Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 688

“Atrocious attack”: U.S.-backed Saudi coalition bombs 4th MSF hospital in Yemen, killing 11 people

Doctors Without Borders staff protest in Geneva, Switzerland on November 3, 2015, one month after the U.S. bombing of their hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan (Credit: Reuters/Denis Balibouse)

At least four medical facilities operated by the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders have been bombed by the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition in Yemen in the past year.

Abs hospital, in Yemen’s northwestern Hajjah governorate, was hit by an air strike on Monday.

Since July 2015, Abs hospital has been supported by Doctors Without Borders, which is known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.

At least 11 people were killed in the attack, and 19 more were injured, according to MSF.

Amnesty International blasted the bombing, calling it “an atrocious attack that could amount to a war crime.”

Air strike that hit @MSF-supported Abs hospital in #Hajjah, Yemen kills at least 11 and wounds at least 19

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 15, 2016

Air strike has partially destroyed @MSF-supported Abs hospital in #Hajjah, #Yemen and all remaining patients and staff have been evacuated

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 15, 2016

“Once again, today we witness the tragic consequences of the bombing of a hospital. Once again, a fully functional hospital, full of patients and MSF national and international staff members, was bombed in a war that has shown no for respect medical facilities or patients,” said Teresa Sancristóval, desk manager for the MSF emergency unit in Yemen, in a statement.

“People in Yemen continue to be killed and injured while seeking medical care. The violence in Yemen is having a disproportionate burden on civilians,” she added.

“We want to express our outrage at having to send condolences once more to the families of our staff member and 10 patients, who should have been safe inside a hospital.”

Bloody photos allegedly of the attack circulated on social media.

MSF shared photos of the destruction.

صور من موقع #مستشفى_عبس في #حجة #اليمن المدعوم من قبل منظمة #أطباء_بلا_حدود الذي تعرض لضربة جوية عصر يوم 15/08/2016 pic.twitter.com/2nQ8mtA5it

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 15, 2016

At the time of the attack, there were 23 patients in surgery, 25 patients in the maternity ward, 13 new-borns and 12 paediatrics in Abs hospital, MSF said.

In the past year, 4,611 patients have been treated at the hospital.

MSF stressed that it has “repeatedly” shared the location and GPS coordinates of the hospital with the coalition.

.@MSF repeatedly shared location & GPS coordinates of #Abs hospital with all parties of conflict in #Yemen, including Saudi-led coalition

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 15, 2016

“The bombardment of this hospital is a deplorable act that has cost civilian lives, including medical staff who are dedicated to helping sick and injured people under some of the most challenging conditions,” said Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty International’s deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa Program, in a statement.

“Deliberately targeting medical facilities is a serious violation of international humanitarian law which would amount to a war crime. The circumstances of this attack must be thoroughly and independently investigated,” she added.

“Today’s airstrike appears to be the latest in a string of unlawful attacks targeting hospitals highlighting an alarming pattern of disregard for civilian life.”

Since March 2015, a coalition of countries led primarily by Saudi Arabia — with weapons, intelligence, and support from the U.S. and U.K. — has been brutally bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East.

Salon has documented three previous coalition attacks on MSF medical facilities.

Shenk confirmed “at least four attacks severely damaging or destroying MSF-supported medical facilities in Yemen.”

“There have been other incidents where MSF-supported hospitals have been damaged by shelling or airstrikes,” he added, “so whether you count it depends to some extent on how severe it is.”

In October, the coalition bombed an MSF hospital in the northwestern town of Haydan, in Yemen’s Sa’ada governorate. The U.N. condemned the attack.

This came just weeks after the U.S. bombed another MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing at least 30 people, including 14 staff members. MSF slammed the bombing as a “war crime.” The U.S. refused to allow an independent investigation and no one involved faced criminal charges.

In December, the coalition bombed another MSF medical facility in the southern city of Ta’iz. This hospital had treated 480 patients in the two days before the attack.

In January, the coalition bombed yet another medical facility, this one in the Razeh district of Sa’ada governorate.

MSF made it clear in these previous attacks as well that it had provided GPS coordinates of its medical facilities to the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition.

The medical group’s international president gave a powerful, heart-wrenching address before the United Nations Security Council in New York City in May. “We are facing an epidemic of attacks on health facilities, impeding our ability to do our core work,” Joanne Liu declared.

“In reality, they amount to massive, indiscriminate and disproportionate civilian targeting in urban settings, and, in the worst cases, they are acts of terror,” she said. “They demolish routine and lifesaving healthcare for all. They make life impossible. Full stop.”

This latest attack comes after a string of bombings of other civilian areas. More than 50 Yemeni civilians were killed in at least four attacks in the week since peace talks broke down on Aug. 6.

More than 6,500 people have been killed in the war in Yemen. The U.N. has repeatedly reported that the U.S.-backed coalition is responsible for two-thirds of civilian casualties.

(This article was updated with the death toll at 6:15 pm EST on Monday, Aug. 15.)

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My skin is contraband: How prisons are hostile to women visitors

(Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)

I pull on a long black-and-white mottled skirt, a black t-shirt, and black flats. Each of these items of clothing is carefully considered. The skirt covers my legs and tattoos. The shirt is loose, but not too loose, and covers other tattoos. The shoes are unlikely to set off the metal detector. It’s 65 degrees out and so I risk a light sweater. Here I might run into problems. It’s voluminous and has a cowl neck, both of which might raise suspicions that I’m smuggling in contraband. It also has a meshed back which, though I’m wearing a shirt under it, may still be too suggestive of the possibility of seeing flesh that it will be nixed.

I’m getting dressed to go to prison. Since 2006, I’ve been involved in education programs in prisons across the country. Over the years, I’ve devised a couple of outfits unlikely to get me held up at security. Getting ready for prison is a sort of bizarro-Halloween. Instead of sexy teacher, my costume is teacher-who-looks-like-a-cross-between-a-plush-polar-bear-and-a-beanbag. In my professional life, I usually opt for something more middle-of-the-road.  Today, as I dress, I feel a minor twinge of embarrassment about how unflattering my outfit is. But I always go full Puritan. As a woman, it’s the best way to keep from being hassled by the correctional officers (COs) at security.

Getting into prison in America is far too easy. Unless you are a visitor who wants to get in and get back out again, in which case it is too hard. Prisons are built away from urban centers and are poorly served by public transport. I’ve never had less than an hour-and-a-half drive to any of the prisons I’ve worked in. Getting to Rikers Island in New York City was by far the most difficult. I took a bus, to a subway, to another bus, then got picked up by a colleague and driven to the prison block I was teaching in. The whole trip took five hours round trip, not including the time it took me to do my work there.

Once at a prison, it’s hard to get through security. Things I’ve personally been busted for are: a quarter in my pocket, plastic buttons on my turtleneck, and, I shit you not, walking too heavily through the metal detector. I committed these particular infractions at the first prison I ever visited, Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Norfolk. Norfolk, as it’s called colloquially, is a medium-security prison roughly 22 miles southwest of Boston. There, when you set off the metal detector, all the people who are visiting at the same time as you must wait while a CO brings you to a private room. Alone with the CO, you are told to unhook your bra, presumably so that anything hidden inside will fall out. For the same reason you are to turn the elastic on your underwear inside out. The CO wands you and pats you down. When this happened to me I was scared, not knowing how invasive the search would be. I also felt guilty because my search delayed about a dozen people who had limited time to visit their incarcerated friends and family. At Norfolk I started tiptoeing through metal detectors, and I retain this habit ten years later.

Teaching in prisons presents its own complications. I’ve been forbidden from bringing in standard tools of my trade such as staples, paper clips, and pens that aren’t transparent. I spoke with Arminta Fox, who used to coordinate classes that brought together students from Drew University and Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in the New Jersey prison. She told me that she and others had been busted for bringing in spiral-bound notebooks, pens with springs in them, and the poem “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou.

Over and above all of these things, the dress code is, for me, the most difficult thing to negotiate. Each facility has its own list of rules about what you can wear. I’ve always found the lists to be overwhelming. For example, when picking out something to wear on your bottom half at Norfolk, you have to make sure that it does not have metal, holes, excessive pockets, or drawstrings, that it is not too tight or too baggy, sheer, revealing, transparent, layered, wraparound, bibbed, camouflage, ripped, torn, missing buttons, spandex, worn for exercise, at all similar to what people who work or live in prison wear, at all similar to what gang members wear, or more than three inches above the knee. Also please be sure that you don’t wear “wind pants” once you find out what wind pants are.

Once you have picked out a bottom that meets the above criteria, you will need to select underwear, a top, socks, and shoes that meet similar lists of criteria. Then you must vet the rest of your body to make sure you have not left contraband on it. Remember that your hair extensions are subject to search and that if you plan on wearing a religious medal to Rikers, it must be “no more than two inches in diameter hung on a chain of one quarter-inch or less in diameter and no longer than 24 inches.”

When you get to the prison you may find that preparation and a will to comply can only get you so far. Whether your pants are too tight or too loose, for example, is entirely up to the discretion of whichever CO is working security at that time. Some COs tend to have short memories and short tempers, so how they decide on your pants differs from visit to visit and seems to depend on how shitty their day has been.

You will also run up against unwritten rules that you will learn only through word of mouth or by breaking them. A pervasive example of this is the underwire bra. None of the prisons that I have visited mention underwires in their dress code. But wearing one will probably set off the metal detector, subjecting you to a search that, depending on the institution, varies in its degradation.

The burden of prison dress codes falls disproportionately on women. I have not been able to locate any demographic studies providing gender breakdowns of who visits prisons. Those studying prisons tend to focus on the men and women inside of them. But, if you’ll allow for a bit of anecdotal evidence, women far outnumber men in the waiting room according to my colleagues, my students in and outside of prisons, and yours truly. Because women visit prisons more than men, women have to negotiate the vagaries of prison dress codes more than men.

In addition, and more concretely, each prison dress code has clauses that exclusively regulate clothing typically considered feminine. Take, for example, the prison I currently visit, Columbia River Correctional Facility (CRCI). CRCI is a minimum-security prison in the outer reaches of Portland, Oregon. As far as prisons go, it’s one of the least horrible. The prisoners call it Prisneyland because of its relatively relaxed style. I have been told by both a CO and several inmates that the dynamic between COs and prisoners is a lot like that between babysitters and children. One prisoner compared CRCI favorably with other prisons he’s been at because, at CRCI, when guards want to establish dominance they do so by talking down to you rather than beating you.

Outside the grounds of CRCI stands a sandwich board detailing the dress code. Visitors cannot wear hats. Nor can they wear blue denim since this is what the prisoners wear. CRCI forbids visitors from wearing smart watches and bringing in cell phones to stymie prisoners’ potential attempts to access any information through their visitors.

The rest of the sign is dedicated to controlling prisoners’ visual access to the human form. Visitors cannot wear skirts, dresses, or shorts more than two inches above the middle of the knee. A rare editorial note on the sign emphasizes that “this applies to all visitors,” an ostensible attempt to signal that the dress code forbids the bearing of flesh equally on the part of men and women. The sign also forbids tight-fitting or revealing clothing as well as leggings. There is no attempt to signal that these latter expectations apply equally to men and women.

The Oregon Department of Corrections states that the intent of the dress code is “to maintain a positive environment for all inmates and visitors.” It goes on to say “visitors are encouraged to wear clothing that is conservative in nature in order to maintain a respectful visiting environment.” The first time I was volunteering, however, a CO offered a different explanation. “A lot of these guys haven’t seen a woman in a while,” he said. The real point of the dress code, from his point of view, was to keep women’s skin from stirring up a sexual response from the prisoners.

Another sign hung on the controlled entrance to CRCI lists contraband other than clothing: “narcotics, narcotic paraphernalia, weapons, ammunition, explosives, controlled medication, escape devices, money including negotiable instruments, intoxicants, tobacco, or gambling proceeds.” The signs outside of CRCI announce bans on things that are either criminal in themselves or that have the potential to cause criminal or disruptive behavior. Female skin is one of these things. As surely as the ban on ammunition betrays a spectral fear of violent uprising, the ban on female skin hints at the phantasm of sexual assault.

The Rikers Island website explains that the purpose of the dress code is to maintain a safe and “family friendly” environment. Certain swaths of human skin are, by deduction, family-hostile and compromise Rikers’ T.G.I.Friday’s-like atmosphere. Like the signs at CRCI, the Rikers website hints at an association between contraband materials and contraband skin. It states, “overly suggestive clothing and clothing in which contraband and non-permissible items can be hidden are not permitted.” Visitors must wear only one layer of clothing – revealing enough of their body that COs can perceive potential dangers but not so much that their body creates additional dangers.

At Rikers, the human body begins to be dangerous three inches above the knee. No one will be admitted wearing clothing with hems, holes, or rips in this hazardous area. Human skin continues to be dangerous in the torso. Visitors are not allowed to wear tops or dresses that expose the chest, stomach or back. Even the outlines of the human form must be obscured in this area. “Spandex leggings” are considered in the same way as skin itself and must be dressed as the skin is dressed, by something with a hem no higher than three inches above the knee.

Hidden in prison dress codes is a paternalistic impulse to control, denigrate, harass and abuse women visitors under the pretext of protecting them. A particularly poignant  example of this comes from a woman whom I will call Jennifer to protect her anonymity. Jennifer visited her mother, “Angie,” several times in the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW). WCCW is a medium-security prison in Gig Harbor, Washington, noted for its relatively humane treatment of inmates. Among other programs, the prison has a Residential Parenting Program that allows some pregnant inmates with shorter sentences to keep their children with them after giving birth.

Jennifer visited accompanied by her child, who she was breastfeeding at the time. The first time Jennifer breastfed at WCCW, a CO told Angie that Jennifer would have to cover herself up. Jennifer did her best to be discreet as she fed her child but did not cover up because her child would not eat if covered. Babies know nothing about compliance. On her way out of the prison, a pregnant CO told her again that she needed to cover up because “there are men who work here.” The CO expressed that Jennifer slightly exposing her breast was like walking into a gas station puffing on a Marlboro – you might not cause an explosion, but best practices say don’t take that risk.

After a subsequent visit, during which she also breastfed, Jennifer was confronted by a male CO she described as “giant,” who told her to cover up. She asked him if WCCW had anything in writing that breastfeeding while uncovered was forbidden, to which he responded that he was sure they did. Jennifer asked to see the rule and suggested he cross-reference it with Washington’s breastfeeding laws, which ensure women’s right to breastfeed at any time or place without having to cover up. At this point, the CO told her to have a good day and left her alone, leaving Jennifer shaken. The COs at WCCW had singled Jennifer out, repeatedly badgered her, and attempted to intimidate her on the groundless assertion that the Department of Corrections did not allow uncovered breastfeeding and that doing such was a provocation of the men in the prison.

Arbitrary enforcement of prison dress codes means that you will most likely not be able to avoid being hassled by a CO. The kind of harassment you might receive will depend on who you are. In my experience, volunteers generally receive better treatment than prisoners’ friends and family. Visiting women of color experience added sartorial demands and therefore are open to more harassment than their white counterparts. Fox shared with me stories of women of color being told to remove bobby pins and bandanas they wore to conform to professional expectations that skew in favor of tamed hair that is generally more easily achieved by white women.

The kind of treatment you’ll receive for an infraction also depends on where you are visiting. If you wear an underwire bra at CRCI, you’ll be wanded and scolded, sometimes gently and sometimes quite rudely. At Rikers Island, many women visitors have alleged being subjected to vaginally penetrative searches for infractions such as wearing an underwire or otherwise setting off the metal detector.

When I spoke to Fox and Jennifer, both made sure to tell me about positive experiences that they had had with COs bending rules for them in humane ways. Fox, a religious scholar, described being allowed to bring olives and nice cheeses to a class on the centuries-old Christian practice of Love Feasts. At closing ceremonies for a class, COs raised no objections when students from Drew entered wearing uniform clothing that mirrored (without replicating) prisoner dress in a show of solidarity. Jennifer noted that COs allowed her mother to attend her sister’s funeral, to stay longer at the funeral than she was technically allowed to, and to be hugged despite rules against contact with prisoners. I, too, have had positive experiences, particularly at CRCI, where many COs are generally friendly and are more interested in enforcing the spirit rather than the letter of the rules.

The arbitrary nature of dress code enforcement, however, means you’ll never be able to predict how you will be treated. Dressing myself for prison is an absurdist act in which I pantomime control. In my modest clothes, I’m less likely to get hassled by the COs than my colleagues who commit playful acts of rebellion by risking skinny jeans at each visit. No matter what any of us wear, though, we’re all on a spectrum of vulnerability, subject to rules that are at the same time too specific and too vague, enforced at the discretion of changeable individuals. The stated and implied purpose of these rules is to protect visitors from the inmates, but I’ll say that, in my experience, mistreatment comes much more often at security checkpoints than in the visiting room.

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“Skinny isn’t beautiful”: Only after I stopped dreading my weight did I find true happiness

Ann Hood (Credit: Catherine Sebastian)

My doctor’s assistant motioned me toward the scale, clipboard in hand. This was my third visit in less than a month — first for the swine flu, then for a mole that appeared suddenly beside my belly button and changed shape just as suddenly, and now for an earache that had kept me up all night. Each time, she had weighed me. But standing there now, I wondered what my weight had to do with my sore ear. Or my mole. Or the flu, for that matter. Standing there now, the last thing I wanted was to take off my winter boots and big puffy coat and watch as she slid that bar up and up, past the 129-pound mark, where for years it had settled, perfectly balanced.

“I don’t want you to weigh me,” I said.

The truth was, I didn’t want to be weighed ever again if that bar was going to keep creeping upward, past 130, past 140, into territory I never imagined my weight would reach. Goddamn it! I was a thin person! The woman who people asked how I could eat so much and still be so skinny. The woman who fit into her size 4 jeans, even after two babies.

The doctor’s assistant frowned at me.

“I mean, I have an earache,” I explained.

She began to write on my chart. In red.

“And I was just here last week,” I reminded her. “Remember? The mole?”

She blinked at me. “The doctor will be in shortly,” she said, and left.

I immediately picked up my chart to see what she’d written. “Refuses weigh-in.” At first, I felt embarrassed. I hadn’t exactly “refused,” had I? It just seemed silly to get weighed again so soon. So frequently. But as I climbed up on the examining table, the strangest thing happened: After years — a lifetime, really — of worrying about and taking pride in my thinness, I suddenly didn’t care that I was no longer a skinny size 4. And the reason I didn’t care was that I was happy. Happier than I’d been since I was a teenager. I don’t mean happy in that my life was perfectly in place; in fact, in many ways it was the opposite — messy and sad, confusing and frantic. Rather, I mean happy with me, with who I was and how I felt about my place in the world.

I’d been that way years ago, a girl who knew her mind and her heart. And now here I was, squarely in middle age, finally certain again of those very same things. Finally happy with myself, despite all the mistakes I’d made, all the bad decisions and wrong turns and enormous losses that marked my life. Despite, I realized with something— I swear — akin to wonder, the added twenty-plus pounds I carried.

Some girls are raised to be the first female president or an astronaut. Some girls are raised to find a cure for cancer or to battle social injustice. Or to be a perfect wife or mother or hostess or chef. I was raised to be beautiful.

***

To my mother, beautiful meant tall and blond and — perhaps most important — thin. She spent most of her life embarrassed by her Italian looks. Unmanageable dark hair, brown eyes behind thick glasses, a large nose with a bump at the bridge like all the Masciarotte clan had. She dreamed of being a cheerleader, a girl who could easily be lifted onto the shoulders of football players. She dreamed of being homecoming queen, lovely in a pale dress with a sweetheart neckline that cinched a tiny waist. But she’d inherited the peasant-farmer genes of her ancestors: broad hips, large breasts, short stature. And so she was doomed to playing the sidekick to pretty girls, like Eve Arden in the old movies, all sass and sarcasm as she planned school dances but didn’t get a date. Or, at least, not one with the boys she wished for. Her dates were neighborhood kids, also Italian immigrants, also short and squat and tough.

For me, her only daughter, she dreamed of a different life, a charmed life that she believed beautiful girls led. As a baby, I had the big blue eyes and a winning toothless grin that made strangers stop and compliment my mother, who dressed me in elaborate matching outfits and used egg on my few strands of pale blond hair to make them stand up enough to hold a bow. One afternoon, a man with a camera passing by our front yard doubled back, pointing to me in my stroller. “Your baby could win the Beautiful Baby of the State of Maryland contest,” he said. “She could?” my mother asked hopefully. The man nodded and offered to take my picture for free if my mother split the cash prize with him, should I win. She agreed. I won. And my mother got her wish: She had a beautiful daughter, and a certificate from the state of Maryland to prove it.

The problem was, I didn’t care about being beautiful. I cared about the March family in Little Women and poetry and why the leaves changed color every autumn. As I sat squirming in pain while my mother wrapped my now-long blond hair into rags to make perfect banana curls, I yammered on and on about the things that mattered to me, that kept me up at night. “How do you pronounce the name of the country spelled I-r-a-q? Why isn’t there a u after the q? Why is y sometimes a vowel? Can I carry a baked potato to school to keep my hands warm like Laura does in Little House on the Prairie?” My mother twisted another thick hank of hair into a scrap of cotton and sighed. “No, you cannot carry a baked potato. You’ll wear your new mittens that match your hat and scarf. Why do you have to be so weird? You’re beautiful. That’s all that matters.” This last was always said with a sigh — resigned or grateful or both, I’m not sure.

Although I’d inherited the traits my mother valued from my midwestern father, I often felt that my mother believed I looked this way because of some kind of divine intervention. She had prayed for a beautiful daughter, a blond daughter, a thin daughter — and now she had one. Her prayers had been answered. I would fulfill all the dreams she’d had dashed because she was overweight. The fact that I didn’t like being onstage or primping or shopping didn’t matter. “If I’d looked like you when I was young …,” she’d say, as she exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke. There was no ending to that sentence; it was implied. If she’d looked like me, she would have been happy.

I wasn’t happy, however. I was a frightened, anxious kid who overthought everything. As soon as I learned the Earth was rotating, I worried that it would spin off its axis. After seeing a child die from a botched tonsillectomy on Ben Casey, I worried that I would die if and when I ever had my tonsils removed. When my brother showed me a flake of my skin under his microscope, I convinced myself that we were all actually microscopic and that a larger species was looking at us under its microscope. I wouldn’t stop reading a book on a page that ended with a 3 because I’d heard that bad things come in threes. I was blond. I was tall. I was skinny. And I was miserable.

As I smiled my way through beauty pageants, collecting trophies and getting to ride in convertibles in parades and having my picture splashed across the local newspaper, inside I was all nerves and queasy stomach. For my talent in pageants, I recited a poem: “I have ten little fingers and ten little toes, long blond hair and a turned-up nose, big blue eyes and a cute little figure. Stay away, boys, until I get bigger!” This was recited wearing a leopard-print bikini that my auntie Julia had sewn for me, with matching leopard-print sandals. By the time I was ten, I asked if I could recite a real poem: Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” “That poem is so depressing!” my mother told me. “Why are you so weird? If I’d looked like you when I was young …”

***

Like all things associated with beauty, thin is relative, a subjective idea, a subjective ideal. In countries like Tonga and Tahiti, fat women are considered beautiful and desirable. Here in the United States, however, thin is usually equated with beauty. And, just as my mother believed, beauty is often equated with happiness. How interesting to me, that a 1993 study conducted in rural Jamaica associated thinness with sadness and heaviness with happiness. Of course, it took me decades to believe that such a notion could even be possible.

As a teenager, I stayed on the track that pretty girls move along. Although too uncoordinated to make the cheerleading squad (the one thing I failed at, in my mother’s eyes), at the age of fourteen, I became a model for Jordan Marsh, the local chain of department stores here in New England. Throughout high school, I did fashion shows from Boston to Maine, as well as special spreads in Mademoiselle and Brides. I modeled at the mall, standing perfectly still for hours in the store window, dressed in the hottest teen trends. My modeling got me noticed by Bonne Bell Cosmetics, and I modeled for them as well, my face washed in their Ten O Six lotion, my lips and cheeks glossy with their makeup. Then, for two years, I won a coveted spot as a special teen “correspondent” for Seventeen magazine, which primarily meant appearing in both print and photo spreads.

But this was the early 1970s, long before Kate Moss’s heroin chic. Our icons were women like Cheryl Tiegs and Jean Shrimpton, who, though certainly still thin, had curvy bodies and good-sized breasts. To model back then, I didn’t have to be super skinny, and I wasn’t. Neither were the girls I worked with. Don’t get me wrong, we were far from overweight. But we had breasts and hips and round cheeks. We looked, I daresay, like healthy American teenagers, which is exactly what we were.

When I wasn’t working, I was starring in school plays or writing for the school newspaper. I was dancing to Van Morrison songs at sandy bars on the beach, kissing boys in Mustang convertibles and tiny Fiats, riding waves and eating fried clam cakes. Although I had my share of teenage angst, much of what I’d felt so anxious about as a child disappeared. I worried about more concrete things: the war in Vietnam, losing my virginity, the environment. But mostly I was happy. I had friends to share my dreams with. I had creative outlets. I had boyfriends, lots of them. I used my brain all the time. And I was doing something considered valuable in my family: putting on clothes and makeup and walking down a runway. I didn’t love it, but I was used to it by then, and it conferred a certain status that I now understood … not to mention providing me with extra money.

Somehow, everybody was happy with me. But even more important, I was happy with me. I knew how I felt about politics and love and art. I was confident as I moved through the world — as small as my world was then, its borders reaching only from Rhode Island to Maine and most of it contained in Jordan Marsh, the mall and West Warwick High School.

My freshman year of college, I went from happy to, frankly, miserable. I roomed with a girl from high school who I didn’t know well. I’d never shared a room with anyone, and the ins and outs of now accommodating someone baffled me. School baffled me too. Did I fit in with the pot-smoking dorm kids or the large Greek community with its keg parties and formal dances? Neither, I feared. When I went on dates, boys suddenly wanted sex, not just making out, and I was confused about these new expectations. Previously an effortless straight-A student, I floundered under the burden of syllabi and no roll calling. I skipped classes frequently. When grades for that first semester arrived, I was shocked to find myself on academic probation.

Although many first-year college girls succumb to the Freshman Fifteen and gain weight, the opposite happened with me. Pounds fell off — not because I was dieting or starving, but because I was anxious. That first winter break, I had to take all my Christmas money and buy new, smaller jeans that fit. The more unhappy I felt, the skinnier I seemed to get, until people were commenting on how thin I was. Through college, the weight stayed off — and I stayed, in many ways, unhappy. Even though I had friends and boyfriends and served in student government, I never believed I truly fit in anywhere.

As graduation approached, fellow classmates bought suits and took résumé-writing classes. Even though I felt confused about who I was and where I belonged, I understood that I didn’t want what they wanted. My childhood dream of becoming a writer had not faded, even though I never shared it with anyone. Alone in my room, I scribbled stories and poems in notebooks that no one ever saw, read every book I could get my hands on. I needed to run with the bulls, I decided. To jump naked in fountains and live in a garret in Paris! A girl raised differently might have bought a Eurail Pass and headed for Europe after college, or applied to graduate writing programs. But I was a girl raised to be beautiful. I decided to become a flight attendant.

***

In 1978, weight restrictions still existed for flight attendants. Along with the application came a weight chart. If you were above the maximum weight, you were told not to bother to apply. For my height — almost five-foot-eight — the maximum I could weigh was 135 pounds; I was around 123. But, so desperate was I for this job that would take me away from Rhode Island and allow me to have the experiences I yearned for, that I went on a binge diet before my interviews and managed to shed four more pounds, leaving me a skeletal — and weak, famished — 119.

At training in Kansas City for TWA, we were told that if we went above our hiring weight, we would be fired. Routinely, when we got off a flight, a supervisor was there waiting to weigh us. One of my roommates was fired for weighing six pounds over her hiring weight, though still five pounds below the maximum weight on the airline’s chart. So for the first time, I began to starve myself. Dinner — my one meal a day — might be steak on a stick from the appetizer menu at TGI Fridays or a shared salad at Crickets or Lily’s in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. For years, I survived mostly on coffee and wine. My size 0 uniform was loose enough that I could slide my skirt entirely around my waist, easily.

Then, in 1982, my brother Skip, my only sibling, died in an accident. The grief that followed took over my life for the next decade. At the same time, I fell in love with an actor and moved to New York City to be with him. Of all the things he gave me during our time together — and there were many — that he fed me, that he satiated my actual, physical hunger, was one of the most important. He brought home Chinese food late at night, after work, and took me for Indian food on East Sixth Street, cooked me soft-shell crabs, elaborate breakfasts, spicy noodles. I was happy with him, truly happy, but also grief-stricken — so much so that I didn’t even worry about gaining weight and losing my job. And I needn’t have anyway, because, once again, and despite my loving boyfriend, I was horribly anxious; afraid to be alone on layovers, certain that someone I loved had died in my absence. So even though he fed me, constantly and well, I stayed skinny. Too skinny.

***

Out of the grief of that period, I wrote my first novel. By the time it was published, the actor and I had broken up — partially, I see now, from my own inability to deal with my sadness. A man who had been a good buddy confessed he’d been in love with me all the time I’d been in love with someone else, and without pausing, I stepped immediately into a new love affair, even though it had none of the passion I’d felt before. If such a big love failed, I reasoned, perhaps I should not wait for that again but opt instead for companionship. That, we had in abundance, staying up until all hours playing Scrabble or watching old movies. Reading together and sharing each other’s writing. Best friends. So we married — even though in my heart I knew that I didn’t love this man the way he should be loved, the way I wanted to love someone.

As I grappled with this over the course of years, my weight once again dropped, this time lower than ever. Here I was, a successful writer, living the literary life I’d dreamed of … and unhappier than I’d ever been. In pictures from that time, I see gobs of long blond hair hanging down a too-skinny body. I see an unhappy woman. The relationship ended, and again I jumped right into a new one. This time, I felt all the corny things someone in love says they feel, but the man — who would become my second husband — lived in Rhode Island. So I found myself packing up my New York City apartment and moving back to the place I thought I’d never live again. We wasted no time in starting our family, and before I even knew his morning routine or favorite color, we had our son, Sam, and then our daughter, Grace. Getting to know my husband, figuring out how to raise children and trying to keep my writing career afloat took all my time. No longer a flight attendant, I no longer had to focus on my weight — and I ate again, now with abandon, and wrote and took care of my kids. And one day I looked up and realized that I was truly and fully happy.

When, in 2002, Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep, this new world of mine fell apart in ways I never could have imagined. Not only was my grief all-encompassing, but I also couldn’t read or write, the two things that had never failed to comfort me. Eating for pleasure was a distant memory; my body, at that time, was not something I thought of or cared about.

I wrapped myself around Sam, worrying over his every move, unable to be calm when I couldn’t literally see him. I learned to knit, and I knitted constantly. Crowds made me nervous. I was unable to speak on the telephone. During the day, I took small bites of food, but I had no appetite for more. After I’d had my babies, my weight was a healthy but still thin 129 pounds. Now it once again plummeted.

It seems to me that I crawled out of that abyss of grief slowly, slowly. I remember tasting food again, and then actually enjoying it. I remember marveling at a tree whose leaves had changed color. I remember breathing in my favorite smell of salty air and really smelling it, as if for the first time. I read “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” and remembered the joy a good book can bring. We adopted a baby girl from China, and Annabelle reminded me how a child’s arms lifted to you for a hug can make your heart soar. One night, I had Sam asleep on one side of me and Annabelle on the other, and I understood how sadness and happiness can live side by side in our hearts.

When, during this time, did those twenty pounds begin to accrue? I don’t know, because I was too busy reminding myself of what mattered, of what made me happy … of how to be happy. I wasn’t noticing numbers on a scale. I was just trying to find my way back.

I am still a person who goes to the doctor a lot, partially because I have a touch of hypochondria and partially because I frequently get mild illnesses and strange pains. But the doctor’s assistant no longer tells me to get on the scale. She knows I won’t; I know I don’t need to. Because whatever that scale says, it can’t tell me what I already know. Skinny isn’t beautiful. And thin or not-so-thin really doesn’t matter. What matters is how you feel in your body, regardless of what you weigh. And what’s beautiful is being in this sad, messy, lovely world and liking who you are in it — and knowing that the people you love are right here in it with you.

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Integrity in politics: Is the “lesser of two evils” an ethical choice for voters?

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pauses while speaking at a rally at the Coliseum in St. Petersburg, Fla., Monday, Aug. 8, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) (Credit: AP)

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Every election cycle, there are citizens who don’t like either of the candidates nominated by the two major political parties.

And so, a familiar debate begins: Is a vote for a third party a principled stand — or wasteful naiveté?

This year, party discord has swelled the numbers of dissatisfied citizens, and the debate is even louder than usual.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are unprecedentedly unpopular. On the left, intense pressure is mounting to vote for Hillary Clinton to avoid what many think will be genuine, large-scale dangers of a Trump presidency. This pressure is most intense in states that rank relatively high on what Nate Silver describes as the “voter power index” like Nevada or Florida. But such arguments are also engendering a defiant backlash as voters declare, “I will not vote out of fear.”

As a moral philosopher, I’m particularly interested in the question of whether we can be obligated to vote for someone we dislike. Let’s look at the arguments.

The third-party dilemma

Pretend for a moment that you are a swing-state voter who agrees with the following four statements.

A Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster.
A Hillary Clinton presidency would be better.
A third-party candidate would be better still.
Neither third-party candidate has a serious chance of becoming president.

My point here is not to defend these claims, since it doesn’t matter whether I believe them. What matters is that there are people who do accept them, and they are trying to decide whether they really ought — whether they are morally required — to vote for Hillary.

Although many such voters are predictably Bernie supporters who object to Clinton on various grounds, the dilemma applies to many on the right as well.

Trump has divided the Republican Party, and many conservative voters — or even conservative leaders — have had trouble supporting the nominee. It is quite possible that these individuals also endorse claims 1-4.

The integrity objection

The angry rejection of the idea that one ought to vote for someone she finds objectionable is not only understandable, but I think tied to something deeply important. Voters are being told that they ought to vote so as to minimize harm, which sounds like a moral commandment. But these voters also have a conflicting moral belief — that they ought not to endorse a candidate that they take to be corrupt. They are being put into the position of choosing an external moral principle over an internal one.

One of the things that Green Party supporters say is that you aren’t supposed to vote for the lesser of two evils — after all, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Rather, you’re supposed to vote for the best candidate.

One way to think about the third-party vote is that it is a form of conscientious objection. Such a vote, like abstaining from voting, allows the voter to avoid acting in a way that she thinks is wrong or distasteful. We can understand this person’s vote for a third party as a commitment not to let the badness of the world force her into violating her principles.

The issue being identified here is not a new one. Philosophers have long argued that, while the consequences of one’s actions are morally relevant, they rarely or never amount to a requirement to act in a way inconsistent with one’s firmly held commitments. A British philosopher named Bernard Williams famously argued that if we were forced to abandon our ideals every time the world conspired to make following through with them suboptimal, this would rob us of our integrity. This is a very compelling idea.

The self-indulgence response

Williams seems right that we are not always obligated to violate our own principles or commitments in order to promote the greater good. But surely this idea has limits.

For, as critics of Williams have often said: When the consequences of one’s action or inaction get bad enough, following through for the sake of keeping one’s hands clean starts to seem self-indulgent. Indeed, even Williams admitted that you may sometimes be required to violate your principles for the greater good.

One take-home lesson of Williams’ view is that focusing on our “integrity” is the most justifiable when the action that we are being asked to take deeply violates our most central life commitments, and the cost of not acting is relatively low.

If, for instance, a vegan lifestyle were central to my self-identity and I found myself in a situation where my abstaining from eating meat would hurt my host’s feelings, plausibly I would be allowed to respectfully turn down the food. If, however, either the moral costs of turning down the food were much higher — for instance, if I were a peace ambassador to a foreign government host with thin skin and a finger on the nuclear launch button — or I was only toying with the idea of veganism, then my preferences would not play the same justificatory role.

For those who endorse claims 1 to 4, it’s likely the case both that the costs of not voting for Clinton are quite high and that voting “for the best candidate” is not really such a deep commitment.

On the first point: If a Trump presidency would be as bad as predicted by claim 1, then failing to vote for the candidate who can stop him is contributing to what will likely be a massive, moral harm. While it’s true that each of us has but one vote to cast, in so casting it, we are participating in a collective action with serious moral consequences and that makes our actions morally serious.

On the second point: Although voting for a candidate we dislike can feel dirty, my guess is that most of us don’t actually hold the ideal of voting for the very best candidate as a central, guiding commitment. Rather, we see voting as a thing we do, but not something that’s deeply tied to who we are. So voting in a way that “feels dirty” does not seem to rise to the level of undermining our integrity.

Those who are wrestling with whether to vote for Clinton out of fear of Trump are tapping into something real, then. They are distressed that a threat of bad consequences can undermine their freedom to choose as they please. But it is self indulgent, I would argue, to claim their integrity is on the line. If you believe Trump is a moral disaster, then you may well be obligated to vote for Clinton — even if that means getting your hands a little dirty.

Travis N. Rieder is a research scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.

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Black pain isn’t a video game: The possibilities and pitfalls of virtual reality in the Black Lives Matter era

The Argus Project (Credit: The Argus Project/Tribeca Film Institute)

Everyone has the license to tell a story from their own perspective and lexicon. Virtual reality technology is gaining popularity for elite storytellers, and people have the power to employ this new technology to invent their truth however they see it, changing the way we think about sharing our experiences, thoughts and ideas. When using virtual reality technology to tell stories that impact the African American community, however, the danger for exploitation is high.

“Every medium has its own strengths and weaknesses, and a master storyteller in any medium can build empathy. In VR, however, your senses are engaged in a way that blurs the line between fantasy and reality,” said Guy Primus, CEO and co-founder of The Virtual Reality Company, via email. “When you have the ability to look into someone’s eyes and have them look back into yours, things get more real. You can’t look away. Everything is happening in real-time, and that creates a different level of emotion. Those emotions can be positive or negative, but they are very real.”

Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen citizen journalism take on a new prominence with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. But while White America may be able to center conversations of black trauma and pain around themselves and choose when to engage with the realities of Black American life and history through, for example, social media and viral videos, Black America doesn’t have the luxury of disembodying itself from the past. When virtual reality technology is introduced, the ethical questions multiply. New technology may work to agitate empathy in white people, but at the same time, it can pick at Black America’s wounds, wounds that haven’t yet healed. How can this technology be used responsibly to tell stories that center the narrative around disenfranchised groups of people?

Veteran journalist Nonny de la Peña and her company Emblematic created “One Dark Night,” a virtual reality app that recreates the February 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, which they demonstrated at 2015’s Tribeca Film Institute Interactive. The interface of the project was similar to that of an adult-rated video game — think “World of Warcraft” — except the content presented was far from a fantasy. Instead, users experienced Trayvon Martin navigating the neighborhood in which he was shot, the sounds of George Zimmerman’s gunshots, and residents frantically making 911 calls.

Peña explains to Salon why VR was her choice for creating this project.

“One of the reasons is it was compelling audio. And even with a GoPro rig, you couldn’t really go out and recreate the events, the way that they kind of transpired,” she says.

Peña researched “One Dark Night” thoroughly, reviewing police reports, jury testimony and Zimmerman’s interview with the police the next day.

“We did everything that would have been done in traditional journalistic practice. I used the same procedures that I would use to make any piece before I begin to make this piece,” she says. “And as you can see from the piece, we never put you anywhere near where Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had their fatal confrontation.”

She declined to respond to a follow-up question asking whether her team had spoken to Travyon Martin’s parents prior to releasing “One Dark Night.”

In our conversation, I asked if her virtual reality experience included additional interpretive materials that could situate Martin’s story in a greater historical or cultural context. Peña said they did not provide those.

“We acted very quickly when we went about creating this piece. We created it in just under a week. I think that’s one thing that the web has immediate access to that VR doesn’t — the ability to research and click on links and find out where the material comes from. And I think that something like that might be more useful when we have more time to integrate them into our news stories and, of course, translate them into VR stories,” Peña said.

The “One Dark Night” project was introduced during a time when non-indictments, Black Lives Matter and police armed with riot gear were becoming branded into the collective memory of a generation of African-Americans. While the intent of the “One Dark Night” project may have been to spark awareness among white users and agitate empathy in them, it did so potentially at the expense of African-American users, by invoking a present pain that can cause heightened emotional distress.

Peña notes that, before releasing the project, she consulted with several of her friends who are part of the Black Lives Matter movement and that the Tribeca committee approved of it. But after I experienced “One Dark Night” myself, I stayed to watch other users. Most of the Black people I spoke to after had the same reaction: “Why would someone create this!?” White users, on the other hand, seemed to be able to get up, move on and go about enjoying the rest of festival. While this project may have been created to raise awareness around police brutality, it does so by putting the mental and emotional health of African-American users at risk.

A recent study conducted by the British Psychological Society suggest that viewing violent news on social media can cause trauma. The study was conducted with 189 participants, with an average age of 37. Each participant completed a clinical assessment for PTSD, a personality questionnaire, a vicarious trauma assessment and a questionnaire concerning different violent news events on social media or the internet. These included the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, school shootings and suicide bombings.

The analysis indicated that 22 per cent of participants were significantly affected by the media events. “These individuals scored high on clinical measures of PTSD even though none had previous trauma, were not present at the traumatic events and had only watched them via social media. Those who reported viewing the events more often were most affected,” the study reported.

Peña suggests that future projects should acknowledge the risk of VR-induced trauma. “We need some sort of warning sign, like a mature audience sign,” she says.

If the goal of “One Dark Night” was to create an immersive virtual reality experience, then it’s important, moving forward, that such experiences are coupled with real learning from those who are mourning. That’s what the Argus Project did the following year. Created by Ligaiya Romero, Julien A. Terrell, Raquel de Anda and Gan Golan, Argus, a “trans-media project that directly intersects the public debate over police accountability,” was showcased during 2016’s TFI Interactive. The experience consists of counter-surveillance armor embedded with body cameras that asks a simple question: “If the police wear body armor to protect themselves while in public, what must ‘The Public’ wear to protect themselves from the police?”

Video projections surrounding the suit include former officers, activists and family members directly impacted by police violence, creating a space for a real conversation on police violence. The project was set up in a space that allowed the users the opportunity to talk about the experience and how they felt about it.

Perhaps virtual reality storytelling can help to close an empathy gap through immersive technology. Guy Primus affirms this potential.

“The situations that the Black community faces, and the emotions that those situations evoke, are clearly not relatable to everyone, currently,” says Primus. “When you transition from being a casual observer in a situation to being an active participant in that situation, your perspective changes. I wouldn’t wish the trauma faced by many of the members of the Black community experience on others, but I do think that the ability to relate to those traumatic experiences, even in a small way, will help to bring people together.”

But simply experiencing these videos — and relying on them to inform consciousness — can create the deceptive feeling in users that they’ve gone to the frontlines of Ferguson, Baltimore or Dallas, without actually ever being there.

If these virtual reality experiences are going to assist in bringing people together around issues of injustice, it’s important that they are coupled with discussion. We’re already a highly-desensitized generation. Black bodies sprawled across the internet have become almost commonplace. As people watch a video game-style display of a news story, it’s vital that they don’t walk away with an “othered” understanding of the experience. These are real stories, people and places.

In the past we’ve seen the chain reaction of events when a video of a police shooting is posted on the internet: Watch, protest, wait, the rush to judgment, non-indictment. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to come up with any real recourse or plans of effecting change. No real conversations beyond race relations 101 are taking place. Instead, there’s a disheartening numbing of the American consciousness when it comes to the senseless killings of Black and Brown people.

Even though these visuals may be able to compel a white person to take action on issues of social injustice, by giving them the vantage point of Black America’s pain, it’s absolutely necessary that African-Americans are the ones telling these stories and informing those who are in the business of creating them. Virtual reality can be used as a learning tool, but can’t be used as a cop-out or replacement for tough history lessons. We can’t afford to, once again, have African-American history remixed and modified to cater to the comforts of white people.

“There’s always the potential for history to be rewritten in ways that co-opt or modify the truth or that modify it to the point that whatever happen is no longer apart of the story, so it’s experienced and understood very differently,” says Dr. Bryan Carter, creator of Virtual Harlem and an associate professor of African-American Studies at the University of Arizona, in a phone interview with Salon. “People assume that whatever it is can be experienced through whatever the created virtual reality is truth, when, in all actuality, it may not be.”

Carter is making sure that more African-Americans are exposed to this technology as a means of storytelling. He teaches a course called Digital Africana where he exposes his students to the creation of augmented and virtual reality. During the course of the semester, he noted that he takes his students to Paris, where they work on creating an immersive experience based off of their visit.

“Now, to get more African-Americans or people of African descent involved in this — it’s number one, a matter of exposure, knowing that this is, in fact, even possible. And how to go about even creating these sorts of experiences. And then number two, it’s a matter of encouraging individuals to figure out interesting and new ways to tell stories or to relay information or to pass on various experiences through that particular technology,” says Carter.

While virtual reality may be used to bring to light the ugly realities of Black American history and life, we can’t fully grapple with it until we do the work of pulling back the pages of history that aren’t surrounded by Eurocentric parameters.  As we consider the best practices and use for virtual reality as a technology for non-fiction storytelling, it’s important that it’s coupled it with some textbook teaching — and uncomfortable conversation, too.

“I think that the ‘columbusing’ of stories of black trauma and pain is perhaps more dangerous than columbusing in any other art form,” says Lauren Frazier, a software developer for Google, in an email exchange. “While movies and books can portray our struggle through a distorted lens, VR can cause people to experience black trauma and pain through a distorted lens. This means that there would potentially be large numbers of people who now ‘know what it feels like’ to be black, yet their experiences were not authentic.”

“I believe that however sincere the creators of the VR experience are, if they have not experienced the trauma and pain themselves, they won’t be able to capture it 100 percent accurately, turning the black experience into something more akin to a theme park ride,” she adds.

In an industry workforce made up of only 2 percent African-Americans, ensuring that African-American history is told with a level of accuracy, coupled with sensitivity, is going to demand proper research.

“I see three key ways that I can help ensure that our stories are being told properly. The first is to expose VR and AR to those who are already telling the stories of African-Americans in a meaningful and authentic way,” says Primus. “I can also help by ensuring that we at VRC are developing and producing our own VR and AR experiences that feature authentic African-American perspectives. Finally, I can ensure that any experience that comes through our studio depicts the myriad of African-American experiences and perspectives accurately.”

There are multiple sides and perspectives to every story that have every right to be told. However, the shared experience of the oppressed needs to be at the center as they are revealed. We can’t be so overstimulated — to the point of being sucked into an experience, buying it as reality — without doing our research, having cross-cultural conversations and peeling back the pages of history by doing the work of learning just as much as teaching.

“While I believe that some people are truly hateful towards black people, many people are simply apathetic or unaware of the pain and trauma inflicted on black people daily. I think those people would definitely benefit from experiencing the trauma firsthand and would likely move forward with a different perspective after a VR experience,” Frazier said.

If this is the future of storytelling, then it’s imperative that African-Americans are weighing in on the conversation. The emotional cost is far too high for the African-American community; white America is at risk of sinking into empathy without action.

It’s important to question whether technology can really help heighten that consciousness through virtual reality, or whether it will turn white people from passive spectators into participatory video game players. By adopting a reality that is not their own, simulating technology may be used as a learning tool, but it’s vital that stories of Black trauma and pain don’t become narratives that are co-opted and distorted. This isn’t fiction, it’s real life.

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From corporate lawyer to corporate critic: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy dissects Citizens United

Birthplace of the Citizens United decision (Credit: Orhan Cam via Shutterstock)

This piece originally appeared on BillMoyers.com.

Not many people with a healthy regard for their bank balance would have made the decision Ciara Torres-Spelliscy did: to leave the white-shoe law firm of Arnold & Porter for a new career in election law. She remembers feeling gleeful, though: “I thought: I have finally escaped the boredom of corporate law,” she told BillMoyers.com in a recent interview.

But life has a way of throwing funny curves, and 11 years later, Torres-Spelliscy’s old field of expertise has turned out to be integrally important to her new one. Her just-released book, “Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State,” analyzes a wide range of cases to show how corporations have leveraged rights originally reserved for citizens to expand their influence and avoid regulation. It’s a phenomenon that dates as far back as the Gilded Age but that, Torres-Spelliscy argues, has been vastly accelerated by the current Supreme Court and especially by its 2010 decision in Citizens United.

Since the justices “were literally giving corporate entities First Amendment rights, which I think a lot of people think of as protecting the free speech of individuals, as in human beings,” Torres-Spelliscy said. “So I sort of had to dust off my corporate knowledge and apply it in election law.”

In her book, Torres-Spelliscy makes the case that the decision to extend First Amendment protections to corporate “persons” — who, unlike real ones, can’t be jailed and never die — is the latest chapter in a long history that has seen clever lawyers turn laws that were meant to defend individual rights to the advantage of moneyed interests.

“One of the key forks in the road was after the Civil War when the 14th Amendment was adopted,” Torres-Spelliscy said in the interview. “It includes the Equal Protection Clause, and one of the early claimants of equal protection rights was not the emancipated slaves that this clause was meant to protect, but rather, it was corporate lawyers, who came in on behalf of their clients saying they too should have equal protection rights.”

Torres-Spelliscy’s own personal odyssey from corporate lawyer to corporate critic is intertwined with the civil rights movement. Like President Barack Obama, she is the child of a white mother and a black father. She grew up in Richmond, Va., shortly after the landmark 1967 Loving v. Virginia case in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional. While the “daily kindnesses I saw between my parents influences my optimism,” Torres-Spelliscy doesn’t hide her dismay over the current state of race relations or sugar-coat her analysis of the reason for it.

“When Barack Obama was first running in 2007 and 2008, my fear was that the country was not ready for him,” Torres-Spelliscy said of the president whom she unabashedly admires. “And I think that fear has been borne out.” She cited “speakers at the Republican National Convention still clinging to this weird accusation that he’s secretly Muslim,” noting, like the lawyer she is, that the oft-repeated canard, even if true, wouldn’t matter: the Constitution explicitly bars a religious test for the political office.

“What seems to underly it is this inability in certain parts of the United States to accept that a black man can be president, that there must be something illegitimate about this,” Torres-Spelliscy said. “And I fear that what should have been this moment of change has actually only exposed a really dark underbelly of American political thought.”

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Torres-Spelliscy majored in Afro-American studies and took a class from the provocative multimedia philosopher Cornel West that she credits with setting her on the path to where she eventually landed. The class, called “Democracy,” made her think for the first time about the role money played in politics, Torres-Spelliscy said.

“I had always thought of politicians playing a role in politics or voters playing a role in politics,” she said. “So it was a bit of a revelation to think, wait a minute: It’s possible that what the politicians say or what the voters think is not the thing that’s driving outcomes. It really could be heavily influenced by who has money to give in campaigns.”

Going to work as a corporate lawyer straight out of Columbia Law School hasn’t made Torres-Spelliscy any less suspicious of her erstwhile clients’ power. “I worry about what the largest corporations on the planet are up to,” she said. “Some of them have more resources running through those corporations than actual countries have running through their treasuries,” she said.

Now, she added, transnational financial behemoths are enjoying additional influence, thanks to “the magnifying power that corporations seem to be getting from our courts.” She criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’ court for “using the First Amendment in a very blunderbuss manner to deregulate all sorts of things that I think were very noncontroversial just a few years ago.” As an example, she cited court rulings that prohibited the Food and Drug Administration from requiring tobacco companies to put more graphic health warning labels on their products.

According to Torres-Spelliscy’s book, those kinds of decisions grew out of a legal tradition that began with the momentous post-Civil War decision that the equal protection clause was not limited to natural persons — a decision that was arguably pre-rigged by the clever machinations of the infamous Gilded Age figure, Sen. Roscoe Conkling.

“Citizens United didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Torres-Spelliscy, whose book parses more than a century of legal decision-making that, more often than not, went in favor of corporate pleaders claiming that their legal “personhood” gave them the same rights as U.S. citizens. Torres-Spelliscy does not believe the results have been healthy for society. “The more rights the courts give corporate entities, the harder it is for legislatures, whether they are state legislatures or the Congress, to regulate corporations,” she said.

To Torres-Spelliscy, there are “two big problems” with corporate spending on elections. “Under current American law, there is no requirement for the corporation to tell its investors that it’s spending in politics,” she said. “And the other problem is there’s no opportunity for shareholders in American companies to vote on whether it’s appropriate to be in politics at all. So we have this transparency problem and this consent problem.”

Further complicating the situation is that allowing corporations to spend in elections raises immediate problems with the enforcement of existing U.S. law that bar foreigners from donating to U.S. candidates. Torres-Spelliscy’s favorite example for illustrating the dilemma is Citgo, the gasoline company owned by the government of Venezuela.

“What is totally ambiguous after Citizens United is whether Citgo is allowed to spend in American elections or not,” she said. “On the one hand, they’re a corporation, and the decision says that the identity of the speaker doesn’t matter, and they can spend in our elections. But the issue is, if you had a Venezuelan individual, it would be clear that they couldn’t spend under our election laws. But suddenly if that foreign individual sets up a Delaware corporation, that Delaware corporation does have the Citizens United rights to spend in our elections.”

Torres-Spelliscy sees a number of potential solutions:

Action by regulatory agencies that govern elections law and corporations: The IRS, the Federal Elections Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. “All if them, if they worked on this issue, could eliminate some aspect of the dark-money problem,” said Torres-Spelliscy, who also suggests that they work on a foreign-ownership threshold past which a corporation would be barred from spending in U.S. elections.
Action by shareholders: More and more, she said, shareholders are using their power to raise proxy questions to demand corporate transparency about political spending. “Only a few of them have won. But even in the cases where the vote is 25 percent, I think that is a significant message to management that they need to be more transparent,” she said.
Action by consumers: Torres-Spelliscy said more and more tech-savvy buyers are using downloadable apps that allow them to check on the political giving of a corporation before they buy a product. The apps “inform end-users who are shopping in their local mall or their local grocery story about the politics behind the brands.” That does require time that a parent with toddlers in tow might not have, she conceded. It also would miss the dark money that isn’t being reported.
Action by voters: Torres-Spelliscy is a big fan of publicly funded election laws, like the one that matches the contributions of small donors 6-to-1 in New York City municipal elections. “It broadens who elected officials feel accountable to,” she said. “Instead of just being beholden to a very small group of big donors, you’re beholden to a vast group of tiny donors.”

Despite representing the Davids in a battle against a Goliath of a status quo, Torres-Spelliscy is not giving up. “There are many reasons to be pessimistic about the world, but I feel like we can’t give up on trying to improve the democratic process, trying to put voters at the center of our democracy,” she said. “This is, I think, one of the fights of a lifetime. At least, for me, I’m still willing to put my dukes up.”

(Contributing: John Light)

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This is how your favorite wine gets made: Forget Uber — tech pioneers are chasing the perfect Cab

The super computer display on the dome of Palmaz fermentation cave

In 2000, when start-up guru Chuck McMinn arrived in Napa Valley to embark on a second career as a vigneron, the man who once worked at Intel and later as CEO of early DSL provider Covad Communications encountered a community of humble farmers so focused on the minutiae of growing, harvesting and fermenting grape juice that the world had passed them by.

“We purchased two vineyards. They would send out paper letters to all their customers with blank order forms and ask people to fill them out by hand and fax them back with a credit card number on it. That was state of the art,” McMinn says. “The web had been live for ten years and browser technology was five years old.” Napa Valley wasn’t low-tech back then, it was no-tech.  

Rob McMillian, the founder of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division, recalls those days well. “Back then probably 30 percent of my clients still used paper ledgers for their accounting,” he says. “They didn’t even own a PC.”

Ever the trendsetter, McMinn’s first order of business was funding Cultivate Systems, a web-based ordering system that, to this day, moves a couple million dollars for product wineries in the U.S. every year. It took McMinn sometime to fully understand just why the vineyard owners and farmers around Napa were so resistant to the digital world.

“Fundamentally, to make great wine you must be a great farmer,” McMinn told Salon. “Fifty percent of what great wine is, is where vines are planted, the terroir — right place, right varietal, right root stock. Twenty-five percent is weather, in any particular year. Twenty-five percent is the skill of the winemaker, turning grape juice into wine. That and technology aren’t tightly coupled. People here aren’t anti-technology. They’re a ‘show me’ group. Getting distracted could compromise the quality of the product. They don’t want that.”

Sixteen years later, Napa continues to make, arguably, the most sought-after Cabernet Sauvignons in the world (not to mention renowned Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc) and it is the most technologically forward-thinking winemaking region in the world. Those old hippie vintners have have fully embraced digital technology and are using it to make their previously big businesses into titanic money-making operations. Others have noticed that there’s gold in Napa’s hills — some of, if not the best, Cabernet Sauvignon in the world. Massive beverage companies (long purveyors of the generic jug) have recently discovered that Millennials value premium drinks, so they are in speculation mode, buying small vineyards and labels for hundreds of millions of dollars. Moguls from winemaking strongholds like Burgundy have invaded, paying upwards of $250K per acre for a foothold in Napa Valley. And the area has also been become home to a new wave of tech billionaires eager to try their hand at winemaking. All of which is a validation for McMinn and a handful of other trendsetters who’ve lead Napa into modernity, but it raises the stakes as well.

Napa has become a leader in wine-world innovation — in part because of its proximity to UC Davis, which boasts a leading viticulture and enology school and in part because of its proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. David Duncan, the CEO of Silver Oak Cellars, one of Napa’s leaders in high tech and sustainable winemaking, adds that Napa benefits from some cultural similarities to the Bay Area’s tech community. Long before open-source code was a thing, the open-sharing information was standard in Napa winemaking community — and now, as a result, nearly every winery is engaged in efficient, high-tech winemaking.

Back in 2000,  McMinn didn’t restrict his advancements to the logistics side. Over the next five or so years, as he got his new winery, Vineyard 29, off the ground, McMinn linked up with Fruition Sciences, an Oakland-based precision viticulture company run by a cabal of French PhDs. Fruition Sciences had created thermal sensor technology to measure the amount of water taken up by individual grapevines by measuring sap flow through a vine in real time. Those measurements provide winemakers with an exact picture of the vine environment over each day, week and month of the growing season — not to mention from year to year and vintage to vintage. McMinn also started using an optical sorter technology, designed by a French firm to remove imperfect grapes, stray stems and other ennui from the harvest. Sorting had traditionally been a job reserved for human hands. According to McMinn, this new mechanized tool is faster, more effective and doesn’t get tired.  Later, McMinn had his HVAC technician install power-generating micro-turbines throughout his winery. McMinn captures and reuses all of the runoff energy and uses it for warming the fermentation tanks in winter and running the air conditioning during summer and cooling the caves. Vineyard 29 is, remarkably, 82 percent energy efficient.

Meanwhile, just up the road from Vineyard 29, at Palmaz Winery, Dr. Julio Palmaz, the MD who created the balloon-expandable coronary stent, is practicing a version of viticulture that only vaguely resembles the  traditional winemaking you see in movies. Palmaz and his family spent eight years and a reported $20 million in building the most technologically advanced winery on the planet, in order to reinvent the entire process.  The Palmaz clan uses a small airplane equipped with a high resolution multi-spectral camera to identify the chlorophyll in leaves of every vine (imagine an insanely detailed Google Earth-style  heat signature map drawn down to inch). Those readings tell the viticulturist exactly how much water each individual stalk of each plant needs, down to the microlitre. After the harvest, this digitized scientific experience extends into the seemingly alchemistic craft of winemaking. The fermentation tanks at Palmaz utilize probes that vibrate 10 times per second, yielding millions of data points about the density of the liquid, its sugar and alcohol levels and ultimately revealing the rate of fermentation. Then their proprietary software processes the information and projects a variety of computer-generated data, such as temperature variations, on the dome of the fermentation cave, so the staff can make adjustments. It’s not automating the art of winemaking, Palmaz explains, simply arming the artists with power. “We’ve taken a more scientific than artistic approach to winemaking, but we’re not trying to change way the product is made,” he says. “We’re just trying to understand the millions of variables and make better choices so we can avoid mistakes and anticipate when good things are going to happen — that’s what technology can really help you do when applied properly.”

Nevertheless, this sort of data-driven wine production has its share of critics. A palpable tension exists between tradition and modernity, art and science.  There are winemakers in the Valley who staunchly refuse to depart from the old ways. Others fear that the sudden exactitude and reliance on data gathering in modern enology will spell the end of something precious and special: the craft and serendipity that make each wine in Napa Valley distinct. 

While discussing the benefits of optical sorting technology, which costs more than $100,000, Danielle Cyrot, the winemaker at Cade, wondered aloud if little imperfections in the fruit — a piece of bruised fruit here, a missed stem there — are what give wine some of “its personality and magic.”

Silver Oak’s Duncan is of a similar mind to Cyrot. Silver Oak has been operating since the early ‘70s, and  Duncan, who took over for his father — a Denver oil and gas man — is unafraid of test any sort of new technology, but he doesn’t commit easily. Duncan and his winemaker, David Baron, are using lasers to measure pruning effectiveness and running detailed experiments to see what new tools work and which ones don’t. During their last harvest, they studied the volume and quality of the output of three different brands of optical sorters against the old human method; ultimately, Silver Oak decided they wouldn’t be purchasing another new sorter any time soon.

They work closely with Fruition Science — the same company Chuck McMinn has been working with for decades — trying every sort of new precision viticulture method on offer, ultimately adopting some and rejecting others. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Duncan says. “We’re trying to progress.”

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U.S.-backed Saudi coalition bombs Yemen school, killing 10 children, wounding 28

A Yemeni girl cries at a school sheltering people displaced by Saudi-led air strikes on Yemen's Saada province, in the capital Sanaa on August 27, 2015 (Credit: Reuters)

At least 10 children were killed and another 28 were injured in the bombing of a school in Yemen on Saturday.

Locals and officials say the attack was carried out by the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition, which has been conducting a brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, since March 2015.

International medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders says a medical center it runs received people who were killed and wounded in the attack.

Doctors Without Borders, which is known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, confirmed the casualty figures, and noted that the victims were all between 8 and 15 years old.

.@MSF update: Final number of injured from Haydan school is 28 & 10 deaths. All between 8-15 years old #Saada #Yemen pic.twitter.com/Qj4pu8tiPi

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 13, 2016

Before the massacre, the children had been studying in their classrooms in the town Haydan, in the northwestern Sa’ada governorate, UNICEF said in a statement.

The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition denied attacking a school, The Washington Post reported. It instead claimed that it had bombed a camp where Yemen’s Houthi rebels were training child soldiers. The Post noted, however, that these “claims could not be independently verified.”

In October, the coalition also bombed an MSF hospital in Haydan, in an attack condemned by the U.N.

MSF reported that U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition airstrikes had “flattened” Haydan. Before the October hospital bombing, air strikes in June and July hit several houses, a school and a market.

The coalition has destroyed at least three medical centers run by the medical humanitarian group.

U.S.-backed Saudi forces have bombed more hospitals, schools, civilian neighborhoods, weddings, a refugee camp and even an Oxfam humanitarian aid warehouse.

This most recent attack comes just days after coalition warplanes bombed a market outside Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, killing at least 18 civilians.

Yemeni pharmacist Sadam al-Othari, who lost his son in the attack, told The New York Times, “They targeted only civilians.” He added, “There wasn’t a single gunman or military vehicle around.”

Peace talks between Yemeni rebels and the U.S.-backed, Saudi-allied government broke down on Saturday, Aug. 6. On Sunday, hours after the negotiations ended, the coalition launched 30 air strikes throughout Yemen.

More than 6,500 Yemenis have been killed in the war. Human rights organizations have accused both the coalition and Yemeni rebels of war crimes. According to the U.N., however, the Saudi-led coalition is responsible for two-thirds of civilian casualties.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have called for the Saudi absolute monarchy to be suspended from the U.N. Human Rights Council because of its “gross and systematic violations of human rights abroad and at home.”

Meanwhile, the war in Yemen has pushed the poorest country in the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe, creating one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world.

More than half of Yemen’s entire population, 14 million people, are hungry. For more than a year, humanitarian groups have warned that 80 percent of the population desperately needs food and medical assistance.

The weapons the coalition has used in civilian areas,  including widely banned cluster munitions, have been provided by the U.S. and U.K. The U.S. has done more than $100 billion in arms deals with the extremist authoritarian Saudi regime in the past several years.

Moreover, American and British military officials are physically in the command room with the Saudi military, and have access to a list of targets.

“With the intensification in violence across the country in the past week, the number of children killed and injured by airstrikes, street fighting and landmines has grown sharply,” UNICEF said in the statement it released on Saturday.

The U.N. children’s agency called on “all parties to the conflict in Yemen to respect and abide by their obligations under international law,” stressing, “This includes the obligation to only target combatants and limit harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure.”

.@MSF calls on all warring parties to take greater measures to protect civilians in #Yemen pic.twitter.com/p3rYXtuXR0

— أطباء بلا حدود-اليمن (@msf_yemen) August 13, 2016

MSF echoed UNICEF’s call for “all warring parties to take greater measures to protect civilians.”

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The conversation on Zika needs more than alarm bells: 5 things we must keep in mind

(Credit: AP/Andre Penner)

As the warm months continue, and as we continue to be hurled headlong into a spectacular election season, there seem to be more and more things to fear. Not the least of these is the Zika virus. Zika is a virus spread by mosquitoes, and until a couple years ago, it was mainly confined to Africa and Asia.  Then it showed up in Brazil and affected more than a million people there, spreading into other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Recently it made its way to the United States, first only affecting those who had traveled outside the country. But as of just a few weeks ago, Florida saw a few locally transmitted cases (meaning that the people who got the virus didn’t get it from outside the country but from mosquitos in the U.S.). The virus can also be transmitted through sexual contact, and to a developing fetus from a pregnant woman.

The alarm bells are ringing in the media, and misinformation abounds. Despite knowing very little about the short- and long-term impacts of contracting the Zika virus, news outlets are calling Miami “ground zero” for the virus in the United States. Some are comparing the phenomenon to a political apocalypse (on both sides of the aisle). To be sure, contracting the virus can be harmful, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a sane conversation about its effects.

Like most global health issues, understanding Zika requires research, nuance and thinking about the relationship between poverty and illness. Here are a few helpful reminders for navigating the maze of fear and terror about Zika that will surely increase in the coming months.

1. There’s a lot about Zika that we don’t know. About 80 percent of Zika infections in adults are asymptomatic. For those in the U.S. who are experiencing symptoms and think they may be infected with Zika, the process to get diagnosed and then to find care and treatment can be a maze of bureaucratic twists and turns. Vox journalist Gracie MacKenzie wrote about her search for information and resources when she acquired Zika in the Dominican Republic and returned to D.C., where she lives. In Texas, which has one of the highest rates of Zika infections in the country (just behind New York and Florida), the state’s response works on “raising awareness,” communications strategies and getting rid of mosquitoes. Nowhere in the plan is there a mention of reproductive health care. But even if it included it, almost all of the state’s reproductive health clinics were shut down by House Bill 2 — which was recently overturned, but hasn’t resulted in the immediate re-opening of the clinics that have been shuttered for over a year.

2.  Zika will disproportionately impact poor people. Both Texas and Florida legislators refused the federal funding offered to expand Medicaid in their states. This is true of several other states now facing increasing cases of Zika, leaving many of their most vulnerable communities, including pregnant women, without access to the care they might need in the instance of an epidemic. For many, the proximity to Zika is increased by unsafe living conditions and lack of access to health care — including sex-ed and reproductive health care, as in Texas. Poverty, in this as in so much, increases risk and reduces access to quality care.

3. Let’s listen to the disability justice advocates when they tell us how to talk about Zika and how to talk about people with disabilities. News report after news report discusses the potential birth “defects” caused by Zika, primarily microcephaly. People living with disabilities are just that; they are not “defective” nor are they “abnormal.” Much of this stigmatizing language is used to discuss microcephaly, a condition in infants that has been linked to Zika. Importantly, though, the likelihood that a Zika infection will result in microcephaly is still unknown. The constant images of babies on examination tables, or being handled by a masked doctor with the parent nowhere to be seen, are ubiquitous, and contribute to the fear and stigma surrounding microcephaly. This stigma can have devastating effects. In some instances, the babies born with this condition have been abandoned, as have some of the mothers who delivered them. Every pregnant woman deserves compassionate health care, as does every child and every family navigating care for a child or adult family member living with a disability.

Furthermore, there is little discussion of the care that state or federal government agencies will offer to the families of children born with microcephaly and how they might work to raise awareness to challenge the fear, stigma and isolation that such families may face.  For instance, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has asserted that pregnant women who get the Zika virus should not be granted access to abortion and has also resisted increasing support and assistance from the state and federal governments to families raising children who are living with disabilities.

The debate about whether microcephaly or other conditions are justification for abortion is an important one. It’s one that people who care about reproductive rights and justice for people living with disabilities must have, with a greater emphasis on the voices of those living at that very intersection. It’s far too important a conversation to have in an ill-informed, anxiety-provoking and un-nuanced way.

4. The best way to keep people well and safe is to keep them informed. Let’s listen to the health experts on this issue. In 2011, the last year for which national-level data are available, 45 percent of all pregnancies in the United States were unintended. Given the anemic response by most state agencies to the spread of Zika, the burden is falling on pregnant women to prevent themselves from becoming infected. Not only is that an immense burden in the best of circumstances, but in places where accurate, medically sound information about how to prevent sexually transmitted infections is scarce, it’s damn near impossible. A recent analysis done by the researchers at the Guttmacher Institute argues that our ability to respond to health care concerns, like the spread of Zika, is heavily impacted by the “often hostile policy, programmatic and legal environment women face on issues surrounding pregnancy.” The researchers find, unsurprisingly, that if we’re going to adequately respond to Zika, we’ve got to focus on access to safe, legal reproductive health care.

5. Let’s remember the (ongoing) problem of public health institutions implementing population control policies, both in the U.S. and abroad. Conversations about the Zika problem that reference the trouble with getting women of the “third world,” Latin America or the Caribbean to take preventative measures often completely ignore the complicated history that those places have with Western public health practices. In Puerto Rico, where the Zika virus is rapidly spreading, President Obama issued a broadcast warning for Puerto Ricans to take it seriously. Puerto Rican women, however, know the history that the U.S. has of lies and deceit when it comes to coercive contraception and sterilization. When the United States assumed governance of Puerto Rico in 1898, population control policies came to the island hard and fast. In 1937, the U.S. passed Law 116, a program designed by the Eugenics Board, which promoted the use of sterilization in Puerto Rican women instead of offering them other contraceptives. Many of the women sterilized under that program were not told that the procedure was irreversible. It’s not hard to imagine why Puerto Rican women are currently suspicious of U.S. intervention in their reproductive lives, even if it is in the name of preventing Zika transmission.

 

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Trump’s populist hogwash: His debunked trickle-down proposals would only serve folks in his tax bracket

Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Eric Thayer)

In an economic speech last Monday at the Detroit Economic Club, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump promised to “make America great again” for those “who have the very least,” which he would accomplish by implementing what he calls “America First policy” (i.e. a blend of xenophobic nationalism and supply-side economics). According to the billionaire New Yorker, the policies he laid out (which are based largely on what George H.W. Bush once called “voodoo economics”) would bring back jobs and prosperity to American cities like Detroit, a former industrial powerhouse that has steadily declined over the past half-century because of deindustrialization and globalization — two realities of modern capitalism that the candidate has railed against over the past year by scapegoating immigrants and foreigners.

Trump, who has run an incoherent and often contradictory presidential campaign since announcing his candidacy last year, went on to declare that his political opposition (i.e. the Democrats) had run “out of ideas” long ago, and that Hillary Clinton is the “candidate of the past.” And, for good measure, the billionaire also told several blatant lies — including the desperately manufactured claim that Clinton said she would raise taxes on the middle class (the Trump campaign released a video a few days earlier in which Clinton didn’t fully enunciate “aren’t” in the sentence “We aren’t going to raise taxes on the middle class”; though it was clear what she meant, as the candidate frequently made this point during her primary campaign to take cheap shots at Sen. Bernie Sanders).

The rate at which Trump spewed falsehoods about his opponent and the American economy (e.g. the unemployment rate, economic growth) indicates a real insecurity and lack of conviction in his own ideas. And it’s hard to blame him — his proposals aren’t particularly new, nor do they have a good track record when it comes to bringing prosperity to working people. As noted above, most of the proposals that he laid out are the same “voodoo economic” policies that were discredited under Reagan and Bush Jr., which have also done and their working class people over the past few years, from Sam Brownback’s Kansas to Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana.

While Trump’s new tax plan is less extreme and utterly ridiculous than the one he put forth during the primaries (yes, the one that would have, according to several analyses, added over $10 trillion to the debt over the next decade), it is still very good for the richest Americans and very bad for the government’s revenue (read: the deficit) — cutting the income tax rates to 33, 25 and 12 percent rather than the previously proposed 25, 10, and 0 percent.

Trump would also slash the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent and eliminate the estate tax (or, as he and his conservative friends like to call it, the “death tax”). Once again demonstrating his aversion to the truth, Trump declared that American workers “should not be taxed again at death,” even though, as Patrick Caldwell points out in Mother Jones, “The inheritance tax, as currently constituted, touches only a small segment of the population.”

“The federal government doesn’t take any taxes out of estates unless the inheritance exceeds $5.4 million for individuals or $10.9 million for couples,” continued Caldwell. “That leaves just the wealthiest 0.2 percent of families paying any estate taxes and makes its repeal less than a great boost to the working class.”

This is yet another example of Trump’s phony populist rhetoric, claiming to help working families while in reality helping wealthy families like the Kochs, the Waltons and the Trumps.

As I previously mentioned, one has only to look at various red states to see how trickle-down tax policy works for the economy. In states like Kansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, big tax cuts enacted by Republican governors have caused massive budget deficits (the magical trickle-down growth has yet to materialize), which have led to downward economic spirals that have, unsurprisingly, harmed society’s most vulnerable citizens. In Kansas, where Gov. Brownback slashed taxes in 2012 (particularly for the rich, of course), the economy’s growth has been anemic and the state’s finances have collapsed; in California, meanwhile, where tax hikes on the rich were approved in 2012, the economy has boomed and a budget deficit has turned into a surplus. (As others have pointed out, one of Trump’s economic advisors, Stephen Moore — who has previously said he isn’t a big fan of democracy — is also an advisor to Brownback, and he is pretty much oblivious to Kansas’ economic disaster).

Not surprisingly, red states are the most dependent on federal funds in 2016, according to a Wallet Hub study, while blue states are the least dependent. (So much for rugged individualism).

Trump’s voodoo economic plan goes beyond tax cuts; the billionaire also called for a moratorium on all new regulations, including financial and environmental ones, which he blamed for slow economic growth. (In addition, he attributed Detroit’s economic decline to over-regulation, which is a ridiculous assertion). As Bryce Covert points out in ThinkProgress, this is mostly nonsense: The economy grew steadily after Dodd-Frank, which Trump has frequently blamed for slow growth in the past and has vowed to dismantle, was passed in 2010. In fact, it was the sweeping financial deregulations of the 1980s and 1990s, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, that led to the fraudulent housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis (and bailouts) of 2007-08.

Donald Trump’s economic team is made up of 13 white men, and most of them are as wealthy as himself — including several billionaire bankers and investment managers, an oil magnate and a New York real estate tycoon (how appropriate). Trump has proven over the past year, of course, that being a street-smart billionaire does not necessarily denote economic literacy — and, tellingly, there is only one trained economist on his team. Thus, it should come as a surprise to no one that Trump’s economic plan is based on discredited economic dogma that places the economic interests of billionaires and corporations above those of the working and middle class. (If Trump’s team was made up entirely of labor union representatives, one can imagine how different his policies would be).

A President Trump wouldn’t bring prosperity to those “who have the very least,” but to those who have the most; and, like his casinos in Atlantic City, he would leave the country’s economy in ruin with his personal wealth improved.

 

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