This week, we’re proud to share the pilot season of a new podcast made by students at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It’s called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
On today's show about deregulation, reporter and Berkeley journalism graduate student, NeEddra James interviews labor historian Michael Mark Cohen about the executive order titled "Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregluation."
THE STAKES EXPLAINED ON BAY MADE: EPISODE 3
DAVID BOYER: You're listening to Bay Made, a mix of local stories and storytellers from the Bay Area, only on KALW. I'm DAVID BOYER. Each week on the show, we spotlight a different Bay Area producer or podcast. You may hear things you totally agree with and some stuff that you don't. That is the point of the show to share a range of perspectives, ideas and stories that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area. This week, we are proud to share the pilot season of a podcast made by the students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. It's called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders and actions that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Thanks David - I'll take it from here. I'm SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, a professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism where I direct the audio program.
The Stakes Explained is a series that came out of my race and journalism seminar this past spring.
When President Trump issued a wave of executive orders, many of them touching on race and civil rights, I encouraged my students to talk to experts here at UC Berkeley to better understand what those orders could mean for our democracy.
On Monday we talked about Education in light of the Trump Administration’s executive orders aiming to eliminate federal funding for programs that focus on race and diversity.
TRAVIS BRISTOL(associate professor of teacher education/education policy, UC Berkeley): “You’ll have lots of educators who will continue to do what they need to do to prepare their children to be successful in this global economy. And, that’s to talk about diversity, to talk about equity, to talk about inclusion.”
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Yesterday's Stakes Explained episode was all about Immigration and how the executive order titled “protecting the American people against invasion…” is disproportionately affecting Latinos…
CRISTINA MORA (professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley): “At the core of this is also a sense of belonging. My parents are immigrants, and I've written about this in other places, growing up as Mexican-American in L.A. Often felt like growing up erased and invisibilized, even though everybody else looked like me. A friend of mine said, it’s almost like growing up in a house where all of the family pictures don’t have you in them.”
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: “deliberately through public policy, generating an economoic landscape in which people’s lives become more precarious, more toxic, more dangerous.”
Labor historian MICHAEL MARK COHEN came into the stakes studios to discuss the executive order titled UNLEASHING PROSPERITY THROUGH DEREGULATI
The executive order mandates that for every new federal regulation introduced, at least ten existing regulations must be eliminated.
Professor Cohen studies racism, class struggle, and social movements in the United States and he’s being interviewed by Reporter and Berkeley journalism graduate student, NeEddra James
NEEDDRA JAMES: Welcome to The Stakes Explained.
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I like the title. I think that my question to my students is always, what is at stake in this?
NEEDDRA JAMES:So deregulation, when I hear that word, I tend to think about the government removing or getting rid of a rule or restriction on how businesses operate. How would you describe or define deregulation?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Let me just introduce the way I kind of want to frame this, which is to say that regulations are rules imposed upon corporations and industry by democratic institutions, by the state, to say in a certain sense that capitalism cannot just do whatever it wants. It has to actually follow the rules of democracy. So regulations are a compromise that are worked out between capital and democracy. And so when capital, in this case, again, businesses, big corporations, the ultra rich, say that things like regulations are a kind of burden on their profitability, they're not wrong. Things like the minimum wage, child labor laws, environmental protection laws, the rights of workers to organize and form unions do indeed impose limits on a business's capacity to accumulate endless amounts of money. Those regulations, from the point of view of the public, of ordinary people, are often, in many respects, necessary for the survival of communities, to ensure that people are not being discriminated against, to ensure our communities are healthy, that we're not suffering from pollution or public health crises, that children should be allowed to have a childhood and not be forced to work in meatpacking plants. There is a whole long history, in the history of capitalism as a whole. Really starting with the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, of the state having to intervene in the economy so as to make sure that the economy remains fair and just and above all safe for ordinary people.
NEEDDRA JAMES:So the tension you're describing, that's what I was thinking as I was reading it, like regulations seem like a good thing, like the EPA, let's protect our waterways. But the text of the order explicitly says these are economic burdens, right? So this is a real tension between protecting the commons, protecting people, and corporations being able to, you know, extend their bottom line and pay out their shareholders and so forth. Can you take us to the origins of this tension? Like what? When does this begin? When does the U.S. Government start regulating businesses?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN:It goes all the way back to English factory legislation of the late 18th, early 19th century, right? About the role of the British state to regulate the length of the working day. In the early industrial era in Britain and textile mills and the like, it would have been common for children as young as nine to work 16 hour days, six and a half days a week. And it became quite apparent in the British liberal system under industrial capitalism that the British factory system would work people to death if they weren't regulated in some way, if the state did not step in and challenge, and this is a state governed by factory owners and landlords that nonetheless had to step in and say, if we don't do something, like the nation state is gonna suffer, the working people in this country will be essentially exhausted.
Now, by the time you get... in the United States, there's a whole other sort of question in terms of regulatory issues around labor. Now, the primary form that we think of is the Gilded Age, which is the late 19th century, which is an era in which we think it is a laissez-faire constitutionalism, which is a kind of classic, liberal economic term, laissez faire meaning leave it alone. Let capital do what it's going to do. And the, you know, the invisible hand of the free market is going to just create the greatest amount of prosperity for the greatest number of people. Now, that's a lovely idea. There happens to be no empirical proof that that's actually how capitalism works. In fact, all available evidence is to the contrary. But that hasn't stopped economists from pressing this kind of agenda. But the belief then in the Gilded Age was probably the era of the greatest degree of economic inequality in US history since at least slavery. Now, we'll come back to slavery in a bit.
But the Gilded Age becomes an era in which, right, the first billionaires are created, the first billionaire corporation is created, the first, like, real clear ruling class in the United States emerges, right? In the form of J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, all of the Henry Clay Frick, all of these sorts of guys that are the titans of Wall Street and finance and the like. And, their power over industry and particular over finance triggers again and again and financial panics. There's a collapse in 1873, there's a collapse in 1893, regular periodic financial disasters which we all know is a permanent feature of capitalism, when it's sort of left to its own devices it will run into crises.
What we have is this ongoing class struggle, right? American labor history in the late 19th century is incredibly violent. Um, you know, large scale strikes that look to all the world to be a renewed form of the civil war, uh, the largest industrial uprising anywhere in the world happens in the United States in 1877, full-scale military engagements between armed workers and soldiers across the entire country.
Government has to do something or the, the nation is going to dissolve into a civil war between workers and capital. Something has to be done beyond that. You also get these kinds of. New generation of journalists and reformers, the muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, and my favorite, Upton Sinclair. And Upton Sinclair writes a book, The Jungle, in 1906, which is about the Chicago meatpacking plants. And it was supposed to be a book about the working class, about the suffering of an immigrant working class in Chicago in the early 20th century, but when he tells one too many stories about people falling into the pits of meat, they get turned into hot dogs. You get the Food and Drug Act of 1906, which regulates the meat industry, but also very importantly, regulates the drug industry for the first time. Before the Pure Food and Drugs Act, you had a patent medicine industry that was running rampant across the country, right? And they're selling morphine to moms to give to teething children. Now I have had two kids of my own, teething is a bear, but the idea that selling, giving them morphine as a solution is a pretty dangerous prospect.
So the government had to step in and prevent. Business corporations from making addictive products, from selling tainted meat, from poisoning communities through pollution and all sorts of other things. And this sets off the wave of what we think of as the progressive era. Now, this is an ironic term because for white middle-class America, it is the progressive area, but for Black Americans, this the nadir.
NEEDDRA JAMES: So I've heard people pronounce it Nader, I've heard Nadir, which is it? And can you explain what it means?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Nader works for me as well. I call it the nadir and this is the way in which African-American historians have periodized that period and what it means is the low point, right?
The low point which is to say after emancipation comes 1865, after the period of reconstruction in which Black folks remake democracy in America, they're granted, you know, the real revolution in U.S. History is the Civil War and Reconstruction.
But that revolution is turned back and African- American voting rights are turned African-American economic freedoms are turned back. And by the turn of the 20th century, Jim Crow is the law of the land. Plessy versus Ferguson, institutes separate but equal. So Black folks are just, after a period of revolutionary promise, are simply just crushed back down into this sort of second-class citizenship that African-American historians refer to as the nadir, the low point of Black history in the 20 century.
And so in a way, if you wanna think about it this way, and I do, the American Civil War was a deregulatory effort. Emancipation was a form of regulation to say Black folks are not just free, but are citizens and now voters, right? So this is a major intrusion of the federal government into the Southern economic system. And hence the kind of unending bitterness that a wealthy Southern plantation aristocracy has for the Civil War. Like they interfered with our God-given rights to property. The abolition of slavery is a form of government regulation.
Music up…
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: You’re listening to The Stakes Explained. A series produced by the students at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
They interview on-campus experts, frontline journalists and community members to better understand what the flood of executive orders and actions mean for our democracy.
On today’s show, reporter NeEddra James has been interviewing labor historian, MICHAEL MARK COHEN about the Trump Administration’s executive order titled UNLEASHING PROSPERITY THROUGH DEREGULATION…
Music up and under…
Let’s get back to it.
NEEDDRA JAMES: I wonder if we could pivot a little bit to talk about the order more directly in light of some of what you're sharing. So the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought will implement this executive order. He has a history of advocating for reduced federal spending on social programs, also author of Project 2025. So, I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about... How you think his approach to deregulation reflects particular class interests and how does race fit into that?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Capitalism is dependent on racism in a whole host of ways, in particular in terms of their ability to expropriate land from various people. We're in a settler colonial nation, we are an Indian land. This is an essential component of building a capitalist state and extracting surplus profits out of minoritized people, whether those be enslaved African-Americans, whether they be Chinese railroad workers, whether they'd be Mexican migrant farm workers across the southern border.
There's always a kind of impetus to rely upon racial distinctions as a way of creating differential wage systems. So, which is to say, under capitalism, some bodies are worth more than others. Some bodies accumulate or have a right to higher wages than others for doing the same job. Now, we understand this clearly in terms of the gender wage gap, right? That, you know, women make 78 cents to the male dollar, depending on what state you're in. Of course now, if you're a Black woman, that margin is even higher. If you're Latina woman, that margin is even even higher and so on. So like there is, in the economy itself is a base stratified, almost naturalized level of racism that just operates on a day in and day out sort of basis.
Now, what you have through, you know, really starting with the regulatory regime of antislavery and pushing through reconstruction and in particularly just to think about the civil rights movement, is if, segregation is a way of monopolizing public opportunity for white people and integration is a of trying to actually bring, in particular Black folks, into government, into big business, into higher education, into all these other aspects.
Then the attempts to redress the history of segregation take on a kind of regulatory form. So this is why I want to sort of think about regulation as a kind compromise or contradiction between democracy and capital.
In so far as democracy carries the possibility, not necessarily the reality, but the mere possibility of speaking in a popular voice, a public's voice, interest, you know demonstrating or carrying forward the values and interests and needs of working class people.
Insofar as democracy is even capable of doing that, it is the enemy of someone like Russell Vought, right? Who wants to see capital as the singular authority that gets to wield the levers of government, that gets dictate what our national, domestic, health and safety, environmental policies are, right.
These are people who genuinely believe that democracy itself is the threat to their ability to make profits. And so anything they can do and will do in this and really all of the other policies coming out of the Trump White House right now are explicitly anti-democratic because democracy represents to them an enemy to the capacity of capital to accumulate endlessly.
NEEDDRA JAMES: So is this an echo of what was happening in the Civil War?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not just, I mean it's certainly an echo of what was happening in the Civil War, but I think it's, you know, it's certainly an echo of what has been happening over the generations since the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, even the 1930s, the New Deal Era, there's still this movement of sort of business conservatism. When that project gets married to this kind of openly authoritarian populism in which the big corporations don't really have to give money to both political parties in order to control the system. They can just lump in with one who promises to destroy the capacity to have future elections, destroy the ability of the administrative state to regulate business enterprises. It is all explicitly a threat to democracy because they perceive democracy as a threat to capitalism.
NEEDDRA JAMES: So given everything we've talked about and the vulnerability of Black and Brown communities, I'm curious to hear what you think might be some of the most vulnerable regulations, like what might be at risk of elimination?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Child labor was banned in the United States effectively in 1916, right? It was re-banned in the 1930s. Now, we've seen really since, you know, 2023, but is really gaining steam at this point, is states voting to undermine or rewrite their child labor laws, right. This is how it's always framed. It's always like the freedom of workers to, you know, sell themselves and their lives to capital, right?
What we're talking about here are 14-year-olds working as maids in hotels, 14- year-olds working in fields, with the clear and obvious result that their education is going to be severely impaired.
NEEDDRA JAMES: So it sounds like you're saying the implications of this order for poor people in communities of color is more poverty.
MICHAEL MARK COHEN:Yes, deliberately, deliberately through public policy, generating an economic landscape in which people's lives become more precarious, less safe, more toxic, more dangerous, all so that the billionaires who have essentially taken over our government can add another couple trillion dollars to their already unnecessarily bloated incomes.
NEEDDRA JAMES: It's not just multi-million dollar corporations that are calling for deregulation. There are small business owners that say regulations in California squeeze them and make doing business difficult.
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Yeah, that's always important to understand, right? Because there are various enterprises that are caught in the middle, right. There's always the small business owner that has Amazon looming over their head and workers who need wages to pay for rising housing costs below them and to try and figure out how to make an enterprise function somewhere in the Middle there. And that is extremely challenging, particularly in a place like California. Right, and so some of that is to say that the deregulation is not a universally bad thing in a certain sense, right? Which is to see that if we were to do it in a kind of rational way, in a kinda democratically organized way, there are versions of deregulations that could meet the needs of small businesses. Now, what counts as a small business is kind of an accounting game that politicians like to play. So there's a kind of problem there in terms of what actually constitutes a small business. But of course, they do exist and they would benefit from one degree or another, right? Certain kinds of deregulations that might make it easier to build plants to hire workers and those kinds of things. But that's not the regulations that this is going for. Right, when the billionaire class is doing the deregulating, they don't care about these small businesses. The oil company's licenses to, you know, drill in the Alaskan wildlife refuge. that is of no aid whatsoever to a small business owner in the Central Valley.
And so, insofar as this kind of language can recruit those people into the cause and say, yes, deregulation, dereguilate! you know I'm faced with all of these regulations and they can be quite onerous, but it's important to remember that they're there for a reason.
It's not so much the regulations that are your enemy. It's the high cost of living. It's the failure of the state to keep up with the growing population. It's a failure of the state to actually enact the sort of housing and other public policies that would allow these industries to thrive.
NEEDDRA JAMES: Given what you know of what galvanizes people to participate in social movements, what is your prediction?
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Prediction. You should never ask a historian to predict anything. I appreciate the, I'm sort of flattered by the question, but like, it's a bad idea to ask historians to predict something, but I'll bite, sure, why not? There is a sense in which people are shocked, they're, you know, that the hits keep coming, that it's hard to sort of get your grounding, and that's deliberate. That is the sort of flood the zone strategy. Um…that really can't keep up forever. I do think a lot of it should fall at the foot of the corporate media, who's really was built. I mean, when I'm talking to MSNBCs and the CNNs and the like, who were built, right? Since 9-11 to chase whatever bone is thrown in front of them.
So I think there is a kind of chaos that is being generated by the Trump regime that the media is in fact, making worse in many respects and I know there is no the media as we are you know you all in J school are quite quite good at demonstrating there is not singular the media but the the places in which people get their the sort of sources here I think are making this worse.
Now when the economy collapsed in 1929 when the economic collapsed in 2008 people's resistance This did not begin immediately. It took. And part of this is that Americans, by and large, are taught to individualize every problem. If I'm suffering economically, it's not because of public policy, it's because I need to go get another job. It's because, I'm not working hard enough. It's because I'm a failure of one kind or another. And we carry a lot of this kind of individualized burden and shame that goes along with that, when really what we're talking about are structural problems. And this is a conceptual difficulty. It's always a difficult thing. Well, okay, you know, where am I free and where am I being governed? What is being made of me and what can I make of myself, right, is the kind of fundamental sort of crisis we all experience on a daily basis, particularly when we think politically.
And so Americans often have to work through this, like, oh, God, you it's not actually my fault that this mortgage blew up. It's actually genuinely almost entirely fraudulent, except for of course, it's not, it was all perfectly legal in 2008 and so on and so on. But there is always that process that says, which Americans actually have to then come and say, I experienced this blow, you did too? It's not just me, it you too, right? I didn't cause this crisis. Why do I have to pay for your tariffs? I didn't cause this crises. Why are you undermining my ability to get an education? Right, so it takes time. In some respects, for people to sort of absorb the blow, realize it's not their fault, and begin to organize in various ways.
In many respects, the response to the 2008 financial crisis doesn't fully come until 2011 with Occupy. Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, and the Occupied movement broadly, say what you want about it, but it changed the way we as a nation think about inequality and think about the relationship between capitalism and the state.
NEEDDRA JAMES: Once they understand what's happening and kind of depersonalize it, understand the structures and systems that are impacting them, they begin to organize. That's what the pattern has been…
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Speaker 1: And yet I do have faith in the American people by and large to eventually, and it will take time, to figure out exactly what this means to them.
But I do think also that part of the lag or the sort of immobility, if you want to put it that way, that we're seeing right now is because of just how unprecedented what's actually happening is. There really is no pattern for this, right? You have the single richest man in the world who bought himself. A seat at the side of the president. You've got a billionaire president if he is in fact that rich. He probably is now thanks to his meme coins, but like there is something so unprecedented in this. And the question really becomes at what point do ordinary Americans really begin to realize that none of this is being done in their interest? Historically speaking, White people in America, particularly a kind of white working class or White Christian conservative class have always been willing to see their life chances and life opportunities eroded as long as Black and Brown people were hurt worse. It's like, I will tolerate an undermining of my economic conditions as long you kick Muslims out of the country and that you are deporting immigrants and Black people are being stripped of their jobs in the federal government. And how long can that actually go on for? This is what DuBois called the psychological wages of whiteness, right? That prevent black and white workers in his essence from actually seeing each other as equals and working across the line.
How long can that actually go on for when the wages of whiteness don't pay anymore, right, in which White workers and White people in general are seeing their economic conditions crushed just as badly, right.
They're seeing their 14-year-olds forced into factories and fields. They see themselves having to pick up multiple jobs just to make a living. At what point can you create the solidarity, which is to see commonality across difference, you're different, you have different interests than I do. Like your life is different than mine. We don't have the same ideas, the same identities, the same interests.
But if I see a little piece of myself in you, If you see a little piece of yourself in me and I recognize that my freedom is bound up in yours and vice versa, then really opportunities for a completely new version of politics then sort of enter in. And I would say that the Trump people are creating the conditions in which that's not just possible, but absolutely necessary for human survival going forward.
NEEDDRA JAMES: Thank you so much.
MICHAEL MARK COHEN: Sure, this is a pleasure.
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SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: That was MICHAEL MARK COHEN speaking with reporter, NeEddra James for the Stakes Explained. NeEddra is a graduate student at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism.
The Stakes Explained is a series examining the wave of executive orders and actions coming from the Trump White House - and the stakes for our democracy.
I’m SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI - I run the audio program at UC Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism. And, I’m the executive producer of The Stakes Explained.
Tomorrow on the show:
ANDRÉS LARIOS: The Trump administration in the first 100 days signed the "reevaluating and redefining the refugee admissions program,but along side that, they also signed an executive order designating Afrikaners as an oppressed group of people that have refugee status..
SARAH SONG(Professor of Law, Philosophy and Political Science, UC Berkeley): If you think about the motivations for why it’s been suspended and the privileging of a particular group of people as the ideal american, I think it implies that all of the current citizens, who are not White, are not fully included.
DAVID BOYER: Thanks for listening to today's Bay Made, and thanks to SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI and her students for sharing your new series. If you wanna learn more about the project, head to hub.journalism.berkeley.edu slash The Stakes.