Author: telegraph

Democratic Naysayers Are Wrong On Medicare For All

Posted on November 19, 2019

The American political debate over health care is absurd. Americans pay twice as much as any other nation for health care, and then are told daily that they “can’t afford” to switch to a lower-cost system very similar to those of Canada and Europe. If President Donald Trump and the plutocratic Republican party were the only ones carrying this ridiculous message, it would be understandable. Yet this message is also coming from media pundits aligned with the Democratic Party and the most conservative wing of the party.

Let’s be clear on the central point. Medicare for All, as first proposed by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, is affordable precisely because it is cheaper, much cheaper, than the current system.

America’s health care system relies on local monopolies (such as a health care provider centered at the sole major hospital in a city) and national monopolies, notably pharmaceutical companies holding exclusive patents.

In other countries, the government sets delivery prices and typically pays the health bills through the budget. In the US, the monopolists set the prices.

The sky-high revenues end up as huge corporate profits, wasteful administrative costs, useless and even harmful advertising and lavish salaries. Health care CEOs are making gargantuan salaries, many exceeding $10 million per year.

Who loses? Almost all Americans, whose insurance costs and out-of-pocket outlays inevitably lead to lower income because of unaffordable health care costs, untreated chronic illnesses, premature mortality and personal bankruptcies. Single-payer systems such as in Canada and Europe are cheaper, fairer and have better outcomes.

A recent international comparison of the performance of 11 national health systems on five main dimensions (care process, access, efficiency, equity and health care outcomes) ranked the US health system dead last.

Despite all of this, the US pundits profess to be alarmed about the prospect of Medicare for All. There has been a wave of op-eds and columns published (for example, here and here and here) declaring that Medicare for All would lead to massive tax increases, and that Sanders’ and Warren’s support for Medicare for All threatens to reelect Trump. It’s ridiculous.

Both Sanders and Warren poll well against Trump, ahead in the overall popular vote (though like all Democrats, facing headwinds of the Electoral College).

And at this stage of a national campaign, the goal should be to explain to voters the vast benefits of a single-payer system rather than to prejudge the politics based on self-fulfilling fearmongering.

Yes, one way or another, taxes would rise with Medicare for All, but private health outlays would go down by much more. Total health costs would fall.

That idea is not so hard to understand.

One influential pundit, economist Paul Krugman, has come around. In the 2016 election cycle, Krugman railed against Medicare for All. Yet after Warren laid out her proposal, Krugman supported Medicare for All. In truth, he was simply returning to the economically sound observations that he had long made before 2016.

The pundits seem to believe that Americans will rebel at “higher taxes.” Actually, Americans are much smarter than that. They know that their current private health care payments, whether insurance premiums or out-of-pocket, are nothing other than “taxes” they pay to stay alive. They’ll agree to pay higher taxes to the government if those new taxes eliminate larger private health care bills — again, there are “taxes” by any other name — that they now pay.

Some mainstream pundits are simply repeating what they hear from Democratic Party conservatives and centrists, the wing that has been dominant since Clinton’s election in 1992. They are following the lead of Nancy Pelosi, Pete Buttigieg and others who are trashing Medicare for All.

What in the world are these leading Democratic Party politicians doing in opposing the transition to a fairer, more efficient and lower cost health care system? I would suggest it’s not a lack of understanding. It’s the power of campaign financing. These Democrats are funded by the status quo. The health sector contributed $265 million to federal campaigns in 2018, of which 56% went to Democrats. The sector spends nearly $500 million per year on lobbying. Money talks. Meanwhile, Americans go bankrupt or die early.

There remains the issue of the best way to raise budget revenues for Medicare for All. The basic answer is to use progressive taxation to fund the program. In this way, the nation as a whole will pay much less for health care and the vast majority of households will as well. The highest income households will end up paying a bit more because their funds will not only finance their own health care but will help to pay the health care costs of the poorest households as well.

Sanders rightly proposed a menu of options to pay for Medicare for All, including payroll and income taxation. Warren has proposed one specific approach: progressive taxes on the super-rich and the corporate sector but also a surprisingly regressive “head tax” on companies. She took great pride in not charging a penny of new income or payroll taxes on middle class households. But the proposed head tax on companies would hit wages indirectly and regressively.

Still, both Sanders’ and Warrens’ approaches would result in a more equitable and less expensive system. For most households, overall health care costs will decline.

The most worrisome thing about Warren’s statement as she introduced her Medicare for All plan, is her emphasis on “not one penny” of new middle-class taxes. Here we go again. The Democrats have, for far too long, copied the Republican mantra about “no new taxes,” even as our public debt soars, our infrastructure and public services collapse and inequality reaches stratospheric dimensions.

To honor the silly stricture of “no new taxes” directly paid by middle-class households, Warren ended up endorsing a regressive head tax paid by the employer, which would end up hitting lower-wage workers even though its paid by their employers.

Let’s hope this blunder is a one-time stumble for Warren. Most importantly, both Sanders and Warren are pointing the correct way to reform America’s costly, unfair and inefficient health care system. And this is a goal that most Americans support.

Big Oil Needs To Pay For The Damage It Caused

Posted on November 15, 2019

This month in a Manhattan courthouse, New York State’s attorney general Letitia James argued that ExxonMobil should be held accountable for layers of lies about climate change. It’s a landmark moment—one of the  first times that Big Oil is having to answer for its actions—and James deserves great credit for bringing it to trial. But it comes with a deep irony: Under the relevant New York statutes, the only people that New York can legally identify as victims are investors in the company’s stock.

It is true that Exxon should not have misled its investors—lying is wrong, and that former CEO Rex Tillerson had to invent a fake email persona as part of the scheme (we see you, “Wayne Tracker”) helps drive home the messiness. But let’s be clear: On the spectrum of human beings who are and will be hit by the climate crisis, Exxon investors are not near the top of the list.

In fact, if the “justice system” delivered justice, the payouts for Exxon’s perfidy would go to entirely different people, because the iron law of climate is, the less you did to cause it, the more you’ll suffer.

The high-end estimate for economic damage from the global warming we’re on track to cause is $551 trillion, which is more money than exists on planet Earth.

The right set of priorities might put different groups of people at the front of the line for payouts: dwellers along the edge of the African deserts that are expanding fast as climate warms, Bangladeshi peasant farmers losing their land as the Bay of Bengal spreads inland, and Inuit hunters no longer able to depend on the sea ice. Every one of these groups was directly harmed by the decision of the fossil fuel industry to bury its knowledge of climate change in the 1980s and instead work to deny, deflect, and delay action.

When the CEO of Exxon told Chinese leaders in 1997 that the Earth was cooling and that it didn’t matter when they took action on climate change, the direct and indirect harm fell on South Pacific islanders now having to plan for the evacuation of their nations and South American cities losing their sole source of drinking water as glaciers disappear.

Even in the U.S., the burden falls disproportionately and violently on the most vulnerable communities—poor people and people of color. Wander into any disaster zone, from Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey to the California fires, and you’ll find that the hardest-hit people are the ones set up by the status quo with the least. Hurricane Sandy shut down Wall Street for a few days, but for working class and subway-dependent communities in the Rockaways and throughout Brooklyn and Queens, it changed lives forever.

Put another way, those who made their money peddling fossil fuels—the executives and shareholders holding funds—owe something to those who got hurt. It’s not, in the bigger picture, all that different from the demand for reparations by African American descendants of slaves—claims that in recent months more than a few institutions have begun to pay, among a growing number of faith denominations, universities and politicians, including presidential candidates, have begun to publicly endorse.

That’s not to say that fossil fuel extraction is a crime of the same kind as owning human beings. It isn’t—but the two are not unrelated; the same instinct to abuse and extract, deplete, discard, and disavow holds. And we have always understood the evil of slavery, but until about 40 years ago, as newly developed supercomputers made climate modeling possible, it wasn’t even clear that fossil fuel extraction and use carried with it a systemic danger. And where a wide variety of thinking offers plans for a real possibility of compensation for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, there’s no practical way to compensate everyone who will be harmed by climate change.

Indeed, the high-end estimate for economic damage from the global warming we’re on track to cause is $551 trillion, which is more money than exists on planet Earth. Even that figure is notional: How do you compensate the generations of people yet unborn who will inherit a badly degraded world? Even if Exxon et al were to disgorge every dirty penny they’d ever made, it wouldn’t pay for relocating Miami, much less Mumbai.

Justice demands real money moving from the global North to the global South to compensate for the damage we’ve done.

We obviously should expand the circle of obligation. Even as we write, investment banks continue to bet against our survival and lend huge sums to this industry to expand its network of pipelines and wells. And they do this over the calls for a new economy and the end of the age of fossil fuels. At this point, JPMorgan Chase and Citi are the functional arms of Chevron and Shell. They literally make fossil fuel investments possible. But even holding them to the reckoning they deserve—though we will certainly try to do it—can’t bring back sea ice to the Arctic or compensate the fishermen around the world now watching their harvests shrink in a hot and acidic ocean.

The staggering cost of inaction here demands that we co-create the solutions with a concentric circle of communities that were made vulnerable to the effects of climate change. And that starts with thinking together about aligning these movements for “climate reparations” as a necessary framework for thinking about how we move forward.

Justice demands real money moving from the global North to the global South to compensate for the damage we’ve done. The United States has poured more carbon into the atmosphere than any other nation historically, and we’re champs when you measure it per capita, too. So it’s particularly painful that the Trump administration has stopped funding even the modest payments envisioned under the Paris accords.

And as we think about our own country and its efforts to deal with the climate crisis, we need to hold onto equity and justice as our guide. The communities that deserve priority in public spending are those that have suffered the most. It is a sadness to lose a second home on the Carolina coast or in California wine country, but it is a life-destroying tragedy when poor communities go underwater. Priority for the good jobs in a new energy economy belong to those whose communities suffered most from in the dirty energy era. The images from the Superdome in New Orleans during Katrina should haunt Americans as long as the climate crisis lasts. At its start, it was clear who the first and worst victims were going to be.

Framing the climate crisis as a matter of equity and another opportunity for justice doesn’t mean we stop thinking about it in other ways, too. In the end, this is a tussle with chemistry and physics, and clearly the most urgent goal is to slow down the planet’s heating. Building solar panels and wind turbines in the end ultimately benefits the most vulnerable. If the Marshall Islands have a chance at surviving, if the rice farmers of the Mekong Delta have any prayer of passing on their land to their sons and daughters, then it depends on a rapid energy transition for the whole planet.

But at this point, even the best-case scenarios are relentlessly grim; lots of damage has been done, and far more is in the offing. We’re going to have to remake much of the world to have a chance at survival. And if we’re going to try, then that repair job shouldn’t repeat the imbalances of power and wealth that mark our current planet. Justice demands a real effort to make the last, first this time around.

America’s War On Chinese Technology

Posted on November 7, 2019

In the run up to the Iraq War, then-US Vice President Richard Cheney declared that even if the risk of weapons of mass destruction falling into terrorist hands was tiny, say 1%, we should act as if it were certain by invading. The US is at it again, creating a panic over Chinese technologies by exaggerating tiny risks.

The worst foreign-policy decision by the United States of the last generation – and perhaps longer – was the “war of choice” that it launched in Iraq in 2003 for the stated purpose of eliminating weapons of mass destruction that did not, in fact, exist. Understanding the illogic behind that disastrous decision has never been more relevant, because it is being used to justify a similarly misguided US policy today.

The decision to invade Iraq followed the illogic of then-US Vice President Richard Cheney, who declared that even if the risk of WMDs falling into terrorist hands was tiny – say, 1% – we should act as if that scenario would certainly occur.

Such reasoning is guaranteed to lead to wrong decisions more often than not. Yet the US and some of its allies are now using the Cheney Doctrine to attack Chinese technology. The US government argues that because we can’t know with certainty that Chinese technologies are safe, we should act as if they are certainly dangerous and bar them.

Proper decision-making applies probability estimates to alternative actions. A generation ago, US policymakers should have considered not only the (alleged) 1% risk of WMDs falling into terrorist hands, but also the 99% risk of a war based on flawed premises. By focusing only on the 1% risk, Cheney (and many others) distracted the public’s attention from the much greater likelihood that the Iraq War lacked justification and that it would gravely destabilize the Middle East and global politics.

The problem with the Cheney Doctrine is not only that it dictates taking actions predicated on small risks without considering the potentially very high costs. Politicians are tempted to whip up fears for ulterior purposes.

That is what US leaders are doing again: creating a panic over Chinese technology companies by raising, and exaggerating, tiny risks. The most pertinent case (but not the only one) is the US government attack on the wireless broadband company Huawei. The US is closing its markets to the company and trying hard to shut down its business around the world. As with Iraq, the US could end up creating a geopolitical disaster for no reason.

I have followed Huawei’s technological advances and work in developing countries, as I believe that 5G and other digital technologies offer a huge boost to ending poverty and other SDGs. I have similarly interacted with other telecoms companies and encouraged the industry to step up actions for the SDGs. When I wrote a short foreword (without compensation) for a Huawei report on the topic, and was criticized by foes of China, I asked top industry and government officials for evidence of wayward activities by Huawei. I heard repeatedly that Huawei behaves no differently than trusted industry leaders.

The US government nonetheless argues that Huawei’s 5G equipment could undermine global security. A “backdoor” in Huawei’s software or hardware, US officials claim, could enable the Chinese government to engage in surveillance around the world. After all, US officials note, China’s laws require Chinese companies to cooperate with the government for purposes of national security.

Now, the facts are these. Huawei’s 5G equipment is low cost and high quality, currently ahead of many competitors, and already rolling out. Its high performance results from years of substantial spending on research and development, scale economies, and learning by doing in the Chinese digital marketplace. Given the technology’s importance for their sustainable development, low-income economies around the world would be foolhardy to reject an early 5G rollout.

Yet, despite providing no evidence of backdoors, the US is telling the world to stay away from Huawei. The US claims are generic. As a US Federal Communications Commissioner put it, “The country that owns 5G will own innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world and that country is currently not likely to be the United States.” Other countries, most notably the United Kingdom, have found no backdoors in Huawei’s hardware and software. Even if backdoors were discovered later, they could almost surely be closed at that point.

The debate over Huawei rages in Germany, where the US government threatens to curtail intelligence cooperation unless the authorities exclude Huawei’s 5G technology. Perhaps as a result of the US pressure, Germany’s spy chief recently made a claim tantamount to the Cheney Doctrine: “Infrastructure is not a suitable area for a group that cannot be trusted fully.” He offered no evidence of specific misdeeds. Chancellor Angela Merkel, by contrast, is fighting behind the scenes to leave the market open for Huawei.

Ironically, though predictably, the US complaints partly reflect America’s own surveillance activities at home and abroad. Chinese equipment might make secret surveillance by the US government more difficult. But unwarranted surveillance by any government should be ended. Independent United Nations monitoring to curtail such activities should become part of the global telecoms system. In short, we should choose diplomacy and institutional safeguards, not a technology war.

The threat of US demands to blockade Huawei concerns more than the early rollout of the 5G network. The risks to the rules-based trading system are profound. Now that the US is no longer the world’s undisputed technology leader, US President Donald Trump and his advisers don’t want to compete according to a rules-based system. Their goal is to contain China’s technological rise. Their simultaneous attempt to neutralize the World Trade Organization by disabling its dispute settlement system shows the same disdain for global rules.

If the Trump administration “succeeds” in dividing the world into separate technology camps, the risks of future conflicts will multiply. The US championed open trade after World War II not only to boost global efficiency and expand markets for American technology, but also to reverse the collapse of international trade in the 1930s. That collapse stemmed in part from protectionist tariffs imposed by the US under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act, which amplified the Great Depression, in turn contributing to the rise of Hitler and, ultimately, the outbreak of World War II.

In international affairs, no less than in other domains, stoking fears and acting on them, rather than on the evidence, is the path to ruin. Let’s stick to rationality, evidence, and rules as the safest course of action. And let us create independent monitors to curtail the threat of any country using global networks for surveillance of or cyberwarfare on others. That way, the world can get on with the urgent task of harnessing breakthrough digital technologies for the global good.

Cornel West Discusses Hope And Resistance In The Age Of Trump

Posted on November 3, 2019

Donald Trump’s presidency is a stress test for American democracy, the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution. The enduring strength of American democracy has long been prefaced on the assumption that the country’s leaders — especially the president — had some basic respect for democracy. Moreover, the president was assumed by both elites and the public to be a person who wanted to leave the country better off than it was when he or she first took office. Donald Trump has exposed these assumptions as grossly naïve, paper-thin restraints on a person who has shown himself to be mentally unwell, as well as an authoritarian demagogue.

Donald Trump is an American fascist. His movement — the supporters, enablers, voters, the Republican Party and the conservative media — are implements of Trump’s will. In TrumpWorld he is a king or emperor whose perfidy, greed and ego supersede the common good and American democracy. As with other authoritarians and demagogues, cruelty and the ever-present threat of violence is both how Trump enforces their will as well as being an end goal in themselves.

Trumpism is a crisis of public policy. Trumpism is a moral crisis. Trumpism is a psychological, emotional and physical assault on the American people. Defeating Trumpism will require a critical intervention across all areas of America’s political culture and institutions.

I recently spoke with philosopher, public intellectual, activist, scholar, and author Dr. Cornel West about resistance and hope in the age of Trump as well as the unique role that black Americans have played in sustaining and fighting for the country’s democracy. West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard and a professor emeritus at Princeton. He is the author of several bestselling books, including “Democracy Matters,” “Race Matters” and “Black Prophetic Fire.”

In this wide-ranging conversation, West explained how Donald Trump embodies the worst of American society — but that Trump’s rise to power should not be a surprise. He also reflected on his support of Bernie Sanders, his criticisms of Barack Obama, and why American society needs challenging truth-tellers such as comedian Dave Chappelle.

Several weeks ago, I received an email from someone who reads my essays and listens to my podcasts. This person wrote, “Chauncey, I appreciate everything you’re writing about Trump and fascism, and this culture of cruelty, but it’s upsetting me and scaring me. I don’t know what to do.” Then the person wrote, “Please stop.” Their learned helplessness was so depressing and sad. What would you have told them?
Oh no. You don’t want to stop it. You just tell that person it is difficult for me to think about these topics and live through this moment too. But that’s the way in which any of us will be strengthened and empowered. Stopping is not going to lead us to be empowered at all. Not at all.

How do we inspire Americans and others to get over that learned helplessness?
You recognize that it’s just a moment. That’s all it is. There are always moments in which all of us feel helpless. All of us feel impotent. You’re standing before your mama’s coffin, you’re going to feel helpless, and you ought to be because you can’t do anything about it. You love her to death, but you’ve got to learn how to acknowledge the helplessness. You’ve got to learn how to wrestle with it and know that there will be moments, instances in which you will feel so thoroughly impotent and so thoroughly helpless that you will feel like giving up. There is nothing wrong with feeling like giving up.

He or she who has never despaired has never lived. It’s just a sign that you are alive. And then from there you recognize that it’s just a moment. And that time is going to pass. And that’s when you bounce back and say, “What would she want you to do? How will her afterlife in part be at work in your life? Would she want her afterlife to be you feeling helpless for the next 10 years?” That isn’t your mother’s legacy. You have to be true to her.

And the same is true in terms of struggle for something bigger than us. What would Malcolm say? What would Martin say? What would Fannie Lou Hamer say? What would Ida B. Wells say? What would Toni Morrison say? All of these warriors who have passed away, we have to be true to them.

How do you define the “Black” in the “Black Freedom Struggle”? Do we as black folks — as black Americans specifically — have a special obligation to struggle in this moment of fascism and authoritarianism against Donald Trump’s regime?
The Black Freedom Struggle has always been the leaven in the American democratic loaf. Therefore, when we as black folks go stale, the whole project is going to go stale. And we’ve seen this in the last few decades. But I don’t think we do struggle just because we’re Americans. We do it because we are human beings trying to have integrity, honesty, decency, generosity and courage. Because it’s just not an American project. It’s a global project. It’s an international project. It’s a human and humane project. It goes far beyond national boundaries and national lines. It includes America, but it goes far beyond it.

When I write about the long Black Freedom Struggle, I always try to locate that struggle as part of a broader global struggle for human rights. How can we do a better job of communicating those relationships?
Part of doing that work is realizing that we are in a moment now where people’s conception of community has been degenerated into a conception of constituency. It’s that people’s conception of a cause has been degenerated into a conception of a brand. People’s conception of the public has been degenerated into PR strategies. This creates a spiritually and morally impoverished culture. And so in order to have some notion of human rights that is actually full of content and substance, one has to have some primacy of the moral and the ethical. The calculations cannot be just the Machiavellian. So much of the culture just comes down to strategies and questions such as, “How am I going to make more money? How am I going to get something out of somebody?”

In response one should say, “No.” Life is not about that. Life is about the primacy of the moral and ethical. The legacy of a people, especially black people with Martin Luther King and others, has always been rooted in a tradition that embraces everybody and we’re losing that. We’re in a decadent moment in the culture where everything ethical becomes strategic. Integrity is reduced to money and so forth.

What of black and brown and other freedom fighters in a moment when the market, through neoliberal capitalism, can make all things and people into commodities and products? It totally robs our freedom fighters of their radicalism. For example, see how capitalism has debased and distorted and lied about Martin Luther King Jr. and used his image and legacy to sell fast food and other consumer products.
It’s true. If they can appropriate Marvin Gaye by selling some commodity on TV, you know they can get Martin Luther King. The market has that power. But we’ve got to remember that the market cannot completely commodify the sacrifice, the love to service and the death. When it reaches that level of giving, there is something that eclipses the market appropriation of the image and the spectacle. This is true of the movement as well. For example, there is no Martin Luther King Jr. without Howard Thurman, Benjamin Mays and his mother and then so forth. All of them come out of traditions and families and networks. Those institutions and networks and families are tied to causes in love which cannot be thoroughly commodified.

But what do we do with the truth-tellers? It comes at a cost. Dave Chappelle has been taking lots of criticism for his last comedy special.  I think it was genius. Especially so when you watch it in the context of the first two specials on Netflix. Chappelle is a master bard because he’s making people uncomfortable. He’s dislocating their sense of comfort. But some folks can’t handle Chappelle right now because of their expectations. They expect art to always cater to their expectations and not to challenge them.

Dave Chappelle is doing what he’s called to do. He is being true to who he is. Chappelle has got to be able to express himself. Now, that doesn’t mean of course, that people do not have a right to criticize Chappelle. That’s part of what the conversation’s about. But the thing is, you should not truncate someone’s art. You just don’t do that. That’s like trying to tell Marvin Gaye, “You wrote this album, ‘What’s Going On.’ We want your next album to be political.” He said, “No, my next album is going to be ‘Let’s Get It On,’ because that’s what I’m feeling.” Don’t try to police his mood or creativity. Police the craft and the technique.

The same is true with David Chappelle. He has got to say what’s inside of him. That is mediated through a mastery of his craft and technique. And so if it looks like Chappelle’s offended somebody, then he can explain it and say, “No, I’m not trying to trash anyone, I’m trying to come to terms with some of these issues. I express it in a way that might be too challenging at times, but my heart is not motivated by trying to trash anybody.” And that’s true for any great artist.

It always goes back to the truth. There are these horrors in Trump’s concentration camps. Yet there are so many people both in the American news media and among the general public who keep saying “This is not who we are!” That is a jaw dropping claim, viewed by anyone who has even an elementary school level understanding of American history. I want to be critical and respond with, “You don’t know your history.” But then I say to myself, maybe those folks who say such a thing are being aspirational about what America should be. How do you work through that tension?
Every nation is founded on barbarism. It’s not just the United States. We also don’t know of a nation that has not produced some magnificent human beings to fight against that barbarism — people of all colors. We have seen bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, black bodies swinging from trees in Alabama, the Chinese Exclusion Act, people denigrating gay brothers, lesbian sisters and trans folks. That is all in fact part and parcel of America. When we see people fighting against those barbarities, that is part and parcel of America too.

Let’s use Trump as the example of the worst of America — which he is. Trump is also American as apple pie. Let’s use Martin Luther King Jr. as the best of America. King is as American as apple pie. Trump and King are both America.

You can’t say, “Oh my God, there’s Aretha Franklin singing and there’s John Coltrane blowing and that’s who we really are as America now.” They are as American as apple pie — but they represent the best. There is the worst too. So one cannot say that the worst is who we really are as America. You also cannot say the best is who we really are either. They’re part and parcel of what it is to be part of the American imperial project and also part of America as a democratic experiment. America is both an empire and a democratic experiment against the backdrop of empire. America is a profoundly white supremacist civilization and also a democratic experience in which people of all colors have tried to fight against white supremacy.

We make some progress. We get pushed back and make some concessions. They get taken away. That is part of what it is to fight against evil and injustice. There are some people actually saying, “Well, I’ve never felt ashamed of being American until Donald Trump became president.” The response is, “Well, where have you been? What is your understanding of American history? What is your understanding of our past, and the present?”

Good God, is Donald Trump worse than Obama? Hell yes. But when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to security, when it comes to drones, when it comes to special operations forces around the world, when it comes to seven wars going on at the same time, bombs being dropped on innocent people, there is continuity between Obama and Trump.

America under Donald Trump and his allies is a condition of malignant normality. So many Americans and others are disoriented. They are dislocated by Trump and his allies’ attacks on the truth and empirical reality.
There has been a lot of sleepwalking that has been going on for a long time. America is a corporate democracy. That is the challenge. That is why I support brother Bernie Sanders so strongly. It’s always a critical support. But it’s a strong, intense support because we have got to focus on the concentration of wealth in America. Capitalism has to be a crucial object of critical interrogation. Now, even as a socialist, I still believe in markets, and I still believe in private liberties. I believe in civil rights. I believe people should have freedom of expression and opinion and so on. But under what conditions do we have these markets where 1% of population owns 42% of the wealth? How are those “free markets”? Quit lying. There is escalating poverty that is hardly even counted.

Structures and institutions which are linked to social misery must be highlighted. What I love about Bernie is, at least in his critique of America, he really begins with a critique of capitalism. We have a highly financialized capitalism now run from Wall Street. It’s not the old corporate model that had industry at the center. Now the banks are at the center. We have to begin a critique there. We must have a serious critique of what Martin talked about, which is both the poverty of capitalism and militarism. We need to talk about the ways in which mass incarceration is connected to poverty and the white supremacy. We must also take on male supremacy and homophobia. There is serious work to be done in terms of vision and analysis.

When democracy becomes conflated with capitalism, what does that do to people’s ability to dream, their sense of a better future and more hopeful possibilities?
It is connected to a type of moral and spiritual sleepwalking. So if your dream is just to be the head and winner of a rat race, then you can do that. But when you win, you’re still a rat. It’s still moral and spiritual impoverishment. So if the American Dream is just narrow success and has nothing to do with spiritual greatness, then you will never be spiritually great. The aim is to try to be a human being. We need a larger framework and a broader horizon, one which is moral, spiritual and political in order to get at the root problem.

This is why the crisis cuts so very deep. A person wins the rat race. They then say, “I’m the winner, I’m the peacock, look at me, I’m so successful!” Yes. That may be true. But that person is successful in an empire that’s disintegrating.

So many people in this moment of American fascism are aghast at the abominations. But they do not realize that these horrible things being done by Trump and at his command and in his name are another person’s dream. Trump’s fascists, agents and supporters are looking at this evil and saying, “This is beautiful. I want to see more brown and black babies in concentration camps. I want more walls. I don’t want women to have their reproductive rights. I want to be able to stand on black and brown people’s necks!” We must confront the nightmare and the utopia of American fascism or the battle cannot be won.
That is this country’s history. It is built on somebody else’s land. This is the history of assets and wealth based on slave labor. The history of white suburbs with ties to redlining and a whole host of manifestations of racial apartheid. Jim Crow laws didn’t allow people of color, especially black folk, to gain access to credit, capital and housing. We made great progress because we’ve got these black elites and billionaires at the top who are living so well. And many black folks live through them even though they have been kept in hell. This is the tension and interplay between the nightmare and the dream in America.

How does what you and others have described as the “blues sensibility” of black folks prepare us to survive and triumph in these hard times? How can others model our struggle and survival skills? Is it even possible? Of course we should avoid race essentialism. But we should also not run away from the particular experiences, struggles, triumphs and lessons learned and exemplified by black folks.
You don’t want to essentialize. But you do want to tell the truth in terms of how rare it is that a people could be hated for 400 years and those same people can teach the world so much about how to love and what love is. I don’t know of too many oppressed people such as black folks who produce the love warriors that still embrace the very people who raped them and raped their grandmothers and mothers and sisters. That same society incarcerated their friends and their partners, and yet black folks still treat white brothers and sisters with a certain decency. I’m talking about the best of black folks such as Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Nina Simone, Coltrane and others. All of these are examples of people who come out of a community that has been so hated and terrorized and traumatized, but they are not calling for the hatred and terrorizing and traumatizing of others.

There was not a black version of the Ku Klux Klan. We could have a black version of the Ku Klux Klan. It could have been the dominant black response to American empire. Instead, black Americans and others across the Black Atlantic produced love warriors. Of course we’ve got black thugs and black gangsters. But black thugs and black gangsters did not become the major spokespersons and leaders of our churches and of our trade union movements and in the universities. These are not people calling to hate other people. They’re not calling to terrorize other people. They’re not calling for revenge. They calling for justice. It didn’t have to be that way. And one of the problems we have now is that tradition is getting weak and feeble.

You were in “The Matrix Reloaded.” The “Matrix” trilogy is a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” So long after the Greeks in antiquity struggled with that metaphor for the truth, why are so many people still stuck in the cave? Are 21st-century troglodytes afraid of the truth?
One, is you recognize that the truth has always been under siege. It is just a matter of degree. Two, you have your own life to live. The question becomes, given whatever limitations and faults you have, how are you going to bear witness to a truth-telling and a justice-seeking with a certain kind of integrity and courage? Yes. It is a difficult question, but everybody has got to face that question in terms of how short our lives are.

But there is a structural, institutional question as well, which is, “How will you become part of movements and organizations that are trying to bring political pressures to bear that will tilt American society and empire towards the poor, towards those friends who are called the wretched of the earth?” Do not be obsessed with the prizes of the world, the approval of the establishment and being patted on the back by the rich and powerful. That is not the criteria. To do that is like looking at America through the lens of the stock market rather than its prisons and decrepit schools. If you know that the truth is always under siege, then the question is, “How will one you be a force for good against that siege?” It’s a day-to-day challenge.

The Age of Trump is a moral crisis. A reckoning will be needed to help fix all that Trumpism has broken — and the deep cultural, social and political problems his fascist movement has shined a light on. People want change. They want to improve American democracy. But they do not want to do the work and make the necessary sacrifices. The American people need to decide what side of history they will be on. Unfortunately, it seems so many of them are content to be bystanders.
“What side of truth in history are you going to be on?” That’s exactly the right question. When you talk about the reckoning, my brother, that is not just about the pain, the persecution, the lies and being misunderstood. It is also about joy. And this is very important. The only way you can be a long-distance freedom fighter is to find joy in the struggle. Joy in empowering others. Joy in enabling others — even when they don’t understand you. I was critical of Obama for eight years. Black folks were coming at me tooth and nail, trashing me and misunderstanding me. And I tell them, I’m not loving them for them to love me back. This is not a quid pro quo thing. No, it’s about integrity. It’s not about popularity. I’m concerned about poor people, especially black poor and working people. And I’m doing this work because they’re worthy of it. That is true whether folks understand it or not.

And then there is this magnificent sense of joy in surrendering yourself to a cause that’s bigger than you. Even if it gets you crucified, you are on the cross with a smile on your face. It’s like your mama’s love. The world can’t take that away. You always remember the people who loved you, who put a smile on your face even right before you get executed. Nothing can take that away from you.

Bill McKibben On How Climate Crises And New Technologies Will Change What It Means To Be Human

Posted on October 19, 2019

Is the human race approaching its demise? The question itself may sound hyperbolic — or like a throwback to the rapture and apocalypse. Yet there is reason to believe that such fears are no longer so overblown. The threat of climate change is forcing millions around the world to realistically confront a future in which their lives, at a minimum, look radically worse than they are today. At the same time, emerging technologies of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence are giving a small, technocratic elite the power to radically alter homo sapiens to the point where the species no longer resembles itself. Whether through ecological collapse or technological change, human beings are fast approaching a dangerous precipice.

The threats that we face today are not exaggerated. They are real, visible, and potentially imminent. They are also the subject of a recent book by Bill McKibben, entitled “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?” McKibben is an environmentalist and author, as well as the founder of 350.org, a campaign group working to reduce carbon emissions. His book provides a sober, empirical analysis of the reasons why the human race may be reaching its final stages.

McKibben spoke to The Intercept about the book. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you explain what you mean by the “human game”?
I was looking for a phrase to describe the totality of everything that we do as human beings. You could also term it as human civilization, or the human project. But “game” seems like a more appropriate term. Not because it’s trivial, but because, like any other game, it doesn’t really have a goal outside of itself. The only goal is to continue to play, and hopefully play well. Playing the human game well might be described as living with dignity and ensuring that others can live with dignity as well.

There are very serious threats now facing the human game. Basic questions of human survival and identity are being realistically called into question. It’s become clear that climate change is dramatically shrinking the size of the board on which the game is played. At the same time, some emerging technologies threaten the idea that human beings as a species will even be around to play in the future.

Could you briefly run down the implications of climate change for the future of human civilization, as we presently understand it?
Climate change is by far the biggest thing that humans have ever managed to do on this planet. It has altered the chemistry of the atmosphere in fundamental ways, raised the temperature of the planet over 1 degree Celsius, melted half the summer ice in the Arctic, and made the oceans 30 percent more acidic. We are seeing uncontrollable forest fires around the world, along with record levels of drought and flooding. In some places, average daily temperatures are already becoming too hot for human beings to even work during the daylight.

People are making plans to leave major cities and low-lying coastal areas, where their ancestors have lived for thousands of years. Even in rich countries like the United States, critical infrastructure is being strained. We saw this recently with the shutdown of electrical power in much of California due to wildfire risk. This is what we’ve done at merely 1 degree Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels. It is already becoming difficult to live in large parts of the planet. On our current trajectory, we are headed for 3 or 4 degrees of warming. At that level, we simply won’t have a civilization like we do now.

Since the major culprit in climate change remains the fossil fuel industry, what practical steps can be taken to get their activities under control? And given that they also share a planet with everyone else, what exactly is their plan for a future of climate dystopia?
We have already made efforts at divestment and halting the construction of pipelines, but the next crucial area is finance: focusing on the banks and asset managers that give them the money to do what they do. It has become very clear that the only goal of the fossil fuel industry is to protect their business model at all costs, even at the cost of the planet. Major oil companies like Exxon knew about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change in the 1980s. They knew and believed in what was coming. Instead of rationally adjusting their behavior to avoid it, they invested millions in lobbying and disinformation to ensure that the world wouldn’t do anything to make them change or stop their activities.

To the extent that any fossil fuel company thinks about the long run at all — and it’s not clear that any still do — they know that their days are numbered. Renewable energy costs are plummeting, and what the industry is fighting for now is to just keep themselves going for a few more decades. Their goal is to ensure that we’re still burning a lot of oil and gas in 10 or 20 years, rather than trying to get off the stuff as fast as possible.

The other major threat that you identify is posed by technologies like genetic engineering. Can you explain the threat that they pose to human identity and purpose?
Just as we had long taken for granted the stability of the planet, we have likewise taken for granted the stability of the human species. There are technologies now emerging that call into question very fundamental assumptions about what it means to be a human being. Take, for example, genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR. These are already now coming into effect, as we saw recently in China, where a pair of twins were reportedly born after having their genes modified in embryo. I don’t see any problem with using gene editing to help existing people with existing diseases. That is very different, however, from genetically engineering embryos with specialized modifications.

Let’s say for example that an expectant couple decides to engineer their new child to have a certain hormonal balance aimed at improving their mood. That child may reach adolescence one day and find themselves feeling very happy without any particular explanation why. Are they falling in love? Or is it just their genetic engineering specs kicking in? Human beings could soon be designed with a whole range of new specs that modifies their thoughts, feelings, and abilities. I think that such a prospect — not far-fetched at all today — will be a devastating attack on the most vital things about being human. It will call into question basic ideas of who we are and how we think about ourselves.

There is also the implication of accelerating technological change in genetic engineering technology. After modifying their first child, those same parents may come back five years later to the clinic to make changes to their second child. In the meantime, the technology has marched on, and you can now get a whole new series of upgrades and tweaks. What does that mean for the first child? It makes them the iPhone 6: obsolete. That’s a very new idea for human beings. One of the standard features of technology is obsolescence. A situation where you are rapidly making people themselves obsolete seems wrongheaded to me.

As things stand, these technologies will take the economic inequality presently in existence and encode it in our genes. This is so obviously going to happen if we continue down this path that no one bothers to argue otherwise. Lee Silver, a professor at Princeton University who is one of the leading proponents of genetic modification, has already said that in the future we will have two unequal classes of human beings: “GenRich” and “naturals.” He and many others have already begun taking such a future as granted.

Do you think that artificial intelligence poses a similar threat to human beings?
Many of the first generation of people who studied AI came away deeply afraid of its potential implications. There is a fear that smart robots and programming codes may get out of hand and end up posing a threat to human beings. Those fears may or may not be real. At the end of the day, they worry me less than the more fundamental assault on human meaning and purpose posed by these technologies. They can easily eliminate most of the choices and activities that have given us our basic sense of identity as human beings.

What should be the priority of social movements seeking to defend “the human game” at the moment? And do we have cause for optimism?
Climate change is such an immediate and overpowering issue that it should be the focus of our attention right now, because it could make everything else moot. I’ve gotten to watch the rise of the climate movement over many years and it gives me cause for some optimism. We’ve recently seen massive climate strikes around the world. The Democratic Party in the United States is becoming energized on this issue. These are good signs. Whether they come in time or not, we don’t know. But the advent of human genetic engineering is not getting the attention it deserves at the present. The profound implications of CRISPR and other rapidly evolving technologies are things that we should give much more attention. From a strategic perspective, it would be good to get a resistance going sooner than later. As we have seen with fossil fuels, once there is a huge, powerful industry behind something, it becomes much more difficult to control.

It seems like at core there is an ideological issue underlying all of these threats that are presently facing human beings.
It’s instructive that a lot of the fantasies underlying the most extreme manifestations of genetic engineering and AI come from people in Silicon Valley who share a libertarian mindset. They are essentially hip versions of the Koch brothers. They share an ethos with the fossil fuel industry that says no one should ever question decisions made by the powerful and that no one should ever get in the way of business and technological innovation.

Meanwhile, the public is being told — and has been told for a long time — that they’re nothing but individuals and nothing but consumers. That goes against everything we know about human nature. Human beings are happy when they’re part of working communities, not when they’re out on their own as individuals trying to take over the universe. That’s what all these battles are in some sense about: building human solidarity against a hyper-individualist elite. We need to find out once again how to make decisions as a society, rather than have a small group of super-wealthy people privately making them for us.

Simon Sinek On Impact Theory, How To Motivate People, Transform Business, And Be A True Leader

Posted on October 15, 2019

In this episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu, Sinek discusses his newest work The Infinite Game and argues that most leaders don’t understand the infinite game they are in.  He goes on to explain how our current business climate creates poor leaders, how to change that climate, and how to build the clarity and the courage necessary to lead with an infinite mindset.

 

A Recession Is Coming. When It Does, We Need To Demand A Green New Deal

Posted on October 14, 2019

American carnage and Brexit collapse, detention camps and environmental breakdown – the daily barrage of bad news makes it easy to forget that these are disparate symptoms of the same disease unleashed by the 2008 financial crisis.

Back then, activists in Europe and the US pushed for a holistic cure: a Green New Deal to deliver necessary investments in people and the planet. But establishment economists waved them off, preferring a shot-in-the-arm of easy money. Now, all the grave symptoms of recession have returned – and the old drugs don’t work any more, antibiotics to which the disease has already adapted.

But now is not the time for I-told-you-so. Never before has so much idle cash accumulated as in the past decade – and never before has circulating capital failed so miserably to invest in human health and habitat. We are long overdue for a Green New Deal.

Back in 2008, commentators were quick to announce the death of financialized capitalism. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was trotted out in front of Congress to apologise for his faith in self-regulating financial markets. Activists occupied town squares from Oakland to Madrid. And even the CEO of Goldman Sachs admitted he had a “reason to regret”. It seemed like radical change was around the corner.

It wasn’t. Far from collapsing, banks like Goldman Sachs turned around to record profits, hand out record bonuses, and rehash the risky practices that produced the Great Recession.

Mortgage debt – the proximate cause of the Wall Street collapse – is now at levels higher than in the pre-crisis period. The stock of BBB-rated bonds in Europe and the United States has quadrupled since 2008. Public debt has ballooned. And collateralised loan obligations, or CLOs, have surged to $3tn, “reminiscent of the steep rise in collateralized debt obligations that amplified the sub-prime crisis”, according to the Bank of International Settlements.

How did this happen? How did the financiers succeed in snatching such riches out of the jaws of their bankruptcy? How did the most severe economic downturn in a century result in a broad preservation of a broken status quo?

By a combination of carrots, sticks and tricks.

The first two ingredients are well known. The banks, of course, got their carrots. Governments in the US and the EU bailed out their bankrupt private lenders, shifting the mass of their debt on to the public balance sheets.

The public would then get the stick. Instead of punishing the irresponsible architects of the crash, our governments punished the pensioners, the poor and anyone who rose up to challenge the regressive cuts they imposed.

Less well known are the tricks deployed by governments and their central banks to stabilize the financial system and stave off the growing demand for fiscal stimulus.

Among many – swaps, exchanges, special vehicles purposes – quantitative easing was the most impressive, and the most poisonous.

To understand how it worked, recall that banks hate one thing more than bank robbers: assets on their books that they cannot lend with interest. After the 2008 collapse, with investment dead in the water, the central banks had pushed interest rates to near, or sometimes below, zero – hoping to kickstart investment. But this drove bankers up the wall, since they could not charge interest to lend their assets.

To help them along, the central banks bought trillions of these assets from the banks, using freshly minted cash. One knew that things got silly when the Bank of England bought IOUs issued by McDonald’s.

On the surface, the tricks worked. The influx of central bank money ended the recession, shrank unemployment, even revived the United States’ gargantuan trade deficit to its pre-2008 levels. Business-as-usual regained its dominance, and banks were declared safe again.

Under the surface, however, the crisis was deepening. The easy-lending environment created by quantitive easing and rate cuts – far from raising wages and sparking new startups – encouraged corporations to buy back their own shares, deliver more money to their wealthy shareholders, and load up on debts in the process. In 2018, buybacks soared to a record-high $806bn, a 55% increase from the year before. According to a recent study by the Bank of England, the overall effect of quantitive easing was to increase the wealth of the bottom 10% in the UK by roughly £3,000, and that of the top 10% by £350,000.

Meanwhile, investment in the real economy has plummeted. In the US, public investment dropped to 1.4% of GDP, its lowest level in 75 years. In the eurozone, net public investment has remained near zero for nearly a decade, with infrastructure investment in southern European countries over 30% lower than it was pre-crisis. And with the state on the sideline, the planet warmed, the environment collapsed, and species after species moved toward extinction.

Now, we are heading back into recession – but the old tricks don’t work any more. Rates have been cut, liquidity has been pumped, and the economy remains at a stall. Central banks are simply “pushing on a string”, as the former Fed governor Marriner Eccles once said.

If 2008 saw the original development of the Green New Deal proposal, then, 2019 is the time to deploy it: a moment when the architects of the old strategy, pockets empty, no longer seem able to defend it. “There was unanimity,” said Mario Draghi, retiring president of the ECB, “that fiscal policy should become the main instrument.”

But fool me twice, shame on me. Having squandered the last crisis, we cannot fall again for Draghi’s promise of a mild Keynesian stimulus in the face of human extinction. Instead, we must mobilize behind the Green New Deal as the only reasonable response to the coming recession.

It is tempting to think of the present moment as a crossroads: we either get our Green New Deal, or we descend into eco-fascism. But the fallout from the last recession suggests that – if we do not articulate a shared demand – we might just as easily get a slightly reconfigured version of the status quo: a little more green around the edges, sure, but with roughly the same distribution of power and resources. Such a plan is already under way in Europe, where the European commission now calls for a “green deal” with none of the transformative content of the Green New Deal agenda.

With the climate strikers marching on their front feet – and the old guard caught retreating on its heels – we have a clear opportunity to achieve a true systems change. But it will require us to make clear to our governments: it is a Green New Deal or bust.

If You Are Black And In A Mental Health Crisis, 911 Can Be A Death Sentence

Posted on September 29, 2019

Osage Osagie, 29, was beloved by his family and community. At his funeral this March, so many people showed up to pay their respects that every seat in the main room was taken and at least 100 more were filled in an overflow area. Person after person told stories of his warmth and kindness. Ten days earlier, his father, Sylvester, made a simple call to local police to perform a mental health “wellness check” on his son. Osagie was shot and killed in his own home by police in State College, Pennsylvania, soon thereafter.

Osagie had been hospitalized at least six times over the years; with a history of autism, paranoid schizophrenia, extreme anxiety, and Asperger’s syndrome, he sometimes struggled to function in society. Last December, his family was proud when he transitioned out of a community residential center to an apartment of his own. As much as they wanted it to work out for him, it was rough. Osagie stopped attending support meetings and cycled on and off his medications. On March 10, after sending texts to family suggesting that he might harm himself, they called 911 for support.

When police got there, they claimed that Osagie had a knife that he refused to put down. When he walked toward the officers, they claimed that a Taser had no impact on him, so they shot and killed him right there on the spot. This past week, the family announced their intention to file a lawsuit against the police department for abandoning multiple protocols when their son was confronted and killed.

Over the past five years, I’ve closely studied thousands of police shootings and seen a trend of black families under duress calling 911 during a mental health emergency, only for their loved one to be killed by police as a result. Of course, when a black family calls 911 for support in a mental health emergency and it goes well, that doesn’t make the news. But the fact remains that in general, black families remain skeptical of calling the police for help under any circumstance — and fatal encounters like the one experienced by the Osagie family confirm those doubts.

Black families remain skeptical of calling the police for help under any circumstance — and fatal encounters like the one experienced by the Osagie family confirm those doubts.

Police killings of people with mental illnesses are a huge problem for those of all races. Studies show that as many as 50 percent of people killed by American police had registered disabilities and that a huge percentage of those were people with mental illnesses. One study states that people with untreated mental illnesses are a staggering 16 times more likely to be shot and killed by police.

But African Americans are at even higher risk due to the racism in our country and in our police forces. Right now, outside of Atlanta, a trial is underway for the officer who shot and killed Anthony Hill, an Afghanistan war veteran who had a mental illness. Hill was not only unarmed, but he was also completely nude. He needed immediate medical attention. Instead, he was fatally shot by an officer who claimed what officers often claim: that he feared for his life.

This past December, the city of New York paid the family of Deborah Danner — a 66-year-old black woman with a long history of mental illness, who was also completely nude and in her own home — $2 million after an New York Police Department officer shot and killed her. She, too, needed medical help, but got bullets instead.

It is interesting how many times American police routinely find a way to push past such fears to peacefully arrest white mass shooters who were heavily armed and just slaughtered scores of people. For years, I used to advocate for police to receive more training to prevent the shooting deaths of people like Hill and Danner. Cut after seeing police from coast to coast routinely exercise so much restraint and patience when arresting armed white shooters, I’m no longer confident that training is the problem. Police seem fully capable of exercising restraint when they feel like it.

The list of black deaths is so long. This past May, Pamela Turner, a 44-year-old black woman experiencing a mental health crisis was shot and killed by police in Texas. In Oklahoma this past April, 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis, also naked and in a mental health crisis, was shot and killed by police. This past June, Taun Hall called 911 for support with her 23-year-old-son, Miles, who had a mental illness. Police shot and killed him. The latest research suggests that no single group of people is more likely to be killed by police than young black boys and men — registering even higher than white people with mental illnesses. Consequently, young black men with mental illnesses are in the single most at-risk category in the nation for fatal police violence.

People live with mental illness all over the world without being shot and killed by police. This happens, in great part, because police in many countries aren’t trained with a “shoot first, ask questions later” type of mentality. In fact, in many countries, it is the standard for mental health experts and nurses to travel with police on mental health calls. Those practices are already being deployed in a few places in the United States, but New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Willis is proposing a complete overhaul for the police response to mental health calls in our nation’s largest city. Last year, a staggering 180,000 unique calls were made to 911 in New York City for “emotionally disturbed persons.” But 78 percent of NYPD officers haven’t even received training on how to handle the calls. That’s not going to work. They all need training, but Williams is proposing that expert mental health teams be dispatched to these calls.

No solutions to this crisis are simple, but the bottom line is that what we have right now is just not sustainable.

San Juan’s Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz Reflects On One Year Since Hurricane Maria

Posted on September 28, 2019

On Sept. 21, the day after the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria, WBUR sat down with Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who became a national figure in the days after the storm.

The mayor’s critics say she’s focused too much of her energy attacking President Trump, while San Juan is still struggling to recover a year later.

Cruz sits outside a makeshift office, in an athletic complex that served as the city’s largest shelter after the storm — and where Cruz herself stayed for more than a month.

In this interview, which has been lightly edited, she reflects on the first anniversary, the death toll and the inability of Puerto Rico to act in its own defense — and on her time in Boston.

Carmen Yulín Cruz:
Yesterday was a day when we gave ourselves permission to grieve.

It was about two weeks ago that the official death toll was raised from 64 to 2,975. Of course, the people that lost loved ones knew, we all knew. Why did the Puerto Rican government wait until three weeks ago to say what everyone knew? FEMA received 2,741 requests for funeral assistance, which is eerily similar to that 2,975. People were dying because they were gasping for air because they were plugged into a respirator, or they didn’t get their nebulizer to treat themselves, or they didn’t get their dialysis in time or chemotherapy in time — [all] because there was no electricity.

And there was a spin from the White House to say this is an “unsung success.” Well, when you have to sing your own praises, it’s because people don’t see it. The response from the federal government was inappropriate, it was inadequate, it was ineffective, it was negligent. And some have gone so far as to say it was a crime.

The U.N. says that whenever people are denied the access to essential services that constitutes a violation to our human rights. The director of [the Puerto Rican electricity authority] said he was told that Puerto Rico could not purchase any generators or electric poles from countries outside of the U.S. — but the U.S. didn’t have any poles left because of the emergencies that happened. The U.S. can buy from other countries, like Colombia, but they weren’t allowing us to buy from Colombia. Our hands are tied, which is why it’s an issue of human rights. We are literally a hostage market.

You’ve become a national figure in the wake of Maria, but how has it affected you personally, everything you’ve been through?
I often say to people that I’m just a small person that spoke very loudly, because the injustice and the unfair treatment of the people of Puerto Rico was evident to everybody. In a humanitarian crisis, you either speak up or you shut up, and if you shut up you become an accomplice to

I have become a lot more centered in terms of what my goals in public service are. One is the eradication of poverty. We can no longer hide our poverty and our inequality behind piña coladas and palm trees. How do we make education continue to be what it can be, the great equalizer? Everything I do now is about making sure people have a safe home. We’ve changed public policy in San Juan so energy is not an afterthought, but an integral part of a resiliency plan for the city. We’ve established that every home that we build or rebuild has to be able to run on solar lights and has to be able to harvest the rain, so people are more [self-sufficient].

I was in Puerto Rico shortly after the storm, and returning a year later the most powerful thing you see is the vegetation is back. But you learn very quickly that all is not normal. Tell me about how San Juan is doing a year after Maria.
I often say to people: “Don’t let the lights in San Juan fool you.” We still have between 2,600 and 3,000 blue [tarp] roofs, so that’s something that we need to take care of as fast as we can, which is why we continue to push on FEMA to do their job.

You must have read the headlines back in January or February: “$1.5 billion for housing in Puerto Rico.” Well just yesterday they signed the agreement. Just yesterday [Housing Secretary] Ben Carson says: “Oh well you know, for an agreement like this, we’ve done it really fast.” Well really? Tell that to the people that have no homes. Tell that to the people whose everyday life is now tainted blue because the sun comes through that tarp — the color of desperation, the color of loneliness, it’s blue.

So that’s one thing. We have tons of bridges that still need to be either rebuilt or mended. We have about 100 traffic lights that belong to the central government that aren’t working.

On the one hand we have that, and on the other hand we’re building 21 centers for community transformation — which is a center [to enable local] people to be first responders. It’s a challenge, but I have no doubt that we’re going to make it.

What about all the people who have left Puerto Rico in the wake of the storm? According to one estimate, 77,000 people still haven’t returned.
A lot of the children left. That happens in areas where there’s been wars. You hear about the children of London being taken away into the countryside [in World War II]. You hear about the children in Cuba that were sent to the United States. Children are taken away because they’re the future, so you want to give them a better life.

The problem is that we have to come back. And I say “we” because 5 million Puerto Ricans are in the states and 3 million Puerto Ricans are in Puerto Rico. We are now the diaspora. But it’s very hard to come back to a place where the basic services are a struggle. And for our children — especially children that have some sort of disability or some sort of a physical or emotional challenge — it’s very difficult. I know people that have decided to send their children and they’re staying here. It’s a devastating loss — it’s like a loss after a loss.

Suicide rates have gone up between 30 to 50 percent; suicide attempts have gone up almost 60 to 75 percent. And you know, people lose hope, so our job is to ensure that they don’t.

And all this comes in the midst of an economic crisis that some economists call Puerto Rico’s “Great Depression.”
First of all, I think it’s a “great exploitation.” Hedge funds, they loaned money to Puerto Rico, money that they know the Puerto Ricans couldn’t pay. They loaned the money for pennies and now they want us to pay them dollars.

And two years ago the Fiscal Management and Control Board was imposed by the Obama administration, which just goes to let you know what colonialism is all about. And the fiscal control board now decides what happens: Pensions get reduced, the [academic] credit at the University of Puerto Rico goes from $54 to $157. It doubles that when you go to a master’s degree. Three-hundred schools were closed in the past two years and about 300 schools were closed before that — so before [Puerto Rico] had 1,600 schools and know you have close to 1,000. You’re talking about the singular [most important] tool to get out of poverty, which is education.

The fiscal control board has to go. They have no place in Puerto Rico.

There’s a lot of [disaster recovery] money that’s going to be coming into Puerto Rico right now. The numbers tell us that $4.5 billion in construction contracts have [already] been granted. Out of that you would think the largest chunk would be for contractors in Puerto Rico — but no, only $500 million of the $4.5 billion. The majority of the money will be sucked out.

You say the reconstruction money will get sucked out, as if it were a foregone conclusion. Is it possible that this money becomes a stimulus to the economy?
Oh, that’s why I continue to speak and speak and speak.

One of the things that Maria did is it shed a light on Puerto Rico, and it allows us the opportunity of a world stage. There are Puerto Ricans that feel themselves as second class citizens. And then there’s the ones like me: I’m a Puerto Rican national that has American citizenship. So I live in a dual relationship. I respect very much the ties of Puerto Rico and the United States have, but right now it’s not a dignified relationship. I don’t want to be a colony. The American people are better than that. They’re hardworking people, people that fought very hard in a place called Boston, which I know very well, precisely to rebuke financial domination. That was what the Boston Tea Party was all about. You don’t get that just because you’re a citizen — you get that because you’re human.

Talk about your connection to Boston.
In 1980 I went to Boston University [to study political science]. It was the first time I left home. Best time of my life. Boston University and Boston itself opened up a new world to me. It was the first time I was exposed to a variety of different cultures. It gave me a different view on life. To me it was the opening of a world of accepting differences rather than tolerating differences. You don’t put down people because they are different. I participated in the rich culture that Boston has to offer.

It’s good to hear nice things about our city. Boston has this reputation as the most racist place in America.
Everyone has lights and shadows — that happens in San Juan, that happens in Puerto Rico, that happens in the best of places. But if you look at Boston, you look at BU, you look at Boston College, you look at Northeastern, you look at Harvard, you look at MIT — a lot of great minds go to Boston to be shaped. I didn’t perceive it as racist. The civil rights movement was a little bit shaped by the city of Boston and by Boston University — Martin Luther King got his doctorate degree there.