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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Sept. 11, 2020

The Bid to Pierce the Bubble Economy
One organizer is using direct action to confront the runaway inequality
of the pandemic

 

Protesters with the Congress of Essential Workers demonstrate outside
Jeff Bezos's mansion in Washington on August 27. (Graeme Sloan/Sipa
USA via AP Images)

First Response

A decade ago, after the financial crisis, Stephen Lerner developed a
theory about power and how to seize it. This wasn't out of character
for him. Lerner, now a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz
Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, was the architect of the
Justice for Janitors campaign
,
SEIU's successful campaign, despite beatings and repression, to win
organizing for some of the most powerless people in our society.

Lerner's idea after the financial crisis was similar to his idea to
organize janitors: make power uncomfortable. "I said, 'As long as
the stock market goes up, nothing will change,'" Lerner tells me in
an interview. "We have to confront the super-rich. I remember being in
these huge fights, [critics] said it was so unfair and terrible and
traumatizing. I thought, what do you think it's like when a sheriff
comes up and puts your stuff onto the street?"

You can repeat those lines without further context, and any reader would
assume you were talking about the present day, not 2009 and 2010. And
actually, things are worse. The rich took a hit in the financial crisis,
only to clean up afterwards. We went right to the clean-up this time.
The enormous support from the Federal Reserve has created a K-shaped
recovery
,
with the wealthy pulling away from everyone else.

Stocks are up. Real estate is way up
.
Bidet sales are up
.
This is at a time of mass evictions, mass unemployment, mass use of food
banks. We have a bubble economy, only I'm not talking about a
financial bubble, I mean the bubble like what the NBA is using down in
Orlando. A thin slice of Americans at the top are completely unaffected
by this crisis, and they've isolated themselves from the rest of the
country.

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Lerner has gone back to his playbook when considering what to do about
this. "We need to start to bring the crisis to their doorstep," he
says. No other way, he reasons, will allow the broad mass of the public
to get the same kind of support from their government that the
ultra-rich have gotten. In other words, you have to pierce the bubble.

The strategy has many parts to it. First, Lerner and his allies at
various community organizations have been documenting corporate landlord
profits and contrasting that with the precarity of renters, blocking
housing courts, and building eviction defense units to physically block
police from throwing out tenants. (The national organizing on September
1

was part of this.) Second, following on actions from the post-financial
crisis years, they have taken car caravans to Greenwich, Connecticut and
the Hamptons, marching through the streets and directly in front of the
homes of rich people, sometimes with pitchforks
,
demanding progressive taxation to fill the severe budget shortfalls
brought on by the pandemic, and detailing how those inside the mansions
make their money. And they have a capital strategy, pressuring pension
funds to divest from the type of investments like hedge funds and
private equity, which bolster the ultra-rich.

Lerner highlighted hedge fund founder Daniel Kamensky, arrested

for defrauding creditors of the department store chain Neiman Marcus. He
mentioned Seth Klarman, the never Trump investor who won a $3 billion
bet

on insurance claims stemming from PG&E's settlement over wildfires in
2018. "They make money off of money, and contribute nothing to the
economy," Lerner says. There is a plausible case to be made that the
funding gap for states is equivalent to the boost in the fortunes of a
fraction of the top 1 percent during the pandemic.

On top of all of these actions, there are union contract expirations
involving five million workers over the next year and a half. At
Bargaining for the Common Good
, which
Lerner is involved with, there's a map of where these contract
expirations are happening across the country. The concept behind
Bargaining for the Common Good is to use the union negotiation process
not just to win better terms for members, but to improve communities and
expand benefits for everyone.

The confluence of union contracts and pandemic pain could create the
kindling, Lerner believes, for a movement, overlapping with the budget
cycle in the states, to create a more equitable set of solutions, to tax
the rich, to rein in the K-shaped recovery. Working with the unhoused
and evicted is a window into organizing the mass of unemployed, which
has always been a difficult project given the atomized nature of
unemployment. The goal is to forge a movement of jobless people, a
modern antecedent to Coxey's Army after the Panic of 1893