The struggles of Black migrants and refugees are everyone’s problem

This week in North Philly Notes, Philip Krestedemas, coeditor of Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations, writes about the impact of the wet foot/dry foot policy.

The U.S. government’s wet foot/dry foot policy for Cuban and Haitian refugees, which was rolled out in the mid-1990s, is often cited as an example of the racially biased double standards that are baked into U.S. refugee policy. Under this policy, Cuban asylum seekers who touched ground on U.S. soil were eligible to receive asylum. Haitians who did the same thing were detained and returned to Haiti. But on closer inspection, the wet foot/dry foot policy is not just a story about how Haitian refugees were treated differently from Cubans.  It’s also a story about how the exclusionary treatment of Haitians established a precedent that weakened asylum rights for all Caribbean asylum seekers.
            The disparate treatment of Haitian and Cuban asylum seekers is most apparent in the way the “dry foot” criterion was applied (i.e., what happened once refugees reached U.S. soil).  The “wet foot” criterion was applied the same way to Cubans and Haitians. This wasn’t much of a change for Haitian refugees. For Cuban refugees, on the other hand, it marked the end of the more generous “open arms” policy that had been in effect since the early 1960s. Under the “open arms” policy, Cuban refugees were fast-tracked for asylum whether they were apprehended at sea or on the shores of south Florida. Under wet foot/dry foot, this generous asylum policy was limited to Cubans who touched U.S. soil. Cubans who were apprehended at sea were treated no different from Haitians. 
            The saga of wet foot/dry foot is just one example of a story that has repeated itself many times over in U.S. history. Black communities are often the first to be affected by deprivations, coercions, and incursions on personal liberty that, eventually, spread to the wider society. Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations aims to give the reader an insight into the depth of this problem, examining it from several theoretical, historical, and geo-political vantage points.The book’s contributors note that anti-Black racism doesn’t just describe a group-specific experience of race; it is foundational to the structures of thought and feeling that gave rise to the modern world. One implication of this analysis is that the problems that Black people contend with can tell you a lot about problems that pervade our entire society. 
            Think of a house that is built on top of a sinkhole. The people on the bottom floor of the house are more at risk of falling into the sinkhole. The people on the upper floors of the house may not feel the same sense of urgency to address the problem and may feel comforted by the thought that they are in a somewhat better situation. But they are ignoring the fact that when the foundation finally gives way, everyone’s falling into the hole. 
            This may not be a perfect metaphor, but it captures a dynamic that is very common to the Black experience. Haitians, for example, were the first U.S. refugee population to be subjected to mandatory detention. Thirty years later, mandatory detention is not only standard for most asylum seekers in the US., it has become the norm for how governments around the world manage refugee populations.  The same can be said for the interdiction practices initially rolled out to control Haitian asylum seekers in the 1980s. These were expanded throughout the 1980s and 1990s to all refugees trying to enter the U.S. by water, imitated by European governments in the 2000s that were trying to control flows of African and Asian refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, and were also cited as a precedent by the U.S. government in the 2010s when it rolled out programs to control the growing numbers of asylum seekers (mostly Central American, but also including Haitians and many other nationalities) at the US–Mexico border. These are just some examples from the recent history of U.S. refugee policy.  You can find similar processes at work in the U.S. history of mass incarceration, predatory lending practices in housing markets, unsafe work conditions in low-wage employment sectors, medical neglect in the health care sector, and the list goes on.
            Although Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations is focused on the migrant experience, it engages this experience with an eye to the bigger picture I’ve just described.  Our analysis is premised on the understanding that the Black experience can be used as a starting point for diagnosing problems that affect everyone, and also in a way that elevates the value of Black life. But in order to do this, we have to step outside of the ways of seeing that normalize all of the problems I’ve just described. This sums up  the purpose of the book—to invite the reader to take this step.
 

The issues raised by this blog will be discussed in more depth at a free webinar hosted by the Acacia Center for Justice, to be held on Monday, February 26, 3pm (EST), featuring faculty from Morehouse College, Temple, and Bowdoin Universities and guest speakers from Undocublack, Families for Freedom and the Haitian Bridge Alliance. Click here for more info and to register.  

All Work and No Play—Or the Reverse?

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Gagliardi, author of All Play and No Work, writes about the contradictory attitudes towards work.

 

Like most people, when I first think of the word “work,” my mind goes to my career as an English professor. I take a great deal of pride in my career and it provides me with a sense of self-worth. But  “work” extends far beyond a 9-to-5 job and can, at times, feel all consuming. Recently I spent a considerable amount of time explaining to my youngest child that my wife, a middle-school teacher, and I often need to spend our weekends trying to catch up on work, doing everything from answering emails to grading to doing research. He couldn’t quite process why people needed to do work on the weekends, a time that he felt “should be for playing.”

Our professional work has become so pervasive that we might not consider how many other types of work—or markers of success—we encounter.  I might be reading an email about my retirement plan while checking out at the grocery store while the person ahead of me purchases a bunch of lottery tickets. I can believe in the value of an honest day’s work, but I cannot help but root for a swindling character on a television show who is able to outwit an unscrupulous businessperson for a small fortune. I might watch that television program—itself full of a range of visible and invisible labor—while attending to everything from laundry to cooking in an endless loop of home labor.  

These views of and contradictory attitudes about work compelled me to write All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comedies of the Federal Theatre Project. Our complicated relationship with work in all its forms is not just of the current moment. People have been wrestling with these ideas for decades, as seen in one of the unlikeliest of places: theater produced by the federal government during the worst economic crisis in American history. 

During the Great Depression, a New Deal program entitled the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was charged with producing plays across the country to provide both entertainment to Americans and jobs to unemployed theater workers. Working under the guiding principle of “free, adult, and uncensored,” the FTP often performed plays that challenged theatrical norms and audiences. Given that most New Deal programs were, at their heart, concerned with working and employment, it should not be a surprise that many plays produced by the FTP addressed those issues, including several s, such as Power or Triple-A Plowed Under, that have been analyzed at length by other scholars.

The discussion of work in the plays I analyze in All Play and No Work is unique. Radically, at a time when seemingly everyone from the Roosevelt administration to everyday Americans were concerned about work, these plays critique the dominant views of working and, at times, question accepted pathways to success. And perhaps even more surprising, these plays were comedies, a mode that is often downplayed by critics and the public as incapable of addressing serious issues. A common refrain was that comedies during the Great Depression simply served to distract audiences from their economic troubles. Yet I have found  that these plays—rather under the radar—connect to larger conversations about work, security, and social status happening in economics, government, and culture at large during the Great Depression. And perhaps more important, these plays pose questions that extend to contemporary experiences with working. They include, how much work should determine our daily lives, what lengths will we go to in order to gain security, and how much are we willing to risk to achieve success. 

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Do you have a political role model?

This week in North Philly Notes, Jennie Sweet-Cushman, author of Inspired Citizens, writes about what politicians Americans look up to—if any.

Like many flabbergasted Americans, I recently watched the footage of a US Senator, Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) threatening to fight a union president providing testimony with whom the junior senator apparently had a pre-existing beef. It happened right there at the meeting of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The posturing was broken up by committee chairman, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who scolded Mullin like a child. It was all very….not exactly behavior that should be emulated by anyone.

At its best, the incident is yet another comical example of politicians behaving badly; at worst, it further deteriorates the perception Americans have of their elected officials, making it harder and harder for citizens to admire the people who represent them.

This example perhaps explains what drew me to write Inspired Citizens: How Our Political Role Models Shape American Politics. Americans who have political role models often identify with a national political figure like a high-profile member of the House of Representatives or, even more likely, a U.S. Senator. I found that people that identify with a political role model—especially if that connection is a strong one—are more likely to be politically engaged. They vote at higher rates and are more likely to participate in important forms of political participation like contacting their elected officials, protesting, or donating to political candidates. More democratic engagement makes for a better, healthier democracy and aspirational political figures can be associated with this sort of positive impact on American politics.

But our political role models also present a mixed bag. Only about half of Americans report that they even have one. And for those who do have someone they admire, there are also downsides for contemporary American politics. Those that identify with former president Donald Trump, for example, are much more likely to report experiencing or participating in acts of political aggression and are more supportive of the possibility that political violence may be necessary. It is not just Republicans. Those that name current President Joe Biden as their role model very similarly sanction violence. And, as extremely well known and high-profile figures, U.S. presidents are the most common political role models that people name, suggesting how very important it is that we elect people to the presidency that encourage participation in politics by civil means and not by inciting violence.

No one in either my study of Americans or political candidates in the United States named Senator Mullin as their political role model (though he was a relatively unknown member of Congress until just this year). But a significant number of Americans reported that they have no one at all that they look up to in American politics. Perhaps that is for the best if those most likely to be admired are going to foster the darker side of American politics—if they are going to model solving political disagreement by challenging their opponents like schoolyard bullies.

Importantly, however, political role models also have the potential to inspire democratic engagement and normatively positive attitudes like trust in government and political efficacy. National political figures would be well served to consider how their behavior may (or may not) be emulated by those they aim to serve. Political role models in American politics should serve as guiding lights, illuminating a path toward a more equitable, inclusive, and kind society. Their leadership should not just be about wielding power but about harnessing it for the greater good, inspiring hope, and catalyzing positive change.

A deep dive into organized taxpayer activity in the 1930s

This week in North Philly Notes, Linda Upham-Bornstein, author of “Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender”, writes about what she unexpectedly discovered about the taxpayers’ associations during the Great Depression.

“Mr. Taxpayer versus Mr. Tax Spender” is, at least in part, the product of serendipity. About 25 years ago, my husband and I were reorganizing the basement of his law office in New Hampshire when I happened upon a box containing bound copies of the Coos Guardian from 1934, of which Arthur J. Bergeron, the firm’s retired senior partner, was the editor. This weekly newspaper provided contemporaneous accounts of the efforts of Arthur and the newly formed local taxpayers’ association to effectuate economic and political change in the community, region, and state. This story spurred me to investigate whether this manifestation of organized taxpayer activity was unique to northern New Hampshire or part of a broader movement during the Great Depression. In the ensuing years I identified a plethora of rich, untapped primary sources that documented the emergence of a nationwide taxpayers’ association movement in the 1930s.

A number of my findings surprised me. Among the most prominent are the magnitude of the tax revolt and the speed with which taxpayers’ groups multiplied; the attitudes of organized taxpayers toward the size and reach of government; and the distinctive form of collective tax resistance that emerged in the Reconstruction South.

The proliferation of taxpayers’ leagues in the early 1930s was remarkable. In 1928, they probably numbered fifty or so. As the domestic economy contracted, a good government professional observed in 1932, “an irresistible demand that the cost of local government be reduced” swept “across the country like a prairie fire.” By 1933 there were over four thousand taxpayers’ organizations nationwide.

The attitudes of tax resisters toward the role and reach of government in general, and toward the New Deal in particular, were also unexpected. Because much of modern tax resistance is grounded in the world view, articulated by Ronald Reagan in his first inaugural address, that “government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” I anticipated that Depression-era tax revolters would exhibit intense antistatism. Although some organized taxpayers sought to shrink and shackle government, most did not want smaller, more limited government but rather government that was more efficient, more effective, more progressive, and able to provide necessary services in a cost-effective manner. Nearly all taxpayers wanted the price of government to undergo the same measure of deflation as the economy, but they also wanted to maintain the government services they needed and used. What most organized taxpayers desired was less expensive state and local government so as to reduce their state and local tax burdens.

The views of organized taxpayers toward the New Deal were a complicated and sometimes incongruous mix. The feelings of most members of taxpayers’ associations about the New Deal ranged from outright support to ambivalence. Two factors account for the overall lack of opposition to the New Deal from citizens who were protesting vigorously their state and local taxes.

First and foremost, New Deal programs were conferring direct, concrete benefits on many of these taxpayers, especially the housing, agricultural, and relief initiatives. Consequently, many members of taxpayers’ groups understandably welcomed—and some expected—the federal government’s intervention in the domestic economy. Even taxpayers with an individualistic, antistatist mindset tended to have mixed feelings about the New Deal, harboring suspicions of big government but recognizing their need for assistance from the Roosevelt administration and grudgingly accepting it.

Second, the New Deal tax regime did not produce significant tax awareness among or tax resistance from the middle classes because it eschewed taxing the income of the middle classes and instead relied mainly on taxes on the wealthy and corporations, on indirect or hidden consumer taxes, and on taxes (like social security payroll taxes) that taxpayers did not think of as taxes. By and large, taxpayers who participated in collective tax resistance at the local and state levels did not perceive New Deal spending to be adding to their tax burdens.

In my investigation of the 19^th-century origins and antecedents of Depression-era taxpayers’ associations, I was struck by how different collective tax resistance in the Reconstruction South was from organized taxpayer activity elsewhere. Outside the former confederate states, the overarching goal of nearly all taxpayers’ associations in this era was to reduce taxes, though in many cases taxpayers also had a genuine interest in promoting the public’s interest in good and efficient government. In the Reconstruction South, however, tax resistance under the guise of good citizenship was merely the means to other, ulterior ends. Taxpayers in the South used collective tax resistance in an effort to weaken government authority, “redeem” state governments from Republican control, reestablish the institutions of white supremacy, and nullify in practice (if not as a matter of law) the post-Civil War amendments to the United States Constitution. Taxpayers’ groups in the South also diverged from those in the North in their methods, including extrajudicial violence, which was absent from tax protests outside the former Confederacy.

Finally, tax resistance in the South was untethered to the evolving notions of civic responsibility and good citizenship that broadly animated Northern tax resistance. Most taxpayers’ groups outside the South were interested in, and worked for, better and more efficient government. Southern taxpayers’ leagues wanted the opposite: government that was worse, small, and ineffectual. The Redeemers were highly successful in their quest for low taxes, low spending, and weak state governments after 1877. In Mississippi, for example, between 1875 and 1885, Democrats cut the state budget by more than half and slashed taxes. The connections between organized tax resistance in the South and the commitment to good citizenship, better government, and the rule of law that most Northern taxpayers’ organizations evidenced was attenuated at best and often absent altogether.

Historians strive to be objective, but they often approach the subjects of their research with certain preconceptions. My investigation of organized taxpayer activity in the 1930s reminded me of the importance of keeping an open mind, expecting to find the unexpected, and adapting one’s historical analysis accordingly.

No More Consenting to Corruption in Philadelphia

This week in North Philly Notes, Brett Mandel, author of Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting, offers ideas about how to overcome the perils of public corruption.

Philadelphia is weeks away from an election that will help set a new direction for local government. Change is badly needed, given the unsatisfying state of the city. Candidates for mayor and for other offices are talking a lot about poverty, gun violence, and lack of economic opportunity. They should also be talking about public corruption, which underlies so many of Philadelphia’s problems. Today, corruption is consented to—through action and inaction by so many in our hyper-connected town—and it costs so much to run a city so poorly. To move Philadelphia into a better future, we must change a culture of corruption and implement key anticorruption reforms so we can best address the city’s challenges.

What is public corruption? It is when officials put their own private gain before the public good, abuse their public authority to advance private agendas, and pervert the work of public entities by excluding the public from official decision-making processes in order to favor private interests. Corruption increases the price of government services and reduces resources that could be used to address our many challenges. Corruption also imposes further costs in denying opportunity for those who deserve It, trampling on the values of fairness and equity, and threatening the health and safety of residents. 

Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting details the city’s history of corruption and show how it threatens our future. The book recounts the story of the city’s most important corruption investigation so far this century. It discusses the roots, effects, and reasons for corruption’s persistence, places our current issues into perspective, and offers recommendations to make positive change. Every candidate for office should read the book, review its recommendations, and tell voters what they will do to stop consenting to the corruption that holds Philadelphia back.

To make change for the better, we must understand certain things.

• We need to learn to recognize corruption when we see it. We are on the lookout for overt shakedowns or passing envelopes of cash to bribe seekers, but Philadelphia corruption generally consists of officials doing favors for friends and subverting the work of government to benefit special interests
• Arguing about whether corruption in Philadelphia is worse or better than it previously was is counterproductive; asserting that today’s corruption is different from that of the past does not reduce its cost or blunt its other damaging effects today
• Norms, laws, and accepted standards change; what was once an everyday practice can become stigmatized, even demonized, so we cannot count on the legal system to solve these problems
• We cannot leave the fight against corruption up to a few reform actors or a single reform moment; each of us needs to want our city to function systematically and properly for everyone more than we want to know someone who can get something done for us — and we cannot stop the fight after any small victory is won

We need a mayor and other elected officials who will confront our culture of corruption and embrace an anticorruption honor code for themselves and those they hire—to not only not engage in corruption acts, but to report instances of corruption they see. Ultimately, it is not enough to change rules or laws and we must all stop enabling corruptors with our silent consent. The defining characteristic of Philadelphia corruption is its collegiality. We are all so closely connected to each other, which makes us reluctant to call out bad behavior by anyone who is “one of us.” 

If we cannot stand against those who engage in corrupt activities because too many ties bind us together, then we need to organize a different “us” to oppose corruption. An anticorruption movement or slate of candidates, or even a formal local anticorruption political party could build a movement so we can split from those who do wrong by the city—and those who try to play both sides. If we refuse to consent to more corruption, we can create the thriving city that Philadelphians deserve.

Brett Mandel is a writer, consultant, and former city official active in reform politics in Philadelphia.

Looking at Religion, Politics, and COVID-19

This week in North Philly Notes, Paul Djupe and Amanda Friesen, coeditors of An Epidemic among My People, write about the impact of COVID-19 on collective action in religious communities.

If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. —II Chronicles 7:13–14 (King James Version)

A pandemic, unprecedented in nearly all of living human lifetimes, swept across continents starting in late 2019. By February 2021, total cases topped 100 million worldwide, with deaths numbering over 1.3 million. Understanding, explaining, and responding to this (preventable?) catastrophe has pitted science against ideology, pushed tensions among people of faith, and drawn sharp lines between people and their governments struggling to respond in reasonable ways with lives on the line. As social scientists interested in studying religion and society, we’ve been thinking and gathering data about the implications of the pandemic for our social institutions and individual behaviors as well as the reverse—how our social institutions shape responses to the pandemic. We see the pandemic response as a massive collective action problem—individuals need to cooperate with others and their governments at a time when the individual costs appear high in terms of restricted behavior, and the benefits are distant and collective.

Thinking about the pandemic in terms of collective action highlights core concerns in the social sciences regarding trust in others and in government, compliance with laws that are otherwise difficult to enforce, the availability and spread of accurate information, and the civil society forces that make or break effective governance. Though 1000s of articles have been published about the social science of COVID-19, we thought that a book-length treatment was necessary to mark this substantial moment in time. We were uniquely positioned to address these questions as many Americanist social scientists had secured funding, ethics approval, and organized plans to collect original survey data in a consequential presidential election year. Pivoting to ask about the pandemic in addition to religious and political inquiries provided a nimble responsiveness to events typically not available on the average academic budget. Yet, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these relationships, we needed experts across the social sciences of religion to tell the full story. One particularly rich data collection by the editors conducted in late March 2020 and then October 2020 was made available to our recruited authors who may not have access or funding to run their own studies. In this way, we were able to expand the number of voices interpreting our empirical results.

One of the values of this collection is the breadth and scope of how social scientists approach questions about religion and the COVID-19 pandemic. To keep the individual chapters in conversation with one another, we organized the chapters around three major themes. In the first part, we investigate the reaction of religious communities to pandemic public policies. Numerous churches, well covered in the media, defied state government public health orders, but how common was defiance in the broader population? What religious forces drove defiance?  Part II shifts gears to the courts and court of public opinion, exploring arguments of religious freedom versus public safety. Part III reverses the causal arrow to examine how the pandemic (and pandemic politics) affected group and individual religious choices, behavior, and beliefs.

Throughout, our contributors find a variety of novel insights that have not been aired elsewhere. Here is a sample. Much of the resistance to shut-down orders was linked to prosperity gospel beliefs, in which fervent belief recruited God’s protection from illness. And many religious adherents were more likely to adopt COVID conspiracy theories. Another finding is how Christian nationalists had little regard for protecting the vulnerable at the expense of liberty and the economy.

We looked for racial differences in congregational and clergy reactions given the frequent assertion that racial minority communities were hit harder than white communities. Surprisingly, we largely did not find disparate reactions organized by racial groups, and defiance to public health orders grew as people attended worship more across racial groups. We also saw that racial groups equally trust their clergy with their health, but African-Americans had less trust of medical professionals early in the pandemic.

Despite strong partisan lines drawn over restrictive public health orders, the public’s willingness to save people largely did not follow that pattern, though Trump remained a polarizing figure in related religious freedom cases. This is no surprise, in part due to his own rhetoric, but also because Christian Right organizations found common cause with Trump in the pandemic due to a connection to their historic commitments to law and order and against foreign threats.

An Epidemic among My People expands upon these findings, digging deeper into sources of pandemic information, the impact of the pandemic on religious behaviors, discussion of the legal battles, and more. Our goal was to provide a nearly comprehensive discussion of religion in public life.

Our Contributors: Daniel Bennett, Kraig Beyerlein, Cammie Jo Bolin, Ryan P. Burge, Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Ryon J. Cobb, Melissa Deckman, Joshua B. Grubbs, Don Haider-Markel, Ian Huff, Natalie Jackson, Jason Klocek, Benjamin Knoll, Andrew R. Lewis, Jianing Li, Natasha Altema McNeel, Matthew R. Miles, Shayla F. Olson, Diana Orcés, Samuel L. Perry, Jenna Reinbold, Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Stella M. Rouse, Justin A. Tucker, Dilara K. Üsküp, Abigail Vegter, Michael W. Wagner, Andrew L. Whitehead, Angelia R. Wilson, and the editors: Amanda Friesen and Paul Djupe, who also contributed chapters.

Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and Canada Research Chair in Political Psychology (Tier 2).

Paul A. Djupe directs the Data for Political Research program at Denison University, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog. Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.

An Epidemic among My People is available open access or for purchase

The (real) cost of living with dignity

This week in North Philly Notes, Lisa Iezzoni, author of Making Their Days Happen, writes about the personal and political implications of home-based supportive services and the workforce available to meet this need.

Although it sounds like hyperbole, Nelita kept my friend Michael alive. Michael is completely paralyzed below his neck from primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS), but he  has a happy life. Because of disability, he had to retire from being a physics professor and lives alone, in a modest home adapted for disability accessibility. Nevertheless, when we met in 2009, his power wheelchair had over 2,500 miles on its odometer, and if the weather cooperated, he spent his days rolling about his community, doing errands, auditing classes at the local university, and taking the train into nearby New York City to visit museums, attend concerts, or ride through Central Park. Michael couldn’t do any of this without Nelita.

Michael needs support for all activities of daily living (ADLs)—feeding, bathing, toileting, dressing, and moving in and out of his wheelchair—and Nelita was his primary personal care assistant (PCA). She arrived every morning at 6:00 am; got him out of bed using his automated, ceiling-mounted lift; assisted him with toileting, showering, and shaving; dressed him; got him set up in his power wheelchair, with its complicated electronics; made and fed him breakfast; and tidied up his bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen before rushing off, with kind parting words, to her second job (a Haitian immigrant, Nelita always juggled two or three jobs). Nelita worked for one of those franchise home-based personal care agencies with a warm and fuzzy name that have sprung up nationwide, and she received a fraction of the hourly fee Michael paid them. When, after several years, Michael’s MS progressed and he needed more PCA hours, he could no longer afford the agency. He finally enrolled in a tightly managed care insurance plan that covered his PCAs, and Nelita changed jobs to stay with him. She—and a team of other PCAs—not only keep Michael alive but support his ability to live his life as he wishes, with dignity.

Nelita, in turn, found her work with Michael personally rewarding. She knew that Michael valued her immeasurably and could not get by without her support. But personal assistance services jobs typically have low wages, meager benefits, scant societal respect, and are viewed as low skilled “women’s work.” However, providing personal care assistance is physically and emotionally demanding and requires navigation of complex and intimate relationships with consumers. It also demands keen observational skills and judgment. PCAs can identify consumers’ new health problems early, thus sometime preventing worsening disease and hospitalization. Nevertheless, by standard metrics, providing personal care assistance—which keeps people with significant disability alive and living with dignity—engenders little dignity for its practitioners, who are predominantly women, people of color, and often immigrants. Immigrants especially risk exploitation from private-pay consumers desperate for ADL supports but unwilling or unable to pay even the routine low wages.

Today, about 17 million Americans living in their homes need assistance with daily activities because of disability. These numbers will grow as baby boomers age. Most people receive assistance from family member or friends. However, as for Michael, when no one is available to provide this support, paid PCAs fill the need. In 2019, approximately 2.3 million workers provided home-based care, broadly defined, and job positions are expected to climb substantially in coming years. But the PCA workforce, with its low wages and high turnover (exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic), cannot keep pace with increasing demand.

Much has been written about the impending gap between the need for home-based supportive services and the workforce available to meet this need. Over the last two decades, blue ribbon commissions of experts have convened to discuss this and other imminent crises of long-term services and supports in America. Yet something has been missing from their copious reports and pronouncements: the voices of PCA consumers with significant disability and of PCAs. Also missing were detailed descriptions of exactly how consumers and PCAs approach their intimate interactions in consumers’ bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, and behind closed doors, and what dignity looks like day-to-day to consumers and to workers.

A reality in the U.S. is that money is the starting point for achieving the dignity objectives for both PCA consumers and PCAs. Many Americans erroneously believe that Medicare—federal health insurance for older people and former workers under age 65 with disability—pays for in-home ADL supports. It does not, except in narrow circumstances. Many consumers can only obtain the services they need by getting Medicaid (the joint federal-state health insurance program for low-income people), a difficult process with benefits varying widely across states. Even in more generous states, Medicaid budget limitations and complex policies mean that today about 800,000 people are on waiting lists to receive home-based services under Medicaid. President Biden’s Build Back Better plan—passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but currently stalled in the Senate—includes funding to provide in-home supports to older people and people with disability and to increase wages of home care workers. Build Back Better focuses on Medicaid-funded home-based supports, so it will not assist everyone needing these services, but it is a start.

To introduce the missing voices mentioned above, Making Their Days Happen uses interviews of PCA consumers and PCAs to tell their stories, putting these essential ADL support activities into current health and labor policy contexts. It also provides advice for people who might need personal care assistance services for themselves or a family member. Like any intensely intimate human interactions, providing and receiving ADL support can be interpersonally complex. Although PCA consumers and PCAs approach these services from different perspectives, both the benefits and challenges of paid personal care assistance distill down to a single word, dignity. For PCA consumers with significant disability, despite their physical vulnerabilities, dignity means having their wishes respected, all the way from how mundane ADL tasks are performed to supporting their preferences for how they live their lives, participate in community activities, and maximize their quality of life. For PCAs, dignity means societal recognition and respect for the crucial work they perform, plus a living wage, paid sick leave and vacations, safe working conditions, and the training and skills advancement to build a career.

Moving Beyond Schoolhouse Rock and Understanding Regulatory Processes

This week in North Philly Notes, Sara Rinfret, editor of Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?, writes about why regulations do matter.

Former President Trump often used slogans on the campaign trail to “end bad regulations” or to halt the “war on coal.” These soundbites assisted the Trump administration’s efforts to rollback more than 100 environmental regulations in the United States during his presidency. But, why? Are regulations bad?

Teaching courses on U.S. government to high school or college students often only covers the Schoolhouse Rock‘s version of “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” Unfortunately, we do not spend enough time examining in our curriculum what occurs after a piece of legislation becomes law.

Who Really Makes Environmental Policy?, urges that we must increase our understanding of regulatory processes to document policymaking in the United States less complex, with a myriad of access points for public participation. The book uses illustrative environmental policy case studies to guide the reader through the stages of administrative rulemaking. Unpacking these regulatory stages moves us beyond our Schoolhouse Rock mindset and illustrates how and why Congress delegates its decision-making authority to administrative agencies.

Congress delegates the implementation of policy to administrative agencies because it does not have the time or expertise to do so. This delegation of authority provides administrative agencies the ability to create law through the administrative rulemaking process. The stages of this process can be best understood by learning from the case studies that examine each of the distinct steps, such as rule development, public comment, to post-rulemaking activities. Our regulatory adventure does not stop after the stages of the rulemaking, but it is monitored and carried out by state environmental inspectors who ensure compliance with environmental law. These individuals, for example, ensure a nearby company is not improperly disposing of waste.

Unfortunately, the regulatory process is not discussed enough and often depicted as detrimental to business. Who Really Makes Environmental Policy? dispels this myth by inviting and encouraging the opportunity for students, practitioners and the general public to engage in a clear, step-by-step guide about the stages of the process. Specifically, we argue environmental policymaking is not made in a black hole. Instead, taking the time to understand regulatory processes is another access point for the American public to directly engage in providing input by using electronic platforms such as Regulations.gov.  

Regulations are not bad in general; they protect the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. The heavy lifters of environmental policy are career civil servants, your next-door neighbor who works for agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service, or the National Park Service, to name a few. We just need to do a better job of understanding the process, which is the goal of Who Really Makes Environmental Policy? As Regulations.gov clearly states, “Make a difference. Submit your comments, and let your voice be heard!”

The Top Five Reasons to Pack the Supreme Court

This week in North Philly Notes, Stephen Feldman, author of Pack the Court! explains why Democrats should expand the number of Supreme Court justices.

Democrats should pack the Supreme Court if and when they have the opportunity. Yet, many object to court packing, arguing that it would destroy the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a judicial institution. According to this view, the Court’s legitimacy is based on a law-politics dichotomy: The idea that law and politics must remain separate and independent. The justices must decide cases by neutrally applying the rule of law. If politics infect the Court and its decision making, then Court decisions are tainted.

Although many Republicans and Democrats share this view of the Court, it is seriously mistaken. Here, then, are five reasons to support court packing.

1. History of the Court’s Size. History reveals that Congress has repeatedly changed the number of justices based partly on political grounds; seven times by express statute. The Court has fluctuated between a minimum of six and a maximum of ten seats. Nothing in the Constitution precludes Congress from changing the Court’s size. From 1861 to 1869, for instance, politically driven Congresses changed the number of authorized Court seats from nine to ten to seven to nine. Most recently, for more than a year from February 2016 to April 2017, Mitch McConnell and a Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee de facto reduced the Court to eight justices when they refused to open confirmation hearings for Democratic President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland.

2. History of the Appointment and Confirmation Processes. Despite the usual insistence that politics must be irrelevant to the Court’s business, presidents choose and congresses typically confirm (or reject) Supreme Court nominees based heavily on political considerations. Contrary to conservative claims that Democrats politicized and ruined the confirmation process in 1987, when they refused to confirm Robert Bork, presidents starting with George Washington have seen Congress shoot down their nominees for political reasons. Throughout American history, nearly one-fourth of the Supreme Court nominees have failed.

3. Analytical Argument Against the Law-Politics Dichotomy—Understanding the Law-Politics Dynamic. The law-politics dichotomy is a myth, propagated over the years for professional and political reasons. Contrary to this myth, law and politics dynamically interact in Supreme Court decision making. Law is neither the handmaiden of politics nor mere window-dressing, hiding political machinations. But law should never be understood as being separate and independent from politics, at least in Supreme Court decision making. In most cases, the justices sincerely interpret the relevant legal texts—the Constitution, statutes, executive orders, and so on—but interpretation is never mechanical. The justices’ political ideologies always influence their textual interpretations, so law and politics always intertwine in the adjudicative process. Politics, in other words, shapes the justices’ interpretive conclusions even though the justices focus on the law. Unsurprisingly, then, the justices’ legal interpretations and judicial conclusions ordinarily coincide with their respective political preferences.

If the Court decides cases pursuant to a law-politics dynamic—and the law-politics dichotomy is a myth—then the primary criticism of court-packing vanishes. If Supreme Court decision making is not and never has been apolitical, then court-packing cannot undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an apolitical institution. Court-packing cannot infect the Court with politics because the law-politics dynamic is already (and always) inherent in legal interpretation and Supreme Court adjudication.

4. Politics of the Roberts Court. Despite claiming to follow the rule of law, the Roberts Court has consistently decided cases in accord with a conservative political agenda. Corporations and the wealthy usually win; the poor might not even get into court. Employers win; unions and employees lose. Whites win; people of color lose. Men win; women lose. Christians win; non-Christians lose. Republicans with entrenched political power win; Democratic voters lose. Gun owners win; everybody else loses.

If the Democrats were to enact progressive legislation—for example, statutes restoring and fortifying voting rights, creating universal health care, strengthening environmental protections and fighting climate change, restricting gun ownership, and protecting documented and undocumented immigrants—the Roberts Court, with its current personnel, would likely construct constitutional barriers to weaken or invalidate such laws.

5. Public Support for the Court. Would court packing cause many people to lose faith in the Court’s authority? The question here is not how the Court actually decides cases, but rather how the public perceives the Court. Nevertheless, political science studies suggest that the Democrats should go ahead and pack the Court. The public’s diffuse support for the Court is resilient, sustained by “a reservoir of favorable attitudes or good will.” Even when the Court issues a decision contrary to an individual’s personal views, that individual is unlikely to lose faith in the Court. If anything, when news of Court activities draws an individual’s attention, then that attention (to the Court) will likely reinforce the individual’s positive views of the institution. In a sense, the more one knows about the Court, the more one is likely to find its decisions legitimate (the opposite is true for Congress). In fact, many Americans understand that Supreme Court decision making entails a combination of law and politics—the law-politics dynamic. The people’s support for and loyalty to the Court does not depend on the myth of the law-politics dichotomy. To the extent that individual views of the Court’s legitimacy might change in response to a court-packing plan, partisan shifts would likely cancel each other out.

In conclusion, the potential for court packing is baked into the checks and balances of our tripartite national government. As history demonstrates, the Constitution grants Congress and the president control over the size of the Court as well as the nomination and confirmation processes. Therefore, at any particular time, politics determines whether court packing is possible and appropriate. When the time is right, as it is today, then a court-packing proposal would likely reinforce rather than weaken the Court’s legitimacy.

Examining our fraught relationship with food

This week in North Philly Notes, Jeffrey Haydu, author of Upsetting Food, writes about how food is ethically identified—and why that matters.

On May 28, 2021, the New York Times reported a lawsuit against Vital Farms. Plaintiffs charged that Vital Farms misled consumers by advertising its eggs as, “‘delicious, ethical food you don’t have to question.'” Three years earlier, a leading proponent of alternative agriculture, The Cornucopia Institute, rounded up different egg labels (ranging from “All Natural” to “Omega-3”). Of eleven examined, the Institute found five to be meaningless, misleading or “seriously flawed.”

These disputes testify to our fraught relationship with food. Concerns about the safety, nutritional value, and ethical virtues of what we eat are pervasive. Increasingly, consumers rely on third-party programs to certify a food as “good,” whether for body or soul, local community or planet. Upsetting Food: Three Eras of Food Protest in the United States, shows that such doubts about commercial food date back to the early 19th century. But the ways in which conscientious consumers sought to resolve those doubts have changed. Consumers have looked to quite different markers of trustworthy food from one era to another.

In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham warned his followers of the dangers of meat, commercial bread, and spices. What were the hallmarks of trustworthy foods? Those sanctified by the Bible, but also those prepared at home with the loving hands of wives and mothers. Such food, wrapped in piety, family, and tradition, was good for the body. It also met ethical goals by quieting men’s and women’s baser impulses.

Food reformers of the 1890s and 1900s voiced some similar concerns over suspect bread, contaminated meat, “unnatural” preservatives, and adulterated beverages. In this era, however, consumers were told to trust food that had been vetted by the federal government; that conformed to the new science of nutrition; and that had been prepared in modern, “hygienic” factories. Here too, more than health was at stake. The new regulatory and educational regime would restore honesty to markets and expertise to tradition-bound homemakers.

In the 1960s, some additional concerns emerged: “artificial” foods and pesticides joined fluffy white bread and preservatives on the list of anxieties. But now, food untainted by modern technology and nutritional science—”natural” food—represented the gold standard. And food acquired through alternative institutions like small farms, natural food stores, and neighborhood co-ops was deemed more reliable. By patronizing these alternatives, moreover, consumers were joining a virtuous conspiracy against Big Ag, corporate capital, and a servile state.

These differences among the three eras mostly reflect the larger movement cultures in which food reformers moved. Graham applied to diet a more general evangelical template for social uplift, one already in use to address the problems of slavery, intemperance, and “fallen women.” Proponents of pure food legislation and nutritional science applied to food the standard Progressive playbook: modern science can identify solutions for social ills, and government regulation can implement those solutions. Early organic advocates shared with a wider counterculture a deep suspicion of organized politics and modern technology. They shared, too, its belief that by living our lives differently we could bit by bit build a better society. Nowadays, many activists retain doubts about government as a lever for change. And partly for that reason, we have more faith in our ability to achieve social justice through concerted consumer choices. For a better food system, vote with your fork!

But there is more to the story than that. Upsetting Food also shows how reformers’ ideals of trustworthy food built on—or deliberately repudiated—the efforts of their predecessors. Progressive reformers were deeply skeptical of religion and tradition as guides to social practices, whether in managing factories or cooking food. Early organic advocates, in turn, explicitly rejected modern science and government—the Progressive stalwarts—for being little more than shills for big business. And contemporary food reformers are often guided by the perceived failures of the organic movement. Its eventual embrace of minimalist government standards and its cooptation by large food companies, we hear, doomed organic as a genuinely alternative food system. Hence the appeal both of labels less easily coopted by global corporations (“local”) and of third-party certifiers (Non-GMO Project, Certified C.L.E.A.N.) who, we hope, can themselves be trusted. And thus the outrage (channeled through legal action) when the virtues proclaimed by labels (“delicious, ethical food”) prove illusory.