February 9, 2025

The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

Building Radical Democracy

Uncategorized

LIKE BAD SCIENCE FICTION: THE GROWING DANGER OF ANTI-ABORTION EXTREMISM

It’s January 2026. The Republican president thanks Congress for banning all abortions and makes an enthusiastic plea for a law that would require a national registry of pregnant women, so their pregnancies could be subject to surveillance.

Far-fetched? Not the way things are going. When it comes to extremism, Republican politicians are racing each other to the bottom.

Once we thought that otherwise anti-choice Republicans favored allowing girls and women who were victims of rape or incest to get abortions. But there are no such exceptions in the laws Republican legislatures have recently enacted.

Many Republican officials now even oppose an abortion exception for protecting the life of the mother. And already in some states, women have been prosecuted for stillbirths and miscarriages deemed suspicious and charged with child neglect or abuse for allegedly causing their pregnancies to end.

We also thought that Republicans acknowledged that the decision to use contraception was a constitutionally protected, private decision. But that’s also now up for grabs.

When an anti-abortion law says a fertilized egg, not yet implanted in the womb, is an “unborn child,” a woman who uses an IUD to prevent pregnancy can be alleged to “murder” the supposed “child” (actually a microscopic clump of cells).

As for other contraceptive methods, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has invited cases to be brought to cancel the constitutional right to use any form of contraception. Is it difficult to imagine that people with certain religious beliefs might demand the GOP outlaw selling contraceptives to unmarried couples or teenagers?

A Republican-sponsored federal anti-abortion bill is certainly in the cards — even though 62 percent of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court’s overruling Roe v. Wade, and a solid majority believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But the Republican Party prefers to follow instead the view of a religious minority that believes they are entitled to impose their religious views on everyone else.

This desire to impose religious orthodoxy is at the root of the issue.

Certainly it’s hard to imagine any justification for asserting — other than religious beliefs held by a minority — that a blastocyst of six to ten cells (which is all there is three days after an egg has been fertilized) is an “unborn child,” let alone a person with full constitutional rights.

How might a nation-wide anti-abortion law be enforced? A federal pregnancy registry is one possibility. The government could require all doctors and clinics to report all pregnancies and require follow-up reports on how the pregnancy ended. Claims of miscarriages might warrant investigation.

Another possibility was offered by the Texas law deputizing private individuals to seek a $10,000 fine from anyone who provides or facilitates an abortion. Congress could pass a federal law along the same lines.

Bounty hunters could use modern technology to track women’s movements. With cell phone location data that’s already available, it is possible to track individuals from place to place.

For a small fee, data brokers can provide bounty hunters — and today’s anti-abortion vigilantes — with data for an abortion clinic, showing how often people visit, how long they stay, and where they came from.

In fact such information is for sale today. It doesn’t yet include the names of clinic visitors, but it’s technologically simple to “de-anonymize” the data and identify each person by name and address. The same technologies can identify pregnant people who travel to another state for an abortion.

It sounds like bad science fiction, but these are elements of a very real near future that Republicans hope to bring to America.

Contraceptives limited or banned. The government surveilling your pregnancy. Prosecutors investigating miscarriages. Bounty-hunters seeking $10,000 fines from you. Private anti-abortion fanatics tracking your movements.

Voters must decide whether they welcome or fear this future.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left – Episode 12 Out Now!

The twelfth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

This episode is the first in our education series which looks at the origins of capitalism in the early modern period. In part I of the series, I explore early modern English history, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and William Shakespeare’s works to look at early aspects of separation, dehumanization, and exploitation and how those aspects of capitalism manifest in The Tempest.

This podcast includes works from:

  • Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch
  • Francisco de Victoria’s lecture – “the Indian problem” from 1539
  • Dr. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s article “The Tempest and Early Modern Concepts of Race.”
  • Claire Waters “The Tempest’s Sycorax as ‘Blue Eye’d Hag’: A Note Towards a Reassessment”
  • Jerry Broton’s The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

SELFISHNESS FUELS THE WAR ON ABORTION

Stories abound of conservative women who picket out front of clinics quietly coming in the back to get their own abortions.

By Sonali Kolhatkar | July 20, 2022

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was as predictable as it was shocking. Right-wing forces have spent years working to erase the right to abortion, and — for now — they have won.

Contrary to the idea that men have foisted the abortion ban on women, though, the ban is a patriarchal attack by conservatives — men and women — on the rest of us.

There’s a general attitude that forms the basis of most right-wing attacks: that the denial of rights will only affect someone else — someone who deserves it. But when conservatives are personally impacted, they’re an exception.

Stories abound of conservative women who picket out front of abortion clinics quietly coming in the back to get their own abortions. One provider told The Daily Beast, “All of us who do abortions see patients quite regularly who tell us, ‘I’m not pro-choice, but I just can’t continue this pregnancy.’”

She added, “These are not people who turn anti-choice after having an abortion, but who simply access this essential service when they need it in spite of their personal beliefs about abortion in general.”

A survey of women who’ve had abortions by the fundamentalist Christian group Care Net suggests that many of these women belong to conservative churches. Over 40 percent of their respondents reported attending services regularly.

It’s a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do.” This selfish logic informs many conservative positions.

Take gun violence. Those who support the complete availability of guns seem to have no problem surrendering that right when it comes to protecting the powerful.

Armed members of the public are allowed nowhere near Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, or current and former presidents. Guns are even prohibited at National Rifle Association conventions when current or former presidents speak.

But the rest of us — even children and the elderly — have to risk living among armed and dangerous people.

Take welfare.

Republican politicians have made it their mission to slash what they call “entitlement” programs. But their voters often rely most heavily on food stamps and other benefits. In polls, white Americans, who are overrepresented among conservatives, tend to support welfare programs — until they discover those programs might also help people of color.

Take voting rights.

Conservatives and Republicans want to make it harder for people to vote, premised on the false claim that many people vote for Democrats illegally. But most of the very small handful of people caught illegally voting have turned out to be Republicans.

Circling back, many religious conservatives seem to believe that abortion is the first resort of promiscuous teen teenagers.

In reality, today’s typical abortion patient is a low-income woman in her late 20s who has already had one child and cannot afford another one. In fact, nearly a quarter of all people capable of pregnancy will have one in their lifetimes by age 45. That percentage may be even higher considering that researchers find people severely underreport their abortions.

It’s a fair bet that if anti-abortionists had a way to ensure their own personal access to abortion when they needed it, and a ban for everyone else, they’d do it.

Of course, the religious right didn’t do this on their own. So-called liberals in Hollywood have written anti-abortion tropes into their plot lines for decades, and Democrats in office failed to codify these rights when they had the chance.

Years of invisibility and shame paved the road to Roe’s reversal. But now, more and more people are coming forward to tell their stories, revealing abortion as the mundane and shame-free health procedure that it is.

These stories will be crucial to tell. And when anti-abortion conservatives — victims of their own success — need an abortion have nowhere to turn to, I hope we’ll hear their stories too. When you’re no longer the exception to the rule, it’s harder to be selfish.

Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This commentary was produced by the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and adapted by OtherWords.org.

HOMELESSNESS IS A POLICY CHOICE — AND WE CAN CHOOSE DIFFERENTLY

Much of my adult life has been spent homeless or incarcerated. Now I help homeless people and returning citizens.

I’ve lived on the streets, been in Hollywood films, owned my own footwear service, rubbed elbows with a Saudi Prince, and even sung for Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago — while in and out of homelessness. I’ve also been to federal prison and battled substance abuse.

In some ways, I’ve lived an unusual life. But with 140 million Americans poor or low-income, there’s nothing unusual about growing up in a broken home, enduring homelessness, or ending up in the criminal justice system.

We all make our own choices. But I’ve learned that our social and political systems often make choices for us, too. And those are the choices we can change together.

My dad left when I was two, and my stepfather was abusive. My mom tried her best to shelter me. But in reality, our “broken home” was a reflection of the politically and economically neglected community we lived in.

As a teen, I was never sure what I would find at home. So I joined band, theater, track, football, martial arts — anything I could do to avoid dangers and make myself strong.

I was supposed to go to the University of Miami for football, but I also suffered from what we now call ADHD. In those days kids like me were just called hyperactive, drugged, and punished. So my grades fell and I went to Miami Dade College instead.

Eventually I fell in with the wrong crowd, lured by the money that came with a life of drug dealing in Miami. When I got caught, I realized how much I’d betrayed the values my mother raised me with.

I used my time in federal prison to become more educated and started counseling my former inmates, who called me “Preacher.” The guards broke the rules and allowed a dozen inmates at a time into my cell to be led in prayer and teachings.

Armed with my faith in God and my values — and the concrete help of the critical housing voucher program — I was able to move from a shelter to a home of my own after I was released.

I now work with the National Coalition for the Homeless, helping other homeless people and citizens returning from incarceration. I’m even a “lived experience expert” with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, helping streamline programs to help people find stable housing.

Many people I work with have stories like mine — or yours.

Some have lost jobs — or had jobs that didn’t pay enough. Some had a baby and couldn’t afford child care. Some suffered domestic abuse. Many had health problems, injuries, or debt.

These things can happen to anyone. So when you see us on the street, look at us like fellow human beings. If you can spare them, gift cards for food, medicine, or supplies can make a huge difference for homeless people individually.

But collectively, we can also make different political choices that will help everyone keep a roof over our heads.

Nowhere in America are rents affordable on the minimum wage, so we should raise it to a living wage and invest in affordable housing, rental assistance, housing vouchers, and stronger unemployment insurance. Better access to affordable child care, mental health care, and health insurance would also keep more people in their homes.

President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would have provided all of this, but conservatives in Congress shelved it. But with enough pressure, we may be able to get housing needs back into a reconciliation bill Congress is now considering.

If we recognize our common humanity and fight for the rights of everyone, we can create a fairer society for all of us.

Don Gardner is an advocate with the National Coalition for the Homeless and a member of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

AN UGLY NEW ERA OF “STATES’ RIGHTS”

An earlier version of this op-ed was published on May 11, 2022. It was updated on June 29 with new information.

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade — and with it, half a century of constitutional precedent.

At least 26 states are now likely to criminalize abortions, often without exceptions for rape, incest, or life-threatening pregnancies. In Louisiana, people seeking abortions could even face execution, which doesn’t strike me as particularly pro-life.

A few states are already rushing to attack contraception too, with officials in Idaho and Louisiana pushing to ban IUDs, the morning after pill, and other common birth control methods. Hardline lawmakers are also likely to ban methods of conception, including in-vitro fertilization, or IVF.

Down the line, experts warn that the rights to interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and even divorce, parental custody, and the right to accept or refuse medical treatment could be in jeopardy. People’s control over their own intimate decisions and private lives is at stake.

But among the most alarming things in the ruling is its sneering pretense that this is somehow about safeguarding democracy. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito.

That’s the same “states’ rights” deceit once used to defend segregation. The truth is that in many states, so-called “elected representatives” pick their voters — not vice versa. And that’s leading to a new wave of extremism in statehouses.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called states “laboratories of democracy.” These days, as former Hamilton County, Ohio commissioner David Pepper put it in his book of the same name, many have become “laboratories of autocracy.”

Pepper and I share a home state that’s a case in point. In Ohio, a Trump-appointed federal judge just allowed Ohio Republicans to force illegally gerrymandered maps on voters, who twice voted overwhelmingly for fairer districts. The state Supreme Court ruled four times that the maps illegally diluted Ohioans’ voting power, but we’re stuck with them anyway.

Most Ohioans are pro-choice, but thanks to maps like these we now have one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. That’s why “returning power over basic civil rights to illegally gerrymandered states like Ohio is an absolute disaster in waiting,” concludes David DeWitt in the Ohio Capital Journal.

It gets even more absurd elsewhere.

In states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly gotten more votes than their Republican counterparts. But rigged maps keep giving Republicans sizable majorities — which they’ve then used in all three states to strip power from Democratic governors elected statewide.

Across the country, methods like these are used to ram through extreme legislation that ignores the will of voters. For example, recent polling suggests at least 34 states plus D.C. have pro-choice majorities or pluralities. Many are banning abortion anyway.

It’s not just abortion. Again and again, unaccountable state governments are showing themselves incapable of decent governance.

Florida is ripping up K-12 math books — yes, math books — that allegedly teach “critical race theory.” Unhinged Tennessee lawmakers are calling for literal book burnings. And one-party states nationwide are making it harder to vote.

Frankly, things aren’t much better at the federal level — and Alito should know.

Five of the six conservative seats on the Supreme Court, including Alito’s, were appointed by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote — and confirmed by Republican Senate “majorities” representing a minority of Americans.

The same Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression while lifting bans on money in politics. This court, in short, has made it much harder for people to choose their own representatives.

The loser here isn’t the big-D Democratic Party. It’s small-d democracy. When politicians can do whatever they want to us, everyone loses.

Decades ago, it took a national civil rights movement and federal legislation to reclaim common sense and decency from extremist state governments. Today, it’s also going to take reforming the Supreme Court.

Peter Certo is the editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of OtherWords.org.

MOST AMERICANS SUPPORT ABORTION RIGHTS. DO YOUR LEADERS?

Often when we get bad news, someone on the sidelines will say “look on the bright side” and offer some pablum to make us feel better.

But with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, there ain’t no bright side.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading non-partisan research organization on sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion soon as a result of the ruling. In fact, some states’ anti-abortion laws have already gone into effect.

But that doesn’t mean the strong majority of Americans who support abortion rights are helpless.

The street and clinic protests we’re seeing daily are important and likely to grow — at least until the billy clubs and bullets come out. That’s doing what activists have done throughout our history: turn anger into action.

If you’re not there already – get mad. Then get even. There’s time, there’s opportunity, and there’s a process open to all U.S. adults: the midterm elections. If you can’t change their minds, you can change their faces.

Many state legislators and governors have already declared themselves for or against abortion rights. It’s your right to vote accordingly.

All 435 U.S. House seats are on the ballot, and 34 of the 100 Senate seats will be decided. You can find out where your reps stand on codifying abortion access into federal law — often in their own words, if you search for them. If they’re celebrating Dobbs or on the fence, you can vote to kick ‘em out.

Meanwhile, educate your peers and your neighbors. Lots of folks may think the Dobbs decision doesn’t affect them personally. Wrong. All civil rights are in the cross hairs.

Don’t take my word for it. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas celebrated the Court’s conservative coup by declaring that decisions protecting same-sex relationships, marriage equality, and access to contraceptives should be revisited.

Think it will stop there? Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn has already tweeted “Now do Plessy vs. Ferguson/Brown vs. Board of Education,” seemingly suggesting going back to racial segregation. (Cornyn tried to walk it back, but you know what they say about cats and bags.)

Get even with time or money or both. Many national and state organizations are mobilizing to turn out the pro-choice vote. You can give money if you’re able. If not, you can give time by knocking on doors or staffing voter registration drives.

Remember that people with good intentions often don’t act unless prodded. Groups will need volunteers to push, pull, or drive supporters to the polls on election day.

There’s never been a more urgent time to heed the words of former President Barack Obama: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

A clear majority of Americans want abortion to be legal and women’s rights safeguarded. Our best opportunity to restore basic rights to bodily autonomy is now.

Martha Burk (@MarthaBurk) is the director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO). This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Good Grief: An Art Show in Loving Memory of Mimi Soltysik by Lynn Lomibao

On Sunday, June 26th, 2022, Mimi Soltysik’s widow, Lynn Lomibao, hosted an art show in loving memory of Mimi who passed on June 28th, 2020 titled Good Grief.  Mimi was not just an activist, the 2016 presidential nominee for The Socialist Party USA, an organizer for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and the former educator for The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, but he was also a loving husband and friend to his wife and fellow activist, Lynn.

I am not an art critic, but you don’t need to be an art critic to be moved by art. As someone who both knows Lynn and knew Mimi, this show and the art on display moved me deeply. Lynn, while talking to attendees, noted that she started to paint after Mimi’s diagnosis. Upon seeing her paintings, Mimi remarked that they’d get Lynn an art show to display her amazing works.

With her permission, we’re sharing the art pieces she’s created during her grieving process that were featured at the show.

 

             

CELEBRATING JUNETEENTH WITH BOLD NEW IDEAS

This op-ed was originally published on June 19, 2019. We’re reprinting it to mark Juneteenth in 2022.

One day in late June, 1865, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas. They carried some historic news: Legal slavery had ended some two and a half years ago with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. And so some of the last enslaved people left in America were freed.

The day became known as “Juneteenth,” a holiday still celebrated today in black communities across the United States.

Yet more than 150 years after slavery, black wealth still lags centuries behind white wealth. A report by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) found that it would take 228 years for black families to amass the amount of wealth white families already own today.

In fact, the racial wealth divide is greater today than it was decades ago, and still widening. That divide won’t close without bold, structural reform to match the structural injustices that created it — from slavery itself to Jim Crow, red lining, and mass incarceration.

A more recent IPS report offered a number of promising solutions to close this gap. Some ideas include….

1. Baby Bonds: Baby bonds are federally managed accounts that could be set up at birth for all kids and grow over time. When a child reaches adulthood, they could use these federally seeded funds for education, to buy a house, or start a business.

2. Guaranteed Employment and a Living Wage: Bridging the racial wealth means creating good jobs that pay a living wage for everyone who can work. A federal jobs guarantee would provide universal job coverage and eliminate involuntary unemployment. A much higher minimum wage would ensure all jobs actually support families.

3. Affordable Housing: Secure housing remains out of reach for millions of families, and homes are the biggest source of middle class wealth. We need big investments in public housing, rent control, and down payment assistance for first-time buyers from marginalized backgrounds to ameliorate historical injustices and address the current crisis.

4. Medicare for All: People of color accounted for more than half of the 32 million non-elderly uninsured people in 2016, putting them at serious medical and financial risk. Medicare for All would drastically reduce bankruptcies from health care, the single largest source for all Americans.

5. Postal Banking: People of color are particularly vulnerable to being unbanked, along with rural people and the elderly. The Postal Service could offer short term, low-interest loans to these populations to protect them from predatory payday lenders.

6. Higher Taxes on the Ultra-Wealthy: Significantly raising taxes on the extremely rich would reduce the corrupting influence of wealth on our politics while producing significant revenue to create opportunities for those who’ve been blocked from generating wealth.

7. Fixing the Tax Code: We spend $600 billion per year on tax subsidies that ensure the wealthy are able to become wealthier. Shifting these expenditures toward low-wealth people would have a monumental impact.

8. Reparations: A bill called HR 40, championed currently by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18), would create a commission to study the issue of reparations and grapple with what they could really look like. That’s a welcome step.

9. Better Data Collection: It’s difficult to understand the scope of the racial wealth divide without good information on the full range of racial diversity in the United States. Localized data on household assets and debt by race would provide better insight for policy making.

10. A Racial Wealth Audit: All laws and policies can have unintended consequences. So we need a framework to assess the impact of new ideas on the wealth divide.

All of these are bold ideas. But none are so bold as the news that greeted Galveston in 1865: Slavery was over. This Juneteenth, let’s keep thinking radically about how to take on this incredibly important challenge.

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Jessicah Pierre worked as an inequality media specialist at the Institute for Policy Studies. She now works in public service. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

ONLY IN TOP GUN CAN THE MILITARY SOLVE ALL OUR PROBLEMS

Somewhere at a theater near you, Top Gun: Maverick is serving up a feel-good drama about a plucky U.S. Navy pilot who dispatches some unnamed bad guys before he gets the girl.

Meanwhile, a real-life drama is unfolding in Washington around the massive resources we put into the real U.S. military, where the stakes are much different than in the movies.

The world of Top Gun is simple: the hero, Maverick, dispatches a nameless enemy with his fighter jet, and all is well. In the original Top Gun, the hero literally rides off into the sunset.

In real life, hundreds of Americans continue to die each day from COVID — deaths that are at this point largely preventable. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year of opioid overdoses. Millions of us are at risk of eviction or behind on rent. Millions more are about to face another hurricane and wildfire season in the age of climate change.

Needless to say, Maverick is not coming to the rescue. But that isn’t stopping some members of Congress from demanding ever more money for the military. They want well over $800,000,000,000 for the next budget.

It’s as if Top Gun were the real world and a jet fighter were the answer to all our problems.

Our real-life leaders have a damning record in this century of starting wars that can’t be won. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan kept troops endlessly deployed for years and cost trillions of dollars plus nearly 1 million lives. Yet not even Hollywood could make them look like wins for the United States.

The fighter jets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, either.

The U.S. plane that was supposed to put all others to shame, the F-35 fighter jet, was called “a scandal and a tragedy” by none other than the U.S. Senate’s own “maverick,” the late Senator John McCain. That’s because it’s a money pit that has spontaneously caught fire at least three times.

The Pentagon tacitly acknowledged these failures when it requested a smaller number of these planes for next year. But some in Congress are eager to force the Pentagon into a bigger buy.

An entirely different sort of movie could come from the story of TransDigm, the Pentagon contractor that swindled the Pentagon (and taxpayers) by charging millions of dollars more than its spare parts should have cost. In this movie, the swindler gets away with it: TransDigm continues to receive Pentagon dollars even after its price gouging was uncovered.

Meanwhile, our over-reliance on sending weapons and military aid as a foreign policy means the U.S. and its allies are failing to seek a viable end to the conflict in Ukraine. The U.S. already spends more than 12 times as much as Russia on our military, so a lack of money clearly isn’t the problem.

All of this adds up to a Pentagon that has so much money, it literally doesn’t know where it all goes — and a government that can barely imagine solutions beyond Maverick in an F/A-18 Super Hornet that the Navy lent to the studio.

While some lawmakers want to add even more to a Pentagon budget that is already higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, others see another way forward. A new bill from Representatives Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan would cut $100 billion from the Pentagon budget to fund neglected priorities and bring some discipline and sense to the Pentagon.

At a bare minimum, lawmakers should refuse to fund the Pentagon at a level higher than the $773 billion already set aside for fiscal year 2023, which Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says is plenty adequate.

The real world is rife with problems that fighter jets can’t touch, and the real Pentagon has problems far more complex than what you see on the big screen. Legislators should embrace the real world when it comes to Pentagon spending and say that more isn’t always more.

It might even be the most maverick move there is.

Federal budgeting expert Lindsay Koshgarian directs the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

KEEPING WORKERS POOR IS BAD FOR BUSINESS

At America’s biggest low-wage employers, chief executives now pocket 670 times more than their workers.

By Sam Pizzigati | June 14, 2022

CEOs at America’s biggest low-wage employers now take home, on average, 670 times what their typical workers make.

But we don’t just get unfairness when a boss can grab more in a year than a worker could make in over six centuries. We get bungling and inefficient businesses.

Management science has been clear on this point for generations, ever since the days of the late Peter Drucker.

Management theorists credit Drucker, a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, for laying down “the foundations of management as a scientific discipline.” Drucker’s classic 1946 study of General Motors established him as the nation’s foremost authority on corporate effectiveness.

That effectiveness, Drucker believed, had to rest on fairness.

Corporations that compensate their CEOs at rates far outpacing worker pay create cultures where organizational excellence can never take root. These corporations create ever bigger bureaucracies, with endless layers of management that serve only to prop up huge paychecks at the top.

Drucker argued that no executive should make more than 25 times what their workers earn. And, in the two decades after World War II, America’s leading corporate chiefs by and large accepted Drucker’s perspective.

Their companies shared the wealth when they bargained with the strong unions of the postwar years. In fact, notes the Economic Policy Institute, major U.S. corporate CEOs in 1965 were only realizing 21 times the pay their workers were pocketing.

Drucker died in 2005 at age 95. He lived long enough to see Corporate America make a mockery of his 25-to-1 standard. But research since his death has consistently reaffirmed his take on the negative impact of wide CEO-worker pay differentials.

The just-released 28th annual edition of the Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report explores these wide differentials in eye-opening detail. The report zeroes in on the 300 major U.S. corporations that pay their median workers the least.

At these 300 firms, average CEO pay last year jumped to $10.6 million, some 670 times their $24,000 median worker pay.

At over 100 of these firms, worker pay didn’t even keep with inflation. And at most of those companies, executives wasted millions buying back their own stock instead of giving workers a raise.

Just as Drecker predicted, this unfairness has led directly to performance issues. Many of our nation’s most unequal companies, from Amazon to federal call center contractor Maximus, have seen repeated walkouts and protests from justifiably aggrieved workers.

Lawmakers in Congress, the Institute for Policy Studies points out, could be taking concrete steps to rein in extreme pay disparities. They could, for instance, raise taxes on corporations with outrageously wide pay gaps.

But with this Congress unlikely to act, the new Institute for Policy Studies report also highlights a promising move the Biden administration could take on its own. The administration could start using executive action “to give corporations with narrow pay ratios preferential treatment in government contracting.”

That would amount to a major step forward, since 40 percent of our largest low-wage employers hold federal contracts. If the Biden administration denied lucrative government contracts to companies with pay gaps over 100 to 1, those low-wage firms would have a powerful incentive to pay workers more fairly.

Various federal programs already offer a leg up in contracting to targeted groups, typically small businesses owned by women, disabled veterans, and minorities.

“Using public procurement to address extreme disparities within large corporations,” the IPS report adds, “would be a step towards the same general objective.”

And a step in that direction, as Peter Drucker told Wall Street Journal readers back in 1977, would honor the great achievement of American business in the middle of the 20th century: “the steady narrowing of the income gap between the ‘big boss’ and the ‘working man.’”

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win. This op-ed was adapted from Inequality.org and distributed by OtherWords.org.