The January 6 committee’s first hearing evoked the day of the Capitol attack, held in the same building before a roomful of people who had been there.
The first hearing of the January 6 select committee was a bit unusual.
It wasn’t just the historical import, the primetime national television audience of more than 20 million, or even its content, though that was outside the norm. The committee of seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans does not operate along traditional partisan lines, and their format deemphasized live witness testimony in favor of footage of the attack and clips of depositions.
Instead, it was the location of the hearing that made it unique. The Iran-Contra hearings did not take place at a remote Central American airstrip, nor did the House Un-American Activities Committee convene in Whittaker Chambers’s pumpkin patch. But the committee investigating the attack on the United States Capitol met in the Capitol complex, before a roomful of people who had been in the building that day.
The result was an eerie tension hanging over a committee room where almost everyone there had some sort of direct connection to the events of January 6.
At one table, the journalist wearily responding to Slack queries from an editor had filmed the mob battering down the doors to the Rotunda. In the back of the room, the Congress member intently watching had bunkered down in his office, gripping tight a baseball bat in case rioters made it through his locked door. When clips of the rioters inside the Capitol were shown, those in the room weren’t just seeing the building for its symbolic nature. They saw corridors down which they walked every day. The routes that the attackers took that day on their way to “hang Mike Pence” and hunt down Nancy Pelosi were also paths to a preferred lunch spot or shortcuts to make it to a meeting.
Their memories were not anywhere near as graphic as those of the officers who engaged in hand-to-hand combat that day, like Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who testified about “slipping in people’s blood.” But they were just as visceral.
Of the roughly 20 members of Congress watching the hearings in the room, many of whom had been trapped in the House gallery during the attack, most of them teared up at some point. This wasn’t something they had watched on cable news. It was something they’d lived.
Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) recalled to Vox the memory of seeing her colleague Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) get “clocked” in the cheek that day. The assault didn’t come from a rioter but a fellow member, who accidentally whacked him during the mad scramble over railings to escape the gallery as members tried to flee while simultaneously fumbling to put on their gas masks.
There will be a half-dozen more hearings by the committee, and those will be different, too. They may not get the same attention or audience. There may be fewer reporters, fewer members of Congress who clear their schedules to attend, and fewer special guests who have become the faces of that day, like former DC police officer Michael Fanone and current Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn. Future hearings will focus on issues in addition to the events of that day: Monday’s scheduled hearing will feature former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt as the committee explores Trump’s knowing embrace of lies around the 2020 election. Viewers are as likely to see footage of the hair dye dripping down Rudy Giuliani’s face as the blood that stained the corridors of the Capitol.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be other potential drama. No matter the topic of the hearing or the crowd in the room, tension is always there. There could be a defining moment, like when Joseph Welch asked Sen. Joseph McCarthy “Have you no sense of decency?” or a stunning confession, like when Alexander Butterfield told the nation about Richard Nixon’s White House taping system. And, of course, there’s always the potential for a member of Congress to go on a long, self-aggrandizing monologue. But this set of hearings will always have an edge that sets it apart: the committee isn’t just convening in the halls of Congress. It’s meeting at the scene of a crime.
Some progressive groups are urging Biden and Democrats to more aggressively cast corporations and billionaires as enemies in the fight against inflation.
Americans don’t need the Labor Department to tell them that prices remain high. Still, Friday’s consumer price index report for May revealed that inflation reached a 40-year high, an 8.6 percent increase last month compared to a year ago. Energy and food supply shocks from the Russia-Ukraine war, pandemic-related employment and production shortages, and strong consumer demand, especially in airline travel, all contributed to higher prices.
The Biden White House knows that the economy will be the primary matter on the ballot in midterm elections this year; that’s partly why President Joe Biden has dedicated the month of June to voicing the ways the White House is trying to soften the blow of rising prices, while giving the Federal Reserve cover to raise interest rates.
But Democrats also know that they have a major messaging problem. CNN and NBC News both reported in the last month that Biden is frustrated he can’t break through the bad economic vibes to convince the American people that, objectively, the economy is doing pretty well. Faced with competing priorities by different audiences in his party, in Congress, and among the public, the White House is struggling to find an enemy to pin that fault on without admitting that, just maybe, the president’s crowning economic accomplishment was partially responsible for worsening inflation.
Still, Democrats in Congress and the White House may not be going after two perfect villains hard enough: large corporations and billionaires, which progressive think tanks, economists, and activist groups say bear some of the responsibility for rising costs of living.
Starting with local demonstrations and continuing to organize throughout this year, an array of progressive groups are trying to shift the national conversation on inflation toward corporate giants — and some think that national Democrats should do more to cast “corporate greed” and price gouging by big businesses and Republican politicians as bigger culprits for still sky-high prices. They also argue that beyond turning the tide on Biden’s approval rating, focusing on a populist economic message can win back working-class voters in competitive House districts.
What progressive groups are doing — and what they want from Biden
Price gouging is a pretty self-explanatory concept: when a seller (a large corporation or business) takes advantage of a crisis, emergency, or disaster (in this case, high inflation) as cover to raise the price of a product to an unreasonable level. Left-leaning economists and think tanks argue that this practice is happening now, with corporations taking advantage of bottlenecks in the supply chain (like not enough truckers or overwhelmed ports), the Russia-Ukraine war (which raised the price of oil and natural gas), and high demand, in order to raise prices — not just to cover higher production costs but to make bigger profits — and pin it all on inflation.
“Firms are passing along their rising costs, but then they’re going for more. And that’s leading to really historic high profit margins,” Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic nonprofit, and a former senior economic policy adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), told Vox. Owens listened in on earnings calls last year to understand how CEOs were thinking about supply chain disruptions and projected earnings, only to find positive outlooks for profits.
“The story of inflation in 2021 was really big markups, and markups that were coming in part because firms were using the cover of inflation to take big price increases to change the price level. As we moved into the first quarter of 2022, that trend has continued,” she said. Owens said the May CPI report makes more sense in the context of “corporate greed” because some oil and gas executives have scored higher profits while not increasing production to keep pace with demand — worsening the supply shortage.
By calling these practices “corporate greed,” activists hope to convince people that the current economic system may not be working for consumers who are stressed by inflation, but is delivering handsome returns to shareholders and business owners who may be making more money under the cover of inflation.
Some progressive groups are now ramping up efforts to amplify this message. Unrig Our Economy, a progressive campaign formed by local organizers in various states and started by the merger of two other progressive groups, Health Care Voter and Tax the Rich, began a summer campaign Friday to call attention to large corporations and their profit margins with a series of rallies in Arizona, California, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, and Texas.
The “day of action” Unrig Our Economy and its local partners organized zeroed in on specific energy, food, and pharmaceutical companies that have presences in the cities they selected for protests, like Tyson Foods in Waterloo, Iowa, Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Kellogg’s in Omaha, Nebraska. Speakers trained their ire on corporations they argue have taken advantage of the pandemic and inflation to raise prices — and politicians they accuse of having stymied efforts to regulate price gouging and profiteering.
Progressives in the Unrig coalition want to prove that “economic populism is a winning strategy … and this fight over inflation is like ground zero in many ways for achieving that,” Sarah Baron, the group’s campaign director, told Vox. With the nation’s attention being pulled among inflation, gun violence, the January 6 committee’s public hearings, and a Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade expected this summer, that strategy isn’t guaranteed to work.
Several of these demonstrations happened in or near competitive House districts held by Republicans, like Iowa’s First and Nebraska’s Second congressional districts, where activists argue large corporations have exploited communities’ reliance on jobs. The Unrig Our Economy arm that organized a demonstration in Bakersfield, California, for example, rallied outside the field office for Rep. David Valadao, one of this year’s most endangered incumbent Republicans, and linked his past roles on the Land O’ Lakes food company’s regional leadership council and the California Milk Advisory Board to his work in Congress to support the dairy industry, a major employer and industry in the fertile farmlands of California’s Central Valley.
Alice Walton, a spokesperson for Unrig Our Economy’s Central Valley arm, told Vox that though they are not coordinating with Rudy Salas, the Democratic candidate who will face Valadao in November, they see speaking about corporate greed as an easy way to rally working-class voters to support policies that progressives back.
“In a competitive race, there’s a much better opportunity for candidates to talk about what’s on the minds of voters. We’re out there talking about economic policies that we think are important to average Americans, and we are hopeful that it starts a greater conversation within the district,” she said.
Unrig members and a handful of members of Congress plan to bring that call for stricter regulation of prices in these markets to Capitol Hill in the near future, organizers told Vox. In Congress, progressive senators like Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Jeff Merkley have already trained their attention on corporate profits and antitrust regulations as key policy and political goals. As it is, the federal government is limited in what it can do: The Justice Department opened an investigation into “illicit gain” from companies through its antitrust division, and the House passed a bill to give the president the power to limit price hikes by oil companies, but most price gouging is regulated at the state level. Biden has urged the House to take up a vote on a bill to give federal agencies more power to regulate costs from ocean shipping companies, which have raised prices dramatically over the last year. Other kinds of legislation to regulate costs among big food and energy producers, however, don’t appear to have much momentum.
Will “corporate greed” stick?
There’s not a lot of unanimity among economists on just how much of a role price gouging and corporate greed plays in inflation. Progressives say it has a large role, if not necessarily the primary role, while more centrist economists, like Larry Summers and Jason Furman, two of President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers, have referred to blaming price gouging as “dangerous nonsense” and “political ranting.”
Even Biden’s own Treasury secretary is unwilling to pin the blame firmly on corporate profits. Owens argues that it can still be seen as “an accelerant, an amplifier of inflation, not as the root cause of inflation”— a part of the puzzle. But regardless of the wonkish debates over what is causing inflation, corporations are a popular punching bag: polling from Navigator and Data for Progress shows that Americans already assign some blame to big business for rising costs, and anecdotal evidence from grassroots groups backs this up.
With prices rising on everyday goods, average Americans “just see it happening, when you go to the store or fill up your gas tank. People get it, that it’s the companies who are deciding what the prices are. Our strategy here is we just need to help connect those dots a little bit, and remind people about what is actually happening,” Matt Sinovic, the executive director of the activist group Progress Iowa, which protested Tyson Foods, and Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, in Waterloo on Friday, told Vox.
Biden and his White House team have already leaned into the message a bit. During last year’s holiday season, he pinned some of the blame on industries where a handful of corporations have consolidated the market, like meatpacking. But he’s renewed the effort this month with speeches and on social media. On Instagram, Biden is explaining the consolidation of ocean shipping. He’s calling out oil companies for not increasing production on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. And he’s picked fights with CEOs. Just Friday, Biden made headlines at the Port of Los Angeles by attacking Exxon Mobil, saying: “Exxon made more money than God this year … Why aren’t they drilling? Because they make more money not producing more oil.” Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, similarly made that argument to CNN this week.
An ExxonMobil spokesperson countered the president’s claims in a statement to Vox, saying they “have been in regular contact with the administration, informing them of our planned investments to increase production and expand refining capacity in the United States,” and specifying increased oil production in the southwest United States, additional investments in their infrastructure, and pandemic losses in 2020.
Progressives want more of this kind of offense — and Biden might have no other choice. A recent FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos tracking poll showed that more than half of Americans are worried first and foremost about inflation, and right now, Biden seems to be bearing the brunt of the blame in polling for rising costs, even if most of that rise is out of his control. His current economic plan is rooted in letting the Fed do its work, pushing Congress to pass new taxes on big businesses, and reducing the deficit. What he doesn’t have is a clear enemy to attack.
Even if Biden and Democrats can persuade voters to blame corporate greed for rising prices, the success might be limited if legislative and regulatory action doesn’t happen, and voters return to blaming Biden. Democrats have an immense challenge ahead to show Americans that the party in charge not only knows who is worsening the problems, but is doing something to fight it.
Bad news, but there’s still time to fix it.
In March 2020, schools across the country switched to remote learning due to the pandemic. But they didn’t all switch back to in-person learning at the same time. Now, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of the impact of those decisions on students.
Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, is part of a team that recently released the broadest analysis of pandemic learning loss to date. They crunched data from over 2 million students across 10,000 elementary and middle schools.
One of their biggest findings: the speed at which schools returned to in-person learning was the key factor in how far students fell behind. “In schools that remained in-person throughout 2021, students lost ground, but they lost about seven to 10 weeks of instruction. In school districts that were remote for more than half of 2021, students in high-poverty schools in those districts lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of instruction, so more than half a year,” Kane tells Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram in this episode.
To understand how the pandemic impacted America’s kids, Today, Explained — Vox’s daily news explainer podcast — reported on Cramer Hill Elementary School in Camden, New Jersey, throughout the past academic year. In October 2021 the show covered how difficult it was for school staff to balance making up learning loss and keeping kids safe. In December 2021, they explored the challenges of vaccinating kids. And in June of 2022, the show returned one last time for the eighth-grade class’s graduation. It was a triumphant capstone to a year defined by the students’ struggle to make up academic and social deficits created by the pandemic.
You can listen to the final episode in Today, Explained’s series on Cramer Hill Elementary below — or wherever you find podcasts. A partial transcript of Sean Rameswaram’s conversation with Thomas Kane, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Sean Rameswaram
What were your takeaways?
Thomas Kane
We found that even in parts of the country where schools did not shut down, students lost ground. Remember, everybody went remote in spring of 2020. And we see that that achievement slowed down even in places that went back to in-person pretty quickly. However, in places where schools remained remote for more than half of 2021, there were much larger losses, especially for students attending high-poverty schools.
In the areas where students remained in-person for 2021, students lost ground. But there was no widening of gaps between Black and white students, between high-poverty and low-poverty schools. Everybody lost about the same amount. But in areas that went remote for more than half of 2021, achievement gaps widened pretty dramatically between high-poverty and low-poverty schools, between Blacks and whites, between whites and Hispanics.
Sean Rameswaram
How exactly do you measure that?
Thomas Kane
When we say students lost ground, I’m not literally saying people forgot how to do algebra or forgot how to read. It was that they didn’t grow as much in algebra or math, and they didn’t grow as much in reading as we would expect them to grow. Students are learning all the time. It’s just that they learn much faster when school is in-person.
Sean Rameswaram
So even if the schools were remote for comparable periods of time, lower-income families did worse. Is that right?
Thomas Kane
Kids in high-poverty schools lost the equivalent of about 22 weeks of instruction if their schools were remote for half the year or more. And students in low-poverty schools, or higher-income students, lost ground, too. But rather than 22 weeks, they lost about 13 weeks … It was almost as if we flipped a switch on a critical part of our social infrastructure. Where schools stayed open, gaps did not widen; where schools closed, gaps widened dramatically. Horace Mann used to argue that schools are the balance wheel of the social machinery. I think we got a chance to see that.
Sean Rameswaram
What can schools do now to make up for what’s been lost?
Thomas Kane
Well, I know everybody is eager to get back to normal, but I hope people recognize that normal is not going to be enough. Based on our calculations, virtually every student in the high-poverty schools that were remote for half the year of 2021 would need a tutor in order to catch up. The logistically least challenging option, but which is politically the least popular option, would be extending the school year over the next couple of years and then paying teachers, you know, time and a half, or [adding to] school bus drivers and other school staff pay. Make it worth people’s while to teach the additional time. School districts have the dollars through this federal aid that they’ve received over the last couple of years. And we just need to be thinking about what’s the scale of effort that’s going to be required to help students catch up.
Sean Rameswaram
How long do schools have to fix this?
Thomas Kane
Over the course of the pandemic, schools have received about $190 billion in federal aid, and much of that money is currently unspent. School districts have until the end of 2024 to spend those dollars. … We need to start planning for interventions far beyond the scale that most districts are currently contemplating. … We should be talking now about things like extending the school year at the end of next year. Not in the next few weeks, but at the end of next year. If we gave teachers and parents enough time to plan ahead, it is a challenge we could all take on. My sense — my fear — though, is people are underestimating the scale of the effort that’s going to be required to help students catch up.
Listen to previous episodes in the series:
How do you do, fellow kids? | October 21, 2021
School’s been back for a month. Today, Explained spent a month checking in with Cramer Hill Elementary to find out how it’s going.