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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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https://conversationalist.org/2019/02/22/media-outlets-are-still-not-amplifying-female-experts-and-this-means-we-really-dont-know-whats-going-on-in-the-world/
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The corrosive effect of the ‘Trump bump’

by Hadeel Al-Shalchi

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-30 14:56:40
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    [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
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    [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_date] => 2019-05-17 16:53:51
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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.
    [post_title] => Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza
    [post_excerpt] => 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.
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Policy, not aid: how to avert catastrophe in Gaza

by Tania Hary

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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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    [post_content] => Americans tend to associate centralized government power with Democrats and the pursuit of states' rights with Republican ideology, but the truth is far more complex

“Litigation can’t solve our problems but it can illuminate them,” Stacey Abrams said at a fundraiser held this week in New York City for her voting rights’ organization, Fair Fight Action. Abrams became one of the country’s most famous Democratic politicians when she lost her 2018 bid for governor of Georgia, in a closely watched campaign that was marred by allegations of widespread voter suppression. She has refused to concede and is currently suing Governor Brian Kemp for targeted suppression of minority voters.

Abrams understands that the courts are only as principled as the judges that preside over  them. President Trump has, over the two years since he took office, appointed so many judges to lifetime tenure on the federal bench that one in six circuit court judges is now a Trump appointee. Given the long and substantial historical precedents, we can expect those newly appointed judges to cite states’ rights when upholding discriminatory policies enacted by red state legislatures. 

Americans have good reason to believe the phrase “states’ rights” is code for white supremacy. When he was employed by the Reagan White House, Republican strategist Lee Atwater notoriously revealed in an interview that the party deliberately employed abstractions like states’ rights and tax cuts as racist dog whistles. Just 13 years after the sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, was tried — together with 17 co-conspirators — for the notorious 1964 abduction and murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, Ronald Reagan chose to launch his presidential campaign there with the phrase, “I believe in states’ rights.”

A pragmatic agenda

But enthusiasm for states’ rights tends to be based on political pragmatism rather than ideology. As historian Caleb McDaniel writes in The Atlantic, southern slaveholders were perfectly content with federal overreach so long as it benefited them. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which coerced residents of free states into returning escaped slaves to their masters, and the 1857 Supreme Court ruling against Dred Scott, which denied citizenship to black people, are two of the most infamous examples of conservatives approving of federal intervention to preserve slavery during the antebellum period. 

Like their conservative counterparts, progressive state courts and legislatures have historically pursued an active role as “laboratories for democracy.” When out of power nationally, progressives and conservatives alike invoke federalism and the Tenth Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.” The New York Court of Appeals cited state sovereignty when it ruled in the 1860 Lemmon Slave case that eight enslaved people brought into New York in 1852 by a Virginia couple en route to Texas (both slave states),were subject to New York state law, which had abolished slavery, and were thus free.

In our current era, red and blue states are taking similar steps to enact opposing agendas when challenging the federal government. On the issues of reproductive and LGBTQ rights, some states are choosing to amend their constitutions or are passing legislation that defines terms to their liking, thus solidifying rights they view as under threat. New York recently passed the Reproductive Health Act (RHA), which codifies Roe v. Wade into state law, and the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), which adds gender identity and expression to the New York Human Rights Law. Although New York already protected these rights in practice, explicit codification leaves less room for judicial interpretation. Compare this to the 16  states seeking to impose heavy restrictions on abortion access: Georgia, for example, just passed a “heartbeat bill” that outlaws abortion after six weeks; while Alabama is this week considering legislation that would make women who choose to terminate their pregnancies guilty of committing a felony. 

Selective federalism

States can also exercise power by suing the federal government. In the Obama era, Republican-led states consistently challenged the president’s legislative agenda, particularly over implementation of the Affordable Care Act.  But while the challenges were consistent, the logic was not. Conservative challengers to Obamacare made conflicting arguments in separate court cases, leading Abbe Gluck, a Yale Law School professor, to call them “fairweather federalists.” In 2012, in a partial win for Republicans, the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate provisions of Obamacare while striking down Medicaid expansion as an undue burden on states, making it optional. In 2015 Republicans turned around and argued that the optional state insurance exchange programs were overly punitive.

Abbe Gluck describes the legislative model of the insurance exchanges as similar to the Clean Air Act — a national program that gives states the right of first refusal before the federal government intervenes. But this model is predicated on the assumption that the federal government will enforce pre-existing laws, rather than deliberately undermine them by hollowing out administrative agencies — which is precisely what the Trump administration is doing. In January 2019, New York Attorney General Letitia James led a coalition of six states in filing suit to force Trump’s EPA into compliance with the Clean Air Act in order to protect the health of New Yorkers, whose state air quality regulations are among the most stringent in the country. Attorney General James’ predecessor, Barbara Underwood, led a different coalition of states in a lawsuit to prevent new off-shore drilling. 

Battle of the blue states

States have also chosen to assert their power by refusing to enforce or implement policies and procedures handed down by the Trump administration, leading the federal government to sue them. The most salutary example of this struggle is over the issue of immigration. California has been leading the fight to protect undocumented residents from ICE detention and deportation in so-called sanctuary cities, which are jurisdictions where local law enforcement refuse to cooperate or assist in enforcing federal immigration laws.  

Politico, in an article titled “Trump endorses states’ rights — but only when he agrees with the state,” noted that Trump’s lawsuit against California over its non-enforcement of immigration laws followed the blueprint of an Obama-era lawsuit against Arizona, which sought to block a bill requiring immigrants to carry proof of status and requiring law enforcement to determine a person’s status during a legal stop. 

Blue states have won some significant battles. The federal courts have repeatedly struck down Trump’s attempts to block federal funding for states with sanctuary cities, and experts say the courts will also shut down his latest threats to bus migrants into sanctuary cities. Meanwhile, New York state courts recently issued a directive that bars federal immigration authorities from arresting people in courthouses without a judicial warrant, curtailing ICE’s ability to arrest people who show up for hearings. These rules establish a precedent for other progressive state legislatures and courts to follow.

The one major difference between the Obama and Trump eras is that the current president is widely known for his dubious financial dealings in New York City where, crucially, he still maintains significant family business interests. The consequence is that New York’s Attorney General has the unprecedented power to launch a criminal  investigation of a sitting president — and his children — for state crimes. Trump has no power to issue pardons for criminal convictions at the state level. Just to make sure, Attorney General James is seeking to amend the state’s double jeopardy laws, so that any associates pardoned on a federal level can be recharged for state crimes. In the meantime the state has forced the dissolution of Trump’s charitable foundation, and the AG’s office has sent subpoenas to Deutsche Bank regarding its business dealings with the president. 

In this respect litigation might, in fact, solve some of our problems. 
    [post_title] => Why Democrats are battling Trump at the state level
    [post_excerpt] => Americans have good reason to believe the phrase “states’ rights” is code for white supremacy. When he was employed by the Reagan White House, Republican strategist Lee Atwater notoriously revealed in an interview that the party deliberately employed abstractions like states’ rights and tax cuts as racist dog whistles. 
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Why Democrats are battling Trump at the state level

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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    [post_date] => 2019-05-09 15:23:43
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    [post_content] => On Monday the UN published a devastating report, which identifies human activity as the reason that millions of species are disappearing at a rate “tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years.”  The bottom line of the report, which summarizes the work of 145 researchers from 50 countries, is that the damage we humans are doing to our environment might be irreversible — if we fail to take immediate action and heed its main conclusions:

    
 	
  • Current global response is insufficient;
    • 
 	
  • Transformative changes’ are needed to restore and protect nature;
    • 
 	
  • Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good.
    • 


The following articles offer various responses to the report’s conclusions. 

It’s not too late to prevent the extinction of over 1 million animals and plants, reports Seth Borenstein for the Associated Press. In order to stop or even reverse this trend, we need to change how we produce food and energy, reduce waste, and address climate change — all monumental tasks that will require cooperation between governments, companies, and people. 

If you’ve been hearing a lot about this report but need a little context to understand its significance, The Guardian published an excellent back-to-basics explainer on biodiversity. It explains how one species can be an integral part of an entire system; the financial toll that biodiversity loss takes on humans; and the benefits humans have reaped for centuries from the diverse animal and plant species that cover the earth. 

The call for a Green New Deal in the United States is spreading. A proposal to rework Canada’s economy in order to battle climate change has the support of environmentalists, youth organizers, Indigenous groups, and others. Learn more here.

The Green New Deal, while ambitious and promising, won’t be enough on its own to save the environment. Ben Adler argues, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post, that the Green New Deal must include support for developing nations to invest in more expensive clean energies as they industrialize. These countries have already said they are open to more ambitious energy goals — if they receive support from more financially secure nations. Cooperation is possible. Read more here.

Finally, your ICYMI author recently published a how-to for Lifehacker on growing a bug-friendly garden anywhere — no matter how much or how little outdoor space you have. Insects are an integral part of the food chain, and pollinators are essential for growing fruits and vegetables; any small amount you can do for them is a help. Learn how here.

 
    [post_title] => How to pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe
    [post_excerpt] => The Green New Deal, while ambitious and promising, won’t be enough on its own to save the environment. It must include support for developing nations to invest in more expensive clean energies as they industrialize. 
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How to pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Healthcare professionals have found a treatment that could help end the opioid crisis, but their efforts to treat addicts are severely hampered by an arcane government regulation

Over the past two years, a team of medical scientists have been working on a project that could play a role in ending the opioid crisis. We are investigators on a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) project that seeks to revolutionize the treatment for opioid addiction available at hospital emergency departments by providing medical care providers with effective new tools. One of us is a health economist and health services researcher at the Mayo Clinic; the other is a health IT physician-scientist at Yale. The tools we have helped create work within hospital computer systems to help healthcare practitioners provide immediate treatment and link patients up with longer term follow-up to treat their addiction. In the next phase of the work, we will test these tools in five large healthcare systems across the country. We believe they will change the way hospitals treat opioid-addicted patients.

But these tools, combined with short-term treatment in the emergency department, are an incomplete solution to a national crisis. Throughout this year of work, we have been surprised and, frankly, baffled by the regulatory barriers around treatment of opioid addiction. Perhaps the most shocking (and heartbreaking) thing we’ve learned is that people addicted to opioids are resorting to the black market to treat themselves, because they are facing so many obstacles in obtaining treatment from their doctors and clinics in their communities.

Bureaucratic obstacles

There is a little known but extremely powerful regulatory deterrent to treating patients with opioid use disorder. It’s called the X-Waiver — it’s a legal requirement imposed on physicians to apply for a waiver in order to prescribe medicine that has been shown to be an effective treatment for opioid addiction. Following recent media coverage of this issue in several prominent professional publications (JAMA, STAT, NAM) and in the New York Times, the medical community is pushing to end the X-waiver. On April 8, the Departments of Health in 22 states signed a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services proposing that it be discontinued, asserting that the law is severely hampering the ability of physicians to fight the opioid crisis. We’d like to share with you details on this movement, in order to raise public awareness as part of the campaign to have the law changed.

The X-Waiver is a remnant of an earlier opioid epidemic in the United States. Just like today, headlines from the popular press 100 years ago lamented the high rates of opioid use in the U.S. — higher than any other country in the world — and the large number of people addicted to narcotic drugs. Many blamed physicians, pharmacists, and patent medication manufacturers, for getting and keeping patients hooked on these drugs. 

In response, and as part of the same temperance movement that supported alcohol Prohibition during the 1920s, laws were passed to criminalize manufacture, sales, and use of opioids except as part of “legitimate” medical practice. Policy makers were certain that prohibiting the use of opioids (and alcohol) would cause addiction to disappear. They were so certain of this, that they started closing treatment programs in anticipation.

Their mistaken belief was that addiction was a moral disorder — a failure of self-control that could be cured by taking away access to drugs and alcohol. Today, we know better. We understand that, just as diabetics cannot will their pancreas to start working and people with depression cannot will their brain to produce more serotonin, people who struggle with addiction cannot will themselves better.

Fortunately, we have very effective treatments for opioid use disorder that help people to live normal lives, free of disabling withdrawal symptoms. Medications to treat opioid use disorder include methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Naltrexone blocks the feeling of being high, reducing the incentive to take opioids. However, it requires that a person abstain from opioids for seven to 10 days, making it more difficult to start treatment. By contrast, methadone and buprenorphine — when properly dosed — prevent the symptoms of withdrawal and allow people to feel normal, without experiencing either the feeling of being high or the distress of withdrawing.

Unfortunately, the laws and stigmas held over from the last opioid epidemic more than 100 years ago are still preventing people from accessing these lifesaving treatments. Though the original law — the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914— is no longer in force, today’s laws regulating the use of methadone and buprenorphine for the long-term treatment of opioid use disorder are its direct descendants. They focus on punishment, distrust of physicians’ motives, and bureaucratic intrusion into the physician-patient relationship. 

Today, any physician with a DEA license (i.e., pretty much all of them) can prescribe buprenorphine or methadone to any of their patients in any amount, for dispensing in any pharmacy — as long as that medication is intended to treat pain. But in order to use buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder, clinicians must obtain a special DATA 2000 Waiver. That means they must take a special training course, apply to the federal government for a waiver, and agree to open their practice and records to unscheduled in-person audits during the working day by DEA agents. We have never cheated on our taxes, but we still don’t want to be audited by the IRS.

After meeting all these requirements a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant applies for a DATA 2000 waiver, and gets a new DEA number that starts with an X — which is why these waivers are often called X-waivers. With an X-waiver in hand, the healthcare professional now has the right to prescribe any schedule III through V controlled substance (for now, only buprenorphine meets the criteria) for treating opioid use disorder, but only to 30 patients at a time. If a thirty-first patient shows up needing treatment, he or she must be turned away or another patient has to be discontinued. After a year, the medical care provider can apply for an increase to treat 100 patients at a time. And a year after increasing to 100 patients, the clinician can apply for an increase to treat 275 patients at a time as long as he or she either 1) has additional certification in addiction medicine or 2) practices in a “qualified practice setting”, which means, among other requirements, accepting insurance for some services—not necessarily addiction treatment, just some services.

A need for urgency

These are all worthy, wonderful things, and we agree that they are ideal, but we are in the grips of a national crisis. A person born in 2017 faces a greater risk of death from opioid overdose than car crash, for the first time in history. There aren’t enough X-waivered providers available to treat everyone who wants medical help in overcoming opioid addiction. There is no evidence to suggest that clinicians who accept insurance are safer or better at the practice of addiction medicine. Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that limiting physicians to 30, 100, or 275 patients improves safety or outcomes. In fact, quite the opposite. And we have ample evidence that buprenorphine saves lives. Of the estimated 2 million Americans with opioid use disorder, only 11% are receiving any treatment: that’s 1.8 million people who might be helped if treatment were easier to access.

It’s time to end these bureaucratic barriers that are discouraging physicians from providing safe, effective treatment to people who need it. That’s why healthcare professionals across the country are pushing to “X the X-waiver”: drop the restrictions on providing buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder. We need to increase treatment availability so that everyone who wants help can get it in a timely way. This will require clinicians from many specialties to work together: in the ED, clinicians can help people start on buprenorphine treatment, then refer them to a local community provider of medication for opioid use disorder who can provide long-term follow-up care. Our project is designed to help facilitate that process. And follow-up care doesn’t have to be with a specialist in addiction medicine--there aren’t enough of them to treat everyone who needs treatment. But just as primary care physicians provide long-term medication for diabetes or depression, they can also provide long-term buprenorphine treatment for opioid use disorder. 

Proponents of the current system argue that buprenorphine prescribed for opioid use disorder can be diverted for abuse. But the evidence shows that when buprenorphine is diverted –that is, when it is sold or given away by the person for whom it was prescribed—the most common use is for self-treatment for opioid use disorder or withdrawal. How heartbreaking is that? People are having so much trouble getting treatment that they go to the black market to treat themselves. Improving access to care should help to prevent this kind of diversion. But from a harm reduction perspective, buprenorphine is less likely to cause an overdose (it’s almost impossible for an experienced user of opioids to overdose on buprenorphine unless it is combined with other depressants, like alcohol or benzodiazepines), less attractive for recreational use (it’s harder to get high on), and it can’t be misused by injection because it’s formulated with a drug that will precipitate withdrawal when not taken orally. 

We have to do better with this opioid epidemic than we did the last time. The bureaucracy surrounding provision of the safe, effective treatment for opioid addiction has the effect of pointlessly rationing care for people who need and want it. Get rid of it: X the X-waiver.
    [post_title] => Doctors could alleviate the opioid crisis — if the government would let them
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Doctors could alleviate the opioid crisis — if the government would let them

by Molly M. Jeffery and Ted Melnick

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    [post_content] => Change is slow and hard, but the long, in-depth reporting collected here shows how it happens, from Switzerland to Turkey to the United States 2020 election season.

In Switzerland, Operation Libero is reversing the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. A key component of their tactics is taking back the narrative from the authoritarian populists. “Everywhere, the conversation’s about identity: who we are, where we’re from, the past,” explains the co-president. “But that’s their turf. We have to go on the offensive – clear the fog, refocus attention, reframe the debate.”

Operation Libero launched in 2014. Since then they have campaigned proactively, and not merely reactively, on behalf of causes like same-sex marriage. Their campaigns are playful, colorful, youthful — and also sincere. Rather than debating the pros and cons of harboring “criminal foreigners” as the right-wing populists describe immigrants, Libero re-centered the argument around “fundamental Swiss values.” Read more about their tactics and remarkable successes.

Recently The Conversationalist published the remarkable story of how Turkey’s first communist mayor came to be elected despite the country's deeply repressive political leadership. What Hande Oynar’s story demonstrates is that “transparency, rectitude, and hard work” demonstrated over years can earn people’s faith and trust, and overcome their fears of the unknown or the maligned. Read the full story here.

What is almost more difficult than shifting the politics of a country, is shifting the politics of a party. But an increasing number of democrats are coming around to the idea that “it’s the left’s turn to take the wheel,” as Ed Kilgore writes in New York Magazine, arguing that centrist democrats should focus on helping and not hindering their more progressive peers.

Kilgore is not alone in calling for a cessation of hostilities on the left; former Bernie Sanders critic Peter Daou took to the pages of The Nation to say: “I am calling on Democrats, progressives, and leftists to hit the pause button, to table our disagreements, no matter how intense, as we fight to preserve the rule of law and the last semblance of our democracy. We owe it to ourselves and our country.”
    [post_title] => Taking back the narrative: tactics that work
    [post_excerpt] => Around the world, activists armed with smart tactics are proving that they can turn back the tide of authoritarian populism. 
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Taking back the narrative: tactics that work

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_date] => 2019-04-26 11:42:00
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    [post_content] => Smart Cities are controversial because they are sponsored by Big Tech, which is offering 'free services' in exchange for detailed private information. But there is a way to overhaul the concept so that it serves ordinary citizens. The real issue is finding the political will to tackle those necessary changes

From Toronto to Singapore, and New York City to Malta, municipalities flying the “smart city” flag are on the rise across the globe, promising to improve the quality of life for urban residents. Using artificial intelligence to analyze data collected from Internet-connected cameras, sensors, license plate readers, drones, digital identification cards, personal electronic devices, and mobile crowd sourcing, smart cities can, advocates say, eliminate traffic jams, improve energy conservation, assist in crime detection, better respond to weather conditions, and provide faster and better citizen services.

But the massive amount of data needed for smart cities to work has given the concept a bad name among those concerned about personal privacy. Tech companies supplying software and hardware to smart cities are hungry for citizens’ data, which they want to monetize and share with partners. For law enforcement agencies and municipal governments, data collected for smart cities represent a treasure trove of information about people’s movements, preferences, associations, and habits. Suddenly smart cities are starting to sound more like surveillance cities with less traffic jams. And there are plenty of people who’d prefer the traffic jams to the loss of control over their privacy.

Smart cities for the people?

Whether smart cities can truly benefit people in a meaningful way without handing over their private information to AT&T, Google, Amazon, and other corporations is unclear. We need to rethink the smart city concept to offer smart services to people without allowing corporations to exploit and profit off their data in the process.


At present, cities that want to become “smart” rely heavily on vendors that can supply the technical know-how about networking systems, AI algorithms, data optimization, cloud storage, infrastructure technologies, risk management, high-speed broadband, and security, just to name a few. City officials and municipal information technology departments don’t have the technical expertise to build and manage smart cities on their own. That’s where companies like Google come in.

The city of Toronto contracted with Sidewalk Labs in October 2017 to design a neighborhood on the city’s waterfront “from the Internet up." Sidewalk Labs is owned by Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company. According to the plan for this smart city initiative, a network of sensors will collect real-time data about the environment, while it also gathers location-based information about buildings and infrastructure. Citizens would access services through a personalized portal. The project will be a “global testbed where people can use data about how the neighbourhood works to make it work better,” Sidewalk said. 

Almost immediately, Toronto's residents began asking questions about data collection and privacy. Who would own the data, and how would it be protected? A privacy expert hired by Sidewalk to assist with these issues resigned a year after project launch, telling the Global News newspaper that she couldn’t support the project after learning that third parties might have access to identifiable data collected. Another technologist resigned her post on the project’s digital strategy advisory panel, saying it had disregarded residents’ concern about data. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff said earlier this month that the company has no interest in monetizing personal information, just as a citizens’ group in Toronto launched #BlockSidewalk.

Citizens should be involved

There are more than a few lessons to be learned from Toronto. People are rightly concerned about their personal data being used without their knowledge and permission, and being tracked online. Recent privacy scandals at Facebook, numerous data breaches, and online misinformation campaigns have heightened those concerns.  Cities going “smart” should be prepared to respond with specifics about whether they or their technology partners, or those partners’ partners, will have access to identifiable data. And they should expect a public backlash if the answer is yes, or “we don’t know yet.”

Citizens should be involved in the planning and development of data collection efforts from Day One. They should have a strong say in how and where they are being surveilled rather than be told that Vendor X’s cameras will be installed on every corner filming 24 hours a day, and the feed will go into a massive data base to be kept indefinitely.

Cities need experts who can defend citizens’ privacy and challenge inadequate safeguards over private information. They must incoluate themselves before signing contracts or entering into agreements with vendors, by engaging with top-notch security and privacy experts who can match the tech smarts of Google engineers and demand a privacy and human rights framework for smart city projects. To accomplish this, cities would have to make big investments in their IT departments, hiring cryptography and experts in data anonymization. 

Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 

Municipal governments need to get tough about rules regarding data privacy. The effective way to do this is as follows:

    
 	
  •  Pass ordinances or establish regulations that prohibit vendors from sharing citizens’ information
    • 
 	
  • Place strict limitations on turning data over to law enforcement or ICE
    • 
 	
  • Require vendors to anonymize personal data and purge it soon after use;
    • 
 	
  • Allow citizens to opt out of the collection of their locations, images, biometric data, and other personal information;
    • 
 	
  • Appoint executive level privacy and security czars to oversee data handling and storage and enforce data privacy practices. 
    • 


We have become accustomed to “free” technology — email, social media accounts, instant messaging and photo sharing platform — but of course we are paying for it with our personal information. It's a high price to pay. 

Data collection for smart city implementation presents the same uneven exchange, but on a much larger scale. Your commute home becomes faster because cameras are capturing, analyzing, and storing scans of your license plates and the plates of the drivers around you, which are used to predict congestion and trigger modifications to traffic lights and lane closures to avoid jam ups. You get a seat on the bus because facial scans of you and your fellow riders are stored in the cloud indefinitely to help city transportation departments predict when to deploy more buses during periods of peak ridership. We have become convinced that a high quality of life is predicated on convenience. Perhaps it is time to question that assumption — to ask whether the price for all this convenience is just a bit too high.
    [post_title] => Who's benefitting from Smart Cities?
    [post_excerpt] => Smart city projects should start with the fewest privacy invasive methods of data collection, instead of using the most invasive and then winnowing that down. Vendors and developers would have to think creatively, in order to come up with ways to obtain data for smart city applications without defaulting to facial scans and license plate readers. 
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Who’s benefitting from Smart Cities?

by Karen Gullo

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    [post_date] => 2019-04-25 16:50:36
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    [post_content] => In honor of Earth Day this week, we’ve collected stories about environmental activists who are having an impact on policy. These individuals, companies, and organizations are refusing to succumb to inertia and fatalism 

Mass-produced cleaning solution tablets that consumers mix with water at home can drastically reduce the environmental damage caused by toxic chemicals. Several new companies are now producing those tablets, which consumers can use in reusable cleaning bottles instead of relying on disposable plastic. A little change can go a long way. Learn more here.

In London, climate activists showed that the act of disruption is a powerful tactic. After police arrested more than 1,000 protesters with the Extinction Rebellion movement, the movement leaders “paused” the protests, saying they have enough momentum and support to “enter into negotiations with those in power.” Read more.

The Guardian profiled nine of the “ordinary people” arrested for standing up for the climate. Read those here.

Disrupting business as usual doesn’t always take the form of marching in the streets. The increasing number of climate-change-related lawsuits suggests that the sheer volume of such cases could force corporations and governments to change their ways. Read more here.

Researchers are using mushrooms to clean up toxic messes, like oil spills. Check out this fun infographic to find out how it works.

Can science fiction help us envision better worlds? This article looks at what the world would look like after we’ve solved climate change. On a practical level, it could help policy-makers and politicians set appropriate goals and priorities. Read about the possible future here.

 
    [post_title] => Climate change disrupted
    [post_excerpt] => This week's roundup is about environmental activists whose disruptive tactics succeeded in changing policy
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Climate change disrupted

by Jessica McKenzie

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