Brown Political Review - Winter 2014 Issue

WINTER 2014 / VOLUME III ISSUE 4

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Brown Entrepreneurship Program is hosting Brown’s first multischool pitch competition this April! Spend a weekend networking and building a business, while learning the ins and outs of pitching. No prior experience necessary! Stay tuned for more info.

Who: Brown and other schools from the Southern New England area What: A fun competition where you can work on a business idea and pitch it Where: Brown University When: April 10-12 Why: Because it’s awesome

Contact ignite@brownentrepreneurship.com

STAFF Executive Board EDITORS IN CHIEF MINTAKA ANGELL & BENJAMIN KOATZ CHIEF OF STAFF KATRINA MACHADO ASSOCIATE CHIEF OF STAFF NAZ AKYOL SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR L AUREN SUKIN INTERVIEWS DIRECTOR HENRY KNIGHT MEDIA DIRECTOR MARÍA PAZ ALMENARA CONTENT DIRECTOR MEGHAN HOLLOWAY BUSINESS DIRECTOR ANISA HOLMES MARKETING & OUTREACH DIRECTOR ELENA SALTZMAN L AYOUT DIRECTOR LIZ STUDLICK

CONTENTS Features A DRUG DEFERRED The curable diseases we just can’t fix Ariadne Ellsworth VIOLENCE WITHOUT BORDERS Fear and loathing from LA to Latin America María Paz Almenara

Editorial SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR L AUREN SUKIN NATIONAL MANAGING EDITOR EZRA KAGAN GLOBAL MANAGING EDITOR MIGUEL PIMENTEL ASSOCIATE EDITORS SADHANA BAL A, MATTEO CAVELIER RICCARDI, NAOREEN CHOWDHURY, EDWARD CLIFFORD, ARIADNE ELLSWORTH, NOAH FITZGEREL, JACOB FREUND, DAVID MARKEY, BASUNDHARA MUKHERJEE, CARLY WEST & YIDI WU

Copy Editorial CHIEF COPY EDITORS NIKHIL KUMAR & SHEHROSE MIAN COPY EDITORS CLEMENS AEPPLI, SABIYA AHAMED, MEREDITH ANGUEIRA, THOMAS CULVER, GRAHAM GONZALES, ERIN IYIGUN, STELL A KIM, NATALIE LERNER, WILLIAM NOBER, DANIEL RABINE, GABRIELL A REYES, TALIA RUESCHEMEYER-BAILEY, BRENNA SCULLY, DUNCAN WEINSTEIN, ASHER WOODBURY & KERRY YAN

Interviews

INTERVIEWS DIRECTOR HENRY KNIGHT ASSOCIATE INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS ELI MOT YCKA & ZACHARY RUBIN INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES ALEXANDER ABUAITA, NAOMI CHASEK-MACFOY, MICHAEL CHERNIN, LIAM DEAN-JOHNSON, MADELEINE MATSUI, SABIN RAY & SAM RUBINSTEIN

Media

MEDIA DIRECTOR MARÍA PAZ ALMENARA ASSOCIATE MEDIA DIRECTORS ALIF IBRAHIM & EUGENIA LULO CONTENT CREATORS GRAY BRAKKE, T YLER DAELEMANS, INDIRA PRANABUDI, NINA ROESNER & ERIC SONG

Content CONTENT DIRECTOR MEGHAN HOLLOWAY ASSOCIATE CONTENT DIRECTOR NOAH FITZGEREL WEBMASTER TANAY PADHI ASSOCIATE WEBMASTER SHREYA SRINIVAS SECTION MANAGERS MATTEO CAVELIER RICCARDI, MEG SULLIVAN & CARLY WEST ASSOCIATE SECTION MANAGERS EDWARD CLIFFORD, ARIADNE ELLSWORTH, NIKHITA MENDIS & BRENNA SCULLY CULTURE WRITERS EMMA AXELROD, SARA ERKAL, ASHLEIGH MCEVOY, EMMA MOORE, OWEN PARR, AMALIA PEREZ, NATE SHAMES & PHOEBE YOUNG US WRITERS PIETER BROWER, BRIAN COHN, ZACHARY FREDMAN, ERIN IYIGUN, MITCHELL JOHNSON, KANIKA KHANNA, KRISTINE MAR, IAN TARR, SCOTT THEER & ALEJANDRO VICTORES WORLD WRITERS QIHENG CHEN, LYDIA DAVENPORT, MATTHEW DUDAK, MARINA GATTÁS DO NASCIMENTO, HASSAN HAMADE, JAMES JANISON, MATTHEW JARRELL, PAUL A MARTÍNEZ GUTIÉRREZ, MILI MITRA, LUKE O’CONNELL, PREDRAG PANDILOSKI & CAMIL A RUIZ SEGOVIA

Business BUSINESS DIRECTOR ANISA HOLMES BUSINESS AND SALES ASSOCIATES SOPHIA ASHAI, ISABEL DIAWARA, EDWARD LI, GRAHAM ROTENBERG, MALLIKA SAHAYA & STEPHEN STAHR

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THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

Dispatches

5 6 7

WHEN POLICE ARE CRIMINALS Paula Martínez Gutiérrez & Camila Ruiz Segovia CHILDREN FROM CHAINS Sara Erkal AMBASSADOR FOR SALE Zachary Fredman

United States

9 10 12 14 22

KEYSTONE LIGHT Kevin Chen & Thomas Culver RATERS OF THE LOST ART Yidi Wu EMPT YING THE FULL HOUSE Christine Blandhol UNDERGRADUATE, OVERPRICED David Markey AN UNCHARITABLE TRUTH Mintaka Angell

The idea of tanks rolling into Finland, though implausible, is less ludicrous than a Russian flag over the Riksdag in Stockholm.

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World

25 26

The value of the informal care

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that women provide to the

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elderly ranges from $148 to $188 billion annually.

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Marketing & Outreach MARKETING & OUTREACH DIRECTOR ELENA SALTZMAN ASSOCIATE MARKETING & OUTREACH DIRECTOR OLIVIA PINCINCE MARKETING & OUTREACH ASSOCIATES GEOFFREY KOCKS, ALEKSANDRA LIFSHITS, EBONY MCCASKILL, PERL A MONTAS & MARLEY RAFSON

REPAINTING HISTORY Rebecca Hansen PERU’S DARK AND SHINING NIGHTS Marina Gattás do Nascimento WHEN THE SWEDISH FISH Alex Lloyd George SIX DECADES L ATER Thaw Zin Aung Gyi HOW TO TRUST A TERRORIST Katherine Long

Interviews

Layout

L AYOUT DIRECTOR LIZ STUDLICK ASSOCIATE L AYOUT DIRECTOR BEN BERKE DESIGN ASSOCIATES KEREN ALFRED, ANNABEL RYU, ANDREW STEARNS & KIMBERLY TRUONG INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS MYLES GURULE, EMILY REIF & LUCY VAN KLEUNEN

Artists

ART DIRECTOR OLIVIA WATSON STAFF ARTISTS MARÍA PAZ ALMENARA, KWANG CHOI, SORAYA FERDMAN, AMANDA GOOGE, ANISA HOLMES, JULIA L ADICS, KATRINA MACHADO, KRISTINE MAR, EMILY REIF & GRACE SUN DISPATCHES OLIVIA WATSON COVER ARTIST EMILY REIF

BPR MEDIA SPOTLIGHT: UBER AND LYFT

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43

DAWN SMITH JUNOT DÍAZ THOMAS PEREZ KATHERINE MANGU-WARD JOE SCARBOROUGH REZA ASLAN JOEL SIMON

THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS THE MPAA IS MADE UP OF THE SIX LARGEST PLAYERS IN THE FILM INDUSTRY — TOGETHER FORMING MORE THAN

OF THE US MARKET.

90%

AT ITS APEX, PERU’S SHINING PATH WAS COMPRISED OF

10,000

WU p.10

MILITANTS AND WAS REPONSIBLE FOR AN ESTIMATED

ELLSWORTH p.16

DEATHS IN THE CIVIL CONFLICT.

37,400

GATTÁS DO NASCIMENTO p.26

THE NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ESTIMATED THAT AS MANY AS

10 TO 27 MILLION

DOSES OF AN EBOLA VACCINE ARE NEEDED.

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BLANDHOL p.12

ALMENARA p.28

84.6%

STUDIES SUGGEST THAT AS MANY AS OF CAREGIVERS FEEL THAT THE BURDEN OF

THEIR RESPONSIBILITIES IS TOO GREAT

WOMEN’S LIFETIME RISK OF BREAST CANCER HAS INCREASED FROM 1 IN 22 IN THE 1940S ANGELL p.22 TO 1 IN 8 IN 2014.

$190

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

117%

$45

IN THE PAST YEAR, THE NUMBER OF UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN UNDER 12 APPREHENDED WHILE ATTEMPTING TO ENTER THE UNITED STATES HAS INCREASED BY

1960

2014

COST OF A BROWN DEGREE IN THOUSANDS, ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION

MARKEY p.14

DISPATCHES WHEN POLICE ARE CRIMINALS PAULA MARTÍNEZ GUTIÉRREZ & CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA

economic development and reintegrate Mexico into the global market. By targeting the fiscal, telecommunications and energy sectors, the reforms present Mexico as a hub for innovation and development. Peña Nieto’s administration has called this the Mexican moment — a series of campaigns to restore the government’s legitimacy and shift the narrative from that of a potentially failed state to that of a rising nation. Indeed, within a few months of his 2012 election, Time magazine claimed Peña Nieto was “saving Mexico.” Soon after, reports about the country began to focus less on decaying national stability and more on new, rapid economic improvements.

This illusion fell apart with the events in Ayotzinapa. On September 26, local po-

bodies are those of the missing students, but fellow teacher-trainees assume that the corpses are those of their colleagues.

Investigations revealed more chilling information regarding police involvement in the incident. After interrogations, 22 policemen confessed to collusion with the United Warriors. José Luis Abarca Velázquez, the mayor of Iguala, took flight with his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa, the sister of one of the main leaders of the United Warriors. Despite the magnitude of the events and the sweeping implications of guilt, Abarca has assumed no responsibility.

Though violent episodes are quotidian in Mexico, the events of Ayotzinapa sparked national outrage and attracted significant international attention. This act of violence was committed not just against civilians but against students training to be teachers in rural areas — young activists

In Mexico, torture rates have increased by 600 percent since 1994.

Amnesty International indicates that recent events will only contribute to worsening conditions. licemen in the city of Iguala opened fire on 80 students at a rural college for educators.

The students had been raising funds in order to attend a peaceful demonstration in Mexico City. During this attack, six students were murdered and 57 were forcibly taken away in police cars. A few days later, 14 of them managed to escape and explained that the police handed over the remaining students to a local drug-trafficking group, the United Warriors. On October 4, with the whereabouts of the remaining 43 students still unknown, a mass grave with at least 28 charred bodies was found near the location of the abduction. Since Guerrero is the most violent state in Mexico, investigators aren’t yet sure that these specific

committed to improving the lives of fellow Mexicans. The episode was linked to drug violence and involved criminal cooperation with government authorities responsible for civilian protection. This tragedy is more than an abhorrent act — it is a state crime.

As Mexican social activist and political leader Imanol Ordorika Sacristán emphasizes, it is important to acknowledge the involvement of the Mexican government in the events of Ayotzinapa: State authorities used force against civilians by criminalizing protest as well as by abducting and murdering individuals in order to induce terror.

Moreover, these officials have not yet been held accountable. The jarring lack of transparency in the treatment and punishment

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On September 26, 80 Mexican students from Ayotzinapa, a city in the Mexican state of Guerrero, disappeared in the nearby city of Iguala. Starting with demonstrations on October 8, civil society groups and the international community have demanded the whereabouts of the students and justice against the perpetrators. The search has only prompted more questions, but in the midst of this confusion one thing remains clear: This incident is but the latest case of social and political decomposition in the country. The events in Ayotzinapa contrast with the idea of the “Mexican moment” of prosperity and expose deep corruption and entrenched collusion between drug cartels and the Mexican state.

Violence in Mexico is not rare. The war against the drug cartels, declared by former President Felipe Calderón in 2006, has resulted in a traumatic readjustment of Mexican society. What started as a war between the national army and drug cartels has mutated into a multifaceted conflict involving rival cartels, local governments, federal institutions, self-defense groups and political actors. This has normalized violence — human rights violations are commonplace and include kidnappings, sexual abuse and the disappearance of civilians. In 2012, estimates of the death toll reached between 60,000 and 120,000, according to domestic and international organizations respectively.

The increase in violence has eroded governmental legitimacy on a national level and dampened international economic investment, tourism and foreign relations.

In an attempt to remedy the situation, President Enrique Peña Nieto has pushed for numerous reforms that aim to promote

Highlights from our online writers at BrownPoliticalReview.org

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BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW DISPATCHES

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of these acts has come to characterize the behavior of public institutions.

Ironically, the effort from authorities to stop students from exercising their right to protest has spurred massive civil action.

Since October 8, groups have organized demonstrations in Mexico and around the world to show solidarity and demand information about the students’ whereabouts.

Valeria Hamel, a law student who has been significantly involved in the country’s student movements since 2012, points out that even though there was a slow initial reaction from the government, the large civil response and international media spotlight have pressured leaders to act.

The director of Amnesty International Mexico, Perseo Quiroz Rendón, urged Peña Nieto and his administration to conduct immediate and transparent investigations into abuses in Mexico. In a country where the torture rate has increased by 600 percent in the last 10 years, Amnesty International indicates that the impunity of government authorities will only make conditions worse. The international outcry has extended beyond NGOs and the media.

The European Union has labeled the case of Ayotzinapa a matter of urgent discussion and has already suspended the process of extending the 2008 Global Agreement with Mexico, stating that before such economic affairs can be discussed, the Mexican government must first protect human rights.

Herein lies Peña Nieto’s greatest fear — that the events in Ayotzinapa might destroy the image of the Mexican moment. His administration’s goal of bolstering Mexico’s international reputation and downplaying the costs of the drug war has lost force. The disappearance of students, along with the domestic response it has stimulated, has reminded the international community of Mexico’s history in the previous administration: a corrupt state caught in the grips of the drug war. Ayotzinapa has already stained foreign economic ties and may break the illusion of the Mexican moment.

But the reality is that the moment never arrived. No matter how many reforms pass through the country’s Congress or how many media campaigns insist a renewed Mexico has emerged, the country’s revitalization cannot take place while it is wracked by violence. The drug war is far from over, and it continues to perpetuate a systemic problem of violence in Mexico. The exposure of complicity between the Mexican government and drug cartels shows that the situation has reached a critical stage — the

police department and local governments are prey to drug cartel interests. As long as the state remains an unaccountable, active participant in crimes and violence, there will be no place for economic development.

The active presence of Mexican protestors in the past month has pressed the government to address the underlying causes of the Ayotzinapa tragedy. Police forces are increasing the standards for the “trust exams” required to join the ranks to prevent cooperation with the cartels. Such reforms hint that achieving stability in Mexico is indeed possible, but it will require a comprehensive and exhaustive revision of the state’s institutions to ensure that they serve the interests of the Mexican population.

The road to a real Mexican moment is long, and the current situation looks grim. The students of Ayotzinapa were raising funds to attend the commemoration of the Mexican student massacre in 1968. Let us hope that their deaths will be the end of a cycle of violence and serve as an ultimatum that drastic changes must begin. u

CHILDREN FROM CHAINS SARA ERKAL In the words of Bitch Media writer Victoria Law, “Imagine a woman actively in labor. Now, imagine her handcuffed. Attached to those handcuffs is a chain that links her wrists to a chain wrapped around her belly.

That belly chain is the same weight as a bicycle chain. Attached to her belly chain is yet another chain that attaches to shackles around her feet.” The process she describes is called shackling — specifically, the shackling of pregnant female inmates. According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), this act is banned in only 16 states, but even in states where the ban holds, it only holds for women who are actively giving birth.

The widespread acceptance of shackling is indicative of larger problems endemic to the female prison population, namely the lack of adequate understanding surrounding fundamental aspects of the female experience — reproductive healthcare, rehabilitation after sexual and domestic violence as well as the treatment of pregnancy — by those involved in creating the

regulations that govern female prisoners.

Approximately two-thirds of women in state and federal prisons belong to a minority group, yet minority groups account for a mere 26 percent of the general female population. Despite the significant decrease in the rate of violent crimes committed by women, the number of women in prison per capita continues to grow rapidly. According to estimates by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, “3 out of 4 women sentenced for violent crimes [commit] simple assault.” In 2000, 61 percent of women in state correctional facilities and 84 percent of women in federal prisons were jailed due to larceny, fraud or drug offenses. Futhermore, the majority of incarcerated females report experiencing physical or sexual abuse and assault before their sentences.

Prisons contain an abundance of women like Marissa Alexander — sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot to ward off her violent husband — who are put behind bars after defending themselves from their abusive partners.

Such stories highlight the low threat many female prisoners actually present, yet shackling remains a prison-industry standard for dealing with arrested or incarcerated women. The practice is not only overused, but it can also cause serious physical strain. The issue is especially problematic when it comes to pregnant inmates, since it presents a threat to both the mother and the baby and reflects a larger inability of the corrections system to adequately address the needs of female inmates.

The practice of shackling violates the conception of decent treatment. Shackling during transport to a hospital makes it difficult for mothers to break their falls should there be an accident. Women tied to their hospital beds during labor cannot move around for comfort. Since this impedes both the mobility of the patient and the ability of doctors to administer care effectively, it can create a hazardous situation in the case of a medical emergency. And according to National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) Pro-Choice Massachusetts, women are also “routinely shackled immediately post-delivery,” a procedure that “significantly increases the risk of dangerous blood clots.”

There has been significant outcry by the medical establishment regarding this dangerous practice. The undue harm has been criticized by several prominent institutions, including the American Medical Association, the American Public Health

AMBASSADOR FOR SALE ZACHARY FREDMAN

Shackling impedes the mobility of the patient and the ability of doctors to administer care effectively, and it can be hazardous in an emergency.

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Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Many pregnant inmates have undiagnosed or untreated conditions such as depression, diabetes, hepatitis, hypertension, asthma and drug addiction. In pregnant women, these are indicators of high risk and could require special medical care that is hard to administer if the mother is shackled.

In response to these problems, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, along with 16 states, has banned this method of restraining pregnant inmates. Massachusetts is the latest state to pass anti-shackling legislation.

The legislation, proposed by Rep. Kay Khan (D-MA) and Sen. Karen Spilka (D-MA) and titled “An Act to Prevent Shackling and Promote Safe Pregnancies for Female Inmates,” was officially signed into law by Gov. Deval Patrick in May. As described by the Massachusetts ACLU, this bill moves to “prohibit the shackling of pregnant women in state and county correctional facilities during pregnancy, childbirth and post-delivery recuperation unless they present a specific safety or flight risk. It would also establish minimum standards for the treatment and medical care of pregnant inmates,

including adequate nutrition, prenatal care and services for managing high-risk pregnancies, to promote safe, healthy pregnant outcomes.” Yet many states still allow the procedure’s use on a routine basis, and its proponents believe that the flight risk and assault threat of an unshackled woman in labor outweighs the harm.

Many experts, including California State University, Fresno Professor of Criminology Barbara Owen, purport that approaches towards female criminality reflect the devaluation of women and girls and show society’s sexual stereotypes. Perhaps most telling is the fact that none of the 16 states that have banned shackling have yet documented an incident of an inmate escape or assault. Given the inhumane nature of this practice, there are few convincing arguments for maintaining this system.

It is, in the words of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts Political Director Michael Falcone, “a patchwork of inconsistent policies that make the health and safety of a woman’s care contingent upon geography or the institution where she happens to be housed.” Although the new Massachusetts legislation is a step in the right direction, the move only resolves an immediate problem that hints at the larger policy oversights in women’s prisons across the country. As Richard Posner, the chief judge for the US Seventh Circuit Appeals Court, wrote: “We must not exaggerate the distance between us, the lawful ones…and the prison and jail population; for such exaggeration will make it too easy for us to deny that population the rudiments of humane consideration.” u

In February 2014, Noah Bryson Mamet told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had never been to Argentina, the country to which he was to be appointed as the American ambassador.

Mamet’s nomination by President Obama, for whom he helped raise $500,000 in 2012, is not the only one that has raised questions regarding the use of diplomatic posts to return political favors. In contrast to nations where almost all ambassadors are career diplomats, the United States typically gives out 30 percent of ambassadorships as political favors, usually to stable, well-established allies in Asia, Western Europe and the Caribbean. This tradition is one of the few open examples left of political cronyism in the United States.

The trend of using diplomatic appointments to return political favors has increased under the Obama administration.

Almost 41 percent of Obama’s second-term nominations have been political, coming from outside the ranks of career Foreign Service Officers. The president has increasingly come under fire from both sides of the political aisle over what many see as a sequence of foreign policy failures. Relationships with allies have deteriorated, conflict with Russia has reached a post-Cold War high and civil wars in both Iraq and Syria seem to be spiraling out of control.

According to the US State Department, an ambassador is the “President’s highest-ranking representative to a specific nation.” Ambassadors are responsible for every government agency that operates out of the embassy, and they coordinate the activities of all US personnel in that country. In certain countries, particularly allies, ambassadors are also responsible for upholding less formal diplomatic rites and traditions. Ambassadors in countries like Britain and France are expected to host extravagantly expensive dinners and parties for other diplomats, foreign journalists and local officials. Because the government’s budget does not cover all of these expenses, they usually become the ambassador’s personal responsibility, with some spending over $1 million per year on entertaining at their post.

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To be appointed as an ambassador, it usually isn’t enough to make traditional political donations. Many appointees are so-called “bundlers,” a term referring to those who have raised money from various donors that is then delivered in a bundle often reaching seven figures. Exact numbers for bundles are hard to come by, as candidates usually only release amounts in broad ranges.

In addition to a prestigious title and foreign policy power, ambassadors also receive material perks. Those in rich countries live in elaborate houses and compounds, hosting parties dotted with celebrities and powerful politicians. Not only did the ambassador to Italy, John R. Phillips, raise more than $500,000 for President Obama, but his wife was also a White House communications director. They now enjoy a 16th-century Italian villa with a three-story, 5,000-bottle wine cellar.

The current nominee for ambassador to Norway, George Tsunis, damaged US relations before even taking his post. At his nomination hearing, he testified that he had never been to Norway, incorrectly identified the country’s political system as presidential — although it is a parliamentary monarchy — and referred to one of the parties in the coalition government as a radical “fringe element” that “spewed ha-

stop there. Colleen Bell, the unconfirmed nominee for ambassador to Hungary, could not name any US interests in the region more specific than “the security relationship and also the law enforcement and to promote business opportunities [and] increase trade.” Bell is a television producer with few qualifications other than being a top Obama fundraiser. The former ambassador to Luxembourg, Cynthia Stroum, an Obama bundler who raised over $800,000 in 2008, resigned in January 2011 before the release of a scathing report by the Inspector General that blamed her for many of the embassy’s problems. In 2012, Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue Magazine who created the Runway to Win fashion line that raised over $40 million for Obama’s 2012 campaign, was considered a front-runner for the ambassadorship to Britain or France.

Both the executive and legislative branch have ignored the Foreign Service Act of 1980, which states that “contribution to political campaigns should not be a factor” in presidential nominations. It adds that ambassadors should have “useful knowledge of the language...and understanding of the history, the culture, the economic and political institutions, and the interests of that country.” While some political appointees meet these standards, many fall short. And Congress has not done its part to prevent such appointees from taking office overseas.

With the fallout from the NSA scandal, continued resentment of the United States in the Middle East, a stagnant economic recovery and an aggressive Russia, positive relationships with other nations can no longer be taken for granted. While foreign countries send their top diplomats

Nonetheless, there have been some successful political appointees. Charles Rivkin, who raised more than $500,000 for the president’s 2008 campaign, was the ambassador to France during Obama’s first term. He has been lauded on both sides of the Atlantic for developing close ties to Paris and for raising Foreign Service morale.

Importantly, Rivkin already had longstanding connections with France. While he was not a career Foreign Service member, he was fluent in French and had lived in the country prior to his appointment. Rivkin also had a long business career with strong ties to the French media.

The president isn’t fully to blame for the use of ambassadorship appointments to return political favors. As demonstrated by the Senate’s confirmation of nominees like Baucus, Congress has largely accepted the practice of appointing donors and political friends to key Foreign Service positions.

to the United States, the United States has been sending rich donors with deplorably little knowledge about their respective host countries. This unbalanced relationship sends a powerful message of arrogance and disrespect to allies. If the United States wants to retain its influential role in world politics, economic and military power is not enough. It needs talented and experienced diplomats to negotiate relationships and further American interests abroad.

This trend has become an executive tradition, and political bundlers, who are increasingly vital for winning elections, have come to expect perks. However, Obama campaigned on the promise of a newer, more transparent Washington. With regards to diplomacy, this has yet to happen.

Obama can and should do better. With two long years remaining, it’s not too late for the president to display the willpower to defy political norms. u

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW DISPATCHES

In addition to prestige and power, ambassadors receive material perks.

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tred,” provoking anger in Oslo. Since 2008, Tsunis has personally donated more than $800,000 to Democratic causes, in addition to the $500,000 he has raised from others for the party.

Even nominees to countries where ambassadors will need to play a much more important role, such as China, have shown dismal knowledge of the country in which they are nominated to serve. On paper, Max Baucus seemed like a reasonable diplomatic nominee. He served in the Senate for 36 years and was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. However, during his confirmation hearing earlier this year, he admitted that he was “no real expert on China” and was unable to answer a question about China’s Air Defense Identification Zone, a vitally important issue in Asian-American foreign relations. Baucus was confirmed to the post in February.

The irresponsible nominations do not

KEYSTONE LIGHT Rhode Island’s fight against fracked gas on tap STORY BY KEVIN CHEN AND THOMAS CULVER / ART BY KATRINA MACHADO

F

miliar, Rhode Island’s opposition has taken on a distinctly small-town flavor. Throughout the Northeast, grassroots groups like Stop the Algonquin Pipeline Expansion (SAPE) and Fighting Against Natural Gas (FANG) are working to oppose Spectra Energy’s proposal. These groups advocate nonviolent protest as a way of combatting the Algonquin expansion, and they have had some success rallying New Englanders.

Several members of Providence’s chapter of FANG were arrested during a sit-in at the office of Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) — the protestors vowed to stay until he promised to oppose fracking. Locally, Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion has mobilized Rhode Islanders to canvas Burrillville neighborhoods and has organized an anti-natural gas march featuring signs with slogans like “People over profit” and “We don’t need no compressor station.”

Federal representation hasn’t been much help to the local movements. Even Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), one of Congress’s token environmentalists, supports natural gas as a transition fuel. In April of this year, Whitehouse and Reed cosigned a letter with several other New England senators imploring the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to consider the pipeline expansion in order to stabilize New England’s energy market. Furthermore, state action does not seem capable of pre-

venting the compressor station expansion.

When Nebraska attempted to stop a similar expansion of the Keystone pipeline, it faced opposition from the courts. In February 2014, a judge struck down the 2012 law that gave the governor and state legislature the right to determine the Keystone XL route and returned jurisdiction over routing to the Nebraska Public Service Commission.

And despite the grassroots efforts, local governance can’t help either. Cities like Burrillville are relatively constrained in their legal ability to influence pipeline expansions.

FERC has primary oversight over regulating and permitting interstate pipeline projects and has a strong history of supporting the natural gas industry — it has yet to turn down a project comparable to the AIM expansion anywhere in the United States.

While citizens have been invited to provide feedback through a number of public hearings and a “notice and comment” process, FERC’s track record indicates that it is likely to approve the proposal after the completion of its final environmental impact statement at the end of the year.

Fortunately, the Keystone XL debate halfway across the country may offer a glimmer of hope for frustrated Rhode Islanders. Keystone would run through rightwing states with a stronger pro-natural gas bend than Rhode Island. Nevertheless, the project has been sidelined for six years, thanks, in large part, to grassroots advocacy that has drawn national media attention and a string of lawsuits brought forth by concerned locals. With this in mind, it seems possible that continued pressure from liberal northeastern groups like SAPE and FANG could at least postpone a final decision. If a handful of farmers and ranchers in deep-red Nebraska can keep a transnational energy project worth billions on hold, there may yet be reason to believe that protesters stranded without government support in a small Rhode Island town can do the same. u KEVIN CHEN ‘15 IS AN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES CONCENTRATOR. THOMAS CULVER ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR AND A COPY EDITOR AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

rom the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, the notorious Keystone XL pipeline has divided the United States perhaps more than any other environmental issue in the past decade. But a thousand miles away, a similar, lesser-known controversy is becoming painfully local for the citizens of Burrillville, Rhode Island. A town of roughly 16,000 in the far northwest corner of the Ocean State, Burrillville houses a compressor station that pumps pressurized natural gas along a pipeline owned by Spectra Energy, a Texas-based corporation.

In April 2012, Spectra unveiled plans to increase the capacity of its New England line, the Algonquin Gas Transmission pipeline, by 14 percent. Despite the fact that the pipeline’s actual length would only increase by about 40 miles, the expansion, known as the Algonquin Incremental Market (AIM) project, has generated outcry all along its route. The controversy is taking place in New England’s intimate town halls, and it raises serious questions about the ability of a tiny state like Rhode Island to influence the outcome of a major interstate energy project.

The arguments for and against the AIM are nothing new. Those in favor of the expansion tout natural gas as a transition fuel that will bring economic stimulus to towns along the route, with potential savings of $651 million a year in energy costs for New England customers. Supporters also present an environmental argument: Natural gas production means decreased air pollution as compared to oil or coal use. On the other hand, opponents point out that New England’s current natural gas infrastructure is adequate and that much of the additional natural gas would be destined for export. Consequently, they argue, the expansion would do little to improve the domestic energy situation and even less to create permanent jobs. Those challenging the pipeline also have grave environmental and safety concerns, particularly regarding possible negative health effects like asthma and nausea related to emissions from natural gas compression stations.

But even if the general debate seems fa-

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RATERS OF THE LOST ART The following article has been approved for all audiences.

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horoughly mixed into the cultural Kool-Aid of the United States, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating system — consisting of “G,” “PG,” “PG-13,” “R” and “NC17” — is one of the most effective tools of censorship and content control in the movie industry. These ratings ostensibly inform parents of a movie’s suitability for children of different ages, but they have a far greater impact than whether or not a rebellious 12-year-old can watch “Anchorman.” Just ask Kimberly Peirce, the filmmaker of “Boys Don’t Cry.” She was surprised to hear from her studio that her film was in trouble because it had received an NC-17 rating. “I thought, well, all of my favorite movies are NC-17,” she said, “but the studio told me they wouldn’t release it because of [that].” Peirce is in good company: Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky and many more notable filmmakers have all been subjected to the same process. The difference between NC-17 and R could mean millions of dollars in revenue for a film, and such a loss presents a strong incentive to alter or simply never release a movie.

Jointly comprising close to 90 percent of the US film market share, the six largest players in the American movie industry — Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal Studios Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. — make up the trade organization that holds internal regulatory power over films: the MPAA. When the MPAA was formed in 1922, it served as an internal regulating force in the movie industry, preempting a concurrent political conversation about whether obscenity in film required government censorship. With the idea that a self-regulating movie industry would stave off censorship, the organization took on the role of devising the guidelines commonly known as the Hays Code. Until the Supreme Court reversed a prior ruling that films were not protected by free speech, the Hays Code put ascen-

dant censorship boards at ease by assessing films before they hit the market. But even after the Supreme Court case extended First Amendment protection to films, the MPAA continued to champion ratings for film content, efforts that manifest themselves today as their rating system. The sad irony of the organization is that in its continued attempts to protect films from censorship, the MPAA has become the film industry’s biggest censor.

The ratings apply to all movies produced by filmmakers from MPAA studios as well as virtually all other filmmakers who want their movies to stand a chance in mainstream theaters. While there are no individual legal repercussions for ignoring ratings — say, allowing minors younger

DURING THE REVIEW PROCESS, ONE DIRECTOR WAS TOLD TO CUT A NUMBER OF SCENES, INCLUDING ONE OF A FEMALE ORGASM DECLARED “TOO LONG.” than 17 into R or NC-17 rated movies — most theaters, especially small ones, follow these informal guidelines with strict adherence. The reluctance to bypass the MPAA stems from the fact that while theaters are under no explicit obligation to enforce MPAA ratings, the MPAA is also under no obligation to allow theaters to show its movies. Neither must the MPAA subject its rating decisions to any oversight or even to any external scrutiny, lending its board of directors significant private power in deciding which films are shown to wide audiences and which will gather dust because of their warning labels.

Perhaps this power wouldn’t pose the tyranny that it currently does if the MPAA possessed an open adjudication process for its ratings system. But that’s not the case.

The MPAA’s internal procedure is almost as obscure as the NSA’s — and perhaps even more so, given that there’s much less political capital in trying to demand clarity from the MPAA. Up until this year, a to-

tally anonymous panel of 10 reviewers, accompanied by a varying number of members on the appeals board, composed the full set of individuals deemed qualified to determine the ratings of almost every film shown in American theaters.

The sheer obscurity of the process and the indecipherable reasons behind rating decisions impressed strongly upon Peirce.

During the review process for her movie, she received edicts from the board to cut a number of specific scenes, including one of a female orgasm declared “too long.”

In an interview for the 2006 documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated,” she wryly wondered: “I do all these terrible things to Brandon [her main character] — I shoot him in the head, there’s all this violence — and that’s fundamentally okay…Since when has an orgasm that was too long hurt anybody?” Peirce believes that the board is not just wrong on the distinction it draws between violence and sex, but also discriminatory in rating obscenity of sexual material, giving harsher ratings to nonheterosexual or female-focused sexual experiences and generally applying its policies inconsistently across films with content that doesn’t match traditional expectations.

Indeed, there is evidence that is difficult to reconcile with claims of consistently applied standards: While movies like “American Pie” receive R ratings for explicit sexual content that essentially lasts the length of the movie, films like “But I’m a Cheerleader,” a movie about a lesbian sent to a gender-correction facility, receive NC-17 ratings for their homosexual spin on similar themes. But even these are among the better outcomes for filmmakers — oftentimes, the board delivers sweeping indictments based upon “thematic content” and “harmful themes,” leaving the film almost impossible to edit to the MPAA’s standards. Facing such judgments, filmmakers find that removing the offensive parts of a film has become far more difficult and often confront the choice of appeasing the MPAA or maintaining artistic integrity.

The MPAA’s strongest claim to legitimacy — that it assigns movie ratings for

cated tastes, but this is not because of individual poor taste — individuals tend to hold specific and complex pleasures, but they are more likely to share primal preferences, like sex and violence, with the masses. And even if large audiences ultimately reject films about personal expression and experiences outside of the brutal and the banal, they are free to do so. This doesn’t justify an external body imposing its own will on the industry. The marketplace of ideas will continue to determine which movies succeed and which get stabbed behind the shower curtain. But whatever the true preferences of audiences might be, it does not appear that large groups must or do hold their preferences in line with the MPAA system.

It’s important to note that while the MPAA makes the ultimate determinations on American films, other film industries face different standards and systems. Largely the opposite of their US counterparts, European films tend towards leniency on sexual content while cracking down harder on cinematic violence. Many Europeans are surprised by the US movie industry’s alacrity to display violence coupled with its puritanical crackdown on sex, demonstrat-

ing how social and cultural standards have become essential components of deciding what content is valid to display and what content is taboo.

All this underscores the reality that MPAA ratings hold little to no inherent value. It is unthinkable that parents particularly concerned with the entertainment material their children might see could get all the information they needed from a few letters and a few more cryptic phrases. Furthermore, in the age of such open and readily available information, it seems dubious that the majority of parents who can afford to take their children to the movies are unable to find a synopsis or review online — that they can’t determine suitability for themselves. Yet the movie industry continues to grant enormous power to the whims and sensibilities of a select few to make decisions that calcify a set of ideals that do not represent the interests their audiences actually hold. Perhaps the MPAA’s regulations seem like something out of a slasher film, but frankly, my dear, moviegoers shouldn’t give a damn. u YIDI WU ‘17 IS AN INTENDED APPLIED MATHECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR AND AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT BPR.

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the benefit of American parents — remains doubtful. In “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” a filmmaker hires private detectives to track down the identities of the MPAA film review board and finds that the board is not necessarily representative of American parents. Many review board members have children of college age or older, but some have never had children. On top of this, the MPAA has never released any of the internal studies it uses to claim authority in discerning the preferences of parents, raising serious questions about their methods.

The steps that the MPAA has taken to improve its rating system are of scant comfort. Upon the release of “This Film Is Not Yet Rated,” the MPAA announced that it would release the identities of its top three panelists online, limit hiring to panelists who fit the profile of the average American parent and clarify the standards for ratings. The MPAA has also agreed to allow producers to bring up examples of other movies during appeals, though it has tempered this concession with the note that the MPAA can give no guarantee that comparisons can help the producer, since its decisions are based on the context within the movie itself.

However, these improvements still don’t change the perverse structural incentives behind votes on ratings. First and foremost, simply being a parent and living in Los Angeles ought not to be the primary qualifications for deciding the fates of thousands of films in the United States. Beyond its flagrant lack of diversity, the panel remains unaccountable for explaining why an aspect of a movie is unacceptable. But the most important harm is that there’s no overarching incentive for the panel to negotiate with individual movie directors, even those who work for large studios — the panel has all the leverage, no oversight and the final say. A realistic appraisal of the situation makes two things clear: The MPAA will never voluntarily relinquish its power, and heavy-handed policy restricting their actions would be more or less infeasible. The MPAA is a trade organization with enormous influence and financial resources. There’s very little will amongst the powerful to ban it or abolish its existing structures, including the ratings system.

Still, it’s unclear whether the MPAA is even necessary, given that audiences can largely self-regulate. General audiences do not have the most nuanced and sophisti-

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EMPTYING THE FULL HOUSE Home is where the hospice is.

STORY BY CHRISTINE BLANDHOL / ART BY GRACE SUN

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he United States is all grown up, and the wear and tear is starting to show in all the wrong places. The baby boomers, the largest generation in American history, are aging out — by the year 2050, the population of American adults over the age of 65 is expected to double, making up a projected 20 percent of the population. Improvements in medicine and living standards have steadily increased life expectancy in the United States, presenting a unique problem: The very health care system that is responsible for higher life expectancies is unequipped to handle the burden of an aging population. While the demand for long-term care becomes greater and greater, the go-to caretakers have become those who are often the least prepared to handle the challenges of elder care: family members. As the United States grows old, it is the government’s turn to become the caretaker and provide resources for the aging.

Informal care has always been an essential part of the US health care system.

Today, 39 percent of American adults — mostly between the ages of 30 and 64 —

find themselves caring for a sick or elderly family member. These unpaid and usually untrained caregivers provide 84 percent of total long-term care hours to the elderly.

Most are not qualified or equipped to provide geriatric care, especially when chronic illness is involved. Nevertheless, the role of informal care has been perceived as a complete substitute for professional care.

Society views formal care as a necessity for patients with illnesses such as cancer, but for the elderly, family-based care is often glorified as a virtuous commitment, even though the task puts emotional and fiscal strain on the caregiver. Studies suggest that, despite largely considering their care to be important, as many as 84.6 percent of caregivers feel that the burden of their responsibilities is too great, and many report feeling unqualified or unable to provide adequate care for the individual whom they are responsible for. The failure to recognize the costs and difficulties of caring for the elderly masks the need for collaboration between formal and informal care. The first challenge in preparing an infrastructure that can adequately care for a growing el-

derly population is acknowledging the need for formal health care and destigmatizing professional involvement in the day-to-day well-being of older family members.

Elder care has broad economic ramifications: The total opportunity cost of taking time off from work in order to care for elderly family members is estimated at $522 billion annually. Moreover, 40 percent of individuals requiring long-term care live near the poverty line, so low-income families bear a disproportionate share of the burden and cost. Private home care costs range from $10 to $40 an hour, and the average cost of one year spent in a nursing home is $76,680. Given the current inadequate state of government funding for longterm care, the high cost of alternative options gives low-income families little choice but to bear the economic load and provide the care themselves.

Medicare provides limited coverage for professional in-home care, but it does not provide adequate support for long-term care. It fails to cover 24-hour in-home care, and it usually does not cover personal care (including bathing, dressing and bathroom

implemented it have done so unequally.

As a result, many people still struggle to finance long-term care options. Given the low income level of many individuals needing long-term care, equalizing and expanding reforms to Medicaid’s long-term care policies are all the more urgent.

The reliance on informal elder care carries specific implications for women in the workforce. Since women are typically paid less than men, the opportunity cost of female family members staying at home is often lower. Although societal expectations also play a role, this economic argument helps explain why the average caregiver is a middle-aged, married female. In total, the annual worth of informal care provided by women ranges from $148 billion to $188 billion. When women take time off of work to care for family members, they are more likely to earn lower wages and benefits upon returning to work. Even when women don’t leave their jobs, 33 percent of working women providing informal care reduce their work hours, while 29 percent

IT COSTS BUSINESSES AN ESTIMATED $3.3 BILLION ANNUALLY TO REPLACE WOMEN WHO QUIT THEIR JOBS TO ACT AS CAREGIVERS. pass up career-furthering opportunities. A lack of affordable professional care in the future would not only stymie women’s advancement in the workforce, but also cause substantial harm to companies — it costs businesses an estimated $3.3 billion annually to replace women who quit their jobs to act as caregivers.

One common argument for family care is that geriatric patients are widely considered safer in the home of a relative.

But elder abuse is actually more likely to be committed by family members than by professionals: 89.3 percent of reported abuse “occurs in domestic settings,” according to the National Institute of Justice.

This abuse, affecting 11 percent of the older population, takes on many forms, including financial exploitation, neglect and physical abuse. However, considering the difficulties of reporting elder abuse, the rates are likely even higher — for every reported case, it is estimated that five more go unreported. Elderly people with certain diseases are at an even higher risk of abuse: Almost 50 percent of those with dementia were found to have experienced mistreatment

at the hands of their caregivers. Regardless of whether elder abuse is fundamentally a product of overburdened families, intentional mistreatment or unintentional neglect caused by a lack of expertise, it’s clear that more comprehensive fixes need to be implemented to prevent this problem.

As the US population continues to age, the financial and personal burdens of providing predominantly informal elder care will only increase. Because of this, it’s necessary for federal and state governments to take prompt action. To their credit, some states have recognized the intense struggle of informal long-term care and have begun taking steps in the right direction. In July 2013, Rhode Island became the third state to pass the Temporary Caregiver Insurance bill. The legislation guarantees four weeks of leave for employees at two-thirds of their normal pay in order to take care of loved ones who have fallen ill. Unfortunately, only a few states currently have a form of paid family leave. Efforts by Democrats to pass a national family leave insurance act have been unsuccessful so far, due to staunch resistance by pro-business conservatives.

The Family and Medical Leave Act allows family members to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave — but without compensation, this initiative does little to help the financial strain put on caregivers. In a Republican-dominated Congress, those dynamics look unlikely to change anytime soon. But if Americans continue to rely primarily on informal eldercare, establishing paid family leave will be essential to financially protect the increasing number of people who need to take time off to care for their aging relatives.

An increase in spending on in-home care will be necessary to address the challenges millions of Americans face as they provide for a booming elderly population. Professional in-home care preserves the autonomy of the elderly and provides much needed relief for families without putting additional strain on the capacity of expensive nursing homes. Failing to enact reform threatens the sustainability of informal care. If these options are not expanded, the United States may reach a tipping point where families can no longer absorb the extra strain on the health care system.

As more baby boomers retire, that tipping point will come soon. Without governmental preventative measures, this aging country will soon find itself on life support. u CHRISTINE BLANDHOL ‘17 IS AN APPLIED MATH-ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR.

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assistance). Furthermore, Medicare does not underwrite stays in assisted living facilities and only covers the first 100 days of long-term care after a hospitalization. In fact, Medicare’s first official line of advice for those seeking home care is to “talk to your family to see if they can help with your care or help arrange for other care providers.” In this way, the program plays into the cultural status quo which dictates that informal care is an adequate, if not desirable, substitute for professional care.

Despite its shortcomings, public insurance has improved upon earlier systems in which families were solely responsible for elder care — previous programs didn’t provide for the limited in-home care that Medicare now covers. Important services now available include some in-home nursing services and in-home physical therapy.

Additionally, some programs have improved upon Medicare’s system of longterm care. The Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), for example, allows Medicare recipients to receive inhome help by offering assistance in the form of meals, nursing and adult day primary care. In addition, PACE focuses on training familial caregivers and supporting them through social services. Rather than being the sole source of care, loved ones are used as a complement to formal care under the PACE model. But only 31 states currently implement this program, and even then the services are only offered on a small-scale basis.

Meanwhile, Medicaid coverage of long-term care — which often serves as a supplement for the low-income elderly population — still leaves much to be desired and varies significantly from state to state. Washington’s Medicaid program, for example, provides for two nursing visits daily, whereas Oklahoma’s provides for just 36 visits a year. Cash and Counseling, a Medicaid program that seeks to account for the financial strain put on caregivers, pays family members to provide care and offers them counseling, but only 15 states have implemented the program thus far.

Although these programs are limited steps forward, they are not available to all, even in the states where they are implemented.

In order to qualify for any of these programs, the elderly must be eligible for Medicaid in the first place, which excludes middle-class elders from its benefits. While the Affordable Care Act sought to expand the coverage of Medicaid, many states chose to bypass the expansion, and those that have

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UNDERGRADUATE, OVERPRICED Why you don’t deserve an Iron Man suit STORY BY DAVID MARKEY / ART BY SORAYA FERDMAN

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Brown University undergraduate degree in 1960 cost $45,000 when adjusted for inflation. Today, tuition costs around $190,000 — enough money to pay full fare for a 1960 Brown degree and a 1960 Harvard Business School degree and still have a couple thousand dollars left in couch coins. This upward trend in college tuition isn’t limited to Brown. In the last 50 years, the price of higher education has outstripped inflation by over 150 percent. Increasingly, Americans need a college degree to compete in the job market. As a result, the higher education market’s rising prices are drowning millions of Americans in debt. But the federal government’s response to rising tuition prices has focused almost exclusively on reducing the tuition burden by keeping Stafford Loan interest rates low and increasing spending on Pell Grants — both demand-side solutions.

While undoubtedly important measures for students struggling to keep their heads above water, these attempts to make college more affordable fail to address the heart of the tuition issue: The nature of the higher education market promotes inflation.

Tuition is far more complex than its price tag suggests. Since different types of colleges raise revenue in different ways, the college market can be divided across two distinct lines. First, the differences between public and private universities significantly affect tuition. While government funding underwrites a large portion of public university expenses, private universities receive most of their revenue from tuition and donations. This distinction largely explains the more than twofold difference between the average annual cost of attending a public university, $17,474, and that of attending a private university, $35,074. The second dividing line is between research and nonresearch institutions. Research universities such as Harvard and Duke can generate a significant portion of their revenues through independent operations like hospitals, university publishing houses and retail operations. Smaller nonresearch institutions cannot generate revenues beyond tuition as easily and, consequently, rely more heavily on donations. With these

differences in mind, it might seem odd that nearly all colleges — regardless of their funding sources — have become progressively more expensive, but these distinctions actually illuminate the sources of tuition inflation.

Rising college tuition prices essentially boil down to two major factors: increased spending and cost shifts onto students.

When universities raise professors’ salaries, build new athletic facilities or fund mousetrap research, they increase spending and often leave students to foot the bill. Occasionally macroeconomic forces, like the demand for PhDs in the finance sector, can increase university spending by driving up the price of inputs such as faculty salary.

When this happens, all universities — public and private, research and nonresearch — are affected. More often than not, however, universities elect to increase spending on improvements to their facilities and programs, which drives up the cost of tuition.

This latter form of increased spending is especially troubling because it can justify spending on projects that do not significantly benefit the quality of the education, such as renovating gymnasiums or refurbishing eateries. This villain has an accomplice: decreasing revenue, which can also shift university costs onto students. When state and local governments cut funding or private donations plummet — as happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — universities can elect to shift those costs onto students through increased tuition. In a severe enough crisis, a university may be forced to engage in cost shifts just to keep its doors open.

But the dual forces of spending and cost shifts have not affected all universities equally. History shows that research universities maintain high spending even when market forces push in the opposite direction. From 2000 to 2010, public universities faced massive cuts thanks to slashes in state and local funding. It might seem reasonable that all affected public universities would have increased tuition and decreased spending accordingly. However, while all public universities raised tuition, only nonresearch universities cut spending.

In fact, the Washington Post reported that public research universities saw an average increase of $5,793 in net revenue per student between 2000 and 2010, despite the severity of local funding cuts. Even if these universities kept tuition constant for the entire decade, they still would have raised $2,651 more in revenue per student per year — something public nonresearch universities could not have accomplished.

Over this period, research universities’ revenue growth stemmed from increases in both federal subsidies and profits from independent operations and were then augmented by levying higher prices onto students. Private research universities saw similar increases in spending, largely underwritten by tuition hikes.

Rising spending at universities is partially a function of rising input costs — specifically, professor salaries. Since the 1980s, professors’ wages have outpaced inflation by around one percent per year, yet professors do not seem to have had any obvious productivity boost. Computer science professors in the ’80s taught one class per semester and wrote a few papers per year, just like those of today. However, while the same professors of the ’80s could only work on firewalls, today’s professors are being recruited by Wall Street. Soaring wages of well-educated workers in other markets have forced universities to raise professors’ salaries to compete with other markets

spa and a rock climbing wall. The push at nonprofit universities to increase spending isn’t just a trend; since there is little to no limit to the amount of money a university can justify spending on its endeavors, universities are compelled to raise more and more money for an endless list of potential improvements. In other words, the nonprofit nature of these universities has undermined the higher education market.

Universities that spend gain prestige; those that cut fall into disregard.

The race for prestige also speaks to the growing inefficiency in the higher education market. College is what economists call an “experience good” — a good whose quality can only be known after purchase.

For this reason, any market for experience goods faces intrinsic inefficiencies. The

PURDUE UNIVERSITY SPENT $98 MILLION ON A FITNESS CENTER COMPLETE WITH A 25-PERSON SPA AND A ROCK-CLIMBING WALL. only way consumers can properly evaluate experience goods is if they buy the good consistently and can immediately judge its quality post-consumption. Before ever trying a Hershey’s bar, buyers will use signals — ingredients, brand, price, etc. — to determine the quality of the treat. If, after the purchase, the buyers realize they don’t like chocolate, then they can adjust their purchases accordingly. However, students don’t generally have the luxury of buying multiple undergraduate degrees, so they are forced to rely on signals alone. Since higher prices and fancier amenities signal a higher quality university, albeit at times incorrectly, students are drawn towards universities with high tuitions and higher spending than their more frugal counterparts. Robert E. Martin, a professor of economics at Centre College, notes that when institutions try to “compete on the basis of cost, consumers are going to construe that to mean they’re cutting quality. So you don’t have cost competition, and you thus don’t have a competitive pressure to reduce cost.”

The government and nonprofits alike have tried to remedy tuition inflation by subsidizing education with loans and grants, but this only reinforces the problem. Evidence suggests that when the government increases student aid, universities raise tuition to capture part of the subsidy.

Though this has a marginal effect on rising tuition, it explains what makes the govern-

DAVID MARKEY ‘18 IS AN INTENDED APPLIED MATH-ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR AND AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

looking to hire the highly educated.

But rising professor salaries alone can’t explain ballooning tuition; between 2000 and 2010, increases in spending on instruction only accounted for 15.8 percent of increases in total spending at public research universities. The other 84.2 percent increase in spending primarily focused on institutional endeavors, such as heightened research budgets or greater public service projects. Herein lies the biggest culprit behind tuition inflation: Universities have little to no incentive to control their spending. A college can increase spending on expensive institutional projects (Brown’s strategic plan, “Building on Distinction,” comes to mind) that bring prestige and revenue, but this spending does not always raise the quality of education they provide.

Imagine that Brown buys every student an iPad to use for class. Not to be outdone, Columbia supplies its student body with Lenovos, and MIT soon reacts by giving away Google Glass. So long as the university continues to generate revenue, this amenities arms race can theoretically continue until every student at Harvard flies to class in an Iron Man suit. While this hypothetical is undoubtedly far-fetched, projects of this type can be seen all across the country. Washington University in St. Louis has Tempur-Pedic mattresses in all its dorms.

Purdue University spent $98 million on a fitness center complete with a 25-person

ment’s response to tuition inflation so problematic: Demand-side policies are ineffective at keeping college prices low. Imagine a university that costs $2,000 per year. If the government decides to guarantee all students $1,000 per year to go to college, the university can simply raise tuition to $3,000, since everyone was already willing to pay the pre-subsidy tuition. Though the college now reaps more revenue, it can still save face by accepting students who are only willing to pay the subsidized cost and then call it generous financial aid. This puts financial pressure on low- and middle-income families and keeps barriers high for low-income students.

But there are ways to help these families without hurting schools. Supply-side solutions offer the government alternatives to step in and overhaul tuition inflation within the higher education market.

Regulating a university’s access to revenue and reducing the inefficiencies of higher education associated with an experience good would help tackle rising tuition. This would mean creating avenues for students to compare universities based on final results and allowing them to see how tuition prices are related to results in the job market. Regrettably, most proposed programs centered around these ideas border on either too constraining or too weak-willed.

On the toothless side, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) have co-sponsored a bill that would provide additional employment and earnings data on universities and specific majors. In a more biting vein, President Obama has proposed a plan to use student debt, average net tuition and share of low-income students to give more generous subsidies to schools that keep their tuitions and student debts low. Others suggest that the government fully subsidize public universities, forcing private universities to compete with a zero-dollar price tag. None of these options presents itself as an all-encompassing political Band-Aid. But they do open up a necessary conversation about the need to regulate the higher education market beyond the trope of subsidized loans. And if we hope to bring down tuition inflation, we need to change the distorted incentives at the heart of the issue — and find ways to discourage spending on “Iron Man suits for all” policies over meaningful improvements in education. u

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a drug deferred the curable diseases we just can’t fix

story by ariadne ellsworth / design by annabel ryu

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hile West Africa faces the ravages of Ebola, potential vaccines developed a decade ago are being exhumed from what Dr. James E. Crowe calls “the biotech valley of death.” Dr. Crowe, Director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University, describes the valley as the tenuous transition researchers face in moving drugs from animal to human trials. At this point, many potentially life-saving medical technologies and pharmaceuticals have been relegated to laboratory shelves. In 2000, a group of scientists based out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Vaccine Research Center published a paper in Nature Journal titled “Development of a preventive vaccine for Ebola virus infection in primates.” Three years later, a second group of American scientists built on this study in another paper in Nature describing the development of a primate-tested vaccine that “could provide an intervention to limit the epidemic spread of Ebola.” Despite the vaccine’s apparent potential, however, trials never occurred. Now, as the world faces the largest Ebola epidemic in history — with the CDC estimating a worst-case scenario

of 1.4 million cases of the disease by January 2015 — scientists, politicians, health organizations and the distraught public are belatedly rushing these vaccines to clinical trials, leaving a string of ethical questions in their wake.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has sprinted to the forefront of this fight; the organization convened in October to discuss the framework for and planning of clinical trials. Volunteer-based trials to test the safety of the vaccine began in the United States in October, and similar trials are scheduled to take place in Canada, Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Mali, Gabon and Kenya. Two significantly larger trials are set to start as early as January in Liberia and Sierra Leone, two nations that have borne the brunt of the epidemic. But, according to the WHO official Marie-Paule Kieny, the world’s mobilization to rush vaccinations to clinical trials, “accelerating in a matter of weeks a process that typically takes years,” has raised a number of ethical quandaries and logistical problems. With the growing complexity of global health infrastructure and clinical trials, the media and the public have asked important questions regarding the morality of place-

bo-based trials, the selection of target populations and the infrastructural difficulties of initiating trials. While these are critical inquiries, the Ebola crisis has also uncovered even larger issues about why medical technologies do not go to trial when they should. By uncovering these shortcomings, the Ebola epidemic has provided the global health establishment more than just an opportunity to critically reevaluate its approach to and incentives for clinical research and trials — it is an opportunity to effect structural, long-lasting change. erhaps the most significant problem within the biomedical research field that the Ebola epidemic has unveiled is the underinvestment in research and development in the infectious disease sector.

This is partly responsible for the fact that early-stage vaccinations for Ebola, developed over a decade ago, sat on the backs of laboratory shelves until now, after over 5,000 individuals have already lost their lives to the disease. Dr. Jonathan Kimmelman, Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at McGill University, explained to the Brown Political Review: “The ethical issue is not who is going to get access to these drugs that are in Phase I or Phase II tests.

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The ethical issue here is why, as societies, we underinvest in addressing major infectious-disease health threats.”

Ebola and many other infectious tropical diseases fall victim to the “orphaned research” phenomenon. Even promising drugs and vaccines are often orphaned in their nascent stage. According to the Food and Drug Administration, such “drugs and biologics are intended for safe and effective treatment…but are not expected to recover the costs of developing and marketing,” either because they affect only a small subset of the population, or because they provide little opportunity for substantial profit over high development costs. The prohibitive price tags associated with developing preventative technologies (such as vaccinations), as well as cures for diseases that, like Ebola, predominantly affect less wealthy equatorial countries, have helped engender a category of infectious diseases referred to as “neglected tropical diseases” (NTD).

Like Ebola, the 17 other NTDs, which include rabies and dengue fever, have fallen victim to a system that does little to create or sustain investment in high-cost, low-return vaccines.

Obscured behind vague medical terminology and funding figures are the hu-

ability of this research area, the pharmaceutical industry provided only $231.8 million — 9 percent of global investment — in research and development for NTDs. Furthermore, not all NTDs receive equal attention: The report found that “funding was highly concentrated, with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria receiving nearly 80 percent of the total.” Notably, all three of these diseases, while still more prominent in less developed regions of the world, are much more prevalent in the developed world than are other NTDs. Despite the large amount of private capital available to for-profit pharmaceutical companies that command the global medical research and development sector, few of these resources are put towards unprofitable NTD vaccines. In the United States — the largest global investor in health research and development — approximately 54 percent of health research and development funding is provided by private pharmaceutical corporations. The WHO reports that “even in the United Kingdom, where the medical profession receives more independent, publicly-funded information than in many other countries, promotional spending by pharmaceuticals companies is 50 times greater than spending on pub-

most one trillion dollars, a few billion is little more than a drop in the pond. The WHO recognizes that this conflict of interest can mean difficulties in getting important drugs and vaccines developed, acknowledging that “the profit imperative ensures that the drugs chosen for development are those most likely to provide a high return on the company’s investment. As a result, drugs for use in the industrialized world are prioritized over ones for use in the [developing world], where many patients would be unable to pay for them.” This problem — with no easy fix — contributed significantly to the failure to pursue further trials for promising Ebola vaccines.

The WHO estimates that the development of vaccines can cost anywhere from $163 million to $518 million and can take 15 or more years. While wealthy Western governments have the means to subsidize research and development in new medical technologies that might have enormous social benefit but little profit potential, governments in the developing world don’t have the same financial capacity. Because neither poor countries nor their citizens can afford to bankroll medical research and development for “unprofitable” diseases, there are even fewer incentives for pharma-

Ebola vaccinations, developed over a decade ago, sat on the backs of laboratory shelves until over 5,000 individuals had lost their lives to the disease. lic information on health.” Because large for-profit corporations carry out the majority of research and development globally, the pursuit of new medical technologies is inherently influenced by their perceived future profitability.

It was this phenomenon that kept the 2000 and 2003 Ebola vaccines shelved.

Thomas Geisbert, one of the developers of the 2003 vaccine and a researcher at the University of Texas Medical School’s Galveston branch, told the New York Times that “there’s never been a big market for Ebola vaccines. So big pharma, who are they going to sell it to?” Vaccines simply are not profitable for pharmaceutical companies. Even though the value of the vaccine market increased from $5 billion to $24 billion between 2000 and 2013, this represents merely 2.5 percent of the pharmaceutical industry’s $955 billion revenue in 2013. On balance sheets in which revenue reaches al-

ceutical companies to pursue vaccines or treatments for diseases primarily affecting the developing world. Consequently, the developing world is left largely dependent on Western governments and agenda-driven private philanthropy to underwrite research and development for diseases that disproportionately affect it.

This is not to say that Western countries shouldn’t take up these causes — just that they rarely do so to the necessary extent. After all, Ebola has shown that developed nations can’t simply rest easy — no country is entirely immune to the threat of epidemics. But the sudden interest amongst pharmaceutical companies to begin clinical trials on an Ebola vaccine is not the product of simple altruism. The Norwegian Institute of Public Health has estimated that as many as 10 to 27 million doses of a vaccine are needed due to the recent crisis — numbers which have surely piqued pharmaceutical

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man lives affected by orphaned research and the associated underinvestment in treatments and preventative technologies: NTDs kill an estimated 534,000 of the poorest one billion people on the planet every year. Because the diseases have little to no impact in the developed world, there is little economic incentive for drug companies to invest in research for preventative and treatment technologies. Consequently, progress against these diseases proceeds at a slow pace and is largely contingent on philanthropic and government funding.

A 2009 analysis commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that in 2007, $2.5 billion was invested globally in research and development for new “neglected disease products.” Of this money, 90 percent, or $2.3 billion, was given by public donors (such as the NIH and other government-funded groups) and private philanthropists. Reflecting the low profit-

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interest. And with Western governments increasingly worried about their own populations’ chances of exposure, the profitability of medicines to combat and prevent Ebola has increased. Johnson & Johnson, one pharmaceutical company working on developing a vaccine, has already invested a total of $387 million in a potential solution — $200 million to accelerate the production of the first of a two-part vaccine and $187 million to acquire the rights to the second part of the vaccine from a Danish company.

While it is easy to blame “Big Pharma” for previously failing to bankroll research into medical technologies and pharmaceuticals with the potential to eradicate and treat diseases like Ebola, they may be taking more flak than is due. Large pharmaceutical companies have the capability to maintain capital, technology and personnel that government institutions don’t — resources that have proven immensely valuable — in part because of the profitability of their products. Since the system is unlikely to change outright, government policies that induce private interests to take up research on diseases like Ebola and other NTDs might be a constructive step forward for both policymakers and the pharmaceutical industry. The current Ebola crisis can

clusivity to “sponsors of approved orphan products” and “a tax credit of 50 percent [of] the cost of conducting human clinical testing.” The FDA reports that the program “has successfully enabled the development and marketing of more than 400 drugs and biologic products for rare diseases since 1983. In contrast, fewer than 10 such products supported by industry came to market between 1973 and 1983.” Furthermore, Dr. Blumenthal-Barby explained, “the ethically favorable thing about nudges (as opposed to mandates) is that they preserve the liberty of corporations or individuals since they are just that — nudges — and these entities may still choose a different option.” In light of the neglect of NTDs by the world of corporate-dominated medical research and development, leading countries like the United States should consider implementing nudging laws that apply directly to infectious diseases such as Ebola. he class-specific barriers to drug development are not the only deep-seated issues that the Ebola epidemic has unearthed. The acceleration of the clinical trial process has also exposed fundamental flaws in the way we currently approach and conduct clinical trials themselves. Western media has mostly focused on the ethical concerns of using place-

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would be otherwise. “In the case of Ebola,” says Dr. Kimmelman, because the standard of care is essentially nonexistent, “giving people a placebo is not inconsistent with the standard of care, so it’s not unethical; you’re not putting people at greater risk in order to test something.”

While this sentiment may still leave many uncomfortable, anti-placebo concerns are predicated on mistaken assumptions. The overwhelming concern with the morality of placebos relies on a general belief that those receiving the placebo will inherently be worse off than those who don’t receive it. This assumption points to misplaced optimism as to the efficacy of experimental drugs and vaccines and to a general lack of public knowledge about the problems that clinical trials face. “In the media-portrayal of the [Ebola] vaccine studies, there has been a presumption that this vaccine will ultimately prove to be useful. But the reality is that the vast majority of drugs, vaccines and other interventions that make it into clinical development end up either being unsafe or being ineffective, or both,” explains Dr. Kimmelman. The rushed pace of the Ebola clinical trials in particular should make the public even more wary of placing too much stock in the vaccine’s success.

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The sudden interest amongst pharmaceutical companies to begin clinical trials on an Ebola vaccine is not the product of simple altruism.

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serve as the catalyst for this type of change.

The epidemic has pulled the curtain aside on underinvestment in research and development for the types of infectious diseases that disproportionately affect the bottom billion. In doing so, it has created an opportunity to evaluate and change both public and private biomedical technology development policies across the globe.

Speaking with BPR, Dr. Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby, an assistant professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Baylor College of Medicine, suggested that “using the powers of social norms, ego and re-aligning incentives might be promising ‘nudges’ to use with drug companies.” The Orphan Drug Act of 1983 is one example of a policy nudge that can be used to induce pharmaceutical companies to rescue orphaned research and invest in less profitable areas of research and development.

The act provides seven-year market ex-

bo-based control groups in the trials that are set to occur in West Africa (for instance the upcoming trial in Liberia). While accepting the usefulness of placebos in other cases, experts like David Heymann, the head of the Chatham House Center on Global Health Security, have said that the use of placebos can’t be justified “in the midst of the worst Ebola epidemic in history.” Although the concerns of experts like Heymann are understandable, the use of the placebo in this case is not the main ethical concern. As explained by Dr. Kimmelman, a well-designed clinical trial utilizes the concept of clinical equipoise — the understanding that a trial should function only so long as it can work under a null hypothesis. In other words, throughout the length of the trial there should be no reason to believe that any group of test subjects, regardless of whether they receive the placebo or not, will be any worse off than they

Global efforts to develop vaccines to protect against malaria and HIV, for example, have been largely in vain. Unlike Ebola, malaria is an ever-present problem in tropical regions, killing an estimated 627,000 people per year, and as such it has received significantly more attention from the medical research world than Ebola has.

Despite the fact that scientists have been studying and attempting to defeat malaria for decades, no vaccine has yet proven successful. The WHO reports that although over 20 malaria vaccine variants are currently in clinical trials, only one vaccine in the history of malaria vaccine research and development has made it to Phase III clinical trials (in which testing begins in large test-groups; Phase I and II trials also use human subjects but smaller test-groups).

Although the malaria vaccine currently in development looks more promising than its predecessors, it will not be ready for some

NTD Research funding by organization US National Institutes of Health Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation European Commission US Department of Defense US Agency for International DevelopmenT Wellcome Trust UK Medical Research Council Department for International Development Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pasteur Institute Irish Aid Swedish International Development Agency medical technologies even reach clinical trials. Dr. Kimmelman describes the current state of preclinical research as “a mess” with “so many problems and distortions in the way we do preclinical work that it’s hard to know what you can trust and what you can’t.” Preclinical trials are subject to publication bias and high incidences of type I errors, also known as false-positives. This is because clinical trials often aren’t subject to the most stringent testing standards, like randomization, physician and patient blinding and large sample sizes. Additionally, because publications have a tendency to only publish positive findings, it is hard for researchers to contextualize and interpret successful trials and to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate results.

In light of the Ebola epidemic, reforms to enhance the preclinical trial process are all the more pressing, as the faith put into Ebola vaccines is largely rooted in their perceived success in such trials. But given the tendency for successful preclinical trials to fail once they reach human trials, the celebration may be coming too soon. Since failure due to poor preclinical work can result in hundreds of millions of dollars lost and countless resources squandered in the midst of a time-sensitive epidemic, holding trials to higher research standards increases chances of success in times of crisis.

All this does not go to say that there’s no merit in conducting clinical trials for the current Ebola vaccinations. For one, clinical trials depend on the existence of an

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at-risk population, which, unfortunately, the current epidemic has provided. While circumstances will certainly complicate the clinical trials, the ability to test a vaccine today may help save thousands of lives from Ebola tomorrow. However, the public must remain aware that vaccinations are not infallible, and given the poor state of the preclinical research realm, the global community should be wary of putting all its eggs in one basket.

The Ebola epidemic has opened the door to questions that the medical world has long avoided asking, but to which the answers would be invaluable. The ability to refine response mechanisms in the future will largely depend on the willingness to reexamine and take steps to improve the current system of pharmaceutical research and development. For the first time in decades, the Western world has tasted some of the fear that citizens of the global south face daily, and while the Ebola epidemic will eventually pass, the looming specter of disease will not disappear. After a summer of death in West Africa, it’s no wonder that the emergence of a possible vaccine to protect against Ebola has ignited the public’s imagination. But even more valuable than the vaccine itself could be the lessons that we draw from it. u ariadne ellsworth ‘17 is a political science concentrator and associate US section manager and associate editor at bpr.

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time and, thus far, has only demonstrated 51 percent efficacy. Similarly, the search for a vaccine to protect humans against HIV has been a long and fruitless battle. The first clinical trial for a potential HIV vaccine began in 1987, but 30 vaccine trials and 27 years later, the WHO reports that “only two related [HIV] candidate vaccines [are] being evaluated in Phase III efficacy trials.”

Uneducated optimism surrounding novel vaccines may lead us to disregard the very real risks faced by the test subjects of new vaccines, such as those developed for Ebola. Novel vaccines, explains Dr. Kimmelman, have real potential to “make people worse off.” In 2008, it was discovered that a promising HIV vaccine — the STEP vaccine — which had begun Phase II trials in 2003, may have actually made participants more vulnerable to contracting HIV. Test subjects who had received the vaccine were contracting HIV at a higher rate than those who had not. While the vaccine almost certainly did not cause HIV to develop, its role in the increased incidence of HIV in vaccinated participants remains unclear, and the STEP trials serve as a cautionary tale when it comes to the general optimism that surrounds the rollout of experimental vaccines.

The immense complexities behind conducting clinical trials are partly responsible for the high rate of failure when medical technologies, such as vaccines, make the leap from non-human to human trials.

But the greatest problems begin before new

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BPR Media Spotlight: Uber and Lyft

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MEDIA SPOTLIGHT

BY INDIRA PRANABUDI

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While Uber has attempted to expand internationally, it has faced challenges and regulations from governments across the globe. The ride-sharing service has been banned from Belgium, and in Australia, Uber drivers have been fined by taxi commissions in order to enhance the competitiveness of traditional taxi drivers. In an effort to fight legislation that might hamper their business, Lyft, which raised more than $250 million this investment cycle, hired two Republican-linked lobbying firms in April. And in August, Uber announced that David Plouffe, former adviser to President Obama, would be joining the company’s ranks to help it navigate disputes. Plouffe’s appointment demonstrates the growing understanding from tech companies of the legislative challenges that arise with innovation. The war between ride-sharing services and taxis is as much a political battle as it is an economic one.

See the full photo essay in the Media section at www.brownpoliticalreview.org.

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In the past year, ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have experienced an unprecedented rise to prominence.

These companies are part of an emerging market of freelance service firms that connect buyers directly to sellers in a simple and inexpensive way. With the touch of a button on a smartphone, people who need rides can contact drivers, who can be nearly anyone with a car. Many car owners around the world have welcomed this flexible freelancing job, and customers have embraced the immediacy of the service. With increasingly cheaper rates, Uber and Lyft provide a faster and simpler alternative to taxis. This has led to a decrease in the number of taxi rides taken and has considerably lowered the revenues of taxi companies. As a result, swaths of angry taxi drivers and companies have come out to protest, notably blocking off major streets in Washington, DC this past October. Across the United States and Europe, especially in cities where taxi industries are historically important, the convenience that has accompanied the rise of these new services represents Silicon Valley’s triumph over traditional, heavily regulated institutions.

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AN UNCHARITABLE TRUTH Breast cancer philanthropy is selling out.

STORY BY MINTAKA ANGELL / ART BY KWANG CHOI

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ere’s how to tell if your company is a philanthropic hypocrite,” the Guardian’s Suzanne McGee fumed in early October, following news that oil giant Baker Hughes (BH) had announced a donation of $100,000 to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Coming from a company that is heavily involved with fracking — a process that creates carcinogenic chemicals linked to breast cancer — BH’s donation was both hypocritical and rife with absurd pageantry. Komen’s founder, former CEO and Chair of Global Strategy, Nancy Brinker, accepted the check during a Steelers game, along with a promise that BH would distribute 1,000 pink drill bits to “do [its] bit for the cure.” This is not a new trend: Over the past decade, “pinkwashed” items — branded with cause-related marketing to both fundraise for breast cancer and turn a tidy profit — have come to dominate the market as a way for corporations to express slick-packaged social awareness and for consumers to feel altruistic on a trip to the grocery store. Komen’s acceptance of BH’s donation epitomizes the breast cancer awareness movement’s history of allying with questionable donors to keep momentum behind its campaign.

The breast cancer awareness movement is a complex beast. My mother’s diagnosis came in January 2009, in the United Arab Emirates; the tumor had grown into a hard knot under her skin in a matter of months. Cancer is an ugly, messy disease, and my family was unprepared for the blow. Fortunately, our community was incredibly supportive. Busloads of families went with us to the annual Safe and Sound BurJuman Breast Cancer Walk, all wearing bright pink pants in keeping with the dress code. BurJuman, a local shopping mall, decked out the highway in pink regalia for the march each year, and thousands of people showed up in T-shirts with stylized logos and pink-brimmed hats. “I’m marching for _______,” announced the pink badges we pinned to the backs of our shirts. We carried pink balloons, bought pink wristbands

and streaked our faces with pink war paint.

My mother squeezed my hand tightly as we walked, and she smiled. Everywhere, the ubiquitous pink ribbon stood as a symbol for our struggle and our love for those in the midst of the fight. The crowd laughed, sang and marched, and I felt nothing but intense solidarity. But as evidenced by a long string of controversies ending with the recent BH donation, the breast cancer movement has a much darker underbelly: a history of alliances that have often compromised the principles upon which the movement ostensibly stands.

Though it seems ubiquitous now, breast cancer awareness only became a consolidated movement in the early 1990s, with corporations getting involved after the government and public showed interest in the issue. For the first half of the 20th century, breast cancer was a diagnosis suffered in shame and stigma. The rapid succession of announcements in the 1970s by Shirley Temple, Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller, however, drew a great deal of public attention to the disease and helped contribute to its destigmatization and the increased use of mammograms. By the late ’80s and early ’90s, large advocacy groups had arisen to fight the disease. In 1991, George H.W. Bush established the President’s Commission on Breast Cancer, chaired by Brinker, but Bush failed to deliver on a promise to transfer $210 million in defense spending to breast cancer research. After President Bill Clinton’s election, federal funding jumped from $155 million in 1992 to $400 million in 1993. By then the National Cancer Institute had spent more money on breast cancer than it had on research for prostate, ovarian, colorectal and liver cancers combined. This was paired with increased funding to breast cancer foundations and the first corporate activity in the breast cancer sphere: Estée Lauder makeup counters handed out 1.5 million ribbons with breast self-exam cards in 1992 and collected 200,000 pink ribbon petitions urging the White House to increase research funding further.

The pink ribbons started out peach.

The original breast cancer ribbon was a peach-colored loop fashioned after the AIDS awareness ribbons and made in the living room of 68-year-old Charlotte Haley, whose grandmother, sister and daughter had all fought breast cancer. When Self Magazine and Estée Lauder came calling to offer her a national platform, Haley refused on the grounds that they were too commercial and that she feared they would cause the grassroots nature of the campaign to disappear. Estée Lauder plunged ahead

with the idea anyway, but to avoid legal issues, the company changed the ribbons’ color to pink. The rest is history.

It’s unclear how close nonprofits and their corporate partners have actually come to finding a cure. The lifetime risk of breast cancer has increased from 1 in 22 in the 1940s to 1 in 8 in 2014. By the end of 2014, there will be 2.8 million women with a history of the disease living in the United States. It’s estimated that in 2014, around 232,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 40,000 will die from it.

Mortality rates are a mixed bag too — while they have dropped since 1990 for white women, there are distinct racial disparities in diagnosis and survival rates. Women of color have persistently shown lower rates of screening and shorter survival periods after diagnosis. A 2013 study in the International Journal of Cancer Epidemiology, Detection and Prevention concluded: “While white women are more likely to be

marketing campaign as the “democratization of a disease” — one in which joining the fight against breast cancer is as easy as buying a pink-themed muffin. A 2002 ad run by the BCA in the NYT had a different take on Brinker’s corporate philanthropy: “Guaranteeing quality treatment for breast cancer,” the ad read, “will require real change — and not the kind you carry in your pocket.” The BCA has a good point.

Many pink-themed products don’t actually move money into the hands of charities, nor does sporting tiny pink loops just in the name of “awareness.” And the money that does get channeled into nonprofits, particularly that which goes to Komen, is devoted largely to detection and mammography — noble, but comparatively less valuable than early prevention or a cure.

However, nothing seems to stop companies that are in many ways at fundamental odds with the campaign. The NFL is particularly notable for its promotion of breast cancer awareness this past October, even amidst the league’s recent domestic violence scandals — a move that not only struck many as off-key, but also made clear that a corporation’s support of breast cancer awareness does not necessarily equate to its support of women or women’s rights in other regards. It is important to recognize the adverse impact of these campaigns, regardless of intent. In her book “Pink Ribbons, Inc.,” Associate Professor of Physical and Health Education and Women’s Studies at Queen’s University Samantha King points to how marketing experts have been explicit over the past two decades that cause-related marketing is, above all else, a business strategy, and not an altruistic one.

King quotes one consultant who describes it as “an innovative and socially useful way to augment the power of more traditional marketing.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with profiting from good deeds, but there’s something questionable about Komen’s corporate spending. Much of the money earned from cause-related marketing isn’t going towards curing cancer at all. In terms of awareness, the Komen Foundation and its partners have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; one would have had to live in a doomsday bunker for 20 years to remain unaware of breast cancer and mammography. But many question the value of this relentless education. “Screening is their thing,” sociologist Gayle Sulik, author of “Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health,”

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diagnosed with breast cancer, black women are more likely to die from it.” It’s likely that these figures result from wider racial inequalities in access to health care in the United States, but when an additional five black women die of breast cancer per day with barely an acknowledgement from the mainstream movement, it’s clear that the awareness campaign has missed some critical areas where cancer strikes the hardest.

These numbers have not slowed the philanthropic juggernaut that is the Komen Foundation. Komen’s 2014 Race for the Cure event was nationally sponsored by American Airlines, New Balance Athletic Shoe, Self Magazine, Walgreens, Bank of America and many other large corporations. In the 2010 fiscal year, the Komen Foundation generated $420 million in donations and revenue, and it hosted over 150 races globally in 2014. Komen has also partnered with dozens of corporations to put the pink ribbon on their products in exchange for a fraction of the proceeds they generate. Some of these partners include KFC, Ford Motor Company, the gun company Bersa and even Tito’s Vodka. Initially, the problem with these products may seem to come from the ridiculousness of advertising for a cure on products that harm people’s health. But the real problem is that this tone deafness also shows how deeply disassociated with their roots the awareness movement, and Komen itself, have become. Not only are many of these products directly tied to carcinogens that are linked to breast cancer, but their tacit approval by the Komen Foundation and its ilk is also indicative of complacency at best — and actively selling out at worst. The notion that simply buying a pink-embossed product is enough to stop cancer obscures the real needs of the movement: not money or awareness, which the cause has in spades, but demands for accountability from the government, foundations and nonprofits in terms of producing methods to cure and prevent cancer.

Komen and Brinker are undisputed champions of corporate partnership. A 2011 New York Times article quoted Brinker as saying: “America is built on consumerism.

To say we shouldn’t use it to solve the social ills that confront us doesn’t make sense to me.” The term pinkwashing, which was coined by the activist group Breast Cancer Action (BCA), describes the exploitation and commercialization of breast cancer in order to boost sales. In contrast, the NYT quotes Brinker describing the decades-long

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told Reuters in 2012. “Getting out the word that breast cancer exists is what they excel at — that and raising money. But if your mantra is ‘end breast cancer,’ screening isn’t going to do it.” While studies have suggested that screening has substantially increased the rate of detection for early-stage breast cancer, a three-decade study showed that screening mammography “has only marginally reduced the rate at which women present with advanced cancer…There is substantial overdiagnosis, accounting for nearly a third of all newly diagnosed cancers, and that screening is having, at best, only a small effect on the rate of death from breast cancer.”

Komen has countered these accusations by claiming to put an emphasis on the people who are suffering in the present. Though this is a worthy goal, the question of motive has long surrounded the awareness movement. King notes that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (NBCAM) was actually founded in 1985 by Zeneca, now AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical corporation that manufactures tamoxifen, a top breast cancer drug. Until 2000, AstraZeneca was also the leading producer of chemicals and petrol-based products that have been linked to breast cancer. NBCAM promotes mammography as the most effective tool in fighting breast cancer, and AstraZeneca continues to reserve the right to approve or veto every piece of marketing material for the month’s activities. The link between a pharmaceutical corporation that makes its billions from cancer drugs and its campaign to promote detection — not prevention or a cure — hardly needs explanation, but unfortunately the issue has rarely drawn overt criticism. This is probably due to the increased celebration over the past two decades of cause-related marketing. King argues that corporate influence has framed the fight against breast cancer as most productive when it utilizes the “personal optimism” of breast cancer survivors and research money generated by the pharmaceutical industry.

Moreover, while Komen touts itself as searching for the cure, the proportion of money it spends on research has decreased in recent years from 29 percent in 2008 to 15 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, 18 percent of its revenue was spent on fundraising and administrative costs. Komen has also used a large amount of money to sue lesser known charities and events with the words “for the cure” in their name, even if they were fundraising for entirely

different causes. As of 2010, Komen has filed trademark opposition against more than 100 smaller charities. These legal ventures cost almost one million dollars per year. Komen’s executive salaries are also extremely high: Brinker was paid $684,000 in 2012. This isn’t the only questionable allocation of Komen’s cash. The foundation suffered a scandal in 2012 after the instatement of a new, anti-abortion vice president led to Komen pulling almost $700,000 in grants from Planned Parenthood — money that had been apportioned to help low-income women secure breast-cancer exams.

Though Komen quickly reestablished the grants, the damage was done: The vice president resigned almost immediately, and Brinker stepped down as CEO soon after.

Just one year later, Brinker was voted one of the 100 Most Trusted People in America

by Reader’s Digest — surprisingly, public support had remained high throughout the controversy.

ASTRAZENECA, A DRUG COMPANY THAT PRODUCES BREAST CANCER MEDICINE, CONTINUES TO RESERVE THE RIGHT TO APPROVE OR VETO EVERY PIECE OF MARKETING MATERIAL FOR NATIONAL BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH. Finances aside, there’s also the question of what effect the pink ribbon campaign has on individuals. In the midst of my mother’s struggle with breast cancer, our family drew a great deal of support, solidarity and comfort from the corporate-sponsored marches that have such problematic undertones. One need only watch the high production value videos taken at these marches, with beaming faces and an upbeat, “can-do” attitude displayed by almost everyone in the march, to see the genuinely positive effect that this corporatized activism can have. But this relentless focus on positivity — and the clean, sanitized image of the campaign, highlighting smiling white women in the midst of recovery instead of the realities of a body ravaged by cancer — has been strongly criticized for trivializing the disease. Following the controversial BH donation, the Pittsburgh Tribune Review quoted University of Michigan Professor Shobita Parthasarathy as saying that pinkwashing is a way to avoid the fact that “[breast cancer] is hard and ugly and devastating and women are dying

of the disease.”

Positivity isn’t the only problem with the awareness movement; there’s also a distinctly sexual undertone. When faced with the movement’s wristbands that say “I <3 boobies” and sweatshirts emblazoned with “Save the Tatas!” — retailing, of course, at $45 — it’s hard to deny that the focus shifts from illness to gendered objectification. It is distinctly concerning that a movement ostensibly based on women’s health has such a preoccupation with sexualizing an illness and implying that the reason someone should care about it is the prospect of losing her breasts. Sex might sell, but that doesn’t make it an appropriate marketing technique for such a serious issue. On the ground, cancer is about watching your mother’s fingernails softening and turning purple and falling out from the chemo; it’s about a whole lot of needles and redrimmed eyes and tooth-and-nail fights with insurance companies. The long and short of it is that cancer leaves scars on everything in its wake, and wading through its reality can never hope to live up to the cheeky, pretty-pink image of the awareness campaign.

While the pink ribbon is an incredible symbol of how a once-stigmatized women’s health issue was brought to the forefront of the American consciousness, it is also an indicator of what capitalizing on capitalism itself can achieve. The breast cancer awareness movement provides patients with a strong sense of community and support in their deepest times of trouble. But this does not excuse the movement’s numerous flaws. The unwavering confidence of the Komen Foundation and its corporate partners, in spite of mounting evidence that the problems they face are not going away, indicates not just arrogance, but also entrenchment in the practices that cause health disparities and needless deaths in the first place. Though the breast cancer awareness movement took a great leap forward in the 1990s, that doesn’t mean it should now be reduced to drill bits. Increased consumer knowledge about charitable practices, demands for greater accountability from large institutions and increased funding for preventative measures and treatments will go a long way towards getting back to the roots of the campaign: the fight to stop a disease that has caused innumerable families so much pain. u MINTAKA ANGELL ‘15 IS A HISTORY CONCENTRATOR AND CO-EDITOR IN CHIEF AT BPR.

REPAINTING HISTORY A blank wall is not a blank slate.

4.9 INCH BY 4 INCH

STORY BY REBECCA HANSEN ART BY OLIVIA WATSON

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permit visitors to graffiti the wall, to paint over existing graffiti and to then restore the original murals.

Some of the original painters have reveled in the wall’s commercialization. As a result, these artists originally supported the restoration project — for a price. The wall has brought in millions of euros of tourist revenue, and artists have demanded to see a portion of the profits, decrying the €3,000 restoration fee as laughable in the face of the multi-million euro restoration budget.

Instead of negotiating, the government objected to these artists’ higher counteroffers and whitewashed the wall, hiring new artists to copy the original works. As a result, several of the original artists sued the government in 2011 for copyright infringement, demanding to see payment for their pieces. The lawsuit is still ongoing, but the questions brought up by the East Side Gallery can’t be solved in a courtroom; they address the very nature of public art and its interaction with the public, the government and artists.

Through public art, artists try to “heighten our awareness and question our assumptions,” says the US-based Association for Public Art. Although art has been increasingly democratized, the process has been, in some ways, a reaction to the public art of the past in which one distinct point of view was represented: the commissioner’s. Still, public art doesn’t always address the needs of the community, particularly in cases where the art offers no outlet for community interaction. In the face of new austerity measures and a youth poverty rate of 20 percent, Germany’s dedication of public funding to art can seem at best idealistic and at worst cruel. Cultural critic and former California Institute of the Arts professor Michael Asher argued that to say public art is inherently democratic is to ignore the

fact that such art is based on government control and commission and thus on access to power and privilege. The prioritization of monied interests explains why Bodo Sperling, a founder of the original gallery, calls the product of the government’s new changes the “Disneyland version” of the Berlin Wall. In this sense, public art is often not quite as democratic as it may initially seem.

As a political statement, the East Side Gallery professes the freedom of a democratized Germany. Meanwhile, the government still retains control over the piece, deciding without formal public or artist input whether or not the work has been destroyed, as well as whether restorations will take place and who will complete them.

The issue of the Berlin Wall is complex because it necessitates interactions between German citizens, the government, the original artists and even spectating tourists. The solution to Germany’s public art problem requires privileging one view: either that of the government or that of the artists. Since it is fundamentally impossible to create a single work that can accurately reflect the lived experiences of millions of Germans under communist rule, it makes the choice of who tells their story all the more pressing. As these questions come up, however, the city must weigh the balance between public participation and the lack thereof. The restoration of the wall must take into account not just the story of the wall under communism, but also its evolution since that time. And ultimately, if the government wants to preserve Berlin’s rich history, it must maintain both the image and intent of the gallery — a commitment to the freedom of artistic expression that came with a reunified Germany. u REBECCA HANSEN ‘17 IS AN INTENDED ANTHROPOLOGY CONCENTRATOR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

he 7,000 illuminated balloons winding through Berlin this November 9 marked the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite the celebration, the wall is in the midst of an identity crisis. While the western side of the wall had always been covered in graffiti, the murals painted on the eastern side were revolutionary — under communist control, armed guards were told to shoot any would-be vandals (and escapees) on sight. One year after the wall fell in 1989, artists teamed up to create a 1,300-footlong memorial to freedom that juxtaposed their new paintings against those that had adorned the eastern side of the wall before its fall. The result was a public art exhibition called the East Side Gallery, a vibrant mural including images of kissing politicians and a white dove that expressed hope for a better future. But conflict between the government, the public and the original artists has raised questions about the nature of freedom and artistic expression in a reunified Germany.

Since its creation in 1990, the gallery has not remained a static mural installation — pieces have been chipped away and vandalized, and the weather has slowly deteriorated the paint. In 2000, the Berlin city government claimed that the murals had been destroyed and subsequently made plans to restore them, offering the original artists €3,000 to repaint their works. Some artists rejected this offer — a few looking for higher profits, others arguing that the wall was intended to be a monument to freedom.

For years, the prohibition of artwork on the eastern side of the wall was maintained through the brutality of communist guards.

The paintings were meant to celebrate the absence of these violently enforced restrictions. But the German government has now decided, 25 years later, to no longer

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PERU’S DARK AND SHINING NIGHTS The path to peace that crumbled STORY BY MARINA GATTÁS DO NASCIMENTO / ART BY GRACE SUN

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ormer Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 by the Special Criminal Court of Peru’s Supreme Court to the maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for crimes against humanity. The conviction marked the final chapter of Peru’s decades-long conflict against the Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path. A self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionary force, the Shining Path believed a communist revolution could take place if the agrarian preindustrial society became politically conscious — and, more importantly, armed. As such, its members have been alternatively considered the heroes and the villains of Peru’s turbulent civil war, which began in 1981.

They have remained idyllic in their ideology and brutal in their strategy: While initially promising to transform society, they also pledged to pay a “quota of blood” in order to establish a utopia. Their terrorist tactics of kidnapping, assassination and bombing were met with an equally violent

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response from the state that spilled over into the lives of its civilians. Elected with the promise of ending the bloodshed at any cost, Fujimori had tough-on-terrorism policies that transformed him in the eyes of the Peruvian public from a savior who promised to end the bloodbath to a monster that created deep wounds in Peruvian society.

As Fujimori now serves his time in jail, the story of his battle against the Shining Path is a reminder that trading liberty for security is a deeply fraught choice for any nation.

The seeds of Peru’s conflict were sown in 1962, amidst national economic hardships and the widespread marginalization of rural Peruvians. The increasing difficulties of eking out a living made the poor, rural province of Ayacucho the ideal site to incubate a revolution. It all started with Abimael Guzmán, a leader of the Peruvian Communist Party and a philosophy professor, who was appointed to teach at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho. Guzmán visited

China during his time teaching and witnessed Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which ultimately contributed to the radicalization of his beliefs. He became, in the words of Encyclopedia Britannica, “convinced that a rapid violent revolution was necessary to destroy Peru’s existing government and institute a peasant dictatorship.”

By the 1970s, Guzmán had transformed the Peruvian Communist Party into a guerrilla army under the name Sendero Luminoso. The group began its military operations in Ayacucho in 1981 and quickly came to dominate most of the countryside through not only appeals to popular justice, but also tactics of intimidation. What began as a peasant revolution then slowly began to infiltrate the cities.

The conflict had escalated into a full-blown civil war by the early 1990s. While the Sendero Luminoso was not the only leftist group taking up arms at the time, it was the most prominent and violent one. At its peak, the Shining Path was comprised of 10,000 militants and controlled about 60 percent of Peru’s national territory. It alone was responsible for an estimated 54 percent of the 69,280 total deaths produced in the conflict.

Indiscriminate use of violence by the Shining Path undermined its intended message of justice, and the Maoist-style Cultural Revolution it tried to incite at gunpoint failed to take root. As Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission later concluded, the Shining Path’s support base was largely limited to academics and unemployed youth. The group’s militaristic, totalitarian and brutally violent revolution was far from welcoming: The Shining Path banned indigenous and Christian holidays, stoned communal leaders and massacred entire villages where self-defense militias were organized — oftentimes even using machetes and knives in order to save ammunition.

Confronted with prolonged conflict, many citizens began clamoring for the end of the Shining Path’s reign of terror. Protestors advocated for restrictions on fundamental rights and principles for the sake of combatting guerrilla violence — demands with which the government readily com-

life in prison. Additionally, the army secretly formed a death squad called “Grupo Colina,” which was responsible for assassinations, disappearances, widespread massacres and inhumane cruelty between 1991 and 1994. While the group was originally established to annihilate communist militants, it eventually targeted trade unionists and political opponents as well. The Grupo Colina also carried out infamous massacres in Barrios Altos, El Santa and La Cantuta — neighborhoods of Lima, the capital — killing ordinary civilians and peasants.

Despite the ongoing human rights violations, popular support for Fujimori remained surprisingly high. Counterinsurgency policies in particular continued to receive support from up to 82 percent of the population in the ’90s. These brutal policies eventually led to Fujimori’s 2009 conviction, but they were nevertheless effective in subduing the threat of terrorism in the country. He arrested Guzmán in 1992 and mostly dismantled the Shining Path, though it still maintains limited operations today.

THE SHINING PATH WAS COMPRISED OF 10,000 MILITANTS AND WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR AN ESTIMATED 54 PERCENT OF THE 69,280 TOTAL DEATHS PRODUCED IN THE CONFLICT. Peru’s case parallels many similar instances of state violence across the globe.

Insurgent or criminal threats usually serve as a justification for violations of fundamental rights. As terrorism expert and professor at Washington College of Law Robert Goldman explains, “When people feel there is no security, people will support suspension of fundamental liberties, basically believing, ‘This really doesn’t affect me, I’m a good citizen, I’m not engaged in any subversive activities.’” While some indigenous and rural communities who were disproportionately affected by the conflict resisted these incursions on their rights from the beginning, resistance was rarely successful.

Always marginalized, their voices were not represented in the government. So long as the threat of terrorism persisted, the social costs of war could be ignored.

Support for state-sponsored lawlessness, however, eventually hit a threshold.

As the violence escalated, more people were swept under the brutality legitimized by antiterrorism laws, making it undeniable

among the general population that a great portion of the “terrorists” were innocent and that the justice system had become an instrument of repression. As the government stepped further beyond its bounds, the populace realized that there was no inherent tradeoff between security and liberty. The indifferent became attuned; a critical mass of people started caring, questioning and contesting.

As the threat of guerrilla violence subsided, the Peruvian government lost its carte blanche for abuse, and corruption schemes and human rights violations were finally brought to light. The head of Peru’s National Intelligence Service at the time, Vladimiro Montesinos, was caught on video in 2000 bribing an opposition senator to ally himself with Fujimori, causing significant public outcry. Both Fujimori and Montesinos were subsequently accused of drug smuggling, vote tampering, embezzlement and arms trafficking — including through deals struck with the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC). The pair was later also held criminally accountable for the Grupo Colina and its violence.

By the end of the century, Fujimori was utterly discredited. He failed to secure an illegal third term in office and fled the country a few weeks later, faxing his resignation from a new safe haven in Japan. When he later left Japan for Chile, he was arrested and extradited to Peru. He ended his legacy as the first Latin American president to be tried in his own country for grave violations of human rights, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Still, the Shining Path did not regain its legitimacy with Fujimori’s fall and conviction, and the fact that it too was victimized did not undo its acts of terror in the public’s eyes. Similarly, the government, and Fujimori especially, were no longer seen as heroes by the Peruvian public. Statistics and reports from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission attest to the nuances of victimhood in the Peruvian civil war. While it can be an extreme case, Peru’s handling of the Shining Path shows that concentrating executive power and bending the norms is a counterproductive strategy for winning support in the global fight against extremism. Complying with the law is not “a weakness,” as Goldman points out. “It’s a strength. It’s what differentiates you…from your enemy.” u MARINA GATTÁS DO NASCIMENTO ‘15 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND STAFF COLUMNIST AT BPR.

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plied, employing a military solution with no civilian oversight. Threatened now by the Shining Path and the army, who both ruthlessly rallied for support in the countryside, many rural communities sided with government forces, seeing it as the lesser of two evils despite a normalized culture of military crackdowns and the regular disappearances of dissenters.

Support for the government’s counterinsurgency eventually extended beyond rural areas. Because of the Shining Path’s brutality, people from all social strata were willing to take a risk and give substantial power to the army — although the tradeoff ultimately meant an exchange of democracy for security, and with it, toleration of violence against civilians as a necessary cost to end the insurgency. In many minds, violent terrorism by the Shining Path called for an extreme response from the government, including the expansion of presidential powers, the indiscriminate use of force and the abrogation of democratic principles. In this context, the population offered strong support to Fujimori, who promised to stabilize the economy and crack down on terrorists. Using strong political rhetoric against the agitators, he was elected president in 1990 and subsequently refused to devolve power, eventually transforming himself into the first democratically elected dictator in the region. Two years into his administration, with widespread support from the population and the military, Fujimori staged a “self-coup” that would allow him to address terrorism and Peru’s stagnant economy as he had envisioned. He declared a state of emergency, wrote a new constitution that allowed him to legislate by decree, dissolved Congress, dismantled the country’s legal system and took over its media outlets.

Under Fujimori’s new anti-terrorism laws, many Peruvians’ legal rights were violated, including their access to both due process and judicial guarantees. The new definition of terrorism that the law created was vague, leaving room for virtually any act of violence against “life, the body... [or] property” to be interpreted as one of terrorism, regardless of intent. Military and security forces were given a free pass to arbitrarily detain and even kill alleged terrorists. Torture and forced confessions became common interrogation practices.

With no civilian oversight of the judicial process, anyone could be indicted for terrorism and punished with disproportionate sentences that ranged from 20 years to

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violence without borders FEAR AND LOATHING FROM LA TO LATIN AMERICA

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STORY BY MARIA PAZ ALMENARA ART BY BEN BERKE

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n just the last year, there has been a 117 percent increase in the number of unaccompanied children under 12 apprehended while attempting to enter the United States illegally. This phenomenon has repeatedly been called an â&#x20AC;&#x153;urgent humanitarian situation,â&#x20AC;? and President Barack Obama has appeared on numerous media outlets to address the crisis. While critics of the Obama administration have blamed the surge of young migrants on lenient immigration policies, it is unlikely that lining the border with officers is the solution. To target the roots of the problem and ultimately resolve it, US policy should instead address the lawless gang violence affecting

Central American countries today.

It is impossible to untangle the current immigration crisis at the US border from the catastrophic state of affairs in Central American countries. The stories of children and teenagers detained at the border are too often the same: Their escape attempts are a response to the pressure to engage in local drug-trafficking operations, the fear of going to schools where gangs overtly recruit new members, an absolute distrust of law enforcement and the murder of their neighbors. To these immigrants, who mainly hail from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, the United States symbolizes the hope of a dissipated threat. Pover-

ty and unemployment remain motivators for those who uproot their lives in Central America, but for most of these young detainees the pursuit of a future beyond the border takes a more literal sense: Central American countries have 4 of the 5 highest homicide rates in the world, and leaving the area is seen as one of the few ways to guarantee personal safety. In Honduras, the country that has seen the largest increase of child immigrants to the United States, an average of 20 people are murdered every day. The main perpetrators of this bloodshed across the region are two rival street gangs, or maras: the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, and the 18th Street gang, or M18.

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panded to include relatively minor offenses like petty theft and drunk driving. This policy change resulted in the deportation of tens of thousands of Central Americans whose families had settled in LA in the ’80s.

Although they had never attained legal residency, many of them had grown up as native English speakers in the United States and had no connections with the countries to which they were being repatriated. Upon arrival, they were quickly pushed to the margins of their new Central American societies — just as they had been in the United States. Once back in their countries of origin, which generally suffered from weak

to MS-13. Children as young as nine are recruited to serve as lookouts, make deliveries in backpacks and even assault civilians.

Many of these children eventually become drug traffickers or hitmen themselves.

Gangs like MS-13 and M18, now operating multinationally, have also developed a more significant presence in the United States, threatening US domestic priorities beyond immigration concerns. While less influential in North America, MS-13 now operates in 42 states and Washington, DC. Across the country, and particularly on the West Coast and in the Northeast, the group perpetuates violence ranging from assault

SAN PEDRO SULA, A HONDURAN CITY ADVERTISED AS THE "MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD," HAS AN ANNUAL RATE OF 169 HOMICIDES PER 100,000 RESIDENTS - COMPARED TO LA'S 7.8. state institutions and offered few chances of legal employment, their gang connections served as their only prospects for securing a new and sustainable life.

Today, Central Americans continue to live with the violent repercussions of irresponsible and incomplete US deportation policies from the ’90s. In a number of these countries, unstable political structures have now been supplanted by perverse gang stand-ins. San Pedro Sula, a Honduran city advertised both as “the main gateway into the country” and the “murder capital of the world,” is emblematic of state-gang dynamics in the region overall. The city has an annual rate of 169 homicides per 100,000 residents — compared to LA’s rate of 7.8. Each neighborhood has particular gang associations, and a set of makeshift regulations by the gangs can carry more weight than the actual rule of law. Freedom of movement between neighborhoods is far from guaranteed. In the area of Chamelecόn ruled by MS-13, the gang extorts a “war tax” from households and businesses just to stay in their neighborhoods. Matters usually handled by the police, like domestic violence or robberies, are instead reported

to homicide, using machetes and blunt objects as a way to intimidate rival gangs and law enforcement. MS-13 cells, sub-groups founded only after the organization had moved to Central America, can now be found along the East Coast from Washington, DC to New York City to the suburbs in between. And it’s not just that gangs have a wide influence in the United States — mara operations have become bureaucratized on an international level. In 2008, US law enforcement found evidence suggesting that MS-13 leaders imprisoned in El Salvador were ordering retaliatory assassinations in the Washington, DC area. The US Department of the Treasury finally designated MS-13 a “significant transnational criminal organization” in 2012 for its involvement in criminal activities including drug trafficking, sex trafficking, human smuggling, blackmail, extortion and immigration offenses. Although the gang does not have formal national leadership in the United States and its rule consists mostly of regional sects operating independently, hierarchies have been established domestically based on the sects’ connections to the major Central American branches of the gang.

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The cruel irony of the affair is that both gangs originated in the United States and have taken advantage of disparate foreign and domestic policies to perpetrate crime with relative impunity across the borders to Central America.

Though MS-13 and M18 now terrorize Central America, these gangs have their roots in the streets of Los Angeles and the racial divides that have long characterized the city. In the ’70s and ’80s, a new demographic surfaced in LA with the arrival of young Central American refugees escaping the civil wars that had erupted in their homelands. These new immigrants found an established culture of ethnic and territorial gangs and were forced to join for protection. Those who did not fit into the existing sectarian divides had to find an alternative. As a result, M18 was created by mixed-race Mexicans and Hispanics who had been rejected by racially exclusive groups like the Mexican-dominated Clanton Street gang. Because M18 willingly accepted marginalized populations, it dominated areas of LA. Another alternative emerged after a group of El Salvadoran youth, who were more attached to their national origins, came together to form MS13. Despite their initial exclusivity, MS-13 eventually adopted members from across Central America, increasing its influence and fueling intergang violence with M18. lthough these two gangs had operated in the United States for decades, maras like MS-13 did not materialize in Central America until 1992, when aggravated gang violence in US cities pushed legislators to find international solutions to their domestic problems. In the aftermath of the LA riots — which cost almost $1 billion in property damage, killed 55 people and were widely considered the most destructive US civil disturbance of the 20th century — police held local gangs like MS13 responsible for much of the looting and violence. State legislators responded by enacting harsher anti-gang laws in California that relied on the illegal immigration status of many gang members to dismantle the gangs’ infrastructure. In 1996, Congress complemented these stricter gang policies with reforms to US immigration laws.

Noncitizens serving sentences in California prisons were repatriated to their countries of origin once their sentences were complete — in some cases, foreign-born Americans were deported and had their citizenships revoked. Under these reforms, the list of crimes punishable by deportation ex-

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El Salvador and Honduras have therefore become the distant headquarters for organized crime across the United States.

Deportation policies originally responsible for the dangerous export of gangs to Central America persist today, aggravating the domestic immigration issue and perpetuating gang violence. Current US efforts to sweep the gang problem across the border have become little more than routine government-subsidized travel opportunities for MS-13 and M18 deportees. In fact, Central American gang members have mastered the deportation process and even developed it into an entrepreneurial pursuit. While they may be convicted and temporarily imprisoned in the United States, once gang members are deported, Central American officials don’t have access to their criminal records or their affiliations, unless they wear that history tattooed on

towards gangs. Some Central American countries originally adopted “mano dura,” or firm hand, policies of mass incarceration in order to quickly resolve their precarious security situations, despite being dangerously short of the funds necessary to run such operations. Under these laws, young men could be incarcerated for up to 12 years for merely displaying gang tattoos.

Although mano dura techniques initially gained popular support, they were plagued by a chronic lack of resources and eventually proved counterproductive.

In El Salvador, the simplistic solution led to alarming overcrowding in prisons and detention centers, some of which are now filled beyond maximum capacity by up to 320 percent. It is estimated that about 40 percent of inmates in the country are serving sentences for gang-related offenses. LA, with its long history of gang violence, had

and has further revealed the need for stronger political institutions to combat the gang issue. El Salvadoran Minister of Justice and Public Security David Munguía Payés initiated negotiations in 2012 for a truce between MS-13 and M18. While these efforts are reported to have initially reduced the homicide rate by 60 percent — from an average of 14 murders per day to 5.5 — killings are once again on the rise and have doubled since 2013. Morever, these statistics were revealed in an official government report and have not since been verified. Recent polls indicate that almost 80 percent of Salvadorans feel the truce has done little to reduce crime. Citizens understandably viewed the negotiations as an example of government subordination and corruption. Instead of reducing gang influence, the original truce brought political leverage to gangs, as they could offer their compli-

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IN 2008, US LAW ENFORCEMENT FOUND EVIDENCE SUGGESTING THAT MS-13 LEADERS IMPRISONED IN EL SALVADOR WERE ORDERING RETALIATORY ASSASSINATIONS IN THE WASHINGTON, DC AREA.

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their faces and bodies. Once “home,” they find others hoping to immigrate to the United States and offer to take them across the border for a fee. The journey also serves as a recruitment platform because the clients are often young and impressionable with little idea of what they will do after crossing the border. This process has also led to the creation of new MS-13 cliques in previously unmarked areas — new branches in the United States become home to gang members hoping to escape the scrutiny of harsh anti-gang policies in Central America. With members swiftly stepping back and forth over the border, the gangs continue to expand.

Before the current immigration crisis, the only direct US efforts to help Central American states combat their gang problems were diluted into broad foreign policy strategies. But under these policies, the United States failed to provide the necessary resources to combat the regional issue it is partially responsible for. In the face of a lack of resources and scant US cooperation, Central American nations have mostly embraced a monolithic hardline approach

implemented similarly strict incarceration policies and also faced overcrowded prisons. Jails in LA, like those in Central America, became “finishing schools” where firsttime offenders could deepen their ties to the gang’s illicit activities. The “crazy life” of gangsters, an ideal often represented by three dots tattooed on their hands, includes prison as a central marker of their careers. The US State Department used the LA model to counsel Central American authorities on gang prevention, supporting programs in El Salvador to expand prisons and shorten sentences. But the policies didn’t work in either country, and the situation itself could have been avoided entirely with stronger communication between authorities in the United States and those in Central American governments. Unfortunately, like deportations in an earlier era, Central America’s mano dura policies and the mass incarceration policies in both Latin America and LA have only served to strengthen gang organizations.

Direct state negotiation with gangs, another attempted solution in Central America, has been equally unsuccessful

ance with the law in exchange for better treatment.

While the gangs’ demands for rehabilitation programs could ultimately improve social conditions overall, the process of negotiation is widely considered to undermine the rule of law and perpetuate a politically unstable environment with gangs as alternative authorities. US foreign policy has recognized the paralyzing role of Central America’s institutional frailty in combatting the gang issue. In the past few years, the US State Department has provided training and assistance to law enforcement and hosted workshops on efficient gang-prevention strategies. In 2008, the State Department sponsored an assessment of the gang problem across Central America, an effort which produced a detailed plan focusing on six key areas for institutional improvements: investigative capacity, legal capacity, intelligence capacity, community policing, prevention and prisons. he United States has also sought to resolve the issue of international gang influence through more balanced bilateral means. In 2004, the FBI created the

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Creative Associates International, which works to reduce violence and improve education programs in Central America. For him, since “Los Angeles and Central America are tied together at the hip,” the new role is the logical evolution of his efforts.

This transition, and the collaboration it represents, will hopefully help to establish new agencies for youth outreach to prevent gang recruitment in El Salvador, Guatemala and across Central America. Although functioning under a very different set of challenges, the transfer of these LA-specific policies across international borders may ultimately help resolve the gang issue in other Central American countries.

US government mediation and aid will be vital in coordinating new approaches towards gangs in the region. It has become evident that mano dura policies will not eliminate the influence of gangs in Central America, although US pressure will likely be necessary to push some countries towards less militaristic long-term approaches. While Central American countries have created institutional branches to develop crime prevention strategies, politicians have mostly neglected funding for prevention and rehabilitation programs for members seeking to leave their gang associations behind. Officials have justified this decision by citing budget shortfalls and the prioritization of other issues like drug trafficking, while arguing that church groups and NGOs are better suited to carry out these community-based approaches. But recently, the outpouring of young refugees and the widespread media coverage of the issue have sparked a positive transition in US-Central American collaboration. This year, the United States will be contributing $161.5 million to the Central American Regional Security Initiative, a program started in 2008 and run by the State Department that aims to stabilize Central American political institutions and create safer environments for citizens of the region. This additional funding will enable a comprehensive approach to immigration issues and combine border security with more constructive policies to cure Central America of its gang worries.

The current immigration crisis at the US border is an important impetus for improving the precarious policies of the past.

Former immigration policies did not take into account factors beyond US borders.

In addition to the almost $130 million provided by the United States as ongoing bilateral assistance to El Salvador, Honduras

and Guatemala, the US government will be allocating an additional $9.6 million to “receive and reintegrate…repatriated citizens.” According to White House reports, this funding will be invested in existing repatriation centers, provide training to immigration officials and support government agencies and NGOs that provide services to returned migrants. Better, more secure integration of deportees might serve to acclimatize them to their new communities and dissuade them from seeking continued gang membership.

The recent surge of young migrants has also led the White House to consider improvements to the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which protects children from trafficking and guarantees that they will not be sent back to dangerous situations just to fast-track the deportation process. Critics of the Obama administration have suggested that the act has encouraged illegal immigration and have strenuously advocated for its reform. However, a recently proposed amendment may ultimately result in an even more dismissive perpetuation of the gang problem abroad by removing it from domestic legal concerns.

Obama’s fast-paced response to the “urgent humanitarian situation” he describes is finally targeting a problem that has brewed in Central America for decades — one that originated from previously neglectful US policies. Much of the rhetoric today surrounding the need for immigration reform remains centered on domestic policy and the internal economic repercussions of changing US demographics. However, the rising levels of gang violence internationally reveal more complex dynamics and boundaries that challenge current conceptions of border issues. The evolution of gangs like MS-13 and M18 highlights the importance of US partnerships with countries that the United States has historically debilitated through shortsighted foreign policy, a reality that should inform the tone of future international collaboration. Although it should not have taken throngs of terrified children escaping Central American violence for the United States to account for its responsibilities, its current attitude towards the issue is a good prospect for comprehensively resolving the gang crisis in Central America. u MARIA PAZ ALMENARA '16 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A STAFF ARTIST AND THE MEDIA DIRECTOR AT BPR.

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MS-13 Task Force to establish a network for sharing information between the United States and Central American countries.

The creation of the Transnational Anti-Gang Initiative in 2007 established concrete means for cooperation by stationing two permanent FBI agents in San Salvador to work alongside the Policía Nacional Civil and to share intelligence on gang activities across Central America and the United States. The collaboration proved successful when the task force’s first operation resulted in the arrest of 10 MS-13 members and the safe recovery of a three-year-old boy who had been in gang custody for two years. Until recently, however, this persistent aid from the State Department and the collaborative policing efforts lacked the urgency felt by those directly facing the maras’ threats. Although a comprehensive US response is decades late and finds several Central American countries on their last legs, the pressure introduced by the media and the recent immigration issue has finally pushed efforts in the right direction.

Following the reports of unaccompanied children at the border, Vice President Joe Biden met with regional leaders in Guatemala to develop a collaborative strategy and solidify US support in combatting gang violence.

Building upon gang resolution methods first applied in the United States, recent advances in curbing gang violence suggest that the solution to the cross-border problem may lie at the municipal level. The gang issue, which arose from international mobility and broad political conflict, may be best addressed by creating neighborhood-specific approaches across Central America. Nicaragua, the poorest of the countries in the region, recently rejected the Central American trend of suppression-based policies, instead adopting a less militaristic approach that uses community-building efforts to provide alternatives to gang lifestyles and to deglamorize its members. Such policies are rooted in strategies that have already proven successful in LA. Since 2003, LA government officials have used policies that combine law enforcement with the development and support of social programs. Their approach has included targeted programs, such as using ex-convicts to dissuade gang members and young potential recruits from joining these associations. In January, one of the pioneers of this program, Guillermo Céspedes, former director of the Office of Gang Reduction in LA, took a position at

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WHEN THE SWEDISH FISH What’s below the surface in Nordic relations?

STORY BY ALEX LLOYD GEORGE / ART BY SORAYA FERDMAN

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here is something rotten in the seas of Sweden. An unidentified swimming object was confirmed mid-November, nearly a month after Swedish military forces fervently searched their waters for the invading culprit. For a week in October, the Swedish military was gripped by the possibility that a Russian submarine was lurking in the murky and mysterious Stockholm archipelago, whose 30,000 islands and countless straits could easily conceal a foreign vessel in its depths. Some 10 days before, Finland had accused the Russian Navy of interfering with a Baltic Sea research vessel — the latest in a series of minor transgressions that included violating Finnish airspace three times in the space of a single week in August. The confirmed presence of a foreign U-boat, along with a string of other small incidents, has invited observers to connect the dots in a region famous for its steadfast neutrality.

Many claim that these incursions are directly linked to the fact that neither country can claim the protective umbrella of NATO membership against Russian incursion. Although both Sweden and Finland would do well to keep neutrality close at hand, with the shadow of Ukraine hanging heavy over Europe, the pattern of subtle Russian bellicosity is a chilling one for those outside Europe’s most powerful alliance.

“Fucked up.” The words belong to Sverker Göranson, Sweden’s top military commander, describing the possibility that a Russian submarine had entered the Stockholm archipelago. Eventually the submarine hunt was called off, and it took Sweden a month to present an anticlimactic confirmation from its manic efforts. Though Göranson may have treated the incursion with the utmost seriousness, the media circus that erupted around the search for the sub received derision from some quarters of the state. The line between legitimate fear and outlandish farce grew dangerously blurry when a grainy image of a man dressed in black emerging out of the waters of the Swedish coastline appeared.

But the picture was a dead lead: The man in the photograph turned out to be “a pen-

sioner called Ove who was doing a ‘spot of angling,’” as per the Guardian.

Though Sweden eventually confirmed the presence of the submarine, the tale of Ove and the corresponding media madness imply a certain absurdity to the whole affair. This, after all, is not the first submarine intrusion into Swedish waters. The height of the Cold War saw repeated incidents in the Baltic; perhaps the most famous one involved a Russian diesel W-137 submarine getting stuck between some underwater rocks near Swedish shores in 1981. The incident was resolved after a 10-day standoff and substantial negotiations between the two nations. The following years saw a series of submarine hunts, and though there was the occasional hint of something sinister, the softening of Soviet policy under President Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War eventually brought the searches to a standstill.

While Swedish forces spent the ’80s scouring the Baltic for misplaced Russian subs, Finland followed a strict policy of noninterference so unique as to elicit the inception of the term “Finlandization.” A CIA brief noted, “The concept would imply not mere neutrality, but a relationship in which the Soviets possessed a large measure of hegemony.” True to its informal Russian ties, Finland did not participate in the Marshall Plan and stayed out of NATO. As in Sweden, Gorbachev’s rise to power and the decline of the Soviet Union provoked a change in this mentality, and criticism of the USSR finally surfaced in Finland. Anti-Russian art was uncensored, but the 20 years following the fall of the Berlin Wall passed more or less without incident, until the Russian bear began to growl once again under President Vladimir Putin’s reign.

These tremors have put neutrality on trial and made NATO membership the elephant in the room for both Sweden and Finland. A poll taken in Sweden in the aftermath of Submarinegate showed that, for the first time, more Swedes were in favor of joining NATO than were opposed. But at 37 percent to 36 percent, the difference between pro- and anti-NATO factions was

a hair’s breadth and certainly within the margin of error. Even if a shift away from Swedish stoicism would hold, not all forces point to greater NATO integration. This year saw the election of a new government, led by the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which has previously expressed opposition to NATO membership — a stance it has reiterated since ascending to office.

The situation in Finland is equally complicated. The Finnish public is squarely against the idea of NATO membership — polls generally put those in favor at 20 percent and those against at 60 percent, though a decade or so ago the naysayers stood at 80 percent. However, the current Finnish government is a coalition led by the conservative National Coalition Party, which has articulated support for NATO membership on numerous occasions. Jyrki Katainen, who prematurely finished his term as prime minister in June to pursue a position in European government, was a staunch advocate of joining the transatlantic defense group and even once remarked that strong public opposition might be an “insufficient reason” to stay out of NATO. It is certainly true that Russia has be-

IN 2007, RUSSIAN HACKERS CRIPPLED THE WEBSITES OF KEY ESTONIAN INSTITUTIONS, INCLUDING THE GOVERNMENT, BANKS AND MEDIA, AFTER THE ESTONIAN GOVERNMENT RELOCATED A SOVIET-ERA STATUE. come more aggressive in recent years, given the war with Georgia, the conflict in Ukraine and the aforementioned border and sea disputes with Sweden and Finland.

And Finland only seceded from Russia in 1909. If it is true that Putin’s belligerent fancies are revisionist — hence his interference in the affairs of former Soviet territories Ukraine and Georgia — then Finns ought to be frightened. But conflict with Finland would not necessarily be militaristic. Russia represents about 10 percent of Finland’s export market, and the small

Nordic country is already dealing with economic toxicity from an anemic eurozone market. Additionally, Russian hackers in 2007 crippled the websites of key Estonian institutions, including the government, banks and media, after the Estonian government relocated a Soviet-era statue. The bear doesn’t need much poking to get angry. As such, it is only too sensible to think that Finland might consider enlisting the help of larger, friendlier forces.

Then again, joining NATO would represent exactly the kind of provocation that Finland has steered clear of. The only concrete reason for Finland to join NATO would be if the country firmly believed that Russia had designs on its land. Yet it’s hard to imagine what pretext Putin and his cohorts could fabricate for such an incursion.

While Russians or Russian speakers are a sizable minority in Ukraine, they represent a paltry 0.5 percent of Finland’s population — hardly pretext for the kind of faux-protective action that took place in Crimea and Georgia. And Finland is a stable democracy insulated from the kinds of constitutional crises that gripped Ukraine and Georgia. In the former, a Russia-friendly president was ousted amidst popular upheaval, while the latter struggled with civil war on the back of ethnic tensions.

Many of the same arguments apply to Sweden, albeit to a lesser extent. Sweden, unlike Finland, has the luxury of not sharing an 833-mile border with Russia, and the lack of such exposure means that the stakes are undoubtedly lower. For the kind of his-

torical precedent that Putin is apparently fond of consulting to justify his plans for world domination, one has to go all the way back to the Viking era and the Kingdom of Rus, Russia’s national forbearer. The idea of tanks rolling into Finland, though implausible, is somewhat less ludicrous than that of a Russian flag hoisted over the Riksdag in Stockholm. That small — but crucial — Baltic buffer may be decisive in determining how Sweden reacts to the shifting Northern European landscape and may be a reason why Sweden doesn’t need the military protection of full NATO membership.

Though NATO membership may or may not be on the table for both countries, neither has shied away from taking action in response to Russia’s recent aggressiveness. Since 1994, Sweden has been a participant in the NATO-led Partnership for Peace, and the government is planning to increase its defense budget. Meanwhile in Finland, broad political support for increased defense spending has also emerged.

And the two Nordic countries recently signed both a military pact that pledged to pool resources between their armed forces and a Memorandum of Understanding with NATO to allow assistance from and sustain the presence of NATO troops in the two countries in case of “disasters, disruptions and threats to security.” These actions show a third way for Sweden and Finland — one in which they don’t have to abandon their neutrality in order to preserve their regional autonomy.

The world outside the Nordic pair is

split along familiar lines. The recent memorandum suggests that NATO members would welcome Sweden and Finland with open arms. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are among NATO’s most devoted members — unsurprisingly, considering their proximity to Russia and their not-so-distant history of nonconsensual union with the USSR. The three countries would be very keen to see their Nordic neighbors join NATO’s forces. Rhetorically, the addition of Sweden and Finland would bolster NATO’s international position, especially because of the Nordic nations’ history of neutrality. When even mild-mannered Finland considers angering the Kremlin, it is clear that Russia has been up to no good.

The recent spate of international politicking includes maneuvers that have all leaned away from Russia and towards insurance policies, both between Finland and Sweden and with external Western allies.

Even public support for NATO membership — low, but still increasing — is unlikely to motivate either country to go so far as to entertain full membership in the defense organization. And both states would be well advised to refrain from doing so. Neither country is truly in a position to be the victim of Putin’s domineering foreign policy. Swedes and Finns would do best to embrace the shivers Putin’s Russia gives them and let their cool heads prevail. u ALEX LLOYD GEORGE ‘16 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A BPR STAFFER ABROAD.

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SIX DECADES LATER How Burma is fighting its general problem STORY BY THAW ZIN AUNG GYI / ART BY AMANDA GOOGE

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urma may be small, but it has withstood the longest ongoing civil war in the history of the modern world.

Since its independence from Great Britain in 1948, the Burma National Army (BNA) has been engaged in battle with various internal ethnic minorities. Today, there are 16 major armed groups in Burma, most notably the Karen National Liberation Army and the Shan State Army, each of which represents an ethnic minority. The roots of this six-decade conflict, however, can be traced beyond specific ethnic conflicts back to the inception of the nation, when the military became an entrenched and overpowering institution in Burmese political affairs.

In the 1940s, Aung San, a Burmese man inspired by the nationalist fever of Imperial Japan, wanted to replicate its system in his home country. Aung San and 30 other comrades trained in Japan in 1940 during World War II and later returned to Burma to form the Burma Independence Army (BIA). In 1942, the BIA — primarily drawn from the majority Burmese ethnic group — and Japanese forces launched an offensive against the country’s British colonizers. Importantly, the British forces contained a number of recruits from the minority ethnic groups in the country, who protested rule by the ethnic majority. After the BIA and Japanese army successfully overthrew the British, the BIA became the BNA, and the Japanese took charge alongside them. Minority ethnic groups deeply resented their new rulers, a sentiment ethnically Burmese politicians capitalized on to brand these minority groups as “collaborators” with the British. While at first the BNA’s and Japan’s political interests aligned, the agreement was not fated to last. In 1945, Aung San forged a partnership with Allied forces to overcome Japan’s obstruction of Burmese independence. By the time the British were back in Burma, Aung San had become General of the BNA and was venerated across the country for his efforts in the war.

At the time of Burma’s struggle for independence, 131 minority ethnicities constituted 40 percent of the population.

These minority groups inhabited the pe-

ripheral regions of the country, whereas the ethnic Burmese occupied the central and coastal parts of the nation. Aung San’s push for independence drew concern from minority ethnic groups like the Karens; they feared that Aung San’s Burmese government would become “internal colonizers,” quashing the concerns of the minority ethnic groups. As one Karen leader said, “We are going to be passed from one colonial leader to another.” Because of this, a year before Burma’s official independence in 1947, the Karens unilaterally declared independence and proclaimed Kawthoolei — a southeastern sliver of the country — as the nation of the Karens.

That same year, Aung San assembled a historic conference that was attended by the major ethnic leaders of the country and that produced the Panglong Agreement.

This document promised a federal union

THE BURMESE GOVERNMENT MARKED ENTIRE VILLAGES AS FREE-FIRE ZONES WHERE CIVILIANS OUTSIDE DESIGNATED AREAS WERE SHOT. for Burma and asked in return for ethnic minorities to pledge allegiance to the new nation. In an unexpected turn of events, six months before formal independence from Great Britain in 1948, Aung San and his cabinet leaders were killed by political opportunists with connections to the British.

Afterwards, a new nationalist government rose to power and reneged on the promises that Aung San had made, pushing Burma to the brink of war just a year later.

The Communist Party of Burma and the Karen National Liberation Army rebelled, making huge territorial gains and leaving human destruction in their wake. The total casualties are still unclear, but the first two years of fighting saw at least 60,000 deaths.

It was during the ’50s that the current political system was crafted. During that decade, Burma’s army under General U Ne Win slowly regained much of the territory it had lost to the Karens. Despite the army’s efforts, armed minority ethnic groups maintained a stronghold in the periphery of

the country. While civilian portions of the government saw compromise as the solution — Burmese Prime Minister U Nu even began to take steps towards federalism — the military was not so quick to relinquish its stronghold on civil affairs. As a result, Ne Win launched a coup in 1962, taking over the Burmese government in order to continue his oppressive campaign. Ne Win also cracked down on minority ethnic groups’ activities, arresting ethnic leaders across the country. This coup marked the beginning of 49 years of military rule and the heavy entrenchment of the military in politics. Ne Win’s plot laid the groundwork for every future iteration of Burmese government and set an important precedent: The military’s motives, at least as defined by its top generals, came first.

In the name of unity, Ne Win installed a socialist regime headed by the Burma Socialist Programme Party that lasted two and a half decades until its overthrow in 1988. Envisioning a nation based on “one ethnicity, one language, one religion,” he repealed laws that guaranteed rights to the country’s religious and ethnic minorities in a process that ethnic peoples refer to as “Burmanization” — or forced assimilation. These communities faced two choices: accept the assimilation or take up arms.

Many chose the latter. Every major ethnic group created militias in response to the crisis, with over 30 ethnic armed militias operating throughout the country. Insurgency quickly became a way of life for the ethnic peoples of Burma.

The rise of these armed groups only bolstered the army’s dedication to supposed national security. Ne Win saw the army as the nation’s vanguard organization, essential to economic, social and political affairs and to protecting the country from enemies both foreign and domestic.

He sought to imbue the state institutions with his militant and nationalist ideology — and succeeded by merging the military and the government entirely. This culminated in the suspension of the country’s constitution and the dissolution of its legislative branch, with Ne Win ruling entirely through executive and military power.

Through the militarization of the state, Ne Win aimed to destroy the ethnic armed militias. To this end, he launched the Four Cuts policy: cut food, cut sources of revenue, cut intelligence sources and cut recruits. His tactics were devastating both to the fighting members of armed ethnic groups and to the country’s civilians overall. The War Office ordered the execution of anyone, including children, who was suspected to be an insurgent. Entire villages were marked as free-fire zones where civilians outside designated areas were shot. In response to the immense brutality, ethnic armed groups refused to negotiate with the military.

In 1988, a democratic government toppled Ne Win’s socialist regime. This event, called the 8888 Uprising, led to thousands of deaths in the ensuing violence, but it did force Ne Win out of office. In his resignation speech, Ne Win warned: “When the military shoots, it doesn’t shoot in the air.

It shoots straight.” True to his prediction, a new military government, consisting mostly of Ne Win’s loyal officers, launched a coup, claiming that pro-democracy protestors were disintegrating the nation and that it was the military’s duty to unify the country. The military shot straight into the protestors, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Although the democratic uprising did not succeed, it gave rise to an icon: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a popular opposition politician. As a concession to her wide fol-

lowing, the military allowed for democratic elections in 1990. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, won by a landslide. Nevertheless, the military prevented Aung San Suu Kyi from taking office — placing her under house arrest for 15 of the next 20 years — and the elected parliament was forbidden to assemble.

Now under the thumb of Senior General Than Shwe and his State Law and Order Restoration Council, the country’s name changed to Myanmar in a political maneuver meant to eschew the country’s colonial past. The cosmetic changes in name and government made little difference in terms of violence: Tensions with the ethnic armed groups remained, the Four Cuts policy stayed in place and the war continued.

Recent years have seen rare flickers of hope in response to fiery public protest. In 2009, the Burmese government ratified a new constitution. Two years later, top military leaders stepped down, paving the way for a civilian government to come to power.

Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest. Thousands of political prisoners were freed. Restrictions on free speech and press were relaxed. And for the first time, the topic of a federal union — one that minority ethnic groups have been demanding for decades — would be on the agenda for peace negotiations.

However, the new government is not genuinely democratic, and the military establishment has retained many of the priv-

THAW ZIN AUNG GYI ‘15 IS A DEVELOPMENT STUDIES CONCENTRATOR FROM BURMA.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

ileges it secured for itself over the past 60 years. The new president, U Thein Sein, is a former general and was prime minister under the previous military government.

Clear favoritism is still shown towards the military: Soldiers and officers maintain immunity for past crimes, reserve leadership over defense, home and border affairs and are guaranteed 25 percent of seats in parliament, meaning the military party has the power to dismiss the government in the case of a national emergency. These embedded constitutional powers are especially problematic today: They show that the military has not truly acceded to democratic forces and, though lurking in the background, still controls most of the crucial aspects of governance.

Despite these authoritarian policies, the peace process has continued. After signing peace agreements with 16 individual ethnic armed groups, the government is now working towards a nationwide cease-fire agreement, which would set the framework for the end of the armed conflict, along with increased political dialogue and a new constitutional convention. These promises, however, are undermined by the government’s continued attacks against ethnic minority militias. During the early days of the peace effort, the military broke a ceasefire with the Kachin Independence Army and waged offensives against the Shan State and the Karen National Union.

The secretary general of the New Mon State Party remarked, “The president wrote to the army [to stop attacking], but the army did not obey…You can see that the government cannot be influential over the army.”

He was right. Old habits die hard, and the Burmese military still has a mind and agenda of its own.

Demilitarizing the government will be difficult, if not impossible. Even the president does not have complete control over the state’s actions, as the military has operated for half a century with an ingrained sense of absolute authority. Although the democratic transition and signing of ceasefire agreements in 2011 raised hopes for peace, the military is unlikely to cordially accept a great reduction in its power. But the lives of millions hinge on finding a way to do this. The military’s entrenched role in government must be dismantled for any hope of national stability and peace in the future. u

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HOW TO TRUST A TERRORIST The media just can’t take its eyes off Kurdish female fighters.

STORY BY KATHERINE LONG / ART BY JULIA LADICS

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hey carry guns, dress in jumpsuits and boast impeccable eyeliner — such is the irresistible image the US media has created for the female peshmerga soldiers of two influential Kurdish political parties. In southeastern Turkey and northwestern Syria, respectively, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and People’s Protection Units (YPG) have employed battalions of these fighters for many years, but their most recent claim to fame has been their fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Dozens of articles about these “badass women” fighting ISIS have flooded English-language media accompanied by objectifying, and ultimately damaging, images of beautiful women and their rifles.

The apotheosis of these soldiers even rose to the point where H&M designed — and then was pushed to recall — a “peshmerga chic” khaki jumpsuit.

The newfangled focus on this decades-old group has appeared parallel to the founding of the US-led anti-ISIS coalition. By focusing on the role of female Kurdish fighters in the battle against ISIS, Western media sources inflate the assumption that the peshmerga, or pesh, are the perfect ally in a turbulent Middle East. But one snag makes the romanticization of these forces a lot more complicated: The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization on the State Department watch list. The female pesh are a stark example of the unconventional associates that the United States has had to rely on in a region largely hostile to the West. America’s Kurdish partners are not the great hope of the Middle East and can hardly be said to be fighting for Western-style democracy.

The PKK and YPG are two militant wings of the fractious Kurdish nationalist movement. The peshmerga — literally “those who face death” — earned their chops fighting for Mustafa Barzani’s Kurdish Regional Government in Northern Iraq during the ’60s and ’70s and in his son Masoud’s government during the Iran-Iraq War in the ’80s. Female pesh have only reappeared in the media in the past few months, with outlets busying themselves drawing an impermeable boundary between ISIS and the peshmerga. This largely

centers on the narratives of how each group treats its women; female pesh are presented as embodiments of liberal democratic ideals in contrast to the arcane misogyny of ISIS. But the Kurdish communities from which the pesh come — where honor killings are still common — largely maintain traditional gender roles.

There is little question that the terrorist designations of the PKK and YPG are well-founded. The period of greatest PKK activity during the mid-’90s in Turkey was one of immense unrest and fear, with both the PKK and the government committing

atrocities that contributed to a 45,000-person death toll. The PKK’s most notorious tactic is its use of female suicide bombers, including one infamous case in which a pregnant suicide bomber killed six Turkish soldiers in 1996. Additionally, the PKK and YPG have a fractured base: Not all Kurds support a physical fight for a sovereign, independent Kurdistan. This is especially true in Turkey, where the battle for greater civil rights and regional autonomy is taking place largely in Parliament and the courts.

Yet the West seems to have reconsidered its position on these armed militias, a fact that analysts have claimed may be a reason why Turkey expressed reluctance to join the anti-ISIS coalition.

The US position is bolstered by Western media coverage of the female pesh that softens the public’s gaze on these violent guerillas. Conservative sources, including The Telegraph, have highlighted an oft-quoted but unfounded rumor that ISIS fighters “know their reward will come in heaven, in the shape of 72 virgins — but not apparently if they are killed by wom-

en.” The PKK and YPG have also been given the opportunity to reconcile the public perception of themselves abroad: “We have been called terrorists for years,” one female fighter told Foreign Policy in September, but ISIS “beheads civilians...We have rescued civilians.”

It is unclear whether the media’s love affair with the female pesh will make Western nations more supportive of Kurdish autonomy in the future. In the early ’90s, Masoud Barzani’s Iraqi Kurds fought on the side of the US-led international coalition against Saddam Hussein. Then, as now, CNN trained its cameras on the faces of Kurdish women, who were cast as empowered young ladies participating in a righteous war against a temperamental regional strongman. Yet just a decade later, faced with the necessity of currying favor with Turkey, the PKK was internationally castigated as a terror group. Former President George W. Bush described the PKK as “an enemy of Turkey, a free Iraq and the United States.” Now recent reports suggest that the EU and United States are considering lifting the PKK’s terrorist designation.

In response, talking heads across Washington have affirmed that the Kurds are the West’s most “solid allies in the long-term war that jihadism has declared against us” and that the Kurds are “our best friends inside Syria.” In many ways, the media’s questionable use of the female peshmerga as a symbol of an allied cause is just the latest example in a long history of self-serving rhetoric.

The upsurge in media coverage of the female pesh helps repaint Middle Eastern battlefields as portraits of ideological struggle with far-reaching consequences rather than landscapes of sectarian violence. The West’s fairweather friendship with the Kurds is one of the only invariable features of Middle Eastern politics in the past four decades. America’s boldfaced political and sexual co-optation of the female rebels creates tacit support for their terrorism and undermines attempts to resolve the regional crisis. u KATHERINE LONG ‘15.5 IS A MIDDLE EAST STUDIES CONCENTRATOR AND A BPR STAFFER ABROAD.

DAWN SMITH Dawn K. Smith is an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In May, the CDC began recommending that men who have sex with men (MSM), intravenous drug users and other high-risk groups take Truvada, a drug that can reduce the risk of contracting HIV by as much as 92 percent. Smith spearheaded the development of the CDC’s guidelines for the use of Truvada. Brown students and community members interested in this medication can contact the Division of Infectious Diseases at The Miriam Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

INTERVIEW BY SAM RUBINSTEIN When did scientific literature first indicate that using Truvada as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a preventative medecine taken before infection, might be effective, and when did the CDC first consider issuing this recommendation?

There were animal studies indicating that Truvada might reduce the risk of the monkey version of HIV called SIV in the mid- to late-2000s. At the end of 2010, the first large clinical trial testing Truvada in MSM published its results. Those were the first results that were definitive concerning how effective Truvada could be for MSM...The [Food and Drug Administration] then looked at the results from that and other trials and made a recommendation that PrEP be added to the list of Truvada’s uses in the United States. At that point, we began finalizing a guidance document for the clinical practice of prescribing Truvada as PrEP. In 2011, we had issued interim guidelines for Truvada use by MSM and heterosexual adults. We did that because the drug was already available for treatment of HIV, and we knew that providers would prescribe it [as PrEP] in an off-label use. While we were working on the final guidelines, another trial presented its results in 2013, showing Truvada’s effectiveness with injection drug users in Thailand. Each time a new trial came out, it was necessary to update the draft guidelines. At the end of 2013, we went ahead with final approval and issued the 2014 guidelines.

In deciding to make this recommendation, how did you weigh Truvada’s public health benefits against the concern that it might encourage more individuals to practice unprotected sex?

We issued clinical guidelines that are focused on safely delivering a drug to its intended population. We were not writing public health impact guidelines, rather guidelines for practitioners who have patients that may be right for PrEP. In the guidelines, we did

The term “Truvada whores” was coined to stigmatize PrEP patients. What can be done to reduce stigmatization of the drug?

The people who have used that term are a minority. It is my sense that reporting on the term’s use is more common than people actually using it. I think that as PrEP becomes mainstream, stigmatization will become less of an issue. There are people who disapprove of PrEP because they don’t think it’s a good idea, but that’s not the same as stigma.

Does any of the scientific literature indicate a risk that using Truvada as PrEP will lead to the development of drug-resistant strains of HIV? No. None of the trials showed any impact on drug resistance.

The people who are taking PrEP are not infected with HIV, and without the virus present it can’t develop resistance. The only risk of resistance is for those few people who become infected with HIV while on PrEP. In the trials, what they saw was that people who accidentally started on PrEP while they were in the very earliest stages of HIV infection — the first week or two when the antibody tests were not yet positive — did develop [drug-resistant forms of HIV]. Among truly HIV-negative patients, however, who started PrEP and later became infected, there were only a couple of patients out of thousands who had very low levels of resistance to one of the components of PrEP...It seems likely from the models we are looking at that most of the drug resistance will develop in people who are being treated for their existing HIV infection, not in the few people who contract HIV while taking PrEP. Are you optimistic that this new recommendation will lead to significantly reduced rates of HIV infection in the United States?

If it is scaled up effectively, and if it is targeted at people who have a high risk of HIV, then yes, it will have an impact. Right now many of the people who need it the most don’t know about it...But [if used correctly], it will have a high level of impact on the epidemic...There are clear indications that if we do this right, we can drive down the incidence of HIV infection.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

What should public health charities and agencies in the United States be doing to inform sex workers, drug users and other hard-to-reach, vulnerable populations about access to Truvada?

We think that a variety of stakeholders will be involved in informing key groups about the availability of PrEP, what it is used for, its effectiveness, what requirements there are for patients and how they can acquire it. These stakeholders can include state health departments, city and county health departments and community-based organizations that work with those populations. The effort can include the CDC insofar as it works with those organizations and public campaigns. I don’t think any one entity will drive the effort. We need all hands on deck.

emphasize that it is important to provide ongoing support for the use of other prevention tools while taking PrEP...We would like people taking PrEP to continue using condoms, if they are willing...Neither PrEP nor condoms are 100 percent effective, but when used together, you have even higher levels of protection from HIV.

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JUNOT DÍAZ Junot Díaz, a professor of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” His recent collection of short stories, “This Is How You Lose Her,” was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller.

INTERVIEW BY MADELEINE MATSUI Do you regard writing as an art form that is also an inherently political act? As a writer of fiction, how do you envision your role in relation to politics?

All art is politically charged. Everything that we consider the default is framed by political ideology. Even people who claim that they are apolitical artists are deeply political. That’s just freshman art class 101. I understand my art to be a little distinct from my civic engagement. Sure, I do my art and hope that it breaks silences, raises critical questions and opens people’s minds to certain realities, but I am not convinced that’s ever enough. My art can’t help hand out fliers and certainly can’t help give out food in a soup kitchen, but those are things I can do on my own time.

While I have great dreams and hopes that my art produces progressive effects, I also think that, in the end, I have to be in there doing the work myself. It’s not enough to just outsource it to the art.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Your stories feature some pretty misogynistic characters. Do you think your work reinforces cultural tropes about gender?

I guess the question would be: “Does representation of reality reinforce reality?” We can’t answer your question without first understanding what the baseline for that question is. Is the understanding here that representations of sexism reify the patriarchy? It really depends on whether it is one’s belief that representation equals affirmation. Any representation somehow approves and reinforces, endorses and works to reify the ideologies that are supposedly representative. But I’m not sure that’s exactly how representations work. I don’t think that’s the nature of representation. My question would always be: “What percentage of males that you’ve encountered are misogynists?”

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A nontrivial percentage.

Exactly, so why would the representation of male misogyny be so striking, since it’s basically the default? I think that the question for me is: “What is the ideological work that these representations are doing?” And it’s not up to me to say or to make that decision.

That is the work of the reader. I think that we’re already starting from perhaps a profoundly confused place if the problems are representations themselves. What is interesting for me is that I’m rarely asked about the sexual violence and the rape that I represent. I wouldn’t say rarely — I am never, never asked. No one ever says: “Professor Díaz, you represent a lot of sexual violence and rape against women. Don’t you think you’re enforcing rape and sexual violence against women?” And the reason they don’t ask such absurd questions is because it’s pretty patent in the text that that’s not what’s happening. I think that encountering unvarnished traditional masculinity and those kinds of discursive masculinities — like the ways that boys talk when there are no women in the room — is shocking for many folks. Most folks like their misogyny well-lacquered, well-contained. They will endure the endless misogyny of Game of Thrones, but not read a book where a character’s interiority reflects their masculine assump-

tions and culturally accepted patriarchal assumptions. Folks will have Marie Claire, Vogue and Elle lying around — they don’t mind that commodification and objectification of women — but they’ll be troubled by a dumbass boy talking about a woman’s ass. I like to point out that someone like Yunior [the narrator of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”] certainly has a lot in common with an issue of Vogue or Marie Claire, which is to say that what’s the matter with Yunior is not about my representations, but the larger framing ideology called patriarchy.

What are your views on affirmative action?

Recently there have been polls released where you see a large percentage of whites claiming that anti-white discrimination is as present and as toxic as discrimination against blacks. When you’re dealing with such counterfactual delusions, it’s hard to have a conversation. When all sociological studies show pervasive and deep inequalities across race, when scholarship again and again underscores how racism deforms and limits the opportunities of people of color in this country, when there’s this constant drumbeat of information that racism is…pervasive, alive and well, and embedded in many of our institutions… when you have all that stuff before you, it’s hard to say that society is completely just and requires no strategies to deal with these inequalities and profound structural racism. If folks really believe that we’re post-racial, you can imagine that affirmative action would seem like this unnecessary giveaway. But I think that if you understand and live in what I would consider the real world, and see how fucked up and omnipresent and disastrous racism is and how it impacts people’s lives, then you might be more favorably disposed to some kind of legislative remedy. I myself predicate my support for affirmative action on a critical understanding of the role that white supremacy and white supremacist racism play in our national outcomes.

If you were a college student now, what do you think your biggest political concern would be going forward?

There are some perennial evils that persist: patriarchy, white supremacy and the ravages of capitalism. I imagine my alternative self would be engaged in issues surrounding increasing the presence of justice and people’s access [to it]. The aspiration of justice has driven a lot of my civic interests. It’s tough to be a student now. I’m seeing it at the faculty level. This is a moment in our university system where privatization and market logic dominate everything. Students [are] treated more as consumers and less like students every day. They’re being forced to live in a climate of competitive fear versus a climate of wonder and inquiry and openness — which are the cornerstones of education and of a learner’s stance. In my dream world with my dream self, I would be engaged around the issue of how one learns, becomes a student and transforms oneself inside of a university institution that has become hypersaturated by the logic of cash. How can we roll this back a little bit?

THOMAS PEREZ Thomas Perez ’83, a Brown alumnus who holds a master of public policy and a law degree from Harvard University, is the US Secretary of Labor and the former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the US Department of Justice.

INTERVIEW BY HENRY KNIGHT According to the Economic Policy Institute, increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016 would drive consumer spending, raising GDP by $22.1 billion, yet the federal minimum wage firmly remains at $7.25. What is the Department of Labor doing to change this? With the GOP regaining the Senate, what is the likelihood of federal progress?

It has been an all-hands-on-deck enterprise with raising the minimum wage…When you look at the United States in a global context, we’re not leading on this issue. The unfortunate aspect of that is when people don’t have money in their pockets, they don’t spend. The reason why Henry Ford raised the minimum wage for people on his assembly line 100 years ago was that he understood that when you put money in people’s pockets, they spend it. He also understood that when you pay people fairly, they stay longer. That’s why the majority of businesses support an increase in the minimum wage. I’m optimistic about its chances because I look at election night, and there were five ballot initiatives on the minimum wage. All of them passed, and four of them were in deep-red states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Alaska and Arkansas…People understand that you should be compensated fairly and that when the purchasing power of the minimum wage goes down 20 percent over the last 30 years, people can’t make ends meet. As we move forward, I’m hopeful. Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton came together [to raise the] minimum wage during Congressional sessions with Democratic control of the White House and Republican control of the House and the Senate. And I’m hopeful that we’ll do the same here.

Now that Congress is led by the Republicans, what are the prospects for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform in the remainder of President Obama’s second term?

The president will take executive action, as he has said recently.

He also said that there’s no substitute for Congressional action.

The bill that the Senate passed on a bipartisan basis was very much in the spirit of prior bipartisan efforts such as those from the mid-’90s with Ted Kennedy and Alan Simpson, and those in the ’80s under Ronald Reagan. This has always been a bipartisan issue, and the president would love nothing more than not to have to take executive action. But Speaker Boehner wasn’t able to deliver his caucus, though if he had put it to an up-or-down vote, they would have voted for it. Instead, he was hostage to the Tea Party fringe of the House caucus. That’s bad for America. That’s bad for our economic competitiveness. There are few issues that unite the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce, but immigration reform is one of them.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

The October issue of the Harper’s Magazine Index included a statistic that 69 percent of Republicans say they could not live on minimum wage, but only 37 percent support raising it. How do you explain this seemingly self-defeating discrepancy?

When you look at aggregate data, the majority of businesses support an increase in minimum wage. The majority of Republicans support an increase in the minimum wage…One of the most frequent things I hear from companies is, “The most important thing I need, Tom, are customers, because this has been a consumption-deprived recovery”…My colleague, Penny Pritzker, the Secretary of Commerce — with whom I spend a lot of time — spends virtually all of her time with businesses, and she said to me the other day, “I have yet to meet a business owner who didn’t support an increase in the minimum wage.” It’s become a philosophical issue where ideology has trumped common sense. That’s unfortunate. The challenge ahead is to educate folks. I think Republicans continue to oppose the raising of the minimum wage at their political peril. South Dakota, Alaska and Arkansas aren’t exactly liberal bastions. People across the ideological spectrum have spoken pretty clearly on what needs to be done here: People need a raise.

The 20 wealthiest nations in the world guarantee their workers paid parental leave. However, all but three US states do not. What is the Department of Labor doing to bring the United States up to speed?

It’s unconscionable that we’re the only industrialized nation on the planet that has no federal paid leave. It’s hurting our competitiveness as a nation. For instance, when you look at the year 2000 and compare female labor force participation of prime-age women — that’s ages 25 to 54 — the United States and Canada were identical. You now look to 2014 and Canada is about eight points higher. If we had maintained pace with Canada, we would have five and a half million more women in the workplace. That would be five and a half million more women contributing to the innovation economy. That would enable all of those Silicon Valley companies, tech companies and Wall Street companies, which all have pretty serious gender issues, to have access to that talent pool. What is most interesting to me about this issue of paid leave is that countries that are led by conservative governments and countries that are led by progressive governments are all leading forwards on paid leave because it is an economic imperative…I was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Frankfurt last week. I asked the business owners there: If you had the opportunity to repeal Germany’s paid leave law, would you do so? The answer in a nanosecond was absolutely not. This is an indispensable part of our ability to maintain competitiveness. It is in our enlightened business self-interest. And it’s in our national interest. Both the minimum wage and paid leave, when you look at them through a global frame, have conservative and progressive support. Governments across the world are raising the minimum wage and putting paid leave policies into place. It’s only in the United States that we’ve allowed these two issues to become partisan issues.

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KATHERINE MANGU-WARD Katherine Mangu-Ward is the managing editor of Reason magazine, the news arm of the libertarian policy center Reason Foundation. A featured panelist at BPR’s recent family weekend media event, she is a 2013-2014 Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation.

INTERVIEW BY ELI MOTYCKA How do you think libertarianism fits into the two-party system that has dominated American politics for so long?

Awkwardly. The Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement are two very different things. The Libertarian Party is not an American success story. The libertarian movement — a gross absorption of libertarian ideals — is a more optimistic tale. There’s an inclination to identify libertarians as Republicans, but libertarians have always been treated like the redheaded stepchild of the Republican Party. Frankly, libertarians have just as much in common with Democrats. That’s what is liberating about being a libertarian and looking at the American political stage — both parties are terrible. You see this as more and more people are starting to identify as independents. At the same time, libertarians have a feeling that they can do business with both parties.

When it comes to social issues like personal freedoms and civil liberties, Democrats have historically been a teeny bit better and used better rhetoric. And when it comes to economic issues, Republicans have been a teeny bit better and used better rhetoric.

What we see is that when one of these parties is in power, they almost immediately start behaving like the jerkface politicians that we always knew them to be.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

How do you respond, and how has Reason responded, to marijuana legalization through ballot initiatives in Oregon, Alaska, Washington and Washington, DC? The official Reason response is “woohoo!” It’s fantastic because it’s happening directly through referenda — through direct democracy. One thing that it shows is that people actually do have a gut understanding that just because something isn’t totally desirable doesn’t mean it should be illegal. That is a core idea that people on the left and the right consistently miss that libertarians have right: Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that you should make it illegal.

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Do you view ballot reform initiatives favorably?

No. My view is what I think a lot of people’s views are: I sure like it when the American people agree with me, and I sure hate it when they don’t. Ballot initiatives are very much a double-edged sword. There’s a deep history of ballot initiatives [being] used primarily as a tool of progressives. When we’re thinking of the landmark progressive era, that’s something that often can only happen somewhere like California, where ballot initiatives are passed willy-nilly without any regard for how that stuff is going to get paid for. All forms of governance have good and bad outcomes, but I don’t think there’s anything special about ballot initiatives that I particularly like.

How do you cope with the dispersion of your political beliefs across both the Democratic and Republican platforms in the political process?

I’m a lover, not a fighter. I just want to build bridges. When you have a nonstandard ideological cluster, the best approach is always to say: “Let’s start where we can agree.” My set of views is

driven by a single set of ideological views about nonaggression and free will and the dangers of the overweening power of the state. So if you agree with me about why it’s an absolutely terrible idea to let the government decide what you do with your body, then let’s talk about why I think that means you should also disagree with the government deciding what you should do with your money or what you should do with your professional life or your health insurance.

How do you try to effect change or broach political issues that you’re passionate about but that many people might not agree with?

I used to start out the fight with anarchism: Everything the state does is coercion and should be ended — even the government building roads is theft. And that doesn’t get you very far most of the time, so I’m much more of an incrementalist these days, and I think that’s true of the libertarian movement in general. The next issue of Reason magazine is going to be a libertarian-inflected agenda for the GOP-dominated Congress in the next two years. We’re not saying cocaine in vending machines is the American way, although we believe it is. We’re saying, “Hey, why don’t we, on a federal level, revisit the classification of marijuana and reschedule it to acknowledge that it does have medical uses and so should be less tightly regulated?”

What should the first increment be?

I think that the War on Drugs is the place to start. Ending the War on Drugs is an issue that is not identified with one party right now. Both parties are total crap on drugs and have been for 30 years, so when you hear someone like Rand Paul saying, “Hey, one thing that I don’t like about the War on Drugs is that it disproportionately affects black men,” that’s kind of a topsy-turvy moment for American politics. To hear a front-runner for the GOP nomination make the social justice argument for ending the War on Drugs suggests that there is some wiggle room on that issue. The fact that it’s happening at the state level already, in admittedly small steps, means that your Republican federalism types can get on board.

What’s the biggest obstacle to a libertarian America?

The biggest obstacle to libertarian change is the current size of the government. It’s easy to forget how every aspect of our lives is permeated by the state and the control of the government. The fact that people are quite apathetic about the status quo makes the libertarian row a tough one to hoe. That’s why it’s easier to argue for the power of markets rather than [against] the evil of the state. It’s easy for people to imagine how great free markets are, because all you have to do is say, “Look at all the stuff you can get delivered to your door by Amazon.” People really like that.

The iPhone in your pocket, which rounds up all the information that has ever existed — free markets gave you that. But the obstacle of a gigantic, overweening, ever-growing state should not be underestimated.

JOE SCARBOROUGH Joe Scarborough is a former lawyer and the current host of the popular political commentary news program “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. He was a Republican congressman from Florida from 1995 to 2001.

INTERVIEW BY SAM RUBINSTEIN What policies do you expect to come out of this GOP-controlled Congress and the states under GOP control?

I want policies that I expect they won’t touch, unfortunately.

There is an entitlement crisis and a debt crisis that are going to cripple future generations [that] neither Republicans nor Democrats are talking about reforming. I would love for Republicans to show a bit of their populist strain. [We need to] reverse the trend of income inequality that has skyrocketed over the past 15 years. A lot of Americans would be impressed by a party that follows what Warren Buffet has said, which is that millionaires should never pay less than 30 percent in taxes. Even Alan Greenspan says that income inequality is one of the greatest threats to American capitalism. We need to reinvest in infrastructure, education, research and development and in areas that China and our political rivals are doubling down on. We shouldn’t cut and slash all spending simply because we have an entitlement system that’s exploding and growing at unsustainable rates, but that’s exactly what is happening right now. We are both robbing Peter to pay Paul and slashing investments that will grow this economy in the future to sustain a pension system that can’t be sustained at current rates.

Are those policies in line with what might be considered conservatism?

If you are talking about John Boehner and Mitch McConnell conservatism, probably not. If you are talking about Reagan-style conservatism, which supported tax cuts for middle-class Americans and small business owners and created the earned income tax credit, I think that is in line with [those policies]. I don’t think that slashing and burning future investments is conservative; I think it’s foolhardy. And it’s political nihilism.

What steps should the Republicans take?

They self-corrected for the most part in these midterms. They

Why are both parties lacking depth in presidential candidates?

There is something really depressing about the prospect of having another showdown between the Clintons and the Bushes. I think it has to do with the fact that it costs billions of dollars to run for president, and you have people on Wall Street who are much more comfortable with someone like Hillary Clinton than Elizabeth Warren, or with someone like Jeb Bush over Rand Paul.

How do you serve the American people as a news pundit, compared to how you did so as member of Congress?

I have a lot more influence now than I did in Congress. There are only a handful of people shaping the news in the morning...I’ve felt the responsibility to go out and say things that other people won’t say, whether it’s taking on the Republican Party before other people feel comfortable doing it or whether it’s calling out President Obama and the Democrats when others in the media may not be comfortable doing so.

What would you like to say directly to college students?

You are being screwed. There’s a massive income redistribution from young Americans to old Americans. We have an entitlement system that’s going to cause this generation to pass a trillion dollars of debt onto the next generation of leaders. Washington is afraid to stand up and do anything about it because senior citizens vote in much higher numbers than young people. They feel the wrath of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) more than they fear an economic meltdown 10 years from now. I hope that young voters get more engaged and have their voices heard. Students who are reading this are not going to be able to pay 85 percent tax rates to keep Social Security solvent. If you want to destroy Social Security and Medicare, the best thing to do is absolutely nothing. In Washington, a sort of sclerosis has set in, and I hope that there will be a major disruption in the political process by younger voters in 2016.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

How should each party address the structural and policy flaws it currently faces?

Two areas where Democrats are on the wrong side of history are energy and education. We will be the number one producer of oil by 2020...The energy revolution will help working- and middle-class Americans by lowering energy bills, helping businesses hire new employees and allowing manufacturing to return. The fact that President Barack Obama is talking about vetoing the Keystone pipeline shows that the Democrats are more interested in environmental symbolism than environmental and economic realities. On education, teacher unions have been millstones around Democrats’ necks. We spend more money per pupil on K-12 education than any nation in the world, yet we are not getting the results. We are going to have to reform our system so we are not throwing the money down the rathole. Unfortunately, too many Democrats have just followed the lines of the teachers’ unions over the past 20 to 30 years. I hope the unions get on the forefront of education reform. If not, they will simply fade away.

stopped nominating crazy people who had to go out and remind voters in 30-second advertisements that they are not witches who tried to redefine what rape is. As the comedians say, “It’s pretty bad when your party has to ask, ‘How did the rape guy do?’ and the response is, ‘Which one?’” I think the Republicans have learned from those mistakes...I’m hoping those voters have become more pragmatic, and if they pick candidates in presidential elections who know how to attract more youth and women voters, they will be in good shape. The second crisis [Republicans] face is the feeling that this is a party that is out of touch with working-class Americans…I hope the days of Republicans just blindly cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans are coming to an end and that Republicans find a way to push for targeted tax cuts that will actually help small businesses and the working class.

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REZA ASLAN Dr. Reza Aslan is the author of the New York Times Bestseller “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.” Currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, Aslan was born in Iran and holds a BA in religious studies from Santa Clara University and a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

INTERVIEW BY ALEXANDER ABUAITA You wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about Ben Affleck’s “lambasting” of Bill Maher in regard to Maher’s generalizations of Islam as “inherently violent.” Do you think Islam is violent?

Religions aren’t inherently anything. They’re not inherently violent, peaceful, misogynistic or pluralistic. Certainly, when you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, there is an enormous amount of violence, misogyny and patriarchy that has infused those religions and their sacred texts for centuries. At the same time, those exact texts have also exuded compassion, pluralism and tolerance. The anti-theist movement focuses on the bits of savagery in scripture, on the verses of violence. They ignore the verses of love and compassion.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

How do you account for the misrepresentation of Islam in our society?

There’s no question that there is an extremist, violent virus, if you will, that has gripped a great many Muslims, particularly in the Middle East. Islamic terrorism and violence is very real and undeniable. It has gripped the attention and imagination of not just Americans, but people around the world. Understandably so, when you have an organization like ISIS selling women into sex slavery, beheading individuals, killing women and children — that deserves our attention. But if that’s all that you see about Islam, it becomes very easy to associate the most extreme elements of the religion with the Muslim that lives down the street from you. The media’s job is to report on the planes that crash, not the planes that take off safely. So if all you knew about planes was what you saw on the media, then you would assume that every single plane crashes.

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How might this trend be reversed?

It begins with understanding where anti-Muslim bigotry comes from. For many people, particularly smart, secular, liberal groups, there is a widespread notion that bigotry is a result of ignorance. Therefore, if you could just sit down with a bigot and present him with the facts…then he would change his mind.

Unfortunately, that just doesn’t happen. There are a lot of very intelligent bigots in the world, and that’s because bigotry doesn’t reside in the mind — it resides in the heart. It’s an overwhelming sense of fear of the Other…No amount of data is going to change a bigot’s mind because fear can’t be affected by information. The only way to change a person’s perception of the Other is through relationships. Studies bear this out — nearly 6 out of 10 Americans have a negative view about Islam, but 4 out of 10 Americans claim to have never met a Muslim. What we’re seeing is the result of a country that doesn’t have the ability to recognize Islam as part of the diverse religious fabric of this nation. That will change in time…We shouldn’t forget that everything being said about Muslims right now was said about Catholics at the end of the 19th century and about Jews in the 20th century.

Where does this fear of Islam come from?

September 11 was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans about the problem of violence and extremism in Islam. What we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria is fearful…At the same time, it doesn’t take a genius to realize the way in which that fear has been inflated by the media and by our political and religious leaders for their own personal, political and economic gain. When you have politicians talking about the very real possibility of a member of Hamas deliberately infecting himself with Ebola and then dressing up like a Mexican and crossing over the border into Texas to kill Americans, the absolute idiocy of that statement becomes washed away by the overwhelming fear of something real, which is violent extremism. The media certainly does it too.

CNN recently referred to Ebola as the “ISIS of biological agents.”

It’s not that the media or politicians create this fear; it’s that they heighten it to hysterical levels for their own benefit.

How does that heightened fear and hysteria play into the average American’s view of ISIS? ISIS is definitely a threat to global peace and security. This is an organization conducting nothing less than a genocidal campaign across the Middle East…Anyone who believes that the United States can be a force for good must support some kind of military response to an organization that is bloodthirsty and draconian in its dealings. However, I’ve never met a single national security expert who seriously believes that ISIS is a direct threat to the United States. That’s not to say that terrorism is not a threat to Americans…However, when the president wants to rally Americans to a military engagement, he has no choice but to couch it in this rhetoric of national security. This kind of rhetoric has no place in this conversation, yet it has become so commonplace that not only is it tolerated, but it’s also become the political mainstream.

What advice would you give to those trying to go beyond the media’s representations of Islam and the stereotypical conceptions held in this country?

The great irony is that young people are living at a time in which they have access to novel sources of information in a way that no other humans have ever had before. We are not slaves to the mainstream media. We don’t need a gatekeeper to tell us what’s going on in the Middle East. We can have direct access to that information by going online and reading newspapers and direct reports from journalists on the ground. You just can’t blame the media anymore for the ignorance of Americans about Islam or the Middle East...If you’re getting your news from CNN or Fox or MSNBC, you’re wasting your time. These are not news outlets; they’re commercial enterprises. The purpose of CNN is not to tell you what’s going on in the world. It’s to get you to the commercial so that you will buy Coca-Cola or Viagra.

JOEL SIMON Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent nonprofit that provides assistance to journalists in dangerous situations around the globe.

INTERVIEW BY SAM RUBINSTEIN News organizations have recently slashed budgets for foreign correspondents and have since taken on more freelancers.

How are freelancers treated in comparison to full-time staffers with respect to safety, and what bearing does that have on journalists’ security?

When I was a freelancer in Latin America in the ’80s, I never had a staff job. Some of the issues I hear about now were the same issues I heard about then. There was always a role for freelancers in journalism [because it] traffics in information. If you have information with news value, you can find someone who will take it. Freelancers always believed that they could go out there and track down information that others couldn’t. We never had the formal support of media institutions...That dynamic hasn’t really changed. So, what’s shifted? There are more freelancers on the front lines, and they’re covering things that are even more dangerous and deadly. When I was a freelancer in Central America, it wasn’t a walk in the park, but it was nothing like Syria [is today]. They’re just night and day. In some ways, these two dynamics are related. Technology has completely transformed the news business, but it’s also reduced the value of journalists themselves.

It used to be that if you had information to disseminate, you had to do it through journalists. They had an information monopoly.

That’s not the case any more. This makes all journalists, but particularly freelancers, even more vulnerable.

What impact did the beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIS have on the journalistic community?

The community of people who cover conflict is small and tightknit. Many people knew Steven Sotloff, but he was a more reserved person. Jim Foley was extremely outgoing and knew everybody who had covered the Middle East in the past couple of years, so people felt personally devastated. There are a couple of things that have caused reflection within the industry: There has been discussion about freelancers, their role, their vulnerability, the kind of support they need and how we can provide that. Another thing that has been really tricky is how to cover these videos...[ISIS has] created an information black hole through their extraordinary violence. There’s almost no independent information from the areas under their control, so they’ve created an environment where whatever information does come out is even more valuable. These ISIS videos are essentially news reports. It’s even creepier now that they have [British hostage] John Cantlie running around as a fake anchor. You have to acknowledge that the beheading of a US journalist is a newsworthy event, but the source of this information is the perpetrator of the violence. So how do you cover that and inform the public while not simply participating in their propaganda efforts?...We have to be very wary about relying on ISIS propaganda to tell these stories.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Is there any way to guarantee the protection of journalists abroad? For example, do treaties like the Geneva Conventions, which define the rights of noncombatants in armed conflicts, have a demonstrable impact on the safety of journalists?

The Geneva Conventions were written in the aftermath of World War II, when there was no notion of independent journalists operating in a battlefield environment. The journalists who covered WWII were largely integrated into the military forces that they were covering. One of the important protections the Conventions afford is that journalists are entitled to Prisoner of War status. Then Vietnam came along, when the notion of independent war correspondents developed. Some journalists during the Vietnam War covered the conflict while integrated into the military, but more and more were operating independently, [which] gave them greater security to cover the conflict as civilians.

When the [Geneva Conventions] Additional Protocols were developed, they conferred on journalists the protections available to all civilians — meaning that they are not military targets, and unless they carry a gun, they can’t be targeted. Most journalists have to acknowledge that international humanitarian law is really, from a functional perspective, not even operative in most of these conflict environments because they’re not fully respected.

But I think that these journalists see themselves as civilians operating independently with the protection of the armed forces, so therefore they are entitled to the full range of protections available to civilians.

You wrote a letter to President Obama regarding the effect of NSA surveillance tactics on journalists, and you also signed an open letter to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani encouraging him to comply with the United Nations Special Procedures. How much of the effort in writing a letter to a head of state is an exercise in naming-and-shaming?

When we write to President Rouhani, we certainly hope for, but don’t expect, real engagement. He is trying to convince folks that there is real reform going on in Iran and that his government is trying to improve conditions for the media, when in fact, conditions have not improved. If he’s trying to make those claims, we need to make sure he’s held accountable. With President Obama, there are very different considerations. The first is that surveillance is a real threat. Not in the same way that jailing or violence are, but among journalists around the world there’s awareness that it’s difficult and maybe increasingly impossible to communicate via modern methods while feeling safe that the communication is totally secure. It’s almost guaranteed that it’s being swept up by the NSA. Everyone is focused on this in a US context. But if you’re a Pakistani journalist interviewing militants in Pakistan — and these are very sensitive stories — if the NSA knows you’re doing this and can get access to your electronic communications, they’re going to do it...In fact, if they weren’t doing it, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs. We think there has to be some awareness of the implications of these policies on the free flow of global information.

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