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The74Million.org is a non-profit education news site, devoted to telling the stories of schools, teachers, parents and America’s 74 million kids.
(Newark) — Equel Easterling, a rising senior at Morehouse College in Atlanta, spent the summer at his grade-school alma mater, North Star Academy. He was, as before, contending with the rigors of charter school instruction — but this time, as a teacher rather than a student.
The 20-year-old New Jerseyan was among 147 soon-to-be college seniors who participated in this year’s Student Teaching Fellow program, run by the Uncommon Schools charter network. If all goes as planned, after graduation in 2017, Easterling will be back at an Uncommon school full time, in charge of a room full of boys and girls who remind him a lot of himself— young, black and striving.
“I feel like I’m educating that 12-year-old me in the classroom,” he said. “These are the things I don’t want him to miss out on. So it’s just a very engaging and encouraging experience.”
Each summer between the end of May and mid-July, the collegians are stationed throughout the network’s 49 schools in Boston, Newark and Camden, N.J., and Brooklyn, Rochester and Troy, N.Y. They participate in several weeks of intense instructional training and shadowing veteran teachers as they teach summer school. They spend the latter part of the program planning and leading their own classes, under supervision.
Uncommon Schools started the program in 2010 with just 10 fellows; since then, 431 have completed the program and 165 have been hired to full-time positions at Uncommon. About half are currently still with the network, according to data provided by the organization.
Roughly half of the fellows hired are certified teachers; the other half generally go through the Relay Graduate School of Education program while working at Uncommon, spokeswoman Barbara Martinez said.
All new teachers start their first year with three weeks of professional development.
The student teaching program functions as a staff diversity pipeline — about 70 percent each year are black or Latino, the network said, and fellows often return to their colleges and recruit other students to apply.
That was the case for Shavon Mathus, who was encouraged by a classmate at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., to apply in 2013. After successfully completing the summer program, she finished her senior year and accepted a teaching position at Uncommon. This year, she’s teaching second-grade at the Excellence Girls Charter School in Brooklyn. Mathus, who is originally from Chicago, said she found the racially diverse staff refreshing and reassuring as a newcomer to the region.
At the same time, her experiences elsewhere made it painfully clear that this mix is the exception rather than the rule in most areas of the country.
“I was literally the only senior of color who was graduating (from college) as an education major,” Mathus said.
The network attributes much of its staff diversity growth to the program. Currently, about 34 percent of teachers across the network are black or Latino, nearly twice the national average, Martinez said.
The share of minority teachers overall grew from less than 30 percent during the 2010-11 school year to 42 percent during the 2015-16 school year, the network said.
(Related: A Student Protest at High-Achieving Charter High School Spotlights Teacher Diversity Struggle)
Shana Pyatt, a longtime science teacher and a founding educator at North Star Academy, stepped into the newly created role of director of diversity last year as the organization ramped up efforts to attract and retain a more diverse teaching staff.
“It’s really important for our students to continue to see teachers and school leaders that look like them in the classrooms and actually can identify with their backgrounds and their experiences,” Pyatt said. “As you dream, and as you have ideas of what you want to be and what you want to do in life, it’s hard to envision what you don’t see.”
Schools need to do a better job of offering young adults the chance to try teaching before they commit, Pyatt added.
Getting a taste of what it’s like to stand in front of a classroom every day will help young adults understand the importance and relevance of the work and, Pyatt and her colleagues hope, encourage some of them to join the profession.
About 85 percent of fellows do go into teaching after college, and roughly 70 percent of them teach at Uncommon Schools, the network said.
Easterling, the fellow at North Star Academy, was initially worried that he and his students wouldn’t be able to keep up with the charter network’s breakneck instructional pace. But he ended his summer on a confident note.
Being at the front of the classroom, he said, helped him understand how significantly education can alter the trajectory of his young students, most of whom are black or Latino.
“We live in a society where they’re being judged at a very young age,” he said. “And we see that for cases like Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown. … We’re teaching them skills that, as a child, can not only prepare them for the future, but potentially save their life.”
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Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls, but it’s more due to Donald Trump’s many blunders than excitement with Mrs. Clinton. She has benefitted from being the anti-Trump. But new allegations about the FBI finding another 15,000 missing emails, as well as evidence of a possible “pay-to-play” donation system between her husband’s Clinton Global Initiative and the Secretary of State’s office, raises old perceptions about her untrustworthiness and dishonesty.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is badly in need of a bold issue that fires the imagination of voters. Otherwise, if Trump stops the bloopers and regains his economic populism, this race could tighten very quickly.
What issue should Hillary Clinton focus on that will rally voters? Here’s one that will neutralize her opponent’s economic appeal: a dramatic expansion of Social Security.
This popular program, which celebrated its 81st birthday on August 14, enjoys stratospheric support, even among 70% of Republican rank-and-file voters. It’s the greatest anti-poverty program that the US has ever devised. Three-quarters of Americans depend heavily on Social Security in their elderly years, and nearly half would be living in poverty without it. It’s been an especially important support system for minority and female retirees. During the 2008-09 economic crisis, when home ownership, private savings and the stock market collapsed, Social Security remained stable.
Despite its popularity, critics have stoked the fear that Social Security will face a financial shortfall sometime in the 2030s. But that is overblown, Social Security has an established trust fund that, legally speaking, cannot spend more than it takes in. Any future deficits could be made up from any number of revenue sources. It’s all a matter of budgetary priorities.
In fact the real problem with Social Security is not a shortfall but that its payout is so meager. Social Security is designed to replace only about 40 percent of a worker’s wages at retirement, yet retirement experts estimate you will need almost twice that amount to live decently. With private retirement pensions, as well as personal savings centered on homeownership – the other two legs of the three-legged “stool of retirement” -still looking wobbly, and with incomes low and inequality high, tens of millions of retirees won’t have much more than their monthly Social Security checks to live on.
So the real problem with Social Security is that it is too stingy to function as the nation’s single pillar retirement system. The obvious solution, as Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out during his presidential run, is to expand Social Security, not cut it. There are numerous revenue streams that would allow an increase in the monthly payout for the 43 million Americans who receive retirement benefits.
How much should we expand Social Security? Senator Sanders proposed adding about $68 per month per beneficiary – better than nothing, but not nearly enough to make a significant difference. The US needs a much more dramatic expansion.
If we design it correctly, we can afford to double the monthly benefit for every retiree, creating a new system that I call Social Security Plus. This would come much closer to providing sufficient income for the nation’s retirees, and also put the US retirement system in line with the benefits provided by many other developed nations. As demonstrated in my recently published book Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve, there is so much waste in the US tax system that if we simply close many of the tax loopholes and deductions that disproportionately favor wealthier Americans, the nation could easily afford this.
Social Security Plus: How to pay for it
How much would it cost to double the monthly payout? Approximately $662 billion. That seems like a lot of money, but here’s how we could do it.
1. Eliminate the unfair Social Security payroll cap. Currently any income above $118,500 is not taxed for Social Security purposes. The practical effect of the cap is that billionaire bankers and CEOs contribute a far lower percentage of their income for Social Security – much less than 1% – than their secretaries and chauffeurs, whose income is taxed at a rate of 6.2%.
The old rationale for this discrepancy is that Social Security is not welfare, instead it is an earned benefit – the more you pay into it, the more you receive. The maximum amount that a Social Security beneficiary can receive is capped at around $2600, and so if the benefit is capped, so should be the payroll deduction, goes this line of thinking. If we are going to lift the payroll cap and tax wealthier Americans more, shouldn’t they also receive more of a payout?
But that’s not how Medicare works, nor private company pensions, nor any other tax-funded government service. Wealthy people don’t receive more access to doctors, hospitals, roads, schools or airports just because they pay more in taxes. The rationale for treating Social Security so differently might have made sense when it was launched over 80 years ago, and there was little tradition of government providing a helping hand. But it makes much less sense today in this time of rampant inequality and greater acceptance of government acting as a counter-balance to unstable market economies.
So simply making the payroll contribution more fair and equal by requiring all income levels to contribute at the same rate of 6.2% on all of their earned wages would raise approximately $135 billion toward the targeted goal.
2. Apply a Social Security tax to investment income. Many wealthy Americans make a lot of their money through investment income instead of from wages. Yet they make zero Social Security contributions based on that income. By applying Social Security rules on this investment income — which is how Medicare is partly funded — we would raise another $50 billion more for doubling the Social Security payout.
3. Eliminate tax shelters and loopholes for 1-percenter households and businesses. The loopholes crying out for elimination include capital gains and other types of investment income, such as ‘carried interest’ and the truly outrageous ‘step-up in basis,’ which exclusively benefits inherited wealth. These function as direct federal subsidies to mostly affluent Americans. And they cost the national treasury some $250 billion per year, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that a whopping 70 percent of this subsidy is hoovered by Americans in the top 1 percent income bracket (and nearly 93 percent by the top 20 percent bracket).
The ‘step-up in basis’ exemption is particularly repugnant. When a yacht, mansion or any other type of expensive asset is sold, the seller’s profit is subject to the capital gains taxation rate of 15-20 percent – already only about half the 39.6 percent tax rate that the wealthiest pay on their wage income. Normally, the amount subject to taxation is the difference between the sale price and the amount that the seller originally paid for that particular asset. But for inherited property, the difference is calculated using the date that the previous owner died and left it to the heirs. As a result, the appreciation in value is a lot less, and so are the capital gains taxes. Rather than a ‘step-up in basis,’ this dodge might more accurately be termed a ‘step-up in privilege.’ In 2015, this rule reduced federal revenues by an enormous $63 billion.
Step-up in basis is one of the 10 largest federal tax expenditures in the entire individual and corporate income tax system. And most of it is pocketed by the wealthiest of Americans. Of course none of the investment income received from the sale of these inherited assets is taxed for Social Security purposes. If it were, at the usual 6.2 percent Social Security tax rate that all workers pay, it would generate another $19 billion for the Trust Fund.
President Barack Obama has done next-to-nothing to close these loopholes while president, and Hillary Clinton has been mostly silent. Ironically, Donald Trump has been more outspoken about the unfairness of this system than most Democratic leaders. To his credit, Trump defended Social Security against budget cuts during the GOP presidential debates and primaries. So Mrs. Clinton is vulnerable on this issue.
4. Eliminate the tax exclusion that private employers receive for sponsoring their company’s retirement plans. Not many people realize it, but every tax-paying American subsidizes the retirement plans provided by private companies, even though only a small slice of Americans – about 15% of private-sector workers – have pensions today. By implementing Social Security Plus, which would double the monthly benefit and make Social Security the de facto national retirement plan, employers would be liberated from having to provide retirement for their employees. So they will not need the substantial taxpayer-funded subsidies they receive from the federal government for their company’s retirement plan. That will raise another $100 billion that can be used for Social Security Plus.
At this point, we have found nearly $600 billion in funding for Social Security Plus, nearly reaching our mark for doubling the monthly retirement benefit. So let’s keep going and look for more sources of revenue for our increasingly expanded and financially sound national retirement plan.
5. Scrap other retirement tax breaks that disproportionately benefit wealthier Americans over middle class and poor Americans. Savings vehicles such as 401(k)s and IRAs have tragically failed to help most retirees for a very simple reason – you can’t put very much into your 401(k) if your wages are too low to save. And with aggregate wages in the US staying flat for the last three decades, the reality is that most middle- and poorer-class Americans haven’t been able to sock that much away. Consequently, of the $165 billion that the federal government spends subsidizing individual retirement savings, nearly 80 percent goes to the top 20 percent of income earners. President Obama has proposed a universal 401(k), in which workers with no savings plan will be enrolled automatically in a 401(k) plan. But it seems pointless when wages are so low that the vast majority of middle class and poor Americans can’t accumulate sufficient savings. Most Americans would be far better off if we scrapped the 401(k) and IRA subsidies, and instead doubled the Social Security monthly benefit.
The same is true for federal underwriting of homeownership, which totaled $154 billion in 2014. The federal subsidy for the home mortgage interest deduction amounts to around $70 billion per year, with Americans in the top 10-percent income bracket receiving a massive 86 percent of it. And the federal tax deduction allowed to homeowners to mitigate the cost of paying state and local property taxes on their houses cost the federal budget another $32 billion in 2014; a study by the Congressional Budget Office found that Americans in the upper 20 percent income bracket reaped 80 percent of that federal subsidy.
Just to make sure everyone understands whom the tax code favors, homeowners also do not have to pay taxes on up to $250,000 of their capital gains profits when they sell their home, which doubles to $500,000 for married taxpayers. That exclusion amounts to another giant subsidy amounting to $52 billion per year. And here’s the real kicker: these three subsidies for homeownership, which in aggregate mostly benefit higher-income people, cost the federal treasury nearly four times the $42 billion that the Department of Housing and Urban Development spends on all affordable housing programs for low-income people. Renters and most low-income Americans don’t benefit at all from the subsidies, and while some middle-income people benefit, the total amount of their deductions is too small to help them much. They would benefit a lot more from a doubling of their Social Security payout.
Whose entitlement? Who’s the ‘welfare queen’?
Critics of Social Security have derogatorily labeled it an ‘entitlement,’ but in reality these tax-code favoritisms are nothing more than entitlements for wealthier people at the expense of everyone else. The affluent recipients of federal largess are the true ‘welfare queens,’ since these subsidies are mostly unavailable to middle- and lower-income Americans.
If we combine those budgetary add-backs with our previous savings, we now have reached nearly $900 billion, well over the $662 billion we need in order to enact Social Security Plus. And note that we were able to do this without spending a dime more in taxpayer money or national wealth than what is already spent on the retirement system, or on subsidizing the savings of better-off Americans. We are just shifting existing expenditures that right now benefit a small number of people, and redirecting these resources toward the vast majority of people.
Social Security remains one of the most popular government programs ever. It’s not only good for the nation’s retirees, but also for US businesses and the broader national economy. Retirees spend their income to live, providing customers for businesses, even during an economic downturn. So Social Security acts as an automatic stimulus that helps to maintain levels of consumer spending that in turn help stabilize the economy.
Moreover, expanded Social Security would be a better fit for the type of high-tech digital economy that is slowly taking root. More and more Americans are working as contractors, freelancers, temps and part-timers for multiple employers; many Americans now are working several part-time jobs to make ends meet. Social Security Plus would form a core part of a portable, universal safety net that is badly needed, providing a new kind of deal for American workers.
More members of Congress, led by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as other political and media leaders and organizations like Social Security Works and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, have come to the conclusion that we need to expand Social Security. So has President Obama, who initially disappointed his backers by supporting ill-advised cuts to the program and appointing an ill-fated commission that tried to enact cuts. Unfortunately Hillary Clinton has been the worst kind of waffler on this issue. Her latest position is that she will support expansion, but only for those who need it the most, which means not many people. If she isn’t careful, she is going to be leapfrogged by Donald Trump, who is unpredictable enough to take a bolder stand on Social Security.
The simple message is that we can pay for this expansion by enacting tax fairness, and ensuring that all Americans contribute their fair share to the nation’s bounty and security. With support among even Republicans extremely high, there appears to be no political risk to Hillary Clinton being out front on this issue. And with her campaign teetering on the edge of a cliff of scandal and pay-to-play politics, the Clinton campaign needs a popular issue that excites voters. Social Security expansion provides a vision for not only how our nation will treat our retirees, but also for what kind of nation we want to be.
So Mrs. Clinton should become a key catalyst in this movement for Social Security expansi9oon by leading the way during this presidential election. What is she waiting for?
[Steven Hill (www.Steven-Hill.com) is a political writer and author of the recently published Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve (www.ExpandSocialSecurity.org]
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Images of police officers appearing to force a Muslim woman to remove her clothing on a beach in Nice have brought renewed scrutiny to France’s so-called burkini ban this week. At least 26 towns across the country have passed bylaws to restrict women from wearing the full-body swimsuits, prompting legal challenges as well as accusations of Islamophobia and sexism.
While judges in France have so far upheld the bans, the case reached the nation’s highest administrative court for review on Thursday. The body will have 48 hours to deliver a ruling on the bans, as the rights groups that brought the challenge hope it will overturn lower court rulings.
French bylaws setting parameters on what women can wear on the beach don’t specifically use the word “burkini” in their language. The prohibitions instead often outlaw clothing not “respectful of good morals and of secularism” and outline restrictions on clothing that covers certain areas of the body. The result is a loosely defined set of laws that critics allege authorities are using solely to target Muslim women.
One woman on a beach in Cannes, a 34-year-old who gave her name as Siam to local media, said she was not wearing a burkini but clothes and a headscarf when authorities confronted her. Her case suggests that what’s being worn is less important to authorities than the person wearing it.
Many opponents have also asked whether these bans, which are ostensibly about enforcing France’s strict form of secularism, would be extended to groups like Catholic nuns who wear similarly concealing clothing. Others have compared it to the religious policing of women’s bodies that occurs in theocratic societies such as Saudi Arabia. These questions highlight that the broad bans have thus far seemingly only targeted Muslim women.
“The broader ban is problematic from a religious freedom perspective, but to say there’s a further and very discriminatory intent targeting only one type of religious believer is far worse,” Asma T. Uddin, director of strategy at the Center for Islam and Religious Freedom in Washington, told The WorldPost.
But despite the numerous inconsistencies, vague wording and broad mandate that these bylaws give authorities, prominent politicians and much of the French public support the bans. France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls called the burkini a “symbol of enslavement” and said the country was locked in a “battle of cultures,” while an Ifop poll conducted this week found 64 percent of French in favor of the ban.
Supporters of the bans have put forth a wide range of dubious rationales to justify the bans. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy argued that the full-body swimwear was a “provocation” in support of radical Islam, while one town’s ban cited “hygiene” as a reason.
The argument that carries the most weight in courts, according to Uddin, is that the swimsuit is a threat to public order. In an excellent editorial on the bans for The New York Times, Uddin outlines how European courts have often affirmed lower courts’ use of this rationale.
“The way that it’s argued tends to rest less on actual evidence and more on fears and stereotypes,” Uddin says.
This is also despite the fact that these bans have led to protests, legal challenges and discrimination that is a far greater threat to public order than the one they seek to prevent.
“You see this in a number of diverse legal contexts, where courts are trying to clamp down on rights in the name of public order and what ends up happening is that it leads to greater public disorder,” Uddin says.
What may end up killing the bans, according to Uddin, is that such a broad prohibition on swimwear would be hard to enforce. Authorities would have to address questions of whether someone is allowed to wear full-body swimsuits if they are doing so for secular reasons, or if they are doing so for religious reasons that aren’t specifically Islamic.
The swimsuit bans are part of a recent resurgence in the debate over clothing bans in a number of western countries. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling conservative coalition is proposing making face veils illegal in schools, universities and while driving. In Canada, a major campaign issue last year was whether to stop women from wearing niqabs during citizenship ceremonies. The Conservative Party proposal was dropped after the Liberal party won elections. Since taking power, the government has shifted tack and now permits hijabs as part of the country’s iconic “Mountie” uniform. Many European nations, however, have growing far-right, anti-Islam sentiments that politicians have sought to appease.
The latest round of bans follow a spate of ISIS-inspired or directed terror attacks across western Europe in the last year, but also come as countries including France and Germany prepare for national elections in 2017. In both countries, far-right parties such as France’s National Front have capitalized on ethno-nationalist sentiments and fear of Islam.
While France will have a judgment in the next 48 hours on whether its so-called burkini bans are legal, the prominence of the sentiment that led to the laws being passed in the first place means this issue is far from being settled for good.
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Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s powerful denunciation Thursday of “alt-right” extremism that she said GOP opponent Donald Trump embraces was cheered by adherents of the political philosophy.
Clinton, linking Trump with white nationalists and a “radical fringe,” delivered a blistering attack on what she said was the alt-right’s takeover of the Republican Party. In doing so, she cast a spotlight on the obscure movement, thrusting it into mainstream political discussion.
“She is doing the white nationalism movement a great service by bringing attention to our issues to the forefront of political debate,” said William Johnson, a leader of the white nationalist American Freedom Party who was selected by Trump as a California delegate during the primary, but later resigned.
Jared Taylor, who helps run white nationalist online magazine American Renaissance, said he and those who share his beliefs “appreciate any publicity Mrs. Clinton gives us.”
“We have important things to say and are glad for any opportunity to speak to national audiences,” Taylor told HuffPost.
The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that calls itself “the world’s most visited alt-right website,” also cheered Clinton’s speech.
“Well guys. We’ve made it,” Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin wrote. “Hillary Clinton is giving a speech about us today.”
Richard Spencer, head of white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute who is credited with coining the term “alternative right,” wrote in an online journal that Clinton’s speech is “empowering.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, calls National Policy Institute’s journal “racist.”
Moreover, according to Spencer, it may no longer be accurate to label the extreme right-wing ideology “alternative.”
At the Republican National Convention last month, where Trump formally accepted his party’s nomination, Spencer declared that alt-right had “taken over” the mainstream right.
Spencer celebrated that sentiment on Twitter Thursday, before Clinton’s speech.
On white nationalist website Stormfront, there was a call to use the #AltRightMeans tag to counter Clinton’s rhetoric about the movement. The hashtag was trending before and during Clinton’s speech.
The alt-right is a somewhat amorphous label for a what Southern Poverty Law Center defines as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals” whose core beliefs rest in the notion that “white identity” is under attack by “political correctness” and “social justice.” These forces are acting to “undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization,” according to the law center.
American Renaissance defines the alt-right as a “broad dissident movement” that rejects the principle that all people are equal. Race is central to its philosophy. Here’s American Renaissance in its own words:
The movement, called different things as it festered on the margins of politics for decades, appears to be gaining a boost during this presidential campaign. Google Trends shows interest in the search term “alt right” as very low from 2004 until about April 2015. Since then, searches for the term have quadrupled.
That’s at least in part related to the higher profile that white supremacy groups have received during Trump’s campaign, which has been criticized for not rejecting support from white supremacists like David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard who encouraged other white nationalists to volunteer for Trump’s campaign.
Trump denies he’s a racist, but continues making racist remarks. His ever-changing immigration policies include the deportation of millions. He has pledged to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. And he has a habit of retweeting messages posted by white supremacists and sharing them with his 11.1 million Twitter followers.
Clinton’s speech also sparked a flood of news articles about the alt-right.
That widespread coverage is a “lottery win” for the extremists, Brian Levin, director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, told HuffPost. While pushing extremism into the mainstream conversation may be unpleasant, he said, it remains critical to show the extremism celebrating Trump’s candidacy.
The alt-right, Levin said, is a “cobbled and somewhat amorphous movement that includes a core of bigots has infiltrated part of a mainstream political insurgency.” And as its profile rises, it must at the very least be reckoned with, he said.
“The fact that Euro-nationalism and all the horrendous bigotry that is tied to it has not just become an unwelcome visitor at the door of a major political party, but an occupant of the household, is of relevance not only for those partisans trying to defeat Republicans, but to those within the GOP who are alarmed that their presence is antithetical to their principles as well,” Levin said.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar,rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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When I was a kid, successive presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie.
I was a teenager during the Cold War, several presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons, garrison the world, maybe invade Cuba, fight covert wars in all sorts of odd little places and use the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments and replace them with dictators, or the Russians would destroy us. We believed. It was a lie.
When I was in college our president told us that we needed to fight in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua or the Sandinistas would come to the United States. He told us Managua was closer to Washington DC than LA was. He told us we needed to fight in Lebanon, Grenada and Libya to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
When I was a little older our president told us how evil Saddam Hussein was, how his soldiers bayoneted babies in Kuwait. He told us Saddam was a threat to America. He told us we needed to invade Panama to oust a dictator to protect America. We believed. It was a lie.
Another president told us we had to fight terrorists in Somalia, as well as bomb Iraq, to protect ourselves. We believed. It was a lie.
The one after him told us that because a bunch of Saudis from a group loosely tied to Afghanistan attacked us on 9/11, we needed to occupy that country and destroy the Taliban, who had not attacked us, for our own safety. The Taliban are still there 15 years later, and so is the American army. We believed. It was a lie.
After that the same President told us Saddam Hussein threatened every one of our children with weapons of mass destruction, that the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. We believed. It was a lie.
In 2011 the president and his secretary of state, now running for president herself, told us we needed regime change in Libya, to protect us from an evil dictator. We believed. It was a lie.
In August 2014 the president told us we needed to intervene again in Iraq, on a humanitarian mission to save the Yazidis. No boots on the ground, a simple, limited act only the United States could conduct, and then we’d leave. We believed. It was a lie.
That same president later told us Americans will need to fight and die in Syria. He says this is necessary to protect us, because if we do not defeat Islamic State over there, they will come here, to what we now call without shame or irony The Homeland. We believe. We’ll let history roll around again to tell it is a lie.
The two main candidates for president both tell us they will expand the war in Syria, maybe Libya. Too many of our fellow citizens still want to believe it is necessary to protect America more. They want to know it is not a lie.
So candidates, please explain why what you plan is different than everything listed above. Tell us why we should believe you — this time.
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By Christina Hambleton, Denison University
The Brexit debate in the United Kingdom is only the most recent of a number of threats to the European Union’s integrity. Commenters increasingly frame these threats as xenophobia brought on by economic distress, phobic reactions to terrorism, and refugee flows. In the case of the UK, they also frame the threat as a hubristic demand to return to more nationalistically oriented state policies, isolating the UK from its most lucrative trade partners and plunging it into economic and political oblivion. Discontent with the EU is, at any rate, caricaturized as the backward desire to return to the “anarchy” suffered by protectionist and “unreformed” nations without basic respect for international norms (EU and NATO members invoke disrespect for international norms a great deal these days, in light of Russia’s expansionism). The EU is a safe, law-governed island in a “lawless world,” they claim. However, this rhetorical gambit fails to note that even those at the “heart” of the EU have begun to critique the institution, and that the so-called deviants outside Western-dominated institutions such as the EU are not the only or indeed the principle threat to multilateralism. On this, conservatives and leftists are in agreement: the legalistic orientation of the EU makes it ineffective and oppressive. The symbol of successful, democratic regional and multilateral institutions is the forum, not the court. The EU fails at successful multilateralism for three reasons:
1. Laws per se tackle anarchy in much the same way as a hegemon–they impose it by means of hard and soft power that don’t have the capacity to invite consensual, norm-governed behavior.
The first, and perhaps most important, fact of the European Union’s founding is that from its nascent stages subsequent to World War II it was constituted by a coalition of countries with relatively similar interests (presenting a united front against the Soviet Union and achieving post-War recovery) and domestic characters (even Italy had recently converted to a republic). The Copenhagen Criteria, the often selective stringency with which members must adopt EU laws, and the economic policies it adopts reflect nothing so much as the interest of these initial founders in inducing other countries in the region to play by rules that will perpetuate their advantage. In the Brexit discussion we can see that the most realistic proponents are talking about the EU as though it were an exclusive benefits club. They describe it as a rallying point for Western unity, despite the fact that Europe and prospective EU members are far from exclusively Western. Indeed, some commenters argue that Britain needs to stay “in” for all Europeans, because it is one of few countries powerful enough to halt the French and German domination of EU institutions that Brits feel so disadvantaged by. Such criticisms can be heard from the “Inner Six”, as well. Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has recently attacked uses of the EU budget that he implies most members signed on for–namely, agricultural and other trade protections and cohesion spending resembling entitlements diverted from the global economy’s resources. Instead, Schäuble emphasized the need to restructure the budget to deal with real regional problems. As such, for the EU to extend membership to a new state reflects less a desire to create an accommodating legal and economic structure that can address regional challenges and more the desire to leverage an alluring benefits package coercively to induce behavior in accord with present members political and economic goals from other states. This is why the Ukraine crisis began with Russia rejecting moves by Ukrainian President Yanukovych toward Brussels; Russian history is filled with proofs that participating in Western institutions like the EU means becoming the West.
2. The European Union is Insufficiently Democratic.
Even Jürgen Habermas, by all means, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the EU, has complained that the organization has yet to live up to the 2007 Lisbon Treaty mandating that it operate democratically. Only the EU’s least powerful institution, the Parliament, truly enfranchises all members. The real power, Habermas argues, belongs to a “Brussels-based technocracy” that tells members what is good for them and for Europe, largely in accord with the status quo. Its failure to innovate and the disenfranchisement of smaller EU members was put on clearest display during Greece’s debt crisis. Greece argued against restrictive “reforms” proposed to it by the EU in favor of reforming Europe’s trade system (which was actually penalizing Greece for economic growth) and adopting more left-oriented policies at home. It was lambasted by fellow EU members. Furthermore, little attempt has been made by the EU to empower populations in its territories who direly need voice–namely, stateless populations such as the Roma (routinely and brutally evicted from such nations as France; which has engendered accusations that the Schengen Agreement is an exercise in hypocrisy), Eastern European economic migrants, and more recently, refugees from the Middle East.
3. The EU is an Ineffective Institution for Representing its Constituents Internationally.
Finally, it is notable that the European Union is supposed to serve as a valuable spokes-agency for the region. It holds a seat at the WTO, the UN, the largely defunct G-8, and the G-20. Yet its policies and members’ political fragmentation do not allow the EU or its representatives to constructively engage other actors in the international arena. EU protectionism is alive and well, despite the market reforms it demands of members intraregionally, and the European block has continually thwarted trade negotiations with developing countries due to its damaging agricultural subsidies. Diplomatically, the EU deploys sanctions against “deviant” states largely in accord with traditional Western alliances, and that even this unity tends to crumble in the face of conflicting domestic economic interests. There are also tremendous rifts, likely owing to a lack of overarching regional mechanisms to deal with situations like the refugee crisis or forge common interests, in member states’ policies and degrees of hawkishness in theaters such as Syria and Iraq.
In summary, while it is true that multilateral forums encouraging collective responsibility in the international arena are a dire necessity in an increasingly interdependent world, it is unclear that the European Union is acting as such a forum. Instead, it resembles an exclusive enclave designed to award tenants special privileges in exchange for maintaining the status quo. It is not particularly representative nor responsive to the diverse landscape of political and socioeconomic challenges faced by a broader European constituency. As such, before condemning Eurosceptics and right-wingers badgering their national governments for more autonomy, it may be wise to consider what merits the curses they’re flinging at the “bureaucracy” really have. A legalistic EU is elitist and insufficient for the purpose of adapting to a changing international arena or generating consensus for its projects. “Deviants” from its institutions may be more a symptom than a cause of the organization’s ills.
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. Of course, the typical response was to hang onto them until they were needed again… however long that might take. Days. Weeks. Months. Decades. I was expecting some paperweights.
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