Society

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Solidarity and strategy: the forgotten lessons of truly effective protest

      by

      ‘Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote in his 1777 essay Of the First Principles of Government. Centuries later, his observation still holds. Despite having numbers on our side, the vast majority of people continue to be dominated by a small subset of the population. Why?Today, an oligarchic minority rules because they have extreme wealth. The 2022 World Inequality Report found that the richest 10% today take over 52% of all income, leaving the poorest half just 8.5%. The same year, the bottom half of US citizens, or more than 160 million people, held a mere 2% of the country’s total wealth. An upper class owns most of the land and capital, which allows them, in turn, to exert control over politics and pass on enormous fortunes to their offspring, effectively establishing a modern-day aristocracy.In opposition to the power of money stands the power of the many – at least in theory. In practice, things are more complicated. As Hume noted long ago, power does not flow from sheer numbers alone. What matters is not merely absolute numbers but organised numbers. Without solidarity and organisation, numerical advantage doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t matter if there are thousands of workers and only a handful of bosses if those workers lack a union, or if there are millions of citizens and one dictator if people are too atomised and afraid to try to topple the regime.Yet history has shown time and again that even a proportionally small number of people, if they are well organised, can have an outsized effect. People getting organised is what brought down slavery and Jim Crow, outlawed child labour in the US and elsewhere, and overthrew the legal subjugation of women. If it wasn’t for people acting in concert, universal suffrage would not exist, and neither would the eight-hour workday or the weekend. There would be no entitlement to basic wages, unemployment insurance, or social services, including public education. It would still be a crime to be gay or trans. Women would still be under the thumb of their husbands and at the mercy of sexist employers, and abortion would never have been legalised, however tenuously. Disabled people would lack basic civil rights. The environment would be totally unprotected and even more polluted. Without collective action, colonised people would never have ousted their oppressors, Indigenous people would not have survived attacks from genocidal settlers, and apartheid would not have been overthrown.Often, the powerful like to take credit for social change after the fact, portraying progress as the inevitable result of economic development and enlightened, beneficent leadership. We praise President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for forging the New Deal, with its wealth of social programmes and labour protections, instead of paying tribute to the militant labour movement that forced his administration’s hand, inflicting real costs on bosses and investors through thousands of work stoppages, picket lines and strikes. Similarly, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not come about because of Lyndon B Johnson’s bravery, but rather because a militant and well-organised minority fought boldly against a hostile and often violent majority, pushing them to shift their behaviours, if not their beliefs.Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the labour movement and the civil rights movement had a complex relationship, but ultimately collaboration strengthened them both. The 1963 March on Washington was a march for “jobs and freedom”, and many of the signs held aloft during that historic gathering bore the stamp of the trade unions that helped fund the event and provided critical logistical support. In the decades that followed, there was a steep decline in the membership bases of unions and civic associations, as the right wing began a concerted campaign to undermine their legal ability to organise.Scholars have since documented the way the late 20th century was, for the activist left, characterised by a shift to a shallow, professional and often philanthropically funded model of “advocacy”, one that elevates self-appointed leaders and elite experts to speak on behalf of constituencies to whom they are not directly accountable. Rather than organising people to fight for themselves, these groups promote professionals who attempt to exert influence inside the halls of power. Instead of protests, they publish white papers; in place of strikes, they circulate statements; instead of cultivating solidarity, they seek access to decision-makers.These kinds of elite strategies can occasionally produce positive results, but the approach is often counterproductive, and certainly not democratic. This top-down approach puts its faith in the persuasive abilities of a tiny few, and denies the fact that politics is a power struggle – and that engaging and organising more people gives your position more leverage.The sociologist Theda Skocpol uses the phrase “diminished democracy” to describe this shift from membership to management-led initiatives. A similar trend of diminishing democracy is apparent in the growing number of people who think of themselves as allies or activists, but who are not connected to political organisations. Millions of concerned citizens support social justice causes – they want an end to racism, a shift toward ecological sustainability, better treatment for workers, and so on – and they raise awareness by sharing on social media, committing random acts of kindness, voting for progressive candidates and showing up at rallies. And yet, they are not actually organised.The diminished organisational capacity in American civic life is reflected in the weakness of social movements that appear, on the surface, to be robust. The 21st century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects. On 15 February 2003, across the world, an estimated 10 million people came out in opposition to the impending war in Iraq. Since then, in the US, protests have only become bigger. In 2017, the Women’s March, held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, attracted an estimated 5 million people, taking part in at least 400 actions worldwide, from large cities to small towns. In the autumn of 2019, teenagers called for a global climate strike, which inspired more than 6 million people to protest at 4,500 locations in 150 countries. In 2020, the protests against racism and police brutality continued the trend, rapidly becoming the largest movement in the country’s history. After the murder of George Floyd, an estimated 15 to 26 million people demonstrated nationwide over a one-month period.Of course, there is much to cheer about here, especially when people move from the sidelines to the streets. During the anti-police brutality protests of 2020, half of those who protested reported that it was their first time ever doing so.View image in fullscreenBut we’ve seen again and again that size alone doesn’t guarantee success. President George W Bush dismissed the anti-war actions as a “focus group”, and barrelled ahead with an illegal war that would cost more than 1 million lives; protesters never unleashed the kind of sustained resistance that played a role in ending the war in Vietnam. The Women’s March protests were meaningful and inspiring to the participants, and offered a vital outlet for dissent that fed the electoral energy that deposed Donald Trump, but failed to deeply shift policy or the patriarchal status quo. The youth leaders of the global climate strike hoped for something more confrontational – teenage organiser implored adult allies to walk off the job and escalate the fight – but the few grownups who skipped work didn’t do so in a coordinated fashion. If the adults had organised as the teenagers did and halted business as usual around the world, more might have come of it. The racial justice protests of 2020 were historic and changed the terms of the national debate, and many local groups and electoral campaigns harnessed the movement’s momentum to important effect – but the scale of these victories hardly matches the massive outcry and depth of public support the numbers in the streets indicate. What might have happened had a larger fraction of the tens of millions who demonstrated been channelled into member-based organisations to work toward common goals?Elsewhere in the world we see a similar problem. The protests of the Arab spring brought out huge numbers of people across the Middle East, from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Syria. The numbers sparked significant political consequences in some cases, but the lack of organisation around clear alternatives meant that the results were not necessarily improvements. Syria devolved into a devastating and protracted civil war; Egypt saw its authoritarian leader resign, only to eventually be replaced by a military dictatorship; Tunisia was the lone nation in the region that adopted democracy, but a decade after the 2011 protests, its president was already reconsolidating power, expanding his executive powers, and diminishing checks and balances, undermining the reforms that the revolution initiated.Uprisings can sometimes create a mirage of popular power, but without the organisation, strategy and vision necessary to influence what follows, the presence of large numbers is insufficient to produce transformative results, leaving more disciplined and mercenary formations to fill the void.It’s worth lingering on this dilemma, because it is tempting to think that the problem is that our movements aren’t big enough. This is where the question of organisation comes in. It’s not enough to pursue numbers alone. If material transformation is your goal, it may well be better to have a dozen staunch supporters than 1,000 fair-weather friends; 100 dedicated organisers will probably accomplish more than 100,000 email contacts or retweets.Consider what it took to compose and deliver a petition two centuries ago. In 1839, the London Working Men’s Association presented a People’s Charter to the British parliament, demanding electoral reforms including universal male suffrage and annual elections. They gathered more than 1,280,000 names, representing workers of every imaginable occupation and background, on a massive scroll that was three miles long. Simply transporting it across town was a feat that demonstrated the dedication and ingenuity of the ringleaders, and the depth of popular support. When the petition was rejected by parliament, public outcry inspired organisers to try again. They presented a second charter in May 1842, signed by more than 3 million people, which was also ignored, and then a third petition delivered in 1848. Today, the UK parliament’s official website recounts this history, noting that while the Chartist movement formally disbanded before it succeeded, it helped catalyse change, including the electoral reform bills of 1867 and 1884, and that by 1918 “five of the Chartists’ six demands had been achieved”. Today, a million virtual petition signatures are an indication of good digital marketing skills, not the devotion of the organisers or the signatories to a cause.View image in fullscreenThis is why labour unions are so critically important. They organise people to come together in the real world and to engage in a series of collective actions that ultimately can’t be ignored. At their best, unions facilitate collective discipline and long-haul dedication, enabling people to use a clear form of leverage: the withholding of labour.To make a real and lasting mark, transformative solidarity must involve expanding the number of supporters while also strengthening the relationships between participants. Consider the civil rights movement. Today, everyone knows about the Montgomery bus boycott led by Rosa Parks, but few realise it lasted 381 days, and we rarely acknowledge the years of organising that laid the groundwork, nor do we recall earlier efforts that helped hone the boycott in Montgomery, including the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953. Similarly, we have vague inklings that the suffragettes struggled to secure the right to vote, but we often fail to grasp the tireless decades of meetings, planning and petitioning, or we forget the fact that their tactics included property destruction: bombing, arson and breaking windows. These organisers didn’t confine themselves to civil debate, or seek unity with racist and patriarchal authorities who viewed Black people and women as subhuman. They engaged in an unremitting, high-stakes confrontation.An excellent example of the power of radical imagination in building transformative solidarity is the movement for disability justice. The idea that disabled people occupy a distinct social category first began to take shape amid the large-scale social changes of the 19th-century industrial era. This was the period when workers began to see themselves as a cohesive group with a unique form of social power, and when women and also gay people, particularly gay men, began to understand themselves in new ways.Something similar was true of disabled people. Of course, mentally and physically impaired people have always existed, but the nature of the barriers and prejudice disabled people face, as well as the ways disability is understood, have changed as underlying conditions have evolved. While religious superstition and persecution of disabled people were common during the middle ages, preindustrial economies also permitted many people with a disability to contribute to their household’s economic survival; they lived and worked alongside family members at home or in nearby farms and workshops, doing tasks that their bodies could accomplish. As production industrialised, this ceased to be the case. Piecework and factory lines demanded rote precision, and people’s bodies were increasingly valued for their ability to make precise mechanical movements. “Industrial capitalism thus created not only a class of proletarians but also a new class of ‘disabled’ who did not conform to the standard worker’s body and whose labour-power was effectively erased, excluded from paid work,” observe scholars Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra. “As a result, disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem and a justification emerged for segregating them out of mainstream life and into a variety of institutions, including workhouses, asylums, prisons, colonies and special schools.”In a world of rapidly increasing inequality and cutthroat competition, disability came to signify dependence and inferiority as eugenicist ideas gained ground. Social Darwinism, a popular form of eugenics thinking in the 19th century, rationalised discrimination against people with physical and mental impairments as well as other marginalised populations, to whom disabilities were attributed. Women, Black people, Jewish people, gay people and immigrants were all said to lack the physical and mental capacities required for full equality and inclusion – they were emotional, feeble-minded, degenerate, diseased and so on. Sadly, members of these groups too often reinforced the ableist stigma, distancing themselves from disabled people in an attempt to assert their full humanity and prove their relative worth.Given these pervasive prejudices and other barriers, it’s no wonder solidarity was slow to build among (and with) disabled people. And yet, if there is any oppressed group that has numbers on its side, it ispeople with disabilities, who make up the world’s largest minority – and a growing one, given the fact that every able-bodied person lucky to live long enough faces the prospect of joining those ranks. (One might imagine that would be grounds for a robust alliance of the able-bodied and disabled, yet the typical attitude of the able-bodied toward disabled people remains pity, not solidarity.)In the 1970s, the disability justice movement took off in earnest when people began to apply insights from the movement for racial equality to their own lives: perhaps they too were part of a constituency that was also entitled to civil rights? The mere possibility of a world that embraced every individual, regardless of physical or mental ability or health, provided motivation.Part of the challenge, in those early days, was that many disabled people didn’t necessarily identify as such. Instead, they saw themselves as individuals with distinctive embodiments or medical conditions. It wasn’t obvious to people with different impairments that they were part of the same “Us”. For solidarity to develop between a deaf person, a blind person, a person with cerebral palsy, a person with polio, a person missing a limb, a person with Down’s syndrome, and a person with autism or another form of neurodivergence, a shift in consciousness was required, an act of radical imagination.In the early days of the disability rights movement, organising work was even more challenging than it is today. Countless obstacles blocked the way, many of them physical, such as the existence of stairs where there could be a ramp. Even when disabled individuals embraced solidarity in principle, they had a difficult time physically joining with others to put their values into practice. When the call for disability rights first rang out, dropped kerbs and wheelchair lifts on public buses were rare or nonexistent in the US, and channels of communications were similarly inaccessible, which meant getting the word out could be as hard as getting out into the streets. Fortunately, activists understood that a small number of participants could have an outsised impact if they used the right tactics and had the right strategy. And so they began coordinated and confrontational campaigns of civil disobedience to vividly dramatise their oppression and demand public services and equal protection under the law.View image in fullscreenIn 1977 in San Francisco, about 150 disabled radicals occupied the fourth floor of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for 25 days. “Blind people, deaf people, wheelchair users, disabled veterans, people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities and many others, all came together,” leader Judith Heumann later recalled. “We overcame years of parochialism.”The demonstrators held their ground despite great physical discomfort – the space was not meant to be lived in, and certainly not by people with a wide range of functional needs – and demanded that officials clarify and enforce existing rules protecting disabled people from discrimination under certain circumstances. Knowledgable disabled spokespeople sparred with lawmakers about legislative proposals in televised broadcasts, and the organisers sent a delegation to Washington to further lobby officials. Brad Lomax, a member of the Black Panther Party who had multiple sclerosis, was responsible for the party bringing hot meals to the sit-in each day. The pivotal protest helped strengthen government regulations and provided an example for organisers around the country to follow. In Denver the next year, 19 disabled activists, the Gang of 19, got out of their wheelchairs and lay down to stop traffic, demanding accessible public transportation. That event directly led to the creation of the Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, Adapt, which organised similar protests across the country and brought a further degree of militancy and national visibility to the movement.Once disabled people began to organise to build transformative solidarity, they changed the landscape of the US at an astonishing pace. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that, in many ways, is more far-reaching than its civil rights-era predecessor, for it requires not only that establishments open their doors to previously excluded groups, but that they remake the entrance, widening the frame and adding a ramp or an elevator.Today, we take dropped kerbs, wheelchair lifts, accessible bathroom stalls and closed captioning for granted, but each of these adaptations was hard-won. During the lead-up to the ADA’s passage, disabled activists secured critical support from key Republican officials, finding common ground with individual politicians who had disabled loved ones whose rights they felt called to protect. At the same time, activists refused to play into attempts to divide and conquer by homophobic conservative politicians who wanted the legislation to deny protections for people with HIV and Aids. Society has been dramatically transformed as a result of strategic organising by disabled people who imagined a world where discrimination wasn’t sanctioned by the state, and where people with a wide range of embodiments would be able to move around not only unimpeded, but actively and creatively assisted.Where disability rights are concerned, incredible progress has been made, but much remains to be done. Today, resources are funnelled into youth- and life-extension therapies, instead of into planning for the unavoidable reality of human difference, ageing and fragility. We obsess over personal wellness while sidelining the issue of public health. We focus on cures for impairments and illness, when we should also work to make the world more hospitable to those who are disabled or unwell. Meanwhile, we fail to examine how our economic system maims and sickens millions – think repetitive stress injuries on the job, how poverty negatively impacts mental health, or asthma or cancer caused by poisoned air – while denying people treatment and care.Instead of submitting to this injury and devaluation, we should heed disability theorist Alison Kafer’s call to organise toward what she calls an “accessible future” – one that values and makes space for a multitude of bodies and modes of moving, thinking and being. As some early theorists of solidarity recognised more than a century ago, we are all interdependent, and we all begin and often end our lives in states of total dependency. Instead of marginalising disabled people and vilifying vulnerability, a society founded on the principle of solidarity would understand human variation and mutual reliance as the basis of a decent and desirable society.The kind of solidarity required to secure a more accessible and inclusive future will not appear spontaneously. It needs to be organised into being. Real organising is a kind of alchemy: a process that turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength while fashioning a whole that is stronger than its parts.Again and again, people build solidarity and leave the world a better place, as the examples of movements for labour, civil and disability rights all show. And yet we still struggle to tell these inherently collective stories. Too often the tale of “Us” gets whittled down into a tale of an “I” – a story about a visionary liberator or self-sacrificing saint who changed the world. We turn a handful of protesters and rebels into icons, but hear comparatively little about the organising communities that shaped and supported them, or the ones that they tried to build to carry their efforts forward.Our simplifying, celebrity-obsessed culture distorts the legacies of talented organisers and historical figures while also amplifying a handful of contemporary telegenic activists – the latter too often possessing a knack for social media and self-promotion, but lacking a commitment to an organised base they are accountable to. This emphasis on lone heroes is a kind of flipside to the fixation on increasing numbers for their own sake, or on notching bigger protests rather than better ones. An unhelpful binary emerges as a result: social movements are imagined to consist of charismatic individuals on the one side and nameless masses on the other.But real organising is something else entirely. Every successful effort to challenge the status quo has required a multitude of people playing a wide range of roles. Allowing for this diversity is one way to grow both numbers and meaningful organisation. When we come together in an organised fashion – forging new self-conceptions, embracing radical visions and acting strategically – we can wield the power of numbers to disrupt business as usual, wrest concessions and pave the way for future victories.Adapted from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, published by Pantheon Books More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      US health secretary on Alabama’s IVF ruling: ‘Pandora’s box was opened’ after fall of Roe

      by

      The health and human services secretary, Xavier Becerra, said the US must provide federal protections for reproductive rights if Americans hope to avoid further restrictions on in vitro fertilization, contraception and abortion in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.Becerra’s comments come in the wake of an Alabama supreme court decision that gave embryos the rights of “extrauterine children” and forced three of the state’s largest fertility clinics to stop services for fear of litigation and prosecution. The fallout from the decision prompted the Alabama legislature to hastily sign new legislation that will give IVF providers with immunity from civil and criminal suits, which the governor signed into law on Wednesday night.He said the events in Alabama were linked directly to the “take-down” of Roe v Wade, a decision that provided a constitutional right to abortion grounded in privacy and was overturned by conservative US supreme court justices in 2022.“It wasn’t until this new court came in” – that is, that three new supreme court justices were confirmed by former President Trump – “that we saw the attacks on Roe v Wade take hold, and today without Roe v Wade there are women who are trying to have babies in Alabama who are facing the consequences,” said Becerra.He continued: “None of this would be happening in Alabama on IVF if Roe v Wade was still the law of the land, and no one should try to deny that.”Becerra’s comments come ahead of Joe Biden addressing the nation in the State of the Union on Thursday night. Although the White House has not released the speech, a large number of Democratic guests suggest reproductive rights may feature heavily.Among the guests of high-ranking Democrats are Elizabeth Carr, the first person in the US to be born via IVF; Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who nearly died of septic shock when she was denied a medically necessary abortion; and Kate Cox, who had to flee Texas for an abortion after she learned her fetus had a fatal chromosomal condition.View image in fullscreenAlso, sitting alongside First Lady Jill Biden as a guest of the president will be Latorya Beasley, from Birmingham, Alabama.She and her husband had their first child, via IVF, in 2022. They were trying to have another child through IVF but Beasley’s embryo transfer was suddenly canceled because of the Alabama court decision.Beasley’s “recent experience is yet another example of how the overturning of Roe v Wade has disrupted access to reproductive health care for women and families across the country,” the White House said on Thursday.More guests include reproductive endocrinologists, an Indiana doctor who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim, and leaders of reproductive rights groups.Becerra’s comments emphasizing the importance of reproductive rights, Democrats’ guest list for the State of the Union and a recent administration officials’ trips to states with abortion restrictions are the most recent evidence of Democrat’s election bet: that when Republicans married the motivated minority of voters who support the anti-abortion movement, they also divorced themselves from the broader American public, broad margins of whom support IVF, contraception and legal abortion.“As a result of the fall of Roe v Wade – or actually the take-down of Roe v Wade – my daughters have fewer rights in America than their mom did,” said Becerra. “And that happens only when you have a supreme court that acts to overturn a constitutional protection.”While Becerra said his agency would continue to enforce federal laws in Alabama, including laws that provide medical patients a right to privacy and the right to stabilizing emergency care, including emergency abortions, it is ultimately the courts in and politicians of Alabama who need to fix the upheaval their policies caused.“The supreme court in Alabama is the one that has to undo its wrongful decision,” said Becerra. “The state legislature in Alabama should move to provide protections to families that rely on IVF – and serious comprehensive protections, not short-term, piecemeal protections that threaten anyone going through the process or any provider who wishes to provide quality IVF services.”Although Alabama politicians have passed a bill to give IVF providers immunity from civil and criminal suits, national associations of fertility doctors have said the law does not go far enough to address the core problem – the supreme court “conflating fertilized eggs with children”.“Clearly, this goes way beyond abortion,” said Becerra. “It would not surprise me if we also begin to see actions which undermine the ability of women to get basic family planning services,” including contraception.While doctors and patients have reacted with astonishment, anger and sorrow at the Alabama supreme court’s decision, the anti-abortion movement has cheered the decision. “Fetal personhood” has long been the ultimate aim of the movement.For years, Republicans have abetted this aim. As recently as 2023, 124 Republicans co-sponsored the federal Life at Conception Act, which would give embryos the rights of people “at the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment when the individual comes into being”. This week, Kentucky Republicans advanced a bill to allow people to claim fetuses as dependents on their taxes.They have also blocked federal legislation to protect IVF – twice. In late February, Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois introduced an IVF protection bill. Most recently, its expedited passage was blocked by Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi (a state which, like Alabama, has a near-total abortion ban).Nevertheless, the Alabama decision has been palpably uncomfortable for many members of the party. Former president Donald Trump has said he supports IVF, and views anti-abortion policies as a threat to his campaign. Republicans such as Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Joni Ernst of Iowa have issued awkward, noncommittal statements about the decision. Ernst supported federal fetal personhood statutes in the past.“When Roe v Wade was struck down by the Dobbs decision the Pandora’s box was opened,” said Becerra. “Now, we see the consequences and how far the loss the protections of Roe go beyond abortion.” More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      How Covid changed politics | David Runciman

      by

      Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this together – whatever this turned out to be.I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past. Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if only because other people have moved on.The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid, different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by an enduring sense of fatigue.When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test. Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail. At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common. An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems, including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky we are.Four years on, the picture looks very different. The immediate experience of the pandemic feels more and more remote, even though public inquiries are now under way, trying to establish just what really happened and who was to blame for what went wrong. Part of the reason for the remoteness is that much of what once looked like high-stakes decision-making has come out in the wash: many outcomes were similar, regardless of the political choices that were made. Maybe it was in the lap of the gods after all.At the same time, the more pernicious but harder to recognise political consequences of Covid are all around us. The immediacy of the threat has passed, but the lingering signs of the damage it did to the body politic are everywhere. The pandemic and its consequences – lockdowns, economic dislocation, inflation, growing frustration with political elites – have found out pre-existing weaknesses in our politics and made them worse. It has given what ails us extra teeth.The early days of Covid gave reason to hope that the massive disruption it entailed might also shift the direction of travel of global politics. That hope turned out to be illusory. In the first phase of the pandemic, it looked to have exposed populist grandstanding for what it was: bleach, it turned out, was no sort of viral disinfectant. But populism remains on the rise around the world, feeding off the many discontents of the lockdown years, and of the years that preceded them.Likewise, Covid did not start any major wars – 2020 and 2021 were two of the most peaceful years for international conflict on record. But a post-Covid world is now as militarily dangerous as at any time since the cold war.Covid did not exacerbate climate breakdown: for a short while, carbon emissions fell as economies shut down. But the world is still getting warmer and the hope that tackling the virus would provide a model for more urgent climate action turns out to have been a pipe dream.The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life, just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.During 2020, when the pandemic forced governments around the world to improvise their responses at breakneck speed, it looked as though it would expose some basic truths about the strengths and weaknesses of different political systems. The biggest and most immediate contrast was between autocratic China and the democratic west. Ruthlessness and decisiveness – which the Chinese political system appeared to possess in abundance – were the order of the day. The democracies struggled to keep up.In March of that year, after Italy became the first European country to grapple with the question of how to keep its population from infecting one another, the Chinese sent a group of health officials to help advise. The Italians were concerned by the fact that, despite putting draconian lockdowns in place, the virus was still spreading. The Chinese explained the problem. These weren’t actually lockdowns as they understood them. People could still leave their homes for emergencies, enforcement was sporadic, and punishment was relatively light. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, the very centre of the Covid outbreak, armed guards stood outside apartment blocks, curfews were brutally enforced and those with the virus could be barricaded inside their homes. Within a matter of weeks, Italy’s death toll was more than double that of China’s.The biggest contrast with China was the US, where a federal system of executive decision-making, a widespread suspicion of government mandates and an incompetent president meant that Covid soon killed far more people than anywhere else. If the US was the flagship for democracy, then it looked like democracy was failing to answer the call.However, it quickly became clear that the global picture was more complicated than any hastily assembled political morality tale might suggest. New Zealand – democratic, liberal and with a robustly independent population – for a long time kept the virus almost completely at bay. The country had the advantage of being an island state that was able to shut its borders. But Britain is also an island, and that made no difference to the government’s ability – or inability – to act. Vietnam, which is not an island, did almost as well as New Zealand. Russia did almost as badly as the US. Some of the worst death tolls were in the countries of eastern Europe, such as Bulgaria and Serbia, which had a mixed legacy of authoritarianism and democracy. Dividing the world up by regime types proved little.Demography turned out to be as important as politics: elderly, unhealthy populations suffered more. Equally, any geopolitical morality tales concealed a more complex set of tradeoffs. A zero-Covid policy, ruthlessly enforced as in China, turned out to be storing up trouble for the future. Even with the advent of effective vaccines – and China’s homegrown versions turned out to be less effective than elsewhere – too many of China’s population remained unprotected from the virus and the much-delayed economic opening left them exposed. China has also displayed a longstanding weakness of autocratic systems: an absence of transparency means we don’t know the ultimate death toll there, because they are not telling. It is simply not possible to compare it with other countries.View image in fullscreenThe wider tradeoffs – the toll that lockdowns have taken on mental health, on treatment for other illnesses, on educational prospects for the children worst affected – make it hard to draw any clear political lessons. Sweden, which was heralded – and viciously derided – for providing a real-time experiment in the efficacy of non-lockdown policies, now presents as mixed a picture as anywhere else: more Covid-related deaths than its Scandinavian neighbours (2,576 deaths per million, compared with Denmark’s 1,630 and Norway’s 1,054) but similar or even lower overall excess mortality rates from all causes, and less educational and economic disruption, though no readily quantifiable economic benefits. Covid was not just a political stress test. It was a series of impossible choices.Four years on, it is also clear that many of the lasting political consequences of the virus have little to do with the relative performance of individual governments. In the UK, the long-term incumbent parties north and south of the border are suffering serious Covid fallout despite adopting opposed approaches to the pandemic. The Tories in Westminster were reluctant lockdowners, the SNP in Edinburgh far more enthusiastic ones. It made little odds for the final outcomes: overall mortality rates were relatively consistent for the UK as a whole and variations had more to do with the underlying population profiles in different parts of the country than with the policy preferences of elected politicians.What lingers is something more familiar: the whiff of corruption and the stench of hypocrisy. Although Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, was responsible for one of the more hare-brained schemes of 2020, “eat out to help out” – which gave diners discounts for getting back into pubs and restaurants, at a time when the virus was still widespread in the population and about to surge back – that is not the reason why he is in such deep political trouble. Instead, the Covid legacy that haunts the Tories stems almost entirely from the parties held in Downing Street during Boris Johnson’s premiership, when the rest of the country was still locked down. Ultimately it is not the contrast between the public performance of different administrations that has come to matter politically, but the contrast between public pronouncements and private practice: not how many died in the end, but how many died while the wine was flowing in Downing Street. Hypocrisy is the political killer.The same is true for the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, who once appeared caring and decisive in her nightly news conference, now seems sanctimonious and evasive, her WhatsApp messages long deleted, her personal grievances exposed. The harsh light of a public inquiry has revealed the SNP to have been as motivated by petty point-scoring and score-settling as any other self-interested political party.Politics everywhere – in whatever form – takes its toll on its practitioners. The scars accumulate, especially for longstanding administrations. Covid, initially, appeared to be something else: an unprecedented governmental challenge, requiring a new kind of skill set. But in the end, it found a way to expose the regime fatigue that had set in regardless. As Johnson and Sturgeon have discovered, long political Covid is a lonelier business than the exposure they faced in the white heat of the initial outbreak. It works its way through to latch on to personal vulnerabilities and makes them far harder to shake off.What happened to the sense of solidarity that the arrival of Covid appeared to have engendered? In the early days of the pandemic, many governments – including in the UK – were worried that people would soon tire of restrictions on their freedom of movement. Some behavioural models had indicated that widespread disobedience would become the norm after a matter of weeks. Those models turned out to be wrong. Most citizens around the world did as they were told for far longer than might have been expected.This gave rise to a hope that concerted action on an equivalent scale might be possible in other areas, too. If, in the face of a serious threat, the public was willing to act in the common interest, even if that meant making significant personal sacrifices, then perhaps other collective action problems – from mass migration to the climate crisis – might be amenable to a similar spirit of cooperation. Maybe we were more public-spirited than we had given ourselves credit for.Yet no such dividend has been delivered. On the most contentious political questions, we remain as far apart as ever. Environmental policies – particularly when tied to net zero targets – still provoke deep divisions and can stoke widespread anger. A voting public that was so furious with Johnson over breaking his own Covid rules that it effectively helped turf him out of office nonetheless elected a Tory in his Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency when the party turned the issue of the Ulez traffic levy being introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, into a symbol of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of local communities. Lockdown was one thing. But environmental protections are something else: readily weaponised as evidence of elite interference in ordinary people’s lives.Anti-immigrant sentiment, including among many of the older voters who most dutifully complied with Covid restrictions, continues to fuel populism around the developed world. Geert Wilders won the popular vote in last year’s Dutch general election on a platform that combined migrant-bashing with net zero scepticism. But unlike some other far-right politicians, Wilders is no Covid sceptic. He had also been one of the first Dutch politicians to complain about his country’s slow rollout of its Covid vaccination programme.View image in fullscreenWhy does Covid solidarity not translate to other areas? In part, it is the lack of any comparable sense of urgency. Net zero targets are there to stave off long-heralded but also long-distant threats of catastrophe. At its height, Covid threatened to crash public health systems in a matter of days. But there is another difference. Public support for government restrictions during Covid was about controlling collective behaviour when it threatened our personal safety. The danger was other people: keep them in to keep us safe. Climate action is so much harder to sell because it seems to represent an infringement of personal freedom for the sake of some far less immediate collective benefit. In that sense, Covid compliance has more in common with anti-immigrant sentiment. Keep them out to keep us safe.Throughout the pandemic, public opinion in the UK tended to be critical of the government for being too eager to lift restrictions rather than too keen to impose them. In a pandemic the majority of British people want other people to be told what to do, even if it means being told what to do themselves.This has not been the case everywhere. In large parts of the US, the public proved deeply resistant to the many varieties of mandated behaviour, particularly when it came to mask-wearing, which became a proxy for a whole host of other resentments and frustrations. The pandemic latched on to what unites us and what divides us. It did nothing to change the contours of those divisions.The truth is that public cooperation during Covid did not reveal civic capabilities of which we had been unaware. Publics obeyed the injunctions of democratic politicians because those politicians were already doing their best to respond to the choices of the public. Successfully observed lockdowns were as much a reflection of ongoing behaviour as they were a constraint upon it. Likewise, when lockdowns failed, it was often because political leaders, themselves pandering to perceived public opinion, failed to endorse them wholeheartedly.Covid didn’t generate the political response required to change the way we live. In most cases, it gave us the political response that we asked for.The area where Covid made the biggest immediate political difference was in public finance. Politicians suddenly found the money that was needed to stave off disaster, conjuring it up any way they could. The magic money tree turned out to exist after all. In a genuine crisis, despite everything that had been said about the insurmountable limits on public spending, there proved to be both a will and a way to surmount them.As chancellor in 2020, Sunak launched a furlough scheme that guaranteed 80% subsidies to almost everyone in employment: the closest the UK has ever come to instituting a kind of universal basic income. In the US, a rolling series of extensive relief and stimulus packages included direct cash payments to all households, mortgage relief, tax holidays and giant subsidies to businesses. As a result, people stayed in work and businesses stayed afloat, while public debt in both countries soared. At the same time, governments around the world spent heavily to support vaccine development programmes. Conventional practice in the pharmaceutical industry meant there was invariably a multi-year gap between finding a new treatment and bringing it to market. But again, these constraints turned out to be dispensable. Effective vaccines arrived within a year of the outbreak.Was this, then, the model for an alternative political future, in which vastly accelerated public spending can drive innovation while protecting citizens from disruption? Could it be the means of tackling the climate crisis?In reality, the response to Covid was less like a trial run for a new climate politics and more like the response to a war. The emergency measures were put in place for the attritional phase of the pandemic, when the threat of collapse was real. They have been steadily wound down ever since. Meanwhile, the spending on vaccine research was only a part of wider government programmes that tended to be far less efficient and highly wasteful. As in any actual war, successful weapons programmes are the exception, not the norm. Most of the money gets siphoned off by schemes that go nowhere.View image in fullscreenAs a result, the legacy of government action on Covid has been lingering dissatisfaction rather than a new sense of political possibility. The symptoms of political long Covid include public frustration with the bill that has to be paid. Part of the cause for that frustration is widespread inflation, stoked by looser public finances, which has fuelled anger with governments around the world and created electoral volatility. Javier Milei might not be president of Argentina without Covid-fuelled inflation. Donald Trump might not be making a comeback without it, either.At the same time, stories of the waste and corruption that inevitably went along with unfettered government spending continue to surface. In the UK, the face of government pandemic spending is not Kate Bingham, the head of the highly effective UK vaccines taskforce, but the Tory peer Michelle Mone, who is accused of having used a VIP fast-lane to bypass standard procurement processes and secure government contracts for a company to supply PPE worth more than £200m, much of which apparently turned out to be useless (though the company denies this). The price of sidelining politics as normal is that when politics as normal resumes, the corner-cutting doesn’t look so good.In the aftermath of the first and second world wars, when government spending among the belligerents was colossal, and waste and corruption were widespread, lasting social transformation nonetheless followed in their wake. The foundations of a new kind of welfare state were laid by the scale of wartime public investment, along with a sense that public sacrifices needed to be repaid.The pandemic has not been the same. In part, it is a question of scale. The $12bn the US federal government spent supporting vaccine research is a drop in the ocean of public spending. Even the trillions of dollars the US government made available in various forms of aid pales compared with the legacy of pre-existing programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid. The levels of US public debt in 2024 are similar as a percentage of GDP to what they were in 1945, in the immediate aftermath of second world war. But that has more to do with the long-term burdens of welfare programmes and defence spending than with the response to Covid.In a war, the young fight and give up their lives to keep the old safe, who in return pledge to make life better for the those who are being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is part of what creates a sense of mutual obligation between the generations. In Covid, it was the old who lost their lives, but it was still the young who made many of the sacrifices, in lost employment and educational opportunities. That makes the tradeoff more complicated. Its legacy has not been a new intergenerational compact. If anything, political differences between the generations are wider than ever, and Covid has exacerbated them. The young have not been repaid for their sacrifice with the kinds of promises that tend to follow an actual war: better housing, greater educational access, full employment. This is in part because the price paid by the younger generation has proved far harder to quantify than the physical toll the disease took on the old. Who owes whom for what? This was a war with no obvious winners.Except, perhaps, those politicians who saw what might come next. In October 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine was stalling, Vladimir Putin told his government coordination council in Moscow that the lesson was clear: Russia needed to translate Covid urgency into military urgency. “We faced certain difficulties and the need to upgrade our work, give it a new momentum and a new character when we were responding to the coronavirus pandemic,” he said. Those lessons had to be taken forward in prosecuting the war. “We need to get rid of those archaic procedures that are preventing us from moving forward at the pace the country needs.” As a first step, Putin declared martial law in the four regions controlled by Russian forces.Covid was not an actual war, though it often felt like one. Nor was Covid a dry run for how to deal with the challenge of the climate crisis, though it occasionally felt like that too. Now we know that Covid was, for some politicians, a dry run for war itself.Covid did not fundamentally change the way we live. The French writer Michel Houellebecq, when asked what impact Covid would have on the future, said: “The same, but worse.” That is perhaps too bleak. It is not all worse. In some respects, life has returned to its previous patterns, for better and for worse. The drivers of change remain the same, even if some of them have accelerated.The pandemic dramatically accelerated some social transformations that were already under way. Working from home was something being facilitated by new technology long before 2020. The pandemic did not create hybrid working, nor did it begin the steady hollowing out of downtown office space. But it brought them forward by about a decade.Politics, too, is similar enough to what went before that it seems unlikely future historians will see 2020-21 as representing a sea-change in world affairs. The US and China are more hostile to each other than they were, though the hostility had been growing for more than a decade before 2020. The Middle East is more unstable than it was, electoral politics more fractious, authoritarians more assertive, the planet hotter, the disparities greater. This is somewhat different. But none of it is new. And there is no vaccine for political long Covid, any more than there is for the longer form of the disease itself. Its effects are too sporadic and its triggers still too poorly understood for that.But in one respect, the political consequences of Covid in 2024 might yet come to look decisive in the history of the 21st century. The politician who paid the highest electoral price for the pandemic was Donald Trump. At the start of 2020 he was well set for re-election: the US economy was relatively strong, his base was relatively happy (above all with his nominations to the supreme court), and the Democrats were unable to agree on a candidate to oppose him. Covid changed all that. Trump handled it badly – he never got his message straight – and even some of his supporters noticed. The economy suffered. The Democrats rallied behind Joe Biden, who did not have to suffer the physical stresses of a full campaign because most forms of campaigning were impossible. Trump lost, but only narrowly – without Covid he would almost certainly had won.For the many people inside and outside the US who found Trump beyond the pale, his removal from office looked like one of the few blessings of the pandemic. Yet had Trump won in 2020 he would have been, like most second-term US presidents, something of a lame duck. He had achieved little by way of serious reform in his first term: a second term would have likely been even more underwhelming, since Trump runs on resentment, which re-election would have done much to defuse. Now, in 2024, we would be looking at the back of Trump, and at a new generation of candidates, some of whom might have been offering something new.Instead, a narrow defeat in 2020 – coupled with his insistence that he had been robbed – has given Trump all the resentment he needs. It is Biden who has inherited the problems of a post-Covid world and the challenge of defending his administration from the resentments that have built up. A second Trump term coming after an interlude of four years, during which time he and his supporters have been making sure they won’t get fooled again, and his opponents have been looking for ways to have him jailed, is a far more serious prospect. The stakes are much higher. The damage could be far greater.This year is the busiest year around the world in the history of electoral democracy: more than 4 billion people are entitled to vote in elections from India to Ireland to Mexico. It is one sign that Covid, which put so many democratic freedoms on hold, did not do so permanently. But the US presidential election in November still has the potential to outweigh all that. Trump is by no means certain to win. Yet if he does, and if he decides this time to make good on his promise to change the way the US is governed, by hollowing out the administrative state and by withdrawing US support for Ukraine and for Nato, then Covid will have had a truly lasting impact on global politics. At that point, political long Covid will be hard for any of us to escape. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      The Republican party wants to turn America into a theocracy | Robert Reich

      by

      In a case centering on wrongful-death claims for frozen embryos that were accidentally destroyed at a fertility clinic, the Alabama supreme court ruled last Friday that frozen embryos are “children” under state law.As a result, several Alabama in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics are ceasing services, afraid to store or destroy any embryos.The underlying issue is whether government can interfere in the most intimate aspects of people’s lives – not only barring people from obtaining IVF services but also forbidding them from entering into gay marriage, utilizing contraception, having out-of-wedlock births, ending their pregnancies, changing their genders, checking out whatever books they want from the library, and worshipping God in whatever way they wish (or not worshipping at all).All these private freedoms are under increasing assault from Republican legislators and judges who want to impose their own morality on everyone else. Republicans are increasingly at war with America’s basic separation of church and state.According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation – either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21%) or sympathizing with those views (33%).Christian nationalism is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the same survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly four in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (a Republican from Georgia) said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.“We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”A growing number of evangelical voters view Trump as the second coming of Jesus Christ and see the 2024 election as a battle not only for America’s soul but for the salvation of all mankind. Many of the Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 carried Christian symbols and signs invoking God and Jesus.An influential thinktank close to Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas into his administration if he returns to power, according to documents obtained by Politico.Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his presidential term and remains close to him.Vought, frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.Those policies include banning immigration of non-Christians into the United States, overturning same-sex marriage and barring access to contraception.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a concurring opinion in last week’s Alabama supreme court decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, invoked the prophet Jeremiah, Genesis and the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians.“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote. “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”Before joining the court, Parker was a close aide and ally of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court who was twice removed from the job – first for dismissing a federal court order to remove an enormous granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and then for ordering state judges to defy the US supreme court’s decision affirming gay marriage.So far, the US supreme court has not explicitly based its decisions on scripture, but several of its recent rulings – the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v Wade, its decision in Kennedy v Bremerton School District on behalf of a public school football coach who led students in Christian prayer, and its decision in Carson v Makin, requiring states to fund private religious schools if they fund any other private schools, even if those religious schools would use public funds for religious instruction and worship – are consistent with Christian nationalism.But Christian nationalism is inconsistent with personal freedom, including the first amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.We can be truly free only if we’re confident we can go about our private lives without being monitored or intruded upon by the government and can practice whatever faith (or lack of faith) we wish regardless of the religious beliefs of others.A society where one set of religious views is imposed on those who disagree with them is not a democracy. It’s a theocracy.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Out of control’: Congresswoman sounds alarm over ‘unchecked’ gambling boom

      by

      America’s “unchecked” gambling boom risks exacerbating a nationwide mental health crisis, according to a congresswoman pushing for federal government support. The industry is pushing back hard.Operators must be held “accountable” for rising addiction rates, Andrea Salinas told the Guardian, after lawmakers proposed legislation that – if approved – would provide tens of millions of dollars in funding to help those affected.Sports betting is “proliferating like never before”, she said. “Rather than try to put the genie back in the bottle, let’s make sure we have the research and the treatment before it does become out of control.”The supreme court struck down a decades-old law in 2018 that had banned sports betting across much of the nation. The market is now legal in 38 states, attracting billions of dollars in wagers every month. Its rapid growth has coincided with a spike in addiction cases, according to clinicians, counsellors and campaigners.Diverting taxes already raised on sports wagers towards compulsive gambling support services would make “the entire industry healthier”, said Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s sixth district. “I, as much as anybody, enjoy the recreation of gambling, in a fun casino. When done, like everything, in moderation, it’s fun, right?“But the access to these applications for sports betting has taken us in a direction that is harmful. Nearly 7 million Americans are struggling with the gambling addiction.”The Grit (Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment and Treatment) Act, proposed this month by Salinas and the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, is pinned around the federal sports excise tax. Receipts from the tax, which dates back to the early 1950s, have surged in recent years as the legal market expanded; it raised an estimated $271m last year.Under the proposed law, half of the revenues raised by the tax would be set aside for gambling addiction treatment, prevention and research. Taxes would not rise and the funds for treatment would go through an existing federal grant program.Researchers have identified close links between gambling addiction and other mental health disorders, like alcoholism. “If we let this go unchecked, this could be one of the sources” of an escalating mental health crisis, said Salinas. “We would be ignoring an upstream problem that we could start to address.”Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, which has been pushing for the Grit Act, has said it would “significantly bolster” addiction prevention, research and treatment resources.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut gambling operators are against the proposal. “Our industry’s growth means that there’s never been more attention paid to, or money invested in, problem gambling support than there is today,” Chris Cylke, senior vice-president at the American Gaming Association, said.Suggesting the Grit Act would “give criminals a leg up”, Cylke argued that the excise tax – upon which it is based – should be repealed. “Today, this antiquated policy puts the nascent legal market at a competitive disadvantage against offshore illegal operators, who do not pay any taxes and prey on vulnerable customers.”Advocates for greater compulsive gambling support criticised the “predictable, shortsighted objection” of operators. “The gambling sector can no longer reasonably expect to evade external responsibility,” said Derek Webb, founder of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling. “The Grit Act is our best chance to save lots of lives by doing what’s responsible, fair and inevitable.”But Salinas is braced for a long campaign to pass the Grit Act. Politicians in Washington and beyond “aren’t really paying attention” to gambling addiction rates, she said. Congress is “not doing a lot of substantive work right now. So, yeah, it could take a while.” More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Brawny billionaires, pumped-up politicians: why powerful men are challenging each other to fights

      by

      The first rule of insecure masculinity fight club? Tell everyone about it. And I mean everyone. Tweet about it, talk to reporters, shout about it from the rooftops. Make sure the entire world knows that you are a big boy who could beat just about anyone in a fistfight.Twenty twenty-three, as I’m sure you will have observed, was the year that tech CEOs stepped away from their screens and decided to get physical. Elon Musk, perennially thirsty for attention, was at the center of this embarrassing development. The 52-year-old – who challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat in 2022 – spent much of the year teasing the idea that he was going head-to-head with Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight. At one point he suggested the fight would be held at the Colosseum in Rome.Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. The fight never happened and will never ever happen for the simple reason that Musk would get destroyed by Zuckerberg, who has been obsessively training in mixed martial arts (MMA) and won a bunch of medals in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. The only way Musk will actually follow through with the cage match is if he manages to get his hands on some kind of brain-implant technology that magically transforms him into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neuralink, Musk’s brain-chip startup, was working on that brief right now. Although seeing as the company is under federal investigation after killing 1,500 animals in testing– many of which died extremely grisly deaths – it may be a while before any such technology comes to fruition.Musk and Zuck aren’t the only tech execs looking to get physical. Vin Diesel-level biceps have become the latest billionaire status symbol. Just look at Jeff Bezos: his muscles have increased at about the same rate as his bank account. The Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, has also been working on getting swole. Back in June, Chesky told the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee that he’d “challenge any leader in tech to bench press”. He added: “I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech. It’s just so funny.”It’s not just tech bros. Politicians are at it too. Over the summer, Robert F Kennedy Jr posted a video of himself doing push-ups while shirtless with the caption “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Which may or may not have been prompted by Biden once challenging an Iowa voter and Donald Trump to a push-up contest.I don’t know how good Kevin McCarthy is at push-ups, but he’s certainly fond of shoving. In November, the former speaker bumped into the congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee and reportedly elbowed him in the back. Burchett then chased after him, calling him a “jerk” and a “chicken”. McCarthy, it seems, was angry that Burchett had helped oust him from the speakership in October, making him the first speaker in US history to have been removed by his own side.Just a few hours after that altercation, Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, challenged Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to a physical confrontation during a Senate committee hearing on labor unions. Mullin, a former businessman who regularly boasts about his prowess as an MMA fighter, was miffed that O’Brien had once called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown” on Twitter. He decided to settle his private grievance during a public hearing and the two agreed to have a fight right there and then – yelling at each other to “stand your butt up” and get started. Eventually Bernie Sanders got them to calm down.Just pause for a moment and imagine acting like this in your own job. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I challenged a colleague to a fight and started yelling at them to “sit their butt down” in the middle of a public meeting, I would face some sort of consequences. In the Mullins case, the meltdown doesn’t seem to have had any impact on his career. It may have even increased his popularity among his base. Politicians routinely seem to be held to a lower standard than the rest of us.If you ignore the fact that we’re being ruled by people with enormous egos and no self-restraint, then there is an amusing element to all this. But more than anything, it’s just pathetic, isn’t it? All these grown men so clearly worried about their masculinity that they feel the need to puff out their chests and show everyone just how strong they are.The one per cent’s desperate shows of bravado are part of a broader insecurity about masculinity in the west that plenty of snake-oil salesmen and opportunists are exploiting for all it’s worth. In 2022, for example, the rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson came out with a documentary called The End of Men that argues testosterone counts are plummeting and “real men” are an endangered species. The documentary was full of bizarre ways to counteract this, including testicle tanning. I’m not sure how many tech bros and politicians are regularly exposing their balls to red-light therapy, but there does seem to be a widespread preoccupation with “bromeopathic” ways to increase testosterone. Testosterone blood-test “T parties” are apparently a growing trend among tech types: a bunch of founders get together and find ways to raise their T.Do whatever you like in private, I say. Tan your testicles, go to T parties, organize push-up competitions. Just don’t foist your masculine insecurities on the rest of us. Stop challenging each other to public fights and getting into brawls in government. It seems to be easy enough for women to follow this advice, doesn’t it? I mean … has a female CEO or politician ever tried to organize a public fistfight with a female counterpart? I’ve got a weird feeling the answer is “no, they would be a complete laughingstock if they did”, but if anyone can find me a recent example then I’ll eat my hat. Or – on second thoughts – I’ll throw my hat in the ring and fight Elon Musk myself in the Roman Colosseum. Consider that a challenge. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘There’s no limit’: one congressman’s solitary crusade to rein in sports betting

      by

      As Las Vegas prepares to host Super Bowl LVIII sports betting is preparing to celebrate its remarkable shift from the illegal fringes of American sports to the heart of its establishment. In Congress, one man is not cheering.Congressman Paul Tonko fears the industry has already gone too far. “There’s no limit to this,” he told the Guardian. “You can’t have this wild west environment.” So far Tonko is a rare voice of dissent in Washington, another arena where the new gambling establishment is gaining ground.The gambling capital of the world is playing host to one of its largest sporting events for the first time in February – less than six years after the supreme court set the stage for sports betting’s surge across much of the United States.The transformation of official attitudes to online gambling has been head-spinning. Barely a dozen years ago, US authorities were still arresting and jailing online gambling executives. Now, in most of America, placing a wager has never been so easy.This now-legal sector’s sprint must be stopped, according to Tonko, who has become its fiercest critic on Capitol Hill. The congressman is calling for a federal crackdown to halt a “public health crisis” from engulfing the country – starting with a nationwide ban on advertising.The crusade has so far been a solitary one. No other member of Congress has yet publicly endorsed his campaign against betting ads, launched nine months ago. But Tonko is not prepared to throw in the towel.Over the course of an hour-long interview, the Democrat of New York let rip at a sector he believes must be reined in, accusing it of “preying on” the vulnerable, targeting ads at recovering addicts and putting “profits over people”.Back in May 2018, when the US supreme court struck down a decades-old law which had prohibited legal sports betting across much of the country, it knew the ruling would be divisive. Supporters of the ruling believed it would prompt a financial boon for states and “critically weaken” illegal platforms, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s opinion. Opponents feared it would “hook the young on gambling” and corrupt professional and college sports.The sports betting industry loudly highlights potential signs that its supporters were right. The American Gaming Association (AGA), which represents legal gambling companies, estimates they paid $13.5bn in taxes to state and local governments last year.So far the opponents of legalization have tended to speak more quietly. Signs of climbing youth addiction rates are more likely found in treatment clinics and helpline call centers than in political press releases.Tonko is trying to turn up the volume. “I’m very academic about this job,” he said. “And if I see something as a looming crisis… then I should respond.”The congressman was drawn to scrutinize the burgeoning gambling market after hearing “routinely” from younger constituents about a “constant bombardment” of ads. This is a “known addictive product” which, as far as he’s concerned, should be regulated like any other.At 74, Tonko noted that his generation was not “much of a target” for the sector’s marketing blitz. “But high schoolers, young children, college students and, believe it or not, people that were on the list as people in recovery were a targeted list of populations that sportsbooks went after.”With online sportsbooks now live and legal in more than two dozen states, Tonko is alarmed that this liberalization has triggered a sharp increase in compulsive gambling rates. “It’s an issue that needs to be addressed before we are overwhelmed by pain and suffering.”Back in February, on the eve of the last Super Bowl, Tonko proposed the Betting on our Future Act, based on legislation that banned tobacco advertisements in the 1960s. It is designed to “protect the innocent” from the betting commercials that have flooded television, radio and the internet in recent years. “We didn’t outlaw smoking,” he said, “and we’re not outlawing gambling here.”Days later, with 115 million people tuned into the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory over the Philadelphia Eagles, and companies reportedly shelling out up to $7m per ad to reach them, gambling giants dug deep. DraftKings, one of the biggest players in sports betting, recruited a cadre of celebrities to promote its special offer: a “FREE BET” for all customers. “Man, that’s big,” the comedian Kevin Hart said during its advert. Only the small print (displayed in the last seven seconds) explained it was impossible to withdraw winnings from such a “non-cashable” wager.The wider industry continues to spend heavily. The top four operators – FanDuel, DraftKings, BetMGM and Caesars – spent $825.3m on advertising last year alone, according to data from the advertising intelligence groups Vivvix and Pathmatics, and an estimated $417.2m on adverts in the first eight months of this year; more than the same period of 2022.These digital gladiators are still battling to dominate this nascent arena. Their extensive marketing campaigns have made gambling more visible than ever before; their innovations have made it more accessible, too. Regular prompts and opportunities to gamble have made the practice “far more destructive”, argued Tonko, who believes legal operators want “free rein” to do as they please. This is a market with “no parameters”, he claimed, laying out his case for swift action.So far, however, support for his proposal has been muted. Privately, some in Washington question whether advertising restrictions would make more sense than outright ban. The pushback has been blunt.The congressman’s comments “ignore the hard work and commitment of thousands of state and tribal gaming regulators who work every day to safeguard consumers, uphold marketplace integrity, and enforce the law”, Cait DeBaun, the AGA’s vice-president for strategic communications and responsibility, said. “The only ‘Wild West’ out there is the unchecked illegal market enabled by failed federal legislation, which handed bad actors a monopoly for almost three decades.“Offshore sportsbooks pad their pockets by targeting kids, college students and those with gambling problems. Anyone interested in protecting vulnerable Americans should focus their efforts on strengthening and enforcing existing laws to stop illegal gambling.”The industry has made some changes. The AGA’s marketing code, for example, was updated in March to prohibit use of the term “risk free”, and clarify that ads should be “designed to appeal primarily” to people aged 21 and over. Insiders deny this move was prompted by anything in particular. (Asked if it still uses the term “free bet” in ads following the change, DraftKings did not respond.)“As legalized gaming expands, our commitment to responsibility continues to grow and evolve in tandem,” said DeBaun. “The changes to the Code enacted by AGA members demonstrate this commitment by raising standards and introducing increased protections for college-aged audiences who are more vulnerable.”Such action is not enough for Tonko. “Intervening here, I think, is the just and right thing to do,” he said. The congressman is focused “for now” on advertising, but in time believes his colleagues should consider the best ways to both prevent and treat compulsive gambling.Congressional hearings could explore what should be “off limits” for this industry, he suggested. “There will be ripple effects of all sorts that, I hope, will be reviewed, and given intense examination. And if it warrants public policy, let’s do the bills. Let’s do that legislation.”Tonko is not sure the current safety net for problem gamblers is sufficient. “We do a lot to fund efforts to address people with alcohol, tobacco and heroin” issues, he said. When it comes to gambling, “you’ll tell me there’s an 800 number. How strong is it? How functional is it? You don’t treat any mental health disorder, any addiction, [with] a simple telephone number.”Media companies selling ads, gambling operators pursuing customers and states collecting tax revenue “all stand to gain” from sports betting’s rise, Tonko observed. “But at what price?”Toward the end of his interview, the congressman trailed off. “Look, I have a horse track in my district,” he said. “I’m not against gambling.”Tonko visits the Saratoga course, in upstate New York, from time to time. His staffers reckon the congressman most recently placed a bet last summer.But attending a track to wager on which horse finishes first seems quaint in an era when smartphones have enabled myriad bets – from the length of the longest touchdown to the number of passes two players might complete – during a single football game. The congressman believes tougher regulations are needed to reduce the odds of addiction trapping a new generation. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      High stakes for abortion rights as Pennsylvania votes on key judge pick

      by

      Pennsylvania voters will select a new member of the state’s supreme court on Tuesday in a judicial election that has become the unlikely focus of Republican billionaire donors, political action committees and abortion rights advocates.Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing off against Carolyn Carluccio, a conservative judge whose apparent opposition to abortion access has drawn the ire of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups.As McCaffery and Carluccio compete for a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court, total spending in the race surpassed $17m, according to the Associated Press – an unusually high price tag for an election that typically sees low voter turnout. But Democrats and abortion rights advocates hope Pennsylvania voters view Tuesday’s ballot as a proxy for reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania.“This election, Pennsylvania voters have a choice between Carolyn Carluccio, who has tried to hide her anti-abortion positions and dodge questions about the judiciary’s role in protecting abortion rights, and Daniel McCaffery, a proven champion of reproductive freedom,” said Breana Ross, campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Votes Pennsylvania.Abortion rights advocates hope to energize Pennsylvania voters by casting Carluccio as an existential threat to abortion access. This strategy delivered liberals a resounding victory in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year, when record numbers of voters turned out to elect Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat who pledged to defend abortion rights. Protasiewicz’s conservative opponent, Dan Kelly, refrained from voicing his opinion on voting rights.Carluccio’s campaign, taking its cues from Kelly’s unsuccessful playbook, has avoided sharing her views on abortion. After winning the primary election in May, Carluccio removed information about her opposition to abortion from her campaign website, according to a May report from the Keystone.Carluccio’s campaign site previously vowed to defend “all life under the law”.“When we redesigned our website, we chose to no longer include a résumé link. Judge Carluccio listed on her résumé that she would ‘defend all life under the law’, and she meant just that: under the law,” Rob Brooks, a spokesman for Carluccio’s campaign, told the Guardian.Carluccio has frequently branded herself as a non-political actor who operates outside the bounds of traditional partisanship.“I reject calls to rule based on partisan or ideological grounds and instead rule according to our laws,” Carluccio wrote in an August op-ed about her candidacy.Despite Carluccio’s insistence on her own ideological neutrality, her campaign has invited the support of distinctly rightwing groups. In a February letter to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, Carluccio disclosed that her candidacy was endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a leading anti-abortion group in the state.According to campaign finance reports, her campaign received over $4m from Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political organization funded by the billionaire GOP donor Jeffrey Yass.Pennsylvania Democrats said Carluccio is hiding her ties to the anti-abortion movement in a disingenuous bid for primary voters. The general electorate is supportive of abortion access – 64% of all Pennsylvania voters in the 2022 midterms said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to polling from the Associated Press.“Her campaign is clearly trying to portray her as acceptable to a primary audience,” said JJ Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive political consulting firm. “They know abortion is a motivator for voters, since the Dobbs decision, voters are more likely to engage in elections because of what is at stake for abortion.”But the stakes of Tuesday’s election are not straightforward. Unlike Wisconsin, where the threat of the 1849 near-total abortion ban loomed overhead, the outcome of Pennsylvania’s supreme court race will not directly affect abortion access in the state. Tuesday’s race will not change the composition of Pennsylvania’s high court – four of the seven seats on the current bench are held by Democrat-affiliated justices. Carluccio is operating in what appears to be a much less dire political environment than Kelly, whose campaign struggled to avoid the topic of abortion while Wisconsin was feeling the effects of the 1849 ban.Still, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice advocates said the abortion rights movement needs to look ahead to the 2025 election, when three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic justices will appear on the ballot.The long-term maintenance of Pennsylvania’s liberal supreme court majority is a priority for abortion rights advocates. In September, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a seven-figure advertisement campaign against Carluccio, the largest ad buy in the group’s history.As anxieties mount, abortion rights supporters are hopeful that Pennsylvania voters, as in Wisconsin, will heed the warnings offered by Planned Parenthood on the long-term consequences of Carluccio’s candidacy.Dr Benjamin Abella, a medical professor and emergency physician in Philadelphia, said voters like him are “paying attention” to Carluccio’s efforts to hide her campaign’s ties to rightwing anti-abortion groups.“The public understands that we should not be lulled into a false sense of security on abortion rights, especially if a judge is keeping quiet on their intentions and positions,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a safe state any more and that any and every election poses a risk.” More