Politics

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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_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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    [post_date] => 2019-06-06 14:36:45
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    [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_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.
    [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_date] => 2019-05-15 16:23:03
    [post_date_gmt] => 2019-05-15 16:23:03
    [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] => 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] => 2019-04-18 15:35:22
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    [post_content] => A surprise electoral win by the first and only communist mayor in Turkey deserves a closer look at how his socialist policies won over the hearts of his constituents and then of the whole country

By Hande Oynar

After dancing with his supporters on the street, one of the first things Turkey’s first elected Communist mayor did, within a week of taking office, was to remove the police checkpoint and demolish the wall in front of the municipality building in the city of Tunceli. Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu told the assembled television news reporters that he intended to make the administrative building more accessible to the public, in keeping with the platform on which he had run. He also tweeted that he would not accept any celebratory flowers or gifts; instead, he suggested to those who wanted to give him a gift that they could instead donate to a fund for the rehabilitation of the city’s stray animals. 

The results of Turkey’s municipal elections last month inflicted several losses on President Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) in strongholds such as Istanbul and Ankara, but the most remarkable victory went to Maçoğlu, a 50-year old healthcare worker with a bushy moustache and ever-present smile who won the race for the province of Tunceli with 32.7% of the vote. The communist challenger beat the candidate for the left-wing, Pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the incumbent from the CHP, historically the main opposition party. 

Maçoğlu called his election “a victory for the people of Dersim,” using the Kurdish name for the city to emphasize that its population is predominantly Alevi and Zaza/Kurdish. The city has seen several uprisings; most recently, it was run by a trustee appointed by Erdoğan as part of a crackdown on 24 Kurdish-run cities after the failed coup attempt in 2016.

Maçoğlu earned his political support over a period of five years as a regional small town mayor, in which capacity he established a sterling reputation for transparency, rectitude, and hard work. But even so, his win in last month’s municipal elections is an anomaly for Turkish politics, where the word “communist” has long been used as a slur. Since the 1920s, successive Turkish governments have persecuted communists, starting in the 1920s with the assassination of the party’s leaders, through the Cold War and the period of military rule during the 1980s. Under Erdogan, opposition leaders, journalists and intellectuals are in jail. Given all this, Maçoğlu’s overt embrace of communism is an act of great courage.

Rise of an idealist

Maçoğlu entered politics in 2014, winning  a local election with 36.1% of the vote. He beat his closest rival from Peace and Democracy Party (BDP, the precursor to today’s HDP) to become the mayor of his hometown of Ovacık, a rural district of Tunceli with a population of approximately 7,000. Previously, he had worked as a healthcare professional in public hospitals. But besides his well known socialist views and his union activism, Maçoğlu had no political experience. As mayor of Ovacık he inherited a debt of approximately $200,000 from the previous local government; and so he immediately set about to increase the district’s revenue.

In Ovacık, Maçoğlu’s first priority was to improve agricultural production and ease unemployment by allowing people to cultivate 160,000 acres of arable land that belong to the municipality. Comprised mostly of women and unionized teachers who had recently been laid off, Maçoğlu's army of amateur farmers began producing organic potatoes, garbanzo and cannellini beans — all crops that are relatively easy to grow in the province’s harsh climate, with its heavy winters that last five to six months. 

Subsidized by the municipality, the farmers founded an agricultural production cooperative, which eventually evolved into an e-commerce site, ovacikdogal.com (Ovacık Natural). Soon they added sustainably and organically produced honey, salt, cheese and molasses to their range of products. People in big cities who were following the communist mayor on social media began buying the communist beans of Ovacık to support the cooperative. 

The initiative performed beyond expectations. The amateur organic farmers of Ovacık succeeded not only in paying off the district’s debt, but also in providing local women with earned income for the first time in their lives. Part of its profits were put toward a small fund that helps college students from disadvantaged backgrounds to pay their school-related expenses.

Maçoğlu also reduced the cost of water, which is prohibitively expensive in Turkey, to a symbolic 50 kr (about 10 cents) per cubic meter. His reason: access to water is a basic human right. He transferred the annual budget allotted to cover the cost of gas for his unused official vehicle to the only bus that served the whole district, making public transportation free. He built a library containing 10,000 books for a small town of 3,200 people and organized public programs to encourage reading habits among children and adolescents. 

A folk hero

But perhaps the most striking reason for Maçoğlu having become a viral folk hero overnight was his radical fiscal transparency. At the end of the first fiscal year of his first term, he hung an enormous poster showing his administration’s profit and loss statement on the facade of the town’s municipality building. In the murky waters of municipal politics, where tenders miraculously go to people with close ties to administrators, this was a breath of fresh air. Across the country, both Maçoğlu’s supporters and his critics alike applauded his action. 

In Ovacık, Maçoğlu ran on a platform that promised transparency and accountability. He emphasized those two principles while championing and explaining his socialist values almost every time he opened his mouth, especially in front of cameras. And there were (and still are) a lot of cameras. People began to travel from across the country to meet the determined man with the cheerful smile, and to see his model of governance.

In fact, he has made a point of keeping his office door open and has set up his desk in such a way so that he sits alongside his visitors, instead of across from them behind his desk. In Turkey, every public officer has a portrait of Ataturk, the founder of the republic above their seats, but Maçoğlu has a picture of the Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara up on his wall as well. 

As mayor of Tuncil, Maçoğlu has rejected the trappings of power. He made the official vehicle assigned to him available to newly weds who get married at City Hall, and opted to drive his own car while on the job. This is a significant statement in Turkey, where public officials enjoy driving around with security convoys of up to 50 vehicles, blocking traffic everywhere they go.

These small acts may seem trivial or even gimmicky to those unfamiliar with Turkish politics, but in the corruption-ridden atmosphere propagated over decades by local and central governments, simple gestures go a long way. 

“Socialism has an inherent understanding of how to create a culture that provides the ability to act in a way that is united and in solidarity based on equality and social justice,” Maçoğlu noted in an interview with the leftist publication SOL International. With his work in Ovacık and now in Dersim, he hopes to set an example in municipal governance for other cities across the country. The fact that these values are so rare in Turkey’s political landscape makes Maçoğlu a harbinger of hope for a new breed of public official, whose agenda is truly to serve the people

Hande Oynar is a freelance writer based in New York and Istanbul. She has been writing for various art and lifestyle publications for the past decade and is a regular contributor to Vogue Turkey. Follow her on Twitter @handeoynar.
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In Turkey, a communist mayor has become a national folk hero

by Hande Oynar

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    [post_content] => The power of the individual to halt global warming is the major theme of this week’s curated articles. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she wants to “rediscover the power of public imagination" as we begin to address our changing climate.


 

    
 	
  • “It’s 2050 — how did we stop climate change?” This is the question posed at the opening of a recent NPR report. Instead of focusing on the monumental challenge facing the world, the reporter asks what actions we as individuals can take right now. The result is an optimistic road map for a more climate-friendly future, relying almost entirely on technology and capabilities that we already have. Listen to the story here.
    • 


 

    
 	
  • A grassroots campaign in Britain convinced Walkers, the manufacturer of the country’s most popular brand of potato chips, to create a recycling scheme for its excessive packaging. The company’s response to the popular campaign shows that consumers have the power to influence corporate policies. Read The Independent op-ed.
    • 


 

    
 	
  • Case in point: Greta Thunberg, the adolescent activist who skipped school to protest climate inaction outside of the Swedish parliament building. What began as her lone crusade has become a global movement with Thunberg at the helm, inspiring her teenage peers and adult activists alike. Read The Guardian’s profile of this remarkable girl.
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  • In finding a way to get the Green New Deal passed by the Senate, there’s a case to be made that the left wing of the Democratic Party has embraced tactics more effective than those of the moderates. While the moderates are searching for a sensible compromise, progressives want to eliminate structural impediments to real action. “This might seem like fantastical thinking, but it actually carries a greater dose of realism about both the current political situation and about the opposition in the Republican Party,” writes David Atkins. Read his op-ed in The American Prospect.
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  • A vegan reporter faced an online backlash from dairy farmers after appearing on a national Canadian radio show to talk about veganism. But instead of throwing up her hands in frustration at the incivility of social media, she took the opportunity to learn from her so-called opponents, and modelled the ideal social media conversationalist for people on either side of the issue. Read her account for Vice.
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    [post_excerpt] => 				The power of the individual to halt global warming is the major theme of this week’s curated articles.		
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Harnessing the imagination to address climate change

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => Many of the stories in our roundup this week are about silver linings: The activist arrests that fortified a movement; a bottom-up small-dollar revolution in the absence of campaign finance reforms; from the ashes of local newspapers and shrinking media empires, an opportunity to remake the news by learning from the mistakes of the past. We hope these stories inspire you to look for the best-case scenario in any setback, and to find the opportunity to grow and change for the better.

    
 	
  • The Chinese government thought that they could nip a feminist protest in the bud by arresting five activists planning to hand out anti-sexual harassment stickers on International Women’s Day in 2015—but instead their crackdown turned the women into heroes, and laid the foundation for a growing feminist movement. On a recent episode of The Current, author Leta Hong Fincher discussed a new book she wrote on the subject. Listen here.
    • 
 	
  • South Jersey non-profit Distributing Dignity provides women in need with free, new bras and other goods that often go overlooked, but are essential to any woman’s well-being and dignity. Read the story at The Philadelphia Citizen.
    • 
 	
  • According to a new study published by the Aspen Institute, schoolchildren who study in an environment with strong, secure relationships grow up to become empathetic and collaborative adults. Read about the education reform that appeals to conservatives and progressives alike in Governing magazine.
    • 
 	
  • The industry working to improve global access to clean water, food, and education, relies too heavily on jargon that obscures more than it explains—and usually excludes the very people NGOs are trying to help. Simpler, more accessible language does not necessarily mean simpler, less impactful interventions. Read the op-ed in Bright Magazine.
    • 
 	
  • Big money distorts our democracy in favor of those with the deepest pockets, but in the absence of campaign finance reform, politicians can make small-donor contributions a cornerstone of their for-the-people platforms. Read the op-ed in The American Prospect.
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  • Defying telecoms and internet service providers, cities across the country are taking steps to create municipal broadband utilities to help close the digital divide in our country. Learn more on Smart Cities Dive.
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  • Although the steady drumbeat of layoffs at newspapers and media companies across the country is devastating for the people who work in the industry, one optimistic way of looking at the wreckage is to see an opportunity to remake digital news and local media, learning from the mistakes of the past. Read the op-ed in Wired.
    • 
 	
  • Finally, a start-up seeks to make disposable coffee cups a thing of the past with its reusable coffee mugs on-demand service. Sierra Magazine has the story.
    • 


Jessica McKenzie is a freelance journalist in Brooklyn, NY. Previously, she was the managing editor of the civic technology news site Civicist and interned at The Nation magazine. You can follow her on Twitter @jessimckenzi.
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Setbacks and silver linings

by Jessica McKenzie

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