[ROBERT REICH]

It’s no secret that rental housing costs are skyrocketing. But there’s a way for tenants to fight back: tenant unions. Tara Raghuveer, a longtime advocate for housing justice and the director of the Tenant Union Federation, is here to explain.

[TARA RAGHUVEER]

In the workplace, unions exercise power to secure a better and more affordable life for workers. So why can’t we do that to secure better and more affordable housing? 

Well, we can by forming tenant unions. The basic premise of a tenant union is that there are more of us — tenants — than there are of them — our landlords. But that only matters if we’re organized– and it’s never been more important to get organized. 

Rent is now unaffordable for nearly half of all tenants across the country. There is no place in America where a full-time worker earning minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment. 

I live in Missouri, where a minimum wage worker would have to work 63 hours per week — the equivalent of more than one and half full time jobs — to afford a modest two bedroom apartment. 

But it’s not just that the rent is too damn high – the rent is also the biggest bill in most working people’s budgets, determining so much about the rest of our lives. Whether we can keep our jobs, sustain our connections to our neighbors, send our kids to school consistently— all of this becomes a question of whether we can pay our rent. 

This means that in the richest country in the history of the world, over 650,000 people are experiencing homelessness — the highest number on record. And so many more are in their cars, in extended stays, in and out of shelters, and doubled up with friends, family, or acquaintances. 

Tenants’ ultimate power is our rent. Individually, our money doesn’t matter much to our landlords. But when we come together in a union, we can threaten this entire system — if we figure out how to use the power we have.

I’ve seen up close how tenants can do that. One example: the Independence Towers Tenant Union. 

Just outside of Kansas City, Independence Towers was a dump — leaks, asbestos, broken appliances — you name it. The tenants were paying higher rents than they’d ever paid for the worst conditions they’d ever endured.  And the situation turned deadly. In the summer of 2024, a child died after falling from a window that had not been properly maintained, according to wrongful death lawsuits filed against the landlord.

The Towers residents formed a tenant union. They issued demands to their landlord. No response. They escalated through rallies and press. No response. They pressured Fannie Mae, the building’s federal lender. They organized tours for their congressman. Nothing. 

So on October 1, 2024, they launched a rent strike with over 50% of the building withholding rent, together. 

The strike lasted eight months — the longest and largest in regional history. The tenants withheld nearly $300,000 in rent. In the end, the strike got them to the bargaining table with the building’s new owner. The union negotiated new leases, rent freezes, and a schedule for major repairs. Best of all: The tenants kept all the rent they had withheld through the strike. 

Tenant unions like the one at Independence Towers aren’t just critical for improving material conditions for the tenants on the property. They’re also the best chance we have to rebalance the scales of power in a market that’s now increasingly dominated by massive corporations. 

For the last decade or so, the market has been under siege by institutional investors who have been buying up single and multifamily housing. Big time investors and private equity companies now own one out of every 10 apartments nationwide. That figure is even higher in cities with tenants who are more likely to be paying 30% or more of their income on rent and utilities — like in Tampa, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte.

What happens when your rent goes to a giant corporation? Hidden junk fees. Stolen deposits. Shoddy maintenance and repairs, plus other deadly safety violations. And through it all, the rent keeps rising — sometimes due to illegal price fixing amongst landlords. Even if your landlord isn’t one of these Wall Street players, your housing could still be affected. The Philadelphia Federal Reserve found that when corporate landlords infiltrate a housing market and hike the rent, smaller landlords do, too.

The bottom line is that the housing market is a catastrophic failure. This is the result of a relentless prioritization of profits over people and our basic needs. Rent isn’t a measure of the quality or condition of our homes — it’s whatever those who control the market will allow. 

And when we look for solutions to this crisis, we’re often told it’s simple: just build more housing. Now, we do have a housing shortage. But it’s important to be specific: we have a shortage of truly affordable housing. 

Recently we actually saw the largest boom in multifamily housing production in the last 50 years. But, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the units built were mostly in the high-end of the market.

When it comes to affordable options, we are losing housing faster than we can build because landlords are hiking the rent. 

And we can’t be agnostic about who owns and manages the housing that does get built — by prioritizing building over all else, we put all the power in the hands of the same giant corporations who care about their money over our lives.

So, yes, we need to build housing — housing that people can actually afford. But this is not just a story of underproduction; this is a story about power: who has it and who doesn’t, who calls the shots and who deals with the consequences.

If we want a world that guarantees housing as a public good — one where we (not corporations) have agency over our homes, where the public sector builds and maintains housing that’s not just for money-making, a world where we are protected by strong regulations– tenants must build robust political and economic power to contest against the profiteers who are squeezing us for every last dollar and dime. 

Tenant unions are our best chance to do that — and you could organize one where you live. 

After the union won at Independence Towers, the Tenant Union Federation started organizing with tenants in similar properties across the country — from Missoula to Memphis, Boise to Albany, and everywhere in between.

If you’re like us, sick and tired of dealing with soaring rent and crumbling buildings, and if you want to level the playing field between landlords and tenants, go to tenant federation dot org to join the movement and learn how to start your own tenant union.

You’d think with 500 different channels to watch, there’d be something interesting on.

An even bigger problem? Our media is controlled by just a handful of billionaires and their corporations. And Trump is making things worse.

Trump’s FCC just approved a massive merger that would let one huge media company control what over 80 percent of American households see.

One of these merging companies, called Nexstar, tried to silence late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. 

Trump’s FCC also cleared the way for billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, to buy Paramount — which includes CBS News. The Ellisons are huge Trump boosters.

Under their ownership, CBS News has already seen a massive shift toward a Trump-friendly agenda. 

That report examined allegations of abuse and torture suffered by men deported by the Trump administration and sent to a prison in El Salvador.

Which is probably why Trump gave his blessing for the Ellisons’ company, Skydance Media, to also acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. If that deal goes through, Trump allies would also control CNN. Larry Ellison has reportedly had discussions with Trump about firing CNN hosts Trump doesn’t like.

And thanks to Trump, the Ellisons can also count TikTok as part of their growing media empire. 

Did you know that one out of five Americans gets their news from TikTok? 

And you thought Fox News was bad. Don’t forget the other media billionaires Trump has in his corner:

Trump’s billionaire suck-ups already control a HUGE portion of the information Americans get. The more his cronies control, the less Americans will know.

A free press is vital to democracy. But for Trump and his billionaire buddies, it’s all about accumulating more power and more wealth. They know that a well-informed public could stop them from acquiring both.

So, what can we do about this? 

Pressure our State Attorneys General to sue and block these mergers. 

And when Democrats take back power at the federal level, bust up these massive media conglomerates. 

And we should support our local independent media, as well as outlets like NPR and PBS — news funded by the public, not owned by billionaires. 

As a once-respected newspaper says, “Democracy dies in darkness.” 

We can’t let Trump’s billionaire helpers turn out the lights. 

[Robert Reich] What does a farmer in Iowa have in common with an Uber driver in New York City?

Their struggle, much like the struggle facing millions of Americans, isn’t left versus right. It’s about who has power — and who doesn’t.

Economic populism is how we rebalance the economy to work for the many, not the few.

To explain what economic populism really means, a great champion of working people, former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya. 

[Alvaro Bedoya] My time at the Federal Trade Commission — before Donald Trump fired me for doing my job — totally changed the way I see our political divide.

It turned me into a populist. 

Here’s what I mean by that: I used to think that the defining fight for our country was between Democrats and Republicans, between the left and the right. Now, I am much more worried about the money and power at the top crushing everyone underneath.

That sounds grim because it is. But I also think that this way of looking at the world can unite our country across cultural and even political lines in a way that feels almost impossible today. 

As Robert Reich has pointed out, the largest force in American politics right now is anti-establishment fury at a rigged system. 

I saw this every day while I was at the FTC. I saw it when I talked to farmers in Iowa and Uber drivers in New York City and pharmacists and grocers in Knoxville and Salt Lake City and Pine Ridge, South Dakota.

Nearly every person I talked to had one problem. And it wasn’t DEI or immigration or the “trans agenda.” No, they couldn’t stop talking about how corporate power was bleeding them dry. 

Let me tell you about just two of those visits. 

In Iowa, I heard from fourth and fifth generation family farmers who told me about the Big Ag corporations who have monopolized the entire food supply chain — from inputs, to outputs, to every middle man in between. 

They used to have twelve companies to buy their seeds from. Now they have two. They used to have four places to sell their cattle; now they have one. 

And guess what: their costs were going through the roof — and the prices they got for their products were going through the floor. They were going bankrupt. “We have a noose around our necks and we’re standing on an ice cube,” they said. “It’s like getting picked apart by a chicken,” they said.

Even the farming equipment they owned outright was locked by John Deere so that only John Deere could fix it, and profit from those repairs. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, I met a group of Uber and Lyft drivers, every one of whom was an immigrant. They were lured by promises of lucrative earnings and near-total control of their schedules. Many of them spent tens of thousands of dollars on new vehicles so they could get the best fares.

But they were nickeled and dimed by the ridesharing apps, hit with new fees and restrictions. And they reported often getting locked out of their apps at random times of day — meaning that it would take eight or nine hours to make what they used to earn in three or four.

They were going into credit card debt. They couldn’t make rent. And when they weren’t locked out, they would drive up to 13 hours straight with no bathroom breaks. No food. Nothing. 

In a roundtable I hosted with the drivers, a man walked up to the table and told me his wife had died that morning. But he showed up anyway because he was locked out of the apps, he was going bankrupt, and no one would listen to him:

If you focus on the conflict between left and right, if the most important thing is what you are — your party, your state, your race, your ethnicity — the people I met during my time at the Federal Trade Commission couldn’t be more different. 

On the one hand, you had farmers who were four or five generations into building a life in ruby red rural America. On the other, you had immigrant workers in the biggest blue city on the east coast.

What could they possibly have in common?  Everything — if you look at what they need. 

If you look at what they need, everyone I met was part of one huge group: people working themselves to the bone who were getting screwed by billionaires and corporations—regardless of their politics, or where they lived, or whether they were citizens or immigrants. Regardless, even, of whether they were workers or the owners of farms and small businesses.

And It may not seem that way at first, but I think the Iowa farmer who can’t run his own combine because it was locked by John Deere has a hell of a lot in common with the Bangladeshi dad in New York City who can’t work the morning commute because he’s locked out of Uber and Lyft.

Because what they need is surprisingly the same: 

They need a government that gives them a level playing field against the powerful and wealthy.

They need regulators and courts that enforce laws to protect them against abuse and exploitation.

They need basic dignity and control of their material lives.

That is what an economic populist movement can deliver to this country.  

It’s an opportunity to unite the worker, the farmer, the small businessman against the billionaire corporations who are making it harder and harder for them to make a living. Across races, ethnicities, religions, and even politics. 

Donald Trump wants you to think that the least powerful people in this country are the most responsible for your problems. Not Wall Street. Not the billionaires at his back at the inauguration. 

No, he wants you to blame your neighbor. Don’t love your neighbor. Hate him. Hurt him. Deport him.

But let me tell you this: You can’t deport your way out of a rigged economy. 

You deport the construction worker or the rideshare driver down the street, those jobs aren’t going to suddenly start offering overtime and health care and benefits. Your landlord isn’t going to stop nickel and diming you on rent. Your life won’t get any better.

Who is getting rich? The billionaire CEOs who showered the president in money. 

Don’t take the bait. Let’s focus on the money and power at the top. Let’s focus on what people need. 

That’s what gives me hope right now. That’s what feels like the future. 

Robert Reich: Have you heard about this new economic trend? 

Rohit Chopra: People are increasingly using “buy now, pay later” services to borrow and pay for all kinds of purchases — including basic necessities like groceries.

Robert Reich: Rohit Chopra, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is here to break down what the “buy now, pay later” trend means, how corporations might be taking advantage of anyone who uses it, and how it could be a warning sign for our economy.

Rohit Chopra: If you’ve bought something online recently, you’ve probably seen an option to “Buy Now, Pay Later.” 

Instead of paying the full price up front, you can pay for your purchase in multiple installments — often with no interest and with instant approval.

This sounds like a sweet deal. But it’s really a troubling sign of the cost of living crisis — and it could put millions of people on a treadmill of unsustainable debt.

In 2025, over 90 million people in America took out a Buy Now, Pay Later loan — from lenders like Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, and dozens of other companies.

During the holiday shopping season, as consumers dealt with higher prices on nearly everything, Buy Now, Pay Later surged. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2025 alone, Americans borrowed nearly $2 billion from these lenders. 

And as more families struggle to pay for basic necessities, that number is expected to keep growing. About a quarter of Buy Now Pay later borrowers say they’ve used it on groceries. Other consumers have used it to pay for gas, healthcare, and even rent. 

58% of borrowers say they used it because it was the only way they could afford their purchases. About a third say they’ve used it as a “bridge” between paychecks.   

So you might be thinking, “But isn’t Buy Now Pay Later better than using a credit card?"

Great question. Buy Now Pay Later lenders tell us that they don't charge interest. But that doesn't mean we aren’t paying a price.

First, there are merchant fees. Buy Now Pay Later lenders charge hefty fees to businesses that sell to you. While retailers pay about 3% of the purchase price to accept your credit card, they often pay 6% or more for Buy Now Pay Later. And guess what, as prices across the economy go up, that means commissions go up too.

For many businesses that operate on a thin margin, these required fees can force them to increase prices even further.

Second, there are borrower fees. For many Buy Now Pay Later companies, they make more money the more that we slip up. 

Some charge late fees as high as 25 percent of the total loan.  This revenue stream is growing for the Buy Now Pay Later industry. And it might incentivize them to push you into borrowing that they know you'll struggle to repay.

And if you’ve got other loans, like most people, this could lock you into a cycle that’s hard to escape.

Third, our data could be used against us. Analysis of Buy Now Pay Later lenders reveals that they use sophisticated tracking and surveillance to monetize our data. 

Some lenders track our precise location, our interactions with apps on our devices, and our browsing history to help advertisers target products to us — and even give retailers the power to charge you a different price than someone else when shopping online. 

Together, these hidden costs underscore the urgent need to protect Buy Now, Pay Later borrowers.

During the Biden administration, I was Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

We made it clear that Buy Now Pay Later products are loans, and those lenders have to play by the same rules as credit card companies. It meant they had to investigate consumer disputes, give refunds for returned products or cancelled services, and provide billing statements – just like credit cards.

But that didn’t last long. Buy Now Pay Later companies lobbied to get it killed, and the Trump Administration quickly complied — along with shutting down all of the work the CFPB was doing to crack down on crime against consumers. 

Each year, the CFPB would return billions of dollars to people cheated by financial companies. But with no enforcement of the law, that’s going to make life more expensive for all of us.  

While regulators in Washington are now doing the bidding of big corporations, individual states are stepping up. State attorneys general are launching inquiries to watch over Buy Now Pay Later companies. States like New York have enacted new laws to beef up oversight and protections for  Buy Now Pay Later. More states are looking to block companies from selling our data and adding on junk fees.

And when Trump is gone, we must enshrine those protections into federal law by passing a Buy Now Pay Later Borrower’s Bill of Rights to block predatory practices — just like Congress did for credit cards in 2009. 

Given the cost of living crisis that is running people ragged, the boom in Buy Now Pay Later debt is going to be another burden for so many Americans.

In many ways, it's become a mirror — reflecting how broken our economy is — and how much work it will take to fix it.

Remember when Donald Trump said he would cut credit card interest rates down to 10%?

No, I'm not talking about what he's said recently. I’m talking about what he said in September 2024 during his presidential campaign.

But after he was elected, we didn’t hear a peep about it.

Instead, his Administration has been showering politically connected companies, like the credit card giants, with all sorts of favors, tax breaks, and industry deregulation. What’s happened since? Credit card company stocks, and their CEO pay packages, have surged.

As the cost of nearly everything goes up, credit card companies are sitting pretty. That’s because when those prices go up, it means more people will rely on credit cards to get by — and credit card companies take a cut of every purchase. 

Americans now owe over $1.2 trillion on their credit cards — the highest level on record. With so many people struggling with higher prices, nearly half of credit card users are now carrying a balance on their card.

This is where the big bonanza is: interest payments. In 2024, people paid about $160 billion in interest on their credit card. That’s over $400 million per day — and a 50% increase from 2022.

Right now, the typical American is paying near-record interest rates on their credit cards — with the average rate over 20%. That’s way higher than the interest rates on other types of loans, making it easier to get trapped on a treadmill of debt.

As Americans are souring on Trump’s economy, and his failure to address the cost of living crisis, he is bringing back his promise to cap credit card interest rates. 

And while he talks a big game about helping people with debt, his cronies are doing the exact opposite.

Take the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency I led until 2025. 

The new regime at the CFPB has effectively shut down all oversight of credit card companies. 

For years, the credit card companies harvested billions of dollars in illegal fees by exploiting a loophole. We worked to close it, and when the credit card industry pushed to get those fees back, the Trump administration quickly took their side.

The agency has also ripped up law enforcement actions against numerous corporations that have broken the law. That includes Citibank, which illegally discriminated against people with Armenian last names on their credit cards.

Trump’s CFPB has even abandoned its enforcement of laws cracking down on predatory lenders who charge excessive interest rates to members of our military. 

But it’s not just the CFPB. 

Trump’s financial regulators rubber-stamped a credit card megamerger between Capital One and Discover that’s expected to push up rates and fees even more. And the administration is siding with companies that are suing to stop states like Colorado from enacting their own laws capping interest rates on credit cards and other loans.

So when you hear Trump claim he wants to help ordinary people with their credit card debt, don’t just listen to his words — look for his actions.

Because what you’ll find is the opposite. 

He’s making a small clique of huge financial companies even more powerful, while leaving everyone else to pay the price.