Blog
-
Broken Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire ; Latest on U.S. Politics; Ebola Update
Transcript:
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The preliminary agreement between Iran and the U.S. excludes another party to the war that got us here – Israel.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah threatens U.S.-Iran negotiations.
SIMON: I’m Scott Simon.
RASCOE: I’m Ayesha Rascoe, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.
SIMON: As the U.S. and Iran try to move toward negotiating a lasting deal, Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon have agreed to renew their ceasefire deal. It doesn’t seem to be holding. We’ll tell you more.
RASCOE: We’ll also look at how the U.S.-Iran agreement is being received here in the U.S. among Republican lawmakers.
SIMON: And we’ll have the latest on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where cases of the deadly disease are surging, and aid has been slow to arrive.
RASCOE: So stay with us. We have the news you need to start your weekend.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: Iran has once again closed the Strait of Hormuz over Israel’s continued attacks in Lebanon.
RASCOE: Deadly Israeli airstrikes struck Lebanon today, and that was shortly after Israel and Hezbollah renewed a ceasefire agreement.
SIMON: The fighting could have a direct impact on negotiations between Iran and the U.S., aimed at a lasting deal that would include curtailing Iran’s nuclear program. NPR’s Jane Arraf is in Beirut. Jane, thanks for being with us.
JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Strait of Hormuz closed again, and the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah is not holding. What’s going on?
ARRAF: Iran is now saying that it was Washington’s job to ensure Israel adhered to the ceasefire in Lebanon. And it’s saying that Washington did not fulfill that commitment and it calls it a violation of the understanding it had with the United States. Iran further says that calls the entire agreement, including opening the Strait of Hormuz, into question. That’s after Israeli attacks Friday and Saturday. Those attacks were in the Beqaa Valley in the east, but mostly in southern Lebanon, where Israeli forces have invaded and are trying to take more territory. Hezbollah is fighting back. Israeli airstrikes on Friday killed at least 55 people, including 12 children, according to state media and local officials. And Hezbollah attacks on advancing forces inside Lebanon killed four Israeli soldiers. So not much of a ceasefire.
SIMON: A preliminary agreement President Trump signed Wednesday with Iran explicitly includes Lebanon in the ceasefire, but as you’ve reported, it hasn’t really been fully enforced. Where does that leave the wider agreement with Iran?
ARRAF: Well, as we’ve seen, Israel believes it’s not bound by that wider agreement, which calls for ensuring Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. In fact, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Israeli military is destroying Lebanese border villages, including infrastructure, making it impossible for 200,000 residents to return. And Israeli troops are trying to take a strategic Hezbollah position deeper into Lebanon. Hezbollah has been attacking Israeli tanks and troops to prevent that advance.
SIMON: Earlier this week, you were in Nabatieh, still a center of fighting. What’s life like there?
ARRAF: There is an awful lot of destruction, including downtown in the historic Ottoman-era market, hundreds of years old. All of that was heavily damaged. We met one of the town residents, Najib Bayad (ph), a little further into the city. He was returning briefly to see the damage to his apartment. So a part of the building had collapsed, and there was so much rubble. It was difficult to get through the door, even. There was a sound of artillery in the distance. You could see smoke rising. And inside, all the glass had been blown out, including the balcony doors.
NAJIB BAYAD: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: He’s saying, “you see that castle? See what it looks like?” He says the Israelis are still there. And from his balcony, you can see the Beaufort Castle. It’s a crusader-era fortress on a strategic hill that’s now occupied by Israeli forces.
BAYAD: (Non-English language spoken).
ARRAF: So he said that as long as Israeli forces are that close, he could never move back. There are now more than 1 million people displaced in Lebanon. Some had tried to return, but recent fighting has driven them out again.
SIMON: NPR’s Jane Arraf in Beirut. Thanks so much.
ARRAF: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: Israel, who went to war with Iran alongside the U.S., has been highly critical of the framework for a potential deal between Iran and the U.S.
SIMON: This has not been received well in the White House, where President Trump and Vice President JD Vance used uncharacteristically tough language this week against the U.S. ally. NPR’s Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: President Trump used some what I’ll call choice words in an interview this week, talking about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to launch strikes on Beirut right before the MOU was agreed to. Words we cannot play on the air. Let’s just say that he questioned the Israeli prime minister’s judgment. Then Vice President JD Vance was asked during an interview with The New York Times whether he thought Israel has incentives for the agreement not to go through, and this is what the vice president posed to Israeli critics.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JD VANCE: What is your exact proposal? And, you know, you’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.
SIMON: Why this kind of rhetoric?
ELVING: There’s so much at stake here, Scott. There’s the fragile ceasefire that may or may not be holding for the moment, as we just heard from Jane Arraf. Then there’s the fate of the MOU between the U.S. and Iran. There’s at least a short-term chance for peace in the region, and then there’s the future of the relationship between the U.S. and Israel that’s been so important to both for almost 80 years. So two months ago, the current war began with coordinated attacks by the U.S. and Israel on Iran and its ally, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Now the Trump administration wants to dial back, make a deal, or at least start to make one, so the world oil market can recover and stop endangering the U.S. economy and the world economy. But Israel still sees itself fighting a threat at its doorstep from Hezbollah.
SIMON: When the agreement to extend the ceasefire and open the Strait of Hormuz was announced, President Trump hailed it as a success. But it is being questioned by many critics at home, most notably some members of his own party. What can you tell us?
ELVING: Conservative hard-line Republicans are saying that this deal seems – if it is a deal – seems to squander the military successes of the past two months in exchange for little or nothing beyond a return to where things stood in February when ships were flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. As for nuclear weapons, Iran is apparently only required to say they won’t develop them, ever, and to have more negotiations on the subject. And in exchange, the U.S. has offered to lift sanctions on Iran and make available some of Iran’s financial assets that have been frozen and even set up a fund to rebuild what Iran lost in the recent fighting.
So some of these Republicans who object have been doubters for a while. Others, say, might have been political, let’s say, rivals to the president at one time. Others had political scores to settle with Trump. But then you have such loyalists as Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. These people seem genuinely surprised and distressed at this turn of events. Wicker, for one, says that the Iranians will use every penny that they get from this new arrangement to further their ultimate goals, which are death to America, death to Israel. And yet Trump has lumped all these Republican critics together and dismissed them as, quote, “fools.”
SIMON: The negotiations, the announcement of the agreement, all occurred while the president was in France for the G7. And because the president has so much global responsibility, is under unrelenting pressure at all times, a lot of his observers noted he looked and sounded tired.
ELVING: The Wednesday news conference was especially striking. Trump was rambling, often off topic, lacking his usual bravado. But it was hard not to notice the contrast with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is, after all, 32 years younger and hosted the summit with grace and assurance. There was a little spat over a picture to be taken with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Trump said she begged him to take a picture with her. She took strong exception to that. Now the Italian foreign minister has canceled a trip to the U.S. And then, Scott, at the end of the conference, when the G7 leaders posed for their usual class picture after the meeting, Trump stood as a caucus of one, while the others conferred and engaged with each other.
SIMON: NPR’s Ron Elving. Thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RASCOE: The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that emerged last month is surging at an unprecedented pace, with at least 900 cases and nearly 250 deaths confirmed since then.
ELVING: Health officials there are overwhelmed with cases. Emmet Livingstone just returned from a reporting trip to the region and joins us. Emmet, thanks for being with us.
EMMET LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
SIMON: You’ve spent a week in Ituri in the area that’s at the heart of the Ebola outbreak. How bad is it?
LIVINGSTONE: Yeah. To put it bluntly, the situation is dire. For lots of people, life is still continuing as before, but because it has to. Children are going to school, people are going to church on Sundays and so on. But there’s also a growing sense of fear. Ebola is spreading across a huge and difficult-to-access area. It’s also spreading in Bunia, a city of over 1 million people, and there is a massive international response underway, but this outbreak was caught very late. In the hospitals I visited, there was a constant arrival of suspected Ebola patients, and in many cases because of poor health infrastructure, there’s no way to isolate these cases, so they risk infecting others.
People are also dying every day. Health personnel also say they don’t have enough PPE. Doctors explained to me that lots of PPE, like masks or gloves, is single-use, so there needs to be a constant supply. And because the disease has spread so widely, nurses in rural areas are coming into daily contact with suspected Ebola patients, too, and for the most part, they have nothing.
SIMON: You, of course, have been inside Ebola treatment centers and hospitals. How were the healthcare workers coping?
LIVINGSTONE: I saw a difference between doctors working in Ebola treatment centers and other health personnel. Only a handful of these treatment centers are operating at the moment, and they’ve been set up specifically for Ebola patients. The doctors working there are often world specialists. But then there’s the other health personnel, the community nurses or doctors working in small clinics. They’re not trained for this, and yet they’re highly exposed. Dozens of health workers have already been infected, and some, unfortunately, have already died.
SIMON: And of course, as you said, the number of cases is quickly rising. Are healthcare workers able to keep up doing contact tracing, isolating people who are infected?
LIVINGSTONE: Yeah. It’s actually hard to know for sure because so much of this outbreak is happening out of view. The government says 72% of contacts are being traced, but aid workers are very skeptical of this figure. Some told me off the record that it’s probably around 40%. What this means in simple terms is that the outbreak is out of control. And of course, that means there’s a risk of regional spread. Many people are not turning up to hospitals or health centers and are dying unnoticed. Health responders just don’t know where all the cases are.
So, for example, it emerged this week that there have been dozens of suspicious deaths in a displacement camp in Bunia. This camp is right next to the city’s airport and the headquarters of NGOs. If it’s confirmed to be Ebola, it’s spreading right under the nose of the official response. And then isolating suspected patients is also a huge problem. There’s no system of triage in many hospitals or clinics, so suspected Ebola patients can be clumped together with others. To give you a concrete example, I visited a hospital 40 kilometers outside of Bunia, where there was only one block of toilets for patients. So if you had Ebola, or say, appendicitis, you had to use the same facilities.
ELVING: Emmet, you’ve seen so much these past few days. I wonder if there’s an image or a moment that stays with you in particular.
LIVINGSTONE: Yes, there is. I mean, amid all of this complexity and darkness, there were moments of joy. And in particular, in Mongbwalu, a gold mining town at the heart of the outbreak, I happened to be in the hospital when two patients were released. One was a woman who was a member of staff at the hospital who had been infected, another was a 3-year-old girl. They both looked a little bit dazed, but the adult woman was smiling and clutching the little girl’s hand.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing in non-English language).
LIVINGSTONE: Hospital staff sang and danced, celebrating these patients who had survived the disease. It was a beautiful moment.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing in non-English language).
SIMON: Well, thank you so much. Emmet Livingstone in Kinshasa.
LIVINGSTONE: Thank you.
SIMON: And you can hear more of Emmet’s coverage from the Ebola epicenter on NPR next week, including a report from the mining town that’s at the heart of the outbreak. That’s Monday on All Things Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIMON: And that’s UP FIRST for Saturday, June 20, 2026. I’m Scott Simon.
RASCOE: And I’m Ayesha Rascoe. Dave Mistich produced today’s podcast, along with Michael Radcliffe and Danny Hensel. D. Parvaz was our editor with help from Melissa Gray, Miguel Macias, Tara Neill and Jacob Fenston.
SIMON: Our podcast has been directed by Andy Craig, who worked alongside our technical director, David Greenburg.
RASCOE: He’s got engineering support from Jay Czys, Simon-Laslo Janssen and Zo van Ginhoven.
SIMON: Shannon Rhoades is our senior supervising editor. Our executive producer is Evie Stone, and Catherine Laidlaw is our deputy managing editor.
RASCOE: Tomorrow on The Sunday Story – you’ve heard of those online scams – right? – where people are either catfished or hoodwinked into forking over their life savings. In some instances, these operations are part of a whole industry, where the scam workers themselves are often trafficked and trapped into doing the work.
SIMON: Going to want to tune in for that and for so much more. Thank you for listening and for supporting your local NPR station. And if you need to find your local station, go to stations.npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
-
Opinion: Algae doesn’t care about our party lines
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has witnessed more than a century of American history, in all its heartbreak and majesty. Crowds have gathered around it in protest and in praise to denounce American wars, and hear great voices sing and speak.
Today, it’s the center of a slimy controversy.
President Trump said in April he found the water in the reflecting pool “filthy” and “disgusting.” He authorized a no-bid contract to resurface the basin of the 2,000-foot long pool, and paint it “American flag blue” in time for July 4th celebrations.
“I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” the president crowed, before the National Park Service gave out no-bid contracts for sealing and upgrades.
After weeks of renovation, the project has cost taxpayers more than $14 million and… the reflecting pool looks green. And I mean green. Like the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day. But that river is dyed green for a day. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is green because of algae.
Look, algae happens. It’s clouded the reflecting pool since it was first filled in 1923. Algae blooms flourish when sunlight falls on warm, sluggish water — like you’d find in a shallow, still pool absorbing the glare and swelter of a Washington D.C. summer.
But a University of Virginia satellite analysis commissioned by the Washington Post saw more algae in the Reflecting Pool this month than at any other time in the past five years.The Interior Department says workers have deployed “a state-of-the-art ozone nanobubbler filtration system” to banish the algae.
“President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the reflecting pool for good,” spokesperson Kate Martin said in a statement this week, “unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden.”
That’s a reference to a major project during President Obama’s first term to stop the pool from sinking and add a filtration system.
In these deeply divisive and partisan times, it’s good to remind ourselves that many issues aren’t just Republican red or Democratic blue. The Reflecting Pool algae doesn’t care about our party lines. It’s green, and it’s not going anywhere.
Transcript:
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has witnessed more than a century of American history in all its heartbreak and majesty. Crowds have gathered around it in protest and in praise to denounce American wars and hear great voices sing and speak. Today it’s at the center of a slimy controversy.
President Trump said in April he found the water in the Reflecting Pool filthy and disgusting. He authorized a no-bid contract to resurface the basin of the 2,000-foot-long pool and paint it American-flag blue in time for July Fourth celebrations. I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools, the president crowed, before the National Park Service gave out no-bid contracts for sealing and upgrades. After weeks of renovation, the project has cost taxpayers more than $14 million, and the Reflecting Pool looks green. And I mean green, like the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day. That river is dyed green for a day. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is green because of algae.
Look, algae happens. It’s clouded the Reflecting Pool since it was first filled in 1923. Algae blooms flourish when sunlight falls on warm, sluggish water, like you’d find in a shallow, still pool absorbing the glaring swelter of a Washington, D.C., summer. But University of Virginia satellite analysis commissioned by The Washington Post saw more algae in the Reflecting Pool this month than at any other time in the past five years.
The Interior Department says workers have deployed a state-of-the-art ozone nanobubbler filtration system to banish the algae. The president posted to Truth Social last night that it’s already 75% gone. President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who has fixed the Reflecting Pool for good, Interior Department spokesperson Kate Martin said in a statement this week, unlike the failed and extremely costly attempt by Obama and Biden. That’s a reference to a major project during President Obama’s first term to stop the pool from sinking and add a filtration system.
In these deeply divisive and partisan times, it’s good to remind ourselves that many issues aren’t just Republican red or Democratic blue. Reflecting Pool algae doesn’t care about our party lines. It’s green, and it’s not going anywhere.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “IT AIN’T EASY BEING GREEN”)
RAY CHARLES: (Singing) Lord, it’s not easy being green. It seems you blend in.
-
The real horror of ‘Alien’ and how it explains why we’re not paid enough
Maybe the real monster in the Alien franchise isn’t actually the killer alien. Because behind the acid blood and jump scares is an even more insidious horror: a single employer with unchecked power. That employer is named Weyland-Yutani, a mega-corporation that dominates workers across the galaxy.
Weyland-Yutani is a sort of extreme example of what economists call a monopsony — when one employer dominates a labor market and gains power to underpay and mistreat workers. Sure, it’s science fiction. But a growing number of economists argue that monopsony power is a much bigger deal in the real world than previously thought.
We watch scenes from the movie Alien with labor economist Arin Dube, whose new book, The Wage Standard, shines a spotlight on the problem of monopsony power in the modern economy. We ask Arin what policy ideas he has that would have maybe prevented the worker tragedy seen in Alien. And we use his answer to try and rewrite the movie (spoiler: the movie becomes much shorter and less exciting).
Plus, we speak with Fede Álvarez, the director and co-writer of Alien: Romulus, which puts Weyland-Yutani’s poor treatment of workers front row and center.
For more on monopsony and anti-trust:
- The labor economics of ‘Alien’ — and its lessons for inequality on Earth (PM newsletter)
- The hidden power keeping wages low (PM newsletter)
- Antitrust In America (PM series)
- How we got free agents in baseball (PM episode)
Support:
Read:
- Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life
- Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter
- Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter
Follow:
Today’s episode of Planet Money was hosted by Greg Rosalsky and Kenny Malone. It was produced by James Sneed, edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
Music: Source Audio – “Interstellar,” “Does Prayer Work,” and “The Acid Jungle.”
Transcript:
KENNY MALONE: You are about to hear some deeply troubling allegations, allegations about a company that we should say does not provide financial support for NPR. Here’s our episode.
SPEAKER: This is Planet Money from NPR.
MALONE: We begin today with, I think, truly, one of the most chilling earnings calls I have ever heard.
GREG ROSALSKY: Really disturbing.
MALONE: And people should know, earnings calls generally, they’re very, welcome to Q3.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, profitability, costs, stuff like that.
MALONE: But in this call, they throw to the CEO. And it is very different here. You want to hear it?
ANNOUNCER: –bringing us to the earnings report on our deep space initiatives. Every corporation has a space fleet.
ROSALSKY: Space fleet, of course. Every corporation has a space fleet.
MALONE: Space fleet is a weird way to put the pivot to space, I suppose. But I kind of follow.
ANNOUNCER: But because we were there first, our profits have grown exponentially in less than a decade.
MALONE: I’m not a CEO coach. But like–
ROSALSKY: I’d sound less cartoonishly evil, maybe.
MALONE: Don’t sound like a supervillain.
ANNOUNCER: This year, the first of our research vessels are scheduled to return. And with it, they’ll bring back something that will keep our profits well ahead of everyone.
ROSALSKY: Sounds like maybe a good investment. I’m not sure.
MALONE: Are you a buy on–
ROSALSKY: I’m buy.
MALONE: –the Weyland-Yutani company, Greg?
ROSALSKY: I think so.
MALONE: Weyland-Yutani is a fictional company from the film franchise Alien.
ROSALSKY: Alien, yeah.
MALONE: And Greg, in case people don’t know, the thing they have found in outer space that will bring great profitability–
ROSALSKY: Could it be a killer alien?
MALONE: Yes, double-mouthed, acid-blooded Xenomorph. You want to make a Xenomorph sound? Can you do xenomorph?
ROSALSKY: [HISSES]
MALONE: Excellent, excellent. All right, so we’ve been talking about a fake company this whole time. The Weyland-Yutani corporation runs through the Alien franchise. And it is certainly a caricature of a futuristic conglomerate. But what Greg and I will propose today is that it is, in fact, the perfect vehicle to look at how we are living our lives today as workers and laborers in the modern economy.
ROSALSKY: Dun, dun, dun!
MALONE: Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I’m Kenny Malone.
ROSALSKY: And I’m Greg Rosalsky. The movie Alien is set 96 years in a future where a single, gargantuan company controls basically everything and employs seemingly everyone.
MALONE: This proves to be bad for workers because they have no other options, of course. But then even worse for workers when they are forced to onboard their company’s newest team member/profit center, which then basically eats all of them, except for one.
ROSALSKY: It’s pretty scary sci-fi stuff. But you know what’s scarier, Kenny?
MALONE: Oh, what’s that, Greg Rosalsky?
[LAUGHTER]
ROSALSKY: More and more research suggests our sci-non-fi world has a lot more in common with the labor dynamics of Alien than you might think.
MALONE: It’s true. And look, we at Planet Money see economics in everything. But on this one with Alien, we are not alone. Today on the show, you don’t need a textbook to learn labor economics. You just need some clips from Alien and one of our leading labor economists to watch them with us.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[SCREAMING]
ROSALSKY: OK, so today, we are going to spoil some parts of the 47-year-old movie Alien. If you haven’t seen it, come on, people.
MALONE: We will also be spoiling some parts of the brand new book, The Wage Standard, subtitle, What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It, by economist Arin Dube. And if you haven’t read that, also, come on. What’s wrong with you people?
ROSALSKY: Spoilers all around. So we emailed Arin to say, you know what, we love your book. But you know what would be cool? If we mostly interviewed about the movie Alien.
MALONE: It’s true. And then Arin wrote back to us and said, basically, heck, yeah.
ARINDRAJI DUBE: Pretty sure I watched Alien for the first time when I was in middle school.
MALONE: That’s very young.
DUBE: Yeah, I was very edgy.
MALONE: It’s R-rated, Arin.
[LAUGHTER]
ROSALSKY: Arin is one of the most prominent labor economists working right now. He’s at UMass Amherst. And he’s probably best-known for his research on the minimum wage.
MALONE: Arin’s been contributing to this growing body of shows higher minimum wages do not kill jobs the way economists used to think.
ROSALSKY: But you can read all about that in Arin’s book.
MALONE: Yeah, yeah.
ROSALSKY: Back to Alien, right?
MALONE: Let’s get back to Alien, yes. Do you remember feeling like there were worker rights issues at play?
DUBE: That was the first thing I thought of. I was like, oh, my gosh. I told my friends. No, I think I was just like, oh, my god, I can’t believe I’m watching this.
MALONE: Yeah.
ROSALSKY: If it just so happened that this is why you got into labor economics, that would have been a wonderful answer.
MALONE: That’s true.
ROSALSKY: But that’s OK.
DUBE: We can go with that because, who knows?
ROSALSKY: Yeah, who knows? Because there is genuinely a surprising amount of labor economics baked into the very core of this movie.
MALONE: So if you haven’t seen it, allow us to briefly explain the setup, the basic setup of the film Alien.
[20TH CENTURY STUDIOS AUDIO LOGO]
ROSALSKY: 20th Century Fox presents–
MALONE: Exterior shot, spaceship from a company called the Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
ROSALSKY: This is a space truck, essentially. It’s hauling a bunch of ore from a mining planet back to Earth.
MALONE: But, interior shot–
[ELECTRONIC BEEPING]
MALONE: –computer screen.
ROSALSKY: The space truck’s computer picks up a mysterious signal, then wakes the entire crew from cryosleep.
LAMBERT: Hey, I’m cold.
ELLEN RIPLEY: Could use some cornbread.
MALONE: Now, this crew, they’re rough, they’re tumble. They’re blue-collar space truckers. They wear tattered clothes and headbands. They work for Weyland-Yutani and clearly would rather still be a-cryosleep.
BRETT: Right.
KANE: Ugh, I feel dead.
ROSALSKY: So yeah, that’s the basic setup.
DUBE: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
MALONE: What about that setup gets labor economist senses tingling?
DUBE: So first of all, these are not great jobs.
MALONE: They’re tough jobs, yeah.
DUBE: There’s some serious negative amenities, as we say.
MALONE: Is that the term?
DUBE: That’s the term.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, that’s the term. When you watch Alien with Arin Dube, it’s like the nerdiest DVD commentary ever. He spots all of these hugely important, real world ideas from labor economics.
MALONE: And so we are going to watch Alien with Arin Dube and learn about our world from his commentary.
ROSALSKY: So negative amenities, those are things that make a job less desirable. An emergency room job, it may require overnight shifts. A construction job, it may come with the risk of injury.
MALONE: A space trucker job on a beat-up old mining ship?
ROSALSKY: Yeah.
MALONE: Arin immediately sees some likely negative amenities here.
DUBE: There’s a few, but risk of death is probably a pretty big one.
MALONE: Yes, I think that’s fair.
DUBE: It could be fun, though, if life-threatening, but definitely not good.
ROSALSKY: I mean, they have to go into cryogenic sleep for many years. They’re away from home for a long time.
MALONE: So negative, away from home for a long time. Positive, get to sleep on the job for a lot of the job.
DUBE: Yeah.
MALONE: A job with lots of negative amenities is what Arin calls a bad job. That’s a real term. And being a space trucker for the company Weyland-Yutani, bad job, high-risk.
DUBE: When you have a job where there’s a big risk, you get something that’s called compensating differential, meaning you get paid more because– to compensate for the risk. Now, that’s if the labor market is working pretty well.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, Arin has some questions about how well the labor market is functioning in the year 2122.
MALONE: Mhm. You don’t have to watch for very long to see the problems. Basically, the first scene of the movie Alien is all about work and pay and contracts. And we cue that scene up to watch with Arin. All right, everyone ready?
ROSALSKY: Yeah.
MALONE: OK.
DUBE: Sounds good.
MALONE: Here we go.
ROSALSKY: OK, so in this scene, the crew, they gather around this table. Their captain tells them about this mysterious transmission. And they’ve been woken up because their company, Weyland-Yutani, it needs them to go investigate that transmission.
RIPLEY: A transmission out here?
ASH: Yeah.
PARKER: SOS?
ASH: I don’t know.
RIPLEY: Human?
ASH: Unknown.
PARKER: I hate to bring this up, but this is a commercial ship, not a rescue ship. And it’s not in my contract to do this kind of duty. If you wanted to give me some money–
DUBE: Not in the contract.
MALONE: Yeah, let me pause there. Not in the contract. What’s reaction to that line?
DUBE: Well, it’s not in the contract. So if they are told they have to do something, it’s not in their contract, they should just quit and get another job.
MALONE: You’re being facetious, because they’re on a spaceship.
DUBE: Oh, no!
[LAUGHTER]
DUBE: How is that going to work?
MALONE: Yes, here is a giant clue that the true monster of Alien may be hiding in the labor dynamics, Greg, yes?
ROSALSKY: Yeah, I mean, OK, so our crew, they live on a company ship. They sleep in a company cryosleep chamber. They eat company cornbread, apparently. Functionally, our space truckers live in a company town.
MALONE: Now, what makes Alien a smarter econ movie than it needs to be is that it goes further than just saying, oh, the crew’s trapped. Therefore they must do what their company says. Instead, this scene keeps going. And the crew is like, well, if we do this little side mission, we better get overtime or something.
KANE: Can we– can we just–
PARKER: Let’s talk about the bonus–
KANE: I’m sorry. Can I say something?
PARKER: Let’s talk about the bonus reward.
ASH: There is a clause in the contract.
ROSALSKY: OK, so that person who is, well, actually, there’s a clause in the contract, he’s an android. He represents the company, Weyland-Yutani. He’s a management shill.
MALONE: Big narc energy.
ASH: There is a clause in the contract which specifically states any systematized transmission indicating a possible intelligent origin must be investigated.
PARKER: I don’t want to hear it.
BRETT: Parker, will you just listen to the man?
ASH: On penalty of total forfeiture of shares–
MALONE: That sounds bad.
BRETT: You got that?
MALONE: No money, he said.
DUBE: No money.
[LAUGHTER]
BRETT: All right, we’re going in.
KANE: Yeah, we’re going in, aren’t we?
ROSALSKY: And that shut him up. They’re kind of forced into doing this mission because, surprise, the company, Weyland-Yutani, has hidden a clause in everyone’s contract.
MALONE: So just walk us through what a labor economist thinks watching that scene.
DUBE: Yeah, so if the labor market’s really competitive, the ability for companies to write contracts where there are sort of hidden risks– like, hidden risk, alien calls, you have to go pick up– those would get priced out properly. And so you would get a bonus of some sort or get a higher pay. But if the market’s not particularly competitive, then that could easily be that these shrouded– we call it shrouded attributes. People have the unpleasant finding out that, actually, your contract has things that you didn’t fully factor in. And you’re kind of stuck with it.
MALONE: I mean, they don’t know they’re about to go be infected by a man-eating super-killer.
DUBE: Yeah, I think the technical term is you’re kind of screwed.
[LAUGHTER]
MALONE: No, I just want to say how wonderful it is that the inciting incident of Alien is a shrouded attribute. It’s this little clause about a wildly risky job responsibility that Weyland-Yutani did not need to price into its worker pay because they could just bury it in the contract.
ROSALSKY: And the fact that Weyland-Yutani could get away with this, that is the second big clue that our poor space truckers, they are not just dealing with a bad labor market.
MALONE: No, no, no. They’re dealing with an infamous economic concept.
ROSALSKY: A concept that could keep some labor economists up at night.
MALONE: A concept that we are actively avoiding saying.
ROSALSKY: Because, yeah, we wanted Arin to say it.
MALONE: Yeah, he says it well. Would you say that the thing we have not yet said is scarier or less scary than the xenomorph, the alien?
DUBE: In eighth grade, not so much. But today, yeah. Xenomorphs are not great, but monopsony–
MALONE: Ahh, monopsony!
ROSALSKY: Monopsony, it’s coming to get me!
MALONE: Now–
ROSALSKY: It bursted out of Kenny’s chest. Help us!
MALONE: Well, I will say, we are bursting with enthusiasm to talk about monopsony, yes? Because Planet Money stans will know that we love talking monopsony when we can. So of course, monopoly is where there’s one big company selling in a market. Monopsony is when there is one company buying in a market. And the version we probably hear most often is about one company buying labor, hiring people, so only one company that people can go work for. And it certainly seems as if the corporation, Weyland-Yutani, is operating with the power of a monopsony in the dystopian sci-fi future of Alien.
ROSALSKY: Now, obviously, this is a crazy, fantastical world, far off in space, with aliens and xenomorphs and whatever. But these all-powerful monopsonies have existed in the real world, like mining towns that were owned and run by one company. And when there’s only one employer– how did Arin put it again? Kind of screwed.
MALONE: Yes, one company, real bad for workers.
DUBE: Of course, in a company town, there’s going to be monopsony power. Weyland-Yutani– but this is really a much more endemic feature of the labor market than people have really understood.
MALONE: As in, monopsony power is sneakily hiding all over our current labor market, even when there is more than one company to go work for. And this– this actually is the part that should land like the economic version of a surprise alien bursting out of your colleague’s chest. Greg, you want to go with that again?
ROSALSKY: [SCREAMING] Wait, am I the alien or the person? [SCREAMING] I guess it was both.
MALONE: Excellent. The monopsony was hiding within us all along. That’s the takeaway here, yes.
ROSALSKY: For decades, economists assumed that labor markets were mostly competitive, and that monopsonies, they could be treated like unicorns, only found in rare circumstances. But Arin and a growing number of economists, they’re finding monopsony is more of like a regular horse. Monopsony power, it’s just much more pervasive than previously thought.
MALONE: Yes, sure. Pervasive, but the key here is that monopsony power that Arin and other researchers are finding, it’s not obvious, like in old mining towns or future space mining companies. It’s kind of with us now, sneakily. So Arin walks us through how to spot what today’s monopsony power looks like for us.
DUBE: I think that the key thing is to start with the– what is monopsony power? Monopsony power means that workers can’t easily switch jobs. And employers have some degree of choice of what kind of wages or what kind of working conditions to provide. Now, why do they have this choice? Why don’t you have basically, I pay a little bit lower than the market wage, everyone bolts and is gone to the next, best alternative? Why does that not happen?
MALONE: So it’s not because we’re stuck on spaceships. That’s not the reason.
DUBE: That’s not the reason. That’s, like, the fifth reason. But first, because there may be concentrated markets.
ROSALSKY: Concentrated markets– so maybe we don’t yet have one giant Weyland-Yutani Corporation running the world. But when you look at specific industries, within specific geographies, some of those have been consolidating, offering fewer and fewer employers for people to work for.
MALONE: As industries consolidate, employers tend to be able to reduce pay for workers. And one example Arin points to in his book, somebody who is working in the skiing industry.
DUBE: Skiing industry, like 25 years ago, there was a lot of small, family-owned hills. But over the last 25, 30 years, it’s become very consolidated. For example, in Vermont, you could maybe go to the next one over. And hey, that’s also owned by the same employer. But that right there is a classic source of monopsony power, that there may be less employers around than you may think for the kinds of work that you’re doing.
ROSALSKY: This seems to be true more broadly. Arin points to one study that found typical American workers only have about three equal-sized employers within driving distance for their particular employment field.
MALONE: But even when you move to big cities where people have way more job options, Arin’s work has found that people simply do not quit a job for better-paying jobs in the way that classic labor market theories would predict.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, maybe they kind of like their commute, or they’re like, oh, I love my coworkers. I’ll miss them if I leave or whatever. And then there’s the fact that changing jobs is just a huge pain.
DUBE: What we call in economics “surge frictions,” that employees actually have difficulty finding out about, applying for quitting, and taking a new job. These are costly. It can be slow. It can be exhausting. And it can take a lot of effort, especially when you already have another job.
MALONE: And it’s not just that changing jobs is annoying, which it is. Arin says companies intentionally also make it harder for workers to jump ship and change jobs.
DUBE: I talk about this monopsony by artifice. Here’s an example, non-compete agreements. So a third or more of American workers end up signing these.
ROSALSKY: A third?
DUBE: Yeah.
MALONE: Wow.
DUBE: And by the way, sometimes it’s argued that it’s because– to protect trade secrets. But then Jimmy John’s sandwich chain, summer camp in Massachusetts, the examples go on. But it’s basically a way to reduce competition for workers.
MALONE: What you’re saying about the ways in which monopsony shows up, surely we’re not all stuck on a spaceship with a single employer controlling our entire life. And what your research has shown is, aren’t we, though, in just littler ways?
DUBE: That’s right. So jobs are sticky. Quitting is harder. And as a result, our working conditions and job quality are only partially determined by a well-functioning market force. So yes, there’s aspects of exactly what doesn’t work in a very dramatic way in Alien does afflict us in smaller but important ways. And the good news is we have ways of fixing or improving those, more so than in the movie, perhaps.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, Arin says, in the real world, we have ways to push back against monopsony power, things like minimum wage laws, antitrust enforcement, and labor unions that fight for worker interests.
MALONE: And this is basically what Arin’s book is about. He says the erosion of those counterforces is a big reason we’ve seen a stagnation of worker pay and a rise in inequality. That’s in the real world, of course. But Arin says he supposes those things would have helped in the movie Alien too.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, imagine if, in the movie, the employees of Weyland-Yutani were in a really strong labor union or something, one that we see in a lot of other countries, where they hammer out worker protections for a whole sector of the economy.
DUBE: So if we had, for example, the Sectoral Space Truckers Association–
MALONE: The SSTA, yep, the SSTA.
DUBE: An SSTA. And so, when they start having these debates about what they should do, there’s a big volume of SSTA contract that lays out our collective bargaining. And in fact, if they found out something they didn’t really like, they would say, you know what. Let me call– let me talk to my shop steward.
MALONE: That scene would probably play out a little different, wouldn’t it?
DUBE: It would be a really boring scene. And then they would say, OK, fine, we’re not going to do it. And then they’re just going to go back to Earth, the end.
MALONE: I don’t know that that would be a boring scene.
ROSALSKY: It sounds riveting to me, honestly.
MALONE: Agree. And so Planet Money is proud to present the world premiere of Alien, 1979, The Labor Economist’s Cut.
ROSALSKY: And we hear from someone with firsthand knowledge of what it takes to make an actual Alien movie and how to nail the perfect balance of labor economics and killer aliens.
MALONE: All of that after the break.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MALONE: The labor economist Arin Dube’s cut of Alien, 1979, it starts the same way.
[20TH CENTURY STUDIOS AUDIO LOGO]
ROSALSKY: Spaceship–
MALONE: Computer–
ROSALSKY: Space truckers wake up.
BRETT: Right.
KANE: Yeah, oh, I feel dead.
MALONE: But we asked Arin Dube to tweak the labor conditions for a better worker outcome in Alien.
ROSALSKY: Arin imagined, instead, a future where the space truckers were part of some sectoral bargaining agreement, where there was a strong union. And here, he thinks, is how the opening of Alien would have played out instead.
BRETT: Some of you may have figured out we’re not home yet. We intercepted a transmission of unknown origin.
RIPLEY: A transmission out here?
BRETT: Yeah, he got us up to check it out.
PARKER: This is a commercial ship, not a rescue ship.
BRETT: Right.
PARKER: And it’s not in my contract to do this kind of duty.
ASH: Sorry, can I say something? There is a clause in the contract which specifically states, any systematized transmission indicating a possible intelligent origin must–
ROSALSKY: No, no, hold on. I think somebody’s trying to say something in the back.
DUBE: Yeah, remember our grievance procedure? So I’m going to file that. And while it’s being investigated, we actually can’t go. That’s part of the rule.
MALONE: So, the end.
[LAUGHTER]
MALONE: Back to the cryosleep, I guess.
[LAUGHTER]
ROSALSKY: Back to cryosleep we go.
DUBE: It’s a YouTube short.
[LAUGHTER]
MALONE: OK, OK, yes, ultimately, you cannot have Alien without all these labor dynamics, the negative amenities, shrouded attributes, the monopsony. And I would contend that all of that rich texture is what makes this movie special, and a huge part of what makes Alien more than just another good horror movie.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, there are now a bunch of Alien movies. And the best of those, they strike this delicate balance of space terror and smart economic themes. And we were unbelievably excited to get to talk to someone who has actually had to walk that econ-horror tightrope.
MALONE: I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit. Do you remember, off the top of your head, the first words that are spoken in your film, Alien Romulus?
FEDE ALVAREZ: First words spoken? What is– let me remember.
MALONE: This is Fede Alvarez. He co-wrote and directed the newest film in the Alien franchise. I can give you the answer, if you want it.
ALVAREZ: Attention all workers.
MALONE: Attention all workers.
ANNOUNCER: Attention all workers. Attention all workers. Day shift starting, T-minus 15 minutes.
MALONE: We at Planet Money, we bring our economics lens to everything. But surely we are not hallucinating that you also have chosen to put labor dynamics, to some degree, front and center here, yes?
ALVAREZ: Yeah, and I think all the– when you’re going to make an Alien movie, the first thing you do is trying to study what make the best iterations of this franchise. And I think– and if you look at the first one, you look even the second one and the third one, they’re always talking about that. I mean, in a way that– how powerless the individual can be in front of the machine.
ROSALSKY: This is kind of a big deal for us. Fede Alvarez, he’s a very accomplished horror-thriller director. He made his first films in Uruguay. He co-wrote and directed a huge hit in the United States called Don’t Breathe. He also directed a reboot of The Evil Dead, which was freaking awesome and supposedly set a record for gallons of fake blood used in a movie.
MALONE: Indeed, it rains fake blood, lots of fake blood. And yeah, Greg and I, big Fede Alvarez fans. And clearly, Fede knows that great Alien movies need smart ideas about labor and work. He’s not a labor economist, though. So we wanted to talk to Fede about how he went about finding and building those smart ideas into his movie.
ROSALSKY: And Fede he told us he admittedly did not notice the econ in Alien at first. But later, when he was around age 20, he started to understand that this movie, it’s saying something much bigger.
ALVAREZ: The movie starts. And as soon as they’re at the table, they talk about the bonus situation.
MALONE: It’s right away. It’s like, first thing, we’re in a contract. It’s wild.
ALVAREZ: It’s the first thing they do, and talk about the rights as workers. But also, they’re not just talking about that. They talk about inequality as well. They’re talking about, why am I getting less money than you guys? And the captain goes, you’re going to get what you deserve. And obviously, he’s talking about, when the monster comes, we’re all going to be the same. We’re all going to be equal. Actually, the captain is one of the first ones to die. And that shows how death is that biggest equalizer.
MALONE: So I’m curious. We’re going to get a little economicsy here with your permission, yes?
ALVAREZ: Yeah, of course.
MALONE: OK, great. Have you ever heard the term monopsony? Does this come across our radar?
ALVAREZ: Oh, no.
MALONE: OK, because you 1,000% nail this perfectly in your movie.
[CHATTER]
ANNOUNCER: The company pays for food and shelter and takes our lives in exchange.
ROSALSKY: OK, let us set this up for you if you haven’t seen Fede’s movie Alien Romulus. In his Alien, we actually start on a mining and farming planet, a colony entirely controlled by the corporation Weyland-Yutani.
MALONE: And it is bad. Workers are living some version of indentured servitude in a company town. And just like in the original Alien, one of Fede’s first scenes is simple, yet stuffed with all kinds of huge labor economics.
ROSALSKY: Right. Our protagonist, a young woman named Rain, she goes into Weyland-Yutani’s office of colony affairs. And she tries to submit some paperwork to get off this planet. Basically, she’s trying to quit her job.
CLERK: Full name and occupation, please.
RAIN CARRADINE: Rain Carradine, ma’am. I met my quota. And I should be free to go now.
CLERK: I’m sorry, but you’re not eligible for contract release yet.
CARRADINE: Wait, what? No, no, no, I reached the required hours.
CLERK: Unfortunately, quotas have been raised to 24,000 hours. So you’ll be released from contract in another five to six years. Thank you. And remember, the company is really grateful for your ongoing service.
ROSALSKY: This is a depiction of monopsony that could be taught in economics classes, the way that remote towns historically created this kind of trapped labor force, the way company towns infamously had so much control that workers had to use fake company money to buy things from their company stores using company scrip.
MALONE: We asked Fede if he and his co-writer, Rodo Sayagues, had researched case studies to get this right. And he was like, yeah, but also, it’s a bit more intuitive than that. And it’s also about, early on in the movie, setting up what he thinks is the ultimate theme of a good Alien movie, general powerlessness.
ALVAREZ: And in the case of Alien always, Weyland-Yutani represents the government. It can be literally that in the stories. But it’s also how you feel powerless versus something that cannot be destroyed, that seems to be you cannot negotiate with, that seems that it’s relentless. So I think that’s why I think the best ones, they always start there. They get the audience. They draw them in from a perspective of, everybody knows how it feels to be in that place and feel powerless.
MALONE: I’ve read a few quotes from you about this as an Uruguayan.
ALVAREZ: Exactly, yeah.
MALONE: You said things like, growing up under a dictatorship in a developing country, that there is a feeling that may seem specific but is universal about sort of a lack of options for you as a young person.
ALVAREZ: Yeah. I mean, ironically, at the same time, yes, Uruguay, by being born in a dictatorship, my parents had a mentality and a way of a survival instinct that came from being born in that environment, where you didn’t have a lot of choices. And if you grew a beard, you will get arrested. But at the same time, that being said, there’s also– the other side of it is, when I moved to the United States, when I make Evil Dead, my first film and I moved here, I was like, wait a second, you guys don’t have vacation salary? You don’t have guaranteed 30 days of vacation every year? And people were like, what are you talking about?
MALONE: You have to work.
ALVAREZ: And I was like, what is this dystopian society?
[LAUGHTER]
ALVAREZ: So Uruguay, we have health care. There’s free health care. And in particularly on the employer dynamics, if you get hired by and a company, and they want to fire you, it’s OK. They can fire you. But they will have to pay you. There’s all this severance thing. They have to pay you at least a month of salary for each year that you work at the company. So the more you work, the harder it is to fire you. And I took for granted all my life living there. And then when I came here, there were people were laughing at all this nonsense that I was telling them. So for me, that also made me understand why, in Alien, it was important, if I was going to make one, to really bring some of the subjects to the forefront.
MALONE: A rumor on the street is that you and Rodo have already written the sequel to Alien Romulus. Is that correct?
ALVAREZ: We did, we did. I didn’t want to direct another one.
MALONE: No, no, no questions about whether you’re going to direct. I don’t need spoilers. You don’t need to spoil any plot. But can you exclusively, for our Planet Money audience, tell us, will we get more labor economics?
ALVAREZ: Definitely. That’s what they’re all about. That’s what they’re all about. It’s not a good Alien movie if it doesn’t deal with that.
MALONE: That’s true. Can we expect, now that I’ve taught you the term monopsony, is it too late to change your next script and throw a little– sprinkle in a little monopsony?
ALVAREZ: Don’t you see it, guys, this is a monopsony! The whole theater is going to say, what?
MALONE: Yeah, that’s right. They’re going to know. They’ll know. They’ll know. Fede, thank you so much. This was awesome. I hope you enjoyed talking some of this.
ALVAREZ: Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.
MALONE: Don’t fast-forward. We’ve got a special event to tell you about that is just going to be for our NPR+ supporters. If you couldn’t make one of our book tour events back in April, we’ve got great news for you. We’re doing one more, one more book tour event. This time, it’s a live virtual event. It’s on Thursday, June 25 at 3:00 PM Eastern. My colleague Jeff Guo will be there. The main author of our book, Alex Mayyasi, he will be there. We’ll also have some special guests, TBD. If you’ve already joined NPR+, thank you. And listen to our most recent bonus episode to find out how to register for the event. And if you have not joined NPR+ yet, well, make sure you’re signed up by June 24 to get our invite. Just go to plus.npr.org. Again, that is plus.npr.org. Signing up is a great way to support the show, NPR, and independent, non-profit journalism. We’ll see you there.
ROSALSKY: Today’s episode of Planet was produced by the wonderful, the incomparable James Sneed. Go, Knicks. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark.
MALONE: Special thanks this week to Taylor Haber and to you, Greg Rosalsky, you little xenomorph. Greg, if you are not familiar, is our newsletter writer and wrote two excellent newsletters about monopsony, about the movie Alien, about Arin Dube. And those inspired this show. So you can find those. We’re going to link to them in our show notes.
ROSALSKY: Yeah, thanks, Kenny. Really appreciate that.
MALONE: Yeah. I’m Kenny Malone.
ROSALSKY: And I’m Greg Rosalsky. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
[HISSING]
ROSALSKY: The key is–
-
In the US, who gets compensated when the government wrongs them?
Transcript:
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
It’s CONSIDER THIS, where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, who in America gets compensated when the government wrongs them? Well, if you ask President Trump, he would say…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: People have been destroyed by crooked politicians, and they should be reimbursed for that.
KELLY: Here he is speaking with NBC’s Kristen Welker earlier this month, he’s talking about the nearly $1.8 billion fund that was going to reimburse people who claim they were targets of politicized prosecutions, including people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. The DOJ now says it is not moving forward with the fund, but Trump personally hasn’t ruled it out.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: Well, look, if it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve.
KELLY: Money that they deserve. By contrast, we’ll note that while the Trump administration was pushing this anti-weaponization fund, a bill to study slavery reparations has failed to advance for decades. CONSIDER THIS – not every group that’s been harmed by the government gets compensated. So who counts?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: From NPR, I’m Mary Louise Kelly.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: It’s CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. It’s Juneteenth, the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., and our colleagues at NPR’s Code Switch have been looking at a question tied to this day, which is, who in America actually gets compensated when the government wrongs them? Gene Demby is co-host of Code Switch. He spoke with my colleague, Ailsa Chang.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: I just want to start in a place that may feel unexpected as it relates to this term reparations, and that is the anti-weaponization fund. That’s the fund that the Trump administration announced last month. It never happened. But can you tell us how that idea connects to what you’ve been reporting on?
GENE DEMBY, BYLINE: Right. So back in May, the Justice Department announced this nearly $1.8 billion fund that was set aside to compensate people the administration, the White House says, were wronged by the federal government. And it was strongly implied that a lot of that money could go to people pardoned for their roles in storming the capital on January 6, 2021. And, Ailsa, the number itself is telling ’cause it’s not around $1.8 billion, as Rebecca Nagle, who’s a journalist and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, told me.
REBECCA NAGLE: I believe the exact number of the fund is 1.776 billion. To me, I read that number as intentionally being 1776.
KELLY: Ah.
DEMBY: Yeah. So, you know, we’re just weeks from the country’s 250th birthday. And the administration picked this number that points right back to the founding.
KELLY: OK. And so since the idea was announced last month, this fund – it’s gotten a lot of heat from both Republicans and Democrats. Tell us the status of this fund right now.
DEMBY: I mean, it’s in limbo. And that’s the wild part. Like, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, told Congress flat out…
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TODD BLANCHE: We are not moving forward with the fund.
DEMBY: But, Ailsa, he refused to put that in writing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BLANCHE: I don’t know what the purpose of putting something in writing. I’m telling you what we’re doing. I’m not committing to doing anything in writing. No.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Not committing. OK.
DEMBY: And then the president kept saying he still liked the idea. And he said, quote, “if it was up to me, I’d pay them the money they deserve,” end quote. But then a federal judge stepped in and issued an injunction blocking this fund, and she gave the Justice Department a deadline that happens to fall on this Juneteenth to produce a sworn statement, you know, put it in writing under penalty of perjury, signed by both Blanche and the treasury secretary promising that this anti-weaponization fund is firmly done, scrapped. She even barred them from reviving it under a different name. So as we speak, the clock is ticking on that deadline.
CHANG: OK. There’s been this whole saga. OK. But can you explain, just step back a little and explain how something like the anti-weaponization fund ties into this larger picture of race and identity in America and to reparations.
DEMBY: Yeah. So it’s because of the contrast around who gets made whole. So for decades, there’s been a bill sitting in Congress, and it wouldn’t even pay reparations for slavery. All it would do is study the question at the federal level, what’s owed after 246 years of slavery, after another century of Jim Crow and the discrimination that followed that. And that bill has been introduced over and over and over for more than 35 years, and it has never once reached the floor for a vote. We talked with Don Tamaki. He’s a lawyer who worked on California’s Reparations Task Force, and his family was incarcerated in the Japanese American concentration camps, you know, that were built…
CHANG: Yeah.
DEMBY: …By the U.S. government during World War II. His family and those like his that were imprisoned waited 46 years before they eventually got a formal apology and got financial redress from the government. But in contrast, he said…
DON TAMAKI: When it comes to Black Americans, Congress doesn’t even have the will to study what happened, let alone do anything about it. So I think there’s a lesson in the Japanese American redress effort about the ability of America to right its wrongs. But the corollary is that is what’s happened to reparations for Black Americans, which still remains unfulfilled.
DEMBY: And yet on the flip, we had this proposal to compensate anyone who believes that they were prosecuted for political reasons, including January 6 defendants. And that came together fairly quickly under this administration.
CHANG: I mean, it kind of blows me away, Gene. OK. So one thing that came out of your reporting was that the money that the administration wanted to use actually is there because of what is essentially an existing mechanism for reparations. Is that right?
DEMBY: Yeah. This…
CHANG: That’s wild to me.
DEMBY: This blew my mind. Like, I did not know this before going into this reporting, but the money that the anti-weaponization fund would draw on comes from something called the judgment fund, and that’s basically the government’s account for paying settlements. And the machinery to pay those settlements – it exists in large part because Indigenous people, native nations, spent more than a century building it. They had…
CHANG: Wow.
DEMBY: …No way to sue the U.S. government directly. So they fought to create these legal tools to do so. And so when the DOJ announced the fund, they cited a case called Keepseagle as precedent.
CHANG: And what was Keepseagle about?
DEMBY: So Keepseagle was this case where Native American farmers sued the USDA for discrimination back in 1999. I talked with the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk, who’s Fond du Lac Band Ojibwe, and she explained the significance of citing their precedents like this.
MAGGIE BLACKHAWK: Most of the American public doesn’t have a sense of what was actually done to Native people. And so…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
BLACKHAWK: …It’s an easy place to just point to without setting off alarm bells, saying, ah, we’re doing this because we’ve done it before.
DEMBY: Yeah.
BLACKHAWK: Here’s my precedent, move on. Whereas if they were pointing back to, for example, instances of human enslavement and saying, this is why we’re doing it. Everyone would be marching in the streets.
DEMBY: Everyone’s antenna would twitch as like, hey, wait a second, right? Yeah.
BLACKHAWK: Exactly.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yeah.
BLACKHAWK: There’s no antenna.
CHANG: Wow. So basically, if I’m understanding this correctly, Gene, she is saying because most Americans do not know this history, the administration can borrow tools built by the very people seeking redress for real harm and then repurpose those tools for their own purposes.
DEMBY: Exactly. And there’s a word she uses for that pattern. She calls it the boomerang, the idea that what a government builds to control or harm people on the margins eventually comes back around to everybody.
BLACKHAWK: What they’re doing is taking those mechanisms that people who have been harmed by the violence of the United States and turning it towards their own supporters.
DEMBY: And Rebecca Nagle says there’s a way that our government treated Native people, treated Indigenous people as a blueprint for a lot of other stuff.
BLACKHAWK: And so I think that people think that history and that those aspects of our government will kind of stay in their place. And I think we’re living through this moment where it’s clear that it’s not (laughter).
DEMBY: Yeah. Yeah.
BLACKHAWK: And that, you know, like, those scary things that our government has done in the past are things that our government still knows how to do.
CHANG: Dang. So what do you think, Gene? Is this story over in the case of the anti-weaponization fund?
DEMBY: No, and that’s kind of the point. Like, the fund may be frozen, but the machinery forward is still very much in place. And at the same time, the Justice Department is actively trying to stop slavery reparations efforts happening at the local level, not at the federal level, but, like, in cities and states. Just days ago, the Justice Department announced a motion to intervene in a program in suburban Chicago that was giving millions in cash and assistance to descendants of Black residents as redress for things like discrimination in housing. And the government called it a form of illegal race discrimination because other races besides Black people can’t benefit.
KELLY: That is Gene Demby, co-host of NPR’s Code Switch, speaking with my colleague, Ailsa Chang. This episode was produced by Erika Ryan and Karen Zamora. It was edited by Courtney Stein, Ashley Brown and Tinbete Ermyas. Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning. Thank you to our CONSIDER THIS+ listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors and unlock bonus episodes of CONSIDER THIS. You can learn more at plus.npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: It’s CONSIDER THIS from NPR. I’m Mary Louise Kelly.
