Chris Hedges's Blog, page 584

Keeping Cool on a Warming Planet

One of the ironies of increasing climate change is the cooling crisis: the hotter the planet becomes, the greater our demand for ways to cool down. And most often, in rich countries, that means switching on the air conditioning, which in turn means using more electricity and emitting more fossil fuels to escape the heat we’ve emitted by burning so much already.

Just how serious that irony is in practice is clear from a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on the future of cooling. The Agency’s executive director, Fatih Birol, sums up the problem in his foreword: “The world faces a looming ‘cold crunch.’

“Using air conditioners and electric fans to stay cool accounts for nearly 20% of the total electricity used in buildings around the world today. And this trend is set to grow as the world’s economic and demographic growth becomes more focused in hotter countries.”

Since 1990, the report says, global sales of electrically-powered fans and air-conditioning systems (ACs) have more than tripled. More than half of them are used in just two countries – China and the United States. Over a year the 1.6bn ACs in use worldwide consume more than 2,000 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity – 2.5 times more than Africa’s total annual electricity consumption.

Carbon dioxide emissions from cooling have also tripled since 1990, to 1,130m tonnes, causing corresponding growth in local air pollution. And the growing demand for cooling is moving south, driven by economic and population growth in the hottest parts of the world.

Very Limited Effect

Most of the projected growth by 2050 in energy use for cooling is expected to come from the emerging economies, half of it from three countries—India, China and Indonesia.

The IEA says its analysis shows that governments’ policies to address current and future electricity consumption so as to meet cooling demand would have only “a very limited effect” in slowing it. Its baseline scenario sees the energy needed tripling by 2050 to 6,200 TWh, with meeting peak electricity demand a major challenge, because of the need for extra generation and distribution equipment.

But the baseline scenario is not the only option, the IEA says. Its alternative vision is what it calls an efficient cooling scenario which greatly strengthens policies for limiting the energy needed for cooling, and which it says “is compatible with the ambitious goals to limit climate change that were agreed in the Paris Agreement.”

The key word here is “efficient”. This scenario focuses on achieving massive improvements in the efficiency of AC equipment, accompanied by other measures like tougher minimum energy performance standards, and clear labelling to guide consumers.

If governments altered their policies in this way, the report says, the present average energy efficiency of ACs worldwide could more than double in the next 30 years.

Energy demand for cooling would by 2050 be 45% lower than in the baseline scenario, saving an amount equivalent to all the electricity consumed by the European Union in 2016. And between 2017 and 2050 the efficiency strategy would cost US$2.9 trillion less than the baseline scenario, meaning lower electricity costs for everyone.

Carbon dioxide emissions would, with the decarbonisation of power generation, fall to 13% of their 2016 level, and key air pollutant emissions would fall by up to 85%.

The report says there is potential for even bigger energy savings through changing the way buildings are designed and constructed, and in what materials are used. The idea is not new: across the Middle East there is a long tradition of constructing buildings that incorporate windcatchers, which use natural airflows to ventilate them and have even been used for refrigeration. And just painting buildings white so that they reflect sunlight can help.

The principle of passive building design, which uses natural sources, including wind, solar energy and daylight to cut the amount of energy buildings consume, is being updated and extended and, even in countries as hot as India, is providing useful lessons.

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How the Left Can Gain Footing in White America

Near the end of his life, the great civil rights and anti-war leader and democratic socialist Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that the “real issue to be faced” in the United States was “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” These words have never been truer than they are today, when the profits system threatens to end livable ecology in the historical near term.

It will be difficult, if not impossible, to carry out King’s reconstruction without backing from millions of white people in what is still very much the world’s most powerful state. While the U.S. population becomes less Caucasian with each decennial census, the nation is still supermajority—69 percent—non-Hispanic white. The nation’s physical and related political geography is whiter still, thanks to a political system that overrepresents America’s disproportionately white rural and exurban regions and states.

How might a U.S. left that mattered—currently nonexistent, thanks in part to its hyper identity-politicized alienation from everyday white people (not a new problem)—find a place in white America? How could it do that without dropping its principled and undebatable opposition to racism, ethnocentrism and nativism?

I am an anti-racist, leftist historian and journalist who grew up in an unusually integrated and liberal big-city neighborhood and has spent many years living in predominantly white and rural counties. Thanks to a retrospectively welcome failure to achieve lasting professional-class success, I have spent a good share of time employed alongside (and talking politics with) “white working-class” people in the “heartland.”

Here, for what it’s worth, are 12 recommendations for how my fellow leftist progressives might understand and communicate with “flyover zone” whites in ways that further our goals without sacrificing our commitment to racial, ethnic and gender equality and environmental sanity and without pushing middle-American and noncollege-educated white folks further to the right:

1. Drop the notion that you/we don’t need a lot of white allies to advance leftist goals. King knew better than that. So did the Black Panthers, who worked to help working-class whites, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans build organizations that would merge their specific ethnocultural identities with a “proletarian” people’s struggle against capitalism and imperialism. King placed a big emphasis in his last years on fighting with and for poor and working-class people of all colors against the economic injustices of capitalism. (He had no romantic illusions about people of color and a few white allies being able to transform America alone. He would have been horrified by the position of the blustering white “radical,” violence-fetishizing and infantile-leftist Weathermen, who decided in 1969 to write off pretty much the entire white U.S. population as reactionaries. The Panthers rightly rejected the “anti-white chauvinist” Weatherman standpoint as idiotic.)

2. Avoid blanket statements about “white people” and “white America.” People on the left rightly bristle at broad racialist and sexist generalizations about blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, Arabs, females, immigrants, gays, lesbians and transgendered people. We should also avoid sweeping statements about all U.S. whites, who are torn by their own sharp socioeconomic, ethnic, partisan, political and ideological differences.

3. Avoid saying insulting and condescending things about nonmetropolitan and working-class whites—stuff like presidential candidate Barack Obama riffing on how rural whites “get bitter, cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton telling rich New York City campaign donors that Donald Trump’s white, rural and noncollege-educated backers were “a basket” of racist, nativist, homophobic and sexist “deplorables.” Clinton’s sneering comment was vote-getting gold for the white nationalist Trump campaign, which printed up “Adorable Deplorable” T-shirts and bumper stickers to use in key battleground states. (Clinton recently doubled down on her progressive neoliberal contempt for stupid middle America by saying this to an elite, globalist gathering in Mumbai, India: “If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won. I win the coasts. But what the map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward” … and lost to people who, “You know, didn’t like black people getting rights, don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, don’t want to, you know, see Indian-Americans succeeding more than you are.” That was a raised middle finger from a superwealthy, arch global corporatist to all the supposedly pessimistic, slow-witted, racist, sexist and generally retrograde white-hick losers stuck between those glorious enclaves—led by Wall Street, Yale and Harvard on the East Coast and Silicon Valley and Hollywood on the West Coast—of human progress and variety [and GDP!] on the imperial shorelines. Think right-wing media picked up on that elitist, multicultural, globalist insult to the white heartland? You betcha!)

4. Academic and other elite professional-class “progressives:” Please don’t brag about your advanced degrees, your next book publication, your next sabbatical, your latest European vacation, your small teaching load, your latest fine dining experience, your favorite French wines or the fancy and expensive college or university to which you are sending your children. Working-class people don’t like hearing about you enjoying your class privileges and related educational attainments. It’s the overeducated and know-it-all professional and managerial classes, not the capitalist 1 percent, whom working-class people most commonly and regularly confront and see as the agents of class privilege and humiliation.

5. Take a low-paid and low-status job during this current tight-job market expansion. This will help you get a sense of the difficult and underappreciated work that tens of millions of supposedly privileged white Americans do every day: sweeping out parking garages, emptying bedpans, cleaning offices and bathrooms, driving trucks and buses, operating forklifts, waiting tables, making telemarketing calls, mowing parkways, laying foundations, extracting obstructions from production lines, filing medical documents and the like. (To make up for how you are adding to the wage-cheapening reserve army of labor, do your best to organize a union if one does not exist where you work, and make sure to pay union dues if you are in a union-protected job in a “right to work” state.)

6. Stop thinking or saying that all white America voted for the Trump. There were 156 million non-Hispanic whites eligible to vote in the 2016 elections. Trump got 63 million votes. Pretend that every single one of Trump’s voters was a non-Hispanic white. We know that’s not the case (Trump got 28 percent of the Latino vote, 27 percent of the Asian-American vote and 8 percent of the black vote, along with 57 percent of the white vote). But even if we imagine that every single one of Trump’s voters was a non-Hispanic white, it would mean that Trump was backed by just 40 percent of the white electorate. That’s hardly the whole “white tribe united” (to quote the noted black and neoliberal “Afro-pessimist” Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trump’s white supporters).

7. Don’t deny that candidate Trump’s economic populism (however disingenuous) was part of his attraction to rural and working-class and other whites who voted for him. Yes, as numerous leftist analysts (myself included) have noted, Trump’s appeal to those voters rested significantly on white nationalist racial identity. But it also relied on his economic-nationalist promise to honor the “forgotten” American heartland working-class by restoring the lost Golden Age of American manufacturing and economic “greatness.” Trump showed himself far more adept—to say the least—than the establishment neoliberal Clinton when it came to tapping the economically populist sentiments of the majority white and majority working-class electorate, most of which has less than $1,000 in its bank accounts while the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent has as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Trump was no normal Republican 1 percent candidate. As Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen recently explained:

In 2016 the Republicans nominated yet another super-rich candidate—indeed, someone on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. But pigeonholing him as a Romney-like Richie Rich was not easy. Like legions of conservative Republicans before him, he trash-talked Hispanics, immigrants, and women virtually non-stop, though with a verve uniquely his own. He laced his campaign with barely coded racial appeals and in the final days, ran an ad widely denounced as subtly anti-Semitic. But he supplemented these with other messages that qualified as true blockbusters: In striking contrast to every other Republican presidential nominee since 1936, he attacked globalization, free trade, international financiers, Wall Street, and even Goldman Sachs. “Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache. When subsidized foreign steel is dumped into our markets, threatening our factories, the politicians do nothing. For years, they watched on the sidelines as our jobs vanished and our communities were plunged into depression-level unemployment.” … In a frontal assault on the American establishment, the Republican standard bearer proclaimed “America First.” Mocking the Bush administration’s appeal to “weapons of mass destruction” as a pretext … He even criticized the “carried interest” tax break beloved by high finance.”

Such populist-sounding rhetoric was part of how and why Trump defeated Clinton, who, the authors note, “emphasized candidate and personal issues and avoided policy discussions to a degree without precedent in any previous election for which measurements exist.” At the same time, Trump would have lost many of his white working-, lower- and middle-class votes to his Democratic opponent had the Democratic primaries and caucuses not been rigged against Bernie Sanders, who ran passionately against “the billionaire class” without the noxious racism, nativism and sexism that colored Trump’s campaign. Sanders might well have defeated Trump by mobilizing working-class voters of all colors, including white ones. (Whether a President Sanders could have done anything is another matter.)

8. Stop accusing U.S. white working-class people of “lacking class consciousness” just because the multibillionaire Trump did better than multimillionaire Clinton with noncollege-educated white voters. Many affluent and white, nonworking-class Trump voters lacked the allegedly class-defining college degree. Millions of working- and lower-class U.S. white citizens didn’t vote at all, as is common among lower-income Americans. The democratic socialist Sanders (currently and quietly the most popular politician in the country) would have done far better than both Clinton and Trump did with working-class white people in the general election. At the same, Trump tapped white working-class anger at the globalist financial and corporate elite (Goldman Sachs, et al.,) but also at the more liberally inclined and professional and managerial classes, whose position and meritocratic ideology is, according to historian Thomas Frank, the real face of class privilege and authority that working-class people grate under on a regular basis.

9. Don’t exaggerate the white privilege payoff in capitalist America. The income and especially the wealth gaps between non-Hispanic U.S. whites on one hand and U.S. blacks (whose median household net worth is 13 times lower than that of whites), Latinos and Native Americans are horrific. But those disparities do not change the fact that a vast swath of the U.S. white population lives below the threshold of a minimally adequate standard of living. The median white U.S. household income—$71,300 a year—is below the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI) rigorously calculated no-frills basic family budget—$ 74,004—for a family that comprises two parents and two children in the relatively cheap, 89 percent white Iowa jurisdiction of Muscatine County.

Things look much worse for white privilege when you drill down further in the census data. In the nearby university enclave of Iowa City, the EPI’s basic family budget for the same-sized household is $87,836. In the 93 percent white Muscatine County seat city of Muscatine, median white household income is $51,801, equivalent to just 70 percent of the EPI’s basic family budget for a family of four. Or take the 93 percent white upstate Michigan town of Sheboygan (5,000 people). Median household income there is $27,206, just 37 percent of the EPI’s basic family budget ($72,875) for Sheboygan County. The same basic story is evident across countless predominantly white towns and counties in the U.S heartland.

Three years ago, Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam’s rigorously researched book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” showed that social breakdown among low-income whites in the age of neoliberal capitalism was mimicking tendencies long said to characterize the black “underclass”: high rates of out-of-wedlock births, widespread male joblessness, endemic addiction, violence, elevated high school dropout rates, and more. Then came news of surging opiate addiction among working-class white Americans and of rising mortality rates fed by suicide and substance abuse among middle-aged white “surplus Americans.” The leading cause for these rising white “deaths of despair” cited by those who discovered them in the data is the collapse of the labor market for working-class people. Clearly the “wages of whiteness” are no ticket to the middle-class American dream for much of white America, a considerable portion of which has been rendered poor and replaceable by automation, de-unionization, globalization, the shredding of pensions and the poverty of the U.S. welfare state.

10. Appeal less (or not at all) to guilt over white privilege and more (or entirely) to white working-class people’s self-interest in interracial solidarity with black, Latino, Asian and Native American working-class people on behalf of the many against the nation’s wealthy few—the American oligarchy—in making the case for racial, ethnic and gender equality and civil, immigrant and gay rights. People with small savings accounts struggling to meet basic costs in a virulently unequal nation with a weak social safety net and a shortage of decent-paying jobs are not likely to respond warmly overall to outsiders who tell them how “privileged” they are by the color of their skin. Their bank accounts and more say different. They are getting shafted, and they know it. It’s better to talk about:

● How the real agents of their despair are not immigrants or urban people of color but the parasitic, exploitative and obscenely rich, class-privileged, capitalist 1 percent, the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money.

● How that capitalist employer and ruling class has long cultivated the racial and ethnic (and other) divisions within the working-class majority to maintain its immoral and now environmentally lethal profits and power.

● How white working-class people and working-class people of all colors and ethnicities have always done the best for themselves when they reach out across those divisions to form powerful unions and other grass-roots organization to fight the rich and powerful.

● How the “psychological wage” of whiteness—the sense that you are someone special and entitled just because you are white—is lame, self-defeating pseudo-compensation for economic exploitation by rich people.

● The many and remarkable moments when black and white North American workers joined in common struggle against capitalist exploiters, compelling the white ruling class to respond with strategies of racial divide-and-rule. “Since the 17th century,” Viewpoint Magazine editor Asad Haider has reminded us, “resistance to racial oppression and [resistance to] capitalist exploitation [in North America] have gone hand in hand,” led by militants and workers of all races who have understood that a racially divided working class cannot prevail over the wealthy few.

11. Drop any assumption that any but a small number of heartland whites have been given reasonable opportunities to know much if anything about the reality of racial oppression in 21st-century America. Beyond the appalling hyperconcentration of many millions of black Americans in communities that are shockingly devoid of resources and opportunities for advancement, contemporary racial segregation renders real black experience frightfully invisible to the nation’s white majority. Thanks to the quietly but deeply persistent problem of U.S. racial apartheid, much of white America’s image of black America is fed by wildly distorted and dichotomous media images of spectacular black success (the Obamas, Oprah and numerous superstar black athletes and entertainers) and black “underclass” criminality. To make matters worse, racist mass incarceration brings hundreds of thousands of young black urban felons into hundreds of rurally situated prisons, putting white prison personnel in highly unpleasant and conflictual contact with contemporary capitalist racial oppression’s most hardened victims—not a good mix for racial healing and understanding, to say the least.

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12. Last but not least, the left should approach climate change—the biggest issue of our or any time—with empathetic sensitivity to “flyover zone” America’s desire for the creation of good-paying jobs. The right’s influential propaganda claiming that action against global warming destroys employment chances for working-class people should not simply be met with sneering invocations of the green maxims that “there are no jobs on a dead planet” and “no economy on a dead planet.” The adages are true enough, but the more politically strategic and astute point to make is that, as economist Robert Pollin showed in his 2014 book, “Greening the Global Economy,” “clean energy investment projects consistently generate more jobs for a given amount of spending than maintaining or expanding a country’s existing fossil fuel infrastructure. … The massive investments in energy efficiency and clean renewable energy necessary to stabilize the climate will also drive job expansion,” contrary to the “widely held view that protecting the environment and expanding job opportunities are necessarily in conflict.” Besides saving prospects for livable ecology and a decent future, the green conversion required for human survival is a job creator. Imagine that.

Here again, as with my recommendations on how to advance racial justice and gender equality in the name of working-class people’s solidarity, leftist progressives would be wise to elevate reasonable self-interest over guilt and shame in advancing the common good. If you grew up and lived in a mining or oil town, you’d probably be concerned about how the—yes, existentially necessary—transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy will affect job prospects for yourself and others in your community. Whether tenured liberal-leftish Obama fans like James Livingston, author of “No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea,” like it or not, working-class people still need and want to work, and not just for economic reasons. What could be more meaningful than working to save the world from its greatest scourge in this century: ecocide?

The Steps Trump Has Taken to Undermine Student Debt Reform

In the 16 months since President Donald Trump took office, the nation’s student debt burden has soared by $110 billion, to an astonishing $1.41 trillion.

The number of student debtors has continued to grow as well – to 45 million Americans, up 2 million since Trump’s inauguration.

And last week, the administration began what reformers fear is the dismantling of an Obama-era initiative to crack down on lending abuses – an effort that in 18 months had forced the student loan industry to give back $750 million for alleged unfair and abusive marketing and collection practices.

The administration insists its reorganization of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s student loan office was routine: There was “no functional or even practical change” to the unit’s mission of protecting and informing students, an agency spokesman said.

But critics said it was a worrisome sign that Trump has little interest in addressing the nation’s student debt crisis.

“The Trump Administration’s message to families ripped off by student loan fraud: ‘Stop whining,’ ” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement. He accused the administration of moving to dismantle the student debt office’s watchdog function.

Lisa Wang, Washington director for The Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit that monitors student debt issues, also said the administration seems set on taking apart the office.

The office “has a lengthy history of getting real results and real outcomes for student loan borrowers,” she said. “We feel this move to dismantle it is devastating.”

The student loan office was set up to address concerns from borrowers who struggle to make their loan payments.

As a 2016 investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed, student debtors for years have complained of a long list of lending and collection abuses: threatening phone calls, retaliatory lawsuits, even aggressive collection efforts targeted at borrowers who were current on their loans.

Other debtors accused lenders of deliberately misleading them about their eligibility for debt relief programs that could lower their payments or win them forgiveness for their loans. Many aggrieved borrowers reported that after they filed complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, lenders backed off.

A centerpiece of the bureau’s efforts is a consumer fraud lawsuit filed last year against Navient Inc., a former division of Sallie Mae that services the accounts of more than 12 million debtors.

The complaint, filed in federal court in Pennsylvania, also names Navient’s Pioneer Credit Recovery subsidiary. It contends that the companies routinely violate federal consumer protection laws by steering student borrowers into expensive repayment plans, failing to inform them about cheaper options and even ruining borrowers’ credit by falsely telling credit agencies that they are in default on their loans.

Navient has denied wrongdoing, saying the lawsuit was politically motivated – it was filed in the final days of the Obama administration – and “designed to get headlines rather than help for student borrowers.”

The case is awaiting trial. Reformers worry that once the reorganization of the student loan office is complete, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who also serves as acting director of the consumer bureau, will drop the lawsuit.

During the presidential campaign, Trump seemed to endorse student loan reform, declaring that debt loads should be tied to borrowers’ ability to repay and criticizing the government for earning billions from interest payments on federal student loans.

Trump’s recent budget package included $350 million to make it easier for teachers, police officers and other public-sector employees to enroll in programs to get their student debt canceled after 10 years of on-time payments.

But the administration also has taken steps to undercut reform efforts. Last year, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos moved to scrap rules intended to punish abusive student loan collectors by making it more difficult for them to win lucrative loan servicing contracts from the government.

The student loan industry had lobbied on the issue, contending that the rules were unnecessary and expensive, Bloomberg News reported.

Also last year, Trump proposed cutting $5.2 billion from the federal Pell Grants program, which has provided scholarship aid to millions of needy college students. Critics said the cuts would force students to take out ever-larger loans, and the administration backed away from the idea.

And on Sunday, The New York Times reported that DeVos effectively shut down fraud investigations of several for-profit colleges by reassigning personnel. Many former students have complained that for-profit schools induced them to sign up for expensive student loan packages by falsely promising them high-paying jobs upon graduation.

Administration’s Plan for Immigrant Children: Send Them to Military Bases

According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration is preparing to hold immigrant children in military bases after they are separated from their parents. The information came in an email from the Department of Health and Human Services, which informed the Pentagon that it would soon survey several military sites in Texas and Arkansas for possible use as shelters for young, undocumented immigrants.

The Post reports:

The bases would be used for minors under 18 who arrive at the border without an adult relative or after the government has separated them from their parents. HHS is the government agency responsible for providing minors with foster care until another adult relative can assume custody.

The email characterized the site visits as a preliminary assessment. “No decisions have been made at this time,” it states.

An official at HHS confirmed the military site visits, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the plans are not yet public. The official said that HHS currently has the bed space to hold 10,571 children.

The same HHS official told the Post that the agency’s existing facilities for housing migrant children are already operating at 91 percent capacity.

The administration recently warned that it plans to split up undocumented families caught at the border and potentially prosecute parents, which is expected to increase the number of child immigrants detained in the United States. The New York Times reported last week that President Trump is frustrated by an increase in immigration under his presidency and berated Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Cabinet meeting. Nielsen reportedly drafted a resignation letter after the meeting but didn’t submit it.

Trump has announced several plans to deal with what he says is a border problem between the United States and Mexico. In April, he authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to the border to assist immigration officials, after Congress refused to allocate the money needed to build a wall along the border.

If Trump goes ahead with the plan to house children at military bases, he will be following in the footsteps of the Obama administration, which sent more than 7,000 immigrant children to live at military bases in Oklahoma, Texas and California during the 2014 child immigration crisis. During that period, large numbers of children, most of them from Central America, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied by adults.

The separation of immigrant children from their parents has often had dire consequences. Many such children are sent to live with foster parents. However, in Senate testimony in April, an acting assistant secretary of HHS, Steven Wagner, said the government lost track of 1,475 immigrant children after placing them in foster care. In April 2016, The Associated Press reported that over two dozen immigrant children who had been placed in foster care were later subjected to sexual abuse, human trafficking or other abuse.

Although Trump administration officials have not released statistics, The New York Times found that between October 2017 and April 2018, over 700 undocumented children who entered the United States were subsequently separated from their parents by immigration officials.

DA: Children in California Home Choked, Waterboarded

FAIRFIELD, Calif.—Prosecutors allege in court documents filed Wednesday that the 10 children rescued from a Northern California home were punched, kicked, strangled, shot with a BB gun and subjected to waterboarding by their father—and their mother did nothing to stop it.

The details of the alleged abuse were included in a motion to increase the bail of Ina Rogers, 31, who was charged with nine counts of felony child abuse Wednesday in Solano County Superior Court. Rogers did not enter a plea, but has previously denied allegations her children were harmed. She also faces 1 count of child neglect involving all 10 children.

“On a continuous basis the children were getting punched, strangled, bitten, shot with weapons such as crossbows and bb guns, hit with weapons such as sticks and bats, subjected to ‘waterboarding’ and having scalding water poured on them,” Solano County Deputy District Attorney Veronica Juarez wrote in the bail request.

Since announcing Monday that they had removed the children from the home where they say torture was carried out “for sadistic purposes,” prosecutors have refused to discuss further details of the allegations against Rogers and her husband Jonathan Allen, 29. He has pleaded not guilty to nine counts of felony child abuse and seven counts of felony torture. He is being held on $5.2 million bail.

Records show the 10 children removed from the house March 31 are 6 months to 12 years old, but the documents do not specify which child suffered which injuries.

The motion states that when Fairfield Police arrived at the two-story house in a suburb 46 miles (74 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco on March 31, they found the children “huddled together on the living room floor” in a home littered with feces and trash.

“The children appeared to be skittish and spoke with speech impediments,” she wrote.

Juarez alleges Rogers assisted in the abuse and “dissuaded the children” from reporting their injuries, which included broken arms.

On Wednesday, Judge William J. Pendergast set bail at $495,000 for Rogers, saying she “may not be a danger to the public at large, but these charges make clear she is a danger to the children.”

It’s unclear whether any California government agencies had an opportunity to intervene sooner or knew of turmoil in the household.

Solano County court records show that Allen was charged with four felonies in 2011, including corporal injury, assault with a firearm and criminal threats in a case involving his wife, identified by her initials, I.R.

Prosecutors alleged Allen used a .22 caliber revolver in some of the crimes.

He pleaded no contest to corporal injury as part of a deal with prosecutors. He was sentenced to 180 days and three years of probation. Prosecutors dropped the other charges.

Rogers told reporters that she had one prior interaction with child welfare officials when her mother “had mentioned something” that prompted a home visit. Officials took pictures of the children and interviewed them individually, she said.

“Nothing was founded, my kids were placed back with me,” she said.

Solano County’s Child Welfare Services department officials did not immediately provide information on details about the visit or other interactions they may have had with members of the household.

Rogers says she home-schooled the children, but the Fairfield, California, home was not registered as a private school and neither were three prior addresses where the family lived in Fairfield and Vallejo, according to the California Department of Education.

California law requires children to be enrolled in public school unless they meet specific exemptions, such as documented attendance at a private school. Parents who teach their own children are required to register with the state, but the state does not approve, monitor or inspect them.

The Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District had no record that the students attended any school in the district, said Tim Goree, a district spokesman.

Police responding to a missing juvenile report found a home filled with rotted food and human and animal waste, Fairfield Lt. Greg Hurlbut said. Police removed the children and arrested Rogers on suspicion of neglect. She was released after posting $10,000 bail.

Stories about alleged abuse dating back years came out gradually in interviews with the children over the past six weeks, authorities said.

Rogers was taken into custody after the hearing. Her court-appointed attorney, Barry Newman, declined comment.

___

Har reported from San Francisco.

Ethics Chief Flags Trump Financial Disclosure to Rosenstein

NEW YORK—President Donald Trump noted in his financial disclosure Wednesday that he “fully reimbursed” personal attorney Michael Cohen as much as $250,000 for unspecified “expenses,” with no mention of a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about a sexual tryst she said they had.

The head of the nation’s ethics office questioned why Trump didn’t include this in his previous year’s disclosure and passed along his concerns to federal prosecutors.

“I am providing both reports to you because you may find the disclosure relevant to any inquiry you may be pursuing,” David Apol, acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Apol wrote that he considers Trump’s payment to Cohen to be a repayment on a loan and that it was required to be included in Trump’s June 2017 disclosure. Ethics experts says that if that payment was knowingly and willfully left out, Trump could be in violation of federal ethics laws.

“This is a big deal and unprecedented. No President has been previously subject to any referral by (Office of Government Ethics) to DOJ as a result of having failed to report an item on their public financial disclosure report,” said Virginia Canter, a former ethics official in the Clinton and Obama White Houses who is now with the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

How Trump dealt with the Daniels payment in his disclosure has been closely watched, particularly after his attorney Rudy Giuliani gave interviews earlier this month saying the president had repaid Cohen, a payment that had not shown up in Trump’s report last year.

In a footnote in tiny type on Page 45 of his 92-page disclosure, Trump said he reimbursed Cohen for “expenses” ranging from $100,001 to $250,000. The report said the president did not have to disclose the payment but was doing so “in the interest of transparency.”

While the disclosure didn’t specify the purpose of the payment, Cohen has said he paid $130,000 to Daniels in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election to keep her from going public about her allegations that she had sex with the married Trump in 2006.

Daniels’ lawyer, Michael Avenatti, tweeted: “Mr. Trump’s disclosure today conclusively proves that the American people were deceived.”

The tweet continued: “This was NOT an accident and it was not isolated. Cover-ups should always matter.”

The footnote appears in a report giving the first extended look at Trump’s income from his properties since he became president. His Washington, D.C., hotel near the Oval Office, which has become a magnet for diplomats and lobbyists, took in $40 million.

His Doral golf course and resort in Miami took in $75 million, his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, received $25 million and his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, generated $15 million.

Some of the 12-month figures for his properties are down from his previous report, but that earlier report covered about 16 months and so it is not directly comparable.

The figures are before expenses and so give no indication of how much profit the president made off the properties.

Trump has at least $315 million in debt, about the same as he reported a year ago. One of his biggest lenders is Ladder Capital, which has lent more than $100 million. Trump owes Deutsche Bank as much as $175 million.

The debt figures are given in broad ranges in the report and capped at $50 million, so it’s unclear just how much Trump actually owes. The president’s tax returns would give a clear picture, but Trump has broken with tradition by refusing to make them public.

When Trump took office, he refused to fully divest from his global business, another break with presidential tradition. Instead, he put his assets in a trust controlled by his two adult sons and a senior executive. Trump can take back control of the trust at any time, and he’s allowed to withdraw cash from it as he pleases.

___

Abdollah and Associated Press writer Richard Lardner contributed from Washington.

Senate Backs Effort to Restore ‘Net Neutrality’

WASHINGTON—Senate Democrats, joined by three Republicans, pushed through a measure Wednesday intended to revive Obama-era internet rules that ensured equal treatment for all web traffic, though opposition in the House and the White House seems insurmountable.

Republicans on the short end of the 52-47 vote described the effort to reinstate “net neutrality” rules as “political theater” because the GOP-controlled House is not expected to take up the issue and the Senate’s margin could not overcome a presidential veto.

Democrats, however, were undeterred, saying their push would energize young voters who are tech savvy and value unfettered access to the internet. “This is a defining vote. The most important vote we’re going to have in this generation on the internet,” said Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who sponsored the measure.

At issue are rules that the Federal Communications Commission repealed in December that prevented providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon from interfering with internet traffic and favoring their own sites and apps. Critics, including the Trump administration, said overregulation was stifling innovation, and they backed the FCC’s move, which is still set to take effect next month.

Markey said net neutrality has worked for the smallest voices and the largest, but he said internet service providers are trying to change the rules to benefit their interests.

Republicans said they were willing to work with Democrats on enshrining the principle of net neutrality in legislation. But they wanted to also ensure that regulatory efforts didn’t get in the way of innovation and quickly evolving internet services.

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said the internet thrived long before the Obama administration stepped in with rules in 2015, and he predicted that when the FCC repeal is in place, consumers won’t notice a change in their service.

“That’s what we’re going back to: rules that were in place for two decades under a light-touch regulatory approach that allowed the internet to explode and prosper and grow,” Thune said.

But the FCC’s move has stirred fears among consumer advocates that cable and phone giants will be free to block access to services they don’t like or set up “fast lanes” for preferred services — in turn, relegating everyone else to “slow lanes.”

Tech companies have been signaling that the repeal of net neutrality could lead to significant financial consequences.

In its annual report filed in January, Netflix said the repeal of net neutrality, and the possibility that other “favorable laws” may change, could result in “discriminatory or anti-competitive practices that could impede our growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business.”

Other businesses have echoed this statement. In Spotify’s pre-IPO filing in February, the company said laws limiting “internet neutrality” could “decrease user demand for our service and increase our cost of doing business.

Similarly, Snapchat parent Snap said in February that adopting laws that “adversely affect the growth, popularity, or use of the internet, including laws governing internet neutrality, could decrease the demand for our products and increase our cost of doing business.”

A consortium of tech companies from Etsy to IAC, which operates Tinder and OKCupid, have banded together to create a campaign called “Red Alert,” which supports the congressional vote and other efforts to preserve net neutrality.

Joining all Democratic senators in voting to reverse the FCC’s action were GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

In recent months, Republicans have used the tools made available in the Congressional Review Act to overturn several environmental, health and safety rules put into place in the final months of the Obama administration. This time, however, it was Democrats who led the effort to kill a rule supported by the Trump administration.

“This is our chance, our best chance to make sure the internet stays accessible and affordable to all Americans,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

“Net neutrality is what allows the internet to be a tool for free speech, permissionless innovation and diverse voices on an infinite number of websites,” said Chris Lewis, vice president at the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

But the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank, said Congress was taking the wrong tack. Instead of blocking the FCC’s rule repeal, it suggested that policymakers work toward “bipartisan compromise legislation that will stand the test of time.”

___

AP Writer Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this report.

Time’s Up for Israel’s Impunity

Side by side on the screen, the images could hardly be more grotesque. In Jerusalem, a beaming Ivanka Trump, clad all in white, extends her hand like a game-show hostess, unveiling the plaque of the new American embassy that bears her father’s name. Scarcely 40 miles away, dozens of unarmed Palestinians, children and a baby among them, are slaughtered by Israeli soldiers near a fence in Gaza.

In the hours following the massacre, U.S. officials followed a familiar script to convey upon Israel, yet again, a blanket impunity. As Gazans were still counting their dead, a White House spokesman blamed “a gruesome and unfortunate propaganda attempt” by Hamas. Jared Kushner declared the Gazans to be “part of the problem.” At the U.N., U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley managed to blame Iran. And the president, icon of oblivious disregard, praised the “big day” for Israel. “Congratulations!” he tweeted.

Without question, much of the cable news chattering class echoed the White House’s talking points. Yet this time, many who ordinarily provide cover for Israel found the whole thing too much to stomach. “Daddy’s Little Ghoul,” declared the front page of the New York Daily News, as the smiling Ivanka’s outstretched hand appeared to point to the carnage in Gaza. “Israel Kills Dozens of Unarmed Protesters in Gaza as Jared Kushner Speaks of Peace, in Jerusalem,” the New Yorker intoned. And The New York Times, blasted on social media for tweeting that “Palestinians have died” in Gaza (from what—a flu epidemic?), corrected its passive language in a subsequent headline: “Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem.”

In Hollywood, criticizing Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza risked career suicide. But in late April, after Israeli soldiers had wounded hundreds of unarmed Gazans and killed 28, actress Natalie Portman pulled out of a prestigious awards ceremony in her native Israel. After Monday’s massacre, more were emboldened. “You have lost your humanity,” director and comic Judd Apatow replied to a troll on Twitter. “You watch these images and see a game, not the death of children.” Added Bette Midler: “Fifty-two people die in protest. … Thanks, asshole! Your uninformed and demented actions have consequences! Don’t you get it? Those people had families too!”

Could cracks finally be appearing in the armor of Israel’s impunity? For decades, American shade excused Israel’s criminal behavior: its theft of lands by hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers; its imprisonment of thousands of young men and children without charge; its military occupation without end; its ongoing siege of Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison. Even during the 2014 Gaza War, in which Israeli explosive power outnumbered that of Hamas by 1,500 to 1 and American-made Israeli rockets and bombs killed more than 500 children (compared with one Israeli child killed by a Hamas rocket), American politicians and punditry convinced the masses that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

But now, before the images of thousands of defenseless Gazans being shot down by one of the world’s most powerful armies, the impunity may be crumbling. Perhaps it is the sickening juxtaposition itself—the raw imagery of carnage alongside the imperious celebrations of the callous elite—that is finally too graphic to ignore.

A cynic might say that this response is different because Donald Trump is president, not Barack Obama. After all, it was under Obama, in 2014, that the American military resupplied Israel’s ammunition depot—in the middle of the Gaza War. And it was Obama who implored both sides to seek a peaceful resolution, just as he inked a 10-year, $38 billion pledge to renew Israel’s arsenal.

Yet the disgust with Israel’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza, as it was celebrating the 70th anniversary of its birth from the ashes of the Holocaust, is palpable. The images of Gazans yearning to live in freedom and dignity being gunned down while trying to are not something open-hearted people can un-remember.

Perhaps this moment will fade quietly into the mosaic of terrible images and memories from generations of the tragedy that is Israel and Palestine. But sometimes a single moment, and the understanding that comes from it, can change everything. Nick Ut’s image of the screaming, naked “Napalm Girl” helped shift the understanding of the American role in Vietnam. In Birmingham, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church helped turn the tide in the American civil rights movement.

The Gaza massacre of 2018 could be a catalyst to change the way Americans think about Israel’s behavior and its blanket protections from America. Twenty years ago, when I was reporting in Gaza, a white-haired old man in a crisp blue suit forecast as much. “The Israelis think that America will always protect them,” Issam Shawa told me. “They think America will always give them arms, and they will always be the biggest power in the Middle East.

“They are now. But do you think this can prevail forever and a day?”

For the people who lived through them, the last 70 years in Israel and Palestine may only feel like forever. But it’s foolhardy to think that the political and military status quo will stand for seven decades more.

 

 

It’s the End of the World, and I Feel Terrible

I’ve written many hundreds of columns. The one below has caused me the most uncertainty about going public with it.

I’m accustomed to writing about facts, quotes, documented history, while offering assessments. But this piece extrapolates from the current zeitgeist, going into realms of events that must be speculative and—until too late—unprovable.

Diary

So lucky to be here. Tiny island of dreams.

The serenity is unbelievable, except I want to believe it. Bluest waves with silver froth. Sun through the palms is damn near orgasmic. And solitude! If I can’t finish the book here, it’ll be my own fault.

***

Sort of knew I shouldn’t bring the shortwave. That’ll teach me to donate to NPR. Just can’t resist a “thank you gift.” Will crank it tomorrow.

***

Wish I hadn’t turned on the radio. BBC World Service all there is. Downbeat.

Swim, then write. Plenty of sunblock. As for writer’s block, perish the thought.

***

Latest newscast unnerving. Need to concentrate. I blow this deadline, I’m seriously screwed.

OK, no distractions, beautiful isle all to myself. A thousand words a day and I’ll be in clover.

***

Radio getting scary. What’s coming out of Washington and Moscow, not to be believed.

Stop worrying and get to work!

***

Worse. Can’t listen any more. Can’t not.

Wish I could call home.

***

BBC now mostly static. What I could make out this morning left me shaky. “Standoff” … “ultimatum” … “hair trigger” … “nuclear alert” … “drills.” Threats escalating.

Is that idiot trying to prove he’s not Putin’s bro after all?

***

Radio gone silent. Can’t write.

Should have packed some valium.

***

Trump traumatized us. Despicable lunatic president. Groundhog day after day, one alarm after another, real-life nightmare.

So whatever he said had to be wrong. Easy to forget that even a broken clock, once in a great while …

Early on, so much scorn when Trump said would be better to get along with Russia. Now I wish.

***

When I was a kid, most liberals wanted détente with Russia. After Trump got in, a very different approach. (Putin more odious than Brezhnev?) Righteous flamethrowers over nuclear powder keg.

Still nothing on shortwave. Cold sweat in this heat. Staring at waves and worrying.

Just realized: All the talk about climate change and hardly a word about the ultimate climate disaster—nuclear winter—in which case, forget about agriculture. Or human life on earth. All it would take is a nuclear war with Russia. For all I know, about to happen!

When we kept baiting Trump as a Putin tool, maybe we were even crazier than Trump.

***

Somehow a zeitgeist switch got pulled. By early ’17, the “Russiagate” juice was pulsing like Times Square. Hypnotic.

Didn’t think much about where the frenzy might plausibly lead. I certainly made no objection. Who wants to be a bull’s-eye, Kremlin’s useful idiot? Now I feel like an idiot all right. For never really asking: Where’s all this headed? Just keep increasing the chances of blowing up the whole friggin’ world?

***

Oscillating between numbed, frightened, outright terrified.

Should have been so obvious, where all the hostile rhetoric was taking us. Should have slammed on the brakes. But so much easier to fixate on Putin, the creepy bad guy with bare chest on a horse. Forget about the nuclear horseman of the apocalypse.

***

Supply boat 72 hours late. Still nothing above the water line but sky and birds.

All I can do is useless. Starting to dream about arrival of food, water. Crank the radio and think about that last news report. The surreal staccato words, on the edge, out of control.

***

Should have been obvious:

1. The frenzy of hostility toward Russia made negotiations less and less likely.

2. Absence of negotiations with Russia made nuclear war more likely.

3. The frenzy of hostility toward Russia increased the chances of nuclear war.

Q.E.D.

The lemming logic of it all was unseen in plain sight, evaded most pivotally by Democrats, liberals, progressives. We were so good at displacing our fearful rage at Trump, we propelled our own stampede. A kind of collective madness, the commonest of common sense.

***

Brooding. Climbing walls that aren’t here. How could this be?

All of us tiny, but every twig we threw on the fire helped it spread, burn fiercer. A socialized, psychological firestorm. Relentlessly obscuring the biggest picture imaginable. Actually unimaginable.

Hardly enticing to wrap minds around nuclear holocaust, or the nuclear winter that would come right behind it. Maybe none of us really could.

Instead, steadily, we got our froggy legs boiled in the propaganda pot. And we never jumped out. Now all that Russiagate uproar looks so trivial.

***

Always wanted to assume that some people I love will live after me.

***

Hungry. Waves lapping. No boat or plane in sight. No radio sound beyond static no matter how hard I crank.

Trying to understand how it could have maybe come to this.

***

Better reduce my meal portions again. Cut back on water.

***

Remembering back to 2017 when Democrats in Congress were quite sanely denouncing Trump for refusing to pursue real diplomacy with North Korea—and many of the same ones were denouncing him for talking with Putin. So party-line clever. Now I’m terrified the world is on fire.

***

Still nothing. No drop-off. Eleven days late and counting.

Closed my eyes and could hear the scratchy “South Pacific” album. I must have been in third grade. Learning cursive writing. “Happy talk, keep talking happy talk.”

Never thought I might die alone under palms.

***

Not feeling good. Maybe it’s from cutting back on food. Nauseous, dry heaves. Starting to throw up.

***

Will I see the kids again?

Do they have any future?

Trying not to let fear overwhelm!

***

I must have seen hundreds, maybe thousands of cable news hours about how bad Russia is. Doubt even 1 percent—make that 0.1—mentioned the nuclear missiles between us. Minor detail. Careers being boosted, great ratings.

***

Water everywhere I can see. Almost out of water. So thirsty.

***

I blame the whole spectrum. It wasn’t just the right-wing fanatics and crackpot “centrists.” Just as bad were the liberals, progressives. They glommed onto the madness about Russia. Set aside realities for human survival, an analytical sense of what was at stake. The bennies of conformity and received wisdom were just too great, the need for context, history actually, too large. So they fell for or into one of the oldest basic tricks in the books: diverting attention from the homegrown rot, the obstacles to democracy that couldn’t be closer to home. Instead, they wrapped themselves around the lightning-rod flagpole of rage at who they were told was our foreign foe. And Russiagate was to stand alone as a supreme offense.

While supposedly rejecting “American exceptionalism,” those liberals/progressives were fervently embracing it. A silent message in it all, a message so implicit and apocalyptic that it dared not speak its true content, an insane content: It would be worth escalating, and escalating, and escalating against Russia, with no end in sight—or really sought, given the political investment in demonizing Putin as Trump’s patron—escalating the real dangers of horrific conflagration from the world’s two nuclear superpowers.

Where would it end? We didn’t ask. Much of the madness was bound up in not thinking about such questions, not asking them, much less searching openly for answers grounded in the real world. There was a word that could scarcely ever be heard, and yet it described as maybe no other could what became more and more likely as a consequence of the hyped Russiagate madness. Omnicide.

***

Still no food drop. Prepaid!! Supposed to be absolutely reliable!!!

Hope hope hope I’m somaticizing.

Don’t know what the nosebleed is about.

***

Where’s the food drop?

Exhausted. Aching like some kind of bad flu.

***

Sicker. Hardly can move. Need help soon.

My God want to see my kids tell I love them!!!!

***

Didn’t have to be this w

Sanders Institute Offers a Fix for Our Abysmal Voter Turnouts

America has frequently found itself in deadly, expensive wars, all under the cover of promoting “democracy.” But perhaps that goal would be better served in our own backyard, especially after one looks at U.S. voting records, and the fact that just 55.7 percent of Americans eligible to vote did so in the 2016 election.

In a May blog post, The Sanders Institute, a progressive think tank co-founded by Jane Sanders, the wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders, examines why these numbers are so low, and what we can do to solve this issue.

As the institute explains, “The fact that our Senators, Representatives, and even President are selected by a small portion of our population, contrasts sharply with our democratic ideals. Ultimately, our system fails to encourage full voter participation.”

The numbers from the 2016 election are not an anomaly. As the institute points out, “During off-years the voter turnout is much lower. In 2014, turnout in the United States was 36.4%.”

The Electoral College, in which some states’ votes are weighted higher than others, received a lot of media attention following the 2000 and 2016 elections, when George W. Bush and Donald Trump became president by winning the Electoral College but not the popular vote. Even the famously conservative National Review, on May 14, published an article titled “The Electoral College Favors Republicans.”

On the other side of the aisle, David Faris, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of “It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics,” noted in The Daily Beast: “American democracy has misfired by hewing to institutions and procedures cooked up over candlelight a hundred years before the invention of the internal combustion engine.”

The Sanders Institute cites the Electoral College as one reason for the country’s dismal turnout, but it also gives much-needed space to several lesser-known, often insidious, reasons why, in what is supposed to be a democracy, so few Americans feel welcome to—or are able to—vote.

● There’s the prevalence of closed primaries, which ban unaffiliated voters from voting in any party’s primary. This is a particularly critical issue in a country where, as noted by the Sanders Institute, “According to Gallup, a little under half (46%) of Americans do not identify with a political party. Only a quarter (25%) identify as Republican, and 27% identify as Democrat. This means voters are either forced to choose between a political party they may not fully identify with or they are barred from participating in many state primary elections.”

● Harsh voter ID laws effectively disenfranchise large populations. As the institute points out, “While for some, having an ID is a normal part of life, more than 21 million Americans do not have government-issued photo identification.” If those Americans live in one of 10 states with strict, narrow voter ID laws, they are effectively disenfranchised.

● Banning felons from voting is another insidious form of disenfranchisement. A total of 6.1 million Americans are barred from voting due to prior felony convictions. There’s an extra level of racism here, as, according to the Sanders Institute, “this disenfranchisement disproportionately affects African-Americans.” According to The Sentencing Project, “1 of every 13 African Americans has lost their voting rights due to felony disenfranchisement laws, vs. 1 in every 56 non-black voters.”

Separating voter registration from voting is especially confusing. The Sanders Institute says, “In the United States, at the age of 18 every American male is automatically sent a letter telling him he could potentially be called for the draft. In contrast, not a single American is automatically registered to vote in the same way.”

Additionally, each state has different rules about how and when to register, whether it can be done in person or by mail, what kinds of information people are required to bring with them and whether they are allowed to both register to vote and vote on the same day.

Early voting and automatic voter registration (AVR) are two steps that states can take to alleviate some of these barriers. In 2017, researchers Sean McElwee, Brian Schaffner and Jesse Rhodes examined Oregon’s adoption of both steps and their effect on voter turnout. As they wrote of AVR in The Nation:

In 2016, 288,516 people registered to vote for the first time in Oregon. Of individuals registering for the first time, 186,050—or 66 percent—were registered via the AVR program. An additional 35,000 Oregon residents whose registration had lapsed were re-registered through AVR. Given these figures, it is not unreasonable to conclude that without AVR, 220,000 fewer citizens likely would have had the opportunity to vote in the 2016 elections.

AVR, working in tandem with early voting and Oregon’s option to vote by mail, increased not only registration but turnout. The Nation continues:

Turnout in Oregon increased more between 2012 and 2016 than in any other state. Overall voter turnout in the state reached 68 percent in the 2016 presidential election, up from 64 percent during the 2012 non-AVR election period. Nationally, voter turnout increased by only 1.6 points.

Not every state is Oregon, of course, but these two steps, in addition to striking down voter ID laws and allowing felons to vote (or, as New York state has done, allowing felons on parole to vote), would go a long way toward raising America’s abysmally low voter turnout.

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