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Peppers and watermelons harvested by the Yolo Food Bank's volunteers this fall.

High-Hanging Fruit

Every so often I will drive by farmworkers toiling in the fields near my home in Davis, a town in rural Yolo County, California. Even in the middle of the summer, everyone will be covered from head to toe in long-sleeved shirts, khaki work pants or blue jeans, wide-brimmed hats, and work boots. It’s always a colorful scene. Cars of different shades, glinting in the sun, lined up along the dirt road running past the field. The faded reds, greens, blues, and browns of old work clothes. Rows of green crops, sunshine pouring down from a powdery blue sky, a line of rolling brown hills on the horizon.

When I saw several months ago that the Yolo Food Bank was looking for volunteers to do some harvesting, I signed up. I respected the work the food bank did, and I was curious about what went on in the fields of California’s Central Valley. In the back of my mind, too, were articles I’d read about how very few native-born Americans signed up to do farm work nowadays—and how those who did would quit right away. The articles would make shocking claims: Just a handful of the hundreds of Americans who apply for farm jobs in North Carolina last the season. A California grape farmer raised his average wage to $20 an hour, but his U.S.-born workers kept quitting: “We’ve never had one come back after lunch.” An Alabama tomato farmer said that in twenty-five years of farming, he could “count on my hand the number of Americans that stuck.” Was it true that migrant laborers were taking jobs that locals could be doing? Or was the work just too hard to attract Americans raised in relative privilege? I wanted to see for myself what harvesting was like.

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Paul Michelson lives and writes in Davis, California.

 

My New Book, Organizational Imaginaries, Is Now Out

When people think of starting a new business or organization, they often choose from a very narrow set of options: a corporation with investors, a nonprofit with a board of directors, and so on. But there is a much wider range of possibilities to choose from, as CUNY sociologist Katherine K. Chen and I explore in our new book Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy, just released by Emerald Publishing.

At one extreme, there is the for-profit company owned by investors and run by managers in a top-down fashion. At the other extreme, there are what the sociologist Joyce Rothschild calls “collectivist-democratic organizations.” This latter category includes worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and social movements built on democratic principles. What these groups share is some form of collective ownership, a commitment to democratic decision-making, a communal spirit, and a focus on values and goals other than just making a profit.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Members of the Proud Boys, a far-right nationalist group, confront a crowd at the second Million MAGA March in Washington, DC, in December 2020. The Proud Boys participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 insurrection, which was motivated by conspiracy theories about the stealing of the 2020 presidential election. Geoff Livingston, via Flickr

Why Conspiracy Theories Captivate

The 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred when I was nine years old. In the days afterward, I remember obsessively reading everything I could about the attacks in my dad’s ​Newsweek ​magazines. A few years later, I stumbled upon the film ​Loose Change​, which purported to uncover the truth behind 9/11. At first, I was skeptical. Of course, Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks—that’s what I’d read in ​Newsweek.​ But as I kept watching the film, I felt a growing sense of doubt. By the time the credits rolled, I was sure that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated to create a pretext for a war in Iraq and subsequent war profiteering. 

As I grew up and gained more in the way of critical-thinking skills,​ I eventually came to recognize that the theories being pushed by 9/11 skeptics were delusional. That earlier flirtation with conspiracy theories in my adolescence has made particularly sensitive to the rash of similar falsehoods that are being widely peddled today—most notably, the pervasive belief that the 2020​ election​ was stolen, which led directly to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. What motivates people to believe in these blatantly bogus conspiracy theories?

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Lynn Barlow is a writer based in Asheville, North Carolina. When she’s not writing, she can be found skiing, whitewater kayaking, or playing fetch with her dog Urza. Instagram: @biggitygnar

U.S. President Donald Trump at a February rally at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Gage Skidmore, via Flickr

Comparing Biden and Trump on Economic Inequality

The economic impact of market restrictions prompted by the pandemic—not to mention the coronavirus’s broader toll of more than 200,000 Americans deaths and other losses from ruined health and well-being—will likely linger well into the next president’s term. In the meantime, the pandemic appears to be accelerating trends toward greater income and wealth inequality within the country. U.S. billionaires have fared spectacularly well under the lockdown, having increased their wealth by $931 billion since March, according to data from Forbes analyzed by Chuck Collins and his collaborators. A report by the anti-poverty group Oxfam estimates that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos now has so much money that he could pay each of his employees a six-figure bonus and still have more wealth than he had in March. Meanwhile, less advantaged Americans have been hit hard by the lingering downturn. Although stimulus checks and temporary expansions of unemployment benefits for a time worked well to mitigate the damage, poverty rates have recently spiked. Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities are disproportionately high among people of color. And while high-wage earners have recouped almost all their job losses, employment among low-wage earners remains almost a fifth lower than it was at the start of the pandemic, according to an analysis by Raj Chetty and other researchers.

Amid this upheaval, the next president will make policy decisions with major implications for whether the gap between the rich and poor in this country grows or narrows. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have put forward two starkly different visions for the country’s economy—particularly in regards to tax policy, which will dramatically shape income and wealth inequality over the next decade. In general, Trump argues that the tax cuts on high earners that his administration pushed through in 2017 should be extended, which he believes will lead to greater economic growth. Biden supports rolling back tax cuts for those who earn more than $400,000, saying on the campaign trail that the wealthy need to pay their “fair share.” The continued impact of the coronavirus on the economy will complicate these policy decisions moving forward, but we can sketch out the sort of agenda each candidate will likely push forward once in office—based on their stated proposals as well as their track record while in office—and the possible impact of a Biden or Trump presidency on economic inequality.

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Timothy Beryl Bland, PhD, is a writer based in Richmond. For his doctorate in public policy and administration from Virginia Commonwealth University, he researched the influence of think tanks.

 

Call for Submissions: Resilience

In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | September 2020: Resilience

The pandemic has forced everyone to reconsider how to live, survive, and cope during a time of loss, economic upheaval, and social unrest. For some, the period has also been marked by discovery, resilience, and perseverance. How does one navigate when things are out of control, when civil discourse is anything but, and when six feet is today’s social norm?

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that examine how people have responded and what has lifted them up during this time of uncertainty. Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch NO LATER THAN SEPTEMBER 30. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

Young men wearing face masks in Ho Chi Minh City, four days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic.

The Evacuation of Saigon, 2020

It’s not 1975, and we aren’t Americans and South Vietnamese fleeing the advancing Viet Minh forces. It’s forty-five years later, in the middle of March, and we are mostly Australians (along with some New Zealanders) fleeing the contagion of the novel coronavirus.

Amid rumors that the country will soon halt international flights, I board Vietnamese Airlines Flight VN773 out of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon. Bound for Sydney, the plane is scheduled to take off on this balmy Sunday night with a full load of passengers. When I flew in just one week before, my plane had been almost a third-empty. Only the cabin crew wore masks. Back then, the number of reported cases worldwide was under 100,000, with most of the infected in China and only a few dozen in Vietnam. But on tonight’s flight, the faces of all the passengers are half-hidden in paper filter masks. Cases in China and elsewhere have surged, and the World Health Organization, which announced just days earlier that the COVID-19 outbreak was a pandemic, is urging governments around the world to mobilize to stop its spread.

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Igor Spajic is the author of books on low-cost car restoration and vintage science fiction and a longtime contributor to Restored Cars Australia.

Palmyra's Great Colonnade, photographed in 2007. Alper Çuğun, via Flickr

Waiting for Syria

Sand continued to drift in through the open doors. The overhead fan swirled the grit into our clothes, hair, eyes, teeth. The women wore their hijabs tight across their faces, their eyes cast down, stealing glances at James and me. It was hard to tell what they thought of us, the only white people at the crossing. Certainly they were suspicious—mostly of me, I sensed, even though my head was also covered.

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Dian Parker is a freelance writer who has published in a number of magazines and literary journals. She is currently working on a collection of narrative nonfiction. Email: dianparker9@gmail.com

The city of Oaxaca's zócalo, or central plaza. M. Thierry, via Flickr

Ghost Lives

Mira! Erika wagged a slim forefinger toward vendors, gawkers, and ice cream-smeared toddlers moving through the city of Oaxaca’s central plaza as she turned to face me. “You think you’re seeing people but they’re not people, they’re ghosts!”

Erika had taught high school for nearly thirty years and was a member of the state teachers’ union. She had recently participated in a strike for better salaries and working conditions—a strike that the government had crushed just months earlier. “Ghosts,” she repeated with a sigh. “Oaxaca exists in the past. Maybe all of Mexico does.”

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The Dual Economy

In his new book The Vanishing Middle Class, MIT economist Peter Temin provides a short and accessible take on this country’s deeply unequal economy, which he argues now represents two different Americas. The first is comprised of the country’s elite workers: well-educated bankers, techies, and other highly skilled workers and managers, members of what he calls the “finance, technology, and electronics sector” (FTE)—the leading edges of the modern economy. A fifth of America’s population, these individuals command six-figure incomes and dominate the nation’s political system, and over the past half-century, they have taken a greater and greater share of the gains of economic growth. The other America, what he calls the “low-wage sector,” is the rest of the population—the dwindling ranks of clerks, assemblers, and other middle-income workers, and an expanding class of laborers, servers, and other lowly paid workers.

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Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Photo by Amy, via Flickr

Human Subjects

In 2013 I moved to Ndola, a city in northern Zambia, to work on an HIV research project. Ndola is the hub of the country’s copper mining industry, a bustling commercial center that draws entrepreneurs from South Africa and beyond. My organization worked with government clinics in villages around the Ndola area to provide HIV and family-planning counseling, care, and education. I’d recently graduated from a master’s program in public health, and a US-based research organization had hired me to co-lead a year-long study of HIV infection among women.

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Photo by David McNeary, via Flickr

Trump’s American Dream: You’ll Have to Be Asleep to Believe It

While there are many reasons why Donald Trump won the election, it’s clear that the movement of the white working class away from the Democratic Party had something to do with it. Given that this demographic seems to have put Trump over the top in the Electoral College, what do we expect his administration’s policies to do for this group—and for the working class (which, importantly, is increasingly nonwhite) more broadly?

Continue reading Trump’s American Dream: You’ll Have to Be Asleep to Believe It

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

 

The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy

The sun shining on a cityI’ve written a piece for The Atlantic about the hollowness of our modern economy and the effect it has on the working class.

Continue reading The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy

Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen