment network twice as dangerous as its competitors, Amazon simply cannot turn a profit on rapidly delivering packages for free or with minimal fees. For the consumer division to make money doing so, it will need to tighten the screws on its workers even more, extracting ever-more labor from their ailing bodies.

Perhaps the company can defy the laws of nature. Perhaps it can reengineer “scores of processes and mechanisms” in the interest of efficiency without simultaneously inflicting a greater toll on its pickers and packers. But it will be another year until we find out.

The ideal solution would be unionization across the entire fulfillment network, which would enable workers to negotiate a reasonable, safe, and humane work rate.

In the meantime, we have clearly reached an impasse. In a couple weeks, the shareholders will gather again, and the same activist groups will present their proposals for change. But it’s difficult to see how results could be better this year, given the firm’s financial struggles, which will surely take center stage. A better bet would be state intervention — new legislation, a serious clampdown from OSHA — but Amazon has thus far fended off these challenges with relative ease.

The ideal solution would be unionization across the entire fulfillment network, which would enable workers to negotiate a reasonable, safe, and humane work rate. But from the company perspective this simply cannot be allowed to happen, for even under the current regime of brutal labor extraction, Amazon appears to be incapable of turning a profit.

Amazon is operating injury mills — more than thirty-six thousand of its workers suffered serious injury last year. The company has clearly determined that such numbers are acceptable. Do the rest of us agree?

Amazon Responds

Since Jacobin started reporting on Amazon’s shareholder letters back in 2021, we have annually reached out for comment. After two years of ignoring our requests, the company came through this week. Here are our inquiries and Amazon’s responses:

1) In his 2020 shareholder letter, former CEO Jeff Bezos indicated that he was introducing a new leadership principle, that of making Amazon “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But when the leadership principles were updated on July 1, 2021, this was changed to “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.” Why was this change made? Is Amazon no longer committed to being Earth’s Safest Place to Work?

When Jeff introduced the ideas of “Earth’s Best Employer” and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” in the letter, he did not say anything about these being leadership principles. He talked about them as a “vision for our employee’s success.” Here’s what he said, lifted directly from the letter: Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success. We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.
Separately, three months following the shareholder letter, Amazon announced our two new leadership principles. If you read the description of the leadership principle “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer,” you’ll find that safety is included in the definition, which states “Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.”
Our commitment to continuous safety improvement is reiterated in Amazon’s 2022 safety report, which was released in March. The report states “Our goal is to be the safest workplace within the industries that we are typically designated.”
Andy Jassy has also underlined the importance of safety numerous times, including at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, in a CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with CNBC’s Jon Fortt.

2) Also in his 2020 letter, Mr. Bezos noted that in his new role as Executive Chair, he was eager “to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But we have been unable to find any media reports that Mr. Bezos has indeed devoted any of his time over the past two years to the matter of worker safety. Could you provide details on his activities in this critical area?

Amazon has done significant work to improve safety performance. We began releasing Delivered With Care, our safety, well-being, and health report, in 2022 and released it again this year (which you can download here). The report includes some of the following highlights:

From 2019 to 2022, we saw our recordable incident rate improve by almost 24%. This includes an 11% year-over-year decline in our recordable injuries from 2021 to 2022.
Since 2019, we reduced the number of injuries resulting in employees needing to take time away from work by 53%.
In 2022, we engaged with over 1.4 million employees to understand safety sentiment and areas of improvement.
From 2019 to 2022, we invested $1 billion in safety initiatives unrelated to COVID-19, and in 2023, we are investing another $550 million in safety initiatives. This is in addition to the $15 billion in COVID-related costs we incurred to make more than 150 significant process and procedural changes to help protect our employees and partners during the pandemic.
We have reduced collision rates in our U.S. Delivery Service Partner network by 35%

In 2023, Amazon became one of the first to sign on to the Department of Transportation’s nationwide call to action to reduce deaths on the roadways. Amazon committed another $200 million to continue upgrading safety technologies across our fleet of trucks and vans, including additional investments in collision avoidance technologies, strobing brake lights, and in-vehicle camera safety technology — just to name a few.

3) Since we began reporting on Amazon’s workplace injury record, the company has regularly referred to the fact that it employs more than 6000 safety professionals; Mr. Bezos cited the figure of 6200 in his April 2021 letter. Given the recent mass layoffs at the company — 27,000 roles eliminated with a new round currently underway — is this figure still accurate? How many positions have been eliminated in the safety division? What is the current figure?

Amazon’s current number of workplace health and safety professionals is more than 8,000 globally.

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First Republic Bank’s failure resulted in its acquisition by JPMorgan Chase. As more banks continue to fail in the coming years, massive banks like Chase stand well-positioned to swallow them up.

First Republic Bank signage is displayed outside of a bank branch in Beverly Hills, California, on May 1, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

It’s been quite a month for JPMorgan Chase. The bank is still embroiled in a deeply damaging court case over its close ties to underage-sex-trafficker-for-the-ultrarich Jeffrey Epstein, with its CEO Jamie Dimon now confirmed to have to face questioning over its turning a blind eye to Epstein’s crimes.

At the same time, in brighter news for the mega-bank, Chase also swooped into the second-largest bank failure in US history and bought the collapsing First Republic Bank, growing its slate of ultrawealthy clientele and expanding its footprint into Silicon Valley in the process. As Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell later said, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) — which held the “highly competitive bidding process” for First Republic — is bound by law to take the option that would result in the most minimal payout from its Deposit Insurance Fund — something JPMorgan, by virtue of its immensity, was best placed to offer. Bigness begets bigness.

The deal has been sold as a grand victory for Dimon and the bank, not just for business reasons, but also because it’s allowed Dimon to burnish his reputation as the savior of the US banking industry, first shored up when JPMorgan swooped in to a different financial collapse to buy up failing competitors in 2008. But JPMorgan’s bargain purchase gain here may well mean some serious pain for the rest of us in the long run.

With $3.2 trillion in assets, JPMorgan has had an unbroken run as the largest bank in the United States since 2011. It was already deemed years ago by the G20 to be one of the two most “systemically important banks” in the world — too big to fail, in other words, not just for the sake of the country, but the entire planet.

And now it’s become even bigger. The bank today holds nearly $2.5 trillion in deposits, or around 13.6 percent of the nation’s total, and holds a market share of 14.4 percent, up from 1.5 percent thirty years ago, prompting renewed concerns about the bank’s potentially destabilizing size. Far from simply posing a systemic risk to the financial system, JPMorgan seems to be slowly trying to become the financial system.

But didn’t we already go through this state of affairs fifteen years ago, when there was general agreement we shouldn’t let banks grow so gargantuan that they pose a threat to the entire financial system? And aren’t there regulations in place to stop this kind of thing from happening because of the dangers that come with it?

The answer is “yes” — sort of. In theory, banks are legally barred from buying another bank if they already hold 10 percent or more of the country’s insured deposits, a figure JPMorgan Chase was well in excess of. But of course, there’s a loophole: known as the “failing bank” exception, this ban no longer applies if the bank being purchased is “in default or in danger of default.”

It’s dangerous to let big banks get too big — unless, that is, they do it by absorbing another one that’s insolvent and collapsing.

Small Government, Big Banking

The obvious absurdity of this rule can be traced back nearly thirty years to another Jeffrey Epstein associate, the forty-second president of the United States. The 10 percent deposit cap and its attendant loophole was put in place by the Riegle-Neal Act, a piece of deregulatory bank legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994 that aimed to end restrictions on interstate banking that had been in place since before the Great Depression.

While today, customers of Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, and other large institutions can be certain they will find one of their bank’s branches just about wherever they go, this wasn’t always the case. Since the McFadden Act of 1927, US banks had strict limits on their ability to operate across state lines, partly due to fears that doing otherwise would spur a dangerous concentration of the financial system and make regulation harder. Banks chafed at the restrictions, but they caused frustrations for customers too.

The process of chipping away at these rules started under Jimmy Carter, the first neoliberal US president. Acting on complaints that foreign banks, which weren’t covered by these restrictions, had a competitive advantage over US banks, Carter and a Democratic Congress passed a 1978 law ending this privilege and mandating a general review of banking laws. The decades-old interstate banking limits were “ineffective, inequitable, inefficient, and anachronistic,” concluded the resulting report in the final moments of Carter’s presidency, recommending that “interstate banking be ratified and further liberalized through a phased relaxation of current geographic restraints.”

While several aborted attempts at this would be launched over the following decade, it was state governments that led the way. Forty-six states relaxed limits on out-of-state acquisitions of banks within their borders by 1990, and by 1994, nearly every one of them had signed compacts, reciprocal interstate banking agreements that allowed banks to cross state lines.

The federal effort to end interstate banking limits was led by Sen. Donald Riegle, the Michigan Democrat who chaired the Senate Banking Committee. Representing a state whose auto industry had been devastated by foreign imports, Riegle worried about “the ability of the United States to compete effectively in the international marketplace,” he said.

There may also have been another motive. Riegle was known as the darling of and champion for a financial sector that showered him with tens of thousands of dollars of campaign donations, in particular from the savings and loan industry whose implosion necessitated a pricey taxpayer bailout in 1989. Riegle’s closeness with finance reached its peak in his embroilment in the “Keating Five” scandal, in which the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he had given “the appearance of being improper” by intervening with regulators on behalf of a collapsed savings and loan association (S&L) while taking money from it.

Starting in 1991, Riegle used his perch at the Banking Committee to hold thirteen hearings about the US banking industry’s competitiveness on the world stage, in which a parade of Wall Street representatives — including the Chase Manhattan Bank CEO, speaking on behalf of the American Bankers Association — urged the lifting of interstate banking limits to unleash the put-upon US financial sector. The government report that followed those hearings bitterly noted that while three US commercial banks had been in the world’s top twenty by asset size in 1983, not a single one was still on the list by 1989.

While earlier federal efforts to end interstate banking limits had been beaten back by opposition from community banks and insurance companies, by 1993, the stars had aligned. The just-elected Clinton was as bullish on bank deregulation as his Republican predecessor, and his Treasury secretary made clear the administration wanted the restrictions lifted, telling a Democratic think tank, “We’re operating with laws and regulations made for another time in America.” Lawmakers in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina pushed their own, state-based versions of interstate banking liberalization, while the Clinton administration used a loophole to let First Fidelity Bank operate in two states, putting pressure on Congress to pass the bill.

“The world has changed,” lamented a defeated Kenneth Guenther, executive vice president of the Independent Bankers Association of America. “For the first time in many years, the chances look pretty good” for a bill to pass, remarked a much happier Richard Thomas, chair of the Bankers Roundtable that represented the top executives of the country’s biggest banks.

Those chances were helped by a concerted push from that same industry. Representatives of six of the country’s major financial trade groups wrote Clinton a letter before his inauguration in 1993 urging banking deregulation, including ending the “micromanagement of bank operations.” They hired lobbyists with close ties to both Clinton himself and the wider Democratic Party and launched a large-scale lobbying effort they called “National Cut the Red Tape Week.”

In the end, though, Riegle can’t fully take the credit for the “failing bank” carveout in the law that carried his name. That provision was absent from the Senate legislation he introduced, which included the 10 percent deposit cap. The loophole could instead first be found in the bill introduced into the House by its other namesake, Rep. Stephen Neal (D-NC), who like Riegle was a leading recipient of S&L cash known for voting in line with the industry’s wishes.

Neal’s state was home to the country’s fourth-largest bank, NationsBank, a particularly vocal supporter of unshackling interstate banking which in a few years would swallow up and officially become today’s Bank of America. A few months earlier in a speech in Clinton’s hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, its CEO Hugh McColl had cheered on the idea of bank consolidation, calling for “let[ting] the strong take over the weak so that we can move forward.” Under Neal’s shepherding, the bill cleared the House Banking Committee — whose ranks counted Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, and Barney Frank — on a lopsided fifty-to-one vote, with then first-term congressman Rep. Bernie Sanders the sole no vote. When it eventually cleared the Senate, ninety-four members voted in favor, including Joe Biden.

McColl and Chase Manhattan CEO Thomas Labrecque were among the big bank executives at the September 1994 signing ceremony, where Clinton placed the bill in his wider economic strategy of “reinvent[ing] government by making it less regulatory and less overreaching and by shrinking it where it ought to be shrunk.” Sure enough, Riegle-Neal, viewed today alongside Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall as one of the most significant bits of deregulatory legislation of the past few decades, led to a wave of bank consolidation.

Since Riegle-Neal went into effect, “the number of large bank mergers has increased significantly,” the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco stated in 2004. Between 1990 and 1998, there were 4,944 bank mergers and the number of US banks fell nearly 27 percent to 9,015. Today, the number is around 4,100, while the four biggest banks hold roughly 40 percent of the entire banking system’s $23 trillion of assets.

All Part of the Plan

The “failing bank” exception tucked into Riegle-Neal wasn’t commented on at the time. But later events give us some idea of what may have motivated it.

In 2011, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), created in the wake of the 2008 financial crash to keep an eye on risk in the financial sector, produced a report on “concentration limits on large financial companies” in which it expressly endorsed the loophole. In fact, the FSOC recommended that the hole get bigger and cover all insured depository institutions, not just “banks.”

There was a “strong public interest in limiting the costs to the Deposit Insurance Fund that could arise if a bank were to fail,” the report stated, “which might be partly or wholly limited through acquisition of a failing bank by another firm.”

It would save the taxpayer money, in other words, by putting the private sector on the hook for taking care of collapsing financial institutions. There was no mention of the public interest in stopping too-big-to-fail mega-banks from coming into existence. (Senior Treasury advisor Amias Gerety, one of the staffers who presented the report to the FSOC for approval, now works for QED Investors, a venture capital firm that invests in and promotes fintech to banks.)

It wasn’t without its critics. The Federal Reserve board had partly used Riegle-Neal’s various loopholes to sign off on several big bank acquisitions in the wake of the 2008 crash, putting JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo all over the 10 percent deposit cap by October that year. “All of the resulting entities needed subsequent bailouts through various means,” Duke law professor Lawrence Baxter later wrote, suggesting “that perhaps the banking agencies headed in precisely the wrong direction by creating even larger, weaker banks as a means of extricating the financial system from its crisis.”

George Washington University law professor Arthur Wilmarth, who had served as a consultant to Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010, had that year recommended closing several Riegle-Neal loopholes. That included narrowing the failing bank exception by forcing regulators to make a “systemic risk determination” in exactly the kind of scenarios that JPMorgan and First Republic found themselves in this month.

In Wilmarth’s vision, regulators would have to show that such a merger needed to happen to avoid “systemic injury,” and would subject that decision to an after-the-fact review by, among other things, Congress. But while Dodd-Frank, the Obama-era Wall Street reform law, closed one major Riegle-Neal loophole, it left that one and several others in place. As late as February last year, the Independent Community Bankers of America complained to the Biden administration that the limits in Riegle-Neal and Dodd-Frank “still permit mergers among the nation’s largest banks to occur,” producing “anticompetitive effects” and “creating downstream pressures for other smaller institutions to grow larger to compete,” feeding ever more bank consolidation.

If these concerns are shared by the country’s top regulators, they’re keeping up a strong poker face. Asked in the wake of the JPMorgan/First Republic merger if he was worried about consolidation, Fed chair Jerome Powell simply answered, “It’s probably good policy that we don’t want the largest banks doing big acquisitions.”

“But this is an exception for a failing bank,” he added. “And I think it’s actually a good outcome for the banking system.”

All Roads Lead to Consolidation

Powell’s confidence may well be put to the test in the coming years. First Republic was only the latest bank to collapse thanks to Powell’s series of interest rate hikes the past year, following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank this past March.

There’s little sign Powell and the Fed are going to pause, despite the fact that inflation has been slowing for months, and despite it being far from clear that the rate hikes are the reason for that. That means potentially numerous more bank failures to come, and so, numerous more chances for the country’s mega-banks to get even bigger by invoking the “failing bank” loophole to leapfrog regulations. And in the long run, that concentration could pose all manner of problems for working Americans, from more consumer abuses at the hands of large financial firms, to a growing risk of big bank criminal impunity and a 2008-style financial meltdown.

There’s many things in this three-decade-long Rube Goldberg machine of corruption and neoliberal policymaking you could blame this state of affairs on — from the deregulatory zealotry fed by Wall Street’s Herculean campaign of lobbying and political bribery to the legal loopholes planted like landmines by elected officials (some of whom remain in power today) that have let big banks take advantage of the resulting failures to get bigger and bigger. But part of it is also that, as Baxter wrote, regulators see mega-banks as “serv[ing] a public, quasi-governmental purpose in assisting the government to maintain stability in financial crises in a way that reduces, in the short term at least, the cost to the public.”

Whatever short-term savings this practice has secured for the public could well pale in comparison to the costs that growing financial concentration and everything that comes with it poses. We may be alarmingly close to finding out.

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Jackie Robinson is popularly portrayed as a mainstream figure who broke baseball’s color line by quietly enduring racist abuse. But he was much more a lifelong activist and defiant crusader for civil rights.

A portrait of Jackie Robinson in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform, circa 1945. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

Last month, Major League Baseball (MLB) celebrated Jackie Robinson Day, an annual event that the league debuted in 2004. Every April 15, each player wears Robinson’s number, 42, to honor the day he broke the baseball’s color barrier in 1947.

For years, many have embraced an oversimplified image of Robinson as a stoic man who endured racist abuse with grace and dignity. In his book, Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy, David Naze aims to fill in the politics scrubbed from this narrative while breaking down the sanitized version of Robinson that has permeated the public memory. What emerges is a complex, defiant figure, as opposed to a simplistic symbol of frictionless racial progress. “Often we forget the details of one person’s legacy, either because of the passage of time or because we were never really taught about those details in the first place,” Naze writes.

A lifelong activist, Robinson participated in the World War II–era “Double V” campaign — the effort among black Americans to wage a war against fascism abroad and racism at home — refusing to move to the back of an Army bus in 1944. After his retirement from baseball in 1957, Robinson was a fixture at civil rights demonstrations and, along with Martin Luther King Jr, was named an honorary chairmen of the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, DC, the following year.

When Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, King praised him in a letter: “You have made every Negro in America proud through your baseball prowess and your inflexible demand for equal opportunity for all.” King further lauded him in a newspaper column:

Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, [Robinson] underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which comes with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.

Robinson even directed the money from his Hall of Fame dinner to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s voter registration project.

Jacobin contributor Michael Arria spoke to Naze about the standard story of Robinson, the political schisms among black Americans during the civil rights era, and what can be done to recover Robinson’s multifaceted legacy.

Michael Arria

Before we get to the mythmaking, I wanted to talk about the parts of Robinson’s legacy that are generally scrubbed from the narrative. His story is often presented in an apolitical way, and sometimes he’s even presented as a conservative because he agreed to testify in 1949 before the red-baiting House Committee on Un-American Activities (he used the speech to decry Jim Crow) and his brief flirtation with Richard Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign (he distrusted John F. Kennedy on civil rights).

David Naze

When I came to this subject about twenty years ago, my understanding of Robinson was the mainstream narrative. I have come to argue it’s very limited — important and significant historically, but narrow in terms of how we think about Robinson’s legacy.

The story we hear is that he was the first black baseball player in Major League Baseball and that he broke the color barrier in 1947. He’s largely remembered as a baseball player. However, his legacy and his impact go far beyond baseball. Jackie Robinson was a forerunner to the modern American civil rights movement. He was doing a lot of significant things prior to 1947, when he was in the army. Then he comes to baseball and breaks the color barrier.

Jackie Robinson in his military uniform, during a visit to his Pasadena, California, family home, circa 1943. (LOOK Magazine / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

We also don’t really remember him as a postbaseball figure. What he did from 1957 to his death in 1972 gets eliminated from his legacy. He was a strong political advocate. He contributed immensely to the civil rights movement. This included writing a regular column in the New York Amsterdam News, in which he and Malcolm X famously exchanged heated sentiments about which direction the black community should be headed.

He wrote extensive and prolific civil rights letters to allies, adversaries, politicians, and so on. When he served as an executive at Chock Full o’Nuts, he included in his contract that he could work as extensively as he wanted on civil rights efforts.

Michael Arria

Can you talk about this image of him as a gentle, quiet hero who gracefully endured racist barbs?

David Naze

Everything you’re asking about connects to the whitewashing of his legacy, and I think the primary example of that whitewashing is Major League Baseball’s decision to create Jackie Robinson Day in 2004, which it observes every year on April 15.

On the one hand, it’s great. Of course he deserves to be recognized. But every year it’s the same rerun of Major League Baseball holding itself up as the tolerator of racial integration. I refer to Robinson’s “radical legacy” because I believe, in the context of 1947 and the stuff he was doing for the last twenty-five years of his life, he was a radical by the strictest definition of the term. He was doing things outside the mainstream.

Malcolm X certainly saw him as an adversary during that time, especially after white America began holding Robinson up as someone they could root for or tolerate because he was an “exceptional Negro” — he represented an exception to what mainstream white society saw as a problematic community. African Americans were split. Some people thought he threw Paul Robeson under the bus, and Paul Robeson broke so many different barriers before Robinson.

Jackie Robinson with his son David during the March on Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. (US Information Agency / Wikimedia Commons)

He was the most popular, renowned black figure at the time, and then in 1949 Robinson testifies for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). I think his participation is misconstrued, but many white Americans approved of his actions and thought, “Look, he’s even willing to speak out against members of his own community.” It fit a neat, uncomplicated narrative: a black figure who has given us a reason to root for him and not given us any reason to root against him.

So, the MLB story is a narrative about the tolerator. The story can be, “See? We’re tolerant, we’re accepting. We’re not bigots.” And that’s where the focus is. But we don’t ask what Jackie Robinson thought of all that, because if we did, it would complicate the narrative and make it more difficult for Major League Baseball to celebrate Jackie Robinson Day in the way that it does.

Michael Arria

I think many younger people might derive their perception of Robinson from the 2013 film 42, starring the late Chadwick Boseman. That movie is a decade old now, but what did you make of it when it came out?

David Naze

When that movie came out, I wrote a review for a local media outlet and referred to it as a double in the gap. It wasn’t a home run. It was successful in holding up a hero and a really important figure. I don’t think it was doing anything to complicate the narrative we’ve been discussing. It was designed as a feel-good movie. I’m not trying to be hypercritical; I think it was well done, but it was predictable.

Jackie Robinson with the Kansas City Monarchs (Negro Leagues) before a game, circa 1945. (Kansas City Call / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

I think it missed an opportunity to create some space for true democratic dissent and productive dialogue. It’s a good example of the Disney-fication of complicated legacies on the screen.

If you go to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, too, you’re going to see Robinson a lot, but it follows the same script that most mainstream platforms do. It sees baseball as a meritocracy where you belong if you can play well.

It pales in comparison to something like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) in Kansas City. The museum’s aim is to bring to light as many different narratives as possible, regardless of how complicated they are, and Robinson is just one of those narratives. They do a great job covering how black Americans were split over the disintegration of the Negro Leagues.

A significant portion saw something that they had created out of necessity on their own going away. So there was celebration on one hand, but they also saw that a thriving league was about to go away.

Michael Arria

What’s something Major League Baseball could do to promote Robinson’s true legacy?

David Naze

One of the things Major League Baseball did as part of Jackie Robinson Day was to retire his number throughout all of baseball. Anyone who was wearing number 42 at the time was grandfathered in and allowed to continue wearing it, but the jersey number would never be given out again. Then on Jackie Robinson Day, every player wears 42.

I think that’s a unique and well-intentioned initiative, but I believe they should unretire his number and allow players to wear it again. It’s the complete opposite of what we usually do with athletes. We say, this person’s contributions are so unique in their accomplishments and contributions in this sport that no one else is going to be able to wear that number.

Here’s where MLB misses the mark. While everyone is wearing number 42, it’s one day out of the year — so for 364 days out of the year, we’re not talking about Jackie Robinson. We’re not seeing a representation of his legacy. I say unretire it, allow any player to wear it, because you might end up having multiple players choosing to commemorate his legacy by wearing his number.

I believe you’d probably have some prominent players make that decision, and then we’d be talking about his impact more. His presence would literally be seen throughout the entire season.

Political rights are not enough. Economic rights — the right to home, food, health care, a union, and a safe and stable planet — should be our rallying cry for a just country and world.

A homeless man sleeps under an American Flag blanket on a park bench in New York City. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Although the United States is richer and more productive than it ever has been, over forty million Americans live in poverty — roughly the same number as in 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to office during the height of the Great Depression, and 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson announced his “war on poverty.”

Despite these troubling numbers, many economists assert the American Dream is alive and well, and that inequality is simply the price we as a nation must pay for economic growth. For years, both Republicans and Democrats accepted this fiction, though lately some Democrats have begun to return to fighting for more democratic control over the economy to broaden prosperity to the working class. Yet the party has no plan to address economic insecurity and poverty and better provide Americans with genuine freedom in their pursuit of happiness.

An economic bill of rights — one that expands on the freedoms enumerated in the Constitution by guaranteeing Americans basic economic security — should be the first step. It’s one that an increasing number of Americans support.

This spring, polling by Data for Progress found that 69 percent of likely voters are in favor of legislation guaranteeing economic security, while just 24 percent are opposed. Young voters, who are less likely to achieve the upward mobility America promises, are even more likely to support the idea, with four out of five voters under forty-five in favor of passing universal economic security. Among voters edging closer to economic peril, those making under $50,000, nearly three out of four want economic rights enshrined in law. This support transcends party affiliation: majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all favor the passage of an economic bill of rights.

Economic rights are not a new idea. On January 11, 1944, as the Allies were turning the tide against fascism, President Roosevelt sat before an array of microphones to deliver his eleventh State of the Union address, which included his demand that Congress immediately take up an economic bill of rights to provide all Americans the right to a job at a living wage; the right to medical care; the right to a home; the right to an education; the right to economic protection from old age, sickness, and accident; and more. Roosevelt had sold Americans on the war as a fight for four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. It was time to focus on the last of these: to guarantee “cradle-to-grave economic security.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington, DC. (Library of Congress)

Although Roosevelt’s proposal was sui generis, he was drawing on an all-American history that reached back to its founding. Thomas Paine, the firebrand whose pamphlets spurred a fledgling nation to revolution, had called in Common Sense for the abolition of inheritance rights and the embrace of economic equality as essential in the fight for democracy. Alexander Hamilton argued that a strong centralized state, one that would shape markets and direct the economy to meet human needs, was the nation’s best “guarantor of liberty.” And Abraham Lincoln, through both the Homestead Act and Special Field Order No. 15, had sought to redistribute land to ensure universal economic security for white and black Americans alike (though without consideration for Native Americans, who were forcibly dispossessed through violent measures to provide parcels for white homesteaders).

Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 would forestall the push for economic rights but not extinguish it. Just two decades later, civil rights leaders like A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr (MLK), and Coretta Scott King would adopt the cause, linking civil rights with economic rights. Just prior to his murder, MLK penned an article for Look Magazine entitled “We need an economic bill of rights.” He believed that economic rights were a necessary condition for the full realization of civil and political rights, and his devotion to the Poor People’s Campaign after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts was a testament to this conviction.

Economic rights returned to the agenda with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s upstart presidential campaign in 2016. Sanders’s popularity, especially among younger voters, speaks to the wellspring of support for economic rights. In Data for Progress’s polling, voters across the political spectrum — again, including majorities of Independents and Republicans — responded positively to specific proposals ranging from guaranteeing people work through direct job creation at living wages to a massive buildout of social housing to ensure every American has a place to call home.

Some might argue that now is not the time to push for new rights given the threats to long-established civil, political, and reproductive rights. But as history has shown — in reparations-hobbled Germany after WWI, in Japan during the Great Depression — economic insecurity and a lack of public purpose give rise to demagogues and catalyze our worst impulses.

The fight for freedom must continue. Political rights are not enough. Civil and reproductive rights are enough. Economic rights — the right to home, the right to food, the right to health care, the right to a union, and the right to a safe and stable planet — must be front and center if America is to achieve the founders’ promised “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As MLK wrote from a lonely jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, “We will reach the goal of freedom . . . because the goal of America is freedom.”

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