Vol III Issue III Online

FALL 2014 / VOLUME III ISSUE 3

The Rhode to the Governor’s Mansion The big battle over small reforms

By Graham Gonzales & Ariadne Ellsworth

A Bone to Pick

Argentina is in a life or debt situation.

By Alex Lloyd George

Sponsored by:

Interviews on Ferguson and Policing:

Hugh Clements

Providence Police Chief

Sherrilyn Ifill

NAACP Legal Defense Fund President

New from the Cato Institute Press PAPERBACK: $14.95 EBOOK: $9.99

HARDBACK: $24.95 EBOOK: $12.99

HARDBACK: $24.95 EBOOK: $12.99

HARDBACK: $15.95 EBOOK: $9.99

AVAILABLE AT CATO.ORG/STORE AND BOOKSTORES NATIONWIDE.

STAFF Executive Board

CONTENTS

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

Features THE RHODE TO THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION The big battle over small reforms Graham Gonzales & Ariadne Ellsworth A BONE TO PICK Argentina is in a life or debt situation.

Alex Lloyd George

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

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

Interviews

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

Media

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

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

4

THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

Dispatches

5 6 7

IN GOD WE STILL TRUST Kanika Khanna ASYLUM FOR THE ABUSED Ashleigh McEvoy RECOVERING FROM THE REGIME Camila Ruiz Segovia

United States

9 10 12 22 24

JUSTICE ISN’T BLIND Noah Fitzgerel BRINGING HOME THE BAKKEN Kevin Garcia TORT REFORM IS THE NEW BL ACK Mintaka Angell DR. MONOPOLY Yuval Yossefy DISJOINTED PROGRESS Marina Golan-Vilella

The ableist undertones in

Business

the debate over voting rights

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

have scarcely been a topic of national conversation.

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

Layout

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

Artists

ART DIRECTOR OLIVIA WATSON STAFF ARTISTS MARIA PAZ ALMENARA, ANISA HOLMES, JULIA L ADICS, KATRINA MACHADO & EMILY REIF DISPATCHES KATRINA MACHADO COVER ARTIST OLIVIA WATSON

9

28 Although the “yes” campaign may have lost the referendum, Scotland still emerged a winner.

20

BPR MEDIA SPOTLIGHT: PEOPLE’S CLIMATE MARCH

World

25 26 28 34 36

THE ATMOSPHERIC WASTEL AND David Markey FAVEL A CHIC Francis Torres THE GREAT SECESSION Matteo Cavelier Riccardi STRANGER ON OUR SHORES Clara Tondato da Ruos POLITICS AGAINST HUMANIT Y Predrag Pandiloski

Interviews

18 19 38 39 40 40 41 42

GINA RAIMONDO ALL AN FUNG SHERRILYN IFILL HUGH CLEMENTS DENNIS ROSS MAEN RASHID AREIKAT NOAM CHOMSKY SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

THE MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

7.7%

DRUG AND IMMIGRATION OFFENSES ALONE MAKE UP

AT , RHODE ISLAND’S UNEMPLOYMENT RATE IS THE THIRD HIGHEST IN THE US GONZALES & ELLSWORTH p.14

FITZGEREL p.9

3

ONLY STATES HAVE ADOPTED VOTING MEASURES DESIGNED TO AID THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED TELECOM COMPANIES LOSE $10 MILLION IN FUTURE PROFITS EVERY TIME THEIR SATELLITES DODGE INCOMING SPACE DEBRIS

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MAGAZINE IN NUMBERS

MARKEY p.25

4

TONDATO DA RUOS p.34

60% OF ALL CONVICTIONS

ANGELL p.12

IN THE UNITED STATES

THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR’S DEATH TOLL IS PANDILOSKI p.36

190,000

ARGENTINA’S ECONOMY SHRANK BY AS A RESULT OF THE ARGENTINE GREAT DEPRESSION IN 2001

28%

LLOYD GEORGE p.30 GOLAN-VILELLA p.24 THIS YEAR, COLORADO WILL GAIN $95

23,000

OVER MIGRANTS DIED

TRYING TO REACH EUROPE BETWEEN 2000 AND 2013

MILLION

IN TAX REVENUE FROM RECREATIONAL AND MEDICINAL MARIJUANA

RIO’S FAVELAS HOUSE

22%

OF THE CITY’S POPULATION.

TORRES p.26

DISPATCHES IN GOD WE STILL TRUST KANIKA KHANNA

unique because it extends well beyond civic life into political life. US politicians have not only fully embraced religion, but are often required to do so for the sake of their political careers. Demonstrating religious values is expected on the campaign trail: President Barack Obama often referenced his Christian faith during the 2008 election, particularly after conservatives claimed that he was Muslim. Obama invites pastors to hold prayer calls every year on his birthday and speaks to them before presidential debates. Former President George W. Bush, a self-identified born-again Christian, often worked theological rhetoric into his addresses on foreign policy with words like “mission” and “crusade” or allusions to hymns in his speeches. Over 90 percent of addresses by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush mentioned God. The use of religious rhetoric extends across party lines — despite the right’s typically stronger religious affiliation, President Obama’s inaugural addresses mentioned God more than his predecessor’s speeches did. Although inaugural addresses have seldom omitted God — Theodore Roosevelt and Rutherford B. Hayes are exceptions to the rule — the use of God in American political rhetoric has actually increased in the past 30 years. Up until 1980, “God bless America” was used only once in a major national political address. Since then, it has been used upwards of 49 times. Although the country is becoming less religious, politicians seem to be following the opposite trend.

The presence of religion in US political

language contrasts starkly with rhetoric in countries like France. Sessions of Congress open with prayer, while religious invocations and symbols are forbidden in French governance. And no current member of Congress is a professed atheist. Even Barney Frank, the first US Representative to come out as gay while in office, only admitted to being an atheist after leaving office in 2013.

The only other avowed atheist who ever sat in Congress is former Representative Pete Stark from California, who announced his religious affiliation, or lack thereof, only after losing his reelection bid in 2012 and after serving in the House for 30 years. In late 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion found that 57 percent of representatives identified as Protestant, 31 percent as Catholic, five percent as Jewish, and one percent as “oth-

Seven states have constitutions prohibiting atheists from holding public office. er.” Representative Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9) said she is religiously unaffiliated, but not an atheist, and she was sworn in using a copy of the US Constitution. In the Senate, 53 members are Protestant, 27 are Catholic and 18 others specify another religion, but there are no unaffiliated or atheist senators.

This November, James Wood, an openly atheist Arizona Democrat, is contending for a seat in the House despite the formidable challenges facing a godless campaign. A 2011 Gallup poll reported that 43 percent of respondents would not vote for even

DISPATCHES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

In a nation founded on the premise of religious freedom, there is one denomination of faith that is struggling to leave a political legacy: atheism. The United States is one of the most religious Western industrialized nations. A 2011 Pew Research poll found that 50 percent of Americans consider religion to be very important. In comparison, only 22 percent of Spaniards, who are among the more religious Europeans, and only 13 percent of the French, believe the same. Because religious affiliation is at an all-time low in the United States — in 2012, 20 percent of Americans considered themselves unaffiliated — one might expect that politicians’ religious affiliation would lose significance as well. However, in 2011, the Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project found that atheists are the most disliked religious group in the United States, receiving negative ratings from roughly 40 percent of respondents. The country’s nuanced and intrinsic ties to religion are largely responsible for this distrust, but the unsuccessful New Atheism movement may also be preventing itself from gaining the political acceptance it needs to break barriers to religious nonbelief in the United States. While fewer Americans than ever are religious, this has yet to translate into a shift in US political realities.

Distrust of atheists is rooted in America’s civil religion — the religious traditions present in US public institutions and founded on colonial Protestant and Puritan values. In 2012, Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans think that believing in God is “a necessary foundation for morality and good values.” This civil religion manifests itself in many public spaces, from “In God We Trust” on US currency to the insertion of “one nation under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

While most secular countries have a religious tradition, US civil religion is

Highlights from our online writers at BrownPoliticalReview.org

5

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW DISPATCHES

6

“well-qualified” presidential candidates if they happened to be atheist. Seventy percent of Republicans wouldn’t vote for such an atheist, compared to 43 percent of Democrats. Furthermore, seven states in the union — Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee — have articles in their constitutions prohibiting atheists from being elected to public office.

Atheists, alongside Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus — groups that have faced increased discrimination since September 11 — are a distrusted crowd in the United States. Despite the prejudice, atheists have a luxury other marginalized religious groups do not: more control over their public image and public opinion. As a relatively new movement in the United States (although certainly not in many other Western nations), atheism has not had to contend with the negative stereotypes and associations that have become associated with other religious beliefs. With the number of atheists and agnostics in the United States on the rise, atheist groups could still cultivate their persona favorably. But the New Atheist movement has not done so.

Because atheism lacks the institutionalized leadership positions that many religions have, the representation of the group has been left in the hands of the loudest.

The most prominent and active atheists often extoll controversial points that reinforce distrust in atheism. In 2004, Sam Harris wrote “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason,” criticizing Islam, Christianity and Judaism for their role in both moderate and extreme religiously-motivated wars and terrorism.

His highly controversial work is affiliated with the New Atheism movement, which, according to CNN’s Simon Hooper, asserts that “religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises.” Harris’ writing has been lauded by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, writer and influential atheist.

Dawkins wields considerable influence within the atheist movement, and he is no stranger to controversy. Recently, his tweets about rape victims and prosecuting alleged rapists have outraged many, even widening the already large schism between believers and nonbelievers. In a response to another Twitter user, he wrote, “If you want to drive, don’t get drunk. If you [rape survivors] want to be in a position to testify & jail a man, don’t get drunk.” He also

stirred uproar about degrees of crime, tweeting: “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.” While these views are personal and certainly not espoused by the community of atheists as a whole, the lack of official atheist leadership and Dawkins’ prominent position within the New Atheist movement make it hard for the public to differentiate between his personal views and those of the movement as a whole.

Atheists have difficulty presenting a united front and message, which only serves to fortify confusion and distrust.

According to the Pew Research Center, 2.4 percent of Americans today identify as atheists. Of those, 67 percent are men, 38 percent are between 18 and 29 years old, and 43 percent have a college education.

New Atheism has caught the attention of the public, with books on the subject debuting on the New York Times Bestsellers List and well-known atheists discussing their ideas on popular talk shows. With the movement’s rise to prominence, some would be inclined to believe that Americans are more willing to call themselves atheists now than ever. But the nature of the movement — and politicians’ longheld disdain for atheism — has not swayed the opinion of unsupportive Americans in atheism’s favor. While the electorate may be less religious than ever, the public’s politics and perceptions are not moving in the same direction. u

ASYLUM FOR THE ABUSED ASHLEIGH MCEVOY In 2005, a woman identified in court documents only as “A-R-C-G-” fled from her abusive husband in Guatemala to the United States. She had endured horrific marital abuse, including rape, regular beatings, burnings with paint thinner, stalking and death threats. The police proved unhelpful; she called them to the house several times, but they refused to interfere in a marital relationship. After arriving in the United States, she petitioned for asylum status, but an immigration judge denied her application in 2009. Her case then

moved to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), a body within the Department of Justice that decides appeals from lower federal immigration courts. In a landmark decision on August 26, the BIA gave its verdict, ruling that survivors of domestic violence may qualify for asylum in the United States. The decision effectively asserts that the United States has a moral responsibility to offer refuge to the survivors of intimate partner abuse.

In a nine-page decision, the BIA established that domestic violence survivors represent “a cognizable particular social group that forms the basis of a claim for asylum or withholding of removal.” More specifically, this means that “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” qualify for protection from the US government. This finding represents a departure from previous policy: In 1999, the

BIA had ruled that Guatemalan survivors of domestic violence were not a protected social group.

Advocates for domestic violence survivors heralded the recent decision as a critical and long-awaited legal precedent. Karen Musalo, who directs the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, told The New York Times: “Women who have suffered violence in these cases can now rely on the legal principles established in this ruling. A judge can no longer say, ‘I believe these horrible things happened to you, but this is just a criminal act, this is not persecution.’” Supporters believe the decision to be a sensible and humanitarian response to the unimaginable abuse experienced by people trapped in violent relationships.

Such a policy is in line with a critical feminist perspective, which sees acts of domes-

tic violence not simply as isolated criminal acts, but as symptoms of larger structural power inequities that leave women as a social class vulnerable to violence and oppression. This lens frames domestic violence as part of the systemic persecution of women by men, and it gives abused women a right to claim refugee status.

The BIA ruling has the potential to make a considerable impact. Before the decision, the United States had ratified the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, and Congress had passed the 1980 Refugee Act. Under these rules, the United States does not explicitly protect individuals persecuted specifically because of their gender; its protections are based only on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group.” To secure asylum for these reasons, an individual must demonstrate that he or

Currently, about 300 women have asylum appeals based on domestic violence claims.

Central American nations must also undertake proactive reforms for true change to happen. Working towards improving conditions in refugees’ home countries would mean that fewer individuals would need to seek asylum in the first place.

A holistic approach would include attempts to shift the cultural norms and gender relations that promote domestic violence, in addition to providing resources to help survivors successfully exit abusive relationships. There are no quick fixes to these gender inequities, but as long as there are people just across our borders suffering because of their “membership in a particular social class,” these issues remain as relevant to the United States as they do to communities in Guatemala and Honduras. u

RECOVERING FROM THE REGIME CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA “History is ours and it is written by the people,” said Chilean President Salvador Allende in his last speech to the public on September 11, 1973, minutes before his presidency was overthrown. 9/11 is a date to be remembered for more than one tragic event. A brutal era of Chilean history began on that day when military forces bombed the presidential palace of La Moneda and began a fateful coup. For 17 years Chile remained under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose reign finally ended in 1990. This period witnessed brutal human rights violations including torture, rape, censorship, the disappearance of citizens and, ultimately, the death of an estimated 3,000 people.

Five years after his ascent to power, Pinochet established an amnesty law to protect the military personnel who had committed crimes against civilians. Despite the end of the dictatorship and Chile’s transition to democracy, the law has remained in place. This, however, may change in the upcoming weeks. During the 41st annual commemoration of the coup, President Michelle Bachelet announced that she was considering the possibility of repealing the 1978 amnesty law. While largely symbolic, the action would reflect an important shift

DISPATCHES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

she has been persecuted due to membership in a protected category and that the government in his or her home country has failed to provide adequate protection. This new verdict establishes domestic violence survivors as one of these particular social groups. Despite technically applying only to domestic violence survivors from Guatemala, the decision has implications for survivors from other Central American countries as well, particularly Honduras and El Salvador, whose governments have also widely failed to offer protection to women who suffer abuse at the hands of their partners. Currently, about 300 women have asylum appeals based on domestic violence claims before the BIA. The BIA decision demonstrates the potential for the United States to expand its moral responsibility in the international community. However, some have expressed fear that this ruling may initiate an unmanageable wave of asylum applicants. An article published the day of the decision by The Daily Caller reads, “The decision creates a huge new incentive for Guatemalan women to cross the US border, because if their asylum claim is accepted, their children get US citizenship, plus the use of federal health, education and retirement programs, re-

gardless of their initial education and work skills.” In an August 27 segment of Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade mused that immigrants may claim to be victims of domestic violence when they are not in order to underhandedly receive asylum status. “Nice immigration reform,” he said sarcastically, while a graphic on the screen read: “Opening the Border.”

The fears of a torrential flood of Central American immigrants lying about their abusive home lives to secure citizenship for their children are factually unfounded.

In response to Fox’s piece, The Huffington Post published a clip of the show to its website with the heading “Watch Fox News Blow Several Facts on Major Immigration Story In Just Two Minutes.” In the accompanying article, the Huffington Post journalist notes that it “remains to be seen how widely this change will actually be applied.

The ruling doesn’t extend to all women, but rather to ‘married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship.’”

Even then, the article explains that “the ruling says applicants may only win asylum on those grounds ‘depending on the facts and evidence in an individual case.’”

The BIA decision sheds light on an ugly reality: Immigrants to the United States are often running from unstable or violent conditions at home. They are in search of a better life. In recent months, immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have flooded into the United States, driven largely by social unrest aggravated by gang violence. According to US Customs and Border Protection, about 63,000 unaccompanied children have been apprehended along the Southwest border of the United States so far this year. This is unsurprising, considering the blood being spilled to our south: Honduras holds the title of “murder capital of the world,” while El Salvador and Guatemala have the fourth- and fifth-highest national murder rates respectively. Although the BIA decision is solely focused on victims of domestic violence, it emphasizes the larger idea that the United States has a moral responsibility to respond to events across its borders with compassion and humanitarianism. Still, resources allocated for protecting and assisting immigrants are tight. If the United States is to meaningfully embrace these changes in immigration law, decisions by the BIA and other agencies to protect oppressed people globally will need to be accompanied by new funds and resources for taking in immigrants.

7

in the country’s attitude towards the dictatorial era.

Chile’s transition into democracy has been a long process that is arguably still taking place. The legacy of years of repression is indeed hard to overcome — it requires the will of an entire society to come to terms with its own history. During the years that followed the end of the regime, civilian organizations attempted, but never fully succeeded, to account for the human rights violations. This was due in part to the protections of the amnesty law. Bachelet believes that the effort would represent the end of the Pinochet era.

Chile’s current ability to overturn the law is the result of many historical efforts.

Over the past 20 years, Chile has gone through a series of political and cultural episodes that have shaped its current political milieu. These include the rise of civilian movements, the government’s examination of the former regime, changes in the judicial system and international pressure to bring human rights violators to justice. If

eight years. An outstanding 97 percent of eligible voters reported to the polling offices, indicating how deeply the referendum’s results would impact the everyday lives of civilians. After a pluralistic and civilian-led “no” campaign against the regime, 56 percent of Chileans voted to end Pinochet’s political career.

The beginning of the post-Pinochet era necessitated rewriting the history of the coup. Documenting instances of human rights violations was an essential step in acknowledging the costs of the dictatorship and understanding the dimensions of the tragedy. The shift from a totalitarian regime to a democracy allowed for this documentation to happen. In 1991, President

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW DISPATCHES

Amnesty International reports that 38,254 Chileans have been recognized as “survivors of political imprisonment and/or torture” under Pinochet’s regime.

8

the law is to change in the near future, it will be due to the labors of yesterday.

Many Chilean urban social movements were born under the dictatorship as reactions to the oppressive state. Such movements were heavily repressed and activists were often abducted, imprisoned and tortured. As a result of censorship and lack of initial documentation, the precise number of survivors of these governmental crimes has never been determined. Each year, more and more cases accumulate in court. Today, Amnesty International states that 38,254 Chileans have been recognized as “survivors of political imprisonment and/or torture” under Pinochet’s regime.

Despite the brutal conditions of the Pinochet regime, civilian participation increased and even proved effective during Chile’s national plebiscite in 1988. On October 5 of that year, Chileans were asked whether Pinochet should continue his dictatorship with his military junta for the next

Patricio Aylwin designated a commission to create the Retting Report, an extensive document recording the deaths and disappearances under Pinochet. This would be the first of various governmental efforts to examine the crimes of the regime.

Fifteen years later, in 2005, a second report of abuses was released at the request of then-President Ricardo Lagos. The Valech Report revealed human rights abuses such as torture and found these instances to be more frequent than did the Retting Report.

Even though both documents examine human rights abuses during the same time period, the Valech Report spanned over 1,200 pages and accounted for more than 25,000 victims of torture. Furthermore, it established a monthly stipend for survivors of the regime. The slow but continuous change to a more transparent political system led to an increase in the government’s accountability for its policies — past and present.

Once Chileans started documenting their history, a demand for justice — however delayed — appeared more feasible. The 1978 amnesty law may not be repealed, but changes within the system have already taken place and aided the process of criminal accountability. The Chilean Supreme Court underwent legal revisions and reforms that adapted to the new democratic system.

Most notably, in 1998, the court held that “application of the amnesty law was unlawful and international law had supremacy in the constitutional system.” Though not capable of repealing the law, these reforms at least weakened the power of the amnesty law.

Last July, the United Nations Human Rights Commission called upon Chile to reevaluate elements of its judicial system. Moreover, just last year, Guadalupe Marengo, deputy director of the Americas Programme for Amnesty International, commented: “It is not acceptable that 40 years after the military coup, the search for justice, truth and reparation in Chile continues to be hampered.” He blamed the amnesty law for continuing “to shield human rights violators from prosecution,” citing “long delays in judicial proceedings” and a failure of sentences “to reflect the severity of the crimes committed” as shortcomings of Chile’s justice system overall.

In the words of Justice Minister José Antonio Gómez, “The repeal is likely to pass easily, considering that the ruling coalition has a simple majority in both chambers.” Twenty years after the coup’s end, the country’s political scene has dramatically changed. Left-wing President Michelle Bachelet won the second round of voting in the 2013 presidential elections, revealing the country’s evolving political inclination towards a more liberal system. Additionally, Chile’s right-wing parties, many of which were created during the Pinochet era, are now weakening and fracturing.

Salvador Allende’s final words to his people ring true. Indeed, in the last 20 years, Chile’s efforts to reconstruct its own history have shaped its current political scene, and the repeal of the 1978 amnesty law may soon mark the end of the post-conflict era.

Chile’s overcoming of the legacy of dictatorship has been a painful, ongoing process. However, the country’s commitment to conflict resolution has been remarkable and offers an example of how justice, even if delayed, can always be delivered. u

JUSTICE ISN’T BLIND Pulling aside the curtain for visually-impaired voters STORY BY NOAH FITZGEREL / ART BY EMILY REIF

L

ing that the state must permit disabled individuals to use an online tool that makes it easier to vote. With this system, voters can mark ballots at home, without the assistance that would compromise privacy, and then send their ballot to the local election office. For Mark Riccobono, president of the NFB, the federal court decision in Maryland is a victory for civil rights and protects “the right to equal access and to a secret ballot” that could soon extend to the rest of the country. Since the case was tried in a federal court, Maryland will set an important precedent that could potentially lead to a national change in voter laws.

But success is not guaranteed. In fact, the Maryland affair shows that both Democrats and Republicans are hesitant to expand the use of electronic voting systems, even for the disabled. Democrats concerned with computer security and Republicans advocating for stricter voting laws have joined in opposition, their convictions aided by reports from security experts concerned that hackers could compromise the system. The NFB claims that such fears are unfounded and points to the fact that most states already permit members of the armed forces serving abroad to vote electronically.

In addition, Alaska and Delaware already use similar online voting systems for visually impaired individuals, and neither measure has proved vulnerable to voter fraud, as security experts fear.

Here, civil rights have been pitted against security concerns — a theme that also permeates political debates about voter identification laws across the United States.

In these instances, concerns over voting fraud are the antagonist to legal flexibility for voters. Politicians scrutinize whether the hardships of voting for certain minorities are the result of burdensome laws or

NOAH FITZGEREL ‘17 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR, THE ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF CONTENT AND AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

ong lines, shoddy preparations and incomprehensible rules: The US voting process is marred by these well-documented problems. But these barriers are just the beginning for minority groups like the blind and visually impaired.

Individuals with visual impairments often find typical ballots — electronic or otherwise — inaccessible. For these citizens, exercising their right to vote remains difficult, if not impossible. In some cases, even the way they are given assistance compromises confidentiality. Worse, the American public largely neglects these issues.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guarantees all disabled voters the right to arrive at the ballot box with relative ease, as well as access to specialized voting machines — but this alone is not enough.

Al Jazeera recently reported on serious shortfalls in existing measures: Machines that verbalize voters’ choices are sometimes unintelligible or confusing, and officials at polling places are often not trained to operate them properly. Having officials assist differently abled voters in filling out their ballot compromises the secrecy of their choices. Often the only other option, besides going to underequipped polling places, is to vote by mail, which may require the help of visually abled friends or family members. These inherent inadequacies in the available choices mean a visually impaired voter will likely encounter critical barriers.

With the standard of a safe and confidential vote insufficiently protected, many organizations are seeking to expand voting options for the visually impaired. Some advocates have resorted to legal action. In National Federation of the Blind (NFB) v. Maryland State Board of Elections, the court ruled in favor of the NFB, conclud-

inevitable social factors. Those who suggest that the difficulties are inevitable default to tighter voting laws and anti-fraud measures. Conversations surrounding voter identification laws show the racialized nature of the debate. As a result, there is an ongoing backlash against stricter voting laws that are seen as disproportionally affecting people of color, making it clear that perpetuating racist outcomes is unacceptable.

However, the similarly lopsided debate on the rights of the visually impaired is hidden from the public view. This hints at the distinct presence of ableism — structural forces and ingrained patterns of thought that entrench systemic obstacles for disabled individuals. Ableism is evident in the perception that because the visually impaired often rely on others for assistance in daily living, so too should they rely on assistance when voting. After Maryland’s Board of Elections initially rejected the online system, the director of the University of Maryland School of Law’s Center for Health and Homeland Security even said that “sanity prevailed” in the vote. The ableist undertones in this debate have scarcely been a topic of national conversation, much less a source of mobilization. A resolution to the debate over electronic voting for the visually impaired clearly lies in more than just the contention between civil rights and security — it requires changing attitudes towards the disabled community.

Politics will ultimately play an important hand in normalizing electronic voting procedures for the visually impaired. These procedures will likely be used in elections across the country and may transform larger attitudes within the voter accessibility debate. Maryland’s developments, both in the political and judicial spheres, not only illustrate a dispute between security and civil rights, but also shed light on how American society perceives the rights and privileges of people with disabilities. The issue of ableism has not yet received the attention it deserves. As the United States takes its voting system into the 21st century, its citizens must also modernize their views on civil rights. u

9

BRINGING HOME THE BAKKEN North Dakotans are richer than you — for now.

STORY BY KEVIN GARCIA / ART BY JULIA LADICS

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

S

10

outh Dakota might have one Washington on Mount Rushmore, but North Dakota has pockets lined with Benjamins. The state is experiencing an unprecedented period of economic growth and prosperity due to its booming oil industry — big enough to produce more than 2,000 new millionaires in 2012 alone. When new oil extraction technology allowed miners to access reserves in the Bakken Formation, a rock unit in the northwest corner of the state, North Dakota experienced a surge in oil and natural gas production that has doubled its real GDP in the last 10 years.

The result will be an estimated $457 million general fund surplus by June 30, 2015.

The state has started a campaign to fill the estimated 20,000 new jobs created by the burgeoning fossil fuel market and is opening its doors to the outside, welcoming in anyone who wants to contribute to its expanding economy. While the nation’s economy struggles to grow, North Dakota is enjoying unrivaled monetary success. Even its southern sibling can’t compete.

However, the rapid changes have brought unintended — and still unaddressed — consequences. North Dakota’s housing situation is in tatters. Crime is on the rise. Pollution is endangering residents and wildlife. The education system is inadequate. And with oil production forecasted to peak in 2015 and dramatically taper off in the decade afterwards, North Dakota must begin to plan for what the post-boom state should look like. Unless the North Dakotan government takes a hard look at the state’s financial future and implements much-needed reforms, the state risks missing an opportunity to turn a lottery ticket into sustainable growth.

North Dakota is more vulnerable than it seems. For a state ranked 47th in the nation for population density, its $800,000 campaign to recruit job seekers may, in theory, be a good idea. But in its efforts to entice talent, the North Dakotan government is not telling the whole truth about the lives future residents can expect to lead.

The state is not spending enough money on housing to accommodate relocated workers or on services to assist them. People enter-

ing the state find themselves paying exorbitant rates for housing and sometimes living in RVs and tents that lack running water.

Rent bills for property near oil fields have outstripped even downtown San Francisco’s. This may seem like a bad bargain for the unemployed, but it’s equally problematic for North Dakota’s current residents.

People moving into the state are pushing poorer residents who live near oil projects off of their valuable land, and the native, working-class citizens of the state are in danger of losing their livelihoods because of overcrowding and other pressures.

Quality-of-life concerns go hand in hand with the deteriorating quality of education. Here the statistics may be misleading: North Dakota ranks second in the nation for SAT scores, but only 2 percent of high school students actually take the test. Meanwhile, the 98 percent of students taking the ACT post an average score below the national average. With a large influx of workers, schools will be facing rising enrollment — without the funding, additional teachers or supplies necessary to adjust.

This mirrors the housing crisis: Current students are seeing their conditions worsen, while new students aren’t guaranteed the quality of education they expect.

Declining standards of living and tenuous demographic balances are correlated with another new phenomenon: the rise of crime. According to State Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, drug trafficking by Mexican cartels is soaring in the Bakken region.

Pounds of methamphetamine are circulating among workers. Other hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin are used abundantly around the oil fields. This increase in drug use may be understood as a response to the dismal working conditions in oil fields.

Many workers maintain 12-hour shifts in 20 days on, 10 days off cycles: an 84-hour work week for nearly three weeks in a row.

And along with their products, drug cartels bring violence. If a permanent drug route is established in North Dakota, social ills could plague the citizens of the state for a very long time. Combating this problem will require coordination and extensive deployment of law enforcement officials — a

costly but necessary expense the state has not yet shelled out for.

And drug trafficking isn’t even the most pernicious form of smuggling in North Dakota. Ever since the oil boom, human trafficking — particularly sex trafficking fueled by the largely male oil-field workforce — has run rampant. The state government has, so far, been slow to react: Polaris, an organization focused on eliminating human trafficking, ranked North Dakota as a tier three state with regard to human trafficking laws, meaning that it

effectively has the worst trafficking laws in the United States. In a state with such a rapid influx of sex workers, this sparse legal framework will have profound human consequences. Unfortunately, the federal government hasn’t lent much of a hand. In May of this year, a single FBI agent was assigned the job of managing all of the state’s human trafficking cases. If North Dakota does not invest some of its surplus money in providing safe living environments for its citizens and combating this dangerous issue, then its torrential influx of wealth will lay the foundation for years of human rights violations.

Perched atop the human tragedy is the environmental destruction that North Dakota’s oil extraction has wrought. In a rush for black gold, the state has thrown green concerns to the side. Shale fracking, the method of fossil fuel extraction primarily

in solutions to the state’s problems. While the coffers are expanding, the state is saving for a rainy day — one that’s already looming on the horizon, if forecasts of an oil peak are to be trusted. An additional benefit of this strategy is that it gives policymakers time, which they can use to study the effects of the oil industry and the wave of migrant workers. Frugality has so far been a virtue for the state, but a time for spending will come; when crowding reaches critical levels, it will be necessary to implement strategies to improve state services.

DRUG TRAFFICKING BY MEXICAN CARTELS IS SOARING IN THE BAKKEN REGION. POUNDS OF METHAMPHETAMINE, COCAINE AND HEROIN CAN BE FOUND AROUND THE OIL FIELDS IN ABUNDANCE. While investments to counteract the negative effects of the boom are essential steps, the government can go even further.

North Dakota needs new areas for expansion that can continue to bring economic growth — even after the oil wells are dry.

One such model can be found in Alberta, Canada. A province that runs on oil, Alberta has begun to invest in local businesses, healthcare and higher education, crafting a lasting local economy. North Dakota can also supplement its oil endeavors by developing alternative energy sources. With such a vast expanse of land, North Dakota is in a prime position to experiment with wind and solar power by offering tax credits or working with established federal programs.

These measures may not pay off in the short term, but the state will reap massive dividends in the long run, when the state can no longer rely on oil to keep its economy afloat.

North Dakota hit the jackpot. Because of big oil in a small, northwest portion of the state, lawmakers have been handed a large amount of money and an even larger burden. But they have the chance to propel the state into sustainable prosperity. With proper investment and an eye towards the future, the government may be able to construct the building blocks for a new, wealthier North Dakota. But if they choose to spend imprudently, the state could see its oil pipe dream turn into a nightmare. u KEVIN GARCIA ‘18 IS AN INTENDED ENGINEERING CONCENTRATOR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

used in the Bakken rock formation, is a relatively new process, and environmentalists have been quick to point out its dangers.

Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is the process by which a special liquid consisting of water, sand and various chemicals is shot at high pressures into the ground to stimulate the release of oil and natural gas.

Once the fracking liquid comes into contact with local water supplies, its carcinogenic chemicals can pose serious health risks to residents — an especially problematic concern when many live without access to well-filtered water. Moreover, agricultural products are among North Dakota’s main exports; if the crops produced by the state’s farmers are compromised by contaminated water, the state will face significant economic consequences.

The oil boom isn’t just threatening North Dakota’s agricultural yields through contaminated water. Waste liquid is commonly left out in the open after drilling and can evaporate and adulterate the air.

In addition, North Dakotan frackers burn 30 percent of their natural gas output, releasing dangerous pollutants in the process.

By comparison, Texas’ regulations require energy producers to capture 99 percent of their natural gas. The inadequate precautions taken by a state in an economic frenzy could lead to acid rain, which would be harmful to North Dakotans and their crops. But to reach Texas’ level of efficiency would take upwards of six years — time the state does not have and that residents and businesses are unwilling to waste.

Acid rain and contaminated water, drug and human trafficking, unacceptable housing, education and sanitation issues: These may be the seeds of a North Dakotan decline, but they are just beginning to hinder the state’s current success. Right now, the state has the highest well-being in the United States, the second-best emotional health, a 2.6 percent unemployment rate and the fourth-best life evaluation. But these numbers have been skewed by the income surge from the boom, and statistics will soon reflect the decreasing quality of life for the swelling ranks of the working class. The question now is whether the state government can put its surplus to good use and maintain high quality-of-life benchmarks through efforts like education, housing assistance, sanitation and crime prevention.

The hope for North Dakota rests in its $457 million — and growing — budget surplus, and it’s up to state legislators to invest

11

TORT REFORM IS THE NEW BLACK What negligent hiring law costs criminals STORY BY MINTAKA ANGELL / ART BY KATRINA MACHADO

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

I

12

t’s no secret that the United States has a prison problem: astronomically large incarcerated populations, soaring recidivism rates, a disproportionate number of non-white prisoners — the list of maladies goes on and on. But true to form, Washington has made lackluster progress in addressing these issues. The ongoing War on Drugs, and the War on the War on Drugs, has failed to effect sufficient change, and the pattern of failure is likely to continue.

A recent Bureau of Justice study conducted in 30 states shows that 68 percent of former prisoners were arrested for a new crime within three years of release from prison, and 77 percent of former prisoners were rearrested within five years. Continual negative reports will hopefully send policymakers scrambling to find a big fix for this fractured system. However, tucked away in a dusty niche of tort litigation, there are small measures with huge consequences whose reform could signal the start of a meaningful solution: negligent hiring laws for nonviolent offenders.

The search for employment holds some of the most insidious barriers for recently released prisoners. Most states allow employers to deny jobs not only to people who have a criminal record, but also to individuals who were arrested, but never convicted — regardless of how long ago the incident happened. In 2012, The Huffington Post interviewed several former offenders to gain individual perspectives on the job search after prison. HuffPo found that former offenders struggled to readjust to outside life not only because of their time spent in a cell, but also due to a series of systematic barriers: poverty, social condemnation and denial of public housing and drivers licenses. One ex-offender noted that while he was out of literal confinement, he was still “in this proverbial prison of stigma.” With the Internet providing easy access to criminal records, and heavy incentives for businesses to avoid ‘risky hires,’ ex-offenders find themselves frequently passed over for jobs for which they are otherwise qualified.

It should come as little surprise that former offenders, when locked out of the mainstream economic system, are often forced to turn to the black market and crime

— wasting untold amounts of economic capital and human potential. Most research indicates that employment either reduces recidivism rates or significantly increases the time until reincarceration, either way allowing time for rehabilitation programs to make their mark. And importantly, recidivism doesn’t only hurt individuals and their communities — it also damages the American economy on a macro scale, with the United States spending about $52 billion a year on correctional costs. The question is not if the United States needs to help former prisoners gain employment — it’s how. While many nonprofits and volunteer programs have dedicated themselves to creating pathways for ex-convicts after their release, reforming negligent hiring is a little talked about policy solution.

SINCE EMPLOYERS LOSE AN ESTIMATED 79 PERCENT OF NEGLIGENT HIRING LAWSUITS — WITH THE AVERAGE JURY AWARD EXCEEDING $1 MILLION — THE CALCULUS FOR BUSINESSES AND CORPORATIONS IS CLEAR. Reforming tort law isn’t sexy, but it’s essential for lifting barriers to employment.

Negligent hiring refers to a legal claim made by an injured party against an employer for the damaging actions of its employees.

The charge is that if an employee commits a crime on the job and has “a dangerous or untrustworthy character,” an employer should have investigated the employee’s background enough to know that person was unfit for the job. For example, an Arkansas company employed a truck driver with a record of unsafe driving, which ended in a wrongful death lawsuit. That, combined with the subsequent negligent hiring litigation, ultimately cost the company $7 million in damages. By not conducting due diligence in their hiring practices, companies can, and have, put their customers and the general public at risk. Given the incredible economic and legal power of corporations in the modern United States, the arguments for negligent hiring laws are clear.

However, these tort cases have serious consequences for prisoners with even minor or nonviolent offenses on their records. Courts and juries, when addressing negligent hiring claims, assess whether the employer exercised “reasonable care in choosing or retaining an employee for the particular duties to be performed.” And in determining whether a person is “improper,” judicial bodies often turn to what society sees as the most obvious indicator of a person’s reputability: their criminal record.

Therefore, the very act of hiring a criminal forces a corporation to take on significant and implicit financial liability. Since employers lose an estimated 79 percent of negligent hiring lawsuits — with the average jury award exceeding $1 million — the calculus for a small business or corporation is clear: By hiring someone with a history of drug use or petty theft, a company takes on not only the risk associated with their criminal history, but also the threat of a million-dollar lawsuit if something goes wrong.

In short, current tort law does not distinguish between violent and nonviolent individuals when considering an employer’s liability. This is especially egregious when minor offenses have little bearing on an individual’s ability to perform a specific job. Proponents of negligent hiring law will point to incidents such as a 1991 case of a Florida furniture company that failed to perform a background check on an employee who had an extensive record of violent assault. The worker went on to brutally attack a customer in her own home, and the company was proclaimed liable for $2.5 million. But not all cases are like this, and applying the logic of these rulings broadly creates a ripple effect that prevents the vast majority of former convicts from securing gainful employment.

The weight carried by a criminal record has created a legal trap, impairing the ability of convicted offenders to find work after release. One report showed that 55 percent of employers admitted to conducting background checks in order to “reduce liability for negligent hiring,” while 39 percent did so to “reduce theft, embezzlement…and other criminal activity.” Another study re-

society, its use has a far greater effect on the African-American community, further contributing to a vicious, racially disparate cycle of recidivism and poverty. Sometimes, people of color don’t even have to commit a crime for negligent hiring laws to hurt them. A 2006 study found that “employers who are averse to hiring people with criminal records sometimes presumed...that African-American men applying for jobs have disqualifying criminal records” despite a lack of evidence. A 2012 case demonstrates the prevalence of this problem: Pepsi Beverages settled an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit that required them to pay $3.13 million for using a criminal background check policy that adversely impacted African Ameri-

practices whenever they go awry.

Addressing this issue requires direct action, not vaguely worded guidelines. Absolving employers of financial liability for negligent hiring lawsuits in connection to nonviolent offenders is a clear step towards encouraging companies to hire ex-prisoners. This would put in motion the wheels to reduce recidivism and the social ills that accompany it. In analyzing negligent hiring and its adverse impacts on minority populations, the EEOC points to Automobile Workers v. Johnson Controls, Inc. (1991), in which the ruling noted that “if state tort law furthers discrimination in the workplace...then it will impede the accomplishment of Congress’ goals in enacting [the Civil Rights Act].” The clear racial dispari-

the majority of convictions were for crimes like armed robbery, murder or rape. But given that drug and immigration offenses, neither of which imply a violent disposition, make up 60 percent of all convictions in the United States, it seems as if arrest records and convictions for crimes are an insufficient determinant for whether an employee will be reasonable and responsible.

Despite the fact that the majority of convicts are nonviolent offenders, language like “weeding out the bad seeds” and “expos[ing] the criminal factor” continues to resonate among the business community.

This hysteria incites employers to overprotect themselves against potential legal liabilities. And the overprotection is not spread equally. A 2003 Princeton University study revealed that white applicants with “the same qualifications and criminal records as black applicants were three times more likely to be invited for interviews than black applicants,” showing that although negligent hiring law impacts all sectors of

cans. Sadly, these kinds of lawsuits may not even protect against racist recruitment policies in the future since negligent hiring litigation can often cost companies more than these payouts.

While many argue that the blanket use of these measures is essential to keeping the public safe, the data on convictions show otherwise. Two-thirds of inmates released each year have been convicted of either nonviolent or drug offenses, and crimes like marijuana possession do not represent a genuine threat to people who will interact with the former offenders. Reform advocates have gravitated towards clearer EEOC guidelines as a solution. But this effort misdiagnoses the problem, since these guidelines are already largely in place. The EEOC has regulations, strengthened in 2012, that supposedly limit how much an employer can consider the criminal records of their applicants. But many courts continue to liberally interpret these rules and consistently hold employers accountable for their hiring

ties present in the implementation of these laws make it seem like the fears justices had two decades ago have now come to fruition.

Luckily, the trend can still be reversed.

Republicans will find that reforming negligent hiring law protects corporations from frivolous litigation, emphasizes personal responsibility and reduces government expenditure on the legal and penal systems.

Democrats can rally behind social justice underpinnings and the assistance these reforms will give to underprivileged communities in finding employment. Moreover, reforming the law will help relieve some of the social stigmas associated with criminal convictions, making communities more welcoming for returning prisoners. While fixing tort law is an obscure battle in the fight for social justice, it can provide quick, meaningful relief to earnest job-seekers caught in a legal trap. u MINTAKA ANGELL ‘15 IS A HISTORY CONCENTRATOR AND CO-EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AT BPR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

vealed that over 40 percent of employers indicated that they would “definitely not” be willing to hire an applicant with a criminal record, regardless of the crime itself. Simple arrest records can often factor in as well, especially since only 13 states have statutes that explicitly prohibit the use of arrest record inquiries in hiring decisions. The consequence is that an actual conviction may not even be needed for a company to turn down an otherwise qualified job applicant.

While the law prohibits using a criminal record alone to make a hiring decision, proving such discrimination in court is an extremely difficult task. All of this leads to a distinct set of legal and cultural barriers to finding employment after prison — or after a wrongful arrest. This might make sense if

13

2014 GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION

THE

RHODETHE MANSION

TO GOVERNOR'S

A VS LLAN F O U D N N G O M I A R

GINA

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

ARTICLE BY GRAHAM GONZALES & ARIADNE ELLSWORTH / ART BY BEN BERKE

14

If a win-win situation ever existed in politics, the Rhode Island governor’s race might be it. Both candidates — Republican Allan Fung, mayor of Cranston, and Democrat Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s General Treasurer — are members of politically underrepresented groups as well as native Rhode Islanders. Regardless of who wins this year’s gubernatorial race, Rhode Island’s government will uncontestably be moving forwards in terms of diversity: Fung would be the state’s first Asian-American governor and Raimondo its first female one. However, these two distinctly 21st-century politicians are facing age-old questions: Who has the more coherent vision for the state? Which candidate is better

suited to handle education policy and fight poverty? And who can better propel Rhode Island into a position of economic progress and growth after years of post-recession stagnation?

THE CONTENDERS:

In one corner stands Raimondo, the favorite, with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard and a law degree from Yale. In the other, Fung — the loyal son — who remained in the state to study political science at Rhode Island College before earning a law degree from Suffolk University. Raimondo is known for her strong uppercut: legal experience in the district courts and a corporate background. She is

backed by the solid credential of founding Rhode Island’s first venture capitalist firm.

Fung, however, is an experienced fighter who can parry blows on the legal front — his stint as a special assistant attorney general preceded his tenure as lobbyist for the Government Relations Counsel at MetLife.

Fung comes into the race carrying belts from smaller prizefights, having served as one of Cranston’s three city-wide councilmen for four years before becoming mayor of Cranston.

In this fight, the partisan tropes are flipped: The venture capitalist candidate is the Democrat, while the Republican candidate has spent his life in the public sector.

In either case, their experience leaves both

Raimondo and Fung eminently qualified to serve as governor of Rhode Island — at least on paper. They have distinguished public service backgrounds and records to draw upon. The true concern revolves around who possesses the vision and political gravitas to make waves in the Ocean State.

THE ECONOMIC STATE OF THE STATE:

Rhode Island never really recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Whether you’re traversing the cracked streets of Olneyville or passing one of the foreclosed houses that litter the state, it’s clear that the recession’s lingering stagnation still claims a tight grip on the state. Until August 2014, Rhode Island had an 8 percent unemployment rate — the highest in the country. While the rate has since declined to 7.7 percent, that only brings the state down to the third-highest spot nationally, just outpacing Georgia and Mississippi.

One in five children in Rhode Island lives in poverty. Moreover, the 2014 ALEC-Laffer State Economic Competitiveness Index

policy the central issue of their campaigns.

Both candidates have first-hand experience attempting to stimulate Rhode Island’s economy. While Raimondo’s role as general treasurer might constitute more obvious experience — she spearheaded key reform agreements regarding pensions in 2011 and unions in 2013 — Fung is not lacking in experience either. Like the rest of Rhode Island, Cranston was hit hard by the recession. But Fung points out that his city’s employment rate is slightly higher than that of the state as a whole, and he attributes these results to his pro-growth policies. It is left to be seen whether Raimondo and Fung can recreate these successes under their belts while sitting in the governor’s mansion.

Fung offers a diverse selection of economic solutions to Rhode Island’s struggle.

Across the board, he has consistently emphasized his role in downsizing Cranston’s government and implementing cost-cutting reforms that, he claims, stimulated small businesses and created 1,000 new jobs. In an April 2014 letter published by the Providence Journal, Fung says that Cranston’s “remarkable turnaround” can be directly linked to the budget proposal he

and small business prospects. The package centers around corporate taxes in the hopes of making Rhode Island “one of the most competitive states for business taxes and business friendliness” in the region. Currently the state’s corporate tax is 9 percent; Fung’s proposal aims to lower it to just 6.5 percent within his first year, which would make it the lowest rate in the Northeast.

For many, Fung’s plan ignores the benefits that more robust government action can bring to an economy, something Raimondo’s plan embraces. Her platform combines some of Fung’s private-sector flair with serious government initiatives, including numerous job-creation policy proposals. Raimondo’s central economic policies propose establishing support networks and programs for Rhode Island businesses and innovators. This focus underlines a perennial concern for small New England states — incentivizing talented graduates to start their businesses in the same states as their alma maters. She has pledged, if elected, to create the Rhode Island Innovation Institute to “tak[e] the good ideas coming out of our colleges and universities and [turn] them into products that we make right here in Rhode Island,” as well as to begin a concierge service to “help small businesses nav-

THE PART ISAN TROP ES DEMOCRA T, WHILE T ARE FLIPPED: THE VENTURE HE REPUB CAPITALIS L ICAN CAND THE PUBL T IS THE I DATE HAS IC SECTOR EMINENTL SPE .T Y QUALIFI ED TO SER HEIR EXPERIENCE L NT HIS LIFE IN E VE AS GOV ERNOR - AVES THEM BOTH AT LEAST ON PAPER ranked Rhode Island 41st in the nation . in terms of positive economic outlook. crafted, which “meets day-to-day expenses, invests in education and long-term fiscal stability, and maintains a healthy rainy day fund.” When Fung took office as mayor of Cranston in 2009 at the height of the recession, he inherited a 10.5 percent unemployment rate (Rhode Island’s unemployment rate at the time was 9.7 percent). That rate may seem high, but other cities fared even worse: Providence’s unemployment rate hit an all-time high of 15 percent in July 2011.

Ultimately, Fung’s administration has seen Cranston’s unemployment rate plummet to 7.1 percent.

As governor, Fung promises stimulatory tax relief in the form of a $200 million tax reduction package to help boost job growth

igate state and federal regulations, and connect them with the resources they’ll need to thrive.” Though Raimondo hasn’t made her tax policies quite as clear as Fung has, she has said that she opposes higher taxes across the board, claiming that the issue isn’t insufficient revenue, but budgetary focus. “[Rhode Island has] the money,” she said, “we just don’t spend it wisely.” She criticized her primary opponent and current Providence mayor, Angel Taveras, for property tax increases he instituted earlier this year.

Raimondo instead plans to fund increased infrastructure investment through low-interest loan programs. To round off her

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Residents are understandably frustrated with the current state of affairs, but it seems that negativity has taken on a special character in Rhode Island. A recent Gallup poll showed that Rhode Island residents are the least enthusiastic Americans when it comes to their home state: Almost one in five Rhode Islanders says that their state is the worst place to live. The future governor is, then, tasked with not only revving up economic activity, but also rekindling state pride.

At the core of this malaise are the poor economic prospects for Rhode Islanders today and the state government’s inability to initiate effective reform. Unsurprisingly, Fung and Raimondo have made economic

15

platform, she has also pledged to increase Rhode Island’s minimum wage from $8 to $10.10 — a move that Fung has opposed, saying that it would damage the state’s economy.

Fixing the business climate through various entrepreneurial incentives is the common thread in both candidates’ economic policies. While their approaches are different — Raimondo wants to use the government as an aid, whereas Fung wants to minimize its influence — the focus is the same. In this way, Rhode Islanders’ general frustrations are reflected in the gubernatorial election: People want jobs and need

O D N O M I RA

VS

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

ocrat PARTY: Dem $2.1 million ED: MONEY RAIS HARE: 42% TE S PRIMARY VO G: 54% ATIN APPROVAL R G: 42% OLLIN CURRENT P RSEMENTS: NDO SELECTED E thood, ren Planned Pa mer RI , For EMILY's List Noel, ip il h P r o n r Gove ions Various un

16

renewed hope in their state. Attracting energized businesses will combat the post-recession status quo from both fronts.

DID SOMEONE MENTION PENSIONS?

being unable to fund its $3.5 billion dollar pension shortfall. In Rhode Island, the gap in funding threatened to crowd out public sector spending for education, public works and the police department. An inability to pay pensions would have left the future of Rhode Island’s 66,000 state workers, and the underfunded public programs they staff, hanging in the balance. As the general treasurer of Rhode Island, Raimondo found herself in an essential position to resolve this crisis.

Raimondo’s plan, which was passed by the legislature in 2011, faced opposition from labor unions until a temporary

The 800-pound gorilla in the race that threatens to trample both candidates is pension reform. Until recently, Rhode Island faced $8.9 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Such liabilities force governments to fund the salaries of retired workers through current tax revenue rather than previously accrued savings. With such a sizable chunk of the state’s income at risk, Rhode Island feared going the way of Detroit, which declared bankruptcy after

FUNG PARTY: Rep ublican MONEY RAIS ED PRIMARY VO : $256,000 TE SHAR APPROVAL R E: 55% ATING: 82% CURRENT P OL SELECTED E LING: 37% ND Mitt Romne ORSEMENTS: y, Nat Associatio ional Rifle n, Right to Life, Former RI Governor Lincoln Alm ond

agreement was reached last year under her tenure. The new agreement leaves the state’s liability at $5 billion, slightly higher than the $4.8 billion figure stipulated in the original legislative overhaul. However, this still decreases the total liability by $3.9 billion.

The compromise kept many core aspects of the temporary plan but lightened the load on state workers closer to retirement, essentially softening the burden for workers with seniority. Raimondo took what her supporters dubbed a progressive approach towards the state’s pension reform. In her “Truth in Numbers” report, she expressed concern for the impending pension crisis, emphasizing that it could have led to insuffi-

cient funds for other crucial social services.

Before the settlement, Raimondo’s pension overhaul curtailed benefits, increased employee contribution to individual retirement accounts, raised the retirement age of public sector workers from 62 to 67 and provided cost-of-living adjustments to retirees every five years until pensions were 80 percent funded. This design remained largely intact during last year’s changes.

Unsurprisingly, her plan has garnered stark opposition from public employee unions.

Although a 2011 Brown University poll found that 60 percent of Rhode Islanders supported Raimondo’s pension reform, her plan has since generated uproar in both liberal and conservative wings of the state. In combating these critics, Raimondo has suggested that her approach towards pension reform is a pragmatic “national model” that other states with pension struggles could follow.

Many Democrats remained unconvinced. In addition to union dissenters, progressives have questioned Raimondo’s choice to invest Rhode Island’s pensions on Wall Street. As treasurer, Raimondo created the Ocean State Investment Pool, designed to help the state and its municipalities receive better returns on their investments by trusting private firms with the funds.

But doing so cost the state a considerable amount of money: Around 15 percent, or $1 billion, of the state fund was handed to Wall Street hedge funds, who take 20 percent performance fees out of any profits. This plan, along with Raimondo’s heavy fundraising pulls from investment firms and her history in venture capital, led Forbes magazine to call her the “handmaiden” of Wall Street firms.

Fung has capitalized on this disenchantment with Raimondo’s Wall Street connections to further question her credibility as an economic leader. In a 2014 editorial piece for the Providence Journal, Fung called Raimondo’s pension overhaul “simply outrageous” and stated that representatives must move beyond “closed-door, behind the scenes deal[s].” Fung argued that the plan would create unnecessary fees for taxpayers at a cost of over $10 million for Rhode Island’s cities and towns. But despite Fung’s objections to Raimondo’s pension reform plan, he instituted a similar plan in Cranston in February 2014, though his is less austere and leaves more of the city’s liabilities unfunded. However, there are fundamental similarities: Fung’s plan also limits cost-of-living adjustments and,

while it will immediately save Cranston’s taxpayers about $6 million, it has similarly been met with opposition by some of the city’s retirees, who are now suing the city in the Rhode Island Superior Court. Fung also had a hand in crafting the statewide pension reform plan spearheaded by Raimondo. In 2011, he was an advisory group participant on the reform panel.

Despite criticism on multiple fronts, Raimondo has not backed down from her approach, which she says will “produce strong long-term returns while reducing risk and ensur[ing] retirement security.”

She notes that the new investments are only halfway through their life cycle and that it will be a few years until the state fund sees a positive return. And even though Raimondo initially drew the ire of organized labor, nearly all the unions that opposed her in the primary have now fallen in line with the Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, the battle is far from over. For Raimondo’s supporters, her pension reform plan is the strongest example of her ability to deal with the state’s still fledgling economy; for her opponents, it’s an example of her strong ties to Wall Street interests. While Fung’s role in the statewide pension reform plan has received less attention than Raimondo’s, it highlights how similar the two really are when it comes to Rhode Island’s pension problem. No matter who wins, it looks unlikely that unions and soon-to-be retirees will have a close ally in the statehouse.

THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER:

million.

Following the pattern of being different, but not too different, Raimondo and Fung agree on many specific issues pertaining to education policy. When asked about current teacher evaluation policy, Raimondo showed support, stating that “teachers should be given regular feedback and coaching,” while Fung expressed his disappointment in the elimination of many annual evaluations for education. Both candidates concur that a mandatory standardized test for high school graduation would add intrinsic value to receiving a diploma.

Additionally, they have both supported charter schools, albeit for different reasons.

Raimondo’s argument focuses more on equal funding for all educational ventures, while Fung strongly believes that charter schools can serve as models of innovation for new and improved curricula. On Common Core, Raimondo has stated her belief that it will “make our state more competitive in a global economy,” and Fung also has offered his support — though with the caveat that it must provide enough flexibility for teachers in the classroom.

BIG CHANGES FOR A TINY STATE:

It remains to be seen whether a new ethnic or gender identity in the governor’s office will bring new politics with it.

Jumpstarting a lagging economy will be the central mandate of whoever is elected, but there are many other profound issues that plague the smallest state in the union.

Raimondo has laid out a detailed plan that includes raising the minimum wage, funding infrastructure projects and providing resources for entrepreneurs. Fung’s plan sticks to common conservative principles for stimulating economic growth — tax cuts and bureaucratic trimming — fused with a focus on education and good governance.

Compared to the vicious polarization of national politics, Rhode Island’s race for governor offers a relatively insightful centrism.

The small state has a long way to go before achieving economic prosperity, but the big vision of a centrist in the governor’s mansion will help steer it towards success. u

GRAHAM GONZALES '18 IS AN INTENDED POLITICAL SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR AND A COPY EDITOR AT BPR. ARIADNE ELLSWORTH '17 IS AN INTENDED POLITICAL SCIENCE AND ENGLISH CONCENTRATOR, AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND THE ASSOCIATE US SECTION MANAGER AT BPR.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

With Rhode Islanders clamoring to get the economy back on track, Raimondo and Fung have largely steered clear of contentious disputes over social issues and education policy. But this doesn’t mean they are on the same page. The Rhode Island Right to Life Committee and the National Rifle Association (NRA) have both endorsed Fung, while Planned Parenthood has endorsed Raimondo. Though Fung is far from extreme on either issue, he has made a noticeable effort to downplay issues like the environment, gender politics and gun control. Some have gone so far as to question his pro-life endorsement, since he referred to himself as pro-choice at the first Republican debate in June of this year. When it comes to gun control, Fung has noticeably changed his stance; in 2004 he voted in support of a nonbinding Cranston City Council resolution to ban assault rifles, but he now boasts a 93 percent pro-gun rating from the NRA.

Raimondo, on the other hand, has emphasized social issues in her campaign, in part because of her potential to become the first female governor. She has touted her Planned Parenthood endorsement and has policy proposals for pay equity and environmental issues prominently displayed in her online literature. She has also expressed her desire to enact stricter gun-control laws.

The future of Rhode Island’s schools and universities is another place where these candidates differ. Raimondo’s views on college education fall squarely in line with the Democratic platform — subsidize higher education to promote a stronger middle class and a more fortified economy.

She is running on an election mandate that includes a loan forgiveness program, scholarships for in-state colleges and partnerships between community college training programs and employers. This palette of policies dovetails nicely with Rhode Islanders’ desire to extend their state’s appeal past the undergraduate years. And Raimondo’s plans dig deeper than post-graduate education. If elected, she has promised to rebuild physically crumbling schools, provide expanded options for extracurricular activities and improve teacher resources.

Her campaign estimates that by 2018, 61 percent of all jobs will require a post-secondary education. Consequently, her propositions echo the need for funding that can provide schools with the resources to teach children the skills necessary for college and the workforce.

Fung’s education policy, however, focuses on increased accountability in the state’s educational structure. Fung, like Raimondo, posits that education must be “innovative and accountable” in order to prepare children for their future careers and argues that a more educated workforce will innately bring about economic development for Rhode Island. But Fung also has a highly specific vision that begins with leadership at the top. To these ends, he has proposed creating an Education Cabinet with newly separated boards for K-12 and higher education, which would work closely with the governor’s office. In addition, his campaign has promised to help the University of Rhode Island (URI), the state’s flagship university, establish a Board of Trustees or Regents. Through these efforts, Fung hopes to “eventually reduce the University’s reliance on state funding.” That funding currently covers 12 percent of URI’s $524 million operating budget — a total of $65

17

INTERVIEWS WITH

GINA RAIMONDO

The lineage of Rhode Island governors has thus far consisted only of white men. What would it mean to you to be the first to break that mold?

It would be significant — to me and also to my 10-year-old daughter. It’s time — it’s time for a woman to be governor. I think so much of what has held Rhode Island back is that we have a culture of favoring insiders. I want to send a signal that it’s time to break that culture and treat everybody equally. Politics is not just for people who know somebody, because that political culture has held us back for too long.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Are there any other governors or states in particular that you might look to for examples of how to deal with the challenges facing Rhode Island?

The story in Massachusetts is not that different from the one in Rhode Island. Once upon a time, we were both leaders in manufacturing, and then the low-skill manufacturing jobs left and went to Asia. Unfortunately, Rhode Island did not reposition itself in new industries — Massachusetts did. They partnered their colleges and universities with industry and became a powerhouse in the areas of information technology and health care. And as a result they have a vibrant economy, and we don’t. There are many lessons we can learn as we bring back our economy.

18

You’ve said: “You can’t have well-funded and flourishing public schools and public buses and an underfunded pension system.

It’s just not possible.” Massachusetts would seem to defy this logic. Why do you see progressivism and the pension plan as mutually exclusive?

I don’t know enough about Massachusetts to talk about that intelligently, but here’s what I can tell you about Rhode Island: When I took office, the pension system in Rhode Island was 48 percent unfunded — one of the highest unfunded liabilities of any state in the country. If we hadn’t taken action to change it, several cities and towns would have almost certainly gone bankrupt in the near term. Rhode Island has cities and towns — Woonsocket, West Warwick, Coventry, Cranston — that are teetering on bankruptcy, and pension reform in the first year alone saved a hundred million dollars for cities and towns. Comparing Massachusetts to Rhode Island is apples and oranges, because Massachusetts has a robust economy and a stable fiscal situation. Until recently, Rhode Island had the highest unemployment rate in the country and had many cities and towns on the brink of bankruptcy. Frankly, one actually went bankrupt on account of their pension woes. So in Rhode Island, at this point in time, it’s just impossible to pay the pension bill the way it was and also have money for public buses, public schools and so on.

How do you respond to critics who brand you as a Democrat in name only?

I am running for governor to get Rhode Island back to work and to rebuild the manufacturing sector, which will provide good mid-

dle-class jobs to put men and women back to work, to rebuild our infrastructure, to make college more affordable, to make sure we have flourishing public schools, to raise the minimum wage — I’d like to see the minimum wage go up to $10.10. Rhode Island is in a jobs crisis, and I’m running to be the jobs governor, to get people back to work and rebuild the middle class with good high-paying jobs and to make sure that kids can get an education and the skills to get jobs.

Forbes magazine said that your pension reform plan slashes benefits and saddles taxpayers with the burden of paying the steep fees of hedge funds. Why are hedge fund investments a smart play for a state pension fund?

As you know, our job is to manage these assets in a way that provides strong long-term returns and, most importantly, to make sure that money is there to pay pensions. That’s what our strategy is doing. We have strong returns after we’ve paid off all the fees, with less risk. There’s much less risk in the portfolio now than when I took office. You have to remember that in the 2009 stock market crash, Rhode Island’s pension system lost $2 billion, and it took us more than five years to climb out of that hole. If you want the highest return possible, then put all your money in the stock market.

But it’s very risky. What we’ve done is to diversify the portfolio, and it’s working. Brown University and every major endowment and state pension fund also pursue this strategy.

You have yet to take a public stance on decreasing the state corporate tax. Shouldn’t corporations be paying their fair share to improve the quality of Rhode Island’s public education and transportation systems?

You need a tax structure that’s fair, and it is absolutely true that everybody needs to pay their fair share. This means corporations and certainly the wealthy, but we also have to be competitive as a state — and until recently Rhode Island had uncompetitive, high corporate taxes. The General Assembly just moved to lower the corporate tax rate to put us in line with the rest of New England, and I support that because Rhode Island is in a jobs crisis, and if we have business taxes that are much higher than our neighbors, that could be problematic. The real taxes in Rhode Island that I worry about are property taxes. The average family is struggling to pay their property taxes because cities and towns pay a big portion of the pensions. With respect to tax policy, I think it’s important to have a strategy. I have a comprehensive jobs plan designed to create 10,000 jobs in the next 10 years. Taxes are a piece of it, but really we need to invest in education: Invest in worker training and in tourism so that we can create jobs. That’s how you grow revenue — not necessarily by raising taxes, but by getting tens of thousands of people back to work.

AN

ND

ALLAN FUNG How would you apply the Cranston experience to all of Rhode Island to promote better governance?

The experience that I had as chief executive of the third-largest city in Rhode Island has prepared me for any challenges coming up at the state level. A lot of the things that we’ve done locally to make sure that we are not only stabilizing the city finances, but also providing appropriate services to the residents and functioning properly in terms of creating a better business environment, have all seen real results. There are real reforms that we’ve implemented locally that could be taken to the state level. Local chief executives have a pulse of what’s going on in their communities, and it’s that type of experience that I want to bring to the statehouse: to foster better relationships with mayors and town administrators and particularly to foster a healthier business climate so that we can improve our economy, get higher on national rankings and get people back to work.

Why do you think that lowering the corporate tax rate will create jobs?

My $200 million tax reduction plan isn’t just focused on the corporate tax rate; it’s a comprehensive plan that focuses on the corporate tax rate, the death tax and the sales tax. All of those levers are crucial to improving our overall tax environment, particularly for businesses. My approach would be to make Rhode Island a center for business within the region. It’s difficult as a small state to compete with all 50 states and against the global economy, but my premise is that we are an important hub, and if we can support many of the businesses that are here, even in this down economy, [we can] send the message to employers outside the state that we want them here too. That’s the comprehensive strategy that I want to implement.

Johnston, Rhode Island recently received military equipment through a military surplus program. In light of recent events, how do you think we can improve policing procedures without relying on military surplus?

I think you’re raising two different questions: procedures and equipment. Some of the resources are definitely needed to help aid

the police in some of the situations that they have encountered or that they may encounter in the future. But the equipment should be a lot more targeted towards the particular needs of a police force, instead of police just grabbing as much as they can in the hopes that it can be utilized. I support providing the necessary equipment to local cities and towns and to our state police force. I think the second process question relates more to fostering improvements in policing overall, and we need a lot more communication between the police department, the officers themselves and the community.

I’m a strong advocate and proponent of community policing. With a continued level of engagement at the local level, there’s a lot more trust that’s built in. It also helps from an enforcement standpoint when neighbors have an opportunity to know who is patrolling their areas.

Do you worry about voters’ assumptions about your social policies after seeing that you have been endorsed by the National Rifle Association and the Rhode Island Right to Life Committee?

I’m not too worried about quick leaps because, quite honestly, I have a proven track record during my three terms as mayor that shows who I am, what I’m about and what I hope to do. That message is resonating with many Rhode Island voters. They understand that I’m not some really hardcore person. I sit, I listen and I empathize. And that’s the same type of leadership and the same skills that I’ll take to the state house.

Rhode Island voters don’t fit neatly into either major party — there are a lot of swing voters, and party affiliation in the state isn’t very strong. How has your campaign taken this into account?

One thing I won’t get into is the strategy of the campaign. But what I can tell you is that I’m out there and that I enjoy a broad base of support that crosses party lines. Rhode Islanders, regardless of party affiliation, are supporting me because they respect what I hope to do to turn our state around. I think that’s the message that I’ve been sending from day one. The track record that I have established in Cranston is about how I operate above partisan politics and do the right thing for the people.

How do you see the relationship between universities and the cities that they exist in?

Universities and colleges play an integral role in helping to foster a better economy because they are educating the workforce of the future. There has to be a symbiotic relationship that exists, so that once students are done with college, they can hopefully continue to stay in the state. There are also challenges. I have part of Johnson & Wales University in Cranston, so there are challenges that are presented with having students and making sure that they don’t infringe on the quiet in surrounding neighborhoods. It’s a delicate balance. Actually, I’ve had a pretty good working relationship with Johnson & Wales, which was fostered through communication and a willingness to work together.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Would it be more about drawing in new businesses or increasing additional hiring from businesses already in Rhode Island?

It’s both, actually. The main focus of that $200 million would be on the local businesses that are here and about not forgetting the small business owners, because that’s the background that I came from.

The minimum corporate tax is one that many businesses pay, and it’s frustrating for them. I hear a lot from people [who don’t view the tax as a burden]: “What’s $500?” Well, it’s those months when my parents couldn’t cash their paycheck or had to take money out of their own pockets to sustain their expenses. $500 means a lot.

And that’s where those dollars can be better utilized: Small businesses can hopefully put it back into their business or even towards hiring.

BY HENRY KNIGHT & MICHAEL CHERNIN

19

BPR Media Spotlight: Peop

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW MEDIA SPOTLIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TYLER DAELEMANS

20

ple’s Climate March

Last month, in the early afternoon of September 21, about 400,000 people congregated in the streets of New York City for the People’s Climate March. The movement was a call to action for world leaders attending the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit in New York. According to the event’s organizers, groups from all 50 states and from around the world were marching together in the city. In addition, more than 2,500 partner events were held internationally in solidarity with the New York marchers.

The event sought to draw attention to the need for transformative political action to abate the global impacts of climate change. Both the People’s Climate March and the UN Summit focused on the development of strategies to tax and reduce carbon emissions as part of a commitment to keep global temperature increases to less than two degrees Celsius: the threshold required for limiting the dangerous effects of human-induced climate change.

These photographs are a record of widespread recognition of the need for greater environmental consciousness and the power of individuals to raise political awareness for the cause. It was this record-breaking demonstration and the hundreds of thousands of voices propelling it that prompted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to claim: “We are not here to talk. We are here to make history.”

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

MEDIA SPOTLIGHT BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

“Sometimes you can’t wait for politicians to make the right decisions. Sometimes taking to the streets is the most effective way to make change happen.” — Kevin Chen ’15

21

DR. MONOPOLY Are medical mergers a health care emergency?

STORY BY YUVAL YOSSEFY / ART BY HALEY MOEN

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

D

22

espite the intense scrutiny of the health care debate sparked by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Americans have overlooked a simmering problem. Over the past three decades in cities all across the country, a movement towards hospital consolidation has changed the faces of medicine and its practitioners: Large institutions are merging and illegally raising prices to cushion their margins. Without powerful and consistent legal action, Americans’ fundamental relationship with their health care providers will soon be corrupted by monopolistic actions.

The story of two major nonprofit hospitals in Boston illustrates this aptly. On December 8, 1993, Boston learned that two of its largest and most prominent hospitals — Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital — had agreed to merge, forming the medical monolith Partners HealthCare. Over the past 20 years, Partners — the largest private employer in Massachusetts, with approximately 60,000 employees — has presented serious problems for the city’s health care beneficiaries. At the time of the merger, hospital officials argued that joining the two institutions would primarily serve to improve Boston’s health care; the merged hospitals would be more efficient as a single entity, thereby reducing overall administrative and treatment costs. Furthermore, the hospitals argued, the merger was necessary to keep insurance companies from extorting low prices by threatening to send patients to another hospital if health care providers didn’t pony up.

The merger was authorized, and the consequences were astounding. Shortly after Massachusetts’ Attorney General gave the go-ahead, Partners began growing rapidly. After just six years it encompassed eight different health care providers. Using this newly acquired market leverage, Partners struck a covert deal with one of the region’s largest insurance companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Blue Cross consented to pay Partners’ higher prices for a variety of services if Partners forced the other major insurance companies to pay similarly high amounts. Both companies upheld their sides of the bar-

gain flawlessly. The same year, Partners announced that it would no longer accept Tufts Health Plan insurance when Tufts refused to pay Partners’ “unjustifiably high prices.” Under pressure to provide coverage for its community, Tufts reneged later that year and surrendered to the high costs.

Blue Cross’ pricing shows how exorbitant this racket had become: Between 2000 and 2009, the price tag they put on Partners’ care increased by 75 percent. When the Boston Globe discovered and revealed the clandestine deal in 2009, the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General launched investigations against both companies for violation of antitrust law.

Partners HealthCare is not a standalone case. In 1994, about 56 percent of all US hospitals belonged to at least some form of health network — a group of health care

ONE JUDGE CLAIMED THAT “COMMUNITY SERVICE, NOT PROFIT MAXIMIZATION, IS THE HOSPITALS’ MISSION.” BUT THE COURTS’ TRUST WOULD BE SEVERELY TESTED. providers that agree to pre-negotiated prices. By 2000, this figure had grown to about 72 percent. Another survey found that during the same time period, Americans living in metropolitan areas experienced an average “reduction from six to four competing local hospital systems.” During the 1980s, when the merger trend began, academics and journalists were divided on the implications, with much of the dispute revolving around the question of whether these merged hospitals would use their newfound market control to behave like monopolies. While the possibility is alarming, it’s important to note that monopolies do not yet control US health care markets; the typical metropolitan area still has multiple competitors, if fewer than before. But as hospitals gain control of larger market shares, they have the opportunity to abuse their control by unfairly forcing out competition and driving prices up drastically — all to the detriment of the consumer.

Consolidation, however, is not inher-

ently bad. Many hospitals claim that by merging they are able to streamline their provision of care and purchase more effective equipment that a small hospital may struggle to afford. After the 1998 merger that created the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani praised the decision as one that would provide “better care and lower costs for patients.” Similarly, Dr. David Skinner, the CEO and vice chairman of the merged hospitals, highlighted the opportunities for the hospitals to improve the quality of care and the availability of services after the merger.

Nevertheless, in the 1990s the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) took seven soon-tobe-merged hospitals in urban areas across the country to court for monopoly concerns. Since the FTC and the DOJ had no precedent in the health care industry to support their claims of unfair pricing and anti-competitive measures, they brought precautionary data in the hopes of proving that the mergers, if permitted, would lead to antagonistic behavior towards consumers. But the hospitals won all seven cases because the judges found the government’s evidence unreliable.

Interestingly, the courts found solace in the hospitals’ nonprofit status. In many of the cases, judges presumed that because the hospitals operated programs serving those in need, they naturally wouldn’t engage in anti-competitive practices. One federal district court judge claimed that “community service, not profit maximization, is the hospitals’ mission.” But nonprofits are still businesses, and the courts’ trust would be severely tested.

Years later, the FTC returned to investigate the same institutions. The investigations confirmed that most hospital mergers induced price increases, although the magnitude of the increases was disputed.

An FTC report revisited four of the seven hospitals tried in court and found that two of them — Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Chicago and Sutter Medical Center in California — raised prices by a range of 23 to 50 percent, depending on the patient’s insurance. The research commu-

nity continues to support and build upon these findings. One of the strongest studies, conducted by a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, uncovered that mergers not only increase the new entity’s prices, but also affect competitors, whose prices increase by about 40 percent in the long run. Another oft-cited paper, published by Michael Vita, an FTC official, and Seth Sacher, an economic consultant, shows price increases of over 20 percent at merged hospitals and 17 percent at rival hospitals. Moreover, these studies only examined nonprofit hospitals, refuting the expectation that supposedly philanthropic hospitals would avoid the temptation to take advantage of monopolistic practices.

Although it is apparent that merged hospitals tend to unlawfully exploit their market power, that evidence alone does not prove their guilt. If hospital executives were indeed correct about mergers improving the quality of care, the benefits may outweigh the rising costs. Regrettably, research on the quality of care is lacking and inconcrete — and what findings there are conflict with each other. In a second report, the FTC ran a series of tests evaluating Highland Park Hospital’s quality of care before and after its acquisition by Evanston Northwestern Hospital and found that there was no change in most cases and a decrease in quality in a few cases. Overall, they found “little evidence that the merger caused quality to improve at Highland Park.” Other institutions couldn’t provide conclusive evidence towards either claim. The Rob-

ert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization that focuses on health, showed that a “slim majority of studies find that…increases in hospital concentration reduce quality” and that the most reliable studies pointed to a decline in quality as well. Although the findings are not irrefutable, it seems that care has actually worsened through consolidation, not improved as the mergers have claimed.

Yet for the sake of argument, let us suppose that these mergers actually did improve the quality of health care. It is vital to recognize that, even under these conditions, an American’s right to quality health care may still be compromised by nonprofit monopolies. Because of hospitals’ excessive market power, health insurance companies are forced to cover hospitals’ services regardless of the prices they demand. These cost increases are then passed on to consumers in the form of higher insurance premiums, which many Americans simply cannot afford. The main problem in the US health care system isn’t quality of care, but lack of access to it. The ACA is a step in the right direction in terms of lowering insurance costs, but if prices continue to rise, consumers will lose the access to care that cheaper coverage provides.

Unfortunately, since the release of this research, little has been done to correct the problem — or to publicize it. As a result of the issue’s obscurity, even informed elected officials may not be able to leverage its political capital. The simplest way to address health care monopolies seems to be through lawmaking: Instigate a national

debate and hope that members of Congress take pro-consumer action. In an ideal world, this would not be difficult due to the bipartisan nature of antitrust measures.

Given the political milieu, most economists and politicians — regardless of ideology or affiliation — agree that monopolies and companies with unjust control over a market corrode the free enterprise system and harm consumers. But until the United States overcomes its political gridlock and the public becomes more informed, the solutions will be stymied. Neither the FTC nor the DOJ has been able to bring a successful case to court since 2004, leaving the vast majority of monopolistic activity unregulated.

While not all mergers necessarily impact patients negatively, some monopolies do act immorally. And when they do, they can decrease the quality of care, raise costs and pressure competitors to either adjust to expensive demands or fold their services.

The case of Partners HealthCare is a stark reminder: Patients were promised efficiency and handed higher bills. Not all mergers can, or even should, be prosecuted, but those that violate the right to accessible, affordable health care ought to face consequences. It is imperative that the FTC and others continue to publish research on this issue and promote productive solutions to problematic mergers in order to ensure that the most uncompetitive mergers and monopolies do not pass go, do not collect a fat check and go directly to jail. u YUVAL YOSSEFY ‘17 IS AN ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR.

UNITED STATES BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

23

DISJOINTED PROGRESS Colorado’s legalization law gives whites the green.

STORY BY MARINA GOLAN-VILELLA / ART BY JULIA ROSENFELD

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW UNITED STATES

A

24

s Colorado adjusts to the many changes brought about by the legalization of marijuana, supporters and skeptics across the country continue to scrutinize the effects of legal pot. While there have certainly been benefits — the drug is a green gold mine for the state — there are also some more sinister effects of the policy change stewing. It is becoming increasingly clear that those most harmed by the old system will reap the fewest rewards from the new.

Colorado’s legalization has weeded out some of the state’s defunct War on Drugs policies and served as a boon for Colorado’s coffers: A report published by the governor’s office in February projects that the state will gain $98 million in tax revenue this fiscal year from recreational and medicinal marijuana, with potential law enforcement savings ranging from $12 million to $60 million. But these benefits do not affect all Coloradans equally. Though legalization means that fewer individuals from socioeconomically marginalized minorities are being incarcerated for minor drug crimes, legalized marijuana has failed to actively assist the communities most harmed by the War on Drugs.

Michelle Alexander, an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, explains in her book, “The New Jim Crow,” that drug laws disproportionately target black communities. Between 1986 and 2010, Colorado’s police arrested African Americans for marijuana possession 3.1 times more than whites and arrested Latinos 1.5 times more than whites, even though these two minority groups have a lower rate of drug use than their white counterparts in the state. Decades of legal discrimination — including lengthier prison sentences for nonwhite drug offenders — have exacted a toll on these communities that cannot be undone by simply ceasing to discriminate.

So while the legalization of marijuana possession certainly protects minorities from arrests for drug possession, Colorado must do more to address the past and present racial injustices caused by its drug laws.

In fact, it is Colorado’s white citizens who have most benefited from the state’s legalization movement. White residents tend to be wealthier, which gives them more ac-

cess to the advantages of legalized weed. In 2012, the poverty rate for white residents in Colorado was 7.5 percent, compared to 23.4 percent for Latino residents and 22.2 percent for black residents. This inequality means that blacks and Latinos continue to face barriers to entry into the legal marijuana market as consumers and, as a result, still have to resort to unlicensed, illegal dealers.

Due to high excise and sales taxes, legal marijuana is pricey — on average, an ounce of legal weed is approximately $220, but it can cost upwards of $300. Street prices hover around $160. Low-income smokers are left with only two options: buy illegally or go broke. The Marijuana Policy Project estimates that this year, 40 percent of Colorado residents seeking to purchase marijuana will choose the illegal option, and, as such, unlicensed dealers will remain on the black market to supply that demand. This leaves communities of color with many of the same pernicious effects of illegal drug dealing — gun violence, theft and murder — that existed during explicit marijuana prohibition. Community activist Rudy “Reddog” Balles commented to The Washington Post that he doesn’t know “who is buying for recreational use at dispensaries unless it’s white, middle-class people and out-of-towners.”

Socioeconomic barriers also prevent many illegal dealers from transitioning into the legal market as suppliers. The cost

to apply for a legal retail marijuana establishment alone is $5,000, and individuals convicted of a drug felony in the past five years are barred from applying. These restrictions make it much harder for illegal sellers, often minorities, to transition into the legal market. The system instead provides opportunities to established business owners, who are often white and have already accumulated capital and experience from other fields.

At its core, the problem with marijuana legalization is the assumption that it will change mass incarceration and underlying systems of inequality. Legalization lacks not only the intention, but also the ability, to do either. Because the law is not retroactive, Colorado’s new policy will not change anything for the 210,000 people arrested in the state for marijuana possession between 1986 and 2010. Furthermore, legalization does nothing to affect the underlying economic structures that drive people into illegal dealing, nor does it shutter their markets. As Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA, which works to lower youth incarceration rates, explains, the presence of drug dealing as a viable economic option signals a lack of safer business opportunities and capital investment in minority communities. Marijuana legalization in and of itself, and drug legalization in general, is helpless to address these structural issues.

Currently, the majority of tax revenue from legal marijuana sales has been directed towards substance abuse treatment and marijuana use prevention for children. This spending shows that the state is more interested in limiting the potential negative effects of marijuana use than it is in addressing the larger problems of mass incarceration and racial inequality. Legalization could promote racial justice more effectively if the revenue and savings were used to combat the root causes of the black market for drugs. As analysts look back at the crucial beginnings of legalization in Colorado, they must do so with blunt attention to class and race — and with a willingness to push past a system that creates a black market for some in favor of one that embraces legalization for all. u MARINA GOLAN-VILELLA ‘17 IS AN INTENDED SOCIOLOGY CONCENTRATOR.

THE ATMOSPHERIC WASTELAND Taking out the space trash STORY BY DAVID MARKEY / ART BY MARIA PAZ ALMENARA

S

of trash even the size of a sugar cube would cause damage equivalent to a grenade explosion. These aren’t just fear-mongering predictions; collisions destroy roughly one satellite per year, and this number is set to rise dramatically. The US National Research Council now estimates that the Kessler Syndrome has reached a tipping point where collisions will grow exponentially, taking down satellite after satellite and making GPS, telecommunications and scientific research increasingly uneconomical.

Telecom companies currently bear the brunt of the cost. They lose roughly $10 million in future profits every time their satellites must dodge incoming space debris, because such maneuvers waste fuel and decrease the lifespan of the satellite.

In 2010, a particularly menacing “zombie” satellite passed through the orbits of several commercial satellites, eating up an estimated $100 million in potential profits.

But even though monetary loss could encourage companies to invest in debris clean up, the Outer Space Treaty’s property stipulations eliminates any organization’s incentive to do so, because any such action risks a potentially disastrous diplomatic kerfuffle.

In 2009, when a deceased Russian satellite was headed directly towards an Iridium telecommunications satellite, Iridium had no right to attempt to remove the Russian satellite from orbit, and eventually the two crashed, flinging out even more debris.

But space’s tragedy of the commons extends far past the satellites of Earth’s orbit.

With groups like SpaceX claiming they will put astronauts on Mars within a decade, the international community should make a second attempt to regulate outer space.

Current international law allows organizations to harvest materials from space, but it can’t punish firms that, through malice or negligence, destroy extraterrestrial resources. For example, SpaceX would bear no legal consequences if, in a quest to harvest Titan’s methane, it set Saturn’s orange moon ablaze, crippling the long-term interests of humanity. The international community walks a fine line when considering these hypothetical scenarios. Postponing regulation has only exacerbated the problem by tacitly permitting bad behavior, but enacting premature regulations may be putting the fuel cartridge before the horse, almost certainly leading to unintended consequences that could rob humanity of future opportunities to explore the final frontier.

For now, we must deal with the tragedy spinning around our only home. Most space-faring nations have taken modest actions to limit the accumulation of space debris so as not to exacerbate the situation.

France passed a law requiring rocket stages to fall back to Earth after takeoff. NASA outlined practices for limiting orbital debris. The UN created the Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines. Many technologies that could begin clearing the existing pollution from our orbit, such as solar sails, space harpoons or capture nets, exist or are in development, but international law makes such solutions impractical and diplomatically dangerous. Only once international law recognizes space as a finite resource — one that needs to be protected — will we secure our future in the skies. u DAVID MARKEY ‘18 IS AN INTENDED APPLIED MATH-ECONOMICS CONCENTRATOR AND AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

ince Sputnik kicked off the space race, humans have steadily littered Earth’s orbit with derelict satellites, spent rocket stages and bits of space projects gone awry. Burgeoning space industries, private and public, only continue to add to the ever-expanding trash. Though growing private markets may provide more opportunities to explore and access space, the deteriorating situation of space detritus threatens everything from DirecTV and GPS to space travel and basic telecommunication. But our skies cannot be cleaned.

Half-baked international laws protect the almost one million pieces of defunct space junk by declaring them private property — unable to be removed, except by whoever put them there.

The story of our orbiting pollution puts a unique spin on the tragedy of the commons. At the height of the Cold War, the United Nations created the Outer Space Treaty, which labeled space the common heritage of mankind. However by designating space an unregulated territory, the international community subjected our skies — like our oceans before them — to pollution through free use. The Outer Space Treaty’s insistence on unlimited property rights, by dictating that every artifact in space belongs to its owner indefinitely, has further compounded the space debris problem, because the United States has no right to remove long-useless pieces of Russian satellites — even though their possible collision with US space technology, Gravity-style, poses a major risk. The “let’s clean it up later” mentality of these ill-conceived laws is the heart of the problem: The international community views space, and its debris, as an obscure topic for Trekkies, not as a serious threat that economists and policy makers should address.

But the threat is real. Earth’s satellites orbit our planet at immense speeds. Any collision between existing satellites spews new fragments of space junk into orbit, increasing the probability of future collisions in an effect known as the Kessler Syndrome. The result is an ever-thickening shell of space debris slowly closing humanity off from the skies. The impact of a piece

25

FAVELA CHIC A botched face-lift for Brazil’s poorest neighborhoods STORY BY FRANCIS TORRES / ART BY KRISTINE MAR

B

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

“

26

e careful, someone was killed here last month,” the cab driver said as he dropped us off at the entrance to Vidigal, one of Rio de Janeiro’s infamous favelas, “a foreigner who worked in some hostel.” We got out of the taxi and into a van that took us up the neighborhood’s serpentine streets, passing several heavily armed police units along the way. Twenty minutes later, we were ordering tacos and drinks at the open-air deck of Alto Vidigal, the same hostel where a young Swedish entrepreneur had been found dead some weeks before.

Smartly dressed patrons, most of them exchange students like us, kept arriving to drink and socialize as the night progressed, and the clouds cleared to reveal a stunning view of Rio’s beaches.

“This place is so gentrified,” a friend from Brown University told me as she sipped her mango cocktail, “but it’s such a cool scene.” Lounge music played from the speakers and mixed with the hum of conversations in English, Spanish and, occasionally, a bit of Portuguese. Eventually, the crowd spilled out onto the street, where motorcycle taxis were waiting to carry us down the hill and on to the next party of the evening. It was the first night I spent up on the hill, as well as the first time I witnessed the social dynamics that drive favela gentrification, one of Rio’s most salient urban conundrums.

Broadly defined, gentrification usually refers to a process of demographic change in which the arrival of new, wealthier groups in a marginal zone displaces the area’s original population. It is often called a market-based eviction because it triggers factors that make it economically unviable for the typically poorer (and darker-skinned) old-time residents to maintain their homes. Rent prices go up, goods and services begin targeting the wealthier demographics, and homeowners are pressured to sell their properties as the value of land in the area increases.

Gentrification is by no means a new phenomenon in Rio de Janeiro. As in many large cities around the world, Rio’s geographic and economic growth has led to changes in the socioeconomic makeup of neighborhoods all over the city. However, the winds of change have only recently been felt in favelas, the informal settlements that are often seen as dangerous and unruly no-

go zones by Rio’s more privileged classes.

Unlike other cases of urban renewal — a common euphemism for gentrification — there are unique factors underlying the redrawing of maps and the expulsion of favela residents. Gentrification in Rio carries colonialist implications that can be traced back to earlier foreign incursions into the Global South. The reorganization of neighborhoods, while beneficial for a new class of consumers and legitimized as part of the World Cup and Olympics preparations, threatens to uproot close-knit communities within the traditionally poor favelas and

disrupts the delicate balance of these culturally rich neighborhoods.

The policies that shunt the poor out of their homes have a complicated history colored by the legacy of decades of class conflict. Rio’s poor make up a large portion of the city’s population and are just as characteristic of the city as its famous beaches and Carnival processions. Originating as homes for freed slaves, retired soldiers and poor immigrants from other Brazilian states, favelas started out as small, illegal settlements built by people who lacked access to public housing. These settlements grew into sprawling mini-cities on the sides of bigger cities’ hills, but they were beyond the purview of the government and thus became riddled with drug trafficking and gang warfare. Because of this bloody history — interlaced with class and racial biases — Rio’s middle and upper classes grew up fearing the favelas. The concept of well-off citizens moving into these places willingly would have been unthinkable merely 10 years ago, when favelas were thought to contain only drugs, destitute poverty and violent crime.

But now, in the wake of Brazil’s recent bout of economic growth, the state is forcibly taming these formerly off-limits spaces for the benefit of a new class of consumers, including mobile young students and professionals from around the world. Many commentators argue that the floodgates of gentrification opened when the Rio government began implementing its Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) program in 2008. Developed and implemented in preparation for the city’s mega-events, this initiative places permanent police units within favelas to wrest power from the drug gangs that have exerted de facto control over them.

While the 40 UPPs established so far have succeeded in limiting drug traffic and lowering violent crime rates, they have also gained a reputation for human rights abuses. The UPPs and the special forces battalions that helped militarize the favel-

removal by the police.

Many of gentrification’s most vocal apologists justify the practice by its alleged inevitability. It is seen as a part of a natural process of urban renewal and often portrayed as the way cities inherently change and grow in reaction to supply and demand.

But many local intellectuals are now pushing back against this legitimation of gentrifying dynamics by helping communities organize and publishing research on more sustainable methods of favela development.

In a speech given at local think tank Casa Fluminense, Theresa Williamson, an urban planner and the director of local NGO Catalytic Communities, proposed that favelas — and slums everywhere — should not be thought of as unsolvable human blights.

Instead, they should be considered opportunities for experiments in sustainable development for the urban poor. With United Nations projections stating that a third

THE CONCEPT OF WELL-OFF CITIZENS MOVING INTO FAVELAS WILLINGLY WOULD HAVE BEEN UNTHINKABLE MERELY TEN YEARS AGO, WHEN FAVELAS WERE THOUGHT OF AS CONTAINING ONLY DRUGS, DESTITUTE POVERTY AND VIOLENT CRIME. of the world’s population will be living in slums by 2050, favelas present an invaluable opportunity to construct and maintain self-sufficient, affordable housing within close proximity to urban centers.

Finally, what many forget while discussing how to improve favelas is what favelas are already doing right. Despite the oppressive forces of poverty, crime and the other problems that riddle favelas, their close-knit communities have nevertheless crafted a unique identity for their spaces. With their layered levels and winding streets, favelas promote pedestrian-friendly development and organic architecture, and their structural characteristics lend themselves to a focus on the residents’ needs, rather than on outside businesses’ potential profits. In a country where 44 percent of the adult population does not have a bank account — and with many such individuals living in the favelas — community ties are the only way many residents obtain financial support in times of need. The proximity of these favelas to neighborhoods in

Rio’s south and central zones supplements this communitarian safety net with vital access to the places where job opportunities are most abundant. And the ubiquitous presence of these communities all over Rio leads to a more varied socioeconomic distribution within the city’s main zones — even in posh beachfront neighborhoods.

The culture that arises out of these tight-knit communities is an essential component of favela identity. Many of Brazil’s most famous and cherished traditions, from samba to capoeira, are favela-bred art forms that were censured and criminalized before trickling into the national mainstream. The recent surge of funk carioca — a sub-genre of Brazilian dance music — shows that favelas are still very much at the center of Rio’s cultural production. Perhaps most importantly, favela communities were developed from the bottom up. There is a great sense of pride among long-time residents that supports local entrepreneurship.

While these factors are essential to the historical identity of favelas, they also make up the so-called charm that attracts wealthier city residents to their streets. The cultural vibrancy of these neighborhoods actually propels their own gentrification, as young people enamored with a romanticized image of the favelas seek to live there in order to experience the “authentic” Rio. The recent favela development projects are, to an extent, recognition of the importance and usefulness of these unique spaces. To the degree that they make favelas safer and improve the lives of their working-class residents, these programs should be encouraged. However, those who enter these communities seeking a “genuine” Global South experience, or even those who are just trying to avoid the steep prices of Rio’s established neighborhoods, have a responsibility to understand the history and struggles of the places they wish to inhabit.

To other exchange students sipping tropical cocktails in a small bar in Vidigal: There is more to these communities than the next hip bar. Students, foreigners and Brazilians making forays into these complex spaces can contribute — not to cultural whitewashing, but to the building of stronger communities. If only we could pay attention to the surroundings as much as the sangria. u FRANCIS TORRES ‘16 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR AND A BPR STAFFER ABROAD.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

as have been responsible for tense encounters between community members and the forces of the state. Even in Vidigal, often considered a community in the advanced stages of gentrification, it has become normal to see military police in body armor walking around with semiautomatic rifles.

Frustration with the UPPs has led to a rich history of protests against the criminalization of favela residents’ conditions; these police forces disproportionately stop and arrest poor Brazilians of color, while often declining to state the motives behind their actions. These arrests and operations can turn violent quickly: The nonprofit watchdog organization Brazil Forum on Public Security counted 1,890 people killed during UPP operations in 2012. This violence adds yet another burden to favela residents who are already trampled by increasing property values that prompt market-based evictions.

Building upon the mechanisms first established to reduce crime in the favelas, the federal and state governments have implemented developmental programs meant to improve the quality of life for the residents of these communities. The Morar Carioca and Minha Casa Minha Vida programs aim to upgrade favela infrastructure and provide an acceptable housing alternative for dislocated favela residents. In practice, however, these initiatives — designed to support the original residents — have developed the land but ignored the people on it. Infrastructure improvements often end up benefiting newcomers, rather than long-time residents, who are instead priced out of their homes. And less necessary projects — fancy bridges and funiculars — receive more funding because they embellish the area for the gentrifying new residents.

While the right to land is constitutionally protected in Brazil and between a third and two-thirds of favela residents legally own their property, many have been forcibly relocated to make way for World Cup or Olympics-related development projects.

These evictions are often justified with trumped-up claims of natural disaster risks.

Many relocated residents are subsequently forced into low-quality apartments outside the city that are hours away from their original communities and hours more from their jobs. In protest, some have even chosen to squat in abandoned factories close to their former homes instead of migrating to the periphery, though this choice carries the considerable risks of unsafe shelter conditions as well as the potential for forceful

27

THE GREAT SECESSION The Scottish independence movement was just the beginning.

STORY BY MATTEO CAVELIER RICCARDI / ART BY GRACE SUN

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

O

28

n September 18, the day of Scotland’s referendum, it was not just the Scottish that held their breath — panicked Westminster politicians, stakeholders across Europe and curious onlookers around the world also awaited the verdict. Reporters commented on the throngs of foreigners who had flooded into Scotland to support the nationalist movement.

Coming from separatist regions like Italy’s Sardinia and Spain’s Catalonia, Belgium’s Flanders and the United Kingdom’s own Northern Ireland, they paraded alongside Scottish flags and Union Jacks on the streets of Edinburgh. Ultimately the referendum failed — 55 percent of Scots voted to stay in the UK — but debate about the relationship between regions, states and the European Union has kept its fire. The growing desire for regional autonomy within the EU may not lead to a proliferation of new states, but it is likely to decentralize the current ones.

While members of various European pro-independence movements were campaigning for the Scottish referendum, their compatriots at home were ramping up ac-

tivity to capitalize on Scotland’s international spotlight. As Scotland’s tallies trickled in, the number of pro-independence tweets from Barcelona surged, Basque separatists in Spain increased their activity and the right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League) party in Italy, which vociferously supports the secession of Italy’s Veneto region, was on high alert. None of these groups have been afforded the same opportunity to secure their independence as Scotland’s movement has, but the newly increased international attention on secessionism could help them advance their agendas. A referendum on whether Catalonia should become independent from Spain was scheduled for November 9 and had even been confirmed by the regional president, but the vote has since been ruled unconstitutional after the Spanish president intervened. In Veneto, an unofficial independence referendum in March logged ballots from 75 percent of the region’s eligible voters, with 89 percent favoring independence. However, a true independence referendum would be unconstitutional under Italian law. To remedy such

barriers throughout Europe, the Flemish People’s Party, a Belgian secessionist group, is pressuring the EU to amend its treaties to explicitly support self-determination.

According to The Guardian’s Severin Carrell, these movements are jointly creating “pan-European momentum” to overcome ossified national politics by appealing directly to the EU’s supranational bodies.

Despite their common goal of self-determination, Scotland’s movement and others across Europe differ in their legal and cultural landscapes. To begin, Scotland, unlike Catalonia, Veneto or Flanders, is not constitutionally bound to its parent state.

Further, its independence debate is seen as more balanced and constructive. Comparing the Scottish and Catalonian movements, renowned writer Javier Caceres said that “in Great Britain there is a pretty calm and rational debate…In Spain we can barely exchange anything apart from yelling, lies and personal attacks in a hysterical climate that does not exclude thuggery.” Former El País reporter Ramón Lobo similarly praised Scotland’s use of “negotiation, agreements

stay in the UK, many of which would apply to Wales and Northern Ireland as well. In a role reversal of sorts, the English are now examining the effects of Scottish influence on their own decisions and are even debating establishing a regional English parliament parallel to that of Scotland’s. Former British politician Shirley Williams argues that such steps are paving “the way towards a federal United Kingdom,” similar to government structures in Canada, Germany and Australia. Promises of devolution of power by London could change the way the UK interacts with Europe: It could magnify the overall influence of the country in EU affairs by increasing interactions between its individual regions and EU structures.

Federalization is nothing new within the EU. The Single European Act of 1985, which helped ease the transition to a single market, coincided with the decentralization

AS EU POWER HAS GROWN, SUBNATIONAL JURISDICTIONS HAVE INCREASINGLY SET THEIR SIGHTS ON SHAPING POLICY. CITIES, MUNICIPALITIES AND REGIONS NOW HAVE AROUND 250 MISSIONS IN BRUSSELS. of the French government. At that point, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Spain were all taking steps towards federalization, creating directly elected local governments with clear administrative responsibilities. Jean Quatremer, from the French newspaper Libération, explained that the previous topdown approach to governance was “past its prime…and no longer corresponded to the adaptability that the modern world demanded.” As a result, EU policy has, from the beginning, taken into account the shifting power structures of its member states.

This was evident as early as 1988, when the EU Structural Funds, created to reduce economic disparity between regions, began awarding funds directly to regional governments.

As the political significance and economic power of the EU has grown, subnational jurisdictions have increasingly set their sights on shaping policy. This process has been fast-tracked by the growing federalization of member states, which allows regions to represent themselves more independently with respect to both their national governments and Europe at large. Some such areas, most notably the wealthy German state of Bavaria, have long had independent missions in Brussels to lobby policy

interests and secure financing from the EU. In total, cities, municipalities and regions now have around 250 missions in Brussels.

South Denmark’s mission alone had $1.3 million at its disposal in 2012, and Bavaria’s mission was made up of 23 employees.

These missions reflect the way some regions have sidestepped national governments by using EU structures to gain traction on key issues. In many cases, this has helped diminish regional tensions, especially regarding central government spending, which could have otherwise exacerbated separatist tendencies. If the UK shifts to a more federal model, its regional components will likely start to look past London to similarly advance their economic and legislative interests.

The failure of Scotland’s independence bid raises a lot more questions than it resolves. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, acting as a Scottish supporter of Westminster, has promised a clear timeline for creating guarantees of autonomy for Scotland, though the process could take years. Scotland has demonstrated that the debate over autonomy can be negotiated in a constructive manner, but it is improbable that the showdowns with other European movements will proceed similarly.

The EU’s role in these conflicts is still uncertain. The organization provides an opportunity for autonomy-minded regions to influence EU policy without becoming fully independent. At the same time, the EU may be indirectly encouraging separatist movements to seek independence: The ability for the organization to intervene and resolve economic instability provides a hypothetical safety net for regions whose voters fear the economic toll of independence. However, the EU’s official structures for engaging regional aspirations are still rudimentary and unlikely to assuage enduring tensions in Catalonia, Veneto and other areas. If anything, the EU remains a partner for regions seeking a greater say in their affairs, not a replacement for central governments. But as decentralization continues to gain traction within nations, the face of European integration will need to reflect this kaleidoscopic reality. At least for now, Scotland’s citizens have demonstrated that unity — both within and among Europe’s states — is as vital as regional autonomy. u MATTEO CAVELIER RICCARDI ‘17 IS AN INTENDED EAST ASIAN STUDIES AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE CONCENTRATOR, AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND CULTURE SECTION MANAGER AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

and polls” as “something that Catalonia is missing.” Both writers hint at the fact that only 19 percent of the Catalan Parliament’s deputies support a coherent message of independence; the rest of the pro-independence majority supports only the nebulous “right to decide.”

Similarly, Veneto’s separatist movement has been derided for a lack of legitimacy. Italian weekly L’Espresso called the online referendum in March a “hoax” after discovering that one could sign up to vote with a fictitious name and cast innumerable ballots. A Le Monde correspondent in Rome, Philippe Ridet, went so far as to say that Lega Nord’s call for independence in Veneto was mere politicking with no policy implications. Speaking about the Veneto independence debate, but perhaps reflecting on Europe’s radical autonomy movements as a whole, former Economist writer Beppe Severgnini suggested that engaging with the movements in a serious way would “waste a ton of time.”

Unlike these other independence movements, Scotland never intended to gain full control over regional affairs. Instead, it only wished to reestablish Scottish agency in its own governance and finances, while ceding some powers to the EU. That desire is partly a result of Scottish politics. Scots traditionally vote for social democratic policies, placing Scotland historically in line with EU decision-making. In the context of the UK, Scots have voted liberal almost continuously since 1935, but because of the conservative majority in England, they have spent more than half that time under a conservative majority parliament in Westminster. The pro-separatist “yes” movement argued that “independence [would] give Scotland a seat at the top table and a voice when key decisions are being made about Europe’s future” — a voice that it alleged was being drowned out in London.

Although the pro-independence “yes” campaign may have lost the referendum, Scotland as a whole still emerged a winner. In response to the debates sparked by the Scottish referendum, the UK may take landmark steps to decentralize its government. A poll in early September, prior to the vote, suggested “yes” supporters outnumbered “no” supporters, sending Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as well as leaders of the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats scrambling. Party representatives hastily met to decide on a plan of action to reverse the trend and decided to promise major policy changes if Scotland chose to

29

A BONE TO

PICK

ARGENTINA IS IN A LIFE OR DEBT SITUATION.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

O

30

STORY BY ALEX LLOYD GEORGE / ART AND DESIGN BY AMANDA GOOGE & ANDREW STEARNS

n his deathbed, Oscar Wilde is reputed to have quipped, “I am dying as I have lived — beyond my means.” This sense of gallows humor is no doubt one that strikes a nerve with Argentines everywhere as the country slips into default for the second time this millennium. The first default arrived in 2001, at the tail end of the Argentine Great Depression, when the Argentine economy shrank by 28 percent and millions of jobs disappeared.

While the two debt defaults are separated by a mere 13 years, time is not the only source of intimacy between the two economic disasters. The second crisis is, in many senses, a case of Argentina’s vultures returning home to roost.

Early in September, the United Nations General Assembly passed a potentially historic piece of financial legislation. The res-

olution aimed to address sovereign debt — national debt held in foreign currency — by establishing “an intergovernmental negotiation process aimed at increasing the efficiency, stability and predictability of the international financial system.” The decision may not have the most inspiring prose, but it could reshape the landscape of the international financial system on a divisive issue: the recurring problem of sovereign debt defaults. An impactful resolution might allow the UN to establish some equity in an increasingly zero-sum and lawless system.

Despite being the cause of so much toxicity and strife, sovereign debt remains ubiquitous in the world today. While the history of debt is an elaborate one that stretches back several thousand years, sovereign debt defaults are relatively novel.

Perhaps the most telling default in antiquity was the case of Rome after the Punic Wars.

Though successful, the wars fought against Carthage came with an enormous cost to Roman coffers. Faced with the prospect of being unable to pay its debts, the Roman government decreased the amount of metal in its currency from 12 ounces to 2. Effectively, the currency suddenly devalued by a factor of six — roughly the same impact as turning 1970 dollars into 2014 dollars overnight. As such, the Roman government could mint coins at one-sixth the previous cost and were thus able to pay off their debt with relative ease. This strategy, known as currency debasement, was an extremely popular solution for overextended governments beginning in the ancient world.

Debasement was made possible in large part due to the fact that most debts were

holdings. Venezuela discovered the bellicose nature of this system in 1902: In order to protect their economic interests, British, German and Italian warships simply blockaded the nation’s ports until Venezuela paid its debts. Caracas’ predicament is equally valid for today’s Argentina, as powerful international creditors also threaten the country’s livelihood — though the menace now consists of fewer warships, more lawyers.

Debt settlements have increasingly involved compromises between a national government and international creditors.

Since defaulting on debt hurts a country’s creditors as well as the indebted nation itself, last-minute restructuring deals are the name of the game. The concessions made

A few days before the curtains closed on 2001, the Argentine national government defaulted on $82 billion worth of loans. in these deals by creditors to overburdened debtors became much more frequent as global markets became increasingly interdependent. Argentina has had experience with this mode of deal-making since its default in 1890, when private British creditors lent the country millions of pounds in order to grease the wheels of repayment.

The same creditors subsequently agreed to restructuring that involved a short-term reduction in interest payments when that loan proved insufficient. The successes of such techniques were amply reapplied over the years, as they not only provided debtors more flexibility in fulfilling their obligations, but also gave creditors more security and stability in their investments. By the time Argentina defaulted again in 1982, the processes of renegotiation, restructuring and rescheduling had become the bread and butter of the sovereign debt scene.

T

oday’s crisis mirrors the 2001 Buenos Aires default. Back then, Argentina faced the worst economic conditions it had ever seen, and the government was unable to pay off its multibillion-dollar international debts. The country’s economy had been mired in recession for a few years prior, due to the domino effect of the Russian and Brazilian financial crises, and it had been dancing on the edge of default since the 1990s. Among a confluence of tipping points, the refusal of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — which had been propping up the Argentine economy with loans for nearly a decade — to continue lending forced the country over a financial cliff. A few days before the curtains closed on 2001, the Argentine national government defaulted on $82 billion worth of loans.

The value of Argentine bonds, the country’s sovereign debt, plummeted as investors desperately tried to offload them onto the secondary debt market — where investors who had originally bought the debt could resell it at a discount. A few plucky financiers, however, continued to purchase Argentina’s debt, hoping to utilize the nation’s increasing inability to manage its finances in order to reap massive profits by going against the flow. Following its crippling default, Argentina became a nest of opportunity for vulture funds — investment firms that explicitly focus on buying distressed sovereign debt following a default. Though these financiers know that the debt is unlikely to be paid back at full value, their goal is to prey on desperate governments’ need for cash, build up a large portfolio of bonds and then sue the desperate government for the full value owed. This field was opened up by a 1996 court case involving Panama and a hedge fund called Elliott Associates. Run by billionaire investor Paul Singer, Elliott Associates successfully sued Panama for almost the entirety of the expected return on its bonds and used this lawsuit as the inspiration to later force an entire series of national governments to meet their full debt obligations. As others took after Elliott Associates’ example, a simple formula was crafted: Buy the debt of countries teetering on the edge (or already over the precipice) of default at a steep discount and sue those countries in court to force payment as close to full debt obligations as possible. The method marked a profound departure from the practice of renegotiating debts that had built up over the previous century.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

denominated in local currency. But as debt went international, things became much more complicated.

Two millennia later, sovereign debt defaults have proliferated due to the belligerent maelstrom that was Europe and the brittle economies of newly independent nations that emerged when colonialism collapsed. Civil wars, international conflict and the flowering of the modern financial market — in which countries can borrow from private investors by selling bonds internationally — have sent government borrowing into the stratosphere, and this surge has brought a similar increase in debt defaults. Though time has passed since the Roman affair, sovereign debt defaults are now more widespread than ever. But while the time-tested problem is still around, the time-tested solution — allowing central banks to manipulate currency values in order to avoid default — can no longer be applied.

By the 19th century, currency debasement had fallen out of vogue. While the Roman government in 200 BCE could afford to arbitrarily devalue its currency by simply stripping out more than 80 percent of the metal content, things are not so easy for modern governments. For starters, national debts are often denominated in currencies the debtor does not have control over, most commonly the US dollar or the euro, meaning that the government in question cannot drag itself out of a debt hole by tampering with the currency. For example, if Argentina issues its debt in US dollars and doesn’t wish to pay it back, the Argentine government can’t force the US Federal Reserve to print enough dollars to substantially devalue the US currency. Borrowing in international markets takes the form of selling bonds, which carry an interest rate and entitle the buyer to be paid back the original price of the bond — plus interest payments — by a certain date. As such, debt issuance is equivalent to taking out a loan. Because bonds can be sold through any exchange, they can take on the form of any currency.

Even if a country has control over its own currency, many creditor-debtor relations are already internationalized— creditors from countries like the United Kingdom have holdings anywhere from Bangladesh to Bolivia. Well-coordinated and powerful creditors, with military and naval power to boot, would not accept any currency manipulation measures that might prove unbeneficial to their own

31

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW FEATURE

32

Singer’s unconventional strategy has been outrageously successful. In the case of Panama, his firm bought $28.7 million of debt for a sale price of $17.5 million and eventually collected $57 million from the Panamanian government by claiming the repayment of the original debt plus fees and interest. Argentina’s case is even starker. The debt now controlled by Elliott Associates is one example in a pool of debts held by investors with similar strategies and is now worth $630 million at face value, though the company only paid $48 million for it originally. The sum of debts owed by Argentina to holdout investors, however, is now $1.5 billion; with interest and fees added on, it could even end up being as much as $3 billion. Given how much the country is already struggling to stay afloat, being forced to pay the full amount could cripple many of the government’s vital functions.

Argentina is desperate not to meet the same fate as Panama, especially since the country’s decision to default on its debts was designed to establish a clean slate for its troubled economic policy. Elliott Associates’ holdings originally accounted for a tiny portion of the $82 billion that the country defaulted on back in 2001. The debt that didn’t make its way into the hands of vulture funds went through the same process of renegotiation that was common throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

Through restructuring deals that dragged on until 2005 and 2010, the creditors agreed to take a ‘haircut’ — or reduction — on these debts, and the Argentine government agreed to pay back the debt at this renegotiated price. Argentina’s government has honored the haircut terms. Or rather, it has attempted to.

Using an impeccable understanding of international and local laws, Elliott Associates and similar vulture funds have made it impossible for Argentina to settle its debts through conventional means. Because the 2001 debt default was issued in New York, it falls under New York law, and in the heat of the legal tussle between the investors and Argentina, the former won a crucial skirmish by utilizing the nuances of New York regulations. Judge Thomas Griesa of the Southern District Court of New York ruled that Argentina could not pay the majority of its creditors until it had paid the holdout investors, named as such because they did not accept the restructuring deals that Argentina had already negotiated. Following a failed appeal to the US Supreme Court, Argentina was forced to either pay the $1.5

billion it owed or default. Unable to finance the burden, the nation defaulted in July of this year.

Argentina’s latest default has brought the conflict between creditors and indebted nations to yet another impasse. The Argentine government continues to condemn the holdout investors as thugs holding a nation of 40 million for ransom, while Singer and his fellow investors, aside from pursuing profit, still believe that Argentina’s government is flying in the face of international financial law, threatening the global financial system as a result. Much of the holdout investors’ case pivots on the idea that they should be paid because the Argentine government agreed to the commitment when it borrowed the money in the first place. Singer also proposes an ethical dimension to the situation. A Bloomberg Businessweek profile on Singer noted that he “characterizes the case as a fight against charlatans who refuse to play by the market’s rules.” Singer has panned Argentina as being responsible for “horrendous government policies in many areas” and says that they would be flouting norms and getting off scot-free for their behavior if the state were allowed to renege on its commitments. The argument might come across as patronizing, especially in the face of the enormous payouts Singer would receive at Argentina’s loss, but it’s one that rests primarily on the international rule of law — if there’s no guarantee that a country will follow through on its obligations, then the sanctity of international contracts rests on thin ice.

Some of Argentina’s argument also relies on ethical reasoning, but Singer and the Argentine government unsurprisingly reach different conclusions. Investors might be legally entitled to the full payout, and though that may be the morally scrupulous thing to do, not only is it unfeasible, but it would also come at a devastatingly high human cost to Argentines. Argentina’s government certainly carries some responsibility; it’s hardly a model of democratic government, with the country ranked 106th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index in 2013. Moreover, its misguided fiscal policies are what forced it to accrue this debt in the first place. Still, it is a legitimate question as to whether it is right, or even possible, to hold a nation of millions accountable for the corruption or incompetence of its leaders.

It’s worth mentioning that while around 92 percent of Argentina’s creditors accepted the terms of restructuring offered

by the government in 2005 and 2010, the creditors weren’t given much in the way of choice. The options at the time were either accepting a haircut or not seeing a dime of their original investment. The terms offered weren’t exactly generous either — one otherwise sympathetic commentator described them as the “worst terms since World War II,” as investors had to accept only 30 cents on every dollar.

The holdout investors have said that they are willing to sit down with Argentina and hammer out terms; Singer himself claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that “we could settle this thing in an afternoon.” But the need to keep up appearances may be standing in the way of a deal — if Singer capitulated and accepted the terms offered to the majority of creditors, then countries around the world that are nearing default would undoubtedly notice. For an investment strategy that hinges upon stubbornness, concession would set a precedent that would likely undermine the effectiveness of Singer’s tactic.

Although holdout investors have professed openness to renegotiation, further compromise may not be viable for Argentina. Even if the two parties could come together and hammer out terms tolerable to both sides, the nation would be legally obliged to extend the same improved offer to the 92 percent of creditors that previously agreed to restructure the debt they held. In short, Argentina’s costs of servicing the debt would skyrocket — an event that would have dire consequences for the country’s already troubled economy.

This is perhaps the fundamental difference between sovereign debt and almost all other kinds of debt: The risk associated with sovereign debt considers both the stakes involved with damaging the country’s population with the difficulty of making a national government do something it is not inclined to do. As a result, the rules are different and more fluid than for other types of debt. Holdout investors may claim that the Argentine government is violating international finance regulations, but before 1996 and the Panama case, the de facto rule of sovereign debt defaults was that creditors and debtors renegotiated to terms that were more likely to be equal sacrifices for both sides. This deal-making is also a process that can go on for years, while both sides haggle endlessly until they strike a bargain. Often the terms are not kind to creditors, but this is an implied risk of buying sovereign debt and the primary reason

why such investments carry high interest rates to begin with. The lawless landscape of sovereign debt means that every transaction and interaction between creditor and debtor is laced with uncertainty. Perhaps some sort of wide-reaching regulatory apparatus is necessary.

$138 billion

tory structure for sovereign debt could be in the works, the countries that rejected the proposition are key. The United States, the UK, Germany and Japan all opposed the measure. It’s no coincidence that the nations with financial centers like New York, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo are keen to

BIGGEST SOVEREIGN DEBT DEFAULTS $82 billion

SINCE 2000

$7.9 billion

Greece 2012

2001

he thought of getting caged in a similar predicament to that of Argentina concerns many countries, particularly developing ones, who fret that what little procedure there was to sovereign debt default has vanished. This anxiety was the propelling force behind a UN resolution recently passed for “the establishment of a multilateral legal framework for sovereign debt restructuring processes.” Introduced by Bolivia on behalf of the Group of 77 — a group of developing nations banded together in a sub-UN intergovernmental organization that includes China, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Argentina — the resolution passed with a strong majority: 124 in favor, 11 against and 58 abstentions.

Although the strong numeric majority would suggest that a supranational regula-

Jamaica 2010

Ecuador 2008

Source: The Wall Street Journal avoid more regulation. Tellingly, a spokesperson for the United States “stressed that she could not support a statutory mechanism for sovereign debt restructuring as such a mechanism was likely to create economic uncertainty,” and urged renewed efforts to go through established global channels like the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The desire to avoid uncertainty is an admirable and agreeable one, but it’s too little, too late: The reality after Panama and Argentina is mired in uncertainty anyway.

Calls to use the IMF as a conduit for reform are fine as far as they go, but they don’t go far. IMF management has a past full of failed attempts and a reputation for draconian measures. And since it was unable to establish a sovereign default restructuring

ALEX LLOYD GEORGE ‘16 IS A POLITICAL SCIENCE CONCENTRATOR AND A BPR STAFFER ABROAD.

FEATURE BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

T

Argentina

$3.2 billion

mechanism in 2003, despite a robust effort, there’s no guarantee that it could reform its practices going forward. Though a decade has passed since these reform attempts collapsed, the issues surrounding sovereign debt remain the same — countries with significant financial centers prefer to keep decision-making power at home. Financial industry initiatives, like the International Capital Markets Association’s proposal to include clauses obliging all debt holders to go along with any restructuring deal that 75 percent of the relevant holders accept, have also come out of the woodwork. Plans like these would prevent situations like Argentina’s, but would also fail to address the underlying problem: the lack of an overarching solution for the disorder that occurs after a sovereign debt default.

Final judgments must be kept waiting until a full picture of the framework proposed by the UN emerges, but it’s an encouraging step towards a secure progression of responses to sovereign debt defaults.

The nonbinding nature of UN resolutions means that such a process is no doubt a long way off; a resolution serves more as a memorandum of understanding than anything else and would require independent changes in legislation by each signatory.

Furthermore, the opposition of big money centers will likely prove a significant hurdle to making this an effective measure. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm of emerging international powerhouses like Brazil and China — countries whose debt levels have soared in recent years — means that progress may be viable even in the short term.

The crux of the international sovereign debt issue is the delicate balance between debtor and creditor. If the global system leans too far to one side, unrest and unruliness are bound to follow. When the debtors have the upper hand, there is no accountability for mismanagement, and creditors withdraw their resources from the pool of capital that debtors need access to. If the imbalance leans too far to the creditors, debtors will experience a downward spiral as default feeds into default and legal and monetary losses pile up. The actions of Paul Singer and his peers — morally debatable but not technically illegal — have upset this balance. While debt and death were synonymous for Oscar Wilde, the world cannot subject its developing nations to the same misanthropic fate. u

33

STRANGER ON OUR SHORES Crafting a safe landing for refugees STORY BY CLARA TONDATO DA RUOS / ART BY KRISTINE MAR

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

A

34

ccording to the Migrants’ Files, over 23,000 migrants died trying to reach Europe between 2000 and 2013 — a number so staggering that Russia Today called the Mediterranean an “underwater graveyard.” Illegal entry into the continent, especially through Italy, has long been a contentious issue on a national and European level, but civil unrest in the Middle East and ongoing instability in many North African nations have recently led thousands more to leave their homes in search of safety. More than 100,000 people have landed in Italy this year — a significant increase from just 43,000 in 2013.

Among these are immigrants in search of financial security and refugees escaping from the horrors of civil war, persecution and violence.

In response to the increasing number of shipwrecks that have followed this wave of immigration, the Italian Marine Corps created a rescue initiative called Mare Nostrum, or Our Sea. This program was approved under Italy’s left-wing government in October 2013 after the death of over 350 migrants who tried to reach Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point, which has become the new symbol of Italian immigration since the incident. The initiative aims to avoid such casualties by intervening in dangerous passages and taking incoming immigrants to detention centers. The government then arrests the people who brought them, making the journey into the country safer for migrants but riskier for traffickers.

As a key entry point into the rest of Europe, Italy is the focus of continental reform efforts, but the country is not braving the waters alone. After a recent summit meeting between Italy’s Minister of the Interior, Angelino Alfano, and the European Union’s Commissioner for Home Affairs, Cecilia Malmström, Italy has finally prompted the EU to take responsibility for the border crisis. The new pact comes after years of mostly unilateral Italian efforts to both stem the tide of immigration and ensure safe passage for those involved. The Italian marines, for example, have been patrolling the Strait of

Sicily since 2004 in an attempt to catch traffickers. Since October 2013, the marines have reportedly saved — and subsequently detained — about 100,000 people. They’ve done so not only by surveying the coasts of Italy, but also by navigating past Italy’s own territorial waters to look for vehicles transporting immigrants to the country’s shores.

The incursion of Italian forces past their official national boundaries has long suggested the need for more international efforts, but the EU has criticized Italian practices for their ineffectiveness and denounced the disgraceful conditions of Italian detention facilities, which The New York Times described as “inhumane, inefficient and costly.” As a result, European officials have avoided any direct involvement with Italy’s program and have, up until now, mostly left immigration policy and practices to the EU’s member countries.

Given the rapidly expanding number of refugees seeking asylum, the EU has had to reconsider this stance. Following the new pact, the EU will soon deploy Frontex Plus, its border control agency, to monitor the Italian border and devise future immigration policy. But while Frontex Plus is partially modeled after Mare Nostrum — at least in terms of its role in patrolling the seas — Alfano reiterated that the new initiative is not “a photocopy with a name change.” Frontex Plus has very different aims, as it has promised to shift Italy’s priorities from limiting immigrant casualties to protecting Europe’s borders. While the extra help may come as a relief to Italy, which considered Mare Nostrum to be only a temporary, emergency response, it comes at a significant devaluation of the lives of immigrants and refugees.

Founded in 1999 to oversee border protection projects, Frontex Plus has been tasked with protecting Europe’s maritime border on the Mediterranean. But the organization’s goal to secure and protect the border, unlike Mare Nostrum’s goal of protecting and saving immigrants, is worryingly narrow in scope. If there is an emergency outside the border, Frontex Plus will extend no rescue party. While the EU

maintains that Frontex Plus strengthens the Italian effort, it will maintain the burden on the Italian government to go outside its territorial waters in emergency situations. As such, Frontex Plus is advantageous only in the sense that it could serve as a first step towards future policy reform in the EU; the way the program is framed today and the aims it has set are disappointing. Cloaked under the rhetoric of a stable initiative, the EU’s decision only superficially addresses the crisis at hand and robs asylum seekers of a consolidated safety net during their crossing.

The ultimate effect of the EU’s policy shift will depend on how Frontex and Mare Nostrum work together — and there already seems to be disagreement about practicalities. Although Malmström has remarked that Frontex Plus will only serve to reinforce Italy’s actions, Alfano has stated that the country will retire Mare Nostrum this November. This uncertainty regarding control of waters and delegation of responsibilities is further proof of the EU’s inability to effectively implement multilateral plans. It also suggests the unwillingness of its members to shoulder the burden of immigration or to even acknowledge it as an issue to be solved by the European community at large.

en Southern Europe, but who also cannot apply for legal status in a different country.

The efforts of humanitarian campaigns such as Mare Nostrum, with all its flaws, are seriously hindered if there is no willingness within the EU to create a multilateral agreement on refugees.

Further complicating the potential for a sustainable and enduring policy on im-

SINCE OCTOBER 2013, ITALIAN MARINES HAVE REPORTEDLY SAVED — AND SUBSEQUENTLY DETAINED — ABOUT 100,000 IMMIGRANTS NOT ONLY BY SURVEYING THE COASTS OF ITALY, BUT ALSO BY NAVIGATING PAST THE COUNTRY’S TERRITORIAL WATERS.

CLARA TONDATA DA RUOS ‘17 IS AN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS CONCENTRATOR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

There is no unified European structure for dealing with the influx of asylum seekers, and countries have no obligation to grant residency — even to people who have successfully applied for legal status in other member states. Meanwhile, the number of individuals seeking asylum has surged in the past year, especially as a result of the Syrian civil war. While it is true that the continent cannot possibly integrate and absorb all the immigrants seeking refuge, the EU member states have extremely inconsistent policies on granting asylum, making the overall process confusing and unreliable for those seeking security. John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International has called European actions against the crisis in the Mediterranean “shameful.” Many members of the EU, including Italy, maintain a quota on refugees that blocks asylum seekers from finding safety on Europe’s shores.

Because of the 2003 Dublin III Regulation mandates, which state that the first country in which immigrants request asylum must handle and accommodate the immigrant, there is no way for even those refugees who do receive asylum to move around Europe as other Europeans do. International channels for refugee redistribution simply do not exist — a problem for those who often do not want to remain in debt-strick-

migration is the fact that the entire debate has been framed with alarmist rhetoric: Immigrants are increasingly portrayed as an economic and social threat to stability.

In Italy, this has been a fundamental talking point in right-wing politics for years. With the rise of anti-communitarian pessimism, such groups have gained traction in national constituencies and increased their influence in Brussels. In Italy, only a minority actually holds these extreme beliefs on immigration, but the right certainly leans towards isolationism. The Lega Nord, one of Italy’s most conservative right-wing parties, ran a campaign in 2010 depicting a Native American with the caption: “They suffered immigration and now they live in reservations!” Alfano himself has talked about keeping immigrants from stealing Italian jobs.

This line of argument is deeply flawed.

Many economists and think tanks agree that immigrants do not drive down wages or jobs, and historical data has often shown that unemployment actually decreases during periods of high migration. More importantly, the moral implications of the EU’s immigration policy on thousands of helpless refugees should take priority.

In 2011, illegal immigration and related policies cost Italy only 2.07 percent of national expenditure. The issue is less about how much money is being spent, but rather about how it is being utilized. In the same year, Italy spent approximately €124 million ($156.9 million USD) on immigrant integration projects, but almost double that amount on trying to keep immigrants out.

By pouring money into unsustainable pre-

vention measures, Italy will only exacerbate the dire situation for refugees while wasting taxpayer euros.

In Italy, there is a deep-rooted idea that projects such as Mare Nostrum actually incentivize illegal immigration. However, immigrants who choose to make the trip to Italy often do so as a last resort and not necessarily with the expectation of assistance. Radical anti-immigrant movements like Beppe Grillo’s Five Stars Movement and the more moderate right have repeated misinformation. But European inaction, combined with the plight of Middle Eastern immigrants, means that immigration is an issue that is unlikely to go away soon.

As a result, these political movements will have to either moderate their views or be ignored — presuming Italy doesn’t want to have death on its doorstep.

Although effective national immigration policy is important, it is only truly viable if EU member states work together on multilateral reforms. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has advocated, there needs to be an agreement on mobility for immigrants and refugees similar to the one made for European residents. Although this maneuver will involve ceding some border authority, it would also help redistribute migratory fluxes to all regions of the continent and mitigate any unfair burdens on one nation. Furthermore, there needs to be a shift in policy from the politics of protectionism to one of sympathy and integration. Everyone agrees that Europe cannot shoulder the entire burden of immigration and asylum seekers, but if it intends to be a leader in equitable treatment of civilians, the continent must take concrete steps towards saving immigrants from the immediate danger of their journeys.

Until the EU revisits its responsibility to protect the well-being of immigrants, there will be no effective solution to the immigration issue. Emergency programs and militarized borders will not stop people from fleeing civil wars; they will only inflict further loss of life. It does not make sense to create only reactionary policies, which ultimately permit traffickers to take advantage of human suffering. With Frontex Plus, the EU is choosing to patch up a problem instead of creating the sustainable solution: a continental approach to immigration and internal corridors for integration. u

35

POLITICS AGAINST HUMANITY Responsibility to Protect is not protecting Syria.

STORY BY PREDRAG PANDILOSKI / ART BY KWANG CHOI

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW WORLD

T

36

he Syrian civil war has been marked by crimes against humanity so undeniable that they could have leapt into existence from a textbook, yet the world has remained largely idle. Reports suggest that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad presided over the systematic murder of more than 11,000 prisoners between 2011 and 2013.

The United Nations has confirmed nine intentional massacres of Syrians since the beginning of the conflict — eight perpetrated by the government and one by the opposition. Al-Assad’s government has openly confined, tortured and killed thousands of civilians it considered a threat during the course of a war that has caused millions to flee. Both sides have engaged in siege warfare: setting up blockades around populated areas, preventing humanitarian aid and starving the areas’ populations. An imam in Damascus was so desperate that he issued a fatwa — an Islamic religious ruling — that allowed people in refugee camps to eat dogs and cats, which the Quran otherwise prohibits consuming. In some cases, people in besieged cities have resorted to eating grass.

As these atrocities have flickered across screens worldwide, global authorities have debated how to address the escalating crisis, yet they have come to no firm conclusion. For cases like Syria, the UN has a set of standards — “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P — to guide humanitarian intervention. While the severity of crimes against humanity in Syria demanded such intervention by the UN, political arm wrestling between Russia, China and the United States prevented it from occurring. These machinations are rooted not in the Syrian conflict itself, but in the history of botched intervention that echoes profoundly across international policy today.

R2P and the body of international law that supports it attempt to redefine sovereignty as contingent on a nation’s ability to protect the welfare of its people. This principle allows the international community to intervene in a nation that has either steamrolled or actively ignored the well-being of its citizens. It contains three foundational pillars: 1) Every state has the responsibility to protect its population from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and other

mass atrocities; 2) The international community has a responsibility to encourage and assist states in this task; and 3) Should a state fail to protect its population, the international community has the responsibility to use diplomatic and humanitarian collective action in accordance with the UN Charter. Unanimously adopted during the UN’s 2005 World Summit, R2P arose from the onslaught of mass atrocities that occurred towards the end of the 20th century — from the massacre in Bosnia to the Khmer Rouge to the Rwandan genocide.

The principle, as first conceived, attempted to guarantee the basic right to life for citizens of every nation.

In 2011, bloody events in Libya required the UN Security Council to authorize its first military intervention under the auspices of R2P. Prior to the intervention, protests aimed at ousting Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s government resulted in a bloody civil war. After repeatedly pressuring Qaddafi’s government to stop its human rights violations, the Security Council passed a resolution demanding an imme-

diate ceasefire while authorizing member states to take all necessary measures to protect civilian lives. Russia and China — often opposed to any UN intervention within a sovereign state — did not oppose the resolution. NATO forces, along with Jordan, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, then launched a military intervention, imposing a no-fly zone over Libya and striking Qaddafi’s forces. Within months, Qaddafi’s government crumbled, and the rebels launched an offensive, taking back territory before eventually claiming Tripoli, Libya’s capital. The UN recognized the anti-Qaddafi government — the National Transitional Council — as the legal representative of Libya, and the new government then captured, tortured and murdered Qaddafi.

Western governments lauded the humanitarian intervention in Libya as a successful mission that saved thousands and carried out R2P’s principles. But many other governments disagreed. As more than a hundred prominent African intellectuals wrote in an open letter, “NATO went be-

yond what was predicted in the Resolution, declar[ed] the Qaddafi government illegitimate, pursued regime change, supported opposition rebels and proclaimed the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council as the legitimate governing body in Libya.” Critiques of the operation raised accusations of sinister paternalism: Many nations argued that Libya’s conflict was a straightforward civil war with relatively few human rights atrocities. Because of this, they claimed that the West exaggerated the existence of war crimes as an excuse to intervene for the sake of their own oil interests in the country. Moreover, NATO did not engineer any sustainable exit strategy after initiating the strikes, leaving Libya with its infrastructure in tatters and an incompetent government tasked with picking up the pieces. All of this combines to color NATO’s intervention as an operation designed to install a pro-Western government in an oil-rich nation, rather than as a humanitarian mission designed to protect a helpless population.

ACCORDING TO STUART GOTTLIEB, “THE ENORMOUS DAMAGE CAUSED

BY THE OVER-ZEALOUS LIBYA INTERVENTION” CREATED RUSSIA AND CHINA’S “NEW RED LINE: THERE WILL BE NO MORE R2P-STYLE MISSIONS.”

twist international law.

Nonetheless, the UN has made some progress in Syria. This spring, Russia agreed to a UN resolution that compelled both the Syrian government and the rebels to allow humanitarian aid to civilians and to lift the sieges on a few Syrian towns. In addition, the Syrian government has agreed to give up its chemical weapons under the threat of US military intervention and Russian pressure, although barely five percent of the stockpiles have currently been turned over.

The resolution does not address the main atrocities at hand: By the time the international community took action, the tolls of war were already too high.

According to Columbia University professor Stuart Gottlieb, “the enormous damage caused by the over-zealous Libya intervention” created Russia and China’s “new red line: There will be no more R2Pstyle missions authorized by the UN.” Indeed, the NATO intervention in Libya created a “get out of intervention free” card for China and Russia to wave in the face of the West whenever it attempts to invoke R2P. Originally a norm born of good intentions and optimism, protecting vulnerable populations from abuse has unfortunately become a tool that major states use in pursuit of their self-interested goals. NATO’s overreaching embrace of R2P in Libya has been compounded by failure: The reemerged conflicts that continue to rage in Libya only bolster the arguments of skeptics. As Russia continues to shield the al-Assad government from international pressure — and thereby protects Russian political and economic interests — NATO should rethink its policies on R2P in order to avoid handing ammunition to geopolitical rivals.

Despite R2P’s faults, we should not write it off entirely. The principle still has the potential to emerge as a powerful norm and prove critical to preventing mass atrocities. But in order to restore R2P and prove its legitimacy, all nations must stop abusing the principle to justify their self-serving actions. In their battle to globalize their political values and advance their economic positions, the great powers should not invoke R2P as a tool. Instead, these countries must use the Responsibility to Protect for just that — to safeguard populations suffering at the hands of atrocities too terrible to ignore. u PREDRAG PANDILOSKI ‘17 IS A DEVELOPMENT STUDIES AND PUBLIC POLICY CONCENTRATOR AND A STAFF WRITER AT BPR.

WORLD BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

The support for this claim is mixed, but the truth in this case is less important than the perception of Western actions. Qaddafi’s soldiers did shoot protesters and deny medical care to rebel combatants. On the other hand, the rebels engaged in racial targeting of black Africans during the conflict. The lack of clarity in who was committing more atrocities should have tempered NATO action, but instead the West wholeheartedly embraced the revolutionary crusade. Unsurprisingly, the perception that the West was simply furthering its geopolitical interests garnered a seething critique not just in Africa, but also among other great powers including Russia, China and India. Abuse of R2P by NATO damaged the legitimacy of the principle and jeopardized its future use to the detriment of countries like Syria.

Much like the Libyan conflict, the Syrian civil war arose from the Arab Spring, when President Bashar al-Assad and his army responded to nationwide protests with brutal crackdowns. In a matter of months, the national uprising evolved into an armed conflict. Since then, the Syrian

civil war has become one of the most violent and destructive conflicts of the past decade. Besides the severe violations of human rights committed by both the government and the rebels, the conflict has created almost three million refugees, four million internally displaced persons and 800,000 civilians under siege — many of whom are now dying of starvation and disease. Currently, the death toll is estimated to be over 190,000.

These numbers make Libya’s atrocities pale in comparison. But years of unilateral Western intervention and abuse of R2P have kept the UN out of the conflict. The Security Council’s inability to agree on Syrian intervention arose from a battle of political gamesmanship between Russia and the United States, both of which hold powerful energy interests in the region. Russia and Iran both transferred weapons to the Syrian army and supported Bashar al-Assad’s government, while the United States, along with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, supported and supplied the rebels. The United States is deeply invested in ousting al-Assad’s government in favor of a more Western-friendly one that would act as a political and economic ally in the Middle East — a relative necessity given continual tensions in US-Iran relations and the destabilizing force of ISIS, which will undoubtedly have long-term effects on the progress of the Middle East. Not one to pass up an opportunity to secure its own interests in the region, Russia has been doing everything in its power to swing Syria’s political allegiance away from the West. When the United States first called on the Security Council to intervene in Syria in 2014, China and Russia vetoed every proposal, with both governments issuing statements expressing concern that the West would abuse R2P in Syria as they did in Libya. The improper action taken by the United States in Libya thus gave Russia a legitimate reason to veto the proposed interventions.

But Russia would have had strategic reasons to avoid the intervention anyway; misuse of R2P was a handy excuse. The country has exploited the principle to further its own interests: Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked it to justify his military intervention in Crimea earlier this year. This use of R2P in a situation with no realistic threats of mass atrocities even further delegitimized the emerging norm.

It also underscores an important point: It’s not just the West that uses the hazy line between civil war and governmental abuse to

37

SHERRILYN IFILL Sherrilyn Ifill is the seventh president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She has served as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union and is currently a professor of law at the University of Maryland.

INTERVIEW BY SAM RUBINSTEIN

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

As a top civil rights lawyer, what keeps you up at night?

Ferguson has kept me up all night. I worry about the safety of people who are advocating for their civil rights. I think anyone who saw the first nights of the Ferguson protests — the snipers, the gas grenades, the tear gas — can understand why safety is an essential concern at this point. I worry about the ability of marginalized young people to have a chance. That means an education system that gives them real economic opportunities, so they can have their own families and realize their dreams. I also worry about those who have taken a path of crime and who need a path back. And, to be perfectly honest, I worry about almost everything about the criminal justice system. We’re talking about real people whose liberty is infringed, real people whose lives are taken away, real people who don’t get second chances. I worry that racial discrimination affects the criminal justice process, which delegitimizes the process. That’s dangerous and corrosive to our democracy. Needless to say, I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights.

38

We are now a month out of the shooting in Ferguson. What impact has it had?

The issue of police officers shooting unarmed African Americans did not begin with the Mike Brown case, although it did constitute something of a tipping point, both for the people of that community and nationally. Three weeks before, Eric Garner was killed by police officers in Staten Island. However with Garner’s case, we very quickly learned the name of the officer.

He was placed on administrative leave, and preparations were made to engage the mayor and police chief. Ferguson was such a stark contrast. The lack of transparency was astonishing. What we saw in Ferguson was an utter lack of respect. The conduct of police officers during the protest was shocking and appalling and revealed to Americans the militarization of our police forces. People are also now aware of a broader lack of accountability in government, given that officials refused to release documentation about the shooting and that the incident report was not contemporaneously created. What happened in Ferguson is reflective of a broader phenomenon where incredibly weak local governments do not take accountability for real leadership on economic or educational development. I bet, to this day, you can’t even tell me the name of the mayor of Ferguson, or any councilperson, or the town manager. We were presented with the police chief, who works for them. Elected leadership is just passive.

Did you get the sense that the case of Michael Brown was a touchstone that aggravated existing racial tensions?

Very much so. Killing Mike Brown and leaving his body in the street for four hours reflected a level of disrespect for the community from the police. This community has a deep mistrust for the police department to begin with. Ferguson and the towns surrounding it rely heavily on traffic fines for revenue, so as a

result of the excessive reliance on speeding tickets and of the constant engagement with the police, many people feel harassed.

There are also pretty awful incidents of police brutality that have been alleged against the police in Ferguson that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now investigating as part of their [civil rights] investigation.

What policy ramifications should come of this event?

Four days after Mike Brown’s killing, the Legal Defense Fund submitted a letter to the attorney general with proposals aimed at changing police culture in this country. Through their Justice Assistance Grant Program, the DOJ provides $400 million in funds to police departments around the country. We suggested that those funds come with certain requirements including training around both explicit and implicit biases, training for de-escalation of violent encounters, training on encounters with the mentally ill and requirements for the use of body-worn cameras. Police officers should be credited for not discharging their weapons and for de-escalating a situation. We really believe that the funding streams present an opportunity to change the culture of police departments around the country by requiring intense training around a core set of issues and by incentivizing police [departments] to not engage in violence...to have a more diverse police force and to engage with the communities they serve. What we too often see on too many videos from all over the country are police officers using every opportunity to ramp up the conflict to a higher level of aggravation. They are supposed to be trained to stop it. What we have continued to see linger is the perception of young African-American men as dangerous and criminal. Until we begin to reverse this perception, and until all Americans — white Americans in particular — believe in the humanity of black people, we will continue to have these incidents of violence, particularly when we are talking about police, who need the training to control what might be their own irrational biases or stereotypes.

Is the United States backsliding in race relations?

I don’t know that the bar was very high, so I don’t know that we can be backsliding. But I think people forget. Every day I watch people interacting with one another in hotels, in train stations and in bus depots, and other people don’t even know why they’re able to do that. They don’t even know that it came at the cost of lives and struggles. We now just breathe that like air, and it seems perfectly normal. That all goes back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so it would be impossible for me to say that I think we’ve gone backwards. We have every reason to want and demand greater progress. We’ve made progress in enormous ways, progress that is so vast, and so fast, that we almost don’t recognize it has happened anymore. And then in other ways we haven’t made progress; in other ways we still have such a ways to go, and now our expectations are higher than they ever were.

Photo: NAACP Legal Defense Fund

HUGH CLEMENTS Hugh Clements became Providence’s 37th Chief of Police in 2012. Clements has received recognition from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for his service and holds a bachelor of science in justice administration from Roger Williams University.

INTERVIEW BY HENRY KNIGHT What was your initial reaction to the events in Ferguson, Missouri?

There were flaws by the local authorities in their approach: More information should have been released more quickly. The appearance that they used force in their law enforcement tactics — such as when they brought out the artillery before they had conversations or tried to develop a relationship with the protestors — is something that I thought was in error.

How would you have managed the police response in Ferguson differently?

I would have tried to develop a rapport and communicate with people who wanted answers and with leaders in the community.

They certainly have a right to protest, and I would have promoted peaceful protesting and set standards around that similar to those we set with Occupy Providence. We were given praise for the way that we handled that — by having continuous meetings with the leaders of the Occupy Movement. We actually escorted them in marches and set up circumstances in which they could peacefully protest. We certainly wouldn’t go there with heavily armed officers and in big numbers. In fact, we stayed off on the side. Unlike what you saw on the West Coast and elsewhere around the country, we had zero violence...With respect to the Ferguson situation, coming out with the heavy artillery and a large show of force has shown, over time, to be a mistake. It goes way back to the 1960s with the racial strikes or to 1999 with the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle. There are lessons to be learned by law enforcement when coming out with vehicles, and in the uniforms that the police wear, and with the numbers that the police bring out. The absence of police sometimes fosters a better relationship, or police in small numbers; someone from a position of authority in the department who can speak to the leaders of the organization to give answers and find out exactly what they’re looking to do.

According to Go Local Prov, the city of Johnston, Rhode Island “obtained 30 units of armor plating, nearly 600 high-capacity rifle magazines” and other equipment. Does Johnston’s local law enforcement really need to be that militarized?

I don’t know the inner workings of their town well enough to comment on what they need or what they don’t need from a law enforcement standpoint. I know the police chief well and I’m

Where do you draw the line between necessary preparation strategy and excessive militarization?

I think it’s important for law enforcement to be prepared. There is a rise of civil unrest around a number of issues surrounding this complicated political world that we live in. Especially being in a capital city, we’re prone to having more visits and conferences of a pretty fiery type. We should be prepared for a hot-button issue to draw the attention of radical groups that may want to cause violence within the community. However, it’s important from the standpoint of law enforcement to not show an aggressive stance or to use brute force in return, and in fact, police should not try to escalate the situation.

Trust seems to be the distinguishing factor between necessary preparation and excessive militarization. How do you build trust with the community?

We have a police department advisory board comprised of members from the community, the clergy and many different groups in the city and state. But we also have nontraditional partners in the community too, including the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence, a gang intervention unit.

I think it’s important that we’re connected to many of the different organizations in the community, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We have members of the Providence Police Department who serve on the Southeast Asian community board. We also serve on housing boards throughout the city, which is not a traditional thing for police departments around the country to do. Most importantly, it’s about accountability in the community, transparency and respect — respect to the community that we police and respect to the individuals with whom we come in contact.

You’ll recall the activism that drove Ray Kelly from Brown University’s campus last year. Many of the protestors were Providence citizens: people of color who feel personally victimized by your policies. How do you respond to their stories?

I was very disappointed that we were unable to hear Commissioner Kelly speak. I understand the concern in the community, but it’s always about the communication. The issue in policing diverse communities in America, and all communities really, is that people are very concerned about violent crime. We go to community meetings all the time where people of color impress upon us the importance for more police in their communities and for greater enforcement. Where the community wants some heavy or solid enforcement action from their police department, we must, as a department and individually as police officers, balance individuals’ constitutional and civil rights in performing our police duties. Our policies actually promote that. We have a high volume of calls, a high volume of interactions in the community. And based on that, our percentage of complaints is not that high. It’s really not.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

In the wake of the shooting, many have advocated for police to wear body cameras. With local police departments stockpiling expensive military gear, why isn’t this technology more widespread?

Economics are a huge issue with technology and policing around the country. There may be some opposition from unions, but I know there are also some unions that are very much in support.

We haven’t had the opportunity to have that conversation here in Providence yet. [The military gear question] is separate — that’s equipment given to police via the 1033 program. The federal government doesn’t have the body camera equipment to just hand out to local law enforcement.

sure he took into account how important it was to protect his community and that he put a lot of thought into the judgment as to whether to take that equipment.

39

DENNIS ROSS

MAEN RASHID AREIKAT Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat currently serves as the chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) delegation to the United States. Prior to his appointment to Washington, he served as Chairman of the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority.

Dennis Ross has been a principal actor in US policy towards Israel and Palestine for decades. More recently, he worked for the National Security Council as the Special Director of the Central Region.

INTERVIEW BY SAM RUBINSTEIN Do you believe that there is sufficient domestic political support for the Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate effectively?

If the two leaders came and presented [a deal] to the public, I’m not sure the public would do handstands, but I think they would be more open to it than is generally assumed. The real challenge is whether you can create a context where both leaders feel more comfortable moving [forwards] than not moving [at all]…You have to show that something can change for the better, because there is a perception that it can’t.

Is it true that Yasir Arafat did not accept a deal at the Camp David Accords because he thought he would be assassinated if he did?

At Camp David, he rejected what we were proposing because he said if he accepted it, we would be marching behind his hearse.

I think, in truth, when he rejected [President Bill Clinton’s] parameters, it wasn’t that. He wasn’t prepared to end the conflict.

The conflict defined him.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Do the Palestinians stand to gain more from United Nations statehood status than from negotiations with Israel?

They will not gain anything [at the UN]. One of the problems with the Palestinian national movement is that historically it has focused much more on symbols than on facts. No symbolic moves at the UN are going to advance the cause of Palestinian statehood one iota. I would like to see the Palestinians focus on how to build the state, rather than on symbols.

40

Is Israel a human rights violator?

There is no such thing as an occupation that is benign. On the other hand, a lot of security measures that exist didn’t emerge because there were no threats. There was an intifada, where large numbers of Israelis got blown up in buses and cafes and nightclubs and pizza parlors. To be fair, Palestinian security forces are doing much more than they used to do. But there are a lot of things that the Israelis do that help ensure that there aren’t bombings in Israel…How does the United States react when there are big security threats? What happens to civil liberties when you are afraid that bombs will go off? That affects the reality...To equate it to apartheid is to cheapen apartheid. That was an ideological subjugation by a very small minority that had a racist element. That is not what you see in the West Bank today. What you see is Palestinians having to endure an occupation and the Israelis controlling large aspects of their lives. But it is of a fundamentally different nature. Look at how the Palestinian Authority self-governs. If a journalist writes something he shouldn’t write and is put in jail, what does that represent? I think there are human rights questions that should be raised. But I also think that if we can resolve the political problem, at least we could deal with the dimension of the occupation that I would like to see ended.

INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL CHERNIN After the Gaza City agreement in April, a plan was set in motion to absorb Hamas into the PLO. How will the PLO ensure Hamas’ support for the diplomatic process, given that Hamas isn’t committed to nonviolent conflict resolution?

The PLO remains the highest political umbrella of the Palestinian people. It includes different factions that have different political views, but all of them believe in the PLO’s goal of reaching a political solution to the conflict with Israel. The PLO tried armed struggle. We invented the armed struggle against Israel in the mid-1960s. Today we believe that the only way we can achieve our objectives is through political processes — nonviolent processes. Certain Palestinian factions, including Hamas, continue to believe that armed struggle is the only way to pressure Israel to accept the establishment of the Palestinian state.

Unfortunately, Israeli policies encourage these positions…In order for Palestinian factions to start engaging politically and change their approach, Israel needs to change its behavior as well. Israelis have not, over the last 20 years, done anything to tell the Palestinians that they are willing to end their occupation and allow [Palestinians] to have their state. So don’t expect the Palestinians to completely turn around and abandon certain approaches if Israel continues with its old mentality of subjugating the Palestinian people and continues to rule them by force.

If Palestine becomes a recognized state, what infrastructure and economic development will it need?

I am someone who hopes to see the day when we will be able to abandon all international aid support. I think we do have the capability to do that if we are allowed to control our country and have authority over our land: Sixty percent of the West Bank today is under total Israeli control…The occupation is not only political and military — it’s economic. [Israel is] exploiting our labor and markets. We are the largest market for Israeli products. The trade imbalance between Palestine and Israel amounts to $1.5 to $2 billion a year...Like we argued at the World Bank, if Israel allows us to start projects in these areas, we would be able to generate an additional $2.8 to $3.4 billion annually, which means that we could completely abandon donor money. I’m not blaming Israel for all our social ills. What I’m saying is [that] we have great potential.

US-Israel and US-Palestine relations have fluctuated frequently. How can we obtain stable relations over time regardless of leadership?

This is something that you can never guarantee. We think differently and we act differently. The United States has been consistent in some aspects of its relationship with the Palestinians and Israelis, and they have changed their positions in other aspects…We ask the United States to take a more evenhanded approach. After all, the United States is the strongest supporter and ally of Israel.

NOAM CHOMSKY Noam Chomsky is a professor emeritus in the department of linguistics and philosophy at MIT. In 2005, Chomsky topped a list released by Foreign Policy magazine of the 100 most important public intellectuals of our time.

INTERVIEW BY HENRY KNIGHT In the long term, how do you see the relationship between Israel and Palestine?

There is an overwhelming international consensus on a political solution, and it’s been that way for almost 40 years. It’s blocked by the United States and Israel, and until that is overcome, there is not likely to be a peace settlement. The terms are very wellknown: There should be a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border with maybe minor and mutual modifications, a ceasefire alliance and guarantees for the rights of every state — including these two states — to exist in peace and security with secure and recognized borders. There are special issues about how to deal with the refugee problem, but the crucial issue is territory.

Do you think that there’s a common language by which both sides could reach a mutual understanding?

There’s a common language: international law, which is very straightforward. The only major institutions that determine the character of international law are the United Nations Security Council and the International Court of Justice, and they both have taken the same position — that Israeli settlements and infrastructure development in the occupied territory are illegal, that they have no basis and are in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.

Is there some way to equalize the playing field with respect to international law to prevent powerful actors from diminishing their accountability?

There’s no supranational authority that can compel states to observe Security Council resolutions and so on. If states are weak, then yes, there is an international authority, but not for the most powerful states. For example, the US invasion of Iraq couldn’t be stopped by the Security Council. It didn’t matter what anyone believed. The only way that can change is internally. It’s up to the citizens of the United States to decide whether they want to live in a law-abiding state or a rogue state. It’s worth recognizing that the world regards the United States as the greatest threat to world peace. There was an international poll released last December by Gallup in which one of the questions was: Which country is the

There’s some commonality between the circumstances of Palestinian refugees and prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay; neither can be served justice because they face substantial barriers to relocation. What do you do with these populations in limbo?

The United States took Guantánamo, one of Cuba’s major ports, at gunpoint and won’t give it back. That’s part of the policy of trying to strangle Cuba economically. The analogy to Crimea is the closest there is, except that the Russians have a much stronger case. With regard to the Palestinian refugees, it’s a much more complicated problem. They have a theoretical right of return, but everyone understands that there won’t be more than a symbolic return to Israel itself. In fact, the Palestinians have pretty much accepted that. If you take a look at the actual negotiations, what they talk about is the right of return, not the actual return. So they want to maintain that. It’s a legitimate right, which I think makes sense.

You’ve said before that you think the ideal solution to this conflict is not a two-state solution, but rather a binational state. Do you still think this is a realistic solution?

If the United States changes its policy, then there is a realistic solution: the international consensus. I don’t like it, but I’m not God. [A two-state solution] is the realistic solution for the short term. If peace is established, and the cycle of violence is reduced, it’s very likely that there will be interaction between the two states. In fact, every time violence has been reduced, [interaction has] begun: commercially, culturally and otherwise. If you know the area, it just makes absolutely no sense to draw a line through it. It would be even more meaningless than most national boundaries. The borders are not sacrosanct.

If you were mediating the peace talks, how would you moderate the language used to negotiate?

Suppose someone were to suggest that Iran should negotiate the Sunni-Shia conflicts in Iraq. We’d laugh. In this case it’s even more extreme, because the United States for 35 years has been blocking the diplomatic settlement that is called for by the entire world and has been providing massive and critical aid for Israel to continue its policies, which undermines the possibilities for peace. If there were genuine peace negotiations, they’d be managed by some party with some international credibility. They’re not going to get anywhere; that’s clear from the beginning.

INTERVIEWS BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW

Do you think that there’s some internal function of the language that’s being used to mediate the conflict that subverts compromise?

In the 1970s, when there were clearly steps towards diplomatic settlement that could have been pursued, Israel upped the ante.

They insisted that a condition be recognition of Israel’s right to exist. That’s something that doesn’t exist in international law. No state has a right to exist. Mexico recognizes the United States, but not its right to exist sitting on half of Mexico, which was conquered in an aggressive war.

greatest threat to world peace? The United States was first. Nobody else was even close. It wasn’t reported in the United States; you’re not supposed to know things like that. But that’s the opinion of the world, and there are reasons for it. Again, US citizens have to ask themselves: Is that the kind of country I want to be a citizen of?

41

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has been Rhode Island’s junior senator since 2007 and is the former Rhode Island attorney general. He serves on the Senate Budget Committee, Environment and Public Works Committee and the Judiciary Committee, among others.

INTERVIEW BY ELI MOTYCKA You recently went to the People’s Climate March in New York City. Can you describe what that was like for you and why it was important?

I don’t think I’m ever going to forget when everybody put their hands up and the entire parade, running dozens of blocks, fell silent. A shout started from the back and came roaring down like a wave until it swept over us. That was pretty amazing. I think it’s important that things like that demonstrate where the public is on this issue. Right now, the Republican Party is what is preventing action on climate, because they’re torn between their desire to conform to what their constituents expect them to do and their allegiance to the polluting industries that are responsible for so much of their campaign funding. The more that the public can make its position clear, the more it tips that balance.

At some point that balance is going to tip to the point that we’ll have the Republicans working with us and we’ll be able to get something done.

BROWN POLITICAL REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Since 2013, the Obama administration has focused on climate change. What impact will Obama’s Climate Action Plan have in the United States and internationally?

The most important thing is to see the existing power plant rule [on carbon emissions] through into operation. Right now it is a proposed regulation that must go through the whole administrative process before it becomes a real regulation and begins to have more of an effect. That’s terribly important. The other thing is to forge an agreement with China. We can probably incorporate, without too much effort, the European Union into any agreement. And then you have the vast bulk of the world’s economy behind a common strategy.

42

How can the United States help the climate change agreement in Paris and combat coal companies’ influence?

I think making sure that we nail down an agreement with China and with other nations is the most important thing. If we can get that done, then a lot of other things will fall into place. That’s just going to take a lot of effort, a lot of negotiating and a lot of creativity. But it’s doable. If we look at the stakes, it’s important to do it, and it’s possible. So long as there is a Democratic president, such a deal could be negotiated. The Republicans could complain, but they don’t get to control foreign policy in their branch of government.

What steps are necessary to bridge the gap between the two parties with respect to climate change?

I think the gap is inevitable. The Republican Party is in step with the oil and coal industries, but way out of step with the public. A poll of Republican voters under the age of 35 showed that a majority claim that denying climate change is ignorant, out of touch or crazy. When you have a party whose under-35 voters think that their party’s position is ignorant, out of touch or crazy, you know that the policy, frankly, cannot be long-standing.

Do you think that the gap between the opinions of the public and those of Congress should color policy responses to other social issues?

I think we’ve seen it with gay marriage: Members of Congress were the last ones to get the memo, but when they did, they pivoted immediately. Now you can hardly find a senator or a congressman criticizing and attacking gay marriage. Just a few years ago, it was a constant theme. Ultimately, there was a realization that they were so out of step with the American public that they had to shift. I think something very similar is going to happen with the climate.

What impact will the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have on the midterm elections?

There are some local impacts in places where the exchange was particularly poorly handled. Six months ago, the Republicans thought that they were going to ride the ACA to victory and that the race was going to be all about Obamacare. What we’re seeing now is that Democratic candidates in conservative states are running on their support for elements of Obamacare. A lot of the Republicans have moved to other issues because there has been enough actual experience with the ACA that the myths are evaporating. People are starting to like what they see — particularly people who have never had coverage before or whose children had a preexisting condition.

What types of policy changes do you think could make the ACA better?

The two great victories of the ACA were dramatically expanding access to health insurance and eliminating some of the injustice in the health insurance marketplace…What the ACA left undone was the work of changing the health care delivery system so that it provides better health care at a lower cost.

How can the ACA make physicians more accessible to people who need them?

There’s going to be a transition in the health care market from being able to see any doctor you want at any time to going to doctors who are properly connected into the electronic health record systems, meet quality controls and provide the adequate kind of care. When you’re really sick, having your choice of doctor can be a lot less valuable than having doctors who know what the other doctors are doing for your care and who are not getting caught in conflicts between different medical practices and different providers that aren’t talking to each other and aren’t linked electronically…There’s still a lot of work to be done for health care costs and health care quality. The ACA laid a few foundations for beginning to take on that problem, but that’s the big problem that remains. That’s where Republicans and Democrats can still work together. Some of the best work is being done in states that have Republican senators. That sets a pretty good expectation that this can be a bipartisan issue.

©2014 St. George’s University

“Working in the ER, you never wonder if what you’re doing is worthwhile.”

Michael Carr, MD SGU ‘14

Dr. Michael Carr was already a successful biochemist when he realized he missed having direct contact with people.

Drawn by the international student body and faculty, he enrolled at St. George’s University. Like 395 other graduates, he landed an Emergency Medicine Residency. Today, he practices in one of the busiest ERs in the US. Dr. Carr is just one of the 12,000 SGU medical school graduates practicing medicine and changing lives in over 50 countries around the world.

A medical degree from SGU will change your life, and the lives around you.

Find out about information sessions and webinars in your area at sgu.edu/md

sgu.edu/md US/Canada: 1 (800) 899-6337 ext. 9 1280 sguenrolment@sgu.edu

Grenada, West Indies

Public Policy You can make a difference.

Accelerate your impact through the 1-year MPA.

Rigorous. Relevant. Interdisciplinary.

Global. Experiential. Making a difference.

APPLY NOW.

watson.brown.edu/public-policy

Fifth-year MPA information session November 19, 2014 • noon–1:00 p.m. • 67 George Street, Room 104