Social exclusion

Subterms

    Latest story

    175 Shares74 Views

    LA 2028 Olympics: fears of mass displacement and homeless sweeps as Trump threat looms

    by

    In the lead-up to the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the city deployed 30 police officers on horseback to rid downtown of unhoused people and, in the words of a captain, “sanitize the area”.Some people were arrested and transported to detox centers. Others were forced from public view while their possessions were trashed.Now, as the city prepares to host the games once more in 2028, civil rights advocates are fearful history will repeat itself, and authorities will again banish unhoused communities in ways that could exacerbate the region’s humanitarian crisis.Karen Bass, Los Angeles’s Democratic mayor, has vowed not to bus unhoused people out of the city and repeat the tactics of 1984, telling the Los Angeles Times her strategy will “always be housing people first”. But the scale of the problem in LA is larger than it was four decades ago, and the Trump administration’s forceful stance on homelessness could increase pressures on Bass and the unhoused population.LA county is home to an estimated 72,000 unhoused people, including 24,900 people in shelters and 47,400 people living outside in tents, makeshift structures and vehicles. In the last two years, Bass and county leaders have reported some progress in moving people indoors, which they attributed to their strategy of targeting people in encampments with shelter options and resources.But the dramatic shortage of affordable housing in the region will make it difficult to get tens of thousands of people stably housed in less than three years and stop new encampments from rising up.Meanwhile, Trump, who appointed himself White House Olympics taskforce chair, has made it clear he wants to see encampments disappear from American cities, signing an executive order in July to push local governments to clear encampments and making it a point of focus during the federal crackdown in Washington DC.Combined with a supreme court ruling allowing governments to fine and jail unhoused people when no shelter is available, Trump’s ongoing deployment of troops to Democratic cities, significant support from California residents for tougher policies towards the unhoused, and California governor Gavin Newsom’s push for aggressive sweeps, experts fear the Olympics could force out many of LA’s poorest residents.“The pressures are going to come from the White House, from the state and from local government as we get closer to the Olympics,” said Pete White, executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, an anti-poverty group that advocates for unhoused people and is based in Skid Row, a downtown area with a high concentration of homelessness. “My fears come from being an Angeleno and seeing our communities attacked and displaced when major events come our way.”‘I remember the arrests’There is a long history of Olympics host cities trying to get rid of their most disenfranchised communities.In Moscow in 1980, organizers pledged to “cleanse” the city of “chronic alcoholics” and dumped people outside city limits. In Atlanta in 1996, officials arrested thousands of unhoused people under anti-loitering and related ordinances. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than 70,000 people were displaced. And last year in Paris, thousands of unhoused people, including asylum seekers, were bussed out.The 1984 LA games led to the increased militarization of the LA police department (LAPD) and an escalation of racist and aggressive policing that targeted Black and Latino youth, experts say.“I remember the pre-Olympics arrest of my older cousins,” said White, 56, who grew up within walking distance of the Coliseum, a stadium that served as an Olympics venue then and will be used for the 2028 opening and closing ceremonies. “Young Black and brown men were afraid to be in the streets, because they were sweeping people up under the pretext of addressing gang violence.”View image in fullscreenThe games helped LAPD acquire flashbang grenades, specialized armor, military-style equipment and an armored vehicle, which it used a year later to ram a home where small children were eating ice cream, Curbed LA reported. The Olympics-fueled law enforcement expansion also paved the way for LAPD’s notorious Operation Hammer, a crackdown that led to mass arrests of Black youth.In 2018, after LA won the 2028 bid, then-mayor Eric Garcetti said the games would present an opportunity to improve homelessness, which he said could be eliminated from the streets by the games.“Garcetti kept saying: ‘We’ll end homelessness in LA,’” said Eric Sheehan, a member of NOlympics, a group founded in 2017 to oppose the Olympics in LA. “And we have been warning that the only way they can actually end homelessness is by disappearing people.”Increasing sweepsCalifornia, LA and LA 2028 officials have not released plans for a homelessness strategy.But on the streets, there are already fears that sweeps of people living outside are escalating due to the Olympics – and as LA prepares to also host the World Cup next year.In July, the city shut down a long-running encampment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in the San Fernando valley, north-west of downtown and visible from the 405, a major freeway. The site, which residents called the Compound, was across from the Sepulveda Basin where the Olympics is planning events. The sweep displaced roughly 75 people. The city said it offered 30 motel rooms to the group and other shelter options.Carla Orendorff, an organizer working with the residents, said she was aware of at least 10 displaced people now back on the streets, including several who had been kicked out of the motels, which have strict rules. Residents were dispersed to eight motels, and in one, staff ran out of food and people were left hungry, she said.Those still out on the street “are just forced further underground, in places that are harder to reach, which makes it incredibly dangerous for them”, Orendorff said.Giselle “Gelly” Harrell, a 41-year-old displaced Compound resident, said she lost her motel spot after she was gone for several days. She was temporarily staying in a hostel with help from a friend, but would soon be back in a tent, she said. Before the Compound, she was at another major encampment that was swept.View image in fullscreen“They’re strategically cleaning out the area for the Olympics,” Harrell said. “They’re destroying communities. It’s traumatizing … I wish all that money for the Olympics could go toward housing people … but they are not here to help us.”It was hard to imagine the Olympics taking place in an area where so many people were living outside and in cars, Orendorff added: “The city has all these plans, but our people don’t even have access to showers.”Bass denied that the Compound closure was Olympics-related, with the mayor telling reporters the site was a hazard. Officials had worked to shelter everyone and keep people together and would aim to transition residents into permanent housing, she said, while acknowledging some “might be in motels for long periods”. “I will not tolerate Angelenos living in dangerous, squalor conditions,” she added.The mayor’s office continued to defend the Van Nuys operation in an email last week, saying an outreach team had built relationships with encampment residents over several months and offered resources to all of them: “Coming indoors meant access to three meals a day, case management and additional supportive services.”Zach Seidl, Bass’s spokesperson, did not comment on the city’s Olympics strategy, but said in an email that since the mayor took office, street homelessness had decreased by 17.5% and placements into permanent housing had doubled: “She is laser-focused on addressing homelessness through a proven comprehensive strategy that includes preventing homelessness, urgently bringing Angelenos inside and cutting red tape to make building affordable housing in the city easier and more efficient.”Inside Safe, Bass’s program addressing encampments like the Compound, has brought thousands of people indoors and “fundamentally changed the way the city addresses homelessness by conducting extensive outreach, working with street medicine providers and offering other supportive case management services while they are in interim housing”, he continued. “This is why she ran for office and this is progress she would’ve made regardless of the Games.”The White House did not respond to inquiries about the Olympics, and a spokesperson for Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (Lahsa), the lead public agency responsible for addressing homelessness in the region, declined to comment.‘Legal restraints are gone’Advocates’ concerns are partly fueled by a supreme court ruling last year that gave local authorities significantly more leeway to criminalize encampments.“The legal restraints are gone, to the extent they were meaningful, and there is broad policy-level agreement by liberals and conservatives that sweeps are an acceptable approach,” said John Raphling, associate director of Human Rights Watch, a non-profit.He authored a report last year on LA’s policing of unhoused people, which found that unhoused Angelenos were routinely subject to aggressive LAPD crackdowns, misdemeanor arrests and sweeps that destroy their belongings.Homelessness-related arrests and citations, such as anti-camping violations, increased 68% in LA in the six months after the supreme court ruling, a recent CalMatters analysis found. The crackdowns are happening even as LA has vowed to not rely on criminalization and has promised a more restrained approach than other California cities.View image in fullscreenSheehan said he was concerned LAPD would work with federal authorities to target people during the Olympics, especially after officers aggressively attacked protesters and journalists during demonstrations against Trump’s immigration raids in June, in violation of the department’s own protocols.Newsom, meanwhile, has pushed California cities to ban encampments by adopting ordinances that make it a violation to camp in the same spot for three days, and advocates fear his presidential ambitions could lead him to continue to push punitive strategies as the Olympics approaches.“We’re already seeing a contest between Trump and Newsom as to who is going to appear tougher on homelessness, with tough being defined as how one responds to visible homelessness,” said Gary Blasi, professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-wrote a report last year on the 2028 Olympics in LA and the unsheltered population. “There aren’t good signs from either of them. Newsom offers the promise of alternatives he doesn’t identify and Trump offers the promise of some equivalent to incarceration.”In a statement to the Guardian, Newsom said the state has a “strong, comprehensive strategy for fighting the national homelessness and housing crises” and was “outperforming the nation”. “I’ve emphasized that our approach is to humanize, not criminalize – encampment work is paired with shelter, services [and] behavioral health support,” he said, citing his Care court program, which is meant to compel people with severe psychosis into treatment.“Bottom line: encampments can’t be the status quo. We’re cleaning them up with compassion and urgency, while demanding accountability from every level of government. There is no compassion in allowing people to suffer the indignity of living in an encampment for years and years,” the governor added.Tara Gallegos, Newsom’s spokesperson, said the governor’s approach was distinct from the president’s, writing in an email: “The Trump administration is haphazardly bulldozing and upending encampments without creating any sort of supportive strategy to go along with it. It is about fear, not support … California’s strategy pairs urgency with dignity and care, creating wrap-around services addressing the root causes of homelessness.”An LA 2028 spokesperson did not comment on homelessness, but said in an email: “We work closely with our local, state and federal partners on Games planning and operations, and remain committed to working collaboratively with all levels of government to support a successful Games experience.”Organizers and providers prepareHomelessness service providers and advocates said they hoped LA officials would pursue bold solutions that quickly get people housing and resources without the threat of criminalization.A key part of the region’s strategy during the early pandemic was getting people out of tents and into motels, but those programs are costly and not a good fit for all of LA’s unhoused residents; it can also be challenging to transition participants into permanent housing. Blasi noted that that approach would become even harder during the Olympics when hotels face an influx of tourists.Blasi advocated for direct cash payments to unhoused people, akin to the 2020 stimulus checks, which could help some unhoused people get off the streets at a faster and cheaper rate than the traditional process, he argued: “There are a lot of people who can solve their own homelessness if they just have a little bit more money.”Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said LA has seen success with rapid rehousing programs that offer people rental subsidies, and that he hopes those efforts can be scaled up: “We know how to move people back into housing and do it quickly. It’s just a matter of whether we can marshal the political will to bring the money to make that happen.”Funding cuts, including from Trump’s slashing of federal homelessness resources, will be a barrier.The Union Rescue Mission, a faith-based group that runs the largest private shelter in LA, has recently seen an influx of people needing services as other providers have faced cuts, said CEO Mark Hood. Hood, however, said he has had productive conversations with the Trump administration and remained optimistic the Olympics would provide an “opportunity to collaborate with our city, county, state and federal government in ways that we never have before”.He said he hoped the Olympics would lead to increased funding for providers, but was so far unaware of any specific plans.White, the longtime organizer, said he expected grassroots groups to come together to defend unhoused people, especially as mutual-aid networks have grown in response to Trump’s raids: “The kidnappings of immigrants and the attempted clearing of houseless people as we get closer to the Olympics gives us an opportunity to bring various communities together, and that’s when we can build the power necessary to push back.” More

    More stories

    • 200 Shares128 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s Ice raids recall a painful past for these Americans: ‘I see myself in those children’

      by

      Mass expulsion, babies born behind barbed wire, intrusive medical exams for newcomers, families torn apart: these aren’t scenes from Donald Trump’s promised second-term immigration crackdown, but from the US’s extensive history of xenophobic immigration policy.While so many Americans watched in horror at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s military-like raids across Los Angeles this summer, US cruelty and violence towards immigrants is nothing new, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the mass deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. As the Trump administration escalates its attacks on immigrants – or those perceived to be immigrants – survivors of previous eras of xenophobia say it’s more important than ever to remember the past. The harms done to them and their families have lasted generations, and what’s happening now threatens to do the same.The Guardian spoke with four Californians who have lived through, or whose parents lived through, some of these dark moments in US history. They shared how these episodes shaped their lives, what it’s like to see these chapters of history repeat themselves today – and what gives them hope.Christine ValencianaView image in fullscreenWhen Christine Valenciana, 75, watched footage of armed, masked Ice agents in unmarked vehicles snatching people off the streets across southern California this summer, rounding up gardeners, car wash workers, veterans and US citizens, it recalled a familiar time in her own family’s history.In the 1930s, under the economic pressures of the Great Depression, nearly 2 million Mexican Americans – more than half US citizens – were forced out of their homes and unconstitutionally deported to free up jobs for “real Americans”. Valenciana’s mother’s family was among them.“The raids that took place at the time were not unlike now,” said Valenciana, 75.Mexican “repatriation”, which Valenciana prefers to call “expulsion”, consisted of military-style raids, mass deportations, scare tactics and public pressure that terrorized Mexican communities and broke up countless families. For American children like Valenciana’s mother, who was born in 1926 in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, the trauma was layered: leaving their home and country, adjusting to a new culture in Mexico and eventually returning to the US years later.Emilia Castañeda, Valenciana’s mother, was seven when her own mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died less than a year later on the day of Emilia’s first communion. “She told me what bothered her the most about having to leave was that she wouldn’t be able to visit her mother’s grave,” remembered Valenciana, now an associate professor emeritus at the department of elementary and bilingual education at California State University, Fullerton. “They went to the train station and she and other people were crying.”She told Valenciana that the girls in her school in Mexico referred to her as “repatriada”, which was meant as a put-down. “My mom was pretty miserable,” said Valenciana. By age 12, Emilia worked as a live-in babysitter, but at times she was not paid or given a decent bed or blanket, according to her daughter. Emilia was desperate to come back to Los Angeles once the repatriation period ended. During the second world war, she made the journey alone by train right before her 18th birthday with the help of her godmother, who gave her a place to live.View image in fullscreenAlong with Valenciana’s husband, Francisco Balderrama, who co-authored a seminal book on Mexican repatriation, Emilia eventually went on to become an advocate for others to learn about this previously hidden chapter in US history. In her 70s, she helped pass legislation that led to a formal apology from the state of California in 2005 and a monument in downtown Los Angeles in 2012. Emilia passed away in 2020 at age 94.While Valenciana sees parallels between the 1930s and today, there’s one big difference, she says: “There’s much more support for people who are being kidnapped and tortured today as opposed to the 1930s where people either didn’t know or care.” She says she better understands what her mother and others like her experienced when she sees members of her community leaving the US voluntarily or living in hiding, fearful of going to church or the market because of Ice.“I’m not just heartbroken,” she said. “I’m sad and angry. Racism is deeply rooted in this country.”Felicia LoweView image in fullscreenGrowing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Felicia Lowe, 79, was never taught about Chinese American history. She had plenty of questions, but no answers. Her immigrant parents refused to talk about how they came to arrive in the US from China.Lowe’s curiosity inspired her to become a television reporter and filmmaker, whose work has revealed the impact of Chinese exclusion, a series of racist immigration laws from 1882 to 1943 that restricted Chinese immigration to the US in response to growing anti-Chinese sentiment and competition for jobs.After reading the book Island about the Angel Island immigration station in the San Francisco Bay, which opened in 1910 to enforce exclusion and prevent “undesirable” immigrants from entering the US, Lowe knew she had to share this little-known story. In 1988, she released a film about it, Carved in Silence.“For all the immigrants, there was a very intrusive physical examination,” Lowe said. “Angel Island was built to jail people, to interrogate them and make them feel so unwanted.”View image in fullscreenImmigrants were detained for months and years at a time in crowded, prison-like dorms with locked doors and separated by race and sex. The station processed up to 1 million Asian and other immigrants, including 250,000 who were Chinese, from 1910 to 1940. Since Chinese people were effectively barred from entering the US, “paper sons” and “paper daughters” circumvented exclusion by purchasing documents that falsely identified them as the children of Chinese Americans.It wasn’t until after Lowe made Carved in Silence that she discovered a shocking secret about her own family’s history: her father had been detained for three weeks at Angel Island, according to transcripts from the National Archives.“Every time people were interrogated, they had to sign their names,” she said. “On one of those documents, my father’s handwriting was very shaky and I thought he must have been really scared that day.” She realized her father, who died of a sudden heart attack at 58, had been a “paper son” himself, which gave Lowe an even deeper understanding of the trauma and cost of leaving one’s homeland, and entering a country that did not want you because of your ethnicity. “The risks taken required courage and hope, that the payoff would be a greater opportunity for himself and his future family,” she said.Unlike the Angel Island era, where the public was largely unaware of detainees’ conditions and experiences, many of today’s immigration actions are being recorded on phones in real time and circulating online (the Trump administration has broadcast raids and regularly runs commercials encouraging people to “self-deport and stay out”). Lowe said people in 2025 have more evidence of their experiences and she believes that Ice’s hypervisibility has united people who may not have been activists to be more supportive of immigrants.“What we’re witnessing today is wholesale harassment, arrests with little to no acknowledgement of a person’s legal status,” said Lowe, who has been a leader in the preservation and restoration of Angel Island as a national historic landmark. “Rights are being ignored and innocent immigrants and/or those who have proper paperwork to be here are being locked up and, in some cases, sent to jails in other countries.“I don’t care what color you are – we need to understand how much we share humanity and pain. We cannot be afraid to tell our stories.”Satsuki InaView image in fullscreenDuring the first Trump administration, Satsuki Ina made multiple visits to family immigration detention centers, where she met with Central American mothers and children who were being held by the US government after fleeing horrific violence.“Mothers poured their hearts out about what was happening to their kids and I couldn’t help but see myself in those children,” she said. That’s because Ina, 81, herself was born behind barbed wire in a US concentration camp where she was formally listed as an “enemy alien” by the US government.It was the second world war, and the US had rounded up and unconstitutionally imprisoned more than 120,000 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry based on unfounded national security fears over their race. Ina’s parents, who were US citizens, were first sent to California’s Tanforan racetrack in San Bruno, where the smell of horses and manure lingered, then to Topaz prison camp in Utah.After failing a loyalty questionnaire, the Inas were sent to the Tule Lake segregation center, a maximum-security concentration camp with 28 guard towers, 1,000 military police officers and tanks patrolling the perimeter. Overcrowded barracks were useless protection against choking dust storms, searing heat and snow.View image in fullscreenWhile at Tule Lake, Ina’s father, Itaru, spoke out about his civil rights, which led to him being sent to a separate Department of Justice camp in Bismarck, North Dakota, that was less chaotic and filled with almost 4,000 German and Japanese men, leaving Ina’s mother, Shizuko, to raise two young children alone. After the war ended in 1945, the family was reunited at a camp in Crystal City, Texas, before finally being freed after four years of captivity. Ina had spent the first two years of her life imprisoned.Her parents’ San Francisco home and property were seized in 1942, and the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Satsuki became Sandy. Years later, when Ina said she wanted to be called by her real name, her mother repeatedly said: “Don’t do it. Bad things will happen.”“When I was a child, my mother tried to protect me from the stigma that was directed towards people who were resisters, so she would just say things like: ‘Don’t say you were born in Tule Lake. Just tell them you were born in Newell,’ which is nearby,” Ina remembered. “The message we were getting from our parents was: ‘You have to keep us safe. Don’t get into trouble, don’t cause problems.’ ”Decades later, Ina, who is now a psychotherapist and a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento, started connecting her experience with the expansion of family immigration detention first under the Obama administration and then during the first Trump administration, imprisoned children and separated Central American and South American families seeking asylum on a larger scale.Together with activist Mike Ishii, she co-founded the group Tsuru for Solidarity to help end detention sites and support immigrant and refugee communities under attack. “We felt like we had the moral authority to stand up and protest,” said Ina. “I never set out to be an activist. I just mostly saw myself as someone who was pissed off about what was going on.”It was only in the last half of Ina’s 40-year career as a psychotherapist that she started studying the effects of trauma and how it could be passed down to subsequent generations. She found that many Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated as children struggled with anxiety and depression as adults. Last year, she published a memoir, The Poet and the Silk Girl, which follows the Ina family’s agonizing journey through incarceration, based on her mother’s diary and censored letters her parents exchanged while held at separate prison camps.“It’s more than 80 years since our incarceration and the effects of it are still impacting my community,” said Ina. “The mass incarceration solution is the most dehumanizing, long-term impact for whole communities. To imprison children, in particular, is inhumane and damaging. I think about the children I interviewed, and the amount of anxiety and depression that they’ve been filled with doesn’t get erased when you’re freed. It lies in you with each stage of life.”Eliseo MedinaView image in fullscreenAfter growing up in Huanusco, Zacatecas, in Mexico, Eliseo Medina, 79, came to the US with his family in 1956. His parents worked in the fields of Delano, California, an agricultural area in the San Joaquin valley known for its grapes, while he attended school. When he was a boy, immigration raids, arrests and deportations were commonplace. He recalled hearing loud knocks at the front door of their modest home in the middle of the night. “We’d get up and go to the door and find lights shining on our faces,” said Medina, whose family were legal immigrants. “These guys in uniform were there asking for our papers – we had no idea we had any rights.” Like today, these farm workers were mostly immigrants and their wages were often lower than US-born counterparts and workers in other sectors.Medina left school at 15 to join his parents and sisters working in the fields. In 1965, when Medina was off work due to a broken leg, he heard that Filipino farmworkers in Coachella had walked out on strike demanding $1.40 an hour and that they were coming to Delano next. He grabbed his crutches, got in his car and drove to 11th Avenue, where he saw about 200 people with signs shouting: “Huelga! Strike!” Although he was scared, Medina attended his first union meeting inside a local church just days after the historic Delano grape strike and boycott began. It happened to be Mexican Independence Day, which felt symbolic, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.“Every seat was taken, people were standing around the walls and there was electricity,” he recalled. “Cesar Chavez walked out and he talked about how we had rights even though we were poor, that we deserved to be treated with respect and dignity, that we sold our labor, not our souls.” Chavez called for a strike, and the whole hall erupted, chanting: “Huelga, huelga, huelga!” Exhilarated by what he had witnessed, Medina went home, broke open his piggy bank and joined the union and grape strike the next morning.“We went against some of the biggest growers and I saw them being scared for the first time and I got hooked,” he said. Dolores Huerta took a shine to the 19-year-old and recruited him to represent United Farm Workers (UFW) at rallies. Over the next 13 years, he worked alongside Chavez, leading boycotting efforts and organizing fundraisers and rallies around the country, and eventually became UFW’s national vice-president.View image in fullscreen“It was the most exciting thing that any person could have ever experienced for me,” he said. Medina later worked for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), pushing for equal labor and civil rights protections for workers. In 2013, the labor leader participated in a 22-day hunger strike on the National Mall, where he was visited by Barack Obama, to draw attention to the need for immigration reform.Medina, who lives just outside Los Angeles, sees sustained protests against Ice and other Trump administration policies as building the foundation for maintaining democracy and modernizing the immigration system. “It’s dark right now, but it’s also a great opportunity for organizers because people are paying attention across our society,” said Medina. “People are asking: ‘Who am I? Who is this country? What do I care about? What are my values?’”Some California farm workers are on strike following immigration raids at several farms, calling for an end to raids and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers (the United Farm Workers has not yet called for a strike or boycott). “I certainly understand and support their right to be heard and respected,” he said. “They are striking against a cruel and unusual government. In the end, they may lead the way for a broader worker response.”He said that the diversity of the anti-Trump coalition, and the public image of Ice as armed, masked soldiers terrorizing people, is helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. “I’ve been doing this almost 60 years. I saw the farm workers win, civil rights, a war ended. I saw women make huge impacts. I saw gay rights,” he reflected. “When you change minds, you also change policies and the laws, so I have hope.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn

      by

      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More

    • 200 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      How Baltimore’s violent crime rate hit an all-time low: ‘This is not magic. It’s hard work’

      by

      The end of violence in Baltimore is a litany of stories that weren’t told in 90-second clips on the evening news, about shootings that didn’t happen.The untold stories sound different, said Sean Wees: “The guys had guns pointed at each other. We got in between.”One summer afternoon, two years ago, two men emerged from a corner store at Patapsco Avenue and Fifth Street, steps from Wees’s office at Safe Streets, in Baltimore’s Brooklyn neighborhood.“They had a little face-off in the store,” Wees said. “Words were exchanged when they stepped out the store.”A woman in the neighborhood saw what was about to go down and banged on the door of Safe Streets, a longstanding city-run violence-prevention program and a fixture in Baltimore. Wees knows his community, and knew one of the men well – a guy with a high potential for violence. A shooter. The other guy was new, Wees said.The neighborhood was still reeling from a mass shooting that June. Safe Streets had de-escalated five fights at a Brooklyn Day block party, but weren’t on the scene when a gunfight started there late that night. Two people died, 28 were injured and Wees was on edge.He and his co-worker Corey Winfield rushed outside to find both men shouting at each other with guns drawn.View image in fullscreen“We stood in between,” Wees said. “Corey was talking to one, and I was talking to a guy that was from the community.” Wees and Winfield carefully talked them back from the cliff.“That’s why having that rapport and being very active in your community is real important with this work,” Wees said. “Because if you don’t have that rapport, you’re not going to get them to put away those guns, because you don’t know what this man is thinking. You don’t know if he had that respect for you, enough to not blow your brains out along with the next man.”Violent crime in America’s big cities has been receding from pandemic highs for about two years. But even in comparison, Baltimore’s improvement is breathtaking: fewer people have been killed in the city over the last seven months than in any similar period in the last 50 years.As of 15 August, the running 365-day total for murders in Baltimore stood at 165 dead. Assuming the city remains on that pace, its murder rate would finish below 30 per 100,000 residents for the first time since 1986. If it remains on the pace set since 1 January, it would finish 2025 at 143 murders, a rate of about 25 per 100,000, last seen in Baltimore in 1978.It confounds Baltimore’s bloody legacy. An army of social workers, violence interventionists, prosecutors, community leaders, and even cops all pulling in the same direction for once has made David Simon’s stories from The Wire or Donald Trump’s exasperating trash talk less relevant.But this metropolitan renaissance is born of agony.Before Ahmaud Arbery or Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, there was Freddie Gray, rattled to death in the back of a Baltimore police department van.“We had, if you will, a head start with our uprising in 2015,” said Dr Lawrence Brown, a Baltimore historian and health equity researcher.View image in fullscreenGray’s death in April 2015 of spinal injuries set off an earthquake of protests against police brutality across the country, with none as consequential or long-lasting as those at the epicenter. Protests in Baltimore turned into riots.“Since 2015, there’s been here in Baltimore this acknowledgement that equity needs to be a priority,” Brown said. The riots were as much about the conditions of poverty that led to Gray’s death – people losing their homes in foreclosure to water bills, for example – as they were about police brutality, Brown noted.But the heavy-handed response by cops to the protests and failures to hold police accountable for misconduct eviscerated the relationship between the Baltimore police and the public. Baltimore’s state attorney Marilyn Mosby laid murder charges on the officers involved, and Baltimore’s police union closed ranks in response, eviscerating the relationship between police and politicians. And a series of scandals at city hall and the state attorney’s office – and the failure of Mosby’s charges to result in convictions – eviscerated the relationship between politicians and the public.Violence skyrocketed.Three months after Gray’s death, Baltimore’s homicide count set a 42-year record high. Baltimore’s mayor canned the police chief, then abandoned her re-election bid. In the previous year, 211 people had been killed in Baltimore, about 33.8 per 100,000 residents. That was high at the time relative to other large US cities, but reflected incremental improvement by Baltimore’s historical standards. After Freddie Gray’s death turned the city upside down, the count rose to 344 in 2015 – a 63% increase and a multi-decade high – bucking a long national trend of declining violent crime. The rate at which police made arrests in homicide cases cratered.View image in fullscreenThe gun trace taskforce (GTTF) scandal in 2017 exacerbated problems.Baltimore’s police culture revolved around statistics-driven measures of productivity, which Baltimore street cops often achieved by busting whoever happened to be convenient without concern about the quality of an arrest or the real criminality of a suspect, according to an internal report in the wake of the scandal.The GTTF had a reputation for aggressively pursuing arrests and putting up big numbers, insulating it from internal scrutiny. But a federal investigation revealed that the taskforce had long abandoned its mission to track down the source of illegal guns and had instead become a criminal gang prowling the street to rob drug dealers. Its officers planted guns and drugs on suspects and fabricated testimony to cover their tracks. More than a dozen police officers went to federal prison.Baltimore had tried more than one way to attack violent crime, from zero-tolerance “broken windows” policing to relying on neighborhood crime statistics to motivate police officers into making more arrests. Efforts to get guns off the street backfired spectacularly from political interference, incompetence and, with the GTTF, corruption.The scandal destroyed whatever public faith in Baltimore’s police department remained. By 2017, Baltimore’s homicide rate had risen to the highest of any large city in the US.“We had a police unit that was committing crimes. They were contributing to the crime,” Brown said. This history makes it hard to attribute the city’s current gains to police work, he added: “Who do I give credit to? Police are the lowest on my scales. It may be 5%. In some cases, at least with that gun trace taskforce, it’s negative.”Snake-bitten, adrift and in a state of profound civic despair, Baltimore’s leaders came to a fundamental consensus: reducing violence had to take priority over everything else. It was defining the city and was the only thing voters cared about.The first time Brandon Scott saw someone get shot in Park Heights, he wasn’t quite seven years old.Scott, a former city council member, had long been a keen observer of violence-prevention strategy before becoming mayor in 2020. An academic consensus looking at research done in Chicago and elsewhere about violence had long suggested that a dollar spent on policing reduced violence less than a dollar spent on intervention. But political leaders find it hard to justify cuts to police budgets under the best of circumstances. And Baltimore in 2021 did not have the best of circumstances.Scott had been mayor of Baltimore for about three months when the American Rescue Plan Act (Arpa) passed in Congress, giving him an option to supercharge his violence-prevention strategy without a massive political battle. The $1.9tn economic stimulus package passed in March 2021, sending $1,400 checks to taxpayers, paying unemployment benefits at a higher rate and granting money to cities to recover from the pandemic however they saw fit. Using Arpa money, the city could fund the new data-driven project without using the police budget, sidestepping the thorny “defund the police” rhetoric that had hamstrung previous efforts around the country.“When we said we were going to reduce violence by 15% from one year to the next, folks laughed at me,” Scott said. “Folks said that we couldn’t do it this way. The only way that we could do it is we went back to zero-tolerance policing, which actually didn’t do it in the first place.”Against a Baltimore police budget topping half a billion dollars – the largest police budget per capita of any large city in the US – Baltimore’s political establishment gave its new millennial mayor room to experiment with $50m in Washington’s money.View image in fullscreenTrust was in short supply after years of scandal. The first step was to get everyone on board – the cops, the hospitals, the jails, the schools, the social services teams, the state government and the feds. Scott appointed Richard Worley as the city’s new police commissioner in June 2023; Worley was a life-long Baltimore officer picked in part to bring the rank and file in line with Scott’s antiviolence program. Scott emphasizes partnerships as an important part of the plan’s successes.Other federal grants, from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, emerged in 2022 to help support the network of non-profits needed for the plan. The funding came from the first federal gun-control legislation enacted in 28 years, with the support of 15 Senate Republicans and $250m over five years for community violence-intervention programs under the Department of Justice.Baltimore’s approach is tailored and personalized. The social worker who knocks on someone’s door carries a letter written for that person from the mayor, with an offer of help – and a threat.“We focus on the individuals and groups that are most likely to be a victim or perpetrator of that gun violence, and we go to them,” Scott said. “They actually get a letter from me. And if they don’t do that – if they don’t take us up on that help to operate their lives in a different way, to not put themselves at risk of being a victim or perpetrator or get involved in illegal and violent activity, then we remove them through our law enforcement partnership with the police department that obviously works at my direction, or with our attorney general, our state’s attorney and our federal law enforcement partners, and we’re holding people accountable.”Crime charts start showing the decline in September 2022, when the comprehensive plan had been up and running for about a year, Scott said. About three out of four people offered services by the program accepted them, and the city today has less violence than at any point in his life, he said.“Of the folks that we’ve been able to work with through our partners … 95.7% of them have not been re-victimized, and 97.7% of them have not recidivated,” Scott said. “You’re talking about, in any city, a very relatively small group of people who are at the highest risk. For us to be intensely focusing on them, and to have that few of them become victims again, or recidivate into their previous life, is very impressive.”No one got killed in Baltimore last week. Also, the local paper’s reporters are quitting in droves. Surely, this is a coincidence.Summers bleed Baltimore. School is out. People congregate. Tempers flare. But between 27 July and 2 August, the homicide line of the Baltimore police department’s weekly crime report posted a shutout.Baltimore’s strategy revolves around focused deterrence. Take the kind of targeting advertisers use to put an ad up on your phone for mouthwash on a day you forgot to brush your teeth, and apply it to murder. Only, instead of an ad, someone at high risk for violence gets a case worker knocking on their door.“We’re talking about young people at elevated risk,” said Kurtis Palermo, who runs the youth violence-prevention non-profit Roca in Baltimore. “We’re not talking about the young person who says F-you to his teacher, or tells Mom, Dad, Grandma they don’t want to do XYZ. We’re talking about kids who literally have probably two tracks: jail and death.”Palermo knocks on doors while a cop is carrying the mayor’s letter. As often as not, he has to knock on a door a dozen times before he finds his charge.The process often begins after a shooting. Case workers at local hospitals treating gunshot victims will take note of a patient’s history and their friends and family. The data is combined with school records, police records, social services records and whatever else might be relevant; then the violence-prevention team will have a quick meeting. When they determine someone has enough risk factors, they intervene.View image in fullscreen“It could be anything from information that is gleaned on jail calls, video evidence, you know, whatever it is, and then the connections to other people,” said Terence Nash, chief of the group violence-reduction strategy (GVRS) in the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement.About 570,000 people live in Baltimore. If 200 people are murdered in the city in a year, the average person’s risk would be about one in 2,850. But almost all the violence is concentrated among a tiny, impoverished and identifiable subset of that 570,000: 2% or less of the city, Nash said. If 80% of 200 murders are in this cluster, then most people are facing a murder risk of a bit less than 14,000 to one, while the high-risk cluster’s odds are about one in 71.There’s no single factor that is perfectly predictive, Nash said. But as connections accumulate with other people at risk for violence, a threshold is crossed. The process is epidemiological, treating violence like an infection to track.Two types of people are most vulnerable, Nash said: people in their early 20s who are feuding over trivial matters, “someone looked at somebody wrong, somebody bumped into somebody”; and older people in the drug game, “more around violence that has to do with their criminal enterprise, and so it’s much more calculated”.Critically, it’s not every young person with an Instagram beef, and not every Sandtown neighborhood street dealer that rises to their attention. The risk factors create a reasonable, articulable – and legally defensible – basis for contact. The team looks at each person individually, and crafts an approach for each one, Nash said.“This is not magic. It’s hard work,” Nash said. “It takes attention to detail.”Jaylen was in a hospital bed recovering from a gunshot wound when a life coach with Youth Advocate Programs (YAP) approached him. Jaylen had, he said, been in the wrong part of West Baltimore at the wrong time. He wasn’t especially receptive at first to a life coach, of all things, he said.“I thought there was a catch,” the 20-year-old said. “I thought I’d have to pay them back in the future.”Jaylen couldn’t say much about his life or where he was: people might still want to hurt him. But it took a couple of months of outreach for the offer of help from Teshombae Harvell, Jaylen’s life coach, to look real. It took consistency.“It’s about the follow-up,” Harvell said. “Today they might say get the F out of here. Tomorrow, they could be wanting services, because something tragic happened where they need change.”When someone gets shot, Jaylen expects someone to retaliate, he said: “Back and forth, back and forth. It’s never-ending.”What Harvell offered – what no one had offered in a credible way before – was a plan for the future, and perhaps the realization that he had a future. Jaylen had thought about killing someone before, he said. He felt as if the prospect of surviving long enough to have a legit life wasn’t worth considering.Now he has a driver’s license and wants to become a plumber. Helping fix some of Baltimore’s stubborn oversupply of abandoned houses would be a living, and ironically would be paying back the city for its help.“The only way programs like YAP or GVRS are going to be successful is for people to buy in,” said Harvell. “They can’t be spectators on the outside, looking in, wondering if it’s going to be a success or a failure.”Brandon Scott’s approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.“There’s the carrot and stick,” said Ivan Bates. “We’re the stick.”Bates had a pretty good track record of getting drug dealers off the hook before winning election as Baltimore’s state’s attorney – what most places call the district attorney and chief prosecutor. Baltimore’s history of light prosecutions for handgun cases is a legacy of questionable policing practices – weakly supported cases landing in court – and a negative view of mass incarceration by prosecutors.“I was the one who was beating the brakes off the state,” Bates said. “Look, my law partner and I went 25, 26 straight jury trials against Baltimore city prosecutors representing some pretty rough people, you know. And when I come and say that the street – the criminal elements – do not respect that approach, I’m not saying it because I read in a book. I’m saying it because I lived it.”After defeating Mosby and assuming office in January 2023, Bates immediately reversed her policy of non-prosecution for low-level offenses like drug possession, prostitution and trespassing. He successfully lobbied the Maryland legislature to increase the penalty for illegal gun possession from three years to five years. And he started putting people in prison.View image in fullscreenIn Mosby’s last two years in office, 2,186 people faced felony gun charges. Mosby dismissed about 34% and another 30% received plea bargains, mostly without imprisonment. In Bates’s first two years, the number of cases increased a bit, to 2,443. Bates only dismissed 19% of the cases, and only 10% received plea agreements. The rest were convicted – an increase of about 1,000 people sent to prison – which includes a 70% increase in homicide convictions.“Everybody has a plan. The mayor had his plan. The police department, they have their plan,” Bates said. “And when I came and I ran for office, I had my plan. The plans have to work together as one.”Bates is quick to attribute the city’s reduction in violence to a team effort. For example, without victim assistance – which is supported by a federal grant – prosecutions that would have fallen apart in previous years concluded in convictions because witnesses could be found to appear in court. Police now are actually focused on removing illegal guns from the street, he said.It also requires people to have an out. Without a path off the street, people on the edge in Baltimore will do what they must to survive, he said.He rejects the suggestion that his approach is a return to mass incarceration. Prosecution is not zero tolerance and it is not indifferent to a defendant’s conditions.“We have focused on violent repeat offenders, not the first-time kid,” Bates said. “Remember, 5,000-6,000 individuals are doing this type of behavior. So, we’re not here to go back to mass incarceration.”But he’s sensitive to how this approach plays out in five years.“My No 1 worry is, when individuals come home, we have to have something for them,” he said. “Did we actually prepare them to come home? … Look, I believe everybody pays a debt to society. We move on, and then we as a society put them in a place that they can win. And if we didn’t, then we’re going to see these numbers bounce back up.”Sean Wees from Safe Streets said stopping a shooting might come down to noticing that a kid on a street corner has holes in his shoes.“So we asked the little kid, are you hungry?” Wees said. “That could lead to a conversation where you find out this kid is not eating. But we have the resources, or if we don’t have them at that time, we find the resources to help this family out. And now that key individual, that target individual, is the father of that child … We fed his child now, we’ve started to build a rapport with this guy, because he’s going to be appreciative of the work that we just did. That’s how this works.”View image in fullscreenOne might think that the thing that prevents expanding the work is personnel. Very few people have the street credibility, the devotion and the nerve to be successful. But Wees said the constraint is actually money.“I love this work, because I’m always trying to save an individual life,” he said. “I’m good with this work. The time and the money don’t match right now, but guess what? I still do this work … You get more money, people will put in more time.”For the first time in forever, Charm City’s leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They’ve placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican “screw cities” general principles.Trump closed the White House office of gun violence prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence-intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the office of justice programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims’ services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.Scott blasted the cuts to the program’s partners as dangerous and reckless.“You’re talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,” he said. “The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.”The youth antiviolence organization Roca had three grants terminated, one in Baltimore with about $1m left unspent. The termination letter said the grant did not align with its priorities including “directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combating violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault”.As applied to Roca, the rationale is absurd. But they could see it coming, said Dwight Robson, a Roca executive.“Initially, it was a huge blow. We were estimating that we were going to serve roughly 60 fewer young people a year,” Robson said. After an outcry, funders outside the federal government, including the city itself, started to step in, who “made it clear that they don’t want to lose momentum” in Baltimore.Support in other places, like Boston, is fleeting, in part because they’ve done their job too well, Robson said: “Boston is the safest big city in America. And you know, the homicides and crime just aren’t on people’s radars to the degree that it is in Baltimore.”Roca has appealed the decision to cut their grant, and a coalition of non-profits is suing the Trump administration, arguing that the cuts were made unlawfully.The real threat posed by the cuts is continuity, said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the mayor’s office of neighborhood safety and engagement (Monse). The violence-intervention plan has worked in part because it has been consistent. People are so used to the presence of Monse staffers around crime scenes and in high-violence neighborhoods that some people have come to expect a knock on the door after a shooting.View image in fullscreenIf Monse’s partners start disappearing, and if they can’t back up promises of help made to victims – or shooters – then things may fall apart, she said.“We’ve got to make the investment in the service side of things,” Mavronis said. “We can’t just make empty promises to folks who we are telling we have the services for you to change your life.”Baltimore’s leaders, both in city hall and in the streets, have been putting their reputations and capital on the line, in some cases risking their lives.Budget cuts while they’re winning makes it look like they want Baltimore to lose. The exasperation is plain.“We have the lowest amount of violence that we’ve seen in my lifetime, and I’m 41 years old,” Scott said. “If everyone says that they agree that this is the top issue, that we have to make sure that more people are not becoming a victim of these things, why change it? Why disrupt the apple cart, if the apple cart is producing the best results that we’ve seen in a generation?” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump cracks down on homelessness with executive order enabling local governments

      by

      The federal government is seeking to crack down on homelessness in the US, with Donald Trump issuing an executive order to push local governments to remove unhoused people from the streets.The order the US president signed on Thursday will seek the “reversal of federal or state judicial precedents and the termination of consent decrees” that restrict local governments’ ability to respond to the crisis, and redirect funds to support rehabilitation and treatment. The order aims to “restore public order”, saying “endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe”, according to the order.The action comes as the homelessness crisis in the US has significantly worsened in recent years driven by a widespread shortage of affordable housing. Last year, a single-day count, which is a rough estimate, recorded more than 770,000 people experiencing homelessness across the country, the highest figure ever documented.Cities and states have adopted an increasingly punitive approach to homelessness, seeking to push people out of parks and city streets, even when there is no shelter available. The supreme court ruled last year that cities can impose fines and even jail time for unhoused people for sleeping outside after local governments argued some protections for unhoused people prevented them from taking action to reduce homelessness.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told USA Today, which first reported on the executive order, that the president was “delivering on his commitment to Make America Safe Again” and end homelessness.“By removing vagrant criminals from our streets and redirecting resources toward substance abuse programs, the Trump Administration will ensure that Americans feel safe in their own communities and that individuals suffering from addiction or mental health struggles are able to get the help they need,” she said.The president’s order comes after last year’s US supreme court ruling, which was one of the most consequential legal decisions on homelessness in decades in the US.That ruling held that it is not “cruel and unusual punishment” to criminalize camping when there is no shelter available. The case originated in Grants Pass, Oregon, a city that was defending its efforts to prosecute people for sleeping in public.Unhoused people in the US have long faced crackdowns and sweeps, with policies and police practices that result in law enforcement harassment, tickets or jail time. But the ruling supercharged those kinds of aggressive responses, emboldening cities and states to punish encampment residents who have no other options for shelter.In a report last month, the American Civil Liberties Union found that cities across the US have introduced more than 320 bills criminalizing unhoused people, the majority of which have passed. The crackdowns have taken place in Democratic- and Republican-run states alike.Advocates for unhoused people’s rights have long argued that criminalization only exacerbates the housing crisis, shuffling people in and out of jail or from one neighborhood to the next, as they lose their belongings and connections to providers, fall further into debt and wind up in increasingly unsafe conditions.During his campaign last year, Trump used dark rhetoric to talk about the humanitarian crisis, threatening to force people into “tent cities”, raising fears that some of the poorest, most vulnerable Americans could end up in remote locations in settings that resemble concentration camps. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      The Rev William Barber’s ‘moral movement’ confronts Trump’s America. Can it work?

      by

      On 2 June, at St Mark’s Episcopal church in Washington DC, people packed the sanctuary – elders in denim jackets, seminarians in collars, organizers clutching clipboards. Some had come in from North Carolina; others walked from their homes just a few blocks away. The seats were full, so the crowd lined the aisles and leaned against the red-brick walls beneath stained-glass windows that cast streaks of light across the floor.It was the first Moral Monday of the summer – a tradition of weekly, nonviolent protest that began in North Carolina in 2013 and now serves as the beating heart of the Rev William Barber’s national movement to end poverty and systemic injustice. “I am not afraid,” the congregation sang. They clapped in rhythm. They swayed in place. Their voices, layered and lived in, reverberated through the rafters: “I would die for liberation, because I know why I was made.” It was part worship, part invocation, part warning. They folded into the center of the sanctuary as they sang covenants of nonviolence – pledges to neither resist arrest nor retaliate, to remain disciplined and dignified in the face of confrontation. One organizer stepped forward and asked them to consider the gravity of what they were saying. “In every cell of your body,” he said, “do you believe that?”Barber, the co-chair of the revived Poor People’s campaign, a national movement to challenge inequality in all its forms through moral protest and policy change, has spent years preparing people for moments like this. Barber draws on a tradition that views justice as a covenant rather than charity, as a sacred demand to confront moral rot. Right now, that means challenging the Trump administration’s second-term agenda – and the Republican-controlled Congress advancing legislation that would slash Medicaid, food assistance and public education, while simultaneously giving tax breaks to some of the wealthiest Americans – or what Barber has simply called “policy murder”, a wholesale dismantling of services for the poor and vulnerable.But Barber’s battle is both a moral rebellion against Trump’s America and against the deeper architecture of inequality that has survived every administration. His movement doesn’t simply resist a president. It challenges a political theology that weds nationalism to capitalism and cloaks exploitation in scripture. In Barber’s view, Trump isn’t the disease – he’s the symptom of a nation that never fully confronted its sins. “Jesus was not crucified because he was just talking about private sin,” he told me. “He was crucified because he turned over the money tables. That’s where government and religion had come into an unholy relationship, and were robbing from the poor.”View image in fullscreenIn a sermon the day before, Barber had turned to 2 Kings – to four lepers outside a besieged city, caught between certain death and uncertain deliverance. “Why sit we here until we die?” they ask, before rising to move toward the enemy camp. That movement, Barber reminded his audience, is what made the miracle possible. The lepers rose to risk the unknown and found the enemy had already left, leaving behind food, shelter and silver. Deliverance had already come; it just took the marginalized to move first. The US is in its own such moment, Barber said. “This is murder by policy,” he preached, pointing to the $1.1tn in proposed cuts to healthcare, food aid and climate infrastructure. “We cannot stay here and die.”Organizers passed protest signs around the sanctuary like communion: Fund Life, Not Death. Our Faith Demands Justice, Not Policy Murder. Handouts followed: 13.7 million people are at risk of losing health insurance. Eleven million at risk of losing food assistance. Billions redirected from public programs to tax breaks for corporations, defense contractors and deportation forces. Congress was deliberating over what Barber calls a “big, bad, ugly, disgusting, deadly budget”, and they wanted to take a moral stand.The room was intentionally diverse – it’s what Barber calls a fusion movement, rooted in the idea that poor and working people across race, religion and region have a moral force capable of reshaping the nation. They prayed. They assigned roles. Some would march. Some would risk arrest. All would bear witness. Slowly, deliberately, the congregation began to move. First, those in wheelchairs; then the people along the walls peeled off. Then, one section at a time, released with care – no rush, no clamor. They lined up two by two, like they were boarding an ark. It was a practiced procession, not chaos. The organizers had been clear: move like the black-and-white footage you’ve seen, like those who marched before you – with order, with discipline, with conviction.“When politicians and priests bless policies that hurt the poor,” Barber said, “that’s when the prophets have to rise.” For Barber, this is the prophet’s role: to expose, to indict and to force a moral reckoning in the public square. The structure of his movement’s actions, the insistence on grounding resistance in both scripture and strategy, is shaped by a long religious protest tradition in the US. Now, under a second Trump term, with safety nets unraveling and rights under siege, that witness feels urgent again. As the movement experiments with decentralized leadership, more youth recruitment and a sharper digital presence, it will have to decide: is it a movement to awaken the conscience, or to seize the wheel? Can this movement still meet the scale of today’s coordinated assault on democracy, rights and the poor?‘Silence is not an option’Barber met the demonstrators at the corner of East Capitol Street NE and 1st Street SE, where the procession paused before the slow walk towards the steps of the supreme court. He stood with his cane in hand, a white stole slung over his shoulders that read: “Jesus was a poor man.” He joined the group like a hinge between past and present. No microphone. No grand announcement. Just a nod, a steadying breath, and then a turn toward the supreme court.Passersby smiled and posed for selfies, unaware or unbothered by the stakes. The procession kept moving, members singing as they went. The air filled with hymns and the weight of memory. At the court steps, the crowd swelled; marshals implored folks to move closer. They sang battle hymns through the speaker system, a thread of the sacred pulled taut across the concrete. The day was structured to echo the civil rights movement, orderly, solemn and visually potent.When Barber took the mic, he drew on the movement’s rhetorical authority as well. “We gather here not in protest alone,” Barber said, “but in prophetic power. We stand not just as people of faith, but as stewards of moral memory. Injustice has written itself into the budget lines, and silence is not an option when lives hang in the balance of a ledger.” Barber reminded the crowd that the country’s wounds were not just policy failures; they were moral abscesses. “There can be no healing of the soul of America without healing the body,” he said. Not while people are starving. Not while they’re uninsured. Not while injustice is passed off as fiscal responsibility.View image in fullscreenHe said something similar in 2020, in the days after Biden was elected president and many people across the nation released what felt like four years of held breath. Biden called for unity; Barber pushed back. “There has to be division before there can be healing,” he said. In Barber’s theology, peace doesn’t mean calm. It means justice. False unity, he warned, is not reconciliation – it’s complicity. And that is the deeper challenge beneath Barber’s movement: not just to resist one budget, or even one party, but to confront the country’s underlying sickness: its habit of mistaking cruelty for order, and order for peace.‘What will you do with the breath you have left?’“They say they’re cutting waste, fraud and abuse. But what they’re saying is it’s wasteful to lift people, fraudulent to help them live and abusive to make sure they have healthcare,” he said. For a moment, it felt like the church services I’d grown up in. Come on, Barber! a clergyman shouted. Yessuh! a resonant voice rang from the other side of the crowd. By the time Barber started whooping – stretching his syllables as his voice reached a thunderous crescendo – the crowd had been whipped into a passionate holler.Barber told stories of movement members who died without care – Pam in Alabama, Jade in North Carolina – who called him not for comfort, but for commitment. Don’t quit, they said. “They had the courage to fight even while they were dying,” he said. “We ought to have the courage to fight while we’re living.”Then he slowed and asked a simple question to those gathered: “What will you do with the breath you have left?” The question hung in the air. He didn’t wait for an answer. A few days later, he told me why it sticks with him. “That was George Floyd’s cry. That was my brother’s cry – he died in his 60s, waiting on healthcare. That was the cry of people during Covid: ‘I can’t breathe.’ That’s what I hear when I say that,” he told me. “The breath you have left – that’s what you’ve been given. That’s what you owe.”Breath is a gift and a responsibility. “We’re not gonna sit here and let healthcare die,” he said. “We’re not gonna sit here and let living wages die. We’re not gonna sit here and let democracy die. It’s time to live. It’s time to stand. It’s time to speak. To protest. To live justice.” The line echoed down 1st Street. Whether it reached the halls of power was another question.Fusion organizingBarber has always insisted this movement isn’t built for the news cycle. “Movements are not driven by whether the media covers it,” he told me. “They’re driven by whether it’s right. You don’t build fusion coalitions because it’s sexy, you build it because it’s necessary.”The spotlight matters, though. And as the glare has dimmed since 2020, so too has the movement’s leverage in elite policy spaces. For Obery Hendricks, a professor in the department of religion at Columbia University, the tension is theological and tactical. Barber speaks from the Black prophetic tradition, a tradition that calls out injustice with moral clarity. But clarity alone isn’t always enough. “Too often, prophetic rhetoric is co-opted as performance,” Hendricks told me. “It becomes poetry without praxis.”But even when the national spotlight is not focused on the organization, that hasn’t stopped the Poor People’s campaign from lining up in moral opposition to what it sees as destructive policy across the country. “People say, where’s the movement?” Barber told me. “We say, where are you? The movement is here. Maybe you’re just not paying attention.” Fusion organizing in 2025 isn’t theory – it’s practice. Amazon workers marching with choirs in Alabama. Climate activists linking arms with veterans on Capitol Hill. Disability advocates and union reps shaping policy in North Carolina. Barber’s once-local campaign is now connected with movements across the country, from Georgia’s voting rights drives to Los Angeles’s housing struggles.Sometimes, the actions pay off. Inside of St Mark’s, I met Emma Biggs, a childcare advocate from North Carolina who had made the trip to DC for the rally. She had joined similar protests before. In June of last year, she was among those who were arrested inside the state legislature while protesting a looming childcare shortfall. The state legislature had passed a stopgap funding bill by the time protesters were released.To Vaughn A Booker, a scholar of religion and African American history at the University of Pennsylvania, though, the power of Barber’s model lies more in its moral insurgency than the results it produces. “He has this style that’s like a preacher reading out the names on judgment day. He’s not just naming problems. He’s naming people, policies and outcomes,” Booker said. “It lands differently when it comes from the pulpit.” And maybe that’s the point. In an era of institutional drift, moral confrontation remains a kind of clarity. “Moral discourse may not be a dominant mobilizer anymore,” he said. “But that was always the case. The prophets didn’t expect to win. They expected to witness.”View image in fullscreenBarber echoed the sentiment. Bearing moral witness matters even when it doesn’t automatically produce results, because failing to show up at all cedes ground unnecessarily. “A moral fight is one that you have to engage, because not to engage is to risk damage that might not be reversible,” he said. “If a group of politicians were going to crucify voting rights and crucify healthcare, then every crucifixion needs a witness.”Not everyone will be reachable through scripture, though. Whereas nearly half of Americans attended weekly religious services at the height of the civil rights movement, only about 30% of Americans do so now, according to a recent Gallup poll. Barber sees the rising suspicion of moral language, and the growing distance from the church, but he doesn’t see it as an obstacle; rather, he sees an opportunity. “Young people are not leaving the faith because they don’t want justice,” he told me. “They’re leaving because we’ve too often offered them religion without justice, and theology without truth.” So he remains committed to preaching in public, to claiming a tradition that doesn’t just soothe, but disrupts with the intent of building a kind of moral pressure. Barber believes the system has rotted at its core. It’s why he often refers to a sickness in the country’s body, a deterioration of its heart – but he also believes it has the capacity to be reformed, and is drawing on a prophetic tradition to push it towards change. “He’s operating within the system,” Booker told me. “He’s not outside of it burning it down. He’s trying to get the system to live up to its stated values.”Barber’s strategy mirrors that of Martin Luther King Jr a generation before: not to write legislation personally, but to focus enough attention on a moral crisis that the system has to respond. The marches weren’t meant to replace lawmaking, but to expose it – to show where justice had failed, and to make action unavoidable.The campaign’s futureBarber began a labored walk to the Capitol. A woman caught up to him quietly and asked if he had a moment to speak. His eyes were forward, fixed on the entrance. “If you don’t mind,” he said gently, “I’m trying to focus on what I’m doing.” She apologized and nodded, but had to say her piece.She walked beside him and told him that the A was missing from DEI – the A for accessibility. So many movements, she said, leave out people with disabilities. People who walk with a limp. Barber smirked. “Oh, people like me?” he said. The procession stopped and Barber, alongside a small group, descended down the elevator.View image in fullscreenThis is where conviction met cost. At the Capitol rotunda, the group prayed with the purpose of arrest. Suvya Carroll, a disability rights advocate born with cerebral palsy, clutched a Bible. Carroll told Barber she and her friend were there because “people like us always get left out. But we believe this movement sees us.” As Capitol police moved in, she was arrested along with Barber and five others. Barber later reflected on Carroll’s arrest in particular: “That child looked the Capitol police in the eye and said: ‘I’m ready.’ And we all prayed. Right there, in the middle of that dome. And I thought, Lord, if this doesn’t matter, what does?”The arrest was symbolic – the third time Moral Monday activists had been detained since April – but it also surfaced a deeper truth. The witness came from many, but the weight still fell on one. When Barber turned toward the elevator, others followed. And once inside the rotunda, all eyes returned to him. As questions swirl around the future of his organization, a harder one remains: how long can a movement built on moral clarity lean on a single voice? Barber’s voice remains central, but the campaign’s future may depend on how well it distributes that moral authority across a broader base. If the theology is prophetic, the structure has to be plural.Barber’s protest is grounded not in outcome, but in obligation. He’s asked: what will you do with the breath you have left? For Barber, that’s not just a question. It’s a way to keep moving. “This country gets amnesia,” he told me. “We forget. That’s why prophetic work is not about a moment. It’s about building a memory that resists the lie.” Even though he’s become a brand, he’s trying to build a witness. “I don’t want people to follow me, I want them to follow the truth,” he said.“Prayer,” he likes to say, “is never the end of protest. It’s the beginning of a demand.” That day in the rotunda, his prayer echoed through marble. Maybe it reached no one. Maybe it moved someone. But it was heard.That’s the point of prophecy. Not certainty. Witness. More

    • 188 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Medicaid recipients fear ‘buzzsaw cuts’ for Trump’s agenda: ‘We’re not going to be alive forever’

      by

      At the age of 62, Marya Parral knows that her, and her husband’s, years of being able to care for their two developmentally disabled sons are numbered, and so they have done everything they can to ensure their children can continue to live independently.For their oldest, Ian, that’s meant placing him in a program on an organic farm that caters to people diagnosed with autism. For Joey, their youngest, who has both autism and Down syndrome, Parral has found a caregiver who can help him deliver newspapers and run errands around their community of Ocean City, New Jersey.Parral said none of this would be affordable without help from Medicaid, the federal government’s insurance program for poor and disabled Americans. But this week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a budget framework that would make deep cuts to the program, and Parral worries her sons will lose what she has worked so hard to build.“We’re not going to be alive forever. We’re trying to set up a life for them, but that entire life that we’re working so hard to set up for them is dependent on Medicaid,” Parral said. “So it’s really devastating to think about cuts.”Producing a budget is the first step in the Republican-controlled Congress’s drive to enact legislation that will pay for Donald Trump’s priorities. House lawmakers will now spend weeks working to write and pass a bill that is expected to approve $4.5tn in extended tax cuts, as well as funding for Trump’s plan for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To pay for it, Republicans are considering a rollback of the federal social safety net, particularly Medicaid, which has nearly 80 million enrollees in all 50 states. The budget plan proposes an $880bn reduction in funding for the insurance over the next 10 years, an amount that experts warn would hollow out the program and have ripple effects across the entire American healthcare system.Megan Cole Brahim, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health and an expert on Medicaid, said the cut was the largest ever proposed, and if enacted would “have far-reaching impacts not just for those who rely on Medicaid, but for entire communities and economies”.“These changes mean millions of Americans – including the low-income, elderly, persons with disabilities, children – will lose health insurance coverage,” she said. “Others may see significant reductions in benefits or limited access to care. The impact on hospitals and health systems will be significant, particularly for safety-net and rural hospitals, which are already on the brink of closure. Patient revenues will fall, uncompensated care will rise. There will be staff layoffs and site closures.”John Driscoll, a healthcare executive and chair of the board of UConn Health in Connecticut, said: “The scale of the buzzsaw cuts to Medicaid would undermine every hospital’s ability to actually support its mission to care for the community, and would be a dangerous cut to the nursing-home infrastructure in the country.”Republican leaders backed the cuts to Medicaid, as well as to similar programs such as one that helps poor Americans afford food, as a way to mollify lawmakers in their party who want the US’s large budget deficit addressed. Still, not everyone is pleased. As the budget was being debated, eight Republican representatives, some of whom Democrats are keen to unseat in next year’s midterm elections, wrote to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, warning that their districts’ large Hispanic populations would be harmed.“Slashing Medicaid would have serious consequences, particularly in rural and predominantly Hispanic communities where hospitals and nursing homes are already struggling to keep their doors open,” they said.All eight ultimately voted for the resolution, but the dissent may be a warning sign for the budget’s prospects of enactment, particularly in the House, where the GOP has a mere three-seat majority. It also remains unclear whether Republicans will try to pass all of Trump’s priorities in one bill, or split them into two.The GOP has made clear they want to fully pay for the extension of Trump’s tax cuts, and Elyssa Schmier, vice-president of government relations for advocacy group MomsRising, said Medicaid and social safety programs are the party’s prime targets for cost savings.“If you’re not going to go after, say, the Pentagon budget, if they’re only going to go to some of these big mandatory spending programs, there’s only so many places that Republicans feel that they can go,” she said.In the days since the budget’s approval, Johnson and Trump have scrambled to downplay the possibility of slashing Medicaid, insisting they intend only to root out “fraud, waste and abuse.”“The president said over and over and over: ‘We’re not going to touch social security, Medicare or Medicaid.’ We’ve made the same commitment,” Johnson told CNN in an interview.Democrats have little leverage to stop the budget, which can be passed with simple majorities in both chambers. But the Democratic senator Ruben Gallego warned that gutting the social safety net to extend tax cuts that have mostly benefited the rich will alienate voters who sided with the GOP last November.“It will be on Donald Trump and Republicans, the fact that he’s going to side with the ultra-rich versus the working poor,” said Gallego, who won election to his seat in Arizona even as Trump captured the state’s electoral votes. “Families that are barely making a living, scratching a living, they’re now going to get kicked off healthcare to give tax cuts to the mega-rich.”The proposed cut to Medicaid would remove billions of dollars in funding from congressional districts nationwide that are represented by lawmakers from both parties, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress.In California’s San Joaquin valley, the Democratic representative Jim Costa’s district would lose the third-largest amount of funding, according to the data, and Medicaid coverage would be imperiled for more than 450,000 residents.“This reckless budget prioritizes the wealthy while devastating those who need help the most,” Costa said. “I voted no because this resolution is bad for our valley and a threat to the wellbeing of the people I represent.” More

    • 225 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      A capitalist cheerleader wrote the US’s hottest new self-help book. Surprised? | Adam H Johnson and David Sirota

      by

      As economic misery in the US persists, the country’s self-help industry has become a multibillion-dollar bonanza. If one reads enough of that industry’s happiness catechism – including its latest bestseller, Build the Life You Want – one realizes that all of the advice revolves around a core set of directives: focus on the self rather than the collective, redeploy hours to different priorities, spend less time at work, build deeper personal relationships – and, by implication, buy more self-help books.But if “time is money”, then in America’s survival-of-the-richest form of capitalism, time-intensive remedies are mostly for the affluent – that is, those with a big enough savings account to de-risk career changes; those with enough income to afford gym memberships, hobbies and excursions; those with enough paid leave and cash to enjoy the best vacations; those with enough resources to employ personal aides to do paperwork, chores and cleaning; those with enough workplace leverage to secure more hours off for introspection, friend time and outdoor adventures.Erasure of privilege disparity and presumption of wealth has turned most self-help products into a series of Stuart Smalley affirmations for the already and nearly comfortable. But while such class bias pervades the happiness industry, it is particularly egregious coming from the author of the aforementioned Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks, hardly a disinterested bystander in this epoch of economic anxiety and its attendant unhappiness.As the former $2.7m-a-year head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) – one of the country’s most prominent conservative thinktanks – Brooks spent a decade sowing the despair he now insists he is here to cure.Brooks’ career turn from let-them-eat-cake ideologue to I-feel-your-pain happiness prophet may seem bizarre. But he is walking the well-trodden – and lucrative – path from arsonist to firefighter. It is a trail previously blazed by financial crisis-era deregulators now platformed as credible economic experts, and by Iraq war proponents reimagined as leaders of a pro-democracy resistance.In Brooks’ case, he led an organization that repeatedly worked to help its billionaire and corporate donors prevent working-class Americans from securing the better standard of living, universal benefits and leisure time that undergird the countries consistently reporting the world’s highest levels of happiness.Citing a colleague’s book deriding Americans as “takers”, Brooks insisted the central crisis facing the nation is not a notoriously thin social safety net – but politicians who “offer one government benefit after another to our citizens”, complaining that this “has made a majority of Americans into net beneficiaries of the welfare state”.He declared war on “labor unions and state employees demanding that others pay for their early retirements, lifetime benefits, and lavish state pensions”. Under his leadership, the AEI railed against “entitlement” programs, tried to privatize and gut social security, opposed Medicaid expansion, opposed free college, opposed rent control and fought against free healthcare.Now, Brooks’ pivot to happiness guru is disseminating that political agenda via the soft agitprop of self-discovery and self-improvement. Along the way, Brooks is being boosted by (among others) the Atlantic, NPR and Oprah Winfrey (who is listed as co-author of the book, although in reality she only writes a handful of introductory paragraphs to each chapter) – together the most coveted media seals of approval for liberal readers whose purported ideals Brooks spent his career grinding into political dust, but who are now enriching him with $30 book purchases.On its face, Build the Life You Want offers a mix of reasonable – if banal – life advice, parables, reasonably clear distillations of complex philosophical and linguistic concepts, and synthesized academic research. The book engages in pop metaphysics that limits its ambition for the more science- and liberal-minded from the get-go, letting us know that achieving “happiness” – as some final stage of contentment – is impossible. But, Brooks insists, “we can be happier” in relative terms.“Unlike other books you may have read,” he tells us, “this one is not going to exhort you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This isn’t a book about willpower ​​– it’s about knowledge, and how to use it.”Which is all to say, this book is absolutely about how to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and follow concrete steps to self-contentment, but doing so with some reputable sociology and psychology studies as your guide rather than the quasi-fascist bromides about being an alpha dog one typically hears from the likes of Jordan Peterson. But the general motivational tone and reactionary political premises are the same.The book kicks off in earnest with a scrappy, can-do story of self-determination on the part of Brooks’ Spanish mother-in-law, “Albina”, who is used as a template for self-fulfillment.In the introduction, titled Albina’s Secret, we are told that, after years of living with an abusive husband and a fraught domestic life, “One day, when Albina was forty-five, something changed for her. For reasons that were not clear to her friends and family, her outlook on life seemed to shift. It’s not that she was suddenly less lonely, or that she mysteriously came into money, but for some reason, she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life. The most obvious change she made was to enroll in college to become a teacher.”Brooks asserts that the primary change that propelled Albina toward midlife happiness was her shift from worrying about “the outside world” to looking inward.“She switched,” Brooks tells us, from “wishing others were different, to working on the one person she could control: herself.”Personal responsibility is a hallmark of the self-help genre, and Brooks’ breezy title has this convention in spades. In his telling, changing “the outside world” as a pathway to peace and happiness is a fool’s errand. Like virtually all self-help books, we are told the road to self-satisfaction is found within – not with our circumstances, but how we respond to our circumstances.This is a convention of the capitalist self-help genre for one obvious reason: it requires nothing in the “outside world” to change. And once one gets into the messiness of “changing the outside world”, one ventures into political theory. This is uncomfortable and can’t be put into an earth-toned 700-page book that rich Atlantic subscribers will want to buy.Albina’s solution, Brooks tells us, wasn’t to find her local underground socialist party or union headquarters and join a political movement to combat the Franco regime, or to try to materially improve the lot of other women sharing her gender-based suffering – it was to ignore “the outside world” and instead focus on a career shift and a switch in attitude.Like a lot of self-help advice, this works on a micro scale. Surely, it’s too great an ask to demand a middle-aged mother in an economically precarious situation join the fight against the Franco regime. But Brooks is constitutionally uninterested in the forces of patriarchy and capitalism that co-authored the misery – not because they’re irrelevant to his self-help brand of anti-politics, but because of it.Self-help makes grand claims about human progress, it offers advice to the masses on how they can improve their lot – it is inherently political by its nature. But Brooks does not tell us that we can be empowered by making demands of the powerful, or joining a union or a political movement, but – how else – by buying his book.This is Brooks’ big trick: his happiness recommendations presume a society that can and will never change from the one he helped craft in Washington.In today’s AEI-sculpted America, millions are deprived of the building blocks of happiness such as guaranteed healthcare, free higher education, paid family leave, workplace empowerment, retirement security and a host of other social democratic pillars that sustain the world’s happiest societies. Unwilling to allow for the possibility that such conditions can or should change in the United States, Brooks nonetheless presents happiness as an achievable self-centric project inside the dystopia he helped create.Build the Life You Want follows Brooks’ first foray into the happiness industry – a book called From Strength to Strength that is about “finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life”.That monograph argues that because of the way humans’ brains change, one’s professional decline begins much earlier than we expect. The book suggests that workers in midlife should therefore move into work roles that require less cognitive innovation (fluid intelligence) and more teaching of acquired wisdom (crystallized intelligence).It is an important finding that might prompt a broader discussion of policies that could account for this inevitability – retraining programs, funding for midlife career education, universal portable benefits that allow for job switches and earlier retirement ages. But ever the conservative ideologue, Brooks eschews all that, instead channeling the old conservative trope that failing to change professional trajectory – or being demoralized by the work treadmill – is just a mental flaw in one’s personal outlook.“Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things,” he writes, in a call for a mass change of attitude.What prevents necessary career shifts that might lead to happiness, Brooks asserts, is “self-objectification, workaholism, and most of all success addiction that chain us to our declining fluid intelligence curve.”“What do I want to do with my time this week to cultivate the relationships that will result in that end scenario?” Brooks says he asks himself in order to imagine an existence of stronger personal bonds. “I might make the decision to leave work on time, leave my work at the office, get home for dinner, and watch a movie after dinner with my family.”In this dreamscape, most Americans get to choose when they work, and under what conditions. Nowhere in Brooks’ world of lanyards does he consider that Americans working ever-longer hours and ever-more jobs may have less to do with career ambition than with simply trying to earn enough to pay the ever-increasing bills – bills that fund the ballooning profits of the kind of donors who can pay Brooks’ upwards of $125,000 speaking fee or write six-figure checks to outfits like the AEI.This same ideology carries into Build the Life You Want, where Brooks repeatedly hints at a deeper theme of overwork and soul-sucking labor, but avoids the obvious indicators and instead moves on to sell his brand of self-analysis – with little consideration of systemic problems.Recapping researchers documenting how humans are usually good at categorizing their own positive associations, Brooks notes that “activities that were most negative and least positive were commuting and spending time with one’s boss”.He caps this off with a joke: “Obviously, then, it’s definitely best not to commute with your boss.” It’s clear that people’s least favorite activities are related to working dreary, miserable jobs.Does this prompt Brooks to apologize for leading the fight against proposals for government-sponsored healthcare that could end the employer-based system and free Americans to search for more fulfilling jobs without fear of losing access to medical services?No, it’s the subject of a wisecrack and he moves on.This isn’t to say the book is uninterested in “careers” – it very much is. It just doesn’t care much for jobs, or the masses who occupy work for work’s sake, to stave off starvation and homelessness – what novelist Ursula K Le Guin called kleggich, or “drudgery”, work that the vast majority of people do day in and day out for survival.The target demographic for Brooks is the aggressively middle and upper class, so what matters is how “happy” the job makes them rather than whether the worker has carpal tunnel syndrome or is subject to sexual harassment, precarity and a host of problems that affect anyone who can’t afford the luxury of lifehacking their happiness as Brooks prescribes.In its characteristically fawning profile of Brooks as “part social scientist, part self-help coach, part motivational speaker, and part spiritual guru”, Politico recently cast his journey as a departure from politics and ideology.“Brooks has undergone one of the more unusual professional transformations that Washington has witnessed in recent decades,” the Beltway news outlet wrote. “His most recent transformation also represents a type of retreat – away from a conservative movement that once held him up as a model of its future.”Brooks himself leans into this assertion, arguing that “I’m not a player in the conservative movement” and adding that his career in the conservative movement “is just not relevant – this stuff isn’t relevant anymore”.But Brooks’ professional trek is less a “transformation” – and less shocking – if one considers that his happiness books are ideological manifestos shrouded in the veil of social science. His new literature is the kind of academia-flavored politics that has long been the central product – and sleight of hand – of the almost $70m thinktank that Brooks ran for a decade. (The AEI still lists Brooks as one of its scholars.)From its origin, the AEI has depicted itself as a staid, nonpartisan, quasi-academic institution, even though it has always been a lobbying front for rightwing forces – a one-stop shop where corporate America can advance its ideological and political interests under the auspices of academic research and policy-shaping.Though not mentioned in the AEI’s official history, President Harry Truman shut down the organization in 1949 because it was illegally operating as a lobbying front for the railroad industry. It falsely called itself an “educational association” while sharing a physical address with a rail lobby. Though the AEI’s donors remain anonymous to this day (a practice frowned upon in the non-profit world for obvious reasons), the donors that have been revealed through reporting include fossil fuel extractors, labor abusers, opioid pushers, dictators, weapons makers and big tech giants – all of which have an interest in shaping US political discourse, under the guise of seemingly nonpartisan empiricism.The bulk of Build the Life You Want is harmless enough, synthesizing sociological and psychological theories and studies from the past 50 years or so, from personality sorting questionnaires to scientifically suspect, but persistently popular, reliance on brain activity research. But Brooks then weaponizes that research and scholarship to create ideological storylines.The book stresses the importance of “earned success”, which is Brooks’ personal conservative spin on “learned helplessness” – a concept popularized in the 1970s by Martin Seligman, the so-called “father of positive psychology”.“Earned success instead gives you a sense of accomplishment and professional efficacy,” Brooks writes. “The best way to enjoy earned success is to find ways to get better at your job, whether that leads to promotions and higher pay or not.”Hard work for its own sake will make us happier is a storyline that couldn’t have been better articulated by AEI scholars, who insinuate that Americans’ big problem is their alleged lack of work ethic, not the rapaciousness of the thinktank’s donors.Paraphrasing – or rather, misreading – Viktor Frankl, the author of the 1946 Holocaust memoir and social psychology text Man’s Search for Meaning, Brooks writes that “the common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.”Later, building off Frankl’s works, Brooks repeats a major theme of the book: circumstances aren’t what matter, our response to them is.“You can’t choose your feelings,” Brooks tells us. “But you can choose your reaction to your feelings. What [Frankl] was saying is … If someone you love gets sick, you will be afraid, but you can choose how you express this fear, and how it affects your life.”But if a loved one is sick, the most significant way one can choose how it “affects your life” is if said loved one has quality, inexpensive healthcare – something Brooks spent more than 10 years working to make sure the poor can’t have. What would the average person rather have in the face of an earth-shattering family illness: a squishy life guideline to managing emotions or quality healthcare?Obviously the latter, but for Brooks, only the former is on offer.This “tough it out” ethos is consistent with Brooks’ decades of advocating the evisceration of programs designed to help the poor survive – all to extend “happiness” and prosperity to the masses.“It is a simple fact that the United States is becoming an entitlement state,” he wrote in a 2012 Wall Street Journal op-ed that depicted social security, welfare programs and disability benefits as “impoverishing the lives of the growing millions dependent on unearned resources”.“The good news is that we have a golden opportunity to rein in entitlements,” he said, invoking Washington-speak for reducing social security benefits, which the AEI has proposed. “By reforming entitlements and the tax system instead of extracting more money with higher tax rates, the economy could be reoriented away from unearned transfers to earned wages. This would make the economy fairer and sounder. And in the process it could build a happier country for ourselves and our children.”If it seems deeply cynical to use pop psychology and pop morality of “earning” money and creating “happiness” to argue for lowering taxes for the rich and cutting social programs for the poor, that’s because it is.Brooks now insists he is no longer manufacturing such political opinion, but his old austerity activism shines through in his happiness literature.The most explicit example is in his book From Strength to Strength. As part of a passage headlined “The benefits of weakness, pain, and loss”, Brooks cites Frankl to suggest that a world of hardship may actually be desirable, because people “could find the meaning of their lives, and personal growth, in all kinds of suffering”.Perhaps this explains why Brooks’ new iteration as a happiness guru includes no mea culpa for his past career explicitly advocating for the austerity that sows so much desperation. If suffering is a catalyst for personal growth, then why should he offer contrition?The mystery, then, isn’t why he is so unapologetic and still on this trajectory (answer: it is lucrative). The most vexing question is: why are so many liberals falling for this act?This is a man who is deeply uninterested in – and, indeed, actively hostile to – creating the conditions that allow anyone who isn’t in his class status the capacity to be safe and secure, much less happy, and he is now one of the country’s most prominent gurus for finding “happiness”.For the better part of a decade, Brooks hired and curated the careers of documented racists like Charles Murray, climate denialists like Mark Perry and ”replacement theory” advocates such as JD Vance. Now he’s doing a calm, professorial routine about how we all need to take a practical, science-driven path to being happier?This should be a scandal, but Brooks frames it in the right Atlantic-ese, so most just nod along.For a book about a life well lived, Build the Life You Want is remarkably short on objective discussions of ethics or virtue. All moral content exists entirely inside the head of the reader or the authors’ examples of happy people (what makes you feel inspired, what our subject found fulfilling), with zero discussion about what is objectively virtuous or what can be done as a community rather than as an individual – fitting for a career funded by ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers and heirs to the Walmart fortune.Ultimately, this is where all of these class-flattening, middlebrow self-help discussions of happiness fall apart: they treat “happiness” as the center of the moral universe rather than virtue, which is to say, the politics of maximizing others’ happiness over one’s own in a systematic way, rather than as one-off instances of bourgeois charity.But, of course, serial killers are “happy” murdering, Charles Koch is “happy” extracting profit from low-wage workers, and Saudi dictators are “happy” hosting cocaine-fueled yacht parties and buying soccer teams. So what? Being happy is not inherently good or bad. What matters is building systems of justice, welfare and safety that allow the maximum number of people to be secure and healthy.If granting the average working person rights to a universal basic standard of living ends up creating more happiness, then all the better.But without such foundational rights – rights Brooks has spent his career opposing – what is “happiness” if not an abstract privilege of those who can afford it?
      Adam H Johnson is the co-host of the podcast Citations Needed and a writer for the Substack newsletter The Column
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
      A version of this article first appeared in the Lever More

    • 200 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on women and the pandemic: what happened to building back better? | Editorial

      by

      One year into the pandemic, women have little cause to celebrate International Women’s Day tomorrow, and less energy to battle for change. Men are more likely to die from Covid-19. But women have suffered the greatest economic and social blows. They have taken the brunt of increased caregiving, have been more likely to lose their jobs and have seen a sharp rise in domestic abuse.In the UK, women did two-thirds of the extra childcare in the first lockdown, and were more likely to be furloughed. In the US, every one of the 140,000 jobs lost in December belonged to a woman: they saw 156,000 jobs disappear, while men gained 16,000. But white women actually made gains, while black and Latina women – disproportionately in jobs that offer no sick pay and little flexibility – lost out. Race, wealth, disability and migration status have all determined who is hit hardest. Previous experience suggests that the effects of health crises can be long-lasting: in Sierra Leone, over a year after Ebola broke out, 63% of men had returned to work but only 17% of women.The interruption to girls’ education is particularly alarming: Malala Fund research suggests that 20 million may never return to schooling. The United Nations Population Fund warns that there could be an extra 13 million child marriages over the next decade, and 7 million more unplanned pregnancies; both provision of and access to reproductive health services has been disrupted. In the US, Ohio and Texas exploited disease control measures to reduce access to abortions. The UN has described the surge in domestic violence which began in China and swept around the world as a “shadow pandemic”. Research has even suggested that the pandemic may lead to more restrictive ideas about gender roles, with uncertainty promoting conservatism.Coronavirus has not created inequality or misogyny. It has exacerbated them and laid them bare. Structural problems such as the pay gap, as well as gendered expectations, explain why women have taken on more of the extra caregiving. The pandemic’s radicalising effect has echoes of the #MeToo movement. Women knew the challenges they faced, but Covid has confronted them with unpalatable truths at both intimate and institutional levels.In doing so, it has created an opportunity to do better. Germany has given parents an extra 10 days paid leave to cover sickness or school and nursery closures, and single parents 20. Czech authorities have trained postal workers to identify potential signs of domestic abuse. But the deeper task is to rethink our flawed economies and find ways to reward work that is essential to us all. So far, there are precious few signs of building back better.Around 70% of health and social care workers globally are female, and they are concentrated in lower-paid, lower-status jobs. They deserve a decent wage. The 1% rise offered to NHS workers in the UK is an insult. The government also needs to bail out the childcare sector: without it, women will not return to work. It has not done equality impact assessments on key decisions – and it shows. The budget has admittedly earmarked £19m for tackling domestic violence, but Women’s Aid estimates that £393m is needed. And the UK is slashing international aid at a time when spending on services such as reproductive health is more essential than ever. Nonetheless, as a donor, it should at least press recipient governments to prioritise women in their recovery plans.Overworked and undervalued women have more awareness than ever of the need for change, and less capacity to press for it. Men too must play their part. Some have recognised more fully the demands of childcare and housework, and seen the potential benefits of greater involvement at home. Significant “use it or lose it” paternity leave might help to reset expectations both in families and the workplace. There were never easy solutions, and many look harder than ever. But the pandemic has shown that we can’t carry on like this. More