US Politics

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      The US government could shut down: here’s what you need to know

      by

      The US stands hours away from a partial government shutdown as Democrats decide whether to play ball with Republicans on the first major legislative hurdle in Trump’s second administration.The House approved a stopgap funding measure called a continuing resolution last week, and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, has urged Democrats in the Senate to pass the measure in the upper chamber.Lawmakers face a midnight Friday deadline, or the government will be partly shut downIt is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.Schumer faces intense backlash from House Democrats and others in his party, many of whom see any compliance with the Trump agenda as giving up the little leverage Democrats have.What happens when a US government shutdown takes place?It’s not immediately clear which government services would be affected in this shutdown, as the Trump administration hasn’t warned the public about what could happen.But in past shutdowns, thousands of federal government employees were put on furlough, meaning that they were told not to report for work and go unpaid for the period of the shutdown, although their salaries were paid retroactively when it ended.Other government workers who perform what are judged essential services, such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officials, continued to work but did not get paid until Congress acted to end the shutdown.Depending on how long it lasts, national parks could either shut entirely or open without certain vital services such as public toilets or attendants. Passport processing could halt, as could research at national health institutes.What causes a shutdown?Simply put, the terms of a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, first passed in 1884, prohibits federal agencies from spending or obligating funds without an act of appropriation – or some alternative form of approval – from Congress.If Congress fails to enact the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund the US government’s activities and associated bureaucracy, all non-essential work must cease until it does. If Congress enacts some of the bills but not others, the agencies affected by the bills not enacted are forced to cease normal functioning; this is known as a partial government shutdown.How unusual are US government shutdowns?For the first 200 years of the US’s existence, they did not happen at all. In recent decades, they have become an increasingly regular part of the political landscape, as Washington politics has become more polarised and brinkmanship a commonplace political tool. There have been 20 federal funding gaps since 1976, when the US first shifted the start of its fiscal year to 1 October.Three shutdowns in particular have entered US political lore:

      A 21-day partial closure in 1995 over a dispute about spending cuts between President Bill Clinton and the Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, that is widely seen as setting the tone for later partisan congressional struggles.

      In 2013, when the government was partially closed for 16 days after another Republican-led Congress tried to use budget negotiations to defund Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.

      A 34-day shutdown, the longest on record, lasting from December 2018 until January 2019, when Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not include $5.7bn in funding for a wall along the US border with Mexico. The closure damaged Trump’s poll ratings.
      What is triggering the latest imminent shutdown?Republicans hold 53 seats in the Senate but need 60 votes to get the bill ready for passage, meaning they need Democratic support. Democrats in the House near uniformly oppose the measure, with just one member defecting. These budget votes are one way Democrats can exert power with the runaway Trump administration, led by the billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) slashing the federal workforce.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSchumer plans to vote to move the measure forward, saying it’s worse for Americans if he doesn’t approve the “deeply partisan” Republican stopgap legislation. “If government were to shut down, Doge has a plan in place to exploit the crisis for maximum destruction. A shutdown will allow Doge to shift into overdrive. It would give Donald Trump and Doge the keys to the city, state and country. Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be free to destroy vital government services at a much faster rate than they can right now and over a much broader field of destruction that they would render.”Other Democrats strongly disagree. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, said the bill would be a “devastating assault on the wellbeing of working-class families”. Senators should follow their appropriations leaders, Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray, who have proposed a four-week funding extension to keep the government operating while both parties work on a bipartisan agreement, she said.“America has experienced a Trump shutdown before – but this damaging legislation only makes matters worse,” Pelosi said.The younger wing of the party is especially incensed by Schumer’s defection. “There are members of Congress who have won Trump-held districts in some of the most difficult territory in the United States who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. “Just to see Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk, I think, is a huge slap in the face.”How could a shutdown affect the wider economy?There is no current estimate of what the costs to the economy could be if the government shuts down this time.However, according to the congressional budget office, the 2018-19 shutdown imposed a short-term cost of $11bn on the US economy, an estimated $3bn of which was never recovered after the stoppage ended.How has Donald Trump reacted?Trump would probably face blowback if the government shuts down, just as he did during the 2018-19 shutdown.He has so far praised Schumer for “doing the right thing”.“Took ‘guts’ and courage!” the president wrote on Truth Social. “The big Tax Cuts, L.A. fire fix, Debt Ceiling Bill, and so much more, is coming. We should all work together on that very dangerous situation. A non pass would be a Country destroyer, approval will lead us to new heights. Again, really good and smart move by Senator Schumer. This could lead to something big for the USA, a whole new direction and beginning!” More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      US rebuts Hamas’s ‘entirely impractical’ ceasefire demands

      by

      The Trump administration has accused Hamas of making “entirely impractical” demands and stalling on a deal to release a US-Israeli hostage in exchange for an extension of the Gaza ceasefire.“Hamas is making a very bad bet that time is on its side. It is not,” the office of Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and the US national security council said in a statement. “Hamas is well aware of the deadline, and should know that we will respond accordingly if that deadline passes,” it said, adding that Trump had already vowed Hamas would “pay a severe price” for not freeing hostages.A week ago Trump repeated a threat to destroy Hamas in a “last warning” to release the hostages, but it is unclear exactly to which of several potential deadlines the new statement referred.The US appears to have brushed aside an offer made earlier on Friday by the militant Islamist organisation to free Edan Alexander, an Israeli-American hostage who was abducted while serving as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces during Hamas’s surprise raid into Israel in October 2023, and the remains of four other Israeli-Americans who have died in captivity in Gaza.“Unfortunately, Hamas has chosen to respond by publicly claiming flexibility while privately making demands that are entirely impractical without a permanent ceasefire,” the statement added.The reaction from the US dashed any hopes of sudden progress in continuing indirect negotiations in Qatar over the fragile ceasefire in Gaza but will comes as a relief to the Israeli government.The initial phase of the ceasefire in the devastated territory came into effect in January but lapsed almost two weeks ago. In recent statements, Hamas has said it wants Israel to implement the second phase of the ceasefire, which was supposed to definitively end the conflict.Israel has so far refused to move to the second phase, and is calling for an extension of several weeks to the first phase instead, leaving open the possibility of a new offensive in the months to come.Witkoff has presented a “bridge” proposal in Qatar to extend the first phase of the truce to mid-April if Hamas releases living hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.“Hamas was told in no uncertain terms that this ‘bridge’ would have to be implemented soon – and that dual US-Israeli citizen Edan Alexander would have to be released immediately,” the statement said.After the Hamas statement, Netanyahu’s office said Israel had “accepted the Witkoff outline and showed flexibility”, but said “Hamas is refusing and will not budge from its positions”.“At the same time, it continues to use manipulation and psychological warfare – the reports about Hamas’s willingness to release American hostages are intended to sabotage the negotiations,” the prime minister’s office said.It added that Netanyahu would convene his ministerial team on Saturday night to receive a detailed report from the negotiation team and “decide on the next steps for the release of hostages”.Netanyahu has consistently opposed any permanent end to the war in Gaza, in part due to domestic political considerations. However, the Israeli leader has made it clear that maintaining good relations with the White House is a priority.After more than 16 months of indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas brokered by the US, Qatar and Egypt, Washington recently opened a direct channel of talks with Hamas with the aim of freeing US citizens abducted by the organisation during its raid into Israel.Hamas abducted 251 hostages during its attack and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians.In a social media post earlier this month, Donald Trump said there would be “hell to pay” if all the 58 hostages still in Gaza were not released. Fewer than half are thought to be still alive.In an attempt to pressure Hamas, Israel has cut off all supplies of goods to Gaza and on Sunday stopped any remaining electricity supplies from Israel to the territory.Almost the entire population of Gaza was displaced by Israel’s military offensive, which killed 48,500 people, mostly civilians, and reduced swaths of the territory to rubble.The six-week first phase of the ceasefire led to the exchange of 25 living Israeli hostages and the remains of eight others, in return for the release of about 1,800 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. It also allowed much-needed food, shelter and medical assistance to re-enter Gaza.Official reaction from the Israeli government to the news last week of direct talks between the US and Hamas was limited to a single terse statement by the office of Netanyahu acknowledging the negotiations, but the mass-market newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth said Israel had been “stunned to discover that, behind its back, Trump’s envoy had flirted for weeks in Doha” with a senior Hamas official. More

    • 263 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Why is Donald Trump crashing the US economy? Because he’s high on his own supply of fake news | Jonathan Freedland

      by

      Not content with shattering the post-1945 international order, which delivered prosperity and power to his country for eight long decades, Donald Trump is seemingly set on destroying the US economy. And he’s doing it because he, and the American right, have lost their ability to grasp reality.Start with the economic vandalism, unfolding in real time and mesmerising to watch. For weeks, you could see the US stock market falling and falling until on Thursday the S&P index passed an unwanted milestone: it stood more than 10% down from the peak it had reached less than a month earlier, a fall that meets the Wall Street definition of a “correction”. In other words, even if the market eventually rallies, this is no blip.The talk now is of a recession and you can tell that Trump himself suspects it’s coming. “I hate to predict things like that,” he said this week. “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America … It takes a little time.” Did you catch that? The great booster, who campaigned on a promise to turn things around “on day one”, is now adopting the lotus position, talking of “transition” and urging patience.The source of the trouble is not mysterious. It is Trump himself. His actions since taking office less than two months ago have spooked investors. They crave stability but see a president who governs by whim. Those whims can change hourly – imposing a tariff after breakfast only to drop it before lunch. One minute it’s a 50% levy on Canadian aluminium, the next it’s 200% on European wine, only for one or the other to be binned within hours. It keeps Trump in the news, which he loves, but plays havoc with companies that have to plan for the long term. Confronted by chaos, they prefer to wait to see where things settle. That means orders on hold, workers without work, less money in everyone’s pocket.Add in a wild-eyed guy with a chainsaw taking chunks out of a federal bureaucracy that provides services that, for all their Ayn Rand talk of a minimal state, business leaders rely on – whether it’s schools, roads or air traffic controllers to keep planes in the sky – and you can see why the only surging number on Wall Street right now is the one that measures pessimism.To be clear, it’s not just the manic style of Trump and Elon Musk that’s causing alarm. Even if imposed calmly, tariffs are a prosperity killer. Trump may be their biggest advocate, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand how they work. He speaks as if the people paying them will be hated foreigners, the likes of China or Canada forced to pay billions into US coffers. When, in fact, tariffs are a sales tax levied on US consumers who have to pay extra for imported goods. A tariff on foreign cars, say, is not paid by Germany but by an American who buys a BMW. It drives prices up for Americans. When other countries hit back with tariffs of their own, making US products harder to sell, you’re in a trade war that only makes everything worse.Hence the current dread of stagflation, the grim combination of zero growth and rising inflation. The word was born in the Jimmy Carter era, but the Trumpcession will have bonus features all its own. When I spoke to Heather Boushey, who served as an economic adviser to the Biden administration, for the latest Politics Weekly America podcast, she told me that Musk’s supremacy over so much of the federal government, even as he continues to run his own mega-businesses, is having one particular chilling effect. “Companies are looking at this and saying: ‘I can’t compete with an Elon Musk that’s in charge of the regulatory agencies, that’s going to do things only for himself.’ That’s going to stymie investment, it’s going to stymie innovation, and ultimately be terrible for the US economy.”View image in fullscreenBoushey adds that Trump’s US will be less able to weather a recession, because the Trump-Musk cuts are stripping away so much of the infrastructure of support, cutting a combined total of more than $1tn from the Medicaid and food stamps programmes alone. When the storm hits, families will go hungry.It’s bad for the country and bad for Trump politically: the people most dependent on soon-to-be gutted government help such as Medicare or Medicaid are Trump voters. As the impact of the cuts kicks in – national parks closed during the summer, delayed benefits for veterans, a deadly accident, for example, in an area previously safeguarded – many Americans could sour on the president who promised to make their lives better. Especially when they see him go ahead with his signature policy: a $4.5tn tax cut that will massively benefit the very richest.Why, then, is Trump pursuing a course of action that can only damage the country and dent his own standing? The explanation lies in the way Trump sees the world. Which is through a lens clouded by the very phenomenon he once did so much to identify: fake news.For most of the past decade, the focus has been on the likes of Trump and Musk as peddlers of falsehoods. There has been less attention paid to their role as consumers of lies. And yet it’s long been clear that Musk is spending too much time on X and is getting extremely high on his own supply. Witness his credulous swallowing of all kinds of far-right rubbish about Britain.Trump is scarcely any better, believing provable nonsense about Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s poll ratings being in the single digits, when in fact the Ukrainian leader’s numbers are much better than his, to pick just one instance of Trump putting aside the briefings he could have from the world’s best-resourced intelligence agencies and preferring to gobble up internet slop instead.It’s a function of Trump not shifting his core views in decades – he was banging on about tariffs in the 1980s – and being, as Zelenskyy memorably put it, “trapped” in a “disinformation bubble”. It consists of the team of sycophants that now envelops him – the “adults in the room” of the first term are long gone – and whose message is reinforced when he meets the press: note how many of the supposed reporters whom Trump encounters are, in fact, representatives from pro-Trump outlets so slavish they make Fox News look like Edward R Murrow.The result, says one longtime Trump watcher, is that “he’s more sheltered from outside information than he ever has been before”. Like Saddam Hussein in his bunker as US forces approach the palace, he is being told that tariffs made the US rich in the 19th century and will do so again, that Elon Musk is popular and that the people are grateful to their leader, even when the economy is nosediving. Inside the info-bubble, any contrary voice can be dismissed, even if it requires acrobatics to do it. Trump’s latest target is the Murdoch-owned, conservative Wall Street Journal, which dared point out the dangers of a trade war: Trump countered that the “globalist” WSJ was “owned by the polluted thinking of the European Union”. Inside the bubble, there is no room for truth: it must be kept out by lies.For now, and armed with the loudest megaphone on the planet, the US president can keep reality at bay. But eventually, Americans will be able to see with their own eyes and in their own lives what Trump has done to the US and the wider world. Their daily experience will expose him for what he is: a confidence trickster who has made them poorer and less safe. The only question is when.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      There can be no ‘Israel exception’ for free speech | Kenneth Roth

      by

      The Trump administration’s threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil seems to reflect a dangerous disregard for freedom of expression – a blatant example of official censorship to curb criticism of Israel.Khalil was a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He holds a green card, giving him permanent residence status, and is married to a US citizen. They are expecting their first child soon. Immigration agents arrested him last week in his university housing and sent him for detention from New York City to Louisiana. He had been a leader of protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.Beyond that, the facts are contested. His friends called him “kind, expressive and gentle”. A Columbia professor described him as “someone who seeks mediated resolutions through speech and dialogue. This is not someone who engages in violence, or gets people riled up to do dangerous things.”But Donald Trump, hailing his arrest, suggested Khalil was among students “who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. The administration has presented no facts to back up these assertions, but even were it to do so, the suggestion that permissible speech can be a basis for deportation is deeply troubling. Trump vowed more such deportation efforts.Ordinarily, the first amendment protects even offensive speech. Although the government retains greater latitude to deport non-citizens, Trump’s rhetoric suggests an intention to step way over the line of propriety. What does it mean to be “anti-American”? As we saw during the McCarthy era, people can face that accusation for a wide range of legitimate political views. Such campaigns are the antithesis of the free debate that is essential for US democracy.As for the charge of “antisemitism”, Trump seems to be fueling a disturbing tendency to use claims of antisemitism to silence criticism of the Israeli government. Antisemitism is a serious problem that threatens Jews around the world. But if people see accusations of antisemitism as mere efforts to censor critics of Israel, it would cheapen the concept at a time when the defense against real antisemitism is urgently needed.Even Trump’s unsupported suggestion that Khalil is “pro-terrorist” needs unpacking. To begin with, opposing Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on Palestinian civilians, as well as its starvation of them, does not make anyone pro-terrorist. Israel is required to carry out its military response to Hamas’s appalling murders and abductions of 7 October 2023 in accordance with international humanitarian law. War crimes by one side never support war crimes by the other. Pointing that out, if that’s what Khalil did, does not make him “pro-terrorist”; it makes him pro-civilian.The Trump administration’s retaliation against Khalil is part of its larger attack on campus protests against Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Just days earlier, the administration announced the withdrawal of $400m in federal funding from Columbia for supposedly failing to protect Jewish students and faculty during anti-Israel protests, the vast majority of which were entirely peaceful. Other universities have now been threatened with a similar suspension of their funding.Coincidentally, I spoke on the Columbia campus days before Khalil’s detention. As a Jew, I did not feel the least bit threatened. Indeed, many of the protesters against Israeli atrocities have been Jewish. Again, Trump’s pretext for censoring critics of Israel is transparently thin.If we tolerate an Israel exception to our rights of free speech, we can be sure that other exceptions will follow. Trump likes to half-jokingly refer to himself as a “king”. Are we heading toward a Thailand-style lèse majesté under which criticism of the king is criminalized?But censoring criticism of Israel is a poor strategy even for protecting Israel. Trump’s plan to “solve” Israel’s Palestinian problem by forcibly deporting millions of Palestinians would be a huge war crime; it has been rightly rejected by the Arab states that Trump envisioned receiving the refugees or later paying to rebuild Gaza.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFailing that plan, the Israeli government would prefer the status quo – endless occupation – but the world increasingly rejects that option as apartheid, as did the international court of justice in July. Another option would be to recognize the “one-state reality” created by Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the Israeli government refuses to provide equal rights to all residents. Roughly the same number of Jews and Arabs like between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, so Israel would lose its Jewish majority.The most realistic, legal and enduring option remains a two-state solution, an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side in peace. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has devoted his political career to avoiding a Palestinian state, but it is the best prospect for lasting peace.In pressing Netanyahu to agree to the current temporary ceasefire in Gaza, Trump showed his capacity to exert pressure on the Israeli government to take steps toward peace that it resists. He could do the same for a two-state solution.But to build a political support for this important step, we need free debate in the United States. Trump’s efforts to censor criticism of Israeli misconduct is a recipe for endless war and atrocities. Free speech is required if we hope to do better. Trump should reverse his misguided effort to deport Khalil.

      Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs was just published by Knopf More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Why I quit my homestead dream just as farmer tradwives became mainstream

      by

      Our homesteading experiment began before tradwives, before Donald Trump, before Covid-19. It was the summer of 2015 when we were all sure no one would vote for a former reality TV star. I was 25 years old and desperate for a security blanket, working a sales job and looking for excuses not to return to college.My husband, Patrick, and I had talked about farming since our first date. We wanted goats. At his 2-acre property in a quiet suburb of Portland, Maine, we kept a few chickens and a scrawny vegetable garden.One morning, Patrick texted me: “I found the place. You’re going to love it. It’s uber cute.”Ninety-three acres in midcoast Maine, with an abandoned farmhouse and huge barn. Overgrown fields, alders encroaching across a pool of fetid swamp water to scratch against the door, no floor in the kitchen, and a single pipe gravity-feeding spring water from the mountain side. A three-hole outhouse was the extent of the plumbing.It was perfect.View image in fullscreen“What’s your end goal, man?” asked Patrick’s old college roommate. “What are you imagining in five years? Her barefoot and pregnant in the garden?”It was 2015 and you could still buy a piece of rural heaven for less than a small fortune – if you were willing to put in some sweat equity. We put a deposit down on some goats and signed our mortgage.Back-to-the-land wasn’t a political statement then. Sure, your urban friends would think you’d lost it, but not in an anti-vax, don’t-tread-on-me way. I had no desire to be barefoot, nor pregnant. But we were still in the honeymoon phase of our relationship, and building a life together from scratch had its romantic draw.I told myself I was sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau had once done. I even wore a T-shirt that said “Resistance is Fertile”. I thought of homesteading as an overtly political – even rebellious – act.Homesteading was in my blood. My mother had gone back-to-the-land with her first husband in the early 1970s, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, hippie icons who taught a generation to “live simply and sanely in a troubled world” with their book, Living the Good Life (1954). Scott Nearing was an outspoken pacifist, communist and protester. He and his wife, Helen, ate raw foods, tended their own land and railed against capitalism long before there were TikTok trends on the subject.Before my mother moved to Maine, she went to her grandparents to share the news of her move. They had grown up on a hardscrabble Missouri farm during the dust bowl. They had moved to town for a reliable job and to give their deaf daughter, my grandmother, the opportunity to study.When my mother told Daddy Kays, as she knew him, about her plans to go rural, he was horrified. Why do you want to do that? he asked. Why would anyone choose to go back to subsistence living? Why did my mother insist on denying what my great grandfather saw as progress?My mother left her homestead in the late 1980s. She moved to town to provide a better education for her young daughters, to seek more stable employment, and to leave a Sisyphean list of chores. By this time, many homesteaders were joining her in shifting back to a less isolated existence.The few who remained largely credited not a deeper sense of political motivation, but a strong community. Where homesteaders had gathered in groups, they seemed to remain. The Nearings had cultivated a following of interns and volunteers who showed up each year and had gradually settled around their homestead in Harborside, Maine. To this day, that area remains a haven for self-sufficient living.It could never be said that Patrick and I did things halfway. For two years, we showered outside in the negative temperatures and biting winds of a Maine winter. We preserved our harvests, bottle fed baby goats, raised pigs and chickens and geese and sheep. Patrick rebuilt our entire home from the studs. Fields were cleared and hayed to feed our animals. All of our equipment came from barters, trades and Craigslist. For what we couldn’t find a good deal on, we made do. Our lives revolved around the movement of firewood, without which we would freeze in winter.View image in fullscreenI wrote a book on our lifestyle – So You Want to Be a Modern Homesteader? – and shared our journey on social media. Through this outreach we connected with others making a similar leap, a community that was tiny and fringe before the interest in rural living sparked during the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns. We greeted each other, in person and online, with the excitement of people into some shared niche hobby. We troubleshot problems, speculated on livestock choices and traded sourdough starters.Even before terms such as “tradwife” became popular, I noticed remarkable consistency in our homesteading friends. When a couple would show up at our farm to buy a goat or lamb, they’d bundle out of their unblemished Volvos with a snot-nosed toddler swaddled in one car seat in the back, the other car seat occupied by a sleeping infant. The mother would have kind, slightly confused eyes and an instant attraction to animals. The men were bearded, in lumberjack plaid.It got to the point I would joke that I could not tell my friends’ husbands apart, so uniform was their charcoal facial hair. The men always knew what they were doing: brimming with the self confidence of someone who recently read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal, possessed of at least one scheme to provide for his family while living off the land.After five years, our routine was set. The farmhouse had electricity and running water. We’d cleared the fields and put in a farm pond. Every spring we welcomed a new batch of goat kids and lambs that we sold, we milked our goats and sheared our sheep. We turned over our land sustainably using pigs, and we collected dozens upon dozens of eggs every day from the chickens, ducks and geese.View image in fullscreenWe were also very tired. We fell into bed every night exhausted, and woke up and did it again. There was little time for hobbies outside of running the farm, and less for intimacy. There was no time for travel – even going down the coast to see our parents had to be planned and limited to a few hours out of the day. When we did have time to sit together, we bickered about chores and finances strained by hungry animals. The addition of an indoor shower did little to remove the grime that stuck in our emotions.Faced with exhaustion and burnout, for a few years we tried to downsize, to reverse out of our headlong rush into self-sufficiency. To make time for occasional date nights and rest, we tried to sell a few animals here and there, but the chores still piled up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen in late 2019, Patrick’s son died unexpectedly. In the onslaught of grief, we had to manage feeding dozens of animals and moving firewood in for the winter. Have you ever had to make sure that a funeral would be over in time for evening chores?Soon after, Covid arrived. Within the online homesteading community, jokes made the rounds about how well positioned for a pandemic we were: we did not need supply chains or contact with the outside world to thrive. And yet there is a difference between choosing to stay at home on the farm and having to, particularly when the farm is wrapped in a thick cloak of sorrow.By the end of the first year of the pandemic, we were ready to get off the farm. And then our entire flock of more than a hundred birds succumbed to bird flu, which at the time was a new avian disaster. Our abundant flock of friends and entertainers disappeared overnight, culled in the wake of a burgeoning pandemic.Community can save a homestead from failing under this kind of stress. But as we tended to our tragedies, the community around us had shifted.People had started making careers out of being influencers and content creators. The homesteading world was no less full of social media personalities than the rest of the internet. And when Covid lockdowns hit in 2020, anyone who was online talking about self-sufficiency had an opportunity. Those of us who had shared our homesteading journeys since we first shot up on Instagram’s algorithm in 2013 were getting phone calls from places including the New York Times asking us about our lifestyle. Our follower counts had exploded. We – the fringes, the freaks – were the popular kids now.Leaning in to the popularity of from-scratch living was a recipe for success. Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm, once home to rough-and-ready farm life and now curated to a perfect prairie-wife aesthetic, has 10 million followers. All of my other contacts who leaned into the buzz around self-sufficiency in 2020-2021 now have hundreds of thousands of followers.Unfortunately for my pocketbook, I was wrapped up in several blankets worth of troubles at that time, forgetting to reply to emails and sometimes forgetting to just get out of bed.Not all of my friends went full “tradwife”. Some simply began to prothetize more about organic methods, no till gardens, and permaculture practices. They DIYed themselves crazy. How many of them had outside help to manage a menagerie of animals and a list of home improvement projects? Far more than ever mentioned help.Thoreau had brought his laundry into town for his mother. Now, today’s homestead influencers have perfected promoting a from scratch lifestyle while utilizing invisible helping hands at every turn.A less welcoming community grew around these very online homesteaders. When a follower would realize my political views swung left, they’d pepper my pictures with comments about how they’d thought they liked me until they found out I was a radical lefty. Several new homesteading festivals have sprung up around the country, including the popular Homesteaders of America Conference, which draws almost 10,000 homesteaders annually and welcomes speakers such as Joel Salatin, an outspoken libertarian linked to possible roles in the Trump administration and Nick Freitas, a far-right state delegate from Virginia who has referred to the Affordable Care Act as a “cancer”.View image in fullscreenFor those reasons, the embrace of traditional living gave me pause. In between the grief and the daily grind, my community – online and in real life – was becoming more hostile. There were subjects that could not be talked about, loud unfollows when opinions became known, and a lifestyle that had been fun and alternative was warped by ugly exclusion.It felt as if a curtain had been pulled back from my lifestyle choice. I had enjoyed the connection to my food and the land through sustainable living, but I had never thought of my lifestyle as a step backwards in time. I had laughed at the idea I might someday be barefoot and pregnant in the garden. But, with a never ending list of homestead to-dos, I was as tied to the wood stove and the milking routine as an 1800s woman before me.The happiest “homesteaders” I know continue to thrive in semi-urban environments, with neighbors who stop by to check on the ducks if they want a break from the farm. Most of them are minimally online, disengaged from the performative fetishization of the lifestyle. They keep one foot in the garden, and one on the pavement of society.Today, Patrick and I keep a few goats and a garden in the backyard. We have the ability to leave the farm now and then for a trip, and we’re in the process of moving closer to family and culture. We are taking steps to ensure that our hard work is preserved, working with a land conservation group to keep the property in farmland long after we are gone.We have no aspirations towards self-sufficiency, but a desire to experience varied aspects of life while remaining connected to our food sources. I now have a set of skills I can draw on if I find myself in the kind of calamitous situation that sections of the homesteader community are prepping for. I feel a deep appreciation for the labor of food production. I’ve also learned to embrace the freedom of progress. Today, I run, I read, I write, I take the time to walk in nature and sit and converse with my husband.Today, I am able to slow down and live. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s student loan changes leave borrowers facing soaring repayments

      by

      Many of the nearly 43 million Americans who have federal student loan debt are seeing their carefully budgeted monthly payments soar amid Donald Trump’s overhaul of education in the United States.In the last few weeks, the Trump administration closed applications for all income-driven repayment plans (even ones not blocked by courts) and limited those eligible for public service loan forgiveness (PSLF). That program forgives the loans of government and select nonprofit workers after completing 10 years of service and making 10 years of minimum payments.“The student loan system was broken when President Biden was responsible for it. All we’ve seen since President Trump has come in as an effort to provide fewer rights and fewer resources for working people that have student debt, making the cost of living go up,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.“Things are worse now than they’ve ever been, and nothing is on the table that will make life better for people with student loans.”Jordan, a public high-school English teacher in Redding, California, and his wife, who also works in public education, have student loans totaling $200,000. The couple, who recently welcomed a second child, just bought a house to accommodate their growing family. An even higher student loan payment each month wasn’t a consideration when they took out a mortgage, he said.“We’re going from making $600 in payments – that’s what Save (saving on a valuable education) is supposed to do, which we can absorb to an extent. But if we go off of income-based payments, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Jordan, 37, said.“Today I tried to calculate what’s going to happen, and the calculators don’t work on the webpage. I couldn’t even tell you real numbers if I wanted.”With a new mortgage and childcare exceeding $15,000 on a teacher’s salary, Jordan and his family are stretched thin.He said: “It’s been alarming, but I’ve tried to enter into zen mode. I’ll just move my money and I guess wait until they figure out how to garnish my wages, if I even have money. I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”Aaron, a pharmacist in Ohio, started looking for a second job when Trump got elected in preparation for higher monthly payments.“I’m nervous about it. I basically knew on election night what was going to happen to the Save Plan. It was going to go away. I did a second pharmacist job filling in some [pro re nata] hours,” Aaron, 47, said. “I’m still looking for additional hours to try to pick up.”Aaron took out around $180,000 in loans to cover pharmacy school tuition and living expenses for him and his family. With the Save plan and PSLF, he expected to pay $700 a month and have his loan forgiven after 10 years since he works for the state. Without an income driven repayment plan as an option, he fears a possible monthly payment of $1,800 for the next 30 years on a standard extended repayment plan with no chance of forgiveness.“The more that you go to school, have an advanced degree, you earn more over your lifetime. You pay more in taxes. Not just income taxes, but property taxes, sales taxes, everything else. So it’s actually a pretty good deal to invest in somebody to go to school,” he said. “I don’t see [loan forgiveness] as a handout, which is what people try to say ‘well, you know, I didn’t go to school, so I shouldn’t pay for anything.’ Yeah, but if I told you about all the stuff that I shouldn’t be paying for, you could play that game all day.”Reina Chilton-Mayer is a homemaker and caregiver for her disabled teenage son. Despite her husband having a master’s degree and stable income for many years, the unstable rental market alongside the cost of caretaking has left them with few choices, she said. She and her husband’s combined $140,000 worth of student loans has left them so burdened that they are considering defaulting on their debt for the first time.“I hate defaulting on something. It could have career impacts for my husband,” Chilton-Mayer, 44, said. “If you wanted to change jobs, of course there are going to be financial background checks. So we’re not 100% on whether or not we’re going to do that, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to making ends meet every month.”Ebrahim Ghazali, the chief of pediatrics at a clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts, has just one year left of payments until the rest of his loans would be forgiven under PSLF. The recent changes to federal student loans have paused his payments and left him unsure about the future of his debt.“With these giant student loans, my payments were initially close to $2,000 a month. When I got on the Save plan, it brought it down to between $600 and $700 a month, which I can budget a lot better,” Ghazali, 41, said.But now, with the application websites down, he said he is “unable to progress towards forgiveness and with the application site down. I can’t restart them on a different repayment plan. I’m not even sure if my current employment is going to count towards repayment at this point.”As the potential shuttering of the department of education looms, Pierce noted that “the worst things that could happen are already happening right now, and we don’t need to wait for the education department to shuffle the deck chairs around on the Titanic”.“Borrowers have a right to make payments based on their income,” he said. “They have a right to have their debt canceled that they work in public service, and those rights have been shut down by President Trump.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Deporting speakers over supposed ‘propaganda’ is a stock authoritarian move | Sarah McLaughlin

      by

      The dust is starting to settle on the conflicting reports emerging after immigration officers’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader and green card holder, last weekend – and Americans should be alarmed by the similarities to authoritarian regimes’ speech policing.The White House has confirmed the arrest took place under a law granting the secretary of state unilateral power to act when given “reasonable ground to believe” an immigrant’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country.The Trump administration has not been shy in asserting that Khalil’s political expression is at the root of efforts to deport him. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed Khalil distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda”. A White House officially reportedly added that the “allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. Their actions are not about conduct, but speech.Trump himself claimed Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come” against students engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”.Americans must ask ourselves whether we are comfortable with our government wielding its power to deport speakers for what it claims is pro-terrorist propaganda. If your answer is “yes”, you should know this method is often employed by authoritarian governments with significantly weaker national commitments to free expression than our own.In recent years, India has increasingly canceled or failed to renew the work visas of journalists in the country whose writing has challenged the government, including one whose reporting “crossed the line” and another, married to an Indian citizen, who created a “biased negative perception about India” through her journalism. Officials are also targeting the overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status, available to certain individuals of Indian origin or married to Indian citizens, while it takes aim at those it accuses of “tarnishing the image” of India.These denials serve multiple purposes: they not only diminish government critics’ ability to speak but they also limit the viewpoints that citizens of those countries can access – and warn everyone else to shut up.Similar efforts are under way elsewhere.Russia’s targeting of the press, especially after its invasion of Ukraine, has included the expulsion of foreign journalists including Politico’s Eva Hartog and El Mundo’s Xavier Colas. Hong Kong authorities refused to renew the visa of Rowena He, a scholar and Tiananmen massacre researcher, resulting in her removal from the city and her job at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kuwait revoked citizenship from the blogger and critic Salman al-Khalidi and has since in absentia convicted him for social media posts and extradited him from Iraq. The list goes on.Governments retain significant authority over who can enter and reside within their borders. But that authority should not be used as a weapon to reflect the government’s preferred political opinions or sift out their critics. Unfortunately, in many places, it is, often on the basis of spurious national security-related claims.The question at hand today is not whether Khalil’s views are popular or beloved among American citizens or politicians. That should never be the question we ask in our most challenging questions about our speech rights. What we must ask instead is: should we approve of the use of government power to expel speakers whose political views the government loathes?Because, through its many comments about Khalil’s case, that is the question the Trump administration has undoubtedly posed to us. If constitutionally protected speech “adversarial” to the political positions of the US and allies can make Khalil eligible for deportation, this administration is ultimately threatening the authority to revoke the status of any lawful immigrants whose views it dislikes. You don’t need to hold any sympathy for Khalil’s views to see why this is an immense threat to free expression.Here in the United States, I advocate for the rights of international students originating from authoritarian regimes who study on our nation’s campuses and carry fear that research or political activity challenging their governments will create consequences at home. Now, immigrants legally in the United States on either a green card or a student visa may be forced to make some of the same calculations as those who live or work in authoritarian states abroad – but about our own government.Is it safe for me to speak my mind? Is it worth the risk? Is the government going to target me for my views?America’s immigration holding cells should not become detention centers for speech the government intends to target.

      Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      The threat of Trump is vast. But don’t underestimate incremental change | Michael Brownstein

      by

      Donald Trump is attempting to dismantle American constitutional democracy before our eyes. For the past six weeks, many of us have been telling ourselves we have to do something about this before it’s too late. And yet many people who feel this way – no matter how outraged they are or how genuinely worried they are about our country’s future – are doing very little but handwringing and doomscrolling.Elected leaders in the Democratic party are mostly failing to provide inspiration for people who are alarmed about the president’s actions. The protest paddles they held up at Trump’s speech before a joint session of Congress underscored the fact that they’re flailing more than they’re leading. Meanwhile, for most of us, the chance to vote again is almost two years away.The problem is not that there aren’t meaningful things ordinary people can do. There is strong evidence that protesting, calling our elected representatives and even just talking with people about our political concerns can create change. Fighting back against Trump’s naked power grab requires a whole “ecosystem of resistance”, as Sherrilyn Ifill, a law professor and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, recently put it. Each bit of that ecosystem adds up to more than the sum of its parts.The question isn’t whether there are meaningful steps to take. It’s why we don’t take them more often.The work of making change is difficult. Most of it is boring, unsexy and, at best, modestly incremental from day to day. But if asked to describe a success story of political change – for example, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is widely credited with paving the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act – what comes to mind is an image of hundreds of thousands of people gathered together in a triumphant, decisive moment. Images like these can be inspiring, but they can also cloud the imagination. What doesn’t always come to mind are the thousand small steps that led to that moment and carried the work forward the day after.An anti-incrementalism bias keeps many of us from taking action. As the economist Albert Hirschman put it: “It is the poverty of our imagination that paradoxically produces images of ‘total’ change in lieu of more modest expectations.” The thing about modest expectations, though, is that they have a way of being met. Then they can grow a little. Then grow a little more. And before you know it, diseases such as smallpox are eradicated, global poverty has plunged and the average human lifespan has doubled.One reason we resist incrementalism is because we mistakenly think it requires tolerating injustice, such as moderating on an issue like transgender rights in an effort to court swing state voters. But embracing incrementalism doesn’t determine whether you are a moderate, a liberal, a progressive or a radical. Incrementalism is about the means with which we achieve change, not the ends we seek. No matter one’s goals – growing local support for clean energy projects, persuading elected representatives to consider proportional representation or even amending the constitution – change requires small steps, each one pushing a bit further beyond the status quo.Activists, organizers and other social change entrepreneurs are frequently incrementalists, even if they don’t say so. For example, members of the Black Panther party were no milquetoast moderates, yet they were serving breakfast to kids each morning in Oakland starting in 1969. Their work expanded to similar programs across the nation, which eventually inspired the federal school breakfast program, which now feeds millions of kids. Love or hate the Panthers, they showed up day after day, knocking on doors, gathering signatures, planning budgets, making the coffee.The same is true for successful public policy. In most cases, incremental steps – such as ratcheting up social security through successive revisions over decades – are the most efficient path to transformative change. Whatever one’s goals, there’s no avoiding “doing the work”.Another barrier to incrementalism is how easy social media makes it to put off doing the work while simultaneously helping us feel as if we’re actually doing it. In a survey from 2018, the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that one-third of respondents reported spending at least two hours a day reading, discussing and thinking about political news. Yet virtually none of these people spent any time working or volunteering for a political organization. Hersh worries that too many of us, especially on the left, misunderstand what politics is – or, at least, what it’s actually for. As he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Times: “Politics is about getting power to enact an agenda. It’s about working in groups to turn one vote into more than one vote, one voice into more than one voice, by getting others on board with you. If you aren’t doing that, you aren’t doing politics. But hey, congratulations on your interesting hobby.”Other barriers to embracing incremental change run deeper: imagine two city governments, each of which sets a goal for policing reform. Their goals are basically identical, but government A gets much closer than government B to the target, even though neither of them reaches it. In a 2022 paper titled Losing Sight of Piecemeal Progress, the psychologist Ed O’Brien shows that, once a threshold for success is clear, people often lump nearly complete failures together with partial successes as “all the same”. Even though government A made real progress compared with government B, we’re liable to discount its efforts if they don’t result in total success. Worse, O’Brien shows that when we chalk up partial progress as failure, we lose motivation to keep working for change.Some climate activists worry that we’ll apply the same logic to the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5C. Indeed, the climate crisis demonstrates what is perhaps the greatest barrier to incrementalism: if we don’t know about progress, why would we doggedly keep working for it? Per capita, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States are currently down to 1920s levels. Annually, our country now emits about what we did in the 1980s. But as Hannah Ritchie discusses in her book Not the End of the World, when asked whether emissions have increased, decreased or stayed the same in the US over the past 15 years, only one out of five people correctly say they’ve decreased. This lack of awareness of partial victories can breed cynicism and despair.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAmerican conservatives have often been successful incrementalists, perhaps most notably in their decades-long assault on reproductive rights that culminated in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Even as progressives recoil at this rollback of rights, they should learn from how this political goal was accomplished.Acknowledging partial success isn’t tantamount to complacency. While the United States and other countries have made important progress on the climate crisis, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, paving the way for a tremendous amount of suffering. Yet not acknowledging partial success is a recipe for inaction. It leaves us with the idle hope for a moment of liberation, delivered on the wings of a social change angel who doesn’t exist.What’s giving me hope nowWhat gives me hope is the unoriginal, even banal thought that most people are trying to be decent, most of the time. Of course, that leaves a lot of room for bad things to happen. We can do terrible things to one another under the misapprehension that we’re doing good. We’re biased about how, and to whom, we extend our decency. And the indecent few can manipulate the many to look away while they steal and plunder. But justice wouldn’t be possible if most of us didn’t care about it, however fallibly we pursue it. And most of us do, I think.

      Michael Brownstein is professor and chair of philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, Cuny. He is the author, along with Alex Madva and Daniel Kelly, of the forthcoming Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. More