Tag: President Trump

How Much Can This Planet Stand?

Posted on April 21, 2017

President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people.

It’s much the same as his policies on health care or refugees: Real people (the poorest and most vulnerable people) will be hurt in real time. That’s why the resistance has been so fierce.

But there’s an extra dimension to the environmental damage. What Mr. Trump is trying to do to the planet’s climate will play out over geologic time as well. In fact, it’s time itself that he’s stealing from us.

What I mean is, we have only a short window to deal with the climate crisis or else we forever lose the chance to thwart truly catastrophic heating.

In Paris in 2015, the world’s nations pledged to do all they could to hold the rise of the planet’s temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). It was a good idea since, though we’re still half a degree short of that number, we’re already seeing disastrous ice melt at the poles, the loss of coral reefs and the inexorable rise of the oceans. But at current rates of burning coal, gas and oil, we could put enough carbon in the atmosphere in the next four years to eventually push us past that temperature limit.

The planet’s hope, coming out of those Paris talks, was that we’d see such growth in renewable energy that we’d begin to close the gap between what physics demands and what our political systems have so far allowed in terms of action.

But everything Mr. Trump is doing should slow that momentum. He’s trying to give gas-guzzlers new life and slashing the money to help poor nations move toward clean energy; he and his advisers are even talking about pulling out of the Paris accords. He won’t be able to stop solar and wind power in their tracks, but his policies will slow the pace at which they would otherwise grow. Other presidents and other nations will have spewed more carbon into the atmosphere, but none will have insured, at such a critical moment, that carbon’s reign is extended.

The effects will be felt not immediately but over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet’s reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won’t mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won’t sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink. No president will be able to claw back this time — crucial time, since we’re right now breaking the back of the climate system.

We can hope other world leaders will pick up some of the slack. And we can protest. But even when we vote him out of office, Trumpism will persist, a dark stratum in the planet’s geological history. In some awful sense, his term could last forever.

Tohono O’odham Nation Opposes Border Wall

Posted on April 19, 2017

Building a wall between The United States of America and Mexico was a significant element of the Trump campaign in 2016. While there are many political arguments for and against the wall, it is important to look at the individuals whose day to day lives will be affected by the wall.

This video specifically looks at the Native American nation, Tohono O’odham. It is located at the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona with elements on both sides of the wall. In the video, individuals from the tribe describe their living situation, and why a wall along the border would change their lives. Ultimately, they fear that the proposed President Trump border wall would not only sever their land, but also slice through their community and culture.

Background

Historically, the O’odham inhabited an enormous area of land in the southwest, extending South to Sonora, Mexico, north to Central Arizona (just north of Phoenix, Arizona), west to the Gulf of California, and east to the San Pedro River. This land base was known as the Papagueria and it had been home to the O’odham for thousands of years.

From the early 18th Century through to the present, the O’odham land was occupied by foreign governments. With the independence of Republic of Mexico, O’odham fell under Mexican rule. Then, in 1853, through the Gadsden Purchase or Treaty of La Mesilla, O’odham land was divided almost in half, between the United States of America and Mexico.

According to the terms of the Gadsden Purchase, the United States agreed to honor all land rights of the area held by Mexican citizens, which included the O’odham, and O’odham would have the same constitutional rights as any other United States citizen. However, the demand for land for settlement escalated with the development of mining and the transcontinental railroad. That demand resulted in the loss of O’odham land on both sides of the border.

Following the Plan de Iguala, O’odham lands in Mexico continued to decrease at a rapid rate. In 1927, reserves of lands for indigenous peoples, were established by Mexico. Today, approximately nine O’odham communities in Mexico lie proximate to the southern edge of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a number of which are separated only by the United States/Mexico border.

On the U.S. side of the border, the Gadsden Purchase had little effect on the O’odham initially because they were not informed that a purchase of their land had been made, and the new border between the United States and Mexico was not strictly enforced. In recent years, however, the border has come to affect the O’odham in many ways, because immigration laws prevent the O’odham from crossing it freely. In fact, the U.S.-Mexico border has become “an artificial barrier to the freedom of the Tohono O’odham. . . to traverse their lands, impairing their ability to collect foods and materials needed to sustain their culture and to visit family members and traditional sacred sites.” O’odham members must produce passports and border identification cards to enter into the United States.

On countless occasions, the U.S. Border Patrol has detained and deported members of the Tohono O’odham Nation who were simply traveling through their own traditional lands, practicing migratory traditions essential to their religion, economy and culture.

Similarly, on many occasions U.S. Customs have prevented Tohono O’odham from transporting raw materials and goods essential for their spirituality, economy and traditional culture. Border officials are also reported to have confiscated cultural and religious items, such as feathers of common birds, pine leaves or sweet grass.

The division of O’odham lands has resulted in an artificial division of O’odham society. O’odham bands are now broken up into 4 federally recognized tribes: the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Gila River Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community and the Salt River (Pima Maricopa) Indian community. Each band is now politically and geographically distinct and separate. The remaining band, the Hia-C’ed O’odham, are not federally recognized, but reside throughout southwestern Arizona. All of the groups still speak the O’odham language, which derives from the Uto-Aztecan language group, although each group has varying dialects.

The Border Wall

As the Tohono O’odham reservation straddles the US-Mexican border, some of their communities sit squarely in the path of President Trump’s proposed border wall. There are about 10,000 people living on the U.S. side, where there are schools and other services, and another 2,000 living in Mexico. Along the border fence, there are gates that allow individuals from both sides to travel back and forth as needed. About 62 miles of Tohono O’odham land would be affected by the wall.

“And so the impact of a wall would not allow us to do those things on a regular basis. Let me ask you, how would you feel if you were forbidden to go see your relatives whether alive or dead?” -Verlon Jose, Vice Chairman of Tohono O’odham Nation.

The Tohono O’odham leadership says they’re not ruling out a high-profile protest against the wall.

The Interior Department has indicated that there may be room for compromise for groups like the Tohono O’odham, who are directly impacted by the wall.

Are Trade Deals Good For America?

Posted on March 14, 2016

Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are blaming free-trade deals for the decline of working-class jobs and incomes. Are they right?

Clearly, America has lost a significant number of factory jobs over the last three decades. In 1980, 1 in 5 Americans worked in manufacturing. Now it’s 1 in 12.

Today Ohio has a third fewer manufacturing jobs than it had in 2000. Michigan is down 32 percent.

Trade isn’t the only culprit. Technological change has also played a part.

When I visit one of America’s remaining factories, I rarely see assembly-line workers. I don’t see many workers at all. Instead, I find a handful of technicians sitting behind computer screens. They’re linked to fleets of robots and computerized machine tools who do the physical work.

There’s a lively debate among researchers as to whether trade or technology is more responsible for the decline in factory jobs. In reality the two can’t be separated.

Were it not for technological breakthroughs we wouldn’t have the huge cargo containers, massive container ports and cranes, and satellite and Internet communications systems that have created highly-efficiently worldwide manufacturing systems.

These systems have relocated factory jobs from the United States to Asia, especially to China. Researchers find the biggest losses in American manufacturing started in 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organization, requiring the U.S. to lower tariffs on Chinese goods.

MIT economist David Autor and two co-authors estimate that between 2000 and 2007 the United States lost close to a million manufacturing jobs to China – about a quarter of the total decline in those years. Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute puts the loss since then at about 3 million.

This doesn’t mean free trade has been entirely bad for Americans. It’s given us access to cheaper goods, saving the typical American thousands of dollars a year.

A recent study by economists at UCLA and Columbia University found that trade has increased the real incomes of the U.S. middle class by 29 percent, and even more for those with lower incomes.

But trade has widened inequality and imposed a particular burden on America’s blue-collar workers.

If you’re well educated, free trade has given you better access worldwide markets for your skills and insights – resulting directly or indirectly in higher pay.

On the other hand, if you’re not well educated, the trade deals of the last quarter century have very likely taken away the factory job you (or your parents or grandparents) once relied on for steady work with good pay and generous benefits.

These jobs were the backbone of the old American middle class. Now they’re almost all gone, replaced by lower-paying service jobs in places like retail stores, restaurants, hotels, and hospitals.

The change has been a dramatic. A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly income (including health and pension benefits) of around $50, in today’s dollars.

Today America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose typical employee earns just over $9 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t even qualify for benefits.

The core problem isn’t really free trade, or even the loss of factory jobs per se. It’s the demise of an entire economic system in which people with only high-school degrees, or less, could count on good and secure jobs.

That old system included strong unions, CEOs with responsibilities to their employees and communities and not just to shareholders, and a financial sector that didn’t demand the highest possible returns every quarter.

Trade has contributed to the loss of this old system, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should give up on free trade. We should create a new system, in which a greater share of Americans can be winners.

But will we? The underlying political question is whether the winners from America’s current economic system – people with college degrees, the right connections, and good jobs that put them on the winning side of the divide – will support new rules that widen the circle of prosperity to include those who have been on the losing side.

Those new rules might include, for example, a much larger Earned Income Tax Credit (effectively, a wage subsidy for lower-income workers), stronger unions in the service sector, world-class education for all (including free public higher education), a single-payer healthcare plan, more generous Social Security, and higher taxes on the wealthy to pay for all this.

If the winners refuse to budge, America could turn its back on free trade – and much else. Indeed, there’s no telling where the anger we’ve seen this primary might lead.