Duke Political Review Fall 2015 Vol. 3 Issue 1

Duke Political Review Pitch Imperfect

By Shaker Samman

Janet Yellen: The Patient Academic

By Chimnay Pandit

Back To The Future In Shanghai

By Lucas Lu

The Markets Issue FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 1

FALL 2015 / VOLUME III / ISSUE I DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW 1 DUKEPOLITICALREVIEW.ORG 12/3/15 1:53 PM

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

Duke Political Review Editors-in-Chief Michael Pelle and Natalie Ritchie Online Managing Editor Connor Phillips Chief-of-Staff Sam Skinner

Dear reader, Several years ago, two sophomores, Ray Li and Jacob Zionce, were up late studying for finals and decided to start a political review at Duke. No one could have imagined that, in a remarkably short amount of time, this half-baked idea would become the established publication it is today. Ray and Jacob have since graduated and headed on to bigger and brighter things, leaving DPR in our slightly apprehensive hands. This is the first year the founders have not been the editors-in-chief, and we can only hope to build on the incredible legacy they started. So far, we have expanded into new territory through the addition of a podcasts team, and worked to strengthen the existing branches of the organization – revamping the website, launching a mobile platform, and streamlining our publishing process.

With that in mind, we are proud to release the first print publication of this academic year: the “Markets” issue. This edition features three stories that examine distinct areas of economic policy – Janet Yellen’s tenure as Chairwoman of the Fed, China’s meteoric rise, and the recent challenges to the European soccer transfer market. In addition to these articles, the issue covers Supreme Court caselaw, Turkey’s recent political tumult, and refugee crises in Dilley, Texas and Southeast Asia. The breadth of these stories is a testament to DPR’s rise from a small start-up publication to the home for all things political at Duke.

We could not have made it to this point without the dedicated work of our entire staff. Last years’ seniors left us with big shoes to fill, but we are proud to say that this year’s staff is more than up to the task. We are especially thankful to our senior staff, who ensure each department continues to produce the phenomenal content that keeps DPR running, and to the layout team that makes the print edition possible each semester. We look forward to continuing to embed DPR into Duke’s political fabric for years to come.

Thanks for your support,

60 Seconds Managing Editor Liz McGlamry Business, Marketing, and Programming Director Whitney Hazard Interviews Managing Editor Zachary Gorwitz Features Managing Editor Maya Durvasula Art and Layout Director Adam Beyer Deputy Online Managing Editor Shobana Subramanian Columnists Abhi Sanka, Alexander Doan, Dana Raphael, David Wohlever Sanchez, Ed Paranjpe, Hillary Song, Jack Minchew, Mac Findlay, Matthew Rock, Michelle Krogius, Shannon Beckham, Sarah Sibley Contributing Editors Gautam Hathi, Nicolas Russell Pollack, Parker Fox Editors-at-Large Anna Kaul, Daniel Dorchuck, Jay Ruckelshaus, Tanner Lockhead Copy Editors Jess Garda, Jessica Tanner, Steve Hassey, Zhong Huang 60 Seconds Associate Editors Henry Miller, Sydney Smith 60 Seconds Staff Writers Aakash Jain, Alex Carbonelli, Charles Miller, Chinmay Pandit, Connor Gunderson, Jacob Glasser, Meredith Cash, Michael Kiffel Business, Marketing, and Programming Associates Amy Wang, Bella Rivera, Brad Hanson, Emilie Padgett, John Caldwell Interviews Associate Editors Annie Adair, Jay Sullivan Interviews Staff Writers Allison Huang, Lucy Zhang Associate Features Editor Shaker Samman Features Contributors and Staff Writers Jane Kaufman, Joey Dolan-Galaviz, Mabel Zhang, Rachel Sereix

Michael Pelle Editor-in-Chief

Natalie Ritchie Editor-in-Chief

Deputy Chief of Staff William Wei Ran Tong Associate Layout Editors: Jasdeep Kaur, Jess Garda

On the cover: Photo by Sam Valadi. Oppostie page from the top: European Commission DG ECHO, Matt Scandrett, Radio Free Asia.

2 DPR2.indb 2

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Contents DISPATCHES

FALL 2015 / VOLUME III / ISSUE I

LEADERS

11

34

Q&A

MARKETS

26

4

NOT JUST ABORTION

5

GOVERNMENT ACCESS TO ENCRYPTED DATA

6

VOLKSWAGEN SCANDAL HUMILIATES REGULATORS

8

THE UNDUE BURDEN TEST IN ABORTION LAW

11

SAVING THE WORLD’S LEAST WANTED

14

ASYLUM AT THE SOUTH TEXAS RESIDENTIAL CENTER

19

ISIL AND THE POLITICS OF TURKEY

26 31

PITCH IMPERFECT

34

BACK TO THE FUTURE IN SHANGHAI

38

THE RELENTLESS PURSUIT OF TRUTH: MAZIAR BAHARI

41

PUSHING THE LIMIT: SCOTT DIKKERS

By Dana Raphael

By Gautam Hathi

By Parker Fox

By Shobana Subramanian

By Nikita Gawande

By Sarah Sibley

By Connor Phillips

By Shaker Samman

JANET YELLEN: THE PATIENT ACADEMIC

By Chinmay Pandit

By Lucas Lu

By Jay Sullivan and Allison Huang

By Zachary Gorwitz

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 3

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

3 12/3/15 1:53 PM

Dispatches

Dispatches Highlights from dukepoliticalreview.org

Not Just Abortion Though the issue of abortion has recently dominated news headlines, Planned Parenthood offers so much more than just abortion services.

By Dana Raphael

F

or weeks, Republican presidential candidates have filled the headlines with their invidious condemnations of Planned Parenthood and abortion in the United States. Carly Fiorina’s campaign recently spliced together bits of video – including a picture of a fetus born prematurely, not aborted – to back her claim that Planned Parenthood is destroying “the moral character of our nation.”

This week, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards testified before the House

Add Caption

Photo by Rachel Kincaid.

4 DPR2.indb 4

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

Committee on Oversight and Government Reform regarding the services the organization provides.

It is no secret that Republicans want to strip Planned Parenthood of federal dollars and watch as clinics close their doors due to overbearing regulations. Advocates for women’s reproductive health remind opponents that only three percent of Planned Parenthood services are abortion-related – which are not paid for by taxpayer dollars – and that the few women who have late-

term abortions often do so for traumatic medical reasons. Advocates highlight the critical services that Planned Parenthood offers to women, many of whom cannot afford care elsewhere: everything from breast cancer screenings to prenatal care to STD testing. But one thing that both critics and advocates have left out of the spotlight is the critical work Planned Parenthood does regarding sexual education.

Only 22 states and the District of Columbia require that public schools teach sexual education. Only 33 have any requirement that students learn about HIV/AIDS. Even more surprisingly, only 19 states require that sexual education must be “medically, factually, or technically accurate.” For localities that do teach sexual education, most of the money they receive is only for abstinence-based education programs – programs that decry sex before marriage rather than teach students about contraception and STD prevention. The programs came about largely as a result of religious conservative lobbying.

The goal of abstinence-based education is to prevent teens from having sex, with the hope that conversations about pregnancy, HIV and STDs, and contraception will not be necessary. The research, however, does not support this line of thinking. Statistics show that abstinence-until-marriage

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Dispatches programs are completely ineffective, as 95 percent of Americans engage in premarital sex. By contrast, comprehensive sexual education programs are shown to actually delay the age of first sexual activity and increase condom and contraceptive usage.

Furthermore, studies have found that “adolescents who received comprehensive sexual education had a lower risk of pregnancy” than those who had abstinence-only or no sexual education. One study concluded that abstinence-only education “may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.” The evidence couldn’t be clearer. Mississippi requires abstinence-based sexual education and bans condom demonstrations, yet 76 percent of Mississippi high school students report having sex before they graduate. Mississippi also has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, and a third of all babies in Mississippi are born to teenage mothers.

That is where Planned Parenthood comes in. One of the most underrated and undervalued resources Planned Parenthood provides is sexual education, based on a comprehensive approach, to 1.5 million people annually. Each year, they conduct 1.1 mil-

lion pregnancy tests, 4.5 million STD tests, and provide contraception to help prevent over 500,000 unintended pregnancies.

In conservative communities where teens’ only information about sex is their school telling them not to do it, Planned Parenthood helps ensure they do not become teenage parents or contract STDs, in addition to providing them information about healthy relationships and sexual assault.

Closing Planned Parenthood clinics denies vulnerable populations – often young, poor women – vital resources. Scott County, Indiana, a place that doesn’t mandate sexual education, is the source of the largest HIV outbreak in Indiana history. The only provider of HIV testing in the small, rural county, Planned Parenthood closed in 2013 due to new state restrictions targeting abortion clinics, even though the Scott County clinic never provided abortions. It is no coincidence that two years later, in the absence of HIV testing and care, HIV incidence has skyrocketed.

Planned Parenthood makes up the gap in sexual education that so many states endorse and perpetuate through no education or abstinence-based education by providing factual information to those who seek

services. Planned Parenthood is not the baby-killing monster the conservative press would have readers believe. Planned Parenthood is the reason that girls like Simone, who gave birth at 15 years old, remain in school through Adolescent Parenting Programs. Planned Parenthood is the reason men like Marquis are alive through HIV testing for teens. Planned Parenthood is the reason that young immigrants like Shireen learn about their sexual health and how to protect themselves.

Eliminating Planned Parenthood for the three percent of abortion services, and losing the other vital 97 percent they provide would devastate millions of people across the country, especially those most vulnerable. A government’s commitment to making sure vulnerable people have access to quality healthcare should be the real test for the “moral character of our nation.”

Dana Raphael is a Trinity junior. She is an Contributing Editor for DPR.

Through the Back Door: Government Access to Encrypted Data The US government is looking for ways to circumvent data encryption, but security experts and privacy advocates are raising serious concerns.

By Gautam Hathi

I

f you fly with checked bags, at some point you have probably seen a notice left in your bag saying that your luggage was searched by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The TSA regularly opens bags at airports for security searches. In order to do this, they often use special keys which can open a large number of commercially sold baggage locks. The idea is that the TSA can get into your bags and check if you have explosives, but thieves cannot

steal the gifts you bought while you were on vacation.

A few months ago, the director of the FBI, James Comey, asked Congress to set up a similar system for Americans’ electronic data, citing a number of cases in which law enforcement agencies have had to stop or delay investigations because they could not access a suspect’s iPhone or Gmail account. Comey wanted to have his own special key so that law enforcement could search your iPhone if

they had a warrant, but thieves still could not access your data.

In many cases, police and federal agencies can find ways to access data on a device or website even if they do not have a special key giving them access.

But over the past couple of years, device manufacturers such as Apple and web service providers such as Google have begun encrypting users’ data. The latest version of iOS encrypts all data on an iPhone by default, and most other FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 5

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

5 12/3/15 1:53 PM

Dispatches operating systems give users the option of encrypting their data.

When data is encrypted, it is virtually impossible to access without a digital encryption key, which is often generated from a password. As a result, even the companies who created your smartphone or host your email cannot actually access encrypted data if they do not store a copy of the encryption key.

This is not a situation that law enforcement agencies want to be in. The nightmare scenario is one where a device has information on it that could help stop a dangerous crime, but the police cannot find any way to access the information because the device is encrypted. To prevent these kinds of incidents, Comey asked Congress to require that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies be given “backdoor access” to encrypted data – some sort of special key that could decrypt data on an iPhone or in a Gmail account.

So what could go wrong?

Consider the analogous case of TSA baggage locks, where the government has “backdoor access” to your luggage.

The entire system depends on the government’s secret keys staying secret and hidden from the public. The moment someone starts making copies of the baggage lock keys and distributing them, everyone’s luggage becomes incredibly

vulnerable to theft.

And sure enough, the keys have not stayed secret. A Washington Post story about the TSA published last November accidentally included a clear picture of the TSA secret keys. The picture was later taken down, but not before it began circulating around the Internet.

A few months later, a hacker created a 3D model of the keys in the picture that could be used to create duplicates using a 3D printer. He put the model on a website and suddenly, everyone could create their own working TSA key. Your TSA-approved baggage locks are now worthless.

The risk with giving the FBI (or anyone else) special keys to access digital information is similar but also much more dangerous. If Apple creates a secret key that gives access to all iPhones and that key gets into the wrong hands, suddenly all the data in your email account is no longer safe. Your contacts, confidential documents, and private communications could be easily hacked and used against you.

Perhaps even more troubling is the potential for countries with less freedom to abuse government backdoor access. In the US, law enforcement agencies would still need a warrant to access data on a personal device. But authoritarian regimes would give users no such guarantees, and a secret key would allow those regimes to look at

the confidential information of journalists, dissidents, and opposition politicians.

It is no wonder, then, that the technology industry and the computer security community have been adamantly opposed to any kind of backdoor access to encrypted data. In the wake of the pushback against the most recent attempts to require government access, the Obama Administration has said that it will not seek to pass legislation giving the government backdoor access to encrypted data, at least for now.

But this issue will come up again. Police will find more cases where evidence needed to prosecute crimes will be stored on encrypted devices, and one day the government will say that it is unable to access the location of a ticking time bomb because it is stored on an encrypted device. At that point, Americans will once again be asked to consider whether they are willing to take the risk of giving the government a backdoor to encrypted data. If, as has happened before, the country decides to err on the side of national security, we may find ourselves in a situation where the security of our personal electronic data is at risk.

Gautam Hathi is a Trinity junior. He is an Editor at Large for DPR.

Volkswagen Scandal Humiliates Regulators It goes without saying that Volkswagen is at fault for their massive emissions scandal, but the EPA certainly isn’t blameless.

By Parker Fox

O

n Friday, Sept. 18, the EPA publicly accused the Volkswagen Group of deliberately cheating on emissions tests for over 482,000 of its TDI® Clean Diesel vehicles, sending the world’s largest automobile company into a nosedive.

By the following Tuesday, share prices plummeted from $162.40 to $106.00, and by Sept. 29, the stock hit its lowest

6 DPR2.indb 6

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

value in six years at $95.20. Former CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned on Sept. 23 after issuing a public admission of guilt on behalf of the company while maintaining that he was not personally aware of the defeat device that successfully allowed Volkswagen and Audi vehicles to pass emissions tests.

Winterkorn is under investigation and Volkswagen now must work with the EPA

to reach a solution for the “cheat” vehicles currently on the road. Recalls are inevitable and the company stands to face stiff fines that will likely exceed the $7.3 billion put aside by Volkswagen in the immediate wake of the crisis to cover initial losses.

The scale of deception is daunting and cannot be overstated, perhaps removing attention from the colossal failure of the

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Dispatches Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce the Clean Air Act. With the degree of dishonesty on the part of the world’s largest carmaker understood, we can focus on the eye-opening incompetence of the EPA in failing to catch Volkswagen in the act over the course of the six years they were “at large.”

“We are upping our game,” Chris Grundler, head of transportation and air quality at the EPA, told reporters in a recent press conference.

Grundler, who has been with the EPA for 35 years, works towards the stated mission of “protecting public health and the environment by reducing air pollution from transportation vehicles, engines, and the fuels used to operate them.” As nearly half a million vehicles from the world’s largest car manufacturer continue to emit up to forty times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide and Volkswagen works with the EPA to reach a solution, we are left wondering how Grundler is still employed.

Recent concerns regarding the hacking of Internet-enabled cars point to the complexity of the computational systems of newer vehicles. Volkswagen successfully inserted code in their software that turns on the fuel-efficient mode during a test by the EPA. The special sequence is triggered by a specific set of actions that the EPA repeats each time they test a vehicle. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits anyone (including the owner) of a vehicle from meddling with or altering the software. If the EPA had the ability to analyze the code, Volkswagen’s emissioncheating would likely have been detected far sooner, and the enormous corporate fallout and negative environmental impact could have been mitigated. In spite of several appeals, the law still prohibits any regulatory body from interacting with car software.

Since the Digital Millennium Act pro-

Add caption

A Volkswagen dealership located in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Photo courtesy of sbs.

hibits the EPA from investigating car software, the law may be viewed as a compelling defense of the regulatory agency in the Volkswagen crisis. On the contrary, the EPA opposes a potential exception to the law that would have allowed a full review of Volkswagen’s code.

In a letter sent to the copyright office on July 17, the EPA argued that such an exemption for cars “would allow users to modify that software for purposes other than those the proponents envision” in a way that “could slow or reverse gains made under the Clean Air Act.” Irony notwithstanding, the EPA’s statement raises serious concerns about its efficacy in enforcing environmental regulations: if the EPA was aware that such software could alter emissions, they should have instituted measures beyond the status quo of simple, predictable factory testing. Conducting randomized road tests at variable lengths and speeds would have detected the illegally high emissions.

The U.S. Justice Department opened their investigation soon after the EPA

publicly revealed the scandal. However, the EPA itself never actually discovered the defeat device that allowed Volkswagen to successfully cheat – the International Council on Clean Transportation (an NGO) worked with researchers at West Virginia University in discovering the plot. EPA officials’ promises to make improvements to their emissions testing process after the fact should not be sufficient to acquit the government agency of ineptitude in the court of public opinion.

Volkswagen undoubtedly deserves our scorn for sidestepping the law for profit. Yet as the media attention focuses on the company’s deceit and the fallout for stockholders, we must not overlook the deplorable failures of the regulatory agency that failed to perform its job.

Parker Fox is a Trinity junior. He is a Contributing Editor for DPR.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 7

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

7 12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

From

Roe to Casey 8

DPR2.indb 8

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

Evaluating the Undue Burden Test in Abortion Case Law

By Shobana Subramanian

FALL 2014

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

T

wo years after the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (1973), 22% of Americans felt that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances. By 2015 that number had dropped by just three points, a stark reminder that the political battle over abortion is far from over. When faced with a controversial Court decision, state legislatures often continue to pass laws violating it, seemingly with the sole purpose of testing the decision’s constitutional bounds. Such legislative rebellion is actually beneficial to the endurance of a new constitutional right: It reveals the loopholes in the existing case law and allows the court system to craft a unified method for evaluating the constitutionality of laws. However, in the case of abortion rights, this process has taken well over forty years, with no end in sight.

The most important shift in abortion law was the transition from strict scrutiny to undue burden. In the beginning, abortion rights cases were judged under strict scrutiny, which requires a law to be grounded in a compelling state interest, be narrowly tailored to that interest, and be the least restrictive means of achieving that interest. In her dissent from City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1983), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor urged her colleagues to adopt the “undue burden” test as an alternative to strict scrutiny in abortion cases. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), she got her wish.

The undue burden test is similar to rational basis review in that the state must show that the law in question is reasonably related to a legitimate interest. But regardless of state interest, the law cannot exact an undue burden on a citizen’s rights. Like all constitutional tests, undue burden seeks to balance the state’s interests with the individual’s. Before viability, the woman’s right to abortion far outweighs the state’s interest in protecting fetal life. But after viability, the balance shifts towards the states.

One of the major post-Casey applications of undue burden, Gonzales v.

Carhart (2007), challenged the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, which banned a form of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (D&E). Although the partial birth abortion procedure involved fetuses that were not yet viable, the ban survived the undue burden test because the state’s interest was not in fetal life but in the reputation of the medical field. Importantly, Gonzales established that the state interest does not have to be in fetal life; the state can have any interest it wants, so long as its laws are related to that interest and do not impose an undue burden on the woman seeking an abortion.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s failure to properly define the undue burden test has led to a host of judicial inconsistencies. The lower courts remain divided as to the extent to which state interest should be considered when assessing undue burden. Also problematic is the courts’ misplaced faith in statistics and affidavits as sources of objectivity in abortion cases. While quantitative measures appear objective, the Supreme Court has not explicitly stated how they should be interpreted, making them just as subjective as any other brand of testimony. The continued existence of the undue burden test as the primary standard for scrutinizing abortion laws is contingent on the resolution of these issues, which have carried on far too long, depriving two generations of women of their constitutional rights without just cause.

Identifying a State Interest Despite the confusion of Casey—the nine Justices produced five separate opinions—the plurality did make clear certain points. First,

a law restricting abortion poses an undue burden if it does not include an exception for the health of the mother. Second, a restriction that makes a right difficult to exercise is not necessarily a violation of the right itself. Casey struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring spousal awareness before undergoing an abortion but simultaneously upheld requirements for parental consent, informed consent, and a twentyfour-hour waiting period. The latter requirements were upheld even though they made it more difficult for the woman to exercise her right to abortion—the state’s interest in making sure the decision to abort was well-informed and conscientious was strong enough to justify the burden on the individual. This brings us to the third, and most important, point: All restrictions on abortion must be “reasonably related” to a state interest. This is a far cry from “narrowly tailored” but is nonetheless a point of conflict in the lower courts.

In 2012, the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law banning the off-label administration of abortion-inducing pills.

The Oklahoma Center for Reproductive Justice (OCRJ) maintained that the law offered no exemption for off-label abortions necessary to protect the life of the mother. The state did not dispute this but argued instead that there could be no circumstance in which an offlabel medical abortion was the only way to save the life of the mother, as compared to the FDA-approved protocol. The off-label method is better than the official protocol in many ways: It requires fewer visits to the physician, can be self-administered in the privacy of the patient’s home, and requires smaller doses. The OCRJ refuted Oklahoma’s purported interest in the health of the mother; the consensus within the medical community was that the off-label method posed no harm and was actually safer. The Court agreed, and Oklahoma lost the case.

Because the state could not tie the burden imposed on women to a valid state interest, that burden was undue. The burden itself could have been quite minimal – in this case, there was no evidence to suggest that the FDA-approved protocol posed any great danger to the woman beyond mild inconvenience – but by definition, purposeless restrictions of rights are always undue.

The split in the Federal Circuit Courts is in part due to a conflict over the extent to which state interest should be considered when applying the undue burden test. When the Ninth Circuit struck down Arizona’s ban on off-label medical abortions, it deemed the state interest invalid—on similar grounds as the Oklahoma Supreme Court—and therefore insufficient to justify the burden imposed on women seeking an abortion. But the Sixth Circuit disagreed, upholding an Ohio law on the grounds that state interest is not relevant to the outcome of a decision beyond the preliminary question of its existence. The Sixth Circuit was correct. Casey’s requirement that the law be reasonably related to a state interest, along with its subsequent application in Gonzales, clearly suggests rational basis as opposed to heightened scrutiny. Rational basis, unlike heightened scrutiny, does not require a state interest to be based on actual facts—an interest can be deemed legitimate even if it is hypothetical. Thus, even if off-label abortions are not unsafe, the mere suggestion that they may be less safe than the FDA-approved protocol is all the Court need consider. While the Ninth Circuit and the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s judgments facially adhere to the undue burden test, they ignore its most crucial mandate: State interest is only considered so far as to ensure that a law is not purposeless. Once a law is found to have a purpose, no further tailoring is required.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 9

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

9 12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

Popular Preference and Individual Rights Although the right to abortion is an individual right, under current case law, violations of that right are considered violations against the rights exercised by a group—i.e. women seeking a first-trimester abortion— so that any burden imposed by the law is suffered by the group, not just the individual. The result is that the burden imposed by any antiabortion law is dependent on how popular the banned procedure is. For example, if the state banned an abortion procedure that 70 percent of women seeking an abortion chose, that would constitute a much greater burden than banning a procedure only five percent of women chose. Two immediate issues arise from this reasoning: (1) The proportion of women favoring a particular abortion method varies from state to state, so a law that is constitutional in one state may be unconstitutional in the next; and (2) individual rights are placed at the mercy of the collective exercise of those rights, undermining the individual freedom that constitutional rights are meant to protect.

The statistics for medication abortions vary greatly from state to state. The Oklahoma clinic represented by the OCRJ claimed that twothirds of its patients chose medication abortions. By contrast, Planned Parenthood clinics in Ohio reported that 31 percent of its patients chose medication abortions, while amongst all abortion providers, that figure was even lower, a mere 17.7 percent. Numerous factors could account for these disparities, such as variable costs between states, the availability of medication abortions in clinics other than Planned Parenthood, physicians’ preference of one method to the other, and, of course, patient preference. These statistics played a central role in the Courts’ decisions: While the Oklahoma law was struck down, the essentially identical Ohio law was upheld. The notion that an individual’s right to abortion could be violated in one state but remain intact in another is constitutionally absurd; while banning medication abortions may not inflict a collective burden in Ohio, that does not preclude it from inflicting an individual burden on an Ohioan woman seeking a medication abortion. The Supreme Court has not provided any guidelines as to how common a practice has to be for its restriction to become an undue burden—while a ban on a practice preferred by a majority is definitely unconstitutional, that does not mean that the restriction of a practice preferred by a small fraction of women is automatically constitutional. Not only is it problematic to conclude that one method is preferable to another based on selected affidavits presented at trial, which may or may not represent the entire population, but the lack of a uniform standard for preference results in subjective judicial decisions that will inevitably contradict each other.

The concept of popular preference has survived despite bearing little

relevance to the existing case law. There is, after all, no constitutional right to choose a particular method of abortion over another. Only when the restriction of a method results in a woman no longer wanting or being able to receive an abortion does the restriction become problematic. Popular preference is useful because it shows how much more desirable, convenient, or safe one method is compared to another.

However, it does not ask whether the alternative method—in this case, surgical abortions—is undesirable enough to impact the woman’s ultimate decision. This question is far more relevant to the constitutional status of abortion restrictions than is the popularity of the restricted procedure. Popular preference or lack thereof thus bears no relevance to the ultimate constitutionality of a law and should be weighted only at the most primary level of judicial decision-making.

*** If the goal of a constitutional test is to establish a consistent framework for judging the constitutionality of a law, then the undue burden test has failed. The courts can either eliminate or ignore inconsistencies between states – but they ought not create them. By using popular preference to diagnose undue burden, judges have made abortion rights dependent on arbitrary, fluctuating statistics irrelevant to a woman seeking an abortion.

Casey was undoubtedly the product of tense negotiations between the moderate and liberal wings of the Court.

But for all its good intentions, the fragmentation within the Court could not help but translate to the greater body of case law. Casey did not overturn Roe, but it altered the right to abortion in a way that is often not fully appreciated. Roe had established abortion as a fundamental right, placing it in the same league as the right to free speech, religion, or due process. Violations of fundamental rights are always judged under strict scrutiny, so when undue burden replaced the former standard, abortion was demoted to a secondary right. In upholding Ohio’s restriction of medication abortions, the Sixth Circuit was in line with Casey’s substitution of rational basis in place of strict scrutiny. The Ninth Circuit and the Oklahoma Supreme Court, on the other hand, were determined to combine Casey with Roe, stumbling upon a form of heightened scrutiny alien to undue burden. In order to begin to clarify the undue burden test, we must retire Roe to the history books and focus on Casey as the primary abortion rights case.

“The burden itself could have been quite minimal … but by definition, purposeless restrictions of rights are always undue.”

10 DPR2.indb 10

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

Shobana Subramanian is a Trinity junior studying Neuroscience. She is the Deputy Online Managing Editor for DPR.

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar: Saving the World’s Least Wanted

By Nikita Gawande Photo by Steve Gumaer.

DPR2.indb 11

FALL 2015

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

11 12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

S

he had to leave him behind. The only way to save their lives was to go without her eldest son. She just did not have the money to take him with her. Hasinah did not know what would happen to Jubair, her 13-year-old boy, but she knew she could not stay in her small village in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s western coastal region, any longer. She could not continue to endanger her other children, continue to expose them to the harsh realities of who they were and what that meant. She would find a way for Jubair to follow her when she arrived in Malaysia, she promised herself. This was her only chance to escape.

Hasinah’s story is just a single account of one of the worst genocides today. The Rohingya in Myanmar are being murdered, one after another, in “the Burmese Apartheid,” all while authorities look the other way.

The Rohingya, a Muslim group who maintain that Myanmar’s coastal Rakhine State is their home, are an ethnic and religious minority in the primarily Buddhist Myanmar. While the Rohingya have been marginalized throughout the region’s past, the tensions between the Rohingya and the Burmese intensified about 25 years ago. Now, the Rohingya are rendered stateless and criminalized for their very existence. They live in a nation that refuses to recognize them as citizens. More often than not, they pay smugglers hundreds or even thousands of dollars for passage on dilapidated boats, only to be turned away from their destinations, or in the worst cases, sold into slavery. Understanding the roots and escalation of the ethnic conflict requires delving into Burmese history, its previous identity as a British colony, and the implications of its messy struggle for independence.

In 1785, the Burmese took control of Arakan, a region in West Burma known today as Myanmar’s Rakhine state. In this conflict, the Burmese kingdom executed thousands of native Rakhine men and deported countless others to central Burma to serve as laborers at the pleasure of the kingdom, leaving the area sparsely populated. After effectively annexing Arakan, the Burmese conquest of the region continued north, to British held Chittagong. Friction between the two territories resulted in the first Anglo-Burmese war in 1824. After two more wars in 1852 and 1885, the British gained full control of Burma.

After the third Anglo-British war, the British made Burma an Indian province, a move that drastically altered traditional Burmese culture. The action led to significant Indian influence in Burma, which had a markedly different culture than its neighbor. The leadership structure of Burma also changed to a direct rule system. British rule mandated the separation of religion and state in Burma, which had serious ramifications since the two had been significantly intertwined. Most available jobs after British annexation went to Indian indentured laborers, compelling some of the native Burmese to engage in “dacoity,” or armed robbery. Consequently, the British considered nearly all native Burmese to be petty criminals. While Burmese wealth grew, it remained in the hands of British rulers and Indian migrants. These migrants included the Rohingya.

While Rohingya Muslims have always been present in Arakan, there were very few in the area before the first Anglo-Burmese war. Their population increased after the 1826 British annexation of the area, primarily due to relaxed migration laws within their Indian and Southeast Asian territories. These laws, which paid little attention to traditional conflicts and differences between British territories, encouraged workers from the primarily Muslim Bengal to relocate to Burma to serve as farm laborers.

The British East India Tea Company also expanded the office of the Bengal Presidency to include the administration of the Arakan region, effectively

DPR2.indb 12

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

Rohingya in Burma.

The Burmese conquest of Arakan had left the fertile region with a low population, and workers were needed to obtain maximum profits from the land. However, the presence of the Muslim Rohingya led to conflict in the area. Native Rakhines saw the Rohingya as outsiders, representative of British subjugation. While the Rohingya never gained much Burmese wealth, they seemed better off than the native Rakhines and thus were the target of hatred from the native Rakhines and Burmese, a racist and classist manifestation of colonial frustrations.

By World War II, the British recognized the severity of the conflict between the Rohingya and the Burmese and formed a special commission to find a solution to the issue. However, after Imperial Japanese forces invaded the area during World War II, the British retreated, leaving an enormous power vacuum that led to an escalation of violence between the Rohingya and the Burmese as each group vied for political control.

The British armed the Rohingya whilst the Burmese remained primarily pro-Japanese, which lead to a violent multidimensional conflict between the two groups.

Burmese Independence

Back to the Beginning

12

erasing the boundaries between the two nations. This ease of migration prompted more Rohingya to settle in Arakan for work. From 1871 to 1911, the number of Rohingya Muslims in Arakan increased by over 300 percent. By the peak migration year of 1927, the Arakan region was accepting over 480,000 Rohingya per year, leading to a population of 13 million

After World War II, the Burmese fought for independence. This struggle was marked by conflict between the Rohingya and the Burmese, with the Rohingya modelling themselves after Pakistan’s separatist movement to achieve a new, independent state and the Burmese seeking to keep their original territory intact. Ultimately, Burma remained intact due to Pakistani unwillingness to involve themselves with Burmese matters. During these years, the Rohingya and the Rakhine still occasionally fought, but there was relative peace in the region.

In 1962, a Burmese coup d’état by General Ne Win destroyed this fragile peace. General Ne Win sponsored numerous military campaigns against the Rohingya over the next two decades. Many Rohingya fled to Bangladesh and Pakistan during to escape persecution. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, however, many more Muslims and ethnic Rohingya returned to Burma as refugees and were again subject to more persecution.

This cycle continued for the next seven years, with many Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh to escape Burmese brutality, only to return to Burma to escape war and poverty in Bangladesh.

In 1982, the Burmese government enacted a restrictive citizenship law, effectively classifying all Rohingya as foreigners despite their residency predating colonial rule, rendering them stateless fugitives in what they consider their homeland. Burma renamed itself Myanmar in 1989 in an effort to eliminate all ties to its colonial past.

The Genocide Begins In 1990, military junta rule in Myanmar, which relied on chauvinistic nationalism and religious fervor to bolster its authority, expanded its discrimination against the Rohingya, instigating riots by burning Rohingya villages. Subsequent governments have been accused of the same, intensifying the conflict. In 2012, dozens of Rohingya villages were destroyed by arson, and local Buddhist and state security militants opened fire on Rohingya men, women, and children, killing over 100 individuals.

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World Today, the Myanmarese government and local Buddhists see the Rohingya as intruders on their ancestral lands, a remnant of a bloody British subjugation. Their hatred and discrimination towards the Rohingya, equal parts traditional and the result of extreme patriotism, drive them to remove the Rohingya from Myanmar.

Currently, hundreds of Rohingya attempt to flee Myanmar every month.

They pay a great deal of money to smugglers to board ships with unknown destinations. Most head to Malaysia, Indonesia, or Thailand, only to be denied entry into those countries and sent to detainment camps until they can be returned to Myanmar.

Rohingya migrants face harsh conditions on overcrowded boats, living at the complete mercy of the smugglers. They are packed onto boats and forced to wait for months until the smugglers feel as though they have

Saving the Boat People The United Nations admonished Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya, and the UN High Commissioner of Refugees named the Rohingya among the most persecuted groups in history. The BBC called the Rohingya “the world’s least wanted.” The United States expressed the need to end this struggle in Myanmar and to reach a peaceful solution between the Rohingya and the Rakhine. Unfortunately, however, the support ends there. Although Gambia, an impoverished nation, has offered to accept all Rohingya refugees as its duty to its fellow Muslims, this action is simply not feasible due to logistical and cultural barriers.

The international community can do significantly more to help the Rohingya. First, it can pressure Myanmar to stop the persecution, close the internment camps, and provide resources for host countries to accept more

“Those who remain in Myanmar are placed in internment camps, where they are beaten, tortured, and starved.”

enough passengers to make the journey. The refugees are then harassed for additional payments along the way. Food and water are shockingly scarce, and human waste is disposed of through a hole in the bottom of the boat.

In an interview conducted by the New York Times, Muhammed Kashim, a 44-year-old Rohingya migrant from Bangladesh, recalled that there was “no singing, only crying” on the boats. Regardless, many Rohingya are willing to face these extreme difficulties. Mohammed Hashim, 25, a refugee from the Rakhine state, said that, “we knew dangers would come… but the dangers at home are greater than the dangers at sea.”

Others are trafficked, enslaved on Thai fishing vessels or sold into sex slavery. Some, like Shadidah Yunus, 22, marry men they have never met to pay for the passage and avoid being sold into sex slavery, forced to choose between much older men or suffering in Myanmar.

Those who remain in Myanmar are placed in internment “camps, where they are beaten, tortured, and starved. Citing concerns about the refugees’ safety, Myanmar places the Rohingya in walled ghettos surrounded by armed security guards, where their every movement is restricted. Food and water is scarce. The Rohingya are completely vulnerable to the hatred and discrimination of the guards, and a concerning number die in these ghettos. There are currently fewer than 1.3 million Rohingya in Myanmar, a 90 percent decrease from their population 100 years ago.

The plight of the Rohingya is not only a humanitarian travesty, but also an economic disaster for Southeast Asia. The Rohingya refugees must find jobs in their destination countries, leading to an influx of cheap labor. Because the supply stream of workers is constant, they are often treated as disposable commodities. The large supply of labor also leads to rampant unemployment in these countries. Additionally, the influx of refugees places a great economic strain on their host nations, which often do not have adequate resources or infrastructure to handle them. While Indonesia does not turn away refugees, the burden is evident, and both Thailand and Malaysia have publicly decried the presence of Rohingya refugees, indicating that they do not have the capacity to accept the vast number of refugees.

refugees. Australia could display its regional leadership by providing specific logistic and humanitarian aid to help stop the loss of lives. Myanmar must repeal its 1982 citizenship law, which extends citizenship only to indigenous ethnicities. Because the Rohingya are not considered an indigenous ethnicity, they are forced into statelessness. Repealing the law will facilitate a legal immigration process for the Rohingya to move to other nations safely. Altering maritime law to prevent the abuse and trafficking of refugees is also imperative. While these initiatives will not bring a permanent end to the crisis, they will mitigate some of the extreme conditions that the Rohingya face and provide additional time to find a more permanent solution.

In the long term, it is necessary to focus on the economic development of Southeast Asia. This will not entirely eliminate the racism that the Rohingya experience, but it will enable neighboring countries to harbor more Rohingya refugees, which will reduce some of the cause of the extreme hatred the Rohingya face. Reducing the racism and cultural alienation of the Rohingya will take generations, but it is absolutely essential to insist that Myanmar stop anti-Rohingya campaigns and propaganda to reduce the stigma that Rohingya face.

While this conflict is hundreds of years old, it need not take hundreds of years to end it. The Rohingya are significantly marginalized, but pressure and assistance from the international community, the change of maritime law to ensure safe passage, and a focus on economic development in the region to bolster the economic infrastructure of all nations involved can help mitigate some of the drastic implications of Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing. Although erasing the cultural marginalization of the Rohingya will take time, pressure from the international community to end the state sponsored genocide is a crucial first step, and laws in Myanmar must be amended to provide the Rohingya equal protection under the law. A nation depends on it.

Nikita Gawande is a sophomore at Duke University studying Economics and Public Policy.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 13

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

13 12/3/15 1:53 PM

DPR2.indb 14

12/3/15 1:53 PM

DETAINED IN DILLEY: The Fight for Asylum at the South Texas Residential Center

By Sarah Sibley

Protesters march at a rally to end family detention in Dilley, Texas. Photo by Miguel Gutierrez, Jr. DPR2.indb 15

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

A

dusty Texas town of 3,000 saddled somewhere between the Mexican border and San Antonio, Dilley had little to offer until the Correction Corporation of America (CCA) set up shop. In December 2014, the multi-billion dollar private prison conglomerate finished converting an old oil workers camp into the federal government’s newest and largest family detention center.

Dilley’s main visitors now come from the weekly caravan of pro-bono attorneys organized by CARA, an ad-hoc coalition of immigrants’ rights groups including CLINIC, the American Immigration Law Association, and others.

When attorneys arrive, they must take care to leave their cellphones in their cars – neither CCA nor the Department of Homeland Security wants to risk attorneys taking pictures of the facility, although they insist the conditions are “high quality.” Those attorneys who are lucky to have been “permitted” to help the asylum seekers within are given only limited access to the facility. CCA has hung large murals of the children in the facility dancing and smiling for the attorneys to look at as they pass through security. The reality is decidedly different, however; CARA reports stories of children with persistent coughs, of on-site doctors whose

prescriptions mostly consist of “drinking more water,” and, as the Immigration Justice Network wrote, of children being administered the wrong vaccines. With “family style” eight-person bunkrooms connected by dirt roads and penned in by a high security fence, all under the glare of industrial-style flood lights, the Dilley facility is built for the long term, housing some families for well over a year. Democratic Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley decried the permanent, 2,400 bed facility for women and children as “an internment camp.”

Euphemistically dubbed the South Texas Family Residential Center, the refugee family detention center in Dilley has courted controversy since its inception. Not only is refugee detention far from the norm, but it also technically violates the United Nations’ guidelines, especially when children are involved. According to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, children should be kept in the “least restrictive setting” and, for asylum seekers generally, release “should be the default position.” Prior to 2014, the U.S. typically detained only those asylum seekers who had criminal records or were considered security or flight risks.

Yet, after years of near net-zero illegal immigration, the summer of 2014 brought an unexpected wave of immigrants of a new and different demographic — Central

American women, their children, and unaccompanied Central American teens. Violence in the Northern Triangle countries (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) exploded after a coup in Honduras and the disintegration of a truce among El Salvador’s most violent gangs. In 2014, the UN named Honduras the murder capital of the world, while El Salvador and Guatemala were ranked first and second in child homicides. All three countries saw explosions in femicides, murders specifically targeting women. Hundred of thousands fled or were pushed from their homes; tens of thousands made their way north, surrendered themselves to immigration agents at the border, and asked for asylum, a temporary legal protection.

The Obama Administration, under pressure to act and bound by the terms of a 2008 Human Trafficking bill to not immediately deport Central American minors (though, oddly, not Mexican minors), managed to simultaneously slow down and speed up processing. While carrying out “expedited removal” where possible, the administration detained immigrants who were still potentially eligible for asylum until the women and children met their legal burden.

As a result, while thousands of would-be refugees have been sent home from the border, thousands more were corralled and thrown into what one pro-bono attorney calls a “legal thicket.” First thrust into an adhoc facility in Artesia, New Mexico, transfers and new arrivals now come to one of the Department of Homeland Security’s permanent family detention centers in Karnes, Texas; Dilley, Texas; or Burke, Pennsylvania.

Dilley is the largest such facility.

The Legal Thicket

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson announces Dilley’s opening from inside the detention center. Official DHS photo by Barry Bahler.

DPR2.indb 16

Faced with an unprecedented crisis, the Obama Administration had an unprecedented response: expedited removal.

Expedited removal is “a way to deport people quickly,” says Phil Alterman, a Denver-area attorney (and dear family friend). If an

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World immigrant over the age of eighteen is caught near the border and expresses no “fear of return,” expedited removal authorizes the Border Patrol agent to deport the immi-

outlawed the practice, but not before one distraught woman, unable to post bond, attempted suicide. According to an analysis by the Immigrant Justice Network, 88

No matter the justification, the UN says childhood and family detention causes “irreversible psychological damage.”

grant on the spot without even consulting a judge. Faced with its largest border crisis yet, the Obama Administration began making expedited removal, typically an emergency procedure, the default position.

If the immigrant expresses a “fear of return,” however, the migrant is guaranteed a “credible fear interview.” If the government finds that the migrant does have a credible fear, the woman and her children are supposed to be released and given a notice to appear in court. If the migrant fails her first interview, she is entitled to several stages of appeal.

While the government does not have to detain these families throughout their appeals process (virtually all will show up to their court date if they have an attorney), it has chosen to do so with this category of asylum seekers. As a result, because the 2014 wave has so overwhelmed the court system, women and their families have spent weeks, months, and for some, well over a year, in jail-like conditions just to wait on their appeals.

Compounding their difficulties, and for reasons unclear even to their attorneys, women and their children end up spending weeks or months in detention even after receiving a favorable ruling. Some wait weeks while the case bounces between the Asylum Office, which decides their case, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which actually releases them. Others were kept in detention by a prohibitively high bond. A July court ruling has since

percent of women in detention centers like Dilley have already passed their credible fear interviews.

Worse, CARA attorneys believe ICE agents are fabricating false statements.

Alterman recounts that when CARA attorneys would look at the paperwork for women in Dilley, about half of the documents stated the women “expressed no fear of return.” When their attorneys asked them, many women responded that the ICE agent never asked about fear in the first place; ICE agents simply wrote that the women had waived their right to a credible fear interview and set the women on a path careening towards deportation.

It is only because these women had children that they were not immediately deported. With attorney help, these women were able to dispute the false claim, and many have gone on to win asylum hearings.

In Need of an Advocate One of the odd quirks of the immigration system is that you are guaranteed the right to due process, but, unlike in criminal court, you are not guaranteed the right to an attorney. However, being able to navigate a mammoth, unforgiving legal process in another language almost always demands legal assistance.

For one, earning status as an asylee means the refugee is not just unwilling to return to her country because of feared or past persecution, but that the “feared”

persecution falls into one of the five enumerated grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Success hinges on fitting a particular case into one of the enumerated “slots,” a more arbitrary process than it may sound. For instance, last August, the Board of Immigration appeals ruled that those fleeing gang violence do not count as a “particular social group,” and that flight from gang violence is an insufficient justification for asylum. On the other hand, Guatemalan women fleeing domestic violence are a “particular social group.” Having an attorney at your side to navigate such an uncertain process exponentially increases your odds of success.

But the attorneys helping women at Dilley have, on numerous occasions, found themselves boxed out of certain legal proceedings. “It is the government’s position that you are not entitled to a lawyer in certain removal proceedings,” says Alterman.

If a woman fails her credible fear interview, some judges have found that she is not entitled to an attorney to advocate for her during appeals.

Deciding Against Deterrence One of the most vexing questions for the immigration law community has been why President Obama, author of DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans) and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), and hero to many in the community, has chosen to aggressively pursue this strain of expedited removal that results in the mass detention of so many. If the vast majority of these women and children get released anyway, why go through the expense of detaining these families in the meantime? If the courts are overwhelmed, and normal procedures are faster and cheaper, what could justify the massive human and financial cost of the current system?

When faced with the stories of tens of thousands of undocumented children pouring over the border, the President outlined “an aggressive deterrence strategy” in his 2014 emergency budget request to Congress. The detention facilities were necessary, he felt, to prevent other Central American children from making the often-fatal journey to the United States. This philosophy mirrors his approach on immigration FALL 2014

DPR2.indb 17

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

17 12/3/15 1:53 PM

World enforcement more generally; in order to deny Republicans the “secure our border” excuse for blocking comprehensive immigration reform, Obama has been one of the most aggressive presidents yet at enforcing existing laws. He has deported more undocumented immigrants than any

of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California agreed.

Rejecting DHS’s deterrence justification, Judge Gee ruled that terms of a 1997 settlement governing the treatment of unaccompanied minors also governed the treatment of children accompanied by

It has not.

“Judge Gee’s order does not require them to shut down the facility,” says Stephen Manning, American Immigration Lawyer Association attorney and one of the organizers of CARA, “but it requires the government to pay attention to the original settlement agreement.”

That means the government must have a “preference for releasing children.”

The decision still allows the government to detain the family prior to and after the credible fear interview, but the government is now trying to limit prolonged periods of detention.

“Will it result in the closure of the facility?

It looks unlikely. Is the government abiding by it? Plainly no,” says Manning.

The Department of Homeland Security, in the meantime, hopes that with a few reforms, Dilley will not have to face the music before its four-year contract is up. As an alternative to detention, newly released women, even those who have passed credible fear interviews, are outfitted with large, black ankle bracelets meant to track their movement for the months (and, potentially, years) until their asylum hearings.

Family detention was never intended to be a permanent procedure, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and American Immigration Lawyer’s Association are fighting to ensure that it is not. But the Obama Administration’s intent is clear – the White House 2016 budget request called for a 1,000 percent increase in capacity for family detention centers like Dilley. As the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas nears its first birthday, family detention is the new normal.

If the courts are overwhelmed, and normal procedures are faster and cheaper, what could justify the massive human and financial cost of the current system? president in U.S. history.

UN rules are explicit, however, that detention cannot be used as a “penalty for illegal entry and/or as a deterrent to seeking asylum.” No matter the justification, the UN says childhood and family detention causes “irreversible psychological damage.”

In July 2015, Judge Dolly M. Gee

The South Texas Family Residential Center is expected to support 600 jobs in Dilley. Photo by Billy Hawthorn.

their mothers. Detaining children with their mothers is no less harmful than detaining children without them. Judge Gee called for the immediate release of families from Dilley and the two other family detention facilities.

The Obama Administration appealed and had until mid-October to comply with Judge Dee’s order.

Sarah Sibley is a Trinity Freshman majoring in History and Economics. She is a columnist for DPR.

DPR2.indb 18

12/3/15 1:53 PM

The People, the President, and the Jihadists: ISIL and the Politics of Turkey

By Connor Phillips

Courtesy of the World Economic Forum.

Photo by Benedikt von Loebell.

DPR2.indb 19

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

O

n October 10, 2015, the Turkish capital of Ankara was rocked by the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history when two suicide bombers killed over 100 protesters at a peace rally. The attacks, almost immediately linked to ISIL, were presumably retaliation for Turkey joining the US-led coalition against the militant group this summer. Sadly, this tragedy was immediately pulled into the political debate in Turkey, with each faction trying to blame the disaster on its opponents. This unfortunate display hinted at a larger fact: Turkey’s decision to attack ISIL was intimately intertwined with the same factors that have recently poisoned its political discourse. To understand why requires consideration of how Turkey became the state it is today.

Secular State, Turkish Nation?

When the modern Republic of Turkey emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, its founder, a charismatic general named Mustafa Kemal (later christened Atatürk – “Father of the Turks”) enshrined a state ideology of social and technological progress, strict secularism, and Turkish nationalism. This vision of Turkish nationhood, however, forced many groups to the margins, creating divisions that persist to this day. In particular, devout Turks have long found it difficult to fully participate in public life. Veiled Turkish women, for example, were until recently unable to attend public universities or hold government jobs. And those who are not Sunni Muslims are even worse off, with the minority Alevi branch of Islam not recognized by the state as a legitimate religion.

This division has also had political consequences, with the army stepping in to overthrow the government whenever parties

20 DPR2.indb 20

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

of an Islamist bent rose to power. More generally, the military, bureaucracy, and intelligence services, largely dominated by educated elites dedicated to the Kemalist status quo, have a long history of manipulating political events from behind the scenes to preserve what they see as Atatürk’s vision and safeguard their own interests. Known as the “deep state” – or derin devlet in Turkish – this phenomenon delayed the development of a true popular democracy.

Meanwhile, the Kemalist state marginalized the Kurds, a stateless people dwelling primarily in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, denying their language and culture official recognition.

In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) initiated an armed insurgency against the Turkish government, which dragged on for over a decade. The PKK by no means commands universal support from Kurds: Kurdish identity is complex, encompassing militant nationalists, devout Sunnis, and liberal Alevis. But the conflict scarred the country and left the “Kurdish question” no closer to resolution than before.

The Rise of Erdogan All of that seemed about to change in 2002, when an economic crisis and general frustration with the state of Turkish politics handed the new, mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) a landslide victory in parliamentary elections. The AKP’s primary base of support came from devout citizens, Turks and Kurds alike, who felt disenfranchised in Atatürk’s country. Its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had been jailed and banned from politics in 1998 for publicly reciting a poem with allusions to militant Islam; his ban was quickly overturned, and he became prime minister in 2003. A new, more democratic era seemed to be dawning in Turkey, one where the people – all the people – were truly in charge.

The AKP government turned Turkey’s economy around,

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World

Protests against Erdogan’s government in 2013 deepened the country’s political divide. Created by Mstyslav Chernov; CC license

allowed more space for religion in the public sphere, and opened negotiations to join the European Union. And when Turkey’s top generals were accused of conspiring against the government and convicted in mass trials, many believed that the “deep state” was finally being rooted out. Erdogan even opened negotiations with the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, and secured a ceasefire with the organization in 2013. The AKP reaped the benefits of this success, winning three straight parliamentary elections, while Erdogan ascended to the presidency in 2014.

Yet there were troubling signs along the way. In prosecuting the generals, Erdogan’s government cooperated with followers of the exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen. Gülenists are rumored to hold positions of power in the police, judiciary, and AKP – a network similar to the “deep state.” When the AKP sought to close down Turkey’s private schools, including those run

by Gülen’s Hizmet organization, the investigations suddenly turned against Erdogan: many of his allies in government and business were arrested in a massive anti-corruption inquiry, and a purported wiretap of Erdogan plotting to hide large sums of money was posted on Twitter.

In response, Erdogan sacked hundreds of police officers and

prosecutors, took direct control of the judiciary, and attempted to shut down Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Aligning himself with the military, he claimed that its “crimes” had been fabricated by Gülenist elements in the judiciary. Whatever the truth of the allegations against Erdogan himself, this pattern of behavior – co-opting the methods of the “deep state” to neutralize the military and targeting his former allies when they became potential rivals – was alarming.

Furthermore, Erdogan’s habit of labeling his opponents enemies of the nation was polarizing the Turkish people. When demonstrators protesting the redevelopment of Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013 sparked a nationwide protest movement against Erdogan’s authoritarianism and social conservatism, Erdogan slammed the protesters as deviants, calling them “vandals,” “anarchists and terrorists,” and “those who cannot stomach Turkey becoming greater and stronger” – explicitly identifying his opponents as unpatriotic and potentially treacherous. This trend continued with the Gülenists, whom he labeled “pawn[s] of national and international evil forces.” The message was clear: either you support Erdogan, or you support the traitors.

The message was clear: either you support Erdogan, or you support the traitors.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 21

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

21 12/3/15 1:53 PM

World AKP’s Kurdish supporters, who defected to a new left-wing party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP). Rising out of previous Kurdish nationalist parties, the HDP championed pluralism and tolerance, uniting under its banner many who felt marginalized by Erdogan’s rule as well as those wary of a new constitution. When elections came, the HDP swept into Parliament, obliterating the AKP’s thirteen-year majority.

Erdogan’s dream of an executive presidency seemed over.

But Erdogan was nothing if not a savvy politician. He had one last card to play: since no party had won a majority in the new Parliament, if the AKP refused to form a coalition government, then new elections would be held. Coalition negotiations indeed failed, and Erdogan called new elections for November 1, 2015.

As coalition talks bogged down, Turkey also began attacking ISIL and, abandoning the yearlong peace talks with the PKK, the Kurdish group’s bases and affiliates in Iraq and Syria as well. In retaliation, the PKK broke the ceasefire and resumed attacks within Turkey. The Turkish government argues that this about-face is a “counter-terrorism strategy” prompted by two events: an allegedly ISIL-linked bombing in a Turkish border town that primarily killed Kurds A poster for Turkey’s ruling Justice and and the murder of two Turkish police officers by Development Party the PKK in retaliation.

(AKP), featuring Erdogan, however, revealed the government’s Prime Minister true intentions with his vitriolic rhetoric about Ahmet Davotoglu. the threat the PKK posed to the Turkish nation, reated by Nub Cake; rhetoric that implicitly targeted all of Turkey’s CC license.

Kurdish population. By playing up violence with the Kurds, Erdogan inflamed nationalist sentiment and attracted right-wing voters while discouraging middle-of-the-road Turks from supporting a Across the Border Kurdish-rights party like the HDP. And support for a strong While tensions rose in Turkey, its neighbor Syria was executive naturally rises in wartime, further playing into descending into chaos, as President Bashar al-Assad cracked Erdogan’s hands. It is the exact same strategy he adopted with down on peaceful protests against his rule, sparking a sectarian the Gülenists: a former ally was more useful as an enemy to civil war. Erdogan immediately took a strong anti-Assad line, rally his base than as a partner. appearing genuinely repulsed by the dictator’s actions. Yet he did not join the US-led coalition against ISIL in 2014, likely What Now? knowing that ISIL was Assad’s most effective adversary and The consequences of this strategy manifested themselves reluctant to invite violent reprisals from ISIL sympathizers when the bombers struck – tragically, at a peace rally organized or aid the PKK affiliates battling ISIL. In any case, Turkey by the HDP to protest the escalating conflict with the PKK. At allowed foreign fighters to flow through it into Syria and a time when the nation should have been coming together to did not intervene when ISIL threatened the Kurdish town of mourn as one, HDP co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas blamed Kobani, just across the border from Turkey, with destruction.

Erdogan for the violence, and AKP Prime Minister Ahmet Shortly afterward, Turkey held parliamentary elections.

Davotoglu fired right back at the HDP. Erdogan was clearly hoping that his former party would gain On November 1, a divided nation went to the polls and the two-thirds majority necessary to rewrite the constitution returned a stunning but decisive result: the AKP had gained 3 and give him the powers of a true executive president, rather million votes, mostly at the expense of the HDP and right-wing than a ceremonial figurehead. His apparent indifference nationalist MHP, and enough to recapture a parliamentary towards the plight of Kobani, however, had shocked the majority. The HDP did win enough seats to deny the AKP a

22 DPR2.indb 22

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

World two-thirds majority, but the damage was done. After months of campaigning, the AKP was back in power and the rifts in Turkish society were deeper than ever before. With the Kurds united under one party for the first time in support of the HDP, stark lines cleave the nation into opposing camps, with devout and conservative Turks on one side and liberals, Kurds, and Alevis on the other. And by strength of numbers, the former camp holds the reins of power. “I have lost faith in this democracy,” one HDP supporter told The Guardian on election night.

The HDP does share part of the blame for this polarization.

Demirtas’ actions during the campaign – holding a rally at the scene of the bombing and claiming that the AKP “support this terror” – betrayed the ideals of his movement.

But the brunt of the responsibility is clearly Erdogan’s. When he first rose to prominence, a new Turkey seemed within reach, a democratic and strong nation where devout and secular citizens could live peacefully side by side and where the Kurds were finally given the autonomy they demanded and deserved.

Instead of uniting Turks, however, Erdogan has divided them along ethnic and religious lines; instead of uprooting the deep state, he has exploited it for his own gain; and instead of negotiating with the Kurds in good faith, he has used their autonomy as a political bargaining chip to be cynically played or callously tossed aside as needed.

Erdogan positions himself as the spokesman for a silent majority, but he is something much simpler than that: a sectarian leader who wants power for himself and privileges for those like him, and who treats the rest of the people of Turkey as either means to that end or obstacles in

November’s snap parliamentary elections. Yellow provinces won by AKP, red by CHP, purple by HDP. Created by Nub Cake; CC license.

his way. Religious Turks are indeed better off under his rule, but Erdogan has not dismantled the power structure that marginalized them in the first place; he merely displaced those at the top of the pyramid and assumed their place himself.

Turkey’s intervention in Syria has less to do with ISIL and terrorism than it has to do with one man’s determination to cling to power at all costs. His actions may accord with US foreign policy interests for now, but as Turkey fractures more and more, it will become a major concern to the US and to its neighbors. Even without his executive presidency, Erdogan remains a force to be reckoned with, as his latest successful power play attests. In fact, he has already started to claim that being elected president by a popular vote invested him with executive power whether the constitution says so or not, pushing the country closer to an extralegal dictatorship. As Erdogan once said – then the young mayor of Istanbul, now one of the most powerful men on the planet – “Democracy is like a train.

We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.”

“I have lost faith in this democracy,” one HDP supporter told The Guardian on election night.

Connor Phillips is a Trinity junior majoring in Political Science with a certificate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.

He is DPR’s Online Managing Editor.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 23

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

23 12/3/15 1:53 PM

Markets Special Special Feature Feature

Markets Grap

The S達o Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa). Photo by Rafael Matsunaga.

DPR2.indb 24

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Graphic Pitch Imperfect: Modern Monetized Soccer - 26

By Shaker Samman

Janet Yellen: The Patient Academic - 31

By L ucas Lu

Back to the Future in Shanghai - 34

By Chimnay Pandit

DPR2.indb 25

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Pitch Imperfect

By Shaker Samman

There’s more money in world football than ever before, but could discontent in soccer’s middle class change the sport as we know it?

DPR2.indb 26

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Wembley stadium, England’s home turf, the morning of an international match against Estonia. (Photographer unknown).

DPR2.indb 27

12/3/15 1:53 PM

C

MARKETS

ristiano Ronaldo sprints down the left flank, followed closely by Filipe Luís, a defender from his crosstown rival club, Atlético Madrid. The duo tussles for possession. Ronaldo feints left, then swings right, shaking off his pursuer. He pulls back and unleashes. Within seconds, the ball nuzzles itself into the back corner of the net. Euphoria.

Ronaldo – a world-class athlete – is arguably the best player on the planet. But he’s more than that. He’s a number. A price.

In 2009, that price was $123.5 million, and the Portuguese superstar left Manchester United for greener pastures in Madrid.

At the time, the bill was the most expensive in history (a record that would later be eclipsed by Ronaldo’s current teammate, Gareth Bale, whom Madrid purchased from London-based Tottenham for $131.7 million in 2013).

Transactions like these are not unusual in European football. Not unlike the New York Stock Exchange, or the NASDAQ, the soccer transfer market is an economic institution, funneling billions of dollars between parties each year. In this system, clubs can purchase players from other teams for lump sums, and then negotiate with players directly on wages. Though figures often are not so gaudy, teams commonly make a dozen or more changes over the course of a year during two pre-determined “transfer windows.” Players can also be loaned from one club to another for a short period to develop, and earn playing time, during which they play for one team, all while still “owned” by their original club.

In September, FIFPro (the sport’s player’s union) took a step toward ending the system as we know it.

A complaint filed by the organization to the European Commission called for the abolition of the transfer market, and a complete overhaul of the system as a whole.

The grievance alleges players have less freedom of mobility than employees in different fields, and are restricted by the necessity for transfer fees.

FIFPro also claims the loan system in place is monopolistic, and favors larger clubs, thus influencing the movement of players.

In the past, FIFPro took similar action to seek change, but never have they tried to do so on such a drastic level. A ruling in their favor could decimate the business model that clubs have followed for decades, and completely change the world’s biggest sport.

During transfer windows (there are two per year – one in the summer, and one in the winter), clubs are free to buy and sell as many players as they can afford. The result is a ledger with astronomical totals. During the 2015 summer transfer window, nearly $1.54 billion changed hands between English Premier League clubs alone.

Though the transfers can take place between any two teams

in any leagues or levels in the world, most fans focus on the elite level of European footballing — the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Ligue 1 (France), Serie A (Italy), and the Bundesliga (Germany). These five leagues have a combined valuation of nearly $14.7 billion, led by the Premier league, which is valued at nearly $4.6 billion.

The transfer window is not just a game of numbers, though.

The buildup to deadline day leads to high drama, as clubs scramble to put together last-second deals to swing their fortunes. Networks give it round-the-clock coverage, and the suspense in closing hours reminds of a television thriller. Even in the spotlight, however, there are overlooked actors. Lost

Ronaldo world-class Ronaldo – – aa world-class athlete – is arguably the best player on the planet.

But he’s more than that.

He’s a number.

A price.

A price.

28 DPR2.indb 28

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

in the market haze are the key components of the deals – the players.

Unlike employees in nearly every other field, footballers lack the level of control that can be expected when determining one’s working future. Players at the top like Ronaldo or Bale can dictate terms in regard to their movement between clubs, and their contracts later on, but that is not the case for the majority of the 65,000 professional soccer players worldwide.

In most cases, players live at the whims of their clubs, pawns in a perverse chess game with financial repercussions. Teams at the lower levels of world football frequently struggle to pay their players on time, often taking longer than three months to deliver checks.

These are not million-dollar bank stubs. They are modest, middle class salaries going to normal people. Yes, some athletes

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Cristi in a ga (Phot

MARKETS have the luxury of screen time on Saturdays, but they are working professionals. They have mortgages, and phone payments, and families to feed. So why are they treated differently than other employees?

Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems In the early 1990s, Jean-Marc Bosman was the most important man in world football. The Belgian was by no means a world-class – or even remotely memorable – talent. The young midfielder was no different on the pitch than any other player.

Off the pitch, however, he forever altered the fabric of European football.

Cristiano Ronaldo prepares to play a ball in a game between Portugal and Argentina.

(Photo by Ludovic Peron)

In 1990, Bosman was finishing up the final year of his contract at Belgian Pro League club RFC de Liège. He asked his club for a transfer to the French team USL Dunkerque, but after long negotiations, a deal could not be reached. In any other situation, an employee with an expiring contract would be free to seek out employment elsewhere, in a sort of free agency. This, however, was not the case.

After Dunkerque refused to meet Liège’s transfer demands, Liège had no choice but to keep him in Belgium. Bosman could not leave unless the teams agreed to a deal. Because the club felt Bosman was no longer worthy of a first-team selection, they reduced his wages, and stashed him on the bench. He had a choice between retirement, or a reduced role in a hostile environment. Instead, he chose neither.

Infuriated by his lack of control of his own future, and declin-

ing salary (Liège wanted to cut his pay by 70 percent), Bosman filed suit with the European Court of Justice.

In 1995, the Court ruled that Bosman had a right to free movement at the end of his contract, and that his club had no authority to hold him for a transfer fee. This effectively created the free agent market, and allowed players to sign pre-contracts with clubs before the end of their terms.

In addition, because teams no longer had to worry about transfer fees for free agents, they could often offer players more money than they previously would have been able to. Rather than seeing headlines with gaudy transfer prices, and mediocre contract terms, the players could finally capitalize on their success, and earn their fair wages. Since the ruling, dozens of big-name players took their talents elsewhere without transfer fees. The most recent of which, Robert Lewandowski, left his club Broussia Dortmund to their biggest rivals, Bayern Munich – a deal which likely would not have happened otherwise, as Dortmund would have little incentive to work with their foes.

Bosman struck a major blow to the system, but at his own personal cost. The Belgian could not play professionally while his case was being heard, and by the time the ruling was handed down, he was in his 30s and well past his physical prime. He retired without ever signing the lucrative deal he so desperately sought, and later submitted for welfare after a failed clothing line left him broke.

Though he never saw the fruits of his labor, his legacy was cemented. The position of power in negotiations shifted to the athletes. Clubs have to offer more to players out of fear that they would simply walk away at the end of their deals. Though the Bosman case only pertained to Europe, FIFA adopted the verdict as their international standard, and forced all participating teams to abide by its decision.

In the wake of the ruling, teams were nervous about the case’s implications. If the verdict meant players could simply resign and walk out on their teams (like any employee in any other field), the result would be anarchy. To safeguard from this doomsday scenario, FIFA printed their Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RTSP, for short). These act as a guideline to how the transfer market works, and how the relationship between players and clubs play out.

The criteria set the standard for how the sport would be governed from the club levels, and aimed to ensure a competitive balance among clubs while still limiting the windows in which FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 29

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

29 12/3/15 1:53 PM

MARKETS transfers could take place. The last thing clubs wanted were players having the ability to jump ship in between games because of managerial disputes. The rules also attempt to protect contracts so players would not have to live in fear of demotion over menial events or petty squabbles.

For more than a decade, these have been the governing rules of football, and in FIFPro’s eyes, the next domino to fall. The organization’s complaint claims these criteria have not been met, and as a result, RTSP has failed the players it was created to protect.

The Modern Age As groundbreaking as the Bosman ruling was in the mid-90s, it was not until the mid-2000s that it showed its true impact.

In 1992, when the Bosman hearings were still taking place, the Premier League – then in its first season – signed a $295.5 million television deal for five years with England-based Sky TV. By 2007, the League’s value had ballooned, and Sky TV and Setanta signed a five-year contract worth nearly $7.9 billion for the rights to broadcast games. In 2015, NBC struck a deal for an additional $1 billion for exclusive rights to broadcast in the United States for six years.

There is more money in football than ever before, but not everyone is living large. These flashy figures mean cartoon dollar signs appear in managers’ eyes when they are given the green light to spend on players. But they are also misleading.

A main focus in FIFPro’s complaint is the unequal domination of the transfer market by larger clubs, which can be attributed to the wealth gap between them. UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) argues that the influx of money in the transfer market means that clubs from every division are getting in on the action, and players are moving to all corners of the globe. In theory, that might be true. In practice, however, it is a different story.

Rather than teams from lower divisions or leagues playing a role in transfer discussions, it is the bigger clubs – the footballing elites –who dictate terms on a grand scale. They can even bully each other, as was proven on deadline day of the summer window in 2015. Manchester United ignored Real Madrid’s pursuit of goalkeeper David de Gea until the last possible moment, at which point it was too late for transfer paperwork to be filed.

The influence these teams have on the window is unparalleled, and shuts players out of the equation. De Gea had been seeking a move to Madrid for months, but United’s game of chess meant he had no shot of a homecoming. The team effectively pursued its strategy with no regard for its player’s wishes.

The current system is broken.

More damning than transfer fees, or movement restrictions, or even a metaphorical chess match is the truth that players aren’t being paid on time, and in full. A FIFPro survey of more than 3,000 footballers worldwide found that 42 percent of respondents weren’t compensated on time, and 14 percent said they had waited longer than three months for their checks.

In a just world, the players could sue the clubs individually for their lost earnings. Unfortunately, that course of action is implausible. In a number of the countries where payments are

30 DPR2.indb 30

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

delayed (looking at you, former Soviet republics), a fair legal system is nothing more than a pipe dream. Clubs are embedded into the political fabric of the state, and thus have an advantage when it comes to the courtroom. In the Russian Premier League, for example, teams are linked to a certain sector of government. Dynamo is considered the police and KGB’s club.

CSKA Moscow is the army’s club. Lokomotiv is the railroad companies’ club. As a result, it is unlikely that a fair trial could be held without the influence of the groups on litigation.

Even if players could find a fair trial, they would be putting themselves at risk. Like Bosman years before, footballers could not compete while in litigation. It is not likely that the club being sued would allow a player to take the pitch, and leaving for greener pastures would constitute a breach in the very contract the player was suing to uphold. This uncertainty was what pushed the player’s organization to act.

Assuming the European Commission upholds FIFPro’s complaint (which is far from a sure thing, though Bosman was also an unexpected ruling), the future has two potential outlooks.

The first (and less likely) scenario is total chaos. In this world, players are treated like any other employees in any other field, and are given the rights to move freely between clubs as frequently as they wish so long as other teams want them. Players begin to walk out on their contracts and seek employment elsewhere, much like a welder could leave one factory for another without fear of repercussion. Teams are unstable due to their constantly rotating crop of outfielders, and the sport becomes an unrecognizable mess of all-star teams and walk-ons. This is doomsday.

This anarchical society will never exist though, because the most likely scenario would closely resemble the free agent market found in most professional American sports leagues. Teams can sign players to contracts, and after a certain point, players can activate their option to stay on or test free agency.

Contracts in this world, like their American counterparts, would be nearly impossible to break, and would bind both parties to their pre-ordained deals. This would ensure financial stability for both groups, while appeasing all parties. Agreements would be shorter – probably not longer than three years – to allow players to move freely, and clubs a chance to move on without a long-term commitment.

FIFPro Secretary-General Theo van Segglen summed it best when he announced the complaint.

“We need not fear a football world without the transfer system,” van Segglen said. “Through collective bargaining, better labor market rules can be established.”

If he has his way, they just might be.

None of us can say for certain what the future landscape of world football will look like a year from now when a verdict is reached. What is for certain, however, is this: one way or another, the world’s biggest sport is about to change.

Shaker Samman is a junior at Duke University. He has previously written for the Tampa Bay Times, Raleigh & Company, PolitiFact, and The Classical. This is his third piece for Duke Political Review.

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

Janet Yellen: The Patient Academic

By Chimnay Pandit Photo courtesy of the US Federal Reserve.

DPR2.indb 31

12/3/15 1:53 PM

MARKETS

“T

he Committee today reaffirmed its view that the current 0 to 1/4 percent target range for the federal funds rate remains appropriate,” announced the Federal Reserve in October, an unsurprising continuation of the interest rate saga.

The decision, as usual, was met with exasperated sighs of frustration. Yet again, criticism rained down on the Fed for pushing off the inevitable, for “heavily indicating” that a rate hike is likely in the near future, but making no promises.

The announcement fit perfectly into the narrative of the Fed under Janet Yellen’s leadership. Since January of 2014, when she took office as the first female Chair of the Fed, Yellen has had her back against the wall. Yellen was confirmed as Chairwoman by the Senate by the narrowest margin in history for the position, and to this day critics have been eager to twist her into nothing more than a political pawn, a shadow of her predecessor, and an indecisive White House puppet.

But is this a fair characterization?

The market is currently behaving unusually, so much so that no one unequivocally knows what to make of the data. Different metrics paint divergent, conflicting pictures.

Unemployment rates indicate a strengthening market, but underemployment and inflation rates suggest otherwise. Not even experts fully know what to do about the interest rates. However, Janet Yellen has the power to drastically influence the largest economy in the world. Yellen’s story is largely unknown, so she flies under the radar despite controlling America’s chief financial institution. To understand her impact as Chairwoman of the Fed, we must uncover her life experiences, delve into her thought processes, and critically compare her style to those of her predecessors. Only then can we determine if Yellen is really just a “puppet” or something much more.

Influence of Academia A true academic, Yellen spent a substantial portion of her career within the intellectual gates of the world’s top universities. After graduating summa cum laude from Brown and completing her PhD in economics at Yale, Yellen taught at Harvard, the London School of Economics

32 DPR2.indb 32

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

and Political Science, and the Haas School of Business at UC-Berkeley, where she now holds the position of Professor Emerita.

Save for a short stint as an economist for the Reserve’s Board of Governors, Janet Yellen’s professional identity was shaped by four decades of academia, leaving a permanent mark on her style as Chairwoman.

Academia nurtures and values different skills in its workforce than business does.

Professors are paid to focus on research and incentivized to produce research papers in high volume through tenure and in-group relevance. Metabolizing vast amounts of information is central to an academic’s lifework, and they typically collect and analyze data meticulously before adopting policy stances. As a result, however, concrete conclusions are often delayed in the hopes that new information will provide a more comprehensive description of the problem. Yellen’s enduring indecision about raising target interest rates perfectly illustrates this tendency. Meanwhile, consultants in the private sector, like former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, are paid to investigate and solve one particular problem. More importantly, they face a compelling pressure to recommend changes decisively.

Immediate recommendations are valuable, undoubtedly, but Yellen’s patience will serve the nation’s economy well in the long run.

Economic Philosophy As Chairwoman, Yellen presides over one of the most influential financial institution in the world. She is tasked to articulate the government’s opinion of the economy’s health and promote policies that attain the goals of maximizing employment and controlling inflation.

Just two years into her term as Chairwoman, Yellen has been labeled as a “dove,” devoting her attention towards reducing unemployment through low interest rates. Current economic demands could be the cause for her dovish actions, but as the first Democratic Chairperson in nearly 30 years, it would be unlikely for Yellen to deviate from focusing on unemployment rates.

She does not hide behind “Fed speak,” an intentionally cryptic communication style characteristic of former Fed Chair Alan

Greenspan. She speaks clearly, believing that the markets desperately need the Fed’s information to operate properly. Yellen is one of the most prolific supporters of neo-Keynesian economics, meaning that, in her eyes, the public and private sectors must unite to sustain a healthy economy.

Independently, a Keynesian would argue, private firms’ operations may lead to inefficient macroeconomic outcomes.

The government can enact policies to counter the inefficiency, and thus, Yellen’s transparency with investors and consumers should come as no surprise.

In part, Yellen’s story will be written relative to her predecessor, Ben Bernanke.

Yellen was appointed as Vice-Chair of the Fed in 2010, second-in-command to Bernanke, who introduced a highly unconventional monetary policy called quantitative easing (QE) in 2008. The goal of QE was to cushion the catastrophic economic downturn by increasing the money supply in the market. The problem is that no empirical data exists that suggest the program has successfully stimulated the economy, but Yellen continued QE through 2014, pouring billions of dollars into the U.S. economy. She has vocally supported Bernanke’s bond-buyback program and emulates his circumspection when dealing with the public. Yellen has demonstrated thus far that she will follow Bernanke’s precedent of enormous government intervention in the economy.

The difference, however, is her motivation in doing so.

Interest Rates and Patience Clearly, target interest rates have been the hot-button topic of Yellen’s tenure.

While Bernanke’s time was defined by the largest crash the U.S. has seen in decades, Yellen is tasked with guiding the U.S. economy through the aftermath of the downturn, amid challenges abroad and precarious growth at home. Increasing target interest rates will be the first major move of her administration; but why is it such a big deal?

The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which banks borrow and lend to each other. Increasing the target interest rates effectively harms borrowers and generally discourages investment. While the U.S. economy has displayed relatively strong growth, questionable jobs reports

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

MARKETS and slides in the global market are striking enough fear in the hearts of investors as it is (they are not known for being an insensitive bunch). Additionally, a rate hike would likely suppress, or even depress, already low inflation rates.

On the other hand, like many others, Yellen pays attention to business cycles.

With the U.S. expected to enter a correctional phase soon, it would be wise for the Fed to increase target interest rates in order to build up ammunition against the future downturn. In reality, the effects of a rate increase will not be felt for months, if not years, after its implementation.

Target interest rates are of pressing importance today because of optics, or rather acoustics. Janet Yellen’s words carry the weight of the U.S. government and express the administration’s faith in the U.S. economy. Interest rates are merely a proxy through which Yellen can communicate the Fed’s opinion of the current situation. By refusing to increase rates early, Yellen signals to investors that the Fed is skeptical of U.S. economic reports.

This can be ominous. Stocks tumbled severely after the Fed announced in September that it would not raise interest rates, another reminder of the United States’ vulnerability to slowing global markets. Investors feel “dazed and confused” by Yellen’s indecision over the past several months. When the government experts, the “insiders,” doubt

positive economic reports, something must be off. Janet Yellen’s power is in her implicit commentary, not just in controlling monetary policy.

As consumers, though, the least we ought to demand is that Yellen consider every consequence of her actions. In a September meeting press conference, Yellen asserted that the Fed should not be “responding to the ups and downs of the markets, and it is certainly not our policy to do so.” This is the only position that Americans should tolerate. The scope of the Fed’s influence is immeasurable. Aside from concrete changes to open market operations, discount rates, and reserve requirements that the Fed can authorize, it is clear that the implicit messages packaged with each decision is just as, if not more, influential on market activity. Recognizing the Fed’s power, we ought to reject anything less than the most cautious and well-informed actions, and must temper the clamor for the Fed to act now or pay the price.

Yellen’s Legacy Deep academic roots prepared Yellen well for the arduous role of Fed Chairwoman. Her default to generally sift through data before jumping to a solution is exactly the right intuition we need in her position. To contrast, Ben Bernanke was highly reactive, particularly because he was completely blindsided by the economic crash in 2007-08. In an interview 10 years ago, Bernanke claimed

that the “fundamentals” of the economy were “very strong,” a clear misconception of the situation. While Yellen is working with vastly different conditions, she is also averse to rash decision-making, supplying an explanation about why she has maintained Bernanke’s policies. Until convincing data reports arrive on her desk dictating a change in policy, Yellen will stay on course. Even if she prolongs Bernanke’s QE and drop in interest rates, we can be sure that rigorous data collection and interpretation impelled the decision, not her fear of stepping out of line.

Critics will remember Yellen’s early years by her indecision. They will highlight the technocratic public announcements, her robotic data reporting, and sigh at the academic who is more fit for a lab than as Chairwoman. They will argue that her lack of conviction is preventing the U.S. economy from standing its ground in the face of new global issues popping up daily.

Hopefully, Yellen is instead remembered for her levelheaded processing, her averseness to risk, her prudent quantitative analysis, and her clear communication. Her term is young, but she has demonstrated that she is not willing to cave to critics’ pressures, either for or against raising rates. She will not compromise her reliance on empirical evidence for gut reactions.

It is much too early to discuss Janet Yellen’s final legacy beyond being the first woman Chair of the Fed, but the groundwork is already laying itself out.

Some believe that her hesitancy will be the defining characteristic, some argue she will be remembered as Bernanke 2.0, and others still hope she will be remembered for her patience and thoughtfulness.

To a degree, these divergent claims are all true. But they find common ground in their underlying motivation: Janet Yellen’s dependence on data. Her training and persona demand that numbers, not intuitions, decide how best to proceed.

So regardless of what Yellen decides to do over the next few years, rest assured, it will not be on a whim.

Chinmay Pandit is a Trinity sophomore studying Economics and Math. He is a 60 Seconds Staff Writer for DPR.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 33

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

33 12/3/15 1:53 PM

Photo from AP/Str.

DPR2.indb 34

12/3/15 1:53 PM

MARKETS

Back to the Future in Shanghai

I

n 1989, Americans time travelled through James Zemeckis’ film, Back to the Future II, to a 2015 where Japan was a commanding global power.

When the movie came out, such a future seemed inevitable. Several thousand miles across the Pacific, the Nikkei 225, the Japanese stock exchange, hit an all-time high, making it worth roughly 50 percent of global stock market valuation. Americans, humbled by stagflation and the OPEC oil crisis, were filled with awe and fear of Japan’s seemingly unstoppable mixture of state backed mega-corporations, trade surpluses, and technological advancement, all underscored by a relentless Confucian work ethic. The growth of the highly similar “Asian Tigers” – Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea – only solidified these opinions.

Thirty years ago, Japan’s seemingly unstoppable rise to global hegemony suggested inevitable conflict with the West.

As panic and resentment built in America, destruction of Japanese automobiles and other goods spiked, as did harassment of Asian-Americans. The most prominent example would be Vincent Chin, a Chinese man mistaken as Japanese and subsequently beaten to death in Detroit in 1982. This feared “yellow peril,” however, never came to fruition. By the end of 1990, the Nikkei 225 had lost nearly 50 percent of its peak value, and Japan’s real estate market and financial system were teetering on the edge of systemic collapse.

What followed was over twenty years of on-and-off stagnation and recession – the “lost two decades” – from which Japan has yet to recover fully.

This stunning economic reversal is, in

By Lucas Lu

some ways, echoed by the Chinese stock market crash this summer and the events leading up to it. In the wake of the 2009 global financial crisis, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao berated the business and political elite of the western world at the Davos Economic Forum for foolishly causing the crisis with their innately weak political and economic systems, as China continued to power along with near 10 percent growth. In the wake of the Chinese stock market’s implosion this summer, those antagonized by Wen’s 2009 speech are doubtlessly feeling more than a little Schadenfreude.

The parallels between the Tokyo ’90 and Shanghai ’15 stock market crashes, quickly noted by publications like Business Insider and Bloomberg after China’s recent troubles, are now obvious. In less than one month, the Shanghai Composite (the Chinese stock exchange) fell by over 33 percent, resulting in a total loss of over $3 trillion. Although Shanghai ’15 pales in comparison to what happened to the Nikkei 225 in 1990, it begs the question of whether China is poised to follow Japan’s downward spiral.

House of Loans Broadly speaking, the growth model that propelled Japan to riches in the 1980s differs only slightly from those that governed China, South Korea, and Taiwan’s more recent periods of growth. Economists would classify these Asian economies as “heterodox,” or state capitalist, economies, in which enterprises owned by or strongly linked to the government are major economic actors. The governments and government enterprises of these countries played crucial roles in creating the stable FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 35

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

35 12/3/15 1:53 PM

This book by Ezra Vogel was at the top of the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List when it was released in 1979, Photo from Amazon.

macroeconomic conditions (i.e. currency exchange rates, interest rates, and national current/capital accounts) that made it possible to promote growth, secure foreign technology and capital, and promote exports. However, these trends are less relevant to the current discussion than the politics of investment have been.

In expenditure terms, a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is defined as C+I+G+NX, where C is consumption, I is investment, G is government spending, and NX is net exports. To understand the Chinese and Japanese cases, it is very important to consider the percent that each component makes up in GDP. In both Japan and China, investment was and is (respectively) the biggest single component of GDP, dwarfing net exports and consumption. When Japan and China were still poor, they desperately needed strong investment and government-led spending on capital goods like textbooks, factories, and power plants, all of which carry the potential to then increase production across the board. Investing in these capital goods, unsurprisingly,

36 DPR2.indb 36

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

increased production and created jobs, generating more revenue for additional investment. Prior to the Japanese economic crash, investment constituted nearly 35 percent of GDP, and in China today, investment is nearly 50 percent of GDP. For comparison, the EU average investment to GDP ratio is just under 20 percent and the US average is around 15 percent.

China and Japan both super-charged investment by taking on extraordinary amounts of debt. Governments and corporations borrowed money from the major domestic banks, investing well beyond their means as a way of pushing up growth.

Throughout these periods of “hyper growth,” Chinese and Japanese banks either suppressed interest rates or offered lower rates to preferred borrowers, encouraging uncontrolled and unsound credit expansion.

Imagine that this is China or Japan, 25 or 30 years ago. Real GDP is growing at well over 10 percent per year, but bank interest rates remain below 4 percent. With the exception of truly terrible projects, investors expect growth no less than two to three percent below national real GDP growth. Essentially, they walk away with handsome profits from what is effectively free money.

This combination of low-interest loans and growth-fueled profits incentivized investors to throw borrowed money at every project they found, business fundamentals be damned. Accumulation of bad debt was exacerbated by political elites profiting from government links to investment and financial services. When considered this way, the Japanese 1990s economic crash and the Shanghai stock market crash in 2015 are symptoms, not causes, of an economic growth paradigm that has outlived its usefulness.

Life with Financial Repression Of equal importance when considering the crashes in Japan and China is the common source of these credit bubbles.

Carl Walter and Francis Howie’s Red Capitalism notes that “the heroic savings of the [Chinese] people is virtually the only source of non-state money in the game.”

The same savings pattern holds true in Japan and other Asian Tigers, where most debt is held domestically and household savings are upwards of 30 percent of income.

When Walter and Francis describe these savings habits as “heroic,” they are referring to how central banks in both countries kept interest rates far lower than appropriate, a phenomenon that economists call financial repression. For instance, in 2002, the People’s Bank of China capped interest on deposits at the bank at 0.72 percent and handed out loans at marginally higher rates, while GDP continued to grow at well over 10 percent. This made it easier for borrowers like the government and corporations to pay off their debt.

However, financial repression also requires savers like families to put more of their income into the banks to reach their savings goals, effectively acting as a tax on consumers. Consider a hypothetical family that deposits $100,000 in the bank on January 1st. If annual interest rates are equal to a GDP growth rate at roughly 10 percent, then the family will earn $10,000 in interest income by next January. However, if interest rates are instead suppressed to around 1 percent as decreed by the central bank, then our family will earn just $1,000 in interest, a loss of $9,000 relative to market rates.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, argues this is why “little of China’s dramatic economic growth is finding its way into the pockets of Chinese consumers; the byproduct of an economy driven by massive state-owned enterprises.”

In an investment economy such as China’s or Japan’s, increases in consumption are necessarily offset by decreases in investment, since household savings represent the vast majority of money used to underwrite investment.

That is, if people are spending their money instead of saving it, banks have less money to loan out to would-be investors.

This becomes critically important as investment spending becomes less fruitful; when infrastructure and capital goods

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

have already been purchased, additional bridges, factories, and power plants are necessarily less productive. Eventually, returns on debt-financed projects will turn negative, resulting in non-performing loans (NPLs). China has already reached this stage. Debt growth outstripped GDP growth years ago, echoing Japan’s asset bubble in the 1980s. Given that China’s total debt (corporate, household, and government) to GDP ratio reached 280 percent this year, reducing the debt will be quite difficult.

One alternative could be to increase the “NX” element of GDP, net exports. Upon more careful consideration, however, it is unlikely that other countries will import more Chinese goods. Another possibility would be to increase government spending, G, but governments in East Asia already finance much of their spending with debt and raising taxes would only decrease consumption, again impacting the final component of our GDP equation.

The last piece of the GDP puzzle is consumption, which economists define as consumer income minus savings and taxes.

It may seem tempting, in the interest of raising consumption, to increase income. However, rapidly increasing incomes requires companies to raise their prices to match the rise in wages, a phenomenon called “wage-push inflation.”

This increased inflation, like financial repression, reduces the value of savings and encourages borrowing, only exacerbating the debt problem. Thus, the only way to safely and quickly increase consumption in a state-capitalist economy is to reduce savings. However, since these countries rely almost solely on consumer savings to underwrite investment, consumption growth will result in a commensurate fall in investment growth. Although shifting from an investment economy to a consumer economy is necessary for countries like Japan and China, the very structure of their economies prevent a rebalancing from being GDP growth positive.

Game of Corner Offices It is a historical truism that managing the consequences of economic growth is much harder than attaining it in the first place. Consider America’s roaring 20s, the USSR’s rise in the 60s, and Brazil’s 70s export boom. Each credit-fueled growth spree was followed quickly by grinding stagnation or crippling depression.

Elites and policy makers who benefitted disproportionately from the misallocation of debt and investment in these cases all stalled reform until the situation could no longer be salvaged, ignoring the clear truth that the system of economic growth was broken.

In The Age of Uncertainty, John Galbraith writes: “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage… stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges … are a solemn, basic, Godgiven right.”

In the East Asian context, these people of privilege are the executives and bureaucrats at the rotting heart of the state capitalist system, as well as their powerful allies in government. In Korea, Lee Kun Hee, ex-CEO of Samsung, was convicted of using company money to bribe judges and politicians in 2008 but quickly received a presidential pardon. In 2013, the decadesold links between Japanese politicians, organized crime, and business bubbled to the surface when Mizuho Financial, Japan’s second largest bank, received a modest slap on the wrist for laundering billions of dollars for Yakuza organized crime syndicates. In China, state-owned enterprises earn profits worth roughly 20 percent of the government budget, almost all of which disappears before reaching state coffers.

Alas, although empowering consumers and decreasing the power of rent-seeking elites sounds appealing, such policies rarely, if ever, succeed. As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang noted in 2013, “stirring up vested interests is more difficult than stirring up one’s soul.” However, Mr. Li also understands that China’s current debt-fueled growth cannot continue – “but no matter how deep the water is, we must wade through because we don’t have other options.”

The elephant in the room now is how China will remove such powerful, connected, and wealthy elites from the commanding heights of politics and the economy.

Body Bag Basis GDP The new Chinese president, Xi Jinping, gave his chilling answer in a 2000 interview: “I look past the superficial things… I see the detention camps, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics

on a deeper level.” His commentary, which portended the strict anti-corruption measures he would implement as president, was a reflection of the personal losses he had suffered; Mao’s Red Guards tortured his father for over five years, drove his sister to suicide, threatened to kill him, and forced his mother to publicly denounce him in public. Today, those detention camps are overflowing. Since the start of Mr. Xi’s anti-corruption campaign in 2012, hundreds of thousands of party members and military officers have been investigated, with consequences ranging from demotion to imprisonment and execution.

Mr. Xi has violated many implicit taboos in Chinese politics by going after previously untouchable men like retired national officials, senior military leaders, and members of the Politburo standing committee (the highest Chinese governing body). The practical implications of this deviation from custom are that the stakes of Chinese power politics have begun to resemble those of the Cultural Revolution.

It is now a one-shot game where the losers lose everything, possibly even their lives.

If Mr. Xi and his compatriots fail in their reform efforts, death or imprisonment await them as soon as they are no longer shielded by the prestige of high office.

As Japan discovered in the 90s, unbridled economic growth brings with it unsustainable debt. In the best case scenario, China’s growth will slow in the short-term, as it seeks to rein in wasteful investment and boost domestic consumption. In the worst case, Mr. Xi’s reform campaign and China’s economy will recede like Japan’s, pushing Mr. Xi into a prison or a grave and the economy into crisis. Still, the best case would be an accomplishment extraordinaire, making China the only large country in history to achieve developed nation status without first cycling through either stagnation or depression. But, on a more macabre note, we may now be forecasting China’s economic future by counting the number of body bags and prison cells Mr. Xi’s reform campaign fills. It is a stark, gruesome reminder that the political is economic and the economic is political.

Lucas Lu is a Trinity sophomore studying Computer Science and Mathematics.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 37

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

37 12/3/15 1:53 PM

INTERVIEWS

Interviews

The Relentless Pursuit of Truth

By Jay Sullivan and Alison Huang

DPR: You’ve been involved with some cool public artwork in New York City. Could you talk a little bit more about the “Journalism is Not a Crime” movement and some of the things you’re doing with it?

Bahari: Journalism is Not A Crime came from the idea that when I came out of prison I realized that there was an amazing campaign for my release, and also as soon as I came out my employer provided psychological help, legal help, and every kind of

38 DPR2.indb 38

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

An Interview With

Maziar Bahari Maziar Bahari is an Iranian-Canadian journalist, filmmaker, and human rights activist. He was imprisoned by the Iranian government, under charges that he was a revolutionary. His story is the subject of the Jon Stewart film, Rosewater. Bahari is a New York Times best-selling author.

support I needed, and I knew that most of my colleagues in Iran and other parts of the world don’t have that. No one knows their names; they’re just numbers. So, I thought that it would be good to have a project to help them in different ways if I can. One of the aspects of the project is legal help: we have two lawyers working with journalists – if they have any questions regarding confiscation of their properties [and] if the families of journalists have any questions they can contact those lawyers. We have therapists online, and if people have questions they can go to them. Another

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

INTERVIEWS thing we need is study of psychological well-being. We’ve had South African and Canadian behavior scientists work with many doctors around the word.

The third part is the publicity campaign of the project. The not the crime project has two different campaigns within it. One is for journalists and one is for the Bahá’í.

It’s the biggest religious minority in Iran, and the members of that community are deprived of their citizen rights, especially the rights to higher education. So we have asked different street artists and world class artists from different part of the world to join the campaign.

The first phase was in New York during the UN General assembly and we had about 12 to 13 all different walls.

What was especially interesting to me was we had four walls in Harlem, and the way that the community responded to the campaign was amazing because when we talked about discrimination, when we talked about the deprivation of rights, they really identified with it and they really got it. We had one mural in Brooklyn of all places vandalized but in Harlem it was very interesting. People were bringing food to the artists and supporting them. It’s a cool campaign and we’re starting to release videos if you go to Instagram. They’ve released the first videos on the campaign and we have more videos released every day.

DPR: You covered the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election and filmed the protests that followed, and your work is often known for its unique perspective on modern Iranian culture. In hindsight were all your journalistic pursuits worth the jail time, and if you could change anything would you?

Bahari: When I was an unwilling participant in a scenario, the reason for my arrest was they wanted to teach a lesson to a large group of filmmakers and journalists in Iran, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was making a living from working as a journalist. I was traveling and working all the time. I was trying to work within the framework of the laws in Iran, and I had friends in the government and I had friends in the opposition so I wasn’t doing anything really risky. But if someone decides what you’re doing is wrong and has a plan for you, it’s very difficult to say that it’s worth doing because you just don’t know what you’re doing. I was never foolhardy.

I worked in Iraq for three years and those were much more dangerous assignments, but I had six bodyguards so I never

Photo by JD Lasica.

Photo courtesy of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office

took uncalculated risks. I always tried to know where I was going. I did my homework.

No, I don’t think any risk is worth taking. If you don’t know what you’re eating it’s not good to eat it. If you don’t know what’s happening when you’re going one direction you shouldn’t go there. It’s the same thing with journalism.

DPR: So along those lines, for journalists that do face war such as covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq or journalists that do face that kind of pressure – the ones that have been attacked or threatened – what do you think the journalist’s role or response should be in those situations, and how do you think the public should stand on those kinds of issues?

Bahari: You cannot really determine what a journalist’s job is.

If you really insist on telling a journalist what they should do, I think they should inform people, they should give information to people and through that information they have to serve the public’s interest. It is very hard to say how to inform or how to serve the public’s interest – that is why you see the divergence of views. It is very difficult to say what the role of a journalist is, but I think ideally the journalist should be able to inform and serve public interest and that should be determined by common sense.

But I think we’re going through a very volatile time in history of journalism because public interest is changing and journalists are becoming more opinionated.

DPR: You talked about how the Iran Nuclear Agreement might create more restrictions, and the environment might get a little

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 39

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

39 12/3/15 1:53 PM

INTERVIEWS same old methods of suppression – imprisonment, torture, beating people.

DPR: People describe your work both in journalism and filmmaking as having a unique perspective. What is your major influence?

Bahari: I don’t know if I can say what my major influence is, but I think I’ve tried in the beginning to interpret the Iranian narrative to the Westerners, Americans and British audiences. Maybe I did something successfully, I don’t know what happened.

At this point as someone who was brutalized by the Iranian government, was a victim of human rights [abuses], I think my main responsibility was to give nuance to the discussion about Iran, not to fall victim to the people who want to make enemies of Iran. But at the same time to warn the media for the Iranian government that because of your anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism that you should not defend the Iranian government. Yes, there are problems with your foreign policy, but that does not justify what the Iranian government is doing with itself.

Courtesy of Bill Adair.

Photo by Paul Kinsington.

tougher in Iran. How do you see this evolving in the coming years?

Bahari: It’s very difficult to say. But what is going to happen as the Iranian government becomes more confident in its ability to survive and its ability to rule, it’s going to try to control the situation inside the country as much as possible.

That’ll inevitably result in more restrictions for journalists because the government has done something it said it would never do and that is shaking hands with the Great Satan. So, they do not want to lose face and they’re trying to control public opinion. As we talked about, the public opinion is not shaped through traditional media anymore. It is shaped mainly through social media. The government cannot control it and the government doesn’t know how to control it. So the most expedient thing for them to do is to go back to the

40 DPR2.indb 40

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

DPR: So you spent a lot of time with Jon Stewart during the production of Rosewater.

What’s your favorite story about him and the work you were doing?

Bahari: My favorite story, one that solidified our friendship, was when he showed me the rough cut of Rosewater for the first time. We worked on the script and the film was being shot every day, but I went away and he was doing the rough draft of the film for two months or so. I remember when I was watching the film – I watched it on my own in the editing room – and I saw him walking his dog, and he was really nervous about my reaction to the film. His dog has only three legs and he always jokes that before that it had four legs. I could see that he was nervous about my reaction. That was a very interesting moment in our relationship.

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

INTERVIEWS

Comedy Pushing the Limit

By Zachary Gorwitz

DPR: I’ve always marveled at the creativity and cleverness of The Onion. I recently learned that Onion writers write the headline, and then the story. Talk about the reasoning behind that process.

Dikkers: Sure. Before The Onion started, I was aware of a lot of humor publications and I didn’t really think any of them were that funny. Part of what inspired me to be involved with The Onion was seeing some of the other humor that had been done and not being impressed and thinking, “Well, I could do better than that.” There were things specifically with some of those other publications that bothered me, that I didn’t think were done well, that I wanted to fix. And one of those things was that it was always really hard to get to the joke. The Harvard Lampoon, for example, would have this headline that wasn’t funny, it was barely enticing you to read the piece, and then it was a whole page just filled with copy, a big wall of gray. You would often have to read all the way to the end to get some sort of punch line. That was pretty common with written humor at the time. Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon are the only ones that would do it a little bit differently; there would be more pictures and pop-outs and ways to be drawn into the writing. Steve Martin’s book, for example, was a big influence on me for that reason because I worshipped as a comedian and I thought he was amazing.

But his book wasn’t that funny and I was trying to parse out why and a big reason was the headlines weren’t funny, you always had to read to the end of the piece to get the joke. Woody Allen, his stuff was pretty good. But that’s a separate beast because he was writing stuff that was using dramatic structure and I was really

An Interview With

Scott Dikkers Scott Dikkers is the founding editor of The Onion, and its longest serving editor-in-chief. Dikkers is also an author and filmmaker. He sat down with DPR’s Zach Gorwitz in September to discuss satire, free speech and the role of political comedy.

focused on comedic structure where it was just a joke beat that was escalated to a finish.

So what we did with The Onion was, well, I was greatly inspired by this book that I discovered early on in the first few years of The Onion that really solidified my strategy: I wanted the work to be funny as soon as you saw it. I wanted you to be laughing. And hopefully that would draw you in to keep reading, and it would just get funnier and funnier. I wanted to start big and end bigger.

I didn’t want to start with vague intrigue or “Maybe this will be ok?” because I think on a fundamental level I knew that people don’t like to read. Reading is hard work and homework to a lot of people. Nobody is going to just start reading something; you need to draw them in, you need to invite them. Put out a red carpet for them and make it really easy.

We had already been doing this thing where the headline was funny and the story was funnier. But then I read this great book that I think is still around, it’s called Information Anxiety. It’s all about how there’s so much more information produced now, every minute, than a person who lived in the middle ages would have been exposed to in their entire lifetime. It causes anxiety.

As humans, we just can’t process that many options about what’s important to read, what’s not important. The author was a guy who designed instruction manuals for electronics equipment for a living and he also designed the signage in airports. He was the one who laid it out so that you could walk through and intuitively know which way to go to the baggage claim or wherever.

And he was all about putting the big, important information first and have that be really getable, readily accessible, in a way so that almost anyone who say it would know what you’re talking FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 41

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

41 12/3/15 1:53 PM

about. Then, in smaller letters, have slightly more information that expounds on the main headline. If you really want to drill down, then you can have some walls of copy that really get into the details. It’s almost like a billboard sign on the road. If you’re interested in this, you’ll know immediately what it’s about and you can read more if you want. And so I knew we were on the right track with The Onion because the headline was funny and if someone liked that joke they were going to start reading it. I think that’s worked for us. We never thought of ourselves as a newspaper, so sometimes people think it’s odd that we do the headlines first because if you worked for a newspaper that would be very odd. You want to find out where the story is and then write the story and then, as an afterthought, throw a headline on.

Nowadays with the Internet, headlines are much more than an afterthought. You really have to draw people in. We treated it like comedy and humor writing, so we pitch headlines and when we come up with a headline that is really funny that everybody likes then we decide, “Ok yeah, we’re going to run that.” Then we figure out if it’s going to be a big story or a little story and whatever, but it’s all about that first joke. It’s your introduction to the reader and it better make a good impression.

DPR: A controversial topic in the news lately is political correctness and “coddling” on college campuses. Everyone from Jerry Seinfeld to President Obama to student paper columnists have weighed in. No matter which side of the argument you’re on, it seems that we are growing more sensitive as a nation. How do you toe that line as a satirist?

Dikkers: Well, satire has a very clear rule about that arena.

I think political correctness is all about making sure that you don’t unnecessarily offend people. That’s the whole point of it.

You want terms that are empowering and don’t belittle the oppressed and all this other sort of stuff. You want to be sensitive to people who are in a compromised or minority group or something like that. In satire, we abide by that same rule that journalists do: “Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In

42 DPR2.indb 42

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

satire, you have to pick the right target for your jokes. If your target deserves to be made fun of, it will work and people will laugh at that. Everyone loves to laugh at somebody who deserves to be laughed at. But if you pick the wrong target, if you’re going after an oppressed group or a minority group or somebody who’s down and out, nobody is going to laugh at that. They feel like it’s wrong and offensive and inappropriate. Political correctness is kind of baked into satire. However, the way we produce it, if it’s done well, it makes people laugh and they enjoy it so that they’re not even thinking about the fact Photo by Casey Bisson. that it’s politically correct. In the real world, political correctness often seems annoying because you have to know all the right terms and all the modern terms for whatever you’re talking about. And that annoys people.

It especially annoys the oppressors because they’re so use to using the easy term and they don’t care that it’s offending people.

It is nicer to try to learn the “right” term and yes, it can get crazy.

I don’t know that I have too much of an opinion because I’m not too politically correct in my own life. In satire, we don’t have to worry about it because the rules are very simple.

DPR: So it’s almost like being politically correct is good for business.

Dikkers: Yeah, the more your resonate with the audience, the funnier it’s going to be. The more accessible you are, the funnier it’s going to be. If you’re offending anybody or a group of people, like let’s say a minority group doesn’t like a joke you’re telling, then you’re going to lose that part of the audience. It’s so hard to find the audience for written humor as it is; you want the most broad possible reach that you can get. So being an equal opportunity offender (that’s just the term they use) is always good business. So they know that you’re fairly making fun of every single act of stupidity that anyone anywhere is doing, regardless of their station.

DPR: But doesn’t it get difficult to write good satire or to come up with good material when you have to be conscious of, like you said, offending everyone equally? You know, you want to use the right term or you want to stay away from this particular group.

But there are also those topics that are off limits. You have things like trigger warnings for sexual assault or 9/11 being a very sensitive topic… Beyond making sure no particular group is too offended, how do you approach subjects that might have a lot of potential to be funny but need to be handled delicately?

Dikkers: I’ve never had a problem with a so-called “delicate” subject. You can always find something to satirize about anything, even the idea of political correctness in society. You can satirize any event or any trend. All you have to do is find the right target

FALL 2015

12/3/15 1:53 PM

INTERVIEWS in that event, whether its historical or a current trend, whatever it is. That’s what it’s all about. If you pick the wrong target, people will perceive it as piling on the oppressed and that won’t work.

That won’t be funny. So you pick a deserving target, and a great deserving target is often just our own flaws and shortcomings.

And certainly any authority figure or oppressor is a great target.; everybody loves seeing them brought down. There really never a topic that is too sensitive. The more sensitive the better, because people need to relieve that tension.

DPR: Do your stories ever get you into hot water? Which one?

Dikkers: I will be telling a couple stories about that tonight actually. But yeah, definitely. There are a few people who, for some reason, don’t like to be made fun of. And when they do get made fun of, they get really angry and their lawyers call us and it’s really kind of silly. In the old days when The Onion first started, that would happen a lot more often because people didn’t know what The Onion was and they would look at us and say, ‘This newspaper is just ridiculing me. I’m going to sue them.” But now, The Onion is more well known.

People think of it more as being Lampooned on SNL. “Oh, now I’m in the club because I’m being made fun of!” In the past, we might have gotten a cease-and-desist letter or a call from an angry lawyer or from a big company that we made fun of. Now, they’ll send us a big box of their products. In terms of people, there are still some that still don’t get it. One is director Michael Bay; whenever we make fun of him, he gets really angry.

And Donald Trump is another one; every time we make fun of him, his lawyers call us and say, “You can’t make fun of Donald Trump.” I’m sure he’s getting tired of that now because he’s much more in the public eye than he use to be so hopefully those calls with stop. The Onion is going to keep doing what it always has.

Thankfully, we’re pretty well-protected by the first amendment.

something you cherish. That’s just weird; that’s totally weird. Get a sense of humor. I want to tell all the terrorists in the world to lighten up and get a sense of humor. But have I ever been scared?

Well, when we were first starting out in Madison, we were doing a fair amount of, you know, Christianity-bashing jokes. There was this one crazy who sent us a lot of death threats and showed up at our office one time and we had to get a restraining order against him. Shortly after that, we did some book signings in the area and we were all a little on edge thinking that this guy could easily show up because it was publicly announced and everything. But if you’re a writer of satire, that doesn’t really make you want to stop doing what you’re doing. It just makes you want to protect yourself more. The effect that those people want to have, it’s really impossible. If you’re a satirist, you’re going to do satire. If you’re a mountain climber, you’re going to climb a mountain. Nobody is going to stop you unless they kill you, which I guess they could do. But there’s always going to be more. There’s always going to be more people who are going to do it.

That’s why it’s so insane.

Like c’mon, as long as you’re not getting hurt, let people do what they do. But obviously, it’s a culture clash, too. We’re so accustomed to our freedom of speech and having this open dialogue unlike people who are terrorists, wherever they come from with what’s probably a pretty draconian political system, where that’s just unthinkable to them. Obviously it’s a problem.

I think the challenge is... how can we help those societies transform themselves to come up with legitimate, non-corrupt governments that can provide services towards their people and economies that offer jobs and hopes for their young people.

DPR: The Charlie Hebdo attacks showed that satire can be more than just harmless political jokes. Have you ever been scared to make a particularly edgy joke? What ran through your mind when you saw those attacks?

Dikkers: Well, I was very saddened obviously; it’s a horrible tragedy. It shouldn’t have happened because that’s all satire should be, words. It’s just words. It’s mystifying to me how insane you would have to be or how little a sense of humor you would have to have to want to kill someone for making fun of you or

DPR: On a lighter note, what is your all time favorite Onion headline?

Dikkers: I would have to say my all-time favorite Onion headline is from the year 2000 when the Supreme Court gave the presidency to George Bush. The headline was, “Bush: ‘Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.’” And I liked that at the time, I thought it was very clever and very funny. But since that time, that article has proven to be incredibly prescient. Because the writer, who was Todd Hanson, our head writer at the time, predicted so many details about the Bush presidency and laid them all out almost in succession. And that article has been written about in the New York Times and other places as being an amazing prediction of the future. I look back on it now and read it and am astounded by how accurate it was.

And funny! It was done in a really funny way. I just think that was, among all the stories we’ve done, one that I would call our best work.

FALL 2015

DPR2.indb 43

DUKE POLITICAL REVIEW

43 12/3/15 1:53 PM

ALREADY READ THIS COVER TO COVER? Check out more at dukepoliticalreview.org

DPR2.indb 44

12/3/15 1:53 PM