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    [post_date] => 2019-06-21 17:23:28
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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

I am a black man in America, which means I am physically vulnerable all the time. The United States leads the world in police killings of its own black and brown citizens, and ranks first in incarcerating them. Its education system disproportionately funnels black children through the school to prison pipeline. Millions of people  — many of them black — are disenfranchised from voting because they served time in jail for felonies. In many cases they never regain their right to participate  in American democracy. Despite all these obvious and well-documented injustices, the white majority believes America has the moral pedigree to tell the rest of the world how to handle its own internal affairs. 

This attitude among white Americans speaks to an astonishing lack of self-awareness. The people who dominate and shape global conversations in the western and English-speaking world — think tank presidents, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and business executives  — are almost exclusively white men. They have no experience of the America I grew up in, and this limits their ability to understand the world. 

 As a black man who grew up in Detroit and then spent a good part of his adult life traveling and reporting in Eastern Europe, I have learned that white supremacy and imperialism are the same. The difference is that one is global while the other is domestic. Africa is least responsible for global warming but suffers most of its consequences, which are caused by the world’s leading powers. This is the type of visceral understanding gained from lived experience that the white men who dominate and shape the foreign policy conversation do not have. Their understanding of the world is thus limited, and the consequences are becoming increasingly clear: the American conversation about the world lacks nuance and insight; this undermines our ability to engage effectively — which, in turn, weakens both our own society and our place in the world.

I welcome the conversations about the need for more ethnic diversity in foreign policy conversations. I am glad that people are beginning to understand that with more diverse voices, America could develop a foreign policy that was less expansionist in its global engagement. Unfortunately, however, these conversations are predicated on inaccurate beliefs.

A flawed democracy

America is not the world’s most successful democracy; nor is it an example for the world to follow. Its own legal system has kept black people from gaining any real electoral power at the local and national levels. In Florida alone, more than a million people convicted of felonies were disenfranchised from voting before a November referendum restored their rights; the current governor is trying to slow the restoration process. This is not a system to export. It is a system that must be changed.

If America’s white majority were truly interested in making sure that non-white voices were included in foreign policy discussions, they would first work to stop the disenfranchisement of people of color. Nor are teachers with unchecked racial biases qualified to shape the minds of the next generation of foreign policy thinkers.

Besides its many misguided military interventions, such as the now widely-reviled Second Iraq War, the U.S. also has a long-documented history of allowing its intelligence service to carry out assassinations against world leaders whose policies deviate from the administration’s. In the twentieth century the CIA backed the assassination of elected leaders like Chile’s Salvador Allende because he was a socialist, and helped engineer the coup that deposed Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh because he wanted to nationalize his country’s oil reserves. 

The United States is accustomed to implementing its foreign policy via the barrel of a gun, which makes a twisted kind of sense for the most gun-toting country on earth with the second-highest number of gun-related murders of any industrialized nation. But if the United States wants to be an example to the world it must change its gun laws and change its ways. It must ban the sale and distribution of military grade weapons to law enforcement agencies that treat the communities they are supposed to serve like enemy combatants. 

There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.

I write for The Root, the largest black news site in America. I have the rare opportunity of covering national politics from the perspective of a black person with a black editor. I do not have to deal with a white male editor who might try to change my voice or question my using personal experiences to inform my reporting. I love working at The Root, but my ambition is to be a foreign correspondent. I have two graduate degrees in journalism and another in Russia area studies; I speak two Eastern European languages and can point to many other achievements. But I have never been invited to an interview for any foreign reporting job. 

An editor at a mainstream newspaper once told me that I wasn’t qualified to write about U.S.-Russia/Ukraine relations because I was not a diplomat. This same publication has hired white people without any relevant credentials for foreign reporting positions. One of the recurring claims one hears in foreign policy circles is there aren’t enough qualified people of color to fill open positions. And yet, despite my qualifications, I cannot find a job as a foreign correspondent.

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

The lack of diverse voices in international news has a profound  impact on the coverage of countries like Russia, China, Nigeria and Ukraine. The foreign press corps in Moscow and Kiev are almost exclusively white. I am quite confident that the reporting from those regions would be richer and more nuanced if half the press corps were composed of black and brown reporters who had personal experiences of immigration and of police abuse.

In the United States the coverage of Russia over the past two years has been weak. Analysts have focused on Putin, at the expense of nuanced reporting about ordinary Russians. Our media has spent an inordinate amount of time trying to blame the Kremlin for the fact that millions of Americans decided to vote a white supremacist into the White House, even as they have refused to engage in a serious conversation about the white supremacy that played a far greater role in getting Donald Trump elected than Putin could have done.

Incorporating more ethnically diverse people into foreign policy spaces goes well beyond cherry picking brown faces that seem non-threatening to sit at the table. If the U.S. is to pursue an honest, effective foreign policy, it needs to recruit people who are willing to break from the neo-liberalism that underlies the racism in contemporary American society.

There is transparent hypocrisy in insisting that Russia remove its troops from Ukraine while threatening military intervention in Iran. America regularly condemns Russia and other nations over their abuse of LGBTQ people, even as black trans women in America are murdered at alarming rates. 

Why diversity is important

Too many of our white diplomats are blind to this hypocrisy, because they are the products of an America that was built by and for them. There are too few people like me representing the United States at the table of global affairs, and this undermines the effectiveness of its foreign policy. Take Haiti, for example. Under the expansionist Monroe Doctrine, the United States deployed Marines to the island in 1915 to fend off German influence during World War I. But instead of helping to protect Haiti’s independence, the U.S. occupied the Caribbean country until 1934, exacerbating the theft of resources and political instability caused by French colonization. More recent U.S. policy towards Haiti hasn’t been much better. During the 1970s and 1980s successive administrations supported the violent  regime of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, while Donald Trump stripped Haitians in the United States of their Temporary Protected Status and made them vulnerable to deportation. 

House Democrats have held hearings on reparations for the descendants of slaves who were brought to America from Africa. The conversation needs to go global in the case of Haiti, with a hearing to address reparations for that country — or, better yet, a Marshall Plan.

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

Americans see their country as a global cop enforcing democracy around the world, but Putin, Kim Jong-un, China’s President Xi and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei see a state with dubious motives and a narcissistic worldview.

I am working to diversify the international affairs conversation through my fellowship at Global Strategists Association, a non-profit organization that helps people from the black diaspora to engage in foreign policy spaces. Most of our events are held in spaces that are majority people of color, and look at domestic and global issues through the lens of blackness. Founder Apprecia Faulkner created the organization after encountering obstacles that prevented her from persuading white-dominated organizations to open up for black participants. I and other fellows are benefiting from her efforts, but the fact that she had to build that space illustrates the problem: America’s foreign policy circles are not interested in being as diverse as the image of America they sell to the world. 

The United States needs to carry out a major makeover of its domestic politics so that it is committed to all of its citizens, and not just the white ones. Only then can America truly promote an honest foreign policy that is not predicated on exploiting the world’s most vulnerable people — which is precisely what it does to its own minority groups at home. 
    [post_title] => America's foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men
    [post_excerpt] => There is a saying in journalism that all politics is local. I’d argue that international politics is local and it's impossible to deploy a diverse diplomatic corps if so many potential non-white recruits are disenfranchised or jailed.
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America’s foreign policy is undermined by the dominance of white men

by Terrell J. Starr

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-20 16:00:09
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    [post_content] => With leading publications having phased out their public editors, external watchdogs have stepped in, holding the media to account in an age of declining public trust.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has decided to fill the vacuum left by the near disappearance of public editors from major newspapers by appointing a few of its own: Gabriel Snyder will take on The New York Times; Ana Marie Cox will monitor The Washington Post; Maria Bustillos will keep an eye on MSNBC; and Emily Tamkin will oversee CNN. Whether or not the news organizations will engage with these outsiders much (if at all) remains to be seen, but the Columbia Journalism Review is counting on having enough organizational clout so their efforts are not in vain.

Emily Tamkin has already been on CJR's podcast to take CNN to task for filling the airwaves with “underqualified pundits.” An article in the Washingtonian provides more information on CJR’s project, reporting that staffers for various media platforms have already been in touch with editor Kyle Pope to suggest issues for the attention of the public editors.

Something those public editors should consider: Joshua Benton reports for Nieman Lab on the “new avoidance” phenomenon, which is unfortunately becoming more common globally, and especially in the United States. The report is dismaying, but also illuminating. Some of the comments from readers explaining why they sometimes or always avoid the news demonstrate real demand and hunger for more positive coverage of things that are working—problems that are being solved—which is part of our goal here at The Conversationalist.

In other news:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed a new law that permits undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses. Read more.

An argument for targeting the world’s 2.4 billion gamers with messaging about environmental issues and sustainability. Learn more.

How is participatory budgeting enlivening democracy in New York? Read the op-ed.
    [post_title] => The important work of keeping the media honest
    [post_excerpt] => Journalists passionate about keeping the media relevant have taken on the job of shadow ombudsman

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The important work of keeping the media honest

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-14 15:48:34
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    [post_content] => The combination of jokes and storytelling has become a potent weapon in the culture wars

With “Nanette,” her critically acclaimed 2018 Netflix special, Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby inspired an international conversation about the purpose of comedy. During her hour-long monologue, filmed in front of a rapt audience at the Sydney Opera House, Gadsby challenges the idea that comedy is an effective means of dealing with controversial issues. In theory, she explains, comedy creates a connection through laughter; but in practice, it undermines serious discussions and perpetuates toxic norms.

Gadsby grew up lesbian and gender non-conforming in ultra-conservative Tasmania, where homosexuality was legalized only in 1997. Humor was her defence mechanism against fear and shame, but it also kept her from thriving. She has come to realize, she explains in “Nanette,” that the price of self-deprecating humor is her dignity. “I put myself down in order to seek permission to speak,” she says.

Storytelling succeeds where jokes fail, says Gadsby. They can provide answers by integrating marginalized voices in a three-dimensional way that is not just a setup and a punchline, but an arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end.  “What I would have done,” she said, “to have heard a story like mine, to feel less alone, to feel connected.” She adds: “This is bigger than homosexuality; this is about how we conduct debate in public about sensitive things.”

Comedy and storytelling

Several comedians and writers have embraced the challenge of creating films and television series that combine jokes and storytelling to catalyze and reflect new norms.

“Booksmart,” a hilarious and charming new film directed by Olivia Wilde, brings marginalized voices into the mainstream and normalizes them. The film replaces the conventional teen rom-com device of shy boy and awkward girl with two socially awkward teenage girls, best friends, one of whom is straight and the other a lesbian. The girls don't bother to correct the impression of their performatively liberal parents, who believe the girls are romantically involved. On the eve of their high school graduation, they decide to misbehave radically for the first time in their bookish lives, which leads to a series of hilarious misadventures. The girls are precocious and they live in Los Angeles, but they are highly relatable and possess an age-appropriate innocence that transcends their coastal elite status.

“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” an ingenious comedy that has as its protagonist a woman who is obsessed with a man she dated as a teenager, explores mental health seriously and unflinchingly rather than playing it for laughs. It works because the plots are hilarious and the characters compelling. The show manages to combine brilliantly written comedy and story development with a serious agenda — and on mainstream cable television.

Premium cable channels have also been taking some chances with programs about the lives of social groups that were all-but unknown on mainstream television just a few years ago. HBO’s “Insecure,” for example, presents the lives of 20-something middle class African-American women. Star Issa Rae mines her own life in the series, set in Los Angeles. She works for a non-profit while Molly, her best friend since they were undergraduates at Stanford, is a corporate attorney. The series follows Issa’s foundering relationship with a live-in boyfriend, Molly’s awkward dating life, their career hurdles, and all the other universal agonies of fumbling toward adulthood — but presented through a lens that focuses on the unique aspects of the African-American experience in a white-majority society. If the series were about white women, “Insecure” would be a cliché. But because it’s about black women whose life experiences are as recognizable as that of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer of “Broad City,” it is revolutionary. 

“Crashing,” by and with Pete Holmes, and also on HBO, takes on comedy. Holmes’s character, based on a version of himself, is a white, Christian comedian pursuing his career in New York City’s less-than-earnest comedy scene. In this context, Holmes is the marginal one. Viewers gain a visceral understanding that there is no such thing as “normal,” and that diversity is what makes us human.

As he struggles to make it, Holmes finds himself crashing on the couches of comedians who have achieved a degree of fame and financial success; this is a plot device that brings cameo appearances by pretty much everyone in the business — a true comedy nerd’s delight. “Crashing,” has taken on serious issues, such as addiction — with an amazing performance by veteran comic Artie Lange, who has struggled with addiction for decades. The series includes episodes with angry male comics who refuse to adapt to evolving social mores, as well as new female and non-white voices. “Crashing” was not renewed for a fourth season, which is a real loss for the broader conversation about comedy, especially about its changing landscape. The show upends the notion that sensitivity to new voices and old tropes will spell an end to “funny.” Instead it challenges the older guard to be more creative and opens the conversation to those that have been marginalized, which is a lot of very funny people.

But scripted comedy and the traditional comedy set do pose limitations that underscore Hannah Gadsby’s central points. The characters are ultimately fictional, even if they are relatable and represent more diversity. They reflect real concerns, but they they don’t live beyond the page on which they are written.

Unscripted and stand-up comedy

One of the reasons the stand-up comic seems to offer truth, is that she stands there as herself, connecting with her audience through a combination of vulnerability and sharp insights. Comics tend to be quite open about their personal struggles and often draw on them for material. But the stand-up set is usually a well-honed combination of jokes and short stories. With “Nanette,” Hannah Gadsby shows that comedians now have a much broader range of options in which they can present their work.

Comedy seems to have found its value as storytelling. “Nanette” is one example of this form, but podcasts seem to be the perfect storytelling platform.

Comedy and the podcast

Podcasting has helped the golden age of comedy to flourish. It also offers perhaps the most intimate ways of experiencing entertainment, as a one-on-one experience between the listener and the podcaster. In the case of podcasts hosted by people who allow the listener into their personal lives, a long-lasting bond is created.

“My Favorite Murder,” a true-crime podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff, a veteran comic and writer, and Georgia Hardstark, a Cooking Channel personality and food writer, embodies the way in which comedy can be a valuable storyteller, a medium for serious conversations, and a means to connect. They achieved this unintentionally, as a result of tapping into the zeitgeist.

The format is simple: in each episode, the hosts take turns telling the story of their “favorite murder” – stories that have fascinated them and fed their obsession with true crime, ranging from Jon Benet Ramsey to the Golden State Killer. The retellings are not especially well-researched, with Hardstark and Kilgariff openly relying on Wikipedia, or episodes of true crime shows. The hosts also often mispronounce places and names, and sometimes have a tenuous grasp of history or basic geography. It is their very frank awareness of their ignorance, and their openness to being challenged, that taps into the vulnerability and empathy through which they connect — both to one another, and to their audience.

Kilgariff and Hardstark have also arrived at their podcast with baggage they are willing to unpack. The two discuss their past substance abuse, eating disorders, failure to thrive in conventional settings (neither has a college degree), dysfunctional relationships, watching a parent succumb to Alzheimers, and ultimately, the way both have achieved growth through years of therapy. And it is clear they are sharing themselves in a way that they think will be valuable to others.

Since its launch in 2016, the podcast has soared in the charts, sold out live shows nationally and internationally, and has a cult following of fellow “Murderinos.” Their fans are mostly women, who make up the vast majority of true crime fans. There are as many true crime podcasts as there are comedy podcasts, but with this combination, their talent and chemistry, and ability to connect through their own stories, the duo have captured a perfect medium for an audience that seemed urgently hungry for it. Their new memoir, “Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered,” is an even more candid extension of the themes they have spoken about on the show. And they have bared themselves even more-so, to everyone’s benefit.

The podcast has received thousands of emails over the years with fans expressing deeply personal reasons for feeling connected to and by the show. Between full episodes, MFM releases mini-episodes, with the hosts reading out a select few “Hometown Murders” sent in by listeners (really any true crime story that the listener has some kind of personal connection to). Almost invariably, the listener explains at the end of the show why it touched her, and expresses gratitude.

One listener, who is a sex worker, told the hosts that they are “angels for trying to contribute to the [conversation around] the frequent mockery and stereotyping of violence against sex workers;” another wrote, after telling a story about her dad’s role in helping end a hostage situation, that “I am so grateful for the way you ladies talk and are so open about mental illnesses, it was (my dad’s) own bipolar disorder that led to the end of his life and I’ve always felt a stigma around his disease and death like it was an anomaly and isolate thing when really it’s everywhere and I appreciate your willingness to start an honest conversation;” and one woman wrote in to tell a story and thank them for, “helping this junior lawyer with long hours and unbelievable professional self-doubt.” In the interest of total disclosure, I once wrote them myself with a hometown story and thanked them for sharing themselves in the way they do. They were my loyal and constant companions who kept me feeling connected to the world when I was laid off from my job.

Comedy has certainly grown to include more storytelling, and deeper excavations than throwaway punchlines. It helps that comedians often come equipped with a wide array of dysfunctions they are happy to discuss. Hannah Gadsby was right to question the value of comedy if it was used only as a means of defusing tension. But the medium seems to be expanding. It is becoming an avenue for serious conversations, and for a wider variety of us to connect.  Hannah Gadsby is returning this summer with a new special, “Douglas, we may well get a new verdict from her as well. It will be on Netflix in 2020.
    [post_title] => Comedy's role as a catalyst for social change
    [post_excerpt] => The combination of jokes and storytelling has become a potent weapon in the culture wars
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Comedy’s role as a catalyst for social change

by Yael Friedman

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-13 15:06:55
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    [post_content] => Social media platforms and authoritarian populists have a troubled, tangled, symbiotic relationship

Evgeny Morozov, a prominent culture critic and social media expert, argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian that the global right-wing populist movement is divided over Big Tech companies. Globally, populists see the platforms as a way to subvert mainstream media, but in the United States the right wing sees it as a target to attack.  Morozov's analysis overlooks, however, the fact that American extremists have been having it both ways: they capitalize off the opportunity to radicalize individuals on social media, while cynically complaining about “far-left” ideologues, as demonstrated by recent events.

Last week, YouTube initially declined to sanction the right-wing comedian Stephen Crowder for posting videos filled with racist and homophobic attacks against a Vox journalist. As HuffPo reporter Andy Campbell observes, this is a really bad sign for the company’s new anti-hate policy.

Then the company proceeded to prove, as Will Oremus describes it, “The One Rule of Content Moderation”: Namely, if a decision is too controversial, reverse it. YouTube’s decision to take away Crowder’s ability to make money off his videos is neither a “hard-won victory” nor “mob rule,” but merely more evidence that the tech companies have no idea what they’re doing.

As this story by New York Times reporter Kevin Roose demonstrates, the recommendation engines that power platforms like YouTube are as influential as content moderation — if less visible. Roose reports that a series of tweaks to the recommendation system on YouTube made it even easier for white supremacists and other right-wing populists to radicalize their audiences.

However, Roose also reports that some left-wing YouTubers are hacking the system by mimicking the video style, lingo, and subject matter of right-wing populists, and then debunking their messages. These activists are modeling their tactics on successful de-radicalization by co-opting the medium, meme by meme. While this community-driven strategy is promising, its creators are ultimately at the mercy of the same algorithms as their far-right colleagues: if YouTube switches things up again, who knows whether they can still get their videos in front of the people who need them.

In other news:

States race to ban styrofoam in the latest skirmish of the much-needed war on plastic. Read more.

How an “innovation team” is ending blight in Mobile, Alabama. Learn more.

The small Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i is modeling a post-carbon future for us all. Here’s how.
    [post_title] => How the far right games social media platforms
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How the far right games social media platforms

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-06-07 14:32:51
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    [post_content] => Celebrity chefs and food manufacturers are setting an example for us all in reimagining and repurposing discarded food

When I first began to cook, learning to discriminate between what I could and could not eat was essential to understanding my way around the kitchen. Dark green tops of leeks, for instance, are considered waste. Radish roots are for salad, but the greens are usually discarded. As a cook and an avid eater, I generated a significant amount of unused vegetable matter. Eventually, I began composting those food scraps. But what if those radish greens and leek tops had value? What if they were not considered waste?

Unused food product has become a major environmental issue. One third of the food produced globally goes to waste every year, along with all the resources spent on its production, even as 1 billion people around the world starve. Meanwhile, the methane produced by food discarded in landfills contributes 8% of greenhouse gases that are rapidly warming our planet to dangerous levels.

When restaurants, food manufacturers, and caterers break down raw ingredients, peel vegetables, and trim cuts of meat, they generate enormous quantities of scraps. Supermarkets, meanwhile, throw away produce just slightly past its aesthetic prime, sending wilted lettuce and imperfect-looking bananas to the landfills.

In 2016 ReFED, a U.S. non-profit consortium that is committed to reducing food waste, produced a report called “Rethinking Food Waste through Economics and Data: A Roadmap to Reduce Food Waste." Among their findings: in the United States, $218 billion is spent each year just to grow, process, distribute, and then dispose of food that nobody ate. Landfills receive 52.4 million tons of food in a year. Restaurants in the United States alone produce 11.4 million tons of food waste annually, worth about $25 billion. The quantity of waste is mind-bending.

Problem of perception

Now some celebrity chefs are setting an example for us all in reducing waste with creative methods. Massimo Bottura, owner of the Michelin three-star Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, is a famous advocate of using discarded food scraps rather than throwing them away. In his cookbook Bread Is Gold, published in 2015, he provides recipes that reclaim unused food items, including one for chutney made from banana peels.

Plenty of foods considered inedible in some cultures are part of the diet in others. Koreans, for example, make a tea from corn silk. Many chefs today appreciate the woody flavor corn husks add to broths. The green tops of leeks can be used for soups, and radish greens add a peppery bite to salads.

“Waste,” says Chef Douglas McMaster of Silo, the U.K.’s first zero waste restaurant, “is a failure of the imagination.”

Waste is also a byproduct of affluence and privilege. I often think about the disconnect between my grandmother’s kitchen sense and my mother’s: My grandmother survived the Second World War with her family in Siberia, where food was scarce and hunger widespread. When she speaks of that period, she often recounts digging in the ground to find discarded potato peels, which for her were a nutrient-rich food. When I was growing up in suburban New Jersey during the 1980s and ‘90s, we never thought twice about discarding our potato peels — or most food, for that matter.

Converting organic waste into soil

Composting — the process of converting organic materials into densely nutrient-rich topsoil — is a commonly practiced solution to food waste. San Francisco is one of several American cities that has established a municipal program to collect and treat organic waste. New York City currently requires commercial kitchens to dispose of organic matter in separate bins.

Huge digesters, essentially in-house machine-operated composters that convert food scraps into soil using special enzymes, help offset the volume of waste generated by large food establishments that would otherwise be hauled away and processed off premises.

To be sure, alleviating the burden on landfills and turning organic matter into soil is an incredibly important solution for cities and companies to pursue. But, as many food waste entrepreneurs are realizing, a better solution is to limit the creation of waste in the first place and compost only what is truly inedible. In the case of commercial composting, hauling tons of food scraps in tractor-trailers across state lines to commercial facilities (sometimes great distances) and operating fossil fuel-powered machinery to process waste expends energy and places carbon in the atmosphere. Profit is another incentive: according to a recent report, restaurants save seven dollars for every dollar invested in methods to limit food waste.

Turning liabilities into assets

By rethinking how we cook and what we consume, we can create innovative solutions that bring huge ecological and social benefits. Some new food companies have already implemented systems to prevent nutrient-rich foods from being thrown away.

Take, for example, the case of acidic whey. A byproduct of Greek-style strained yogurt, it cannot legally be disposed of by throwing it down the drain or into natural waterways, because it sucks up the oxygen in water and destroys aquatic life. The whey is, however, tangy, probiotic, and nutrient-rich. And so large yogurt-manufacturing companies like Chobani pay to have it transported in bulk to farmers, who feed it to their animals.

Homa Dashtaki, the owner of White Moustache, a Brooklyn-based artisanal yogurt brand, calls whey, which is full of vitamins but contains no calories or fat, a “golden elixir.” She has begun supplying restaurants with whey for their own experiments, like specialty cocktails, but still has a significant quantity left over. Rather than pay someone to haul it away, Dashtaki created innovative products, like a probiotic tonic made of flavored whey, and a probiotic popsicle infused with fresh fruit.

On a much larger scale, the New York-based specialty foods distributor Baldor has pursued a zero waste strategy by creating an entirely new business ecosystem. Thomas McQuillan, the company’s vice president of strategy, culture, and sustainability, understands the value of carrot peels. “Food product has to be consumed by human beings, it has to be consumed by animals or it has to be turned into energy or compost,” he said recently, while giving a lecture at New York’s Food Waste Fair. He added that food “should never go to landfills.”

In 2016, Baldor set into a motion a program called SparCs (scraps spelled backwards) to eliminate food waste from their fresh produce processing facility. It takes the150,000 pounds of fruit and vegetable by-product it generates each week and turns it over to animal or human consumption. Baldor partners with chefs to create baked goods, broths, juices, and sauces with these scraps, and with farmers who use them for feed. Since its inception, the program has diverted 6,000 tons of produce from landfill. Baldor has thus not only generated new revenue streams, but also reduced its waste haul by 73%. It is now a zero organic waste company.

A new consciousness

While not every food service company can afford to rethink its business model, companies with the resources to do so must take the lead. This is the only way to create a cultural shift that will set the standard for small food businesses.

When companies like Baldor and White Moustache notice inefficiencies in the existing structures and begin looking for creative and environmentally sustainable solutions, they change how we as a culture understand the value of food. By strategically intervening and reframing the idea of waste while reasserting the value of the whole vegetable, for instance, we not only limit food waste, but we also ease the burden on our environment and maximize the nutrition of food to reach more people.

These ideas and policies can affect how we all cook and eat in our own homes, so that we create a more sustainable and innovative food culture.  We already have the capacity to feed the entire world. Reframing waste as food is the first step toward ensuring a more just and sustainable food system.
    [post_title] => We would have enough food to feed the planet if we stopped wasting so much of it
    [post_excerpt] => One third of the food produced globally every year goes to waste, even as 1 billion people starve. 
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We would have enough food to feed the planet if we stopped wasting so much of it

by Jeffrey Yoskowitz

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    [ID] => 1083
    [post_author] => 2
    [post_date] => 2019-06-06 14:36:45
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-06-06 14:36:45
    [post_content] => Expressing dissent in China is difficult and dangerous, but a brave few persist in telling their story. 

This week the world remembers the events that took place on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square — although remembering is easier to do in some countries than in others. China’s digital great wall blocks access to information about the massacre, often with the help of American technology companies. Demonstrators who were in Tiananmen and lived through the crackdown that followed don’t even tell their children about it, lest they ask questions of the wrong people. Even more disturbing, young Chinese students raised in a post-Tiananmen world question the value of knowing what really happened that day, as Louisa Lim, the author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia, writes in the New York Times. 

But while the Communist party has succeeded in crushing dissent, it has not figured out a way to make people forget. Today some survivors of those horrific events that took place in Beijing 30 years ago still make tiny, subversive gestures to show they have not forgotten, thus proving that people can uphold the historical record even under the most repressive governments.

In a moving reported op-ed for the New York Times, China expert Ian Johnson describes this quiet dissent expressed by brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as “unofficial history.” They “have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of the country’s many killings, famines, uprisings and government crackdowns,” he writes. This history is smuggled in and out of China, accessed through VPN software to avoid censorship, or conveyed in symbolic code. This unofficial history is a testament to the resilience of people and of storytellers.

In addition to the vibrant unofficial history kept alive by a community of people, Johnson writes for the New York Review of Books that the official history of Tiananmen Square continues to expand, most recently with a book about how the Communist Party rewrote history the week following the crackdown, including backdating political endorsements of the decision to use military force on the protestors. The “truth stubbornly endures,” Johnson writes.

In other news:

Can the social cost of carbon — a figure that estimates the economic burden of climate change per metric ton of carbon dioxide — help incentive climate change solutions? Read more.

What is “economic patriotism”? Read about Elizabeth Warren’s plan to reinvigorate American industry.

At this New York bakery, it’s not your past (whatever it may hold) that matters, but your future. What does employment based on the  Buddhist principle of “non-judgment” look like?
    [post_title] => This is how China's political dissidents keep historical memory alive
    [post_excerpt] => In China, brave writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals have taken it upon themselves to preserve the memories of events their government works hard to repress with digital censorship and police harassment.
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This is how China’s political dissidents keep historical memory alive

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-31 16:43:38
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    [post_content] => The decline in international news coverage over the past two years has worrying implications

My friend used to chain smoke cigarettes as he reported from the front lines of Libya’s civil war and from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the tumultuous 2011 Arab Spring. Today, he lives in Washington, D.C., where he has an exciting job covering U.S. news as well as a dog, and a new baby. My friend belongs to a wave of American journalists who were once foreign correspondents but have over the past couple of years shifted back to the United States. Now he reports from a different front line — the Trump White House. This shift of reporters from foreign beats to the domestic one reflects a worrying decline in rigorous international news coverage.

In 2018, six out of 10 of the top stories published by the Washington Post were Trump-related. This could be because readers are looking for Trump news; or it could be that most of the stories their favorite media outlets publish are about the president.

Foreign news coverage has, to be sure, been on the decline for quite some time. According to a 2014 Pew report 20 media companies eliminated their foreign bureaus over the past two decades. Furthermore, 64% of 250 newspapers surveyed said that over the past three years they decreased the space allotted to international news.

Declining interest

Rick Edmonds, a media analyst at the Poynter Institute, says that coverage of foreign news, especially among the big three American networks, has been declining “for a long time.” Those who seek international news coverage now rely on the New York Times and the BBC, or specialist publications and sites. Trump's attempts to monopolize the news cycle, Edmonds observes, has accelerated and exacerbated the decline in international news coverage.

Freelancers are feeling the pinch. Rebecca Collard, who freelances for various Canadian media outlets, confirms that since Trump was elected, she has found it increasingly difficult to find a home for stories that are not about the U.S. president or about the so-called Islamic State. A couple of years ago, Collard said, “there was constant demand” for reporting across print, radio, and television. She was filing four stories per day from northern Iraq, plus television and radio reports. Today she finds it difficult to pitch stories that lack an American angle. The appetite for foreign news had dried up, she said.

Elisa Lees Munoz heads the International Women’s Media Fund (IWMF), which disburses grants to female journalists for investigative and underreported international stories. She confirms that the organization’s grantees are having a hard time pitching and placing foreign stories that had nothing to do with Trump or the elections. Media outlets will publish foreign news pieces “grudgingly” if a media non-profit like the IWMF pays the reporter’s expenses, she said, but they will rarely commission international stories with money from their own budget.

Shaheen Pasha, a professor of international news at Amherst College, sees the freelancers she teaches struggle to pitch their foreign stories to American editors. “These reporters make no money, risk their lives to do stories about people being brutalized around the world and an editor will say, what is the interest, where is Trump?” Pasha said.

The lack of appetite for foreign news has, according to Pasha, created a generation of college students who are poorly informed about international affairs, because the media outlets they read have shifted away from foreign coverage.

Pasha believes that the absence of rigorous reporting on important issues like the global refugee crisis and climate change narrows the breadth of voices we hear in journalism and contributes to “othering,” or a decrease in identification with and compassion for people who speak different languages and observe different religions.

The cost of not knowing

Another consequence of the vacuum in international news coverage is that it distorts the lens through which we view the world, depicting it in simplistic, binary terms and as a place full of violence and chaos. Elisa Lees Munoz of the IWMF gave the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as an example of distorted coverage.  The few media reports one reads about the DRC, she pointed out, were about “war and rape and rape survivors.” So the average American news consumer has no idea that “there are really interesting stories about entrepreneurship and environmental issues” in the DRC. Editors don’t commission those stories, so reporters don’t pitch them.

There are serious consequences to being uninformed about international events. Not understanding how ordinary Iranians experience sanctions for example, makes it harder for Americans to empathize with their situation or to understand the implications of the U.S. government’s foreign policy not only for Iranians – but for Americans, too. So they continue to vote for hawkish lawmakers who make often misleading, saber-rattling statements about Iran, instead of advocating diplomatic solutions. A lack of rigorous reporting about the effects of climate change has also had catastrophic consequences, with poorly informed voters choosing representatives who ignore environmental issues — or, worse, support policies that further contribute to the depleting of natural resources and the dangerous warming of the planet.

The cost of being uninformed about the world is too high to ignore. There are remedies, but they require a commitment to journalism as a crucial pillar of democracy, rather than as a type of money-making entertainment. Journalism schools, said Pasha, must create courses like the one on media literacy and international reporting that she teaches at Amherst, which is available as an elective to students not majoring in journalism.

Lee Keath, a Middle East editor at the Associated Press, said that because the media was so Trump-obsessed, Americans had the impression that the war in Syria was over. The fighting is in fact still raging, but the media’s spotlight has turned away. Afghanistan, too, has slipped off the news cycle despite ongoing flareups in fighting. Keath said that while plenty of editors are looking for a Trump angle to nearly every story, he also knows many journalists who are determined to cover stories rigorously, without reference to the person currently occupying the White House.

How to change

“For me, the question to editors is, why are you passing up on these stories,” said Lees Munoz. She wants to know what evidence or criteria are being used to publish more stories that are only about Trump and the election – if the editorial decisions are based on real data or just on perceptions. One systemic problem is that the vast majority of senior media jobs are still held by straight, white, men who make editorial decisions based on their own interests and worldview.

But there is no single institution or factor that bears all the responsibility for this state of affairs.  Media outlets are obsessed with making a profit and editors are obsessed with the page views upon which their jobs depend. Publishers struggle to keep their newspapers afloat as the revenue from advertising continues to decline. Readers, meanwhile, increasingly fail to engage with anything longer than a 280-character tweet or a 30-second video.

Miriam Elder, World News editor at BuzzFeed, cautions against blaming readers. The news cycle has accelerated to an unprecedented pace, she said, with so much happening all at once that readers are overwhelmed. It’s up to journalists, she says, to do their jobs by reporting and explaining the news clearly, engaging their target audience so that they want to read about what’s going on in the world. “And that,” she said, “Means making it more relatable to their lives.”

Perhaps we all need to remind the editors who commission stories that making the news relatable is a crucial part of their jobs. While Trump and the U.S. elections must and should be covered rigorously, so should stories about what it means for a woman to be pregnant in El Salvador, or why infanticide is a problem in Senegal, or how Indians who oppose the authoritarianism of Narendra Modi are fighting for their democracy, or the real experiences and struggles of queer refugees in Europe and Canada. These are the stories that connect us on an emotional level. When they are told well and reported sensitively, we feel connected to the rest of the world — instead of isolated in a fear-filled fortress of our own making.
    [post_title] => The corrosive effect of the 'Trump bump'
    [post_excerpt] => The lack of rigorous reporting on important issues like the global refugee crisis and climate change contributes to “othering,” or a decrease in identification with and compassion for people who speak different languages and observe different religions.
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The corrosive effect of the ‘Trump bump’

by Hadeel Al-Shalchi

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    [ID] => 1064
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    [post_date] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
    [post_content] => In the age of increasing government surveillance and declining privacy, can citizens take back their right to live an unwatched life?

This weekend I had the dubious honor of coming face-to-face with one of the robots being rolled out by the supermarket chain Stop & Shop. The purpose of the tower of cameras and lasers is purportedly to keep an eye on spills and litter in the aisles, as the Boston Globe credulously reported, but presumably it could also watch customers and employees. The encounter got me thinking about the many forms of surveillance takes in this day and age, and how individuals and governments can push back.

One of the most extreme examples of a surveillance state is the province of Kashgar in northwest China. New York Times reporters created this audio-visual essay in an attempt to convey the extent of perpetual, all-consuming surveillance and its restrictive effect on residents. There are cameras, everywhere; and checkpoints, everywhere. Residents are required to install software on devices so the state can monitor their calls and other movements; and they are subject to random, unannounced visits by police and other monitors at any hour of the day or night. As the Times points out, the effect is as much about “intimidation as monitoring.”

Should you worry about facial recognition technology? Technologist Shelly Palmer says we should not be, arguing that “we live in a post-privacy world of our own creation, and there’s no going back.” Essentially, he says, things are already bad, so there’s no reason to try to fix it.

But people aren’t buying what Palmer and others are selling. As the New York Times recently reported, shareholders have taken an activist role in pressuring Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to government agencies, and to conduct an independent investigation into potential violations of civil, human and privacy rights. In many ways, the perpetual surveillance Palmer describes as normal and everyday has raised awareness of how the technology can be abused. Since facial recognition is not-yet-ubiquitous, now is the time for individuals, governments and organizations to take a stand against it.

In another example of this anti-surveillance trend, CNET reports that cities across the United States are passing or considering legislation that would require public approval for new surveillance technologies that police departments are considering purchasing. Voters are asserting their right to decide whether surveillance systems are reasonable and acceptable.

In other news:

Infant mortality rates have dropped in states that expanded Medicaid access, according to a new study from the Georgetown University Center of Health Policy. Read more.

Fully one-half of retirement-age Americans can’t afford to stop working, but there are bills and other proposals on deck that could alleviate the crisis. Learn more.

The daughter of the man who coined the term “regenerative agriculture” wants to rethink the way we treat poop (specifically animal poop) in agriculture. Our food systems and health may depend on it. Read more.
    [post_title] => Reclaiming their privacy
    [post_excerpt] => While some shrug off perpetual surveillance as the new normal, others are taking action to prevent government abuse
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Reclaiming their privacy

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-24 16:42:49
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-24 16:42:49
    [post_content] => "The past is never dead. It is not even past."
—William Faulkner

Did you ever wonder why the American education system only gets serious about foreign languages in high school, while the rest of the world seems to start sometime before kindergarten? It’s not by accident, of course. In America, the attitude toward bilingualism has historically been uneasy at best. The tremendous cultural pressure on immigrants to assimilate and to speak English, presents a problem for ethnic and national groups committed to maintaining their own languages and cultural identity beyond the first and second generations.

When a growing Yiddish after school program asked the Milwaukee public school system for use of one of its buildings, it was a local rabbi who went on the record to protest the Yiddish program. “There is altogether too much hyphenism in our present Americanism…” said Rabbi Samuel Hirschberg. He added that foreign language education was wrong because “A foreign language as a household language tends to perpetuate foreignism…” Hirschberg insisted that foreign languages were so corrosive to the American national spirit that no foreign language should be taught before high school.

That was in 1916. Rabbi Hirschberg’s curious campaign to discourage Jewish literacy points to two important facts that tend to be in tension. First, bi- and even tri-lingualism has always been tied to American Jewish identity, both as an immigrant group and a diasporic people. Second, the discourse around bilingualism in America is in large part a function of attitudes toward immigrants. Between 1881 and 1924 some 2.5 million Jews immigrated from Eastern and Central Europe. By the time Rabbi Hirschberg went on the record, the popular conversation around immigrants, especially Jews, had reached unprecedented heights of ugly xenophobia. Less than a decade later, in 1924, Congress passed legislation that would essentially cut off all immigration from Europe, including Jewish immigration.

The persistence of bilingual culture

The case of Rabbi Hirschberg shows that the question of bilingualism was a complicated one, and that the conversations happening in the mainstream were also happening within the Jewish community.

But bilingual (Yiddish-English) Jewish communal life did persist in the United States, and well past its expected life span. In 1933, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, Hillel Rogoff, the managing editor of the most widely-read Yiddish newspaper in the United States, the Jewish Daily Forward, was asked about the future of the Yiddish press in America. Despite widely-held views that Yiddish was a dying language, Rogoff was optimistic. “There is no reason,” he said, “why the Yiddish press in America should not go on for many, many years…”

Today, at 122 years of continuous publishing, the Yiddish language Forverts newspaper has already outlived the traditional Yiddish blessing, “may you live until 120.” The history of Forverts reflects a mixture of enormous communal investment, dumb luck and, in the end, the overwhelming power of monolingualism. In that sense, for newer diasporic groups hoping to maintain an identity tied to a heritage language, the Forverts provides an important case study.

In the United States, maintaining an immigrant language and cultural tradition requires an act of tremendous will and coordinated community action. What’s so unique about the persistence of Forverts — which is still published to this day, albeit in a very diminished format — is not just that it defied the two-generation life span for immigrant media, but that it did so in spite of itself. The Forverts was itself a force for Americanization.

Established in 1897 at the peak of mass Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, Forverts’s most famous sections were aimed at helping new immigrants assimilate. A Bintl Brif (A Bundle of Letters) was one of the first American newspaper advice columns. It provided guidance on many of the dilemmas of Americanization, including, most poignantly, the cultural gap that inevitably arose between Yiddish speaking parents and bilingual American children, many of whom were ashamed of their foreign parents.

The Yiddish of Forverts was also highly ‘Americanized,’ employing many transliterated English words. Perhaps most importantly, given American political attitudes, while The Forverts was a proudly socialist publication, it was vigorously anti-Communist. The Yiddish paper of record managed to thread the needle of politically acceptable cultural autonomy.

The Forverts was always more than a newspaper. It was part of a wide-ranging, interconnected network of Yiddish flavored, socialist and labor oriented institutions that included WEVD radio, Amalgamated Bank, the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, a mutual aid society called the Workmen’s Circle, and a summer camp and after school education system that still exist today. 

At its height, the Forverts parent entity, the Forward Association, was a political machine, an organization with a constitution that spelled out expectations for members to vote along party lines, or risk disciplinary action that included expulsion.

Taken together, the Forverts was a symbol of an urban, all-encompassing model of Jewish life in America. It was explicitly built by and for its members and readers, and that sense of ownership continued to reverberate through later generations, even if in a diminished, distanced way.  

Xenophobia redux

Coordinated anti-immigrant hysteria brought an end to the great era of Jewish mass migration, with the passing of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act. Unfortunately, we are now seeing a resurgence of the ugly xenophobia that was such a salient feature of American life during the 1920s and 1930s. According to a recent Pew Foundation survey, almost one third of Americans feel uncomfortable merely hearing a language other than English in public. The irony is, for all the outrage about immigrants and their supposed resistance to assimilation, the process of Americanization is absolutely relentless and no group is immune to the inevitability of language loss.  

First generation immigrants to the United States generally learn English slowly. They depend on media in their native language, which they continue to speak at home. Second generation Americans are bilingual and may or may not be attached to the immigrant language and its institutions. Third generation Americans are, almost without exception, monolingual.

Many of the institutions created by the first generation of Yiddish-speaking immigrants still exist. While the WEVD radio station was sold to Disney, Amalgamated Bank and the Amalgamated Houses still stand. The Workmen’s Circle has created a new identity for itself in the twenty-first century, one that is different from its origins as a mutual aid society, but still centered on an understanding of American Jews as immigrants and descendants of immigrants. 

But those institutions, for all their longevity, did not create a legacy of contemporary Yiddish speakers. While the Workmen’s Circle offers superb and innovative Yiddish language classes for adults, it faces nearly insurmountable challenges in monolingual America. Providing systematic Yiddish language education for children was an exceedingly difficult proposition, given both the financial cost and the pull of assimilation. The Holocaust decimated Yiddish culture in Europe, reducing its native-speaking population by 85%. Today, outside of the Hasidic communities, Yiddish is spoken by only a small number of Jewish Americans. Many of them are people like me and my friends, residents of what we affectionately call Yiddishland.

The will to preserve a culture

So what are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers? According to my Yiddishland friends who are now parents, supplementary and all-day schools (which also exist for Russian, Chinese and Hungarian) have proven highly effective — if extremely expensive — for language transmission, especially where a first generation parent speaks the language at home. But it remains to be seen whether those schools alone can inspire the second generation to transmit to the third, the true challenge in monolingual America.

On this question of the third generation I turned to a young friend of mine, Shifra Whiteman. As a child in the 1990s, Whiteman was part of a small Yiddish-language playgroup called Pripetshik.  The group was created by a dedicated group of second-generation parents invested in Yiddish continuity. Pripetshik met in the Workmen’s Circle building in New York and lasted for years, morphing into a Yiddish chorus and producing lifelong friendships. As adults Whiteman, and the other members of the playgroup, have gone on to become activists and leaders in the Yiddish world.

The playgroup wasn’t just about teaching a language. It included cooking sessions, movies and history lessons. Pripetshik was about transmitting a very specific diasporic Jewish identity. Its location in the Workmen’s Circle building, a few floors down from the Forverts, was an important part of the lesson, showing the kids that they existed within an ongoing cultural project.  

In addition to her Yiddish playgroup, Whiteman also received a conventional Jewish day school education as well as many summers at Zionist summer camp. She recently started teaching Yiddish classes in cooperation with her city’s YIVO and Workmen’s Circle branches. Her students are almost entirely young people hungry for connection to an alternative kind of Jewish identity, one that is not rooted in nationalism or political ideology. At 30, she is ready to start thinking about children of her own, and plans to speak Yiddish with them, just as her parents spoke to her. As she put it to me, among the many Jewish worlds she inhabited as a young person, “the Yiddish stuck.”  

There are no easy answers to the question of how to preserve immigrant cultures and languages in the face of America’s fierce devotion to monolingualism. However, it’s clear that the success of multi-generational cultural transmission will depend on the durability of institutions, and whether the language and culture express values that the following generations find useful, and essential, to their sense of self. The Forverts was a newspaper for immigrants who wanted to become American. Today, many of its readers are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of immigrants, people who want to expand the definition of American and once again redefine Jewish life in the diaspora.
    [post_title] => Make bilingualism great
    [post_excerpt] => What are the twenty-first century strategies for creating fluent second and third generation heritage language speakers in a pervasively unilingual and often xenophobic culture?
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Make bilingualism great

by Rokhl Kafrissen

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-23 14:09:50
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    [post_content] => Authoritarian politics has become a global crisis that requires creative, new thinking

Far-right, nationalist, populist, illiberal, authoritarian: However one might describe these politicians, they are increasingly dominating the world stage. They've been called a "security threat" and compared to climate change — a global crisis in need of a global response. The outline of what such a response might look like is beginning to take shape, as seen in these articles from prominent media outlets.

Authoritarian politicians are a “global security threat,” writes Jonah Shepp in a recent op-ed for New York Magazine. To know the near-future, he suggests looking to recent events in Austria, where government officials sympathetic to far-right groups illegally seized records from a domestic intelligence agency, including the identities of informants within far-right, extremists groups, jeopardizing domestic terrorism investigations. And yet, as Shepp demonstrates, Austria is far from a global outlier. “So don’t look at what’s happening in Austria and say it couldn’t happen here,” Shepp writes, “it already is.”

For The Nation, John Feffer characterizes rising authoritarianism as a global crisis that requires international cooperation. Feffer worries that progressive tactics rely too much on the “guardrails” of democracy, which authoritarians begin to erode as soon as they step foot in office. “Environmentalists understand that unprecedented change requires an unprecedented response,” Feffer writes. “To deal with the threat of political climate change, a similarly international, broad-based, and fundamentally new approach is called for.”

Polish activists Karolina Wigura and Jaroslaw Kuisz might be the example to follow in combatting illiberalism. In a recent New York Times op-ed, they share three lessons gleaned from their work: First, to find areas of consensus among non-right-wing, populist parties, and to set aside differences in favor of compromise. Second, to spend less time reacting to political provocations on social media, and more time building a long-term strategic plan. Finally, to invigorate voters with stories of optimism and hope that goes beyond a return to the way things were “before the illiberals.” These suggestions can be applied locally, but they could also form the basis of the kind of global strategy Feffer outlines.

In other news:

Is the answer to global warming to reduce the work week to a mere nine hours? That’s the conclusion of one study by the think tank Autonomy. Read more at The Guardian.

A recent win on same-sex marriage in Taiwan could have reverberations throughout Asia, as the country demonstrates that LGBTQ movement can be in alignment with traditional Asian values. Read more in The Washington Post.

Magnolia Mother’s Trust is a model for an unconditional income: small amounts of regularly distributed financial support without any work requirements or other demands. The pilot is small: 20 families in Jackson, Mississippi, are each receiving $1,000 a month for 12 months. But the program could pave the way for more systemic racial justice programs. Read more in The New York Times.
    [post_title] => More effective than punching a Nazi: tactics that work
    [post_excerpt] => The outline of an effective response to authoritarianism is taking shape.
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More effective than punching a Nazi: tactics that work

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Gaza is often described as a humanitarian catastrophe, but its crisis is the result of self-serving policy implementation that could be reversed

Exactly a week after the most recent military escalation between Gaza and Israel, Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli newspaper, placed on the front page of its Hebrew print edition a photograph depicting a crowd of Palestinians in Gaza gathered around a steaming cauldron of soup. Mostly men and boys, they are clamoring to get closer to the cauldron, clutching pots, bowls and even plastic storage containers to be filled. It is an aerial shot and you can almost hear the commotion through the image.

Over just three days during the first week of May, 25 Palestinian residents of Gaza and four Israeli citizens were killed while hundreds were injured. This was just the latest of eight military escalations since Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Israeli missiles and artillery fire damaged homes and businesses in Gaza, while barrages of rockets fired from the Strip hit dozens of homes in Israel in a tactic that seemed meant to overwhelm the Iron Dome defense system, which has until now prevented heavy damage and loss of life in Israeli cities and towns.

For most Israelis, Gaza exists only as a place of violence and misery. The images in the mainstream media depict its residents as either shooting rockets or clamoring for food. Israeli citizens can’t enter the Strip, and residents of Gaza are very rarely granted permission to enter Israel.

The misery-violence connection

While Israelis have little insight into the complex, nuanced realities of Palestinian society, many do see the link between violence and misery. In a poll conducted in early 2017, more than two-thirds of Israelis acknowledged that Israel would be serving its own interests by working to improve living conditions in Gaza. Israeli security experts — current and former military officials, analysts, and politicians — frequently warn that the misery in Gaza is a threat to Israel’s security.

The terms of each ceasefire agreement have been variations on the same theme: Expanding the fishing zone, allowing more goods into Gaza, and granting exit permits to more people. But Israel regularly fails to implement the terms of the agreements, and Gaza’s desperate situation continues to deteriorate. If misery drives conflict, and everyone acknowledges this, why isn’t Israel doing more to prevent the next round of violence?

A crisis rooted in policy

Neither increased aid nor improved infrastructure can resolve the crisis in Gaza. The endless cycle of escalations, ceasefires, and unfulfilled concessions are symptomatic of a broader problem. The international community has allowed Israel to “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians, rather than take meaningful steps to end it. From Israel’s perspective, keeping Gaza in perpetual crisis is the point —not the problem. The two parties will remain stuck in this holding pattern, with escalations becoming increasingly frequent and their magnitude stronger, until external players who have an interest in ending the conflict compel Israel to shift course radically and take responsibility for the well-being of civilians in both Israel and Gaza.

The crisis in Gaza today is rooted in policies implemented over the course of decades, particularly in Israel’s June 2007 decision, soon after Hamas took over, to declare Gaza a “hostile territory” and impose a closure. After 2007, Israel allowed only one crossing for the transport of humanitarian aid to remain open. The message was that Gaza could have aid but not an economy, subsistence but not prosperity. An Israeli official at the time said that the government’s policy was “no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis” and in court proceedings the state articulated that its intention was to wage economic warfare against Gaza.  The justification for the closure, which Egypt joined by closing its own crossing point at Gaza’s southernmost point, was that it would squeeze Hamas into compliance — or place so much economic pressure on the general population, that it would rise up and overthrow Hamas.

Over the ensuing 12 years, there have been three major military operations, more than a dozen interim escalations that felt very much like war to those experiencing them, and more than a year of protests at the perimeter fence where Israeli snipers have killed hundreds of unarmed protesters. Millions of Palestinians and Israelis have been affected by violence. Palestinians in Gaza have borne the vast brunt of the conflict, with Israel using its formidable military force on the small territory, which lacks bomb shelters and has an underfunded and overwhelmed medical system. Israelis — mostly in southern Israel but not only — have also experienced the violence of Palestinian factions, whose use of sniper, mortar and rocket fire, and incendiary devices, has caused death, injury, property damage and trauma.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, realizing that Israeli policy created a situation in Gaza that was a liability as well as an image problem, has sought to manage the situation by keeping the pot simmering, believing he can prevent it from boiling over. But it keeps boiling over.

Israel has reversed some of its most egregious restrictions, like the one that forbade certain foods, books and children’s toys they described as ‘luxuries’ from entering Gaza. Nonetheless, 12 years after the Hamas takeover, there are dozens of policies that have nothing to do with security and everything to do with the logic of applying pressure or sanctions — i.e., creating more misery, which keeps all parties to the conflict locked in a loop of escalations and ceasefires. For example, Israel frequently closes Erez Crossing — the only pedestrian crossing for Palestinians who have permission to leave Gaza — and Kerem Shalom, its only commercial crossing. In 2018, Israel closed both crossings on seven occasions, sometimes for weeks at a time.

Human bargaining chips

Israel only issues permits to leave Gaza for what it calls “exceptional humanitarian” reasons, with some exceptions for merchants. The list of criteria determining who is eligible to request a permit for travel reveals the arbitrary nature of Israel’s access policy and a kind of violent and dystopian bureaucracy. Even after passing a security screening, Palestinians must meet additional criteria in order to be granted an exit permit. Permission to visit a family member, for example, is only granted in the case of a first-degree relative who is dead, mortally ill, or getting married. The processing time for permit applications can run up to 70 business days, and many applications go unanswered. Israel often disputes the request, asking whether the relative is still sick enough to warrant a visit or whether their death occurred so long ago that there is no longer justification for issuing a permit to participate in the mourning rituals. Israel routinely blocks travel that could allow residents of the Strip to establish trade ties or travel for professional development — including for women, who rarely meet Israel’s bar for what is considered legitimate business needs.

If Israel wanted to stave off misery in Gaza, it would take its boot off the necks of Gaza residents and stop using their lives as currency in its negotiations vis-à-vis Hamas. But Israel has no incentive to make compromises that would move the region out of conflict. It conveys the perception that it is “managing” an insoluble problem and that it is a victim of Palestinian violence, with neither responsibility for Palestinian misery nor the ability to alleviate it.

But the truth is that the status quo serves Israel well. As long as a weakened Hamas has control over Gaza while Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah heads the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, Israel can use divide and conquer tactics to manipulate the rift between the two parties and maintain its hold on the West Bank, where more than half a million Israeli settlers live and which Netanyahu recently said he plans to annex.

A deeper look at the situation in Gaza, and its connection to the bigger picture, reveals these truths. If the political leadership of Israel, Palestine and the international community were willing, collectively, to prioritize the needs and rights of civilians, in Israel and Palestine, there would be a clear path to negotiating a way out of the crisis. Israel’s control over freedom of movement provides it with ample opportunities to take meaningful steps in this direction.
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Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza

by Tania Hary

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-15 16:23:03
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    [post_content] => More than two years into the Trump administration, liberals and progressives are struggling to overcome internal divisions as they search for a strategy to push back and win against the Republicans. Some wise and insightful thinkers bring important lessons to the table from which we can all learn

If American progressives wants to win, they need to adopt the strategies of the right: find consensus, stay focused on goals, and be aggressive. This, parsed bluntly, is the message Caroline Fredrickson puts forward in an important article for The American Prospect. Frederickson, who is president of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, makes important observations like this one: “The right believes in long-term funding and general operating support while the left requires groups to perform against metrics in project grants and cuts them off after a short time to fund something new.” What can the left learn from the right, without compromising its values?  Read Fredrickson’s analysis here.

Democrats are trying to restrain the worst of the current administration’s excesses by pursuing their battle at the (blue) state level, via legislatures and the courts. In a sense, their strategy seems to be adopted from the Republican playbook, which since Ronald Reagan has made the phrase “states’ rights” synonymous with racist dog whistles. But Anna Lind-Guzik, a Harvard Law School graduate who is the founder and CEO of The Conversationalist, shows in a fascinating essay that historically both Democrats and Republicans have very pragmatically pursued their political agenda via states’ rights when they were stymied at the federal level. Stacey Abrams, who is suing the governor of Georgia for targeted suppression of minority voters, said in a recent speech, “Litigation can’t solve our problems — but it can illuminate them.” Read more.

By ignoring or sneering at Donald Trump’s tweets, Democrats are missing opportunities to investigate the president’s corruption. David Dayen, the new executive editor of The American Prospect, argues that in our strange and worrying political times, it’s necessary to look at unprecedented levers of power. Read more.

We see in the article above that Twitter can be an important source of information, but as a place for the exchange of ideas it functions primarily as an echo chamber and does not have the power to sway public opinion. As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg points out, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be popular on Twitter, but Joe Biden is still the politician who drives the votes. Goldberg writes: “The future of the Democratic Party is still with left-wing social media dynamos like Ocasio-Cortez...Right now, though, her generation is mostly in charge only online.” So far, no-one has figured out how to translate the energy we see on Twitter from the left wing of the Democratic party, to the much wider voting public that is not online and not interested in the social media discourse. Read more.
    [post_title] => Advice to the left: If you want to win, keep your eyes on the prize
    [post_excerpt] => Twitter is an essential archive of information that should be used to pursue corruption investigations against Trump. But as a tool for swaying voters, its power is very limited
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Advice to the left: If you want to win, keep your eyes on the prize

by Jessica McKenzie

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