O Gonapeptyl Depot é um remédio usado para tratamento de alguns tipos de câncer, como o de mama e próstata, e endometriose. É distribuído pelo Sistema Único de Saúde por meio de convênios com as secretarias estaduais e municipais de saúde. Em 2010, cada dose do medicamento custava R$ 177. Ou deveria custar. O governo do Mato Grosso, por exemplo, achou razoável pagar R$ 319,65. Comprou pelo menos 200 delas de uma distribuidora de remédios chamada Hospfar – todas superfaturadas.
As compras chamaram a atenção do Tribunal de Contas e do Ministério Público do Mato Grosso, que abriram investigações contra a empresa. Não foram as únicas. O roteiro com a Hospfar se repetiu em pelo menos sete outros estados.
A Hospfar distribui uma linha ampla de itens hospitalares para os governos federal, estaduais e prefeituras. São produtos de higiene pessoal, limpeza, fios cirúrgicos, cosméticos e medicamentos de referência genéricos e similares. Só no governo federal, entre 2011 e 2017, a empresa manteve 991 contratos e convênios com dezenas de órgãos subordinados a dez ministérios. Faturou R$ 379 milhões. Na verdade, continua faturando mesmo após as denúncias e as comprovações de produtos superfaturados.
Fraudes em três níveis de governoOs três sócios da Hospfar, Brandão de Souza Rezende, Moisés Alves de Oliveira Neto e Marcelo Reis Perillo, são réus por formação de cartel, associação criminosa, desvio de dinheiro público, fraude em licitações e superfaturamento de preços. Além de inflar os preços, eles são acusados de liderar um esquema que embutia no valor dos produtos vendidos para as secretarias de saúde os 17% do Imposto de Circulação de Mercadorias e Serviços, o ICMS. Na nota fiscal, declaravam a isenção tributária a que os estados têm direito, e embolsavam indevidamente os recursos.
O esquema era movimentado em pelo menos sete estados: Goiás, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Roraima, Alagoas e Pernambuco. Em todos eles, há ações cíveis e criminais movidas pelos respectivos ministérios públicos estaduais contra Rezende, Neto, Perillo e a Hospfar por superfaturamento de preço. Esses sete processos chamaram a atenção do Ministério Público Federal, que também abriu um inquérito para investigar a empresa.
O trio de sócios também responde a 51 processos pela venda de produtos a preços mais altos para o SUS. No total, o valor das multas aplicadas pela Câmara de Regulação do Mercado de Medicamentos, a CMED, órgão responsável por estabelecer limites para preços de medicamentos e pela fixação e monitoramento do desconto mínimo obrigatório para compras públicas, chega a R$ 13,7 milhões.
Em Goiás, a empresa causou um rombo de mais de R$ 13 milhões. O estado era governado pelo primo de um de seus sócios.Só em Goiás, estado então governado por Marconi Perillo, primo de Marcelo Reis Perillo, a Hospfar e mais duas empresas, a Milênio e Medcomerce, são acusadas de causar um rombo de mais de R$ 13 milhões à União e ao estado com venda de remédios superfaturados entre 2002 e 2006.
O Ministério Público estadual condenou a Hospfar a restituir aos cofres públicos pagamentos irregulares recebidos na compra de medicamentos caros, com recursos repassados por meio do SUS. Na condenação, o Ministério Público de Goiás bloqueou os bens dos condenados e proibiu a empresa de participar de qualquer licitação da Secretaria Estadual de Saúde e de celebrar qualquer contrato com o Estado de Goiás. A empresa recorreu e reverteu a decisão.
Procurada, a Hospfar disse, por meio de sua assessoria de imprensa, que sempre praticou “preços em plena consonância com os editais licitatórios e com a legislação vigente”. Sobre as multas por superfaturamento, a empresa argumenta que já apresentou as defesas com as “devidas justificativas legais”, e que “considera inadequado se manifestar” antes da decisão final da justiça. Segundo a empresa, as multas “só passam a existir quando os processos forem julgados, o que ainda não é o caso”.
Cientes do histórico, os sócios da Hospfar já tentaram apagar os rastros judiciais na internet. Eles entraram com uma ação para pedir a remoção de todos os seus processos do JusBrasil, site que indexa processos públicos. Não deu certo – os processos continuam no ar.
Presunção de inocênciaA Hospfar foi fundada em Goiânia em 1991. A empresa cresceu rapidamente ao longo das últimas décadas, especialmente a partir de 2000. Em apenas seis anos, foram inauguradas sedes em Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Belém, Recife, Cuiabá e São Paulo. Apesar da coleção de condenações e irregularidades, os negócios com o governo continuam a pleno vapor.
Hoje, o principal cliente da Hofspar no governo é o Ministério da Defesa, com 539 contratos ativos, seguido da Educação, com 267. A Saúde vem em terceiro, com 125 – e são também os mais caros: R$ 200 milhões. Só o Departamento de Logística em Saúde, subordinado ao ministério da Saúde, rendeu à empresa R$ 114 milhões.
‘Não há ilegalidade nas contratações’, diz o TCU.Além da coleção de denúncias, a Hospfar também recebeu 530 sanções baseadas na Lei de Licitações – a maioria por atraso na entrega de medicamentos. Entre elas, três suspensões que, em tese, a impediriam de fechar negócios com o órgão que a sancionou por períodos pré-determinados. Mas isso nunca aconteceu.
Segundo o Tribunal de Contas da União, são os órgãos que contratam as licitações que decidem se as multas aplicadas são preventivas, educativas ou repressivas a ponto de proibir novos contratos. “Há muitos processos por improbidade administrativa, mas não há trânsito em julgado e prevalece a presunção de inocência”, explicou Frederico Julio Goepfert Junior, Secretário de Controle Externo de Aquisições Logísticas do TCU.
Em pregões eletrônicos, por exemplo, o critério é sempre o menor preço. Se a empresa vencer a licitação e apresentar todos os documentos que provam o cumprimento das exigências do edital, e não estiver impedida de atuar, não há como rescindir o contrato. “Não há ilegalidades nessas contratações.”
Um esquema velho conhecidoA Hospar não é a única que se beneficia de esquemas de superfaturamento na área da saúde. Os processos que investigam a empresa também mencionam outras 15 – entre elas, a Artfio, Cristália, Cristalfarma e Rioclarense. Todas são rés ou condenadas por crimes contra a administração pública – mas, na prática, continuam fornecendo medicamentos e produtos hospitalares para o governo federal.
Só a Cristália, por exemplo, foi investigada pelo Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica, o Cade, com outras 14 empresas por prática de cartel em licitações públicas destinadas à aquisição de medicamentos.
O Cade encontrou evidências que sócios da Cristália e das outras empresas monitoravam as licitações para acertar previamente quais seriam as vencedoras e os valores a serem ofertados por cada uma, como os lotes seriam divididos, quais apresentariam propostas ou não apresentariam lances. A prática teria ocorrido desde 2007 até 2011, em Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Bahia e Pernambuco na venda de medicamentos antidepressivos, ansiolíticos, analgésicos, sedativos, anticoagulantes, além de medicamentos para hipertensão, refluxo e tosse.
A denúncia foi feita pelo Ministério Público do Estado de Minas Gerais, que realizou interceptações telefônicas e mandados de busca e apreensão nas sedes das empresas investigadas.
O esquema, no entanto, também não impediu o governo de continuar comprando. A Cristália ainda possui 1.613 contratos com órgãos subordinados a oito ministérios e até com a Presidência da República. O maior contratante é o Ministério da Defesa, com 962 pagamentos. No total, a empresa já recebeu R$ 1,8 bilhão do governo – R$ 515 milhões só em 2017.
Procurada, a Cristália disse que “está prestando os devidos esclarecimentos para comprovar sua idoneidade nos processos licitatórios e tem rígidas normas de compliance para garantir a excelência em todos os serviços prestados”.
The post Essa empresa já foi condenada por superfaturamento, mas segue vendendo remédios para o governo appeared first on The Intercept.
President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on March 15, 2017 in Nashville, Tenn.
Photo: Andrea Morales/Getty Images
Questions about whether Donald Trump is an agent of a foreign power have intensified since the Washington Post reported that the president of the United States has refused to share with even his most senior aides the details of his personal meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But Trump’s supporters don’t seem to care. The president’s approval rating has hardly budged over the past year despite a seemingly endless series of disclosures about the Russia investigation. The website 538, which publishes a daily approval rating for Trump based on its formula for weighting and adjusting public polls, calculates that Trump’s approval rating on January 15, 2019 was 40.8 percent, compared with 39.3 percent exactly a year ago. Trump’s base dismisses each new revelation about Trump and Russia in the same way. They see the investigation as a McCarthyite witch hunt, a conspiracy by the so-called deep state.
There is a precedent in American history for this weird situation, in which there is evidence that a leader has acted against the interests of the United States, yet a large percentage of the American public doesn’t believe it or simply isn’t interested. Many of the same political dynamics that shaped the treason prosecution of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, seem to be at work today.
On April 9, 1865, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House effectively ended the Civil War. But there were still plenty of loose ends, and one of them was Davis, who fled Richmond, the Confederate capital, just before it was occupied by Union troops. The Confederate president was finally captured in Georgia in May 1865 and imprisoned in Virginia’s Fort Monroe.
Initially, Davis had little support. He was captured in the wake of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and many in the North were eager for vengeance. His backing had also waned in the broken South, where his abrasive personality, his wretched mismanagement of military operations and the economy, and his unrealistic, dead-ender attitude had diminished his popularity by the close of the war.
But Davis quickly regained sympathy thanks to the bungled handling of his case by President Andrew Johnson’s administration. He was imprisoned for two years, and during that time, Southerners who had scorned him in his last days as Confederate president began to rally to him, and he eventually came to be seen as a martyr to their lost cause. Before long, as Ron Chernow wrote in his 2017 biography of Grant, there were reports that “white militias, with telltale names such as the Jeff Davis Guards, were springing up across Mississippi.” Many northern whites, who increasingly wanted reconciliation with the South, also came to believe that the government’s handling of Davis was too punitive. This changing political climate provided the backdrop for Davis’s treason case.
There was no doubt that Davis had broken with the United States. He had been the leader of a government of 13 states that had seceded from the Union. He had fought a bloody war against the United States.
But was that treason? Southern whites had supported the Confederacy and wanted Davis to be its president. Those Americans wanted slavery to continue, and they wanted white power to be undiminished. Davis gave them what they wanted. In fact, one of the concerns looming in the minds of some in the government in Washington at the time was whether Davis’s prosecution might have the unintended effect of leading the Supreme Court to rule that secession was legal.
With political support for the prosecution waning, Davis’s case came to an anti-climactic conclusion. He was freed from prison after his bail was paid by a wealthy group that included Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt. On Christmas Day in 1868, Johnson issued a pardon for treason for Confederates, and the case against Davis was dismissed in February 1869.
Trump came to power thanks to some of the same factors that fueled the rise of Jefferson Davis. Millions of Americans voted for Trump because they believed that he would protect white power and fight against the rising tide of diversity in America. (Iowa Rep. Steve King’s recent comments about white supremacy were an odd place for Republican congressional leaders to draw a line in the sand on racism, given that they continue to embrace and enable Trump’s presidency.)
Many right-wing Trump supporters also have no problem with his alliance with Putin because they see both men as conservative guardians of white power. As I’ve noted before, Russia, too, is increasingly popular among Republican voters, who seem to approve of Putin’s authoritarianism. As a result, many Trump supporters may not mind his eagerness to shield his conversations with the Russian leader from scrutiny.
That leads to a provocative question: Do a significant number of Americans today want a president who defies the nation’s ideals in the name of white power, just as they wanted Jefferson Davis so many decades ago?
The post Why Doesn’t Donald Trump’s Cozy Relationship With Vladimir Putin Worry His Supporters? Jefferson Davis’s Treason Case Holds a Clue. appeared first on The Intercept.
In the first major strike since the U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow to public-sector unions last June, more than 30,000 Los Angeles public school teachers took to the rainy streets Monday to launch the LA teachers union’s first labor stoppage in 30 years. It’s the seventh major teacher protest over the last year, but unlike their counterparts in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia, the Los Angeles teachers are not striking against austere Republican state legislatures. Rather, they are striking against the policies of their Democratic-controlled school district, city, and state, and are framing their efforts as a fight for the future of public education.
As the strike enters its second day, the Los Angeles Unified School District is keeping schools open for students to attend, including regularly scheduled morning and after-school programs, and meal service. District officials also authorized spending $3 million to find substitute instructors, offering to pay them substantially more than K-12 substitutes normally earn. Still, roughly 360,000 students were absent from the nation’s second-largest school district on Monday, as families pulled their children from school in support of the striking teachers or to shield them from the chaos of an understaffed school.
Negotiations between the district and the teachers have dragged slowly since April 2017 and collapsed last month over demands to reduce class size and hire more teachers, nurses, counselors, and librarians. United Teachers Los Angeles President Alex Caputo-Pearl says it’s not unusual for class size to exceed 45 students in middle and high school, and for there to be 25 to 35 students per elementary school class.
But perhaps more notably, the teachers are also striking against school privatization. In December, the union called for a moratorium on the opening of new charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run. Los Angeles has 224 charter schools, more than any other city in the country. On Tuesday, the union plans to protest outside the offices of the California Charter Schools Association, the politically powerful lobbying arm of charters in the state.
The Democratic Party has long straddled an awkward political balancing act between the charter school and labor movements.The centrality of opposition to charter school growth in the LA protests has put many Democrats in an uncomfortable position. The Democratic Party has long straddled an awkward political balancing act between the charter school and labor movements, which both fund Democratic candidates but war with each other. Today, with people across the country focused on the LA teachers, most Democratic lawmakers have stayed silent, and even those who have weighed in have mostly avoided commenting on the union’s opposition to charter school growth.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was the first Democratic congressional legislator to acknowledge that the teachers are striking over school privatization, joined by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on Tuesday afternoon. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted last week in support of the striking teachers and linked to a Jacobin article about school privatization, but he did not mention it explicitly in his statement. (Sanders has spoken out about school privatization before, including last year when Puerto Rico announced its plans to open charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Maria.)
These LA teachers striking against privatization + demanding smaller classrooms/more support for their students is a whole 2019 mood
?????? pic.twitter.com/iMska5whpH
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 14, 2019
I stand in solidarity w/ @UTLAnow teachers in their fight for fair pay, smaller classroom sizes & stipends for materials and supplies. Teaching is one of the most valuable and indispensable professions. We need to treat educators with respect and dignity.https://t.co/NKrqvxXO3e
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 9, 2019
The Intercept reached out to all 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus to ask if they wanted to weigh in on the LA teachers strike and the demands that teachers are striking over. All Democratic senators were also asked to clarify their general views on charter school growth.
Only seven of them responded.
A spokesperson for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., referred The Intercept to a tweet Harris posted on Monday in support of the striking teachers, and said the senator is “particularly concerned with expansions of for-profit charter schools and believes all charter schools need transparency and accountability.” In September, California legislators passed a ban on for-profit charters in the state.
Los Angeles teachers work day in and day out to inspire and educate the next generation of leaders. I'm standing in solidarity with them as they strike for improved student conditions, such as smaller class sizes and more counselors and librarians. https://t.co/WcUdrSOk7D
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) January 14, 2019
Harris’s spokesperson also pointed to a probe that Harris launched as state attorney general into a for-profit charter school company that ran virtual charter schools in California. Harris alleged at the time that the charter chain used false advertising, inflated its student attendance numbers to collect extra state funds, and saddled the virtual schools with debt. The charter company settled with the state in 2016 for $168.5 million.
Martina McLennan, a spokesperson for Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., responded with a statement that did not directly address the LA strike:
Senator Merkley fully supports teachers’ right to use collective bargaining to fight for fairer wages and better schools. He’s seen up close the disturbing trend of disinvestment in public education and growing class sizes: His children attended the same public schools he did, but faced much larger class sizes and fewer elective options. We’re a wealthier nation than we were 40 years ago, so there’s no excuse for our public schools to be more poorly funded, or to offer less to low-income and working families. That’s why Senator Merkley plans to introduce legislation soon that would present a national plan for reinvesting in public education and reducing class sizes across America.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown’s statement also did not directly address the strike. “I support the rights of all workers to join together and fight for better working conditions,” he said. “But it’s shameful that American teachers have to fight so hard just to get the basic supports they need to serve their students. We need to do better as a country investing in public education and public school teachers.”
Saloni Sharma, a spokesperson for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., referred The Intercept to a tweet Warren posted on Monday in support of the striking teachers. She also added that the senator believes rapid charter school expansion can pose a threat to the financial health of traditional public schools, which is why Warren opposed a ballot measure in 2016 that would have allowed up to 12 new charters to open in Massachusetts per year. “While she generally shares the concerns voiced by LA teachers on this and other issues, she can’t really speak to the charters’ specific impact on LA schools — the LA teachers are the best experts on that,” Sharma said. “We should listen to them.”
I support @UTLAnow & LAUSD teachers who are for fighting for better pay, smaller classes, & better resourced schools for our kids. When we fail our public school teachers, we fail their students – and we fail our future. I’m with our teachers all the way. https://t.co/jDY8wWv10u
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 14, 2019
Ryan King, a spokesperson for Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, said his boss “believes that teachers in Nevada, and across the country, should be treated with dignity and paid a living wage for the work they do in educating our kids. The senator believes that Congress must do all it can to support quality public education in America and ensure our nation’s teachers have the resources and support they need to educate students.”
Only two other people responded. Jonathan Kott, a spokesperson for Joe Manchin of West Virginia, declined to comment, saying “we are not weighing in on a local issue in California” and that the senator’s “record on charter schools is well-documented.” (Manchin, who voted against Betsy DeVos’s nomination for education secretary, specifically cited her support for charters and private school vouchers as reasons.) Keith Chu, a spokesperson for Ron Wyden of Oregon, also declined to comment.
Sanders did not respond to a query about his position on charter schools, but he, Warren, and Brown remain the only likely 2020 presidential hopefuls in the Senate who’ve had anything to say about the strike at all. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Cory Booker of New Jersey did not respond to our questions, nor have they publicly commented. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has also stayed notably silent on the teachers strike happening in her own state.
On the House side, Khanna was one of the first to express his solidarity with the striking teachers.
I stand in solidarity with the Los Angeles teachers who are preparing to strike for higher pay, smaller class sizes, and more support staff. Every student deserves a quality education and every teacher deserves fair pay for their hard work. https://t.co/Jp6p6jIjOH
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 11, 2019
In 2016, Khanna said he sees himself as more independent-minded in terms of supporting charter schools than some other Democrats. The Intercept reached out to Khanna’s office for comment on his current views about charter school growth.
“I have the same position on this as Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers,” said Khanna in response. “I am supportive of the original concept of charters as laboratories of innovation within the public school system and in collaboration with teachers and administrators in the district. That was the vision [former President of the American Federation of Teachers] Albert Shanker had. I am opposed to the expansion of private charters that siphon resources from public schools, that do not have the same standards as public schools, or that exploit their staff and prohibit their employees from forming unions.”
Khanna went further and said that in the context of the LA teachers strike, he “share[s] the concern of the teachers that the district should not have private companies run the charters. These charters are mostly not unionized, and they are not serving students with disability or the children of immigrants who don’t speak English. Charters were never supposed to be a substitute for good public education as they have become in the LA school district.”
On Monday, Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, and Pramila Jayapal of Washington state also tweeted in support of the striking teachers, though they did not mention charter schools. Like Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna, they are all members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
I stand in solidarity with the 30,000 public school teachers striking today in LA. Thank you for standing up for our children's education! ??#LAUSDStrike
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) January 14, 2019
The @UTLAnow teacher strike in LA is another reminder that we have abandoned our educators and our children when it comes to teacher pay, class sizes, and supportive schools.
I stand in solidarity with teachers in demanding that we do better. #red4ed #1uhttps://t.co/PfhcFo5Ca1
— Rep. Mark Pocan (@repmarkpocan) January 14, 2019
Conservatives have been slashing school funding for years and our children, our future, will suffer for it.
I stand with #LAUSD teachers and with ALL teachers fighting for better funding, better pay and a better and brighter future for our children. https://t.co/QsjgF4ETuG
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) January 14, 2019
On the local level, Reps. Ted Liu, Adam Schiff, Jimmy Gomez, Brad Sherman, and Nanette Barrágan, who represent parts of Los Angeles, voiced support for the striking teachers but did not mention charter schools in their statements.
The Democratic debate over school privatization intensified in 2016, when high-profile candidates like Hillary Clinton affirmed their support for charter schools but also began articulating opposition to for-profit charter schools, a small but politically influential part of the charter movement. That same year, the party included opposition to for-profit charters in its platform for the first time.
The next year, when President Donald Trump named billionaire DeVos to lead the Education Department, liberals who back education reform were put on the defensive. Their school choice rhetoric shared broad similarities with the Trump administration’s, yet charter-supporting Democrats maintained that their vision was different and that they shouldered no blame for the escalating attacks on public education. A Gallup poll released later in 2017 showed a growing partisan divide on charters, with Democratic support standing at 48 percent, down from 61 percent in 2012. (Republican support stayed steady at 62 percent.)
Pro-charter school Democrats have suffered a number of defeats at the ballot box since 2016, including a high-profile ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts and an expensive election for state superintendent in California. New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’s November election as Democratic House caucus chair marked a significant win for that wing of the party, as The Intercept reported at the time. Jeffries started his political career in 2006 with the help of the Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, a political action committee that fundraised for him in his 2012 congressional bid too. But even as DFER cheered Jeffries’s elevation in the ranks of party leadership, his spokesperson, Michael Hardaway, called this reporter to say that he didn’t understand why Jeffries would be linked to DFER and that the congressman is “absolutely not involved with them in any capacity.” In New York, Jeffries has “pretty much stopped talking about charters for the last 2 years (ie post Trump.),” according to New York Times education reporter Eliza Shapiro.
Weighing in on the teachers’ opposition to charter schools comes with the possibility of upsetting powerful donors.It’s with this skittish context in mind that Democrats’ response to the striking teachers should be understood. While voicing support for teachers and public education is relatively safe territory for any politician, weighing in on the teachers’ opposition to charter schools comes with the possibility of upsetting powerful donors or the growing number of families who enroll their children in the schools. (Charters educate roughly 3.2 million students across the country, and most are concentrated in liberal cities.)
Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, released a statement in support of the teachers on Monday afternoon. “I stand with the Los Angeles teachers marching for the pay, resources, and working conditions they deserve. These educators are responsible for molding our next generation leaders. When they succeed, our children and our country succeed. Like educators across the country, Los Angeles teachers are fighting for the children they teach to have the resources they need to achieve and flourish.”
The DNC’s statement did not mention charters or privatization.
Update: January 15, 2018, 2:16 p.m.
This piece has been updated to reflect that Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., acknowledged on Tuesday that the Los Angeles public school teachers are striking in part over school privatization. He tweeted about that in the same minute this article was originally published.
The post LA Teachers Are Mad About Charter School Growth. Why Won’t Democrats Acknowledge That? appeared first on The Intercept.
Last November, the French started a new Saturday tradition: “Gilet jaune” protesters wearing yellow safety vests started to take to the streets by the tens of thousands in the morning, shouting slogans against the high cost of living, against French President Emmanuel Macron, and against his detested taxes and social service reforms.
By the afternoon, the protesters would clash with riot police, who would fire round after round of tear gas and flash grenades to disperse them. By dusk, protesters would break windows of bus stations and storefronts, and sometimes light cars on fire before fleeing when the cops came. And from the middle of the night into the morning, the other “gilets jaunes” — street cleaners, often immigrants, who also wear the safety vests — would clean up the mess.
This past Saturday, some 8,000 protesters showed up for “Act 9,” or the 9th week, of protests, marching from Bercy in east Paris to the Arc de Triomphe in the west of the city, in an attempt to reach the Champs-Elysées. At least 85,000 rallied across France, marking the second straight week that turnout for the yellow vest protests increased following a dip during the holiday season. “I’m here because I’m a single mother, and I’ve been working for 20 years,” explained Stephanie, a 40-year-old public sector worker who marched in Paris. “After I pay my bills at the end of the month, I can’t even take my daughter out to the cinema,” she said.
Photos: Joe Penney for The Intercept
The strength and endurance of the movement, which has no set structure, no clear leadership, and no political or institutional affiliation, has taken everyone by surprise, not least Macron. Since the first protest on November 17, the gilet jaune protests have eroded Macron’s ability to carry out planned reforms to taxes and social services, and have seriously damaged his public image. They represent the biggest threat to his popularity, his capacity to govern, and the centrist European liberalism he has become the global spokesperson for in the Trump era. Yet while the potency of the gilet jaune protests is undeniable, the danger is that the far right could emerge victorious in the battle over the movement’s political identity.
Macron rose to power by bypassing established political parties. His La République en Marche party was created in 2016 and won a majority of seats in the parliament just one year later, rendering the traditional parties of the left and right spent forces. This means that the two major opposition parties in French politics are now Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and the far-left Unbowed France, both of which have the most to gain from the collapse of the center. While Le Pen hasn’t made too many public comments about the protests, support for her party has risen to the top of the polls for the upcoming European parliamentary elections, at 35 percent. On the other hand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of Unbowed France, has aggressively courted the protesters, but has dropped in the polls, suggesting that the gilet jaune movement, which is most popular in more rural areas where far-right support is high, is more of a boon for Le Pen than anyone else.
The battle over the gilets jaunes and the weakened French center has major consequences for populist parties on the left and right throughout Europe; workers and politicians across the continent are staking their claims. The Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister have praised the protesters, and Russian media outlets like Russia Today and Sputnik News have given them wall-to-wall coverage. Yellow vest protests have sprung up in Belgium, Croatia, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Far-right groups in the U.K. have attempted to appropriate the movement for themselves, and marched in London on Saturday.
Photo: Joe Penney for The Intercept
The first gilet jaune protest was launched on Facebook as a response to a carbon tax that hiked the price of diesel fuel, a major source of frustration for people living in areas not served by public transport. The movement took the yellow safety vest, required in all road vehicles, as its symbol, and had support from Marine Le Pen sympathizers whose stated goals included “Frexit” — France leaving the European Union — and a stop to immigration. As the movement grew, its base diversified, and so did its goals. “We thought it was a movement instrumentalized by the far right,” said yellow vest supporter Abdel Moula Elakramine, a 52-year-old warehouse worker and father of three, who is also a member of Unbowed France in Bobigny, a Parisian suburb. “It’s not true. The poor are on the far right, the far left — they’re everywhere!”
Most major protests in France are called by labor unions or political parties. But a string of tough losses for the unions against the Loi du Travail, a labor reform law that relaxed conditions for laying off workers, as well as a strike by railroad workers against the liberalization of the national rail company, has left little faith in such institutional resistance. In both cases, the labor unions’ months-long battles led to no change in the government’s positions.
The gilets jaunes are unique in their complete rejection of any such affiliation. The closest thing they have to spokespeople are the administrators of popular Facebook pages, like 33-year-old truck driver Eric Drouet and 31-year-old Maxime Nicolle, as well as 33-year-old Priscilla Ludosky, who launched a change.org petition against the diesel tax that has over a million signatures. The protesters are marked by their ambiguity: Anybody can be a gilet jaune, and you can take on and off your vest at any time.
Gilet jaune protesters clash with riot police in Paris on Jan. 12, 2018.
Photo: Joe Penney for The Intercept
This ambiguity has allowed for more open participation from people who weren’t previously involved in any protest movement, and makes it less predictable and harder for the government to control or negotiate with. It also means, however, that there is no one to claim responsibility for, and to discipline, fellow protesters when they beat up journalists, make anti-Semitic gestures, or harass black drivers. Conspiracy theories are plentiful in the yellow vest Facebook groups, and they often include references to Macron’s past employer, the Rothschild Group — a dogwhistle for anti-Semitism. Outbursts of racism and the protesters’ mainly white composition have put off some activists of color from participating.
The gilet jaune protests are also unique in the intensity of the violence, both from the protesters and the police. At least 10 people have died during protests, mostly from being hit by cars and trucks while blocking the road. December saw protesters building barricades and burning dozens of cars and motorcycles in the street. During the January 5 edition, protesters commandeered a forklift and broke open the office door of Macron spokesperson Benjamin Griveaux, forcing him to flee through the back entrance, while an ex-professional boxer was filmed punching and kicking a gendarme. Some reports have stated that Macron is worried for his personal safety. Protesters attempted to break through police lines that were guarding his home in Touquet in December, and his wife’s family has voiced concerns that their chocolate shop in their hometown, Amiens, will be attacked.
The security forces have often responded to the protests with heavy force. At least a dozen people have lost vision in an eye after being hit by flash grenades or tear gas canisters, and more than 80 people have been seriously injured, according to the website CheckNews.fr. An 80-year-old woman in Marseille died after being hit in the face with a tear gas canister. This past Saturday, I saw police in Paris aim at protesters instead of into the air or at the ground. I myself was hit by a tear gas canister in the thigh while not in a crowd, leading me to believe it was intentional. I was carrying two cameras and helmet clearly labeled “PRESS,” and was photographing protesters in an area with few other people around me.
Photo: Joe Penney for The Intercept
The police brutality has led to more of the white French public coming to terms with what people of color experience on a regular basis, argued Almamy Kanouté, an organizer with the Justice for Adama Traoré committee, which was created after the death of 24-year-old black man Adama Traoré in police custody. “It took certain people getting flashballs to the face, beaten with truncheons, gassed, and abused without having committed an act of incivility to find themselves in the experience of excluded people and nonwhites in general,” he explained.
The fear of being targeted by police brutality has also contributed to some black activists and other activists of color expressing reticence to participate. Laurent Lalanne, a social worker from the suburb of Bobigny, said that if black protesters “go to a revolt like that, and go in the front, we will be the first ones targeted.” Lalanne nonetheless supports the movement, because it is fighting for social services.
Laurent Lalanne wears a yellow vest at his home in the Paris suburb of Bobigny, France, to show solidarity with the gilet jaune protesters on Jan. 11, 2018.
Photo: Joe Penney for The Intercept
The protests have had a massive impact on the economy, as well. The country has lost millions of euros in damaged vehicles, storefronts, and more, while police officers’ overtime pay has skyrocketed and international flights to Paris decreased by 5-10 percent in December. The disruption caused by the protests forced 58,000 workers to be laid off, temporarily suspended, or have their hours reduced, according to French Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud. The government has spent 32 million euros to pay them during their unemployment under a provision in French labor laws.
In his first year and a half in office, Macron passed his liberal agenda by refusing to negotiate with labor unions, and publicly insulted impoverished people multiple times, including telling an unemployed young man that all he needed to do to get a job was to “cross the street.” It is thus ironic that the gilets jaunes have utilized some of Macron’s tactics — bypassing the traditional avenues of resistance, becoming more formidable than any other social movement.
A gilet jaune protester carries a French flag with the words “Macron kills” written on it, in Paris on Jan. 12, 2018.
Photo: Joe Penney for The Intercept
Macron’s response to the crisis has been to repeal the diesel tax and to promise a host of other reforms, including raising the minimum wage by 100 euros a month. But critics have voiced skepticism about his plans to implement the promised changes, and Macron has tried to take control of the narrative by calling for a month-long “national debate” on key governance issues starting this week. The debate will feature town hall-style forums throughout the country, though there is no guarantee of any policy implementation.
In the meantime, protesters are readying themselves for next Saturday.
The post Macron and French Centrists Don’t Have Answers as “Yellow Vest” Protests Head for 10th Week appeared first on The Intercept.
Plato believed that a city ruled by the rich could not last. The rich would rule according to their interest in enlarging their wealth, impoverishing everyone else in the process. The poor would not tolerate their raw deal, and they would revolt.
Something like this happened in the city where I grew up. In 2014, a group of leading economists released a report showing that Charlotte, North Carolina, ranked dead last among major U.S. cities when it came to the upward mobility of its poorest residents. Two years later, there was an uprising — hundreds of people flooded the streets, including the city’s main freeway, in protest. The catalyst was the fatal police shooting of the black motorist Keith Scott, but the underlying reasons were decades of segregation, deprivation, and immiseration inscribed into the very architecture of city governance.
If the link to Plato seems trite, it might be because we are not asking the right question. It’s not so much whether dead philosophers have something to teach us about contemporary politics. The question is rather how the struggles of the living can illuminate political theory’s most basic questions.
In “What Is Democracy?,” the philosophical is judged against the everyday — and the two harmonize in surprising ways.The new film “What Is Democracy?,” directed by Astra Taylor, appears in its opening moments to be taking the former approach: The title fades in dramatically over a beautiful Athenian vista, and we soon find ourselves listening in on a group of philosophers discussing the Republic over a picnic among the ruins of Plato’s academy. As the scene shifts, though, from ancient Athens to more contemporary locales (including Charlotte in the wake of its uprising) — and the cast shifts from academics to workers, activists, and refugees — it quickly becomes clear that the present will not be cited simply to confirm dead philosophers’ ideas about the way things are. Instead, Taylor asks people who are living today to refine and improve those ideas.
As both an organizer involved in day-to-day campaigns for economic justice and a filmmaker who uses the medium to explore more metaphysical questions, Taylor is well-positioned to keep philosophy grounded in the world as it is. (Disclosure: In 2018, Taylor participated in an Intercept podcast pilot with Naomi Klein and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.) Her previous film, “Examined Life” (2008), features leading philosophers explaining the applicability of their thinking against worldly backdrops: Judith Butler walks through San Francisco’s gentrifying Mission District; Cornel West rides through Manhattan in Taylor’s Volvo; and Slavoj Zizek digs through a London garbage dump.
The tagline for “Examined Life” — “philosophy is in the streets” — could just as easily belong to “What Is Democracy?,” which premieres Wednesday. But this time, Taylor poses the titular question not just to famous thinkers, but to all manner of democratic subjects: activists, former politicians, college Republicans, Syrian refugees, an immigrant workers’ cooperative, black schoolchildren, and Miami beachgoers, among others.
“I tried to approach everyone I met as if they were theorists,” Taylor recently wrote. The philosophical is judged against the everyday — and the two harmonize in surprising ways.
For a film with such a cerebral premise, “What Is Democracy?” often seems preoccupied with the human condition on a bodily level. Even the academic opening casts the so-called crisis of democracy in bodily terms. “What we’re faced with,” the philosopher Eleni Perdikouri proposes, “is the need to re-member this dismembered society.” (The film then cuts to a Trump rally in North Carolina.)
“What we’re faced with is the need to re-member this dismembered society.”This emphasis on the bodily is present in the filmmaking itself: The handheld cinematography produces a kind of parallel conversation with the gestures of the subjects, embodying the Socratic dialogue that Taylor is carrying out with them. The most engaging scene takes place in a Miami barbershop, as a barber relays his reflections on his nine years in prison while giving a remarkably patient customer a full shave and haircut. The easy, silent intimacy and trust between the barber and customer stands in stark contrast with the description of prison’s abject cruelties, in which the body is no longer one’s own.
During a question-and-answer session accompanying an advance screening, Taylor said she was surprised by just how often personal safety and security came up when she asked people about democracy, by just how physical even this loftiest of concepts could seem to the average democratic subject. The tension between freedom and bodily security is a famous problem of political philosophy, but it’s not clear from Taylor’s exploration that the two are actually in conflict.
Her roundtable with a group of Miami schoolchildren, for example, gets off to a slow start. The children are asked what they think of democracy, and they initially look mystified. (Those of us who have been trapped in a typical U.S. classroom can easily imagine why.) Then the conversation turns to school lunch. The students passionately, articulately denounce the tyrannical way that access to hot food is curtailed by school authorities, and formerly blank faces become animated by looks and gestures of recognition and assent. Democracy appears suddenly as an impromptu exercise in mutual understanding and care.
Still: Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films
Midway through “What Is Democracy?,” the political theorist Wendy Brown identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the modern philosopher who departed most starkly from the individualist views held by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, who famously prioritized bodily security above all else. Rousseau believed that humans could transcend their individual needs and flourish through the kind of collective self-determination that we now identify with successful democratic movements.
Yet Rousseau believed that this flourishing did not come naturally. Too many aspects of modern life cut against the inclination to think and act in a collective manner, encouraging us instead to think of ourselves as atomized individuals. Thus, a paradox: Only a people with a democratic orientation can produce a democracy, but a democratic orientation can only come about from genuine experience with democracy. “How do you make democracy out of an undemocratic people?” Brown asks. “That’s our problem today.”
The audience may not step out of “What Is Democracy?” with a pat answer to its title question, but the film does give us some insight into Rousseau’s paradox. After watching Taylor’s careful Socratic engagement with her diverse array of interlocutors, it’s hard to feel like there’s a paradox at all. She may find a dearth of democratic institutions and support for her many subjects — the formerly incarcerated, children from poor families, refugees — but she does not find a want of democratic culture.
In almost every conversation, an insistent civic mindedness and recognition of some larger, inclusive group of diverse people — what might be called the social body — eventually comes to the fore. If these aren’t the seeds of democratic culture, then I don’t know what is. In Taylor’s hands, bringing out this culture is a matter of giving people the time, space, and comfort they need to feel recognized. And, finally, a matter of asking the right questions.
The post From Athens to North Carolina, Filmmaker Astra Taylor Asks: “What Is Democracy?” appeared first on The Intercept.
National security adviser John Bolton speaks on a morning television show from the grounds of the White House on May 9, 2018, in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
You underestimate John Bolton at your peril.
Remember when he was passed over for the job of secretary of state because, we were told, Donald Trump didn’t like his “brush-like mustache“? How we laughed. Yet less than 18 months later, after regular appearances on the Fox News casting couch, he was appointed national security adviser, with an office around the corner from the president’s.
Remember when Defense Secretary James Mattis met with the new national security adviser on the steps of the Pentagon and joked that he was the “devil incarnate”? Mattis is gone. Bolton is still standing.
Remember when White House chief of staff John Kelly got into a “heated, profanity-laced shouting match” with Bolton, over immigration, right outside the Oval Office? Kelly is gone. Bolton is still standing.
Remember when Trump announced that the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria were “all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” only a few weeks after Bolton had said they would be staying until all Iranian troops and proxies left the country? We were told that Bolton had been ignored, overruled, sidelined even. Not quite. Earlier this month, on a visit to Israel, the national security adviser confirmed that there was no timetable for pulling out the troops and it all would depend on the Turkish government guaranteeing the safety of U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters. “John Bolton puts brakes on Trump withdrawal from Syria,” read a headline in the Financial Times.
Trump’s national security adviser is a hard man to keep down.
In 2003, Bolton got the war he wanted with Iraq. As an influential, high-profile, hawkish member of the Bush administration, Bolton put pressure on intelligence analysts, threatened international officials, and told barefaced lies about weapons of mass destruction. He has never regretted his support for the illegal and catastrophic invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Now, he wants a war with Iran. So say State Department and Pentagon officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, who were “rattled” by his request to the Pentagon “to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year.” The New York Times also reported that “senior Pentagon officials are voicing deepening fears” that Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran.”
Should we be surprised? In March 2015, Bolton, then a private citizen, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times headlined, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” In July 2017, just eight months prior to joining the Trump administration, Bolton told a gathering of the cultish Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq that “the declared policy of the United States of America should be the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran” and that “before 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran.”
Despite leaks to the press over the past few days from “rattled” but unnamed officials at the State Department and the Pentagon, Bolton is far from the only person close to Trump who is pushing a belligerent line on Iran. He has plenty of allies in the administration. As Vox reported on Monday, “Bolton has staffed up the NSC with people who share his views. Last week, he hired Richard Goldberg, a noted Iran hawk, to run the administration’s pressure campaign against the country.”
Outside of the Bolton-dominated National Security Council, there’s also the hawkish Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who once suggested launching “2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity.” As I noted last week, in his recent speech on Middle East policy in Cairo, Pompeo made more than 20 references to “malevolent,” “oppressive” Iran and denounced “Iranian expansion” and “regional destruction,” while giving Saudi Arabia a big wet kiss. “Countries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them,” he declared. Pompeo then told Fox News, before leaving Cairo, that the United States would be hosting an international summit on Iran in Poland next month.
So how do these hawks plan to get their war with Tehran? Bolton, in particular, seems keen on two lines of attack. The first relates to the nuclear issue. “We have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons,” the national security adviser told fellow Iran-hater Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem earlier this month. There is, however, not a shred of evidence for Bolton’s claim; in fact, the U.S. intelligence community has flatly and repeatedly rejected it. “We do not know whether Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in his 2017 “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.”
The second line of attack relates to the activities of Tehran-backed groups in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. According to the New York Times, Bolton’s request for military options against Iran “came after Iranian-backed militants fired three mortars or rockets into an empty lot on the grounds of the United States Embassy in Baghdad in September.” To be clear: No one was killed or injured in this attack.
Also, how far does this retaliatory logic extend? The United States has been accused of supporting extremist, anti-government groups in Iran, as well as Israeli strikes on Iranian positions in Syria; does this mean that the Iranians have a right to launch retaliatory air strikes on U.S. soil? Do the Cubans have the right to bomb Miami, where a number of U.S.-supported anti-Castro groups reside and operate?
Logic, however, has never been Bolton’s strong suit. He is an ideologue. “It is a big mistake,” he once declaimed, “for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so — because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.”
To hell with international law. And the International Criminal Court. And civilian lives. The bellicose Bolton is going to spend much of 2019 making the case, both in public and in private, for war with Iran — a war that would make the invasion of Iraq look like a walk in the park. This is what makes the mustachioed national security adviser, with an office down the hallway from Trump, the most dangerous member of this reckless administration.
Devil incarnate? Perhaps that was an understatement.
The post John Bolton Wants to Bomb Iran — and He May Get What He Wants appeared first on The Intercept.
Though a lot of attention will be on attorney general nominee William Barr’s stance on executive power, and how it could affect the Mueller investigation, during the Senate confirmation hearings starting today, his legacy on immigration also merits strict scrutiny. Since he likely will be confirmed, Barr’s hard-line immigration stance, which runs lockstep with President Donald Trump’s, may set the stage for a new volley of attacks against immigrants and asylum-seekers. Migrants, attorneys, and advocates should be prepared.
Although former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a hawk as well, Barr has a history of implementation that Sessions didn’t have. He also seems less inclined to tighten the reins on the president’s fervid agenda. As Sarah Pierce, policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute, told me, Barr would “fit in perfectly with this administration’s immigration priorities.”
A maximalist in his views of executive power — he’s in favor of torture, doesn’t believe that Congress should restrict a president’s power to control independent oversight commissions, and thinks that a president hardly needs to consult anybody to engage in acts of war — if he is confirmed, Barr may be the kind of enabler Trump desires to further skirt Congress and, through emergency decree or executive action, fund a border wall, continue to gut asylum protections, and keep rounding up, detaining, and deporting tens of thousands of migrants. None of these actions would be a first for William Barr.
A former CIA analyst and White House counsel under Ronald Reagan, Barr served as deputy attorney general and then attorney general to George H.W. Bush from 1991 to 1993, overseeing immigration policy moves that the Trump administration has already leaned on to implement its agenda. Before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the attorney general directly oversaw Immigration and Naturalization Services (the former parent agency of both the Border Patrol and INS interior enforcement, which would become ICE), and so we have an unusually clear idea of how Barr could affect immigration policy — on the border, in the interior, and in the courts.
For over a decade, throughout the 1980s, Haitians had been detained on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, though they were still ostensibly granted the chance to apply for asylum. After a 1991 coup on the island, deposing the country’s first democratically elected president, conditions quickly worsened and sent tens of thousands of Haitians fleeing to U.S. shores in hopes of finding protection. Many of them were blocked by Coast Guard cutters and sent directly back to Haiti or interned for a period at Gitmo. While the State Department deployed agents onto the ships to conduct asylum screenings, an overwhelming majority of them were deemed ineligible. In 1992, as conditions in Haiti had hardly improved and many continued to leave the island, in an attempt to further stem the flow of asylum-seekers, Bush issued the Kennebunkport Order from his Maine vacation home, authorizing the Coast Guard to return all fleeing Haitians back to their country with no screening process at all.
The policy was challenged in court under the argument that it violated the central tenant — non-refoulement, or non-return — of both U.S. and international asylum law: that a country must not return an asylum-seeker to their country of origin if they are in danger there. In 1993, the Supreme Court, in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, ruled 8-1 that it was constitutional, setting the grounds for Trump’s various attempts at asylum bans — including the Muslim ban, which Barr defended, as well as Trump’s recent attempts to limit asylum to those making claims at ports of entry and forcing incoming asylum-seekers to “remain in Mexico.”
In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens exonerated the U.S. of all responsibility toward asylum-seekers who were still outside U.S. territory, even if the Coast Guard cutters were blocking them from entering in the first place, a ruling that could have profound impact if Trump’s efforts to force asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico for the duration of their case is fully initiated and challenged. Further, the second Bush administration would later make an argument similar to Stevens’s — that the Constitution had a limited geographical reach — when claiming that it didn’t need to abide by the international treaty against torture when operating in Guantánamo Bay. Barr agreed.
But it wasn’t just that the Bush-Barr team was denying Haitians the chance to apply for asylum — they were holding them under deplorable conditions. The HIV ban had been in effect in the U.S. since 1987 — blocking people with HIV or AIDs from coming to the U.S. — and detainees with HIV or AIDs were held separately at Guantánamo Bay. According to Brandt Goldstein, author of “Storming the Court,” a book about the legal controversy over the detention program, quoting a Haitian asylum-seeker who was locked into the HIV/AIDs section of Gitmo: “There was no place to move. The latrines were brimming over. There was never any cool water to drink, to wet our lips. There was only water in a cistern, boiling in the hot sun. When you drank it, it gave you diarrhea.” When the abused detainees revolted, more than 300 Marines were dispatched in “Operation Take Charge.”
In a 1993 op-ed about the Sale v. Haitian Centers Council decision in the New York Times, Deborah Sontag asked, “If the United States, with the imprimatur of its highest court, appears to put the protection of its borders above its responsibilities under international law, will others be enticed to follow suit?” The answer is yes. The U.S. and other countries following U.S. lead have continued to turn their backs on both domestic and international asylum protections, leaving asylum-seekers to drown in the Mediterranean, die in the U.S. deserts, or, as with the recent cases of two young children, die in Border Patrol custody.
Although it’s not completely clear how much influence Barr had on Bush’s Kennebunkport Order — it’s likely he played a key role — Barr also oversaw some of the earliest construction of a “wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bar saw it as “overkill” to build a fence along the entire 1,964-mile border, but he advocated for and succeeded in laying the groundwork for a policy that would come to be known as “Prevention Through Deterrence”: building barriers and concentrating enforcement at the parts of the border where it is easiest to cross — forcing migrants to take more remote and more dangerous routes. The policy has since resulted in the deaths of thousands of border crossers. Barr’s wall-building efforts also established key precedent for Operation Gatekeeper and Hold the Line, the first major steps toward the militarization of the U.S. border.
Barr also directly oversaw the expansion of the Border Patrol and ordered the hiring of 200 criminal investigators to combat immigration and crimes committed by “criminal aliens.” His efforts at creating a National Criminal Alien Tracking Center, which offered local law enforcement a way to contact the INS to “identify and track aliens who commit crimes” preceded much criticized programs, such as Bush’s 287(g), which deputized local police into acting as immigration agents. Barr’s Tracking Center is also eerily similar to Trump’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office.
Barr even blamed the Rodney King riots on immigration, as Dara Lind notes, which foreshadowed Trump’s erroneous and malevolent claims that immigrants are to blame for violence in U.S. cities today. In fact, immigrant neighborhoods have significantly less violence and crime.
Under Trump, Sessions — as a way to issue a new ruling and influence immigration law and how immigration judges interpret the laws — certified more immigration cases to himself than any other attorney general in history. Due to the shake-up between Sessions, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and now nominee Barr, there remain four certified cases that will be waiting on the next attorney general’s desk. The decisions on those cases will have profound effects on immigration law and include whether or not asylum-seekers should be eligible for bond or will have to fight their cases from behind bars. Given his history, if Barr takes that seat, we have a good idea of how he will rule.
The post William Barr May Be Worse on Immigration Than Jeff Sessions appeared first on The Intercept.
“Você tem vagina? Quer ser dona dela? Se respondeu ‘sim’ às duas perguntas, então, parabéns, você é feminista!” Foi com essas três frases da jornalista britânica Caitlin Moran que, aos 17 anos, me descobri feminista. Hoje, mais de meia década depois, eu provavelmente daria um suspiro de frustração caso me deparasse com a conclusão de “Como ser mulher” pela primeira vez. Foi o que fiz ao ler a primeira metade do artigo “Você tem um minuto para ouvir a palavra do feminejo?”
Nele, minhas colegas Amanda Audi e Nayara Felizardo argumentam que a cantora Marília Mendonça, por não se importar de ser chamada de “gordinha”, não tentar se encaixar em padrões e cantar sobre liberdade das mulheres, é uma espécie de feminista em negação, com um discurso muito mais eficaz do que o de quem se diz abertamente feminista. “E daí que elas não levantam a bandeira? Marília e suas amigas do feminejo são feministas sem dizer que são”, escrevem. “Quem se identifica com os valores propagados pelo feminejo também provavelmente se identifica com os valores do movimento feminista – só não sabe disso ainda.”
São afirmações simplistas e ingênuas. Marília se recusa a se identificar como feminista, porque de fato não é. O erro da “esquerda lacradora” não é, como sustenta o texto, condenar a cantora por ser feminista e não usar o termo. É colar o rótulo de feminista em qualquer celebridade que fale das questões de menor impacto coletivo do movimento, como direito à expressão da sexualidade, aceitação do próprio corpo ou união feminina – mesmo quando a celebridade recusa o rótulo. E, depois, se chocar com as falas antifeministas dessas mesmas pessoas, como se elas estivessem traindo um movimento de que nunca fizeram parte.
Foi o que aconteceu quando a cantora de feminejo Naiara Azevedo, que já havia negado ser feminista, afirmou que “o homem é cabeça, o chefe da casa”. Um internauta, irritado, comentou: “Depois vem com música de corna pra vender”.
Imagem: Reprodução/Twitter
É verdade que, numa sociedade em que um bocado de homem ainda se acha no direito de dizer o que a namorada pode ou não vestir ou fazer, não é coisa pouca ouvir uma mulher cantar “Tá pra nascer quem manda em mim” e ver a música cair no gosto popular. Mas concordar com essa letra não te torna feminista. Para isso, é preciso ir além da ideia de libertação individual.
Concordo que cantoras como Marília, Simara, Simaria e Naiara Azevedo “conseguem falar sobre empoderamento de mulheres – jargão esquerdista detectado – sem nunca dizer que estão falando disso” e, assim, conseguiram espalhar essa mensagem pra uma multidão que textos como os nossos não vão atingir. Da mesma forma, acredito que a definição de feminismo proposta em “Como ser mulher” é incrível para garotas entenderem se feminismo tem mesmo a ver com ódio aos homens ou à depilação. Spoiler:
Mas a afirmação de Caitlin Moran é só isso: uma porta de entrada amigável para um universo encoberto por mitos e estigmas. Resumir o feminismo a “querer ser dona da sua buceta”, além de excluir as mulheres trans, é reduzir um movimento político de mais de 130 anos a uma mera noção individualista de “empoderamento”.
À Folha de S.Paulo, ela [Marília Mendonça] falou que seu feminismo não é feito de teoria, textos ou protestos. “Protesto com minha vida, ao bancar tudo isso e falar que ia ser do jeito que sou e que ia conseguir o que consegui”.
É importante que mulheres sejam financeira e emocionalmente independentes? Com certeza. Mas, considerando que esse estilo de vida é completamente inacessível para a maior parte das mulheres, nem contribui para que se torne acessível, não traz bem coletivo nenhum. E já dizia a poeta e feminista negra Audre Lorde: “Eu não serei livre enquanto houver mulheres que não são, mesmo que suas algemas sejam muito diferentes das minhas.” Feminismo é sobre isso.
Vejam: o “empoderamento” individual ainda não representou uma mudança concreta na violência doméstica e sexual que as mulheres sofrem enquanto grupo (apesar da “moda” do feminismo de mercado, uma mulher ainda é agredida a cada 15 minutos no Rio de Janeiro e o Brasil tem a 5ª maior taxa de feminicídios do mundo); não nos livra de ter os empregos e subempregos menos valorizados; não põe fim à tripla jornada de trabalho; nem, no caso das mulheres negras, faz com que elas deixem de viver em condições mais precárias do que todo o resto da população.
Essas são questões que não se resolvem quando decidimos que queremos ser donas das próprias bucetas ou afirmamos que ninguém manda em nós.
São problemas sociais e políticos complexos que só podem ser enfrentados com luta política contínua, dentro e fora das instituições de poder. É isso que o feminismo representa: um movimento antissistêmico. Ou, pelo menos, é o que deveria representar.
O feminismo de mercadoriaEm 2015, as brasileiras tomaram as ruas e as redes em um movimento batizado de Primavera das Mulheres. O projeto de lei que pretendia dificultar o aborto em casos de estupro; o assédio da menina Valentina no Masterchef Brasil, que levou à criação da hashtag #PrimeiroAssédio; e a campanha #MeuAmigoSecreto, que revelou casos de machismo cotidiano, foram alguns dos elementos que fizeram o feminismo explodir no Brasil.
Buscas no Brasil pela palavra feminismo no Google entre 2011 e 2018. Em vermelho: agosto de 2012, data do lançamento de “Como ser mulher”; outubro de 2015, a Primavera das Mulheres; e setembro de 2018, o auge do interesse pelo movimento.
Gráfico: Reprodução/Google Trends
Essa primavera fez surgir novos grupos feministas, fortaleceu os já existentes e impulsionou a produção de conteúdo de linguagem acessível sobre o feminismo na tela e no papel. De três anos para cá, as livrarias foram inundadas de títulos sobre feminismo. A popularização do termo levou o próprio livro de Moran, lançado em 2012 com o subtítulo Um divertido manifesto feminino, sair em nova reimpressão para virar manifesto feminista.
Com o aumento do interesse pelo tema no Brasil e no mundo, não demorou para o mercado se dar conta de que o feminismo poderia ser lucrativo. Em 2014, a revista de moda Elle, a marca Whistles e a Fawcett Foundation lançaram uma camiseta com os dizeres “This is what a feminist looks like” [É assim que uma feminista se parece], usada por várias celebridades e vendida a cerca de US$ 70 para levantar dinheiro para caridade. O único problema? As peças eram produzidas por mulheres das Ilhas Maurício, no Oceano Índico, em condições análogas à escravidão. É assim mesmo que uma feminista deve se parecer?
Em março de 2017, dois meses depois de a busca por feminismo no Google atingir seu ápice nos Estados Unidos, a grife francesa Dior lançou a camiseta “We should all be feminists” [Sejamos todos feministas], em referência ao discurso de mesmo título da escritora nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. O preço? Módicos US$ 710, ou R$ 2.200, no câmbio da época.
Mas a venda de produtos com referências diretas ao feminismo não é a questão mais preocupante. A real armadilha está no uso do discurso de “empoderamento” para vender basicamente qualquer coisa. Em 2015, a Bombril reuniu Ivete Sangalo, Monica Iozzi e Dani Calabresa para dar às mulheres um recado: “Toda mulher é uma diva! E todo homem é devagar. Isso! Divou! Bombril: os produtos que brilham como toda mulher.” Olhem só, o acúmulo de tarefas domésticas pelas mulheres não é um problema, fruto do machismo, a ser resolvido. É prova do quanto elas são mais poderosas que o homens!
Marília Mendonça e as demais artistas do feminejo podem cantar sobre mulheres empoderadas e dizer que sua forma de protestar pela causa feminina é ganhando dinheiro, como se isso bastasse para mudar alguma coisa fora de suas vidas pessoais. Essas vendas do “empoderamento” como protesto e feminismo matam dois coelhos numa tacada só. Primeiro, transformam em fonte de lucro um movimento ligado à contestação do capitalismo – sim, porque um feminismo que não olha para as desigualdades de classe é um feminismo incapaz de transformar a vida da maior parte das mulheres. E, ao transformá-lo em mercadoria, passam à frente a ideia de que “mulheres podem ser feministas sem desafiar a si mesmas ou à cultura”, como critica a escritora bell hooks em seu livro “O feminismo é para todo mundo”.
Como assim? Bom, se você já entende que feminismo é a luta pela igualdade entre homens e mulheres, já deu o primeiro passo. Mas você está disposta a repensar e mudar seu comportamento para que o seu feminismo abarque mulheres socialmente mais vulneráveis do que você? Está disposta a ouvi-las? Essas são questões que o feminismo de boutique não vai levantar.
Incapaz de mudar as estruturas de poder, o feminismo de mercado é mais fácil de engolir do que o verdadeiro feminismo, enxergado como “radical” frente à falsa e inofensiva imagem vendida pelo mercado. E é ele que permite que cantoras como Marília Mendonça possam se passar por feministas aos olhos de parte da esquerda. Mas, no melhor dos cenários, tudo que esse feminismo faz é o que conseguem as músicas de Mendonça: ajudar as mulheres a se sentirem donas do próprio nariz. Não é pouco, mas, politicamente falando, elas ainda não são livres. Esse feminismo para por aí.
Estamos vivendo um paradoxo. Por um lado, parece que a discussão sobre feminismo está em todo lugar: no Programa da Fátima, nas séries, nos livros, nas eleições… mas essa explosão feminista não é tão abrangente quanto as longas discussões e tretas online sobre assuntos como “lugar de fala” poderiam levar as militantes – entre as quais me incluo – a acreditar. Uma pesquisa da revista Cláudia divulgada em março de 2018 revelou que menos de um terço das brasileiras se identifica com o movimento feminista.
Levando esse número e o resultado da última eleição em conta, não há como discordar de um ponto central levantado pelo texto de minhas colegas Amanda e Nayara. É preciso que nós, mulheres feministas, aprendamos a comunicar nossas pautas de forma mais eficiente, abrindo mão de “expressões que pouco ou nada dizem para a maioria das pessoas fora da bolha”.
Sim, a definição de feminismo de Caitlin Moran me faria suspirar de frustração hoje em dia. Mas se “Como ser mulher” me dissesse que o feminismo é uma luta política e cultural que pretende derrubar o sistema patriarcal, imperialista, racista e heteronormativo que subjuga a todas as mulheres, mas em especial as mais pobres, LBT e não-brancas, a Bruna de 17 anos teria dado uma de Cabo Daciolo e corrido para as montanhas.
Convenhamos que a imagem que o senso comum pinta do feminismo, além de irreal, é bem desagradável – um movimento de mulheres raivosas, que odeiam homens, nunca se depilam (o que aparentemente seria um grande problema) e gostam de sair por aí profanando igrejas. Então, quem não conhece o movimento costuma vê-lo de forma negativa ou, pelo menos, com alguma suspeita. E, ao ser atropelada por um monte de jargão, a probabilidade de essa pessoa aderir a um “Não sou feminista nem machista, sou ser humano” e seguir a vida é muito maior do que a de pesquisar o que os jargões significam.
Alguns coletivos de mulheres já adaptam o discurso quando abordam temas feministas em eventos nas periferias ou nas escolas. Elas falam em movimento de mulheres em vez de dizer feminismo, por exemplo. Isso ajuda a romper a resistência das ouvintes e facilita a transmissão da mensagem.
O grupo Minas da Baixada, por exemplo, se define no Facebook como um “coletivo feminista interseccional, formado por mulheres da Baixada [Fluminense do Rio de Janeiro] e aberto a mulheres que desejem atuar na luta feminista na região”. Mas, ao participarem de atividades em escolas públicas e de rodas de conversas com mulheres, as integrantes evitam usar termos como “questão de gênero” e “patriarcado”. Com estudantes, fazem dinâmicas, como perguntar o que eles já haviam deixado de fazer por serem meninos ou meninas. Assim, eles mesmos refletem e chegam à conclusão de que o machismo atua em suas vidas. Com as adultas, o discurso também é adaptado, e a estratégia é abrir um espaço de escuta para que, a partir das falas das mulheres, possam ser trabalhados temas como racismo, machismo e desigualdade de classe.
O desapego dos chavões e, como falou a escritora Gabriela Moura nessa entrevista, a habilidade de adaptar nossas falas a diferentes públicos são essenciais para que mais mulheres conheçam o feminismo. E, com o tempo, poderem entendê-lo como um movimento complexo, plural e antissistema, e não como empoderamento à venda na loja de maquiagem da esquina. Passinhos de formiga, gente.
E não basta adaptar a linguagem. É preciso, como escreveu minha colega Juliana Gonçalves no Twitter, que a discussão sobre o feminismo se dê fora dos espaços privilegiados, chegando às mulheres periféricas.
Imagens: Reprodução/Twitter
Temos que parar de pregar para os convertidos. Todo evento que se propõe a debater o feminismo e suas pautas, mas é realizado numa área nobre e inacessível da cidade e só tem (ou tem desproporcionalmente) gente branca, de classe média ou alta que já sabe de tudo que é dito, é um evento feminista que falhou miseravelmente. Ponto. Não passa de um exercício de masturbação mental, em que todos terminam como começaram: alheios ao fato de que as horas gastas não contribuíram em nada para a sociedade e satisfeitos com o doce gostinho de terem suas convicções reafirmadas.
Já é hora de esse gostinho começar a ser amargo. Afinal, que explosão feminista é essa, sequer capaz de explodir nossas bolhas?
Sim, o antifeminismo ganhou a luta de narrativas nessas eleições. E, sim, isso é prova de que precisamos repensar nossas estratégias de diálogo. Mas os ataques ao movimento e às feministas não teriam a ferocidade que tiveram se não estivéssemos fazendo algo certo.
Nós conseguimos colocar o feminismo no centro do debate e, com isso, vieram as pedras. Em seu texto sobre o feminejo, minhas colegas escrevem que Bolsonaro empregou a estratégia de dividir as mulheres entre “as que o apoiam e rejeitam o feminismo; e as femininas”. Uma de suas aliadas nos chamou de “vexaminosas e deselegantes”. Eduardo, o filho caçula, diz que “mulher que se dá o respeito” não é feminista.
Já era de se esperar. Do final do século 19, passando pelas décadas de 1960 e 1980 e, agora, de 2010, a campanha antifeminista continua recorrendo às mesmas jogadas. Somos feias, sujas, mal humoradas, putas ou mal amadas – e não é a adaptação do nosso discurso que vai dar fim a essa cruzada centenária. O que incomoda pessoas como os Bolsonaro não é nosso vocabulário, mas a possibilidade de mudança que nossas palavras representam.
Não devemos adaptar nosso discurso para fugir dos ataques, mas para mostrar o quanto são ultrapassados e mentirosos. O interesse pelo feminismo nesta década nunca foi maior do que em 2018. E, se essa década marca a quarta onda feminista, a curiosidade sobre o movimento é hoje a maior desde pelo menos a onda anterior, nos anos 1990. Se houve um momento para fazer o feminismo realmente explodir, é esse – e não podemos desperdiçá-lo. Então, sim, vamos aprender com a linguagem do feminejo e sua habilidade de se comunicar com as mulheres. Mas não vamos confundi-lo com feminismo. Quanto às pedras, que venham. Não é nada com que não estejamos acostumadas.
The post Como o feminismo de mercado engana você appeared first on The Intercept.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s call for a short-term deal to reopen the government while continuing negotiations on border security means that there is now a working majority in the Senate publicly willing to vote to end the shutdown. Fellow Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and Lisa Murkowski have all urged passage of bipartisan appropriations bills that would bring nearly 800,000 federal employees back to work. Add Graham and all the Senate Democrats, and you have 51 votes.
Back in December, the Senate passed its bill to keep the government open by voice vote, which is recorded as unanimous. That was before President Donald Trump changed his mind and said he would refuse to sign the bills.
The House is now run by Democrats who have already passed legislation to reopen the government. House Republicans are cracking too: The most recent appropriations bill passed for the Department of the Interior earned 10 Republican votes, inching closer to supermajority support. So it’s reasonable to suggest that, under the surface, there may be enough support for the Graham option to override a presidential veto.
This means that one of the main impediments to ending the shutdown is not Trump but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has quietly aligned with Trump since the shutdown began. All McConnell would have to do to open the government would be to put the same bill that the Senate already passed back on the floor.
Yet McConnell has been adamant that he would not put anything up for a vote in the Senate that the president wouldn’t sign, making numerous speeches on the Senate floor on the subject. He has steered clear of negotiations to end the shutdown, now in its fourth week. He rejected a compromise proposal from his own caucus to consider exchanging protections for Dreamers for wall funding.
Democrats have bashed McConnell for abdicating responsibility by refusing to line up votes, but he has not budged. The big question is this: Why has McConnell, whose primary motivation has always been protecting Senate Republicans from negative publicity, hung his fellow senators out to dry on the unpopular shutdown and opened them up to widespread criticism?
It’s true that McConnell cares deeply about the electoral fates of his GOP colleagues. But he also cares about his own. And Mitch McConnell is up for re-election in 2020.
McConnell’s major problem is that, in Kentucky and across the country, he is not particularly likable. He is among the most unpopular of America’s senators, with just a 38 percent approval rating, according to the most recent poll from Morning Consult. That’s actually an improvement over last year, when McConnell ranked as the most unpopular. But that’s still well below Trump’s 55 percent approval in Kentucky, per the same polling outlet.
In 2017, after McConnell publicly clashed with Trump, a poll put the majority leader’s approval rating in Kentucky at 18 percent. Just 37 percent said they’d like to see him re-elected in 2020.
It’s probably the case that McConnell doesn’t fear losing to a Democrat in next year’s elections. Or, at least if he does, it’s a manageable fear — though, the longer he drags out an unpopular shutdown, the more conceivable it becomes. But overriding a Trump veto, crossing him in such a public way, could bolster a primary challenge.
And Trump’s ability to pull McConnell’s stature up in a state like Kentucky was evidenced in the last Congress. McConnell was much further underwater in Kentucky last summer, finishing dead last in popularity among senators, with 30 percent support and 56 percent disapproval. His numbers only started to turn around when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court and McConnell made sure that he was confirmed, regardless of the controversy over sexual assault allegations. McConnell has raised his net approval by 17 points since last summer, mainly by sticking to Trump like glue.
It’s true that a political crisis 22 months before the next election would typically not register with voters. But this is no ordinary crisis: It involves the border wall, the signature proposal on which Trump has staked his political career. If McConnell were to undercut the president on the wall, constituents in Kentucky might not forget. Or Trump might not let them. And the primary takes place in May 2020, six months closer than next November.
On Monday, The Intercept asked senators if they thought McConnell’s re-election played a role in setting the Senate strategy. “No, I think that Senator McConnell has rightly determined that in order for this to end, and for this to get resolved, that the president and the Democrats have to come to an agreement,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, a member of GOP leadership. “He’ll be more than happy to bring something to the floor that can get 60 votes in the Senate and a presidential signature. I think it’s pretty straightforward.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that McConnell was waiting for Trump to tell him what he’ll accept. “No, I think it has to do with — the Senate passed a bill and then the White House said they were open to [it] and then they changed their mind the next day,” he said. “Ultimately there’s no bill we can pass that will become law unless the president signs it. So I think he’s just waiting for the White House to tell us what they would support. And I think he would put to a vote virtually anything they would support.” (As a matter of civics, Congress can enact a law by overriding a presidential veto, with two-thirds of the votes in both chambers. That’s the move McConnell is resisting.)
The White House has endorsed McConnell’s subordinate approach and has broadcasted its appreciation. “Leader McConnell is standing strong,” Vice President Mike Pence told reporters last week. “Republicans are standing rock solid with the president, and Leader McConnell is right there with them.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va, said he didn’t know Kentucky politics well enough to speculate, and Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Doug Jones, D-Ala., said they didn’t want to speculate either way.
The shutdown has begun to take its toll on more and more of the country, from workers to small businesses. The political costs will only rise as it continues, and this public pressure usually leads to one side giving in. But the leader of one of the chambers of Congress has his political future directly tied to remaining obstinate, regardless of whether that will damage the party overall. This is sometimes called the iron law of institutions, which states that those who control institutions care primarily about their own power within the institution, rather than the power of the institution itself.
It’s one thing to deal with the wild mood swings and irrationality of Trump during the shutdown. But McConnell is acting as Trump’s clone in the Senate. Sometimes an upcoming re-election will make a politician moderate their views. But McConnell knows, whether he likes it or not, that the modern Republican Party is a party of Trump, and if he wants to return to the Senate, he cannot let a sliver of daylight come between him and his president.
Asked if McConnell was still committed to his position, and whether his own re-election factored into his decision-making, McConnell spokesperson Don Stewart told The Intercept, “If he issues a new position, I’ll send it your way.”
The post Why Won’t Mitch McConnell Just End Trump’s Shutdown? He’s Up for Re-Election in 2020 appeared first on The Intercept.
The political impasse over the U.S. government shutdown continues, matched now by the tumult across the Atlantic. More than two years after citizens in the United Kingdom voted in favor of Brexit, the strategy on how to actually leave the European Union is more muddled than ever. On Tuesday, the British Parliament voted down Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan, just 10 weeks before the country is scheduled to officially depart from the EU. The stunning rebuke of May could signal the looming end of her tenure as the country’s leader, as the opposition Labour Party is seeking a vote of no confidence that could result in a new election.
Can a sorority be held legally accountable for a student’s suicide? The mother of Jordan Hankins, a Northwestern University student who took her own life in 2017, filed a complaint in federal district court this week alleging that hazing from the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha incited the depression that ultimately led to her death. It’s a unique case, because the overwhelming majority of campus hazing fatalities tend to be male, not female. Regardless, the fallout after Hankins’s suicide is following a familiar pattern that echoes past incidents: First, the sorority or fraternity is suspended from campus for a time, and then bereaved parents attempt to channel their grief into action, only to realize that achieving closure through legal means is a lot harder than anticipated.
New research suggests that trans kids are confident in who they are, which provides insight into the fraught question of when kids are old enough to transition. A University of Washington psychologist studied 85 nonconforming kids ages 3 through 12 who defy gender stereotypes as measured through a series of tests that noted, for example, their preference for particular types of toys and clothes. After tracking the cohort over time, she saw that a significant number of them eventually transitioned. The finding bolsters the case that there is something distinctive about transgender children. In other words, “Children change their gender because of their identities; they don’t change their identities because they change their gender.”
Unthinkable
(Mikhail Klimentyev / AFP / Getty)
Two years into President Donald Trump’s first term in office, The Atlantic looks back on the moments that have defined his presidency. “Unthinkable” is our catalog of 50 incidents, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance.
At No. 4: Putin and Trump meeting, without chaperones.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
Evening ReadFood and drinks infused with cannabidiol, or CBD, have become trendy of late, but regulators haven’t kept up with the fad:
The problem is, it’s not easy to know what you’re actually ingesting, or if it’ll actually change how you feel. At best, CBD in America exists in a confusing state of quasi-legality and yet-to-be-realized potential. Experts estimate that the market for it could balloon to $22 billion by 2022, but with cannabis and hemp laws changing rapidly across the country, the chemical is almost entirely unregulated on the consumer market, with no end-product labeling or composition standards to help shoppers understand what they’re buying.
The market is rife with misinformation even when CBD is sold as a relatively simple oil or supplement. When it’s squirted into a latte or baked into a cookie, CBD’s uses and effects get even more opaque. The chemical’s loudest advocates make health claims far beyond the current scientific evidence, and its harshest critics often dismiss the compound entirely as just another snake oil in America’s long tradition of health scams. Journalists are starting to get a handle on what CBD actually does and what is actually known about it, but along with researchers and regulators, we’re still playing catch-up when it comes to the people who have pushed the compound into what feels like mainstream overnight success: entrepreneurs.
What Do You Know … About Family?1. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is splitting up with his novelist wife MacKenzie Bezos—meaning they’ll now be divvying up an estimated how many billion in assets?
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. A lawsuit filed recently by Felicia Hankins, the mother of Jordan Hankins, a Northwestern student who committed suicide in 2017, alleges that sorority hazing triggered Jordan’s __________________ disorder.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: $137 billion / Post-traumatic stress
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares their top stories:
Manual keigo, Japan’s honorific speech used by store clerks, swept the country in the 1990s. But what was once an immutable aspect of Japanese customer service is now evolving, as a language debate erupts.
The rise of the rented e-scooter has also brought safety fears and injury-related lawsuits. What happens when a new mobility mode meets the American legal system?
When Detroiters were refusing city-sponsored “free trees,” a researcher wanted to know why. What she found: It’s not that people didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.
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Senate Democrats were undoubtedly heartened to hear from President Donald Trump’s attorney-general nominee, Bill Barr, that he does not believe Special Counsel Robert Mueller is on “a witch hunt” and that he would allow Mueller to complete the Russia probe unimpeded.
But they also appeared considerably unnerved as Barr defended a lengthy memo he wrote attacking Mueller’s obstruction inquiry as “fatally misconceived,” dodged questions about making Mueller’s final report public, and refused to commit to recusing himself from the investigation if advised to do so by ethics officials.
As the likely next head of the Justice Department—Republicans have majority control of the Senate, all but ensuring his confirmation—Barr will be at the center of a tug-of-war between Trump, who has sought to exert greater control over the Justice Department and FBI, and Mueller, who is probing a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to win the 2016 election. Barr is set to replace Jeff Sessions, who was ousted in November following a year-long public humiliation campaign led by the president. Trump never forgave Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation early on in his tenure.
Seeking to assuage Democrats’ fears that he would be beholden to the president, Barr said he feels he can “truly be independent” and would “not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong.” If Trump directed him to fire Mueller without good cause, he said, then he “would not carry out that instruction.”
“I want Special Counsel Mueller to discharge his responsibilities as a federal prosecutor and exercise the judgment that he’s expected to exercise under the rules and finish his job,” Barr said. He also said he “would not allow” Trump to fire a U.S. Attorney “for the purpose of stopping an investigation,” and did not rule out the possibility that Mueller could subpoena Trump. “Well, the question from me would be, What’s the predicate?” he said of a potential subpoena. “I don’t know what the facts are. And if there was a factual basis for doing it, and I couldn’t say that it violated established policies, then I wouldn’t interfere.”
Nevertheless, Democrats peppered Barr with questions about an unsolicited, 19-page memo he wrote last June, attacking Mueller’s obstruction inquiry as “fatally misconceived” and arguing that Mueller should not be allowed to subpoena the president about obstruction. Barr’s views on the obstruction inquiry have taken on new significance in light of a new New York Times report that frames that aspect of the investigation as a national-security imperative. The Times provided a new window into how top FBI officials’ perception of the Russia investigation shifted after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the federal probe of his campaign team. “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation,” the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, told lawmakers last year. “But the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.”
FBI leaders, in other words, felt that Trump’s attempt to obstruct the Russia investigation—he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”—was itself a serious national-security issue.
Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein asked Barr how he could oversee an investigation that he had attacked while being in the dark about the facts. The memo, she said, raises “serious questions” about Barr’s views on executive authority and whether he thinks the president is above the law. Barr replied that the memo was “narrow in scope” and did not make the argument that a president could never obstruct justice. He also defended his decision to write it in the first place: “It’s very common for me and other former senior officials to weigh in on matters that they think may be ill advised and may have ramifications down the road,” he said. It isn’t clear, though, why Barr gave the memo to Trump’s personal lawyers, including Jay Sekulow and Emmet Flood, if his intention was to warn prosecutors of the consequences of an obstruction inquiry.
Barr also played down a meeting he had with Trump in June 2017, set up by U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, about the possibility of “augmenting” Trump’s defense team. He turned down the offer and said he didn’t hear from Trump again until he was under consideration for the attorney-general job.
Senate Democrats also seemed particularly irked by Barr’s claim that he would not necessarily follow ethics officials’ advice if they recommended, given his memo and contacts with Trump and his legal team, that he recuse himself from the Mueller investigation.
“Under the regulations, I make the decision, as the head of the agency, as to my own recusal,” Barr said when asked by Democratic Senator Pat Leahy whether he would seek and follow their advice on recusal. “So I certainly would consult with them, and at the end of the day, I would make a decision in good faith based on the laws and the facts that are evident at that time.” Democratic Senator Kamala Harris doubled down on that response, asking under what circumstances Barr would break with career ethics professionals on the recusal question. “If I disagree with them,” Barr replied curtly.
Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are wary of the precedent set by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who disregarded ethics officials’ advice that he recuse himself from the Mueller investigation due to his past statements and writings criticizing that probe.
“The poor judgment Mr. Whitaker demonstrated in rejecting the advice of career ethics officials should not establish a precedent for Mr. Barr or any other senior DOJ official to similarly disregard the independent assessment of conflicts of interest by career DOJ staff,” they wrote in a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general last week.
Ultimately, though, Democrats seemed most concerned about Barr’s unwillingness to commit to making the final Mueller report public. In recent days, Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, has said that he hopes Trump’s legal team will get to review and “correct” any report before it is given to Congress or made public. Barr shot that down during the hearing—“that will not happen,” he said. He would only commit to acting “consistent with regulations and the law” when it comes to public disclosure of the report. He also left the door open to Trump using executive privilege to block the release of some material.
“I don’t have a clue as to what would be in the report,” Barr said. “In theory, if there was executive-privilege material to which an executive-privilege claim could be made, it might—someone might raise a claim of executive privilege.”
It’s Tuesday, January 15. A bipartisan meeting of senators on Monday led to no consensus, and a group of Democrats rejected the president’s invitation for lunchtime talks today, as the federal government shutdown stretches into its 25th day.
Barr None: On the first day of confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Senate Judiciary Democrats grilled William Barr about an unsolicited memo he authored last year calling part of Robert Mueller’s probe “fatally misconceived.” Barr defended the memo to the committee, but also said that he thinks Mueller is a “straight shooter” who is not on a “witch hunt,” and that he would allow the probe to finish.
An Odd Pair: What do Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama have in common? They’re both on the campaign trail for redistricting reform, reports Edward-Isaac Dovere. The year 2020 will bring a presidential election as well as a consequential census, which will be followed by a nationwide redistricting process.
The Burden of Proof: The string of interactions between Trump, his associates, and Russia are now long enough—and strange enough—to warrant an explanation, writes David A. Graham.
Why Now?: Representative Steve King’s xenophobia has been in public view for many years. Russell Berman explores why Republicans are just now starting to condemn him.
Unthinkable(Mikhail Klimentyev / AFP / Getty)
Two years into President Trump’s first term in office, The Atlantic looks back on the moments that have defined his presidency. Unthinkable is our catalog of 50 incidents, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance. At number four: Putin and Trump meeting, without chaperones.
Join the conversation: Which moments from the Trump presidency would you add to this list? Email us at letters@theatlantic.com with the subject line “Unthinkable,” and include your full name, city, and state. Or tweet using the hashtag #TrumpUnthinkable.
Snapshot
Trump stands in front of a table full of fast food in the State Dining Room of the White House, assembled in preparation for a reception for the Clemson Tigers college football championship team. (Susan Walsh / AP)
The ConversationAfter a visit to the Lincoln Memorial last week, George Packer wrote that this iteration of the government shutdown was “what the suicide of a great democracy looks like.” Atlantic readers responded:
“I found the article very moving until I got toward the end. Then I was disappointed,” Mary I. Williams of Elizabethton, Tennessee, wrote. “This nation is dividing and picking sides. I had hoped I was reading a neutral article, one that was based on the concerns of its people. Instead, at the end you seem to blame President Trump for all of the issues and the shutdown. Yes, he made the decision to shut down, but we seem to have two equally stubborn opposing sides.”
Ideas From The AtlanticThe President’s Big-Mac Feast Was an Argument About Government, Political Messaging, and Himself (Megan Garber)
“Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s, from Wendy’s, from Burger King, from Domino’s, carefully piled atop silver platters—that were the point … This was a thoroughly Trumpian strain of spectacle, meant to hijack attention and go viral.” → Read on.
The Clemency Process Is Broken. Trump Can Fix It. (Rachel Barkow, Mark Holden, and Mark Osler)
“There are more than 3,000 people left in prison serving mandatory sentences under the old firearm-enhancement law and the three-strikes provision that imposed a life sentence … For clemency to reach those thousands, the country needs a process that fairly, thoroughly, and efficiently evaluates candidates for a commutation (or shortening) of their sentence under the Constitution’s pardon power.” → Read on.
Why Did the Border Patrol Union Switch Its Position on the Wall? (Conor Friedersdorf)
“As recently as January 4, the website for the Border Patrol union stated, ‘The NBPC disagrees with wasting taxpayer money on building fences and walls along the border as a means of curtailing illegal entries into the United States.’” → Read on.
What Kissinger Knew That Pompeo Does Not (Martin Indyk)
“If Pompeo were Kissinger, he would have seized on MBS’s momentary defensiveness after the Jamal Khashoggi murder to persuade the prince to change course in Yemen. Instead, Pompeo glad-handed MBS in Riyadh, gave lip service to Yemen in his speech, and left the hard work there to Martin Griffiths, a United Nations envoy.” → Read on.
◆ Why America’s Largest Migrant Youth Detention Center Closed (Tanvi Misra, CityLab)
◆ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Turned the Corporate Media Into an Agent of Socialist Change (Eric Levitz, New York)
◆ The Left Critique of Bureaucracy (Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs)
◆ If Trump Doesn’t Act Like He’s President, Will the Courts? (Adam J. White, Commentary)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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There are but a few guarantees about what each new session of Congress will bring: One is that Republicans and Democrats will bicker over government spending, and another is that Representative Steve King will say something deeply offensive about race, religion, or immigration.
So when House Republicans moved aggressively on Monday evening to kick the Iowa conservative off his two prized congressional committees, the logical question to ask was, why now? Why, after King’s 16 years in Congress and, in the words of one former top GOP aide, “a lifetime achievement award of awful comments,” did the party leadership finally decide to punish a lawmaker whose racism has long been obvious for all to see?
Officially, Republicans were rebuking King for his latest embrace of racist ideology, delivered during an interview with The New York Times. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” the congressman said. By defending a phrase that explicitly holds whites above all other races, King had seemingly stepped over an invisible rhetorical line for Republicans. Never mind that the statement was wholly consistent with—if slightly more blunt than— views King has expressed repeatedly in the past, when he’s aligned himself with neo-Nazis, disparaged the values of diversity and “multiculturalism,” backed racial profiling of immigrants, and argued that whites have contributed more to “civilization” than nonwhite groups. Or that his implied defense of the term white supremacist is arguably no more or less offensive than the pejoratives about immigrants, American Indians, African nations, and others that President Donald Trump voices daily in his Twitter feed or in White House meetings.
King initially beat a hasty retreat, insisting during a speech on the House floor that he was neither a white nationalist nor a white supremacist. “I reject those labels and the evil ideology they define,” he said.
It was too late. This time, apparently, King had gone too far.
Mitt Romney, the one-time party standard-bearer who is now a freshman GOP senator, called on him to resign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell effectively agreed, suggesting he “find a new line of work.” And on Monday evening, the newly minted House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, directed his members to block King from continuing to serve on either the Judiciary or Agriculture Committees, where he had been one of the party’s most senior members.
With that move, McCarthy had done something that neither of the past two Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, had managed to do: taken substantive action to strip King of legislative authority.
“I am a brand-new leader,” McCarthy explained on Tuesday when a reporter asked him why he had moved against King now and not before. “I listened to what Steve said. I brought Steve in and met with him. I also did research on what Steve has said in the past. I believe this party is the party of Lincoln.”
“There is no room for white supremacy,” McCarthy continued. “That’s why I took a strong action.”
What McCarthy neglected to mention is that the political circumstances have also changed, both for Republicans as a party and for King personally. In the past, House GOP leaders like Boehner and Ryan have dispensed no more than rhetorical rebukes of King while allowing him to keep his perch on key committees and waiting for each successive controversy to fade with the churn of the news cycle. But with Democrats now in charge in the House, McCarthy could not stop Democrats from bringing a vote on resolutions either disapproving of King’s comments or formally censuring him. The House on Tuesday afternoon voted, 424–1, on a resolution “rejecting white nationalism and white supremacy.” King cast a yes vote on the measure, which cited but did not specifically condemn him. (The one “no” vote came from Democratic Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois, who was protesting the resolution’s toothlessness.)
“It was important for Republicans to stand up and say this is unacceptable, because if the Democrats had done that for them, that would have sent a terrible message to voters, not just in King’s congressional district but voters throughout the country,” says Doug Heye, a former spokesman for the Republican National Committee who also served as a top aide to then–House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Yet what might have been an even bigger factor in McCarthy’s decision was King’s own suddenly precarious political standing back in Iowa. For more than a decade, King had been, well, a kingmaker in his home state: He regularly won reelection to the House by more than 20 points, and he was one of the most sought-after endorsements for conservative presidential contenders campaigning ahead of the first-in-the-nation caucuses. (In 2016, King’s nod went to Senator Ted Cruz, though the congressman eventually became a close ally of Trump’s.)
Last fall, however, King was nearly swept out in the Democratic wave. He eked out a win by just three points over a little-known opponent, as voters in Iowa’s reliably Republican Fourth District—which covers the state’s rural northwest—sent an unmistakable message that they were tiring of their longtime congressman’s penchant for controversy. And last week, just six days into King’s new term, a leading Republican in the state senate, Randy Feenstra, cited his “caustic nature” in declaring that he would challenge King in next year’s primary. In a sign of how seriously Feenstra’s candidacy was being taken, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, declined to endorse King despite having named him a ceremonial co-chairman of her campaign last year. “The last election was a wake-up call for it to be that close,” Reynolds told a local television station in declaring her neutrality.
In Iowa, and now in Washington, King is invincible no more. “If you’re dealing with a member who’s going to win with a large majority, then perhaps you turn them into somewhat of a martyr,” Heye told me. “That’s clearly not the case now. The reality is very different.”
In our interview, Heye called King “a lifetime achievement award of awful comments” and recalled how his earlier inflammatory remarks would prompt “a lot of eye-rolling” from Republican leaders. After King compared young border-crossers to drug mules in 2013 and said they had “calves the size of cantaloupes,” Boehner publicly criticized him and privately called him “an asshole.” But Boehner’s grasp on the speakership was already slipping at the time, and conservatives had revolted over a previous attempt to kick disloyal members off committees. “The reality is that in that situation, given the tenuous hold that we had, substantively there wasn’t a lot that leadership could do,” Heye said. “And that made things difficult.”
McCarthy, who was then serving as the third-ranking House Republican, did not publicly call for more punitive action to be taken against King at the time. What has changed, then, since 2013? It’s not the views of GOP leaders, which on immigration have moved closer to King’s and the party base. And it’s certainly not King, whose language now is simply a more candid expression of the opinions he has long espoused.
The difference is that in November, King’s constituents spoke up with their ballots. They made a once-powerful politician suddenly vulnerable and gave Republican leaders a permission slip to act in ways they didn’t before. Iowa voters didn’t quite oust Steve King from Congress, but as the GOP’s action on Monday evening demonstrated, the election had consequences all the same.
How does that line go? All fast food served warm is alike, but every fast-foodstuff consumed after it gets cold is unhappy in its own way?
Regardless: Taste was not, by all appearances, a top concern when it came to the culinary offerings that the White House presented to visiting members of the Clemson Tigers football team on Monday evening. It was the visuals, instead—items from McDonald’s and Wendy’s and Burger King and Domino’s, many of them piled, in their branded packagings, atop silver platters—that were the point: the gleaming tongs next to the wilting boxes of Filets-O-Fish. The plastic containers of dipping sauces, sorted by flavor, stacked cheekily inside gravy boats. The many faces of Wendy, wrapped recursively around a series of Singles. The French fries arranged, haphazardly, in cardboard cups bearing the seal of the White House. The gilt candelabras lending soft light to the guilty pleasures. A little bit P. T. Barnum, a little bit Hieronymus Bosch, a little bit Beauty and the Beast, had “Be Our Guest” been staged by Willy Wonka and also set in the apocalypse: The scene was grinning and a bit grotesque, and that was the point. A portrait of Lincoln gazed down upon the spread and at the man who would claim credit for it, perhaps wondering anew what God hath wrought.
The answer was as evident as the silver-plattered salads: This was a thoroughly Trumpian strain of spectacle, its images meant to hijack attention and go viral. The president invited members of the press into the State Dining Room on Monday, before the diners were invited in, to take photos and shoot video of the tablescape, rendering an otherwise ordinary White House event—a victorious athletic team, rewarded with a presidential visit—into something remarkable. And the feast that ensued (“great American food,” Trump called it), was the distillation of some of his fondest visions of the country: corporate, homogeneous, teasing, unapologetic, and revolving, above all, around the whims of Donald Trump. Images of the president, presiding over piles of cardboard-boxed burgers, quickly attained their virality; there was pretty much no way for them not to. Trump bragged like so about his own role in the procuring of these postmodern loaves and fishes: “Because of the Shutdown I served them massive amounts of Fast Food (I paid), over 1000 hamburgers etc. Within one hour, it was all gone. Great guys and big eaters!”
A dinner of champions, with only one winner: The event was thus very little about the Clemson Tigers, whose fate, on Monday evening, was to dine on lukewarm Whoppers, and very much about the man who hosted them. The leader, that leader wants you to know, MacGyvered some McDonald’s, and in that fact is an argument not just about the powers of the one politician, but also about the limits of the others. The pragmatic reason for the McMeal, as the president noted, was the partial government shutdown, which Trump himself initiated, and which he refuses to end, and which has resulted in, among many other things, the reduction of staffers at the White House who might traditionally prepare a sumptuous feast for visiting dignitaries. (Adding to the limitations: a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., that kept even some non-furloughed workers homebound on Monday.)
The broader implications of the meal, though, are philosophical. Lurking at the edges of the shutdown—wrapped, along with Wendy, around those rows of wilted burgers—are deeper questions about what government ultimately is for, and about what government can truly accomplish on behalf of a vast and hectic nation. Trump’s feast was in that sense also an argument, one that aligns him, to an unusual degree, with the most conservative elements of the party he is steadily remaking in his own image: Government, all those neat lines of Big Macs insist, isn’t as important as some Americans have assumed it to be. Institutions, staffs, committed teams striving on behalf of the country: overrated. The government is shut down, and yet the Filets-O-Fish appeared nonetheless, each one alleging that, shutdown or no, the people shall have their feast. A McChicken in every pot.
The burger buffet also made a different kind of argument—this one about the ways political communication will work in the age of viral iconography. In her remarkable new book Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power, the digital-culture scholar An Xiao Mina argues that memes, even the seemingly silly versions of them, can drive profound political change. Mina delves into the origin stories of the Grass-Mud Horse protests in China, and of the Arab Spring, and of Black Lives Matter, and of the many more movements around the world that were born online and radiated out to shake the complacencies and complicities of the physical world. One of the book’s sweeping ideas is that these movements, though they vary considerably by country and context, are united by fundamental dynamics: Memes, participatory and productively remixable, tap into the deep desire for storytelling—and for story-receiving—that is such a profound part of being human. The most powerful among them can summon what the UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, whom Mina quotes in a chapter aptly titled “Chaos Magic,” calls “the deep story”: the set of beliefs and feelings that underscore the stories we tell, and that spread, quietly, along with seemingly superficial takes and jokes and images. “Indeed,” Mina puts it, “memes allow us to more quickly develop the visual and verbal language around which movements organize.”
[ Read: When internet memes infiltrate the physical world ]
I thought of Mina’s book when I saw Donald Trump, hands outstretched, welcoming reporters into the State Dining Room to bear witness to a pile of Big Macs. Here was the American president, standing before the whirring cameras, willfully making himself into a meme, and using the particular power of the meme—deep stories, shared symbols—to do exactly what Mina’s argument predicted he might: to advocate for disruptive political change. The viral images of Trump and his McFeast allege, in spite of so much evidence to the contrary, that a functioning government is not fully necessary; the only thing Americans really need, the Quarter Pounders whisper, is Trump himself. He is both the strict father of political discourse and the generous father of ancient myth, capable of providing the American family with the 21st century’s version of the fatted calf. He is all you—all we—require. I alone can fix it.
Trump may be exceptional in his nourishment of authoritarian impulses; his use of memes as tools of argument, though, is becoming more and more common in American political discourse. While Bill Clinton might have sent the first presidential email, and Barack Obama might have posted the first presidential tweet, Donald Trump is, meaningfully, the first of the internet presidents. He embodies some of the core logics of the internet as a medium: He presents, through his angry and smirking and sometimes typo-laden tweets (before he bragged about “1000 hamburgers” on Tuesday morning, he boasted of the same amount of “hamberders”), a version of transparency. He responds to Americans’ fatigue with institutions by insisting that he is a one-man show. It was once understood that politicians, at the highest levels, doubled as embodied committees, their words and actions the result of the work of a team of behind-the-scenes advisers and writers and editors and handlers and image-makers. (The West Wing wrung seven seasons out of precisely that understanding.) But the internet, which prizes immediacy and amateurism and the illusion, at least, of authenticity, is rapidly changing those assumptions.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of course, understands that shift. Ilhan Omar understands it. Beto O’Rourke, who last week broadcast a dental cleaning, understands it. Elizabeth Warren is coming to understand it. Many of this moment’s rising leaders are coming to understand it. Donald Trump, however, was one of the first national politicians to fully weaponize the understanding: to use memes, at once facetious and deeply serious, to make his case for himself, seemingly by himself, to the American public. “We did it. We memed him into the presidency,” an attendee of Trump’s inaugural DeploraBall—the party derived its name from a gaffe that became its own kind of meme—told a reporter in 2017.
As politics bends to the will of the web, it is very likely that other wes will help to meme other politicians into positions of power. And it is very likely, as well, that Trump’s fast supper, for all its gaudy absurdities, will become, in its way, a more common kind of occurrence. The president used the circumstances created by the shutdown he had caused to argue for more shutdown; he used repetitive rows of congealing mass productions to insist that government itself is redundant. It was genius; it was pernicious; it was extremely fitting for the times. Politics is, and always has been, a project of image-making. Now, however, its spectacles can be assembled at the speed of a Big Mac.
The current debate in the United States about building up and reinforcing the border wall with Mexico may have distinctly American roots, but the problems, and the controversial solutions, are global. Growing numbers of immigrants, terrorist activity, continued drug trafficking, and protracted wars have sparked the construction of temporary and permanent border barriers in many regions worldwide. Our own Uri Friedman wrote in his 2016 article “A World of Walls,” “Of the 51 fortified boundaries built between countries since the end of World War II, around half were constructed between 2000 and 2014.” Below, a look at some famous and some lesser-known barriers across the globe.
“I got in a fight with my wife and I slapped her,” says an unidentified male. After a pause, he adds: “I held her and punched the wall.”
The man, whose face is blurred to protect his identity, is speaking to a dozen convicted abusers seated around a table. They’re participating in a group therapy session, part of a state-mandated program for men convicted of domestic violence in California. Over the course of the year-long program, the men identify and reflect on the beliefs and attitudes that underlie their violent behavior.
The short documentary Group—a co-directorial effort from the Chapman University students Jack Mullinkosson, Ben Allen, Claire Cai, Meghan Wells, and Haley Saunders—observes the men as they undergo multiple weeks of the emotionally grueling therapy, in which a compassionate therapist challenges them to take responsibility for their actions and confront their ingrained notions of toxic masculinity.
Under the tutelage of their professor, Sally Rubin, the film students took a no-frills approach to the documentary’s complex subject matter. In the absence of flashy setups and editorialized interviews, the camera simply captures the men as they process their emotions and navigate personal growth. In striving for objectivity—inasmuch as that’s possible while creating a documentary—the filmmakers humanize their subjects. The men of Group come across as multifaceted individuals with complicated personal histories (many of them were abused themselves). They express a desire to change, although the process proves more difficult for some than others; a few men, in particular, display defense mechanisms and attempt to rationalize their abusive acts. Eventually, however, they demonstrate an openness to recognizing their fallibility.
Wells, one of the filmmakers, told The Atlantic that when she began working on the project, she struggled with it ethically. The idea that she was making a film about domestic abuse from the perspective of the perpetrators made her uncomfortable. “I didn’t like hearing some of their rationales,” she said. “I didn’t want any survivor to watch this and not feel supported.” This tension was also felt by some of the other co-directors. It resulted in many charged conversations and, in Wells’s case, some sleepless nights. “But I realized that while we know violence is bad, that doesn’t stop physical abuse from happening,” Wells continued. “Maybe we need another approach to get people to start talking about abuse ... the conversation needs to look at how we can stop the cycle.”
The filmmakers mentioned that they were surprised to witness a substantial change in the men’s perspectives over the course of filming the group therapy sessions.
“I believe in alchemy,” Mullinkosson, one of the co-directors, said. “I think that with the right spell, anybody can turn rocks into gold. We watched, week after week, as these men went from apprentices to expert alchemists, capable of the perfect transmutation of a destructive thought pattern into sustainable morality.”
LONDON—The likelihood of Britain leaving the European Union without a deal just got a whole lot higher—and Prime Minister Theresa May is largely to blame.
On Tuesday, British lawmakers overwhelmingly voted against May’s negotiated agreement with the EU, delivering a damaging (albeit foreseeable) blow to her Brexit strategy. The deal, which outlines the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and paves the way for the next phase of negotiations that will decide their future trade relationship, was reached by negotiators late last year. But it still needs to be ratified by both the British and European Parliaments before it can go into effect, and without such an agreement in place, the U.K. will leave the bloc without a deal on March 29.
Whether the prime minister will get the chance to lead a government out of the EU, though, is not clear. The opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said immediately after MPs voted against the deal by a margin of 432 votes to 202—the biggest government defeat in decades—that he will move for a vote of no confidence in the government in a bid to force a general election. A vote is set to be held on Wednesday, though it appears unlikely that enough lawmakers would support it.
[Read: Brexit crisis. Theresa May in trouble. Rinse. Repeat.]
That the United Kingdom finds itself in this perilous position with barely 10 weeks to go before its scheduled departure from the EU is as much a testament to the lack of the viable alternatives to May’s deal (there are none with the backing of a parliamentary majority) as it is to her own failure in recent months to sell her agreement to the British public and their representatives. That task has been made more difficult, paradoxically, by the prime minister herself.
For the past two years leading up to this vote, May has insisted that the only thing worse than leaving the EU without a deal would be to leave it with a bad one. This mantra—repeated over and over again despite grim warnings of the political fallout, food shortages, and economic chaos that no deal would entail—was intended to convince EU negotiators that the U.K. would not be cowed, that it would “be prepared to walk out” of the negotiations if necessary. It was also an attempt by May to establish her own Brexiteer bona fides: to prove to those who voted to leave the EU in 2016 that she, an unenthusiastic campaigner for Britain to remain, was committed to see the result of the referendum through.
[Read: Can Britain deal with ‘no deal’?]
May has since distanced herself from this mantra—that no deal was preferable to a bad deal—and negotiated a Brexit agreement of her own. Her parliamentary adversaries are still using her own words against her, though. Some Brexit supporters within her own Conservative Party who oppose the deal’s so-called Irish backstop—a mechanism to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland, which they fear could could keep Britain tethered to the EU indefinitely—have openly embraced crashing out of the EU without a deal.
On the other side of the spectrum, those who oppose leaving the EU at all have used her agreement to push for an entirely different outcome: a new referendum on Britain leaving the EU. “The prime minister has repeatedly told us that the choice before parliament is her deal or no deal,” Sam Gyimah, a Conservative lawmaker and advocate for the so-called People’s Vote campaign for a second referendum, told journalists last week in London. “This is no choice at all.”
The prime minister may have changed her mind, and perhaps no longer believes that no deal is a suitable outcome for Britain, but she has crucially never retracted her claim. And in the meantime, multi-billion-pound contingency plans for such a scenario continue apace. Last month, the British government announced it would allocate an additional 2 billion pounds, or $2.57 billion, for no-deal preparations—a process complete with staged traffic jams, medicine stockpiling, and dubious ferry contracts. May has justified this spending as part of the government’s responsibility to prepare the country for every eventuality.
Though the majority of lawmakers oppose a no-deal withdrawal, that may not matter. Without a negotiated agreement, or a revocation or extension of Article 50, the EU’s time-limited exit procedure, the U.K. will leave the bloc on March 29 by default.
[Read: Theresa May is running out of options ]
“No deal is on its way,” Philippe Lamberts, a Green Party member of the European Parliament, told me by phone from Brussels last week. The Belgian politician, who sits on the European Parliament’s Brexit steering group, noted that an extension to Article 50 would require the unanimous consent of the EU’s 27 other member states, and would be granted only if the British government had a “credible game plan” to justify it.
May had been expected to return to Parliament within just three days to present a new proposal on how the government will proceed with Brexit—but her resounding defeat now opens up the possibility that she will not survive that long.
However British lawmakers decide to proceed, the EU urged them to make up their mind—and soon.
“The risk of a disorderly withdrawal … has increased with this evening’s vote,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, said in a statement. “Time is almost up.”
When Donald Trump gives interviews, it’s usually to Fox News. When he gives interviews to Fox, it’s usually to the channel’s opinion side, not to tougher questioners such as Chris Wallace or Bret Baier. But there he was Saturday night, talking to the normally friendly Jeanine Pirro and receiving what he called the most insulting question in his life.
“Are you now or have you ever worked for Russia, Mr. President?” Pirro asked, citing a New York Times article from over the weekend disclosing that the FBI in May 2017 had opened a counterintelligence inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working for Russia. She delivered the question dismissively, with a chuckle, but she asked it—and received a remarkable answer.
“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” Trump groused. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written. And if you read the article, you’d see that they found absolutely nothing.”
The president then talked for some time, but he never actually denied working for the Russians, and “They found absolutely nothing” doesn’t sound like what you say when there’s nothing to find. On Monday, Trump was asked the question again during a press gaggle, and this time he denied it, while again protesting the question.
“I never worked for Russia,” he said. “And you know that answer better than anybody. I never worked for Russia. Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it’s a disgrace that you even asked that question, because it’s a whole big, fat hoax. It’s just a hoax.”
The FBI counterintelligence probe was passed off to Special Counsel Robert Mueller when he was appointed in May 2017. As a matter of law, it’s not clear whether Mueller is still pursuing that line of investigation, much less what new information or conclusions he might have produced. But as a matter of politics, the burden of proof is now on Trump to explain. There may well be some non-nefarious explanation, but it’s the president’s responsibility to clarify his long pattern of strange behavior toward Russia.
Consider the other big Russia-related story of the weekend. The Washington Post revealed that Trump has concealed details of his meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin even from other top members of his staff, going so far as to confiscate the notes produced by his interpreter during a meeting and instructing the interpreter not to speak with other officials. As I have reported, interpreters are privy to highly secret conversations, carry security clearance, and are accustomed to keeping secrets. Nonetheless, this sort of secrecy is unusual, the Post notes:
As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.
Why would Trump do this? Yes, he has a weird tendency to destroy documents (illegally). Yes, he had a vexed relationship with then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has since criticized the president’s leadership. But neither of these answers really explains why Trump has been so secretive about his interactions with Putin, and it’s silly for the public (and press) to spend a lot of time speculating when Trump can answer the question.
Until he does, the interpreter episode joins a long list of incidents where Trump was strangely conciliatory or even obsequious toward Moscow. Max Boot laid out a detailed list of questionable interactions in Monday’s Washington Post, but there are a few lowlights worth reviewing.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly praised Putin and downplayed objections to Russia’s seizure of Crimea. In one extraordinary campaign rally, he called on Russia to hack emails from former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who happened to be his rival for the presidency. (Russian hackers made their first attempt to do so that very day.) He hired Paul Manafort as his campaign manager, despite copious warning signs including his work as a lobbyist for foreign dictators and his offer to work for free. Manafort was one of several aides who in June 2016 met with Russians who the aides believed were bringing damaging info about Clinton. (Trump would later dictate a misleading statement about the meeting.)
Several Trump advisers, especially George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had extensive contacts with Russians, which they have attempted to downplay. The Trump Organization also claimed that it had cut off discussions about building a tower in Russia, when in fact it remained in close contact with Russian government officials about the project.
Before and after the election, Trump dismissed the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was interfering in U.S. politics. During the presidential transition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who attended the June 2016 meeting), sought to set up a secret back channel with Russia that would bypass the federal government. Meanwhile, National-Security Adviser–designate Michael Flynn had conversations with the Russian ambassador, about which he lied to FBI agents and Vice President Mike Pence. Trump only fired Flynn when his lying was revealed in the press.
During a February 2017 interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump dismissed concerns about Putin killing dissidents and journalists. In May 2017, he abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, citing the Russia investigation as his motivation. The day after he fired Comey, he welcomed Russia’s ambassador and foreign minister to the White House—an arrangement that rattled some intelligence experts on its own—where he told them that firing the “nutjob” Comey had relieved “great pressure [on him] because of Russia.” Trump also disclosed sensitive classified information to the Russians.
During the summer of 2017, Trump continued to deny that Russia had interfered in the presidential election, despite a growing body of evidence. In July 2017, he met with Putin in Hamburg, with a tiny team of advisers; Trump greeted Putin warmly and, according to the Russians, Trump “accepted” Putin’s denials of election interference.
That meeting turned out to be only a warm-up for a disastrous meeting with Putin in Helsinki the following summer, in which Trump kowtowed to the Russian leader, openly took Putin’s side over U.S. intelligence on the interference issue, suggested allowing Russia to take part in the inquiry, and entertained allowing the Russians to question a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow.
[David Frum: Why is Trump spouting Russian propaganda?]
More recently, Trump regurgitated a strange and bogus Russian assertion that the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan in 1979 to fight terrorists. According to the Times, the president has also discussed the idea of withdrawing the United States from NATO, which would effectively destroy the organization and fulfill one of Putin’s greatest desires in geopolitics.
Any of these specific incidents, and many others that I have omitted, might be individually explained away fairly easily. As a pattern, they’re too weird to dismiss with a shrug or cobbled-together explanations. On Tuesday morning, Trump retweeted a pair of arguments that President Barack Obama had behaved similarly when he told then–Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in 2012 that he would have more “flexibility” after the election. That moment did indeed raise objections at the time, but it was notable in part because it conflicted with the Obama administration’s harder line toward the Kremlin. Trump’s indulgences toward Putin are part of a lengthy pattern, which is why they deserve, and have received, more scrutiny.
That, again, doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation. And it doesn’t mean that any of them are crimes. But the president is a politician, and he will be judged in the court of politics. The onus is not on the public to speculate about why Trump behaves so strangely with regard to Russia. It’s on Trump to explain it to the nation he was elected to serve.
As the humans go about their affairs, living atop a thin crust floating on molten rock, the liquid iron in the Earth’s core is churning in strange, erratic ways.
This is a problem because those humans, clever in some ways, have figured out that the movement of the liquid iron creates a magnetic field. For centuries, their compasses have pointed “north.” But where that is, exactly, is changing.
After observing, if not exactly understanding, the magnetic field’s recent behavior, scientists decided to update the World Magnetic Model, which underlies navigation for ships and planes today. As Nature reported, the update was supposed to come January 15. But the model is jointly developed by the British Geological Survey and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. government is shut down.
The NOAA web page for the World Magnetic Model currently says, “The website you are trying to access is not available at this time due to a lapse in appropriation.”
Read: [The upheaval at the end of the world]
This isn’t a big crisis: The north magnetic pole has always drifted. Since scientists began tracking its location in the 19th century, it has moved from Canada toward Siberia. (The north magnetic pole is close to but distinct from the north geographic pole, whose location is determined by the axis on which the Earth spins.) For most of the 20th century, the pole moved about nine miles a year. Then, beginning in the 1990s, it moved about 35 miles a year.
What’s making the north magnetic pole speed up? Scientist have proposed that a jet of liquid iron under Canada may be dragging it toward Siberia. Interestingly enough, notes Ciaran Beggan, a geophysicist with the British Geological Survey, the south magnetic pole has not moved much at all.
On top of the North Pole’s movement, scientists have noticed a series of mysterious pulses in the Earth’s magnetic field. No one can say what causes them. “Our knowledge of what’s happening in the Earth’s core is very limited,” says Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder. But the World Magnetic Model cannot account for those pulses, and its predictions are especially off near the North Pole.
One of these pulses came in 2016, right after a scheduled update to the model. “The error started to grow faster than usual,” says Chulliat. So the team decided to compute a new version using satellite data. They planned a release on January 15, 2019, ahead of the scheduled update that usually happens every five years. The new model has the North Pole 25 miles away from what the previous one predicted, according to Beggan.
The updated model itself is ready, and Chulliat says they can make it downloadable for users within a few days. They’re just waiting for the government to reopen.
Read: [It’s not just the longest shutdown ever]
Practically speaking, this delay in the World Magnetic Model update matters only to those currently engaged in navigation requiring great precision around the North Pole. The farther away you are from the pole, the smaller the error. Anyone looking at the compass in a phone in the United States will find it pointing northward with reasonable accuracy.
But in another way, the episode underscores just how mysterious the inner workings of the Earth still are, and how attempts to understand such global phenomena require collaboration and stability that perhaps should not be taken for granted, given humanity’s own inconstant nature.
As I stood at the window of a Weed World Candies truck on Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue last week, a gray-haired man I didn’t know tapped me on my shoulder. “It doesn’t work,” he said, motioning at the truck, which sells candies laced with a cannabis- or hemp-derived compound called cannabidiol.
“I didn’t ask you,” I responded, turning back to the window.
“It doesn’t work,” he reiterated, louder, as though it was easier to believe that he had been misheard rather than dismissed.
We went back and forth like that for several rounds, yelling at each other in 30-degree weather in front of an RV wrapped in marijuana-leaf graphics and blasting Bob Marley music. Finally, he stopped trying to enlighten me and shuffled off to let me buy my lollies in peace. As I tore into my new treats, I realized the whole thing had been a scene from the internet’s dominant cannabidiol discourse come to life: Some money had been spent and some opinions had been said, but no one had gained any information.
Cannabidiol—more commonly abbreviated as CBD—isn’t psychoactive and, apparently to the man’s disappointment, won’t get you high. Instead, many people report that consuming it makes them feel less anxious, helps them sleep, or eases joint pain. Over the past two years, CBD in the form of oils and supplements has become widely distributed across the United States, even in places with no level of cannabis legalization. Now the trend’s new frontier is food. My first clue that it had hit some kind of critical mass was seeing a local restaurant put a sign out front announcing the debut of CBD empanadas. From design-oriented Instagram seltzer to your local pizza place, brands and restaurants want you to order some CBD and eat your feelings.
The problem is, it’s not easy to know what you’re actually ingesting, or if it’ll actually change how you feel. At best, CBD in America exists in a confusing state of quasi-legality and yet-to-be-realized potential. Experts estimate that the market for it could balloon to $22 billion by 2022, but with cannabis and hemp laws changing rapidly across the country, the chemical is almost entirely unregulated on the consumer market, with no end-product labeling or composition standards to help shoppers understand what they’re buying.
The market is rife with misinformation even when CBD is sold as a relatively simple oil or supplement. When it’s squirted into a latte or baked into a cookie, CBD’s uses and effects get even more opaque. The chemical’s loudest advocates make health claims far beyond the current scientific evidence, and its harshest critics often dismiss the compound entirely as just another snake oil in America’s long tradition of health scams. Journalists are starting to get a handle on what CBD actually does and what is actually known about it, but along with researchers and regulators, we’re still playing catch-up when it comes to the people who have pushed the compound into what feels like mainstream overnight success: entrepreneurs.
“Every day, I get a pitch or two for new CBD products,” says Rosemary Donahue, Allure magazine’s wellness editor. In recent months, she has seen the products start to shift away from supplements and toward “beverages, like coffee and seltzers, and even chocolates.” These products provide an easier point of entry for the casually curious: You may not want to order a vial of weird-tasting oil from a company you’ve never heard of online, but spending $3 to squirt some CBD into your daily latte feels pretty low-stakes. Even Coca-Cola is reported to be looking into the CBD-beverage business.
Whether that $3 will get you anything is a more complicated question. Esther Blessing, a researcher and psychiatry professor at New York University Langone Health, is one of only a few researchers who have completed any sort of study of CBD’s effects on mood. She looked at its potential to treat anxiety, and although she stresses the results are very preliminary, she sees a lot of promise. “Studies so far have shown that CBD of a specific dose is roughly as effective as drugs like Valium and other benzodiazepines in reducing experimental anxiety,” she says.
But experimental anxiety, which is when stressors are applied to make a volunteer feel anxious for a test, is different than clinical anxiety, and long-term, rigorous clinical trials are necessary to find CBD’s real-life effects on patients. Several are under way right now, including one Blessing is conducting at NYU, but the process of completing those, finding appropriate dosages, and creating a consistent drug that can meet Food and Drug Administration approval standards takes time. “Getting into the full pipeline of FDA approval is probably eight to 10 years away,” Blessing says.
[Read: The government’s weed is terrible]
In the meantime, there’s virtually no way for consumers to feel confident about what or how much they’re taking when they buy a CBD cookie, and dosage has a big impact on what we know about CBD’s effects so far. How transparent a bakery or coffee shop decides to be about its sourcing and dosing is completely up to them. “It’s actually really hard to get pure CBD. It’s really expensive, and there’s a limited number of high-grade producers across the world,” Blessing says. “If I’m a coffee company that’s coming onto the scene and I want to make some money, I don’t really want to put a lot of stuff in it.”
Sometimes, products that claim to contain CBD don’t have any at all when tested, Blessing says. More commonly, though, cookies and beverages simply contain far less than 300 milligrams of CBD, which is the minimum amount she says has been found effective in the preliminary science so far. Vybes, a brand of CBD-laced drinks, has 15 milligrams of the compound in each bottle. Feelz by Chloe, a line of CBD desserts from the vegan fast-casual chain By Chloe, has said in the past that each dessert contains only 2.5 milligrams of CBD a serving.
Still, Blessing notes, amounts below 100 milligrams haven’t even been tested, so it’s not impossible that small amounts may have some effects. As far as anyone knows, heating up CBD doesn’t degrade its effects, and early evidence suggests that taking it along with high-fat food (like a dessert) aids the body’s absorption of the chemical. Beyond that, all anyone has is guesswork. By Chloe didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about its sourcing and dosing, but I tried a few of the company’s CBD treats anyway. They were all incredibly tasty, and after consuming three cookies in the course of 24 hours, I accidentally fell asleep on my couch at an indeterminate time of the evening and woke up at 4:30 in the morning. Was it the CBD, or was I just tired? Maybe it was a classic placebo effect, in which I expected to be relaxed and became so.
[Read: Marijuana and the modern lady]
CBD research is still in its infancy because both the substance itself and the cultivation of the plants from which it’s derived have long been illegal in the United States. And despite all those cookies you see for sale, CBD does seem to remain illegal, unless FDA approved. In December, hemp cultivation was legalized nationwide as a provision of the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018. But the FDA released a statement explicating the agency’s stance on CBD’s legality: In short, the FDA does not recognize a distinction between cannabis- and hemp-derived CBD and, for the time being, considers both to be illegal—especially as a questionably safe food additive. Although CBD isn’t dangerous to healthy people, it can affect how the body metabolizes certain types of medication, which Blessing says could lead to overdose in some cases. (Because of the government shutdown, the FDA is unavailable to explain its stance or enforcement plans in further detail.)
Even if you live in a state where recreational marijuana is legal, the mainstream sale of CBD in bakeries and coffee shops is still a whole different issue, according to Griffen Thorne, a California-based attorney with Harris Bricken, a firm specializing in cannabis-trade issues. For cannabis, “one of the things that’s a really big requirement in California is safety testing at the distributor level,” Thorne says. “That’s not really there yet for hemp CBD products.” For instance, CBD products sometimes contain enough lingering THC to produce psychoactive effects.
Because hemp-derived CBD currently lacks labeling and purity standards that are required of cannabis products sold at legal dispensaries, it exists in a regulatory limbo that laws don’t yet address. In the meantime, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has announced that starting in July, putting CBD in food products will cost businesses points on their health inspections.
Despite some relatively tough talk from regulatory bodies, it can seem like they’re trying to close the barn door after the horse got out. CBD is already everywhere, and people are curious about it for reasons that seem to go far beyond trendiness, such as financial precariousness and health-care costs. “People are panicking and looking for things. They’re like, ‘What if I don’t have insurance because I get laid off? What can I replace my meds with?’” says Donahue, the Allure editor. CBD fits neatly with a growing distrust in technology and in the pharmaceutical industry, and America’s moderating view of cannabis means that many people see CBD as a safer alternative for anxiety or pain that’s worth trying.
For most of those people, if they eat a cookie, it seems like the worst thing that could happen is nothing. At least they got to eat a cookie.
A pivotal moment in the trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the two-time prison escapee and alleged kingpin of Mexico’s infamous Sinaloa cartel, came when prosecutors played for the jury a phone call between Guzmán and a cartel operative nicknamed Gato. Guzmán, federal prosecutors allege, is overheard in the call directing a cartel member to bribe a commander in the Mexican Federal Police.
“Is he receiving the monthly payment?” Guzmán asks. Gato confirms the cartel is sending the officer regular bribes, then hands the phone over to the “federale” himself, who confirms the payment and pledges his loyalty.
Guzmán is facing charges of money laundering, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder stemming from his time allegedly running an empire that funneled drugs and guns throughout South America and between the U.S. and Mexico. In court, federal prosecutors have played multiple calls from Guzmán: asking for updates, ordering and moving shipments, haggling over the price of kilos, and praising or reprimanding his operatives as they carry out his commands. (“Take it easy with the police,” he scolds Iván “El Cholo” Cruz, the cartel’s top assassin, in one recorded call. “Well, you taught us to be a wolf,” Cruz replies.)
[Read: How DEA agents took down Mexico’s most vicious drug cartel]
In total, the FBI intercepted more than 200 calls from Guzmán himself, and hundreds more from his operatives, lieutenants, and family members. But only last week did the FBI reveal how: They had an inside man. In court last Thursday, the FBI agent Stephen Marston revealed a series of high-risk operations coordinated with the Sinaloa IT guy, and eventual federal informant, Christian Rodriguez, who has since relocated to the U.S. under FBI protection.
“We realized without insider access to the system we were not going to get inside,” Marston told the court Thursday.
Rodriguez’s first act as informant was to circumvent the secure network he’d installed in Guzmán’s mountain hideout. In May 2010, Rodriguez faked an outage that temporarily took the network offline. Jorge Cifuentes, Rodriguez’s then-boss, assumed the servers were down because Rodriguez had simply forgotten to renew the lease. In truth, the outage was orchestrated to force Guzmán and his agents to use compromised cellphones, which allowed the FBI to listen in on Guzmán allegedly negotiating a six-ton cocaine deal with members of the FARC guerrilla group.
But the outage was only temporary, and Marston and the FBI wanted full access to Guzmán’s network. So agents directed Rodriguez to move the servers for its network from Canada, where encryption laws had circumvented the FBI’s search warrants, to the Netherlands. The Dutch outlet NL Times reported that the Dutch High Tech Crime team worked with the FBI over 18 months to compromise the network and gain access to the hundreds of calls forming the bedrock of the prosecution’s case.
But ultimately, it was Guzmán’s own fondness for surveillance that helped federal agents charge him. Rodriguez testified in court that, at Guzmán’s behest, he personally installed 50 BlackBerry phones with monitoring software called “FlexiSpy.” The software is undetectable and can read text messages and call logs, steal passwords saved to the device, and remotely switch on and listen to the microphone. It markets itself as a form of parental control and employee monitoring, and starts at $68 a month. (The software has drawn harsh condemnation from technologists and advocacy groups supporting domestic violence survivors, who say the software abets stalking and empowers abusers to control their victims.)
Guzmán called the BlackBerrys his “special phones” and used them to spy on his inner circle—eventually developing a habit, Rodriguez told the court, of making unexpected phone calls to his people, then activating the microphone after the call ended to hear what they said about him. Rodriguez sent the phone not only to his lieutenants, but to his wife, children, and mistresses as well. “How are the sales going?” he texts a mistress, Agustina Cabanillas Acosta, in 2012. “Like busy bees,” she replies.
[Read: The next data mine is your bedroom]
Rodriguez told the FBI of El Chapo’s internal spy network and agents subpoenaed FlexiSpy, obtaining the messages between Guzmán and his wife and girlfriends, who worked as operatives themselves. Both Acosta and Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, suspected Guzmán of using their BlackBerrys to spy on them—even as no one in the cartel seemed to have any suspicions about Rodriguez. Acosta reportedly texted a friend she “[didn’t] trust” the BlackBerrys “because the bastard can locate them.”
“I’m way smarter than him,” she added.
There’s a perception, flawed as it may be, that college admissions are a zero-sum game. One student gets in, another loses out. That perception is even more acute when it comes to selective institutions, where the seats are few and the applications from qualified students are plenty.
Once students get into such selective schools—with all of the money, prestige, and support that comes with them—they tend to perform well, stay in school, and graduate. According to a new report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, that is particularly true of students who transfer from community colleges. The report, released Tuesday, finds that graduation rates of community-college transfers meet or exceed those of students who enroll at selective institutions as first-time freshman. Community-college transfers also graduate at higher rates than students who transfer from other four-year colleges.
[Read: What Trump doesn’t know about community colleges]
But as Jennifer Glynn, the director of research at the foundation, put it, “There is an underrepresentation issue.” Selective colleges don’t enroll a lot of transfer students. Princeton, for example, recently moved to reinstate its transfer program. The institution hadn’t accepted transfers since 1990. The university then offered admission to just 13 transfer students. That low number is not uncommon at private, elite schools like Princeton.
According to the report, 35 public selective colleges together “enroll 4 times as many transfer students as the 140 private selective institutions.” That’s likely due in part to the low overall enrollment at private institutions, alongside a commitment to a “traditional” college experience, one in which a student graduates from high school and goes directly to live on campus. What makes a traditional experience is changing though. These days, the typical student is likely older, or lives off campus, or has a full-time job, or is going to school part-time, or has a child, or has some combination of any of those traits. And more often, students are starting their higher education at community colleges. In fact, more than 40 percent of all U.S. undergraduates attend community colleges.
Of those community-college students who want to transfer to a four-year college, there are many who might be a good fit for highly selective institutions. (Of course, they could also succeed at a wide range of schools.) However, community-college transfer students make up just 15 percent of all newly enrolling bachelor’s-degree students nationwide, and only about 5 percent of enrolling undergraduates at the top 100 schools.
For the students who do ultimately transfer to selective colleges, it’s not that there are just a few shining stars skewing the data—say, a couple of community colleges launching dozens and dozens of students to selective institutions. The greatness is everywhere. “Fully 84 percent of the nation’s two-year institutions transferred at least one student to a selective four-year institution in fall 2016,” the report says.
[Read: The case for free community college]
Admissions officers are starting to notice, as evidenced by a 2018 National Association for College Admission Counseling report that found that roughly 90 percent of admissions counselors regard transfers as moderately or considerably important to enrollment goals. But it will likely take considerable gumption to push selective colleges to enroll more transfer students, if only because the status quo is so baked in to admissions officers’ mind-set. Foundations such as Jack Kent Cooke have been working with colleges to help them enroll and fund transfer students, and organizations such as the American Talent Initiative have been pushing to get more community-college students into these schools. Even still, the mighty few who have large endowments, a working business model, and few empty seats may not feel compelled to enroll more transfer students.
Still, this report shows that if admissions officers will accept them, community-college students are prepared to succeed at any college—even the most selective.
Since 2013, Kristina Olson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, has been running a large, long-term study to track the health and well-being of transgender children—those who identify as a different gender from the one they were assigned at birth. Since the study’s launch, Olson has also heard from the parents of gender-nonconforming kids, who consistently defy gender stereotypes but have not socially transitioned. They might include boys who like wearing dresses or girls who play with trucks, but who have not, for example, changed the pronouns they use. Those parents asked whether their children could participate in the study. Olson agreed.
After a while, she realized that she had inadvertently recruited a sizable group of 85 gender-nonconforming participants, ages 3 to 12. And as she kept in touch with the families over the years, she learned that some of those children eventually transitioned. “Enough of them were doing it that we had this unique opportunity to look back at our data to see whether the kids who went on to transition were different to those who didn’t,” Olson says.
By studying the 85 gender-nonconforming children she recruited, her team has now shown, in two separate ways, that those who go on to transition do so because they already have a strong sense of their identity.
This is a topic for which long-term data are scarce. And as transgender identities have gained more social acceptance, more parents are faced with questions about whether and how to support their young gender-nonconforming children.
“There’s a lot of public writing focused on the idea that we have no idea which of these gender-nonconforming kids will or will not eventually identify as trans,” says Olson. And if only small proportions do, as some studies have suggested, the argument goes that “they shouldn’t be transitioning.” She disputes that idea. “Our study suggests that it’s not random,” she says. “We can’t say this kid will be trans and this one won’t be, but it’s not that we have no idea!”
“This study provides further credence to guidance that practitioners and other professionals should affirm—rather than question—a child’s assertion of their gender, particularly for those who more strongly identify with their gender,” says Russell Toomey from the University of Arizona, who studies LGBTQ youth and is himself transgender.
(A brief note on terms, since there’s a lot of confusion about them: Some people think that kids who show any kind of gender nonconformity are transgender, while others equate the term with medical treatments such as hormone blockers or reassignment surgeries. Neither definition is right, and medical interventions aren’t even in the cards for young children of the age Olson studied. That’s why, in her study, she uses pronouns as the centerpiece marker of a social transition. Changing them is a significant statement of identity and is often accompanied by a change in hairstyle, clothing, and even names.)
When the 85 gender-nonconforming children first enrolled in Olson’s study, her team administered a series of five tests that asked what toys and clothes they preferred; whether they preferred hanging out with girls or boys; how similar they felt to girls or boys; and which genders they felt they currently were or would be. Together, these markers of identity gave the team a way to quantify each kid’s sense of gender.
The team, including James Rae, now at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, found that children who showed stronger gender nonconformity at this point were more likely to socially transition. So, for example, assigned boys who had the most extreme feminine identities were most likely to be living as girls two years later. This link couldn’t be explained by other factors, such as how liberal the children’s parents were. Instead, the children’s gender identity predicted their social transitions. “I think this wouldn’t surprise parents of trans kids, and my findings are often ‘duh’ findings for them,” says Olson. “It seems pretty intuitive.”
Read: [Why is the media so worried about the parents of trans kids?]
Charlotte Tate, a psychologist from San Francisco State University, says that this quantitative research supports what she and other transgender scholars have long noted through qualitative work: There really is something distinctive and different about the kids who eventually go on to transition. From interviews with trans people, “one of the most consistent themes is that at some early point, sometimes as early as age 3 to 5, there’s this feeling that the individual is part of another gender group,” Tate says. When told that they’re part of their assigned gender, “they’ll say, ‘No, that’s not right. That doesn’t fit me.’ They have self-knowledge that’s private and that they’re trying to communicate.”
Olson’s team also showed that those differences in gender identity are the cause of social transitions—and not, as some have suggested, their consequence. After assessing the group of 85 gender-nonconforming children, the team administered the same five tests of gender identity to a different group of 84 transgender children who had already transitioned, and to a third group of 85 cisgender children, who identify with the sex they were assigned to at birth. None of these three groups differed in the average strength of their identities and preferences. In other words, trans girls who are still living as boys identify as girls just as strongly as trans girls who have transitioned to living as girls, and as cis girls who have always lived as girls. Put another way: Being treated as a girl doesn’t make a trans child feel or act more like a girl, because she might have always felt like that.
“Implicit in a lot of people’s concerns about social transition is this idea that it changes the kids in some way, and that making this decision is going to necessarily put a kid on a particular path” says Olson. “This suggests otherwise.” Children change their gender because of their identities; they don’t change their identities because they change their gender.
“The findings of this compelling study provide further evidence that decisions to socially transition are driven by a child’s understanding of their own gender,” says Toomey. “This is critically important information given that recent public debates and flawed empirical studies erroneously implicate ‘pushy’ parents, peers, or other sources, like social media, in the rising prevalence of children and adolescents who identify as transgender.”
[Read: Many pediatricians don’t know how to handle gender-dysphoric kids]
Olson’s new findings come on the back of another controversial study, from 2013, in which Thomas Steensma from University Medical Center in Amsterdam studied 127 adolescents who had been referred to a clinic for “gender dysphoria”—a medical term describing the distress when someone’s gender identity doesn’t match the gender assigned at birth. Only four people in that cohort had socially transitioned in early childhood, and all of them ended up identifying as transgender. By contrast, most of those who had not transitioned did not have gender dysphoria later.
“People have taken from that study that a lot of these kids are not going to be trans adults so you shouldn’t be socially transitioning them, or that social transitions are changing kids’ identities,” Olson says. But “we’re suggesting that the kids who are socially transitioning seem to be different even before that transition, which shifts the interpretation of that past study.” (Steensma did not respond to requests for comment.)
Olson admits that there are weaknesses in her new study. It’s relatively small, and all the children came from wealthy, educated, and disproportionately white families. And since it began almost by accident, when parents of gender-nonconforming children approached her, she couldn’t preregister her research plans, a growing practice in psychology. (It reduces the temptation to fiddle with one’s methods until they yield positive results and instills confidence among other scientists.)
To at least partly address these shortcomings, Olson did a multiverse analysis: She reran her analyses in many different ways to see whether she still got the same result. What if, instead of using all five tests of gender identity, she just looked at combinations of four? Or three? Two? The team ran all these what-if scenarios, and in almost all of them, the results were the same. “They went above and beyond the analyses typically conducted and presented in scientific journals,” says Toomey. “Their results were robust across these additional tests, suggesting that readers can have a high level of confidence in these findings.”
Olson stresses that she has no magic test that can predict exactly which children will transition and which will not. It’s a question of probabilities. In her study, based on their answers, all the children got a gender-nonconformity score between 0 and 1. For comparison, those who scored 0.5 had a one-in-three chance of socially transitioning, while those who scored 0.75 had a one-in-two chance.
“How much gender nonconformity is ‘enough’ to allay the anxieties parents feel around transition is an open question,” says Tey Meadow, a sociologist from Columbia University who studies sexuality and gender and has written for The Atlantic. Parents are the ultimate arbiters of a child’s access to transition, and they make decisions “in a culture that encourages parents to look for every possible alternative to transness,” Meadow adds.
“It's not like you can take a blood sample or do an MRI,” says Aaron Devor, the University of Victoria’s chair of transgender studies, who is himself transgender. “One of the phrases often used is ‘consistent, persistent, and insistent.’ When you get that constellation, that kid is also a kid who might want to transition. And that’s what [Olson’s] research is corroborating. It adds some very valuable data.”
Devor and others note that Olson’s earlier studies suggest that children who are supported and affirmed in their transitions are just as mentally healthy as cisgender peers. That reminds him of seminal work by the American psychologist Evelyn Hooker. In the 1950s, when many psychologists saw homosexuality as a mental illness (largely because they had only ever worked with gay people who had records of arrest or mental-health problems), Hooker surveyed a more representative sample and found that gay and straight men don’t differ in their mental health. That was instrumental in getting homosexuality removed from a list of mental-health disorders in 1987. “We’re sitting in a similar moment today with transgenderism,” says Devor. “The mental-health issues that we see are largely the result of living a life that blocks your expression of your gender. My view is that the work coming out of Olson’s group will have an Evelyn Hooker effect.”
I am reminded of what Robyn Kanner wrote in The Atlantic last year: “Society has done nothing for trans youth for so many years. People have to trust that the youth who sway in the breeze of gender will land on their feet when they’re ready. Wherever that is, it’ll be beautiful.”
In November 1973, at the end of the Yom Kippur War, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made his first visit to Cairo, to meet Anwar Sadat, Egypt’s president. America was in the process of withdrawing from Vietnam and Richard Nixon was in the throes of the Watergate crisis that would soon drive him from office. The new secretary of state wanted to conceal the appearance of American weakness with effective Middle East diplomacy. To establish his credibility with Sadat and a broader Arab audience, Kissinger told him, “I will never promise you something I can’t deliver.”
Mike Pompeo would have done well to follow Kissinger’s example last week on his first visit to Cairo as secretary of state. Instead, in a speech to an Arab audience, he promised the world—and will surely deliver much less.
As in Kissinger’s era, the United States is drawing down troops—this time from the Middle East—and the president’s authority is shaky at home, where the threat of impeachment is again in the air. Like Kissinger, Pompeo aims to use his diplomacy to show that America can still be “a force for good” in the troubled region. But he also pledged that America would work “to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.
[Read: In the Middle East, is Trump the anti-Obama or Obama 2.0?]
Here’s the catch: Diplomacy requires leverage, which President Donald Trump squandered when he decided to pull the plug on America’s troop presence in Syria. America is now poorly positioned to shape that country’s post-civil-war political outcome, especially when it comes to Iran’s role there.
The day before Pompeo’s speech, Trump’s national-security adviser, John Bolton, tried to deny this reality by conditioning U.S. troop withdrawal on securing a commitment from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan not to harm America’s Syrian Kurdish allies. Erdoğan responded by snubbing Bolton and denouncing him in the Turkish Parliament. If the United States can’t get Turkey, a NATO ally, to do its bidding in Syria, how is Pompeo going to expel all those Iranian boots? One can imagine Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei as he watched Pompeo’s speech, slapping his thigh and saying, “Yeah, you and whose army?”
This isn’t to say the United States is now totally powerless; Pompeo can effect change if he picks the right battles and personally devotes time, energy, and a touch of guile to the challenge.
Kissinger understood that America’s standing in the region, at least in that era of retrenchment, depended on convincing Israel to withdraw from the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula. It took Kissinger days of arduous, emotional negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to convince her that this would serve Israel’s interests—but in the end he did, laying the foundations for peace between Israel and Egypt.
[Read: Mike Pompeo’s worldview? Do as Trump does]
Pompeo faces a similar test with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudis’ U.S.-supported bombing campaign in Yemen has contributed to a humanitarian crisis that now threatens 14 million Yemenis. The war has been a windfall for Iran, which has used its Houthi proxies in Yemen to establish a foothold on Saudi Arabia’s southern border while benefiting from the tarnishing of Saudi and American reputations. Ending the war would reduce opportunities for Iranian meddling and demonstrate that America is indeed a force for good in the region.
Will Pompeo work MBS, as the crown prince is known, as Kissinger worked Meir? It seems highly unlikely. If Pompeo were Kissinger, he would have seized on MBS’s momentary defensiveness after the Jamal Khashoggi murder to persuade the prince to change course in Yemen. Instead, Pompeo glad-handed MBS in Riyadh, gave lip service to Yemen in his speech, and left the hard work there to Martin Griffiths, a United Nations envoy. Griffiths has at least been able to broker an agreement that will allow much needed humanitarian relief to flow through the Yemeni port of Hodeida. But that is a fragile achievement that can only be sustained if Pompeo can now work with MBS to end Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the war.
One initiative Pompeo is taking in the Arab world is to promote the Middle East Strategic Alliance, dubbed the “Arab NATO,” to counter Iran in the Gulf. But he faces a critical stumbling block: Saudi Arabia and other would-be members have embargoed Qatar, which happens to host the largest American air base in the region.
All these countries remain dependent for their security on the United States. In such circumstances, Kissinger would have cajoled, threatened, and enticed them into ending such a self-defeating feud. That’s how he brought to a close the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Yet instead of using his leverage to insist the Gulf Arabs resolve the dispute, Pompeo subcontracted the issue to General Anthony Zinni, who quietly resigned in frustration on the same day as Pompeo’s speech.
[Read: Henry Kissinger will not apologize]
What about the Arab-Israeli peace process, through which Kissinger promoted an era of American dominance in the Middle East? Every other secretary of state since Kissinger has taken up that endeavor. Not Pompeo. In his Cairo speech, he devoted one sentence to it. He has left that difficult challenge to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has been tinkering with his peace plan for more than two years now with no expectation that he will launch it anytime soon.
Pompeo did find time to discuss Trump’s controversial decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, an unwelcome move in the Arab world because it ignored Palestinian aspirations there. Weirdly, Pompeo defended the decision as the fulfillment of a Trump campaign promise, as if keeping one’s word for domestic political reasons would make Trump’s word in the Middle East more reliable. Kissinger would have been more wily; he always explained to his Arab interlocutors that he was doing his best to resist or shape domestic political pressures.
Ten years ago, President Barack Obama gave a speech in Cairo promising his Arab audience a new partnership based on respect, tolerance, and Israeli-Palestinian peace. His failure to deliver alienated much of the Arab world. Pompeo used his Cairo speech to excoriate Obama, but unless he steps up his diplomatic game, he’s also likely to leave America’s friends in the region deeply disappointed.
Kissinger, on the other hand, gave no speeches in the Arab world. He preferred to let his diplomatic breakthroughs speak for themselves.
Last week, George Packer described what it was like to visit the Lincoln Memorial during the government shutdown. “It shamed me to read” Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural, Packer wrote. “Lincoln’s eloquence touched levels of morality and high resolve that were preposterously out of reach in the first days of 2019, in the third year of the Trump presidency.”
I found the article very moving until I got toward the end. Then I was disappointed. This nation is dividing and picking sides. I had hoped I was reading a neutral article, one that was based on the concerns of its people. Instead, at the end you seem to blame President Trump for all of the issues and the shutdown. Yes, he made the decision to shut down, but we seem to have two equally stubborn opposing sides. Both are butting heads and refusing to budge. A compromise of some sort, with each side deciding what is most important to them, needs to come about. It isn’t about who wins in the end. It’s about the people in this nation who voted them into office, who are suffering because of this stalemate. As a nation, in order to survive, we need to quit looking at what side we want to be on. We need to be the embodiment of “We the People,” not “We, the blue or the red side.”
Mary I. Williams
Elizabethton, Tenn.
Why all this angst and gnashing of teeth? We have been through worse. We will get through this.
Andrew Hartman
Longboat Key, Fla.
I usually find great solace in Lincoln’s words, but for the reasons articulated in George Packer’s “The Suicide of a Great Democracy,” they sting at this moment in our history. I wonder constantly what Lincoln would think of our current mess. Have we really let the nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” “perish from the earth”? What have we become?
So I agree with much of what you had to say here. In fact, you had me until you said, “So we stayed for a while at the Lincoln Memorial and read the words carved into its walls, to recall what makes America great if anything does.”
Because, despite the madness and the desolation of these shutdown days, I believe there still are things that make us great. I concede, our democracy feels pretty darn bleak right now and I admit, our ideals are dormant, hidden, buried—but still, I do believe they’re there … somewhere.
We mustn’t give up.
Because the Declaration of Independence—its words and the ideals they represent—inspired Lincoln to say the words you quote and, as we know, to wage a war for the validity of those words. This is no small matter, as far as I am concerned. If Lincoln could hold on to them in the middle of civil war—if he could give his life for those words—like MLK and so many, many others—surely our hope can outlast this shutdown.
We need to read Lincoln’s words, heed their meaning, weep that we have fallen astray, and then give this great nation all we can to bring our democracy back from the brink.
M. B. Donnelly
Falls Church, Va.
I read with great interest George Packer’s “The Suicide of a Great Democracy.” Packer aptly describes the majesty and power of a visit to the Lincoln Memorial, and juxtaposes that with the scene of the Capitol during the current shutdown.
The second inaugural, perhaps the closest Lincoln came to elucidating his personal theology, has been analyzed by countless historians. Packer chooses to selectively quote the address, removing the ideas that Lincoln thought most compelling in March of 1865. In its entirety, the address highlights that slavery was “somehow the cause of the war,” and that people on both sides prayed to the same God and that the prayers of neither side had been answered. For Lincoln, the salient question after four years of war remained why God had allowed the war to ravage the American nation. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln wrote, and believed it was possible that the war was God’s punishment for the national sin of slavery.
Lincoln’s second inaugural then turns toward the more familiar sentences that conclude the address. He not only calls for Americans “to let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds” as Packer references, but to have “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” reminding Americans of our fallibility and God’s power. Lincoln closes by reminding Americans to care for the soldiers, widows, orphans, and for a “just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Lincoln’s eloquence, his humility, and his belief in the power and perfection of God and imperfection of all humankind is on display in his masterpiece of an inaugural, which has come down to history as nearly his last words to the nation.
It is especially disappointing, therefore, that Packer selects a few phrases from this great document for his article, and then follows these with an edited phrase from another address Lincoln gave almost three decades before, as a young lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. There, in January of 1838, the young lawyer addressed an association on an important topic of the day—lawlessness and mob violence. His speech was printed in a local newspaper, and provides a careful chronicle of violence that had occurred in America in the 1830s, including the burning of an African American man who had killed a police officer in 1836 in St. Louis. Packer chooses to quote Lincoln’s statement by writing, “‘If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,’ [Lincoln] said in 1838. ‘As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.’” In this quote, taken out of context, Packer tries to convey to the reader that Lincoln had an apocalyptic vision of a great nation bent on destroying itself by suicide.
Context, however, is paramount in analyzing the past. Thoughtful and accurate editing is as well, so that the words of historical figures are not used for our own rhetorical and ideological purposes. When Lincoln gave his speech in 1838, he considered Americans’ responsibility to pass a legacy on to future generations. He asked,
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?— Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Lincoln did not believe, in 1838, that Americans could be threatened by any power across the oceans. Lincoln saw an internal danger, however. It was not slavery or an inevitable march toward civil war that he envisioned as a young lawyer. Instead, he was disturbed by the mob rule and lawlessness that he witnessed and read about in the newspapers of the 1830s.
Lincoln’s cause, Packer tells readers, was “the ability of free people to rule themselves.” He notes that Lincoln did not allow a government shutdown during the Civil War as proof of this and suggests that Lincoln would not approve of “paralysis and dysfunction.” Perhaps this is true. No one can say. What is certain is that Lincoln instructed a fellow Republican to reject any compromise that would violate the Republican Party’s 1860 platform, which prohibited slavery’s extension into the federal territories. “On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel,” he instructed in December 1860, even as Southern state militias mobilized and South Carolina elected delegates to a secession convention.
Selective use of Lincoln neither inspires nor informs; but when we read Lincoln’s words in their full historic context, we learn much. Even if Lincoln cannot provide answers for our current debates and crises, his words can encourage us to reach beyond ideology and partisan invective. When Lincoln wrote of a nation committing suicide in 1838, he feared lawlessness in a specific historic place and time. He was not troubled by political battles over national borders in the Southwest, or immigration law, or federal budget appropriations exceeding $4 trillion. And in his penultimate public address, Lincoln told Americans to do their best, as God allowed, to avoid malice, have charity, and to achieve “a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” If we are to take Lincoln’s phrases out of context, it may be this idea, alongside his first inaugural certainty that Americans would be moved “by the better angels of our nature,” that is worth remembering today.
Dr. Christine Dee
Professor of History
Fitchburg State University
When Yale University announced in summer 2018 that the renowned cardiologist Michael Simons had received a prestigious endowed professorship, his colleagues at the university’s medical school did not rush to congratulate him. On the contrary, they were outraged.
“I was appalled,” says Nancy Ruddle, an epidemiology professor. Nina Stachenfeld, another researcher at the medical school, got the news from a friend who had also just received an endowed chair, one of the highest honors a university can bestow. “We were both absolutely shocked,” she recalls.
The reason for their shock was this: In 2013, Simons lost his position as the chief of Yale’s cardiology division after a university committee found that he had sexually harassed a postdoctoral researcher and had publicly derided her boyfriend, a colleague who worked under his supervision. The committee called for Simons to be permanently removed from his cardiology position and barred from other leadership roles for five years. But Yale’s provost, Ben Polak, reduced that punishment to an 18-month suspension from the cardiology job, allowing Simons to keep two other leadership positions. Simons eventually decided not to return as cardiology chief, and he now runs a lab in the medical school’s cardiovascular-research center.
[Read more: How women are harassed out of science]
Polak’s decision enraged many of the school’s faculty and made headlines in The New York Times. For years, Yale’s handling of the Simons case has remained an “open wound,” Stachenfeld says. And in early September 2018, more than 1,000 medical-school students, trainees, alumni, and faculty members signed a letter to Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, voicing “disgust and disappointment” with the university’s decision to award Simons the endowed title.
Simons’s appointment sparked a broader conversation about gender equity and sexual misconduct at the medical school, and about what some on campus describe as a culture that tolerates discrimination and harassment. In 1992, women held two of the school’s department chairs in the basic-science and clinical fields. Twenty-seven years later, that number is four out of a total of 28. “There’s a lack of women in key leadership roles at the school,” says Stachenfeld, who co-chairs the university’s faculty-led committee on women in medicine. “Because of that, there’s a problem with sexual harassment and there’s a fear of reporting sexual harassment.”
Despite the backlash against Simons, Yale initially held its ground. Then, on September 21, 2018, less than three months after Simons was given the endowed professorship, the longtime dean of the medical school, Robert Alpern, announced that he would rescind the title, “out of concern for the community’s well-being.” But tensions remained high. In November, the Yale Daily News described a culture of “open secrets” at the medical school, and in late December, amid a swirl of recriminations over his handling of the Simons case, Alpern announced that he would step down as dean.
Last year, for the first time ever, more women than men started medical school. But as the controversy at Yale shows, that milestone does not tell the whole story of women’s experiences in academic medicine. In June 2018, a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that 50 percent of female medical students reported having been sexually harassed. And over the past year and a half, high-profile cases such as the sentencing of the former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar and the abrupt resignation of the medical-school dean at the University of Southern California amid revelations that he’d been disciplined by the university for sexual misconduct in 2003 have shone a spotlight on harassment and abuse in the traditionally male-dominated field of medicine. (The former USC dean, Rohit Varma, declined to be interviewed.)
[Read more: How colleges foretold the #MeToo movement]
Until last summer, Simons had held an endowed professorship named for the former medical-school dean Robert Berliner. But Berliner’s daughter, Nancy Berliner, the chief of hematology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, complained to Yale that it was inappropriate for Simons to continue to hold that position, given the accusations against him. In June, the university transferred Simons to a different endowed professorship.
“In making this transfer, the University had no intention to confer a new honor on Dr. Simons,” the university spokeswoman Karen Peart said in a statement to the Yale Daily News.
But in a June 22 letter congratulating Simons on his new appointment, Salovey, Yale’s president, struck a different tone. “Endowed chairs are awarded to those whose scholarship has brought distinction to the university,” he wrote to Simons, whom he addressed as “Mike.” “I am delighted to convey our pleasure in your accomplishments.”
Critics have long argued that Yale’s administration went too easy on Simons in 2013. Alpern, the medical-school dean, did little to alleviate those concerns during a tense meeting in September 2018 with Yale’s committee on women in medicine. As he sought to justify the university’s decision to give Simons a new endowed title, two professors who attended the meeting say Alpern described the superstar cardiologist as “defenseless.”
“This medical school is his house,” says Lynn Fiellin, an associate professor at the medical school, of Alpern. “He is the one who should be able to step up and set the tone and do the right things. Not just say things, not just create committees or town halls or what have you. Actually take the action that is necessary.”
At the beginning of the fall-2018 semester, Alpern, who started as dean in 2004, planned to seek a fourth five-year term as the medical school’s top administrator. But before the holidays, he instead announced that he would leave the position, saying he plans to stay on the faculty and pursue academic interests.
In an email, Alpern declined to comment on his meeting with the women in medicine committee, and on anything to do with Simons, who sued Yale over its decision to strip him of his new professorship. (Simons eventually withdrew the lawsuit, and neither he nor his lawyer, Norm Pattis, responded to requests for comment.) But Alpern defended his leadership of the medical school, emphasizing that he made salary equity a priority of his tenure and that the percentage of female faculty members has increased from 29.5 percent in 2004 to 39.4 percent in 2019. “The Yale School of Medicine does not tolerate sexual misconduct,” he wrote. “We would never allow anyone who has been accused of misconduct to receive special treatment because of their academic accomplishments.”
A Yale spokesman said Salovey, the university president, was not available for an interview. But in a short statement, Salovey said the medical school “has more work to do” in promoting gender equity. “In recruiting a new dean” of the Yale School of Medicine, he wrote, “I will seek an individual for whom advancing gender equity and eliminating sex-based and other forms of discrimination and harassment are the highest priorities.”
Not every faculty member believes the school faces a crisis. Linda Mayes, who runs the medical school’s Child Study Center, calls the Simons controversy a “distraction” from the medical school’s recent efforts to promote gender equity, such as the appointment of a deputy dean focused on diversity and the rollout of a more generous parental-leave policy, among other initiatives. “I understand the feelings,” Mayes says, “but there’s a lot going on that’s very positive.”
In recent years, some universities and medical institutions have taken steps to curb sexual misconduct and to improve gender equity. In April 2018, USC appointed the geriatrician Laura Mosqueda as its medical-school dean, making her the first woman to hold the position. The University of Michigan recently conducted a comprehensive survey to diagnose the extent of harassment in its medical school. And in November 2018, the National Institutes of Health launched an anti-sexual-harassment website that outlines the organization’s policies on misconduct, including a new initiative designed to make harassment easier to report.
But on their own, such initiatives are unlikely to solve the problem, the causes of which are myriad and deep-rooted. Women hold only 16 percent of departmental-chair positions at medical schools, and the strict hierarchical structure of the profession sometimes forces victims of harassment to choose between career advancement and personal safety. When harassment does come to the attention of university administrators, experts we spoke to claimed that officials may be motivated to protect “superstar” doctors who win valuable government grants that fund research and bring prestige to universities. Simons is one such superstar: Last year, he was the principal investigator on four different projects that cost a total of around $3 million in grants, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“We haven’t really made much progress in diversifying the leadership of health care,” says Esther Choo, a doctor at Oregon Health & Science University who wrote an article about sexual harassment for The New England Journal of Medicine. “As long as that is true, it’s likely that none of these toxic cultures will change. But none of it is particular to Yale. I don’t know of a health-care system or a health-professional school that is succeeding in this area.”
At Yale’s medical school, advocates have proposed a number of strategies to elevate women leaders, including term limits for departmental chairs, some of whom have held their position for decades. Ultimately, though, the success or failure of reform efforts will depend on the tone set by the next dean. “There needs to be a strong moral compass and a group of leaders who not only say they believe that sexual harassment and gender harassment should not happen, but they actually take action,” says Fiellin, the associate professor. “That has to come from the top.”
For years, Reshma Jagsi has spent much of her time talking about what happens in the absence of such leadership. Jagsi, a radiation oncologist at the University of Michigan, travels the country giving talks on gender equity in medicine. Lately she’s started arguing that the story of Simons’s endowed professorship illustrates an important lesson from organizational psychology: that the strongest predictor of sexual harassment in an organization is the perception among members that the organization tolerates such behavior.
But when she tells that story, she says, she also emphasizes its ending: a renewed effort by Yale students and faculty members to promote gender equity and curb sexual harassment at the medical school. “The community is coming together in a very heartening way,” Jagsi said. “So I use it as an example of both things—organizational tolerance, and how an organization can come together to change that.”
In advocating for border security, President Donald Trump has repeatedly sought to enlist Border Patrol agents and their union, the Washington Post reports, even bringing union leaders for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the White House “to tout the wall.”
That isn’t surprising in one sense: Lots of politicians use uniformed law-enforcement officers as political props. But in another sense, it is rather strange. Typically, unions zealously oppose anything that makes the labor of their members less necessary. The Luddites smashed automated looms. The grocery-store checkers are against self-checkout kiosks. The fast-food workers don’t want touch-screen ordering.
Why would union officials representing men and women who patrol the border be in favor of a barrier intended to stop migration better than humans?
[David Frum: Trump has defeated himself]
The most charitable explanation is that members of the union earnestly believe that Trump’s desired wall is in the best interest of the United States, regardless of its effect on their personal interests as laborers. That’s the impression Trump wants to create by touting their endorsement: that the men and women actually patrolling the border, with all the attendant expertise their daily work confers, believe that the sort of barrier he’s advocating for will help them achieve their mission.
Border Patrol agents are not a monolith, of course, and there are individual union members on both sides of the policy debate. In the mid-aughts, when I blogged about immigration for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, I interviewed Border Patrol agents who literally rolled their eyes at the mention of a border wall and others who favored one.
Still, that most charitable explanation is more difficult to accept in light of something that Nick van der Kolk of the Love + Radio podcast noticed in the course of researching a story—that as recently as January 4, the website for the Border Patrol union stated, “The NBPC disagrees with wasting taxpayer money on building fences and walls along the border as a means of curtailing illegal entries into the United States.”
[Peter Beinart: Why Trump is trying to create a crisis]
Below is the whole section on “border fences and walls,” as preserved on the Internet Archive before it was scrubbed sometime after the union president, Brandon Judd, visited the White House. The union is known as the NBPC, or the National Border Patrol Council. NBPS stands for National Border Patrol Strategy; the union argues that the overarching strategy needs to change. The archived website says:
The NBPC disagrees with wasting taxpayer money on building fences and walls along the border as a means of curtailing illegal entries into the United States. However, as long as we continue to operate under the current NBPS and ignore the problem that is causing illegal immigration, we realize fences and walls are essential.
Walls and fences are temporary solutions that focus on the symptom (illegal immigration) rather than the problem (employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens).
Walls and fences are only a speed bump. People who want to come to the United States to obtain employment will continue to go over, under, and around the walls and fences that are constructed.
Walls and fences will undoubtedly result in an increase in fraudulent documents and smuggling through the Ports of Entry.
Walls and fences do not solve the issue of people entering the country legally and staying beyond the date they are required to leave the country, a problem which will undoubtedly increase as more walls and fences are constructed.
The NBPC position regarding walls and fences is not due to a concern of losing our jobs if fences and walls are built. On the contrary, the NBPC realizes that walls and fences require just as much manpower to protect them. Border Patrol Agents witness what happens to walls and fences when there are not enough Border Patrol agents to protect them.
Asked about the seeming contradiction by Politico, the union leader explained that the old language reflected the position of bygone leadership, adding that the page was kept up for years because the union didn’t want to hide from its earlier stance. “But because it continually gets brought up,” he said, “we made the decision to take it down.”
Judd’s statement is reasonable on its face. Over time, unions change their leadership and their stances on discrete issues. Still, it is a bit harder to treat Judd’s explanation as the whole truth in light of the Associated Press’s reporting that “Judd’s support for the wall coincided with Trump’s candidacy for president. There’s no indication Judd publicly urged Congress to allot the money for a border wall between the time he was elected Border Patrol Council president in 2013 and the union’s endorsement of Trump. He did on several occasions warn lawmakers during testimony of the challenges that border patrol agents face.” When the AP asked Judd himself if he had ever recommended a border wall prior to Trump’s candidacy, he said, “I do not know. I believe I have testified 21 times, and I don’t have time to go through each hearing.”
[Read: Trump’s wall could cost him in 2020]
Today Judd talks as though his membership is unified behind a border wall, touting a union survey. As The Washington Times reported:
The NBPC’s survey, of more than 600 agents in two of the Border Patrol’s busiest sectors, found … 89 percent of line agents say a “wall system in strategic locations is necessary to securing the border.” Just 7 percent disagreed.
But that language doesn’t distinguish between existing sections of wall and the wisdom of what Trump wants to build going forward. Most members of the Democratic caucus in Congress believe that a “wall system in strategic locations” is necessary—try to find a congressional Democrat to go on record calling for all walls and fencing to be torn down. The wording seems designed to get the highest possible rate of agreement, not to discern the actual position of union members on Trump’s wall.
The takeaway from all of this isn’t pro-wall or anti-wall. Neither the old language on the web site nor the new language from the dubious survey should shape one’s judgment of whether the wall is a good or bad idea.
Rather, it is a case study in the folly of treating the words of public-employee union officials as if they should carry weight in policy debates. Public-sector unions are biased by the labor interests of members and their political interests in forging strategic relationships with whoever is in power. Union officials do not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Disinterested policy insight isn’t something they offer. And politicians who pretend otherwise are trying to mislead you.
In 1976, Alejandra Melfo and her family joined the tens of thousands of Uruguayans fleeing their country’s military dictatorship. Melfo, who was 11 when her family arrived in Venezuela, remembers delighting in the lighthearted Venezuelan national anthem, and realizing that her blond hair and pale skin were unremarkable in a country where generations of Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian immigrants had also found refuge and opportunity.
When Melfo was a teenager, she and her family moved to the prosperous university city of Mérida, in the mountains of western Venezuela, and she became one of the many foreign-born students at the University of the Andes. The Venezuelan government had invested a sizable portion of the country’s oil wealth in education and research, and the university—the first in Latin America to be connected to the internet—was known throughout the continent and beyond for its scientific accomplishments. For Melfo, it became a professional home: A theoretical physicist, she joined the faculty even before she completed her doctorate, and served as a professor at the university for 25 years.
Though Melfo officially retired in 2016, she is one of the few faculty members still on the job. As Venezuela has descended into political and economic crisis, the university has endured rising street crime and armed raids of campus buildings. Professors and students have left in droves, and classrooms are dark and empty; because of the country’s crushing inflation, the remaining professors earn as little as $3 a month.
Melfo, who once focused her considerable energies on supersymmetric theory, now has a more tangible and pressing concern. High in the mountains above Mérida lie the fast-melting remnants of Venezuela’s once-extensive glaciers, and when they’re gone, the unique organisms they contain will also be lost to time. Melfo can no more save her adopted country’s glaciers than she can reverse its political and economic unraveling—but she knows Venezuela’s glaciers have a scientific legacy, and that she is determined to protect.
Mérida lies on a high plateau at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Mérida, a range that includes five of Venezuela’s highest peaks: Humboldt, Bonpland, El Toro, El León, and Bolívar, all more than 15,000 feet above sea level. Thousands of years ago, the ridgelines of the Sierra Nevada were crusted with as much as 50,000 acres of permanent ice, which was protected from the tropical sun by aspect and elevation, and which advanced and retreated in response to global temperature cycles. By the 1830s, when the Italian soldier and geographer Agostino Codazzi surveyed the area on behalf of the newly independent Venezuelan government, a prolonged global cooling period now known as the Little Ice Age was coming to an end, and the glaciers were shrinking.
Locals noticed the difference: “For some time now, people have been saying that the snow in the Sierra is decreasing,” the Mérida storyteller Tulio Febres Cordero wrote in 1890. “The older neighbors point out, with sadness, all the places where the snow has completely disappeared.”
In 1910, detailed maps made by the Venezuelan explorer Alfredo Jahn showed that the Sierra Nevada glaciers had shrunk to a total extent of about 2,500 acres. In the small mountain towns above Mérida, some men still made a living as hieleros, or ice men: With machetes, they would chop blocks of ice from the glaciers, wrapping hundred-plus-pound blocks in thick leaves and storing them in leather suitcases. The hieleros would make the six-hour journey to Mérida, transporting the ice-filled suitcases by mule or on their own backs. The ice blocks, much diminished, would then be used to make the glacier-sourced ice cream sold in the central market.
Over the past century, as human activities increased global average temperatures far beyond those experienced during previous warming cycles, glacial melting in the Sierra Nevada accelerated. An aerial survey in 1952 showed that the total glacier area had shrunk by almost three-quarters in the previous four decades, to about 700 acres. By 1985, it was down to 200 acres, and in 2008, fewer than 80 acres of glacier remained.
[Read: After decades of losing ice, Antarctica is now hemorrhaging it]
Average temperatures in Mérida are about 10 degrees warmer than they were 20 years ago, but the area is still much cooler than the rest of the country, and until the recent upheaval in Venezuela, the city was a popular destination for domestic and foreign tourists. Merideños pride themselves on their politeness and hospitality, and would often point the way to local attractions: glacier-fed mountain lagoons, the country’s national astronomical observatory, or the highest cable car in the world, which carries visitors from the edge of the city toward the top of the 15,633-foot-high Pico Espejo. Near the summit, in 1961, Venezuela held a national skiing competition. Under the right conditions, it is still possible to see snow.
In 2008, the Venezuelan ecologist Ángel Viloria predicted that the country’s glaciers would be entirely gone by 2020, making Venezuela the first country on Earth to lose all of its glaciers. Viloria, the director of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research in Caracas, not only backed up his prediction with decades of research and observations, but also bluntly assigned blame: Human-caused climate change, he said, was largely responsible for the melting.
Government officials quickly disputed Viloria’s prediction. They claimed that the data he’d cited weren’t reliable; that the melting was caused not by human activities but by a long-term warming cycle; that a new era of “global cooling” would soon restore the glaciers.
Global cooling, however, did not come to the rescue. In 2009 and 2011, when the Venezuelan geologist Maximiliano Bezada and his American colleague Carsten Braun conducted the most recent aerial and ground surveys of the glaciers, they estimated that there were only 25 acres of ice left, all of it in a single glacier on Pico Humboldt.
“Glaciers have been a part of the identity of the Venezuelan mountains and their people for a long time, and their disappearance will leave a gap—both physically on the landscape, but also—and perhaps more importantly—spiritually. It was ‘normal’ to go to the mountains and see the glaciers. The ‘new normal’ for future generations will be a different Sierra Nevada,” Braun says.
Andrés Yarzábal, a microbiologist at the University of the Andes who had studied the effects of climate change in Antarctica, recognized that unique organisms were likely disappearing along with the ice. Though spending cuts by the Chávez government had made government research grants almost impossible to come by, Yarzábal managed to secure some support from the National Fund for Science and Technology for what he called the “Vida Glacial” project, including an expedition to Pico Humboldt and its glacier in 2012. The trek took five days, and the frigid, blustery conditions were grueling; to sterilize their collecting instruments, Yarzábal and his colleagues had to hunch over camp stoves in the freezing wind.
Alejandra Melfo, meanwhile, was expanding her research interests beyond physics to molecular biology and genetics, and a friend introduced her to Yarzábal. Like many others, she had noticed the retreat of the Sierra Nevada’s snow and ice, and she was both intrigued by Yarzábal’s research and impressed by the urgency of his mission. Melfo helped organize and search for private funding for a second expedition, this time to the glacier on Pico Bolivar, which has since disappeared. Melfo trained for several months with a professional climber before the expedition, and even helped Yarzábal through a life-threatening bout of altitude sickness during the trip.
Alejandra Melfo and Andrés Yarzábal take samples on Pico Bolivar. (Courtesy of Ymago Foundation)Together, the two expeditions yielded 600 microbial strains, now stored in deep freezers at the university. About 30 percent of the strains have been identified so far; most are previously unknown to science, and among them are bacteria capable of dissolving phosphorus, an essential plant nutrient. “We were able to show that they behave as growth promoters of certain plants at low temperatures, so it’s possible that they could be useful as biofertilizers,” Yarzábal says. Such fertilizers, he says, could improve the sustainability of agriculture in mountain regions.
After Chávez’s death and the 2013 election of his successor, Nicolás Maduro, scientific research in Venezuela became even more challenging. Inflation made it difficult to buy basic lab supplies, much less the thousands of dollars of food, medicine, and equipment required for another glacier expedition. Outbreaks of street crime and paramilitary violence in Mérida made it dangerous for university researchers to work in the labs during weekends or at night. “We sometimes had to abandon experiments for weeks at a time,” Yarzábal says.
Yarzábal had even greater fears. His two children, 7 and 8 years old, were leaving school one afternoon when they heard gunshots. It turned out that another father from the school had witnessed an attempted kidnapping nearby, and used his own gun to kill two of the kidnappers.
Yarzábal, who, like Melfo, had emigrated from Uruguay to Venezuela as a child, realized that he had to leave the country that had once given him refuge. Yarzábal signed up with Prometeo, an Ecuadorian government program aimed at attracting scientific talent, and he and his family moved to Ecuador during his sabbatical year in 2014; he now works at the University of Cuenca.
[Photos: Fleeing Venezuela’s crushing economic crisis]
This past fall, the only trained microbiologist left in the laboratory was Johnma Rondón, the second-youngest researcher on the entire Vida Glacial project team. Rondón, who helped identify the microbial strains from the glaciers as part of his doctoral dissertation, was responsible for maintaining the strains stored in the freezers in Yarzábal’s lab—no easy task in a country where power failures are frequent. “Many times I would come to the lab on Mondays to find puddles of water around the freezers caused by prolonged blackouts,” he says.
On October 28, Rondón left Venezuela, too, becoming one of the estimated 3 million Venezuelans—some 10 percent of the population—to have emigrated in recent years. The border between Venezuela and Colombia, once one of the busiest in the world, is now closed to traffic, so Rondón planned to cross the border by foot. He made a farewell visit to the lab, leaving some climbing gear with Melfo in hopes that she would once again be able to access the glacier. Melfo hugged him goodbye.
When Rondón reached the border city of Cúcuta, Colombia, he traveled to the Colombian capital of Bogotá, and from there to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is now a postdoctoral student in Argentina, and unless conditions change in Venezuela, he doubts he will return.
Melfo kept a blog during this time, writing not only about fermions and glaciers but also about longing. She described the absence of her colleagues; the quiet labs; the empty homes inhabited by caretakers who water the plants in exchange for shelter.
“M. doesn’t work in the lab anymore,” she wrote in November. “Neither does A. or W., or J., who was the last to leave. Inside, the work tables are clean, the test tubes sit on their shelves, the Petri dishes are inside their sterile bags; the samples are inside the fridge, in the right order, frozen. J. didn’t erase the blackboard, and it still has an equation on it. The lab still has the quality of a home, even though A. has taken his kids’ pictures. It still echoes with the joy M. felt when the money for the incubator finally arrived, and the laughter of W. His lighter is still in the place he left it.”
Melfo and a few university colleagues continue to maintain the freezers, though blackouts are frequent and often lengthy. With no resources to continue her work in molecular biology, she is once again expanding her research interests, this time into ecology, and she and a handful of remaining biology students are monitoring the impacts of climate change on high-altitude biodiversity as part of the GLORIA-Andes project. They must write up their field data forms by hand because their printers have run out of ink. Their rubber boots are broken; their camping tents, and even their gloves and scarves, are borrowed. Supplies are stored in a recycled cardboard box once used for government-subsidized food staples. “Someone will donate a bit of cooking oil, others will give some rice, and when we have collected enough, we head out,” Melfo says. If the weather turns bad during a day of fieldwork, they put up umbrellas and and keep going, because rescheduling the trip would require too much gasoline.
“Five years ago, even three years ago, we had scholarships for postgraduates and funding for expeditions,” Melfo reflects. “Now we are a poor country, without money for fieldwork.”
Melfo continues to seek international funds and support for glacier research in Venezuela. She edited a book, Se Van Los Glaciares (The Glaciers Are Going), that includes chapters written by Yarzábal, Bezada, and others, and drew national media attention when it was published last summer. She says she still hopes to return to the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada: She wants to see what kind of bacteria are left in the remaining ice, and what the retreating glacier has revealed. Even when the glaciers completely disappear, she argues, the decades of data and the surviving microbial samples can be used for comparative studies in the Andes and elsewhere. “The investigation of the glaciers of Venezuela has no expiration date,” she says.
On December 11, International Mountain Day, the president of Venezuela’s National Parks Institute, Josué Lorca, visited Mérida to announce measures intended to lengthen the life of the glacier on Pico Humboldt—the same glacier whose pending disappearance the government denied a decade ago. During Lorca’s press conference, officials presented plans to clean up waste from the national park near the glacier, demarcate safe camping areas, and ban tourist visits to what’s left of the ice. They refused to take reporters’ questions.
Melfo spent the Christmas holiday with her family in Uruguay, but she has returned, once more, to the empty lab, the broken boots, and the handwritten data sheets. She has returned, voluntarily, to the country that welcomed her as a child. She says she doesn’t want to leave a place that truly feels like hers, or abandon the few remaining students who insist on continuing their studies. The Sierra Nevada of Mérida, she says, is her home—even though it rarely snows here anymore.
Translated from Spanish by Ruxandra Guidi.
Writing last year, the New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso used two words to describe economic inequality in America: “high” and “increasing.”
The most common proposals for turning those descriptors around are big-picture government policies—things like hiking the minimum wage or raising tax rates for the highest earners. But in a paper last year, Jasso, who has been publishing academic work on inequality for four decades, sought a scientific answer to the question of what individuals living in unequal societies can do to mitigate the problem themselves (aside from voting for politicians with similar intentions).
Jasso’s method was to think through what kinds of concrete actions would reduce inequality as it’s measured by various mathematical formulas. As such, she doesn’t make recommendations like Move into a neighborhood that’s not segregated or Don’t send your kid to private school, but rather proposes some basic principles for assessing how one’s actions might, however marginally, affect the inequality of a given society.
[Read: The only thing, historically, that’s curbed inequality: Catastrophe]
I recently spoke with Jasso about the individual-level actions she outlines—as well as, more generally, the usefulness of approaching a systemic problem on an individual level. The conversation that follows has been edited and condensed.
Joe Pinsker: Can you walk through one of the strategies that you describe in the paper?
Guillermina Jasso: Let’s talk about the principle of transfers. In a nutshell, this says, if a transfer occurs from one individual to a relatively poorer individual, inequality declines. This is well known, and there are lots of mathematical equations that show it.
Suppose that the richest person in a given distribution transfers a certain amount that will preserve their ranking [as richest], but that will make the poorest person or persons better off—inequality decreases.
Pinsker: To make this a little more concrete, is the recommendation here to donate to charity?
Jasso: That is a very good question. One of the things I go into in the paper is that sometimes there are long chains of transfers, and it can be very difficult to see who is becoming better off and who is becoming worse off as a result of certain spending. What is the final effect of all of these long chains of transfers? What is the final effect on inequality?
So for example, if I buy a best-selling book by a best-selling author, what is the final net effect on inequality? I do not know. There are so many, many little links in this chain. The people who make the paper, who make the ink, who make the binding, the booksellers, et cetera.
Pinsker: What’s another approach you bring up in the paper?
Jasso: Another is assortative mating—this, to my knowledge, was first described by Plato. If rich marry rich and poor marry poor, inequality will either stay the same or increase. But if rich marry poor, inequality will decrease. So, he says, this is what people ought to do.
Now, this mechanism of inequality is well known among scholars, and it can be expressed mathematically. But there’s a really serious side effect: The economic disparity between the two spouses increases.
Pinsker: The concern being, if two spouses come from really different economic backgrounds, their marriage might be less harmonious?
Jasso: We need much, much further research. Maybe one way that this can work is if the rich marrying poor are not really from the extremes—say, if someone from the 60th percentile of wealth marries someone from the 40th percentile. Then the side effect is less extreme than if it’s someone from the 99th percentile marrying someone from the first percentile.
Pinsker: I’m trying to think about what could be done with this knowledge. It would be bizarre to command people to seek out partners who have less money than them. Is the idea instead for people to consider the pools of potential spouses that they surround themselves with, and try to put themselves into situations where there’s more economic diversity?
Jasso: Yes, that’s a wonderful strategy. Now, we already have lots of opportunities for that. Many people play sports, for example. People go to church, they sing in the choir. Obviously, the more opportunities, the better.
Pinsker: Can you talk through one more strategy?
Jasso: There is also the principle of equal additions. Basically, if you give each person or household an equal amount—a little bonus, say a thousand dollars for each person—inequality declines. This is very easy to show mathematically. Conversely, if you tax each person an equal amount, inequality increases.
This is similar to the idea that’s been discussed a lot by taxation experts, of having a universal basic income. If you give everyone $10,000 a year, it reduces inequality—and to prove that, you don’t need any specific information about how much money people already have. But you do need some special fund, a surplus to distribute.
For example, I’ve had administrators in some organizations say to me, “I once had an opportunity like this. It was small, but I took the equal route.” And the December paychecks had this extra equal amount for everybody. So this is another potential mechanism: Managers could give equal bonuses to their employees when they have the money to.
Pinsker: As I’m hearing you talk about these “levers” for reducing inequality, I can’t help but think that, in a lot of ways, American society is pulling on all of them—it’s just pulling on them in the opposite direction of what you’re suggesting. If you take equal additions and then think about how windfalls are distributed by corporations, it’s not equal: A standard approach is to issue dividends to shareholders, who tend to be wealthy relative to the rest of the population. And if you think about romantic relationships, affluent people are often partnering up with other affluent people, because that’s who’s in their peer group.
Jasso: I think that’s a very insightful point. There’s this marvelous effort called the World Inequality Lab, pioneered by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and the late Anthony Atkinson. In their first report a year ago, they had detailed analyses for lots and lots of countries, plus suggestions such as the idea of having a database showing who owns financial assets around the world, or making massive investments in schooling and health.
So there’s already a lot of thought about potential interventions. My paper wasn’t about what government can do, but what you and I can do. If we have more researchers thinking about how these individual mechanisms operate across the whole economy, then these become powerful tools that people can use or not use as they see fit.
Pinsker: To what extent is inequality a problem that can be addressed by individuals’ behaviors as opposed to something bigger, like policy?
Jasso: I think the answer is, any time you fight a war, fight it on all fronts. So in this case, the front includes both the macro set of things and the things that individual people can do. There’s a lot we do not yet know about these levers. It’s possible that there may be contexts or sets of situations in which individual action is quite important, and others where the macro ones dominate. So my bottom-line answer is, attack on all fronts, and do more research to understand all of the dynamics at play.
The year 2018 was not an easy one for planet Earth.
Sure, wind and solar energy kept getting cheaper, and an electric car became America’s best-selling luxury vehicle. But the most important metric of climatic health—the amount of heat-trapping gas entering the atmosphere—got suddenly and shockingly worse.
In the United States, carbon emissions leapt back up, making their largest year-over-year increase since the end of the Great Recession. This matched the trend across the globe. According to two major studies, greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide shot up in 2018—accelerating like a “speeding freight train,” as one scientist put it.
U.S. emissions do remain 11 percent below their 2007 peak, but that is one of the few bright spots in the data. Global emissions are now higher than ever. And the 2018 statistics are all the more dismal because greenhouse-gas emissions had previously seemed to be slowing or even declining, both in the United States and around the world.
Many economists expect carbon emissions to drop somewhat throughout the next few decades. But maybe they won’t. If 2018 is any indication, meekly positive energy trends will not handily reduce emissions, even in developed economies like the United States. It raises a bleak question: Are we currently on the worst-case scenario for climate change?
“We’re actually a lot closer than we should be; I can say that with confidence,” says Rob Jackson, an Earth scientist at Stanford and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, which leads the research tracking worldwide emissions levels.
[Read: How to understand the UN’s dire new climate report]
When climate scientists want to tell a story about the future of the planet, they use a set of four standard scenarios called “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs. RCPs are ubiquitous in climate science, appearing in virtually any study that uses climate models to investigate the 21st century. They’ve popped up in research about subjects as disparate as southwestern mega-droughts, future immigration flows to Europe, and poor nighttime sleep quality.
Each RCP is assigned a number that describes how the climate will fare in the year 2100. Generally, a higher RCP number describes a scarier fate: It means that humanity emitted more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere during the 21st century, further warming the planet and acidifying the ocean. The best-case scenario is called RCP 2.6. The worst case is RCP 8.5.
“God help us if 8.5 turns out to be the right scenario,” Jackson told me. Under RCP 8.5, the world’s average temperature would rise by 4.9 degrees Celsius, or nearly 9 degrees Fahrenheit. “That’s an inconceivable increase for global temperatures—especially when we think about them being global average temperatures,” he said. “Temperatures will be even higher in the northern latitudes, and higher over land than over the ocean.”
This scenario could still be in the planet’s future, according to Zeke Hausfather, an analyst and climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Since 2005, total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the RCP 8.5 scenario, he says. “There may be good reasons to be skeptical of RCP 8.5’s late-century values, but observations to-date don’t really give us grounds to exclude it,” he recently wrote.
Even if we avoid RCP 8.5, the less dramatic possibilities still could lead to catastrophic warming. Jackson, the Stanford professor, warned that every emissions scenario that meets the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree Celsius “goal” assumes that humanity will soon develop technology to remove carbon directly from the atmosphere. Such technology has never existed at industrial scales.
“Even some [of the scenarios] for 3 degrees Celsius assume that at some point in the next 50 years, we will have large-scale industrial activities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s a very dangerous game, I think. We’re assuming that this thing we can’t do today will somehow be possible and cheaper in the future. I believe in tech, but I don’t believe in magic.”
[Read: No ecosystem on Earth is safe from climate change]
Yet not all data suggest that we’re doomed to RCP 8.5 or equivalent amounts of warming, Hausfather cautions. If you look only at pollution from fossil-fuel burning—and not from land-use events like deforestation—then humanity’s recent record trends closer to RCP 4.5.
That’s good news, but only by comparison: RCP 4.5 still forecasts that global temperatures will rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius, enough to kill off nearly every coral reef and soar past the 2-degree target set out in the Paris Agreement on climate change.
There are a few reasons it’s hard to say which RCP comes closest to our reality. First, most of the RCPs tell roughly the same story about global emissions until about 2025 or 2030. Second, the RCPs describe emissions across the entire sweep of the 21st century—and the century mostly hasn’t happened yet. Trying to pick the most likely RCP in 2018 is a bit like trying to predict the precise depth of late-night snowfall at 4:32 a.m.
The RCP 8.5 scenario may also become less likely in years to come, even if major polluters like the United States, China, and India never pass muscular climate policy. RCP 8.5 says that the global coal industry will eventually become seven times bigger than it is today. “It’s tough to claim that … that is a business-as-usual world,” Hausfather says. “It’s certainly a possible world, but we also live in a world today where solar is increasingly cheaper than coal.”
That’s part of the reason the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will soon expand its list of standard scenarios. Its next major synthesis report, due to be published in 2021, will replace RCPs with five “socioeconomic pathways” that allow for a broader range of futures.
Jackson urged caution. “We don’t know yet what scenario we’re on,” he said. “I think most climate scientists will tell you that we’re below the 8.5 scenario. But every year that emissions increase like they have this year, it makes the 8.5 scenario more plausible.”
Jackson published his first academic paper in 1989, just a year after the NASA scientist James Hansen first warned Congress that global warming had begun in earnest. I asked whether he thought actual emissions would ever come close to RCP 8.5.
“It’s nuts,” he said. “But I used to think a lot of things were nuts that turned out not to be nuts.”
On the eve of his confirmation hearings, the attorney-general nominee William Barr released prepared remarks vowing to allow Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to run its natural course. “I believe it is in the best interest of everyone—the President, Congress, and, most importantly, the American people—that this matter be resolved by allowing the special counsel to complete his work,” Barr wrote. “The country needs a credible resolution of these issues.”
As the likely next head of the Justice Department—Republicans have majority control of the Senate, all but ensuring his confirmation—Barr will be at the center of a tug-of-war between Donald Trump, who has sought to exert greater control over the Justice Department and the FBI, and Mueller, who is probing a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to win the 2016 election. At least one Democrat, Senator Chris Coons, plans to ask Barr whether he will commit to resigning as attorney general if the president asks him to break the law.
[Read: As good an attorney general as we’re likely to get]
Barr is an experienced choice; he served as George H. W. Bush’s attorney general from 1991 to 1993, and had a long DOJ career before that. But an unsolicited, 19-page memo he wrote last June, attacking Mueller’s obstruction inquiry as “fatally misconceived” and arguing that Mueller should not be allowed to subpoena the president about obstruction, has rattled Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats—especially in light of a new report that frames the obstruction probe as a national-security imperative.
Late Friday night, The New York Times provided a new window into how top FBI officials’ perception of the Russia investigation shifted after Trump fired then–FBI Director James Comey, who was leading the federal probe of Trump’s campaign team. “Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation,” the FBI’s former top lawyer, James Baker, told lawmakers last year, “but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security.” FBI leaders, in other words, felt that Trump’s attempt to obstruct the Russia investigation—he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired Comey because of “this Russia thing”—was itself a serious national-security issue.
[Read: Trump picks a Washington insider as his next attorney general]
That’s why, in the chaotic days following Comey’s firing in May 2017, they opened a counterintelligence investigation into the president to determine whether he was acting in Russia’s interests rather than in America’s. That decision would not have been made lightly—opening such an investigation, especially into a sitting president, would’ve required “layers of review,” Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterintelligence, told me. “It’s going to the general counsel of the FBI and being reviewed by the best national-security lawyers. Only then is it going across the street to DOJ” for approval.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was notified, according to the Times, and ultimately handed off the investigation to Mueller. It isn’t clear whether it’s still open, but the revelation that Trump himself either was or remains the target of a counterintelligence investigation has made Barr’s views on the probe, which he would oversee as attorney general, even more significant. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy “believes that Barr’s best course of action, given his past comments and actions, would be to commit to recuse himself,” his spokesman told me last week. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii also believes that Barr should recuse himself, according to her spokesman, and that at the very least he “should have to publicly address it during the hearing.” In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Coons, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said he found the memo “unusual” and intended to press Barr on whether he would recuse himself if advised to do so by ethics officials at the Department of Justice.
In a letter sent to the Justice Department’s inspector general last week, Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, including Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, expressed concern that Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker’s decision to disregard ethics officials’ advice that he recuse himself (due to his past statements and writings criticizing the Mueller investigation) could set a precedent for the incoming attorney general. “The poor judgment Mr. Whitaker demonstrated in rejecting the advice of career ethics officials should not establish a precedent for Mr. Barr or any other senior DOJ official to similarly disregard the independent assessment of conflicts of interest by career DOJ staff,” they wrote.
Barr did not address the possibility that DOJ ethics officials could advise him to recuse himself from the probe in his prepared remarks. But he did try to walk his fatalistic view of Mueller’s inquiry back a bit. “I wrote the memo as a former Attorney General who has often weighed in on legal issues of public importance” and did not intend to argue that a sitting president can never obstruct justice, he said.
But the explanation provided little comfort to Coons. “In our private meeting, Barr made a similar characterization of that memo,” he told reporters on Monday. “And I am not satisfied.” Coons said it struck him as “unusual” for a former attorney general to write such a lengthy, “unsolicited” document while holding a full-time legal job. “That would’ve required a fair amount of investment of time and resources,” Coons said. He added that he was struck in particular by Barr’s comment that he did not seek out the attorney-general job when “he essentially tried out for it” with the memo. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, plans to ask Barr who paid him, if anyone, for the time it took him to write and research the memo, whether he discussed it with the White House, and how it was transmitted to the Department of Justice.
Barr, who reportedly interviewed to be Trump’s defense lawyer last year, shared the memo with members of Trump’s legal team around the time he submitted it to Rosenstein and Assistant Attorney General Steven Engel, according to a letter Barr wrote to Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham late Monday night. White House Special Counsel Emmet Flood and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone both received a copy of the memo, Barr told Graham, and he discussed its contents with Trump’s lawyers Marty and Jane Raskin and Jay Sekulow, as well as with Jared Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell. “My purpose was not to influence public opinion on the issue, but rather to make sure that all of the lawyers involved carefully considered the potential implications of the [obstruction] theory,” Barr wrote.
Democrats are also eager to gain assurances about the fate of the Mueller report itself. In recent days, Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s personal lawyers, has said he hopes Trump’s legal team will get to review and “correct” any report before it is given to Congress or made public. Notably, Barr did not commit in his prepared remarks to releasing the full contents of such a report, saying only that he would “provide as much transparency” as possible about the “results” of Mueller’s work.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether Barr’s view of the obstruction probe has changed at all in light of the Times report. But Barr acknowledged in the memo that he was “in the dark” about many of the facts of the investigation, and on Monday he endorsed Mueller’s overall mission of exposing and deterring foreign election interference. “It is imperative that people have confidence in the outcome of elections,” Barr wrote. “I believe that our country must respond to any foreign interference with the strongest measures.”
Piano chords descend at ritual pace, reverberating as if in a cathedral. A woman sings, her each word a weary quaver. “Sitting at the bar, I told you everything,” she begins.
Then: “You said, ‘Holy shit.’”
This is how Sharon Van Etten kicks off her fifth album, with a moment that marks the sole time I’ve LOLed—so much so that it required hitting pause—while listening to her. The Brooklyn songwriter, approaching cult veneration a decade into her career, typically makes music to cry to, and there’s plenty of that in “I Told You Everything.” But she starts with … maybe not a punch line, but certainly a punch. Like a comedian, she knows that a well-placed swear word can jab a hole in pretense, letting intimacy flood in.
Some singers open themselves up in their songs. Van Etten sings about opening herself up, despite her impulse to stay closed. As gutting a tune as any written in the 21st century, 2012’s “Give Out” placed a first flirtation with a stranger in the context of a lifetime of saying no to connection. A track on the artist’s debut record, in 2009, posed the question Why do I need to love someone? almost as a statement of resistance. Now, to open her new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, Van Etten shares a story about sharing a story with someone. Fear gives way to freedom; nervous confession becomes communion. “We held hands,” she eventually sings, and a mischievous guitar figure replies.
Indie rock is defined by characters like Van Etten: eloquent about their own lack of eloquence, emotional about repression. Mitski, the genre’s new standard-bearer, has found a fresh take on the taciturn cowboy. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy translates and then re-scrambles “speakers … speaking in code.” Even the wide-eyed motivational rock of Arcade Fire has foregrounded symbols of isolation: snowpacks, suburbs. With hip-hop’s real talk and Ed Sheeran’s plainspeak dominating the mainstream, this interest in inscrutability can read as defiant or deep—if also, often, a guarantee of irrelevance.
Van Etten’s voice, however, conveys that there’s still something to be said about not-saying. Though the artist’s tunes have pop sturdiness, they also blur and drift, edging from expected notes to weird ones. Sometimes Van Etten’s singing is like a clear stream whose flow is diverted, interrupted, by an obstacle. Or she’s like someone who’s about to broach something impolite, but then thinks better of it, substituting in some new topic. The intrigue is in the gap between where she’d been going and where she ended up.
But this is not music that’s so cryptic as to be difficult. The five years since Van Etten’s previous album have had her busy with acting, movie scoring, getting a psychology degree, and having a kid. Perhaps accordingly, Remind Me Tomorrow features a loosened-up, brighter-seeming vibe than what she’s known for. Synth-pop replaces strumming in many places, and the artist gravitates toward fat, fuzzy bass sounds. A couple of tracks, such as the distortion-swathed triumph of “Hands,” surprisingly recall the ’90s alt-rock band Garbage. The glistening “Seventeen” could almost be a lost Bruce Springsteen hit.
Amid the bustle, snatches of imagery and half-lucid conversation tease the ear. The spacious and swinging “You Shadow” might be a dialogue between sides of a psyche, with one preaching “Use loving words and be gentle and kind” and the other sneering “You ain’t nothin’.” On “No One’s Easy to Love,” Van Etten seems to mock her own angst: “I wish away my love, leave with the dawn / Acting as if all the pain in the world was my fault.” It’s a capital-A Anthem, swerving from queasiness to ecstasy with the feeling of hard-won celebration.
Remind Me Tomorrow, in fact, often feels like a celebration—perhaps thrown to enjoy what comes after vulnerability’s achieved. That great aforementioned opener, “I Told You Everything,” never really describes the substance of the “holy shit” story she refers to. But as the arrangement gathers force and weight and Van Etten sings of two people coming together, the obscurity seems less the point than the revelation. You can project your own secrets onto this music, and laugh at how it might feel to be unburdened by them.
Matthew Charles had served more than two decades in prison for dealing crack cocaine when a judge ordered his release in 2016, believing that a change in federal sentencing guidelines applied to him retroactively. Charles had been a free man for two years, leading a law-abiding and productive life, when he was ordered back to prison to serve yet another decade because federal prosecutors successfully appealed the judge’s decision. The blatant injustice of the situation prompted advocates on the left and the right to urge President Donald Trump to grant him clemency. Thankfully for Charles, he did not ultimately need Trump’s intervention, because the recently passed First Step Act allowed for retroactive adjustments to crack sentences, and he was again released—this time for good. But most of the First Step Act’s provisions fix the law only going forward, leaving behind thousands to serve disproportionate sentences that courts no longer give. For them, clemency from the president remains the only source of relief available.
It took six years of intense wrangling to get the First Step Act passed. Clemency reform, however, requires the action of only one man. The president can act alone to fix what Congress did not.
Even the First Step Act’s primary nemesis, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, has acknowledged a role for clemency, saying as part of his attack on the legislation, “I grant that, in a particular case, the interaction of specific facts and the law can create an unjust sentence. If that happens, the best course of action is the scalpel of the governor or the president’s pardon and clemency power, not the ax of criminal leniency legislation.”
[Read: “I don’t see much mercy in Donald Trump or Jeff Sessions”]
Unjust sentences resulting from mandatory minimums are not rarities. That is why the First Step Act no longer permits mandatory minimum life sentences for third-strike drug offenses and lowered a two-strike, 20-year mandatory minimum for drug offenses to 15 years. The Act also requires that an individual first be convicted of an offense involving a firearm before receiving an additional 25-year mandatory minimum if he commits a second offense with a gun. (Previously, first-time offenders such as Weldon Angelos could receive multiple 25-year mandatory enhancements if the police documented multiple drug buys before making an arrest.)
One problem, as noted above, is that these and other welcome changes do not operate retroactively. People serving sentences now deemed excessive by Congress and the president have no recourse other than clemency to have those sentences rightsized.
There are more than 3,000 people left in prison serving mandatory sentences under the old firearm-enhancement law and the three-strikes provision that imposed a life sentence. Add to that the many individuals who are serving excessive sentences because of prosecutorial overcharging, and it is easy to see the urgent need to correct these injustices.
For clemency to reach those thousands, the country needs a process that fairly, thoroughly, and efficiently evaluates candidates for a commutation (or shortening) of their sentence under the Constitution’s pardon power. At the moment, there are two possible processes, but neither works very well.
[Read: The criminal justice bill had broad bipartisan support and still almost died]
The first is informal: The president evaluates individual cases based on personal recommendations. This system does not scale.
The second, more formal method isn’t any better. It courses through seven levels of review, much of it through a hostile Department of Justice bureaucracy that tends to defer to local prosecutors who are, in turn, loath to undo the harsh sentences they sought in the first place. Indeed, the First Step Act passed in spite of DOJ opposition because those same prosecutors objected to lowering mandatory minimum sentences that give them so much bargaining power. This DOJ-dominated process, by all accounts, does not work well in finding good cases and delivering them to the constitutionally appointed decision maker: the president.
Some states have better systems in place. In Arkansas, Connecticut, Georgia, and South Carolina, among others, an expert board plays a leading role in identifying and evaluating good cases. The best-functioning boards consist of people with expertise in criminal justice, social work, and psychology, and represent key stakeholders such as former judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and community activists who share a common belief that the purpose of the pardon power is to temper justice with mercy.
[Read: The self-pardoning president]
This model could work at the federal level as well. The president could create a similar board of clemency advisers who represent a diverse range of experiences, including those who work in criminal defense or corrections and people who were formerly incarcerated. Ideally, this body would be bipartisan and work collaboratively with a professional staff to identify cases for the president. This body could also track the progress of individuals granted clemency to document how they use their second chances. Many no doubt will serve their communities ably, and publicizing their experiences could help counteract the risk of a single Willie Horton–type incident overshadowing the positive stories of people who have been granted clemency.
There’s a federal precedent for this model. President Gerald Ford impaneled an 18-member clemency board to help him with pardon requests from applicants charged with crimes related to avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War. That board was diverse and bipartisan, and ultimately recommended more than 13,000 pardons.
The members of the bipartisan coalition that pushed through sentencing reform were united by a belief in liberty, a desire to cut costs, a respect for public safety, and a belief in second chances. But as the name of their legislation indicates, sentencing reform was just a first step. Clemency should come next.
LOS ANGELES—Barack Obama and Arnold Schwarzenegger agree: Neither thinks Donald Trump has any business being anywhere near the White House, but the main political issue they’re going to focus on for the next two years is redistricting reform.
The clock is ticking. The 2020 census, and the nationwide 2021 redistricting right after, are around the corner. Deadlines for ballot initiatives and legislation are already on the horizon for some states to change their procedures before then. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court could soon take up a case that would gut most of the efforts at redistricting reform that have, over the past 10 years, changed how states draw the maps that determine who runs where for Congress and their own legislatures.
To hear the redistricting-reform advocates tell it, democracy is on the line. But, they say, the attention to the issue that’s exploded since the 2016 election came at the perfect moment to tap into the anger at a broken system and fundamentally change how the country works.
[Read: A grassroots call to ban gerrymandering]
“The people became more and more frustrated. They decided that the system was fixed, there’s nothing they can do about it. So they look for outsiders to save them—outsiders like myself, or like Trump, or like [Representative Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez,” Schwarzenegger said at an event at the University of Southern California last Thursday. “But unless outsiders are willing to take on gerrymandering and truly fight the establishment, the people will find no salvation.”
Standing in a conference hall, with complicated chandeliers and the flag of every state that has passed an independent redistricting commission framing the stage, Schwarzenegger unveiled his latest move in the wonky fight that has oddly become a decade-long obsession for him since changing the California laws while he was governor: the creation of an organization he’s calling the Fair Maps Incubator, run out of the Schwarzenegger Institute on campus.
[Read: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s war on gerrymandering is just beginning]
Schwarzenegger has eagerly been deploying his celebrity to call attention to the topic for years. Now he says he wants to accelerate the fight, bringing together those who’ve won nonpartisan redistricting ballot initiatives to create an ongoing nexus of advice, information, and connections for people in other states putting together their own campaigns.
The ballot initiatives passed in November in Colorado, Utah, Missouri, and Michigan put one-third of all congressional districts under independent redistricting. Now, with movements to create independent commissions in Virginia and, more distantly, South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and New Jersey, Schwarzenegger announced from the stage, his goal for 2020 is to get two-thirds of all House seats drawn by independent commissions.
[Read: The Supreme Court could make gerrymandering worse]
In a conversation afterward, Schwarzenegger acknowledged that this probably wasn’t possible. But he kept comparing his crusade to when he started bodybuilding. It, too, was an obsession of out-there enthusiasts, but ended up going more mainstream, and eventually laid the path for him to become a multimillionaire Hollywood icon and a governor for seven years.
Realistically, Schwarzenegger said, he’s hoping for movement in four to six states over the next two years. “I shoot for the stars. It’s always easier to be short, and by accident go further. That’s not going to happen,” he said.
At the end of last year, Obama announced that he was folding his Organizing for Action group into the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), chaired by his former attorney general, Eric Holder. In doing so, he blamed gerrymandering for the lack of action on everything from climate change to immigration reform. Schwarzenegger agrees. If there were more competitive House districts, he said, members of Congress might actually feel compelled to compromise and deliver for the voters, instead of retreating into their partisan corners.
Look at the shutdown standoff, Schwarzenegger said. It’s become wall versus no wall, without anyone talking about the Dreamers or border patrol, let alone anything like comprehensive immigration reform. The politicians don’t move for close to a month while workers don’t get paid.
“How stupid of a dialogue is that? How do they get away with this crap?” he said. “Because they get reelected.”
Politicians have been using gerrymandering to entrench their own power for 200 years, deciding which voters get to vote for them and crystallizing party control by cutting up neighborhoods and counties to make them less competitive. Digitizing maps and voter-registration records has accelerated that process. Because Republican operatives prioritized gerrymandering efforts long before Democrats started paying attention, the Republican wave in 2010 enabled the GOP to create nearly insurmountable structural advantages.
Democrats won more votes statewide for the state Senate and assembly in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, but because of maps drawn to split Democrats between districts, they didn’t win a majority in any of those states. In the Wisconsin assembly, for example, Republicans won 63.6 of the seats despite winning just 47 percent of the votes cast—and then went on to do a major power grab ahead of the new Democratic governor taking office.
In a way that no one was anticipating, over the past two years, it’s become an issue that’s moved closer to the mainstream and started driving votes. The ballot initiative that created an independent commission in Michigan, for example, started with a Facebook post by a woman, who had no experience in politics, griping about how politicians controlled the process. The post, she noted, wasn’t so different from one she’d written after the 2014 elections, though that one didn’t get anywhere near the same reaction.
And the issue has moved mostly for Democrats, many of whom have landed on gerrymandering as a prime reason the makeup of government doesn’t seem representative. Democratic operatives in Michigan credit the ballot initiative last year with helping to drive some of the turnout that led to their sweep of statewide offices in November. And Democratic turnout didn’t surge only in Michigan. According to data compiled by the former Obama campaign analyst Andrew Claster, the four independent-commission ballot initiatives that passed last year—in Colorado, Utah, Missouri, and Michigan—saw Democratic support ranging from 72 to 83 percent, heavy support among independents, and much lower support from Republicans.
Obama and Holder argue that if the lines are fairer, more Democrats will win, but the only way to get the lines to be fairer is to back Democratic campaigns and Democratic lawsuits. Obama used redistricting reform to guide many of his endorsements and some of his 2018 fundraising, and he’s expected to keep that up over the years ahead.
“President Obama believes gerrymandering is one of the most important structural problems currently facing our politics because it touches every issue. When politicians choose voters rather than the other way around, you end up with Republican elected officials at a national level who consistently ignore the will of voters on everything from health care to gun safety to climate change,” said Katie Hill, a spokesperson for Obama. “Fairly drawn maps are key to ensuring that the arc of history bends toward justice.”
There’s been the pushback against independent redistricting reform from Democrats in several states. In Virginia, for example, the process for getting an initiative on the ballot would require it to pass the legislature in two consecutive sessions. With Democrats hoping to take the majority in November 2019 races, though, Democratic leaders in the state aren’t eager to give up the power right at the moment when they might get to use it to their own advantage.
“We’ll do everything we can to take as much of the politics out and do it fairly,” Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said at an event in December promoting Democratic efforts in the state, when pressed about whether he’d support an independent commission.
This year, the Obama-backed NDRC group will back candidates in state races in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Virginia, as well as one for a seat on the Wisconsin state supreme court. Next year, the emphasis will be on Florida, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina, in the hope of at least chipping away at the massive Republican advantages in those states. The nonprofit affiliated with the group is also already supporting litigation around changing the districts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“The fight against gerrymandering is about fairness,” Holder said, adding that he sees the next two years as a crucial opportunity. “It is about ensuring that every American has an equal say in our government and that our elected officials truly represent the will of the people. We will continue using every tool at our disposal to make real a fair redistricting process in the states.”
Schwarzenegger and the NDRC backed many of the same efforts in 2018. But Schwarzenegger said he’s not looking for an official partnership.
“It’s the definition of what is fair. I don’t want them to define what is fair. I’m the only one that I know, having been around the country and done this, that really does not care. I don’t even ask anybody when I come to a state, ‘Is this favoring the Democrats or the Republicans?’ I never even talk about that. It doesn’t matter to me,” he said.
The Schwarzenegger event was a mix of activists who’d flown in from all over the country, a collection of operatives from Common Cause and other groups, curious USC students, and a few stragglers who seemed to have come by for the free food and a glimpse of the old movie star.
Claster, the data analyst, walked the crowd through voter data and broke down the elements of the winning campaigns. Wording such as “Voters Not Politicians” (the name of the Michigan campaign) helps, or lines such as “Voters should pick their elected officials, not the other way around,” which he said polled well in every state. He advised targeting Republicans with endorsements from Republican leaders and Democrats with Democratic leaders. It takes cash. The Utah campaign featured commercials starring the actors Ed Helms and Jennifer Lawrence.
“We can’t just take the California model and pass it in each state. We can’t just take the Michigan model and pass it in each state. We need to customize,” Claster said. “Just because we can win everywhere doesn’t mean we will win everywhere—but we will win if we have the right strategy.”
Still, advocates are running out of states where they can reasonably pass ballot initiatives. For all the activist talk of trying to create an independent commission in Florida, most looking at the situation there pragmatically say they don’t expect an effort to be successful. Others note that the emphasis on creating the commissions often overlooks the details of how those commissions will be structured.
“Once you’ve had the baby,” said Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, “you’ve got to have the commitment 24/7 to make sure it grows up.”
In 2017, the Supreme Court heard a case that began in Wisconsin that some thought might lead to the declaration of gerrymandering as unconstitutional. It didn’t. Now there’s fear among redistricting-reform advocates that the new makeup of the Court will do pretty much the opposite and take a case that would declare the independent commissions unconstitutional. Feng said that if that happened, it would lead to a revolution. “I’m calling us to arms,” she joked. Others believe that it could have a boomerang effect, forcing Congress to address the issue nationally—the same thought process that had people believing that Congress would update the Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court struck down a key section of it in 2013.
It hasn’t even come up for official debate in the years since.
Even on that front, Schwarzenegger said he’s optimistic. The justices, he believes, will see the tide toward reform in the country and not move so starkly against it.
“You have to use momentum, but you also have to understand that everything’s not going to happen from one day to the next,” Schwarzenegger said. “But we’re on to something good.”
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