Human-made landscape promotes coexistence of two normally separated Andean warblers

Two Andean warbler species that typically occur at different elevations and hunt by tricking insects to escape can co-occur at the same elevation due to fragmentation of tropical montane forests caused by human agricultural practices

LABORATORY OF BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION AT SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: THE TWO SPECIES AND THEIR HABITATS AT THE STUDY SITE IN ECUADOR (PHOTOS BY J. NOWAKOWSKI). THE HIGHER ELEVATION SPECIES, THE SPECTACLED WHITESTART, CHOOSES FRAGMENTED FORESTS WITH FEW TREES AND... view more 

CREDIT: PHOTO BY JACEK NOWAKOWSKI, THE COAUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL PAPER AT WWW.NATURE.COM/ARTICLES/S41598-020-78804-2

In the mountains across the world, different types of vegetation occur at different elevations creating distinct zones with well-defined borders between them. Each vegetation zone provides specific living conditions for animals. Therefore species that are adapted to habitats created in the specific zone occur only at the specific elevations and do not overlap with other species of similar ecology and behavior adapted to other vegetation zones at different elevations. This zonation is believed to be especially true for ecologically similar species that narrowly specialize to use specific resources and therefore compete with each other if they co-occur next to each other in the same habitat.

However, human activities modify the natural zones and create new types of habitats disrupting the clear natural borders between them. This has consequences for the distribution, ecology and behavior of animals that in a natural situation would rarely co-occur. In the recent paper published in Scientific Reports a team of Polish ornithologists illustrates how those anthropogenic modifications of natural vegetation in the Andes create new conditions in which two ecologically specialized species of birds, that typically occur in different elevational zones, can now co-occur next to each other at the same elevation.

The team of Polish ornithologists, following the long-standing traditions of Polish ornithology in South America since 1800s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sztolcman; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Taczanowski; https://academic.oup.com/auk/article/120/3/577/5561874), have undertook field research on ecology of two warblers in the tropical montane forests of eastern slopes of the Ecuadorian Andes. Piotr Jablonski (Museum and Institute of Zoology PAS & Seoul National University), Jacek Nowakowski (University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn), Marta Borowiec and Tadeusz Stawarczyk (University of Wroclaw) have focused on two very special warblers: the Slate-throated Whitestart, which typically occurs in the Andean montane forests [example of habitat is here and here, and its close relative, the Spectacled Whitestart, which typically occurs at higher elevation in cloud forests [example of habitat is here]. Both species forage in almost identical way: by foraging with outspread wings and tail, and by presenting spots of contrasting plumage during fast pirouetting movements these birds are able to "overstimulate" and to trigger escapes in their prey, which then is pursued and captured in the air. Therefore, this type of foraging is called "flush-pursue" foraging and it has been extensively studied by Piotr Jablonski. Examples of how "flush-pursuers" forage can be seen here and here.

During several visits to the Yanayacu Biological Station & Center for Creative Studies (Ecuador) , the researchers mapped the distribution of territories of the two species near the station in the landscape that contains patches of natural or secondary forests intermixed with pastures and open bushy areas. [aerial view is here ]. "The field work was hard but exciting for us because we are field ornithologists, who value real field work in various exotic locations" mentions Jacek Nowakowski. "We used classical "old-fashioned" typical ornithological methods of field observations based on ornithological skills and perseverance" comments Tadeusz Stawarczyk, who studied Slate-throated Whitestarts in Costa Rica in the past. "It took us three visits until we collected sufficient material" adds Marta Borowiec, who has also studied Painted Whitestarts in Arizona in the past.

The study found that both species occurred next to each other, but occupied different vegetation types. The Spectacled Whitestart was observed in a sunny man-made mosaic of pastures, clearings, and shrubs with small proportion of high trees, all of which created a landscape similar to the high elevation Andean vegetation where the species normally occurs. The Slate-throated Whitestart, was mostly observed in shady and dense forests with high proportion of tall trees. The two species differed relatively little in their foraging technique, but because they foraged in different habitats and locations they seem to co-occur without any direct competitive aggressive interactions. "In the future, we plan to evaluate the idea that the spatial separation of breeding territories between the two species at the study site may be created during territory establishment, when it is possible that the two species respond aggressively to each other's songs" says Jacek Nowakowski.

This work represents the first quantitative field study that incorporates both, the detailed foraging information and the habitat descriptions in order to evaluate the mechanisms that allows two "flush-pursue" species, that are normally separated in space along the elevation, to co-occur at the same elevation in the Andean landscape modified by man. "Our results illustrate how modern science can benefit from the "good old style" expedition-based intense field work" says Piotr Jablonski.

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Links:

Original scientific article is at: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78804-2

For more information contact:

Dr Jacek Nowakowski: jacek.nowakowski@uwm.edu.pl;

Dr Marta Borowiec: marta.borowiec@uwr.edu.pl;

Prof. Tadeusz Stawarczyk, tadeusz.stawarczyk@uwr.edu.pl

FIGURE

The two species and their habitats at the study site in Ecuador (Photos by J. Nowakowski)

RUDN University scientist showed global warming effect on greenhouse gas emissions in paddy soils

RUDN UNIVERSITY

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IMAGE: A SOIL SCIENTIST FROM RUDN UNIVERSITY STUDIED THE DECOMPOSITION OF ORGANIC MATTER IN RICE PADDIES--THE SOURCES OF CO2 AND METHANE EMISSIONS. BOTH GASES ADD TO THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND AFFECT... view more 

CREDIT: RUDN UNIVERSITY

A soil scientist from RUDN University studied the decomposition of organic matter in rice paddies--the sources of CO2 and methane emissions. Both gases add to the greenhouse effect and affect climate warming in subtropical regions. The emissions increase when the roots of plants influence microbial communities in the soil. This influence, in turn, depends on temperature changes. Therefore, climate warming can lead to more greenhouse gas emissions. The results of the study were published in the Applied Soil Ecologyclimate change. The intensity of this process depends on the temperature of the environment and soil microorganisms. In the soils of rice paddies, methane is produced by single-cell organisms called archaea. However, to make methane, they require intermediary substances that come from plant roots. This is how the so-called priming effect occurs: the life of microorganisms is supported by organic substances released by plants through their roots. It is this effect that determines the number and activity of microorganisms in the soil. A soil scientist from RUDN University was the first to discover a correlation between the priming effect and greenhouse gas emissions and to describe the dynamics of these processes in view of global warming.

The team took soil samples from rice paddies located in the Hunan province in South-Eastern China. The samples were sifted to remove soil fauna and bits of plants. After that, water was added to them to model the conditions of a submerged rice paddy. After that, the samples were kept in plastic containers in a dark room for 75 days. To imitate different seasons, the scientists maintained different temperatures in the containers: 5 °C (winter), 15 °C (spring), 25 °C (autumn), and 35 °C (summer). The team wanted to measure how methane and CO2 emissions would vary under the influence of the priming effect in different temperature regimes. Sodium acetate, the simplest form of organic carbon produced by plant roots, was added to the soil to support the archaea.

The team measured the levels of greenhouse gas emissions every 2 to 5 days. On the 75th day, methane emissions from primed soils turned out to have increased 153 times compared to the samples without sodium acetate. The scientists also learned that the priming effect depended on the temperature. The soils demonstrated the highest sensitivity at 15 °C: in these samples, a 10? increase in temperature caused methane emission volumes to grow 25 times. As for CO2 emissions, they directly correlated with temperature levels. According to the team, this is because microorganisms become more active in a warm environment.

"The priming effect determined the correlation between the temperature and the process of organic matter decomposition in the soil. At 5-15 °C, temperature fluctuations had a huge effect on methane emissions: they increased almost 25 times. One could conclude that in warm winters methane emissions from the soil could be the main reason for the greenhouse effect. The results of other studies that do not take the priming effect into account should be interpreted with caution," said Yakov Kuzyakov, a Ph.D. in Biology, and the Head of the Center for Mathematical Modeling and Design of Sustainable Ecosystems at the Agrarian and Technological Institute, RUDN University.

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International research team calls for 'glocal' approach to help mitigate flooding damage

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 RELEASE 24-DEC-2020

Research News

 

IMAGE: BY COUPLING A LARGE-SCALE HYDROLOGICAL MODEL WITH A LOCAL-SCALE, HIGH-RESOLUTION HYDRAULIC MODEL AND URBAN FLOOD MODEL WHILE INTEGRATING MULTIPLE SOURCES OF GROUND AND SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING DATA, A "GLOCAL " (GLOBAL... view more 

CREDIT: ADVANCES IN ATMOPHERIC SCIENCES

Large-scale global forecasting and on-the-ground observations need to meld into one system to better predict and prevent wide-spread flooding disasters, according to an international research team who published a short view in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on Dec. 23.

"A 'glocal' -- global to local -- hydrometeorological solution for floods is considered to be critical for better preparedness, mitigation, and management of different types of significant precipitation-caused flooding, which happen extensively almost every year and in many countries, such as China, India and the United States," said paper author Huan Wu, professor and deputy director in the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies and School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University.

Such a solution, dubbed GHS-F by the researchers, is necessary for both scientific research and operational logistics, according to Wu. A GHS-F could combine wide-spread weather predictions with the deep understanding of how forecasted rain could affect river basins to produce highly detailed and consistent rain-flood information.

Wu pointed to the complex relationship between rain and floods, making the argument that if the meteorological and hydrological communities shared more observations, techniques, measurements and modeled data, as well as lessons learned, some flooding damage might be avoided.

The researchers specifically examined the flood events from May 20 to July 18 of 2020 in central-eastern and southern China. In those two months, the Yangtze River -- the longest river in Asia at a length of almost 4,000 miles -- had 49% more rain than the average amounts for the same time period over the last 60 years. The seven major rain events of this period affected almost 40 million people in 27 provinces, with 141 people reported dead or missing, according to the researchers.

"An encompassing view of flood occurrences, evolution, extent dynamics, and spatial distribution of areas at high risk from flooding over a global or national scale with local detail is highly desirable and, yet, missing for international and national agencies with a mandate in flood response and management," Wu said.

A GHS-F was first suggested about 10 years ago, Wu said, but the unprecedented computing capability and timely data availability, as well as model and data interoperability of the current era mean such a solution is now more practical.

The researchers plan to demonstrate feasibility in a GHS-F by assessing water level observations from ground and remote-sensing instruments in real time, with the goal of increasing the confidence of emergency management decision makers in using this tool for information and risk estimation.

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This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and, in part, by the Program for Guangdong Introducing Innovative and Entrepreneurial Teams and the project of the Chinese Ministry of Emergency Management on "Catastrophe Evaluation Modeling Study."

Wu is also affiliated with the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Laboratory in China and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland in the United States. Xiaomeng Li, Zhijun Huang, Weitian Chen and Ying Hu, all with the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies and School of Atmospheric Sciences at Sun Yat-sen University in China; Guy J.-P. Schumann, with the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and the DFO Global Flood Observatory at the University of Colorado Boulder in the United States; Lorenzo Alfieri, with the CIMA Research Foundation in Italy; Yun Chen and Hui Xu, both with the National Meteorological Center in China; Zhifang Wu, with the Guangdong Meteorological Center; Hong Lu with the GuangXi Climate Center; Yamin Hu, with the Guangdong Climate Center; and Qiang Zhu, with the China Three Gorges Corporation. Chen is also affiliated with the Southern Maine Science and Engineering Laboratory.

What did Henry Wallace stand for?

Henry Wallace was attacked and then dismissed because he proposed “a century of the common man and woman.” Almost eighty years of that century have passed since his dismissal, and his fight for the future is largely forgotten.

An excerpt from The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace's Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics by John Nichols,


In the summer of 1948, when his own fight against American fascism had been lost but he still refused to surrender the radical hope of a future framed by justice and peace, Henry Wallace would ask Pete Seeger to sing a favorite song. The words and music had been submitted by a young college instructor named Dick Blakeslee to the “People’s Songs” project that Seeger, Alan Lomax, Lee Hays and a handful of others launched after World War II to champion a revival of old folk music and new songs of work, struggle and idealism. Blakeslee’s lyrics sampled from Bible verses and ranged across American history. Yet his song closed in the moment, or, rather, in the moment that Wallace had hoped to create:


I was with Franklin Roosevelt’s side on the night before he died. He said, “One world must come out of World War Two, Yankee, Russian, white or tan,” he said, “a man is still a man. We’re all on one road, and we’re only passing through.”

As they traveled the backroads of North Carolina and the other segregated states where Wallace challenged racial hatred, Seeger would sing the words “a man is still a man.” Hundreds of miles to the north, a Jewish teenager from Montreal learned those words from a socialist summer-camp counselor. They inspired an interest in folk music that proved to be transforma- tive for Leonard Cohen. Years later, Cohen would add a slight variation to “Passing Through” as he sang the song from the concert stages of Europe and the Americas. After the line “One world must come out of World War Two” he would whisper “… ah, the fool.” Those who know something of Cohen’s wry romanticism, and the political penchants of the man who chal- lenged his adopted United States (“the cradle of the best and of the worst”) with the slyest protest song of his time (“Democracy Is Coming to the USA”), will recognize that this was no insult. Rather, it was an invitation to reconsider casual notions of wisdom and folly.

Wallace and Seeger barnstormed across the segregated South for a doomed third-party campaign for the presidency, that of a New Party, which came to be known as Progressive. They were demanding that the United States make real the promise of World War II as a liberation struggle meant to defeat fascism abroad and at home. They knew they were being portrayed as nostalgic New Dealers who refused to give up on the hope that died with Franklin Roosevelt; as dupes of the Soviet Union in a nascent Cold War; as naïve idealists. Yet they persevered, in the face of the physical violence of the Jim Crow South and the ideological violence of a dawning Red Scare. This was not just their own political project; it was the mission that FDR had outlined in the last months of his life.

“We cannot be content,” explained Roosevelt in the waning days of World War II, “no matter how high [the] general stand- ard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” Recognizing that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independ- ence,” the president warned, “necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” And he proposed to address the threat of future fascisms with “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all— regardless of station, race, or creed.”

The Democratic Party that in 1940 nominated Roosevelt and Wallace would, as the decade wore on, abandon FDR’s certainty that “an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order” was “the minimum requirement of a more permanently safe order of things.” But despite that surrender, Wallace refused to abandon the New Deal and the promise of Wendell Willkie’s manifesto One World and FDR’s Four Freedoms and Second Bill of Rights. He could not accept that an unjust order built upon the crumbling foundations of racism, monopoly and militarism would need to be maintained for decades, and then generations, because his own Democratic Party had lost its nerve—and its faith.

Wallace, a brilliant writer and thinker and an accomplished editor, cabinet member, vice president, presidential candidate and businessman, never suggested it would be easy to end segregation and sexism, address poverty and inequality, upend the military-industrial complex and avert nuclear war. Rather, with the support of Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, a young Betty Friedan and a younger Noam Chomsky, he argued that this program was an urgent necessity that could not be cashiered as political concession or electoral compromise. His supporters circulated posters with the picture of an African-American youth and the message: “A black child born on the same day in the same city as a white child is destined to die 10 years earlier. … We are fighting for those 10 extra years.”

Wallace embraced a “new liberalism,” asserting: “A liberal is a person who in all his actions is continuously asking, ‘What is best for all the people—not merely what is best for me personally?’ Abraham Lincoln was a liberal when he said he was both for the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict he was for the man before the dollar. Christ was the greatest liberal of all when he put life before things.” He identified as a patriotic American who believed “in using in a nonviolent, tolerant and democratic way the forces of education, publicity, politics, economics, business, law and religion to direct the ever-changing and increasing power of science into channels which will bring peace and the maximum of well-being both spiritual and eco- nomic to the greatest number of human beings.”

These were not uncommon notions at a time when political leaders, having survived the Great Depression and thwarted Adolf Hitler, imagined a new world order of peace and prosperity, freedom and equality. Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee, a young Michael Foot, a younger Tony Benn and the British Labour Party preached another version of this social gospel as they set out to win the peace in 1945 with a “Let Us Face the Future!” campaign on behalf of a national health care system, the nationalization of basic industries and a redistribution of wealth from Downton Abbey elites to the toiling masses. Tage Fritjof Erlander, Einar Henry Gerhardsen and the Scandinavian social democrats echoed that message as they forged the model of the modern social welfare state. Jawaharlal Nehru, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur joined their voices to the chorus as they saw off British colonialism and announced that “at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

In America, however, Wallace was deemed dangerous by the Southern power brokers, the patronage bosses, the corporatists and the monopolists who were quite happy to bury the New Deal with FDR. The men who schemed to divert the postwar march of democracy disdained Henry Wallace. And he disdained them. Their corruptions, their calculations, he warned, were the stuff of “American Fascism.”

From the mid-1940s onward, Wallace was prepared to name the enemies of human progress. He shared Paul Robeson’s view that the danger for the United States in the postwar era lies “in the resurgent imperialist and profascist forces in our own country.” As the vice president of the United States, he did not hesitate to make the appropriate, yet too rarely spoken, connection between Hitler’s preachments about racial “purity” and the language of Southern segregationists who also spoke of a “master race.”

For Wallace, a breaking point came in the summer of 1943, after racial violence flared in Detroit, leaving thirty-four dead (including seventeen African Americans at the hands of the police). Wallace traveled to the city and addressed a mass meeting of labor and civic organizations. “We cannot fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home,” he told the crowd. “Those who fan the fires of racial clashes for the purpose of making political capital here at home are taking the first step toward Nazism.” Wallace warned: “There are powerful groups who hope to take advantage of the President’s concentration on the war effort to destroy everything he has accomplished on the domestic front over the last 10 years. Some people call these powerful groups ‘isolationists,’ others call them ‘reactionaries’ and still others, seeing them following in European footsteps, call them ‘American Fascists.'"

Those were jarring words from the vice president of the United States, but Henry Wallace chose them carefully. Starting when he was Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture, Wallace studied foreign languages so that he could speak directly with the leaders and planners of the fight against Hitler and his Axis. He traveled widely and consulted often with those who had resisted the rise of fascism in Europe and who were resisting its pull in Latin America and Asia. He made a study of the threat, and he intended to speak about it in an American context. He proposed a broad definition of this charged term that could apply to the racists, warmongers and monopolists who manipulated media and politics to maintain their grip on America.

Speaking to that 1943 mass meeting in one of the nation’s great industrial centers, Wallace warned that “the people of America know that the second step toward fascism is the destruction of labor unions. There are midget Hitlers here who continually attack labor. There are other demagogues blind to the errors of every other group who shout, ‘We love labor, but…’ Both the midget Hitlers and the demagogues are enemies of America. Both would destroy labor unions if they could. Labor should be fully aware of its friends and of its enemies.”

Wallace ripped into industrialists. “We know that imperi- alistic freebooters using the United States as a base can make another war inevitable,” he warned. “Too many corporations have made money by holding inventions out of use, by holding up prices and by cutting down production.”

Could the schemes of the midget Hitlers, the imperialist freebooters, the American fascists be stopped? “Shouldering our responsibilities for enlightenment, abundant production and world cooperation, we can begin now our apprenticeship to world peace,” Wallace said. “There will be heart-breaking delays—there will be prejudices creeping in and the faint-hearted will spread their whispers of doubt. But … nothing will prevail against the common man’s peace in a common man’s world as he fights both for free enterprise and full employment.

“The world,” pledged Henry Wallace, “is one family with one future—a future which will bind our brotherhood with heart and mind and not with chains!”

Segregationists, the captains of industry and the big-city bosses of the Democratic Party set out to destroy Wallace, and for the most part they succeeded. They denied him the vice-presidential nomination at the 1944 Democratic National Convention and, by extension, the prospect of the presidency, for it was well understood that, were a Roosevelt-Wallace ticket to be re-elected in 1944, an ailing Roosevelt would in all likelihood be replaced by Wallace. They drove Wallace from the power- ful cabinet position that FDR had chosen for him, secretary of commerce, in the Truman administration. In the late 1940s, they elbowed the former vice president to the margins of American politics and then shoved him into the shadows. Eventually, they reimagined our history and our politics so aggressively, and so completely, that Wallace’s warnings were laughed off as a sort of political madness while generation after generation of centrist Democrats neglected fundamental economic and social challenges. Ultimately, FDR’s New Deal coalition collapsed and a yawning space was opened for the sort of “American fascist… who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings.” With the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene—to the accompaniment of headlines like the CBC’s that asked: "Flirting With Fascism: America’s New Path?"—the full consequences of that failure reveal itself.

Wallace could be prophetic. He raised the prospect of a totalitarianism, of a soft fascism, lurking beneath the facade of democracy in the United States. What he suggested was unimaginable for many in his time, as it is for many in this time. Yet as the U.S. slides further down democracy indexes, even those compiled by corporate-friendly groups like The Economist Intelligence Unit, there must be a recognition that established norms are being diminished, that standards are being disregarded. Wallace urged us to be on the alert for moments such as this. More importantly, he outlined ideals and agendas for avoiding them.

There were those in his time who worshiped Wallace as a hero, and those today who do the same. But Wallace would have been the first to tell you about his flaws. He was constantly reassessing his stances, based on new information, and he was quite capable of acknowledging when he had been wrong. His mistakes are a part of his story. Indeed, they help us to make sense of why an exceptionally popular and extraordinarily talented American leader came so close to the presidency, only to be quickly and thoroughly marginalized.

Any political assessment of Wallace must look at the whole man. Even his sharpest critics acknowledged that Wallace was known for “modesty, human decency, competence, energy, and receptivity to new ideas,” as essayist Dwight Macdonald said. Wallace was confident that it was possible to reason to a better world. FDR described his vice president as “Old Man Common Sense,” but James Farley, the Democratic National Committee chairman, saw Wallace as “a wild-eyed fellow” who might scare away party backers in the South with his talk of eliminating the poll taxes and “white primaries” that locked in segregationist power. Certainly there was nothing of the traditional backslapping campaigner in Wallace. He arrived on the national scene with few political skills, and turned too frequently for counsel to others who lacked those skills. “I love him as much as you do,” novelist Dashiell Hammett confided to playwright Lillian Hellman, “but you simply cannot make a politician out of him.”

Yet Franklin Roosevelt did make a politician out of Henry Wallace, at a moment in 1940 when the 32nd president of the United States was under assault by conservatives in both parties. By choosing Wallace as his running mate, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin suggests, FDR elevated a leader who was “as strong or stronger than he was on those liberal issues” that mattered most then. Goodwin has argued that FDR promoted Wallace from his cabinet to the vice presidency not to be a party man but to be “a weapon against the conservatives.”

Wallace was against the conservatives, wherever he found them, and at every stage of his life. A born-and-bred “Party of Lincoln” Republican who became a Teddy Roosevelt Bull Moose Progressive in 1912, he then returned to the Republican fold and remained there until he embraced Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette’s independent Progressive campaign of 1924. Wallace rejoined the Republicans and worked to steer the party to the left, in tandem with his influential father, who served as secretary of agriculture in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. As Herbert Hoover’s Republican presidency imploded in 1932, Wallace signed on with FDR and became the most ardent New Deal Democrat. After Roosevelt’s death and his expulsion from the inner circles of power and the Democratic Party, Wallace launched his New Party project, which became the Progressive Party, to mobilize the left for the 1948 election. Eventually, Wallace voted for Dwight Eisenhower because of the Republican president’s recognition that domestic programs would be cheated to feed the Pentagon, and because the old soldier saw the threat posed by the military-industrial complex. Toward the end of his life, Wallace displayed considerable enthusiasm for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. But before he died in 1965, Wallace was expressing dread over LBJ’s lurch toward war in Southeast Asia.

There were plenty of liberal Democrats who loved Wallace’s passions and policies but distanced themselves from his campaigning because they feared it was simply too bold for the times. Wallace brought some failures upon himself. He could be strategically inept. He erred in his assessments of particular people and particular policies, at home and abroad. He was a deeply religious man who explored the spiritual traditions of his own Christian faith and other traditions with an enthusiasm that sparked ridicule and concern. He was, as wise historians always say with a poignant pause, a complex man. With the exceptions of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan and a handful of others, he was as fascinating a figure as the ferment surrounding the American presidency has yet produced. The story of how the editor of an Iowa agricultural journal, Wallace’s Farmer, became the most controversial vice president in the twentieth century has inspired fine biographies. In American Dreamer, former Iowa Senator John Culver and journalist John Hyde ably explain how the son of Calvin Coolidge’s Secretary of Agriculture came to define New Deal liberalism and mounted a doomed 1948 challenge to Truman as the nominee of a party that welcomed radicals, socialists and communists. Filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick collaborated on The Untold History of the United States, a 2012 book and television series; in it, they advanced the argument that, had Wallace remained on Roosevelt’s ticket and succeeded FDR in 1945, “there would not have been this Cold War. There would have been the continuation of the Roosevelt- Stalin working out of things. Vietnam wouldn’t have happened.” The Stone-Kuznick project was hailed by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and journalist Glenn Greenwald, savaged by neoconservatives and dismissed by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz as “a skewed political document.” In truth, Wallace remains so controversial that every examination of the man inspires excitement and enthusiasm, objection and acrimony.

The debate about Wallace and a presidency that might have been has often distracted us from an understanding of what Wallace’s fights in the mid-1940s were about, and how they defined the Democratic Party. It is the purpose of this book to renew that understanding. The abandonment of progressive populism by the Democrats, along with the redistributionist policies that FDR developed and popularized, did much to destroy the New Deal coalition. Ronald Reagan would exploit it in the 1980s, winning landslide victories by drawing so-called “Reagan Democrats” to the extreme right. This opened a void in American politics that would be filled first by the self-serving politics of corporate “centrists” in both parties and then, as neoliberalism failed to answer the needs of the great mass of people, by the right-wing populism of Donald Trump. There are many wise observers who believe that the Democratic Party cannot be reformed. But a reflection on Wallace raises a question in this moment of political, economic and social ferment, of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and resurgent democratic socialism and Elizabeth Warren’s promise of “big, bold structural change”: Might today’s Democratic Party take up where FDR and his vice president left off, and become an alternative to the overt and covert American fascism Wallace warned us about?

Answering this in the affirmative is the mission of an insurgency within the Democratic Party that has grown from Sanders’s 2016 presidential bid and the efforts of a new generation of activists who have often operated outside the political arena but now seek to transform debates about domestic and foreign policy This makes Wallace’s struggle more than an isolated story from an all-but-forgotten past.

Trump’s election created a sense of urgency. But Democrats must know something about how it all fell apart in order to see how it all might be put together again. It is easy to be drawn to the 1948 campaign, as it provided a rare glimpse of what multiparty competition might look like in a country dominated by the two “old parties” that so frustrated Wallace and his contemporaries, and that still frustrate the majority of Americans who tell pollsters they long for different and better political options. The 1948 race offered more plot twists than all but a handful of campaigns in American history, along with a dramatic conclusion that produced the greatest wrong headline of all time: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman was, of course, not defeated, and his victory defined the Democratic Party going forward.

There have been significant examinations of the 1948 campaign in general and of Wallace’s crusade in particular. Curtis D. MacDougall’s deeply reported 1965 text, Gideon’s Army, tells an essential story, as does Thomas Devine’s thoughtful 2013 book, Henry Wallace’s 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism. For those on the old left who remember it, and for a rising generation of young leftists, the 1948 campaign has become the electoral equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, where a Gideon’s Army of campaigners armed with leaflets and placards takes the place of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. For guardians of the status quo, the 1948 campaign is something else altogether: a blunt instrument to pull out whenever they feel it necessary to warn against what Wallace described as a “keep the door open” popular-front politics that makes common cause with socialists, communists, social justice crusaders and radical reformers. The contention is less intense now than it was in the days when Democrats shuddered at the mention of the term “Wallace-ite” and its successor: “McGovernism.” History will circle back to the 1948 campaign and it will continue to evoke radically different interpretations of what was, and what might have been. More books will be written on Wallace’s presidential bid in general, and its courageous challenge to racism in particular.

John Nichols
19 May 2020

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“More than a history book—this is an examination of what progressives must do to retake our democracy. Nichols points the way toward how we can build a party based on peace, liberty, and justice for all.”

– Representative Ilhan Omar

“Every progressive must read this book. John Nichols reminds us that Henry Wallace was the true heir to Roosevelt’s New Deal. He stood up against militarism, championed health care as a right, and fought for racial justice. When the party bosses denied Wallace a place on the Democratic Party’s 1944 ticket, they chose caution over a bold vision for ‘winning the peace’ with an Economic Bill of Rights and the Four Freedoms. As Nichols reveals, that set a pattern for compromise that sold the party and the nation short. Now, seventy-five years later, as progressives again fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, Nichols gives us the history and vision for a new progressive era.”

– Representative Ro Khanna

“Henry Wallace is a political figure—one of the giants of the mid-twentieth century—who has kind of been pushed out of the national political discussion … Nichols [tells us] that one of the reasons Wallace was not renominated in 1944 was because of his opposition to racism. The segregationists didn’t want him around.”

– Senator Bernie Sanders

“Nichols is a remarkable thinker and writer. He recognizes that fights that were not won in the past by advocates of economic and racial justice and peace can now be won—if we are determined enough, and hopeful enough, to carry the struggle forward.”

– Reverend Jesse Jackson

“Nichols is so good at exploring the roots of U.S. radical politics, including our long socialist history. He puts the fights we’re in now into perspective—and gives us inspiration to carry on.”

– Maria Svart, National Director of Democratic Socialists Of America

“Henry Wallace thought we could avoid the Cold War internationally and work on addressing racism at home. He was ahead of his time, and he was punished for that. Maybe, now, we can recognize he was right about a lot of things.”

– Noam Chomsky

IT WAS IN THE AIRE

Fanfare For the Common Man

by Aaron Copland.

(A COMMUNIST PARTY USA MEMBER) This fanfare was written on request from Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, in response to the US entry into the Second World War.

During the First World War, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra had asked British composers for a fanfare to begin each orchestral concert. It had been so successful that he thought to repeat the procedure in World War II with American composers.

Goossens suggested titles like Fanfare for Soldiers, but Copland gave it the much better title Fanfare for the Common Man.

The piece was premiered 12 March 1943 at income tax time, as a homage to the common man.

INDIAN COUNTRY USA

The Year That Killed the Native Mascot
If there is a silver lining to 2020, it’s the reminder that even the toughest fights in Indian Country can have a happy ending.

Nick Martin/December 14, 2020 THE NEW REPUBLIC

JUSTIN MERRIMAN/GETTY IMAGES


On Sunday evening, The New York Times reported that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will soon be dropping its “Indians” moniker, which the franchise has clung to for 105 years. The decision follows several seasons in which the team began to slowly phase out the use of the nickname on its uniforms; this coincided with the decision in 2018 by the MLB commissioner’s office to halt further official use of the longtime team mascot, Chief Wahoo, a red-faced, extraordinarily racist caricature of a Native man.

This year has not been a particularly kind one to anybody except maybe Jeff Bezos. The pandemic has exacerbated existing systemic failures, stolen far too many elders, and further exposed the federal government as an existential threat to its citizenry and tribal sovereignty. The outlook, more often than not, has been bleak. Yet this has also been the year in which Christopher Columbus statues were ripped down from their pedestals. The one in which multiple tribal citizens are being openly considered for a crucial Cabinet post and in which the Supreme Court declared that treaties cannot be ignored. Land and water protectors have stood strong against capitalism and greed—and won. And now, odd and conflicting as it may be, 2020 will forever be remembered as the year that rang in the beginning of the end for the Native mascot.


Cleveland is the year’s second major professional sports franchise to abandon its racist branding, joining the Washington NFL Team, which dropped its slur of a team name and similarly offensive mascot in July. While both decisions were derided by the outgoing president and plenty of other brainworm types as an example of “cancel culture,” that framing is a pathetic attempt to paint billion-dollar franchises as victims while erasing the actual harm they’ve done: Native team names have been linked to the formation of stereotypes and the historicization of Indigenous Americans among children and adults. But the names are still changing, mad as some jerks might be about it. That’s an objective win, both for Native people and basic human decency.

For years, Washington team owner Dan Snyder bristled at outside calls by Native people to concede that the R-word is racist. Snyder’s antagonistic defense of the slur only fueled his defeat, though, as corporate partners like FedEx, under the same pressure, threatened to sever ties if the name remained. In Cleveland, facing the same headwinds after the 2020 season concluded, team president Chris Antonetti informed reporters that the franchise was set “to undergo a process of engaging with key stakeholders.” Then, following the Times report on Sunday, owner Paul Dolan revealed to the Associated Press that the Cleveland franchise will continue to use “Indians” for the foreseeable future until a new name is selected.

Neither teams’ billionaire owners deserve praise for their decisions—especially in light of Dolan’s insistence on keeping the name for the time being. They just saw the writing was on the wall: The “Indians,” like the R-words and all their other slur or otherwise offensive counterparts, are soon to be relics of the past. The names and the mascots are blights that were magnified, enabled, and capitalized on by rich white people. They will one day all be rightfully buried.

It’s easy to be cynical about these things. (Why is it that they’re only now brainstorming new names?) Still, there is a stubborn amount of hope to be found. Dolan can drag his feet all he wants. He is still going where Native activists have pushed him. Whether it’s in 2021 or 2026, Cleveland will relegate its name to the past where it belongs. A victory is a victory, but it’s crucial to remember how long it took to get here. The end of the Native mascot was a battle fought over many decades—and many lifetimes.

Vernon Bellecourt, of the White Earth Nation, and Juanita Helphrey, of the the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, were the fighters on the frontline of the Cleveland battle. Helphrey was among the local leaders responsible for blocking the franchise from moving a 35-foot Chief Wahoo statue to the team’s new stadium in the late 1990s. Bellecourt—a former leader of the American Indian Movement and the lead negotiator during AIM’s takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office—joined Helphrey in burning an effigy of the derisive Wahoo mascot outside the team stadium ahead of a World Series game in 1997, a move that got the pair and another Native protester arrested. Yet neither Bellecourt or Helphrey lived to see the payoff from their labors. In his 2007 obituary, the Times even noted that Bellecourt’s “big four” targets in his team name and mascot fight (Washington, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Atlanta) all outlived him. The same held true with Helphrey, who passed two years ago, just as Wahoo was finally going out of vogue with the MLB front office.

Even with new names on the horizon, the fight isn’t over. Franchises and school systems alike will need to be held accountable as they waffle or draw out these changes. And as I wrote in July in the wake of the Washington name change, a world without Native mascots isn’t the end of the story. The work of unwinding the violent anti-Indigenous attitudes embedded in America’s education systems will remain, as will the need to correct the erasure and pan-Indianism encouraged by these mascots and other popular culture vehicles. (And don’t forget, the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, and Kansas City Chiefs are all still in business and tomahawk-chopping their way through the criticism. None of these franchises responded to The New Republic’s inquiries as to whether Cleveland’s move will spur them to undertake similar plans.)

Justice often works on a long, uneven timeline. The battles we see play out in Indian Country nowadays are oftentimes the final acts in campaigns started long before we were born—that legacy of resistance is how you get an 1865 Muscogee Creek treaty standing at the center of one of 2020’s most significant legal cases. That’s how massive changes like these tend to come about: through sustained campaigns that learn from the generations before them. As long as the baton is passed, the fight lives on. Even if you don’t live to see it won.

Today is a reminder of that: Institutions like this will fall if the baton is passed down—generation to generation. For those of us who pay attention to such things, this year, for all the garbage it threw at us, will always have a note scrawled in the corner honoring Bellecourt, Helphrey, and countless others. They were 2020’s too-few silver linings. Two more teams down, plenty more to go.

Nick Martin is a staff writer at The New Republic.

The Lethal Inequality on American Farms
During the pandemic, a broken system for migrant laborers turned even more deadly.

Jonah Goldman Kay/December 22, 2020 THE NEW REPUBLIC

BRENT STIRTON/GETTY
Farm laborers from Fresh Harvest working with H-2A visas maintain a safe distance as a machine is moved in Greenfield, California.

Unbreaking America View All

When Flavio first heard about a temporary farm work program in the United States, it sounded like a great deal. Everything from his salary to his housing would be guaranteed in advance by his employer, who would also sponsor his visa. He forked over more than $1,000 to a recruiter in Mexico and was approved in April for an H-2A agricultural visa through a farm labor contractor. These contractors, a small but fast-growing part of the legal migrant worker system, hire laborers directly and then pair them with farmers. They are also notorious for human trafficking, and many have a background in cross-border smuggling, according to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Several weeks after his visa was approved, Flavio boarded a bus, chartered by the contractor, that would take him from his hometown in Hidalgo to the farm in North Carolina.

The problems started when the contractor asked Flavio and his co-workers to smuggle nearly $50,000 across the border. “Before we got to the border, they gave us each $1,000,” Flavio said. “After we got past the checkpoint, they took it right back.” (Flavio asked that he be referred to only by his first name and not name his employer because of an ongoing lawsuit and fears of retaliation.) This would prove to be the first in a series of labor violations, including cramped and unsafe accommodations, that would force Flavio to lose his visa and his opportunity to earn a living.

Over the past decade, farmers have faced severe workforce shortages—a paucity exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many American workers have avoided agricultural employment since the pandemic began, choosing to stay closer to their families and avoid the crowded working conditions of many farms. To meet their labor needs, farmers have turned to hiring foreign workers who come to the U.S. on temporary agricultural visas, mainly the H-2A program, which allows employer-sponsored workers to stay in the U.S. for up to 10 months every year. In theory, this helps farmers fill employee shortages while providing the workers with a higher income than they could earn in their native countries; employers must pay a living wage and offer safe housing for employees. The Department of Labor, which administers the H-2A program, monitors working conditions on the farms and investigates allegations of wage theft and abuse.

Or at least that’s the intent. In practice, the H-2A program binds migrant workers to their employer, who controls every part of their lives, from work hours to living conditions to transportation. Since the employer also sponsors the visa, they also wield significant control over workers’ immigration status and whether they’ll be rehired the next year. Farmers usually hire the same group of workers every year, so if any speak out about violations, they’ll likely be out of a job when the next season comes around. In effect, workers are forced into an exploitative and one-sided relationship that leaves them vulnerable to all kinds of abuses. Joe Biden’s administration will have a chance to alleviate some of these problems by policing employers’ behavior and reversing a Trump-directed wage freeze. But more expansive reform—like allowing these workers, who spend most of their time in the U.S., to qualify for lawful permanent residency—seem sadly far off.

During the pandemic, this unequal system turned lethal. Only a handful of states have issued mandatory protection for farm workers during the pandemic. In April, the Trump administration declared that H-2A workers were essential to national security and increased its processing of new visa applications. However, the administration never provided updated worker safety regulations, leaving housing and transportation in the hands of the farmers. The results were deadly, in some cases. In Texas, a 48-year-old man on an H-2A visa died from Covid-related complications after his employer denied him medical care. In California, an H-2A worker died after contracting the virus during an outbreak in his employer-arranged congregate housing. Similar cases have been reported across the country.

Nonetheless, employers continue to pack workers into motel rooms and trailers, according to Lauro Barajas, the regional director for the United Farm Workers in the area around San Francisco. They frequently decline to implement social distancing on the buses that transport workers from their housing to the fields where they work. Very few offer protective gear in the cramped packing houses or adjust conditions in the field to accommodate social distancing. Health insurance, which is not a requirement for the H-2A program, remains out of reach for most workers.

Flavio felt the iron grip of his employer as soon as he arrived in North Carolina. His contract was clear—he’d work 35 hours a week on a blueberry farm, and the farm labor contractor would pay for a hotel for him and his fellow workers. But when he got there, he found out that the contractor had actually signed an agreement with another farm, more than an hour and a half away, planting sweet potatoes. The hotel he had been promised turned out to be a run-down trailer that he shared with more than a dozen other H-2A workers.

“There were only two bedrooms for 19 workers,” Flavio said. “We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor.”

After he complained to the local farm workers’ union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, he was moved into a hotel, where he was kept for nearly a week without work or pay. In late June, Flavio was forced to quit in order to find other work. His employer had paid out less than a quarter of the total contract.

Wage theft is particularly rampant among farmers and farm labor contractors who employ H-2A workers, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Last year, the Department of Labor identified 12,000 labor violations in the H-2A program. The vast majority of those were wage violations. According to the Labor Department, farmers owed 5,000 workers a total of $2.4 million in back wages. Farm labor contractors were by far the most egregious offenders. Because many employees choose not to file complaints out of fear of retaliation, these numbers likely paint only a partial picture of the situation.

Employers have been given free rein to mistreat workers like Flavio under the Trump administration. The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which is responsible for investigating labor violation complaints from H-2A workers, faced unprecedented budget and staffing cuts. In 2016, there were around 1,000 investigators; by 2019, there were just 780, according to the EPI report. At the same time, the number of H-2A workers increased dramatically—from around 135,000 in 2016 to more than 200,000 last year. As a result, even when workers manage to file complaints, there is a slim chance that they will be investigated.

Often, as a defense, farmers claim they are too broke to adequately compensate their employees or fulfill their contracts. Surely some farmers face unstable income and operate on slim profit margins. But the federal government has failed to police genuinely bad actors who abuse the H-2A system. Many farmers who commit multiple, severe labor violations have been allowed to hire H-2A workers, usually without needing to prove that they’ve changed their ways.

Just two days before Election Day, the Department of Labor proposed changes to the wage structure that governs wages for workers on H-2A visas, who are already some of the lowest-compensated workers in the U.S. labor market. But the Labor Department has proposed freezing those wages until 2022 and then raising them annually at a significantly lower rate than before. By the department’s own assessment, this would result in an unparalleled “transfer” of income from workers to farmers.

There is a certain amount of irony in this. If the regulation goes into effect, the very organization charged with protecting H-2A workers from wage theft would be executing the largest transfer of income from workers to farmers in the history of the H-2A program. To put that into perspective, over the past two decades, the Department of Labor ordered employers to pay $76 million in back wages. The new wage-rate system proposed by the Trump administration would result in $178 million in lost wages every year.

Fixing the H-2A program’s broken wage system would involve a series of regulatory changes at the Department of Labor. That would be fairly easy for the incoming Biden administration to implement, according to Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the report on H-2A wage violations. The proposed wage freeze is already the subject of several lawsuits filed by Farmworker Justice on behalf of the UFW. If the wage freeze is found to be invalid, the Biden administration could simply choose not to litigate it further. Even if the wage freeze goes into effect, the new secretary of labor could choose to publish new regulations to supersede the Trump administration cuts.

While new regulations could take up to a year to go into effect, there is precedent for such an action. In the waning days of the Bush administration, Elaine Chao—the secretary of labor at the time—cut wages and protections for H-2A workers. Barack Obama replaced Chao with Hilda Solis, who issued new guidance that restored the previous regulations, effectively nullifying the Bush administration’s changes.

More immediately, the Department of Labor under Biden could issue guidance to the agriculture industry on pandemic-related safety measures. In the lead-up to the election, Biden repeatedly called for increased testing and safety precautions for agricultural workers. “President-elect Biden is committed to strengthening labor protections and ensuring all workers, regardless of status, have access to safe working environments and the necessary protections to report labor violations without fear of retaliation,” said Jennifer Molina, a spokesperson for Biden’s transition team.

There are also signs that Biden is committed to broader reforms of the H-2A program, particularly those relating to citizenship. Currently, workers on H-2A visas aren’t eligible for permanent resident status, regardless of how long they’ve worked in the U.S. As part of a broader modernization of the H-2A program, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would provide a pathway to legal status for H-2A workers. The bill, which was passed by the House in 2019, is currently stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Biden’s current immigration plan proposes legislation that is almost identical to the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. His plan supports “compromise legislation” that would allow longtime agricultural visa workers to gain legal status and be fast-tracked to permanent residency and eventually citizenship. However, Costa says that any meaningful legislation would be a “heavy lift” for Biden, given the likely opposition he would face from the Republican-dominated Senate. It’s also unclear how hard the new administration will push on immigration reform given a recent NPR report that Biden’s team is “uncomfortable” with the policies proposed by immigration activists.

When he quit his job, Flavio also lost his visa. He is now undocumented and stuck in limbo, unable to work legally in the U.S. or return home to Mexico. He’s waiting for the results of a lawsuit against his employer, who owes him more than $4,000 in missing wages. What started off as a chance to earn a decent income and send money back to his family has turned into a living nightmare. Without his full wages for the contract, he doesn’t have enough to pay off his debt to the recruiter in Hidalgo, effectively trapping him in the U.S.

“I didn’t expect to be undocumented—it’s not what I wanted at all,” Flavio said. “But until I pay off my debt, I can’t see my family. I’m stuck here.”

Jonah Goldman Kay  is a writer based in New Orleans.

The Case for Giving Workers Ownership Rights

Workplace democracy would have lessened the damage from this year’s economic crisis—and could buffer the next one.

Unbreaking America View All

Osita Nwanevu/December 22, 2020  NEW REPUBLIC

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN WONG. (REFERENCE PHOTO: GETTY.)

It’s a certainty that we’ll be entering both the new year and a new Democratic administration with the American economy on its knees. We’ll return to something resembling normalcy with time, but communities across the country and the lives of millions have already been irrevocably altered. The lesson of the last financial crisis—that precarity endures for working Americans long after the markets and headline figures rebound—will have to be learned again. And the central truth of our economic system will have to be confronted afresh: Ours is an economy where profits and power accrue almost wholly to a class of owners who, as we’ve seen this year, are willing and able to work their employees quite literally to death. The fact that the Biden administration is unlikely to produce solutions that get to the heart of our national iniquities hasn’t absolved us from the responsibility of devising, discussing, and promoting solutions to them. Many of the most promising ideas in circulation now proceed from a simple principle: Our economy will continue to fail the American people until they are given more control over it.

Some of the proposals that should be given consideration concern the reallocation of power at the firm level: that is to say, “reshaping company ownership so that it is democratic, inclusive, and purposeful by design,” as the policy analyst Peter Gowan wrote last year. In an interview this week, Gowan told me, “We should be encouraging the development of a lot of alternative economic models. And we should be encouraging people and workers on the ground to think about how the private ownership of capital is negatively impacting their lives.”

Gowan points, for instance, to the 100,000 establishments that have already permanently shuttered over the course of the pandemic, many of which might have been rescued with some assistance from the government or their own workers. “The bars that are closing down didn’t become unusable under Covid,” Gowan said. “It would have been entirely possible for them to sort of be put on ice and opened back up. But what happened is that a source of money got cut off and capital intervened to find a more profitable use of resources. And that does a huge amount of damage to the economy—the consequences of that are measured not in dollar terms but in whole communities that get hollowed out.”

“In principle,” Gowan continued, “there is a strong possibility—especially in a lot of companies that might have owners that want to exit the marketplace or that might want to sell off their assets⁠—that the government can be stepping in and saying even though there’s no private owner at this place, the workers might still know about what’s going on in their business. They have the expertise, they have the knowledge, they know how to run whatever is being made or whatever services are being provided, and they run it themselves. And that could save a lot of jobs, it could save a lot of livelihoods, and it could create a lot of economic security on a common need for people.”

This isn’t a new idea. In Italy, for instance, a body of legislation called the Marcora Framework offers workers financial support for turning shuttering businesses into worker cooperatives. According to the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, the framework facilitated at least 257 worker buyouts between 1979 and 2014 and saved at least 9,500 jobs. It also found that even distressed businesses that wound up closing eventually survived for over a decade, on average, after their worker takeovers. In 2018, the platform of the U.K.’s Labour Party included an even bolder idea—granting workers the right to a first chance to buy their companies not only when they’re at risk of dissolving but whenever they’re put up for sale.

Full worker cooperatives comprise a small portion of the American economy today. An annual survey by the Democracy at Work Institute and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, in 2018, estimated that there are around 800 of them, and those that were verified by researchers employed fewer than 7,000 workers. But around 14 million workers at over 6,500 businesses participate in Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs—retirement packages in which companies hold shares of their own stock in trust for their employees. In a widely overlooked campaign proposal last year, Senator Bernie Sanders, inspired by another recent Labour proposal, took the concept of the employee stock fund to the next level: the Democratic Employee Ownership Fund. “Under this plan,” the campaign wrote, “corporations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, corporations with at least $100 million in balance sheet total, and all publicly traded companies will be required to provide at least 2 percent of stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20 percent owned by employees.”

In a recent paper, Lenore Palladino, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sketched out the potential benefits of such a plan, which, as constructed by Sanders, might have granted as many as 56 million workers stock dividend payments and the same corporate voting rights held by investors on Wall Street. “They’re one way to rebalance power within the corporation so that employees as a stakeholder group have two things,” she said. “One is they share in the economic benefits or the economic potential of a corporation so that when it does well, they gain some of those profits directly, and two, and really equally importantly, it’s one mechanism or one way to create an employee voice in corporate governance, in the big decisions which corporations make.”

In a poll conducted by YouGov last year, the Democracy Collaborative found that a remarkable 55 percent of voters would strongly or somewhat support a proposal requiring companies with over 250 employees to gradually put half of their shares into a workers’ fund—far more than Sanders proposed. Gowan sees this as evidence of the idea’s intuitive appeal. “It’s like: Well, I work there,” Gowan said. “I do know a lot about this place. I do contribute a lot to it. And why wouldn’t it make sense for me to have some more control over where I work? And why shouldn’t I get some share of what the place makes? If the debate got more polarized, I have absolutely no doubt that a lot of the people who would have responded to that poll would end up deciding that this is actually bad because the media influences people. There’s no doubt about that.

“But I think that it does speak to the fact that there is potential to also reinforce those ideas,” Gowan continued. “To give them a more coherent expression of their desire for more control over their lives. People, I think, on a very basic level, have a desire for the world around them to not just be something that acts upon them.”




If implemented, ownership funds would grant workers a greater say on matters ranging from pay and labor conditions to corporate ethics and the environmental costs of business activity—all while giving them hundreds or thousands of dollars in dividend payments a year. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project is among those pushing for an even more dramatic economic intervention. In a report last year, he made the case for the creation of a “sovereign” or “social” wealth fund—a fund of stocks and assets owned by the federal government—in which every American would have a dividend-paying share, and which would grant the government, as a major economy-wide shareholder, a significant amount of control over corporate governance. These funds, on an obviously much smaller scale, already exist in a few states, including Alaska, whose Permanent Fund paid out $1,606 to each of the state’s residents in 2019.

There were around 80 sovereign wealth funds worldwide at the beginning of 2016, with most having been established since 2000. And Bruenig notes that the public ownership of financial assets has grown more and more common as a policy instrument in recent years. “You only hear about this if you read Bloomberg or The Financial Times, but Japan is slowly but surely buying up all the companies in Japan, just as a desperate effort to do monetary stimulus,” Bruenig said. “Not intentionally, but it’s like, ‘We need to get money out the door.’ That’s just where they’re at now. They’re now the biggest stock owner in the country.”

The Democracy Collaborative’s polling last year found that 57 percent of voters would support creating a national dividend-paying fund like Alaska’s—a result again illustrating that the American people are open to proposals that would structurally shift power and wealth to the working class one way or another. “There’s clearly a lot of questions in the policy design,” Palladino said, “but I actually think there is some kind of even bipartisan growing consensus that the way that corporations operate both is not producing the kind of innovation we need and is not producing the kinds of broadly shared benefits for those who participate that we need.”

There is talk all the time now about a democratic crisis; many are justly concerned that our political system and bad political actors have conspired to deny a majority of Americans an equal say in matters that affect them and the polity as a whole. But the same has always been true of our economic system. If democratic values hold enough moral weight to warrant their defense at the ballot box, they’re surely worthy of defense at the places where we earn our livings and within an economy that routinely destroys livelihoods. “All Americans deserve a say and a share”—this is promising as political messaging and promising as policy. Getting there won’t be Joe Biden’s project, and it may never be the project of the Democratic Party. But it should be ours.

Osita Nwanevu @OsitaNwanevu is a staff writer at The New Republic.