Politics

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    [post_content] => Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable.

America’s inequality crisis has emerged as the central issue of the 2020 presidential campaign. The realization that “it’s the economic inequality, stupid,” was a long time coming, given that the global economic crisis of 2008 is now more than a decade behind us. During the intervening years the global grassroots Occupy movement demonstrated for months to raise awareness, staging sit ins on Wall Street in New York and in major cities across Europe. In remarks delivered in 2013, Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time.” And three years ago an anti-establishment voter revolt gave the United States its first plutocrat president in the form of Donald J. Trump. Americans have at last come to understand the effect of economic inequality on their lives. But the question of how to address inequality is fraught with controversy.

At the Democratic party debates in June, nearly all of the candidates for the presidential nomination railed against the U.S. economy for benefitting only the very rich. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who have made inequality their signature issue, have both proposed detailed plans that would completely remake the American economy. Even frontrunner Joe Biden, for years affiliated with centrist politics, noticed that progressivism was rising in popularity; he too is now talking about inequality—with his donors.

All this is a far cry from the “America is already great” message that hampered the Clinton campaign in 2016, but is undoubtedly closer to the way Americans actually feel. Six years ago, the English edition of Thomas Piketty’s seminal book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published, becoming a surprise bestseller and a cultural phenomenon. At the time, economists regarded as controversial Piketty’s warning that if the concentration of wealth and power remains unchecked we risk repeating the adverse conditions of the nineteenth century. In a 2016 paper, however, French economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman showed that American inequality is at levels unseen since the Roaring 1920s, with the top 0.1 percent controlling 22 percent of the wealth. This year, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker told the New York Times that the U.S. is “developing into a plutocracy.” Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the American economy is “rigged.” In the media, you can often see our current era referred to as the Second Gilded Age, after the period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, when inequality ran rampant and robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan plundered and pillaged their way into unimaginable wealth.

But Americans, who encounter extreme concentrations of wealth and power wherever they turn these days, don’t need economists to tell them what they already know: that capitalism, or at least their country’s form of it, is broken — perhaps irreparably. While the U.S. is among the world’s wealthiest countries, it is also, according to the UN, “the world champion of extreme inequality.” Forty million Americans live in poverty; in some areas of the country, life expectancy is equivalent to that of developing states. Meanwhile, “deaths of despair” — caused by drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide — have spiked. According to the UN, Americans lead “shorter and sicker lives, compared to people living in any other rich democracy.”

The American Dream — the idea that if you worked hard, you could succeed regardless of where you were born or what your parents earned — is still the national ethos, despite the fact that the U.S. currently has the lowest rate of economic mobility of any industrialized democracy. In contrast to earlier generations, very few young Americans will do better than their parents: they are buried in debt, struggling with rising rents and healthcare costs, and see more deaths from suicide and drug overdose than any other age group. The life trajectory of most contemporary Americans is inextricably linked to their parents’ education and income, and to their geographic location. A recent study by researchers at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, for instance, found a 30-year gap in life expectancy between two neighborhoods in Chicago, one rich and one poor.

Republicans, meanwhile, passed an enormous $1.5 trillion tax cut for the wealthy and are now considering another one, while trying to cut Social Security and kick millions off Medicaid. White-collar crime prosecutions are at a record low, the president is openly corrupt, and corporate lobbyists literally run the government. Is it any wonder that polls have repeatedly shown that over two thirds of Americans believe the economic and political systems are rigged in favor of big business and the rich? This is why millions of voters paid attention when Donald Trump said during his presidential campaign that “the American dream is dead.”

While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. And while the top one percent’s share of the nation’s earnings has doubled during that period, the top 0.1 percent fared even better: their incomes quadrupled, even as incomes for the bottom 90 percent, once adjusted for inflation, have remained stagnant.

But it is the distribution of wealth that truly highlights the vast disparities hidden by four decades of policies that have created the illusion of economic prosperity. In the U.S. today, wealth is concentrated to such an extent that three men alone — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — are richer than the bottom half of the entire population. Recent data released by the Federal Reserve reveals in startling detail how the distribution of wealth in the U.S. became so unequal. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project, who analyzed the data, calculated that between 1989 and 2018, the net worth of the top one percent increased by $21 trillion, while the bottom 50 percent became poorer to the tune of $900 billion during the same period. In 2018, Bruenig finds, the top one percent owned “nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.”

A 2018 study by researchers at the University of Bonn shows how the 2008 financial crisis exacerbated U.S. inequalities, particularly for black households, as the crisis contributed to the widening of a racial wealth gap that had already persisted for decades due to systemic discrimination. According to the authors, the median black household has only 12 percent of the wealth of a median white household and earns about half the income, leaving black households 80 percent poorer than white households. The economic crisis of 2008 erased the few gains they had made, while over the past 70 years “virtually no progress” has been made in reducing wealth inequality between blacks and whites in the United States.

The U.S. is the most extreme example, but most of the world has seen increased inequality over the past 40 years. In the U.K., deaths of despair have spiked following a decade of deliberately cruel austerity policies. In France, 2018’s gilets jaunes protests highlighted the country’s inequality crisis, partly fueled by Emmanuel Macron’s policy of cutting taxes to the top one percent while leaving those clinging to the lowest rungs of the income ladder worse off.

The causes of rising inequality vary from country to country, but in the U.S. and Europe the economic literature points to a few culprits. These include automation, the decline of organized labor, financial deregulation, regressive tax systems that allow the rich to cut their own taxes, and globalization. In the U.S. in particular, a growing body of research points to monopoly power and diminishing competition across the American economy as a major contributor. Among economists, a new movement highlights the negative impact done by decades of policies based on dubious market fundamentalist reasoning.

At the heart of all this is the ongoing failure of capitalist democracies to counter growing concentrations of wealth and power, which in turn fuel voter discontent and elevate populist authoritarians to power worldwide. In recent years many have raised the questions of why liberal democracy failed to address the rise of economic insecurity, or why the popular backlash to rising inequality has been marked by a turn toward far-right nativism —  as opposed to, say, a demand for higher taxes on the rich. Some, like Harvard economist Dani Rodrik and author Thomas Frank, argue that the answer lies in the left and center-left parties’ abdication of their historical responsibility toward low-income workers. Whereas the right has always been up front about its allegiance to business elites, the complicity of center-of-left parties in the policies that increased inequality has made them ill-equipped to address the problems that they helped create. A 2018 study by Piketty seems to confirm this view.

With democracies unable to ensure prosperity for all but the rich and well-connected, support for democracy is decreasing. In a recent speech, Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, declared that rising inequality threatens democratic capitalism. But it’s not the “capitalism” part that’s under threat. Despite their populist protestations, far-right authoritarians like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are not opposed to rabid capitalism or even globalization—they just don’t believe democracy must be a part of it, or that it should stop them from giving handouts to their friends. Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman explains that the real threat to liberal democracy “isn’t authoritarianism—it’s nationalist oligarchy.” If left unchecked, the future of Western democracies could look a lot like Brazil, where pervasive inequality and lack of elite accountability gradually eroded support for democracy until the authoritarian Bolsonaro could rise to power — with the help of the country’s business elites.

Despite the bleakness of the current political moment, the slide to authoritarian oligarchy is not inevitable. One remedy, particularly in the U.S., is tougher enforcement of antitrust laws, which is necessary to constrain the power of corporate monopolies. Another, as historian-turned-folk hero Rutger Bregman told members of the global elite gathered in Davos earlier this year, is astoundingly simple: “Taxes, taxes, taxes.” Our current system, as documented by Zucman, is built upon massive tax evasion amounting trillions of dollars, by multinational corporations and the ultra-rich. Any solution to our inequality crisis necessarily involves wealthy people paying their fair share.

Any attempt at meaningful reform, however, would inevitably have to contend with the fact that all of our political and regulatory institutions have been completely captured by big business and the rich. Which brings us back to the 2020 elections.

The 2020 presidential election is not just a referendum on Trump’s authoritarian populism. It is also a test case for the ability of democratic capitalism to correct itself. The Democratic party’s candidate is thus a critical matter, whether that person is a progressive like Sanders or Warren, whose promises include a more equitable construction of the American economy, student debt forgiveness, reining in corporate power and a wealth tax; or a lifelong neoliberal centrist like Biden, who recently promised his donors that despite his newfound interest in income inequality, under his presidency “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing will fundamentally change.”

The choice goes beyond the likelihood of defeating Trump, straight to the heart of the debate over what American capitalism, and democratic capitalism in general, mean in the twenty-first century. Does democracy mean an oligarchy rooted in injustice, which is what we have had for the last few decades; or should it be a system that benefits the whole of society, rather than only a select few?
    [post_title] => In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism
    [post_excerpt] => While growing inequality has long been a fact of American life, income inequality has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, to the point where the top one percent now earn 26.3 times more than the other 99 percent. 
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https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/51/countering-nationalist-oligarchy/
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In 2020, America will decide between oligarchy and egalitarianism

by Asher Schechter

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    [post_content] => Grassroots groups are organizing to protect undocumented immigrants.

In Passaic, N.J., a teenager refused to open her front door when awakened at 1 a.m., and hid with her parents through the small hours of the morning. In Houston,  Texas, a teenager’s post on Facebook alerted neighbors in a largely Hispanic community to the presence of four Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in fatigues and bulletproof vests. ICE agents were also rebuffed in Brooklyn, N.Y. In Nashville, a group of neighbors formed a human chain to help shield a father and son from ICE agents as they walked from their truck to their home.

In response to President Trump’s threats to deport undocumented immigrants en masse, immigrant rights organizations mobilized to inform immigrants of their rights, by spreading information sheets on social media, and passing out flyers out in particularly vulnerable communities. What’s more, they’ve been joined in this effort by Democratic politicians and presidential candidates: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was out distributing Know Your Rights flyers; multiple New York City lawmakers attended a rally protesting the raids; the Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore has provoked the ire of federal agents by standing with the L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti as he informed residents that they don’t have to open the door to ICE agents unless the agents have a warrant.

Although the massive raids never materialized as promised, immigrants are more informed and better prepared than ever. And bystanders are also more informed and angrier than ever.

“The unapologetic publicizing of these threatened raids activated a different level of consciousness for allies not directly impacted,” Ambien Mitchell, an advocate at the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York City, told The Huffington Post’s Angelina Chapin. “Citizens are more outraged now than ever.”

“Allies developed sophisticated tools on all ends,” Sarah Cullinane, the director of immigrant rights organization Make The Road New Jersey, told Chapin. “I think this new level of sophistication arises from the constant and repeated threat to immigrant lives.”

Activists have been preparing for these raids since June, when they were first announced by the Trump administration and then subsequently postponed. The L.A. Raids Rapid Response Network run by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) hands out copies of a judicial arrest warrant to immigrant families so that they can compare that text to the text of documents that ICE agents may hand them, to verify that the document is in fact a legal arrest warrant, CHIRLA’s Shannon Camacho told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. Adelina Nicholls, from the Georgia Latino Alliance of Human Rights, said that they have visited with or spoken to more than 25,000 people across the state.

However, knowing your rights has its limits. A widely-shared video of ICE agents breaking a car window and dragging out the occupant aroused widespread outrage, but subsequent reporting revealed that the agents had a warrant and acted lawfully. (Although that report did not address an eyewitness’ claims that the agents threatened to shoot her when she asked about a warrant.)

Even if the promised large-scale raids have yet to materialize, the constant threat has created a culture of fear and anxiety for immigrant communities and their allies. Undocumented people worry about going to work every day, but have no choice if they want to continue to pay rent and other bills.

“Raids didn’t happen this weekend to the scale people were expecting them, but just the fear of knowing it could happen, it really terrorizes and traumatizes people in neighborhoods," Daniela Alulema, director of programs for the Center for Migration Studies in New York, told NorthJersey.com. "And that was reflected when you saw restaurants, churches and public places that are usually filled with people, they were just empty.”

Stacy Torres, a sociology professor, noticed a similar lull and depression in Oakland. “On the first day of planned immigration raids across the country last Sunday, eerie quiet settled over Fruitvale, the heavily Mexican and Central American neighborhood where I live in Oakland, Calif.,” she writes.

“Normally bustling places were deserted and somber. The feeling of a community holding its breath hung like a fog. Few vendors roamed the sidewalks selling raspados, ice cream and sliced mango. Missing were the mothers I glimpse from my porch walking with young children toddling alongside or babies expertly wrapped in cloth bound to their backs. The baseball diamond and playing fields of Brookdale Park remained empty. Finally, around 8:20 p.m., with the sky still tinged with faint light, the park filled with children and a group of men playing soccer on a neighboring field. The fog of fear had lifted, allowing everyone to burn energy pent up after a day of hiding.”

Although the threat of violence — the forced expulsion of immigrants is a kind of violence — may make some Americans feel big, places are being hollowed out whether people are forced to leave or not.
    [post_title] => Living in terror of the knock on the door
    [post_excerpt] => The constant threat has created a culture of fear and anxiety for immigrant communities and their allies. 
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Living in terror of the knock on the door

by Jessica McKenzie

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    [post_content] => The proud feminists who aspire to be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 haven't said much about how U.S. foreign policy affects women around the world. Maybe they should.

As a Pakistani woman, I cannot vote in the 2020 elections. But as a non-American Muslim feminist who lives in the global south I wonder what impact the election of a female American president might have on women like me. Would a woman in the Oval Office be good for citizens of Muslim-majority countries in South Asia and the Middle East?

Feminism and women’s rights are dominant issues in the current American political discourse, with four of the female candidates for the Democratic party’s nomination vowing to fight back against the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine them. Kirsten Gillibrand, reports The New York Times, is placing “women’s equality and opportunity at the center of her policy agenda.” Tulsi Gabbard has a clear position on women’s issues: she is pro-choice, supports programs to help domestic violence victims, advocates equal pay (although she has not signed the Paycheck Fairness Act), and opposes sex trafficking. Elizabeth Warren has a strategy to protect women’s reproductive rights and another one to fix America’s failing child care system. Kamala Harris backs the passing of the Equal Rights Amendment and supports pro-choice legislation; and as a black American woman, she represents the rights of women of color, who face discrimination based on both race and gender.

American government policy has profound implications for women all over the world. For example, Trump’s decision to reinstate the Reagan-era Global Gag Rule has defunded aid programs that counsel poor women on reproductive health or provide abortions. His decision to cut funding to the UN Population Fund means that women in war zones, refugee camps, and disaster-hit areas no longer have access to free contraception.

Precedents set by women who held powerful positions in Democratic administrations are not necessarily promising. Both Madeleine Albright, appointed the first female secretary of state by Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, who served as Barak Obama’s secretary of state, implemented policies that had a profoundly negative impact on the lives of millions of Muslim women in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya. The wars and conflicts that Albright and Clinton supported undermined the health and wellbeing of millions of women and their children. Both Clinton and Albright whitewashed their policies with the phrase “humanitarian war,” while one of the widely heard justifications for the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan was to claim that it was “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

But war does not improve the lives of female civilians — particularly not in socially conservative societies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “gender-based inequity is usually exacerbated during situations of extreme violence such as armed conflict." This is certainly true in Afghanistan. The U.S. has been fighting its longest war there since 2001, with female civilians paying the highest prices in both mortality and human rights. “The legacy of war is killing our freedom,” says Jameela Naseri, a lawyer with the NGO Medica Afghanistan, in a 2018 article for Time. According to data cited by the reporter, Afghanistan is still ranked the worst country in the world to be a woman: 90% of Afghan women have experienced domestic abuse, while 87% are illiterate.

In Iraq and Syria, women and children have suffered the most from the recent and ongoing wars. The power vacuum left in Iraq following the U.S.-led military intervention was filled by ISIS, which made atrocities against women an everyday occurrence. Women who managed to escape from ISIS-held territory were often destitute and had to sell sexual favors for food; they suffered from malnutrition because men controlled food distribution in war-ravaged areas; and cultural strictures kept them from accessing health services or going to school during war.

As a U.S. senator, Hillary Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2002. Madeleine Albright infamously told journalist Leslie Stahl, during a 1996 interview for 60 Minutes, that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children as a consequence of U.S. sanctions were “worth it.” When she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton authorized nearly 300 drone attacks in Pakistan, which had a direct effect on the safety and security of millions of girls and women in the northwestern region, already traumatized by the reign of the Taliban.

A female president could correct these poor precedents by championing the cause of women’s rights in countries afflicted by war, political instability, or regressive societal and cultural codes that result in massive discrimination against women. This could be good news for many Muslim women, who are struggling mightily for emancipation, empowerment, and opportunities in their own countries. The coming years will probably be critical for Muslim women: they are finding their voice, and their struggle is gaining critical mass and support from Egypt to Indonesia.

If a woman were elected president in 2020, would she adopt the "feminist foreign policy" that Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's foreign minister, tried to promote in 2015? Probably not. Wallstrom lost her job in part because of the diplomatic rows her stance provoked with Saudi Arabia and her position on Israel vis-a-vis Palestine. Clinton made no such mistakes during her stint as Secretary of State; she maintained a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia, even as she maintained that women's rights were of utmost importance to her.

Many Americans associate pacifism with weakness, and no woman who aspires to the presidency can afford to be perceived as weak. A hawkish foreign policy combined with a warm and caring outlook for America might be the winning combination for a female President.

How are these four female candidates taking this dynamic on board their campaigns?

Tulsi Gabbard opposes Trump’s hawkish policy on Iran and advocates ending the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, but she has also met with Bashar al-Assad, who is largely responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians. Elizabeth Warren advocates progressive domestic policies, but she has voted in favor of hawkish foreign policy initiatives such as a 2017 bill to impose sanctions on Iran. Kamala Harris has voted against resolutions condemning Israel for destroying Palestinian villages or using lethal force in Gaza, although the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory under Israeli rule is crushing the lives of Palestinian women and girls.

A female president who campaigned as a feminist would have to reconcile her commitment to the advancement of women's rights around the world with the well-established relationships between the United States and Middle Eastern countries that oppress women. I see nothing yet in any of the female candidate’s foreign policy record or platform that indicates an interest in improving conditions for women in Middle Eastern countries that suffer from poverty, war, and repressive dictatorships.

The women who aspire to be president of the United States must recognize that American foreign policy decisions made by her predecessors have created terrible hardship for millions of women. They must be aware of the disproportionately high cost of war to women and children, and consider how to reverse this trend. For example, they could make the landmark UN Resolution 1325 on  Women, Peace, and Security part of U.S. foreign policy. Or they could employ gender experts with on-the-ground experience in Afghan women's rights  to formulate effective programs that will help women regain their ground after decades of war.

A female president who aspires to undo the damage wrought by U.S. foreign policy on Muslim women globally will face significant challenges. But if she makes that effort, she could become the champion of women that the world so badly needs right now.

 
    [post_title] => Would a female president be a feminist for the world, or only for America?
    [post_excerpt] => A female president could champion the cause of women’s rights in countries afflicted by war, political instability, or regressive societal and cultural codes that result in massive discrimination against women. This could be good news for many Muslim women, who are struggling mightily for emancipation, empowerment, and opportunities in their own countries. 
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Would a female president be a feminist for the world, or only for America?

by Bina Shah

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    [post_content] => America's foreign policy and international image would be improved if the foreign policy community were more diverse.

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

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

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

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

A flawed democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypocrisy won't win hearts and minds

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

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

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

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

Why diversity is important

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

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

What is good for Europe is good for Haiti. 

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

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

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

by Terrell J. Starr

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

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

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

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

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

Problem of perception

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

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

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

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

Converting organic waste into soil

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

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

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

Turning liabilities into assets

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

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

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

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

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

A new consciousness

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

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

These ideas and policies can affect how we all cook and eat in our own homes, so that we create a more sustainable and innovative food culture.  We already have the capacity to feed the entire world. Reframing waste as food is the first step toward ensuring a more just and sustainable food system.
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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
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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_date] => 2019-05-10 16:15:45
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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;
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  • Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good.
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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_date] => 2019-05-02 20:19:38
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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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