Originally published in The Intercept on January 26, 2021.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S recent pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, is welcome news to those who have been fighting to help students access the internet during the coronavirus pandemic. It was Rosenworcel herself, one of just two Democrats on the five-person commission, who years back coined the term “the homework gap,” referring to inequities faced by kids living in communities with poor internet infrastructure or in households that can’t afford internet service.

The homework gap, or so-called digital divide, has been one the most difficult challenges for children throughout the pandemic. The disparity took on new urgency when schools nationwide closed to prevent Covid-19 spread in the spring, and internet providers also struggled to handle the surge in home usage among their regular customers. Ten months into the pandemic, millions of students still lack reliable connectivity, and many of those children have no plans to return to in-person school for months.

One change Rosenworcel has been advocating throughout the pandemic could now be used to address inequities in digital learning: By using her new emergency powers, she could authorize existing federal funding streams to go toward buying hot spots and tech devices for students learning at home who currently lack them. Rosenworcel did not return a request for comment. An FCC spokesperson said, “We need to put classrooms and libraries across the country on course for digital age learning, and a big part of that will be building an E-Rate program that can more fully meet these needs.” The spokesperson also referred The Intercept to Rosenworcel’s remarks before Congress in September, where Rosenworcel emphasized the FCC’s ability to get started “immediately.”

Established in 1996, the federal Schools and Libraries Program, commonly known as E-Rate, provides up to $4.15 billion annually to help connect public schools to the internet. The program was modernized in 2014 under reforms spearheaded by the Democrat-appointed FCC Chair Tom Wheeler. The goal was to help more schools access high-speed fiber broadband, but the modernization effort was opposed by then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who argued that the reforms were fiscally irresponsible and did not do enough to control fraud and abuse.

On January 18, 2017 — two days before Wheeler stepped down as chair — the FCC published a report describing the early results of its E-Rate modernization efforts. Among other things, the agency found that between 2013 and 2016, the percentage of school districts meeting minimum federal connectivity targets rose from 30 to 77 percent, and the costs schools paid for bandwidth fell dramatically. “E-Rate’s new approach to Wi-Fi has had a rapid and widespread impact,” the report concluded. “Nearly 50,000 schools and libraries received Wi-Fi support in 2015, compared to zero in funding year 2013 and 2014.”

But on February 3, 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump appointed Pai to succeed Wheeler as FCC chair, the report detailing the successes of the E-Rate reforms was retracted. Pai issued an order stating that the report “will have no legal or other effect or meaning going forward.” While a copy can still be found on the agency’s website, an FCC spokesperson told Education Week at the time that it “does not reflect the official views of the agency.” Education and tech advocates were baffled by the move, particularly since it showed that the reforms were working.

Pai’s continued opposition to E-Rate modernization was instrumental in hampering students from accessing more reliable internet during the pandemic. One little-known restriction on the program states that E-Rate’s federal funding can only go toward financing internet in physical classrooms and school libraries, meaning that the billions of dollars could not help students access at-home broadband or even subsidize internet at public libraries.

SINCE THE START of the pandemic, Rosenworcel, education advocates, and Democrats in Congress have urged Pai to use his emergency powers to lift the E-Rate restriction for virtual learning. “We should let our school libraries loan out wireless hot spots using the funding in the E-Rate program,” Rosenworcel said in August. “That’s not a radical idea. We could do that with existing law today, and we can do it at national scale.”

In March, 18 Senate Democrats, led by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, sent a letter to Pai urging him to take emergency action during the crisis. In August, 38 Senate Democrats sent a similar letter. While Pai has claimed that his hands are tied and lawmakers would have to amend the federal Communications Act, which created the FCC, the senators pointed out that past FCC chairs have used their powers to reinterpret the statute, including in 2011 when then-Chair Julius Genachowski authorized a pilot funding off-campus connectivity for mobile learning devices.

In September, Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser submitted an emergency waiver to the FCC requesting the ability to direct their E-Rate funds to students off public school campuses during the pandemic. Others have joined in support, including Karen Charles Peterson, Massachusetts’s commissioner of telecommunications and cable.

Kamala Harris was one of the Democratic senators to sign the letters sent to Pai urging the FCC to lift its restriction, and both Harris, now vice president, and Biden have emphasized the importance of addressing the digital divide during the pandemic and after it ends. Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s education commissioner and Biden’s nominee for federal secretary of education, prioritized delivering tech devices to all students during the pandemic, and in December, Connecticut’s Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont announced that they were the first state in the nation to succeed in delivering internet and devices to every student in need.

Late last year, it looked like $3 billion in emergency funding for E-Rate was going to be included in Congress’s relief bill, but it was stripped out at the last minute.

“The FCC always had the power to utilize the E-Rate program to connect students at home for distance learning during the coronavirus pandemic, yet former Chairman Pai and the Trump administration just refused to act,” Markey said in a statement to The Intercept. “So I’m delighted that, under new leadership, the FCC is now poised to begin providing connectivity and devices to students in need.”

Sabia Prescott, an education policy analyst at New America, a think tank, told The Intercept that lifting the FCC E-Rate restriction, even at this point in the pandemic, would be an important step to getting internet to more students quickly — and it has no downside.

“The restriction has to do with where the Wi-Fi and tech devices can go, so right now schools that qualify for E-Rate can purchase Wi-Fi at discounted rates for their campus, and that’s why a lot of students have been sitting outside school buildings or in parking lots to gain access,” she said. “But with the restriction, schools can’t lend out devices or Wi-Fi hot spots that they’ve purchased or lend them to public libraries.”

Doug Levin, the national director for K12 Security Information Exchange, a nonprofit focused on protecting schools from cybersecurity threats, told The Intercept he’s pessimistic that lifting the restriction would help students much this spring, in part due to the failure of the federal government to provide earlier leadership and guidance on addressing remote learning needs.

To act now, Levin said, the FCC would realistically need to waive bureaucratic requirements like granting school districts waivers to spend E-Rate funds outside of a designated “funding window” and waive competitive bidding requirements, which “runs the political risk of future charges of waste, fraud, and abuse” by critics.

Still, Levin notes that even a more limited impact during the spring could help provide a “proof of concept” for a permanent expansion of E-Rate to fund off-campus broadband. “That is, the need to address the homework gap during remote learning can serve as the impetus for enacting Rosenworcel’s longer-term policy agenda,” he said.

Markey, who was one of the original authors of the 1996 E-Rate legislation, also has hopes that the program will be expanded. “Make no mistake,” Markey said, “this is just a first step, and Congress must still pass my legislation to provide billions more in E-Rate dollars to ensure all students can continue their education during this crisis.”

Originally published in Insider on January 17, 2021.
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At the Dupont Circle farmers market on Sunday, Abbye Prelip, who traveled to Washington DC to sell vegetables, said she was keeping an eye out for “any crazies.” But apart from the enormous security presence in downtown, and some delays caused by road closures, the day had been uneventful, even busy.  

“We’ve come to the conclusion that, when there’s civil unrest, people like to come and support small business, which is really cool,” Prelip said. Shenandoah Seasonal, her business, is an organic farm about an hour-and-a-half away in Virginia. 

Washington DC was on high alert Sunday as anxious residents readied themselves for the unknown. With the city still reeling from the insurrection at the U.S Capitol, the FBI warned that violent protesters could take to the streets just days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, and thousands of National Guard troops packed downtown. 

Sunday, Jan. 17 has been marked as a day for right-wing extremists to protest President Donald Trump’s defeat since at least late November. There were calls on Parler, a social media platform used by right-wing groups that has since been shut down, for a so-called “Million Militia March” on Sunday, and the New York Times reported the extremist Boogaloo movement was also planning rallies for the 17th. Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday morning, the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said she was concerned about attacks in residential neighborhoods, where there is less of a formal security presence. The mayor recently requested that businesses hang signs that stress weapons, “including concealed firearms” are not welcome on the premises.

But with the recent crackdown on right-wing organizing by tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, and the booting by Apple, Google and Amazon of the social networking app Parler, the warnings so far appeared to be mostly false alarms. By mid-afternoon, there was an eerie calm in the city of some 700,000 residents. The Washington Post reported that two people had been arrested, a woman for impersonating a police officer and a 22-year-old Virginia man who was reportedly carrying a Glock 22 firearm and ammunition. 

It was less than two weeks after President Donald Trump rallied his supporters to “Stop the Steal” and a mob stormed the Capitol building, overwhelming police and ransacking congressional offices. Federal prosecutors now say they have “strong evidence” the rioters intended to capture and assassinate members of Congress, and  in the days since local residents have witnessed a dramatic ramp-up in policing and security, including new fencing, barriers, and closures of subways, bike-shares, streetcars, stores, and restaurants. 

For now, people are continuing to make essential trips, like scheduling their vaccine appointments and stocking up on groceries. Few if any political protesters were seen around the city.

Back at the farmer’s market, Amanda Humphrey, working a stand for the D.C-based Little Wild Things farm, which sells microgreens, said their sales were actually up on a per-hour basis from the week before. “We thought that maybe it would be dead but traffic is pretty consistent and honestly I don’t notice a real difference,” she said.

Emily Zaas, co-owner of Black Rock Orchard, a family farm in Lineboro, Maryland, said she had been doing good business. Zaas recalled almost two decades ago when there were sniper attacks in the D.C region that killed ten people and critically wounded three more. “We were afraid then that people wouldn’t come out, that there’d be no business, but the markets were so busy that weekend,” she said. 

Maybe people were looking for “a reprieve,” she said. “It’s peaceful here.”

Even local composters didn’t pass up their opportunity to drop off food scraps, taking advantage of a weekly city-wide program that launched in 2017. At the Dupont market, volunteers confirmed their compost collection was not lower than a typical Sunday. “People have a habit, and we’re going to make it easy for them to keep that going,” said Read Scott Martin, a volunteer. “This is really a city that comes together when we’ve got pressure.”

Gannon Pitre, manning the Sexy Vegie stand at the Dupont Farmers Market, which sells plant-based vegan and vegetarian food, noted one of his colleagues from Maryland decided to stay home this week. And JC Clark, owner of Capitol Kettle Corn, a local popcorn vendor, said he got a call on Saturday asking if he wanted to launch a pop-up on Sunday, meaning there were some vacancies. Clark felt comfortable saying yes, noting his normal popcorn deliveries were more challenging with all the road closures across the city.

“Yesterday I had 38 popcorn deliveries and I finished only about 20 of them,” he said. “Getting around in a car was so hard.”

Originally published in The American Prospect on January 4, 2021.
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Miguel Cardona, a former teacher, school administrator, and currently Connecticut’s education commissioner, was recently nominated to lead the federal Education Department. Cardona’s selection reflects a shift from those who spearheaded education policy under Joe Biden’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

As president, Obama aligned himself with the pro–charter school PAC Democrats for Education Reform, which, as co-founder Whitney Tilson put it, was founded “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.” Obama tapped DFER’s top choice for education secretary—Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan—and for the next seven years Duncan pushed controversial reform policies, including charter school expansion, weakening teacher tenure, and tying teacher salaries to student test scores. Unions despised Duncan, and Obama, who largely left the dirty work to his appointee, made clear he approved of the job Duncan was doing. “Arne has done more to bring our educational system—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the 21st century than anybody else,” Obama said in 2015.

While Biden didn’t go so far as picking former National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García to lead the Education Department, the choice of Cardona has nonetheless been a relief to union advocates, who knew education reformers were lobbying behind the scenes for other candidates. It’s another example of how Democratic leaders have drifted away from the Obama-era agenda and more toward a platform focused on traditional public schools and their schoolteachers.

During his confirmation hearing for education commissioner, Cardona made clear that under his leadership, Connecticut would be focusing its energy on “neighborhood schools” rather than charters. He’s also echoed some of Biden’s criticisms of evaluating teachers by standardized test scores. “Not reducing a teacher to a test score and bringing the voices of teachers and leaders into the process of professional learning. Those are the two things I really felt like I had to champion,” Cardona told CT Mirror in 2019.

As an assistant superintendent for Meriden Public Schools—located about 20 miles south of Hartford—Cardona was intimately involved in one of the nation’s most successful so-called labor-management partnerships in public education. Cardona helped lead reforms to boost student achievement in collaboration with the Meriden Federation of Teachers, at a time when educators nationally were being framed as the barrier to such efforts.

Labor-management partnerships are collaborations between executives and their unions that extend beyond traditional collective bargaining over wages and benefits. The partnerships have existed in the private sector for decades, with firms recognizing that expanding labor’s role in decision-making can lead to improvements in productivity, quality, and overall competitiveness. Some well-known labor-management partnerships include UAW’s collaboration with General Motors in the 1970s, and health care unions like SEIU working with hospital systems to drive improvements in patient care.

In public education, these types of partnerships have been more rare. But interest in the model started picking up about a decade ago, partially in response to attacks on teachers unions, and also as a way for reformers to push their preferred policies through new vehicles.

In 2010, with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rutgers labor scholar Saul Rubinstein and his student John McCarthy started researching labor-management partnerships in education. One school district stood out in particular, the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos, California, which put a labor-management partnership in place in 1999. That collaboration helped drive student gains in the district, and also helped ABC Unified weather the 2008 recession with no layoffs, loss of employee health benefits, or increase in class size. This surprising success led to a 2014 paper where the Rutgers academics found “strong evidence” that such partnerships can help boost school quality and student achievement.

In 2007, Meriden’s then–teachers union president, Erin Benham, shared an article with school superintendent Mary Cortright about what was happening in Cerritos. Cortright and Benham met to discuss the piece, and afterward more regularly, in part due to the growing recession. Cortright’s successor, Mark Benigni, was eager to expand the conversations, and starting in 2010, union and district leadership began scheduling regular meetings on the first Monday of every month to discuss whatever was on their minds. Cardona would sit in on the meetings, too.

“We’d just sit there and bring up issues and use the time to hash things out,” says Benham, who retired as president in 2019 and now serves on the state education board. “We’d come up with a plan, and that just became a way of life.”

One of the biggest innovations that came from Meriden’s labor-management partnership was a push to expand the school day at three elementary schools. Research has shown that more instructional time is one of the most effective ways to boost student learning, and union and district leadership wanted to figure out how to deliver that opportunity to more students. The union applied for a $150,000 American Federation of Teachers grant in 2012, and by leveraging volunteers and community organizations, and giving annual stipends of $7,500 to staff, the district managed to offer 40 additional days of instructional time. While funding dried up after about five years, Meriden Federation of Teachers president Lauren Mancini-Averitt says they plan to bring at least one extended-learning school back after the pandemic.

A spokesperson for AFT says there are about 50 labor-management partnerships in various stages of depth and development today, but that “Meriden’s is among the most fully developed.”

Shaun Richman, a labor expert at SUNY Empire State College, says one drawback of labor-management partnerships is that union reps can end up having to do more work with management in improving the company’s product than in organizing members. Benham and Mancini-Averitt agreed the partnership was time-consuming, but defended the commitment, saying it’s proven to be the best way to actually solve problems, which is what their members want.

Richman says these partnerships sometimes draw criticism from more radical workers, who would rather spend their time fighting with management. But he said the partnerships generally tend to be quite popular, as most union members don’t want to be fighting. “For most unions, it’s this cycle where you have two years of fighting and six years of peace,” he said. “I’m a real boss hater and it’s something I struggle with, that most workers would prefer not to be fighting.”

One major initiative Cardona led as part of the labor-management partnership involved developing Meriden’s new teacher evaluation system. Unlike the dominant education reform model sweeping the nation at the time, Benham says their team wasn’t looking at teacher evaluations as a punitive tool to weed out low-performers, and instead believed evaluations should be constructive tools to help all educators improve. “We were very intentional about keeping those things separate,” says Benham. “Evaluations were about being a helping tool, not a gotcha.”

While Connecticut had some requirements to use student test scores in teacher evaluations, Meriden, under Cardona’s leadership, pushed to make those measures weigh less than they were being counted in neighboring districts. In Meriden, relevant department chairs also provided feedback for teachers, rather than just leaving evaluations to administrators less familiar with the assessed subject areas.

Cardona “was assistant superintendent for four years, and if there was any personnel issue, any really sensitive issue, he is who we would meet with,” says Benham. She praised his openness and said together they worked on areas ranging from restorative practices and professional development to improving school climate.

“He was a good partner to us, very personable, and the fact is he’s a parent,” adds Mancini-Averitt, noting Cardona has two of his own children in Meriden Public Schools. AFT president Randi Weingarten shared the enthusiasm. “There is great potential for a renaissance in public education after years and years of the school wars,” she said in a statement, adding that Cardona’s “deep respect for educators and their unions will travel with him to Washington.”

Originally published in The Intercept on December 22, 2020.
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IN LATE MARCH, following an employee walkout at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island to protest the lack of safety protections amid the new pandemic, Amazon fired the lead organizer, Chris Smalls, with the public rationale that he had violated rules around social distancing. Under pressure, Amazon pledged in early April to ramp up its distribution of personal protective equipment, but a leaked memo from a private meeting revealed company executives had discussed how to smear Smalls and damage any potential union efforts. Smalls is “not smart, or articulate,” argued Amazon’s general counsel David Zapolsky, who urged the company to tell reporters Smalls’s conduct was “immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal.”

Zapolsky’s comments outraged many left-leaning groups, including a group of lawyers and law students affiliated with the American Constitution Society, a self-described progressive legal organization that was created in 2001 to help build the bench of liberal judges and act as a countervailing force to the conservative Federalist Society. More than 100 individuals sent a letter to ACS’s president, Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, and the ACS board of directors protesting the inclusion of a deputy of Zapolsky’s, Andrew DeVore, in its leadership ranks. DeVore, an Amazon vice president and associate general counsel, reports to Zapolsky and manages Amazon’s “labor and employment” issues, among other areas.

The signatories argued that Amazon’s conduct around Smalls was no isolated incident when it comes to “trampling worker rights” and also blasted the company’s record on privacy, surveillance, tax avoidance, anticompetitive practices, contracts with ICE, and bullying of local governments. “We urge you to ask for Mr. DeVore’s immediate resignation from the Board of Directors,” the letter read. DeVore was appointed in 2017.

Following the letter, ACS sought to handle the internal uprising in several ways, including organizing a virtual town hall for local chapter leaders with Feingold to discuss their concerns.

Feingold “expressed ACS’s respect for workers rights, but my feeling was he treated the meeting like a politician as a way to pacify the opposition rather than committing to specific actions,” said Hooman Hedayati, a member of the Washington, D.C., ACS chapter board who attended the town hall. Feingold declined to share with attendees how much money ACS receives from Amazon (it’s listed as a 2020 corporate sponsor on its website) but insisted the amount was negligible.

ACS also released a public statement reiterating the organization’s support for workers’s rights, and urged “employers to support the right of their employees” to form unions and demand safe working conditions.

Hedayati noted the statement failed to name-check Amazon specifically. “I think it was very concerning that ACS as a progressive organization won’t make a statement that specifically calls out Amazon and its bad track record,” he told The Intercept. “It makes me question to what degree they’d really be willing to speak up in support of the labor movement.”

Feingold also made a few personal calls, including to Leo Gertner, a labor lawyer and lead organizer of the letter, to suggest that the problem will basically go away when DeVore’s three-year term expires at the end of the year. “Feingold was very nice, diplomatic, and courteous and told me he was very supportive of our effort, but that the board was not interested in voting to remove Mr. DeVore or change his status in any way,” Gertner said. “But he told me DeVore was up for reappointment soon and his term was going to end this year.”

Since April, Amazon has continued to face charges of anti-worker activity, most recently this month, when attorneys for the company sought to blunt a union effort at an Alabama warehouse.

But in response to questioning, ACS confirmed to The Intercept that DeVore’s position on the board was actually renewed this year for another three-year term. David Lyle, ACS’s senior counsel for communications, said in a statement that keeping DeVore on “does not affect ACS programming or other decisions, at the national or chapter levels,” but maintained that leadership found him “to be a very engaged board member” and “valu[ed] representation of a diversity of experiences.”

ACS’S TIES TO Silicon Valley do not end with DeVore. Apple’s in-house counsel, Philippa Scarlett, was appointed to the board of directors in 2017, and now serves on ACS’s board of advisers, though her affiliation with Apple is not actually disclosed in her bio.

Over the last decade, ACS has taken at least $290,000 from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, with other corporate sponsorships coming from Verizon and Amazon, according to pages detailing ACS convention donors. The contributions have raised questions among its members about how ACS positions itself on matters of antitrust, bankruptcy, and corporate power — areas where ACS has less clear stances than it does on issues around reproductive and civil rights. Some members say this is because ACS has molded its politics in the image of the corporate-minded Senate that serves as gatekeeper to the judiciary.

“ACS is an elite-driven organization based in D.C. with a board of directors full of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford alums, where most of those folks cut their teeth in corporate law and advised those megacorporations,” said Gertner. “I think they have an interest in putting themselves out as liberal and progressive because they have genuinely pro-choice views and are mildly anti-war, but the capture of the elite stratum by corporations is pretty much complete.”

ACS doesn’t shy away from questioning corporate power, though the bulk of its interrogation has been confined to panel discussions. Anti-monopoly advocate Barry Lynn of the Open Markets Institute says ACS could be doing more to offer a progressive vision on these issues, in the way the Federalist Society helps train and educate its conservative members on monopoly and antitrust.

Following the election of Donald Trump, some antitrust advocates, including Lynn, reached out to ACS to encourage the legal organization to take a firmer stance on these issues. In February 2017, Lynn, his colleague Lina Khan, antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter, and Andy Green of the Center for American Progress met with Kara Stein, ACS’s vice president of policy and program.

“We said, ‘Hey, at least do no harm, don’t support people who are hardcore conservative on corporate welfare,’” Lynn said. “We want them to be a counterweight to the Federalist Society. Maybe they won’t take as radical a position as us, but we do think they should be pretty critical and at least work to educate its members about why the right takes the positions it does.” Lynn says the response they received was relative openness — if anti-monopoly advocates could fundraise for the work.

“They basically told us, ‘Well, if you really want us to engage on these issues around monopoly, then the way to do it would be to give us some money, build up a program,’” Lynn said, adding that Washington, D.C., “is full of these pay-to-play places.” David Lyle, ACS’s senior counsel for communications, didn’t deny Lynn’s characterization of the meeting and said it “was like many ACS holds regularly to explore partnerships and ways to collaborate on topics and issues.”

ACS has sponsored local and national events that have been critical of corporate power and encouraged stronger antitrust work, including an antitrust conference Khan organized at Yale. Hedayati says his ACS chapter has hosted several antitrust events in recent years — including one last month on political influence around antitrust investigations and a film screening in 2019 where members discussed shortcomings of antitrust law.

In response to questions, Lyle also pointed to a national panel ACS sponsored on consolidation of wealth and power in 2017, one on the constitutional dilemmas of Big Tech in 2018, and one on tech regulation in July. He also noted ACS has “been pleased” to publish scholars like Khan in ACS’s official law journal, and that the organization is publishing an essay by her this week with policy recommendations for the Biden administration.

In a statement to The Intercept, Khan said, “ACS’s leadership choices speak to the organization’s values, and it’s inappropriate for ACS to use my willingness to participate in past events as cover for its troubling choice to reappoint a top Amazon lawyer to the board.”

ACS declined to comment on the donations it receives from tech companies or make Feingold available for an interview. “Our work in this field, including the promotion of leading advocates of more strict antitrust enforcement and critics of technology companies speaks for itself,” said Lyle. As a U.S. senator, Feingold was a leading champion on campaign finance reform, pushing major legislation to curb the influence of money in politics. He was also known among his colleagues — and often privately resented — for his strict and obsessive fealty to the spirit of Senate ethics rules.

Lynn told The Intercept that ACS’s corporate tech donations “can’t help but affect” the organization. “When those sorts of folks are in the room they’re going to affect the policy,” he said.

Other members argue ACS’s murkiness on corporate power is less a reflection of rank corruption and points more to the reality that ACS’s aim to be a “big-tent” organization for liberals means it effectively becomes more of a networking group, with inevitable vague policy positions palatable to the full Democratic Party. In the absence of drawing clearer lines in the sand and providing a sharper vision for what progressive lawyering means in the realms of corporate power and bankruptcy law, newer organizations like Demand Justice, the People’s Parity Project, and the Law and Political Economy Project will continue to fill what its supporters say is an intellectual and advocacy void for lawyers on the left.

The Biden administration, for its part, has recently appointed a number of leaders and alumni from big tech companies, though maintains it will continue serious investigations into the practices of these firms. The Trump administration filed a major antitrust suit against Google, which will continue under the Biden administration. The suit is seen as potentially the first of several such clashes with tech titans.

“I think antitrust and antimonopoly people feel listened to on the substance by the Biden administration,” said Jeff Hauser, the director of the Revolving Door Project, which advocates for progressive executive branch appointments. “But the question is whether there will be people appointed who will be able to slow the move of the government against these companies.”

Originally published in The Intercept on December 14, 2020.
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IN MAY 2019, the Carbon Capture Coalition, a group of roughly 60 companies, unions, research institutes, and energy groups that support carbon capture technology, released a policy platform that was entirely focused on their desired federal investments. The agenda emphasized things like expanding tax credits and loan guarantees, as well as incentivizing new research and development.

Then came the police killing of George Floyd and a summer of protest that reshaped politics, influencing even the debate around carbon capture’s role in the fight against climate change. The coalition’s new policy platform, released in late October, is focused on ways that carbon capture projects could also contribute to environmental justice. 

Beginning in January, the Clean Air Task Force, a research and advocacy group that backs carbon capture, will be launching at least four case studies in California and Texas to study how, if at all, carbon capture technology reduces local air pollution. Their objective, said Deepika Nagabhushan, who is leading a new environmental justice initiative at the organization, would be to provide front-line communities with the information by the end of 2021, so residents can better determine whether carbon capture meets their needs. Nagabhushan told The Intercept that the protests over the last year “have really brought social equity and addressing systemic racism to the forefront” of all conversations, including for carbon capture. 

Some left-wing climate groups take a strong stance against carbon capture, seeing it as a distraction at best and a malign oil industry scheme that will only help prolong, rather than hasten, the industry’s decline. In his presidential climate change plan, Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed the stance of groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sunrise Movement, calling carbon capture a “false solution.” This past September, the House of Representatives passed a nearly 900-page clean energy package, though 18 Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley, voted against it, after a coalition of progressive climate groups protested the bill’s support for carbon capture.

Jessie Stolark, the public policy and members relations manager for the Carbon Capture Coalition, said her group is currently “undergoing an evolution” with regards to how they approach potential impacts and benefits to frontline communities. The political logic is sound: Carbon capture is a rare climate policy with Republican support, and unions and mainline Democrats are already on board, with the holdouts residing on the left. Demonstrating the benefits to marginalized communities could help erode that opposition.

Climate change, of course, is a global and universal problem for humanity. But its effects are being and will be felt earliest and hardest among those with the least means to mitigate it, and the least political power to confront the overlapping crises it produces and exacerbates. Major sources of carbon emissions, meanwhile, also tend to be sources of broader forms of pollution, often landing disproportionately on what have come to be known as front-line communities.

This year, in campaign memos sent to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the Carbon Capture Coalition included language about the need to ensure that the tens of thousands of high-wage jobs associated with carbon capture projects actually benefit the disadvantaged communities where they may be cited, meaning “expanded support for training and apprenticeship programs undertaken in partnership with community colleges, trade unions and other local institutions in affected communities.” Stolark acknowledged that some communities may not want the projects even if they do come with high-wage jobs and said the coalition is “currently brainstorming” around those questions.

Biden’s election has given advocates for carbon capture a lot to be optimistic about. Back in July, his $2 trillion climate plan called for accelerating the development and deployment of carbon capture technology. On his new presidential transition website, where he lists four priorities including climate change, Biden mentions a commitment to innovating “negative emissions technologies” — an umbrella term that includes so-called direct air capture, or machines that suck already emitted carbon dioxide out of the air.

“It remains to be seen what they’re going to do but one area I’m really excited about is just developing the workforce,” said Stolark. “Biden’s climate plan said it would create 10 million jobs, so our question is what is that going to look like.”

In a letter sent September 18, progressive groups including Friends of the Earth, 350.org, and Food & Water Action argued that other environmental justice components of the House’s Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act would be undermined by its carbon capture provisions, and that it would perpetuate burdens on front-line communities and communities of color. “[A]ny new investment toward fossil fuel companies is unacceptable and quite simply incompatible with tackling environmental injustice and the climate crisis,” Lauren Maunus, the legislative manager of Sunrise Movement, told the New Republic after the vote. (This year BP, Shell, and Exxon Mobil wrote down billions in their fossil fuel reserves, telling investors they recognize that some of their reserves will never be pumped out of the ground.)

Despite the 18 protest votes, carbon capture has no shortage of Democratic support, and the House bill garnered votes from the majority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and nearly all the Green New Deal resolution co-sponsors. Sen. Ed Markey, the original co-author of the Green New Deal with Ocasio-Cortez, also has a record of supporting carbon capture technology and assured the Carbon Capture Coalition of his support in 2019.

Unions are also strong supporters, and last year the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and national environmental groups, released a plan for tackling inequality and climate change that included support for carbon capture tech. The environmental groups include the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the National Wildlife Federation, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Defense Action Fund, and the League of Conservation Voters — collectively known in environmental circles as “big green.” The unions include both building trade unions and unions representing industries that wouldn’t necessarily be directly impacted by investments in carbon capture, like the Service Employees International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Communication Workers of America. Both the SEIU and the AFT have passed resolutions in support of the Green New Deal.

Brad Markell, the executive director for the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council and a strong advocate for carbon capture technology, was tapped to serve on the Department of Energy transition team for the Biden administration. Also serving on that team is Noah Deich, the executive director for Carbon180, a group focused on carbon removal, like direct air capture.

One advantage Biden and carbon capture supporters have on their side is the growing scientific consensus that the only way to reach global climate targets by mid-century would be to utilize carbon capture technology, which can both help reduce future emissions and remove some of the carbon dioxide that’s already been released. This past September, for example, the International Energy Agency released a report warning it would be “virtually impossible” to reach net zero without carbon capture tech. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also affirmed carbon capture tech would be necessary to hit climate targets absent rapid reforestation and major changes to global diets and energy consumption. There’s also the fact that renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar are not viable solutions for reducing carbon emissions in the industrial sector, and nearly a quarter of all U.S greenhouse gas emissions come from industry.

“Even if we close every coal fire plant in America — which I don’t think we’re going to do for a while — but even if we did that, it doesn’t change the basic fact that if you believe and follow the science, carbon capture is a thing we must do globally at scale or we won’t make it,” Lee Anderson, director of governmental affairs for the Utility Workers Union of America, told The Intercept last year.

While advocates for carbon capture have been outlining priorities they’d like to see the Biden administration take on, Congress is also currently considering new legislation that could pass as soon as this month. Lawmakers are considering bills both to extend a tax credit to incentivize carbon capture projects and to authorize new demonstrations in the power sector.

Notably, while groups like Sunrise and Friends of the Earth have cited environmental justice as a reason to oppose carbon capture, leaders within the carbon capture movement have been crediting progressive climate organizations for pushing them to think more deeply about environmental justice.

“I think a lot of these movements around a Green New Deal have been really responsible for pushing more groups to center environmental justice in the climate discussion,” said Erin Burns, policy director for Carbon180.

“We’re in a great place where the Department of Energy has done really great R&D and we have a lot of information on how to do things like saline storage safely and securely, but when you’re talking about the need to inject millions of tons of CO2 into the ground, you need to think about how do we talk to communities about that, and what are the questions those communities will have,” said Burns. “We want to make sure we’re thinking about developing clear materials to ensure communities can have a strong voice in how these projects go forward, and that there can be really robust, meaningful engagement.”

Burns declined to share specific names but told The Intercept that Carbon180 has started having conversations with environmental justice groups and expressed gratitude to activists who have lent their time and expertise. While “we absolutely expect resistance and skepticism,” said Burns, from some carbon capture organizations that may balk at pressure to change their practices, “at this point I think we are at least cautiously optimistic.”

Originally published in New Republic on December 14, 2020.
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The Desperate Last Days of Local News | The New Republic

In 2018, in an act of defiance that would become known as the Denver Rebellion, a group of current and former Denver Post staffers wrote and designed a six-page Sunday spread of op-ed pieces aimed at the paper’s owners, the New York–based hedge fund Alden Global Capital. The project, which led with the title, “As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved,” detailed how Alden’s ownership decimated the outlet.

As just one example, the Denver newsroom shrank from more than 250 employees to fewer than 100, even as management reported solid profits. Journalists no longer had enough manpower to report on all the hearings and local events that warranted coverage, even as subscription prices continued to rise.

Prior to the closure, CNHI had been a relatively fair steward of the paper. Robert Carter, a journalist who worked at the North Jefferson News for more than seven years, told me that while he felt CNHI was not very adept at guiding its properties into the digital age, he felt little pressure from his corporate owners on how to do reporting, and praised them for keeping the business side separate. (CHNI only intervened editorially once that Carter can recall, in 2016, when CHNI execs requested the papers write editorials endorsing Hillary Clinton.  “That didn’t really please many people,” Carter recalled. “Maybe it works for their northern Massachusetts papers, but if you ran that thing in Cullman or Gardendale, Alabama—which is one of the most heavily Republican districts in the country—needless to say, it didn’t go over well.”) Bronner declined to comment for this story, and Ketter said it was not mandatory and some papers chose to forego an endorsement. 

The role of hedge funds and private equity is familiar fare for anyone following the economics of the news industry over the past decade. The extraordinary protest in Colorado led to front-page coverage in The New York Times and editorials from leading media writers, such as The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan—she called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners,” whose subsidiary Digital First is “wreaking similar havoc all over the country.” An American Prospect feature story, “Saving the Free Press From Private Equity,” detailed the rapacious role these financial entities have played in driving local media’s decline.

And yet what’s become clear is that this narrow focus on the “vultures” of Wall Street—the cartoonish capitalists singularly focused on profits with no loyalty to news production or the communities their outlets serve—is still not quite the full picture. Ending private equity’s grip on journalism would surely decelerate some of the massive cuts in reporting but wouldn’t be anywhere near sufficient to address the underlying challenges that capitalism ultimately poses to journalism. The problem is a lot bigger than these firms.

The importance of news access to functioning democracies has long been clear, so much so that the Founding Fathers actually viewed the Postal Service for its first few decades as primarily a way to deliver periodicals throughout the country. Federal lawmakers understood that this great democratic experiment could never work if voters were not informed on their communities and leaders. Today we have even more evidence to support the case that local journalism and democracy go hand in hand: Researchers have found the presence of newspapers can make elected officials more responsive and encourage more people to run for office. When newspapers close, studies have found government costs go up, driven by less scrutiny over local deals.

While media watchers have long grasped the threat private equity poses to this democratic mandate of news-gathering, the reality is that even alternative business models that are supposedly more sustainable, like pension-backed journalism and billionaire-sustained news, are proving far more unreliable than previously understood. Journalism is a public good, and it’s well past time we treat it that way.

The Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. is one of the largest chains of daily and weekly newspapers across the country. CNHI is fully owned by the Retirement Systems of Alabama, the state pension fund that manages more than $40 billion in investments and covers roughly 360,000 Alabama teachers, state employees, judges, and retirees. In addition to its venture in small local newspapers, the RSA has earned national headlines for some of its other unconventional investments, including golf courses, resorts, and even the largest commercial skyscraper in Manhattan.

Directed for decades by CEO David Bronner, the Alabama pension fund is considered by media industry experts to be a much more benevolent owner than, say, Alden Global Capital. Indeed it’s difficult to picture a more public-minded investment vehicle than a teachers’ pension fund, where the members are passionate about educating their communities. And Bronner himself has said he believes in the mission of local news. “There’s still a huge need throughout the country, and the more isolated the community, the greater the need for local news, because nobody knows about anything if you don’t have a local newspaper,” he said in 2018, when RSA increased its CNHI ownership stake from 87 percent to 100 percent.

The more than 100 CNHI papers nationwide are overseen day to day by Senior Vice President of News Bill Ketter, the former editor in chief at the Pulitzer Prize– winning Eagle Tribune in North Andover, Massachusetts, which CNHI purchased in 2005. Ketter says their charge is to produce “local journalism to the best of our ability” and credits RSA with being “very hands-off” editorially. With rightful pride, he pointed to one of its small papers, in Palestine, Texas, which won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing earlier this year. Its dailies have an average circulation of roughly 10,000; its weeklies, 7,500; and, as of 2016, nearly 60 percent of CNHI papers served rural areas.

CNHI merged with the television company Raycom in 2017, but a year later, when Raycom was acquired by the Southern outfit Gray Television, its new owner had no interest in newspapers, so CNHI was put up for sale. Soon after, RSA put in a bid to acquire the remainder of the company. “Everyone was relieved,” Ketter told me, “because they had been a longtime investor in the company and knew us.” CNHI had fended off what the newsrooms perceived as the more existential threat of private equity ownership.

Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, shared Ketter’s assessment of the sale. “CNHI did many good things journalistically, and they did so under the Retirement System’s ownership,” he said.

Yet even with Bronner’s professed commitment to local news, the primary motive of the pension fund—to generate returns for workers and retirees—couldn’t and can’t be obscured. This was evident even before the Covid-19 crisis ravaged the news industry, for instance when CNHI began moving to a more regional model, which helped save costs but also meant a small group of editors would manage news across larger swathes of the country.

“It makes all kinds of business sense for CNHI to regionalize. The question is, does it make journalistic sense?” said Cross, who noted that some of the company’s newly merged papers were quite distant from one another.

While not as extreme as private equity, the pressures of CNHI’s pension-backed ownership have also placed strains on local coverage. Between 2004 and 2016, CNHI sold or closed at least two dozen papers, according to research compiled by Penny Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at UNC Chapel Hill.

One example was the Leeds News, a local Alabama paper CNHI acquired in 1998 that had been serving its community for 70 years. In 2011, CNHI merged it with another paper. “The community of Leeds is today getting some coverage from The Trussville Tribune, but it’s not the same,” said Tom Arenberg, a journalism instructor at the University of Alabama. Aside from Leeds, The Trussville Tribune, which is a weekly paper, covers seven other cities across two counties. Despite valiant efforts of journalists at these outlets, that kind of consolidation often leads to a loss in local specificity: Entire beats can disappear, and it’s harder to cover local government with fewer staff.

These concerns have been heightened under the current public health crisis and subsequent economic collapse, as a greater number of CNHI papers have been closed or reduced circulation. The Gardendale, Alabama–based North Jefferson News, founded in 1970 and acquired by CNHI in 1997, was one of the pandemic recession’s newsroom casualties.

Prior to the closure, CNHI had been a relatively fair steward of the paper. Robert Carter, a journalist who worked at the North Jefferson News for more than seven years, told me that while he felt CNHI was not very adept at guiding its properties into the digital age, he felt little pressure from his corporate owners on how to do reporting, and praised them for keeping the business side separate. (Carter said David Bronner only intervened editorially once that he can remember, in 2016, when Bronner wrote an editorial endorsing Hillary Clinton and required his CNHI papers to run it. “That didn’t really please many people,” Carter recalled. “Maybe it works for their northern Massachusetts papers, but if you ran that thing in Cullman or Gardendale, Alabama—which is one of the most heavily Republican districts in the country—needless to say, it didn’t go over well.”) Bronner declined to comment for this story.

This past April, CNHI closed the paper, “merging” it with another based in a town 40 miles away. Arenberg said he thought North Jefferson News, which served the northern part of his county, “was a very good paper.” The publication covered everything from public schools and sports to local government and businesses and impacts from natural disasters. It ran obituaries and local op-eds, and featured birthday, graduation, and engagement announcements.

In April, CNHI also consolidated a number of its northeastern Kentucky weeklies into one daily, for example merging The Morehead News with a paper covering a town 55 miles away. “Many dailies have swallowed up sister weeklies, but it’s unusual if not unprecedented for such consolidation over such a distance,” Cross wrote. In the following months, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Florida endured more mergers of long-standing papers. The three North Florida CNHI papers to close in July—the Suwannee Democrat, the Mayo Free Press, and The Jasper News —had covered rural Florida communities since the 1800s.

Abernathy, the UNC professor, said there are “degrees of aggressive management” of investment entities over journalism, and thinks CNHI “is by no means the worst.” That said, Abernathy predicts CNHI will continue to sell off its properties, pointing to the summer of 2018, when CNHI announced its plans to step back from newspaper ownership, and noted the pension fund has faced mounting pressure to increase the return on its investments. While the Retirement Systems of Alabama does not break out financial results for CNHI, back in 2001 the pension fund was fully funded, but since then its investments have frequently fallen short of expectations. By 2015, it faced $13 billion in state pension debts and $11 billion in unfunded liabilities. “Like the readers and advertisers who abandoned the CNHI papers in recent years, RSA has decided to shed its newspaper habit,” Abernathy wrote. In effect, the local news crisis is converging with the nation’s looming pension crisis. No pension fund would now consider making the kind of investment Alabama’s made back in the late twentieth century.

Ultimately, though, it’s not just financial investment vehicles that cannot be counted on to give local journalism the security it needs to effectively serve communities. Billionaires—once viewed as potential media saviors—are increasingly ducking out, too. Earlier this year, Warren Buffett, who at the time was the third-richest man in the world with a net worth of $88 billion, felt dissatisfied with the returns on his chain of newspapers and decided to sell. That was quite a change in tune when, just a few years earlier, he told CNN, “In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper.”

Likewise Laurene Powell Jobs, who has a $21 billion net worth, waded into journalism but has made brutal cuts. In 2019, she purchased a majority stake in The Atlantic, and just two months into the Covid-19 pandemic, the company laid off nearly 20 percent of its staff, including 22 editorial employees, despite Powell being financially equipped to help her magazine weather the tough advertising tides of the pandemic many, many times over. Powell Jobs also purchased the award-winning magazine California Sunday in November 2018, only to shutter the entire publication in October.

To save journalism—which desperately needs saving—it’s clear policymakers need to act, and finally grasp that neither financial investment entities nor the wobbling interest of the ultrarich are real solutions.

Some journalists have resisted the idea of public subsidy for journalism—arguing it violates a sacred firewall of reporting. Accountability-driven reporting requires independence, and if the state funds a publication, then that could implicitly or explicitly affect coverage. It’s an understandable concern, but in 2020 it’s an overblown fear when considering the potential tradeoffs. Thankfully, many leaders in media have been changing their tune, recognizing there frankly just is no viable alternative if we believe access to news is something all citizens deserve.

Besides, journalists already have the tools to hold outlets and fellow reporters accountable. We have extraordinary reporters providing hard-hitting local news with public subsidy through NPR and PBS, and as Victor Pickard, a media studies scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, has pointed out, the United States is a global outlier among democracies for how little it spends on public media.

Times are changing. In March, the Department of Homeland Security designated newsrooms as “essential” services throughout the pandemic, and hundreds of newspapers received federal Paycheck Protection Program loans over the last few months to stay afloat. On the state level, advocates have been organizing for more public subsidy, too. In 2018, New Jersey became the first state to pass legislation establishing a new consortium that will fund local reporting with public funds. Activists in states like Colorado and Massachusetts are considering similar ideas.

We already subsidize the arts nationally, and electrical power in rural areas. If we believe local journalism is a public good, essential for citizens in every democratic community, then we need to ensure everyone has access to it. Billionaires and pension funds were never going to save us from the news desertification of the U.S. And if, like universal mail delivery, news outlets can’t survive through market forces and charity alone, then the government must step in and make that possible.