BPR Spring 2015/Volume IV Issue 2

SPRING 2015 / VOLUME IV ISSUE 2

Waiting on Change The VA still needs a trip to the ER.

By Lauren Sukin

Sisi the Suppressor

Egypt’s ruthless crackdown on LGBTQ rights shows the country hasn’t changed.

By Alexander Abuaita Sponsored by:

Featuring interviews with:

Stewart Baker

Former General Counsel at the NSA

Thomas Tisch

Chancellor of the Brown Corporation

{ we’re not confined to print }

www.brown political review.com visit our newly redesigned website for additional commentary on: how have experienced howindividuals individualswho who have experienced homelessness homelessness arefor advocating for themselves in are advocating themselves in Rhode Island. { Jason Goettisheim + Eric Rhode { JasonIsland.

Goettisheim ‘18 + Eric ‘18 Song ‘18Song } ‘18 } the 2016 election as it relates to conceptions of the the 2016 election and what it means to be a “true ideal American. { Kanika Khanna gs ‘15 } American.” { Kanika Khanna gs ’15 }

funny politics around the world, when the politicians satirical candidates that actually win elections. themselves are satirists. { Victor Brechenmacher ‘18 } { Victor Brechenmacher ‘18 }

rappers’ responses to ferguson and the rappers’ responses to to Ferguson and racial injustice. increasingawareness enduring racial justices { Samuel ‘17 } such as Kendrick in recentlyLin-Sommer released albums, Lamar’s latest work. { Samuel Lin-Sommer ‘17 } the Iran negotiations according to Reza Marashi,

the negotiations in anatinterview with Reza the Iran director of research the National Iranian Marashi, the director{ Alex of research at the American Council.

Samaha ‘18 }National Iranian American Council. { Alex Samaha ‘18 }

STAFF

Executive Board EDITORS-IN-CHIEF ARIADNE ELLSWORTH & EZRA KAGAN CHIEF OF STAFF MEGHAN HOLLOWAY ASSOCIATE CHIEF OF STAFF ALEXANDER ABUAITA SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR L AUREN SUKIN INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS NAOMI CHASEK-MACFOY & SAMUEL RUBINSTEIN MEDIA DIRECTOR NINA ROESNER CONTENT DIRECTOR NOAH FITZGEREL BUSINESS DIRECTOR ALEXANDRA GARCIA MARKETING & OUTREACH DIRECTOR OLIVIA PINCINCE L AYOUT DIRECTOR MARLENA MORSHEAD

CONTENTS Features WAITING ON CHANGE The VA still needs a trip to the ER. Lauren Sukin

12

Editorial SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR L AUREN SUKIN MANAGING EDITORS EDWARD CLIFFORD & ALEXANDER LLOYD GEORGE ASSOCIATE EDITORS NAZ AKYOL, SADHANA BAL A, MATTHEW COMPOSTO, MATTEO CAVELIER RICCARDI, JACOB FREUND, CARTER JOHNSON, BASUNDHARA MUKHERJEE, DAVID MARKEY, MEGHAN SULLIVAN & CARLY WEST

Copy Editorial CHIEF COPY EDITORS THOMAS CULVER & BRENNA SCULLY COPY EDITORS SABIYA AHAMED, PIETER BROWER, ALICIA DEVOS, ALEXANDRA DOYLE, JONAH GOLDBERG, GRAHAM GONZALES, JIHO KIM, SEONG MIN KIM, MICHELLE KULOWSKI, EMILY MAGAVERN, KRISTINE MAR, CONNOR MCDERMOTT, MILI MITRA, WILLIAM NOBER, TAYLOR PEARCE, LUCREZIA SANES, EDWARD TIE, ADAM VIEIRA & DUNCAN WEINSTEIN

Interviews INTERVIEWS DIRECTORS NAOMI CHASEK-MACFOY & SAMUEL RUBINSTEIN INTERVIEWS ASSOCIATES ALEXANDER ABUAITA, CARI BONILL A, MICHAEL CHERNIN, HENRY KNIGHT, MADELEINE MATSUI, ELI MOT YCKA, GRAHAM ROTENBERG, ALEXANDER SAMAHA & JENNA WALDMAN

Media MEDIA DIRECTOR NINA ROESNER ASSOCIATE MEDIA DIRECTOR WILL DAVIS CONTENT CREATORS GRAY BRAKKE, KAT Y CHU, JASON GOETTISHEIM, INDIRA PRANABUDI, SALIL SINGH, ERIC SONG & L AUREN THOMAS

Content CONTENT DIRECTOR NOAH FITZGEREL ASSOCIATE CONTENT DIRECTOR NAZ AKYOL ASSOCIATE WEBMASTER SHREYA SRINIVAS SECTION MANAGERS BRENNA SCULLY, SCOTT THEER & CARLY WEST ASSOCIATE SECTION MANAGERS PIETER BROWER, MATTHEW JARRELL, CARTER JOHNSON, BASUNDHARA MUKHERJEE, AMALIA PEREZ & IAN TARR CULTURE WRITERS EMMA AXELROD, SERGIO CHEN, ISABELL A CREATURA, ANDREW DECK, ALEX FLOYD, REBECCA HANSEN, SEBASTIAN TUCEK, ASHLEIGH MCEVOY, EMMA MOORE, OWEN PARR, SAMUEL LIN-SOMMER, ELIZABETH STUDLICK & PHOEBE YOUNG US WRITERS MINTAKA ANGELL, BRIAN COHN, ERIN IYIGUN, MITCHELL JOHNSON, RYAN LESSING, KANIKA KHANNA, BENJAMIN KOATZ, L AUREN KOTIN, ROBIN MANLEY, KRISTINE MAR, ASHLYN MOONEY & PATRICIA PAULINO WORLD WRITERS VICTOR BRECHENMACHER, EMILY CUNNIFFE, LYDIA DAVENPORT, MATTHEW DUDAK, JASON GINSBERG, BRAIS L AMEL A GOMEZ, PAUL A MARTÍNEZ GUTIÉRREZ, HASSAN HAMADE, KATHERINE L AMB, NIKHITA MENDIS, MILI MITRA, MARINA DO NASCIMENTO, LUKE O’CONNELL, PREDRAG PANDILOSKI & CAMIL A RUIZ SEGOVIA STAFF CORRESPONDENTS JAMES JANISON & ALEJANDRO VICTORES

Business

BUSINESS DIRECTOR ALEXANDRA GARCIA ASSOCIATE BUSINESS DIRECTORS COURTNEY BERGH & MALLIKA SAHAYA BUSINESS & SALES ASSOCIATES MEREDITH ANGUEIRA, SOPHIA ASHAI, MARINA CANO, PEARSON POTTS, TERRENCE SINNOTT & BRITTANI TAYLOR

Marketing & Outreach MARKETING & OUTREACH DIRECTOR OLIVIA PINCINCE SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR KEVIN GARCIA MARKETING & OUTREACH ASSOCIATES RIYA CHANDARIA, GEOFFREY KOCKS, SANDRA LIFSHITS, ELIZABETH LIPPMAN & AL AN SWIERCZYNSKI

SISI THE SUPPRESSOR Egypt’s ruthless crackdown on LGBTQ rights shows the country hasn’t changed.

Alexander Abuaita

4

THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

Point / Counterpoint

6

VOTING FOR JUSTICE Alex Floyd

7

THEY’RE NOT JUST ELECTIONS. Pieter Brower

28 33

United States

8 10 16

With a hung parliament in the

WILL THE WEST BE SOLD? Thomas Culver REBUILDING AMERICA Derek Rott BAL ANCING THE BUDGET OFFICE Ezra Kagan

UK appearing nearly certain in May, the path to forming a government remains unclear.

World

18

HALFWAY TO NOWHERE Meghan Holloway

21

FIELD OF SCHEMES Brian Cohn

22

BPR MEDIA SPOTLIGHT: GERMANY IN THE SHADOW OF THE PAST

Politicians end up having to decide whether or not to build expensive stadiums just to keep

24

POWER STRUGGLE Blake Nosratian

26

GUNS, GERMS AND SAFARIS Basundhara Mukherjee

27

PRESSING FOR TRANSPARENCY Paula Martínez Gutiérrez and Camila Ruiz Segovia

32

SMALL PARTIES, BIG POWER Matthew Dudak

34

PILL ARS OF SAND Emily Cunniffe

Interviews

their teams at home.

36

ANDREW ROSS

Layout

37

RACHEL LLOYD THOMAS TISCH

Artists

38 40 41

JOHN HUDAK

42

STEWART BAKER

L AYOUT DIRECTOR MARLENA MORSHEAD ASSOCIATE L AYOUT DIRECTOR LUCIA COOKE DESIGN ASSOCIATES BENJAMIN BERKE, JACKSON DABRONYI, GEORGE ESSELST YN, ANICA GREEN & ANNABEL RYU

ART DIRECTOR KWANG CHOI STAFF ARTISTS REBECCA ANDREWS, ANISA HOLMES, SORAYA FERDMAN, JULIA L ADICS, KATRINA MACHADO, GOYO KWON, EMILY REIF, KIMBERLY SALTZ & OLIVIA WATSON COVER ARTIST MARÍA PAZ ALMENARA

912

21

IVAN WATSON

THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS DUDAK, p. 32 OF SCOTS VOTED FOR INDEPENDENCE IN SEPTEMBER’S REFERENDUM. SCOTLAND REMAINS PART OF THE UK.

45%

THE NUMBER OF VETERAN DEATHS THAT CAN BE TRACED TO VA MALPRACTICE AND DELAYS IN THE LAST 10 YEARS, ACCORDING TO A REPORT ISSUED BY FORMER SEN. TOM COBURN (R-OK).

SUKIN, p. 12

MUKHERJEE, p. 26

400

>1,000

THE NUMBER OF SURVIVING MEMBERS OF THE JARAWA TRIBE, AN INDIGENOUS GROUP NATIVE TO THE BAY OF BENGAL.

23

THE NUMBER OF DELAYRELATED DEATHS THE VA OFFICIALLY ADMITS TO.

AS OF 2013, 93% OF PUBLIC TELEVISION CHANNELS IN MEXICO WERE OWNED BY TWO COMPANIES.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

GUTIÉRREZ & SEGOVIA p. 27

4

In the Political Theory Project, we are talking a lot these days about the ideal of Catallaxy. Catallaxy is derived from the Greek verb katalatto, which means “to exchange,” or OF LAND IN THE WESTERN UNITED STATES“toISbecome reconciled with,” or “to admit into the comMANAGED BY THE FEDERAL GOVERMENT.munity,” or, “to change from an enemy into a friend.” The cognate catallaxy, therefore, refers to a pattern of mutually OF LAND IN THE REST OF THE COUNTRY ISbeneficial interaction (“friendship”) that does not require MANAGED BY STATE GOVERNMENTS. that participants share the same ends.

F.A. Hayek made MILLION the term catallaxy famous among economists, using it to CULVER, p. 8refer to the spontaneous order of the free society. At the PTP, through our program of visiting scholars and postMILLION doctoral fellows, and through our student programs such to provide spaces for the THE RATIO OF MIGRANT OF AMERICAN BRIDGES WERE CONSIDERED STRUCTURALLYas the Janus Forum, we aspire building of “catallactic friendships” here at Brown.

50% 95% 24.9%

7.8 9.2

DEFICIENT OR FUNCTIONALLY OBSOLETE BY THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CIVIL ENGINEERS IN THEIR 2014 REPORT CARD.

ROTT, p. 10

WORKERS TO THE TOTAL POPULATION IN THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES.

CUNNIFFE, p. 34

verb

| ‘kät ’lässõ | e

Καταλλάσσω [ with obj. ]

1)

cause to coexist in harmony; reconcile, of persons; make or show to be compatible.

2)

admit into a community; to allow (a person, country, or organization) to join an organization or a group.

3)

change decisively; make or become a different substance entirely; transform.

COGNATES / DERIVATIVES catallaxy noun catallactic adj.

m

e ly e

At The Political Theory Project, we’re talking a lot these days about the ideal of Catallaxy: a pattern of mutually beneficial interaction that does not require that participants share the same ends, such as friendship.

h

Through our program of visiting scholars and post-doctoral fellows, and through our student programs such as The Janus Forum, we aspire to provide spaces for the building of catallactic friendships here at Brown.

POINT

ARE JUDICIAL ELECTI O VOTING FOR JUSTICE STORY BY ALEX FLOYD

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW POINT / COUNTERPOINT

I

6

n 2009, judicial elections came under assault when the Supreme Court ruled in Caperton v. Massey that West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin had to recuse himself from a case involving one of his election campaign donors. The case emerged after Justice Benjamin received campaign contributions from Massey Energy, a major corporation then embroiled in a fraud case, and subsequently voted in the company’s favor. In its decision, the Court ruled that the West Virginia Supreme Court must retry the case — and that Justice Benjamin must, this time, recuse himself. The example has since been cited by opponents of judicial elections as an example of “bought judges.”

However, the situation is not as problematic as it may first appear. The Court ruled the same way it had before the retrial — in favor of Massey Energy. In fact, the West Virginia Supreme Court ultimately decided that there was no bias in the way that the case had originally been handled.

Despite the scandal, the situation did little to challenge the system of judicial elections that has been in place since the 19th century and has provided a notably effective and efficient structure for determining the US judiciary.

The common gripe about judicial elections is that the increasing influence of money in politics tampers with justice and produces biased outcomes. Yet the data to back up such claims is weak, if not downright misleading. Anecdotal evidence like Caperton v. Massey is often pointed to as an indictment of the entire system, even though Justice Benjamin ruled against Massey Energy 81.6 percent of the time, despite receiving contributions from the company.

Judicial campaign donations do not appear to weaken judicial impartiality nor prevent substantive legal debates. Many

studies, including one just released by law professors from New York University, Duke University and the University of Chicago, have found that elected judges frequently match or outperform their appointed counterparts in metrics like opinions produced, independence and efficiency.

What’s more, judicial elections do not, as opponents often claim, damage public perceptions of the judiciary. A report released by Washington University in St. Louis Professor James Gibson revealed that elections can actually improve public perceptions of the judiciary by holding judges directly accountable to the citizenry. Most so-called merit systems, on the other hand, leave judges only indirectly accountable at best. Judicial elections solve this issue, allowing citizens to use the voting booth to hold judges accountable for corruption, political extremism or negligence on the bench.

Democratic accountability makes judicial elections an essential tool of good governance. While seating a judge is always a difficult task, judicial elections give the public a direct check on the judiciary, something nearly impossible under life appointment systems. In fact, the only accountability placed on appointed judges is a lengthy and difficult impeachment process. While this is clearly a deterrent for the most unscrupulous judges, the vast majority of the judiciary can rest easy with almost any decision it makes; impeachment has only removed eight federal judges from the bench in all of US history.

And while judicial elections may cause judges to tailor their decisions to popular opinion, the alternatives offer little promise for improvement. Just as campaign contributions to elected judges may create the potential for biased rulings, campaign contributions to politicians may influence which judge gets placed on the court under the

merit system. The fact that appointed judges receive lifetime tenure further allows judges to overreach their power and hand down overtly political rulings more in line with the politicians who appointed them than with sound jurisprudence. Although both systems create the opportunity for bias, only judicial elections can effectively hold judges accountable for this bias should it become evident.

In addition, a closer look at the federal appointment system reveals another significant drawback: The system often fails to fill the entire federal bench. Partisan gridlock has stalled the appointment process in many places, leaving many vacancies across the federal judiciary. A Brookings Institution study found that the average time from nomination to confirmation has been growing over the past two decades, with the average time to confirm a district judge rising from three months under President Clinton to about 7.5 months under President Obama. The political battles that consume the appointment system are simply leaving the US judiciary with too few judges, weakening the responsiveness of the judiciary.

Proponents of judicial elections do not deny that an independent judiciary is important. Judicial elections are decidedly imperfect, but the alternatives have no better track record of halting corruption and ideological extremism. Citizens deserve to have a say in those who could potentially pass judgment on them and should therefore have the ability to hold their judiciary accountable. Merit-based systems allow party bickering and partisan ideals to dominate a judicial selection process when, instead, true democratic oversight should reign supreme.

ALEX FLOYD ‘18 IS POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A CULTURE STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

COUNTERPOINT

I ONS GOOD POLICY? THEY’RE NOT JUST ELECTIONS. STORY BY PIETER BROWER

O

What’s worse, the continuing relaxation of American campaign finance laws has amplified the problems with judicial elections. Today, elected judges can solicit donations from donors of all stripes, many of whom have an interest in influencing judicial decisions. In 2009, the Supreme Court’s decision in Caperton v. Massey required that judges recuse themselves in cases where a campaign donor is involved, highlighting the growing concern that a public voice in judicial appointments could make court decisions less than neutral. Correlation isn’t causation, of course, but the trend of judicial campaign donors receiving favorable verdicts could shatter the public perception of an independent judiciary. A 2009 Gallup poll found that 89 percent of those surveyed believed that campaign contributions were problematic in judicial elections.

Furthermore, it is no secret that special interests can push private donors to skew judicial races through funding. A 2014 Center for American Progress report found a significant correlation between campaign donations and favorable rulings by the North Carolina Supreme Court. According to a study conducted by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, the mere presence of pricey television ads can influence justices to vote against criminal appeals. The findings reinforce those of another study in Pennsylvania that found that all judges increase sentences as their elections near.

It is hard to negate the fact that elected judges depend heavily on campaign funding to maintain their positions. Spending on judicial elections has met record levels in recent years, even reaching $56 million in the 2011-2012 cycle. And while the Caperton decision offered some hope to remedy the ills of judicial elections, the ruling conflicts with the trend of limiting restrictions on judicial campaign activity — a trend that

includes the case Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, which declared unconstitutional a clause prohibiting judicial candidates in Minnesota from discussing issues that could come before the Court.

In a similar move earlier this year, the Supreme Court took up a challenge to Florida’s campaign finance laws for judicial elections, prohibiting candidates from personally soliciting campaign funds — a regulation that is fairly common across the country.

Given the Court’s ruling in Citizens United, it seems likely that the same five conservative justices will overturn the restrictions on First Amendment grounds, paving the way for increased spending and campaigning in judicial elections. The Citizens United of judicial elections may be on the way, and although the Caperton case is an outlier, it is not hard to imagine similar situations arising in the future.

There are admittedly problems that arise from insulating the judiciary entirely.

Therefore, the best solution to the tensions between a democratic and impartial judiciary probably lies somewhere between the two extremes. Perhaps merit-based judicial systems, which are already used in several states, are the answer. In merit selection, the nominating commission generally screens applicants and selects the most qualified candidates. A political actor — usually the governor — then selects among the recommended candidates. While there are also flaws in this process, the system ensures the selection of qualified judges while still maintaining public oversight, albeit indirectly.

These merit selection systems may be the only way to preserve accountability over the judiciary while still limiting the increasingly pernicious influence of money in American democracy.

PIETER BROWER ‘18 IS A PUBLIC POLICY CONCENTRATOR AND AN ASSOCIATE CULTURE SECTION MANAGER AT BPR.

POINT / COUNTERPOINT BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

ne of the cornerstones of American democracy is the notion of an independent judiciary — distinct from the legislative and the executive branches and insulated from political pressures and the popular will. Only an independent judiciary can rule consistently and impartially. But America’s judicial system may be lacking in this regard, since judicial elections undermine the judiciary’s independence.

Judicial elections have led to biased judges and opened the door to unqualified candidates. Perhaps because of this, it is a virtually unknown system outside the United States, with just two foreign countries — Switzerland and Japan — using the method. Even then, these countries use judicial elections in an extremely limited fashion. Nowhere else does the judicial election system hold as much importance as it does in the United States, where 87 percent of all state court judges face elections and 39 states elect at least some of their justices.

American judicial elections originated in the late 19th century, as progressive reformers sought to make the government more responsive to popular will. More recently, however, the American Bar Association (ABA) and many legal scholars across the country have come out against judicial elections, arguing that states should use a form of selection that prizes merit over mere popularity. There’s a lot of credibility to their criticisms — a University of Chicago report found that although elected judges write more opinions, appointed judges write opinions of better legal quality. Additionally, public opinion may not be a good basis for choosing judges in the first place. The ABA rightfully posits that judges should not necessarily heed public opinion, a view that reflects the framers’ vision of an independent judiciary.

ART BY MARLENA MORSHEAD

7

WILL THE WEST BE SOLD? The brewing debate over land transfers STORY BY THOMAS CULVER / ART BY KATRINA MACHADO

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

N

8

evada rancher Cliven Bundy made headlines when a decades-old disagreement with authorities over grazing rights on federally owned land escalated into a heated showdown between local and federal law enforcement agents. The Bundy dispute prompted reactions from high-profile politicians of all stripes and garnered intense media coverage, bringing hundreds of states’ rights activists to rally around the cause.

Its most significant claim to relevance, however, is the rekindling of a dormant issue — one that cuts to the center of Western identity and the role of the federal government. With everything from quiet rangelands to the scenic vistas of Yellowstone National Park on the table, federalists and land transfer critics seeking to protect Americans’ shared heritage are fighting each other over who should hold the heart of the West: the states or the more secure hands of the federal government.

Much of the debate is grounded in regional inequalities in federal land management. The US government oversees a far greater portion of land in the West than it does elsewhere in the country.

While non-Western states are collectively responsible for managing over 95 percent of all land within their borders, Western ones serve as custodians for less than 50 percent of their region’s land, with federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management, the National Parks Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the US Forest Service maintaining the rest. States’ rights advocates argue that the time has come to devolve land management, while critics of this so-called transfer argument warn — with compelling reason — that such a policy will surely bring financial ruin to these states.

Federalists insist that the management of public lands by the central government has significantly weakened their state governments. Utah State Representative Ken Ivory, a leader of the movement to transfer federally managed lands to state governments, argued in his successful 2014 reelection campaign that the federal government’s oversight of public lands has denied the state billions of dollars in annual revenue for essential government programs.

Public lands, which in Utah’s case make up two-thirds of its total area, generate revenues from grazing permits, mineral leases and tourism — money that Western states today don’t have access to.

In addition to their fiscal argument, these advocates maintain that the federal management of Western lands represents historical injustice and inequality. Federalists assert that states east of the 100th Parallel have prospered in large part thanks to the federal government’s historical policy of bequeathing lands held in trust unto these states, which can then collect the related revenues. Today, there is almost no federally controlled trust land in states like Ohio and Florida, which were instead granted hundreds of thousands of acres of land upon their statehood. However, many states west of the 100th Parallel were not so lucky. Most of their land is still held by the federal government — a fact that land transfer advocates claim is a weighty disadvantage.

Land transfer advocates have gathered a great deal of support, as the Bundy affair clearly shows. But their argument has provoked a strong challenge from opponents who rightly question the impact that transfers would have on the region’s finances and identity. Transfer advocates’ economic argument hinges on the assumption that the federal government is currently reap-

ing enormous revenues from public lands.

While this might be true, it’s a narrow view that overlooks the point that opponents of transfers make: The management of vast new tracts of land would bleed states dry, regardless of whatever revenues might be drawn from tourism or permits.

In addition to the significant costs associated with day-to-day maintenance, the primary expenses that concern critics are those generated by forest fires. The Washington Post estimates that the federal government spends more than $2 billion annually on costs associated with these natural disasters. This financial burden would presumably be passed onto Western states if they were to assume management of public lands, and states may not be able to afford those costs. While Representative Ivory and others insist that land transfers are the key to increasing state revenue by billions of dollars, studies by nonpartisan groups such as the Center for Western Priorities have instead suggested that public land management could, in fact, cost states tens of millions of dollars every year.

Land transfer critics have also argued that the devolution of lands would lead to massive sell-offs of communal land in order to balance state books. Westerners consistently react with shock and outrage to the notion of privatizing public lands — the cornerstone of the region’s economy, recreation and cultural identity — and have castigated pro-transfer political leaders accordingly. A poll by the Center for American Progress found that a majority of Westerners both across the region and within every state except Utah oppose land transfers. Grassroots advocates have taken to social media with messages like #keepitpublic in protest of transfers and land sales, and conservation groups including the Sierra Club and the Rocky Mountain Elk Founda-

a resolution endorsing land transfers. Republican Senators Dean Heller of Nevada and Steve Daines of Montana have both advocated for land transfers, and in March, Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski added a land transfer amendment to this year’s federal budget, which passed 51-49. But even with these prominent politicians on board, the movement has made slow progress. Even Murkowski’s amendment is only symbolic; it doesn’t actually sell or transfer any public lands. And on the other side of the aisle, prominent Western Democrats such as New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, Colorado Senator Michael Bennet and Montana Governor Steve Bullock have come to the defense of public lands, speaking out against transfers and trying to repel Bundy supporters and transfer advocates alike.

PUBLIC LANDS, WHICH IN UTAH’S CASE MAKE UP TWO-THIRDS OF ITS TOTAL AREA, GENERATE REVENUES FROM GRAZING PERMITS, MINERAL LEASES AND TOURISM — MONEY THAT WESTERN STATES TODAY DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO. The debate also played out in several of 2014’s midterm elections. In the Montana Senate race, Democratic candidate Amanda Curtis lambasted the Republican Daines for his alleged support of public land sales, saying that his position “shows he’s out of touch with most working families in the state, [who] can’t go on vacation unless they have access to public lands.” While Curtis lost by a considerable margin, other anti-transfer candidates fared better. Incumbent Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, for example, defeated his staunchly pro-transfer Republican challenger Bob Beauprez, who

declared that the state’s public lands were “supposed to be Colorado’s.” With more anti-transfer than pro-transfer politicians in the halls of Western state capitols, it looks like public lands will be protected. But the upsurge of federalist interest in land transfers suggests that transfer opponents may soon face a steeper uphill battle.

While Beauprez lost his election, his message exposes the question of cultural identity that lies at the core of the public lands debate. Regardless of the financial burden of transfers, it’s unclear who has a fundamental claim to the public lands.

Small-government voices like Beauprez clearly stand with those who argue that spaces like Mesa Verde and Pikes Peak are manifestations of Colorado’s cultural heritage, not of the United States at large.

Beauprez’s view may have limited currency in the American West, but so far his opponents have managed to push him to the political fringe. The 2015 Western States Survey, a nonpartisan annual poll of Westerners, found that a majority in every state views public lands not as cultural objects of the state, but instead as “American spaces” — quintessential parts of what defines the United States itself.

The overwhelming popularity of antitransfer views, even in the face of a wellfunded and dedicated federalist case for land transfers, reflects the importance of these lands to Westerners and how seriously they take any threat to them. Some Westerners certainly distrust the federal government, but they are even more suspicious of those who would intrude upon citizens’ ability to access the spaces that have, for so long, defined the boundless Wild West and the country as a whole.

THOMAS CULVER ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR AND A CHIEF COPY EDITOR AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

tion have rallied around the cause as well.

Despite the weight of these counterarguments, federalists nevertheless continue to push land transfer bills in state legislatures from Alaska to New Mexico — with some success. Bills demanding that the federal government transfer all federally managed lands have passed in states such as Idaho and Utah, and bills mandating studies of the legality and viability of such transfers have become law in Montana, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming. Considering the general opposition of Westerners, this level of success is impressive, if unfortunate. Moreover, it’s indicative of how hard transfer advocates have been pushing.

Federalists’ surprising success has been made possible, in part, by the support of powerful national organizations such as the American Lands Council, a pro-transfer network, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization supported by big oil companies.

ALEC is known for the pre-made “model legislation” it provides to members and now counts a land transfer bill as one of these models. The organization also named Ivory as its Legislator of the Year in 2014, largely because of his advocacy for land transfers.

Funding and lobbying efforts from these organizations have secured limited successes for transfer advocates, even though they have faced off against public opposition and big-name environmental organizations.

Fortunately, however, no substantial progress has been made towards transfers, since the state legislation cannot actually compel the federal government to comply.

While most of the political fighting surrounding the land transfer debate has taken place within the halls of state legislatures, higher elected officials have also weighed in. At the beginning of 2014, the Republican National Committee passed

9

REBUILDING AMERICA How to get transportation infrastructure back on track STORY BY DEREK ROTT / ART BY EMILY REIF

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

A

10

merican infrastructure is in trouble. Years of neglect have left many roads, sewers and dams in questionable condition, posing serious risks to both productivity and safety. From cracks in Washington’s Wanapum Dam to the 2003 blackout, in which 55 million in the Northeast and Canada lost power, to the deteriorating 19th century sewage systems of DC, infrastructure problems continue to make headlines and create problems in the daily lives of Americans. And yet, it’s only when a calamity occurs — like the 2007 collapse of the I-35W in Minnesota that dropped 50 vehicles into the Mississippi River, killing 13 and injuring 145 more — that infrastructure issues receive the attention they deserve.

Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) report card gave the United States a “D+” for its infrastructure, noting that 24.9 percent of American bridges were considered “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.” The report projected that an investment of $3.6 trillion would be necessary to adequately repair roads, bridges and dams by 2020. While the ASCE is an admittedly biased source on the matter, these statistics are still a shocking reminder of just how long the road to sustainable infrastructure stretches. And solutions aren’t coming fast. The problem is exacerbated by

a Highway Trust Fund that is on course for insolvency, with some predicting the end of August 2015 as the fated date. As the government quickly runs out of time to replenish the fuel needed for infrastructure upgrades, funding for infrastructure maintenance is becoming all the more pressing.

Though the need for funding is clear, where it will come from is less so. One frequently discussed and highly controversial

AMERICA’S INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS EXACERBATED BY AN ALMOSTBANKRUPT HIGHWAY TRUST FUND THAT IS ON COURSE FOR INSOLVENCY, WITH SOME PREDICTING THE END OF AUGUST 2015 AS THE FATED DATE. option is to raise the federal gas tax, which is the driving force for the Highway Trust Fund. The tax hasn’t been adjusted since 1993 — when it was set at 18 cents per gallon — despite rising prices at the pump. Because of inflation, it’s as if the tax has suffered a 39 percent decrease over the past 20 years.

Fortunately for advocates of a tax hike, the significant drop in crude oil prices in recent months has made an increase in the gas tax more palatable. And the tax hike has advo-

cates, such as Senators Bob Corker (R-TN) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) who have proposed a 12-cent increase in the gas tax over the next two years. The proposal comes with an offer of $190 billion in tax relief designed to satiate both individuals and businesses and to bolster the tax’s political viability. But Corker and Murphy’s legislation is swerving off course. The proposed hike is both unpopular and myopic; Americans drive less now than ever before. And since federal mileage per gallon requirements have risen, cars are using less gas, meaning that the tax increase, in addition to possibly alienating constituents, would merely postpone a firm resolution to the funding issue.

Another proposal backed by Democrats suggests generating revenue for infrastructure projects by closing corporate tax loopholes. In 2013, President Obama unveiled the Grow America Act, which sought to create a $478 billion infrastructure fund financed by a “one-time 14 percent transition tax on up to $2 trillion of untaxed foreign earnings that US companies have accumulated overseas.” Obama’s idea, however, has failed to garner support among congressional Republicans and is stuck in the slow lane — though, if it did succeed, it would likely provide the means

4.9 x 5.1 in

bill seems to have rare political viability, since the Partnership to Build America Act has garnered significant bipartisan support in the House and is already cosponsored by a healthy mix of 39 Republicans and 36 Democrats.

A $750 billion investment in US infrastructure would certainly ease the worries of Americans driving over functionally obsolete bridges on their daily commutes.

But the money would do even more than that. It would have the potential to increase economic productivity and create jobs; the Economic Policy Institute predicts that even $250 billion alone in infrastructure investment could “support more than 2.2 million jobs” and provide a substantial $313 billion boost to US GDP. The Bureau of Labor Statistics corroborates the economic importance of infrastructure investment, noting that the construction sector, which was hit especially hard during the Great Recession, still faces unemployment levels of around 8 percent.

But the bill has its detractors. Critics argue that allowing companies to repatriate money held overseas will reward corporate actors who dodge taxes through offshore accounts. Furthermore, the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded that the investment model used by the bill

DEREK ROTT ‘18 IS A BIOCHEMISTRY CONCENTRATOR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

to temporarily fund significant infrastructure investment. But corporate loopholes are essentially off the table, since any realistic proposal will need to have strong support on both sides of the aisle.

Both raising the gas tax and closing corporate loopholes are options for temporary sources of funding, but the solution to America’s infrastructure problem will likely have to be radical and far-reaching.

One bipartisan proposal, the Partnership to Build America Act, could present an answer. The act would create the American Infrastructure Fund (AIF), stocked by the sale of $50 billion worth of infrastructure bonds paying 1 percent interest. As an incentive to purchase the bonds, corporations would be allowed to repatriate a certain percentage of their overseas tax money for every $1 invested in these bonds. Analysts have concluded that the AIF could potentially yield $750 billion to fund infrastructure repairs. In addition to providing this extensive funding source, the bill’s structure would drive both private and public-private investment in infrastructure. Bonds have the additional benefit of providing not just immediate funding, but sustainable funding — something crucial to the long-term projects and repairs that the United States needs. Furthermore, the

could have detrimental effects. The Bureau examined the 2004 Homeland Investment Act, which was marketed as a way to spur short-term job creation and which used a similar model to that of the Partnership to Build America Act. The report found that the funds mainly benefited shareholders through dividend payouts, accomplishing little constructive progress. Though Congress has said that it would never repeat the 2004 “tax holiday,” it is possible that the Partnership to Build America Act would continue this dangerous precedent by primarily benefiting shareholders at the expense of American taxpayers.

Others have also criticized the AIF’s funding mechanism as inefficient and fiscally irresponsible. Given the specific structure of the bond, and the AIF’s pledge to raise a minimum of $50 billion, there is a good chance that the government will actually lose money through the program.

Based on predictions by the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Economic Policy Institute, the value of the lost tax revenue from repatriated funds could end up larger than the $50 billion that the bonds will raise. Besides the economic argument, others are unhappy with the bill’s repatriation technique for more qualitative reasons.

Political blog The Hill asked, “Why are we rewarding bad behavior?” Essentially, the AIF has lost support by rewarding companies that hide their finances overseas, a technique that hurts small businesses and is generally considered poor practice.

Despite its drawbacks, the AIF may be worth a shot, since the United States needs to invest in its infrastructure — and quickly. Today’s low interest rates will not be around forever, especially as the Federal Reserve begins to tighten its policy. As a result, Congress needs to act decisively to take advantage of current economic conditions.

In some ways, the bill seems to have run out of fuel — not much progress has been made since its introduction in 2014. It was mentioned explicitly in Obama’s 2014 State of the Union, but was left out of the 2015 address. Perhaps a modified Partnership to Build America Act — one that doesn’t rely on repatriation — would provide an opportunity to curry favor across the political median. The Highway Trust Fund’s ticking clock may drive Congress to do the improbable: pass a bill that will make much-needed investments in our roads, dams and bridges — without requiring a raise in taxes.

11

Waiting on Change The VA Still needs a trip to the er.

by Lauren Sukin / GRAPHICS by George Esse lstyn

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

I

12

n a run-down Los Angeles neighborhood in late January, a homeless veteran struck up a conversation with Robert McDonald, the newly appointed Secretary of Veterans Affairs (VA). After learning that the veteran had served in the Special Forces, McDonald jovially replied: “Special Forces — what years? I was in Special Forces.” What seemed, at the time, little more than friendly banter between two soldiers quickly became a ringing indictment of the VA. While McDonald is indeed a West Point graduate and was a soldier for five years, he never served in the Special Forces. For this little lie, captured by CBS News cameras, McDonald’s reputation took a big hit. Days later, he admitted under pressure: “I made a mistake, and I apologize for it.”

He insisted that, beginning with his service in the Boy Scouts and up through his role as Secretary, integrity was “one of the foundations of [his] character.” Nevertheless, Chairman of the House Veterans Affairs SOLDIER GRAPHIC BY SIMON CHILD

Committee Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL) said the events had left him “disappointed” in McDonald, while others, like Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), were more ready to forgive and forget: “The secretary’s misstatement was an error, but it doesn’t dim the fact that he served honorably…We should all take him at his word.”

This is but one in a series of gaffes that have cast a shadow of suspicion on the VA Secretary’s office. In February, McDonald stated that 60 workers had been fired as a result of a recent scandal beginning at Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care, which revealed the outrageous wait times for veterans trying to receive medical care.

Later, McDonald admitted that the true number of workers fired was only eight — although some estimates have put it closer to 20. This exaggeration reflects particularly poorly on McDonald’s record, since he had originally promised to “aggressively” hold staff accountable for their mistakes.

The New York Times found that, as Secre-

tary, McDonald “has fired fewer employees than his predecessor did in the year before he resigned.”

During the same week as McDonald’s 60-to-8 blunder, the Secretary made another touchy mistake. While arguing with Rep. Coffman — who had defended McDonald after the Special Forces comments — regarding a VA facility in Colorado, the frustrated Secretary lashed out at Coffman’s credentials, asking: “I’ve run a large company, sir. What have you done?” McDonald was apparently ignorant of Coffman’s record not only as an influential representative, but also as the founder of a property-management firm, the former Secretary of State and State Treasurer of Colorado and as a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq.

This recent series of unfortunate events has greatly undermined Secretary McDonald’s goal to rebuild trust in the VA — trust that the institution has lost in the wake of a vicious cycle of scandals,

mismanagement and waste. It’s little secret that the VA has gone through a rough patch lately. Scandal after scandal led to the ousting of former Secretary Eric Shinseki and a series of bipartisan initiatives to reinvigorate the federal bureaucracy. Despite these efforts, the VA is still in dire need of even the most basic reforms.

T

times. Forty veterans had died due to the delays. It was later determined that almost 2,000 more were “at risk of being forgotten or lost” in the hospital’s byzantine system.

The same month, the hospital’s director, Sharon Helman, received an $8,495 bonus for her performance.

When the scandal blew up in the press, Obama ordered an investigation of the hospital, even as top VA officials denied the report’s validity and the corroborating claims of whistleblowers at the hospital.

After the House Veterans Affairs Committee voted to subpoena then-Secretary Eric Shinseki, a further 69 VA facilities were put under investigation for doctoring their official records.

The ongoing saga is not merely the sum of its scandals, but is also evidence of a colossal failure of leadership. Senior VA officials had been aware of the situation in Phoenix long before the story broke.

Susan Bowers, who was responsible for VA establishments across the Southwest, had informed Secretary Shinseki of the problems posed by backlogs as early as 2009, warning that the Phoenix center was set to “implode.” A federal judge even ruled that it was “more likely than not that at least some senior agency leaders were aware, or should have been, of nationwide problems getting veterans scheduled for timely appointments.”

While the former undersecretary for health, Dr. Robert Petzel, confirmed those claims, saying that the VA knew about the wait time issues, Shinseki continued to deny the allegations. Shortly after, Shinseki resigned and Obama appointed McDonald to take over.

"I

need help,” pleaded Richard Miles, upon entering a VA hospital in February. Miles had a history of post-traumatic stress, anxiety and insomnia. He had violent dreams, had been hospitalized four times for his disorder, had once brought a gun into a hospital intending to commit suicide and had tried to hang himself twice.

But when Miles showed up at the VA hospital, he was only given Lorazepam, a sleeping and anxiety medication, and turned away. Miles was later found frozen to death, having ingested a toxic amount of the drug.

Since Miles denied having suicidal de-

Few new doctors have been hired, bungling supervisors have yet to be replaced and trust between veterans and the system built to protect them is exceedingly rare.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

he US Department of Veterans Affairs’ 300,000 employees are responsible for the benefits, medical care and burials of approximately nine million US veterans. The medical system, however, has been heavily criticized, with many veterans’ groups, politicians and media outlets chiding the bureaucracy for its inefficiency and budget woes. Recently, the difficulty in providing timely medical services has placed the VA under a microscope. After discharge, veterans must go through a lengthy process to register for care. They are then means-tested, and wealthier veterans are given lower priority. After all the paperwork is filed and approved, patients are supposed to wait no more than two weeks to see a doctor — but that speedy timeline is far from standard practice. In fact, a report by the VA’s inspector general called the scheduling problems “systemic.”

Problems with the VA are nothing new. In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a campaign promise to fix the “broken bureaucracy of the VA,” which had been severely troubled for the last decade.

A 2001 study found that typical wait times for veterans to obtain medical appointments were two months; a 2003 commission found that more than 230,000 veterans had been waiting more than six months; and in 2007, big bonuses for VA officials sparked public anger in the face of massive backlogs and problematic internal reviews.

Though wait times have been the subject of much scrutiny, they are far from the only issue with veterans’ hospitals. Once veterans finally get treatment, the quality of care is often substandard. In 2009, it was found that 10,000 veterans were potentially exposed to infection as a result of improperly sterilized medical equipment. Thirty-seven had contracted HIV or hepatitis.

Similarly, in 2011 a dentist who admitted failing to change his gloves or even wash his hands between patients accidentally gave

hepatitis to nine veterans. Adding to the tragic situation, in 2012, 120 VA-managed graves were discovered to be misidentified.

A report issued last year by then-Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) found that at least 1,000 veteran deaths in the past 10 years may be traced to VA malpractice and delays. The VA, however, officially admits to only 23 delay-related deaths. Coburn also accused the VA of failing to manage its budget. The report reveals that the organization has spent $20 billion since 2001 on projects like office renovations and new call centers that receive only 2.4 daily calls on average.

Furthermore, the VA’s construction projects routinely and massively exceed their budgets. The construction of a new $2 billion hospital in Aurora, CO — a project originally capped at $600 million — is just one example. Representative Coffman called the VA’s actions in Aurora “pure incompetence,” and the VA Director of the Office of Construction and Facilities Dennis Milsten described it as a “fiasco.” The VA’s budget has also been strained by gratuitous administrative fees: Even during the current controversies, 78 percent of managers have qualified for bonuses, including former VA Regional Director Michael Moreland. In 2013, Moreland received a $63,000 bonus for instituting policies to prevent infections, despite the fact that an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at a hospital under his jurisdiction killed six veterans.

The Coburn report found a litany of other problems, including drug dealing, sexual abuse and theft. In one particularly egregious case, a staff member at a Florida VA facility was found selling patients’ personal data to acquire crack cocaine. The practice of overprescribing powerful drugs to patients recently made news when it was discovered that the Tomah Veteran Affairs Medical Center had been excessively handing out opioid painkillers to its patients. In response, Congress scheduled a hearing to further investigate the VA’s painkiller prescription practices. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said.

The depth of the VA’s woes was ultimately revealed in 2014 at a hospital in Phoenix, AZ. In April, a review revealed that staff had been keeping an under-the-table list of appointments and claims in order to hide the true length of the hospital’s wait

13

Timeline : 2014 PHOENIX VA HOSPITAL SCANDAL

Ap

ril

Ap

ril

Ap

r

Ma y

Ma y

Ma y

Ma y

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

9 1 15 Pr To i l 3 8 Sh 23 Re Th Sh esi 28 Th p ins i p t ins e nto de V he offi 0 e 40 ort s t e e tee Ho h ch sc e ap exi cia the nt O es tera ki te ap vete s co vo use W edu anda ad e Ph ki pl po ste ls a his ns sti all bam tes yo lin l w o m a i n t V n e Aff poin rans me t c eg ini ni es mi g dis Aff fies tm ce the to ete ati a ca air tm di o li str x V th ng mi iden ma airs be en of t P r s a u on lls s H en ed gh e a , T sco s a t w he ho bp ns y o Co fore tiv A a di s. e for e A ea ts a wa t th s o r a n n x e n p ve m th en ffa itin ur ix as du rep lth t P itin at lea d t ecto rt m a a i n a p c w V o r h g v he itte e Se r n Ca oe g f at l t S o s A r i e o l h d n e o . ist rte ins Co e aid f ve re all e, nat n o No xte ts of . d s den m sti eg ex e Sy ix V r me ast ek es rth nd mi ec y ga ati pr ste et d i o . t r tio tn Ca o on ess e m. era ica t n s. ro ns l lin a.

14

sires, the VA doctors were only following procedure when they turned him away. But Miles’ story sheds light on a bigger problem: The system is not properly designed to seriously tackle veterans’ mental health problems. In recent years, the VA’s inability to address mental health needs has been spotlighted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — a report even revealed that the number of suicides by US troops have overtaken the number of soldiers’ deaths in Afghanistan.

"We're missing the boat with these most atrisk veterans,” explains Brandon Coleman, who worked on suicide prevention at the Phoenix hospital. “We can't just hand these guys pills. [That] is not the answer.” Miles’ case — among others — indicates that suicide prevention is not just a problem about access to physical resources, but also about when and how veterans are treated for their mental health issues.

In February, Obama signed a measure to combat veteran suicides. In a rare moment of agreement, the law was passed unanimously in both the House and the Senate. The law will make changes to VA procedures in order to help veterans find resources for mental health care. It will also recruit additional mental health staff for VA establishments, create interactive online resources and provide more time and flexibility to veterans who are seeking care.

The new legislation is critical, since some estimates have determined that 22 veterans commit suicide each day. The law is named after Clay Hunt, a Texas Marine who took his own life at age 28 after a long struggle with post-traumatic stress. Tragically, 15 members of his unit also committed suicide after their returns from active duty.

“This is an issue that needs to be seared into the forefront of every citizen of this coun-

try,” said Jake Wood, a former Marine who served in Afghanistan with Hunt.

In light of these stories — and the many others like them — it is clear that the VA’s approach to mental health has many more flaws than the Clay Hunt legislation alone can fix. Beyond expanding access to medical care and technicians, the VA must also rethink the methods it uses when assigning treatment. As Coleman said, medicine without proper counseling doesn’t go far, and many of the counseling services that the VA does offer use methods that have been noted to actually make depression worse in some patients. Until there is more serious reform to how the VA handles its mental health patients, veteran suicides will continue to plague the country. So although the new legislation is a step in the right direction, it is only a step: The VA still has a long way to go.

T

he Phoenix scandal essentially tells the same story: implementation of a few constructive policies, but ultimately failure to create comprehensive reform.

Nine months after the story first broke, what Obama called a “corrosive culture” at the VA remains. Few new doctors have been hired, bungling supervisors have yet to be replaced and trust between veterans and the system built to protect them is exceedingly rare. In March, Obama talked with hospital managers and staff during a visit to the hospital at the heart of the scandal, where continued delays on reforms suggest that Obama’s old campaign promise may be left in Arizona’s desert dust.

Dr. Sam Foote, a whistleblower from the Phoenix hospital, said that despite the publicity surrounding the VA’s problems, “very little has changed,” and that

hiding delays remains a common practice among hospital staff. Even while supporting McDonald and praising those at the VA — whom Obama insists have generally worked hard for change — the president nevertheless conceded that “there is still more work to do.”

While there has been some staff changeover since the Phoenix fiasco, “not a single VA senior executive has been fired for wait time manipulation…[and] efforts to hold employees accountable in Phoenix have been repeatedly botched,” said Rep. Miller. Instead, Helman, the hospital’s director, was relieved for inappropriately accepting gifts. And although 1,100 employees in VA establishments across the country were fired in 2014, VA officials said that none of those decisions were directly related to the scandals. Furthermore, Phoenix hospital’s Chief of Staff Dr. Darren Deering, who denied that delays were a problem to a Senate committee investigating VA fraud, received no punishment and still serves in his same position.

The ineffectiveness of reform is exacerbated by the blowback that whistleblowers have faced. Though they were promised protection after the scandal, whistleblowers like Alabama’s Richard Meuse and Shelia Tremaine have complained that they have been cut out of administrative conversations and excluded from meetings. Whistleblowers’ jobs are supposed to be protected, and though neither has been fired, both feel as if they are now hindered in their ability to effectively perform their jobs.

"They've cut us out of our responsibilities.

They've watered down our positions," said Meuse. Legislation that would expedite policy responses to whistleblowers’ complaints has been drafted in Congress, but it has not

ca

-

Ma y2

Ma y3

8 A Ob 0 Offi preli res am sy ce min Slo igna a acc ca stem of In ary Sh an G tion epts re r M inse ib . D Er ma ic pr spec epo na obl tor rt fr cDo ki’s son t eput ic Sh ge em G om na rol em y V ins me s e ld e u po A ek t nt. wit nera the i S h V l fi VA akes ntil R raril ecre ’s ov ob y fi tar A nds er l he on ert ls y alt h Jul y3 0.

A

nother long-overdue innovation is the creation of the Veterans Choice Program, or Choice Card, which was implemented in late 2014. The program allows veterans who live far away from VA hospitals to seek subsidized private care elsewhere. The original measure limited availability to veterans who had waited more than 30 days to secure an appointment with a VA doctor or who were living more than 40 miles away from VA establishments.

One of the most critical problems with Choice Card lies in that 40-mile requirement. The distance is measured “as the crow flies,” but that doesn’t take into account the difficulties faced by veterans whose actual drives may be longer than those 40 miles. In recognition of the problems that interpretation has created, 41 Senators and 53 Representatives have signed onto documents supporting alterations in the eligibility requirements for Choice Card, and the House has even scheduled a hearing regarding the 40-mile rule. The failures of the 40-mile requirement eventually became widely known enough — even taking a prime slot on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart — that officials felt pressured to bring about some measure of change. In March, the VA announced it would begin to factor driving time into its calculations.

The program’s chronic underuse demonstrates the importance of the problems with eligibility requirements. Between Choice Card’s introduction in Novem-

ber and March, only 27,000 veterans had taken advantage of the new rules, despite approximately 500,000 veterans being eligible. Though the new regulations are one step towards changing those numbers, the 40-mile rule isn’t the only problematic factor. Underuse is made worse by confusion over most of the eligibility rules and by an abundance of rejections: Many who expected to be cleared for Choice Card have been turned away — almost 80 percent, according to a February survey by Veterans of Foreign Wars, who called the figure “unsettlingly high.”

Pat Baughman, an Air Force veteran, is one such case. Expecting to be allowed to use private care, since he lives 50 miles — or one hour — away from the nearest VA hospital, Baughman requested permission to use Choice Card and to seek closer, private care. But when he talked to officials, they told him that he instead would have to drive three hours to a different VA establishment. Further conversations also led nowhere: When Baughman told officials that the decision did not make sense, a VA hospital two hours away was suggested to him instead.

The rule also only takes into account distance from any VA facility — not necessarily from one equipped to provide the specialized care that the veteran may need. VA officials have said that this loophole cannot be changed internally. Instead, legislation will be required if the eligibility program is to be fixed. Paul Walker, a veteran in Minnesota, experienced the consequences of the requirements’ failure first-hand, when he was told that he did not qualify for Choice Card because of a nearby VA facility, even though it was 50 miles to the nearest one that could provide his cancer treatment. "I don't get a choice,” Walker said. “I get to die."

Ultimately, many of the changes that the VA has attempted have led to the same result: a realization that the agency still has very far to go to clean up its own bureaucratic mess. Steps that have already been taken, like Obama’s new advisory committee, the suicide prevention efforts and increased hiring of health care professionals are promising channels for progress. But regulatory loopholes and problematic oversights still need to be resolved for the agency to function with the sort of integrity that McDonald has promised — and so far failed to deliver.

LAUREN SUKIN ‘16 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LITERARY ARTS CONCENTRATOR AND THE SENIOR MANAGING EDITOR AT BPR.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

passed. Even if it does, it will still be a long time before reporting systemic problems — without personal consequences — will be simple and effective.

Nevertheless, there have been a few constructive steps forward. For example, in a long-overdue move, VA hospitals now allow appointments at night and during weekends, effectively adding another 880,000 visits per year. Additionally, almost 4,000 new physicians, nurses and technicians have been hired — although the agency admits that recruiting is difficult and shortfalls in staffing remain.

Overall, though, the total number of visits continues to rise. “They’ve made terrific strides in on-time appointments,” said Dr. Katherine Mitchell, one of the Phoenix whistleblowers. “I know a bureaucracy this size is a slow-moving beast, but I’m cautiously optimistic.”

During Obama’s Phoenix visit, the President also announced a new project: an advisory committee to recommend improvements to the VA, which will include representatives from nonprofits, veterans groups and political officials. Yet not everyone is optimistic. Arizona Sen. John McCain, for example, dismissed the initiative, saying that it serves “more as a photo-op for the president than…a meaningful discussion of the challenges our veterans continue to face in getting the timely health care they have earned and deserve.”

More specific reforms are also in the works. The VA recently announced changes to how they will determine priority for care — net worth will no longer be included as an eligibility factor, and instead, expenses from the past year and gross household income will be factored into the calculations. Veterans also no longer have

to update their information year-to-year, as the VA has established a program to automatically receive and update information in collaboration with the Internal Revenue Service. Overall, the change could lower costs for almost 200,000 veterans over five years, although it is expected to cost the VA between $55.5 and $80 million.

Some critics of the reforms worry that the new system for standardizing and digitizing form submissions will make it difficult for older veterans, former servicemen with certain disabilities and those without access to the Internet to register for care.

Under the old rules, only a handwritten note was required at the beginning of the enrollment process, and while the new system will improve recordkeeping, it also risks boxing out certain veterans. The VA has claimed that its changes will double the number of claims made on standard forms — but even that figure underscores the current importance of the nonstandardized options for filing claims.

15

BALANCING THE BUDGET OFFICE Republicans and Democrats are settling the score on the CBO. STORY BY EZRA KAGAN / ART BY SORAYA FERDMAN

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

I

16

n today’s game of politics, it’s hard to keep score — especially for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Although it is tasked with providing nonpartisan analyses of budget acts, the CBO has found itself at the heart of partisan bickering. In two of the first substantive moves by the new Republican Congress, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to instruct the CBO to increase its use of “dynamic scoring,” and the Republican leadership chose to replace the CBO’s esteemed director, Doug Elmendorf, with the more conservative Keith Hall.

Since it concerns only the minutiae of economic calculations, it might seem odd that dynamic scoring has become such a thorny point in partisan politics. However, the moves of the new Republican majority to influence the CBO, though relatively unnoticed outside the Washington bubble, reflect much more than an erudite debate over the ins and outs of economic modeling. Rather, the dynamic scoring debate — and the partisan climate surrounding it — demonstrate that Washington’s mechanisms for nonpartisan policy analysis are miserably inadequate.

The battle over dynamic scoring may seem like a half-hearted effort to make budget analysis seem exciting, but it’s an important and substantial change. Generally, the CBO uses static scoring to analyze bills, meaning they assume that a given bill won’t have a macroeconomic impact. Dynamic scoring, on the other hand, attempts to account for the broader economic impacts of policies while analyzing budget proposals.

Conceptually, the idea isn’t that complicated. Say a bill proposes to decrease all taxes by 20 percent; static scoring would simply measure the impact on revenue based on the economy’s current performance. But in reality, that type of change in tax policy would have significant effects on GDP and economic growth. So dynamic scoring measures how a given proposal affects the entire economy and then adjusts estima-

tions accordingly. The CBO has historically used dynamic scoring for major legislative proposals, and the new House rule simply expands upon that precedent, ordering the CBO to dynamically score all tax proposals that would affect at least 0.25 percent of the economy and to do so only “to the extent practicable.”

If that were the whole story, the push for dynamic scoring wouldn’t be terribly controversial. Most economists and journalists agree that dynamic scoring, when done correctly, is a much better way to measure a bill’s effect. But most people agree that clairvoyance would be great, too.

The problem with dynamic scoring doesn’t

BRUCE BARTLETT, A FORMER ECONOMIC ADVISOR TO PRESIDENT REAGAN, APTLY SUMS IT UP WHEN HE SAYS THAT DYNAMIC SCORING USES “SMOKE AND MIRRORS TO INSTITUTIONALIZE REPUBLICAN IDEOLOGY INTO THE BUDGET PROCESS.” lie in the theory behind it — it’s in the execution. And Bruce Bartlett, a former economic advisor to President Reagan, aptly sums it up when he says that dynamic scoring uses “smoke and mirrors to institutionalize Republican ideology into the budget process.”

The Republican decision to encourage dynamic scoring has less to do with a desire for accurate budget analysis than it does with conservative economic theory.

The centerpiece of the Republican economic platform is that tax cuts lead to growth.

However, statically scored CBO budget estimates consistently showed tax cuts ballooning the federal deficit, which poses a problem for the GOP. Though CBO estimates haven’t painted the whole picture — because they weren’t trying to — unflattering nonpartisan estimates became easy fodder with which Democrats could blud-

geon Republicans. A cursory glance at CBO estimates would seem to make the party of fiscal responsibility look more like the party of cut-and-run economics. But in new, dynamically scored estimates, the CBO will account for growth caused by tax cuts in its estimates, providing Republican proposals with an optical boost.

The problem is that estimating the future of the economy is an arduous affair, and it requires economists to make assumptions about complex and unpredictable factors.

Consider the tax proposal from earlier. For the CBO to accurately estimate the effect of a 20 percent tax decrease on the economy, there are a number of questions concerning both long- and short-term behavior that analysts would have to take into account.

How do high-, low- and middle-income consumers respond to tax decreases? How would across-the-board cuts affect consumer confidence? What about business confidence? These are quite complex questions, and for this reason, dynamic scoring is much more expensive and time-consuming than static scoring. More importantly, economists’ answers to these questions are frequently incorrect, and they oftentimes end up boiling down to fundamental differences in ideology. Unsurprisingly, there’s no economic consensus on how people respond to tax cuts or what the multiplier effect from government spending is. To be fair, static scoring also includes problematic assumptions, but it has more of an ability to nail down the fundamentals of a bill — without wading out into unclear estimates on the heavier questions.

And that brings up another a huge problem with dynamic scoring: Economists aren’t fortunetellers. Pointedly, not a single dynamic score from the CBO prior to 2007 foresaw the Great Recession, rendering just about every dynamic score from the early 2000s horribly inaccurate. It’s not just recessions that the CBO can’t predict; the agency also can’t foresee congressional behavior or the Federal Reserve’s mone-

caused the CBO employees in attendance to erupt in applause. Gregory Mankiw, a top advisor to President Bush and a senior advisor to former Governor Mitt Romney, also lamented Elmendorf ’s departure, writing in a New York Times editorial that he had done a “remarkable job.” Nor is Mankiw the only conservative who has come to Elmendorf ’s aid; Mankiw’s position is shared by the director of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, among others. Elmendorf ’s only real opponents were hyper-conservative groups like Heritage Action and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. And although it’s not uncommon for the party in power to promote one of its own to run the CBO, the partisan minefield surrounding dynamic scoring and the overwhelming support that Elmendorf already had makes the Republican Party’s choice of Hall a particularly dubious move.

The dynamic scoring episode demonstrates the enormous structural barriers to the CBO’s ability to act as a nonpartisan referee. Some of this may have to do with the fact that the CBO’s modern role differs from the one for which it was originally designed.

When the CBO was founded in 1974, it was supposed to be a bulwark against presidential impoundment, since at the time, only the Office of Management and Budget would produce budget scores for legislation.

Over time, the CBO evolved into something more — a tried and true source of economic data. But it’s becoming apparent that the CBO may not be equipped to keep producing credible research as partisanship continues to ramp up.

Republicans have continued to defend their changes as a way to provide more information to the public. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for instance, argued that the CBO should produce both static and dynamic scores on the grounds that “it’s stupid to do the one and not do the other.”

But here Hatch and his comrades miss the point. The CBO is nonpartisan and credible in the eyes of the public — that’s why politicians care so much about the contents of its reports. However, if the CBO produces multiple studies and some are filled with inaccurate and partisan assumptions, then each party, for obvious reasons, will cite only the politically favorable one.

There are some fixes that could help the CBO remain neutral. To begin with, it’s unwise to entrust a nonpartisan organization to a director primarily responsible to the party that elected him or her. If politicians are indeed committed to having the CBO serve the role of neutral arbiter, they should have the organization feature equal representation for major factions. In addition, the CBO should increase transparency in its modeling so that other organizations and politicians can more easily critique reports when they disagree with their outcomes. These moves almost certainly won’t happen in the next couple of years. But perhaps in the next Congress, both sides may come together to realize that an overactive and partisan CBO is a pox on both houses.

EZRA KAGAN ‘17 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF OF BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

tary policy. These factors are particularly important because evidence suggests that the effect of tax cuts depends entirely on whether they are eventually paid for with spending cuts or future tax hikes. None of this information will be reflected in CBO dynamic scores, though. They’ll just show tax cuts leading to smaller deficits and higher growth.

Other moves from the GOP further indicate that their changes to the CBO extend beyond a commitment to truth-seeking. In March, the leaders from the Senate and House Budget Committees chose not to reconfirm Doug Elmendorf, the CBO director for the previous six years, and instead to replace him with Keith Hall, who was formerly a top economic advisor to the Bush administration. Since the CBO currently has discretion in exactly how it uses dynamic scoring, the director will have a heavy influence on the outcomes of CBO scores. It’s conceivable that Hall will implement dynamic scoring in a way that is as favorable as possible to the conservative platform. And if he does, Democrats would have almost no recourse except for public vilification of the CBO, an action that would gravely undermine the organization’s credibility.

It’s also unclear why Elmendorf, a Democrat widely hailed for his nonpartisanship, needed to go in the first place. During a recent celebration of the CBO’s 40th anniversary, Alice Rivlin, the first director of the CBO, suggested that future CBO directors should strive to “be as much like Doug Elmendorf as [they] can,” a statement that

17

HALFWAY TO NOWHERE The US justice system is burning bridges back to society.

STORY BY MEGHAN HOLLOWAY/ ART BY MICHELLE NG

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

D

18

erek West Harris was an easygoing, chatty barber who went by D-Nice.

In 2009, Harris was arrested for failing to register his new car and had to pay $700 worth of traffic tickets. More unusual was that Harris was also sent to a New Jersey halfway house called Delaney Hall.

Originally built to rehabilitate 1,200 inmates convicted of minor offenses, Delaney Hall’s purpose was to provide its residents with counseling, so as to prevent recidivism. But when Harris arrived, the halfway house also contained several criminals convicted of violent crimes. Two days into his stay, three inmates, who had been previously been suspended from the halfway house for disruptions, entered Harris’ unlocked room. After demanding that he empty his pockets, one of the attackers pounded on Harris’ chest while the others rifled through his belongings. Vincent Caputo, an inmate in a nearby room, would later testify that he “heard fighting, wrestling, yelling, screaming [and a] guy yelling for help.” Yet none of Delaney Hall’s workers responded to the sounds, and, after choking for a few minutes, Harris died on the floor of his room.

Harris’ three attackers fled the scene with their loot — the $3 they had found in Harris’ pockets.

Halfway houses are not supposed to be

like this, but problematic regulations and attempts to make up for budget shortfalls have undermined their original purpose.

Halfway houses were envisioned as places where nonviolent inmates could spend the last part of their sentences gaining the skills they needed to be successful on the outside.

By focusing on helping soon-to-be ex-convicts find stable housing and employment, the institutions were meant to be primarily rehabilitative instead of punitive — a way to reduce recidivism while simultaneously lowering costs. As such, halfway houses became a popular policy solution for corrections departments around the country.

Yet, as the policy gained momentum, halfway houses increasingly became unregulated warehouses where prisoners could be dumped at reduced costs.

Today, most halfway houses are privately owned and run. They range from small residential buildings housing a handful of residents to large complexes with several hundred beds. While some contract with state and federal governments, others market their services directly to those exiting the system. Halfway houses are often paid a flat fee for every bed they fill; in exchange, they provide career counseling, rehabilitation programs and assistance finding housing to their residents.

The regulations for these institutions vary across the country. Some states, like New Jersey, only allow nonprofit organizations to bid for contracts to run the houses. In other states, the requirements are laughably fluid or, as in Florida, nonexistent.

Lax standards can be detrimental to the intended beneficiaries of these facilities because they allow exploitation of both the system and the people within it. In one particularly outrageous incident, a Floridian halfway house that touted itself as a “sober living” facility actually sent its recovering alcoholic residents to sell beer at Raymond James Stadium in order to make money for the house. Another halfway house in St. Petersburg, Florida — dubbed the House of Hope — was run

by Patrick Jay Banks, a former felon who spent eight years in prison for robbery and forgery. Banks used the institution as a moneymaking scheme, falsely submitting

results, the prisoners who tested positive were removed from the facility, but no further action was taken to curb the problem.

Brian M. Hughes, a Mercer County executive, believed “staff were making drugs available to the population.” And although rampant drug use is certainly a stain on halfway houses, it is far from their biggest problem. When the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation examined the presence of gangs in the state’s correctional facilities in 2009, it found that those most plagued by gang activity were not prisons but halfway houses. The same study found that gangs completely controlled the phone system in one New Jersey halfway house.

Halfway houses are clearly inundated by a host of problems, yet they are illequipped to handle them or even their own basic functions. Because they focus on keeping costs down, halfway houses are frequently understaffed by poorly trained employees unable to provide sufficient rehabilitative and counseling services. In one halfway house, the ratio of inmates to guards on night duty was alleged to be as high as 200 to 1. As a result of understaffing, supervisors would forge patient

WHEN THE NEW JERSEY STATE COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION EXAMINED THE PRESENCE OF GANGS IN THE STATE’S CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES IN 2009, IT FOUND THAT THOSE MOST PLAGUED BY GANG ACTIVITY WERE NOT PRISONS, BUT HALFWAY HOUSES. records and facility reports. “When we had to give a report,” Cynthia Taylor, a former counselor at the Albert M. “Bo” Robinson halfway house in Trenton, NJ, said, “We would look at what was said for the last group and cut and paste.”

This system of entrenched neglect creates situations in which inmates face abuse by other prisoners or staff members but lack any real ability to file charges or make changes. Vanessa Falcone’s nightmare began with her assignment to the cleaning crew at Bo Robinson. One night Falcone’s supervisory janitor ordered her into a supply closet. “He took his pants off and grabbed my hair and pushed me down,” Falcone said in an interview with the New York Times. “That started a few weeks of basically hell.” When she finally mustered up the courage to tell her guard that she

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

reimbursements to take advantage of the Bush-era Access to Recovery program, which gave states funds to increase access to substance abuse programs and recovery support services. At one point, Banks billed for services provided to 50 residents, even though his tiny house barely provided services to the 10 residents who were actually there. He collected over $110,000 from the federal government before he was permanently barred from participating in the program in 2007. Yet just a few years later, Banks opened another house, and in 2012, he received $55,000 in federal funds for the provision of rehabilitation services.

Unfortunately, Banks is hardly an exception in this dangerously unregulated industry.

Even states with supposedly stringent regulations have let egregious violations slip through the cracks. Despite New Jersey’s nonprofit rule, which was created to undercut the profit motive of

these institutions, some halfway houses have found methods of purposefully circumventing the state’s rule. One of New Jersey’s largest halfway house conglomerates, Community Education, is really a for-profit company that can only contract with the state by funneling money through its shell nonprofit organization, Education and Health Centers of America.

This nonprofit provides few services beyond transferring the funds it receives from the New Jersey government to Community Education. The organization has only 10 employees, yet it paid the Community Education CEO a salary of $351,346 in 2011. As Mercer County Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman put it: “This… smells to high heaven.” In light of such cases, halfway house regulations appear feeble, if not downright toothless.

In theory, however, halfway houses might still seem more efficient than the current prison system. Because the rehabilitative services that halfway houses provide are supposed to reduce recidivism, housing an inmate in a halfway house saves the government money by reducing the chances that the offender will break the law again and be imprisoned. The fiscal impact of the organizations is positive in a more direct sense as well; housing inmates in halfway houses is markedly cheaper than incarcerating them in prisons. While the immediate savings are generally small — for example, New Jersey pays halfway houses between $60 and $75 per day per bed versus $125 to $150 a day to house each prison inmate — the cumulative savings can make a sizable difference to many cash-strapped federal and state budgets.

Halfway houses’ cost effectiveness may have ultimately caused their own decline.

When the recession hit in 2008, the tightening of corrections budgets precipitated an increased reliance on halfway houses. It was not an inconsequential shift. As was the case at Delaney Hill, halfway houses no longer serve as places for the rehabilitation of minor offenders — but also for those guilty of more dangerous crimes. This occurs primarily to save the state money. Those more violent criminals are people whom the halfway house system was not set up to handle, and the results of their influx into these institutions have been disastrous.

Violence and drug use run rampant in halfway houses today. A random, externally administered drug test in a New Jersey facility found that 73 percent of the residents tested positive for drug use. Following the

19

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

20

was being sexually assaulted, the halfway house dismissed the janitor and transferred Falcone to a different facility. But charges were never filed. As she describes it: “They shipped me off to another place like it never happened.”

It is no surprise, then, that some residents of halfway houses will take any chance they can get to escape — especially since jumping ship is so easy. All of the facilities are low-security because they are designed to house offenders guilty only of minor crimes. But with the increasing numbers of inmates sent through halfway houses and the subsequent surge in violent offenders, the already limited security in these facilities is becoming less effective.

Most of the time, residents escape when they are out on work-lease or on a visit to their homes. But there are also worrying reports of residents escaping as easily as walking out of their compound or climbing a fence.

Generally speaking, there are no serious consequences for those residents who run away; most are never even charged for escaping. However, escapees pose a serious risk for society at large. Residents who run away avoid the mechanisms of parole that are designed to allow the state to keep an eye on past offenders as they reenter the community. The consequences can be more devastating than expected, as is evident in the case of David Goodell. After spending more than a year behind bars for pinning a former girlfriend to the ground and threatening to kill her, Goodell was transferred to a halfway house in Newark, NJ. One night, after pretending to have a seizure, Goodell was admitted to a hospital nearby, accompanied by a halfway house worker who had no authority to restrain him. Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Goodell escaped and headed straight to the suburbs, trying to contact a different ex-girlfriend, Viviana Tulli. He managed to persuade Tulli to meet him, and, later that night, strangled her to death in his car.

Goodell’s example is certainly an extreme one, but it is nevertheless a symbol of a system riddled with corruption, violence and lawlessness — one that is in dire need of reform. With 30,000 inmates passing through the federal halfway house system each year — and even more passing through the state systems — it’s crucial that conditions in these facilities be improved.

The goal of the halfway house is well intentioned: to better prepare those convicted of crimes for their lives after prison. Yet, as of

now, these facilities do just the opposite.

A study conducted by the Pennsylvania Corrections Department concluded that halfway houses have limited, if any, effect on reducing recidivism. The study found that 67 percent of inmates sent to halfway houses were rearrested or sent back to prison within three years, compared with 60 percent of inmates who were released directly onto the streets. It comes as no surprise, then, that in 2013 Pennsylvania Corrections Secretary John Wetzel went so far as to call his state’s halfway house system “an abject failure.”

Although the problems that plague halfway houses are well known by politicians and policymakers, change is hard to come by. Bills aimed at reforming the system are voted down year after year in states like Florida and New Jersey, despite repeated evidence of their systems’ failings. Part of the lack of political will is due to the fact that the populations most hurt by halfway houses are also the ones

A HALFWAY HOUSE IN ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA WAS RUN BY PATRICK JAY BANKS, A FORMER FELON WHO SPENT EIGHT YEARS IN PRISON FOR ROBBERY AND FORGERY. BANKS USED THE INSTITUTION AS A MONEYMAKING SCHEME, FALSELY SUBMITTING REIMBURSEMENTS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE BUSH-ERA ACCESS TO RECOVERY PROGRAM. that are chronically underserved. Like the rest of the prison population, those housed in halfway houses tend to be minorities of low socioeconomic status, many of whom have mental illnesses or substance abuse problems. Moreover, politicians have financial incentives to maintain the status quo, since halfway houses are an important cost-saving measure when it comes to corrections.

Even in states that have undertaken efforts to improve their corrections systems, politicians have insisted on maintaining as much of the savings usually produced by halfway houses as possible. For example, Pennsylvania recently linked its payment of halfway house operators to their residents’ recidivism rates. Now the state’s halfway houses are scored on their provision of services, security, operations and employment, as well as on their recidivism rates. If

the houses fail to remain in good standing, they can be fined, paid less or have their contract with the state terminated. Highlighted by a Rutgers University study as a successful reform effort, Pennsylvania’s laws are just one way that states try to improve their halfway houses.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) also recently took a step towards reform by mandating that all federal halfway houses deliver standardized mental health and substance abuse counseling and that they hire only those with prescribed qualifications to do it. Attorney General Eric Holder said of the reforms: “This will ensure consistency and continuity of care between federal prisons and community-based facilities. And it will enhance the programs that help prisoners overcome their past struggles, get on the right path and stay out of our criminal justice system.” However, the mandate only applies to the federal system and still does not tackle many of the issues, such as security or overcrowding, that continue to plague halfway houses across the country.

Both the DOJ and Pennsylvania’s reform efforts are promising in that they attempt to address the root of the problem: halfway houses’ failure to meaningfully provide the services that they are intended to supply. Unsurprisingly, a study of Ohio’s halfway houses found that the biggest predictor of each house’s success is its ability to deliver the treatment, counseling and other services initially promised to residents. The study concluded that when these services were effectively provided, halfway houses did have positive effects on the recidivism rates and earnings of their residents. With this in mind, it is clear that reforms must continue to push for halfway houses that effectively accomplish their job of providing robust support to ex-convicts.

But the road to reform is long. Today, halfway houses lack any real contribution to either the judicial system or civil society — the two realms that halfway houses are intended to bridge. If that is to change, politicians can no longer view these houses as short-term cost-cutting mechanisms. Instead, they will need to keep the long-term goal of reducing recidivism close. Until states and the federal government seriously undertake efforts to improve their corrections systems, halfway houses will remain a half-measure.

MEGHAN HOLLOWAY ‘16 IS A HEALTH AND HUMAN BIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR AND THE CHIEF OF STAFF AT BPR.

FIELD OF SCHEMES If they build it, we all pay.

STORY BY BRIAN COHN / ART BY ANISA HOLMES

F

the best benefits to secure franchises. Over decades, demand pushed cities and states, which were willing to pay extravagantly, to finance all stadium construction costs. This dangerous trend was temporarily halted in the 1960s, when the high demand for teams incentivized new leagues to threaten formation. To maintain their monopolies, the existing leagues increased in size, and so the share of public financing for stadiums subsequently fell to around 60 percent. But that number is now back up to approximately 80 percent, as the Big Four — MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL — have grown ever more popular and powerful.

To counter the high costs of stadiumbuilding projects, politicians often pass them off as efforts to stimulate the economy.

Research has demonstrated this claim to be exaggerated, if not downright misleading.

Stadiums provide no positive economic impact, no improved employment and no significant tourism boost; one study argued that most alternate uses of tax money would yield better economic results.

Additionally, the social benefits of stadiums disproportionately benefit those belonging to the upper class, since they are more likely to be able to afford tickets and memorabilia.

Meanwhile, lower-income taxpayers, through regressive sales taxes and their substantial proportion of the population, shoulder the financial burden without many of the benefits. The unfortunate impact of publicly funded stadiums is made all the more terrible by the reality that teams often do not need government funding. Aside from the immense wealth of team owners and the franchises themselves, there are also large profits to be gained from stadium-naming rights and personal seat licenses, which could be used to finance new facilities.

BRIAN COHN ‘17 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A US STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

enway Park, Wrigley Field, Lambeau Field: These stadiums — and the teams that occupy them — are shimmering icons in the pantheon of American culture. But as team owners and national leagues attract more and more fans, they continue to grow in political power. Sports teams and their stadiums no longer just stand for civic loyalty, but also present a civic burden.

As teams look to build better, more costly facilities, team owners capitalize on fan support to draw funds out of local governments — and, ultimately, taxpayers.

When the money does not flow easily, teams can threaten to move to another locale, extracting expensive benefits from their otherwise unwilling host cities and potentially saddling local governments with crippling debt. This very scene is playing out today, as three NFL teams — Stan Kroenke’s St. Louis Rams, Dean Spanos’ San Diego Chargers and Mark Davis’ Oakland Raiders — superficially vie to move to Los Angeles.

Politicians have a notable incentive to prevent this kind of team migration since their constituents are likely to be dedicated fans. There simply is no replacement for a well-known and much-loved sports team, and politicians end up trapped between deciding whether or not to build expensive stadiums just to keep their teams at home.

Knowing this, team owners can simply dangle a move elsewhere.

Though sports have long been a fundamental American pastime, this extortion problem is relatively new. Originally, stadiums were privately financed by team owners, but as national sports became more popular, more cities began to covet a team of their own. Since leagues kept the number of teams low, cities fought to offer sports teams

This power dynamic is particularly apparent as the Rams, Chargers and Raiders avariciously glance towards Los Angeles.

Strangely, two of the teams have actually been in the city before, but both failed to maintain and cultivate their fan bases and ultimately ended up leaving the city. Rams owner Kroenke has proposed personally funding a nearly $2 billion stadium in Inglewood, south of downtown Los Angeles, which would be large enough for two teams to share. As one of the richest owners in the NFL, he could just as easily finance a new stadium in Missouri — a fact that portrays this overture less as an attempt to seek better opportunities than as a case of playing hardball with the Missourian government.

Kroenke’s two-team stadium would also conveniently keep the extortion option on the table for other teams hoping to threaten their local governments into building them state-of-the-art fields. For Kroenke, the threat seems to have paid off: Missouri Governor Jay Nixon recently proposed building a new $1 billion stadium to keep the Rams in St. Louis — even though the state has not fully paid off the Rams’ current stadium, which was built 20 years ago. Spanos and Davis have used a similar tactic: a proposed joint stadium in Carson, CA. Although no source of funding has been identified — and therefore the project seems particularly unlikely — Oakland and San Diego are still nervous enough about a potential move that both cities are scrambling to find ways to build stadiums for their beloved teams.

The influence of teams over their local governments is clearly problematic. Many solutions have been proposed, including lending-of-credit and public purpose doctrines, laws that forbid local governments from granting loans to private enterprises and mandate that public funds be used for solely public purposes, respectively.

Court-ordered expansions of professional sports leagues, anti-trust laws and congressional statutes are other ways to approach this problem. Ultimately, though, history points to a trend of growing team owner and sports league power — power used to exploit local governments into subsidizing stadiums, killing the potential for that money to be used for otherwise more effective and more needed investments. So even though no one wants to tackle sports franchises, someone has to step up to the plate.

21

Germany in the Shadow of the PasT

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MEDIA SPOTLIGHT

As May 8th approaches, many countries are planning public celebrations for Victory in Europe Day, which marks the 70th anniversary of the German surrender in World War II. But the mood is heavier in Germany, as the country continues to face the challenge of living with the legacy of the war. On the holiday, Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” are scattered around Berlin. The blocks commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and try to ensure that the tragedy is not forgotten in Germany’s capital city. Everything in Berlin, it seems, has been touched by the war: A modern parking lot was once the site of Hitler’s bunker; an art museum was used for wartime fortifications. These photos explore Germany’s continuing journey towards recovery — a journey that is as important now as ever, while a new generation learns how to bring together the past and the present to better live with its nation’s legacy.

22

BPR Media Spotlight

By Jason Goettisheim MEDIA SPOTLIGHT BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

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

23

POWER STRUGGLE Why the lights are out in Lebanon STORY BY BLAKE NOSRATIAN / ART BY KWANG CHOI

T

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

hey call it “Sin City of the Middle East.” Chic nightclubs and trendy rooftop bars sparkle along Beirut’s Mediterranean coast — unmistakable manifestations of a Lebanese lust for life.

But this determination to seize the day comes after years of war, military occupation, political killings and incessant political turmoil. Despite maintaining a façade of stability, Lebanon still bears the wounds of decades of unrest. Along with its power grid, nearly all of the country’s infrastructure was devastated during the 1975 Civil

24

War and was never adequately rebuilt. The consequent electricity crisis stands at the forefront of Lebanon’s economic stagnation and perfectly encapsulates the suffering of a state besieged by both corruption and poor governance.

In the 25 years since the end of the Lebanese Civil War, the country’s citizens have struggled with an inconsistent supply of electricity. Today, the state-owned electricity company, Electricité du Liban (EDL), is still struggling to keep the lights on. Chronic power outages have been felt throughout

the country, lasting anywhere from 3 to 10 hours per day, depending on location. According to the World Bank, Lebanese citizens suffer, on average, 220 electrical interruptions per year — giving them the worst electrical supply performance in the Middle East. To make matters worse, the demand for power had been steadily rising by 6-8 percent per year, even before the influx of more than 1.2 million war-displaced Syrians over the past three years.

EDL, which relies heavily on government budget subsidies, has only served to drain the country’s finances and contribute to Lebanon’s widening fiscal deficit. By some estimates, the total accumulated deficit of EDL is about $27 billion, or 40 percent of the total Lebanese public debt. Factoring in the cost of emergency breakdowns and the reality that Lebanon has the highest estimated cost for its electrical energy production in the world, it’s no wonder that this small nation, tucked into the Levant, produces barely enough energy for 75 percent of its own power needs.

To compensate for growing shortages, Lebanon struck a $360 million deal with Turkey to import energy from offshore Turkish power stations. However, these stations only generate a marginal portion of the energy they were originally intended to provide. The deal has also been shrouded in controversy, with each side blaming the other for the lackluster results. While the Lebanese government claims that Turkey supplied inadequate generating equipment, the Turkish power company, Karadeniz Holding, blames Lebanon for providing substandard fuel. So far, there has been no resolution.

In these trying times, the Lebanese have had no choice but to be resilient and adapt.

The Beirut Electricity App allows Beirutis to monitor daily power cuts. In the meantime,

Nor is electricity a priority for the problem-ridden Lebanese government. Currently, the nation suffers from a shrinking government budget, crumbling infrastructure, a lack of human resources and powerful interest groups fighting to thwart reform. The Syrian refugee crisis and subsequent political instability have caused Lebanon’s budget deficit to jump to $5.1 billion today from $3 billion in 2009, before the refugee influx hit.

This humanitarian crisis has also strained national health, education and infrastructure services, leaving a third of Lebanon’s young labor force unemployed. With so many other pressing concerns for Lebanese officials to tackle, reforms of the energy sector have largely been swept under the rug.

ACCORDING TO THE WORLD BANK, LEBANESE CITIZENS SUFFER, ON AVERAGE, 220 ELECTRICAL INTERRUPTIONS PER YEAR — GIVING THEM THE WORST ELECTRICAL SUPPLY PERFORMANCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. Furthermore, those charged with solving the energy crisis — premiers, bureaucrats and ministers — are the ones least likely to be affected by it. After all, many of these politicians have deep ties to the generator mafia and have the financial means to enjoy uninterrupted electricity from both private and public sources. As a result, they are more invested in sustaining the profitability of the private electricity industry than they are in providing affordable resources to Lebanese citizens.

In light of all this, one thing is increasingly clear: The Lebanese government cannot face this crisis alone. It lacks the required funds and political bandwidth to reform the energy sector. In deliberations over how to tackle the energy crisis, Lebanese politicians and policymakers would do well to take a lesson from other countries’ experiences.

In recent decades, there has been a global trend away from heavy state involvement in the electricity industry since competitive markets are said to improve efficiency and raise investment. But as is so often the case in the application of economic theory, expectations fall short of reality.

Despite the voracity of deregulatory boosterism, experimentation with energy reform has seen mixed results. Deregulation policies were credited with reducing electricity prices by as much as 35 percent

in Chile and Australia, but in Sweden these same policies left the Scandinavian nation with the highest electricity prices in nearly all of Europe. A closer look at these cases reveals that the success or failure of deregulation is entirely contingent on the design and enforcement of competition laws — something the Lebanese government would do well to keep in mind when engineering its own reforms.

The question then becomes how to properly configure market structures to ensure effective reform. For a transition towards increased private sector involvement to succeed, there must be specialized agencies consisting of qualified policymakers who fully understand the complex dynamics of regulation and markets in general. In particular, they must have a robust understanding of the widely unregulated private sector that already exists within Lebanon.

Otherwise, the state risks succumbing to higher electricity prices and the deterioration of electricity provision at the hands of energy cartels.

Lebanese policymakers have little choice but to integrate the government and the private sector and implement anti-trust laws. This is a tall order, considering that the enforcement of existing laws has been overlooked for years, but the stakes have never been higher. And there are signs of hope.

The Ministry of Trade and Economy, the department charged with fighting high prices and monopolies, has been slowly revamping its competition policy to be in accordance with international standards. The Ministry’s top priorities now include ensuring increased transparency in the energy sector and adopting a pro-business stance in implementing competition rules.

Even so, change will not happen overnight. Political willpower is a prerequisite for any meaningful reform of the Lebanese electricity industry, and in a country where compromise is a dirty word, getting those in power to prioritize the public good over personal interests is a daunting task. However, the electricity crisis has already had spillover effects into other economic, political and social sectors, making this an opportunity that Lebanon simply cannot afford to miss. As the country continues to grapple with a national debt hovering at around 135 percent of its GDP, Lebanese policymakers certainly have their hands full. But, as the saying goes, the darkest hour is just before the dawn.

BLAKE NOSRATIAN ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

a popular Twitter hashtag, #BlameBassil, mocking Lebanese Energy Minister Gebran Bassil for the power outages, has taken off.

To compensate for power shortages, some municipalities have taken matters into their own hands. The city of Sidon, for example, has installed solar panels to run its traffic lights, and other municipalities have invested in large generators. However, the most common trend has been turning to private power generators run by well-connected traders unsympathetically dubbed the “generator mafia.”

The Lebanese are no strangers to rough business culture. A well-entrenched system of patronage and bribery has led to the ascendance of a new, politically backed crime syndicate. These influential men exploit political ties to profit tremendously from supplying private power. One study estimates that the private generator industry earns $1.2 billion annually. Those profits come mostly from exorbitant prices maintained by restrictive practices such as informal agreements, price-fixing and the division of the market into geographic spheres of influence. These practices continue to thwart competition by creating high barriers to entry, keeping control of the industry in the hands of a few.

But if a string of recent protests is any indication, the public has had enough of the price gouging from private suppliers.

As Michel Massad, a local Beiruti leader, put it: “When the price of oil dropped, the generator prices should have dropped too, but they didn’t…They should all be arrested.” However, any proposed reforms must safeguard public welfare by targeting corruption, without alienating or expunging private suppliers and their networks, as they remain essential to much-needed energy production. Protesters hope that by getting the private sector to play by the rules, more reasonable prices will emerge.

But no such reforms have been made.

To many, the blame resides squarely with the Lebanese government. Lebanese politics appear defined by chaos, even when it comes to the simplest tasks; the current government was not able to elect its president for almost a year due to partisan conflicts. When it comes to electricity, Lebanon is at once united by a common predicament and bitterly divided by its sectarian parliament. Whichever minister leads reform efforts will be scrutinized by those who do not share that person’s political identity — a fact that has significantly slowed progress.

25

GUNS, GERMS AND SAFARIS Tribal tourism threatens the existence of the Jarawa.

STORY BY BASUNDHARA MUKHERJEE ART BY REBECCA ANDREWS

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

T

26

oday the Jarawa tribe, one of five indigenous groups native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, has only 400 surviving members. Until 1998, when a stream of Indian citizens began settling in the islands, this tribe of hunter-gatherers had existed for 50,000 years without sustained interactions with outside civilizations. But now, the Jarawa are at the heart of a booming tourism industry in the Andamans — one that has pushed the Jarawa tribe to the brink of extinction.

Although the Jarawa once inspired fear by firing arrows at visitors and passing airplanes, now more than 300,000 tourists stride into Baratang Island to gawk at the indigenous tribe. The Jarawa’s once remote enclave has been bisected by the Andaman Nicobar Trunk Road (ATR), a two-lane highway that connects parts of Middle and South Andaman. Originally intended to be little more than a convenience for the island’s residents, it has since taken on a more destructive purpose as a conduit for “human safaris.” Hundreds of buses use the road to flock to the Jarawa reserve so that tourists can take photographs and marvel at the lifestyles and traditions of the tribe, treating the island natives like “animals in a zoo,” as the Guardian reported.

But the tribe faces more insidious

threats than the corrosive presence of vacationers, such as its susceptibility to outside diseases. The tribe members have little resistance to fatal diseases prevalent in modern societies because of their isolated existence and lack of exposure to these pathogens.

In the 20th century, the arrival of British settlers to the island led to the mass eradication of indigenous Andamanese people, and the Jarawa were not spared the effects; measles epidemics killed thousands of tribe members in 1999 and 2006. And with hundreds of thousands of Indian settlers continuing to pour into the region, the risk of an epidemic wiping out the remaining 400 Jarawas has grown exponentially.

Besides disease, starvation also poses a very real threat to the indigenous peoples of the Andamans. For thousands of years, the Jarawa have subsisted off of the resources from the nearby forests and bodies of water. From hunting pigs, turtles and fish to gathering wild roots and honey, the tribe has integrated itself into the island’s verdant ecosystem of over 150 plant and 350 animal species. Illegal hunting, fishing and logging, however, have been steadily depleting the tribe’s natural food sources and challenging their self-sufficiency. The tribe has tried its best to fight back. In 2008, for instance, tribe members captured and tied two gangs of poachers to trees before reporting them to local authorities. Nevertheless, poaching and other resource-depleting activities have continued to plague the island’s ecosystem.

The growing encroachment has begun to erode the traditionally autonomous life of the Jarawa. While many still cling to their hunter-gatherer traditions, others have begun to beg tourists for food, tobacco and alcohol. Two decades ago, it would have been unfathomable to spot a Jarawa in public, but today it is not uncommon to see a member of the indigenous tribe dancing in front of crowds for food or stumbling around the streets intoxicated. In 2012, the Observer released video footage of girls from the tribe being forced to dance semi-naked for

tourists visiting the territory. In the background of the video, a police officer coerces the girls into dancing in return for food.

Nearly a year after the release of the footage, the Indian Supreme Court banned the use of the ATR and enforced a five-kilometer buffer zone around the Jarawa’s land.

But the new protections were short-lived.

In March 2013, the Indian Supreme Court reversed course and reopened the ATR in response to complaints from locals that the road was necessary for accessing the island’s hospital and the Limestone Cave, a popular tourist attraction. Tentative talks of a sea route to prevent use of the ATR met little success due largely to numerous delays.

Despite the array of challenges, the Indian government continues to search for solutions to elevate the Jarawa’s standard of living. Most recently, in late 2014, the Andaman government called for upgrades to the surveillance of the Jarawa reserve and to the task force patrolling its borders. The new initiatives arose specifically in response to the trespassing on Jarawa land by two French filmmakers who wanted to illegally film a documentary on the tribe. However, the insufficiency of past government actions offers little optimism that today’s protections for the Jarawa tribe will stand for long.

Certain officials are already jostling the government to weaken its protections for the tribe. A local Member of Parliament for the Andamans, Bishnu Pada Ray, has pushed for the widening of the ATR and for the assimilation of the Jarawa tribe into Indian society. In 2010, Ray described the tribe as being “in a primitive stage of development” and called for their children to be sent to residential schools.

With Ray’s call for assimilation gaining attention, the Andaman Islands stand at a crossroads. The technique of forced assimilation has already proven its devastating cultural effects in Australia, Canada and the United States, but it also harkens back to a darker period in the islands’ history. In fact, mainstreaming was one of the primary factors in the devastation of the Great Andamanese tribe — another regional indigenous group — which now has only 52 surviving members. If Ray’s platform is any indication for the future, then the story of the Great Andamanese suggests a most ominous trajectory for the Jarawa.

BASUNDHARA MUKHERJEE ‘18 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR AND AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND US ASSOCIATE SECTION MANAGER AT BPR.

PRESSING FOR TRANSPARENCY Mexicoleaks threatens to blow the whistle.

STORY BY PAULA MARTÍNEZ GUTIÉRREZ & CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA ART BY TIFFANY KEUNG

F

have emerged in the last few years, they have generally been limited in scope and accessibility. So even though there are more platforms today than there were a decade ago, the fight for information transparency has just begun. The significance of the few alternative platforms that do exist only underlines the necessity for further diversification.

Fortunately, Mexicoleaks is part of the solution. By encouraging what it calls “citizen critical journalism,” Mexicoleaks creates a more horizontal media platform, giving voice to bottom-up sociopolitical perspectives that traditional media tends to quash. And although Mexicoleaks is limited by the same factors as other Internet media sources, its endorsement by both radio and print journalists has dramatically expanded its outreach possibilities.

Although it has yet to start posting documents, Mexicoleaks has attracted significant support and attention. Carmen Aristegui, Mexico’s most famous radio broadcaster and one of the main collaborators in the creation of Mexicoleaks, illegally listed her radio company as one of the platform’s found-

ing members. The company wasn’t pleased.

They fired Diego Lizarraga and Irving Huerta, two of Aristegui’s team members, and implemented new regulations on her radio program. However, the measures were seen as censorship and sparked a wave of public outrage. Ultimately, Aristegui demanded, on air, the return of her journalists and the repeal of the regulations. The request didn’t go so well — Aristegui was fired in March.

Aristegui’s case exemplifies a key problem in the Mexican media: The public benefits of free media are subordinated to private interests. The radio company wrongly framed the situation as being a “private matter,” but Aristegui’s investigative journalism constitutes a public service that far outweighs the impact of the private dispute.

Aristegui was a critical reporter on issues like the existence of a prostitution network in the ruling party’s offices and the First Lady’s mansion scandal. Her investigations haven’t just provided new and important information to the public, they have also helped the push for increased government accountability. In that light, Aristegui’s firing should not be considered a private affair; it is instead a debate about a public service and citizens’ right to information.

Citizens have demanded the right to a free press, but Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration has remained silent. This hardly comes as a surprise, as it is widely known that Aristegui’s investigations frequently exposed the government’s dirty laundry. In fact, protesters have accused the administration of being involved in the decision to let her go. Moreover, the fact that the radio company has recently inched towards the possibility of opening a new TV station raises questions about the relationship between the media company and the government.

Either way, the situation illustrates precisely why Mexicoleaks is such a vital and timely resource for the nation’s citizens. Independent and decentralized media sources are crucial to ensuring that citizens have the necessary information to form educated opinions about the country’s political process. Perhaps, once the platform begins to publish, Mexicans can finally take the power of information into their own hands.

PAULA MARTÍNEZ GUTIÉRREZ ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND HISTORY CONCENTRATOR AND A WORLD STAFF WRITER AT BPR. CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA ‘18 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A WORLD STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

rom a country dripping with corruption has come Mexicoleaks, a media platform that seeks to engage Mexicans in the safeguarding of their country’s democracy. Launched on March 10th, the website is based on the principles and format of Wikileaks. By allowing users across the country to openly share vast troves of information, Mexicoleaks creates an avenue for any citizen to be a whistleblower.

Though the organization has yet to begin publishing, it creates an inclusive and secure way to hold both the government and the private sector accountable. In a nation defined by rampant insecurity, repeated and unapologetic scandals and media monopolization, the incubation of a public, transparent and independent information platform like Mexicoleaks is an unprecedentedly ambitious project — one that will empower civilians to ensure that the state is serving the public interest.

Mexicoleaks has emerged at a moment of general disillusionment with Mexican governance. Since the mass kidnapping in Ayotzinapa last September, where state authorities were involved in the disappearance of 43 teacher trainees, Mexico has undergone a major political crisis. A staggering number of newly unearthed scandals have only fostered the country’s growing discontent, and it has become increasingly clear that the trail of corruption stretches all the way to the top of Mexico’s government. Last November, it was discovered that First Lady Angélica Rivera had mysteriously come into possession of a $7 million mansion built by Grupo Higa — a company engaged in multimillion-dollar infrastructure contracts with the government. As shady dealings like these come to light, the public demand for transparency and honesty is growing increasingly robust.

The fight for access to information in Mexico is long overdue. A critical obstacle in the way of free media has been the monopolization of the news by a couple of powerful private companies. As of 2013, 93 percent of public television channels were owned by just two companies: Televisa and TV Azteca. The current media duopoly damages Mexico’s democratic aspirations by concentrating the power of information, suppressing alternative viewpoints and compromising critical thinking. Though Mexico enacted telecommunication reforms in 2014 that mandated the creation of two additional TV channels, not much has changed: These giant companies still wield overwhelming influence. And while alternative Internet media sources

27

SISI

the

suppressor

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

Egypt 's ruthless crackdown on LGBTQ rights shows the country hasn't changed.

28

In November 2014, a viral video exploded on Egyptian social media. On a Nile riverboat, several well-dressed onlookers gather as rings are exchanged, the ceremony culminating in a brief kiss and loud, happy cries from the audience. To attendees, it was a simple, idyllic wedding scene filled with “pomp and ceremony,” as one guest put it. But what roused interest across Egypt was one unconventional detail: The union was between two men.

In early September, the Egyptian state detained eight individuals identified in the video, including the male couple, on the charge of broadcasting footage that “violates public decency.” A

prosecutor later denounced the event as a “satanic ceremony,” with the video showing images that were “shameful, regrettable, and anger[ed] God.” Egypt’s forensic authority then submitted the men to the humiliating procedure of anal exams before announcing that the couple had been physically inspected and determined to be “not gay.” They were nevertheless sentenced to three years in prison each for “undermining public morals” and distributing “pornographic materials.” In the aftermath of the case, one member of the couple gave an interview on a privately-owned TV station and forcefully denied that any type of marriage had been por-

story By Alexander Abuaita / art by lucia cooke & anna ryu

Political pressure on Sisi continues to mount as Egypt’s economic fortunes remain unchanged. In late September, Sisi returned from the United Nations General Assembly — where he had just made his first speech to world leaders — to find his country fixated on an image that had just gone viral: a man’s body dangling from a billboard on the Cairo-Ismailia motorway. The man had allegedly killed himself because of financial woes, and the image became a larger symbol of the economic uncertainties Egyptians face. Struggling national industries, regular power outages and a devastating lack of food and water in rural areas are public concerns that Sisi, like his predecessors, has done little to address.

The anger drummed up by the suicide put increased pressure on Sisi’s government to make constructive economic changes.

Put in this uncomfortable position, Sisi has since pivoted his focus towards political stability — but not in the progressive way that many had hoped for. In order to confront his waning popular support, Sisi has largely reverted to the same methods of maintaining control that were so loathed in his predecessors. In the face of growing media scrutiny and souring public opinion, Sisi has shifted his attention from solving the economic and social situation to distracting the public from it. To this aim, the LGBTQ community has served as a primary target, and one largely incapable of defending itself.

Widespread police abuse and a sanctioned culture of antagonism towards LGBTQ Egyptians have sent shockwaves of fear through the community. The “moral police” — a new, self-titled branch of the Egyptian police — are using entrapment methods to hunt down people suspected of perpetuating moral crimes. These special police are now infiltrating the same platforms that once protected the anonymity of LGBTQ individuals, such as dating sites.

Last year, Grindr, a gay dating application, sent a message cautioning their Egyptian users to “speak safely.” The message went on to warn: “Egypt is arresting LGBT people, and police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you. Please be careful about arranging meetings with people you don’t know, and be careful about posting anything that might reveal your identity.”

Sisi’s anti-LGBTQ crackdown has helped a complicit police force normalize and defend arbitrary mass arrests. Over

150 people have been arrested under anti-LGBTQ charges since Sisi has taken power, and there have been many raids on suspected LGBTQ individuals under his administration. By early 2014, the Guardian had already documented nine raids and arrests of LGBTQ individuals since October 2013, which it called an “unusually high rate of arrests.” Seven out of nine happened inside private homes, reinforcing concerns that the LGBTQ community is facing a particularly strong and targeted crackdown from Sisi.

Sisi’s specific targeting of the LGBTQ community to quell public discontent recalls the religious conservatism of Morsi, but is actually more in line with the practices of Morsi’s authoritarian predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. In 2001, under Mubarak’s rule, 52 men were arrested at the Queen Boat, a gay nightclub, topping Egyptian news. Analysts argued that the media storm surrounding the events distracted Egypt from the other turmoils of Mubarak’s regime.

Being homosexual in and of itself is not specifically illegal in Egypt, nor even written about in its penal code. Yet under Sisi, LGBTQ individuals are often jailed under legislation that forbids “debauchery,” “sexual deviance” and “insulting public morals” — which makes Sisi’s tactics even more dubious. The false pretenses of the sentences are further demonstrated by the fact that if defendants cannot be found guilty under their original charges, they are often simply tried for other crimes, such as the distribution of pornographic material, until they are found guilty. The government’s harsh approach to private conduct, then, is not about oversight or even about cracking down on laws in the books, but is a separate project, part of a broader effort to consolidate power.

The frequency with which Sisi’s government has jailed LGBTQ individuals on questionable allegations indicates the weakness of the Egyptian judicial system as an independent entity. Corruption in Egypt’s judicial system is not a new problem, nor is it limited to attacks against LGBTQ individuals. In some cases, the courts are allegedly handed verdicts directly by the military, as global media sources speculated when Australian journalist Peter Greste was indicted on charges of journalism considered “damaging to [Egyptian] national security.” After setting off a firestorm in the international press and causing global

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

trayed in the video. Rather, he “was holding a birthday party for a friend and gave him a silver ring as a gift.”

Although this instance of public shaming and police abuse toward LGBTQ individuals made headlines, such acts are no news to Egyptians under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The crackdown on LGBTQ individuals is only one of the many ways that Sisi is trying to consolidate public support by promoting traditional Islamic values. His efforts have also involved widespread human rights violations and the suppression of dissidents. As a result, many Egyptians have found that any optimism they may have had for Sisi as a progressive reformer is rapidly evaporating.

Many Egyptians supported Sisi when he seized power from Mohamed Morsi.

Despite being Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Morsi quickly followed the steps of his predecessors, enacting increasingly authoritarian legislation, including an attempt to hold himself above judicial challenge. Sisi’s coup and his subsequent decision to hold new elections, while controversial, seemed to offer Egypt another chance at a fresh start.

Like Morsi before him, Sisi claimed that the demands of the protesters in Tahrir Square formed the basis of his agenda, and he set about creating a platform with many of those concerns in mind. After entering office, Sisi made immediate commitments to help Egypt’s poor and stabilize the economy, even rejecting the first budget presented to him as a signal of his commitment to be intimately involved in economic reform. He also set out several vast and long-term goals, including mobilizing a stalled workforce, increasing investment, mending Egypt’s relations with the world and committing to peace with Israel. All of these early steps seemed like positive signs for a country searching for an economic and political reformer.

But Sisi has since done little to move past symbolic gestures to realistic policies.

With no roadmap of how his government’s goals will be met, it seems unlikely that Sisi’s proposed reforms will ever see light.

Many in the general public now openly doubt that Sisi can tackle the social unrest and economic plight that have engulfed the country since the Arab Spring. Despite having only recently taken office, Sisi has found the public wary and critical of his governance.

29

20

2,500 16,000

people killed in political violence and

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

$1.3 Billion

30

governments to condemn Egypt’s actions, Greste had the politically sensitive charges against him dropped on the Egyptian government’s order — although the fate of two of his colleagues, who also were indicted, is unclear. This is just one incident in a troublesome trend: As in Morsi’s time, arbitrary arrest and politically decreed verdicts have been widespread under Sisi’s rule. Since Morsi was ousted, at least 2,500 people have been killed in political violence and 16,000 have been jailed — hardly making Sisi the progressive savior that protestors had prayed for.

The crackdown on LGBTQ individuals has effectively become a way to project a warning about state brutality without invoking much public outcry. And brutality is certainly the right word; LGBTQ people, after being arrested and charged, are frequently beaten, and their “crime” is often confirmed through methods such as anal exams, an invasive and pseudo-scientific procedure that has been widely denounced by the international community. These tests claim to determine not only whether someone has ever had anal sex, but also to detect “chronic homosexuals” who engage in “habitual debauchery.”

Dr. Maged Louis is one of the medical practitioners in charge of conducting these exams. Although Dr. Louis denied that examiners penetrate subjects under examination, he did confirm that a test for a “chronic homosexual” is if the anus can accept larger objects. In addition to their

529

people jailed under sisi Amount of uS Foreign aid to Egypt and its military

elongation, he stated that the anuses of “chronic homosexuals” don’t clench when touched or don’t contract as tightly as those of heterosexuals. He further stated that they are smooth and lack the “corrugations” — wrinkles — found on “normal” anuses. The flaunting of this degrading and invasive procedure is not just aimed at LGBTQ individuals, but also serves as a warning to dissidents regarding the kind of extreme treatment that they can expect should they find themselves face-to-face with Egypt’s justice system.

An additional problem exposed by the government crackdown on LGBTQ Egyptians is the uncomfortably close relationship between news media and the government. The police frequently work with state-controlled media outlets to broadcast arrests, trials and even beatings of LGBTQ people, reinforcing the idea that these acts are designed to serve as warnings to the public. Bel Trew, a correspondent in Egypt, reported that this kind of anti-LGBTQ propaganda is on the rise. “These days the Egyptian pro-regime media are increasingly colluding with the security forces who invite them to broadcast the raids — even though that’s illegal,” she says. Sometimes, she explains, raids of suspected “gay houses” are broadcast on national TV to “dramatic cop-show music.”

This style of propaganda has been common in Egyptian media since the coup.

In late 2013, the renowned Egyptian journalist and political scientist Hani Shukral-

Morsi supporters convicted of crimes without substantial evidence

lah criticized the way that the Egyptian military had been using the media to its own political ends. He said that the media and the government were clearly collaborating and pointed to the “blatant opportunism of many of the country’s journalists” as part of the reason why the government had been able to use the media to reinforce its authoritarian bent.

Under the guise of protecting Egyptian society against sexual deviance, Sisi has used homophobic sentiments to justify a more expansive role for the police, normalizing the police’s poor treatment of protesters and dissidents. Furthermore, Sisi’s focus on LGBTQ individuals has overshadowed other pressing social concerns.

Last summer, Egypt made headlines for rising rates of sexual violence against both men and women, especially at the hands of the police. Sexual assault in Egypt remains a crisis that calls for substantive changes in Egypt’s police culture, judiciary system and society at large. With the pretense of shielding the public from an open and vocal LGBTQ community, the government has allowed sexual abuse in police stations and jails to proliferate largely unchecked.

The issue has yet to be addressed by the government, adding just one more entry to the list of grievances against Sisi and his administration.

Despite the growing consensus on LGBTQ rights in the Western world, there has been little concrete action against Sisi’s policies. Egypt has always depended on for-

eign military and economic aid to strengthen its government’s stability. But today, the country’s traditional allies may be too concerned with maintaining good relationships with the country to bother criticizing Sisi’s human rights abuses. In particular, the international community’s general inaction towards Sisi’s treatment of LGBTQ individuals is indicative of how Egypt’s major partners have systematically refrained from criticizing Sisi’s domestic policies — as long as he supports their interests in the region.

This trend has been particularly powerful with the rise of ISIL. As regional and Western allies alike have come to see combating ISIL’s extremism as a primary goal in the region, they have ignored the domestic problems of any country that can help them to that end — including, for example, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Though there have been some scattered symbolic efforts, in general, LGBTQ friendliness has not been a criterion for relations with allied nations.

In fact, the United States has reinstated policies of active support for Sisi’s government. In March, President Barack Obama announced that the United States would lift the ban on arms sales to Egypt and continue to pledge $1.3 billion in annual aid to the country and its military.

These funds come even though Sisi has made no progress in fixing Egypt’s corrupt judicial or police systems. Time Magazine called this a return to the “status quo ante — the way things were before.” Although President Obama did mention concerns about the imprisonment of activists and the corruption of the judicial system when making the announcement, the reality is that these comments are superficial since the United States is still essentially rewarding Sisi’s regime despite its prominent failures to provide justice or progress.

Not all of Egypt’s allies are so willing to let Sisi’s abuse of power pass unremarked.

Whereas the US State Department under Kerry is content to turn a blind eye to-

EU official primarily responsible for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherini, were not in line with the parliament’s larger conclusions that the Egyptian government had committed dire offenses. Both the lack of coherence at the EU level and the lesser importance of the EU’s military and economic ties to Egypt compared to those of the United States mean that the EU’s resolution will do little or nothing to change Sisi’s policies towards LGBTQ individuals.

Other groups that have publicly condemned Egypt are also unlikely to see success. Although human rights groups around the world are fighting to make progress for LGBTQ people in the Middle East, Egypt is an especially difficult case because homosexuality is not illegal, meaning that there are few formal barriers against which activists can push. The problem starts and stops with Sisi, leaving little room for the Egyptian public or the international community to demand true justice for LGBTQ individuals.

Last year, Grindr, a gay dating application, sent a message cautioning their Egyptian users to "speak safely." The message went on to warn: "Egypt is arresting LGBT people, and police may be posing as LGBT on social media to entrap you." wards the abuses against the LGBTQ community in Egypt, the European Union has taken a more hardline official approach.

A January 2015 resolution passed by the European Parliament “express[ed] its outrage at the intensifying clampdown against the LGBT community in Egypt with an increasing number of arrests…and heavy prison sentences against persons based on their sexual orientation.” The resolution also stressed that the situation made maintaining a “‘business as usual’ approach by the EU” towards Egypt impossible, and it advised against “any new initiative in the EU’s engagement with Egyptian authorities, including dialogue at technical level” until EU policy towards Egypt could be revised to take into account the new human rights concerns.

Still, the resolution’s criticism might not translate into more effective EU policy. The document expressed dismay at “the demure public reaction of the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and the EU Member States” against the offenses of Sisi’s government. In other words, the weak responses by individual states and even the

Whereas many Egyptians envisioned their country under Sisi as a more functional and effective democracy, the LGBTQ crackdowns have demonstrated how strong Sisi’s commitment is to bringing Egypt to so-called moral order — whatever violent consequences that vision may carry. His promises for change and symbolic commitments to the causes of the Tahrir Square protestors have almost completely thinned out. Instead, Sisi has insisted upon taking advantage of weak government institutions, enlisting the help of a corrupt police system and a judicial system that lacks independence to further his own power at the expense of Egypt’s citizens. If Sisi achieves the social environment he seems to desire — one of government-sanctioned normalcy and restrictive, police-enforced order — we will doubtlessly see again the 2011 conditions that brought protestors to Egypt’s streets and squares.

ALEXANDER ABUAITA ‘18 IS A POTENTIAL ECONOMICS AND MIDDLE EAST STUDIES CONCENTRATOR AND THE ASSOCIATE CHIEF OF STAFF AT BPR.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

While the United States continues to make strides towards equality and acceptance for LGBTQ individuals at home, these domestic attitudes are not sufficiently reflected in foreign policy. In February of this year, US Secretary of State John Kerry swore in the nation’s first Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBT Persons, which was described as “a new diplomatic post created to contend against homophobia worldwide.”

Kerry stated at the reception: “In country after country, LGBT communities face discriminatory laws and practices that attack their dignity, undermine their safety, and violate their human rights…That’s unacceptable. And we believe it has to change.” The very night before Kerry made those statements, police arrested seven people in Cairo, and the Egyptian government proudly announced that the arrests had been the product of monitoring through fake social media profiles. Yet Kerry still headed to Egypt the next week to raise money for Sisi’s government during an economic summit — and made no comments about the government’s abuses. The sentiment, it seems, of the Special Envoy has fallen flat.

31

SMALL PARTIES, BIG POWER Westminster’s getting hung up on a hung parliament.

STORY BY MATTHEW DUDAK / ART BY OLIVIA WATSON

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

O

32

n May 7th, voters in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland will head to the polls to vote for 650 members of Parliament (MPs) to represent them in Westminster. Projections from various sources expect fairly similar outcomes: between 270 and 290 seats for the Conservative (Tory) Party, between 260 and 280 for the Labour Party, between 21 and 26 for the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems), about four for the farright UK Independence Party (UKIP), 40 to 55 for the Scottish National Party (SNP) and only one each for the Green Party and the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. Though these numbers are bound to change between now and election day, any movement is expected to be minimal, and the most important factor almost certainly won’t change: After the election, no one party will hold a majority, resulting in a hung parliament.

Should this happen, it will mark the second election in a row in which neither the Conservative nor Labour Party was able to win a simple majority in Parliament, something that has only occured twice since 1945. In 1974, a hung parliament resulted in new elections, while the 2010 hung parliament established the current Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

The seeming inevitability of another hung parliament, one in which the Labour and Conservative parties will likely receive only a combined 68 percent of the vote, demonstrates a new reality for the UK po-

litical climate: For the foreseeable future, two-party politics are over.

Perhaps the most important factor in the demise of two-party politics is the rise of the SNP, the current majority party in the Scottish Parliament, best known for spearheading the 2014 independence referendum. Although the referendum’s call for independence fell short at 45 percent of the vote, it allowed Scots a forum to air feelings of broader discontent that had led voters to flock to the SNP. Until

POSSIBLE OUTCOMES INVOLVE VARIOUS “RAINBOW” GOVERNMENTS, WHICH MAY TAKE THE FORM OF EITHER COALITIONS OR CONFIDENCE AND SUPPLY AGREEMENTS BETWEEN PARTIES. recently, Scotland overwhelmingly supported Labour, as the party’s pro-worker and pro-welfare policies are in line with the ideological leanings of many Scots.

But because the major parties predominantly draw their support from English voters, they often disregard the needs of their Scottish constituents, breeding widespread discontent. In the past few years, many former Scottish Labour supporters have seen their party fail to prevent policies deemed as anti-leftist such as tuition fee increases, National Health Service marketization, welfare cuts and, most up-

setting to Scots, the renewal of the Trident program housing nuclear-armed submarines at Clyde Naval Base 25 miles west of Glasgow. Labour’s apparent failure to stop these policies has been compounded by a general sentiment of disconnect between Scotland and Westminster.

In addition, many voters who originally supported the Lib Dems quickly left the party in 2010 after the formation of the new coalition government with the reviled Tories. More liberal Lib Dem supporters saw the union as a betrayal, with many of the party’s Scottish voters finding their way to the SNP instead. Between support from die-hard Scottish nationalists and those disappointed with mainstream Westminster politics, the SNP is expected to win up to 53 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the coming elections. That bloc is important: The SNP will likely play a large part in the parliamentary arithmetic, a fact which has led many to deem the newly risen party “kingmakers.”

Sitting far on the other side of the political spectrum, UKIP, a libertarian party most strongly associated with its euroskepticism, will also play a large role in forcing a hung parliament. The party supports an independent UK outside the realm of the European Union, a view that complements the party’s other key characteristics: strong anti-immigration policies and fierce nationalism. UKIP’s first real taste of legitimacy came in 2014 after winning a plurality of votes in the Europe-

an Parliament elections. In the same year, two Conservative MPs separately defected to UKIP and consequently won their special elections as UKIP candidates, thereby giving UKIP its first two MPs. Since then, UKIP has generally polled at around 13 percent, suggesting that it will win one to six seats in May. UKIP’s disruptive strength lies in the broad geographic dispersion of its supporters. While the SNP is supported exclusively in Scotland, and while Labour and the Tories draw their support heavily from the North and South respectively, UKIP polls relatively uniformly in England and Wales. Though this doesn’t translate directly into seats, UKIP’s broad base upsets the two-party system by drawing voters away from both of the big players. UKIP’s support is comprised largely of former Conservative voters, but many Labour voters are also drawn to the party’s anti-establishment appeal and their euroskeptic, anti-immigration policies. A UKIP challenge may therefore flip many supposedly safe seats and could help prevent either party from winning a majority in Parliament.

The final major player is the Green Party. The Greens are seen as the ultra-liberal, anti-establishment alternative to Labour and are considered even further left than the SNP. The party currently polls at 5 percent and is only expected to win the one seat it currently holds in Brighton Pavillion. Green supporters are almost exclusively former Labour voters, which evens out some of the growth of the more-conservative UKIP. Together, the growth of the Green party and UKIP has chipped away at the large bases of the two major players.

With a hung parliament appearing nearly certain in May, the path to forming a government remains unclear. Since no party is likely to capture the 326 of 650 seats needed to form a majority government, one possible outcome is a coalition government similar to the current alliance formed between Conservatives and Lib Dems in 2010. In a coalition, members of two or more parties become government ministers, and the parties agree to a joint set of policy objectives. Because the Lib Dems, the party historically most likely to coalesce with either of the major parties, will probably not win enough seats to form a coalition with a major party alone, this outcome also seems unlikely.

The alternative option is the formation of a minority government, in which the party with the plurality of seats gains the support of enough other MPs to pass a vote of confidence in their government but must still cobble together votes for each piece of legislation individually.

The more likely outcome of the election in May seems to be a Labour minority government with confidence from SNP. In the early months of the campaign, it seemed as if a Labour-SNP coalition might be a strong possibility. This government would see Alex Salmond, former SNP leader and a likely SNP MP, serving as the Deputy Prime Minister behind Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, as Prime Minister. However, the possibility of power for a secessionist party like the SNP dismays many English and Welsh voters. The Tories capitalized on that wariness, running an advertisement that portrayed Miliband literally in Salmond’s pocket. In response, Miliband was forced

MATTHEW DUDAK ‘18 IS A PHYSICS CONCENTRATOR AND A WORLD STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

to rule out any possibility of a true coalition between the two parties. However, the option of a “confidence and supply” agreement remains open. In such an agreement, Labour would form a minority government, and the SNP would agree to support the confidence motion of the government in exchange for the government’s support on some established set of policies.

Other possible outcomes involve various “rainbow” governments, which may take the form of either coalitions or confidence and supply agreements between parties. The Tories may be able to patch together support from the Lib Dems, UKIP and the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland. However, this result seems unlikely; the Lib Dems are pro-European and so clash with UKIP’s distinct euroskepticism. Additionally, the drop in support that the Lib Dems experienced after forming a coalition with the Tories in 2010 may cause them to be more conservative about joining hands with the Conservative Party again in May. Another possibility is a Labour and Lib Dem coalition, either alone or with the support of the Greens and Plaid Cymru. Ideological and policy differences between the Lib Dems and Labour are smaller than those between the Lib Dems and the Conservative Party, thus representing a more politically viable alliance.

Yet with current polling numbers, even this government could require the confidence of the SNP to rule.

When the dust settles after a whirlwind of post-election negotiations, the era of two-party politics will have ended — leaving the UK with a fractured political landscape. Still, the new dynamic may lead to a more inclusive system of government. With no clear majority party, the legislative process will be forced out into the open. Though it may come at the expense of efficiency, a minority government will be forced to lead with increased transparency and a broader, more fluid base of input, meaning even backbenchers may get to play a rare role in shaping policy. As they head to the polls on May 7th, voters will not just be checking boxes next to the names of candidates; they will also be casting votes for the end of politics as usual.

33

PILLARS OF SAND The UAE’s miracle growth is built on faulty foundations.

STORY BY EMILY CUNNIFFE / ART BY KWANG CHOI

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

T

34

he United Arab Emirates (UAE) is often hailed by the West as a model of stability and modernity in the otherwise tumultuous Middle East. Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s bustling skylines, emblazoned with glittering skyscrapers, have come to symbolize the miracle of the young state’s rise. Yet the foundations of these desert mega-structures are built upon the sweat and toil of millions of migrant workers trapped in a system of modern slavery. In 2013, the United Nations estimated that the UAE was home to the fifth-largest international migrant population in the world. Out of a population of 9.2 million, a staggering 80 percent, or 7.8 million, are migrant workers hailing primarily from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. But in the heedless pursuit of Western-style development, both the Emirates and the West have turned a blind eye to the suffering and abuse of this population as it is exploited in the process of creating modern oases of glass and steel.

Just off the coast of Abu Dhabi sits Saadiyat Island — a shimmering symbol of the UAE’s quest for modernity.

The Guggenheim and the Louvre, literal repositories of Western civilization, are both constructing establishments there, as is another characteristically Western institution: New York University. With multiple billion-dollar projects in the works, the island will soon be a tourist and leisure destination, sporting the art, knowledge and opulence of the Western world. The Abu Dhabi-based Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) has enthusiastically marketed the island, pitching a vision of a new Louvre “where rain of light patterns illuminate a micro-city of small galleries, lakes and landscaping.” But beneath the modern facade, the stories of those who labor for impossibly long hours under deplorable conditions to build these structures are all too easily forgotten.

In 2009, Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigated the construction sites of Saadiyat Island and published a damning report, finding that employers had committed a series of egregious human and labor rights violations. The report found that workers were paid significantly less than they were promised, that they were forced to toil through daily shifts of up to 12 hours and that their documents were seized upon arrival, making them powerless to leave. The workers were then denied access to judicial institutions and faced with swift deportation if they demanded change to their conditions or protested their maltreatment.

The government of the UAE was quick to respond to the report and has since initiated a vast number of reforms at the site. For example, the TDIC created the Saadiyat Accommodation Village to house all workers building Western

WORKERS WERE PAID SIGNIFICANTLY LESS THAN THEY WERE PROMISED, WERE FORCED TO TOIL THROUGH DAILY SHIFTS OF UP TO 12 HOURS AND HAD THEIR DOCUMENTS SEIZED UPON ARRIVAL, MAKING THEM POWERLESS TO LEAVE. cultural institutions. In the words of its developer, the village “provide[s] an internationally recognized, world-class standard of living.”

Nonetheless, a 2015 HRW report found the construction company still in violation of international law and continuing its abuse of workers. The rhetoric of reform, it seems, has proven hollow and catalyzed little change. Moreover, the sad truth is that, despite the continuation of deplorable conditions, the best place to

be a construction worker in the UAE today is on Saadiyat Island. The rest of the country, largely out of the spotlight of the international media and hence exempt from the pressure for at least superficial improvements, has seen little to no reform.

Recruited from South Asia with promises of better lives for themselves and their families, the majority of migrant workers in the UAE find the promised “Gulf Dream” to be little more than a mirage. Workers’ journeys begin in their home countries, where the main channel of employment is often through agencies that place workers overseas. These agencies recruit men from low-income areas, advertising high salaries and opportunities in the Gulf that can help them support their families back home. It is in search of this dream that many men leave their homes, paying exorbitant sums, sometimes up to $4,100, to their agencies in exchange for being placed in a job. The payment of these fees is often funded by a whole family’s investment or by burdensome loans. As a result, even before they touch down at the UAE’s construction sites, many workers are laden with debt.

After arriving in the UAE, workers find themselves earning salaries far below what was promised and living in accommodations that frequently amount to little more than barracks, without even air conditioning to combat the sweltering desert heat. A significant proportion of the workers is housed in ominously designated “labor camps,” where often up to 12 men sleep in a room using a system of hot bedding, where, when one man leaves for his shift, another takes his place in the bed. In some of the smaller construction sites, particularly those outside of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the accommodations are often makeshift and built by the workers out of construction site scrap materials.

These unregulated sites often lack basic utilities like plumbing and electricity and, as a result, have poor sanitary conditions.

For all this, the work itself is only for a pittance in wages.

Leaving is not an option. In addition to having their documents confiscated upon arrival, many workers are further bound to their employers through the kafala visa sponsorship system. Under this law, the sponsor controls the move-

against their employers in response to the withholding of their wages. The following day, the police rounded up hundreds of the men. Anamul al-Haque, who participated in the protests, claimed: “They pushed me. They slapped me. They demanded that I sign a form written in Arabic. ‘Sign and go to jail,’ they said.” Soon after, al-Haque was deported with the rest of the detained protesters. He has now joined the numerous men back in their

5.4 x 5.7 in

home countries who are burdened with debt and who never even came close to attaining the Gulf Dream they had been promised. Cases like al-Haque’s demonstrate why, out of fear of deportation, most workers end up silently enduring their maltreatment. This ruthless response also highlights the absolute power that government authorities hold and the government’s loyalty to corporations over human rights.

Even when workers aren’t deported, the promise of making a decent living and sending money home is hardly ever real-

EMILY CUNNIFFE ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR AND A WORLD STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

ment, working and living conditions of the sponsored worker. This patron-client relationship ensures that the foreign worker is almost completely dependent on his local sponsor.

Moreover, there exists no method of recourse, as workers are unable to access, or are actively excluded from, the justice system. Workers who have taken to other means of expressing discontent such as protests and strikes have been met with vicious backlash from authorities. In October 2013, 3,000 workers for BK Gulf on Saadiyat Island held a daylong strike

ized. With no official minimum wage in the UAE — only a “suggested wage” — workers find themselves at the mercy of their employers, who have a right to dictate wages under the kafala system.

Workers are therefore often paid far below the wage promised by the employment agencies that recruit them in their home countries. And that’s if the workers are paid at all. Wage theft is rampant in the UAE; recent strikes in Dubai, for example, protested the failure of Emaar Properties to pay its employees for their overtime work. Moreover, workers have no way to guarantee that they get the wages they are owed. Strikes are rarities in the UAE, where trade unions and collective action are illegal and the police respond swiftly to any indication of agitation.

The UAE’s record in the realm of international treaties and conventions is not a promising one for those waiting on reform. The nation is not a signatory to a majority of the international treaties and conventions that establish a framework for workers’ rights, including the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.

While the UAE is a signatory to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a number of International Labor Organization conventions, enforcement of these treaties is nearly nonexistent.

The institutions closest to these abuses have also failed to take action.

The NYU campus construction site makes the token effort of asking workers for feedback on their working conditions — but on signs that only feature English, a language that very few workers speak or understand, let alone read or write. On the other hand, the Guggenheim Museum’s public relations team claims that the workers are only subcontractors, washing its hands of any responsibility for their living and working conditions. These examples indicate a disturbing trend: The West is simply shrugging off the blame for the human rights abuses of workers in the UAE. Yet Western institutions would be wise to demand better, since the Emirates’ development has, for far too long, been built on the backs of millions of migrant workers.

35

ANDREW ROSS Andrew Ross is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University (NYU) and the author or editor of more than 20 books, including: “Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal,” “Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City” and “Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times.”

INTERVIEW BY NAOMI CHASEK-MACFOY

What drew NYU to build a campus in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)?

Only money and the ambitions of NYU’s president. If you asked faculty whether or not they thought it would be a good idea to set up a university in Abu Dhabi, none of them would have said yes. The UAE is very wealthy – I think it’s the third biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world – and it has embarked on a nation-building crusade. It is acquiring high-profile cultural assets through brand names like NYU, the Guggenheim and the Louvre. NYU wasn’t the only university the UAE approached, but our president was the one that took the bait.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

What obligations do liberal social institutions have to their workers?

The institution has a very high level of responsibility, especially when it is operating in a society where human rights and labor abuses are rife, as they are in the UAE. In countries and municipalities where employees are organized and have unions, then protection is usually there. A group of faculty and students formed the Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU and pushed the administration very hard to adopt values and fair labor standards. They did eventually do that in 2010, and they were pretty good values. Still, who monitors whether or not these values are being enforced? We have very good labor laws in this country, but they’re not enforced because there aren’t enough inspectors.

And in authoritarian societies, there’s no political will to enforce standards. The labor monitor that NYU commissioned to do the oversight fell through on the job.

36

Do you see a connection between physical and intellectual freedom?

Yes. The AAUP [American Association of University Professors] exists to define and defend academic freedom. We drafted a policy recommendation several years ago about precisely this kind of situation, where universities go offshore and where there is a very urgent need to protect the rights of instructional employees like faculty and the rights of noninstructional staff, which includes construction and maintenance personnel. It was the first time we’d linked these two in any policy statement.

What is your critique of the so-called “Gulf paymasters,” who control the wages and working conditions of employees in manual labor positions?

It’s pretty clear to everybody that the reason why our supposedly liberal institutions are going offshore, especially to the Gulf States and China, is because these countries are footing the bill; everything in Abu Dhabi is paid for by the UAE government. Does that mean that the NYU administration has no voice? Does it mean that it cannot protect its own as it is obliged to do?...The NYU case illustrates the larger point about who calls the shots when it comes to the conduct of educational institutions. Increasingly, we have boards of trustees across the country that are composed almost entirely of very rich people drawn from the world of business, and there are very few faculty representatives. What that means is that the shared governance system, which is supposed to

be the operating culture within the academy, falls apart and is really only there for show. Under those circumstances, the influence of the trustees, who represent immense amounts of wealth, becomes all-pervasive.

What are your views on transparency and democracy within universities, both in the United States and abroad?

In private universities, there is very little transparency to begin with. There’s no fiscal transparency and, increasingly, there’s less transparency in decision-making, which is almost unilaterally done by administrations now. Our faculty had no say in the settingup of branches overseas in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, for example.

So the issue of transparency is key — absolutely key — when it comes to shaping academic affairs and decisions about finances and resources. And then, if you operate in a culture like the UAE, in which there’s very little transparency whatsoever, then the problem gets magnified and compounded because no one knows what’s going on.

How can democracy best be cultivated in a university setting?

We have a large faculty group at NYU called Faculty Democracy whose goal is to promote democracy and transparency in decision-making at the university. We advocate for full fiscal transparency and for much fuller representation and consultation with faculty and students, as well as with the communities that host universities, because they’re very much impacted by university policymaking.

Should American universities abroad expect exemption from a country’s political landscape so that they can be freethinking spaces?

They can’t operate there otherwise. There are no free speech provisions in the UAE. No one else in the UAE enjoys free speech protections. So to operate there, you have to negotiate some kind of agreement regarding academic freedom protections. You couldn’t operate a college without that. That said, there are other colleges in the UAE that predate the introduction of Western colleges into the country, that existed before NYU’s presence there, and they’ve certainly had their fair share of problems in this area, so it’s naive to believe that you wouldn’t run into problems like that.

What is the intended outcome of your research and writing on workers’ rights in Abu Dhabi?

I would describe my work as advocacy research. Scholars often choose to think and write about communities that don’t necessarily have a voice of their own. To some degree, the research becomes a form of advocacy for the workers in this case, or in general for the communities in question. I’m in a lot of company with any number of NGOs and scholars who are working on this issue. You obviously need research to back up the advocacy, and you need to be able to access the research sites. And the authorities don’t want us to do that, which is why they bar us entry or deport us.

RACHEL LLOYD Rachel Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, an organization that works with survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking.

INTERVIEW BY JENNA WALDMAN What do you think are the motivations and causes of commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking?

Both globally and domestically, I think much of it comes down to poverty. The issue in the United States overwhelmingly impacts low-income kids, primarily kids of color who’ve been in the child welfare system or juvenile justice system and have a history of sexual abuse. We live in a culture that has sexualized youth in many ways. In our culture, gender-based violence is a part of daily life.

It’s an epidemic. But I think it’s a disservice to just paint this as bad guys looking to buy little girls. We need to place it in the context of many very vulnerable young people whom we have failed to protect and support and for whom we don’t provide options. And these are the consequences.

Public officials often cite the Super Bowl as one of largest events of human trafficking in the United States, but you’ve criticized this point of view. Why? You’ve got to be pretty dense now, as a pimp, to bring a bunch of underage girls right into a city where the Super Bowl is being held.

And there are plenty of other conventions and events that are far more low-key and off the radar. You can always make money in the sex industry…With conventions like the Democratic National Convention, or anytime that you have a lot of adult men, particularly transient males that come in with money and liquor, you’re going to find an uptick [in trafficking]. But I think the danger in focusing [on a single event] is that we fail to look at what’s happening in every other city on every other night of the year.

The media tends to focus on stories of young girls trafficked abroad as opposed to women within US cities. Why is this the case?

I think we do a good job of pointing a finger everywhere else and at poverty in other countries. When you talk about what’s happening in this country, however, it means you have to accept that some of your decisions have created a culture in which [trafficking and

Some women would say that working in the sex industry is actually a statement of female empowerment. How do you view this perspective?

If that is true for you, individually, then that’s a hard position to argue against. That still doesn’t negate the fact that, generally, the sex industry preys on economically disadvantaged children and adult women who are incredibly vulnerable and who have extreme histories of prior sexual abuse and childhood trauma. So while your position may be such that you decided to go into the sex industry, you need to at least be able to recognize that this is just not true for the overwhelming majority of individuals.

How do you think American political rhetoric is changing around issues of consent? Does this influence your movement?

For every moment where I think, “Okay, we’re coming along on this issue,” there is a crazy lawmaker who says something insane about rape victims. When [Girls Educational and Mentoring Services] used to go up to the Albany State House, we would walk through the halls and it was all white men in suits. The girls obviously noticed, and it became a lesson in civic participation. Let’s talk about who has power and why they have power. Until we see a bigger shift in who is representing the voices of women, we’re going to be hard pressed to see real progress. And I think that, even around issues of consent and sexual violence, the media still wants good victims. We like victims in neat little boxes.

How do you see the anti-trafficking movement fitting into other national movements focused on women’s rights? Specifically, how does college sexual assault activism fit with what you do?

It is a different experience requiring a different response, but we’re still talking about a culture where men don’t feel like women have rights over their own bodies. “She’s asking for it” is taken to the nth degree in the sex industry. However, I think there still exists judgment — even within the women’s rights movement — about women in the sex industry. I remember that, years ago, at a sexual violence conference, I realized that my points were being met with a kind of hostility. The notion of, “If we throw a bunch of sex workers in the mix, nobody will take us seriously,” was made clear. Often on campuses, victims are shamed and are not supposed to make a fuss about sexual assault. Now imagine a girl in the sex industry reporting a rape and trying to be taken seriously. I know many women who, having grown up in a paternalistic, misogynistic society have internalized sexism of their own.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Your organization successfully lobbied New York to become the first state to pass a law protecting victims of trafficking rather than prosecuting them. What were the obstacles you faced?

There was a lack of awareness that [trafficking] was even happening, and a real apathy towards those it was affecting. If we were seeing this happen to upper-class white girls from upstate New York, we would have a different political and social response. So even just getting people to care took a minute. Actually, it took us four and a half years. Everybody was against it in the beginning because of the idea that certain types of young people are inherently criminal. And we see that phenomenon in multiple ways in our politics and our media. I’m incredibly proud of all the young women who were part of those advocacy efforts. Ultimately, people’s humanity began to connect to what they were saying, and we passed the bill.

sexual exploitation] can happen. There potentially may be men in your life who are doing the buying. We don’t want to set up a hierarchy of victims, but I think doing so is in some ways hypocritical. The media enjoys stories that are salacious or titillating, ones that they can fit into a very quick segment with flashy graphics and dramatic background footage. I think speaking with complexity about this issue is challenging for people.

37

THOMAS TISCH Thomas Tisch ’76 is the Chancellor of the Corporation of Brown University and a partner at Four Partners, a private investment firm in New York City. He has served on the boards of numerous philanthropic and educational institutions.

INTERVIEW BY NAOMI CHASEK-MACFOY What is the Corporation’s role, practically or philosophically speaking, for the University?

The role of the Corporation is to take the long view and to be sure that we are on a right and steady course. What the Corporation does not do is manage or entirely set the course for the University. Those responsibilities are really left, in large part, to the president and the senior administration to assemble the combination of planning and resources that are necessary to help chart that course. There’s a deep sense that the University is governed best by a very effective president, and ensuring a shared sense of governance has been institutional tradition. Whether it’s the formulation of strategic plans, budgets or sexual assault policies, a broad base of community participation is usually inherent in decisions.

There’s no direct public access to the content of the Corporation’s meetings. Is that a problem?

There is a community letter that the president generally sends out after each Corporation meeting that often details the items discussed…When we did a review of governance in 2009, we decided to reduce the period over which Corporation minutes are locked from 50 to 25 years.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Why is that period so long?

There is a sense that there are items that might come up which, to certain people, require a sense of confidentiality, and it is important to allow people in the room to have the power to speak freely. I will tell you, having reviewed the minutes of the Corporation meetings and being in the Corporation meetings myself, that having them locked up for that long probably doesn’t make sense. But it is, in many ways, the tradition of university governing bodies to have some degree of confidentiality. The Harvard Corporation, for example, still maintains a 50-year lockup on their records.

38

There’s no democracy in the governing of Brown. Do you think that democratic functions have a place here?

The Corporation was never set up as a democratic structure. It’s among the least democratic structures in the world.

Is that just? Is that right?

I don’t know exactly how I would define “democratic structure,” but we are not a democratic or representative structure.

Do you think student representation should be part of the Corporation?

I think it’s very important for the Corporation to receive input and voices that represent the breadth and character of the Brown community in making decisions. I don’t think that necessarily equates to the Corporation being a formally representative body, and I think it’s very important that we not become one.

So you think that it is important that the Corporation stay nonrepresentative.

No, I believe that it’s important for the Corporation to be structured in such a way that we have deep input, respect and openness in the processes that affect the breadth of the Brown community.

It’s also important that we conduct ourselves in a way in which we have a sense of trust, transparency and engagement. And it’s interesting that there are times when the Corporation will step back and look at our work in a variety of ways to be sure that we are conducting ourselves appropriately and that our processes are such that those ideas are recognized and affirmed. We’re also capable, I believe, and we’ve shown this at various times, of making adjustments and assessments of the way we conduct our business to be sure that those ideas are present and appreciated by the community…I think if we recreated the Corporation as something that appeared to be a more representative body, with faculty, students and staff, then there is a great risk of people feeling that they have to behave as representatives of a certain perspective of the moment in a very political sense. And I think that is a great risk to the governance of the University. We have a broad range of perspectives in the room: I’m very proud of that as the Chair of the Trustee Vacancy Committee.

Are you obliged to include members of the Brown community in presidential searches?

Absolutely not, but we chose to, absolutely. And as a matter of fact, in the search that yielded Gordon Gee and beforehand, candidates were selected and then presented for review of the campus. [Community members] were brought in at the last moment.

In the latest search, from the first day our committee convened as a total group [with student and faculty members] — from the setting of the lens, to the criteria, to the interviewing of the candidates towards the review. There was one moment in the life of the committee, at a very critical point of narrowing the field and selecting the candidate, when I didn’t want to favor one group or the other, so in that moment, I just opened the floor to everyone.

Who do you think Brown belongs to? What are the controlling interests?

In terms of whom the University belongs to, the University has a mission statement: research, teaching and service to the world.

In the broadest sense, we’re technically structured as a nonprofit corporation, so at some level it may belong to the members. But what it really belongs to is the pursuit of an ideal. And the ideal is truly a glorious ideal. I think there’s no greater statement in any university charter than the Brown statement to educate students to live lives of usefulness and reputation. There’s no more glorious ideal than the openness that is inherent in the charter, one that’s not perfect at this time. But we should work over time to make it perfect, and it’s a community that’s very much committed to those values. It’s one of the things that engages me and the entirety of the

senior administration in a very deep way. There are conversations that are difficult, where people might be disappointed in certain rules or judgments of the Corporation. We saw it in the last two years with respect to the issue of divestment from coal, and we’ve seen it in relation to issues of openness and speech, which were framed by the critical point around a discussion on the disruptions to former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly speaking on campus. We see elements of [Brown’s openness] in the way we define the community in terms of behavior around sexual assault.

fraction of the endowment of other institutions in our cohort.

And there are many institutions, such as Wellesley, Williams and Amherst, where their endowment on a per student basis is measurably higher than ours. And yet, they don’t have the same aspirations in terms of research and graduate students. That’s one of the reasons we have a University Resources Committee: to be able to work through those tradeoffs and the consequences of emphasizing various aspects of the budget in relation to other aspects. The tradeoffs are made especially difficult by the fact that

“It’s very important for the Corporation to receive input that represents the breadth and character of the Brown community. I don’t think that necessarily equates to the Corporation being a formally representative body.”

I think one of the real blessings of Brown is that we [have these conversations] in a very broad, open and serious way, with a great deal of integrity. It’s one of the pieces of Brown that makes me feel that the work that we’re doing is just incredibly important — because there are very few institutions in American life that represent this ideal.

How is financial aid weighed in the budget? How does Brown’s aid process compare to peer institutions?

Brown’s commitment to access and financial aid is something that’s glorious and is supported, I think, by the entirety of the Corporation. One of the great challenges for the University is that we find ourselves, blessedly, in a competitive cohort, where the resources that other institutions enjoy are materially greater than the financial resources that Brown enjoys; our endowment is a

Do you think the University and the Corporation have any responsibility to make investments that reflect ethical and political concerns of students?

I think the University has a responsibility to manage the endowment in a financially, morally and ethically responsible manner, yes.

Is that management in specific relation to student concerns?

We have a process through the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility (ACCRIP) to listen to and consider deeply the views and recommendations that come forth from the community. That doesn’t mean that we will necessarily [listen]. In the case of the ACCRIP recommendation on coal divestment, we did not accept that recommendation. That was a decision that was arrived at after much discussion with a Corporation-based committee. I think that there are elements of the letter that President Paxson wrote to the community where her basis of the rationale for the judgment made a lot of sense and was actually beautifully articulated. And on that issue, like on so many issues, there were a great number of perspectives present in the Corporation. I know many students and many members of the community were disappointed at the conclusion. I can tell you as well that there were members of the Corporation who were disappointed in the decision…I do believe very sincerely that it is important for the Corporation to maintain a sense of trust, appropriate transparency and a deeply meaningful engagement with all parts of the Brown community. This was one of the reasons that led to the governance review of our work in 2009, where we created the position of Young Alumni Trustee, a position that has been very effective in the work of the Corporation and that has brought a closeness with student experience to our work. It’s incumbent on us to work to have the right conversations with student and community leadership over the period ahead to be sure that we’re engaging in a meaningful way, to be sure that there’s the right transparency and that we’re working to build the right trust.

We’re doing as good a job as we can.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Some students feel that recent spending projects have been wasteful — specifically, the renovation of Andrews Commons and, to a lesser extent, the renovation of the John Hay Library.

How are student needs assessed in planning projects like these?

Each one of those major projects came about in a process that incorporated a tremendous amount of community input. In the case of Andrews, it’s hard for a student today to imagine what Andrews looked like five years ago. For any project, I know anybody might say: “It could have been spent differently.” I’ve never seen a project built of any kind, a sculpture presented, a renovation project done where somebody doesn’t say they might have done it differently. I actually think that’s what’s happened in terms of housing, which is an area where for many years there were deep concerns about the deterioration of our housing stock, specifically for freshman. The space that’s now Andrews Commons was a large, unused space that was not a place of any life or vitality in the community, and [this coincided with] a discussion of the lack of study spaces in the dormitories. In the case of the Hay Library, one of the most glorious spaces on campus, the building was in a complete state of disrepair. So to see the reading room naturally filled up indicates that, although there may be students who don’t value it, there are students who value it very deeply. And it’s really the work of, in the case of Andrews and in the case of the John Hay Library, the Library Advisory Council and the Campus Life Committee…which have a great deal of student input in the selection and the crafting of those plans.

we live in a moment when the major revenue lines of all universities have become much flatter. Thankfully, we have structures that allow for lots of community input into the buildup of the recommendations that come before the budget and finance committee.

39

IVAN WATSON Ivan Watson ‘97 is the senior international correspondent for CNN based in Hong Kong. He has reported on a broad scope of major global events, including the 2010 Haitian earthquake and the recent Ukrainian crisis.

INTERVIEW BY GRAHAM ROTENBERG How do you maintain objectivity when reporting on travesties?

My primary responsibility is to deliver facts about what is going on and to try to do it as fairly as possible, but if you are witnessing an overt act of evil, there is no way to argue what is happening there. You call it what it is. That is not a case of these people claim one thing and these people argue another; we have an incredible phenomenon taking place in front of our eyes, and it’s not debatable. A lot of other reporting isn’t as black and white.

You try to show both sides of the story and make sure that your facts are well-sourced before you go to air with them.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

What have you learned about war? What has surprised you?

War is pretty awful. There will be a lot of shooting, but it doesn’t seem to be hitting or hurting the combatants…It’s always ordinary civilian people and usually the ones with the worst economic situation who are hit the hardest…That’s one of the rules of conflict that I’ve picked up. It’s really a lot easier to destroy something than to build something. A year ago there wasn’t a war in Eastern Ukraine…I did not see enmity between ethnic Russians and ethnic Ukrainians. They got along. But a narrative was created that said that Ukrainians were fascists and thugs and Nazis and that they were oppressing Russians, and it was promoted. Now there is real hatred between two ethnic peoples who live side-by-side and are intermingled linguistically and in a familial way, and that’s really an awful thing to witness.

40

How has your experience reporting in Ukraine helped you understand the causes of the conflict?

It’s incredible how political leaders can manipulate something that feels like a small difference and turn it into something that is much bigger. Control of the media is one of the most basic ways to do that. That’s a big part of the equation of what happened in Ukraine. It was a country that had problems, but it worked. Now there’s a separatist movement and mutual enmity. It’s incredible to me how fast that happened.

Can you compare the roles you’ve had, from freelance journalism to NPR and then to CNN? Going from radio to television meant having a much bigger footprint. In television, if you show up in a village in the middle of nowhere, it’s a big event. People also react differently to cameras and lenses than they do to somebody with a notebook, or somebody with a little microphone — they can get aggressive. When I was a radio reporter, I was a dorky guy sitting with a shotgun microphone recording the sounds of a babbling brook to help enrich the story with some texture. In television, you need to be right upfront with the action, and when there’s trouble you need to be charging into the action rather than just observing from a safe distance.

You’ve been harassed live on air: In Ukraine you were accosted by people holding weapons, and in Turkey you were asked, “What are your credentials?” How do you respond to this type of aggressive situation?

In the case in Istanbul, I was broadcasting live. I tried to respectfully deal with the police, who accused me of not having credentials, and with the live international audience as best as I could. I don’t know if I handled it well or not. I told the Turkish police afterwards: “You know, this is live.” When you are around a large number of people with guns in a conflict zone, there aren’t a lot of rules. You could have planned and spoken [with] and gotten permits from commanders, and all it takes is one psycho and his buddy to spoil it. That’s what happened when we were near a separatist checkpoint outside Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, where we had permission to interview the fighters.

Two guys showed up and the next thing you know they were cocking their guns at us and lining me and my team up on our knees on the side of the road and threatening to shoot us. In that case, I talked them down. It was the one time in my career that I used my Russian Orthodox Christian background. What happened was that a couple of guys showed up and accused us, as Americans on CNN, of being liars, and they warned people not to trust anything we did. The guy who I interviewed had given this very passionate statement saying, in Russian, “My friends, we didn’t [kill civilians], we didn’t do it.” He was clearly very motivated by his faith, and after he got riled up he said, “If you lie about what we talked about, I’m going to kill you.” I said, “Listen, brother, I’m Russian Orthodox just like you. I would never do that, you’ve got to trust me.” It’s the one time in my career that being a little boy named Ivan and being an altar boy helped. It was a fortunate resolution to a dicey situation.

Despite the things that you have seen in your career, you have said that most of the world is not evil. Can you describe what you mean by that?

As much time as we journalists spend reporting on the crises around the world, whether they are economic or political, we occasionally get to report on beautiful and very human things as well. I am dismayed sometimes when I come back home and I get the impression that people think that the outside world is this terrible, scary place. It’s not. It’s rich and it’s beautiful and it’s amazing. That’s part of why I went overseas after [graduating from] Brown, and it’s why I’ve basically stayed overseas since 1998. As an adult, I’ve lived longer overseas than I have in America. I do that not because of the crises and the troubles but because it is an incredible experience. You’re learning and doing something new everyday. That sounds a little bit like college to me.

JOHN HUDAK John Hudak is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is an expert in campaigns, elections and presidential power. He is the Managing Editor of the FixGov blog and the author of “Presidential Pork.”

INTERVIEW BY CARI BONILLA You’ve written that marijuana policy will be a key topic of discussion in 2016. Why is that the case?

A lot of states right now allow marijuana in a variety of ways — either through decriminalization, medical marijuana or access to recreational marijuana — and this is creating serious legal, constitutional and federalism questions. These are not just state-level issues, but also ones that the next president will have to address.

Marijuana policy is unique in the sense that it doesn’t cut nicely across party lines. There are Democrats who don’t like legal marijuana. There are Republicans who don’t like legal marijuana. And there are Democrats and Republicans who are perfectly fine with it.

It creates this odd dynamic in American politics that we don’t often see. It allows candidates, particularly Republicans, the ability to distinguish themselves from each other. In a competitive presidential primary, with a party that tends to agree on almost everything, any chance that a candidate has to say “I’m different” is an opportunity to get votes.

What will we see happen with immigration reform in the year leading up to the election?

Immigration reform in Congress is dead in the water. There won’t be enough votes in the House to pass it. So it’ll definitely be an important issue in 2016 for both sides. For Democrats, this is an issue that they care deeply about. They almost unanimously feel that the President’s actions are important, and that the people who are covered by the President’s orders need the type of protection that those orders offer and that the system needs to be reformed.

This is also true of Secretary Clinton, who is the likely nominee.

For Republicans, this is interesting because they get multiple things from this policy. Republicans almost unanimously think

Will Republicans use immigration issues to court the Latino vote in 2016?

It’s tough for Republicans because the party as a whole tends to be opposed to comprehensive immigration reform, and the issue is important to the Latino community. I think voters tend to hold parties accountable as a whole. So if you’re a Latino voter and you look at a stage of Republican candidates, a majority of them are against immigration reform and a couple of them are for it, so it’s going to be hard to pick among the Republicans. It’s going to be the easier choice to vote Democrat. Now if there is a Republican candidate who is in favor of immigration reform, then Latino voters face a more difficult choice. At the end of the day, I think there is real skepticism among the Latino community about a Republican president’s ability to push for immigration reform. Frankly, the Republican primary may hurt Republicans among Latino voters. I think 2012 was a pretty good metric of how Latinos are going to vote in 2016.

How should Republicans handle other divisive social issues like gay marriage or abortion?

Republicans are in a bit of a tough position because — while I do think that they want to try to appeal to some of these nontraditional groups who aren’t committed to them, like Latinos, African Americans or younger voters — they’re hampered in a pretty serious way, because the messages that tend to resonate with those groups do not resonate with the base of the party. It’s going to be hard for Republican candidates to take strong views on key social issues in ways that will connect with some of these other demographic groups without offending their base voters. If you can’t talk about social issues in a way that garners favor among all the groups that you want, you’re often better off just not talking about them. That’s of course hampered by a crowded primary where candidates want to talk about those issues and also by other events of the day. For instance, Republicans in 2012 largely avoided discussing gay rights, but now with the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana and other similar legislation elsewhere, those issues get forced into the conversation in ways that Republican candidates can’t avoid.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

What is the ultimate goal of marijuana legalization?

When you look at a social issue like abortion, it’s fairly black and white. On marijuana, however, different groups of people support legalization for different reasons, which makes it a unique issue for a policy discussion. Some people see it as a way for states to get tax revenue in order to balance budgets and extract money in a legitimate way from a system that otherwise would operate illicitly. Other people want legalization because they see it as a freedom issue. A lot of libertarians think that it’s just not the government’s business to regulate what drugs you use. I think in general, though, most people want to see the black market displaced and to remove the criminal element from the production, sale and distribution of cannabis. I think there are also greater guarantees for users that they are getting a safe, regulated and consistent product in a legal market. Those are types of regulated certainties that consumers want, whether they’re buying marijuana, ordering a cocktail, ordering a pizza or buying a car.

that the President overstepped his bounds...and so they are coming out against his reforms on technical or procedural grounds without necessarily passing judgment on the substance of the policy. The substance, however, is one of those areas where there is a little diversity among Republican candidates. There are some Republicans that are in favor of comprehensive immigration reform and several who are opposed. There are a couple of politicians who have had multiple positions on it. And like marijuana, maybe to a lesser degree, immigration gives candidates an ability to distinguish themselves from each other, making immigration a bigger issue in a presidential campaign.

41

STEWART BAKER Stewart Baker was the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and the former General Counsel at the National Security Agency. He now specializes in technology law and telecommunications.

INTERVIEW BY ELI MOTYCKA In light of former Secretary Clinton storing emails on a private server, do you think the United States prioritizes cybersecurity highly enough?

I don’t think that anybody prioritizes cybersecurity sufficiently, in light of the intrusions that we’ve seen. And I’m not quite sure that cybersecurity experts would have caught this right away — the use of a private server — but to the extent that the government knew about the private server, there were certainly very strong cybersecurity reasons not to use it.

Are government officials trained about cybersecurity risks?

I fear that many people think cybersecurity law is just one more painful set of bureaucratic requirements that, when you get high enough in the organization, get in the way of accomplishing some other goal. The problem is, unlike many other rules, [in cybersecurity] there is an active adversary who is waiting for you to cheat.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Do terrorist organizations have the capacity to threaten the cybersecurity of the United States?

Our defenses are very weak against two kinds of attack. One is cyberespionage — stealing information — and another is cybersabotage or cyberwar — making systems that depend on digital networks fail in ways that cause real harm. That doesn’t mean we’re weaker than other countries. Cybersecurity is a field in which it’s easy to have a good offense and difficult to have a good defense.

Our offense is much better than our defense.

42

What is the biggest cybersecurity threat to the United States?

The biggest threat is that an organization or nation with little or nothing to lose will decide to attack the industrial control systems that make civilian life possible. This could recreate the kind of chaos we saw after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Water, sewage, pipelines, refineries and power systems all depend on industrial systems that are vulnerable to attack. A very sophisticated attack could turn them all off in ways that will make it difficult to recover quickly. One of the reasons this hasn’t happened is that most of the people who have the capability to do this have something to lose and do not want to take a chance by launching an attack. But you can imagine that North Korea, Hezbollah or Iran could come to the conclusion one day that they had nothing left to lose and that, since the United States had already done its worst, they might as well do their worst.

How do government agencies like the NSA balance a concern for citizens’ privacy with the priority of maintaining national security?

The NSA has been following, for a very long time, a set of principles adopted in the 1970s. These state that all [of the NSA’s] activities will be governed by law, and any activities that may concern the privacy of Americans will likely have to go under review by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. There is strong legislative oversight from leaders and committee members from both parties, and there is judicial oversight to ensure that the agency actually

adheres to the law. There is a very aggressive set of training and compliance efforts inside the Department [of Defense] to make sure that individual employees adhere to the restrictions. That’s the broad solution — careful and strict rules for intelligence efforts that may affect Americans, more general restrictions for intelligence gathering that focuses on foreigners and an internal compliance regime to make sure these restrictions are followed.

Do you believe that this set of rules works today?

In general, yes. The idea that intelligence efforts that target Americans or that occur on American soil should be the subject of court review can be maintained even with a lot of changes in technology. There’s no doubt that Edward Snowden’s disclosures led to questions about whether the regime for oversight was functioning properly. He deliberately released information designed to shock Americans and withheld information that would have reassured Americans that there were constraints in place.

What is the biggest misunderstanding that US citizens have about cybersecurity policy?

One misperception is that there isn’t really a big problem and that the government agencies and contractors instead want a new enemy to scare Americans into spending more on defense. However, I think that a declining number of Americans believe that, as we have seen more and more intrusions that have bigger and bigger impacts over the last 15 or 20 years.

How has the world of cybersecurity and American cybersecurity policy changed since you were at the NSA in the 1990s?

When I was at the NSA, cyberattacks and even cyberespionage were embryonic. Now they have become the tool of choice for every intelligence agency in the world and have become the war-fighting strategy of a large number of countries. These tools are very realistic and dangerous weapons. Exactly how dangerous, we don’t know. They may turn out to be not quite as nightmarish as they could be, but they will certainly cause civilian harm. The good news is that we have become much better at identifying our attackers in cyberspace, and so people launching attacks have to worry about a response from us. The bad news is we still have no strategy for winning a conflict that involves cyberattacks.

Is cyber instability what we should expect for the future?

Yes. We should expect it because cyber instability is a great weapon for those in a conflict with the United States. It is asymmetric since it hurts the United States more than it hurts our adversaries.

It is a weapon that can be modulated. Unlike terrorism and nuclear weapons, there is no taboo against using it, and it can be used to influence domestic and public opinion quite dramatically. You can demonstrate that there will be costs to the American people for the foreign policy and military decisions taken by their leaders, which is a way of separating American leadership from the country. That could turn out to have a profound impact on what exactly we’re willing to do with our military around the world.

e Th Ro ck

All Ages!

All Abilities!

Sp

ot

Student Night Sunday 7pm-midnight.

100 Higginson Ave, Lincoln, RI 02865 Open 10am-midnight daily http://www.rockspotclimbing.com

L i ke B P R? Join our our staff!

Join staff!

Applications will be open starting

Applications will be open starting December 15th on our website, July 1st on our website, and new and new staff will be accepted on a staff will be accepted on a rolling rolling basis throughout basis throughout the summer.

Winter Break.

Apply here: Apply here:

www.brownpoliticalreview.org/join-bpr www.brownpoliticalreview.org/join-bpr

ibe r c s Sub PR! to B

Brown Political Review

www.brownpoliticalreview.org/subscribe-2/