Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 260
October 25, 2017
A new life for Pittsburgh’s Bhutanese refugee community
Kamala Neopaney (Credit: Ashley Murray)
Over tea in her home in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, Kamala Neopaney and her husband recall their childhood in Bhutan.
Her husband Kul looks out the window above the kitchen sink. “Pittsburgh looks a little bit like Bhutan,” he said.
Neopaney, 39, leans against the smooth island countertop, adding, “We actually met in a refugee camp in Nepal.”
In the early 1990s, the Bhutanese government began to ethnically cleanse certain groups — akin to the recent situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine state today. Neopaney’s family fled to Nepal when she was 13 years old. She lived in a refugee camp there for nearly 20 years.
“When you would try to get out of the refugee camp and work with the outside communities, the way they treated you and looked at you, it didn’t feel good,” Neopaney said.
Neopaney’s husband and her two children, now ages 8 and 16, were fortunate to be resettled in the U.S. — first in Phoenix, and then they moved to Pittsburgh’s South Hills, where a Bhutanese community has been growing since 2008.
Neopaney, like other Bhutanese in Pittsburgh, has since found her place working as a nurse for one of the city’s two large hospital systems.
“I think one of the reasons [is refugees and immigrants] can go to a community college and not be under that student loan [debt]. It’s easy to find job. There are so many hospitals in Pittsburgh,” Neopaney said.
She works in the antepartum unit at Magee Women’s Hospital, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital system, Pittsburgh’s largest employer. Three members of the Bhutanese community who also graduated alongside her from the Community College of Allegheny County nursing associate’s degree program work at the hospital as well.
Bishnu Timsina, of the Refugee Youth Employment Program, said she can’t pinpoint an exact number of Bhutanese nurses in Pittsburgh, but she sees a trend in her social circle and work. As a member of the resettled Bhutanese community, she personally knows twelve women who’ve gone into nursing. In her role in youth employment for the resettlement agency Jewish Family and Children Services, she hears interest in the occupation from the kids.
“Ninety percent of my students are Nepali Bhutanese refugees and immigrants. Ninety percent of girls and some boys want to become RNs,” said Timsina.
Since 2008, the U.S. State Department has resettled more than 2,000 Bhutanese refugees in the Pittsburgh area. Today, approximately 5,000 Bhutanese live in the city, according to the Bhutanese Community Association of Pittsburgh. Discerning the exact number of second-wave migrants — meaning family members and friends who’ve followed others to Pittsburgh from other U.S. cities — is difficult, says Kunti Gurung, of BCAP.
But Gurung has heard of the nursing career path trend in the community. “In my view, most of them are targeting toward the medical field so they can have a good job,” she said.
In true immigrant-story fashion, when asked if her daughter was thinking of a career path in nursing, Neopaney says her daughter will reach higher. She could be a nurse “without a problem,” Neopaney said, but the two have been visiting colleges known for biology — in case her daughter decides to attend medical school.
Can you ever start over in the digital age?
(Credit: Getty/BongkarnThanyakij/Google)
If nothing is forgotten in the digital age, if all our social media posts live on forever, how do we manage our past?
“Our brain is a very efficient machine. It tries to focus on what is necessary, what’s relevant to us in the present,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” “So stuff that our brain thinks is no longer relevant, our brain tends to forget. With digital tools, it’s now easy to store and retrieve data and information, and as we do this we enter territory that is unfamiliar to us as human beings.”
Perfect recall, even when it’s innocently intended to aid us in remembering, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave the past behind.
The internet privileges information that may not be relevant to who a person has become. With perfect memory, our digital tools tether us to a past that we may have moved beyond, and one of Mayer-Schönberger’s solutions — his way of introducing the art of forgetting into our digital tools — is “The Right to Be Forgotten.” In the European Union, this feature allows people to submerge entries they no longer want to appear in Google searches.
The Right to Be Forgotten is controversial, since the idea of submerging the past raises a number of problems. As George Orwell warned in “1984,” “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” What we’ve held as fundamental beliefs that appeared to co-exist peacefully — our right to privacy, free speech, etc. — bump up against each other in the debate over The Right to Be Forgotten, creating friction no one knows yet how to handle.
In Part One of the series, “The Right to Oblivion,” Evan Ratliff, a writer for Wired Magazine, tries to disappear, physically and digitally.
“I had been looking for years for a way to do a story about a fake death,” says Ratliff. “One of the things that interested me a lot was the psychology. What if I could just start over as a new person? What does that feel like? Does it feel liberating, or does it feel debilitating?”
Evan brought up the idea to his editor. Writing about a fake death is difficult, his editor said. “Then I just said, ‘Well, what if I did it. What if I fake my own death,’” Ratliff told his editor.
In the summer of 2009, Wired magazine created a competition. Evan would try to vanish for a month and start over with a new identity, and the public would try to find him — in person. If they did within 30 days, told him the password and took a picture, they’d win $5,000. If Ratliff was caught, he’d lose $3,000.
If Ratliff had disappeared into the woods of Alaska with no internet service, his chances of getting caught would have been slim to none. But the point of the competition was to highlight our digital footprint, to show how every click, scan and swipe reveals us to the world, from our credit card and E-ZPass bill to photos people tag us in on Facebook. And this was in 2009. Facebook and Twitter were newish companies. Instagram was only an idea. But even back then, our ever-expanding digital footprint was raising questions about privacy, surveillance and the internet’s unrelenting memory.
To hear Ratliff’s story and learn if he successfully disappeared, listen to “The Right To Oblivion: Part 1.”
Bruce Paddock, brother of Vegas shooter, arrested on child pornography–related charges
Bruck Paddock (Credit: AP)
Bruce Paddock, brother to the perpetrator of the Las Vegas mass shooting, was arrested in North Hollywood allegedly for crimes relating to child pornography and sexual exploitation of a minor, according to multiple reports.
Bruce Paddock was one of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s three brothers, albeit estranged from the family. Earlier this month, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more using a modified semi-automatic gun fired from the window of a Las Vegas hotel room. Stephen Paddock committed suicide after his massacre, leaving little evidence as to his motives. Since the massacre, there has been a flurry of interest both in understanding the shooter’s motives and on gun law reform. Little progress has been made on either front.
This was not the first time that Bruce Paddock had faced criminal charges; indeed, NBC News reported that “Bruce Paddock has a criminal record stretching back to the 1980s, with convictions for vandalism, criminal threats, theft and driving with a suspended vehicle and other arrests for which he was not convicted.”
Bruce Paddock is not to be confused with shooter Stephen Paddock’s other brother, Eric Paddock. Eric Paddock became the focus of media attention after giving a lengthy emotional interview on the front lawn of his Florida home days after the shooting. The shooter also has a fourth brother named Patrick Paddock who lives Tucson, Arizona.
Patrick Paddock told the New York Times in a recent interview that Stephen Paddock was “the most boring one in the family … He was the least violent one in the family, over a 30-year history.”
It seems unlikely that Bruce Paddock faced new police scrutiny as a result of the media focus on his family, as many of the charges against him appear to date to 2014. An NBC affiliate reported that the Los Angeles County criminal complaint listed “20 potential counts” for Paddock, which included “19 counts of sexual exploitation of a child and one count of possession of child pornography.”
Trump shifts the blame on Niger: “My generals and my military, they have decision-making ability”
Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Chris Carlson/Zuheir Saade/Photo montage by Salon)
President Donald Trump, who has often assumed the role of poster child for respect of the military, said on Wednesday afternoon that he couldn’t be held accountable as commander-in-chief for the ambush in Niger because he didn’t “specifically” sign off on the Special Forces’ botched mission which claimed the lives of four American commandos.
During an impromptu press conference in front of the White House, reporters asked the president if he had authorized the Oct. 4 mission in the West African nation where rebel militants have taken root.
“No, I didn’t. Not specifically,” the president replied. “But I have generals that are great generals, great fighters, these are warriors . . . My generals and my military, they have decision-making ability.”
He further explained: “As far as the incident that we’re talking about, I’ve been seeing it just like you’ve been seeing it. I’ve been getting reports. They have to meet the enemy and they meet them tough and that’s what happens.”
Pres. Trump says he didn’t “specifically” authorize Niger mission, but gave generals “authority to do what’s right so that we win.” pic.twitter.com/OAPqjpo3Ja
— ABC News (@ABC) October 25, 2017
Trump’s comments on Wednesday prove once more that he is entirely incapable of accepting responsibility — unless it is for success. Of course, he decided last spring to delegate broader authority to the Pentagon for exactly these types of missions.
Details of the mission, which had originally been dubbed a joint “patrol,” have slowly dripped out from the Pentagon since it initially began on Oct. 3, including 12 days of total silence from the White House. On the morning of Oct. 4, the group of a dozen U.S. Special Forces soldiers, along with roughly 30 Nigerien soldiers, was ambushed by about 50 militants who are believed to be associated with the Islamic State.
While Trump didn’t explicitly blame the military for the mission, he certainly made sure he cleared his name from responsibility, and it’s not the first time he’s done this.
Just days into his presidency, Trump signed off on a raid in Yemen which resulted in the death of one U.S. soldier and as many as 25 civilians, many of whom were young children. The American Civil Liberties Union has even filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in hopes that files on the mission will be made available to the public.
The White House immediately touted the raid as a success and said that valuable information had been recovered. But after reports continued to surface that no information of importance had been recovered and that seemingly everything went wrong, Trump shifted the blame.
The mission “was started before I got here,” The Washington Post reported the president as insisting. “This was something that was, you know, just — they wanted to do,” Trump said. “And they came to see me and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected,” he added.
As covert counterinsurgency operations across Africa only appear to be deepening, few questions have been asked about the rapidly expanding, and seemingly endless, global footprint of the U.S. military, which has now deployed Special Forces soldiers into 70 percent — or 138 — of the world’s countries.
Will Obamacare marketplaces suffer during open enrollment?
(Credit: Getty/Mandel Ngan/skynesher)
The Trump administration’s executive order changing some elements of the Affordable Care Act’s administration are creating uncertainty as open enrollment for the health insurance marketplaces is set to start Nov. 1.
How will the executive order affect individual insurance and open enrollment this year?
With one very important exception – the elimination of subsidies to help low-income people pay for co-payments and other out-of-pocket expenses – the likely answer is: not much.
However, as a professor of health policy who has extensively studied the ACA, I believe that exception could have big ripple effects.
Changes ahead
The executive order of Oct. 12, 2017 focused on three relatively unknown features of how the ACA affects premiums and enrollment. These three are association health plans, health reimbursement accounts and short-term health insurance policies.
Association health plans, which have been proposed since the 2000s, are insurance plans offered by associations rather than employers and that would be exempt from state insurance laws.
For example, small law firms might be able to buy health insurance through the American Bar Association. Association health plan regulations would seek to exempt the bar association from the many differing state insurance regulations arguably lowering costs and increasing insurer competition.
There are two reasons to think this effort would have “not much” of an effect. First, small employers can already become self-insured and buy coverage that limits their risk beyond a certain dollar amount, or what is called stop-loss coverage. They can therefore rather easily become exempt from state insurance regulations.
The second reason to expect “not much” impact is that modern insurance requires networks of hospital, physician and drugstore networks. Our field research on the effectiveness of competition in the exchanges leads us to believe that the proposed multi-state associations are unlikely to be able to negotiate meaningfully low prices with providers that will allow them to compete with locally based insurers.
So, few get established and even fewer are successful.
Employer-based savings accounts
The next proposal is to allow health reimbursement account funds to be used for a broader array of services and, particularly, to buy private individual coverage through the exchange.
Health reimbursement accounts are similar to the tax-sheltered flexible spending accounts that many people currently have through their employers. Unlike an FSA, however, the employer funds the health reimbursement account and defines what the funds can be used for.
One fear is that the employers most likely to adopt the new-version health reimbursement account are those with a history of high medical claims. They would, it’s feared, dump their expensive workers on the insurance exchange, leading to higher exchange premiums.
It is very unclear the extent to which employers would move toward the new health reimbursement accounts. Traditionally, money to buy private coverage was a not uncommon model used by small employers in the pre-ACA era. These would seem to be the most likely to adopt the new health reimbursement account model.
But, currently uninsured workers in small firms are more likely to be low utilizers of health care services, so they don’t cost much. If so, their enrollment in the exchanges would lower average claims costs, and, by extension, premiums as well. While there is the potential for larger effects, I believe the mostly likely impact seems to be “not much.”
Short-term policies
The order also proposed expanding the time limit on short-term policies from 90 days to 365 days. This has a potentially bigger impact – particularly when tied to the elimination of payments for cost-sharing subsidies.
Traditionally, state laws limited short-term policies to approximately 365 days of coverage. The Obama administration shortened that to 90 days. The short-term individual market is (and was) minuscule; the entire individual market is only about 7 percent and the short-term market was only a slice of that. It focused on those who wanted coverage between jobs, or before new employer coverage began, or before Medicare began. Those with preexisting health conditions paid more. Coverage could also be tailored to exclude, say, maternity care.
However, a reasonably healthy individual may buy such a plan “just in case.” These are the very folks the ACA wants in the exchanges. They would help balance out the high cost people with ongoing health problems.
Thus, some opponents fear that expanding the length of short-term policies would take away healthy buyers from the exchange marketplaces and result in higher premiums for those who remain.
Advocates of the short-term policies would argue that these are precisely the folks who aren’t buying coverage now.
Given the strongly disproportionate enrollment into the exchanges by those with preexisting conditions and other health concerns, I’m of the view that this proposal increases the number of people with coverage, by means of the short-term policies, without having much impact on the exchanges.
But, there is a complication!
Higher premiums almost a certainty
The complication is the administration’s decision to stop payments to insurers for cost-sharing subsidies. These are subsidies to help low income people pay for co-payments, deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses.
These subsidies differ from those to help consumers pay for insurance premiums. The administration’s decision order doesn’t change those premium subsidies.
What does change is that the administration is arguing that Congress never appropriated the payments of the cost-sharing subsidies to the insurers and as a result these payments will now stop.
This presents a problem. Insurers in the marketplace must honor the effectively lower deductibles and co-pays. To offset losses from the administration’s action, they ordinarily would raise premiums or leave the market.
But under the ACA, the insurers can’t just raise premiums. Insurers had to submit their proposed premiums last summer and signed contracts in October. Some insurers assumed the administration would end these subsidy payments; they raised their proposed premiums to reflect this assumption, and the regulators approved the higher rates.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas reported that its 2018 rates reflect this assumption. Other states, such as California, directed insurers to assume that the subsidy payments would go away, it also approved higher rates. Other states may allow insurers to revise their rates; still others may not.
So, in some states, premiums are already higher due to the anticipation of the administration’s action. In others, premiums will increase to reflect the new action. In still others, insurers may be simply out of luck; these are the states where some or all insurers may withdraw from the exchanges.
A new group would be vulnerable
This sets up a second set of consumers who will be affected by the short-term policies. It’s not the folks who have the premium subsidies. As long as their incomes don’t change, the premiums they pay are unaffected. Under the ACA, taxpayers pay for their higher premiums.
No, the second affected group consists of those who are not eligible for a premium subsidy. Whether they buy coverage through the exchange or through an off-exchange, ACA-compliant policy, they will face the higher premiums.
In my view, many of these will be tempted by the short-term policies. Some will be pleased that they can get “just in case” coverage at a lower premium. Some will be pleased that they can buy coverage that doesn’t include features they don’t value, maternity care perhaps, at a much lower price. Others will make the trade-off of lower-priced coverage, but exclusion of coverage for their heart condition. They hope and trust that they can make it to the next ACA open enrollment period if they need such care. These folks all expand enrollment in the short-term market segment.
It isn’t clear, however, how big an impact this enrollment shift might have on the exchanges. To the extent that these are disproportionately healthy folks who withdraw, their withdrawal will mean that those who remain in the exchanges are those with higher average medical costs, resulting in higher premiums next year.
So, while most of the actions in the president’s executive order are likely to have “not much” impact, the real story is likely to be the shift to short-term policies in the face of the elimination of the payments for the cost-sharing subsidy.
Michael Morrisey, Professor, Health Policy and Management, Texas A&M University
The news media’s challenge to cover our constant state of emergency
(Credit: Getty/AP/Salon)
It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. You can’t tear your eyes away. You can already write tomorrow’s story: Today the vicious, deranged freak-show star trashed Enemy A, picked a fight with Failed Insider B, invited unconstitutional action C, insulted population D, declared his intent to abrogate Agreement E or make war on Country F, and denied facts G through Z. Fill in the blanks.
If you are paying attention, each one of his assaults on decency, intelligence and knowledge will feel urgent, ridiculous or both. Each day he threatens grave damage to actual human beings and the rest of Planet Earth, and each day he demonstrates his incapacity to do anything but inflict more damage. But some readers and viewers have erected walls to protect themselves from appreciating the damage, while many others think that what he just said is just the sort of thing you’d expect him to say; or isn’t as bad as expected; or sounds like what he said last week, and so is, like it or not, normal.
Even some of our best journalists continue to scavenge the rubble of everyday politics looking for signs of normalcy and “presidentialness.”
You want to jack up your eyebrows permanently. You will feel tempted to offer, as a prologue or a follow-up to each item of news, You won’t believe this. And your task as a journalist is to convey what he just said so that the reader or viewer willbelieve that he did say what he just said, and will be able to take the measure of it, to know how it was wrong, or incoherent, and why; to know that it was founded on ignorance and falsehood, and in what ways. Making intelligible the everyday nonsense without losing the sense of the ways in which it is nonsense is the tallest of journalistic orders. And to reveal not only what he just said but what he just did, or just let happen, is a task for more journalists than can be found in the entire United States of America.
Whether you are a journalist or a citizen of some other kind, if you lose your capacity to be shocked, you have come untethered from the real shocking world in which meaning is steadily mangled. If you lose your ability to feel disgusted, you have lost your moral purchase. So in order to remain alive to the world, you must hold on to your vulnerability. You must, every day, pause the thought that you’ve heard this story before. You must feel, every day, the pain and contempt that is the gross domestic and international product of this travesty of government — let alone democratic government.
How can you tear your eyes away without renouncing every value you hold dear? But if you don’t tear your eyes away, how do you convey the true magnitude of the menaces unfolding 24 hours a day?
If you are a journalist, it is your duty to disturb — not by exaggerating, not by refusing “balance,” but by refusing to cut corners. You must consider a maniac a maniac. You must agree to be unnerved. Failure to be unnerved is a sign of impairment. Failure to disturb is a failure at your job, which is to excavate and sort through the facts in such a way as to help citizens act as they are bound to act — to restore, as best we can, the health of the republic.
Part of journalism’s challenge at this insane moment is to overcome one of its cardinal principles. It abhors “old news.” So it must struggle to get a grip on the most important news, which surely includes the ugliest, and is always, in a way, “old.” This is because the ugliest news is news that continues, that goes on happening, that fans out into more than one trajectory at a time — news that rolls on in cascading sequences that, by prevailing standards, decline in news value. It’s the initial event that seizes the headlines — the rest is aftermath, mop-up, “old news.” Next will come “breaking news.” This just in… The assumption, possibly accurate, is that once the event has been catalogued in collective memory, it loses its tensile strength, and we stop paying attention.
This distortion of our collective experience is so ordinary as to escape much notice. But the consequences of the original news, the “story,” go on shaping life regardless of who pays attention.
The killer opened fire for a few minutes but the wounded, if they survive, remain wounded, their families and friends suffer their injuries, the trauma goes on. The factories shut down, people take to drugs and drink, and the recently unemployed get worse — less secure, less meaningful — jobs. The poor lose health insurance and then get sick and cannot afford treatment. Homes get seized for nonpayment of impossible loans, neighborhoods crumble, community networks break down. Wildfires burn, and ruins smolder, and the lost are found — or not — but a community expires. The hurricane moves on and the rubble remains, the power is off at the hospital, the medicines run out. The bombs fall, the wedding party was blown up, and the survivors tell stories about what happened and talk about what to do next.
In other words, the important news is not a rivulet flowing through a bounded channel from Point A to Point B. It is more like the sea, endlessly in motion in every direction. The most serious news continues to play out, if less dramatically, less shockingly, than at the desperate moments when the shots first rang out, the fire raged, the factory gate slammed shut, the hurricane first made landfall, the would-be president first opened his mouth about Mexicans. In the nearly 12 months through which we have staggered, day by horrific day, journalists have done well to catch the man making no sense. Yet the challenge remains. How do you tell a story you may think you’ve already told even as the story continues to unfold in its unruly way?
So as not to let this piece lapse into a chronicle of failure, here are some excerpts from a fine example of journalism that rises to the occasion: Ed Morales’ report on Puerto Rico in The Nation:
As Donald Trump’s rule-by-disinformation strategy intensifies, three weeks after Hurricane Maria, a reeling Puerto Rico is becoming more of a sideshow for his callous stereotyping and ruthlessness. He is subjecting the island’s citizens to layers of anguish, at once revealing the resourcefulness of a sturdy rural culture and the banality of government by public relations. Puerto Ricans, meanwhile, are suffering that all-too-human affliction: the desperate need to connect.
One of the enduring images from Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria is people crowded together near outposts of cable or wireless companies, trying to get a signal so they can communicate. By now most people know that their friends and loved ones have survived; that they may in some cases have water but almost never electricity; that they may need precious medications, or may have stood on line at their local pharmacy for hours to get them; that they may have lost all or part of the roof to their home. Survivors have seen their neighborhoods strewn with the carcasses of dead trees, discarded mattresses and refrigerators; have spent hours trying to get cash out of the few working ATMs in their area or — now a less common complaint — waiting in a gas line.
Sustaining contact on an island littered with fallen power lines and cell-phone towers is difficult, and it contributes to a pervasive feeling of disconnection and chaos. This island is full of people suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Imagine finally reaching the remote mountaintop home of a close friend or relative, who sits there with a municipal government–issued packet of crackers, applesauce and bottled water, looking up at you watery-eyed and saying, “I was wondering whether you even wanted to talk to me anymore.”…
And meanwhile, lest the story of Puerto Rico appear too abstract:
Pence’s visit had the unpleasant effect of throwing metro-area traffic into complete chaos, prompting the closure of the Baldorioty Expressway, which is something like Manhattan’s FDR Drive. With all surrounding avenues closed, I was forced to drive back toward Old San Juan, which is still without electricity (as opposed to Condado, where billionaire hedge-funder John Paulson has bought the area’s most luxurious hotel). Driving south toward Rio Piedras in the hopes of avoiding traffic, I encountered flash floods that made Avenida Muñoz Rivera a one-lane lake. Pushing on to the old Route 3 on the way back east to the rain forest, a feeling of dread overtook me as I realized that night had fallen and thousands of cars were surging along highways with stoplights that didn’t work.
Amazingly, the anxious civility that has permeated the island kept us all safe, and I maneuvered the painstaking miles through a torrent of headlights, fading cell signals, flooded roadways and yawning potholes. The landscape had become an unrecognizable blur of fallen trees, twisted highway signs and mangled electrical wires. Landmarks had become distorted and useless, while entire communities that had been previously invisible now emerged, ghostlike. There was no light anywhere, just a full moon that seemed to swallow all of Route 66….
In his sociological classic, Deciding What’s News, published in 1979, Herbert J. Gans itemized what he called “enduring news values” — the unwritten, often unthought elements of a story that elevate it to prominence. Disasters loomed large in his accounting. Some disasters are social, some are natural, but all represent violent breaks from what came before. The rupture is, by definition, a sign of the extraordinary. Something has been torn asunder. The event can be pinpointed, assigned a who, a what, a where and a when, if not a why. So later we can speak of “after Vietnam” and “after Charlottesville,” with the place-name doubling as the time when a specific, bounded experience “took place.”
Gans noted, too, that after a time — usually no more than a few days — the emphasis in the reporting of a disaster shifts from the damage caused to the restoration of order. The restoration of order is not necessarily a happy ending but it’s a happier one, an exercise in not only social but mental management. It affords a sense of what we have come to call closure. The streets are drained, the rubble cleaned up, the National Guard withdrawn, the patients moved from the dysfunctional hospital, the surviving victims outfitted with their prostheses. We can move on.
But there are millions who can’t move on. Thus Ed Morales’ sum-up of the financial situation after Hurricane Maria: “…the relief designated for Puerto Rico comes in the form of roughly $5 billion in loans…a cruel joke for a territory already drowning in debt.”
One rupture of order follows another. Don’t expect order to be restored. All systems failed. That is the story. It must be told, and refreshed, and followed, and followed anew.
Big Ag’s ‘World Food Prize’ is nothing but a slick propaganda campaign
(Credit: The Maui News, Matthew Thayer via AP, File)
On Thursday, the World Food Prize will be ceremoniously bestowed on yet another cheerleader for degenerative agriculture.
This year’s award goes to Akinwumi Ayodeji Adesina of Nigeria, president of the African Development Bank, and a proud supporter of Big Ag and Biotech. In his words, Adesina says he works to “help farmers rise to the top of the value chain by industrializing agriculture.”
In the lead-up to World Food Day (October 16) and Thursday’s ceremony, I’ve received a series of emails with the subject line, “How Iowa is feeding the world.” The email invitations contain glowing praise for industrial, degenerative agriculture — the type that kills healthy soil life, has ruined Iowa’s water and produces pesticide-contaminated food.
One email boasts:
“…in Iowa, solving global hunger is business as usual, from being the #1 producer of pork, soybeans and eggs, to the cutting-edge bioscience research being conducted at the state’s universities, to groundbreaking technological innovations applied in the farms and fields — Iowa has a long legacy of feeding the world.”
Iowa is in fact home to many good farmers. Farmers who work with nature, not against it. Farmers who steward their lands, and grow nutrient-rich, uncontaminated food — without benefit of the huge taxpayer-funded subsidies granted to their GMO monoculture counterparts.
But those aren’t the farmers who are ever awarded a $250,000 World Food Prize. Because those farmers aren’t generating big profits for corporations like Monsanto.
No, the farmers and “thinkers, scientists and advocates of global food security” who are gathered in Des Moines this week aren’t so interested in regenerative agriculture. And, as one new report after another reveal, the only thing they’re feeding the world is a slick PR campaign, founded in lies.
The truth about who’s really feeding the world (spoiler alert: it’s not industrial ag) was published this week by the nonprofit ETC Group in its latest edition of “Who will Feed Us?” But before we get to that, it’s worth pointing out, again, that lack of food isn’t the root cause of world hunger.
According to multiple sources, including Mercy Corps: “There is now 17 percent more food available per person than there was 30 years ago. If all the world’s food were evenly distributed, there would be enough for everyone to get 2,700 calories per day—even more than the minimum 2,100 requirement for proper health.”
So why do 795 million people (one in nine) go to bed hungry every night? Because the food being produced doesn’t get distributed to them — and even if it did, they couldn’t afford it.
Poverty and distribution are the root causes of hunger. And as Pope Francis said this week, the link between climate change (of which industrial agriculture is a major contributor) and hunger is “undeniable.”
What exactly is the World Food Prize?
In 1986, U.S. packaged food conglomerate General Foods Corporation launched the “General Foods World Food Prize” to celebrate advances in industrial food production.
Today, the “World Food Prize” is a public-private partnership between the state of Iowa and numerous multinational agrichemical corporations, including Bayer, Dow, Dupont, Monsanto and Syngenta. World Food Prize events happen on or around October 16, to coincide with World Food Day, the annual celebration of the founding in 1945 of the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO). The FAO uses World Food Day as a call-to-action for countries to meet Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #2: Achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.
According to its official website, the World Food Day Prize is “the most significant observance of World Food Day anywhere around the globe.” Yet interestingly, there’s no mention of the prize on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) website, where you think something so “significant” would bear mention by the originators of World Food Day?
Who really feeds the world?
At a recent dinner party, the subject of Monsanto and GMOs came up. Several of the well-educated and well-read guests asked: But without GMOs, how will we feed the world?
Clearly, Monsanto has excelled at getting its (false) message out. Which means that we have to work harder at getting out the facts — many of which are laid out, and meticulously researched and documented, in ETC Group’s latest publication.
In honor of the real World Food Day, please share some of the facts, brought to you by ETC Group:
Peasants are the main or sole food providers to more than 70 percent of the world’s people, and peasants produce this food with less (often much less) than 25 percent of the resources — including land, water, fossil fuels — used to get all of the world’s food to the table.
The Industrial Food Chain uses at least 75 percent of the world’s agricultural resources and is a major source of GHG emissions, but provides food to less than 30 percent of the world’s people.
For every $1 consumers pay to Chain retailers, society pays another $2 for the Chain’s health and environmental damages. The total bill for the Chain’s direct and indirect cost is five times governments’ annual military expenditure.
The Chain lacks the agility to respond to climate change. Its R&D is not only distorted but also declining as it concentrates the global food market.
The Peasant Food Web nurtures nine -100 times the biodiversity used by the Chain, across plants, livestock, fish and forests. Peasants have the knowledge, innovative energy and networks needed to respond to climate change; they have the operational scope and scale; they are closest to the hungry and malnourished.
There is still much about our food systems that we don’t know we don’t know. Sometimes, the Chain knows but isn’t telling. Other times, policymakers aren’t looking. Most often, we fail to consider the diverse knowledge systems in the Peasant Food Web.
The bottom line? According to ETC Group, at least 3.9 billion people are either hungry or malnourished because the industrial food chain is too distorted, vastly too expensive, and — after 70 years of trying — just can’t scale up to feed the world.
October 24, 2017
“Stranger Things” and the sinister innocence of Reagan’s America
Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, and Sadie Sink in "Stranger Things" (Credit: Netflix)
On July 11, Netflix confirmed this Friday’s release date of “Stranger Things” Season 2 with an ominous 30-second teaser and poster. The largest image in the poster, other than a forbidding red sky, is a road sign reading “Welcome to Hawkins.” Two weeks later at San Diego Comic Con, a full-sized three minute trailer screened to a packed auditorium and included the same road sign, reading this time “Leaving Hawkins, Come Again Soon.” Assumption: The name and place “Hawkins, Indiana” is as much shorthand for and iconography of the series as “What about Barb?,” The Upside Down and the ’80s pop culture references everywhere you look.
The fact that Hawkins, while fictional, has a become a memorable character in a show loaded with them (more Lucas this season, this fan requests) is itself a kind of ’80s nostalgia: Take Shermer, Illinois (The fictional universe of writer/director John Hughes); Castle Rock, Oregon (setting of “Stand By Me”); and the Goondocks (duh) as the short beginning of a very long list of movies from that time about the all-American small town as the ordinary backdrop of an extraordinary adventure. Many of these settings inspired “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer and are paid tribute to in Season 1 of the show.
I’m glad they did. I wrote a book called “Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to ’80s Teen Movies” which looked at American places as seen in the kinds of movies both the Duffers and I love. It came out shortly after the release of “Stranger Things” Season 1. Besides “what is your favorite ’80s movie?” and “when will they stop remaking my childhood?” the most common question I got on book tour was “What do you think of ‘Stranger Things?'”
In silly dreams, this makes the Duffers my soul brothers in Pony Velcro Sneakers. But nostalgia is not a harmless enterprise and their creation, at its best and worst, makes equally brilliant and dangerous use of it. The place where that balance tips dangerously for “Stranger Things” is on the autumn roads and frightening woods of Hawkins, Indiana.
The Duffer Brothers originally wanted to call Stranger Things “Montauk” and set the show in that coastal Long Island town of the same name as an homage to another seaside tale, their favorite movie “Jaws.” Ultimately the logistics of production didn’t allow for that, so what we now see as Hawkins, Indiana, is the Atlanta-metro area. The sinister Hawkins National Laboratory is actually the main continuing education building on the campus of Emory University. Steven Spielberg and his studio, Universal, had to move filming for “Jaws,” too, from Long Island, where Peter Benchley’s novel is set, to the fishing village of Menemsha in Martha’s Vineyard. Spielberg and team couldn’t find a town on Long Island that looked desperate enough to keep beaches open on 4th of July weekend despite shark attacks. The callow opportunism of local officials and the small town they represented lent moral weight to the vanquishing of the shark. The character of Hawkins, Indiana lends moral weight to its citizens, particularly its kids, but with less noble results.
It’s fair to ask two questions when TV mines the 1980s for inspiration: “Was it necessary to do so?” and “What assumptions were made by doing it?” Question #1 demands a TV series be something more than a series of memory flashcards. Question #2 is a reminder that a show set in the past is always a comment on the present and compels its creators to answer for that fact. I ask these questions to keep myself honest around nostalgia-driven pop culture, to avoid getting suckered into patronizing something whose chief appeal is simply reminding me of seventh grade.
How does “Stranger Things” answer these?
Question #1: When asked what I thought of “Stranger Things,” I answered “A brilliant-kids-save-the-world-from-evil-show.” That’s a movie theme that exploded in popularity in the 1980s (see “The Explorers,” “Red Dawn” and “War Games”), but very little about “Stranger Things” requires its exact date stamp. We can argue over whether the sleazy business of Hawkins Labs would have been discovered immediately with cell phone cameras or if Eleven’s telekinetic powers could have been kept secret for so long in the time of Snapchat and Instagram, but fundamentally, the rods and struts of “Stranger Things” are small town, kids, a magic little girl and her creepy father who heads up a creepy corporation with a big ugly secret. It may feel right to open the series with a title card reading “November 6, 1983, Hawkins, Indiana” but it is far from necessary to the first eight chapters of the narrative to do so.
Unless your perspective on “Stranger Things” is as a kid then and a parent now. The cultural conversation around the series and its chosen time period has, in large ways, centered on what we once and no longer allow kids to do. A New York Times editorial published during Season 1 headlined, “The Stranger Things School of Parenting,” called the show “a reminder of unstructured child wandering that — because of all the cellphones, the fear of child molesters, a move toward more involved parenting or a combination of all three — seems less possible than it once was” and reminds us that great ’80s movies about gangs of kids saving their small town from monsters only do so unsupervised. “A show like ‘Stranger Things’ doesn’t tell us that the world is safe, because it isn’t,” writer Anna North continues, “but it’s a reminder that bravery needs its own space to grow.” An equally sad reminder of this might be how few movies and TV shows set in the present feature ordinary kids (instead of wizards or super heroes) saving their ordinary small towns from monsters.
Quite unintentionally, the Duffers have created a present-day fantasy about the past that makes the unsupervised courage of children seem from a time dead and gone. And the irony of it is that the time of “Stranger Things,” statistically at least, was far more dangerous for unsupervised child heroes in training: Childhood mortality rates and reports of missing kids are today half of what they were in 1990. According to data reported by the Polly Klaas Foundation (an organization who “Stranger Things” star Winona Ryder was instrumental in the formation of) 99.8 percent of children who go missing in America come home, and a fraction of 1 percent are kidnapped by strangers. The Washington Post summarized these findings in a 2015 article with the headline “There has Never been a Safer time to be a Kid in America.” The 2016 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act, sponsored by Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, contains provision 858, which makes walking to and from school alone a right protected by federal law.
Are small towns like Hawkins inherently safer places for kids to ride bicycles through at night chasing monsters? In both culture and myth, the American hamlet has long been the gathering place for these prejudices. The idea of a village being inherently safer than the city has been with us at least since kids started running away from farms and towards bright lights and skyscrapers to seek their fortunes. At best, it’s an argument of relativism rather than fact: a place is “safe” only when compared to another that is “unsafe.” If population size is the determining factor of perceived safety, bear in mind Anchorage, Alaska has a higher murder rate than New York City. At worst, it’s a bigoted one, containing the assumption that Americans who live in certain places are inherently kinder and better people than those who live elsewhere.
Our most gifted storytellers of the gothic and grotesque (think Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, David Lynch) tempt us with the simple-minded notion of small town goodness, then pull back the curtains on its cruel practices and our naïveté in being surprised by them. Their less gifted imitators are simply lazy around that same notion, letting us believe that the typical American school town is always a community of the innocent to be invaded by the merciless and mean, rendering the community’s fear of anyone who looks or seems different than them — anyone from the outside — entirely justified.
The movies of the 1980s we remember were both. The cast and crew of “Stranger Things” has promised Season 2 will be darker than Season 1 and draw more from horror movie sources. Two of the decade’s biggest horror franchises, “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street,” are both social critiques of unneighborly small communities. On the other hand, ’80s stalwarts like “Gremlins” and “Adventures in Babysitting” carried on with the myopic notion that small towns are filled with the virtuous and to either leave them at night or let in outsiders is to tempt danger. “Morning in America,” the most famous commercial from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential re-election campaign (the timeframe of “Stranger Things” Season 2) featured white Americans in white American small towns doing things that seemed out of the 1950s and asked, “Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” Ronald Reagan’s favorite movie from this time was “Back to the Future,” not because it made a great joke about him ultimately being president but because Hill Valley in 1955 was the small town he wanted his “Morning in America” political philosophy to usher in once again.
To their credit, the Duffer Brothers and their team have displayed considerable self-awareness around making TV in the present about the past. Egregious racial and sexual stereotyping is studiously avoided and Eleven is a present day creation constructed from a present-day understanding of what young women are capable of. Where they have tripped over themselves is in importing the reductive magical thinking about small towns like Hawkins from the decade of moviemaking that inspired them: That small towns in the American heartland are where good solid people live and monsters are twice as horrifying when they attack those good solid people and shatter what we falsely perceive as the innocence of small town America.
It’s a prejudice “Stranger Things,” perhaps unintentionally, sinks its bicycle wheels into. If the horror genre is by definition a reflection of what we presently fear, “Stranger Things” unintentionally works off of the fear of what may be amassing just outside the town limits of what we consider “real honest America.” How often did you hear something like that in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election?
Nostalgia is not a harmless enterprise. All too often it’s a shovel rather than a sieve, dredging up elements from the past we remember fondly but also unearthing those that should have stayed interred. In gearing up for the next chapters and the five-season arc the Duffers reportedly want the series to take, let’s remember that the portrayal of Hawkins, Indiana, circa Halloween 1984, contained many of the same dark tendencies as complicated, fractured America of today. And though I have loved celebrating that era in my work over the last few years and loved watching “Stranger Things” celebrate it too, maybe the parts of it that now are demonstrably upside down should stay behind a closed door where they can’t hurt anybody.
The Prince nobody knew
(Credit: Afshin Shahidi/ "Prince: A Private View")
In his new book, “Prince: A Private View,” the famous musician’s personal photographer, Afshin Shahidi, shares a satisfyingly large number of photos of Prince, both in the public view and in more private moments.
Shahidi spoke with me in a video interview about what it was like photographing and befriending one of the most famous musicians in the world.
“He was a completely goofball,” Shahidi reminisced about Prince, who died in 2016. “Some of the images of him that you see where he has such a straight and serene kind of face, the second I’m done taking the picture, he’s goofing off.”
“He did have a good sense of humor, which again came out when he felt comfortable,” Shahidi continued. “You wouldn’t see those necessarily if he was doing a shoot for a magazine and there was a roomful of people he didn’t know. A lot of the work I did with him, I didn’t have a crew. I didn’t have lighting guys or production assistants or anything. It was just him and I.”
Prince “really kind of bared it all for me, and the lens,” Shahidi said. “I didn’t feel there was a lot missing.”
“But, in his eyes, at times, there was a depth that I felt like I wasn’t reaching and maybe nobody else was reaching,” he added. “Things he was thinking about, whether it was about music or his life, or anything else, I can’t say.”
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