Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 345

Trump’s big loss

Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Sean Gallup)

The demise of the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is hardly the end of the story. Donald Trump will not let this loss stand.

Since its inception in 2010, Republicans made the Affordable Care Act into a symbol of Obama-Clinton overreach — part of a supposed plot by liberal elites to expand government, burden the white working class, and transfer benefits to poor blacks and Latinos.

Ever the political opportunist, Trump poured his own poisonous salt into this conjured-up wound. Although he never really understood the Affordable Care Act, Trump used it to prey upon resentments of class, race, ethnicity, and religiosity that propelled him into the White House.

Repealing “Obamacare” has remained one of Trump’s central rallying cries to his increasingly angry base. “The question for every senator, Democrat or Republican, is whether they will side with Obamacare’s architects, which have been so destructive to our country, or with its forgotten victims,” Trump said last Monday, adding that any senator who failed to vote against it “is telling America that you are fine with the Obamacare nightmare.”

Now, having lost that fight, Trump will try to subvert the Act by delaying funding so some insurers won’t have time to participate, not enforcing the individual mandate so funding will be inadequate, not informing those who are eligible about when to sign up and how to do so, and looking the other way when states don’t comply.

But that’s not all. Trump doesn’t want his base to perceive him as a loser.

So be prepared for scorched-earth politics from the Oval Office, including more savage verbal attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, more baseless charges of voter fraud in the 2016 election, more specific threats to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and further escalation of the culture wars.

Most Americans won’t be swayed by these pyrotechnics because they’ve become inured to our unhinged president.

But that’s not the point. The rantings are intended to shore up Trump’s “base” — the third of the country that continues to support him, who still believe they’re “victims” of Obamacare, who are willing to believe Trump himself is the victim of a liberal conspiracy to unseat him.

Trump wants his base to become increasingly angry and politically mobilized so they’ll continue to exert an outsized influence on the Republican Party.

There is a deeper danger here. As Harvard political scientist Archon Fung has argued, stable democracies require that citizens be committed to the rule of law even if they fail to achieve their preferred policies.

Settling our differences through ballots and agreed-upon processes rather than through force is what separates democracy from authoritarianism.

But Donald Trump has never been committed to the rule of law. For him, it’s all about winning. If he can’t win through established democratic processes, he’ll mobilize his base to change them.

Trump is already demanding that Mitch McConnell and senate Republicans obliterate the filibuster, thereby allowing anything to be passed with a bare majority.

On Saturday he tweeted “Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW!” adding the filibuster “allows 8 Dems to control country,” and “Republicans in the Senate will NEVER win if they don’t go to a 51 vote majority NOW. They look like fools and are just wasting time.”

What’s particularly worrisome about Trump’s attack on the processes of our democracy is that the assault comes at a time when the percentage of Americans who regard the other party as a fundamental threat is growing.

In 2014 — even before Trump’s incendiary presidential campaign — 35 percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as a “threat to the nation’s well being” and 27 percent of Democrats regarded Republicans the same way, according to the Pew Research Center.

Those percentages are undoubtedly higher today. If Trump has his way, they’ll be higher still.

Anyone who regards the other party as a threat to the nation’s well being is less apt to accept outcomes in which the other is perceived to prevail — whether it’s a decision not to repeal the Affordable Care Act, or a special counsel’s conclusion that Trump did in fact collude with Russians, or even the outcome of the next presidential election.

As a practical matter, when large numbers of citizens aren’t willing to accept such outcomes, we’re no longer part of the same democracy.

I fear this is where Trump intends to take his followers, along with as much of the Republican Party as he can: Toward a rejection of political outcomes they regard as illegitimate and therefore a rejection of democracy as we know it.

That way, Trump will always win.

“The Trump victory sharpens Al’s message”: The directors discuss Gore’s progress in “An Inconvenient Sequel”

VP Al Gore with former Mayor of Tacloban City Alfred Romualdez and Typhoon Haiyan survivor Demi Raya in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power" (Credit: Paramount Pictures/Jensen Walker)

Convenience is one of the hallmarks of our age. Alexa and Siri service us like concubines. We perform life-changing tasks with a swipe. The savants at Pixar sure got it right in “Wall-E” when they satirized us as obese, shake-sucking-armchair-potatoes in space.  

So it certainly was going against the grain when, 11 years ago, Participant Productions and director Davis Guggenheim smacked us with that human 2-by-4, Al Gore, with his message of climate change peril in “An Inconvenient Truth.” The surprising thing was, people listened, and the film became a $23-million grossing hit that helped launch a new era of environmental consciousness.

It would have been facile to think that that success would resolve the problem and there wouldn’t be a need for a sequel. Finally, a sequel that really is necessary. And so, here it is just now in theaters; “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” a documentary again produced by Participant and also starring Gore’s message of environmental urgency, but this time directed by husband and wife team, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (“Audrie & Daisy,” “The Island President”).  

We see Gore as less wooden and more alive this time, as a significant part of a humane and human movement to save the earth. Salon lobbed some questions to the directors of the film, which topped specialty box offices over the weekend.

How did the film come together?

We were hired by Diane Weyermann, Executive VP of Doc Films at Participant Media. She, Jeff Skoll, and Al Gore had been discussing a possible follow up to “An Inconvenient Truth.” We traveled to Nashville, where we met Al Gore, who gave us a ten-hour long slide slideshow in order to bring us up-to-date on the climate crisis. We pitched the idea of doing a behind-the-scenes film in which we would follow Al for 18 months as he went about his work. The result is a cinema verité film in which the audience will see firsthand how Al travels to meet with scientists in Greenland, climate refugees in the Philippines and ultimately to Georgetown, TX to meet with a Republican Mayor who has decided to move his city to 100 percent renewable energy.

Leonardo DiCaprio and others have produced several climate change films in recent years; why did you think it was important to make this film?

Climate change is a highly complex, multi-faceted topic, and there have been many incredible films, books, and investigative Journalism on this topic. Leo D has spent a great deal of time and energy on fighting climate change, and we applaud him! Keep it coming. Climate change is the most important, most challenging issue humans have ever faced. Storytellers need to and should continue telling stories working on problem. Participant asked us to make a follow-up to “An Inconvenient Truth.” We agreed because we think that Al Gore is an unusual figure in the climate movement. Davis Guggenheim’s film helped millions around the world understand climate crisis and also re-introduced viewers to Gore in his post-political life.

Al agreed to give us a great deal of access, and through the scenes that we gathered, we hope viewers will get to know him better and also come to understand that we are at a unique moment in history in which the solutions to climate change exist. In Paris, during the 2015 climate conference, Al is asked to help convince the Indian delegation that India has a great to gain by moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy. It’s a privileged view into international negotiations that people rarely see.

What’s it like working with Al Gore and how involved was he in the edit?

We maintained control over final cut of the film. We did show Al some rough cuts because we wanted to make sure that we were communicating his slideshow material accurately and effectively. We enjoyed getting to know Al and found him to be generous and warm. We also found him to be tireless! We don’t know where he gets his energy, other that the fact that he seems driven deeply to help solve climate change.

What’s your read on Gore’s emotional and intellectual evolution regarding climate change since “An Inconvenient Truth?”

In the film you see that he is now quite optimistic about the solutions  — the cost down-curve for solar and wind tech has made renewable energy as cheap, if not cheaper, than traditional energy in many parts of the world. For example, he meets with the mayor of Georgetown, TX — a Trump supporter and a Republican — who has embraced wind and solar because it’s cheaper for the city and because it makes sense to him to pollute less. Al also now connects the movement to solve the climate crisis to other important social issues of the past. He compares the movement to the movement to end slavery, apartheid, the movement for gay rights, etc. We found him to be quite convincing and emotional on this topic.

How would the film have been different without a Trump presidency? Would it still have been necessary?

Well, the story of the film is about Al Gore’s on-going work to solve the climate crisis. The story mostly takes place before Trump’s presidency. And we think it’s very compelling. The Trump victory sharpens Al’s message because Trump stands firmly in the camp that denies the facts of climate science. What surprised us is the backlash to Trump’s speech in which we announced his intentions to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. Many mayors, U.S. governors and business leaders have stepped up and announced plans to keep America’s commitment to the agreement, despite Trump’s failure to lead on the issue.

Participant tends to have pretty involved outreach programs. What is it doing for this film?

Check out www.aninconvenientsequel.com. There is an incredible educational curriculum in the works as well.

Is there hope that if Trump doesn’t get re-elected (or gets impeached, for that matter) that the US can return to the Paris Accord?

Yes! In fact, the first day that the U.S. can officially withdraw is the day after the next president takes office in 2021. The Paris Accord was designed for each country to voluntarily commit to carbon reductions. It seems somewhat likely that the U.S. will keep to its commitments, given the action being taken by many states, cities, school and companies.

Weaving architecture, history and social justice together, Chicago is imagined anew in “No Small Plans”

No Small Plans: A graphic novel adventure through Chicago (Credit: Chicago Architecture Foundation)

Many comics are socially conscious, from the feminist sci-fi of “Bitch Planet” to the frightening dystopia of “Lazarus.” Many other comics skip through time. Perhaps the best recent example is Jason Aaron’s “Thor” run, which has featured hot-headed and dopey young Thor, familiar and grounded Avengers Thor, and bitter and defeated old Thor. But a new graphic novel takes time-hopping and socially conscious comics in a brand-new direction.

“No Small Plans” isn’t the latest offering from Marvel, DC or Image, but it is a sign of how comics are a populist medium that can spring up anywhere. This graphic novel — written by Gabrielle Lyon and illustrated by the Eye of the Cat Illustration team of Devin Mawdsley, Kayce Bayer, Chris Lin and Deon Reed — will be published this August by the Chicago Architecture Foundation as a culmination of their “Meet Your City” initiative. As part of the initiative, 30,000 copies of the graphic novel will be given to Chicago students in grades 6-10 over the next three years. The product is a gorgeous and thought-provoking call to action. Other cities looking for ways to engage teens in building a better city (and world) should take this project as a model.

“No Small Plans” follows three groups of teens through three periods of Chicago history set in 1928, 2017 and 2211. Among other young protagonists, the 1928 story features Reginald Williams, a paperboy (and budding journalist) for the Chicago Defender, an influential African-American newspaper founded in 1905. The 2017 story includes Natalie, a Hispanic girl whose family is being forced out of the Pilsen neighborhood by condo developers. The comic goes futuristic for the chapter set in 2211, showing a world experienced mostly through virtual reality, in which another group of diverse teens learns the importance of seeing other neighborhoods with their old-fashioned eyeballs.

All three stories revolve around a statement written in the notebook of Williams: “. . . a city is both its architecture and its people.” Racism, gentrification, apathy and ignorance are obstacles the teens in each era fight as they ask a question with no simple answer: “How might we build in ways that unite us?”

The urgency of that question is heightened in the interludes between chapters, featuring Daniel Burnham, who conceived “The Plan for Chicago” in 1909. Burnham’s plan led to the 1911 textbook that “No Small Plans” emulates: “Wacker’s Manual,” which Chicago Public School eighth graders read for nearly thirty years. In that spirit, the final Burnham interlude offers a direct invitation to readers to plan their own city. For anyone exhausted by the endless nightmare of national politics, this focus on the local should be refreshing and inspiring.

Chicagoans — or anyone who’s been to Chicago — will flip for this book. As writer Gabrielle Lyon notes, “Chicagoans will recognize many of the places and buildings in the novel — everything from the Wrigley building and Chicago Defender to iconic locations like Ida B. Wells’ house in Bronzeville to Daniel Burnham’s gravesite in the Graceland Cemetery. I think what might be most satisfying and endearing is the vernacular architecture, the ordinary things that are familiar to so many of us —bungalows, three-flats, alleys, bridges and glimpses of the lake.” Those particulars also have a universality. No matter where you’re from — city, suburb, village or town — you know the pains and possibilities of that place.

Main artist Devin Mawdsley — whose work is highly detailed and should appeal to fans of artists such as Geof Darrow, Frank Quitely and Chris Burnham — said the biggest challenge in producing the graphic novel was time. “Being a part-time teacher, work on the book was squeezed into the morning and late night hours. It was challenging and interesting co-constructing the narrative with Gabe, Chris, Kayce and Deon. The collaborative nature of the project was both stimulating and demanding.”

Indeed, this was an unusual collaboration involving more hands on deck than most comics. Lyon describes the lengthy process: “CAF developed a detailed ‘design brief’ over the course of nine months by asking planners, architects, educators, teens and community organizations ‘What’s most worth knowing and experiencing when it comes to urban planning and civic engagement?’ We used this brief to announce a call for Midwest artists to submit concepts for a new graphic novel that would address Chicago’s past, present and future, Chicago’s architecture as a character, youth as having agency, and grit and shine.”

The teens then helped select the artists. One of those teens, Destiny Brady, said she evaluated the artists with an eye for “their connection to youth in the city.” Brady was pleased with the final result, saying, “The children that this team illustrated really possessed the nature of our beloved city.”

For Mawdsley, bringing “No Small Plans” to life was also part of a re-evaluation of his own work as an artist, shifting from fine art to the more populist form of a comic. “The production of fine art has become less relevant and essential for me. Our culture, nevertheless, is an extremely visual one, and the graphic novel/comics is a potent cultural force. It is story-telling for the masses, it is a medium that is rich, vibrant, imaginative and affordable. Kids love comics and adults love comics.”

The most important — and sobering — lesson may have been learned when Cristina, one of the 2017 teens, learns her parents had been part of a successful battle to keep coal plants out of Pilsen in the 1970s. The fight was a win, but it took 10 years and the combined efforts of 17 different organizations. That kind of serious citizenship is far from sexy and provides no instant gratification. But it’s a task we should all be taking on, and this inspiring book provides much-needed inspiration and fuel.

“No Small Plans” will please any fan of the medium, but if you have a teen — or even better, a classroom — this is something you need to buy, preferably in bulk. Legendary creator Harvey Pekar famously said, “Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”

Amid the blaring headlines, routine reports of hate-fueled violence

In this Sunday, March 26, 2017, still image from a video surveillance camera, a suspect is shown during the vandalizing of a mosque near Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo. (Credit: Fort Collins Police Department via AP)

Last Wednesday, July 19, was something of a busy news day. There was word North Korea was making preparations for yet another provocative missile test. The Supreme Court, in its latest ruling in the controversial travel ban case, said that people from the six largely Muslim countries covered by the immigration enforcement action could enter the U.S. if they had a grandparent here, refusing to overturn a ruling that grandparents qualified as “bona fide relatives.” And then, late in the day, President Donald Trump gave a remarkable interview to The New York Times, one that, among other things, laid into Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The day also produced its share of what, sadly, has come to qualify as routine news: A Muslim organization in Sacramento, California, received a package in the mail that included a Koran in a tub of lard; police in Boise, Idaho, identified a teenage boy as the person likely responsible for scratching racist words on a car; in Lansing, Michigan, police launched a search for a suspect in the case of an assault against a Hispanic man. The victim had been found with a note indicating his attacker had been motivated by racial animus.

The specter of hate incidents and crimes — some of them fueled by the nastiness of the 2016 presidential campaign — felt white hot months ago. The issue remained high-profile as several horrific murders — a South Asian immigrant slain in Kansas City, a homeless black man butchered near Times Square in New York — generated outrage and national news coverage.

Documenting Hate, an effort by a coalition of news organizations, has sought to sustain a focus on incidents and crimes of racial or religious or sexual prejudice even as the temperature around the issue rises or falls. One of the truths the effort has laid bare is that such crimes are so commonplace that they can seem an almost ordinary part of the fabric of life in America.

Scattered among the news items on that single July day — captured in local write-ups and wire-service briefs — was the attempted murder of a black employee at an auto parts store in Desert Hot Springs, California, an attack during which the shooter repeated racial epithets; the menacing of a mosque in Georgia, where repeated telephone threats warned that “white people are going to kill you”; an Indian-American Ph.D. candidate in California had her car’s windshield shattered by a rock as she drove to work, glass from the window embedding in her skin and hair. “Go back to your own country,” the assailant had screamed.

“I was shocked,” Simranjit Grewal told the India West newspaper. “Another human being was trying to attack me, to hurt me.”

Earlier this year, ProPublica reported on studies done in Great Britain on hate crimes in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. Immigrants in the country faced violence, having been demonized as a threat during the polarizing and ultimately successful effort to withdraw from the European Union. One of the researchers’ findings was that the hate incidents very often did not involve fringe, ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi groups. Instead, they were perpetrated by, as one researcher put it, “ordinary people.”

The accounts marshaled by the Documenting Hate coalition suggest the same is true in the U.S. Amid the hundreds upon hundreds of news reports of crimes and insults and threats we’ve collected, there’s an everyman quality to the accused. While the black man killed in New York was allegedly slain by a consumer of white supremacy propaganda, the immigrant shot to death in Kansas City was allegedly killed by an unremarkable suspect, a man who had worked menial jobs across his life and, according to some associates, been in a spiral of drinking and depression for months.

The kinds of suspects implicated in the events of July 19 — a teen, a somewhat bumbling young man who managed to shoot himself in the course of trying to kill an auto parts worker — turn up on other days, in other crime reports. Two college students in Berkeley, California, were charged on July 18 with spray-painting racist graffiti. A man in Oregon was arrested after swearing at and harassing a Muslim women over a 20-block span, pretending to shoot a gun and screaming at her to leave the country and remove her headdress. The man, in tears, later said his “stupidity” had got the best of him.

The news reports collected as part of the Documenting Hate project include more than just crimes. The project also tracks news accounts dealing with reports on things such as hate crime statistics and calls for new hate crimes legislation. This month, for instance, there was the formal release of a Center on Islamic-American Relations report on anti-Muslim crimes, one that showed a huge spike over the last six months, a 91 percent rise in reported incidents over the same period last year.

Also included, though, are reports of steps being taken to combat the crimes and limit their incidence and damage — committees formed, outreach initiated. This month in Montgomery, Alabama, several organizations joined to run what they called “bystander intervention training,” meant to encourage people to act when witnessing the harassment of people because of their race or religion. In Anne Arundel, Maryland, there was a protest on the courthouse steps organized in part by the NAACP to highlight a recent case of a noose being hung in a local middle school.

And in Washington, D.C., there was a conference on hate crimes run by the Department of Justice overseen by Jeff Sessions. Should the news of July 19 — Trump’s first salvo in what seems to many to be a bid to drive Sessions from office — result in a new attorney general, one of Sessions’ final acts will have been an impassioned promise to fight hate crimes.

Burning Raqqa: The civilian toll on the U.S.’ latest anti-ISIS strategy

FILE - In this undated file photo released by a militant website, which has been verified and is consistent with other AP reporting, militants of the Islamic State group hold up their weapons and wave flags on their vehicles, in a convoy on a road leading to Iraq, from Raqqa, Syria. (Credit: AP)

It was midday on Sunday, May 7th, when the U.S.-led coalition warplanes again began bombing the neighborhood of Wassim Abdo’s family.

They lived in Tabqa, a small city on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Then occupied by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known as Daesh), Tabqa was also under siege by U.S.-backed troops and being hit by daily artillery fire from U.S. Marines, as well as U.S.-led coalition airstrikes. The city, the second largest in Raqqa Province, was home to an airfield and the coveted Tabqa Dam. It was also the last place in the region the U.S.-backed forces needed to take before launching their much-anticipated offensive against the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa.

His parents, Muhammed and Salam, had already fled their home once when the building adjacent to their house was bombed, Wassim Abdo told me in a recent interview. ISIS had been arresting civilians from their neighborhood for trying to flee the city. So on that Sunday, the couple was taking shelter on the second floor of a four-story flat along with other family members when a U.S.-led airstrike reportedly struck the front half of the building. Abdo’s sister-in-law Lama fled the structure with her two children and survived. But his parents and 12-year-old cousin were killed, along with dozens of their neighbors, as the concrete collapsed on them.

As an exiled human rights activist, Wassim Abdo only learned of his parents’ death three days later, after Lama called him from the Syrian border town of Kobane, where she and her two children had been transported for medical treatment. Her daughter had been wounded in the bombing and although the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led troops had by then seized control of Tabqa, it was impossible for her daughter to be treated in their hometown, because weeks of U.S.-led coalition bombing had destroyed all the hospitals in the city. 

A war against civilians

Islamic State fighters have now essentially been defeated in Mosul after a nine-month, U.S.-backed campaign that destroyed significant parts of Iraq’s second largest city, killing up to 40,000 civilians and forcing as many as one million more people from their homes. Now, the United States is focusing its energies — and warplanes — on ISIS-occupied areas of eastern Syria in an offensive dubbed “Wrath of the Euphrates.”

The Islamic State’s brutal treatment of civilians in Syria has been well reported and publicized. And according to Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the U.S.-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle to “liberate” these regions from ISIS is the “most precise campaign in the history of warfare.”

But reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from those with family members living in areas under U.S. bombardment, detail a strikingly different tale of the American offensive — one that looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.

These human rights groups and local reporters say that, across Syria in recent months, the U.S.-led coalition and U.S. Marines have bombed or shelled at least 12 schools, including primary schools and a girls’ high school; a health clinic and an obstetrics hospital; Raqqa’s Science College; residential neighborhoods; bakeries; post offices; a car wash; at least 15 mosques; a cultural center; a gas station; cars carrying civilians to the hospital; a funeral; water tanks; at least 15 bridges; a makeshift refugee camp; the ancient Rafiqah Wall that dates back to the eighth century; and an Internet café in Raqqa, where a Syrian media activist was killed as he was trying to smuggle news out of the besieged city.

The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria. In May and June combined, the U.S.-led coalition killed more civilians than the Assad regime, the Russians, or ISIS, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has been monitoring the death toll and human rights violations in Syria since 2011.

“This administration wants to achieve a quick victory,” Dr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights recently told me, referring to the Trump White House. “What we are noticing is that the U.S. is targeting and killing without taking into consideration the benefits for the military and the collateral damage for the civilians. This, of course, amounts to war crimes.”

And nowhere is this war against civilians more acute than in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, where trapped families are living under dozens of airstrikes every day.

Hotel of the revolution  

Located at the confluence of the Euphrates and Balikh rivers in northern Syria, Raqqa was first settled more than 5,000 years ago. By the late eighth century, it had grown into an imperial city, filled with orchards, palaces, canals, reception halls, and a hippodrome for horse racing. Its industrial quarters were then known as “the burning Raqqa,” thanks to the flames and thick smoke produced by its glass and ceramic furnaces. The city even served briefly as the capital of the vast Abbasid Empire stretching from North Africa to Central Asia.

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, wars between the Mongol and Mamluk empires annihilated Raqqa and its surrounding countryside. Every single resident of the city was either killed or expelled. According to Hamburg University professor Stefan Heidemann, who has worked on a number of excavations in and around Raqqa, the scorched-earth warfare was so extreme that not a single tree was left standing in the region.

Only in the middle of the twentieth century when irrigation from the Euphrates River allowed Raqqa’s countryside to flourish amid a global cotton boom did the city fully reemerge. In the 1970s, the region’s population again began to swell after then-President Hafez al-Assad — the father of the present Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad — ordered the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates about 30 miles upstream of Raqqa. Wassim Abdo’s father, Muhammed, was an employee at this dam. Like many of these workers and their families, he and Salam lived in Tabqa’s third neighborhood, which was filled with four-story apartment flats built in the 1970s not far from the dam and its power station.

Despite these agricultural and industrial developments, Raqqa remained a small provincial capital. Abdalaziz Alhamza, a cofounder of the watchdog group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which is made up of media activists from Raqqa living in the city as well as in exile, writes that the local news normally didn’t even mention the city in its weather forecasts.

In the mid-2000s, a drought began to wither the local cash crops: cotton, potatoes, rice, and tomatoes. As in other regions of Syria, farmers migrated from the countryside into the city, where overstretched and ill-functioning public services only exacerbated long-simmering dissatisfactions with the Assad regime.

As the 2011 rebellion broke out across Syria, Wassim Abdo and thousands of others in Raqqa, Tabqa, and nearby villages began agitating against the Syrian government, flooding the streets in protest and forming local coordinating councils. The regime slowly lost control of territory across the province. In March 2013, after only a few days of battle, anti-government rebels ousted government troops from the city and declared Raqqa the first liberated provincial capital in all of Syria. The city, then the sixth largest in Syria, became “the hotel of the revolution.”

Within less than a year, however, despite fierce protests and opposition from its residents, ISIS fighters had fully occupied the city and the surrounding countryside. They declared Raqqa the capital of the Islamic State.

Despite the occupation, Wassim’s parents never tried to flee Tabqa because they hoped to reunite with one of their sons, Azad, who had been kidnapped by ISIS fighters in September 2013. In retirement, Muhammed Abdo opened a small electronics store. Salam was a housewife. Like tens of thousands of other civilians, they were living under ISIS occupation in Tabqa when, in the spring of 2017, U.S. Apache helicopters and warplanes first began appearingin the skies above the city. U.S. Marines armed with howitzers were deployed to the region. In late March, American helicopters airlifted hundreds of U.S.-backed troops from the Kurdish-led militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces to the banks of the dammed river near the city. Additional forces approached from the east, transported on American speedboats. 

By the beginning of May, the Abdos’ neighborhood was under almost daily bombardment by the U.S.-led coalition forces. On May 3rd, coalition warplanes reportedly launched up to 30 airstrikes across Tabqa’s first, second, and third neighborhoods, striking homes and a fruit market and reportedly killing at least six civilians. The following night, another round of coalition airstrikes battered the first and third neighborhoods, reportedly killing at least seven civilians, including women and children. Separate airstrikes that same night near the city’s center reportedly killed another six to 12 civilians. 

On May 7th, multiple bombs reportedly dropped by the U.S.-led coalition struck the building where Muhammed and Salam had taken shelter, killing them and their 12-year-old grandson. Three days later, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that they had fully seized control of Tabqa and the dam. The militia and its U.S. advisers quickly set their sights east to the upcoming offensive in Raqqa.

But for the Abdo family, the tragedy continued. Muhammed and Salam’s bodies were buried beneath the collapsed apartment building. It took 15 days before Wassim’s brother Rashid could secure the heavy machinery required to extract them.

“Nobody could approach the corpses because of the disfigurement that had occurred and the smell emanating from them as a result of being left under the rubble for such a long period of time in the hot weather,” Wassim told me in a recent interview. 

That same day their bodies were finally recovered.  On May 23rd, his parents and nephew were buried in the Tabqa cemetery.

“In raqqa there are many causes of death”  

A few days after the Abdos’ funeral, the U.S.-led coalition began dropping leaflets over Raqqa instructing civilians to flee the city ahead of the upcoming offensive. According to photos of leaflets published by Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, the warnings read, in part, “This is your last chance . . . Failing to leave might lead to death.”

ISIS fighters, in turn, prohibited civilians from escaping the city and planted landmines in Raqqa’s outskirts. Nevertheless, on June 5th, dozens of civilians heeded the coalition’s warnings and gathered at a boat stand on the northern banks of the Euphrates, where they waited to be ferried out of the city. Before the war, families had picnicked along this riverbank. Teenagers jumped into the water from Raqqa’s Old Bridge, built in 1942 by British troops. A handful of river front cafés opened for the season.

“The river is the main monument of the city, and for many people there’s a romantic meaning to it,” Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, currently co-writing “Brothers of the Gun”, a book about life in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, told me.

But on June 5th, as the families were waiting to cross the river to escape the impending U.S.-backed offensive, coalition warplanes launched a barrage of airstrikes targeting the boats, reportedly massacring as many as 21 civilians. The coalition acknowledges launching 35 airstrikes that destroyed 68 boats between June 4th and June 6th, according to the journalistic outlet Airwars. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend later boasted about the tactic, telling the New York Times: “We shoot every boat we find.”

The day after the attack on fleeing civilians at the boat stand, the long-awaited U.S.-backed ground offensive officially began.

After three years of ISIS rule, Raqqa had become one of the most isolated cities in the world. The militants banned residents from having home internet, satellite dishes, or Wi-Fi hotspots. They arrested and killed local reporters and banned outside journalists. On the day U.S.-backed troops launched their ground offensive against the city, ISIS further sought to restrict reporting on conditions there by ordering the imminent shutdown of all Internet cafés.

Despite these restrictions, dozens of Syrian journalists and activists have risked and still risk their lives to smuggle information out of besieged Raqqa — and their efforts are the only reason most Western reporters (including myself) have any information about the war our countries are currently waging there.

Every day, these media activists funnel news out of the city to exiled Syrians running media outlets and human rights organizations. The most famous among these groups has become Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which won the 2015 International Press Freedom Award for its reporting on the ISIS occupation and now publishes hourly updates on the U.S.-backed offensive. All this news is then compiled and cross-checked by international monitoring groups like Airwars, whose researchers have now found themselves tracking as many as a half-dozen coalition attacks resulting in civilian casualties every day.

It’s because of this work that we know the Raqqa offensive officially began on June 6th with a barrage of airstrikes and artillery shelling that reportedly hit a school, a train station, the immigration and passport building, a mosque, and multiple residential neighborhoods, killing between six and 13 civilians. Two days later, bombs, artillery shells, and white phosphorus were reportedly unleashed across Raqqa, hitting — among other places — the Al-Hason Net Internet café, killing a media activist and at least a dozen others. (That journalist was one of at least 26 media activists to be killed in Syria this year alone.) Other bombs reportedly hit at least eight shops and a mosque. Photosalso showed white phosphorus exploding over two residential neighborhoods.

White phosphorus is capable of burning human flesh to the bone. When exposed to oxygen, the chemical ignites reaching a temperature of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so flammable that its burns can reignite days later if the bandages are removed too soon.

U.S. military officials have not denied using white phosphorus in the city. The Pentagon has, in fact, published photos of U.S. Marines deployed to the Raqqa region transporting U.S.-manufactured white phosphorus munitions. Its spokesmen claim that the U.S. military only uses this incendiary agent to mark targets for air strikes or to create smoke screens and therefore remains in accordance with international law. But in the days after the reported attack, Amnesty International warned: “The US-led coalition’s use of white phosphorus munitions on the outskirts of al-Raqqa, Syria, is unlawful and may amount to a war crime.” (Amnesty similarly accused the U.S. of potentially committing war crimes during its campaign against ISIS in Mosul.)

Following the reported white phosphorus attacks on June 8th and 9th, Raqqa’s main commercial and social avenue — February 23rd Street — reportedly came under three straight days of bombing. Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, who grew up in that city, recalls how that street had once been lined with cafés, entertainment venues, and shops. Its western edge runs into Rashid Park, one of the city’s main public spaces. Its eastern edge stretches to the ancient Abbasid Wall.

Between June 9th and June 11th, as many as 10 civilians were killed in repeated bombings of February 23rd Street and its major intersections, according to reports compiled by Airwars. (These sorts of air strikes, ostensibly aimed at limiting the mobility of ISIS fighters, were also employed in Mosul, parts of which are now in ruins.) On those same days, four adults and four children were reportedly killed in airstrikes on Raqqa’s industrial district, another 21 civilians were killed in the west of the city, and at least 11 more civilians, again including children, when airstrikes reportedly destroyedhomes on al-Nour street, which is just around the corner from the al-Rayan Bakery, bombed less than two weeks later.

On that day, June 21st, a Raqqa resident named Abu Ahmad was returning from getting water at a nearby well when, he later told Reuters, he began hearing people screaming as houses crumbled. He said that as many as 30 people had died when the apartment flats around the bakery were leveled. “We couldn’t even do anything,” he added. “The rocket launchers, the warplanes. We left them to die under the rubble.” Only a few days earlier, coalition warplanes had destroyed another source of bread, the al-Nadeer bakery on al-Mansour Street, one of Raqqa’s oldest thoroughfares.

In July, the U.S.-led coalition bombed the ancient Abbasid Wall, and U.S.-backed troops breached Raqqa’s Old City. U.S. advisers began to operateinside Raqqa, calling in more airstrikes from there.

More and more names, photographs, and stories of the coalition’s victims were smuggled out by local journalists. According to these reports, on July 2nd, Jamila Ali al-Abdullah, her three children, and up to 10 of her neighbors were killed in her neighborhood. On July 3rd, at least three families were killed, including Yasser al-Abdullah and his four children, A’ssaf, Zain, Jude, and Rimas. On July 5th, an elderly man named Yasin died in an airstrike on al-Mansour Street. On July 6th, Anwar Hassan al-Hariri was killed along with her son Mohammed, her daughter Shatha, and her toddler Jana. Five members of the al-Sayyed family perished on July 7th. Sisters Hazar and Elhan Abdul Aader Shashan died in their home on July 12th, while seven members of the Ba’anat family were killed on July 13th, as was Marwan al-Salama and at least ten of his family members on July 17th.

Hundreds more were reportedly wounded, including Isma’il Ali al-Thlaji, a child who lost his eyesight and his right hand.  And these are, of course, only some of the reported names of those killed by the U.S.-led coalition.   

“In Raqqa, there are many causes of death,” the journalists at Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently wrote. These include “indiscriminate airstrikes by international coalition warplanes, daily artillery shelling by Syrian Democratic Forces, and ISIS mines scattered throughout the surrounding landscape.”

For those who survive, conditions inside the city only continue to worsen. Coalition bombing reportedly destroyed the two main pipes carrying water into the city in the 100-degree July heat, forcing people to venture to the banks of the Euphrates, where at least 27 have been reportedly killed by U.S.-led bombing while filling up jugs of water.

A coalition in name only

The United States has launched nearly 95% of all coalition airstrikes in Syria in recent months, meaning the campaign is, in fact, almost exclusively an American affair. “The French and British are launching about half a dozen strikes a week now,” Chris Woods, director of Airwars, explained to me. “The Belgians maybe one or two a week.” In comparison, in Raqqa province last month the U.S. launched about twenty air or artillery strikes every single day.

In June alone, the U.S.-led coalition and U.S. Marines fired or dropped approximately 4,400 munitions on Raqqa and its surrounding villages. According to Mark Hiznay, the associate director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, these munitions included 250-pound precision-guided small diameter bombs, as well as MK-80 bombs, which weigh between 500 and 2,000 pounds and are equipped with precision-guided kits. The bombs are dropped by B-52 bombers and other warplanes, most taking off from the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, or the USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier stationed off Syria’s coast in the eastern Mediterranean.

Hundreds of U.S. Marines, most likely from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, are also positioned outside Raqqa and are firing high explosive artillery rounds into the city from M777 Howitzers. In late June, the Marines’ official Twitter feed boasted that they were conducting artillery fire in support of U.S.-backed troops 24 hours a day.

The result of this type of warfare, says Airwars’ Chris Woods, is a staggering increase in civilian casualties. According to an analysis by the group, since President Trump took office six months ago, the U.S.-led campaign has reportedly killed nearly as many civilians in Syria and Iraq as were killed in the previous two and a half years of the Obama administration.

And for surviving civilians, the conditions of war don’t end once the bombing stops, as life today in the city of Tabqa indicates.

As of mid-July, according to Wassim Abdo, Tabqa still has neither running water nor electricity, even though displaced families have begun returning to their homes. There’s a shortage of bread, and still no functioning schools or hospitals. The Tabqa Dam, which once generated up to 20% of Syria’s electricity, remains inoperable. (U.S.-led coalition airstrikes reportedly damaged the structure repeatedly in February and March, when they burnedthe main control room, causing the United Nations to warn of a threat of catastrophic flooding downstream.) The U.S.-backed troops in Tabqa have, according to Abdo, banned the Internet and U.S. officials admit that children in the area are being infected by diseases carried by flies feeding off corpses still buried in the rubble.

Meanwhile, less than 30 miles to the east, the battle for control of Raqqa continues with tens of thousands of civilians still trapped inside the besieged city. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend has indicated that the U.S.-led coalition may soon increase the rate of airstrikes there yet again.

From Wassim Abdo’s perspective, that coalition campaign in Syria has so far killed his parents and nephew and ruined his hometown. None of this, understandably, looks anything like a war against ISIS.

“My opinion of the international coalition,” he told me recently, “is that it’s a performance by the international community to target civilians and infrastructure and to destroy the country.” And this type of warfare, he added, “is not part of eliminating Daesh.”

Protecting Superfunds: The polluter must pay

(Credit: AP Photo/Matt Volz)

It has been almost 40 years since the nation heard the cries for help from Love Canal, where a school and neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, was built on a toxic dump filled with 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children were sick, parents were scared and families lost their homes.

I know, because my children, my family and my home were among them.

The Love Canal crisis created a public awareness and scientific understanding that the chemicals people are exposed to in their everyday environment can cause serious harm to their health, especially to pregnant women and young children.

This understanding of the serious risk of living near pollution was the impetus to creating the Superfund program in 1980. The program gives communities power to hold corporations responsible for cleaning up contamination. Today, a pending action by Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt threatens to strip that power away.

That’s why on Tuesday, a “People’s Task Force” on the future of the Superfund program released a series of recommendations to, as the task force puts it, “place public health as a priority” over “private interests and money.” The task force is comprised of representatives of 25 Superfund sites and 70 environmental organizations..

The cornerstone of the Superfund program is the  “polluter pays” principle.

President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill knowing that other sites similar to Love Canal would have immediate resources to reduce and eliminate people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. And it worked well for 20 years, including under presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all supported the program and the tax that funded it.

Then, in 1995, Congress allowed the tax to expire and by 2003, the entire financial burden of paying to clean up the worst orphan toxic sites fell to the taxpayers. As a result, the number of toxic sites cleaned up went from an average of 85 a year down to as few as eight a year now.

Pruitt says Superfund is his priority. As the “mother of Superfund,” as I am often called, I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m terrified.

How can Pruitt call Superfund a priority if he’s proposing cutting the program’s budget by $330 million without advocating for the polluters’ tax to be reinstated?

There are 1,300 sites on the Superfund list. Of those, 121 sites don’t have human exposure to toxic contaminants under control. There are another 187 sites where groundwater migration of waste isn’t under control.

Nearly 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site; 46 percent are people of color and 15 percent live below the poverty line.

Pruitt is forming a special Superfund task force, but his directive sounds eerily like a plan to expand the Superfund Alternatives program, and that would be a disaster.

Under Superfund Alternatives, responsible parties agree to clean up a site to avoid the stigma of being listed on the National Priority List. The program benefits the polluter while punishing the victims. It gives power to corporations, takes it away from communities harmed by the toxic sites, and weakens EPA oversight.

Superfund Alternatives removes mandatory citizen participation and access to information and resources provided by Superfund. Under the program, technical assistance grants that allow citizens to hire their own experts to review data and plans are awarded by the polluter rather than the EPA.

The alternative approach also allows a company to avoid flagging a National Priority List site as a liability in its financial papers. This can have a significant impact, especially if the company is being sold.

If the polluter is cleaning up the site under Pruitt’s watch, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the cleanup will be as minimal as possible. The result will be partially cleaned-up sites being used for other purposes – and on a path back to where we started 40 years ago.

Institutional controls were supposed to prevent land that is too contaminated for residential use from ever being used for homes and schools. At Love Canal, those institutional controls failed in the 1950s to stop construction of the 99th Street School.

Under Pruitt’s direction, families like those recently evacuated from contaminated public housing in East Chicago, Indiana, might still be there, getting sicker.

If Pruitt truly wants to protect people around Superfund sites, then his first steps should be to advocate for reinstating the “polluter pays” tax to provide funds to adequately clean up sites.

He should hold polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for cleanup costs and collect triple damages from polluters who force EPA to go to court. He should also continue the technical assistance grants that provide communities with the information they need to understand their cleanup options.

Pruitt must protect the power of communities to hold polluters responsible, because after 40 years, it is painfully clear that we can’t count on corporations.

 

Donald Trump could see a bump in approval ratings — but won’t like how to do it

(Credit: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Trump has promised to increase U.S. economic growth — in fact, he’s banking on it. The budget he proposed to Congress in May assumes a 3 percent growth rate, and the White House website promises a return to 4 percent annual economic growth. Both predictions are far higher than the roughly 2 percent growth rate assumed by the Congressional Budget Office or the Federal Reserve.

In fact, most economists doubt that a 3 to 4 percent growth rate is possible at all without some fundamental policy shift. Sustained periods of such high growth haven’t occurred since the tech boom of the 1990’s and, before that, the baby boomers entering the workforce in the 1960’s. But according to a new analysis, there is a quick route to high growth: a massive increase in immigration.

In an analysis for ProPublica, Adam Ozimek and Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics, an independent economics firm, estimated that for every 1 percent increase in U.S. population made of immigrants, GDP rises 1.15 percent. So a simple way to get to Trump’s 4 percent GDP bump? Take in about 8 million net immigrants per year. To show you what that really looks like, we’ve charted the effect below. You can see for yourself what might happen to the economy if we increased immigration to the highest rates in history or dropped it to zero — and everything in between.

“Immigration is a great economic policy opportunity and it’s important to document the impact of that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in both Bush administrations. He agreed with the basic conclusions of Moody’s analysis, and said that 1.15 percent was a reasonable estimate of the effect of immigration on GDP.

“You can’t just flip a switch and make the U.S. a richer place,” said Ozimek, the economist at  Moody’s Analytics who worked on the analysis. “But with immigration, you can flip a switch and massively grow the size of the country.” And while other policy changes may have subtle, indirect effects on the economy, there is a very straightforward relationship between growing the size of the country and growing the GDP (we’re referring to overall GDP, not per-capita GDP, which the analysis does not address).

It may seem like a basic point: Adding immigrant workers means the economy is larger, with more people earning wages and buying goods and services. But that fact may come as a surprise to a lot of people, said Jennifer Hunt, an economist at Rutgers University. Many Americans assume that immigrants have zero effect on the economy, or think that immigrants subtract value from an economic pie of fixed size. In fact, immigrants make the pie bigger. According to a recent paper by economists Ryan Edwards of Mills College and Francesc Ortega of Queens College CUNY, even undocumented immigrants spur growth.

Using the paper’s methods, we calculated that deporting the estimated 11.3 million undocumented people in this country would be an almost $8 trillion hit to the economy over the next 14 years. Legalizing them could boost GDP by almost $2 trillion in that same time period. You can see what these hypothetical scenarios would look like in our chart above.

Immigrants Spur Growth but not Without Some Costs

The debate over whether immigrants take the jobs of Americans has only become more heated in the past few years, and was a major issue throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Studies suggest that immigrants do not threaten the wages or jobs held by most Americans.  A recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found “little evidence that immigration significantly affects the overall employment levels of native-born workers.” While not all people are affected by immigration the same way (for example, high school dropouts stand to lose more than business owners) many studies have concluded the same thing: that immigrants by and large don’t displace native-born Americans, and in fact sometimes actually create more jobs for the people already in this country.

As labor economist Pia Orrenius explains, when immigrants enter the labor force they can actually raise the incomes of natives. This “immigration surplus” is usually small, typically .2 to .4 percent, but that still amounts to about $50 billion per year. Immigrants also tend to be more mobile, moving to places that need workers, tend to be more entrepreneurial and innovative, which boosts economic growth for years, and often work in roles complementary to native-born Americans, which makes everyone more productive.

Moody’s analysis did not take into account the fiscal costs of adding more immigrants to the country: the cost of providing public goods like education, health care, welfare benefits, etc. Calculating the costs of an ever-changing group of people is incredibly complex, and estimates vary widely based on assumptions about immigrants’ average age, education level, number of children, and even legal status.

As a whole, immigrants tend to have more children, which means that state and local governments bear the burden of providing education. They also tend to have lower earnings, which means they pay less in taxes. The National Academies report found that in most scenarios, immigrants take in more in public services than they pay in taxes, especially at the state and local level. That said, because today’s immigrants are younger, working, and have more education than earlier immigrants, they “tend to be beneficial to federal finances in the short term,” according to the report. Because federal benefits largely go to the elderly, the people who really subtract from the budget, according to Hunt, are retired and collecting Social Security.

While the analysis leaves out the potential fiscal cost of allowing millions of immigrants into the country, it also leaves out a number of factors that have positive effects: productivity benefits spurred by innovation and immigrant entrepreneurship, as well as the positive effects on housing markets (immigrants are more likely to be homebuyers and account for much of the household growth over the past two decades.)

A Historically Unprecedented Solution

Immigration is not just a simple way, it may be the only budgetarily achievable way to reach 4 percent growth. Hunt, Holtz-Eakin, and other economists we interviewed agreed that barring a massive and expensive change in policy (for example, increasing child care subsidies or expanding the earned income tax credit), it would be next to impossible for Trump to reach his goal without immigration.

“Three percent is the outer limit of what is feasible without changing immigration,” said Holtz-Eakin.

At some points in U.S. history, notably the 1990’s, the country did see a period of high economic growth that did not depend on immigration. “The 90’s were a special decade,” said Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at The University of California, Davis. The 4 percent growth at that time had more to do with increased productivity because of technological advances, innovation, and tax policy. Immigration did contribute to the growth, according to Peri, but only a portion. Fast forward to today, where conditions are very different, and immigration becomes our only option to repeat such high growth.

That runs directly into political reality, which is that Trump’s base, and indeed much of his campaign rhetoric, was focused on voters who view immigrants as a threat to their livelihoods. Immigration does not usually come up when Trump speaks on the subject of economic growth. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly claimed that his policies would grow the economy by 3, 4, or even as high as 6 percent a year. In the third presidential debate Trump said, “I actually think we can go higher than 4 percent. I think you can go to 5 percent or 6 percent.” Today, the White House website states that Trump has “a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.”  Trump often brings up tax and regulatory reforms to explain how he’d reach such high numbers; immigration is seldom mentioned.

When the Trump administration mentions immigration,  it’s almost always in the context of limiting it. In fact, according to Politico, Trump is backing a law that would cut legal immigration by half over the next decade.

A look at the historical record illustrates the magnitude of the dilemma that faces the administration. The rates of immigration Moody’s analysis suggests are needed to spur annual growth rates of 4 percent — about 8 million net immigrants a year — are an anomaly in America’s oscillating view of  admitting foreigners.

“This has never happened in the history of the United States as we know it,” said labor economist Peri, who wrote recently about how immigration boosted both population and productivity between 2000 and 2015. Even during periods of extremely high immigration such as during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and including estimates of unauthorized immigrants, the U.S. only took in around 2 million immigrants per year.

Because immigration levels higher than about 1 million to 2 million per year are historically unprecedented, it’s difficult to predict how they might affect the economy. Experts point out that these hypothetical scenarios raise a number of questions: Where would all these immigrants come from?  How skilled or unskilled might they be?  How would the U.S. economy adjust to provide them with capital?

“None of these questions seem likely to have an answer that would get us into a practically Trumpian world of 4 percent real growth,” said economist Edwards.

Why More Immigrants Translate into a Higher GDP, or How Our Chart Works

Let’s back up a little bit and take a look at how U.S. economic growth is calculated in the first place. Two important factors that go into the equation are the number of people in the labor force and how productive they are. In the past 50 years, we’ve had an average GDP growth of around 3 percent, about half of which came from a growing labor force and half from their productivity (more recent years have hovered closer to 2 percent).

But because of our retiring Baby Boom generation and falling fertility rates, the growth rate of the labor force is dropping fast. According to Pew Research Center, the projected growth rate for the total working-age adult population will average just .3 percent for the next two decades — and the only reason  that number goes up at all is because of new immigrants. Without them, by 2035 the working age population would go down by 8 million people. In other words, if no one replaced those retiring workers, the U.S. working age population would drop by more than 4 percent in just two decades. The only certain way to reverse that trend is with immigration.

Typically the labor force’s contribution to the economy is a 1:1 ratio — increase the labor force 1 percent, GDP goes up 1 percent. So in order to calculate immigrants’ effect on the economy, one needs to determine how immigrants as a group compare to the rest of the population as a whole. Moody’s found that while immigrants work in a huge variety of fields, from low-skilled field labor to high-skilled tech jobs, as a whole they cluster in industries with lower than average output. At the same time, immigrants in the U.S. tend to be of working age and generally come here to work, so as a group they have more workers than average. Overall, these two factors together mean that immigrants pull a little more weight than native-born Americans when it comes to GDP — specifically 1.15 times as much.

Now, there are a number of assumptions in this calculation. For one, Moody’s does not directly distinguish between documented and undocumented immigrants, but rather uses Census data to look at the mix of industries that immigrants who moved here in the last 10 years work in. This is an indirect measure of their combined effect on the economy.

A second assumption is that immigrants in the future will be similar to immigrants today: same mix of industries, same mix of low- and high-skilled labor. But this could change. For example, if Congress passed legislation dramatically decreasing visas allotted to low-skilled workers while increasing them for high-skilled workers in Silicon Valley, the economic boost provided by additional immigrants could be much greater.

“In some statements, Trump wants to ‘pause’ immigration,” said Ozimek of Moody’s Analytics, “and in other statements he talks about letting only the ‘best’ people come here.” It’s difficult to predict the outcome on real immigration with such contradictory statements.

Of course, immigration is just one of many factors that could affect future GDP. So we’ve combined this “immigration effect” with Moody’s Analytics’ GDP forecast. Their baseline forecast takes into account a number of other factors that can affect future GDP growth, including U.S. population, fertility and mortality rates, labor force participation rates and short-term recovery effects. Slight differences in each of these factors could change the projected GDP in each scenario, especially in the short term. However, all the economists we interviewed agreed that it would take a very substantial policy shift to significantly change growth in the long term.

You can read more about Moody’s forecast assumptions in their recent economic report.

Deporting Unauthorized Immigrants is a Huge Hit to the Economy, Legalizing Them is a Boon

In his campaign, Trump once floated the idea of deporting all 11 million unauthorized immigrants. It remains to be seen whether he’ll attempt to carry out such massive deportations. As the administration weighs whether to do this, economists say it should be aware that removing so many people at once would have a significant economic effect. We calculated a total GDP loss of almost $8 trillion over 14 years, using methods outlined in a recent paper by Edwards of Mills College and Ortega of Queens College CUNY.

Edwards and Ortega focused their analysis on the estimated 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the country, of which roughly 7.1 million are workers. Deporting all of them would result in an almost unprecedented 5 percent loss of the workforce, a reduction in national employment similar to what occurred during the Great Recession.

The paper argues that legalizing these undocumented immigrants would have the opposite effect, boosting GDP by .6 percent, or a cumulative gain of $1.8 trillion over the next 14 years. That’s because immigrants without legal status have limited options for work, often forgoing higher-paying jobs that match their skills because of paperwork requirements or fear of revealing their status. That “productivity penalty” is one thing that legalization could make up for.

Ortega said that the paper’s estimate is conservative because it assumes that gaining legal status would make unauthorized immigrants only as productive as other immigrants with the same education. But some studies have shown that when unauthorized immigrants gain legal status, they actually become more productive than those who came legally, investing in more skills and training. Even with these assumptions, the paper forecasts that legalization would increase the economic contribution of the unauthorized population by about 20 percent.

The authors chose not try to calculate the additional enormous cost of logistically locating and deporting millions of people, which some have estimated to be between $400 billion and $600 billion.

It’s Not Only About GDP

Of course, the question of how immigration impacts GDP is a small slice of a much broader question of how immigrants and immigration policies affect our economy. Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, points out that a key question in any hypothetical scenario is whether the native born population is better off. A massive increase in immigrants may add to the size of the U.S. economy, but that doesn’t necessarily make things better for the people already here.

Increased immigration has differing effects depending on education and industry. The National Academies report suggests that some low-skilled workers (such as high school dropouts) who compete with low-skilled immigrants will lose wages and income even as business owners and investors profit from the overall growth in the economy. As Harvard economist George Borjas explains, the people who compete with immigrants are losing out to the people who employ immigrants.

Those nuances are often hidden in the overall employment numbers. According to Rutger’s Hunt, when economists talk about the effect of immigration on jobs, they ask whether the employment rate for natives has fallen or risen. And from a national perspective, there is broad agreement that increased immigration does not meaningfully change overall employment rates. But those numbers don’t capture people who are forced to change jobs, for example American workers who share job qualifications with immigrant workers and might be forced to move to lower-paying or less desirable jobs. For those individuals, the effect of immigration can be life-changing.

“Generally when it comes to immigration there are winners and losers,” said Michael Ben-Gad, a economics professor at City, University of London, “and those differences tend to be much, much bigger than a net number like GDP.”

As mentioned earlier, even if immigrants increase GDP, the cost of providing public services like health care, education and welfare benefits must also be taken into account. The National Academies report found that, in general, first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments, mainly at the state and local levels, than native-born generations. However, immigrants’ children “are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.”

“Immigration is not a panacea, and it’s not going to cure all our ills,” said Jeremy Robbins, executive director of New American Economy, “but it is by and large good for economic growth…and a net positive for the country by far.”

New Jersey is cutting food waste to help the climate

(Credit: Salon/Mireia Triguero Roura)

A new law in New Jersey aims to shrink the state’s climate footprint and feed the hungry by drastically reducing the amount of wasted food that ends up in landfills.

The law requires the state to develop a plan over the next year to cut the state’s food waste by half by 2030. The bipartisan measure, which passed the state legislature without a single dissenting vote and was signed last week by Gov. Chris Christie, mirrors an Environmental Protection Agency goal for the entire country set under the Obama administration in 2015.

“The beauty of the bill is it’s going to get at two long-festering problems — climate and hunger — at the same time,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York City. “The states are going to have to take the lead on issues like climate and this new law holds the hope of tackling one piece of that problem.”

Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. ends up uneaten and tossed into the garbage. So much food is thrown away every year that it adds up to the equivalent of about 20 pounds of food per person every month. Discarded food also wastes cropland and energy that are used in the production of food.

Worldwide, processing wasted food generates about 3.3 billion tons of greenhouse gases annually. That means if food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest climate polluter after China and the U.S., according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

When leftovers and rotting fruit and vegetables are tossed out and end up in the dump, they become a major climate problem. Decomposing food pollutes the atmosphere with methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times as powerful in warming the climate as carbon dioxide over the course of a century.

Larry Hajna, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, said that while New Jersey has implemented more effective methane emissions controls at its landfills over the past 30 years, much of the state’s garbage is shipped to landfills out of state where New Jersey officials have no control over emissions.

Less methane will be emitted from those landfills and the climate will benefit if the amount of food New Jerseyans discard is cut drastically, he said.

At least five states either ban organic waste from landfills or mandate food waste recycling to some degree, according to the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.

California mandates organic food waste recycling and requires businesses to cap the amount of food they send to the landfill each year. Connecticut and Rhode Island also require many businesses to cap the amount of food thrown out. Massachusetts and Vermont have a weight limit on food waste both individuals and businesses can throw away.

New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, also have organic waste recycling or composting mandates for homes or businesses to prevent food waste from ending up in a landfill.

Mark Milstein, director of the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University, said state laws mandating food waste reductions create business opportunities for recyclers, composters and others.

“You’ve exacerbated climate change with a harmful greenhouse gas. There are more productive uses for that (wasted) material,” Milstein said.

“We can compost it, turn it into fuel,” he said. “If you’re going to prevent the waste in the first place, rethink how people buy food, how they utilize food. Those are all potential business opportunities.”

The New Jersey legislature is considering — but has not yet passed — other bills that may help implement the state’s new food waste law.

One bill would require supermarkets, restaurants and other large generators of food waste to separate discarded food from other trash and recycle it. Other proposals would establish new food labeling standards to reduce waste and incentivize food donations.

If New Jersey’s food waste reduction program is successful, it may pave the way for other states to follow, Goldstein said.

“We think the law has real potential,” he said. “It gets the ball rolling, which is a significant thing.”

A new parent’s guide to social media

(Credit: Getty Images/Justin Sullivan)

Before baby, you were a Facebooking, Instagramming, texting fool, sharing everything from your perfect pasta dish to your hella-good manicure. Now, looking at your little bundle of joy, you may be wondering: Is it safe to post pictures of baby? What’s OK to share and what’s TMI? What are the easiest tech tools to preserve those precious moments, without broadcasting to the world? These tips can help.

Safely share photos of baby online. You may never have given privacy settings a thought. But if you’re posting pics of baby, you may want to think through the impact and potential trajectory of what you post. Maybe you have followers struggling with fertility who aren’t ready to share your joy. Maybe you’re connected to people you barely know — friends of friends of friends — and there’s no guarantee that those people will have your family’s best interests at heart. Stories about people’s kids’ photos falling into the wrong hands — for example, stock-photography brokers looking for baby pics to sell or Internet trolls misusing images — are a growing risk.

You basically have two options to share safely. You can enable stricter privacy settings on the social media services you’re already using, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat (including investigating whether Facebook’s Scrapbook is right for your family). These services have the advantage of an existing, built-in audience, but there’s a greater possibility of photos being viewed (or copied, or downloaded) by people you don’t know. Or, you can sign up for a more secure, password-protected photo-sharing service such as Flickr, Photobucket, or Famipix. These let you be pickier about what you share with whom. But these sites sometimes charge a fee for premium services such as extra storage and prints.

Distinguish between friendly advice and real facts. As a new parent, you may be vulnerable, worried, or overwhelmed, and social media offers a lifeline. Just don’t believe anything people tell you without verifying it with a professional. (No, WebMD doesn’t count.) Anything that has major importance — feeding, health and safety, money, education — is not to be toyed with. Anything with minimal consequences, such as when to put baby in shoes or the best time to clip her nails (when she’s asleep), is OK to experiment with.

Avoid “over-sharenting.” What’s over-sharenting? Pictures of poop, constant updates on every smile, gurgle, and hallmark of intelligence, reports on what a naturally gifted mom you are. Other parents understand the urge to brag about every little thing, but social media is a give and take. Be thoughtful about what you’re sharing, why, and with whom. And make sure to comment, like, or otherwise interact with what friends and family post to keep it, you know, social.

Approach baby’s “digital footprint” mindfully. Some parents create social media profiles under their kids’ names when they’re babies with the idea that they’ll turn them over to the kids when they’re ready. It can be fun for relatives to get an update “from baby.” But there are some risks to creating what’s called a “digital footprint” for your baby. Here are some things to consider:

You might love the photos of baby in the tub, but how will she feel about them when she’s 8 or 9?
Tweens or teens might be upset that you used their names to create profiles they didn’t actually consent to.
Social media sites are for users over 13 because companies use data — basically, who your friends are, what you click on, and where you go on the Web — to build a demographic profile, which they then sell to other companies for marketing purposes. The data isn’t personally identifiable, but it’s still Big Brotherish to think they’re tracking your baby’s online movements.

Bottom line: If you decide to create a profile, make sure you include only minimal information, use strict privacy settings, and avoid any photos that are potentially embarrassing.

Cope with feelings — jealousy, anger, sadness — from viewing friends’ Facebook pages. You’re not alone. The highly curated photos and posts from friends whose lives seem more fulfilling have been shown to make people feel sad, jealous, and angry.

It may help if you connect with others who really “get” you. Create separate groups for your online pals: Put your close friends — the ones who post their joys as well as their trials — in one group. Add the ones who tend to present a perfect image to a different group, and only look at them when you’re feeling up to it. You also can connect with the growing anti-perfection movement. Real Simple’s public Instagram profile, #womenirl, shares photos from people’s real (messy) lives.

The bottom line is that the impact of social media isn’t fully understood, and it can trigger all sorts of responses. New parents are emotionally vulnerable because they’re tired, unsure, and perhaps suffering from postpartum depression. If you feel crappy more than you feel good, and sharing photos from your life doesn’t make you feel better, talk to a professional about what you’re going through.

Find real, meaningful online support. There are some really supportive online groups with active, engaged members.

Scary Mommy: Known for its no-holds-barred conversations, Scary Mommy hosts an anonymous “confessional” where parents can express deep, dark secrets. It welcomes anyone who likes to “say it like it is.”
Circle of Moms: A large, active site brimming with hundreds of specialized communities that you can search for alphabetically.
Café Mom: Conversation, advice, and original programming help you feel welcome right away.
Work It, Mom: Working mothers can find support, learn from each other, and celebrate successes in this forum for those bringin’ home the bacon.
BabyCenter: You’re bound to find support at this highly regarded site, which welcomes all kinds of families into its highly specialized groups, including one for alternative lifestyles called Parents Like You.
Mothering: If you’re into natural, holistic parenting, Mothering is the place to find support. This site offers communities for all kinds of families — from single parents to LGBTQ parents.

Hey, dads need support, too! With the rising number of stay-at-home dads, online resources geared toward fathers have ballooned. Fatherly, National At-Home Dad Network, and New Dads Survival Guide all have supportive communities for new fathers.

Preserve memories digitally. By the time your baby is 3, you will have recorded approximately 1 billion hours of video, taken 300,000 photos, and thought of 1,000 things you wish you could say to her when she grows up. Fortunately, there are easy ways to collect all these memories into one, easily accessible location.

Go low(ish) tech. A lot of parents like to grab the opportunity to create an email account under baby’s name. Once she has an email address, you can use it to send her messages, photos, and videos so they are all collected in one place and she can read them when she gets older — and take ownership of her email address.
Consider an electronic scrapbook or journal. Scrapbooking sites and apps let you create digital diaries of baby’s life. Some families like this option because older kids can use the sites and apps, too. There’s a wide range of programs you can use.
Sign up for a private social network. Apps such as Notabli, 23snaps, and eFamily offer a secure way to collect and share photos, videos, and stories and invite a small number of people who can view them.

The hidden extra costs of living with a disability

(Credit: Getty)

Disability is often incorrectly assumed to be rare. However, global estimates suggest than one in seven adults has some form of disability.

The term “disability” covers a number of functional limitations — physical, sensory, mental and intellectual. These can range from mild to severe and might affect someone at any time across the lifespan, from an infant born with an intellectual impairment to an older adult who becomes unable to walk or see.

What is perhaps less well-known is that studies consistently show that people with disabilities are disproportionately poor. They are more likely to become poor and, when poor, are more likely to stay that way, because of barriers to getting an education, finding decent work and participating in civic life. Taken together, these barriers significantly and adversely impact their standard of living.

However, a new body of research reveals another major barrier, previously missing from most studies: People living with disabilities also face extra costs of living. Our team’s recent review of the evidence suggests that living with a disability may cost an additional several thousand dollars per year, adding up over time to be a significant financial burden on households.

Calculating the cost

Governments draw poverty lines at a level of income that they believe is sufficient to meet a minimum standard of living. Someone at the poverty line presumably has just enough resources to house, clothe and feed themselves at an acceptable level, and participate in the basic activities of being a citizen. Increasingly, countries provide cash benefits or food transfers to people below this poverty line so they are able to reach this minimum standard for basic resources.

The problem is that people with disabilities have extra costs of living that people without disabilities do not have. They have higher medical expenses and may need personal assistance or assistive devices, such as wheelchairs or hearing aids. They may need to spend more on transportation or modified housing, or be restricted in what neighborhoods they can live in to be closer to work or accessible services.

When this is the case, then some people with disabilities might appear “on paper” to live above the poverty line. But in reality, they don’t have enough money to meet the minimum standard of living captured in that poverty line.

In our recent review of the literature, we found that people with disabilities in 10 countries face large extra costs of living. These costs can range widely, from an estimated U.S. $1,170 to $6,952 per year. In a developing country such as Vietnam, for example, the estimate stands at $595 for additional health costs alone.

We used a method called the standard of living approach, which estimates extra costs based on the gap in assets owned by households with and without disabilities. Extra costs accounted for a large share of income, from a low of 12 percent in Vietnam to 40 percent for elderly households in Ireland.

Comparing the costs of disabilities across countries is challenging. Recent studies measure what is actually spent, not what needs to be spent. Estimated costs might be less in developing countries not because it is less expensive to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities in those countries, but because the goods and services needed are not available. If wheelchairs or hearing aids are nowhere to be found, then a person cannot spend money on them.

This could lead to the paradoxical finding that, as a country starts becoming more inclusive, the measured costs of living with a disability could increase. But hopefully, at the same time, the ability of people with disabilities to work and go to school will also increase.

Unanswered questions

There is much we still don’t know about what it costs to live with a disability. In our comprehensive review of the literature, we found only 20 studies that estimated increased costs of living with a disability. The vast majority were from developed countries.

We need better information on how these extra costs may vary by type of disability, and how they may be affected by efforts to remove barriers to participation. For example, how would building a fully accessible public transportation system impact the extra transportation costs that people with disabilities face?

Our work also suggests we may need different income tests for people with disabilities when it comes to social protection programs. For example, should the income limit for receiving cash transfers or subsidized housing be higher for families with disabilities because they face these extra costs? Some countries, such as Denmark and the United Kingdom, provide benefits to support families with disabilities who bear these costs.

Another important question is whether these benefits are adequate. Do they allow people with disability and their families to reach at least a minimum threshold for standard of living? To what extent does this improve their participation in society or the economy?

Supporting people with disabilities

To address these questions, we need to monitor these issues over time. For that, we need more and better data on disability in different countries linked to good data on income, assets and expenditures. We recommend adding well-formulated disability questions to the standard household surveys currently used by most countries to chart their citizen’s wellbeing. The best example of such questions was developed under the aegis of the U.N. Statistical Commission via the Washington Group on Disability Statistics.

It’s also important to undertake qualitative research. For instance, focus groups and in-depth interviews would help researchers better understand the needs of people with disabilities in their own terms.

Policymakers also need to make social programs sensitive to the issue of extra costs associated with disability — for instance, in income tests and benefit amounts or through social health insurance programs. Our review has led us to believe that even well intended anti-poverty efforts and social protection schemes that do not take into consideration the additional costs of living with a disability will leave millions of people who have disabilities, and their families, in poverty.



Sophie Mitra, Associate Professor of Economics, Fordham University; Daniel Mont, Principal Research Associate in Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL; Hoolda Kim, Graduate Student in Economics, Fordham University; Michael Palmer, Senior Lecturer in Economics, RMIT University Vietnam, and Nora Groce, Chair of Disability and Inclusive Development, UCL