interviews
The Compton Pledge
by Nika Soon-Shiong
November 18, 2020
This interview with Nika Soon-Shiong, Co-director of the Compton Pledge, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Nika | My name is Nika Soon-Shiong. I'm the Executive Director of The Fund for Guaranteed Income, as well as Co-director of the Compton Pledge.
frank | And what are both of those things?
The Fund for Guaranteed Income is an organization that I have been working towards for the past five years. My initial plan was to launch it after I finished my PhD on cash transfer implementation systems, but it really feels like now is an unprecedented time for more radical political visions and policies to take root.
The Compton Pledge is the fastest-launched and most robust city-led guaranteed income initiative in the United States. It is implemented by the Compton Community Development Corporation and The Fund for Guaranteed Income, in partnership with the Jain Family Institute. A Community Advisory Board is guiding the design and implementation
In what ways is the city of Compton involved?
Mayor Brown is a founding member of the Mayors for Guaranteed Income led by Stockton’s Mayor Tubbs. Mayor Brown’s leadership and commitment to healing justice is incredibly important to the Compton Pledge.
Aja Brown (Los Angeles News Group)
Our goal is to make the case for new government policies at a municipal, state, and federal level, so the city's involvement is crucial. The Pledge itself, however, is not financed by the city. It is funded philanthropically.
How do you decide who is qualified to be a recipient? How many people are you looking to include and what are you budgeting per person?
We are using a combination of public government and community-based organizations data to select 800 low-income residents to receive the cash transfers. The exact amount received by each participant will vary based on household size. Each participant will receive at least several hundred dollars, and parents with children will receive greater amounts. The frequency of distribution will also vary, but participants will be informed at the outset about the timing of their expected payments so that they can plan accordingly.
And how long does this go on for?
It's a two-year program.
800 people is a large number for a pilot program, but obviously a fraction of the city of Compton itself. How are you choosing who gets to participate?
We have an independent research team that is selecting the participants in order to have an inclusive subset of the city of Compton. So, for example, if there are x percent of formerly incarcerated people in Compton, then there would also be x percentage of the 800 that are formerly incarcerated. The reason for choosing 800 people as the sample number has to do with statistical power. We want to ensure that this is really representative of what a future city policy could and should look like.
Why Compton?
It is a city that is 30% black, and 68% Latinx. In many ways, it's the cultural capital of the world. At the same time, white flight, intentional divestment, and the looming threat of gentrification pose acute financial challenges. Unemployment rates have risen to 22% this year. There is an increasing number of Compton families relying on food pantries regularly for food. More than 23% of its 95,000 residents live below the federal poverty line. Compton is a city where racial and economic injustices intersect.
Other parts of the country or world face these systemic issues, but a motivating factor for The Fund for Guaranteed Income's first initiative being the Compton Pledge is the leadership of Mayor Brown, who has boldly linked the COVID public health crisis to the pervasive PTSD following decades of police brutality and mass incarceration of communities of color. She is standing with movements in the national rallying cry to defund the police and reinvest in communities. We are unapologetically trying new approaches to that second part of the equation: investing in communities.
What is the long-term political vision for The Fund for Guaranteed Income as it relates to the future of cash transfers in America? And do you think you ensure its success?
The long-term vision is to re-imagine social policy through a people-led process that crosses class, industry, and race. The aim is to redistribute wealth at scale and realize individuals’ inherent right to share in the nation's socially produced and inherited wealth.
We need to set a standard that organizers and people with the lived experience of harm from today's existing systems are the experts in the policymaking arena.
What will make or break this ambitious vision for society and its institutions is an ability to coordinate with national movements and organizers, academics, policymakers, and politicians. A coalition of organizations like Black Lives Matter, One Fair Wage, National Council Essie Justice Group, A New Way of Life, Brotherhood Crusade have taken the pledge.
I was talking to Andrea James, the founder of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, and she said this incredible phrase that I can't get out of my mind. She said, "Whether we win, lose, or draw, it’s a win for us. It's going to change things."
The conversation of what the government owes people has really shifted. In the 60’s Nixon was talking about wealth transfers. Clinton initiated welfare reform. Now, bills to provide families with relief during the largest pandemic we have ever seen are stuck in the Senate. How do we move forward? How do you sell this idea in such a politicized climate?
What has persisted throughout welfare reforms is the power dynamics that rationalize and perpetuate a system of rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.
75% of Black Americans were excluded from Social Security when it began. There has been this continuous legal exclusion of Black people from the wealth-building apparatuses whether under the New Deal tax laws that relegate fewer resources to communities of color, or white flight and suburbanization under the name of urban renewal.
Pres. Clinton signing Social Security Independent Agency Act
We have this obsession with individualism and the myth of meritocracy. Universal access to education and health was once seen as an unsustainable dream, perhaps, and in America healthcare still might fall into that category. But now, largely, these things are seen as a right. And I think it's time to invest in guaranteed income as a right of all people. It's an investment in humanity.
How do you think politicians should be advocating for UBI? And do you think the CARES Act has made the idea more palatable?
The CARES Act has proved that when politicians believe we need to fund something, we find the money to fund it. On one hand, the CARES Act has strengthened the case for direct cash transfers. Still, it was a one-time transfer of $1,200 for adults and $500 for a child that left out millions of undocumented and formerly incarcerated people.
It exposed the frailty of the social safety net and the racial fault lines along which it cracks. I think that politicians should frame guaranteed income as a universal income floor for all residents of America, regardless of legal citizenship status, regardless of whether or not an individual has been formerly incarcerated.
As an organization, do you have any investment or interest in what people do with the capital they are given?
So much of this space has been focused on how people are spending the money. There have been lots of studies to empirically prove that people don't spend it on temptation goods and drugs and alcohol, and they don’t quit their jobs. And I think that question reifies the welfare stereotypes and racist tropes that have persisted throughout American perspectives on who is and is not deserving. For me, the real question is not how people spend the money, but how a system could justify denying people the breathing room that a guaranteed income would afford. Especially as massive amounts of public dollars fund a criminal legal system that drains government budgets and perpetuates the criminalization of poverty.
We're starting from the basis that the real question isn't: how do people spend the money, or: is this the right policy to pursue?
Our question is not if we should implement guaranteed income, but how.
How can citizens in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas participate?
How can you pledge Compton? There are a number of ways. We have a donation page on our website, since we are raising for the cash disbursements, which will go directly to the individuals. You can show us love or share your story on Instagram and Twitter. But, really, you can reach out to your elected officials and pay attention to our policy agenda. The Compton Pledge plans to be passed as a local resolution of the BREATHE Act.
Right now the model is philanthropically funded. Are you hoping to move away from the philanthropy model as this broadens?
Yes. We have a team of people looking into the long-term financing of guaranteed income for the city of Compton, and they are coming out with a report on our plans to do so. It is a cross-institutional working group and there's a bigger conversation to be had about how it can be financed at the state level at the federal level.
It's interesting. The whole idea of philanthropy as a solution — it’s a starting point but feels like that model is also inherently part of the problem you are trying to address. The idea that redistribution is left up to the interest and will of people or institutions that have a lot of capital.
I completely take your point. I think the Fund for Guaranteed Income is challenging the assumptions of philanthropy itself. Like the notion that wealthy individuals are the natural experts when it comes to designing a more equitable future. It is certainly time for more sore winners in today’s economic system. If an individual decides that they want to redistribute all of their wealth to every single low-income individual in a city, well, we want to build a platform for them to do that and a coalition that will stand behind them.
interviews
Those Enumerated
by David Schulltz
October 19, 2020
This interview with David Schultz, professor of political science and legal studies at Hamlin University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What is the origin of the census?
The census has a constitutional foundation and is tied to the core notion of our democracy. The purpose of the census is to ensure that we provide a good count of how many people there are and link that count to representation.
The census is listed in Article I, Section 2 of The Constitution. Article I deals with the powers of Congress. It discusses how the House of Representatives is apportioned based on the state population and calls for a census every 10 years in order to count all the persons who are living in the United States.
Can you clarify how people are counted? Is the process still a door to door, head by head counting?
Some of it is. Traditionally that is the way the census is run. A lot of it has, especially during the pandemic, switched to brochures through the US mail that ask people to go online and to fill out the census form. Even now, outside of the efforts throughout the mail and on the internet, there are still census takers who go door to door to try to reach whoever has not responded.
How do you count for a homeless population, a population that doesn't have access to technology, or a population living below the poverty line who might have a harder time being counted? How do you ensure that those people are also being represented within the census?
I'm also going to add to this consideration individuals who are not documented. It's very difficult to count all of these different populations. Some of them may be afraid of answering the questions, some of them may be hard to locate, and some of them simply do not want to respond.
Occasionally, there will be some slight statistical corrections within the census — it is possible to extrapolate from existing numbers to say that there might be additional individuals in specific areas. But, to a large extent, the census has to try to identify pockets of where people are living in tents or may not want to respond to the census, and go out and count them. These are not easy things to do.
The Constitution says that the only people to be counted are free persons — and all other persons are to be counted as three-fifths of a person. How did we move past that? Have there been efforts to make sure we count everyone?
The original constitution is really the product of compromise, fear, and distrust. Go back to 1787. The fear and distrust was between the small populous states versus the large populous states, the North versus the South, the slave states versus free states. All of them were really concerned that if the new constitution was not structured in a certain way, they might be the loser.
Among the battles that were fought was the gap between the free and the slave states over representation. The three-fifths clause was really central to the original constitution but has been removed from the constitution through various amendments, including the 14th amendment, which provides for equal protection under the law, and the 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery. The three-fifths clause counted slaves as three-fifths persons for the purpose of representation and taxes, but in neither case were African-Americans given any rights, let alone voting rights.
Historically, there have been strong efforts to try to count everybody. Of course, when you think back to the 19th century, we were dealing with a much more agrarian, much more rural America. Now, in very large urban areas, it can be difficult to count everyone.
But, over time, at least since the Civil War and maybe even since the beginning of The Republic, there hasn't been a politicization over the census and the counting of people to the degree that we are seeing this year. This polarization over counting is unique.
What is the point of politicizing something like the census? What can the census shape? Can we back up and look at how the census shaped American politics after the 2010 census year?
The census shapes the political landscape in a variety of ways.
The 2010 census happened to be in a year that Republicans did exceedingly well across the United States at the polls — they captured state legislatures, governorships, and so forth. In 2011, when it was time to draw the district lines across the United States, Republicans, who were in control of many statehouses, drew lines to their advantage.
The elections this year are still taking place under the district lines that were drawn in 2011. Of course, we know that partisan gerrymandering is a problem, but the Supreme Court has said that they don't want the federal courts to address it. Again, remember why the census is so important. It affects your count for the population. The count for the population affects the representation in Congress.
The census also impacts how many electoral votes a state has in the election of the president. It has an enormous impact on federal aid money that comes back to the state.
It can also affect how money is earmarked for particular types of programs.
Right. There has been a push to end the census count early, and a recent Supreme Court ruling to end the count by October 31st. Why is the timeline so contentious?
Normally one would think that in a pandemic as serious as what we are experiencing right now, that there would be all kinds of reasons to want to extend the date of the census to ensure an accurate count. Right now people are afraid to open doors. Right now people probably need more time to do the census because of all the other challenges that they are facing.
But, we have wound up with a partisan divide over the census that is due, in part, to the political rhetoric Donald Trump started four years ago, where he was critical of immigration and critical of immigrants, including those lacking documentation in the United States. In addition, Trump would prefer to not count undocumented immigrants in the United States. That has the potential to have a significant impact on representation. Some people are arguing that it could hurt areas of the country where the Democratic party leads, such as big cities. But even for those legally in the US, they may fear that completing the census puts them at risk for deportation.
Who decides the timeline of the census?
Congress has established parameters for the conducting of a census — it has the authority to do so under the Constitution. The president, in many ways, is trying to preempt the authority of Congress. At this point, it looks like the census is going to end on October 31 and there will not be an extension. The next battle is going to be a hearing on November 30th regarding whether the president can exclude undocumented individuals from the census count.
Is there a precedent for that?
Not really, no. The census says all persons, but it doesn't specify a particular type of person — it's broad language seems to suggest that anybody who is permanently dwelling in the United States should be counted as a person. Again, we haven't had a case like this before the Supreme Court. This decision will be brand new in terms of who should be counted.
Do you think that there's a better or more efficient way to run the census?
The census could be improved by using the technologies that are available. But, of course, we know there is an enormous digital divide, which means some people are not going to have access to that sort of technology. but I think the real question about the census is not how do we make it more efficient, but rather how do we deal with the political factors around the counting process.
By some estimates, we have 12 million individuals who live in the United States without documentation.
There are also those legally in the US who fear answering the census puts them at risk. Part of getting an accurate census gets into immigration policy and gets into the question of how to instill trust among people.
Are there suggestions for how people might feel more comfortable? Is there a legal way to ensure protection for those people who might feel nervous about participating?
You could pass laws that say that the information that individuals disclose on the census would not be shared with any immigration authorities. But again, even if those laws were in place, how do you address the basic fear and suspicion and distrust that many people have? It probably would require a really significant education program. It probably would also require the hiring of census workers who look at the people who are taking the census. I'm not sure if the Census Bureau has done a good enough job with that kind of diversity.
In many ways, we've never faced this problem to this degree before. And to a large extent, the centrality of the issue lies in blaming immigrants for America's problems and labeling individuals who are not documented as part of the problem.