Almost everything that is “positive” about the modern air-travel experience, is positive thanks to Southwest Airlines. Upbeat staff and crew attitude, straightforward rather than hyper-opaque pricing, even the more-or-less egalitarian boarding process—these are all associated with Southwest.
In the past few years, Southwest’s on-time performance has declined to just-average, and in 2018 it had its first-ever fatal accident (in which one person died). Still, when I have the choice—which is to say, when Southwest goes where I want to go—I have a bias toward Southwest.
Two Texans, in 2007. Herb Kelleher at left. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)In 1971, when he had just turned 40, Herb Kelleher co-founded Southwest. (And what have you done recently?) In the summer of 1975, when the airline was still getting going — and when I was working, based in Austin, for the then-fledgling Texas Monthly magazine — I did a cover story about Kelleher, his vision for air travel, and the “Great Texas Airline Wars” of that era, which Kelleher’s Southwest ultimately won.
The story, again, is here. If there are things that seem out of date—hey, it was during the Gerald Ford administration, and when I reported and wrote it I was 25.
I really enjoyed knowing Herb Kelleher. He died today, at age 87. RIP—and travel well, in his honor.
One of the odd-but-positive political rumors at the start of this odd year is that Donald Trump is considering former Senator James Webb as a successor to James Mattis as secretary of defense.
Among the reasons why this would be odd:
Webb last held office as a Democrat, and even ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in the 2016 race. Webb is a famously independent-minded character with no ability to suffer fools. (Knowing them both, I can say that Webb is much less willing to go with the organizational flow than Mattis has been.) In his early 40s, he was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, but he resigned from that position within less than a year (having worked elsewhere in the Pentagon for several years) because of disagreements with the defense secretary of that era, Frank Carlucci. Webb is a gifted novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, who has returned repeatedly to the self-directed literary life after his periods of public service.Reasons why it would be good news for the country, if it happened:
Webb is smart, tough, and principled. He would instantly become the Cabinet member with most substantive knowledge of his department. He would personify a response to the idea that the United States has become a “chickenhawk nation”—always at war, never willing to deal with the domestic or international consequences of war—and that the current administration itself represents the Chickenhawk Way.Will this happen? I’m betting: No way! Jim Webb is too smart and self-aware to climb into this barrel. But for reading background while the idea is in the air, as a possibility, I offer you:
From 2006, background on an Atlantic cover package that Jim Webb and I wrote together—back in 1980, on the occasion of his running for the Senate as a Democrat; From 2012, what Webb, then at the end of his one term in the Senate, was like on the campaign trail for Democrats; From early 2015, my reaction to news that this person I’d known for many years might run for the Democratic nomination, against Hillary Clinton (and others); From late 2015, after Webb had done poorly with the Democratic electorate, my reaction to news that he might run for president as an independent.As a friend of Webb’s I’d say to him: Are you crazy? Of course you shouldn’t take that kind of responsibility, in this kind of administration.
As a citizen, I’d feel more comfortable if somehow he ended up holding this responsibility in the chain of command. The items above offered as background while we wait to see what happens next
Still Down: New year, new U.S. Congress, new Speaker of the House, same government shutdown. In its first order of business, the House elected Nancy Pelosi as speaker, mostly along party lines (here’s a less often-cited milestone: she’s the first person in more than six decades to reclaim the position).
Now in the majority, House Democrats started the 116th Congress looking to pass a pair of bills aimed at re-opening the government, neither of which offer funding for President Trump’s border wall. The president isn’t conceding: “I’ve never had so much support” for his position on the wall, he said at an impromptu press conference Thursday afternoon. Is there a way to put an end to all government shutdowns, for once and for all? Annie Lowrey has a suggestion.
The Dark Far Side of the Moon: China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon—on its own a thrilling feat of engineering. But there’s geopolitical subtext to the achievement, given that national government-supported space exploration began as a patriotism-drenched quest for national power (with a side of scientific discovery).
Snapshot
A machine-learning model showed promising results in identifying problematic lead pipes in Flint, Michigan, but city officials and their engineering contractor abandoned it. Alexis Madrigal on what went wrong. (Photo: Bill Pugliano / Getty)Let’s Invent a New HolidayLast month, we asked readers to share some of the unique traditions their families engaged in during the year-end holiday season. The rituals you shared were often quirky and uniformly delightful. They made us think, Why concentrate all these fantastic festivities into one always-too-fleeting month?
With that: We’re in search of a brand new holiday, and we want your help inventing one! National Stress-Bake Day? Turn off the Internet Day? Let us know here by January 11, and come back at the end of the month, when we’ll have you vote for your favorite new holiday.
Evening ReadA “white-sounding” name can significantly impact how a person is treated, including in “hypothetical life-and-death situations,” recent research from two psychologists found:
In one experiment, Zhao and Biernat had participants—about 850 white American citizens recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which researchers often use to pay subjects small sums in exchange for completing tasks—imagine the famous scenario of the “trolley problem,” in which an out-of-control train is about to run over five people on the tracks; pulling a lever to divert it would save them, but kill a helpless individual on another track. The identities of the five and the one were varied—for instance, the individual was referred to as either an Asian immigrant named Xian, an Asian immigrant named Mark, or a white male named Mark.
As is typical of trolley-problem studies, a majority of subjects said they’d pull the lever, but the names of the individual played a role in the decision. The shares of participants who decided to sacrifice the white Mark and the Asian Mark were about 68 percent and 70 percent, respectively; subjects were more likely to divert the train to hit Xian, which they chose to do 78 percent of the time.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. This former Boeing executive is now the acting secretary of defense, replacing his outgoing boss Jim Mattis.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. He was sworn in this week as the president of Brazil, making moves on day one to target the rights of minority groups in the country.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. In his first visit to American troops in an overseas combat zone, U.S. President Donald Trump arrived for an unannounced trip late last month to which country?
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Patrick Shanahan / Jair Bolsonaro / Iraq
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 today’s top stories:
Science has proven that having everyone stand still on the escalator is actually more efficient than allowing space for some people to walk around. Why can’t transit riders be convinced?
Since beginning its subsidized childcare program, Quebec has seen the rate of women in the workforce aged 26 to 44 reach 85 percent, the highest in the world.
Just how apocalyptic is the retail apocalypse? David Montgomery took a closer look at the data and found a more ambiguous picture than the headlines might suggest.
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It's Thursday, January 3. More than 100 congressional freshmen were sworn in today. Here’s what we were keeping an eye on:
New Speaker: Members of the 116th Congress, the most diverse Congress in America’s history, were sworn in. Nancy Pelosi was elected as speaker—despite a few Democratic defections, many from freshmen representatives—of the now Democrat-controlled House. Most Republican representatives voted for the minority leader Kevin McCarthy.
Making Things Awkward: The partial government shutdown, now in its 13th day, is far from the environment that House Democrats wanted to enter when they regained power. More on the first day of the new Congress below.
Look Over Here: In a rare impromptu White House press briefing, President Donald Trump made a show of not budging on his demands for border-wall funding. He took no questions from reporters.
The Politics of Climate Change: Former Vice President Al Gore rarely wades into the political arena these days, though he does say he thinks the 2020 election will be a “political tipping point” for climate change.
— Madeleine Carlisle and Olivia Paschal
Welcome to the 116th Congress
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is seated on the House floor. (Carolyn Kaster / AP)
Why the New Democratic Majority Could Work Better Than the Last (Ronald Brownstein)
“As Nancy Pelosi returns to the speakership after the party’s eight-year exile in the minority, she is unlikely to face anything comparable to the systematic resistance she confronted before, from the rural and small-town ‘blue dog’ Democrats trying vainly to hold back a rising Republican tide in their districts.” → Read on.
An Awkward Beginning to Democratic Control of the House (Russell Berman and Elaine Godfrey)
“The shutdown could sap much of the spotlight from the Democrats’ policy agenda, muddling their opportunity to drive the national debate, at least on their own terms, during their first weeks in power. It’s a reminder that this Democratic House majority will be fundamentally different from the one Pelosi led a decade ago.”→ Read on.
The Shutdown is only because of the 2020 Presidential Election. The Democrats know they can’t win based on all of the achievements of “Trump,” so they are going all out on the desperately needed Wall and Border Security - and Presidential Harassment. For them, strictly politics!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2019President Trump’s New Catchphrase Is an Attempt to Delegitimize Dissent (David Graham)
“It’s that simple phrase, ‘presidential harassment,’ that jumps out.” → Read on.
Trump’s Strange, Fleeting Briefing-Room Cameo (David Graham)
“Backed by several men with clean-shaven heads, Trump stepped to the dais and said ... well, not a great deal.” → Read on.
Al Gore Talks Climate Change and the 2020 Democrats (Edward-Isaac Dovere)
“‘Leaders who advocate solutions to the climate crisis should all run ... I think it’s good for the country and good for the world to have this issue elevated into the top tier during this upcoming campaign.’” → Read on.
How to End Government Shutdowns, Forever (Annie Lowrey)
“There are many paths to ending the shutdown—Trump could sign a funding bill without money for his border wall, say, or with paltry money for his border wall. Better yet, Congress could shut down the government shutdown option, forever.” → Read on.
Trump Just Endorsed the U.S.S.R.’s Invasion of Afghanistan (David Frum)
“It’s amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion. What’s even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandit elements.’” → Read on.
▪️ How a Feel-Good AI Story Went Wrong in Flint (Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic)
▪️ Powerless: What It Looks and Sounds Like When a Gas Driller Overruns Your Land (Ken Ward Jr., The Charleston Gazette-Mail; Al Shaw and Mayeta Clark, ProPublica)
▪️ How a Crackdown on MS-13 Caught Up Innocent High School Students (Hannah Dreier, The New York Times Magazine)
▪️ When Death Awaits Deported Asylum Seekers (Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post)
What Else We’re Reading▪️ How Predictable Is Donald Trump? (Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker)
▪️ Congress’s Incoming Class Is Younger, Bluer, and More Diverse Than Ever (Beatrice Jin, Politico)
▪️ Why Trump’s Generals Have Abandoned Ship (James Stavridis, Time)
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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With the government shutdown headed for the two-week mark with no end in sight, President Donald Trump had a succinct message for the press and the nation on Thursday: Please look at me.
All the attention in Washington had been concentrated down Pennsylvania Avenue for the swearing-in of the new Congress, and especially its new Democratic House majority. As my colleagues Russell Berman and Elaine Godfrey noted earlier Thursday, the new group “will share power with a president who does not cede center stage easily.” Like clockwork, Trump decided to show them just what that meant.
Well, like creaky, late clockwork. At 4:07 p.m. eastern time, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted that there would be a White House briefing at 4:10, three minutes later. The ranks of reporters at the executive mansion were thin—not only was there more action going on in Congress, but no briefing was scheduled, and White House briefings have practically become an endangered species—but those on the spot scrambled to get in place.
[Read: An awkward beginning to Democratic control of the House]
And then they waited, speculating about the reason for the abrupt announcement for the next 20 minutes or so, as 4:10 came and went. Finally, at nearly 4:30, Sanders came onstage, floridly introduced “our very great president, Donald J. Trump,” and got out of the way.
Thus began Trump’s first-ever visit to the briefing room, a milestone he acknowledged in his subsequent remarks. Other presidents have visited more frequently, hosting press conferences there and giving periodic updates to the nation. (Trump eschewed the customary exclamation of surprise at how much smaller the space looks in real life than on TV.) Backed by several men with clean-shaven heads, Trump stepped to the dais and said … well, not a great deal.
He congratulated the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, on her election, then launched into a set of talking points about the need for a border wall. “I’ve never had so much support than I’ve had in the last week over my stance on border security, for border control, and for, frankly, the wall or the barrier,” he said.
Then he introduced three of the men, who turned out to be Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Patrol Council and a frequent Trump advocate; Art Del Cueto, a vice president of the NBPC; and Hector Garza, another vice president. Their message: A wall is necessary and important. Del Cueto, a veteran peddler of bunkum, delivered the message most eloquently and most threateningly: “You all got to ask yourself this question: If I come to your home, do you want me to knock on the front door, or do you want me to climb through that window?”
Trump then returned to the lectern, claiming that the men had been at the White House for a long-planned meeting. “It just came at a very opportune time,” he said. “I said, ‘Let’s go out and see the press. You can tell them about the importance of the wall.’” The president whistled past some troubling economic indicators to say that the strong U.S. economy is attracting immigrants (true) and that high-tech tactics couldn’t replace a wall. “I think nobody knows much more about technology, this type of technology certainly, than I do,” he said falsely. “Having drones and various other forms of sensors, they’re all fine, but they are not going to stop the problems that this country has.”
[Read: The real shutdown fight might only be getting started]
Then they were all gone—Trump, Judd, Del Cueto, Garza, and Sanders, without taking a single query from the press. “The point of the briefing room is to take questions!” an anguished reporter shouted as Trump left.
But that’s begging the question, so to speak. If Trump chooses to use the briefing room to serve up reheated talking points to a hastily assembled crew of reporters, that’s the point of the briefing room. From this administration’s perspective, the media are just there to get the president’s attention. That can work: This was truly a remarkable stunt. It was also, however, an entirely superficial one. Trump can attract eyeballs, but that’s unlikely to convince the plurality of the American public who blame him for the shutdown, to grow the small portion who think the wall is an urgent priority, or to bring the shutdown any closer to resolution. Perhaps he’s saving all that for his second briefing-room visit.
Fifty years after humankind first laid eyes on the far side of the moon, a Chinese spacecraft called Chang’e 4 gently touched down and released a rover onto the unexplored terrain Thursday. The far side is incredibly difficult to reach; mission control can’t send radio signals to spacecraft if they’re out of sight. To communicate with Chang’e 4, China put a separate probe in orbit around the moon to relay messages back and forth. Then again, the entire moon is difficult to reach. Space agencies have launched dozens of ambitious missions to Earth’s companion, succeeding miraculously at some times and failing spectacularly at others. After Americans landed on the moon, investment in lunar exploration waned in the United States and Russia. But interest abounds elsewhere, in China, India, and Europe. Humanity has already achieved many lunar firsts, but others are still to come.
Humankind first laid eyes on the far side of the moon in 1968.
“The backside looks like a sand pile my kids have been playing in for a long time,” the astronaut Bill Anders told NASA mission control. For millennia, people had gazed up at the same view of the Earth’s companion—the same craters, cracks, and fissures. As the Apollo spacecraft floated over the unfamiliar lunar surface, Anders described the new territory, which promised to be a tough landing for anyone who tried. “It’s all beat up, no definition,” he said. “Just a lot of bumps and holes.”
Fifty years later, humankind landed in the sand pile.
China set down a spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Wednesday, Beijing time. On Thursday, the spacecraft, named Chang’e 4, after the Chinese goddess of the moon, unlocked a hatch and released a rover onto the lunar soil. The rover carries tools designed to explore the unchartered terrain, which, thanks to a lifetime of facing the cosmos, is covered in craters.
The landing, celebrated already as an achievement for humankind, is a reminder that people can accomplish some wonderfully wild things, given enough curiosity, skill, and rocket fuel. The first photos from the Chang’e 4 mission, captured inside a crater near the moon’s south pole, are chill-inducing. But the landing is also a distinctly geopolitical win for a nation that hadn’t even launched its first satellite when Bill Anders saw that sand pile 50 years ago.
The story of space exploration, the kind carried out by national governments, began as a quest for national achievement and power. In the 1950s, the Americans and the Russians shot rocket after rocket into the sky with patriotism, not discovery, at the forefront of their minds. Any science that came out of it was an added bonus.
[Read: ]China’s growing ambitions in space
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this geopolitical drive is a Soviet spacecraft called Luna 2. The Soviet Union launched Luna 2 in 1959, two years after sending the first satellite into orbit around Earth. Luna 2 was beachball-shaped, with spiky antennas, and weighed 390 pounds. The spacecraft carried multiple instruments designed to measure the radiation environment around the moon. It transmitted this data back to Earth as it flew through space. When Luna 2 approached the lunar surface, mission control held their breath.
The signals stopped. Luna 2 had slammed into the moon, breaking apart into pieces.
Mission control erupted in cheers. For the Soviet Union, it didn’t matter that Luna 2, which became the first spacecraft to reach the moon, had been smashed into smithereens. The point was to get there first—to mark territory. The Soviets had packed the spacecraft with metal pendants bearing the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. The impact scattered them across the lunar regolith, where they remain today, as if on display at a museum.
For the United States and the Soviet Union, every milestone in the space race was commemorated as an achievement for all humankind, yes, but also as a gain for the nation—for its government, its policies, its ideals—that reached it first. Two days after Luna 2 completed its mission, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the United States. As the British historian Robert Cavendish wrote in the magazine History Today, Americans suspected that the space mission had been coordinated with the political visit: Khrushchev was “beaming with rumbustious pride” and gleefully “lectured Americans on the virtues of communism and the immorality of scantily clothed chorus girls.”
A decade later, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, the Soviets were decidedly less rumbustious. Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the premier, told Scientific American in 2009 that Soviet propaganda let the news of “one giant leap for mankind” slide by without much fanfare. “It was not secret, but it was not shown to the public,” he said.
By then, China had already been trying to insert itself into the space race for more than a decade. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, Mao Zedong instructed his country’s scientists and engineers to prepare a satellite of their own, to launch in 1959, in honor of the Great Leap Forward, the leader’s ultimately failed plan for rapid industrialization. The directive from the top to scientists was simple: “Get it up, follow it around, make it seen, make it heard.”
But the country didn’t have the necessary technology for such a fast turnaround, and space-exploration efforts would be repeatedly derailed by political turmoil in the coming decades. The satellite launched at last in 1970, equipped with a single purpose: playing the first few bars of “The East Is Red,” an instrumental song glorifying China’s Cultural Revolution.
In recent years, though, China’s space efforts have jumped to warp speed. When the country launched its first astronaut in 2003, it became one of only three countries to have done so. It sent an uncrewed orbiter around the moon in 2007, and a rover in 2013. In 2011, it launched a space station that astronauts visited twice before it was decommissioned and deliberately crashed into the Pacific Ocean. A second space station launched in 2016. In 2018, China launched more rockets into orbit than any other country.
[Read: ]Why it’s a bad idea to launch rockets over land
China has more bold plans for the future. The country is aiming to land a rover on Mars in early 2021 and, if successful, would become the second country after the United States to accomplish the feat. It also wants to land astronauts on the moon by 2030.
These and other milestones can be celebrated on a global scale as an achievement for the human species, just like the landing was. “It is human nature to explore the unknown world,” Wu Weiren, the chief designer of the Chang’e 4 mission, said in a television interview, according to The New York Times. “And it is what our generation and the next generation are supposed to do.”
But China’s space accomplishments are as symbolic and strategic as the Apollo and Vostok programs were in the 1960s, especially now, when space agencies in Europe, Russia, India, and, most recently, the United States have put a big focus on lunar exploration. “We are building China into a space giant,” Wu said.
For spacefaring nations, impressive feats, whether it’s landing on Mars or on the far side of the moon, will always be seen through the lens of the nation that managed to pull it off. “When you are the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon, that says something about your science and technology, that says something about your industry,” the Heritage Foundation’s Dean Cheng, one of the few Chinese-speaking analysts in the United States that focus on China’s space program, told The Atlantic in 2017.
If it still seems silly to consider geopolitical history in the exuberant moments after a moon landing, consider this reaction from the Global Times, a newspaper run by the Communist Party, China’s ruling party, reported by The Washington Post:
Unlike mankind’s mania in the past, the Chinese people ultimately harbor the dream of shared human destiny and practices open cooperation. We choose to go to the back of the moon not because of the unique glory it brings, but because this difficult step of destiny is also a forward step for human civilization!
A “forward step for human civilization,” indeed. But the “unique glory” is certainly nice, too.
When the Trump administration released its school-safety report last month, it landed with a thud—and only partly because it’s a clunky 180 pages. Many of the recommendations in the report, authored by the Federal Commission on School Safety, are aimed at fostering a better school climate—how a school feels to the students who attend it—whether that’s through improved access to counseling and mental-health services or a greater emphasis on social-emotional learning. But other recommendations were met with derision, such as a proposal to rescind an Obama-era rule urging schools to be mindful of whether they might be punishing minority students at a higher rate than white students.
Study after study has shown that black students are unevenly suspended or expelled from schools nationwide. The 2014 school-discipline guideline was the Obama administration’s attempt to remedy that. The Trump commission, however, argued that deciding how students should be disciplined should not be the federal government’s job, but the teachers’. Both administrations, at least, agreed that discipline was also a matter of school climate—something educational leaders have been trying desperately to improve.
[Read: How school suspensions push black students behind]
A new study by the Rand Corporation, a nonpartisan think tank, shows just how crucial improving the climate at school can be to helping decrease suspensions. In 2013, Pittsburgh’s public schools were trying to figure out how to remedy racial disparities in discipline. At the time, they had mandatory diversity training for staff that sought to address implicit bias and discrimination in the classroom, but they wanted to do more. Restorative practices, which are nonpunitive ways of responding to conflicts, had been gaining momentum among school leaders as a way to help curb suspensions.
So the district got a grant to try out restorative practices in their schools, randomly selecting 22 of them to receive the restorative treatment, while 22 others went about business as usual. The basic goal of restorative practices is to build relationships between teachers and students, so that students will be less likely to act out. Teachers start off the school year by asking students innocuous questions such as what the students did that summer. As the year goes on, the questions grow more personal and introspective, and students build trust with the adults and classmates around them. Of course, formal times for such events can be time-consuming, so it is often recommended that the practices are woven into the day. As much as restorative practices aim to change how students are disciplined, they also seek to change the behavior that might require discipline, improving the overall climate of the school.
[Read: One Ohio school’s quest to rethink bad behavior]
The researchers examined the schools—elementary, middle, and high schools—over two years and found that restorative practices greatly reduced the number of school days lost to suspension, particularly among elementary schoolers. The dip was most acute among black, low-income, and female students, and nonviolent offenses drove the decline. “It seems to be the case that restorative practices were providing an alternative that the staff felt they could use to enforce discipline, [especially] for offenses that weren’t extremely serious in the sense of endangering people’s safety,” John Engberg, a researcher at Rand, told me.
On top of that, the report found no negative impact on the test scores of students in the schools that had restorative treatments. “That seems to indicate that keeping kids in school is not leading to a deteriorating learning environment,” Engberg said. And, for their part, teachers who worked at schools with the restorative treatments rated their climate as comparatively more positive.
There were some things that restorative practices couldn’t change, though. Sure, academic outcomes, such as test scores, didn’t drop, but they didn’t improve either. The decline in suspension rates was most stark for elementary-school students rather than middle- or high-school students, where the effects were more muted, suggesting that early intervention is important.
Changing a school’s climate is a long process, Catherine Augustine, a senior researcher at Rand, told me.“This isn’t Let’s go to a one-day workshop and we’ll all be restorative,” she said. It takes work from teachers, faculty, staff, and students. And the researchers themselves still have a lot of work to do in terms of understanding how restorative practices work and whether the gains made by the elementary schoolers will carry forward through middle and high school. Still, the bipartisan goal of improving school climate may not be as elusive as it seems.
Donald Trump is a devoted sloganeer, from “You’re fired” to “Make America great again.” But slogans grow tired and lose their oomph with time and repetition, which means it’s important to keep refreshing and replacing them.
Enter “presidential harassment.”
On Thursday, with the government shutdown in its 13th day, with no sign of abating, and the new Democratic majority taking over the House, the president tweeted this:
The Shutdown is only because of the 2020 Presidential Election. The Democrats know they can’t win based on all of the achievements of “Trump,” so they are going all out on the desperately needed Wall and Border Security - and Presidential Harassment. For them, strictly politics!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2019There is, as they say, a lot going on here. Trump is probably not wrong to suggest a 2020 connection. Democrats are staunchly opposed to the wall as a waste of money, but they also want to deprive him of a victory on a key campaign promise, undermining his reelection hopes. (There’s a lot of politics in this shutdown fight for Trump, too, of course—he was signaling a willingness to compromise until he was assailed by right-wing media figures.) And who knows what the scare quotes around Trump’s name are meant to be? (Maybe there’s a weird Dave-style switch just waiting to be discovered?)
[Read: Trump started 2019 on an angry, lonely note]
But it’s that simple phrase, “presidential harassment,” that jumps out. This is the eighth time he’s employed it, according to factba.se, with uses coming more frequently of late. The nascent rise of the phrase is an indication that Trump feels newly embattled, but it also underscores the way he tries to construe any criticism of himself as illegitimate.
Trump is a magpie, borrowing his most famous lines: “Make America great again” from Ronald Reagan; “America first” from Charles Lindbergh; “fake news” from Hillary Clinton. He nicked “presidential harassment” from Senator Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader seems to have coined the phrase in an October 10 Associated Press interview, and then reprised it the day after the midterm election, warning Democrats against prying too deeply into Trump’s affairs.
“The whole issue of presidential harassment is interesting,” McConnell said. “I remember when we tried it in the late ’90s. We impeached President Clinton. His numbers went up and ours went down and we underperformed in the next election.”
Leaving aside whether McConnell offered this advice in good faith, he meant it in a limited sense of oversight investigations. Trump, displaying his knack for branding, has quickly expanded the phrase to encompass any kind of criticism. First came this tweet, five days after McConnell’s post-election warning, and seeming to follow the same definition:
The prospect of Presidential Harassment by the Dems is causing the Stock Market big headaches!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018Two days later, in an interview with The Daily Caller, Trump said:
I think we’ll do very well if they want to play the presidential harassment game. If they play the presidential harassment game I don’t think anything’s going to be done ’cause why would I do that, okay? If they want to get things done I think it will be fantastic, I think we can get a lot done.
Three days after that, he used it again during a gaggle, this time in a riff about the presumptive Democratic House leader, who was then fending off a leadership challenge:
I like Nancy Pelosi. I mean, she’s tough and she’s smart. But she deserves to be speaker. And now they’re playing games with her just like they’ll be playing with me with—it’s called “presidential harassment.” The president of your country is doing a great job, but he’s being harassed. It’s presidential harassment.
In addition to the odd dip into the third person, this represents an important step in Trump’s process for reifying his claims, with “it’s called” serving a purpose similar to “many people are saying,” when in fact only he is saying it, or the one calling it that. Already, the meaning is slipping—opposing Pelosi is harassment, just as opposing Trump constitutes harassment. See, for example, this December 6 invocation:
Without the phony Russia Witch Hunt, and with all that we have accomplished in the last almost two years (Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judge’s, Military, Vets, etc.) my approval rating would be at 75% rather than the 50% just reported by Rasmussen. It’s called Presidential Harassment!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2018On December 23, he complained on Twitter, “Presidential Harassment has been with me from the beginning!” Two days later, during a videoconference with members of the military, Trump couldn’t resist turning the occasion into a political rally. Asked about what to expect in the new Congress, he answered, “Well, then probably presidential harassment, and we know how to handle that. I think I handle that better than anybody. There’s been no collusion.”
On December 29, in the midst of a long string of self-pitying messages, he tweeted:
I am in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come on over and make a deal on Border Security. From what I hear, they are spending so much time on Presidential Harassment that they have little time left for things like stopping crime and our military!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018Every president hates criticism, though few take it as personally or respond as prolifically as Trump does. More important, few if any have dedicated themselves so fiercely to portraying any criticism of themselves as illegitimate per se. By spinning House oversight (a constitutionally mandated function) and any other criticism as “harassment,” he labels it untoward, unseemly, even potentially illegal.
[Read: The most striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford]
Labeling dissent as illegitimate is uncomfortable in a liberal democracy, a form of government about which Trump is ambivalent at best. And his victimhood is unearned. There’s more than enough evidence to warrant stricter congressional oversight of the executive branch. Could Democrats overreach? Of course. But it’s too soon to know. Trump is trying to preempt them.
The phrase is uncomfortable for another reason, too. It’s difficult, especially in this age, to decouple the word harassment from its frequent prefix of sexual. That’s perhaps especially true for Trump. In addition to the at least 19 women who have publicly accused the president of sexual misconduct, there is the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump boasts about sexually assaulting women because he’s a star. He also mocked Christine Blasey Ford, who accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her in high school.
By commandeering the term harassment to dismiss any criticism of himself, Trump is also belittling his own accusers. The White House has flatly rejected all the accusations against the president and refused to recognize them. With his woe-is-me claims of “presidential harassment,” Trump is challenging the public to do the same to him.
Late in 2018, The Atlantic’s Family section asked readers to share some of the unique traditions their families engaged in during the year-end holiday season. The rituals you all shared with us were often quirky (one of them involved a Speedo-clad George Michael made of marzipan) and uniformly delightful. And they made us think: Why concentrate all these fantastic festivities into one always-too-fleeting month? What about the rest of the year? Couldn’t those other periods stand to be a little more joyful, or a little more meaningful, or a little more fun?
With that in mind: We’re in search of a new holiday. And we’re hoping for your help in creating it. Maybe, for example, there should be, sometime in the dark days of winter, a National Stress-Bake Day. Or maybe February would be a little more festive were Galentine’s Day to be converted from a sitcomic treasure into a more broadly celebrated holiday. A beloved local tradition that deserves more widespread recognition? Weird Family Stories Day? Get Back in Touch Day? Resolution Revision Day? Turn Off the Internet Day? (All of the internet, that is, except for TheAtlantic.com and its subsidiaries?)
If you have an idea for a holiday that does not currently exist but should very definitely exist, please let us know by filling out this form by January 11. We’ll put together the ideas you send us and then, later in the month, ask you to vote on them—in a face-off we hope will end with a new holiday that, should you choose to celebrate it, will bring merriment, meaning, or, at the very least, another excuse to consume seasonally justified baked goods.
Here’s a sample, courtesy of the Atlantic staff writer and holiday enthusiast Megan Garber:
What’s the name of the holiday you’d like to bring into existence?
Nocrastination Week
How would you celebrate it? Please describe the festivities, in a paragraph:
If you are a human person currently living in this hectic world, there is a very good chance that you have a bunch of tasks, big and absurdly small, that you’ve been meaning to do for days (or weeks! or months! OR YEARS?) … and have been putting off. Well, this is the week to stop putting them off: spring cleaning, essentially, but with a broader mandate and a specific deadline. This, to be clear, is not at all a glamorous holiday—but what Nocrastination Week lacks in flair, it makes up for in practicality. It’s a holiday that allows its celebrants to give themselves the ultimate gift: the relief that comes with marking those haunting To-Dos as, finally, Done.
When do you imagine it would fall on the calendar? Will it be celebrated on a specific date—or a specific week, or specific day of the week?
Nocrastination Week should probably fall during the late winter, sometime in February or early March. It lasts the week to allow for maximum flexibility with participants’ schedules. Its final day—which is also its final deadline—will be a Sunday. If you don’t get your set task accomplished by sundown that Sunday, you will not, sadly, get any Nocrastination Cake (see below).
Are there any particular foods, costumes, decorations, songs, or anything else along those lines that are associated with the holiday? If so, please describe them:
Yes, there’s a food! Nocrastination Cake: consumed after the day’s task is complete, as a reward for getting the job done.
Why should this holiday exist?
Nocrastination Week is an antidote to the pressures and expectations of the December holidays. It’s not about acquiring things; it’s about doing away with things that are sources of stress. Like any good holiday, it’s a celebration of stuff that, ideally, people would be practicing throughout the year. But it also acknowledges the obvious: There’s nothing like a deadline.
Updated on January 3 at 10:20 p.m. ET
This was not how Democrats expected, much less hoped, to begin their new House majority.
After the blue wave crested, ever so slowly, in November, the start of the 116th Congress on Thursday loomed as a moment of potential drama, a constitutionally mandated deadline for the party to decide whether to make a generational change in leadership. In the weeks after the election, Nancy Pelosi scrambled to put down an intraparty rebellion that threatened to turn her elevation to a second stint as speaker into a nail-biting vote and a showcase of Democratic division. She succeeded in impressive fashion, securing support vote by vote and demonstrating the formidable skills that have kept her atop the Democratic caucus for 16 years.
Once that leadership challenge fizzled, a new, more triumphant vision for the opening of Congress emerged: Pelosi would become the first person in more than 60 years to reclaim the speaker’s gavel, and then Democrats would promptly set about passing bills to deliver on their campaign promises and place their first checks on President Donald Trump’s power. Their initial volleys would include legislation to enact so-called democracy reforms to address campaign-finance loopholes, and measures to expand voting rights and limit gerrymandering. Bills to beef up protections for people with preexisting conditions in the Affordable Care Act and tackle high prescription-drug prices would follow soon after. Yes, these proposals would be dead-on-arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate, but the goal was to send an immediate message to their constituents and reset a legislative debate that had swung far to the right for the past two years.
Instead, neither of those scenarios occurred.
Pelosi won the speakership in a floor vote early Thursday afternoon, having punctured a group of about two dozen Democratic opponents by cutting one-off deals with some members and agreeing to procedural reforms to secure the support of another bloc. She nabbed 220 votes, narrowly clearing the majority she needed after 15 House Democrats either stated the names of other candidates or voted present.
Democrats inside the Capitol were jubilant as they gathered on the House floor with their families for the formal swearing-in and speaker vote. But they won’t be able to fully celebrate their first House majority in eight years, nor will they be able to swiftly act on their agenda. They’re taking over in the midst of a partial government shutdown—the first time in the 42-year history of the modern budget process that a transfer of power in Congress has taken place while major parts of the federal bureaucracy are shuttered due to a lapse in funding.
Within hours of gaveling in the new Congress, House Democrats passed two bills aimed at reopening the government, including one that’s identical to legislation the Senate unanimously approved in December to extend funding for the Department of Homeland Security through February 8. The other measure included bipartisan, full-year appropriations bills for eight other federal departments. Both cleared the House with some bipartisan support, as a handful of Republicans broke with their leadership to vote yes.
The move to pass substantive votes so quickly after members took the oath of office was unusual. “It just drives home how important the work is that we have to do here,” said Representative Katie Porter of California, “and the fact that we’re starting it tonight, that we’re canceling celebrations and parties to do the work the American people have sent us here to do.”
Neither bill included additional funding for Trump’s border wall, as he’s demanded. The bills represented an opening salvo both at Trump and at the Republicans who run the Senate, a bid to showcase Democrats’ new leverage while pressuring the GOP to end a shutdown the president had said he’d be proud to own.
Indeed, as the new Congress begins, there is no end in sight to the shutdown. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would ignore the bills that House Democrats advanced—as well as any legislation that does not have the explicit support of the president. McConnell acknowledged after a White House meeting on Wednesday that parts of the government could remain closed for weeks longer.
The stalemate won’t stop Democrats from moving on the rest of their agenda. Pelosi’s office announced an event for Friday to unveil the party’s democracy-reform legislation, with votes next week. Nor did it interrupt the traditional pomp and circumstance that accompanies the biannual convening of Congress, which proceeded with only glancing references to the government shutdown.
Lawmakers new and old gathered in the House chamber shortly after noon, and the portrait of the 116th Congress was a study in contrasts: The larger Democratic side of the aisle comprised the most diverse House caucus in the nation’s history—spanning race, ethnicity, gender, even styles of clothing—while the Republicans were a sea of overwhelmingly white men in dark suits. The members’ first act is always the roll-call vote for speaker, wherein each lawmaker calls out the name of their preferred candidate.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, brought his party to its feet with an energetic nominating speech for Pelosi. “Let me be clear: House Democrats are down with NDP—Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi!” he shouted to laughs and cheers. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the daughter of the former vice president who was recently elevated to the fourth-ranking GOP post, nominated Representative Kevin McCarthy of California with a speech that reiterated the party’s full support for Trump’s bid to “build the wall.”
The vote for Pelosi was without much drama but not without defections. Many of the 15 members who withheld their support were freshmen who had pledged to voters that they would not back Pelosi for speaker. Four of them voted instead for Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, a fourth-term Democrat who will head the party’s campaign committee for the next two years. Representative Anthony Brindisi of New York voted for former Vice President Joe Biden—the speaker technically does not have to be a member of the House—while two House Democrats voted for Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, despite the fact that she serves in the Senate.
McCarthy suffered losses on the Republican side as well. Four votes went to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Freedom Caucus leader who had challenged McCarthy for the top GOP post.
In her first speech to the House, Pelosi mixed paeans to bipartisan comity with a recommitment to Democratic policy priorities. “I pledge that this Congress will be transparent, bipartisan, and unifying; that we will seek to reach across the aisle in this chamber and across the divisions in this great nation,” she said.
Pelosi never mentioned Trump by name, but the only two presidents she cited were Republicans: Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The new speaker quoted a Reagan tribute to America’s history as a nation of immigrants, and when Republican members of the House didn’t clap, she admonished them. “You won’t applaud for Ronald Reagan?” she asked, in a rare departure from her scripted remarks.
Turning to the Democratic agenda, the new speaker called for action to address income inequality and the climate crisis, to protect Dreamers and combat gun violence, and to reinvest in public education and workforce development. “Working together, we will redeem the promise of the American dream for every family, advancing progress for every community,” she said.
But the shutdown could sap much of the spotlight from the Democrats’ policy agenda, muddling their opportunity to drive the national debate, at least on their own terms, during their first weeks in power. The rancor associated with the funding impasse was also dispiriting to new lawmakers who had hoped that their arrival in Washington would mean a fresh start. “It’s obviously not ideal because there are many of us who came here to try to act in a bipartisan fashion, to try to form coalitions, to try to get things done,” said Representative Colin Allred, a freshman Democrat from Texas. “And this is a very bad start.”
It’s also a reminder that this Democratic House majority will be fundamentally different from the one Pelosi led a decade ago. This freshman class may be infused with the new energy of young, diverse progressives and a record number of women. But it will share power with a president who does not cede center stage easily.
Orchestrating this shutdown may not help Trump broaden his appeal at the midpoint of his term. But if nothing else, it will deny Pelosi, and the new House majority she leads, their full moment of triumph.
“As a foreigner in the U.S., since the first day I arrived,” says Xian Zhao, “I have been constantly asking myself this question: Should I adopt an Anglo name?”
Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, says that his cousin and his aunt changed their name from Pengyuan and Guiqing to Jason and Susan, respectively, upon moving to the U.S. Some of his grad-school peers made similar decisions, but after some deliberation while completing his Ph.D. in the U.S., he resolved to continue using his given first name, which means “significant” and “outstanding.” “Hearing people calling me Alex or Daniel doesn’t mean anything to me,” he told me.
The dilemma, though, inspired Zhao to study first names in an academic capacity, which he’s done with Monica Biernat, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas who was his Ph.D. advisor. Most recently, they looked at the relationship between someone’s first name and whether people would offer them help in “hypothetical life-and-death situations.”
[Read: Why don’t parents name their daughters Mary anymore?]
In one experiment, Zhao and Biernat had participants—about 850 white American citizens recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which researchers often use to pay subjects small sums in exchange for completing tasks—imagine the famous scenario of the “trolley problem,” in which an out-of-control train is about to run over five people on the tracks; pulling a lever to divert it would save them, but kill a helpless individual on another track. The identities of the five and the one were varied—for instance, the individual was referred to as either an Asian immigrant named Xian, an Asian immigrant named Mark, or a white male named Mark.
As is typical of trolley-problem studies, a majority of subjects said they’d pull the lever, but the name of the individual played a role in the decision. The shares of participants who decided to sacrifice the white Mark and the Asian Mark were about 68 percent and 70 percent, respectively; subjects were more likely to divert the train to hit Xian, which they chose to do 78 percent of the time.
Of course, there are limits to hypothetical ethical dilemmas (and to research conducted using Mechanical Turk), but these effects appear in the real world too. In previous research, Zhao and Biernat found that white professors were more likely to respond to an emailed request from a Chinese student when the student went by Alex, as opposed to Xian. And a separate paper found that Chinese job seekers received more favorable responses from employers when they went by anglicized names. (Other research has noted similar difficulties that arise for black job applicants.)
A lot of research on immigration and names examines the subject from an economic perspective. A 2016 paper in the American Sociological Review looked at the first names given to the generation that came after the wave of immigration to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. “Native-born sons of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrant fathers who were given very ethnic names ended up in occupations that earned, on average, $50 to $100 less per year than sons who were given very ‘American’ names,” the researchers wrote. “This represented 2 to 5 percent of annual earnings.” (They determined the “ethnic-ness” or “American-ness” of a name based on how frequently it was given in each immigrant and native-born population at the time.)
Some of this effect, the researchers estimated, was due to class differences among parents (which remain a strong determinant of a child’s future job prospects), but most of it had to do with the symbolism of the name itself. Interestingly, the economic advantage that came with having a “more American” name still applied to people with surnames that clearly indicated their parents’ foreign origins. The researchers surmised that American-sounding first names, then, functioned more as a signal of “an effort to assimilate” than a means of “hiding one’s origins.”
Immigrants in that era frequently felt pressured to change their own first name. A separate study, also from 2016, found that “at any given time between 1900 and 1930,” about 77 percent of immigrants had an American-sounding first name, and it was the norm for them to have dropped their original name within a year of entering the U.S. There were economic overtones here too: Male immigrants were more likely to change their name if they lived in counties where other immigrants had trouble getting jobs.
Researchers in other countries, such as Germany and Sweden, have also used first names as a proxy for assimilation, and picked up on similar economic consequences. Three researchers in Europe estimated that in France, between 2003 and 2007, there would have been more than 50 percent more babies born with an Arabic name if there weren’t an economic penalty associated with having one.
There seems to be a pattern when it comes to immigrants’ decision to give their children “American-sounding” (which in this context, as in many others, is a sort of code for “whiter-sounding”) names. In 2009, the New York University sociologist Guillermina Jasso told The New York Times that “in general, the names immigrants give their children go through three stages—from names in the original language, to universal names, and finally to names in the destination-country language.” The reporter observed that as the proportion of Hispanic Americans who were born in the U.S. increased, the name José seemed to be declining in popularity.
But perhaps when discrimination against a certain ethnic group diminishes, there is an opportunity for a naming reversal. Historically, many Jews have changed their surnames—Larry King’s last name was originally Zeiger, and Jon Stewart’s was Leibowitz—but today, some are changing theirs to something more Jewish. In a 2014 article on shifting naming conventions, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz mentioned two American Jews who had, in an effort to honor their roots, changed their last names from Bush to Silberbusch and Reed to Safran. So maybe there’s a fourth stage: Once immigrant groups establish themselves in new countries, they feel they have room to celebrate the people who helped bring them to where they are now.
It was only one moment in a 90-minute stream of madness.
President Donald Trump convened a Cabinet meeting, at which he invited all its members to praise him for his stance on the border wall and the government shutdown. There’s always a lively competition to see which member of the Cabinet can grovel most abjectly. The newcomer Matthew Whitaker may be only the acting attorney general, but despite—or perhaps because of—that tentative status, he delivered one of the strongest entries, saluting the president for sacrificing his Christmas and New Year’s holiday for the public good, and contrasting that to members of Congress who had left Washington during the Trump-created crisis.
But that was not the crazy part.
The crazy part came during the president’s monologue defending his decision to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria and 7,000 from Afghanistan, about half the force in that country.
[David Frum: The crisis facing America]
“Russia used to be the Soviet Union,” he said.
Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia … the reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt; they went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer part of Russia, because of Afghanistan.
Let’s go to the replay:
The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.
To appreciate the shock value of Trump’s words, it’s necessary to dust off some Cold War history. Those of us who grew up in the last phases of the Cold War used to know it all by heart, but I admit I had to do a little Googling to refresh my faded memories.
Through the 1970s, Afghanistan had been governed by a president who was friendly to the Soviet Union, but it was not reliably under Soviet control. That president, Mohammad Daoud Khan, became convinced that the local Communists were plotting against him. He struck first, assassinating one Communist leader in April 1978, and arresting others.
Instead of preventing the plot, this coup-from-above triggered it. In April 1978, the Communists—enabled by their strong presence in Afghanistan’s Soviet-trained military—seized power.
The new regime launched an ambitious modernizing agenda: women’s rights, land reform, secularization. That project went about as well as expected. While the Communists appealed to a small, educated elite in Kabul, they offended the ultraconservative countryside. Violent guerrilla resistance gathered. The guerrillas called themselves “mujahideen,” holy warriors. The Kabul government dismissed them as “bandit elements” and “terrorists.”
[Read: What Putin really wants]
By the end of 1979, the Kabul-based Communist government was teetering, nearing collapse. The Soviet authorities in Moscow blamed the incompetence, corruption, and internecine violence of their local allies. In December 1979, they overthrew and killed the then-Communist leader, installed somebody more compliant, and deployed 85,000 troops to enforce their rule over the countryside. The Soviets had expected a brief, decisive intervention like those in Prague in 1968 or Budapest in 1956. Instead, the war turned into a grinding Vietnam-in-reverse. The Soviets withdrew, defeated, in 1989.
Here’s why Trump’s lopsided view of this story is so telling. Inflicting that defeat on the U.S.S.R. was a major bipartisan foreign-policy priority of the 1980s. The policy was designed by Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and executed by the Reagan administration.
It’s amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion. What’s even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: “terrorists” and “bandit elements.”
It has been an important ideological project of the Putin regime to rehabilitate and justify the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Putin does not care so much about Afghanistan, but he cares a lot about the image of the U.S.S.R. In 2005, Putin described the collapse of the Soviet Union as (depending on your preferred translation) “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” or “a major geopolitical disaster of the 20th century”—but clearly a thing very much to be regretted.
The war in Afghanistan helped bring about that collapse, not because it bankrupted the Soviet regime—that was an effect of the break in the price of oil after 1985—but because it forced a reckoning between the Soviet regime and Soviet society. As casualties mounted, as soldiers returned home addicted to heroin, Soviet citizens began demanding the right to speak the truth, not only about the war in Afghanistan, but about all Soviet reality.
It’s fitting that Putin’s campaign to reimpose official lying would culminate in a glorification of the catastrophic Afghanistan war. And clearly, that campaign has swayed the mind of the president of the United States.
As of mid-morning on January 3, the day after the president’s repetition of Soviet-Putinist propaganda in the Cabinet room, there has been no attempt by the White House to tidy things up: no presidential tweet, no corrective statement. The president’s usual defenders—Sean Hannity, Fox & Friends, the anti-anti-Trump Twitter chorus—have likewise ignored the whole matter. They’re back to denouncing the Steele dossier, fulminating against Mueller, and reprising the Clinton-email drama. There’s apparently nothing they can think of to say in exoneration or excuse.
Putin-style glorification of the Soviet regime is entering the mind of the president, inspiring his words and—who knows—perhaps shaping his actions. How that propaganda is reaching him—by which channels, via which persons—seems an important if not urgent question. But maybe what happened yesterday does not raise questions. Maybe it inadvertently reveals answers.
The new Democratic majority that takes command of the House on Thursday starts with 21 fewer seats than the party held the last time it elected Nancy Pelosi as speaker. But this new majority may prove easier for the party to both manage legislatively and defend electorally.
Though slightly smaller, the Democratic caucus that’s assuming power is far more ideologically and geographically cohesive than the party’s previous majority 10 years ago. While the 2009 class included a large number of Democrats from blue-collar, culturally conservative, rural seats that were politically trending away from the party, the new majority revolves around white-collar and racially diverse urban and suburban districts that are trending toward it.
That won’t eliminate all internal disagreements inside the caucus, particularly as an energized progressive block moves to flex its muscles. But it does mean that as Pelosi returns to the speakership after the party’s eight-year exile in the minority, she is unlikely to face anything comparable to the systematic resistance she confronted before, from the rural and small-town “blue dog” Democrats trying vainly to hold back a rising Republican tide in their districts.
That resistance shadowed every item on the Democratic agenda during former President Barack Obama’s first two years, from health care to climate change. “Nothing was easy,” says Henry Waxman, the veteran former legislator who served as chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee over that period. “I remember complaining to Pelosi that she was putting too many blue dogs on the committee and she said, ‘You’ll have to do what we all have to do: compromise.’”
[Steve Israel: Nancy Pelosi is the speaker Democrats need]
Compromise was necessary back then because the party still relied on blue dogs to keep its control of the House, though their districts were increasingly attracted to Republicans in presidential elections. CityLab has developed an innovative system for ranking House districts on an urban-rural scale based on the density of their population and other factors. Its analysis found that, in 2009, fully 89 of all House Democrats, or 35 percent, held seats in the two most rural categories. My own previous analysis of the 2009 class found that 76 Democrats represented heavily blue-collar seats that had fewer minorities and fewer white college graduates than the national average.
The moderate-to-conservative blue dogs centered in those rural and blue-collar seats were a consistent source of unease about the aggressive agenda Democrats pursued with unified control of the White House, Senate, and House under Obama. In 2009, 44 Democrats voted against the cap-and-trade climate-change bill that Waxman and Pelosi steered through the House; the next year, 34 voted against final passage of the Affordable Care Act. (“I thought that [cap-and-trade] was difficult but health care would be easy,” recalls Waxman, who shepherded both bills through his committee. “But even health care wasn’t easy.”) After those two votes, the blue dogs’ reluctance to take more risky votes helped convince Pelosi and the White House to abandon consideration of comprehensive immigration reform, much less any new gun-control measures.
That caution couldn’t stem the tide. The rural and blue-dog Democrats were living on borrowed time as small-town, evangelical Christian, and blue-collar whites were becoming more reliably Republican. In the 2010 midterm election, the GOP hunted the blue dogs nearly to extinction: Fifty-one of the 89 rural Democrats CityLab identified were defeated as the GOP surged into the majority.
Critically, the Democrats rebuilt their majority in 2018 without relying on such inherently unstable turf. Instead, the new class has the party advancing into different terrain. Only 35 Democrats in the new caucus hold seats in CityLab’s two most rural categories, according to figures shared by David Montgomery, who developed the ranking system. That represents only about one-fifth of all of those seats—and just 15 percent of the total Democratic caucus. By contrast, 200 of the new Democrats (or 85 percent) hold seats in CityLab’s four most urban and suburban categories. Those districts include almost all of the Republican-held seats that Democrats captured last fall. In the three most urban categories of House seats, Democrats now crush Republicans, 149 to 16.
[Read: How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to wield her power]
Other measures also suggest that Democrats are now holding more defensible ground. In 2009, 49 House Democrats represented seats that had voted for John McCain in 2008. Even after November’s gains, only 31 Democrats now hold seats that voted for Donald Trump. Moreover, Republican DNA was more deeply engrained in those earlier split-ticket seats: Of the 49 Democratic-held seats that voted for McCain, 47 also voted for George W. Bush in 2004. This time, only 14 Democrats represent districts that voted for both Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012, according to calculations by Tom Bonier, the chief executive officer of the Democratic voter-targeting firm TargetSmart. Just 13 House Democrats are in seats that Trump won by five points or more, Bonier calculates.
On social issues in particular, this heavy urban and suburban tilt should produce much greater unity than Democrats managed under Obama in 2009 or during their two years of unified government control under Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994. In those Clinton years, the party faced widespread defections from rural and southern House members over gun-control measures. Now the party’s majority is rooted in suburban districts filled with white-collar and minority voters who lean left on most social issues, like gun control, gay rights, and immigration. “Certainly social issues are not going to divide the party, including guns,” says Gary C. Jacobson, a University of California, San Diego, political scientist who studies Congress.
To Jacobson’s point, Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords PAC, the gun-control organization founded by former Representative Gabby Giffords, said flatly in a post-election analysis that “Americans now have a gun safety majority in the House of Representatives.” According to the group’s count, 40 incoming House Democrats, almost all from urban and suburban seats, defeated Republicans with “A” rankings or better from the National Rifle Association. That’s a very different world than in 2009, when most of the rural House Democrats were determined to avoid crossing the NRA.
Similarly, it’s been revealing how few House Democrats have expressed concern about Trump’s attempts to portray the party as soft on border security during the government shutdown, which was triggered by his demands for $5 billion to fund a border wall. Democrats have even resisted efforts from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to draw them into a more comprehensive negotiation that would link the wall to broader immigration reform. It’s difficult to imagine that the blue-dog Democrats could have been so confident or quiescent 10 years ago.
[Charles J. Sykes: A shutdown reveals the transformation of the GOP]
“In 2018, immigration did not hurt House Democrats in the places they won,” says Frank Sharry, the founder and executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group. “Arguably, the issue hurt Republicans. As Trump closed by hammering on the caravan and immigrants as dangerous, the evidence is that a bunch of Republican and independent voters broke late for Democrats. Today’s Democrats just aren’t afraid of this issue the way many blue-dog Democrats were a decade ago.”
The League of Conservation Voters likewise sees a big shift from the last Democratic majority. Like gun-control groups, the organization had enormous success electing its endorsed candidates in suburban districts last fall; it’s running ads this week welcoming 18 members who expressed a strong commitment to action on climate change and transitioning away from fossil fuels. “There are far more members who campaigned on clean energy and climate issues, and who see it as both good policy and good politics,” said Gene Karpinski, the LCV’s president, in an email. “And the issue has much stronger support among the voters who brought them here.”
In this suburban-centered Democratic majority, the most important fissures will probably come over spending and the role of government. It’s likely that some of the new suburban members—several of whom have joined the centrist Blue Dog and New Democrat coalition groups—will resist expensive new initiatives to expand government’s reach (like single-payer health care) or new taxes. Those suburban members, holding districts that previously voted Republican, will inevitably be sensitive to the risk of alienating white-collar voters who dislike Trump and largely agree with Democrats on culture, but may still lean right on spending.
Those strains will take skill to manage. But they are unlikely to prove as daunting as the cracks in House Democrats’ foundation that the party experienced in previous majorities. In fact, compared with the fundamental fault line that defined Democrats through the 20th century—between conservative southern Democrats and more progressive non-southerners—and with the rural/urban divides that have strained them more recently, this new caucus has an opportunity to become the party’s most cohesive in modern times. “My guess is they will be highly cohesive and more liberal on the standard scales that we use to measure that,” Jacobson says.
In 2009, with its large rural contingent and the continued heavy presence of white men in its membership, the House Democratic caucus in key ways looked back to what the party had been. In 2019, with its urban/suburban geographic center; its huge advantages from states along the two coasts (including 46 seats from California alone); and the unprecedented gender, racial, and religious diversity of its members, the House caucus is looking forward to what Democrats are becoming.
That doesn’t guarantee them success at either passing an agenda or defending their majority in 2020. But on both fronts, it does mean that they are rowing with the current of change in the party—and not against it, as they were so often the last time Pelosi held the gavel.
Al Gore is mostly done with politics these days. Though he popped up at a campaign stop with Hillary Clinton in 2016, he’s otherwise safely in the very small group of nationally known Democrats not thinking of running for president in 2020.
But Gore remains engaged on his signature policy issue: climate change, for which the national political conversation is just starting to catch up to his warnings from decades ago. While he was a senator, through his eight years as vice president, and during his 2000 presidential campaign, Gore was tagged on the campaign trail as a global-warning alarmist obsessed with data and far-off predictions. Now, between the growing support for the Green New Deal in Congress and the presidential candidates railing against climate change, the Democratic Party has made aggressive action central to its developing identity.
The former vice president, who’s won an Oscar for his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental advocacy, speaks often at United Nations and other international meetings on climate change, events that some American officials and other prominent figures continue to attend despite President Donald Trump’s decision to stop sending official representatives on behalf of his administration.
What Gore hasn’t done much of, though, is talk directly about American politics and political candidates, including the dynamics within the party that nominated him for president 18 years ago.
Gore and I spoke recently for a story about Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, who is readying a presidential campaign that will make climate change and America’s response to it the central issue and cause. (Gore says he isn’t making an endorsement, or at least not yet.) We talked about why he thinks the national conversation on climate has changed and what he thinks hasn’t changed quickly enough. Here’s more of our interview, which has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Isaac Dovere: Where do you see the politics of climate change right now?
Al Gore: I think that we are extremely close to a political tipping point. We may actually be crossing it right about now. The much-vaunted tribalism in American politics has contributed to an odd anomaly, in that the core of one of our political parties is uniquely—in all of the world—still rejecting not just the science, but also the messages from Mother Nature that have pushed toward, and perhaps are pushing across, this political tipping point right now.
More and more people on the conservative side of the spectrum are really changing their positions now. This election, in 2020, is almost certainly going to be different from any previous presidential election in that a number of candidates will be placing climate at or near the top of their agenda. And I think that by the time the first primary and caucus votes are cast a year from now, you’re going to see a very different political dialogue in the U.S.
The climate-related extreme-weather events are causing millions of people who had successfully pushed this issue into the background and into the projected distant future to now be finding ways to talk about it and to express their deep concern.
Dovere: When you were in politics and talking about climate change, you were made fun of for it. Is that weird to think about now?
Gore: Forty years ago, it was not easy to get people’s sustained attention for this looming crisis. It’s much easier now.
Dovere: What do you make of the Democratic presidential contenders talking about climate change now?
Gore: Leaders who advocate solutions to the climate crisis should all run. There are several who have indicated they want to make this the No. 1 issue, who are in the midst of deciding whether to run or not. And I think it’s good for the country and good for the world to have this issue elevated into the top tier during this upcoming campaign.
Dovere: Every time there’s a new report on climate change, activists say, “We’ve got to get going before it’s too late.” And every time there’s a new report, climate-change deniers say, “Well, you said the world was ending the last time.” Do you think there’s actually a point when it will be too late?
Gore: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “There is such a thing as too late.” [Editor’s Note: King’s words are often remembered this way, but the actual quote is,“We are faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words Too Late.”] And indeed there is. But where the climate crisis is concerned, we have actually already done some significant damage, some of which, regrettably, is not recoverable. Many people are hesitant to acknowledge that, because it creates a risk of despair. I know that from my long political involvement in this issue. In my first movie, I made this statement: “There are people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step, to actually solving the crisis.” That is the case.
But let me be clear: Even though some low-lying coastal communities are already going to face devastating sea-level rise no matter what we do, it is also undeniably true that we still have the ability to prevent the absolutely catastrophic results that would pose an existential threat to human civilization’s survival. And we must act, even while acknowledging that some damage has already been done.
Dovere: Where is it too late?
Gore: We heard the discouraging news a couple of years ago that a major component of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has now crossed a negative tipping point, and will almost certainly collapse no matter what we do. So for those who were hoping that we could have a comprehensive global response in time to prevent any of these damages, that was an emotional blow. But the scientists who have deep expertise on that part of the issue tell us quickly, “Okay, wait. We still have the ability to affect the rate of that collapse, and more importantly, we still have the ability almost certainly to forestall the collapse of the other large ice sheets, behind that one. And we still have the ability to prevent the collapse of ice sheets in East Antarctica that could take the sea-level rise unimaginably higher.”
So how do we respond emotionally and, then, politically? We just have to be clear-eyed about it—and we have to be brave about it—in acknowledging that for some of these consequences, it’s already too late, but for the most serious of them, it is not too late.
As a longtime resident of New York City, I’ve developed a little game I play when I’m alone in one of Manhattan’s especially ritzy neighborhoods: “Famous or Just Rich?”
To play, all you have to do is notice a person and try to decide if they’ve caught your eye because they’re famous. It will feel as if they’re famous. But more often than not, it’ll just be a regular person who looks like a celebrity, with that polished glow they always seem to have. If you play this game enough, you’ll eventually realize that it’s not just expensive-looking clothes or a striking resemblance to an actual celebrity that gives you pause. It’s the smooth, poreless look of their skin, even-toned and plump. The wealthy, both famous and not, tend to be visibly well moisturized.
The general folk wisdom of skin care has two simple steps. Step 1: Do healthy things. Wash your face, avoid the sun, stay hydrated, wear sunscreen, and get plenty of sleep. Step 2: Apply the right goop to your face, in the form of creams and serums. This advice is repeated time and again in women’s media, with an almost religious authority. If you find the right product and live the skin-care lifestyle (No alcohol! No dairy! Don’t enjoy anything!), then you will be rewarded with the glow of the youthful and righteous.
[Read: Should I keep spraying this water on my face?]
In this advice is a little sleight of hand. The guidance usually comes from the wealthy, who have all the access in the world to the best skin products and treatments, and it tends to overemphasize the importance of lifestyle while sweeping under the rug the actual cost of tinkering with your facial chemistry. Celebrities wouldn’t be as distractingly beautiful without dermatologists, estheticians, and the women behind the beauty counters at Bergdorf Goodman. You can drink as much water and wear as much sunscreen as you want, but the most effective skin-care trick is being rich.
The moral halo around “good skin” isn’t a coincidence. The behaviors associated with a clear, even-toned complexion require those who want it to reject hedonism in a way that is still deeply ingrained as virtuous in American culture; that the wealthy have mastered the look reinforces capitalistic notions of success and who achieves it (the ascetic, dedicated, and hardworking). The journalist Jaya Saxena found as much when she investigated the connections between skin and poverty earlier this year. “We assume those at the top are there because they’ve done something right. And if they have straight teeth, toned bodies, and smooth skin, that must be ‘right’ too,” she wrote. “It’s not that we think having bad skin is a moral failing. It’s that we think poverty is.”
Maybe that’s why the wealthy models and actresses and the media who exalts them are so dedicated to the idea that those results must be earned through actions, when in reality, they’re usually bought with money. Regular people are hungry for intel on how the rich and beautiful became that way, which means that almost all beauty media regularly publishes tips-and-tricks lists from models and actresses. It’s no mystery to beauty editors and writers, as well as the famous women surveyed, that the answer is a combination of youth, genetic luck, and access to expensive products, treatments, and cosmetic dermatology procedures that few people outside their world could ever hope to experience. But a dozen 20-somethings telling you about their expensive laser treatments would be too depressing for women to read about and too embarrassing for the professionally beautiful to admit.
For example, in a 2016 Elle magazine article surveying 17 Victoria’s Secret models, eight of them praised lifestyle habits such as drinking water and exercising, with several more crediting low-cost fixes such as drugstore pore strips. None of them mentioned Mzia Shiman, who tends to the skin-care needs of Victoria’s Secret models. The facials at her New York spa start at $200, and more advanced services offer tightening and plumping via LED light bed or electric micro-current.
Even if you forgo high-tech treatment and avoid skin problems such as cystic acne or dermatitis, which Saxena notes usually require intervention from an expensive dermatologist, a skin-care regimen itself can get very expensive, very quickly. Into The Gloss, a beauty website whose popular series The Top Shelf asks influential people to detail absolutely everything they do to their skin and hair, provides readers with a rare look at the litany of services and products required to keep the famous and wealthy looking that way. The most recent edition, from the veteran model Angela Lindvall, lists skin-care products that add up to $629, most of which come in small, quickly emptied packages. This price range is typical of The Top Shelf.
When affluent people name just one trick that supposedly works like magic, usually when prompted by a women’s publication, that elides hundreds of dollars’ worth of creams, serums, and peels. Even if you’re dedicated to low-cost alternatives, the trial and error of finding what works for your skin adds up, and you’ll probably go without some of the specialized ingredients that target problems such as wrinkles or hyperpigmentation. (And yes, many of those chemicals really do work.)
Which is not to say that a diet of fresh foods, plenty of water, and eight hours of sleep every night don’t affect how your skin looks; studies have demonstrated links between all three and physical appearance, and they’ll help most people achieve the modest goal of looking totally fine. Unless you’re very young and even more genetically gifted, though, self-denial won’t get the results it promises. What its constant recommendation in place of expensive beauty products belies is how closely tied those factors also are to wealth. Only some people have access to a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. Only some people have the kinds of jobs with steady schedules that allow for a good night’s sleep. Only some people can drink the water that comes out of their faucet.
[Read: The pseudoscience of beauty products]
Sunscreen is another one of those beauty hacks whose accessibility is assumed, and it’s elemental to staving off visible signs of aging. Its actual accessibility is a bit more complicated, depending on who you are. In 2017, the YouTuber Jackie Aina posted a review of her favorite sunscreens, intended to help viewers navigate the ghostly cast that results when most SPF products are used on darker skin. All of the options cost more than $30, far more than lighter-skinned people have to pay for a functional sunscreen. Although darker skin is structurally less apt to show some of the most obvious signs of aging, people with it still encounter issues such as acne and uneven pigmentation, and they’re up against a global beauty industry that historically doesn’t prioritize their needs.
Skin tends to be the most visible proof of a person’s accumulated lifestyle, and that only becomes truer as people age. The past few years have been a boom time for skin care, as the oldest Millennials begin their late 30s and start to wrinkle around the eyes. Soon, they’ll need more than just a fancy cream to get results, because skin loses volume as the body ages, no matter how good your products are. That’s when fillers and Botox come in, and when the high prices of those treatments mean class differences are even more easily elucidated by the condition of a person’s skin.
Still, though, mainstream beauty media continues to aggregate the tips and tricks of the young and wealthy, usually without questioning the larger picture. If everyone admitted that skin care is primarily a function of wealth, then they’d have to grapple with who has money, and what we assume and expect of those who don’t.
On December 21, 1968, writing in the Winnipeg Free Press, the reviewer William Morgan starts out admiring of Alice Munro’s debut story collection. He says that the author, in her fictitious small towns, creates a “strange mixture of physical freedom and emotional claustrophobia.” By the end of that review, however, those same features will come to annoy him. Morgan laments that the “characters and situations are real enough, and yet [they’re] enough the same that an unwanted familiarity seems to develop; they were closing in, making one want to escape.”
What Morgan takes issue with in the collection, others may see as a virtue. Fifty years ago, Dance of the Happy Shades won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most important literary awards (an honor that Munro received twice more on her way to winning a Nobel Prize, in 2013). Compared with the long, stand-alone stories that later became Munro’s trademark, the stories from Shades are leaner in page count, more plot-driven, and more conventional in narrative structure; they also have an essential co-dependency. Like James Joyce’s Dubliners or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the book coalesces around a sense of place—rural southwestern Ontario—as much as it does around overlapping themes. In a setting where many homes lack electricity or running water, many men still make a living off the land, and many housewives must jar their own preserves, Munro’s female protagonists often confront expectations that seem as old, and firmly rooted, as the landscape itself.
In a trio of stories that parallel her father’s real life as a fox farmer, Munro explores the distinctive gender roles found within the house versus outside it, as seen through the eyes of the young narrators. Mysterious and inexpressive, rational and work-oriented, their fathers are far more appealing to these girls than are their mothers, who tend to be fussy, opinionated, and overly chatty. In “Images,” the narrator shares a quiet bond and tacit understanding with her father as they fetch rat traps along the Wawanash River. He will not condescend to her about being careful where she steps, and she will not pester him with questions about what they’re doing. In “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” a fox farmer turned traveling salesman takes his daughter on a surprise tour of the countryside. At one house, she observes an unwelcoming customer nearly douse him with a chamber pot of urine; at another, she meets a woman whom she slowly understands to be her father’s former sweetheart. The excursion offers her a break from her routine of chores and acquaints her with a sense of possibility and danger previously unavailable to her.
Even as their fathers offer glimpses into a masculine world less fettered to decorum, the girls’ mothers continue to enforce standards of domesticity. The narrator of “Boys and Girls,” a proud apprentice to her father’s pelting operation, resists her mother’s ongoing campaign to smooth out her rough exterior, saying that she “continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free.” Yet the pressure to conform is ultimately too much to overcome: When her grandmother and younger brother join the efforts to keep her in line, the narrator ruefully concludes, “A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment.”
From story to story, one feels a sustained longing for independence. The desire to speak up—the aching need to call out personal or social injustice—struggles against the heavy weight of collective standards. This pressure is felt more keenly by Munro’s older protagonists, who face heightened stakes in their opposition and ever-greater consequences for failure. In “The Shining Houses,” a young mother, Mary, admires her elderly neighbor precisely because the old woman is “so unaccommodating.” Yet when an assembly of parents circulates a petition to chase the old woman off her property, which they consider an eyesore, Mary is unable to make her own convincing stand. She walks out on the group in weak defiance, knowing that she has succeeded only in alienating herself from the community.
For Mary, as with many of Munro’s other women, translating frustration into effective action proves to be a daunting, if not impossible, task. A voice raised in anger is often silenced; a sense of resolve is quickly snuffed out. That pattern repeats itself in “Postcard,” when a young woman learns that the man courting her over the years has gotten married behind her back. Her mother blames her for having been physically intimate with him short of actual marriage (a judgment he is spared), while the man himself, when she publicly confronts him, chastens her again by a show of complete indifference. Too late, she recognizes him as “a man that goes his own way,” and that she, as a woman, will never be afforded that same privilege.
In “The Office,” the narrator has to contend with similarly inflexible attitudes and rigid standards. As an aspiring fiction writer, she seeks relief from her domestic responsibilities and a proper workspace to pursue her creative ambitions. She notes that it is perfectly acceptable for a man to work from home, while a woman cannot reasonably cut herself off from crying children or a ringing telephone. Echoing the sentiments of the young protagonist of “Boys and Girls,” the narrator complains that a mother “is the house, there is no separation possible.” Unfortunately, even in her rented office, her work will be sabotaged by her obtrusive landlord, who refuses to take her writing, or her privacy, seriously.
In spite of the prevalent sexism these characters often contest, Munro, looking back on her career, has been reluctant to call herself a mouthpiece for her gender. “I never think about being a feminist writer,” she said in a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, “but of course I wouldn’t know.” She does, however, own up to the crucial influence of her biography. “I’m part of that background,” she stated in a 1974 CBC interview. “I think I could never be anything else.”
While many of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades borrow from the lives and rural settings of Munro’s childhood, it is her mother’s lengthy affliction with Parkinson’s disease that gives rise to an important shift in the book. Munro admits in the same CBC interview that her mother is “probably the most painful subject I can deal with,” and in correspondence with her editor at Canadian Short Stories (a CBC radio program that featured her early work), she describes her great difficulty in transforming that material “into the kind of writing I wanted.” That struggle may well have enabled the breakthrough story “The Peace of Utrecht,” whose expansive style and elastic structure most clearly resemble the later work her fans would come to expect.
Written after a 1961 return visit to Munro’s hometown, a year and a half after her mother’s death, “Utrecht” centers on Helen, a mother of two who has traveled cross-country under similar circumstances. Helen has tried to avoid the entrapment of so many other characters in the book—such as that of her older sister, Maddy, who remained in their childhood house and continued to look after their long-ailing mother. Alive, their “Gothic” mom was a spectacle to the community and a source of constant embarrassment. Deceased, she has left her daughters uncomfortable with each other and defensive about their life choices.
The least plot-driven of any work in Shades, “Utrecht” has by far the greatest bandwidth. In what would become vintage Munro style, the act of storytelling feels more like an act of synthesizing, as Helen weaves together flashbacks from childhood, descriptions of the house and front porch, and snippets of dialogue or remembrances. She is reluctant to hear about her mother’s last days, as well as her own daughterly neglect, and the story’s many detours seem intentional, like one more way to shake off these overbearing restraints.
By the end of Dance of the Happy Shades, there is an emerging sense of new forces starting to shape these small-town lives. Some women look bravely to the future, while others remain more cautious. “Take your life, Maddy,” Helen orders her sister. “Take it.” But it is unclear whether her sister will do so. Likewise, Munro’s direction as a writer would remain up for grabs, at least for a few more books. After some indecisive bouts with novels that are really linked stories (see The Lives of Girls and Women and The Beggar Maid), the author would eventually settle on a greater length and more flexible structure for her fiction, allowing her work the breathing space it needed to develop fully, yet subtly, while still shielding it from the exigencies of plot.
Well before then, Dance of the Happy Shades would establish Munro as the great writer she was destined to become. In the half century since the book’s publication, the characters remain faithful to their time period and rural setting, even as their struggles continue to resonate with contemporary readers. Though Munro’s writing does not divide her from her background, it may nevertheless offer some lasting form of liberation. Consider again Helen, from “The Peace of Utrecht,” whose thoughts about her sister might well reflect Munro’s own mind-set whenever she begins a story. She asserts, “All I have ever been able to think, to comfort me, is that she may have been able and may even have chosen to live without time and in perfect imaginary freedom as children do, the future untampered with, all choices always possible.”
As the third government shutdown of the Donald Trump presidency drags on, the miserable effects are piling up. Federal workers, hundreds of thousands of whom are furloughed, are struggling to pay their bills and picking up temporary gigs to make ends meet; the Office of Personnel Management has encouraged them to bargain with their creditors and offer to do chores for their landlords. Contractors working in federal buildings are worse off, likely never to be made whole for their lost shifts. Taxpayers have lost access to everything from loans to museum tours, and businesses are complaining about the uncertainty emanating from Washington.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are many paths to ending the shutdown—Trump could sign a funding bill without money for his border wall, say, or with paltry money for his border wall. Better yet, Congress could shut down the government-shutdown option, forever.
It could do this by implementing something called an automatic-continuing-resolution provision, which legislators from both sides of the aisle have advanced numerous times over the past 30 years. Right now, when Congress cannot agree on how to spend money, it passes a continuing resolution, or CR, which continues federal agencies’ financing for a given period of time. Automatic CRs would absolve Congress from the responsibility of passing new CRs, preventing both quick financing lapses and big, painful shutdowns.
The move would prevent the Senate from shutting down the government over disagreements with the House, Republicans from shutting down the government over disagreements with Democrats, and the White House from shutting down the government over disagreements with Congress. Money would just keep flowing at a steady rate, until Congress were to pass a formal budget or appropriations bill and the president were to sign it.
[Charles J. Sykes: A shutdown reveals the transformation of the GOP]
For all that, the change would be marginal, not radical. Federal law already bars much of the government from closing up shop when financing lapses. And CRs are already a common, necessary part of the budget process: Congress has used them more than 100 times in recent decades, with CRs keeping the government open for full years a few times. Several states have automatic-CR-type provisions, and President Barack Obama signed a military-only automatic CR into law back in 2013.
The case for automatic CRs is straightforward: Shutting down the government is a painful, irresponsible, and stupid thing. Granted, the macroeconomic effects tend to be small, but they are not invisible and they are avoidable. Shutdowns have the potential to increase the jobless rate, bump up borrowing costs, and slow down growth. The worst pain is saved for the hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors affected, sometimes over and over again. Shutdowns mean lost wages mean evictions, higher interest payments, repossessed cars, and the like.
There is also the fact that voters tend to hate shutdowns, and want Congress to make deals to keep the government up and running. For good reason. Voters pay taxes that help finance a suite of services. Shutdowns deny voters those services. Right now, volunteers are desperately trying to keep the bathrooms clean at Joshua Tree National Park and human waste is piling up in Yosemite; the Smithsonian museums and National Zoo have closed; it is impossible to get a marriage license in Washington, D.C.; and entrepreneurs are waiting on their Small Business Administration loans. The longer the shutdown lingers, the worse the effects: late tax rebates, canceled contracts, problems with public housing, and so on.
Granted, politicians do pass CRs in a timely fashion much of the time. And while voters don’t like shutdowns, they don’t tend to hate them enough to punish the politicians responsible at the polls. For that reason, along with the leverage that shutdowns give politicians over one another and the motivation they give both sides to broker a deal, they tend to happen again and again.
[Read: A shutdown would be a fitting end to the GOP majority]
Moreover, getting rid of the threat of a government shutdown might make the appropriations process worse, with Congress doing even less budgeting since the cost of failing to compromise would be lower. The Hill might leave the budget on autopilot for years at a time, never coming to an agreement on how to shape, update, and improve the services that Washington provides. A stuck-in-time budget would choke off the necessary, natural expansion of federal spending as the country gets bigger and inflation eats at the dollar.
There are also legal and procedural barriers to implementing automatic CRs. Reams of federal law prevent the government from spending money that has not been appropriated by Congress, after all. But decades of government memos and proposals from members of Congress suggest that such obstacles are not insurmountable.
All the counterarguments need to be weighed against the inanity and pain caused by the current system. The annual budget process has broken down. The past few shutdowns have happened during a time of unified government. In this climate, it has become critical to improve Congress’s own processes, and to take away its ability to hurt the economy. One way to do that might be by ending government shutdowns once and for all.
The stock market, at least, values Netflix like a technology company. Its streaming service does send content over the internet after all. But as the tech industry has been publicly flogged for the past several years, Netflix has only burnished its brand, with tech workers, Millennials, and the general public.
Two recent stories suggest that Netflix may not stay outside the critic zone forever, however. Yesterday, the company admitted that it had pulled an episode of Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj from its service in Saudi Arabia. In the episode, Minhaj harshly criticizes the Saudi government’s shifting explanations of the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He also suggests that the United States is complicit in the ongoing tragedy in Yemen through its support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Saudi authorities apparently filed the takedown with reference to the country’s anti-cybercrime laws. Netflix, for its part, said, “We strongly support artistic freedom and removed this episode only in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request—and to comply with local law.”
The Netflix response has a we-can-have-it-both-ways scent that feels distinctly pre-2016 for other tech companies. Even as Netflix bowed to the government pressure, it asks to be seen as a hero of the arts.
[Read: How Netflix reverse-engineered Hollywood]
In December, The NewYork Times revealed that Netflix had been trading data with Facebook for years. The company’s response again verged on self-righteous. “A spokesman for Netflix said Wednesday that it had used the access only to enable customers to recommend TV shows and movies to their friends,” the Times reported. “‘Beyond these recommendations, we never accessed anyone’s personal messages and would never do that,’ he said.”
In both cases, Netflix responded like most tech companies used to, assuming that they’d be given the benefit of the doubt that their intentions were good. For Amazon, Google, and Facebook, this assumption gave way over the past couple of years.
These are massive corporations that restructure industries and consumer expectations and wield power to maintain their dominance. As Netflix continues to grow, it will not be able to maintain the illusion that it is some start-up. When Netflix was a small auxiliary source of funding for high-quality content, that was great! Now that Netflix is spending many billions of dollars a year for programming and helping squeeze the life out of the cable industry (which funded plenty of great shows), the roles have shifted. Even assuming that people continue to love Netflix’s service, when the disruptor becomes the dominant player, the questions that need to be asked about the company will shift.
Of course, Netflix doesn’t have all of Facebook’s, Google’s, or Amazon’s problems. But it will almost certainly introduce new ones that don’t apply to the other big tech firms that have come under scrutiny.
For example, it’s easy to make friends in the media when you’re spraying many billions of dollars around to content creators. Selling shows to Netflix is the new favored media play, whether you seek the Holy Grail or a Hail Mary toss.
[Read: When did TV watching peak?]
But many of those billions are funded by debt because Netflix’s business does not currently generate enough cash to cover the amount it is spending on content (and marketing) to grow its subscriber base.
“Netflix’s fundamental business model seems unsustainable,” Aswath Damodaran, a New York University finance professor, told The New York Times in October. “I don’t see how it is going to work out.”
But assuming that the numbers all work out somehow and Netflix becomes the TV of the internet, it seems impossible that the company won’t face increasing criticism over time. After all, before critics bashed the internet, they hated TV even more.
More than a thousand days after the water problems in Flint, Michigan, became national news, thousands of homes in the city still have lead pipes, from which the toxic metal can leach into the water supply. To remedy the problem, the lead pipes need to be replaced with safer, copper ones. That sounds straightforward, but it is a challenge to figure out which homes have lead pipes in the first place. The City’s records are incomplete and inaccurate. And digging up all the pipes would be costly and time-consuming.
That’s just the kind of problem that automation is supposed to help solve. So volunteer computer scientists, with some funding from Google, designed a machine-learning model to help predict which homes were likely to have lead pipes. The artificial intelligence was supposed to help the City dig only where pipes were likely to need replacement. Through 2017, the plan was working. Workers inspected 8,833 homes, and of those, 6,228 homes had their pipes replaced—a 70 percent rate of accuracy. Heading into 2018, the City signed a big, national engineering firm, AECOM, to a $5 million contract to “accelerate” the program, holding a buoyant community meeting to herald the arrival of the cavalry in Flint.
Few cities have embarked on a pipe-replacement program nearly as ambitious, let alone those that have to deal with the effects of segregation, environmental racism, and the collapse of industry in the upper Midwest. In total, 18,786 families in Flint now know that their pipes are safe, because the City has either dug them up and confirmed that they’re copper or replaced them if they were made of lead or galvanized steel. “I think things have gone extremely well,” Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told me. “We’re a year ahead of schedule and under budget.”
But something strange happened over the course of 2018: As more and more people had their pipes evaluated in 2018, fewer and fewer inspections were finding lead pipes. In November 2017, according to meeting notes obtained by local news outlet MLive’s Zahra Ahmad, the city’s head of public works estimated that about 10,000 of Flint’s homes still had lead pipes, roughly in line with the number other experts have floated. The new contractor hasn’t been efficiently locating those pipes: As of mid-December 2018, 10,531 properties had been explored and only 1,567 of those digs found lead pipes to replace. That’s a lead-pipe hit rate of just 15 percent, far below the 2017 mark.
[Read: The ‘horrifying’ consequence of lead poisoning]
There are reasons for the slowdown. AECOM discarded the machine-learning model’s predictions, which had guided excavations. And facing political pressure from some residents, Weaver demanded that the firm dig across the city’s wards and in every house on selected blocks, rather than picking out the homes likely to have lead because of age, property type, or other characteristics that could be correlated with the pipes.
After a multimillion-dollar investment in project management, thousands of people in Flint still have homes with lead pipes, when the previous program would likely have already found and replaced them.
The declining success of the pipe-replacement program has caused critics of the City to raise the alarm. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which represents a community group called the Concerned Pastors for Social Action, has argued in court that the City has abrogated its court-ordered mandate to get the lead pipes out as quickly as possible. If there are still thousands of homes with lead pipes and the City is doing thousands of excavations, how hasn’t it found more of them? “It’s the number of lead pipes removed that matters, not the number of holes dug,” said Pastor Allen C. Overton, a member of Concerned Pastors for Social Action, in an NRDC statement.
Before things got ugly, the effort to pull the lead pipes out of the ground was shaping up to be a high-tech feel-good story. At Google’s AI for Good conference in October, the Georgia Tech computer scientist Jacob Abernethy described how a team of volunteers built the system to predict which homes were most likely to have lead pipes.
The computer scientists saw that an information problem was sitting atop the lead issue in the city. No one knew, exactly, who had lead pipes and who did not. The City had a variety of records: thousands of old cards describing parcels’ hookups, and also maps and small updates that had been filed into the system over the years. But a cataloging system is only as good as its maintenance, and the City of Flint had been starved of resources for decades.
Flint, you probably know, was a key chamber of the heart of the American automobile industry. Through the middle of the 20th century, General Motors had a variety of facilities in the area, employing some 80,000 people. As Flint’s position within the automotive industry declined, most white residents took the money they’d earned and moved to the suburbs, taking their tax dollars and capital out of the city’s core. They created their own regional services in the wealthier Genesee County, while Flint’s residents suffered the repercussions of an economy that had moved on: budget cuts, failing schools, and, of course, post-industrial environmental problems. It is not a surprise, then, that before the crisis began, auditing and correcting water-department records from the early-20th century were not top of mind for city officials.
When Flint’s money woes got bad enough in the wake of the housing collapse, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder sent in an “emergency” manager to enact cost-cutting measures. Half of Michigan’s black residents have lived under an emergency manager, according to a Michigan Civil Rights Commission report about Flint. It was Flint’s emergency manager who made the call to switch the water supply from the Detroit water system to the Flint River in April 2014 without putting in the right corrosion controls. That’s what started the problem.
Many cities share the lead-pipe problem and the informational obstacles layered atop it. The decay of infrastructure built decades ago is not only in the metal, but in the data cataloging that lets the city’s government and residents understand the state of the water system. For all the talk of “smart” cities, the real state of play in many older places is that no one even thinks of these things until there’s a disaster. People have been saying “America is 1,000 Flints” since the city was booming, and it is still true. Just as there are thousands of lead service lines in Flint, there are something like 6 million lead service lines in America.
When Weaver launched the program to replace Flint’s lead service lines, Fast Start, in March 2016, suddenly the city’s maintenance debt came back up to the surface. General Michael McDaniel was picked to lead the program, with less than a handful of people working under him.
Some basic things were known about the lead-pipe distribution: The pipes were most likely to be found in postwar homes, built when Flint experienced major expansions, and least likely to be found in newer homes. In February 2016, Martin Kaufman at the University of Michigan at Flint built some maps of nominal lead pipe placements in the city using City records. McDaniel’s team used them to prioritize initial excavations based on the age of homes and the Department of Environmental Quality’s rough sense of where the worst water problems were. Then they asked themselves who would be the most affected by lead in the water. “The very young, the very old, and those with compromised immune systems,” McDaniel told me. They determined which homes had kids under 5 years old and adults over 70.
Combining these sources gave them a rough sense of where to start. McDaniel set out to replace 600 lead pipes each in 10 small zones. “It was a matter of what was efficient and what was equitable across the city,” he said.
When Abernethy and his collaborator, the University of Michigan’s Eric Schwartz, got involved over the summer of 2016, they saw a familiar type of prediction problem: sequential decision making under uncertain conditions. The crews didn’t have perfect information, but they still needed the best possible answer to the question Where do we dig next? The results of each new dig could be fed back into the model, improving its accuracy.
Initially, they had little data. In March 2016, only 36 homes had had their pipes excavated. And even as the crews began to do hundreds of digs, they were looking for lead pipes, which meant that they were creating a decidedly unrepresentative sample of the city. Using just that data, the model was likely to overpredict how much lead existed elsewhere in Flint. So the University of Michigan team asked Fast Start to check lines across the city using a cheaper system called “hydrovacing,” which uses jets of water, instead of a backhoe, to expose pipes. The data from those cheaper excavations went back into the model, allowing the researchers to predict different zones of the city more accurately.
[Read: How to prevent the next Flint]
As they refined their work, they found that the three most significant determinants of the likelihood of having lead pipes were the age, value, and location of a home. More important, their model became highly accurate at predicting where lead was most likely to be found, and through 2017, the contractors’ hit rate in finding lead pipes increased. “We ended up considerably above an 80 percent [accuracy] for the last few months of 2017,” McDaniel told me.
In late 2017, Weaver announced that the City was awarding a $5 million contract to AECOM, the major national contractor, to run the project. In February 2018, the City held a community forum to “really introduce you to the company that’s going to accelerate Fast Start,” as Weaver put it. Robert Bincsik, Flint’s director of public works, noted at the forum that the City was doing something nearly unprecedented. “There is not anybody else doing this as aggressively as we are,” Bincsik said. “Overall, I think we’ve done a wonderful job.”
AECOM’s published plans said it intended to “efficiently identify and replace 6,000 [lead service lines] per year.” This goal made sense, as the small ragtag and mostly volunteer management team in 2017 had identified and replaced more than 6,000 service lines.
The contractor’s process, as laid out at that community meeting, would consist of two steps. First, it would hydrovac in 10 zones laid out by the contractor. Then, after the nature of the pipes was determined, it would go out and replace the lead and galvanized-steel pipes. Bincsik extolled the virtues of hydrovacing: It was cheaper and faster, less intrusive, and created a lower risk of damaging pipes. Hydrovacing cost $300 or less. Digging up the pipes in a traditional way cost several times more, according to contractor invoices from the 2017 phase of the project—at least $2,500, and as much as $5,000 depending on the type of pipes dug up and replaced.
AECOM’s team, however, struggled before it even started. In late October 2018, the project manager, Alan Wong, told me that the problems started during the transition between McDaniel’s team and AECOM. Wong’s crew was supposed to begin work in October 2017, when McDaniel’s contract ended. But AECOM’s deal was not actually signed until December 28, 2017. There was no overlap between the teams. “We would have had October, November, and all of December,” Wong told me. “We would have been able to mesh, to have a reasonable transition. It didn’t work out.”
Furthermore, AECOM does not appear to have considered the predictive model central to the project. According to a court declaration, after seemingly positive initial discussions, Schwartz, from the University of Michigan, sent five emails to Wong from January through May 2018, none of which was answered. Wong told me that all his company had was a “heat map” of the city—like an image—but Schwartz said his own team had offered its database, which consisted of individual lead-probability scores for every single address in the city.
AECOM basically approached the problem new, as if other people had not been successfully hammering away at it since June 2016. It discovered, as others had before, that the data the City possessed were neither wholly digitized nor wholly accurate. Wong says the company doing the digitization work pro bono, Captricity, was supposed to be done in January but did not finish until May.
At the same time, Weaver asked AECOM to explore all over the city, in each of the city-council wards. The city administration “did not want to have to explain to a councilperson why there was no work in their district,” Wong said. So AECOM created 10 zones spread across the whole city, initially assigning 600 addresses in each area to contractors.
The problem is that lead pipes are not evenly distributed across the city. When evaluated by any available tool—the actual amount of lead pipes that had been found, the predictions from the University of Michigan model, what the city records said, historical knowledge of construction practices—it was clear that the lead was concentrated in a few areas, mostly in the older places in the core of the city, such as the Fifth Ward, and not in the outer regions, such as the Second or Tenth Wards.
[Read: How do you regulate a self-improving algorithm?]
Then, in the middle of 2018, some lead was found in pipes that had otherwise seemed to be made of copper. Hydrovacing generally makes a smaller hole than when a backhoe is involved, which had allowed some lead bits to go unnoticed. The mayor made a decision to abandon hydrovacing, opting instead for the gold-standard traditional method. “You get a 100 percent guarantee and that’s what we’re worth,” Weaver told me. Given that AECOM had planned to hydrovac all over the city as a means of identifying lead, that change threw a kink into the company’s plans.
Other changes were also afoot. The mayor made a decision to excavate every house in areas where program officials thought they might find lead, rather than skipping over homes that the model indicated probably didn’t have lead pipes. “When we started this, people would say, ‘You did my neighbor’s house and you didn’t do mine,’” Weaver said.
“The City did not want to leave anybody behind,” Wong told me.
That makes political sense, but it has serious implications for not just the cost of the remediation project, but the speed at which the project could extract the remaining lead service lines in the city. In the outer regions of Flint, block after block of homes were excavated and no lead was found, as in the eastern block of Zone 10, seen below, where blue represents copper pipes and red shows lead or galvanized-steel pipes. Hundreds of homes’ pipes were excavated in the area; none of them was made of lead or galvanized steel.
A map of 2018 pipe excavation activity showing copper pipes in blue and lead or stainless steel ones in red. In the three highlighted areas, contractors excavated large numbers of homes and found little or no lead service lines. (City of Flint)A new directive had begun to guide the program: to excavate, by the most intensive means, every single active water account in the city. Otherwise, citizens could always wonder if they had lead pipes and didn’t know it. The program managers would have to tell people, “You’ll have to trust a computer model,” Wong told me. “The citizens are just not going to trust that.”
There are reasonable explanations for why AECOM’s hit rate would be lower than the 2017 team’s. McDaniel worked in the areas of the city with the highest concentrations of lead, and his team generally followed the model’s predictions. AECOM and the City went to work across Flint and did every house along certain blocks. Furthermore, there are fewer lead service lines in the city than originally estimated. Early approximations assumed that 20,000 to 30,000 city pipes were made of lead or galvanized steel. That figure proved too high.
However, the NRDC, which has been suing the City over the way it has conducted the program, still argues that the core priority of its settlement agreement—lead removal—was abandoned. Even given the factors above, the rate at which contractors are finding lead has fallen too precipitously to be explained by reasonable logistical changes to the program. This has had the effect of keeping lead pipes attached to people’s homes for longer than is absolutely necessary.
In a court filing, Schwartz estimates that between 4,964 and 6,119 homes with hazardous lines remain in the city. The map below shows, in red, where the AI researchers predict a greater than 90 percent likelihood that hazardous pipes are installed. Blue indicates areas highly unlikely to have lead or steel pipes. The little black dots are where AECOM’s team has done work in 2018, as of November. If the model is even generally correct, casual inspection suggests that the work isn’t being targeted at the areas most likely to have water lines in need of replacement.
A map of predicted likelihood a home has lead pipes (red) or copper (blue) and city excavation activity (black). (Eric Schwartz)“What’s troubling is that the City cannot explain how they are choosing areas to dig,” says Dimple Chaudhary, an NRDC attorney. “You do have this model that is doing a pretty good job of describing ‘Here there is lead.’ And that model says they are excavating in the wrong places.”
To take the most prominent example, the Fifth Ward is expected to have the most remaining lead. The University of Michigan model estimates that crews would find lead 80 percent of the time in that area. Yet from January to August 2018, AECOM contractors did the fewest excavations there, carrying out 163 excavations in the ward out of 3,774 total in the city. They found lead pipes in 156 of those digs—96 percent of them. Meanwhile, over the same time period in the Second Ward, 1,220 homes were investigated and lead was found in 46 of them, just a four percent hit rate. AECOM did the most digging in the two wards that Schwartz and Abernethy’s model predicted had the smallest percentage of lead pipes, and the results bore out the predictions of the model.
Looking at this data, the State, which reimburses contractors for their work, has said it is going to suspend payments to the City because of how the program has been managed. “The City made a policy decision to stop prioritizing excavations at homes where lead or galvanized steel service lines were expected to be found,” the Department of the Attorney General alleged. Now, the City, the NRDC, the State, and AECOM are negotiating to return to the machine-learning model that was used in 2017. AECOM’s contract has been renewed, and appears to include a return to the model. An additional $1.1 million has been allocated to the firm for future work.
City officials have made a good-faith attempt at implementing an ambitious, difficult program. Weaver made important decisions that she saw as protecting the health and safety of all her city’s residents. AECOM claims it has done the best it could. But good faith notwithstanding, a heartbreaking fact can’t be ignored: Simply continuing the 2017 program’s method might have pulled nearly all the remaining lead out of the city during 2018. Instead, thousands of people got the peace of mind that comes with knowing they have copper lines. But others who are more likely to have lead lines that could leach poison into their drinking water will have to wait for digging to commence again to learn for sure.
And that’s assuming that the battle between the City and the State about reimbursements doesn’t get settled in the State’s favor, depriving residents of the support necessary to complete the pipe-replacement project. This tragedy already has more acts than anyone wants to recount, and the stage is now set for yet another one to begin.
The word spiegel means “mirror” in German, and since its postwar founding, Der Spiegel has proudly held a mirror up to the world. When the magazine published top-secret information about the dire state of West Germany’s armed forces in 1962, the government accused it of treason, raided its offices, and arrested its editors. The resulting “Spiegel affair” led to mass demonstrations against police-state tactics and established an important precedent for press freedom in the young democracy. Throughout its history, the newsweekly has helped set the national agenda, like Time in its heyday.
Over the past weeks, however, the name of the magazine has assumed a new relevance. Der Spiegel has cracked, and revealed ugliness within the publication as well as German society more broadly.
On December 19, the magazine announced that the star reporter Claas Relotius had fabricated information “on a grand scale” in more than a dozen articles. Relotius has been portrayed as a sort of Teutonic Stephen Glass, the 1990s New Republic fabulist. “I’m sick and I need to get help,” Relotius told his editor. While that may very well be the case, his downfall is about more than just one writer with a mental-health problem.
A motif of Relotius’s work is America’s supposed brutality. In one story, he told the macabre tale of a woman who travels across the country volunteering to witness executions. In another, he related the tragic experience of a Yemeni man wrongly imprisoned by the United States military at Guantánamo Bay, where he was held in solitary confinement and tortured for 14 years. (The song that American soldiers turned on full blast and pumped into the poor soul’s cell? Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”) Both stories were complete fabrications.
[Read: The fall of a foreign-affairs reporter]
And they should have been easily invalidated. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, Der Spiegel’s fact-checking department is the largest in the world, besting that of the vaunted New Yorker. (In 2013, I spent several months on a fellowship working for a now-defunct English-language unit at Der Spiegel). A diligent checker would have at least contacted the purported death-row roadie to confirm her existence. And the U.S. government keeps scrupulous records about the inmates imprisoned at Guantánamo. Yet Relotius’s inventions escaped the scrutiny of his colleagues.
Der Spiegel is conducting an internal review to explain what went wrong. But it seems to me that the blame lies not only with Relotius or a few careless checkers or even the publication’s research methods, but with the mentality of its editors and readers. Relotius told them what they wanted—what they expected—to hear about America; this is a case of motivated reasoning if I’ve ever seen one.
Consider the story Relotius published in March 2017, “Where They Pray for Trump on Sundays.” In 7,300 words, the German correspondent described the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in the manner of an explorer recounting his visit to a remote island tribe untouched by civilization. Some of the “facts” Relotius reported, like his claim that the city voted 70.4 percent for President Donald Trump when the actual figure was 62.6 percent, could have been exposed as false with a few minutes’ research. The same goes for other, too-good-to-be-true details, like the sign warning “Mexicans Keep Out” and a throwaway line about a resident who had “never seen the ocean.” Most of the story was, according to a devastating analysis written by the Fergus Falls residents Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn, “uninhibited fiction.”
An open-minded editor would have doubted this astonishing tale about a town so jingoistic that its only cinema continues to sell out screenings of American Sniper years after the film’s release (another easily disproven lie). The fact that these blatant deceptions were not exposed until nearly two years after publication speaks to the ignorance about America that characterizes a wide swath of elite German society. Relotius, I submit, was able to get away with his con for so long because he confirmed the preconceived notions of people who fashion themselves worldly yet are as parochial as the red-state hicks of their imagination.
[Read: It’s hard out there for a plagiarist]
Though it is respected abroad as an authoritative news source, Der Spiegel has long peddled crude and sensational anti-Americanism, usually grounded in its brand of knee-jerk German pacifism. Covers over the years have impugned the United States as “The Conceited World Power” (with an image of the White House bestriding the globe), repeated the hoary “Blood for Oil” charge as the rationale for the Iraq War, and, in the run-up to George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, asked, “Will America Be Democratic Again?” When Edward Snowden leaked information detailing U.S. surveillance practices several years ago, Der Spiegel went on a crusade unlike anything in its recent history, railing about U.S. intelligence cooperation with Germany and demanding that Berlin grant Snowden asylum. (The magazine demonstrated none of the same outrage when, two years later, Russia hacked the German parliamentary computer network). Last year, Der Spiegel notoriously featured a cartoon of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty on its cover. And this May, one of its columnists misappropriated the memory of those who struggled against Nazism by calling for “resistance against America,” quite a demand for a magazine from the country that started World War II.
The biases that Relotius stoked in his stories are ones that Europeans, and Germans in particular, have voiced about America since the first colonists set foot here hundreds of years ago. “European elites have consistently and passionately expressed the same negative sentiments about America for centuries,” the scholar Andrei Markovits observed in his 2007 book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. “In both substance and tone, what stands out is this continuity, rather than change.” Among the negative traits Europeans have long associated with America, Markovits writes, are “venality, vulgarity, mediocrity, inauthenticity,” along with the perception that the country is a “threatening parvenu.” America’s frontier spirit and radically democratic ethos frightened European elites, who distrusted their own masses with political power. “You dear German farmers!” the 19th-century poet Heinrich Heine, who never visited America, implored his countrymen. “Go to America! There, neither princes nor nobles exist; there, all people are equal; there, all are the same boors!”
This sort of reflexive anti-Americanism matters. Relations between the United States and Germany are at their lowest point since the early 1980s, when the deployment of American Pershing nuclear-tipped missiles on German soil sparked the largest protests in the history of the Federal Republic. While Trump’s singling out of Germany for rhetorical abuse is obviously a huge part of the lamentable decline in transatlantic relations, so are the latent anti-American prejudices routinely aroused by Der Spiegel’s brand of yellow journalism masquerading as high-minded critique.
When Trump was elected president, it seemed to confirm every negative impression Europeans hold about Americans. Here, in the shape of our reality-TV leader, was the ur-American: vulgar, crass, ignorant, bellicose. Trump may be all those things, but to depict his supporters with such a broad brush is akin to writing off half of Germany as a bunch of goose-stepping, would-be fascists. The wildly popular work of Relotius reads exactly like what you would expect a snotty, effete, self-righteous, morally superior, latte-sipping European to say about America. Pardon the stereotype.
The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks is the story of tragedy as much as it is the story of magic. Nominally the tale of the genesis of Mary Poppins, the 1964 movie, the film is also a biopic by another means: an exploration of the childhood of P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins book series that informed the iconic Disney film. Mary Poppins, Saving Mr. Banks suggests, was rooted in sadness: Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff, lost her beloved father, a man of imagination and youthful wonder, when he was 43 (due to, the film suggests, complications from alcoholism). Employed, like Mr. Banks, at a financial institution, the film’s Goff (Colin Farrell) was torn between the soft whimsies of childhood and the hard responsibilities of becoming an adult. So, in its way, is the movie: Saving Mr. Banks is the story of magic colliding with business. Set in the early 1960s, as P. L. Travers negotiates with Walt Disney about selling him the rights to her enchanted nanny, it is a story, ultimately, about a contract that changed the course of entertainment history. Emma Thompson plays Travers, the owner of the IP, as prickly and principled to a fault and, in all that, slightly pitiable.
The new Mary Poppins film, Mary Poppins Returns—this one starring Emily Blunt as the iconic caretaker, playing the role with a bit more sternness and edge than Julie Andrews’s 1964 version—is in many ways a fitting sequel to the original. The new movie is, like the one that came before it, a meditation on childhood, full of whimsies and mysteries and suspended disbeliefs, all of them grafted onto the sooty cityscape of London. (And the film is, indeed, a sequel rather than a remake: It is set in the 1930s, roughly 20 years after the events of the original film took place. Mary Poppins’s charges, Jane and Michael Banks, are now grown; the nanny has come, this time around, to care for Michael’s three children.)
But Mary Poppins Returns is also fitting as a sequel to Saving Mr. Banks: It is a film about childhood not merely as a time of easy enchantments, but also as a time of profound disappointment. Where the first Mary Poppins was a celebration of childish things—the happy ending it offers finds the adults rediscovering their own sense of kidly curiosities and joys—the 2018 version is decidedly more melancholy. It is a tribute to the pain that can be such a significant part of being young, as small humans come to understand the world as a place not only of possibility, but also of its opposite. The film achieves that shift primarily through one of its plot points: Mary Poppins Returns is set in the year after Michael’s wife, the children’s mother, died. It finds the whole Banks family in mourning—every member in his or her own way. It finds the kids in need of a nanny not because they are neglected by living parents, as in the 1964 version, but because their father is paralyzed with grief. Here is the true story of P. L. Travers, whose loving father was taken too young, woven into the new story of the character Travers created.
The animating idea of Saving Mr. Banks is its implication that Travers, stern and staid and embittered, was perhaps the kind of person that Mary Poppins, whose fate is to give and give and expect nothing in return, might have become—had the character not been insulated by the airy protections of magic. Blunt’s performance as Mary both channels that suggestion and challenges it: 2018’s version of Mary Poppins is still mysterious, still sweet to the children, still stern, still caring. But it does not believe that the solving of problems can be outsourced to magic. Mary Poppins Returns is a movie not about finding solutions in magic, but rather about using magic to make do. It’s a fitting shift for a world that has, in the years between 1964 and today, been disabused of some of its favorite illusions. Here are some of the lyrics to “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” the lullaby Mary sings to the children when they are unable to sleep:
Memories you’ve shed
Gone for good you feared
They’re all around you still
Though they’ve disappeared
Nothing’s really left
Or lost without a trace
Nothing’s gone forever
Only out of place
So maybe now the dish
And my best spoon
Are playing hide and seek
Just behind the moon
Mary Poppins here, summoning sadness and hope as she sings the kids to sleep, functions less as a vehicle of enchantment, and more as an agent of understanding: She, uniquely, is able to empathize with the Banks children, understanding what loss feels like to kids. Her supernatural abilities lead her to a capacious kind of sympathy. That, too, is a tribute to Travers. Saving Mr. Banks may center the life of the author; it doesn’t, however, paint a full picture of who Travers really was. Nor does the 1964 version of Mary Poppins—a film which, after Travers finally gave Disney the rights to it, took the character Travers had imagined and transformed her into Julie Andrews, warbling sweetly about the affordances of sugar and dancing with animated penguins. This was not, fully, what Travers had envisioned for Mary. (After viewing the film, she told her publisher that Disney’s Mary Poppins was “all wrapped around mediocrity of thought, poor glimmerings of understanding.”)
Instead, Travers had imagined something more akin to the Mary Poppins of 2018: a character who is stern, but compassionate. A character who is meant to be not merely magical, but also—and more so—mythical. Travers, by disposition and in practice, was a scholar, a voracious studier of the world. She had, as her biographer Valerie Lawson put it, a “hunger for esoteric wisdom.” In addition to her writing, Travers also had a career as a Shakespearean actress. (She played Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) She was a dancer. (The iconic turnout of Mary Poppins’s feet, the lore has it, was inspired by the foot positions of ballet.) She studied mysticism with George “Æ” Russell, and with the Russian spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. She spent time, in the mid-1940s, on a Navajo reservation near New Mexico. “Gradually,” she would remark of that experience, “I was able to hear some of their stories, elements of their myths and religions, and so to see that these were related, distant cousins but still related to the stories of the rest of the world.”
The monomyth, in the form of an enchanted nanny: Travers’s study of, and abiding interest in, mythology permeates the Mary Poppins series of books, particularly in the later editions. (The Atlantic’s 1944 review of Mary Poppins Opens the Door referred to the protagonist as a “governess extraordinaire and popular beloved of the gods—or is she herself a celestial handmaiden in disguise?”) To call it “magic” minimizes the matter: Travers saw her creation, instead, one 2016 analysis put it, as part of “a rich tradition of female wisdom, living outside of time and somehow beyond the reach of human perspective.” Mary Poppins, accordingly, in the books, carries on conversations not just with animals, but also with the planets (with which she dances) and the sun itself (by which she is kissed). In Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane, a character asks, “Didn’t your grandmother tell you nothing? Mine told it to me and hers told her. And her grandmother told it to her, and away and away, right back to Adam.”
Disney’s original Mary Poppins is content to render much of that mythology as something much simpler. In it, “a rich tradition of female wisdom” expresses itself primarily through the observation that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” The magic is total, encompassing and explaining everything that happens in the film, be it a mirror whose image doesn’t match reality or a caretaker capable of sliding up the bannister with ease. Mary Poppins is two-dimensional in several immediate senses—characters, for one thing, jump into and out of chalk drawings near the Banks family home at 17 Cherry Tree Lane—but one other sense is that the film, a product of the American 1960s, is content to have Mary Poppins be a transactional figure: She is summoned, she arrives, she helps, she leaves. Spit-spot: The magic is, in its way, extremely straightforward.
Fifty years later, Mary Poppins Returns is in its own way two-dimensional: Visually, the film is painterly, its action often unfolding against sets that swirl with impressionistic swipes of color and shadow and light. And its story revolves, too, of course, around magic. But it is much more self-conscious about magic itself, about the complicated mysticism that humans summon when they seek supernatural solutions to natural problems. It is a small thing, but a telling one, that the 2018 answer to 1964’s chalk drawing is a three-dimensional bowl: Mary Poppins takes the children on a carriage ride within the curves of the object. And it is small but revealing, as well, that during the carriage ride, the children don’t merely watch as Mary dances with animated penguins; they are also chased by villains, who are trying to kill them. The stakes are higher here. Childhood is much more dangerous here.
This is mythology, still, in its way—Mary Poppins moves with the wind, and is gifted by the sky—but it is tinged with melancholy realism. It is myth that is unsatisfied with magic: a 20th-century story that has made itself, through the light but also through the shadows, at home in the world of the 21st.
Estamos na primavera de 2043, e Gina acaba de se formar na faculdade. Ela teve uma infância relativamente estável. Seus pais tiraram alguns meses do ano de licença-família a que tinham direito e depois a matricularam em uma creche pública.
O jardim de infância e o ensino básico também foram gratuitos, é claro, assim como a universidade, que ela começou depois de um ano de serviço comunitário – foram seis meses na restauração ecológica de pântanos e outros seis como voluntária em uma creche como a que ela mesma havia frequentado.
Agora que se formou, ela precisa decidir o que fazer da vida. Sem empréstimo estudantil para lhe tirar o sono, suas opções são muitas. Ela também não precisa se preocupar com os custos de um plano de saúde, pois agora todos estão incluídos no Medicare. Como a maioria das pessoas, Gina não é muito rica e mora em um apartamento público, alugado a preços controlados – e não nos conjuntos habitacionais precários que estamos acostumados a ver nos Estados Unidos. Os melhores arquitetos disputaram o privilégio de projetar esse e muitos outros prédios país afora, com áreas verdes exuberantes, creches e até bares e restaurantes. As contas também não são motivo de preocupação. A banda larga e a água tratada são gratuitas e de responsabilidade do governo, e os painéis solares espalhados pelos telhados geram mais energia do que o conjunto habitacional consome.
Gina estudou para ser engenheira em uma fábrica de painéis solares, e alguns de seus amigos estão começando a carreira como enfermeiros ou professoras. Todas essas profissões recebem bons salários, são sindicalizadas e consideradas essenciais na transição dos combustíveis fósseis para a energia limpa – que a população acompanha pelo noticiário noturno. Seja como for, não vai demorar até ela achar um emprego. Nos vários Centros Americanos de Emprego (AJC, na sigla em inglês) espalhados pelo país, ela conta com orientadores profissionais para encontrar um bom trabalho em alguma iniciativa que ajude sua cidade a lidar com as consequências do aumento do nível do mar e da força das tempestades, em algum projeto de história oral, ou então para mudar de área e fazer uma formação para trabalhar no próspero setor de energias renováveis.
Os AJCs são só uma pequena parte da Lei do New Deal Verde, promulgada em 2021, um programa que foi ganhando força nos anos seguintes. Parecia que a Suprema Corte dos EUA iria mutilar a lei, mas, mas o plano de aumento do número de juízes ganhou a opinião pública, e os membros da Corte recuaram.
Gina também pode abrir o próprio negócio. Sem ter que se preocupar com o preço da creche nem do plano de saúde, ela pode investir o seu dinheiro na realização de seus sonhos. E o custo da mão de obra para os empregadores – que não precisam mais gastar uma nota em planos de saúde empresariais – é baixo o suficiente para que ela possa pagar bons salários aos funcionários necessários para suprir a demanda da clientela.
Independentemente do caminho que escolher, Gina não vai trabalhar mais do que 40 horas semanais – talvez menos –, tendo tempo suficiente para viajar de trem (de alta velocidade e zero emissões de carbono), visitar amigos e passar uns dias na praia. Ela também terá tempo para almoçar com calma – com alimentos produzidos localmente – e ir ao parque ver shows de músicos financiados por generosos incentivos públicos à arte. Quando envelhecer, o plano de saúde dela não será um problema, pois todas as consultas, exames, medicamentos e cuidadores serão cobertos pelo sistema de saúde pública, e sua aposentadoria será suficiente para pagar aluguel, contas e opções de lazer até o fim da vida.
Esse é o futuro que o “New Deal Verde” pode trazer, e vários políticos e ativistas estão tentando fazer com que ele seja votado no Congresso dos EUA. Liderados pela deputada democrata Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 17 congressistas já se mobilizaram para criar uma comissão especial cuja tarefa seria elaborar, no prazo de um ano, um abrangente plano de transição energética, que prevê o abandono dos combustíveis fósseis até 2030 e sete metas para a descarbonização da economia.
No dia 30 de novembro, Ocasio-Cortez e seus colaboradores se reuniram do lado de fora do Capitólio para falar sobre esse programa cada vez mais popular. “Não estamos fazendo campanha pelo New Deal Verde só por causa dos recursos naturais e dos empregos”, disse a deputada democrata Ayanna Pressley. “Nossa preocupação é com o nosso recurso mais precioso: pessoas, famílias, crianças, o nosso futuro. Queremos uma matriz energética 100% renovável e a eliminação dos gases do efeito estufa. Queremos garantir que nossas comunidades litorâneas tenham recursos e ferramentas para construir infraestruturas sustentáveis e lidar com o aumento do nível do mar, resistir a desastres naturais e mitigar os efeitos das temperaturas extremas”, explicou.
Na manhã do dia 3 de dezembro, o senador independente Bernie Sanders e Ocasio-Cortez organizaram uma audiência pública sobre o assunto dentro do Congresso.
Então fica a questão: o que seria exatamente o New Deal Verde?
Assim como o New Deal dos anos 1930, o New Deal Verde não é um conjunto específico de programas, e sim uma doutrina sob a qual diversas medidas podem ser implementadas, sejam elas estritamente técnicas ou politicamente transformadoras. Como o consenso científico vem deixando cada vez mais claro, o volume de transformações necessárias para enfrentar as mudanças climáticas é gigantesco, exigindo a mobilização de toda a economia – uma mobilização que não é vista nos EUA desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Embora a ideia de um novo New Deal evoque aqueles tempos, o desafio atual vai muito além da mera geração de empregos verdes e das velhas imagens de jovens arregaçando as mangas para trabalhar nas obras públicas dos Estados Unidos de Roosevelt. O New Deal Verde é muito mais amplo do que o antigo New Deal.
“Fala-se muito que é preciso investir em infraestrutura e novas tecnologias, mas também precisamos de um planejamento industrial para a criação de indústrias totalmente novas. É como o homem na Lua. Quando John Kennedy falou que os EUA iriam pisar na Lua, nada do que era necessário para realizar a viagem existia. Mas nós tentamos e conseguimos”, diz Saikat Chakrabarti, chefe de gabinete de Ocasio-Cortez. “O New Deal Verde envolve todos os setores. É basicamente um upgrade geral da economia”, acrescenta.
De maneira geral, isso é o que governantes de outros países chamam de “política industrial”, na qual o Estado desempenha o papel essencial de direcionar a economia para a realização de objetivos específicos. Isso não quer dizer que o governo controle todos os setores da economia, como no sistema soviético. Trata-se, em vez disso, de um tipo de planejamento econômico praticado pelos EUA durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial e, atualmente, por muitas das maiores empresas do mundo. Se a iniciativa de Ocasio-Cortez der certo, a comissão especial vai reunir políticos, acadêmicos e representantes do setor privado e da sociedade civil para discutir quais serão os próximos passos. Resta saber qual será a abrangência do New Deal Verde definida pela comissão e se ela terá espaço para atuar dentro do Congresso – os parlamentares favoráveis à iniciativa se reuniram em Washington na semana passada para tentar incluir a comissão no regimento da próxima legislatura. Ou seja, o conteúdo exato do New Deal Verde dependerá dessa comissão. Porém, com base na proposta em si, na história americana e nas pesquisas atuais, podemos ter uma ideia do que ele pode significar na prática.
O plano em si – ou melhor, o plano do plano – estabelece sete metas, a começar pela atualização do sistema energético americano e a transição para uma geração de energia 100% renovável em solo americano.
Como indicam os dois primeiros itens da iniciativa, um dos maiores objetivos do New Deal Verde deve ser o aumento da participação da eletricidade na demanda de energia dos EUA, fazendo com que equipamentos baseados na queima de combustíveis fósseis – como sistemas de aquecimento, ar-condicionado e automóveis – passem a consumir energia elétrica. A Comissão de Transição Energética calcula que 60% da energia dos EUA terá que ser distribuída pela rede elétrica até a metade do século – muito mais do que os 20% atuais. Para que isso seja possível, é preciso desenvolver novas tecnologias e reformular a rede elétrica atual, permitindo que pessoas e empresas que geram a própria energia possam alimentar o sistema mais facilmente. Uma rede moderna – ou “inteligente”, nos termos da proposta de Ocasio-Cortez – também abriria caminho para microrredes, sistemas autossuficientes de energia renovável, como pequenos bairros ou hospitais, que podem continuar com acesso a eletricidade mesmo durante um apagão (no caso de um furacão ou um incêndio florestal, por exemplo). Partindo do pressuposto de que não seria viável importar todos esses equipamentos, investir em energias renováveis também significaria expandir a indústria manufatureira do setor para produzir mais infraestruturas solares e eólicas, cujos componentes atualmente vêm em grande parte do exterior.
Painéis solares instalados pela Tesla fornecem energia a 12 residências na cidade de Las Piedras, nas montanhas de Porto Rico.
Foto: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo/AP
“Fabricamos muita coisa aqui em Detroit e em Michigan. Temos muita gente capacitada para trabalhar na indústria que estão sendo prejudicadas pela ganância dos empresários. Nesta semana mesmo, ficamos sabendo que a GM, uma empresa que recebeu bilhões de dólares do contribuinte, está planejando fechar vários postos de trabalho aqui. Então é muito animador poder discutir a construção rápida de uma infraestrutura de energia renovável, pois são esses empregos que deveriam vir para nossos trabalhadores aqui em Michigan”, afirma Rashida Tlaib, deputada recém-eleita pelo Partido Democrata e uma das primeiras apoiadoras do New Deal Verde. “Nós éramos o ‘Arsenal da Democracia’. Ajudamos a salvar o mundo da escuridão décadas atrás, e não vejo por que não poderíamos ser um dos centros da infraestrutura verde dos EUA e salvar o mundo mais uma vez”, diz.
Para aumentar a geração de energia limpa, talvez seja preciso ampliar programas que já existem em nível estadual, mas que, via de regra, não são muito rigorosos. Certos estados já exigem uma participação mínima de energia solar ou eólica aos fornecedores de energia elétrica. Em Nova York, por exemplo, a meta para 2015 era de 29%. O prazo passou sem que a meta fosse respeitada, e pouco se falou de como se conseguiria atingir o objetivo seguinte: 50% até 2030.
Essas metas teriam que ser muito mais rigorosas para eliminar a dependência dos combustíveis fósseis até 2035. “Temos que chegar e falar: ‘Ou você atinge a meta e reduz suas emissões em 10% ao ano, ou vai para a cadeia’”, diz Robert Pollin, economista do Instituto de Pesquisa de Economia Política da Universidade de Massaschusetts Amherst. “Assim eles prestariam atenção”, acredita.
Isso pode parecer severo demais nos tempos atuais, mas não seria nada de novo em um país que já enfrentou outras ameaças à sua existência. Durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, por exemplo, o governo era em grande medida responsável pela administração de preços, salários e abastecimento de setores estratégicos para os Aliados. A produtividade e os lucros dispararam com a demanda por petroleiros e munições, mas as empresas que se recusavam a cumprir as encomendas da Junta de Produção de Guerra e de outros órgãos de planejamento eram passíveis de intervenção federal. Um dos casos mais emblemáticos dessa mudança nas relações de poder foi o de Sewell Avery, presidente da Montgomery Ward. Durante a Segunda Guerra, essa empresa de vendas por correspondência produzia de tudo – de uniformes a munições – para as tropas americanas. Em 1944, a Junta de Trabalho de Guerra mandou que Avery, um simpatizante do nazismo, permitisse que seus funcionários se sindicalizassem para evitar uma greve e a consequente interrupção da produção. Quando ele recusou, o presidente Franklin D. Roosevelt ordenou que a Guarda Nacional o retirasse de seu escritório, com cadeira e tudo, e confiscou a principal fábrica da empresa, em Chicago. O governo assumiu as operações da Montgomery Ward em várias outras cidades até o fim do ano. No fim do conflito, cerca de um quarto das fábricas americanas haviam sido nacionalizadas em nome do esforço de guerra.
Os defensores do New Deal Verde não estão pedindo medidas assim tão drásticas, mas, dada a incompatibilidade da indústria de combustíveis fósseis com a nossa qualidade de vida futura, será preciso não só aumentar a geração de energia renovável como também restringir as fontes de energia suja. “Como a indústria dos combustíveis fósseis está ajudando a criar uma situação insustentável para bilhões de pessoas no mundo todo, o governo deveria intervir para colocá-la do lado dos perdedores, o que já aconteceu antes nos Estados Unidos”, diz Waleed Shahid, diretor de Comunicação do comitê de ação política progressista Justice Democrats, que apoia o New Deal Verde. Nesse sentido, uma das propostas da iniciativa é proibir a participação na comissão especial de políticos que aceitarem doações de empresas de carvão, petróleo e gás.
Em uma coletiva de imprensa convocada para anunciar novos partidários da iniciativa, Ocasio-Cortez foi categórica ao falar sobre os conflitos de interesse envolvidos na questão: “Se continuarmos permitindo que as grandes corporações tenham todo o poder de ditar a qualidade do nosso ar, (…) enganando-nos, dizendo que podemos continuar queimando combustíveis fósseis, pessoas vão morrer. E pessoas já estão morrendo”, alertou.
Evan Weber, do Movimento Sunrise, segue um raciocínio parecido. “Para enfrentar as mudanças climáticas de maneira eficaz, não basta implementar uma série de medidas para interromper as causas da mudança climática e preparar a sociedade para as mudanças já irreversíveis. Também é preciso mudar a nossa concepção do que é e a quem serve o governo”, acredita.
No governo Trump, principalmente, muitas medidas foram adotadas para favorecer a indústria de combustíveis fósseis. Segundo uma análise de 2018 da Oil Change International, o governo americano gasta cerca de US$ 20 bilhões anuais em subsídios diretos ou indiretos para essa indústria. As nações mais ricas do G7 gastam, juntas, cerca de US$ 100 bilhões. Isso não deixa de ser uma política industrial, e o New Deal Verde poderia ao menos redirecionar esses incentivos para o setor de energias limpas. A energia eólica e solar recebem subsídios muito menores através de incentivos fiscais à produção e ao investimento, respectivamente.
Como observa o texto da proposta de Ocasio-Cortez, outro ponto importante do New Deal Verde será o investimento em pesquisa, desenvolvimento e capacidade produtiva para possibilitar a transição energética de setores altamente dependentes de combustíveis poluentes – como a aviação e a siderurgia – nas próximas décadas. No caso da indústria do aço, seria preciso desenvolver um processo ainda experimental chamado eletrólise, e o governo poderia subsidiar as pesquisas do ramo. Na audiência pública organizada por Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez fez uma referência ao trabalho da economista Mariana Mazzucato, que defende investimentos públicos em pesquisas em estágio inicial cujos riscos afastam os fundos de capital privados. Ocasio-Cortez e membros da sua equipe já se encontraram com Mazzacuto.
“Já demos dinheiro demais à Tesla – e a muita gente –, mas esse investimento público em novas tecnologias não nos trouxe nenhum retorno. Essas tecnologias inovadoras foram financiadas com dinheiro público”, diz ela.
Além da descarbonização das atividades poluentes, outra coisa que pode caber na doutrina do New Deal Verde é o desenvolvimento de setores que já têm pouco impacto ambiental, mas que são essenciais para uma economia saudável, como o ensino e a enfermagem. Uma política federal de garantia de empregos, mencionada pelo texto da iniciativa e tema de debate entre os possíveis candidatos a presidente em 2020, pode oferecer trabalho na recuperação de pântanos ou em jardins comunitários como alternativa aos empregos de baixos salários de setores intensivos em carbono. O Walmart, por exemplo, é o maior empregador de 22 estados americanos, pagando um salário inicial de US$ 11 por hora. Estima-se que o McDonald’s, outro grande empregador, já tenha dado trabalho a 1 em cada 8 trabalhadores americanos, mas a empresa se recusa a instituir um salário mínimo de US$ 15. Um programa nacional de garantia de emprego acabaria criando, na prática, um piso salarial, obrigando redes de varejo e de fast-food a aumentar salários, sob risco de perder funcionários para projetos benéficos para as comunidades e voltados para a prevenção dos efeitos das mudanças climáticas.
Para os trabalhadores das indústrias extrativistas, cujos salários são mais altos graças a décadas de militância sindical, US$ 15 dólares por hora pode não ser muito atraente. Portanto, pode ser necessário financiar programas de transição para garantir o futuro da mão de obra de setores que precisam ser eliminados – como carvão, petróleo e gás – e diversificar a economia das comunidades dependentes dessas atividades. Recentemente, o governo social-democrata espanhol colocou em prática uma versão menor dessa ideia, investindo, com o apoio dos sindicatos, a quantia relativamente pequena de US$ 282 milhões para ajudar os operários do carvão na transição para outros setores antes de fechar as últimas minas do país.
Com os investimentos certos, não será difícil gerar novos empregos. Segundo uma pesquisa da Organização Internacional do Trabalho, uma transição controlada para energias renováveis poderia acabar com até 6 milhões de empregos nos setores intensivos em carbono no mundo, mas também gerar outros 24 milhões de postos de trabalho – um saldo positivo de 18 milhões –, além de evitar os piores efeitos das mudanças climáticas sobre o mercado de trabalho.
Não é difícil imaginar republicanos e democratas vociferando contra os custos de tal programa e os riscos de explosão do déficit do Estado. Mas isso não seria nada comparado aos custos de não fazer nada, prognosticados por 13 órgãos federais em um relatório sobre as consequências das mudanças climáticas nos EUA, divulgado na sexta-feira de Ação de Graças. Até 2100, as mortes ligadas ao aumento da temperatura podem custar US$ 141 bilhões aos EUA; o aumento do nível do mar pode causar um rombo de US$ 118 bilhões, e os danos infraestruturais podem chegar a US$ 32 bilhões. Segundo os autores do relatório, as mudanças climáticas podem resultar em perdas financeiras duas vezes mais severas do que as causadas pela Grande Recessão do fim da década passada.
Robert Pollin diz que o New Deal Verde pode custar de 1 a 2% do PIB americano, uma ninharia se comparado ao desastre econômico previsto acima, sem contar o aumento da arrecadação fiscal e do consumo ocasionado pela criação de milhões de novos postos de trabalho. Pollin chama isso de “crescimento verde equitativo”, aliado a um “decrescimento total da indústria de combustíveis fósseis”. Além do mais, as fontes de combustível atuais – particularmente o carvão – não estão fazendo ninguém economizar dinheiro. Uma análise recente do grupo Carbon Tracker revelou que 42% da capacidade instalada mundial de geração elétrica a carvão já não é rentável, uma cifra que pode chegar a 72% até 2030.
“A questão é que política implementar para aumentar o investimento público e incentivar o privado? Não basta apenas ter programas de incentivo ao setor privado. Não é o suficiente”, diz Pollin.
Como observado por vários defensores da proposta, custos são raramente um problema quando se trata de defender os interesses nacionais, seja para sair de uma recessão ou empreender uma guerra. “Se o país fosse ameaçado por um invasor, mobilizaríamos todos os recursos à disposição para nos defender”, diz a economista britânica Ann Pettifor. “E nessas circunstâncias não podemos depender apenas do setor privado”, completa.
Pettifor foi uma das primeiras a pensar seriamente em um New Deal Verde logo depois da crise financeira. Na época, ela trabalhava na New Economics Foundation, um think tank progressista, e ajudou a organizar uma série de reuniões na sala de sua casa que acabaria dando origem ao Green New Deal Group. O grupo produziu vários relatórios sobre o tema, mas, como a crise da dívida pública empurrou os governos europeus para a histeria da austeridade, não havia espaço para discutir um grande pacote de expansão de gastos como aquele. A eleição de Jeremy Corbyn para a liderança do Partido Trabalhista britânico ajudou a mudar isso. E foi no último mês de março que Chakrabarti, que então trabalhava na campanha de Ocasio-Cortez, apareceu na casa dela querendo saber mais sobre o New Deal Verde.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, à esquerda, fala ao telefone ao lado de Saikat Chakrabarti, coordenador de sua campanha, no dia 27 de junho de 2018, em Nova York.
Foto: Bebeto Matthews
Pettifor, assim como muitos defensores do New Deal Verde nos EUA, acha que a questão do financiamento depende mais da reconfiguração dos objetivos econômicos do país do que de encontrar espaço no orçamento para diferentes projetos. Em outras palavras, a solução não é simplesmente fazer o PIB crescer a uma determinada taxa todo ano.
A obsessão de economistas e governantes com o crescimento ilimitado como medida da prosperidade econômica é uma invenção recente, oriunda em grande parte dos retornos cada vez maiores do setor financeiro. “Se eu trabalho duro noite e dia, ganho um salário semanal. Se vou ao cassino e ganho muito dinheiro, fico rico rápido. Então essa passou a ser a prioridade do setor financeiro, em vez de investir na atividade produtiva”, explica a economista. Essa fixação com o crescimento acima de tudo substituiu o foco no pleno emprego dos anos 1960, e o objetivo da economia passou a ser multiplicar o lucro e o consumo em vez de cobrir as necessidades básicas das pessoas. Como resultado, as emissões de carbono dispararam.
É por isso que Pettifor rejeita a premissa dos debates entre ambientalistas sobre crescimento e decrescimento. Para a economista, o movimento verde falar de crescimento é “aceitar a visão da OCDE sobre como a economia deve ser” e “adotar um ponto de vista neoliberal sobre a economia”. Ela prefere priorizar o pleno emprego.
Isso não quer dizer que certas questões orçamentárias básicas não possam ser facilmente resolvidas. Diferentemente dos governos estaduais, que dependem em grande medida de receitas fiscais, o governo federal dos EUA tem várias ferramentas à sua disposição para financiar o New Deal Verde – ferramentas essas que foram muito eficazes contra a crise financeira. O governo pode criar um banco nacional de investimentos para abrir linhas de crédito para o investimento verde. Um imposto sobre poluentes – ou taxa de carbono – também poderia gerar alguma receita, mas serviria principalmente para punir desvios do setor de energia. Garantias de financiamento como as oferecidas pelo pacote de estímulo de 2009 poderiam ajudar a geração de energia limpa, como já acontecia antes de os republicanos assumirem o controle da Câmara em 2010. (Embora a Solyndra, a mais infame beneficiária daqueles empréstimos, tenha ido à falência, em geral o programa teve um retorno de investimentos maior do que o da maioria dos fundos de capital de risco.)
Em um artigo assinado por Greg Carlock – autor de um relatório sobre o New Deal Verde encomendado por um novo think tank chamado Data for Progress – Andres Bernal, assessor de Ocasio-Cortez, e Stephanie Kelton, ex-economista-chefe da Comissão do Orçamento do Senado dos EUA, os autores explicam: “Quando o Congresso autoriza um gasto, isso dá início a uma série de procedimentos. Órgãos federais (…) assinam contratos e dá-se início ao projeto. Então o Banco Central dos EUA paga as contas com transações digitais diretamente para a conta dos fornecedores. Em outras palavras, o Congresso pode aprovar qualquer orçamento, que o governo vai pagar de qualquer maneira”.
Além do mais, um New Deal Verde “vai ajudar a economia estimulando a produtividade, a geração de empregos e o consumo, como os gastos do governo sempre fizeram. O New Deal Verde pode criar empregos com bons salários e ao mesmo tempo resolver nossas desigualdades econômicas e ambientais”, acrescentam os autores.
Os partidários do New Deal Verde sabem que o New Deal original era falho no que diz respeito às desigualdades, tendo deixado intocadas as leis de segregação racial. “Foi uma traição contra negros e pardos”, diz Chakrabarti, lembrando que Roosevelt abandonou sua plataforma de defesa dos direitos civis para conseguir o apoio dos supremacistas brancos do Partido Democrata dos estados do Sul. Um dos exemplos mais infames dessa dinâmica foi a Federal Housing Administration (FHA, a agência federal de habitação dos EUA), que garantia financiamentos para a compra da casa própria e subsidiava grandes projetos habitacionais para brancos, mas apenas se negros não pudessem morar neles. Recusava-se crédito a negros que solicitassem financiamentos em bairros predominantemente brancos. Foi assim que surgiu o termo “redlining”, em referência aos mapas de planejamento da época do New Deal, onde as áreas que podiam ou não receber financiamento eram demarcadas com uma linha vermelha.
“Desde o início, temos tentado consertar as injustiças praticadas contra as comunidades negras e pardas”, diz Chakrabarti sobre o New Deal Verde. “Se não investirmos nas comunidades cujas riquezas foram subtraídas durante gerações inteiras, vai ser muito difícil que as comunidades com histórico de segregação possam prosperar economicamente”, avisa.
Os vestígios da discriminação da FHA vão dificultar a transição, mas precisam ser superados para que o novo New Deal dê certo. Cidades mais compactas e munidas de bons transportes públicos são mais sustentáveis do que um modelo centrado em carros particulares, como é o caso do sistema de subúrbios espalhados ao redor das metrópoles, resultado de planos de desenvolvimento de meados do século passado, políticas segregacionistas e do medo da miscigenação. Apesar disso, o mercado da energia solar está mais voltado a instalações em telhados, o que cria uma barreira para quem mora em prédios de apartamentos, que têm menos vantagens para a instalação de painéis solares. A Autoridade de Habitação da Cidade de Nova York (NYCHA, na sigla em inglês), responsável por cerca de um quinto das unidades de habitação de interesse social dos EUA, poderia ser um modelo para a reformulação da política habitacional do país, mas enfrenta atualmente uma dívida de US$ 17 bilhões e seus imóveis precisam urgentemente de reparos e modernizações.
Um terraço coberto de painéis solares no Brooklyn Navy Yard, em Nova York, no dia 14 de fevereiro de 2017.
Foto: Mark Lennihan/AP
Como destaca o sociólogo Daniel Aldana Cohen, a densidade por si só não faz uma cidade ser mais ecológica. Embora se gabem de comprar comida orgânica e viajar de trem, os moradores de prédios de luxo – com seus produtos importados, casas de veraneio e voos em primeira classe – têm a maior pegada de carbono dos centros urbanos, que por sua vez são responsáveis por cerca de três quartos das emissões mundiais de carbono. “Manhattan, por ser o distrito mais rico de Nova York, é a campeã da cidade no quesito emissões de carbono relacionadas ao consumo”, escreve Cohen. A pegada de carbono dos ricos do West Village é equivalente à dos subúrbios de todo o país, apesar da densidade do bairro”, compara. Além de Manhattan, a Oxfam International descobriu que os 10% mais ricos do planeta são responsáveis por cerca da metade das emissões mundiais de carbono. “Apenas os moradores das áreas menos valorizadas de Manhattan têm uma pegada de carbono pequena”, continua Cohen. “Essas pessoas moram no noroeste e no sudeste da ilha, áreas de forte presença de habitações sociais. (…) Habitação de interesse social, boas bibliotecas, transportes acessíveis, parques exuberantes: essas comodidades são democráticas e de baixo impacto ambiental. E são uma conquista política da classe trabalhadora nova-iorquina”, escreve.
Moradias densas e acessíveis são fundamentais para diminuir o impacto ambiental das cidades. E, com os investimentos certos, a NYCHA poderia reduzir três quartos ou mais de suas emissões de carbono, “aproveitando o processo de renovação para limpar o mofo, aumentar a superfície verde da cidade e consertar rachaduras e fendas que hoje são um prato cheio para pragas. Com essas e outras medidas, as moradias pelas quais a NYCHA é responsável poderiam constituir a maior – embora descentralizada – cidade verde do mundo”, acrescenta Cohen. O New Deal Verde poderia incentivar melhorias similares em outros municípios do país, deixando as cidades mais verdes, mais igualitárias e com uma qualidade de vida infinitamente maior.
Além de retificar alguns dos problemas do New Deal original, os defensores da nova edição do programa também priorizam as pessoas que mais podem ser prejudicadas tanto pelas políticas climáticas quanto pela própria crise ambiental. “Sabemos que, para podermos enfrentar os próximos anos e décadas, precisaremos de um governo que se importe com as pessoas, um governo do povo e para o povo, que proteja os mais marginalizados”, diz Evan Weber, do Movimento Sunrise. “Em um cenário de desastres naturais e de aumento da migração devido às mudanças climáticas, precisamos de uma abordagem mais humanitária do que a do governo atual, que só quer construir muros e trancar seres humanos em jaulas”, afirma.
Nas próximas décadas, as mudanças climáticas podem produzir as maiores ondas migratórias da história da humanidade, tanto internas quanto externas. O Centro de Monitoramento de Deslocamentos Internos já estima em 21,5 milhões o número de pessoas obrigadas a migrar devido a questões climáticas. A guerra civil na Síria, que obrigou muita gente a abandonar o país, se deve em parte a secas causadas pela mudança climática e a uma crise agrícola. A maioria dos governos dos países desenvolvidos têm tratado esse fluxo migratório como um problema. Mas o New Deal Verde poderia ter uma abordagem diferente.
“Vamos precisar de dezenas ou centenas de milhares de trabalhadores”, diz Chakrabarti, que acredita numa possível escassez de mão de obra. “Como resultado, além de investirmos na mão de obra americana já existente, provavelmente teremos que implorar por mais imigrantes”, afirma. Sua previsão se baseia no número de trabalhadores que foram necessários para construir o sistema de estradas interestaduais nos anos 1950. “Não só tínhamos uma política de imigração aberta como também estávamos recrutando trabalhadores no exterior”, lembra. O pai de Chakrabarti imigrou para os EUA depois de visitar um centro de recrutamento em Bengala Ocidental. “Eles falavam sobre o sonho americano para tentar atrair as pessoas para os EUA, para que elas ajudassem a construir o país”, conta.
Embora a questão da imigração esteja em voga, a mudança climática não conhece fronteiras. Os EUA respondem por cerca de 15% das emissões globais de carbono, então não chegaremos muito longe agindo sozinhos. O carvão está em declínio na América do Norte, mas a Ásia é responsável por cerca de três quartos do consumo mundial desse combustível, e a demanda vem aumentando nos últimos dois anos. A China tem o mais ambicioso plano de investimentos verdes do mundo, mas continua financiando usinas a carvão em seu próprio território e nos países em desenvolvimento, incentivando outras nações a usarem um combustível que o consenso científico insiste em dizer que deveria ser eliminado. A iniciativa de Ocasio-Cortez faz alusão a esse problema, propondo transformar as “tecnologias, indústrias, know-how e serviços verdes em um produto de exportação americano, com o objetivo de fazer dos EUA o líder mundial absoluto na transição para economias neutras em carbono e na internacionalização do New Deal Verde”.
Além de transformar os EUA em um grande exportador de energia limpa – em vez de vender petróleo, por exemplo –, o capital americano também pode abrir um caminho para o desenvolvimento de outros países, baseado em energias renováveis, da mesma forma que o Plano Marshall norteou a reconstrução e o desenvolvimento econômicos do pós-guerra. Essa política não seria tão diferente da postura americana atual – o governo Trump afirma constantemente que gostaria de levar o carvão para o resto do mundo, inclusive na Conferência do Clima da ONU, em Bonn, na Alemanha, o que deve se repetir esse ano na COP 24. Mas, para levar o New Deal Verde para além das fronteiras americanas, também seria preciso acabar com a tradição americana de obstruir as conferências internacionais sobre o clima, boicotando projetos e resoluções vinculantes. Como Naomi Klein destacou na semana retrasada, se os EUA começarem a levar a crise climática a sério – colocando em prática, na maior economia mundial, o plano de descarbonização mais ambicioso do planeta –, seremos uma influência positiva para o resto do mundo, que vem tentando encontrar um caminho para atingir as metas do Acordo de Paris.
E tudo isso é apenas a ponta do iceberg. Eis uma breve e não exaustiva lista de outras questões que podem ser incluídas em um New Deal Verde: políticas agrícolas; reforma do Programa Nacional de Seguro contra Inundações e o desenvolvimento de um plano coerente de reassentamento de comunidades litorâneas; soberania dos direitos de propriedade indígena; garantia da participação democrática no planejamento energético e o fim das desapropriações; renda básica universal; prevenção e combate a incêndios florestais; política comercial; construção de infraestruturas de captura de carbono; garantia de banda larga sem fio a todas as comunidades rurais; extração de terras raras e outros minérios; reformulação de Agência Federal de Gestão de Emergências; reforma do financiamento de campanha; universalização do Medicare, etc.
É claro que o New Deal Verde vai enfrentar uma forte oposição no Congresso americano. Além das críticas quanto à sua viabilidade, segundo Weber, a resistência de outros democratas se deve a questões processuais internas da Casa. Ele diz que alguns deputados temem que, se a comissão especial obtiver o poder de redigir leis, a autoridade de outras comissões seja reduzida. De acordo com Weber, a iniciativa de Ocasio-Cortez não impede que qualquer lei proposta pela comissão especial passe por outras instâncias antes de ser votada. Ele acrescenta: “Precisamos de uma comissão que vá além do foco específico das comissões que já existem. Estamos falando de um programa que afeta todos os aspectos da sociedade. O Congresso precisa criar uma comissão especial que englobe todas as questões tratadas pelas comissões já existentes. Se quisermos levar as mudanças climáticas a sério, é exatamente isso de que precisamos.”
Entrei em contato com vários parlamentares recém-eleitos que falaram em lutar contra as mudanças climáticas durante a campanha, mas que ainda não deram seu apoio ao New Deal Verde. Quis saber qual é a posição deles sobre o assunto, mas por enquanto ninguém respondeu. Mas um deles, o democrata Mike Levin, anunciou seu apoio na semana retrasada.
Nos próximos dias e semanas, os deputados democratas devem divulgar a primeira versão do regimento do próximo Congresso, e os defensores do New Deal Verde esperam que a comissão especial seja incluída no documento. “Aconteça o que acontecer, o mais importante é que tenhamos uma mobilização em defesa dessa pauta”, diz Chakrabarti. “O movimento precisa continuar fazendo pressão e planejando como alcançar seus objetivos. Se não conseguirmos a comissão, caberá a nós pensar em como chegar lá”, afirma.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post New Deal ambientalista pode trazer benefícios para a próxima geração appeared first on The Intercept.
O resultado da eleição presidencial ainda estava sendo digerido pela esquerda quando Ciro Gomes, derrotado no primeiro turno, ofereceu uma explicação simples para o sucesso da extrema-direita: o foco dos setores progressistas nas pautas identitárias. “A moral popular é diferente da moral dos setores ilustrados da sociedade”, argumentou em entrevista à GloboNews em 11 de novembro. “Você explorar essa tolerância generosa que nosso povo tem com políticas públicas para afirmar um identitarismo de minorias que são mais próximas do pensamento progressista é falta de respeito.”
A afirmação foi controversa. Há anos os movimentos identitários, que se organizam coletivamente em torno de identidades individuais – como a mulher, no caso do feminismo, ou o negro, no do movimento negro –, vêm reforçando que o desequilíbrio de direitos e de poder entre homens e mulheres, brancos e negros, héteros cis e LGBTs deve ser encarado como um problema tão importante quanto os causados pelas diferenças de base econômica. Não seria coincidência, afinal, a pobreza no Brasil ser majoritariamente negra, as mulheres em idade reprodutiva terem maiores dificuldades para encontrar emprego e conseguir cargos mais elevados, ou as mulheres transdificilmente conseguirem trabalho fora do mundo da prostituição.
De alguns anos para cá, parte da esquerda passou a reconhecer que a desigualdade econômica precisa ser combatida junto a essas outras formas de desigualdade, que se entrecruzam. Mas a centralidade que vem ganhando as pautas dos movimentos identitários ainda é incômoda. “Tentar enfiar as narrativas identitárias pela goela abaixo do pobre só vai continuar dando errado”, opinou via Twitter a cantora Lolly Amâncio, ao comentar a entrevista de Ciro Gomes. Vocalista de uma banda de rock baseada na Baixada Fluminense, região da área metropolitana do Rio historicamente abandonada pelo poder público, ela declarou com firmeza: “Aceitem os fatos, deu merda e isso ajudou a eleger um Fascista.”
O foco nas pautas identitárias foi responsável pela derrota da esquerda? Ou seria o identitarismo o bode expiatório escolhido pelos progressistas que nunca o engoliram diante da onda reacionária que lhe deu um caldo nessas eleições?
Conversamos sobre o assunto com a relações públicas e escritora Gabriela Moura, parte do coletivo feminista Não me Kahlo. Para ela, é um erro acreditar que as pautas identitárias devam ocupar um lugar secundário na agenda de esquerda. O problema não estaria na atenção reservada ao tema, mas sim na incapacidade dos movimentos de comunicarem direito suas pautas a quem está fora da bolha. “Você tem que adequar seus discursos e se fazer entender”, defende Moura.
A ativista critica ainda o crescimento de uma representatividade vazia – a eleição de mulheres com bandeiras antifeministas, por exemplo –, fruto dessa dificuldade de comunicação da esquerda, e a falta de cruzamento entre os movimentos identitários com a questão de classe. “Para mim não existe nenhuma defesa identitária válida que não passe pela questão de classe”, resume. “Assim como eu não acredito em uma luta de classes descolada das questões identitárias.”
Foto: Arquivo Pessoal
Intercept – Em 2019, vamos ter 77 mulheres na Câmara, 26 a mais do que em 2014. Serão três negras a mais além de nossa primeira deputada federal indígena. Até agora, 23 já declararam parte ser da base aliada de Bolsonaro e 32 não declararam de que lado vão estar, ainda que entre essas mulheres tenhamos figuras reconhecidamente conservadoras, como Clarissa Garotinho. Isso tem como ser considerado uma vitória?
Gabriela Moura – Vitória é uma palavra meio forte. Quando a gente pega esse número isolado, de 26 mulheres a mais do que na antiga bancada, parece, sim, uma evolução da representatividade política das mulheres. Ao colocarmos um zoom na situação, vemos que não é bem assim. Quando a gente tem mulheres que são declaradamente pró-Bolsonaro, obviamente isso muda muito pouco a situação das mulheres no tocante a políticas do gênero, do ser mulher. Então é uma pegadinha. Uma cilada que pode ser usada como um grande cala boca, porque aí as pessoas que vão falar assim: “Não, não pode reclamar, porque tem, sim, mulher na jogada, então vocês estão representadas.” Mas a representatividade não se dá meramente por termos mulheres no Congresso, mas pela posição política que elas defendem e pelas ideias que vão colocar lá dentro.
Foi a extrema-direita que elegeu a deputada estadual mais votada na história do Brasil, Janaína Paschoal, e que no Rio elegeu como deputado federal mais votado neste ano Hélio Bolsonaro, um homem negro. Gritamos por representatividade, mas a direita ultraconservadora já pode gritar: “ok, mas fomos nós que conseguimos mais votos pros grupos que vocês querem defender.” A centralidade dada às pautas identitárias pela esquerda é um problema?
Isso põe um bom pé no peito na esquerda, que era necessário. Quando os caras da direita chegam para a gente e falam: ‘A gente elegeu muito mais mulheres do que vocês’, eles têm um ponto, de fato.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
A questão do identitarismo fica confusa quando a gente não intersecciona os assuntos. Eu não queria usar o termo “interseccional” para as pessoas não confundirem, não acharem que eu estou falando de feminismo em si. Estou falando do cruzamento das problemáticas sociais. Se tem a Janaína Paschoal, que é uma mulher declaradamente de direita – e ela na verdade passeia por diversos vieses, porque ela se coloca, sim, como uma representante das mulheres em diversos momentos, até pela condição que ela já exercia antes de entrar na política, de ser professora da USP, de ter um bom cargo, ser muito respeitada na instituição – então é um fato. A direita tem razão quando coloca que elegeu mais representantes de minorias do que a esquerda.
Mas o que a esquerda vai fazer então já que a gente se coloca numa situação de oposição? Como a gente vai fazer esse debate e entender as questões identitárias não como um problema, mas como algo que não pode ser apresentado sem um aprofundamento? Ou seja, não é sobre eleger mulheres e ponto final. É sobre quais mulheres serão eleitas, porque se você tem uma Janaína Paschoal e um Guilherme Boulos, que é um homem, branco, de classe alta etc., como você faz a defesa de que prefere um homem do que uma mulher?
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Não vamos ter as respostas na ponta da língua. É preciso pegar essa provocação e fazer uma autocrítica para entender como a política pode ser feita em todos os períodos, não só no período eleitoral. Bem ou mal, a direita só alçou a condição que eles conseguiram alçar, porque eles estavam sim junto do povo, levando o discurso que o povo gosta, que são respostas muito mais práticas, muito mais rápidas, a curto-médio prazo. Enquanto a esquerda – e eu obviamente me coloco nisso, numa autocrítica, também –, fica nessa masturbação mental de levar o pensamento para esferas que às vezes nem a gente consegue alcançar. E obviamente assim não vamos conseguir afetar as massas positivamente.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Em resumo, a resposta é trabalho de base?
Basicamente.
Como a gente volta para esse trabalho de base, que historicamente já foi muito forte na esquerda e agora está muito nas mãos das igrejas e da direita?
Eu não sei te explicar como nos afastamos, porque é todo um processo. A esquerda é fragmentada, não no sentido de “a esquerda não se une”. Existem diversas linhas de pensamento na esquerda. A intelectualização da esquerda é muito boa, eu acho necessária e acredito sim que as ciências devem ser usadas a nosso favor. Só que essas mesmas ciências têm que ser popularizadas. É aquilo que as pessoas falam: você joga um debate na USP, que é longe para caramba, não é fácil de chegar, às 15h. Quem você espera receber? Enquanto isso, a direita está usando o Whatsapp, está conversando com o tiozinho da esquina, está conversando com o cara que foi assaltado e está puto, porque foi assaltado, sabe?
É você adequar o seu discurso. Quando eu me formei em comunicação, isso foi uma coisa que me tocou e que eu tento policiar muito, que é a adequação do discurso. A gente tem uma mania arrogante de dizer: “Eu sou responsável pelo que eu falo, não pelo que você entende”. Não é isso, é o contrário. Se eu estou te passando uma mensagem, eu sou sim responsável pelo que você entende se eu quero que você me compreenda. E aí, mais para frente, se quisermos levar isso para outras esferas, podemos levar. Mas não vou conseguir isso se não fizer o trabalho de base levando o bê-a-bá. A esquerda ficou tão estigmatizada que qualquer mínimo ato humano que seja é tido como comunismo. E o comunismo é visto praticamente como um crime, não como um viés político que pode ser estudado, pode sim ser contestado. Mas [é visto] como crime. Então se você é minimamente simpático [a ideias comunistas], você é tido como um criminoso. As pessoas não sabem, elas não gostam, elas não querem saber. Então a direita ganhou muito bem essa parcela da população, eles souberam fazer esse trabalho e a gente se fudeu.
Apesar de os conservadores oficialmente rechaçarem a ideia de identitarismo, nos EUA, crescem com força os grupos de supremacistas brancos que se disfarçam como grupos identitários. Aqui no Brasil, o Bolsonaro foi criticado pela ausência de mulheres em sua equipe de transição e escreveu no Twitter que não se importa com a cor ou o sexo de ninguém, desde que seja competente, mas em seguida colocou quatro mulheres na equipe. Todas militares e alinhadas o suficiente com o discurso dele para aceitarem o convite. Caímos numa armadilha discursiva.
Reprodução/Facebook
Exato. A população tem que entender o que é ser identitário. A questão dos supremacistas brancos… a história é cíclica. Voltamos a um ponto perigoso. Acredito que, em breve, a gente possa ter que enfrentar os mesmos tipos de manifestações que acontecem nos Estados Unidos. Talvez de uma forma um pouco mais sutil, porque esse tipo de manifestação nos Estados Unidos não é criminalizada, é tida como uma forma de direito à expressão. Temos que entender primeiro o que é ser identitário e quais são as identidades que vamos trabalhar e como. Para mim, particularmente, não existe nenhuma defesa identitária válida que não passe pela questão de classe. Essa é uma opinião pessoal minha. Assim como eu não acredito em uma luta de classes descolada das questões identitárias – de raça, de gênero, de sexualidade.
Quando o Bolsonaro chega e fala: “Tem essa ministra aqui que é mulher”, mas o apelido dela é Musa do Veneno, alguma coisa está muito errada e isso devia ligar o pisca-alerta. É sim uma armadilha discursiva, porque quando a gente reivindica: “Eu quero mulher, quero negro, quero LGBT”, não especifica as pautas que são defendidas.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Eu quero um negro, mas não que me dê veneno. Eu quero mulher que defenda o direito ao aborto, os direitos reprodutivos. Também estamos falhando nessa comunicação sobre o que nós estamos reivindicando, o que é necessário para a nossa população agora.
Uma crítica recorrente ao identitarismo é a fragmentação da esquerda em microgrupos e uma consequente individualização das pautas progressistas. Para os críticos isso acaba transformando grande parte da população em inimiga, de certa forma. Como culpar todos os brancos pela escravidão. Você compartilha dessa visão?
Eu concordo muito com a primeira parte, não concordo com esse final. Acho que podemos sim prosperar com essas pautas, desde que haja essas premissas que você falou no começo. Se a gente simplesmente joga as pautas identitárias isoladas, de fato elas não vão fazer sentido e a gente vai formar pequenas microbolhas: a população negra, a população LGBT, a população X, Y, Z. Temos que encontrar nosso denominador comum, o tronco que nos une em relação a isso. Qual o histórico dessas lutas? Se você pega a história do feminismo, do movimento negro, do movimento LGBT, cada um tem uma gênese. A gente tem que resgatar essa gênese e recontextualizar com o que estamos vivendo agora.
Foto: Reprodução/Twitter
Você deu um exemplo mais consensual, vou ser um pouco mais polêmica. Você pega um adolescente negro que não tem consciência de classe, consciência histórica. Mas o cara está construindo uma autoestima em cima de uma lógica de consumo. Ele quer ser lacrador, ele quer ser muito foda, imitar a Beyoncé, a Djamila [Ribeiro]. Isso é totalmente individual e pode fazer muito bem para ele enquanto indivíduo. O macro vai continuar intacto, porque a estrutura não vai ser mudada em nível nenhum. Ele vai continuar sendo discriminado na rua, na faculdade, no trabalho, se ele conseguir trabalho. Eu concordo sim que as lutas identitárias têm que ser vistas com muita delicadeza, muito cuidado. Só que eu não descartaria elas, não colocaria em segundo lugar, como muitas pessoas colocam. Para mim é um erro.
Vamos a um exemplo. Depois da entrevista do Bolsonaro no Roda Viva, em que ele engoliu os jornalistas, nós perguntamos à pessoa que faz faxina aqui na redação: “A senhora está preocupada se os arquivos da ditadura vão ser abertos ou não?” Ela disse que não. “A senhora está preocupada com o quê?” Ela falou que com emprego, saúde, educação. A pergunta poderia ter sido sobre representatividade feminina ou negra e a resposta, suponho, teria sido parecida. Como mostrar que as pautas identitárias e essas preocupações andam juntas?
Se eu tivesse essa resposta eu ganharia de pronto um Nobel. Na época da eleição eu ouvi um jornalista que falou exatamente isso: “Cara, a população não está nem aí para machismo e homofobia. Não é que machismo e homofobia não sejam um problema extremo, é sim. Só que a população está muito mais preocupada com os problemas imediatos.” O cara tem fome, o cara precisa de emprego, ele tem que pagar conta. É isso que ele quer. Ele vai virar a atenção dele para quem promete para ele isso, para quem promete que ele vai conseguir voltar para a casa à noite vivo, sem ser assaltado. Para quem promete que a carteira de trabalho dele vai ser assinada. É isso.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
Aí todo o resto fica muito em último lugar, porque as pessoas simplesmente não têm tempo para pensar sobre isso. Essa é uma lógica capitalista cruel. Ela te coloca sempre ocupada, com problemas muito básicos, que não deviam nem existir, que são passar fome e ter onde morar, para você não ter tempo para pensar em outras coisas que formam as relações humanas. Então para você quebrar esse ciclo cruel, você tem primeiro que questionar todo o sistema econômico que está cristalizado há séculos e que está sendo colocado como normal.
Muitas pessoas têm dito que o identitarismo elegeu o Bolsonaro. Isso me parece um exemplo de backlash. Minha impressão é que de forma parecida com o que acontece com o feminismo, o identitarismo está sendo demonizado como o responsável pelas mazelas dos grupos identitários.
Total.
Como a gente sai desse ciclo quando a história nos mostra que estamos repetindo isso há, no mínimo, um século e meio?
A gente volta para a questão do trabalho de base. Se a população tivesse um conhecimento mínimo do que é feminismo, eles não iam acreditar em corrente de WhatsApp que mostra mulher defecando em frente à igreja católica falando que isso é feminismo.
Foto: Reprodução
Toda vez que a gente tem uma onda minimamente progressista que seja, a gente tem esse efeito rebote muito intenso. Porque, óbvio, a camada que detém o poder entende bem isso, eles vão se armar dos ardis mais sujos que puderem. Toda ala da esquerda, sejam feministas, comunistas, anarquistas, ecologistas, o que seja, são vilões. São pessoas que trabalham temas que as fazem ser vistas como destrutivas para a sociedade.
Foto: Reprodução/Facebook
A gente precisa mostrar para a população o que são essas pautas. O que significa ser feminista, o que significa a luta indígena, a luta negra, a luta LGBT. Porque não se sabe, isso ainda é uma coisa muito presa a poucas pessoas que têm acesso a essas informações, como eu e você. A gente sabe que nós duas podemos ter uma conversa tranquila, mas se for falar [nesses termos] com a senhora que faz faxina aí que você falou, não vai rolar. E também o contrário, eles não conseguem se fazer entender. Então a gente fica sempre nadando no mega raso.
O historiador Asad Haider escreveu um livro sobre identitarismo nos EUA e afirmou que a política identitária passou de uma prática política revolucionária para uma ‘ideologia liberal individualista’. Acho que entra um pouco no que você estava falando sobre o adolescente negro que quer imitar a Beyoncé, por exemplo. Você acha que isso aconteceu no Brasil também?
Esse movimento é natural. A gente entraria talvez até numa questão psicológica disso que é da construção da autoestima dos grupos marginalizados. Ninguém gosta de ser marginalizado. Não é legal e você luta o tempo todo para ser parte de um grupo maior. Esse grupo dominante, que são esses grupos liberais, que prezam o prazer individual e o imediatismo, ditam o que é ser legal, o que é ser aceito. É normal que essa pessoa que está nessa situação de construção de autoestima queira seguir muito mais esse caminho do que outro que não tem incentivo nenhum. Não é porque essa pessoa é fraca, é porque ela só tem isso como referência.
E para sair desse processo voltamos a tudo que já foi dito.
Exatamente [risos].
Como fazer para reverter esse aparente esvaziamento das pautas identitárias e fazer com que elas retornem à sua origem?
Isso vai ser difícil, porque quando você questiona isso, você está mexendo justamente com o brio, o ego das pessoas. E chega nesse momento de falar: “Cara, não é assim, você está errado.” Não com essas palavras, mas você tem que mostrar que esse caminho está errado e que outro tem que ser tomado. Você acaba arranjando mais um problema que precisa ser contornado, que é a construção do eu de todo mundo que forma esse coletivo. Mas acaba que para a gente poder reverter esse quadro – óbvio, isso não vai acontecer em um ano, cinco anos, dez anos – isso perpassa esse caminho doloroso, tanto da descoberta quanto de você ficar o tempo todo fora da zona de conforto. Então você está o tempo todo em uma situação que é incômoda, que é ruim, que é desagradável, mas que é necessária para que haja essa reversão.
Você se refere a falar que é preciso tomar outro caminho para as pessoas que estão envolvidas nas lutas identitárias ou para as pessoas em geral?
Todo mundo. Você não vai falar da mesma forma, porque nem todo mundo vai entender. Você tem que adequar o seu discurso e se fazer entender.
The post ‘A direita ganhou as classes populares. Eles souberam fazer esse trabalho, e a gente se fudeu.’ Uma conversa com Gabriela Moura sobre identitarismo nas eleições appeared first on The Intercept.
Bob Corker’s two-term career as a Republican senator from Tennessee ended Thursday with the swearing in of his successor, Marsha Blackburn. While Corker was one of the few members of the GOP who has publicly attacked Donald Trump, he was frequently criticized for hypocrisy for failing to take any meaningful actions to restrain the president.
Such judgements are fundamentally unfair to Corker. He’s acted like this his entire career, not just regarding Trump.
Most notably, Corker occasionally murmured about the Republican Party’s most blatant appeals to racism, while doing nothing about it with his power as a senator.
This is particularly maddening or hilarious or both because he was elected to the Senate in the first place with the help of a notoriously racist ad.
Corker, previously the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, defeated Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in 2006. It was a big year for Democrats: They won 22 out of 33 Senate races, with Republicans taking just nine. In addition, the other two victors — the sole candidate from the Connecticut for Lieberman Party, plus a white-haired independent curmudgeon from Vermont — both caucused with the Democrats. This tipped control of the Senate back into their hands.
The blue wave was so big that Corker was the only nonincumbent Republican who won that year. And he almost didn’t pull it off: Ford was from a prominent African-American political family in Memphis, the son of a U.S. representative and the nephew of a state senator. Of the seven polls from the first half of the October prior to the election, Ford was ahead in five, often by significant margins, and tied in one. In the end, Corker won by just 50,000 votes out of 1.8 million cast, or 2.7 percent.
What turned it around for him? It’s impossible to be sure of anything in politics, of course. But this ad aired in Tennessee during the second half of October. See if you can spot the extremely subtle racial messaging:
In case you missed it, the ad includes a blond white woman exclaiming, “I met Harold at the Playboy party!” and then winking and whispering, “Harold … call me.”
The spot was paid for by the Republican National Committee and produced by Scott Howell, a former employee of Karl Rove. Howell had previously come up with an ad for Sen. Tom Coburn that accused his opponent of mollycoddling welfare recipients, over footage showing the hands of someone black counting money.
Corker complained mildly about the ad, calling it “tacky” and “over the top,” and saying it “does not reflect the kind of campaign that we are running.” It was eventually pulled and replaced in most of the state. The holdout was one of Chattanooga’s stations, because it found the new ad even worse: The replacement cheerily explained that Ford “wants to give the abortion pill to our schoolchildren.”
Fast-forward 12 years and two senatorial terms to 2018. Corker was retiring, and Blackburn was the GOP nominee for the seat.
The Democratic candidate, Phil Bredesen, was close or ahead in several September and early October polls. Then in late October, Blackburn ran this ad about the so-called caravan of refugees headed to the U.S. via Mexico. Again, try to figure out — as the narrator describes the refugees as “gang members … known criminals … people from the Middle East … possibly even terrorists!” — if there’s some kind of racial angle here:
Just as in 2006, Corker was against this vile fear-mongering. He even went so far as to say, “To make pejorative statements about all of them … I don’t approve of that.” Corker received praise from the Washington Post for his bold stand. Then, just as in 2006, the character supported by the grisly, pandering ads won.
Sadly, during the decade-plus bookended by these two ads, Corker’s concerned frowns did not translate into any meaningful legislation or leadership.
In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled that key sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional, thereby making voting suppression by the GOP easier. Congress had the power to pass an amendment to the act fixing the situation, but, Corker stated, “I doubt that will ever happen.” Why? Because, he said in one of the vaguest sentences ever uttered in the English language, “One group of folks would have to be saying another group of folks have some tendencies in a direction that are not good.”
Of course, Corker himself had the power to say that about the tendencies of a group of folks. He did not. He could have co-sponsored a proposed 2014 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that would have fixed the situation. He did not.
What Corker could do was vote for a GOP bill that made it easier for car dealerships to steer African-American and Latino borrowers into higher cost loans. He was also able to endorse Trump early in the 2016 campaign. Then, when asked, “Do you or do you not think that it’s problematic that the Klan thinks that the Republican presidential nominee is a white supremacist?” he was able to respond, “I have no knowledge of what the groups that you’re talking about think.” When Trump famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Corker managed to say, “Look, I let the president’s comments speak for themselves.”
That’s not all there was to Corker, of course. He was also well-known for negotiating with Democrats right up to the moment of decision, at which point he would sigh and vote with hard-line Republican senators. Also, after the 2016 election, he briefly had a shot at being named secretary of state, but Trump decided that he was too short.
But now the Corker Era is over. When announcing his retirement, Corker spoke of his admiration for the “citizen legislator model,” in which Americans do not aspire to become lifetime politicians. Following this path, he will now return to the private sector, to which he will bring all his years of practice at looking apprehensive while remaining 98 percent inert.
The post A Tale of Two Ads: Farewell to Bob Corker, America’s Most Inert Senator appeared first on The Intercept.
In a major win for labor advocates, a federal court issued a long-awaited ruling last week finding that corporations could be held responsible for issues like wage discrimination or illegal job termination, even if the employees were subcontractors or working at a franchised company. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C Circuit determined that a business could be considered a so-called joint-employer if it exercised a certain level of “indirect control” over employees’ working conditions, or if it reserved the authority to do so down the line. The question of who counts as a joint-employer has been integral to movements like Fight for 15, which aims to organize fast-food workers who toil away in franchised businesses.
In its decision, the D.C appellate court affirmed one of the most significant and disputed labor rulings of the Obama administration. In 2015, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that companies and franchisers with both “indirect and direct control” of employees could be held liable for labor violations committed by contractors or franchisees. The line between direct and indirect control is somewhat murky, and precisely defining it has been a matter of fierce debate, but ultimately it concerns how much authority a company has over the “essential terms and conditions of employment.” Prior to this, only employers with “direct control” could be held responsible, a standard that effectively exempted businesses that hired workers through intermediaries from most labor law. “With more than 2.87 million of the nation’s workers employed through temporary agencies in August 2014, the Board held that its previous joint employer standard has failed to keep pace with changes in the workplace and economic circumstances,” the NLRB said at the time.
The case centered on a California business known as Browning-Ferris Industries of California Inc., which operates one of the world’s largest recycling plants. Browning-Ferris contracts with a second company, Leadpoint Business Services, to provide Browning-Ferris with employees who clean and sort recycled products, among other things. In 2013, a union petitioned the NLRB to represent Leadpoint Business Services workers, with Browning-Ferris named as a joint-employer, on the basis that the latter also controls the contractors’ wages and working conditions. Using its new, expanded joint-employer test, the NLRB ruled in favor of the workers, and Browning-Ferris has been fighting the decision in court ever since. Other major business groups and corporations, including Microsoft, have spoken out vehemently against the new standard.
In the majority opinion, authored by Judge Patricia Millett, the D.C. appellate court said that common law “permits consideration” of indirect control when determining joint-employer status, but it found that the NLRB needed to further revise its two-part joint-employer test to pass legal muster. The court sent the case back to the NLRB to fix it.
The appellate decision throws a big wrench into business groups’ plans to overturn the joint-employer standard. It also significantly constrains what the Republican-controlled NLRB can do to curtail labor rights going forward. The Trump administration, which has argued against expanding the meaning of joint-employers to include those who have indirect control over workers, will now have to comply with the court ruling.
“The court is very clear that the determination of who is an employer is a legal question, not a policy question,” said Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor. “And for this question, which is determined by common law, the courts decide that without giving any particular deference to the NLRB. That’s a huge victory for those who want a constrained Trump-era NLRB.”
The decision also holds implications for movements like Fight for 15. Labor advocates have been arguing in court for the last few years that McDonald’s should be held liable as a joint-employer for the fast-food workers who were fired from their jobs when they engaged in nationwide protests for higher pay. An administrative law judge rejected a settlement this past summer, under which McDonald’s would not have been found to be a joint-employer. The company had offered to pay between $20 and $50,000 to individual workers who claimed that they were fired for protesting. If McDonald’s is ultimately declared a joint-employer, the road to unionizing its employees would also be made far easier.
Business groups and conservatives have made overturning the expanded joint-employer standard a top priority. After Donald Trump appointed two pro-business attorneys to the five-member NLRB, the board quickly issued a 3-2 ruling in December 2017 overturning the Browning-Ferris decision. The new case, known as Hy-Brand, reverted the standard back to the old way of doing business, and the decision was celebrated by industry groups. “The 2015 Browning-Ferris ruling stacked the deck against small businesses and inserted uncertainty into day-to-day operations,” said a spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association at the time. “[Hy-Brand] restores years of established law and brings back clarity for restaurants and small businesses across the country.”
But the victory for business groups was short-lived. In an unexpected and dramatic turn of events, the NLRB Inspector General issued a report two months later finding that one of the NLRB board members, a Trump appointee named William Emmanuel, should have recused himself from the Hy-Brand vote due to a potential conflict of interest. Emmanuel’s old law firm had represented a contractor for Browning-Ferris. Had he recused himself, the vote would have been 2-2, leaving the Obama-era joint-employer standard in place.
Within weeks, on February 26, 2018, the NLRB threw out its Hy-Brand ruling on ethics grounds. A former NLRB chair told Bloomberg at the time that he believed such a move was unprecedented. “There is no decision on a matter of such high import that has been vacated based upon a breach of conflict-of-interest rules,” he said.
The NLRB went back to the drawing board to craft a new rule to reverse the Browning-Ferris standard. In mid-September, it published its new proposed rule, one in which “indirect influence … would no longer be sufficient” to establish a joint-employer designation. The board claimed in doing so, they would be promoting “predictability, consistency, and stability” for businesses.
In mid-December, the NLRB’s general counsel, a Trump appointee named Peter Robb, submitted a comment on the NLRB’s proposed rule, arguing that the board’s significantly curtailed standard still didn’t go far enough and should be even more favorable to businesses seeking to avoid joint-employer status.
The opportunity to offer public comment on the rule is open until January 14, and as of January 1, more than 25,000 comments had been submitted.
The appellate court decision could have implications for the new rule as well. “I think it’s really hard to see how the board goes forward with its proposed rule now,” said Sharon Block, executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. “I think there’s a lot that’s not consistent with the majority opinion. I think the board needs to be thinking seriously about pulling back the proposed rule, or at the very least, putting the pause on to think about the implications of the D.C. Circuit decision.”
Block describes the appellate court’s decision as “not a perfect decision, but a pretty good decision” because it validates the NLRB’s Browning-Ferris ruling to take into account indirect and reserved authority when determining who counts as an employer.
Bagenstos, of the University of Michigan, said there are some real challenges with relying on old legal doctrine to address modern workplace challenges, but he said the court’s opinion “gives a pretty strong statement” that many problems with the fissured workplace can be addressed in the confines of existing law. “The Trump administration will have real issues getting around that,” he said. The standards set forth by Browning-Ferris are not codified by law, but with Democratic control of the House, it is an issue that pro-labor lawmakers could foreseeably take up.
Spokespeople for the NLRB and the National Restaurant Association did not return requests for comment.
Some business groups have also expressed interest in bringing these issues to Congress, but their attempts so far to reverse the Browning-Ferris standard through legislation have been unsuccessful. In 2017, the House passed the so-called Save Local Businesses Act, which would have done just that, but the bill has stalled in the Senate.
“The unfortunate twists and turns continue for franchise owners in this ongoing saga,” said Matt Haller, senior vice president of public affairs for the International Franchise Association, in a statement to The Intercept. “If the second-highest court in the land can’t interpret how the Obama NLRB intended for their convoluted joint employer standard to be applied, how is a small business owner supposed to figure it out? This underscores the need for rule-making or a legislative solution to clear up the uncertainty facing America’s 730,000 franchise small business owners and their employees.”
The post Workers Just Notched a Rare Win in Federal Court appeared first on The Intercept.
After President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 2,000 troops from Syria last month, the U.S. military ramped up its bombing campaign against the Islamic State’s remaining territory in the eastern part of the country, according to sources on the ground and photographs we obtained.
The fiercest attacks in the past week have occurred in Al Kashmah, a village on the Euphrates River near the border with Iraq, according to three sources in eastern Syria. Amid U.S. airstrikes and artillery fire by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, civilians and family members of ISIS fighters fled to villages to the south, the sources said. While Al Kashmah has not yet fallen, the only people remaining there are fighters representing what has become the front line of the war against ISIS in Deir al-Zour province.
The ISIS fighters are clustered in villages along the Euphrates, from the border with Iraq to south of Hajin, a former ISIS stronghold that fell to the SDF, a Kurdish-led militia, in mid-December. There are about 50,000 to 60,000 people who remain in those areas, according to a civilian activist in Deir al-Zour who documents rights abuses and asked not to be named out of safety concerns. “The civilians in these areas have no place to go or hide from the U.S. bombardment of their villages,” the activist said, noting that the residents have been harmed at the hands of the Syrian government, the United States, and ISIS alike.
The ISIS-held villages along the Euphrates have been the targets of U.S. bombing sorties since November as part of Operation Roundup. In addition to military targets, Operation Roundup bombed civilian areas, including a hospital, The Intercept and Al Jazeera reported last month.
Trump’s abrupt December 19 decision to quickly withdraw U.S. ground troops involved in the fight against ISIS in Syria took even the Defense Department by surprise. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, the president declined to give a timeline for the pullout and said instead that it would happen “over a period of time.” The increased intensity of the bombings, however, belie claims by Trump and others that ISIS has been defeated or that the U.S. war in Syria, which has largely been carried out from the skies, is over. It remains unclear whether U.S. airstrikes will continue once the troops leave.
The aftermath of the U.S. bombing campaign in Al Kashmah, from where civilians have fled due to relentless attacks.
Photo: Obtained by The Intercept
During the final days of 2018, the U.S. campaign bombed villages up and down the Euphrates, focusing primarily on Al Kashmah. On the night of New Year’s Eve, the bombs relentlessly assaulted Al Kashmah, leaving the village largely destroyed by the next morning, according to an ISIS fighter who was there. (We interviewed members of ISIS and the SDF, as well as a tribal leader, for this article via messaging services, and we’ve granted them anonymity because they all stand to be targeted by the various warring factions for speaking to journalists.)
The coalition against ISIS appears to be targeting internet cafes, according to two sources on the ground. Internet cafes in the villages are used by civilians and ISIS fighters alike. They are not part of ISIS’s tactical communications infrastructure, according to sources, but the militants typically use them to communicate with the outside world, especially their families in other countries.
“They just like to disrupt and mess everything up,” an ISIS fighter said in an interview. “They bombed the places where they sell gasoline for the motor, or they sell cooking oil, or where they filter the water — they bomb all these places. Not just the ‘net, they bomb everything just to make your life horrible.”
The risk of civilian casualties from bombings in Deir al-Zour is high because the rural villages have become densely populated with the families of ISIS fighters and civilians fleeing in recent months from more densely populated cities and towns that have fallen to Kurdish-led forces. “No building is empty here,” the ISIS fighter said, referring to the remaining ISIS-controlled villages in Deir al-Zour. Fighters and civilians in the villages have reportedly been describing the U.S. bombing campaign as a scorched-earth policy, using an Arabic term that translates to “burn the ground.”
On Sunday, the U.S. military admitted that it’s killed 1,139 civilians in Iraq and Syria since the start of its campaign against ISIS in 2014. That number is significantly smaller than the estimates of civilian casualties put out by monitoring groups, like Airwars, which says that between 7,308 and 11,629 civilians have been killed.
In response to a list of questions about the bombings in Syria, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense said in a statement that the coalition dictates “the pace of our strikes against ISIS targets deliberately and with careful consideration of their impact to civilians. The increase in strikes in late December were selected specifically to degrade ISIS capabilities and were unrelated to any other variable.”
Following Trump’s withdrawal announcement, the Kurds, who lead the on-the-ground forces that had partnered with the United States in fighting ISIS in Syria, reached out to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria for protection. Feeling betrayed by the United States, the Kurds are concerned about a possible attack by Turkey, which has long feared that its own minority Kurdish population might be emboldened by the existence of a Kurdish state or autonomous region south of Turkey. (In March 2018, Turkish Armed Forces and allied militia seized control of the Syrian city of Afrin from the Kurds.)
In addition, after the evacuation of civilians from Al Kashmah, ISIS negotiated a three-day ceasefire with the Kurds, according to three sources on the ground. On Monday, seven trucks carrying food and humanitarian aid entered ISIS-controlled areas under the agreement, according to one ISIS and one SDF source. The ceasefire was initially scheduled to end December 31, but ISIS officials are discussing a possible six-month extension, according to an ISIS fighter familiar with the talks but who is not directly part of the effort. During the temporary ceasefire, some ISIS fighters and defectors fled Deir al-Zour to other parts of Syria, according to two sources who made such journeys themselves.
A lasting cease fire would allow badly needed supplies to reach civilians in the villages, and ISIS would also use it to regroup. The Kurds would receive a safeguard from a two-front war if the Turks attack.
A ceasefire between ISIS and the Kurds, coupled with the Syrian government’s potential protection of the Kurds from Turkey, would largely undercut part of Trump’s public rationale for withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria. In a tweet, Trump described how Turkey could “easily take care of whatever remains” of ISIS. In a subsequent tweet, the president spoke of his conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan:
President @RT_Erdogan of Turkey has very strongly informed me that he will eradicate whatever is left of ISIS in Syria….and he is a man who can do it plus, Turkey is right “next door.” Our troops are coming home!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018
But the prospect of Turkey’s completion of a clean-up job against ISIS in Syria seems increasingly unlikely given the rapidly shifting alliances there.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military continues to drop bombs on Deir al-Zour, despite the fact that the Kurds, freshly abandoned by the United States, are not currently engaging ISIS fighters.
“They’ve backstabbed all their allies and they’re killing the people here,” the ISIS fighter said, referring to the United States. “Eventually the Islamic State will survive and spread or it will fall, but there will be people here who will remember what happened here, and they will carry on this information and it will spread throughout the Middle East.”
The post U.S. Ramps Up Bombing of ISIS in Eastern Syria Following Trump Withdrawal Announcement appeared first on The Intercept.
A veteran national security journalist with NBC News and MSNBC blasted the networks in a Monday email for becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism. As a result of NBC/MSNBC’s all-consuming militarism, he said, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength” and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”
The NBC/MSNBC reporter, William Arkin, is a longtime prominent war and military reporter, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, co-reported with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest, on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”
Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC over the years and continuously since 2016. But yesterday, he announced that he was leaving the network in a long, emphatic email denouncing the networks for their superficial and reactionary coverage of national security, for becoming fixated on trivial Trump outbursts of the day to chase profit and ratings, and — most incriminating of all — for becoming the central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI in the name of #Resistance, thus inculcating an entire new generation of liberals, paying attention to politics for the first time in the Trump era, to “lionize” those agencies and their policies of imperialism and militarism.
That MSNBC and NBC have become Security State Central has been obvious for quite some time. The network consists of little more than former CIA, NSA, and Pentagon officials as news “analysts”; ex-Bush-Cheney national security and communications officials as hosts and commentators; and the most extremists pro-war neocons constantly bashing Trump (and critics of Democrats generally) from the right, using the Cheney-Rove playbook on which they built their careers to accuse Democratic Party critics and enemies of being insufficiently patriotic, traitors for America’s official enemies, and abandoning America’s hegemonic role in the world.
MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter (where his mindless servitude to his CIA masters has produced some of the network’s most humiliating debacles). The cable network’s key anchor, Rachel Maddow, once wrote a book on the evils of endless wars without congressional authorization, but now routinely depicts anyone who wants to end those illegal wars as reckless weaklings and traitors.
Some of the most beloved and frequently featured MSNBC commentators are the most bloodthirsty pro-war militarists from the war on terror: David Frum, Jennifer Rubin, Ralph Peters, and Bill Kristol (who was just giddily and affectionately celebrated with a playful nickname bestowed on him: “Lil Bill”). In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst,” where the rendition and torture advocate joined — as Politico’s Jack Shafer noted — a long litany of former security state officials at the network, including “Chuck Rosenberg, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III; Frank Figliuzzi, former chief of FBI counterintelligence; Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser under Bush.”
As Shafer noted, filling your news and analyst slots with former security state officials as MSNBC and NBC have done is tantamount to becoming state TV, since “their first loyalty — and this is no slam — is to the agency from which they hail.” As he put it: “Imagine a TV network covering the auto industry through the eyes of dozens of paid former auto executives and you begin to appreciate the current peculiarities.”
All of this led Arkin to publish a remarkable denunciation of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to various outlets, including The Intercept. Its key passages are scathing and unflinching in their depiction of those networks as pro-war propaganda outlets that exist to do little more than amplify and serve the security state agencies most devoted to opposing Trump, including their mindless opposition to Trump’s attempts (with whatever motives) to roll back some of the excesses of imperialism, aggression, and U.S. involvement in endless war, as well as to sacrifice all journalistic standards and skepticism about generals and the U.S war machine if doing so advances their monomaniacal mission of denouncing Trump. As Arkin wrote (emphasis added):
My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …
To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …
Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.
I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …
In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.
For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?
That an entire generation of Democrats paying attention to politics for the first time is being instilled with formerly right-wing Cold Warrior values of jingoism, über-patriotism, reverence for security state agencies and prosecutors, a reckless use of the “traitor” accusation to smear one’s enemies, and a belief that neoconservatives embody moral rectitude and foreign policy expertise has long been obvious and deeply disturbing. These toxins will endure far beyond Trump, particularly given the now full-scale unity between the Democratic establishment and neocons.
I think the way it's supposed to work is the elected president, as Commander-in-Chief, makes decisions with Congress about whether troops will be deployed (which didn't happen in Syria), & then the President decides when they come home. We have civilian, not military, rule: https://t.co/5GJ2J5jjUE
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 21, 2018
Still, that a network insider has blown the whistle on how all this works, and how MSNBC and NBC have become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies, while not surprising, is nonetheless momentous given how detailed and emphatic he is in his condemnations.
The post Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
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Shaliesh Patel was visiting Adel when he was brutally murdered in the spring of 2000. Years later, his family still doesn’t know anything about who killed him. Their interactions with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations left them with more questions than answers. But one thing was clear, Patel’s murder was part of an emerging pattern of crime.
Jordan Smith: When someone dies, no matter how it happens, there are some questions we always ask.
Liliana Segura: How did they die? Who was with them? Did they suffer? Or was it peaceful?
Jordan Smith: Knowing doesn’t change anything, but it does bring a measure of comfort, closure. When somebody gets killed, knowing how and why takes on a bigger meaning. A way to make sense of something scary and inconceivable.
Liliana Segura: Families of victims often talk about the need for closure and especially the need to know the perpetrator has been ‘brought to justice.’ But when a crime goes unsolved, the family is left with nothing. Especially when it’s gone unsolved for 20 years.
Vipul Patel: Yeah, I talk about couple times GBI to be mostly … I talk almost about eight, nine times over there. And they tell me on the phone, “We still looking, we still looking there. We still don’t find nothing there.”
Liliana Segura: Vipul Patel’s uncle, Shailesh Patel was brutally murdered in Adel, in April of 2000, about a year and a half after Donna Brown’s death. His killer has never been found.
Vipul Patel: Then after I move over here in 2004 so I don’t talk anything after then.
Jordan Smith: Did you ever have contact with the Adel police department after the-
Vipul Patel: Yeah, I contact Adel but they say, GBI handle everything so we don’t have any information.
Liliana Segura: The investigation into Shailesh Patel’s death is still officially open. Officially. But, from the little information we have, it seems more likely that there was never much of an investigation at all. And there’s a chance that if there had been one, the violence in Adel that began with the murder of Donna Brown in 1998 could have been stopped in its tracks. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia. In the spring of 2000, Shailesh Patel was 37 years old. He had a wife and two kids. He had recently sold the gas station he owned in Albany, Georgia, about an hour northwest of Adel, and was living in Locust Grove — another hour and a half north of there, when his brother-in-law Vishnu called. Vishnu needed somebody to watch his store down in Adel while he went on a trip. Shailesh was happy to help.
Manishh Patel: Shailesh had a- he was in between businesses or jobs, whatever. So he was kinda free. So he asked him and was like, “Hey, can you come run my store while I go for this wedding?” So my mom and everybody was at this wedding in California.
Liliana Segura: This is Manishh Patel. He’s translating for his uncle, Haribai, Shailesh’s older brother. This is a big immigrant family, really close knit. We’re at a budget hotel in Macon, Georgia, which Manishh runs. Hotels are part of a long family tradition.
Manishh Patel: Hotels are our original businesses, but now we’re more into gas stations.
Liliana Segura: Maybe you’ve heard of the phenomenon known as the Patel Motel. It’s a thing, all over the country. One third of U.S. hotels are owned by Indians – and some 70 percent of them have the last name Patel. The story goes back to the Indian region of Gujarat, which is where the Patel name comes from. The short version is that beginning in the 1960s, the U.S. loosened immigration laws, attracting waves of Indian immigrants. Back home, the Patels were largely landowners and farmworkers. In the U.S., they began buying distressed properties for pennies, then converting them to motels where they often lived and worked. Like all immigrant communities, they networked and spread.
Jordan Smith: Today, If you’re looking for a cheap room for the night in Georgia, it’s likely you’ll be staying in a Patel motel.
Liliana Segura: Shailesh Patel, the murder victim, and his big extended family, were a part of this trend. They’re from a small town in Gujarat named Jasalpur. Shailesh was born there and, like the rest of his family, moved to the United States. They settled in North Carolina, first working at a textile company, and then moved to Georgia. Shailesh arrived around 1985. He helped out his relatives, running the Passport Inn just off the highway in Locust Grove.
Here’s Manishh again, remembering his uncle Shailesh.
Manishh Patel: Oh man, he was super kind. He stayed with us for a little bit when he first came to America. Probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, soft spoken. I mean, just a hard working guy.
Liliana Segura: Manishh asked Haribai to describe his brother, then translated what he said.
Manishh Patel: Shailesh, if you want to describe him. Yeah, genuine guy, like he was a good guy. He wasn’t very gossipy. That wasn’t his scene. He was always to himself. Just took care of stuff.
Jordan Smith: Haribai was almost 20 years older than Shailesh and like any big brother, he worried. He didn’t want him to go to Adel. Vishnu, their brother-in-law, had recently been robbed at the store. By a “stocky black man,” he said, wearing a mask and brandishing an Exacto knife. But Shailesh insisted.
Manishh Patel: My uncle, he was like, “I made a promise so I’m going to go run the store for him like I said I would.” That’s why he was down there. And I think he was only down there for three, four days only when this thing happened.
Jordan Smith: Shailesh had actually been thinking about moving to Adel — it was supposed to be safer than where he’d been working.
Manishh Patel: My uncle had a gas station in Albany. And the reason why he sold that is because of crime in Albany. So he was like, “I’m trying to get away from this stuff.”
Jordan Smith: April 7, 2000 was a Friday. Shailesh was in Adel, filling in for Vishnu at the E-Z Mart Convenience store on North Hutchinson Ave. It’s connected to a Phillip’s 66 gas station. Today, it’s called the Adel Food Mart.
Liliana Segura: We went there. It’s a typical gas station convenience store. You can buy pretty much anything. Coffee, Gatorade, air fresheners, ChapStick, a lottery ticket. Inside, it kinda smells like wet socks. Haribai said he would call his brother every night. But on Shailesh’s fourth night in Adel – his last night alive – Haribai didn’t call for some reason. He doesn’t remember why. His memories are really fuzzy. It was a long time ago. But also, like a lot of people who live through traumatic events, the details are just a blur. Part of what we know about Shailesh Patel’s death comes from an article in the Adel News Tribune. Manishh was in college then and was the family spokesperson – he is quoted in the story a bunch, although he has no memory of that now.
Jordan Smith: According to the story, Shailesh left work after closing the store with an unidentified co-worker at 11:20 p.m. It says that Patel usually went to get dinner in the neighboring town of Nashville after work. For a vegetarian like him, there really aren’t any options in Adel — save for the Taco Bell. But that night, apparently, he didn’t go to Nashville. He walked home instead, to Vishnu’s house on North Gordon Ave. Police think he got there around 11:30 p.m. But this is about all we know. Unlike the GBI file in the case of Donna Brown, there are no police records to sort through or summaries of interviews done by investigators.
Liliana Segura: When Shailesh didn’t show up for work the next day, another employee at the E-Z Mart called the cops. They got to the house a little after 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. The front door was open. Shailesh was inside, covered in blood. Dead. He had been brutally beaten and repeatedly stabbed. The attacker had also picked up the TV — one of those old, heavy tube TVs — and used it to smash his head in. It was gruesome.
Tim Balch: You see something savagery like that, it’s like- somebody that does that is a straight psychopath.
Liliana Segura: This is Tim Balch, the former Adel cop. He was one of the first to arrive at the scene that afternoon. He was also one of the first to arrive at the Taco Bell the night that Donna Brown was murdered.
Tim Balch: When I got there, I just peeped in and it was like, “We’re calling GBI. This is bad.”
Jordan Smith: The GBI. That’s the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. As we’ve explained before, they’re a statewide law enforcement agency. And small, rural police departments all over Georgia routinely call them in to investigate when there’s a major crime. The Adel police called them in to investigate Donna Brown’s murder too. But calling in the GBI doesn’t necessarily mean that things get done right, or at all. Investigating Donna Brown’s murder, the GBI left plenty of stones unturned and then they arrested the wrong guy, Devonia Inman, for the crime. So, there was reason to believe things wouldn’t work out for the Patels either. For starters, they say the GBI didn’t even call the family to tell them what had happened. Instead, the family got a call from an acquaintance. Here’s Manishh, again, translating for Haribai:
Manishh Patel: It’s either one of those guys that called him. So that’s how we found out. No police or nobody called us and let us know this happened.
Liliana Segura: No police called?
Manishh Patel: No.
Jordan Smith: Manishh’s father was the first to hear the news that something bad had happened. But he didn’t know how bad.
Manishh Patel: They didn’t really know that he was killed. They knew that he was beat up pretty bad.
Jordan Smith: Manishh’s father got in the car and headed for Adel. He called Haribai on the way.
Manishh Patel: Before my dad even made it down there saying that, “Make your way down there, but he’s not alive anymore. Like, it’s not- he just didn’t get beat up, he was murdered.” He said he’d never talked to a cop until GBI came to their place like four or five days later.
Liliana Segura: I guess I would ask you what that was like to hear that news?
Manishh Patel: [foreign language]
Haribai Patel: [foreign language]
Manishh Patel: He was like sad. How else would I feel? I was heartbroken.
Liliana Segura: And shocking, I would imagine, shocking.
Manishh Patel: You can tell in his voice right now. I don’t know, by the tone of him.
Liliana Segura: Try to imagine for a minute what it would be like to find out that your loved one was violently murdered and then waiting four or five days to hear from police. It certainly wouldn’t make you feel like solving the crime was a priority. According to Haribai, when the GBI finally came to see the family, the officer didn’t spend very much time with them.
Manishh Patel: 20 to 30 minutes?
Haribai Patel: Only one person GBI.
Manishh Patel: Oh, one. One guy came only. One GBI officer came. And about 20, 30 minutes he asked them questions. [foreign language].
Haribai Patel: [foreign language]
Manishh Patel: Oh, so basics. He said, he asked them basic … Yea, the basic question were like, “How are you related to this guy? Why was he down there?” You know, the basic interview questions that we just kind of did right now. That’s what he was asking. And then that was the last what they heard from him.
Liliana Segura: Haribai doesn’t remember who did most of the talking with the GBI agent. Again, it’s all a blur. But a few months after the murder, the family was asked to help produce a public service announcement, pleading for anyone with information to come forward. Just like Manishh had to speak for the family, it fell to one of his cousins to do it. She filmed the spot and it aired on a local TV station. And that was all they ever heard. No one from the family knows if it attracted any leads. Yet another unanswered question. Still, even without people coming forward, there should have been plenty to work with. Like in Donna Brown’s case, there was a lot of evidence at the scene. Including plenty of fingerprints. And even DNA — at least according to a story in the local paper.
Jordan Smith: It seems the best the GBI could come up with was a composite sketch of a man they say could have been a witness. A slim white guy with greasy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. They said he’d been seen around the neighborhood several hours before Patel arrived home that night. So, not exactly a promising lead. But there’s something even more disturbing. Talking at the hotel, Haribai said something Manishh had never heard before. He said that the GBI told the Patels that if they wanted the murder investigated, they would have to help pay for it. It’s not clear who said this – or who in the family received the information. Maybe there was a misunderstanding. Maybe it was the language barrier. Whatever the reason, the family couldn’t afford it. They didn’t know that the system doesn’t work this way.
Manishh Patel: Cause the thing is, first generation here, they don’t know the actual process of what happens. If this happened today, I would definitely be like, ‘That’s not right. This is what you all’s supposed to do.’ Like I said, we never had any kind of police investigation or like involved with police or…We’re just hard working people, you know what I’m saying? So, if somebody tells you, “This is what it is, you got to pay for it,” and like “Oh, we don’t have the money for it,” I guess case closed then.
Liliana Segura: While we discussed this, it became clear Haribai was getting upset at what he was hearing. It was bad enough to have all this dragged back up. Now it turns out that the little they thought they knew wasn’t even true.
Manishh Patel: They just don’t know what really happened, because the communication was one thing back then, the mental state they were in. So like even just bringing this up right now, is even hard for them right now. Because they kind of sealed it away a little bit, you know? There was like, they’d rather be free, not have to think about this no more.
Liliana Segura: It’s been nearly 20 years since Shailesh Patel was killed. We called the GBI to see what the story was and reached Special Agent Mark Pro. Like a lot of people we spoke to, he was not forthcoming.
Mark Pro: There’s very little information that I can give you. I mean, you can ask some questions, and if I can answer it, I’ll be glad to, but I can’t go into specific details about what we’re investigating or who we’re looking at or anything like that because my agent is actively pursuing leads in the case. I’ve kind of tried to motivate my newer agents to pick up these older cases and put a fresh set of eyes on them. But go ahead, if I can answer any questions for you, feel free to ask.
Liliana Segura: We asked if he could put us in touch with the original agent in charge of the case. A man named Mike Clayton. It’s Clayton’s name that appears next to Patel’s on the GBI unsolved homicides page. Adel police investigator Jimmy Hill’s name is there too.
Mark Pro: I really would not like for that to happen at this point, because we are still working on it and if you put something out there that is different than what we’re looking at, or that if it puts the people on notice that we’re looking back at them, I don’t really want to risk that.
Liliana Segura: I see.
Mark Pro: Generally, and I’ll just be frank with you, we’re dealing in an area in South Georgia that is very small and the neighborhood and the people that live in that area are very close knit and very tight and it’s very difficult to work cases in those type of areas, because everybody unfortunately is related to each other, and they don’t want to give up information on their relatives. Really right now, to be quite honest with you, where we’re at in the case, I really don’t want any kind of publicity on the case other than something simplistic that, “We’re working the case.” I don’t want to get into any kind of specifics, because I don’t want to put somebody on notice that we’re going in a direction. Do you know what I’m saying?
Jordan Smith: Yeah, we knew what he was saying. A bunch of bullshit. I mean, certainly the cops play it close to the vest in the days and weeks following a murder. That makes perfect sense. But nearly two decades later? That makes no sense at all. In cases as cold as this, cops usually welcome some help to shake out tips and new leads. But apparently the GBI is fine with where things are.
Liliana Segura: Pro wasn’t saying anything else. So we tracked down Richard Deas. Deas is a former GBI agent. He collected evidence at the scene of the murder. He retired in 2001.
Richard Deas: I just remember, just like you said, it was very brutal. He was beaten very severely, lots of blood around. I just remember processing and taking pictures, dusting for prints.
Jordan Smith: From that scene, do you remember what you thought about the evidence that you had in front of you to collect? In other words, did it seem like that you had a good amount of evidence that might be probative in trying to determine who did it?
Richard Deas: Yeah. I thought so. They came up with a suspect I thought they could link it to.
Jordan Smith: I don’t know if you know, but that crime was never solved.
Richard Deas: It wasn’t?
Jordan Smith: No, does that surprise you?
Richard Deas: In a way it does. It really does, yeah.
Jordan Smith: Why?
Richard Deas: Well I figured whoever did that would be a person that would be in trouble with the law, or had been in trouble with the law, or would be in trouble with the law again. And there’d be fingerprints on file that they could match to. I thought it might be a local person.
Liliana Segura: We talked to Deas last year. As of today, the story of Shailesh Patel’s murder is still just five short paragraphs on the GBI website, with a gray N/A instead of a picture. The Patel family still has a lot of questions and they may never get answers.
Manishh Patel: We just want to know what happened. You know, I told you, was it a forced entry or not? What was the story? Were they waiting for him at home to get there or did- they were already there and he walked in? How many people were there? Was it one-on-one at the house? Were they going after him or was this really for Vishnu? And really, my uncle just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, kind of thing?
Jordan Smith: One thing is certain. Patel’s murder was part of an emerging pattern of crime in Adel. In fact, it was the second of four heinous murders that engulfed the small city over a two-year period. It started with the murder of Donna Brown in 1998 and ended with the slaughter of a beloved shopkeeper and his employee in 2000. In between, there was Shailesh Patel. Patel’s death didn’t cause the same kind of stir in Adel that these other murders did. Sure, an elderly resident told the newspaper that the crime was a shock. “We live in a nice, quiet neighborhood,” he said. “We have never had anything like this happen here before.” But nobody really knew Shailesh Patel — remember he’d only been in town for a few days when he was killed. And even his family who owned the store there were relative outsiders in the community.
Liliana Segura: But when William Carroll Bennett and Rebecca Browning — the shopkeeper and his employee — were killed in Adel just months later, there was talk. Lots of it. About a man named Hercules Brown. People had told the GBI back in 1998 that it was Hercules, and not Devonia Inman, who killed Donna Brown. Eventually, Hercules would confess to murdering Bennett and Browning. Some wondered, could it be that Hercules was also responsible for the death of Shailesh Patel?
Manishh Patel: Even if it was Hercules Brown, like what was he thinking?
Jordan Smith: Next time on Murderville, the grisly killing of Bennett and Browning. The last two people murdered in a two-year string of bloodshed. Were these really random acts of violence? Or is it possible they were all connected?
Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. If you can’t wait for more episodes, you can binge listen to the entire season ad-free on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.
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