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Secretary-General António Guterres and Donald Trump, at a UN briefing. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

By Asoka Bandarage
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jan 19 2021 (IPS)

According to the mainstream narrative, President Trump’s incitement of his supporters during the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory led to the ‘insurrection’ at the US Capitol on January 6, resulting in the banning of Trump’s social media accounts and his second impeachment by Congress.

According to so-called ‘conspiracy theories,’ however, the victory of the November Presidential elections was ‘stolen’ from Trump through electoral fraud and the storming of the Capitol was staged or allowed to happen in order to impeach Trump and prevent him from coming back to power in 2024.

It may be even more complicated; a report by the Swiss Policy Research website, for example, suggests that the right-wing QAnon movement, heavily supportive of Trump and prominent at the event, like Russiagate, is the product of an FBI psyop (psychological operation) launched to discredit Trump.

The public may never know the truth behind the January 6 events, the mysterious ‘Deep State’ or the growing polarization between so-called pro-Trump white supremacist, ‘domestic terrorists’ and the anti-Trump multicultural, progressive liberals.

However, the search for peace, justice and democracy at this critical time requires transcending simplistic polarizations and understanding the systemic roots of the conflict that is tearing America apart.

Polarization

Donald Trump is a member of the ruling elite representing its own interests. His assaults on the environment and mismanagement of the Covid pandemic has put the entire country at risk. While claiming to represent the interests of the alienated and underprivileged white population, he introduced massive tax cuts and corporate deregulation worsening their social and economic position.

His rhetoric against minorities and immigrants has exacerbated racial and ethnic tensions and political extremism.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, heavily funded by the billionaire class, also represent elite interests at the expense of the general population. Under the Obama administration, economic inequality increased and Black poverty, mass unemployment and police brutality persisted.

The identity-focused rhetoric of liberals has stimulated racial and ethnic politics, and the rise of groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM). Often portrayed as progressive and “radical,” BLM has been significantly co-opted by corporate liberal interest and has received extensive funding from leading corporations including Amazon and Microsoft.

The corporate media has aided and abetted disunity and violence by silencing moderate and alternative voices that seek to understand and question the motives and strategies of both pro and anti -Trump extremists.

The polarization of politics and media hinder and mask an understanding and dialogue needed to move forward. For example, is there an equal risk of fascism, albeit more insidious, arising from the corporate liberals opposing Trump?

Reclaiming Perspective

A handful of corporations led by big tech and finance control the US political process and practically all aspects of society. The overwhelming focus on identity politics deflects attention from the dangers of deepening techno-corporate control and the destruction of freedom of speech.

The events of January 6 have already contributed to plans for a federal law against ‘domestic terrorism’ and the criminalization of dissent, which would likely be based on the 2019 Confronting the Threat of Domestic Terrorism Act introduced by California Representative Adam Schiff. Anti-terrorism acts, such as the Patriot Act, are notorious for their use in crushing dissent and marginalized groups.

Systemic violence and repression are not new to the United States. The noble ideals of democracy, freedom and human rights aside, the United States was founded on plunder of the land and exploitation of people ¬– Native Americans, Blacks, Asians as well as underprivileged whites.

Likewise, the American Empire was established and maintained with systematic plunder and exploitation and massive military and political interventions around the world that continue today.

The costly military adventures (now up to 2021’s approved $740 billion military budget), along with global economic shifts such as manufacturing and job outsourcing and displacement by technology, impoverished large segments of the US population, both white and people of color.

Corporate deregulation and the decimation of labor unions weakened the working class and strengthened corporate authoritarianism. In recent decades, Republican and Democratic parties have differed little in their pursuit of corporate and imperial interests.

While the United States has had a history of social movements for people’s rights including labor and civil rights, recent initiatives for systemic change have experienced serious setbacks. The anti-globalization movement that came to prominence during the WTO (World Trade Organization) meetings in Seattle in 1999 was undermined by the Patriot Act (with Joe Biden being a key architect) and other policies introduced soon after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged following the 2008 financial crisis and its slogan ‘We are the 99%’ brought attention to the excesses of the financial sector and growing economic inequality. But this movement also dissipated, largely due to state and corporate tactics of division, repression and propaganda to reinstate the narrative.

In the electoral realm, despite an unprecedented grass roots movement backing him, Bernie Sanders was blocked from winning the Democratic presidential nomination by the party elite in both 2016 and 2020.

The ideals of true socioeconomic reform have been squashed and subverted by the liberal establishment adopting the language of the progressive left but equating justice with racial and gender diversity and downplaying economic equality. This reframing channels the progressive energy away from threatening corporate control and profit, into a safe zone of identity politics, which only further divides and disempowers the general population.

Techno-oligarchy

Just as unemployed and uninsured Americans are pleading for support during the Covid crisis, the combined wealth of US billionaires ‘surpassed $1 trillion in gains since March 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic,’ according to a study by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The top five US billionaires – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison – saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%, during this short period. The increasing digitalization of life during this period represent an enormous augmentation of the political and ideological power of the technocratic oligarchs.

Silicon Valley tech firms, financial supporters of Joe Biden, withdrew attention from issues potentially harmful to his campaign. Even some left-leaning media platforms like the Intercept refused to publish an article critical of Biden just before the election. It led its co-founder, investigative journalist, Glen Greenwald to resign from the Intercept.

Social media companies swiftly deleted the accounts of President Trump and thousands of others following the January 6 event in Capitol Hill on grounds that they incite violence and extremism.

While hate speech and incitement of violence should not be allowed, should a handful of unrepresentative, unregulated tech corporations, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube exercise social and political control that exceed that of the state elected to represent people’s interests? Who decides what is appropriate and inappropriate and on what grounds?

Clearly, democratic policies and institutions are needed to oversee the First Amendment right of free speech. Elizabeth Warren, a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination, called for corporate accountability and planned to introduce policies for deregulation including the break-up of monopolistic companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google.

However, given lack of support from the dominant corporate wing of the Democratic party, Warren was not able to secure even the Vice-Presidential nomination over Kamala Harris, the choice of the liberal corporate establishment.

System Change

The mainstream narrative propagated around the world paints a rosy picture of a return to a post-Trump era of freedom and democracy with the Biden-Harris inauguration on January 20. However, even if Trump is debarred from running for office in 2024, the attitudes and grievances of 70 million or more Americans who voted for him are unlikely to dissipate without serious efforts for change from those in power, and not just a return to corporate-dominated gesture-liberalism.

Indeed, all the issues of polarization and the inherent racism of society cannot be reduced to economic inequality and corporate dominance. Yet there has to be a recognition of the suffering and despair of ordinary people on both sides, be they incarcerated Blacks or unemployed whites.

As economic inequality deepens and the middle class disappears, vast segments of people of color as well as whites have become economically desperate and politically alienated from the status quo.

In the absence of genuine leaders to unite people and bring fundamental change, self-interested parties exploit and fuel discontent, anger and hatred by directing it towards each other. Use of epithets such as, ‘criminals and rapists’ against Latino immigrants by Trump and ‘basket of deplorables’ against Trump supporters by Hillary Clinton, have only fueled division and animosity.

Political ‘street warfare’ between the extreme right Trump supporters and extreme left antifascist groups is now a common occurrence across the US.

It is urgent that more and more people speak up and help move society beyond the polarization that is helping solidify techno-corporate totalitarianism and the police state. The us vs. them, good vs. bad dualism needs to be overcome with an appreciation of inherent human and planetary interdependence and the need for freedom and justice for all.

To quote the words of Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on June 6, 1968:

“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

 

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The post Capitol Hill ‘Insurrection’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Dr Asoka Bandarage, a scholar and practitioner, has taught at Yale, Brandeis, Mount Holyoke (where she received tenure), Georgetown, American and other universities and colleges in the U.S. and abroad. Her research interests include social philosophy and consciousness; environmental sustainability, human well-being and health, global political-economy, ethnicity, gender, population, social movements and South Asia.

The post Capitol Hill ‘Insurrection’ appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 19 2021 (IPS)

Covid-19 infection and death rates in the Western world and many developing countries in Asia and Latin America have long overtaken East Asia since the second quarter of 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering prevailing Western accounts of the Asian financial crises, there have been no serious efforts to draw policy lessons from East Asian contagion containment.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Lockdowns necessary?
Although most East Asian economies have successfully contained the pandemic without nationwide ‘stay in shelter lockdowns’, many governments have seen such measures as necessary. But lockdowns are blunt measures, with inevitable adverse consequences, especially for businesses and employment.

Many countries have thus imposed lockdowns, citing China’s response in Wuhan. But as the first WHO fact-finding mission to China noted, “The majority of the response in China, in 30 provinces, was about case finding, contact tracing, and suspension of public gatherings—all common measures used anywhere in the world to manage [infectious] diseases.

Lockdowns were limited to a few cities where contagion went “out of control in the beginning”. The key lesson from China was “all about…speed. The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be.”

To be sure, lockdowns ‘flatten the curve’ by temporarily preventing further contagion. But unless accompanied by appropriate complementary measures, undetected infectious individuals may cause silent community transmission that becomes evident only too late. Instead of lockdowns, it is far more prudent to find and isolate cases before numbers become unmanageable.

South Korean lessons
The Republic of Korea was the first country to dramatically reduce the number of Covid-19 cases and related deaths without nationwide movement restrictions. It checked the spread of Covid-19 infections without imposing lockdowns, even in Daegu its most infected city.

Mass testing has been key to its response, doing the most by mid-March. By late March, Korea’s newly confirmed cases had fallen from second to eighth place in the world. Meanwhile, Korean authorities urged physical distancing, personal hygiene and remote work while discouraging mass gatherings.

The government also had legal authority to collect phone, credit card and other data to expedite contact tracing, and initially only restricted incoming travellers from Hubei province, where Wuhan is, for precautionary reasons, and from Japan in political retaliation.

Just as China had rapidly identified pathogen characteristics using artificial intelligence and big data access, Korea innovatively deployed new technologies to expedite rapid responses to trace, test, treat and isolate those infected.

Lessons from Vietnam
Three months ago, a Vietnamese official described how “Vietnam is fighting Covid without pitting economic growth against public health”. Besides testing and contact-tracing, “the government has depoliticised the pandemic, treating it purely as a health crisis, allowing for effective governance”.

Hence, there is “no political motive for government officials to hide information, as they don’t face being reprimanded if there are positive cases in their authority area that are not due to their mistakes”.

He noted that “With the head of the Hanoi centre for disease control being arrested for suspected corruption in relation to the purchase of testing kits, and small traders getting fines for price-gouging face-masks, the government has also been clear that public health cannot be entangled with commercial interests”.

After China announced its first infections and deaths in January 2020, “Vietnam tightened its border and airport control of Chinese visitors. This wasn’t an easy decision, given that cross-border trade with China accounts for a significant part of the Vietnamese economy”.

Vietnam also “took precautionary measures above and beyond World Health Organization recommendations”. Preparations started “a week before the outbreak was officially declared a public health emergency of international concern, and more than a month before WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic”.

The communist-led government also ensured “freedom of information on Covid-related matters”. “Lockdown and isolation are more selective” from the outset, without resorting to nationwide lockdowns, as has happened elsewhere without much benefit.

Vietnam is one of the few countries with “positive GDP growth” in 2020; “the supposed trade-off between the economy and public health… looks to be something of a false choice”.

In their war, Vietnam is believed to have lost over three million people compared to 58,209 US lives. In fighting the virus, Vietnam, with 97 million people, has lost 35 lives so far, while the US, with a 332 million population, has lost almost four hundred thousand.

Mass testing crucial
After a year of living with Covid-19, all governments can learn a great deal from critical evaluation of their own country experiences, other experiences as well as accumulated, especially new knowledge relevant to feasible policy options.

Thus far, appropriate East Asian policy measures for rapid early detection, isolation and contact tracing, while protecting the most vulnerable and treating the infected, have succeeded in flattening the curve.

More reliable, cheaper methods (e.g., ‘lateral-flow’ antigen tests) allow more frequent mass testing. As undetected cases are more likely to spread infection, such tests enable more frequent, faster and easier testing and quicker results, and facilitate faster, more efficacious actions.

This can help check contagion by identifying more of those infected earlier, thus reducing transmission. Even though less accurate than supposed ‘gold standards’, lower costs allow more widespread and frequent testing to identify many more of those infected.

Easier to administer and delivering results more rapidly, such cheaper, simpler and quicker tests more speedily detect the infected, especially among the asymptomatic, in time for appropriate and timely action.

As SARS-CoV-2 transmission peaks several days after infection, together with the viral load, more frequent testing is necessary to check contagion. More frequent mass testing is probably going to detect many more of those infected much earlier, while they are still infectious.

Look East
In the early 20th century, a young Cambridge-trained doctor, Wu Lien Teh returned to practice in the British colony of Penang where he mobilised thousands against the opium trade. The authorities arrested him, forcing him to seek employment outside the British empire.

He eventually found work with China’s Ching emperor in Manchuria where a plague was raging, eventually claiming 60,000 lives. Recognising it as pneumonic, Wu recommended use of multi-layered masks he designed to protect users against airborne infection, now recognised as forerunner of the N95 mask.

His later analysis of the socio-behavioural determinants of zoonotic transmission of the epidemic was also pioneering. Sadly, a famous French doctor Gerald Mesny, who rejected Wu’s mask advice as diagnostically wrong, died of the plague soon after arrival.

Over a century later, and over two decades after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis exposed the systemic financial fragility creating conditions for the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, the reluctance to learn from the East continues, ignoring Prophet Muhammad’s advice to ‘seek knowledge, even unto China’.

 

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Nadia Helmy Ahmed

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Jan 18 2021 (IPS)

As a Muslim woman born and brought up in Denmark, Nadia Helmy Ahmed broke many stereotypes when she started boxing at the age of 15. “Back then it was not common for girls to take up elite boxing, let alone common for Muslim girls, I used to be the only girl in my gym, along with ten others boys,” said Nadia to IPS News.

Elite boxing is defined by who the boxers fight, how they fight and how they handle top ranked competition on a consistent basis. Nadia has been an elite boxer for over 15 years, and is one of the only ten Danish women in the sport, representing Denmark in world championships.

“Being a girl in a male dominated sport means that you have to learn to deal with all the obstacles that come with it, sometimes you are treated differently, both from inside the community of the sport and outside from the Muslim community as well. Sometimes the tone in the gym can be a bit harsh, but I quickly learnt to turn that direct language into positive fuel.

“Boxing happened by chance in my life and I fell in love with the sport and it has stayed on with me. I am lucky to say my family has always been very supportive, and that’s why I have been able to pursue my passion,” said Nadia.

As a boxer, Nadia continues to challenge various gender stereotypes and cultural discourses. Nadia says, “by living my life the way that I have chosen to live, I have challenged many norms and expectations of what a Muslim woman should look like, what she should do, what her goals and ambitions should be. I have chosen another way for myself, a different path and I feel at home when I am training.”

Nadia is part Egyptian and part Danish and she says she no longer wants to be caught between the discourse of identity and nationality, between her parents’ countries of origin, and her own country of residence.

Denmark is home to almost 320,000 Muslims, which is about 5.5 percent of the population, putting the country in a slightly higher proportion than in the rest of Europe. According to a report published in Reuters, a growing number of Danish Muslims say that they have faced verbal abuse, exclusion and hate crimes since mainstream political parties began adopting anti-immigrant policies. Immigration in Denmark has become a strong issue especially during elections.

In December 2020, Denmark’s government decided to separately classify people from or with heritage in primarily Muslim countries and regions in their official crime statistics. A move which was deeply criticized by many. Immigration and integration minister Mattias Tesfaye supported the differentiation of people in Denmark with Middle Eastern and North African heritage.

“Pluralism is based on trust, and the recognition between people, whether they want it or not, said Nadia. Religion plays an important role in cultural encounters, partly because it highlights differences and opens up new understandings of plurality and community. We as Muslim women have to use our understanding of liberal European politics to protest against the exclusion of immigrants from the public sphere.

“I crave to find a stance of cultural dignity, to find a moral community of mutual acceptance and purpose. The crucial issue for us has been to achieve a status in which is is legitimate and acceptable to be both Muslim woman and Danish at the same time,” said Nadia.

Over the past few years, Nadia has taken her passion for boxing to Muslim girls in local communities living in Braband in Gellerup, an area of western Aarhus, which holds the biggest housing associations in Denmark. Nadia encourages women to empower themselves by teaching them how to tap in and use their physical and mental strengths.

“When I started coaching young girls from the community, I wanted to transfer my passion for boxing to them. My mission was to enable them, to empower them, to give them a space where they could be themselves, at the same time have fun using their bodies to do so”, said Nadia.

“Boxing is a way of life. The combination of the mind and the body in sports gives a smaller picture of life in itself. When you think you can’t give anymore, there is always a little more to give in sports. Without individual strength and power, it is impossible to fight for your rights, for a better society,” said Nadia.

Integration remains a debate and challenge for those who come to Denmark, especially from Muslim countries. Human Rights organizations have reported numerous violations against refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers and have often described Danish policies towards immigrants as some of the most aggressive in the western world. In the current climate where European countries have been opening their doors towards immigrants and refugees, it is important for Denmark to re-think it’s value-based policies which has become one of the biggest reasons for countries’ polarizations especially towards its immigrants, religion, identity and culture.

According to Nadia, the way forward for Denmark is to identify the challenge of integration, without politicization, and interpret differences and similarities in real contexts, defining common goals and interests.

Sania Farooqui is a journalist and filmmaker based out of New Delhi. She hosts a weekly online show called The Sania Farooqui Show where Muslim women from around the world are invited to share their views.

 

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While the opposition leader Bobi Wine is under house arrest, analysts say Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni must make concessions to those who voted against him. Courtesy: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard

By Jonathan Irumba
KAMPALA, Jan 18 2021 (IPS)

Thirty-five years ago when President Yoweri Museveni talked, a majority of citizens listened. But now, as he approaches almost four decades in power, his message is not resonating well — particularly with the country’s youth who constitute about 70 percent of the voting population in Uganda.

On Saturday the Electoral Commission of Uganda declared the incumbent president winner of the vote. While the opposition leader Robert Kyagulanyi, also known as Bobi Wine, remains under house arrest it is unclear how and when he will dispute the election results, as he’s vowed to do. But one thing is clear as analysts say Museveni must make concessions to those who voted against him.

In an election notable because of the nationwide internet shutdown that began on the evening before the elections, and is yet to be restored, Museveni secured 58% of the vote compared to 35% of the vote cast for opposition candidate, musician-turned-politician Bobi Wine.

Bob Wine has rejected the results as rigged. And has indicated that his party will challenge the result through all legal recourses available — this includes filling a case challenging the result within the next 14 days with the Electoral Commission of Uganda; going to court to challenge the results; as well as peaceful demonstrations, which are legal according to the country’s constitution.

Joseph Kalema, 38, resident of Kakindu Village near Kampala is convinced his candidate, Bobi Wine, won against Museveni in the Jan. 15 election but was simply “rigged out”.

“We are waiting for our generation president to tell us the next course of action,” Kalema told IPS, referring to Bobi Wine who is president of the opposition National Unity Platform (NUP).

Bobi Wine shut off from party officials and the world

However, it may take sometime before 38-year-old Bobi Wine can make that call as he has been under house arrest since the elections, with his residence surrounded by state forces, and his mobile phones reportedly disconnected.

The media have been denied access to his residence as well as his close colleagues.

In a tweet from Bobi Wine’s account but with ADMIN written in brackets— and presumably sent from outside Uganda’s borders as at the time of filing in the morning of Monday Jan. 18 the internet still remained shutdown — it was claimed that Member of Parliament Francis Zaake was beaten after he allegedly attempted to enter the residence. He is reportedly still in hospital.

Everyone including media and my party officials are restricted from accessing me. @ZaakeFrancis was arrested outside my gate as he made his way to my house, he was badly beaten by soldiers. He is now in Rubaga hospital.
(ADMIN)

— BOBI WINE (@HEBobiwine) January 17, 2021

In another tweet yesterday, again from Bobi Wine’s account but with ADMIN written in brackets, it was claimed that the opposition leader and his wife had run out of food and when his wife attempted to pick food from the garden she had been “blocked and assaulted by soldiers”.

It’s now four days since the military surrounded our home and placed my wife and I under house arrest. We have run out of food supplies and when my wife tried to pick food from the garden yesterday, she was blocked and assaulted by the soldiers staged in our compound. (ADMIN) pic.twitter.com/MLEtSbyCcW

— BOBI WINE (@HEBobiwine) January 17, 2021

 

Today, Jan. 18, elected members of the NUP called a press conference, demanding Bobi Wine’s immediate release, saying despite claims that the state forces surrounding him were there for his own protection, the current conditions under which their presidential candidate is living can be classified as house arrest.

Mathias Mpuuga the vice president of the NUP, and a newly-elected member of the party, said party officials had attempted to meet Bobi Wine were blocked by security. NUP demanded the immediate release of Bobi Wine, adding that he should be allowed to have access to his party leadership and lawyers to guide the next course of action.

Museveni blames ‘foreign forces’

When this will happen remains unclear. After being declared the winner in the election, Museveni said his main challenger Bobi Wine was an agent of foreign forces who wanted to push for their interests and were using him as their vessel to achieve their agenda.

Who the foreign forces are, was not clarified but Museveni alluded to “promoters of homosexuals” and a neighbouring country which was not named, and those intent on frustrating Uganda from reaping the benefits of its oil discovery

With the internet, a key mobilisation tool for the NUP, still shut down any large scale demonstrations would be difficult to organise. 

Heightened security across the country

A few weeks ago when Bobi Wine, the main challenger to Museveni and the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), was arrested after being accused of flaunting COVID-19 guidelines during campaigning, there were spontaneous riots in urban centres across the country by his supporters.

The national security apparatus swung into action to quash the riots. Over 50 people died.

But Kalema, like many of his peers, simply do not care about the risk of being arrested or killed in confrontations with security.

“Many of our colleagues are languishing in jail, many have been killed, including innocent citizens. Should we just look on?” wondered Kalema.

Security is not taking matters lightly and are armed to the teeth to quail any violence.

“Last time they took us by surprise. Now we are more than ready for any riots,” Lieutenant Colonel Deo Akiiki, the deputy spokesperson of Uganda People’s Defence Forces told IPS.

The army and the police had deployed heavily on the streets of Kampala and other major towns across the country ahead of the election. They are still patrolling the streets days after the election for fear of a repeat of riots, following the declaration of the election results that announced Museveni victorious.

Museveni must make concessions 

Museveni is credited for ushering in peace and security to a country that had descended into anarchy following the overthrow of Idid Amin that subsequent short-lived governments.

The biggest challenge to Museveni is that the majority of voters in this election were not born when he took power. Many were born during Museveni’s reign and did not experience that difficult period in the country’s history.

What they understand are the issues the of unemployment and poverty, which they have to deal with now, with many blaming this on Museveni’s continued stay in power.

Political analyst Dr Samuel Kazidwe says that situation is very fluid and a lot will depend on how the parties react.

“It is not over yet because Preside Museveni must find a way to reach out to Bobi Wine and his supporters and be able to make some concessions. Otherwise we could be headed for trouble,” Kazidwe told IPS. 

Kazidwe said Museveni could learn from the Kenya experience and the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI), which was agreed between Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga following a disputed 2017 election.

Kazidwe said that when looking at the election results, it was clear that the whole of the central region had rejectedMuseveni and his party as evidenced by the numbers of votes for the opposition. 

Meanwhile, the  Secretary General of the ruling NRM, Justine Kasule Lumumba said on Saturday that were looking for evidence of foreign interference in the country’s election.

Some see this as an attempt to justify the earlier shutdown of Facebook after it to blocked NRM activists’ accounts over allegations of impersonating other users and unethical conduct.  However, the NRM has taken this as evidence of foreign interference in the election. 

 ** The story notes that internet was not restored at time of publication of this piece. It was later restored around 14.30 Ugandan time. 

 

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Stuck in Bosnia amid rough winter, Bangladeshi migrant pleads for help

By External Source
Jan 18 2021 (IPS-Partners)

Temperatures have plummeted way below zero in Bosnia, making life even more miserable for hundreds of migrants and refugees — including entire families with small children — sleeping rough while trying to reach Western Europe.

After days of snow earlier this month, a spell of extreme cold that hit the region this week has brought freezing days and nights for the people stranded in northwest Bosnia, near the border with European Union member Croatia.

Meteorologists in Bosnia and Croatia have warned their citizens not to stay out long during the cold spell, predicting that temperatures could drop to minus 15 degrees Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).

While Bosnian authorities, under international pressure, have improved conditions for several hundred people stuck in a burned-out camp, hundreds more are in makeshift tent camps and abandoned houses without heating or any facilities.

“Last night was very cold. We are suffering very much,” said Shahin, a mechanic from Bangladesh, who is staying in a small tent in a forest near the town of Velika Kladusa. “I (didn’t) sleep last night.”

Migrants like Shahin have been sleeping rough for months while hoping to cross illegally into Croatia, sometimes making dozens of attempts while allegedly facing violence and pushbacks at the hands of Croatian border police.

The makeshift camp near Velika Kladusa consists of several small tents on frozen, uneven ground among trees. Some migrants wash outside in the cold in freezing temperatures, they light fires for warmth and have no toilets or electricity.

Shahin said there’s no clean drinking water. “It is not safe, it is a very big risk for our health. … Please save us,” he told an Associated Press reporter.

Bosnia’s often-chaotic response to Europe’s migration crisis has drawn international criticism and warnings from humanitarian groups that both the Balkan country and the EU must find a durable solution.

Twenty-year-old journalism student Mohammad Khan from Afghanistan, who is staying with several dozen other migrants at a garbage-strewn abandoned factory near the town of Bihac, said he just wants a “safe” and “clean” life in Europe.

Inside the crumbling, communist-era factory, migrants could be seen lying wrapped tight in blankets or sleeping inside small tents. The windowless building offers little protection from the cold.

A couple from Afghanistan with their four children aged between 18 months and 10 years, have found temporary shelter in an abandoned house in a village near the Croatian border.

The family cook on a wood-fueled stove, light candles after dark and use old furniture left behind in the house while waiting for a chance to cross the border. They told the AP they have tried 40 times to enter Croatia but have been sent back each time.

Mustafa, the father of the family who refused to give his surname for fear of reprisals, said it’s been hard after failing so many times and having no help except occasional aid packages from humanitarian groups.

“Too (much) hard here, too much game,” Mustafa said, using a migrant term for attempts to illegally cross borders.

According to Reuters, Bosnia has since early 2018 become part of a transit route for thousands of migrants from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa aiming to reach Europe’s wealthier countries.

There are about 8,000 migrants in Bosnia.

Most migrants in Bosnia flock to the northwestern corner of the country because it borders Croatia. Local authorities have said they are overwhelmed but most other Bosnian regions have refused to accept the migrants amid protests from residents.

This story was originally published by The Daily Star, Bangladesh

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Stuck in Bosnia amid rough winter, Bangladeshi migrant pleads for help

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Stop killing journalists. Credit: UNESCO

By External Source
Jan 18 2021 (IPS-Partners)

When journalists are targeted, “societies as a whole pay a price”, the UN chief said on November 2, 2020, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists.

“If we do not protect journalists, our ability to remain informed and make evidence-based decisions is severely hampered”, Secretary-General António Guterres spelled out in his message for the day.  

And when they cannot safely do their jobs, “we lose an important defense against the pandemic of misinformation and disinformation that has spread online”, he added.

Free press ‘essential’

There were at least 21 attacks on journalists covering protests in the first half of 2020 – equal to the number of such attacks in the whole of 2017, Mr. Guterres said.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted new perils for journalists and media workers, the UN chief reiterated his call for a “free press that can play its essential role in peace, justice, sustainable development and human rights”.

“Fact-based news and analysis depend on the protection and safety of journalists conducting independent reporting, rooted in the fundamental tenet: ‘journalism without fear or favour’”, he concluded.

Adverse consequences

In her message, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), maintained that through accurate reporting, journalists “bring truth to light”.

However, she noted that for too many “telling the truth comes at a price”.

While journalists are in “a unique and compelling position” to “speak truth to power”, the UNESCO chief observed that the two “do not always see eye to eye”.

Between 2010 and 2019, close to 900 journalists were killed while doing their job, according Ms. Azoulay – more than 150 in the last two years alone.

Journalists in crosshairs

Although many have lost their lives covering conflicts, far more are being killed for investigating issues such as corruption, trafficking, political wrongdoing, human rights violations and environmental issues.

And death is not the only risk journalists are facing.

“Attacks on the press can take the form of threats, kidnappings, arrests, imprisonments or offline and online harassment with women being targeted in particular”, the UNESCO chief elaborated.

Preserving freedom

Even though the 2019 death toll for journalists was the lowest in a decade, the UN official pointed out that wider attacks are continuing “at an alarming rate”.

States have an obligation to protect journalists — UNESCO chief

She noted that in seven-out-of-eight killings, the perpetrators go unpunished, and asserted: “We can and should do more”.

“Journalists are essential in preserving the fundamental right to freedom of expression, guaranteed by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, she explained. “When journalists are attacked with impunity, there is a breakdown in security and judicial systems for all”.

End impunity

UNESCO commemorates the day annually on 2 November to raise awareness and highlight some of the specific risks that journalists face in their quest to uncover the truth.

“On this day, I call on…all Member States and international and non-governmental organizations to join forces to guarantee the safety of journalists and root out impunity”, said the UNESCO chief.

“Only by investigating and prosecuting crimes against media professionals can we guarantee access to information and freedom of expression”.

Unleashing information

UNESCO also marked the day by releasing the brochure Protect Journalists, Protect the Truth.

Among other things, it revealed that most journalists were killed in countries with no armed conflict.

And while impunity for crimes against journalists continues to prevail, in 2020, 13 per cent of cases worldwide were reported as resolved in comparison to 12 per cent in 2019, and 11 per cent in 2018.

The findings also showed that in 2019, Latin America and the Caribbean region represented 40 per cent of all killings registered worldwide, followed by the Asia and Pacific region, with 26 per cent.

“States have an obligation to protect journalists”, and judges and prosecutors must promote “swift and effective criminal proceedings” to ensure that perpetrators of crimes against them are held accountable, upheld Ms. Azoulay.

A mural on a blast wall in downtown Kabul commemorates journalists killed in Afghanistan in 2016. Credit: UNAMA/Fardin Waezi

Source: UN News

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A healthcare worker at a testing facility collects samples for the coronavirus at Mimar Sinan State Hospital, Buyukcekmece district in Istanbul, Turkey. Credit: UNDP Turkey/Levent Kulu

By Ilze Brands Kehris
GENEVA, Jan 18 2021 (IPS)

A year into the COVID-19 crisis, countries across the globe continue to face alarming levels of pressure on their health and social services. Education and other essential rights, such as water and sanitation, have been severely compromised.

Inequalities and poverty have further deepened with devastating impact on the most vulnerable and marginalised individuals and communities. Many other rights have come under further pressure.

The crisis has required taking necessary and proportionate measures to contain the pandemic, but we have also seen the imposition of opportunistic or unintended restrictions on public freedoms, threats on privacy, curtailment of free speech, overreach of emergency powers and heavy-handed security responses.

It is essential that the pandemic is defeated with a sense of humanity that respects human dignity and human rights for all.

Importantly, going forward in the recovery process, we have a unique if not historic opportunity to change course and rebuild more sustainable, human rights based, socially just and equitable economies and societies as envisioned in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

This is also what the Secretary-General’s Call to Action for Human Rights asks from all of us – stepped up and joint efforts to squarely place rights at the core of sustainable development.

Recovering better will require a new social contract that reduces inequalities and prioritises the realization of economic, social and cultural rights for all. Among the first steps to be taken by States should be to reverse the chronic underinvestment in public services.

Prioritizing resources to social protection, health, and education systems is an investment in the future sustainability of our societies.

Food, healthcare, education and social security cannot remain privileges only for those who can afford them; they are, and must be seen, as basic human rights to which all entitled, without discrimination.

This is a defining moment to see economic, social and cultural rights as legally binding commitments, as essential benchmarks for social policy, that are directly related to achieving a speedy and sustainable recovery.

To recover better, we will also need a global coordinated effort to secure equal access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines that can be distributed to all those who need it.

In this context, we must strengthen international cooperation and ensure development assistance and debt relief to reduce inequalities within and between countries and facilitate equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines.

In building forward better, we need to reset our economies, as well as the global financial and debt architecture, to put the protection of human rights, including the right to development, at the heart of economic policies and choices.

The international financial institutions should be encouraged to promote fiscal and policy space for economic, social and cultural rights as an essential part of economic recovery and economic sustainability.

Our Office, OHCHR, has stepped up its work on economic and social rights and in support of the implementation of the SDGs, through its Surge Initiative. This initiative further strengthened the Office’s ability to work on human rights-based economics in support of State’s efforts to ‘build back better.’

The Surge team has worked with States to encourage transformative economies, providing advice on the human rights impact of economic reforms and austerity policies as well as strategies to secure ‘minimum core obligations’ on economic and social rights and link them up to national SDG and development plans.

In this context, OHCHR has provided seed funding to 20 field presences to reinforce sectoral analysis and interventions in the context of the UN COVID-19 response and recovery with the view to assessing those most vulnerably and ensuring that no one is left behind.

Disaggregated data is crucial to the realization of the international community’s promise to ‘leave no one behind’. It helps States, civil society and other partners to better understand and monitor progress for all groups and to develop evidence-based responses that considers, incorporates and benefits equitably all segments of society. National human rights institutions are a critical partner in these efforts.

We have also revamped the Universal Human Rights Index in a way to make it easier for States to see the linkages and synergies between specific human rights obligations and SDG commitments. This is aimed to facilitate efforts of States to work comprehensively toward achieving both agendas, keeping in view the current COVID-19 challenges.

In this context, OHCHR is also continuing its work on human rights indicators and promoting a human rights-based approach to data that expands disaggregation and strengthening collaboration between NHRIs and National Statistics Offices, including in Albania, Kenya, Kosovo, Liberia, Mexico, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Philippines and Uganda.

The Office is also continuing its work on human rights indicators, including for SDG 16 indicators, and to guide the UN’s socio-economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Also high on the Office’s agenda is our work on civic space, providing technical assistance to Member States and stepping up cooperation with National Human Rights Institutions, civil society organisations and grassroots movements, including human rights-based COVID-19 response and recovery and implementation of the SDGs.

The recently launched first-ever UN System wide Guidance Note on Protection and Promotion of Civic Space will be a critical tool for UN Country Teams to support and strengthen civil society.

Furthermore, reports and COVID-19 guidance prepared by OHCHR, international human rights mechanisms and other partners such as the Danish Institute carry a wealth of information relevant to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and COVID-19 recovery.

Similarly, the Office will continue to support efforts to strengthen the engagement of National Human Rights Institutions in implementation and reporting on the 2030 Agenda as well as responding to the challenges of the pandemic through human rights approaches.

Recovering better will require concerted efforts to rebuild trust in the institutions of governance, with a renewed commitment to eliminating discrimination, promoting meaningful participation and accountability, and protecting fundamental freedoms. We need to reverse the worrying trend of shrinking civic space, and create platforms – including through the use of online platforms – for meaningful participation of those affected that will help us to draw on people’s unique experiences, resilience, insights, ideas and visions.

I look forward to listening to your views and practical experiences on how we can make this a reality – achieve the 17 sustainable development goals by 2030 on the basis of international human rights standards.

 

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Ilze Brands Kehris is Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights heading the UN Human Rights Office in New York

 
Addressing an online event organized by the Danish Institute for Human Rights in conjunction with the Human Rights Council’s third inter-sessional meeting on Human Rights and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

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A Chinese backed solar plant in Cafayate, northern Argentina. Such projects would be given the green light by regulators under new proposals for Chinese overseas investment Credit: Alamy/ChineseDialogue

By Ma Tianjie
BEIJING, Jan 15 2021 (IPS)

A government-backed coalition of international advisors to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has recommended that China apply more stringent environmental controls over its overseas investments. If adopted, this would be a major departure from China’s usual approach of deferring to host country rules, many of them inadequate, for regulating its overseas investments.

High-level advisors, including former UNEP chief Erik Solheim and green finance heavyweight Ma Jun, propose a system to categorise Chinese overseas investments based on their polluting, climate and biodiversity impacts.

The classification methodology was published on 1 December at a press conference organised by the BRI International Green Development Coalition (BRIGC) in Beijing. It would see coal-fired power plants given a firm red light, while other types of Chinese overseas investments, such as hydropower and railways would need to implement internationally recognised mitigation measures to earn “green” status. On the other hand, solar and wind power are considered green projects that advance the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.

 

Higher standards in China’s overseas investments

Christoph Nedopil Wang, founding director of the Green BRI Center at the Central University of Finance and Economics and one of the lead authors of the classification methodology, told China Dialogue that the system combines multiple international approaches to green finance.

The categorisation system and an ensuing taxonomy of green, yellow and red projects take inspiration from international standards such as the EU Sustainable Finance Taxonomy, the Equator Principles and performance standards issued by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group. It also uses China’s own guidelines for green credit and green bond issuance as references.

For years Chinese companies and financial institutions working abroad have primarily adhered to the “host country principle” which emphasises compliance with host countries’ environmental and social regulations. The inadequacy of the safeguards in many Global South countries, which make up the majority of BRI participant countries, means that the principle is often used as an excuse to lower standards for China’s overseas investments.

This creates a stark contrast between China’s domestic green transition and its footprints across the rest of the world. While clean energy is growing at a breathtaking speed inside China, a large portion of the energy infrastructure Chinese companies are building overseas is coal-based. Many such projects are of the low-efficiency type that China itself has gradually phased out.

Biodiversity threats are also a main concern of many of the BRI’s linear infrastructure projects such as railways and roads that intersect with key protection areas. Domestically, China has implemented an ecological redlining system hailed as a model for reconciling development with the conservation of nature.

There are calls on Chinese actors to follow higher standards in their overseas investments, but so far the response has been limited. None of the major Chinese financial institutions involved in overseas lending, for example, has signed on to the Equator Principles, which requires international standards (such as the IFC’s performance standards) to be applied in low-income countries with underdeveloped safeguards.

In 2019, major Chinese banks such as China Development Bank and ICBC signed on to the Green Investment Principles (GIP) which call for “acute awareness of potential impacts of investments and operations on climate, environment and society in the Belt and Road region”. But mechanisms to translate such awareness into action are yet to be developed.

“The GIP is more market driven”, comments Nedopil Wang, “while our [proposed system] is much more targeted at the regulators.”

How the ratings system works

Red projects require stricter supervision and regulation.These are regarded as creating “significant and irreversible environmental harm” in at least one of the areas of climate change, pollution and biodiversity, or the risk of such harm.

Yellow projects are environmental neutral with moderate impacts. These cause no significant harm, and remaining harms can be mitigated by affordable and practical measures, on a reasonable scale, within the project itself.

Green projects are encouraged. These have no significant negative impact on pollution, climate change or biodiversity, and contribute positively to at least one of these, particularly if they benefit the aims of international environmental treaties and conventions.The system considers three dimensions of a project’s potential environmental footprint: pollution, climate change and biodiversity. Projects that are contrary to the Paris Agreement objectives, such as those which increase emissions or undermine climate mitigation measures, are considered to cause “significant harm”. Similarly, projects that encroach on key biodiversity areas are given a red rating.

The system has some flexibility built in to allow contextual considerations of a project’s environmental merits. Some projects types, such as railways, may initially raise a red flag for their potential high risks to biodiversity.

But if developers can credibly demonstrate that mitigation measures are taken to prevent or reduce environmental harms, following international standards, they may get a green classification. However, the original red rating will remain as a reminder of the project’s intrinsic high risk.

The creators believe the two-step classification will better equip the system to respond to complex situations on the ground in most countries along the Belt and Road. “The idea is to make the system adaptive,” says Nedopil Wang, who believes that a black-and-white taxonomy may be too rigid in some circumstances. Therefore, “process standards” which detail how a risk should be managed, are also included.

 

Risky projects

According to the system, the construction and operation of coal-fired power plants will be given a red rating with no mitigation or compensation measures available to upgrade it. The same applies to the retrofit of coal-fired power plants designed to extend their operating life.

On the other hand, a hydropower station will be given an initial red rating but could earn a green rating if it applies “internationally relevant” hydropower standards for mitigating environmental damage, such as the IFC’s 2015 Hydroelectric Power Standard.

The research team provided an initial classification of 38 project types under 20 sectors, ranging from renewable energy to passenger transport and livestock farming. The grouping of the project types into positive (green), neutral (yellow) and negative (red) lists for the first time creates a simple taxonomy for BRI projects based on their environmental impacts.

“I can see the value of a taxonomy [for BRI projects] which raises environmental awareness for investors,” a Chinese expert familiar with international green finance safeguards, who is not authorised to take interviews, told China Dialogue. “At the very early stage of a project, when you have a project concept note in front of you, a taxonomy may help you make a snap judgment about whether a sector is in line with your strategy or should be excluded in the first place.”

But she cautioned that Chinese overseas projects are often large-scale and such a taxonomy may be too simplistic to capture their complex impacts, particularly social impacts.

Architects of the new system respond that the taxonomy is for demonstration purposes at this stage, created to illustrate how the classification system can be run. They are planning to refine the list with more technical details and application guidelines as a next step. One key recommendation from the advisors is to link the system with more comprehensive environmental impact assessments for red and yellow projects.

 

Adoption is key

The international team proposing the system also recommends it be embedded into China’s decision-making processes on Belt and Road projects. According to their analysis, China’s central government agencies such as the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) all have power to regulate overseas investment, but currently environmental considerations are not reflected in their approval processes.

“The positive and negative list will provide a foundation for governmental bodies to make sure overseas investment is in line with climate and environmental goals,” says Wang Ye, a green finance analyst with the World Resources Institute (WRI), who co-created the system. One key recommendation from the team is to develop an “exclusion list” of projects irreversibly harming the environment.

Yuan Feng, deputy director general of the NDRC’s Department for Regional Openness, which oversees the development of the BRI, offered his blessing at the press conference where the system was presented.

But Nedopil Wang admits that the appetite of regulators to adopt such a system is hard to gauge. It is noteworthy that the Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) which hosts the BRIGC, does not have formal regulatory power over project development outside China’s borders.

Experts have also opined that green catalogues, which encourage certain types of investments, are easier for regulators to consider than exclusion lists, which often go beyond their legal authority. China’s own environmental laws have yet to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with binding force, they noted. Positive lists such as the green bond catalogue have so far been the mainstay of domestic actions to steer finance toward greener projects.

There are signs that some regulators might be more receptive of the recommendations. On 25 October, five central government agencies, including the central bank, the MEE and the banking regulator, issued a joint guidance for the country’s financing system to better serve China’s 2060 carbon neutrality goal. It specifically encourages financial institutions to support low-carbon development along the Belt and Road.

There is hope that China’s financial sector may adopt the classification system and apply differential treatment to overseas projects: favourable financing conditions for “good practice” projects and stringent conditions for risky ones.

“The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) has been involved in designing the system, so that’s a good sign,” Nedopil Wang told China Dialogue. “The de facto application [of the system] really depends on the specific champions within the different regulators.”

“Incorporating environmental risks into policy and finance practices requires these champions to push it relentlessly inside the system, like woodpeckers that always hit the same spot without getting a headache,” he said. “[Adopting the classification system] makes reputational sense and environmental sense for China today. But it requires a really different approach to some of the decision making.”

This article was originally published by ChinaDialogue

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The @realDonaldTrump account on Twitter, the outgoing president of the United States' preferred platform for communication, and which was permanently suspended by the company on January 8, as was the official account as president, @POTUS. Image: Twitter

By Andrés Cañizález
CARACAS, Jan 15 2021 (IPS)

Over the last four years, United States President Donald Trump has had in Twitter his main political communication tool. On this technological platform, he spread messages that were not entirely true, insulted and disqualified people, fired, or mocked his collaborators. Twitter was a stage for his sort of presidential reality show.

Twitter’s business decisions, initially to temporarily suspend Trump’s account, and then permanently, have ignited a heated debate, which like all those involving the United States (US), in these days of January, seems to be wrapped around extreme positions. It would be a good idea for another piece to look into how Trump precisely fueled polarization, the fruits of which are now for all to see, and how Twitter was his tool in such a strategy.

Trump and Twitter already had a love-hate relationship before the events of January 6, with the assault on the Capitol in Washington. With almost 89 million followers, Trump is the most influential head of state or government in office on this social media worldwide. Barack Obama, US president for two terms (2009-2016), is the person with the greatest number of followers worldwide, over 127 million.

Remarkably, Trump favored to communicate through Twitter. With succinct publications and by smartly using the impact of his messages among his many followers, the outgoing president not only skipped over engaging with mainstream media, but he himself had a far greater impact on Twitter than any press or TV company could have. From Twitter, he denigrated American journalism.

Andrés Cañizález

For Twitter, it was also a good business to be used intensively for four years by the most powerful man in the world, who sent out tweets at any time of the day or night, messages that were not filtered by the White House communications team. His Twitter account was a way of finding out what Trump was concerned about or up to, and thousands of news stories ended up being written based on the president’s tweets, not from the official president’s office account but from his personal account.

It should not be overlooked that this corporate decision, unprecedented in the case of a political figure with such a large following, was preceded by “misleading content” labels that Twitter decided to place on some of Trump’s messages in November 2020, in the heat of the election and counting of votes.

On claims that Trump was generating false content, which was subsequently proven to be the case, Twitter not only labeled but also even removed some tweets from the president. In my view, that seemed to be a mistake.

Then I argued that 1) a company should not restrict a discussion that was purely political; 2) politicians in the midst of a debate are not under the obligation to tell only truths; 3) without being media outlets themselves, social media are today a substantial part of the public forum; and 4) if Trump or any politician told lies, journalism was obliged to fact-check or prove it.

After the disgraceful and unfortunate events that took place in Washington on January 6, Twitter decided to suppress Trump’s account because with his messages the president would have “incited violence”.

 

Donald Trump’s last two tweets before his Twitter account was permanently suspended, after more than 57,000 tweets generated by the outgoing US president, who had about 89 million followers. Photo: Twitter

 

It is quite accepted that limits can be placed on freedom of expression when messages go from being, for example, a mere insult, to proposing actions that end up unleashing violence. It was only when the crisis became a major scandal and the possibility of an impeachment on grounds of these events began to be floated that Trump finally condemned violence.

It was not the messages of just a random agitated person with a few tens or hundreds of followers. We are dealing with messages from someone who has held the main office in the world’s leading power – and will continue to do so for a few more days, with millions of followers on Twitter. This left the door open for his followers to sabotage the legislative ratification act on Democrat candidate Joe Biden’s victory, scheduled for January 6.

While some of Trump’s messages – or even silence at crucial moments – could be considered an implicit incitement or blessing of violence, the next question is whether a company alone can establish this.

I wonder if it should be Twitter, with a decision based on its corporate policies, that effectively closed Trump’s account or was this a decision that, as it was regarding freedom of expression, had to be settled in the US justice system.

I am afraid that we are facing a case in which we have irresponsible positions both from Trump, with his virulent or deceitful messages, and from Twitter by taking for itself the role of arbiter of what US and global society should read or not.

It is possible that this case will end up spurring a debate that should be urgent, but which has unfortunately been postponed given the immense economic power and political influence that such social media as Twitter and Facebook have gained.

The public defense of these platforms, in order to avoid any public debate or possibility of legislation, was precisely to hide behind the premise that their role was technological. They defined themselves as providers of technological applications to connect people, with no intervention on content. The case of Twitter and Trump proves the opposite.

The post Twitter, Donald Trump, and Incitement to Violence appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Andrés Cañizález is a Venezuelan journalist and Ph.D. in Political Science

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International Year of Volunteers: A volunteer ombudsman in Peru helps a local woman with her problem, 2001. Credit: UN Photo

By Carmen Arroyo
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 15 2021 (IPS)

While the world is grappling with the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peru is still dealing with an epidemic that it has not been able to control—the mosquito-borne viral disease known as dengue.

With almost 56,400 confirmed cases as of December, Peru is suffering the worst dengue epidemic since 2017, when the virus infected over 68,000 people. The illness, coupled with the novel coronavirus crisis, has left thousands of people exposed to malnutrition and water-borne diseases.

Although mortality rates are low for dengue cases, nutritious diets and immediate sanitary responses are needed to battle the condition. And, above all, prevention is key to handling future epidemics, given that the mosquito responsible for dengue, Aedes aegypti, is expanding to new territories in Peru. As informal settlements and urbanization increase, so do Aedes larvae, which grow in stagnant water accumulated in cans or pots.

“Dengue has become endemic to many regions in Peru whereas before it was mostly found in the tropical ecosystem areas,” says a researcher for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) in Washington DC, pointing at the regions of Madre de Dios, Loreto, Ucayali, and San Martin, among others. “It’s normal to find dengue near the Amazon, but now we can find it in desert-type areas. It should be easier to control dengue, but it’s difficult to control urbanization.”

The epidemic

The Peru dengue crisis began in October of 2019 when the cases increased in the Madre de Dios region in the country’s southeast. The government soon sent the armed forces to fumigate people’s houses and kill the larvae while issuing recommendations to avoid the virus.

As a result, the spread of the virus slowed down in November, with the Minister of Health Elizabeth Hinostroza saying that dengue cases in Madre de Dios had decreased by 30%, as reported by local outlets.

But the respite was short-lived. In February, the government declared dengue a health emergency, ramping up the resources dedicated to fighting off the virus. By the time the coronavirus pandemic hit Peru, dengue had spread to 17 regions, including Junin and Ica.

Still, the country lacked the resources to face a pandemic and an epidemic simultaneously.

Protests broke out in early March in the region of Loreto, northeast Peru, due to a lack of medical attention to those infected. With air-borne COVID-19 assailing the country and mandatory lockdowns in place, fumigations became difficult if not impossible to conduct. Besides, some of the coronavirus symptoms, like headaches, were similar to those generated by dengue.

In October of 2020, Peru raised the alarm again by “reinforcing the sanitary response to dengue’s control and prevention […].” By the end of the year, the COVID-19 pandemic had left almost 38,400 casualties, high unemployment levels, and a growing informal economy. (The underground economy may have increased from 70% to 80% or 90% since the pandemic hit Peru, say local outlets.)

In the background, dengue kept spreading.

On December 9, The National Center of Epidemiology, Prevention, and Disease Control, tied to the Ministry of Health, sent out an alert, warning that Peru was the third country in the Americas region with the highest mortality rate due to dengue. The Dominican Republic and Venezuela came in first.

But what does dengue do?

Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease, widespread through the tropics as it is “influenced by rainfall, temperature, relative humidity, and unplanned rapid urbanization,” explains the World Health Organization (WHO). The species Aedes aegypti is also the vector for other viruses such as chikungunya, yellow fever, and Zika.

As climate changes and urbanization increases, the mosquito is finding new places to hatch. “If new areas get warmer, the vector Aedes will expand,” explains the PAHO researcher to IPS. “We can now find it in higher altitudes than before.”

The consequences of the disease vary, notes the WHO in a note on June 23, 2020. The symptoms may range from those similar to the flu to “severe bleedings, organ impairment and/or plasma leakage.” In either case, the virus can also affect women and anemics disproportionately.

“Dengue impacts on an individual’s iron levels, which can be especially crucial for pregnant women,” says Angel Muñoz, climate variability researcher at the International Research Institute, which is part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Anemics are more likely to get the disease.”

Malnutrition

Dengue patients usually experience high levels of dehydration and lack of nutrients, so the intake of water and nutrients is essential.

Recommended diets are rich in vegetables with vitamin A, C, and K, such as spinach and beetroot, fruits with the latter two vitamins, such as citrus, and nuts with proteins.

However, in Peru access to clean water can be tricky in certain regions and marginal areas, where stagnant water abounds. For instance, in the region of Loreto, only 45.4% of the population consumed drinking water through the public infrastructure in 2019, notes the country’s National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI) in a 2020 report.

This lack of access to drinking water heightens the impact of dengue and results in other malnutrition problems. The Food Sustainability Index, developed by the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition and the Economist Intelligence Unit, notes “poor sanitation and a lack of clean water contribute to malnutrition resulting from diarrhea.” In contrast, the index says that “improved sanitation and better water services also help tackle world hunger.”

On top of these infrastructural problems, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warns in its latest report that malnutrition increased in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, deepening the pervasiveness of dengue. “During the last five years, the situation has worsened with an increase of 13.2 million people with undernutrition,” says the FAO.

How to prevent dengue

Prevention is essential to control dengue, both through forecasts and awareness campaigns conducted by public institutions.

Research has shown a relationship between climate patterns and the mosquito’s life cycle, as explained in the paper AeDES: a next-generation monitoring and forecasting system for environmental suitability of Aedes-borne disease transmission, authored by Muñoz and other researchers.

“There’s a relationship between environmental conditions such as temperature, rainfall and humidity, and the mosquito’s life cycle,” he explains to IPS. “It is possible to do reliable climate forecasts and predict the likelihood of the disease spreading.”

As a result of the paper, the team at IRI has designed a tool to monitor and forecast Aedes-borne environmental suitability, which could be used by policymakers to predict the potential impact of dengue.

However, predicting dengue’s probability is not enough, as the information must reach the population. Muñoz notes that awareness campaigns are essential to ensuring the public knows how the disease spreads. “Recipients with stagnant water or large landfills create the perfect habitat for the mosquito.”

Through the Ministry of Health, the Peruvian government has launched awareness campaigns in the past, its latest being “Dengue kills. Kill the mosquito!”

This campaign emphasized getting rid of breeding grounds for the species, both through preventive measures and fumigation. Some of its recommendations include:

● “If you have flowerpots or aquatic plants, clean the recipients every two days […].” every day you water the plants.”
● “Tightly close the recipients where you store water […].”

But fumigations and awareness campaigns require vast amounts of resources. While the regions have exclusive budgets to fight mosquito-borne diseases, in the past months a portion of that money has been used to face the pandemic, report Jorge Carrillo and Alicia Tovar for Peru’s investigative outlet Ojo Público.

As a result, populations with less access to information, healthcare, and lower socioeconomic conditions remain more at risk because they are more likely to preserve cans or planters to conserve water.

“We need tools to understand the impact of environmental factors on dengue’s seasonality. If we have a detailed system of who could be more at risk and where and when dengue could spread, we could reinforce prevention strategies,” concludes Muñoz.

 

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A TB patient at the Srinagar-based Chest Diseases Hospital in the Indian state of Kashmir. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

By External Source
Jan 15 2021 (IPS)

In July 1921, a French infant became the first person to receive an experimental vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), after the mother had died from the disease. The vaccine, known as Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG), is the same one still used today.

This first dose of BCG was the culmination of 13 years of research and development.

BCG remains the only licensed vaccine against TB and 2021 marks its 100th anniversary.

Today, all eyes are on the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. But while the number of people who died from COVID-19 in the last year is shocking, TB kills about the same number of people — about 1.5-2 million — each year, and has done so for many decades.

In fact, it’s estimated that over the last 200 years, more than 1 billion people have died from TB, far more than from any other infectious disease.

 

If we have a vaccine, why do so many people still die from TB?

Tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It’s transmitted when a person with active TB coughs up aerosol droplets, which are then inhaled by someone else.

There are about 10 million cases of active TB annually, and it’s estimated up to 2 billion people are what’s known as “latently infected”. That means they are not sick and do not transmit the disease, but in about 10% of these people the disease reactivates.

In most TB endemic regions of the world, BCG is given to infants shortly after birth. The vaccination prevents childhood versions of TB and saves thousands of children’s lives annually.

However, the efficacy of BCG wanes over time. In other words, it stops working. Protection against TB is often lost by adolescence or early adulthood.

Importantly, BCG doesn’t prevent active lung TB in adults, the most important driver of ongoing transmission and cause of death.

The World Health Organization has a goal of TB elimination. To do that, we need to find a TB vaccine that also works in adults.

 

Why hasn’t BCG been replaced with a more effective TB vaccine?

Over the last decades only about 15 new TB vaccine candidates have entered clinical trials (versus 63 for COVID-19 in one year).

Worryingly, many of the most advanced TB vaccine candidates work no better than BCG.

Because the current TB vaccine candidate pipeline is relatively small, these setbacks and trial “failures” mean BCG may remain the gold standard for many years to come.

Despite being 100 years old, exactly how BCG vaccine works is largely unknown. It’s unclear why BCG usually only confers protection against childhood versions of TB or why protection wanes in adolescence.

Given those uncertainties, we can count ourselves lucky the bureaucratic hurdles for vaccine development were significantly lower in the 1920s.

If BCG were developed today, it would probably never be used; the current complex regulatory framework for vaccine development and licensing would likely not allow the use of a vaccine for which nothing or little is known about how it works.

The reasons BCG hasn’t been replaced with a more effective TB vaccine include:

• the decline of TB in many Western countries in the 20th century
• limited interest from pharmaceutical companies to invest in TB vaccine development
• the fact TB research and pre-clinical vaccine development is logistically challenging and requires special biological containment facilities
• the short-term and fiercely competitive environment for government and philanthropic research funding makes it difficult for academics to commit to TB vaccine research as a career path.

 

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

The pace of COVID-19 vaccine development shows what’s possible when the political will, pharmaceutical interest and funding is there.

While TB is no longer widespread in Australia, it is an issue in remote Indigenous communities.

Papua New Guinea, Australia’s closest neighbour, has high rates of multi-drug resistant TB and low BCG coverage rates. TB has been introduced into Australia via the Torres Strait, with a high proportion of cross-border diagnoses in North Queensland and over-representation of Indigenous children.

Resistance to current TB treatments increases steadily. Treatment of multi drug-resistant TB is hugely expensive and can take up to two years, requiring multiple antibiotics and close monitoring.

Now is the time to put financial and political will into finding a more effective TB vaccine.

2020 taught us pathogens can cause enormous harm to societies and economies. Investment into infectious disease research and vaccine development represents a fraction of the economic cost of a pandemic.

Tuberculosis is a global threat and a public health concern on a scale similar to COVID-19. The development of a new and effective TB vaccine is crucial if TB is to be significantly reduced, let alone eradicated.

Although the anniversary of BCG is cause for celebration, it should also serve as a reminder more needs to be done to combat this deadly disease.

Andreas Kupz, Senior Research Fellow, James Cook University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Tuberculosis Kills As Many People Each Year As COVID-19. It’s Time We Found a Better Vaccine appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Can mobile money be categorized as digital money? IOM helped Mohammed Ahmed to set up a shop in Omduram market, near Khartoum, Sudan. The initiative involves the use of mobile money to buy goods. Credit: International Organization for Migration / Yasir Elbakri

By Catalina Margulis and Arthur Rossi
WASHINGTON DC, Jan 15 2021 (IPS)

Countries are moving fast toward creating digital currencies. Or, so we hear from various surveys showing an increasing number of central banks making substantial progress towards having an official digital currency.

But, in fact, close to 80 percent of the world’s central banks are either not allowed to issue a digital currency under their existing laws, or the legal framework is not clear.

To help countries make this assessment, we reviewed the central bank laws of 174 IMF members in a new IMF staff paper, and found out that only about 40 are legally allowed to issue digital currencies.

Not just a legal technicality

Any money issuance is a form of debt for the central bank, so it must have a solid basis to avoid legal, financial and reputational risks for the institutions. Ultimately, it is about ensuring that a significant and potentially contentious innovation is in line with a central bank’s mandate. Otherwise, the door is opened to potential political and legal challenges.

Now, readers may be asking themselves: if issuing money is the most basic function for any central bank, why then is a digital form of money so different? The answer requires a detailed analysis of the functions and powers of each central bank, as well as the implications of different designs of digital instruments.

Building a case for digital currencies

To legally qualify as currency, a means of payment must be considered as such by the country’s laws and be denominated in its official monetary unit. A currency typically enjoys legal tender status, meaning debtors can pay their obligations by transferring it to creditors.

Therefore, legal tender status is usually only given to means of payment that can be easily received and used by the majority of the population. That is why banknotes and coins are the most common form of currency.

To use digital currencies, digital infrastructure—laptops, smartphones, connectivity—must first be in place. But governments cannot impose on their citizens to have it, so granting legal tender status to a central bank digital instrument might be challenging. Without the legal tender designation, achieving full currency status could be equally challenging. Still, many means of payments widely used in advanced economies are neither legal tender nor currency (e.g. commercial book money).

Uncharted waters?

Digital currencies can take different forms. Our analysis focuses on the legal implications of the main concepts being considered by various central banks. For instance, where it would be “account-based” or “token-based”. The first means digitalizing the balances currently held on accounts in a central banks’ books; while the second refers to designing a new digital token not connected to the existing accounts that commercial banks hold with a central bank.

From a legal perspective, the difference is between centuries-old traditions and uncharted waters. The first model is as old as central banking itself, having been developed in the early 17th century by the Exchange Bank of Amsterdam, considered the precursor of modern central banks. Its legal status under public and private law in most countries is well developed and understood.

Digital tokens, in contrast, have a very short history and unclear legal status. Some central banks are allowed to issue any type of currency (which could include digital forms), while most (61 percent) are limited to only banknotes and coins.

Another important design feature is whether the digital currency is to be used only at the “wholesale” level, by financial institutions, or could be accessible to the general public (“retail”). Commercial banks hold accounts with their central bank, being therefore their traditional “clients.”

Allowing private citizens’ accounts, as in retail banking, would be a tectonic shift to how central banks are organized and would require significant legal changes. Only 10 central banks in our sample would currently be allowed to do so.

A challenging endeavor

The overlapping of these and other design features can create very complex legal challenges—and could well influence the decisions made by each monetary authority.

The creation of central bank digital currencies will also raise legal issues in many other areas, including tax, property, contracts, and insolvency laws; payments systems; privacy and data protection; most fundamentally, preventing money laundering and terrorism financing.

If they are to be “the next milestone in the evolution of money,” central bank digital currencies need robust legal foundations that ensure smooth integration to the financial system, credibility and broad acceptance by countries’ citizens and economic agents.

 

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The post Legally Speaking, Is Digital Money Really Money? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Catalina Margulis is a Consulting Counsel in the IMF Legal Department’s Financial and Fiscal Law unit, seconded from the Central Bank of Chile.
 
Arthur Rossi is a Research Officer in the IMF Legal Department’s Financial and Fiscal Law unit.

The post Legally Speaking, Is Digital Money Really Money? appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Social distancing in a Macau Hospital waiting room. Human Rights Watch has expressed concern about human rights abuses being carried out under the guise of COVID-19 public health lockdowns in China. Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 14 2021 (IPS)

China must end its campaign against individuals seeking redress for COVID-19 linked abuses and the human rights lawyers and activists who help them, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said as reports ranging from allegedly trapping them inside their homes, to chaining alleged lock-down violators to metal posts emerge.

This comes as the World Health Organisation team has arrived in Wuhan to investigate the origins of the outbreak and just as China announced today, Jan. 14, its first COVID-19-related death in 8 months.

In a statement last week, the New York based rights group said that “under the pretext of COVID-19 lockdowns”, Chinese authorities unleashed cruel measures against its citizens. HRW said the government is attempting to silence its critics, through surveillance, intimidation and lengthy prison terms.

HRW China Researcher Yaqui Wang told IPS that governments and the international community should apply pressure on the Chinese government to end the abuses.  

Yaqiu Wang is a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. Courtesy: Human Rights Watch

Inter Press Service (IPS): You cited international human rights law, which dictates that state restrictions due to public health needs must be lawful, necessary and proportionate. Based on reports on the ground, are restrictions in China flouting those conditions?

Yaqiu Wang (YW): Right. There were measurements undertaken by the Chinese government that seemed to be unnecessarily harsh and failed to respect human dignity. For example, officials were seen sealing apartment doors to prevent people from leaving their homes.

Some residents were chained to metal posts for purportedly violating stay-at-home orders. Videos circulated online showed residents yelling from their homes in despair. In Xinjiang, authorities forced some residents to drink traditional Chinese medicines.

According to international human rights law, when quarantines or lockdowns are imposed, the authorities are obligated to ensure access to food, water, health care, and care-giving support.  Yet, during the Wuhan lockdown, you saw on the Chinese internet many chilling stories: A boy with cerebral palsy died because no one took care of him after his father was taken to be quarantined. A woman with leukemia died after being turned away by several hospitals because of concerns about cross-infection. A mother desperately pleaded to the police to let her leukemia-stricken daughter through a checkpoint at a bridge to get chemotherapy. A man with kidney disease jumped to his death from his apartment balcony after he couldn’t get access to health facilities for dialysis. 

Bear in mind, these stories are just the tip of the iceberg given the stringent censorship people in China are living under. Information critical of the government is swiftly removed. More often than not, people don’t even bother to voice their criticism or tell their stories knowing they could be punished.

IPS: You expressed concern about human rights abuses being carried out under the guise of public health lockdowns. What are some of the ways citizens say they are being intimidated?

YW: For example, in the name of cracking down on false information about the pandemic, the authorities have detained hundreds, if not thousands, of people for “rumour-mongering,” censored online discussions of the epidemic, curbed media reporting, and imprisoned citizen journalists.

IPS: How concerned are you about surveillance tactics that intercept citizens’ communications platforms? Are you worried that citizens will be afraid to come forward and voice any concerns?

YW: That is now the digital reality of people living in China. Whatever you say publicly on Chinese social media or privately through Chinese messaging apps is open for the Chinese government to see. If you criticise the government, even privately, you can be harassed, or worse, imprisoned. The perhaps more pernicious effect is that knowing the risks, many choose to self-censor. 

The fear permeates the Chinese society, long existed before the pandemic.

IPS: You stated that residents also fear detainment and harsh punishments, including lengthy prison sentences if they speak out. Are those fears founded on hearings taking place during the pandemic?

YW: Since the outbreak in Wuhan, authorities detained several citizen journalists who reported from Wuhan. A court in Shanghai sentenced Zhang Zhan to four years in prison after convicting her of picking quarrels and provoking trouble. The situation and whereabouts of Fang Bin, a businessman in Wuhan who has been detained for posting videos of city hospital, remain unknown. Beijing-based activists Chen Mei and Cai Wei, whom the police detained in April for archiving censored COVID-19-related information, remain in a detention center awaiting trial.

IPS: Are there measures in place to assist citizens who do come forward, but would require some level of anonymity in reporting grievances?

YW: It has actually become very difficult. One the one hand, many securer communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, are banned in China. It is increasingly difficult to circumvent censorship and obtain secure communication because unauthorised VPNs are increasingly banned in China. So, people are left to use domestic apps, and these apps are heavily surveilled and censored. For example, all WeChat accounts are attached to a phone number which is attached to your national ID card. The Chinese government has pretty much eliminated anonymity in the Chinese digital space. 

IPS: You are calling for an end to intimidation and surveillance of those critical of the government’s COVID response. Bearing in mind the realities on the ground in China, are you hoping that, at the very least, you can shed light on what is going on?

YW: Yes, so people outside of China are aware of the abuses going on inside China. We hope governments and the international community can put pressure on the Chinese government to cease the abuses.

 

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President Donald Trump addressing the UN General Assembly. Credit: UN Photo/Cia Pak

By H.L.D. Mahindapala
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, Jan 14 2021 (IPS)

Democracy is fragile. It is more fragile that the window panes of the Congress that were smashed by the mob unleashed by President Donald Trump. It is the ultimate symbol of the desecration of American democracy.

The world watched in horror as the misinformed, misguided, politically driven mob went berserk destroying not so much the material that stood in their way but the fundamental values of the holiest shrine of democracy that came crumbling down with not a single guardian of the law in sight to stop it.

It was a sad spectacle. A delusional Trump, who refused to accept the grim realities facing him, tried every trick in the book to retain power which he had lost. The voters told him to go. The courts told him to go – 62 times, sometimes by judges appointed by him.

The states which he tried to bully told him to go. Some of his best friends and advisers told him to go. He didn’t budge. He believed fanatically in his narrative that his victory was stolen by Biden. His perennial penchant to wallow in his own lies was pathological.

When all his legal and political tactics failed, he tried violence. He instigated the mob and told them to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue because “we can never get back our country with weakness”. His legal side-kick, Rudy Giuliani, told the crowd that there should be a “trial by combat”.

The veiled messages were quite transparent. Like Hitler, Trump made use of the democratic processes and democratic institutions to undermine the very foundations of democracy. His power was in manipulating the racist slogan of “Making America Great” which meant reinforcing the power of the White Supremacists.

He was aided and abetted by the Right-wing racist media, particularly the media run by “Uncle Rupey” Murdoch – a favoured guest at Mar-a-Lago club owned by Trump. His media lackeys at Fox News – Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson etc.,– have been blind devotees of Trumpism. They white-washed and justified every move made by Trump, even the violence unleashed at the Congress.

Buoyed by the adulation of his followers (72 million voted for him) he once told a campaign rally : “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I would not lose voters.” His meteoric rise cast a spell on America. His White nationalism swept across America, from coast to coast, making him a folk hero.

He rose to be the new symbol of America. The grassroot forces were rallying behind him with a fervour not seen before. He resonated with their aspirations and their hates.

So, when the voters turned against him it shattered his own beliefs. He had vested so much of faith in his own powers that he refused to face the reality. He began with a bang.

His idiosyncratic style that mesmerised the base of the Republican Party made him the most formidable force overnight. The message went along with it with his brash style. Together they galvanised the broader base of White America. He created a new political culture with his incessant tweets, political messages, aimed at creating (successfully!) an alternative reality.

The traditional conservatives who ruled the Republican Party lost their grip. He became the Republic Party and the stalwarts fell in line behind him. The power he acquired overnight was intoxicating and also toxic. Trumpism was the ideology worshipped by his Republican and non-Republican loyalists.

He became law unto himself and he believed, quite seriously, that he was “the chosen one”, the messiah sent to save America and the world. He believed in his mystical power to overcome all obstacles, including Corona virus which he did thanks to the specialist services of the military hospital.

His garish theatrics on the international stage too enhanced his stature at the base. He was relying solely on his base. All what he did was mainly to impress and consolidate his base and he believed that he was invincible as long as the base was with him. He became a one-man band. It as the college-educated, sophisticated urban voters that rejected him.

In the end, the big man was brought down by a small bug : Coronovid-19. He lost his glamour with each death. Lost in the myths of his own invincible powers – he referred constantly to whatever he did as the greatest in history — he thought he could ride over the pandemic by dismissing it lightly as another kind of flu.

But the menacing virus caught up with him and made him pay for his idiocy. His anti-science, anti-minorities, anti-climate change, anti-internationalism, pro-authoritarian regimes were a medley of policies that he could sell to his base with applause. But the educated class was running away from him. The rural areas stuck with him in the last election. But the sophisticates revolted.

All told, he found himself drifting away too far from the mainstream. The more he drifted away the more he lost touch with reality. He refused to recognise the new realities sprouting under his feet and destabilising him. He fancied that he had the power and the following to go against the will of the people. Like all authoritarian figures he was hoping to rewrite history in his own fashion. But after going along with him initially, after taking a few steps with him for a short while, history turned against him.

In the end he brought down the great Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and reduced it to zilch. He did a Ranil Wickremesinghe. He lost the Presidency. He lost the House. And he lost the Senate. He lost even his most loyal aide who stood by him throughout his troubled reign, Mike Pence, the Vice-president.

He was stepping out too far from the traditional, acceptable framework that held America together. Most of all, he divided the formidable Right-wing of America. Brining the Right-wing under his leadership will be the biggest headache for the Republicans.

His success or failure in the opposition will depend on his ability to unite the Right-wing forces under his wing. After the failure of his attempted “coup” it is doubtful whether he could rally the Right around him. He lost his spell in the debacle at the Congress. He can never live it down. It will haunt him for the rest of his days.

He has alienated practically everyone except, perhaps, his family. Today he is a lonely man nursing his emotional wounds. His only escape route is to blame everyone else for his fall, created by his own self-destructive strategies.

But it is too early to write him off. He will not walk out of the White House as a dead man. He still has some clout in his base. In his own way, he has radicalised American politics. He has injected a new strain of hate into the liberal political culture of America. It is just not his version of Munroism trying to make America Great in isolation from within.

His inward-looking view is not mere navel gazing. He has touched and livened the raw nerve of America that was buried deep in its culture. He represents that side of America which is brash, rash, garish, loud, vigorous, inward-looking, narrow-minded and ready to break through all obstacles even if it means doing it the crude way.

In a sense – and without meaning to demean the genius of Walt Whitman – he represents the athletic, energetic, confident power of Whitmanasque America that was ready to break through all obstacles in its predatory explorations of conquering the wild west, destroying civilisations, devastating the pristine glory of untouched nature and polluting every inch of land, lakes and loftiness filled with pure air in its virgin state.

He had no idea of the other side of America : the tender, sensitive, caring, cultured, quiet world of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Thoreau. He was the farthest away from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath – the great American classic that idealised the socialist society. Donald Trump stood only for one man: Donald Trump. America has never seen the likes of him ever before. And it is not likely to see another one soon. But he leaves behind a menacing legacy: he has sown the seeds of American fascism to grow in the declining years ahead.

America after Trump will trend towards more violence. It can be a dangerous place as seen by Trump’s behaviour of encouraging the mob to march down Pennsylvanian Avenue. Trumpism is the first manifestation of all the organised crudities of the red-necked White Supremacists which have deep roots in America.

The rise of Trumpism has been the triumph of Right-wing proto-fascists who have been struggling underground to capture power within the liberal framework of the great democratic laboratory of the world. It exploits of the political and social fears of this deep layer of American society.

The promise of making America Great has been a marketable euphemism to enthrone the power of the White Supremacists. The power Trumpism lies in this hidden agenda.

Trump is the personification of all the crudities of this sub-layer of the American political culture. He is the absolute opposite of Barack Obama, the refined, cultured, symbol of finesse that has given a shine to the best in the American political tradition.

The way he and his family conducted themselves in the White House was comparable to the aristocratic Kennedys who raised a new wave of hope to America and the world. After Obama the fall of America into the hands of Trump is like the fall of Adam into the disastrous temptations of the Snake in the Garden of Eden. Adam also fell when he became a Trump – “a pussy-grabbing” rake.

Is he an aberration? Yes and no. He is an aberration because he is the first of his kind. But America has the potential to produce many more Trumps. He must be considered as a pathfinder for the deep roots of American authoritarianism that has been lying untapped all these years.

He is the maverick who dared to come up from outside and take over the establishment giving respectability and acceptability to the hidden roots of American authoritarianism that was waiting for a leader. He has captured the minds of rural base and psychologically terrorized the American Right, including the elite in the Republican Party leaders.

Mick Romney and the late John Cain are two leading Republican who had the guts to challenge him. But the rest are hedging their bets. They are scared that with his political clout in the Republican base he could tip the scales in their electorates with his approval or disapproval at the next election.

He will still remain as a force — but a divisive force in the Right. Of course, there is a chance that he will be the first president of America to go to jail. The string of charges is so numerous that under the law of averages he is bound to be convicted on at least one of them, according to legal experts.

This will be his biggest nightmare. But the Right-wing of America will not let him die. His legacy that came from the embedded right-wing extremists will go underground and pose a serious threat to Joe Biden. He has the backing of the heavily armed Oath Keepers, Proud Boys who have vowed to fight if Trump loses. He has also dodged condemning the KKK, neo-Nazis, anti-semitic, anti-black, anti-feminist, anti-gay and the minorities who are favoured by the liberal left. They are his backbone.

He will survive in their hearts and minds and will mobilise their forces to bring him back in 2025, if they can. With his political clout in the base, he still could influence the outcome of Congress and Senate electoral results. So, even the Right-wing establishment will be in a dilemma not knowing how to handle him.

But hold on for a minute. I must add the latest news. The 5 a.m. news (Saturday morning) says that Twitter has chopped off Trump’s right hand. For the first time Twitter has permanently – I repeat permanently – suspended his account “due to risk of further incitement of violence.” This could paralyse – at least temporarily – Trump who claims that he has a following of 88 million twitters.

He has relied on it so much that he had dismissed the mainstream media as irrelevant. He called them the “fake news” and ridiculed them because he could dish out his narrative to his loyal followers through Twitter. Now he is faced with a communication problem. His success depended solely on manipulating the news.

Along with Twitter Facebook and Instagram he ran his own news programs. Now all three have cut him off. His lies gained currency mainly through Twitter. Furthermore, twittering has been his main job when he is not watching television, or playing golf. Now he is a loner, well and truly.

On top of this big blow comes the news that the Republicans are breaking ranks to attack him. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski has openly called for the resignation of the President. Lindsay Graham, one of his loyal followers, stood on the floor of the Senate, after the mob attack, and said : “It’s over. The election is over. It’s over.” If Sen. Graham thought the issue was over he was wrong. Trump’s angry loyalists mobbed him at the airport and shouted: ”Traitor! Traitor!”

The worst is the move from both sides of the House to impeach Trump. He has set another precedent of being the first President to be impeached twice. Evidence of the President inciting the mob to unleash violence too is mounting. Sen. Mike Lee has recorded that at 2.26 p.m. when the mob was running berserk Trump had asked him to object to the certification of the electoral votes.

Even at that critical moment he was obsessed with the overturning of the election result. Legal experts say that, in the middle of the biggest security threat to the Congress, he was not concerned as the Commander-in-Chief about the security and law and order of the nation but his own fortunes.

The task before Joe Biden is monumental. America is a patient dying at the new rate of 20,000 a week now. That is the latest figure for the first week of January. Trump, the Grim Reaper, is the first President who leaves behind a legacy of burying the second highest number of Americans since the Civil War which claimed 600,000 victims. Trump has passed 300,000 mark.

Mercifully, he has agreed to depart peacefully after desecrating the sacred political temple enshrined in the American Constitution – the Holy Bible that guides America.

The last gamble of Trump was to resort to violence. That backfired on him. Even the Republican ranks, who were lukewarm, were shocked by the physical threat that endangered their lives inside the Congress. Hopefully, he will depart without causing any havoc between now and Janaury 20 – the inauguration day.

Joe Biden has his job cut out for him. He has to heal, repair, patch up, bandage, operate, and keep America in a nursing home until she recovers fully. To do that, he may have to go for a New Deal of the Rooseveltian type. Hopefully he may not have the need to sack the Supreme Court which obstructed Roosevelt’s deal to serve the people.

Fortunately, Trump, with his swagger and bluster in the last rally in Georgia, removed the main political obstruction that was in Biden’s path when the Republicans lost the two Senate seats. Biden now has the presidency and both houses of Congress in his hands though the razor thin margin is still dicey.

In the post -Corvid-19 phase, the American mood will be amenable to accept Rooseveltian “socialism”. Lifting the victims of the pandemic and poverty will strike a chord in the heart of America. Law-makers from both sides of the Congress will find it difficult, morally and politically, to say no the urgent needs of victims of Trump.

Trump will continue to make the headlines. Biden will have to look after the breadlines.

Initially there won’t be much of an opposition from the Right-wing which is discredited. Their fear-mongering with cries of “communism” and “socialism” will not have the same impact as that of McCarthy – another lying Goebbels. The post-Corvid-19 phase needs compassion not fear. Biden is expected to walk in the footsteps of Obama, particularly in healthcare.

The pandemic has created the right political climate for restoring the Obama care program. Biden has all the tools necessary to lift America from the depths of Trumpist disasters. He can’t lose because he has no other path to follow other than the compassionate route to recovery.

 

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The post America’s Descent into Depths of Disastrous Trumpism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

H.L.D. Mahindapala is a Sri Lankan journalist who was Editor, Sunday Observer (1990-1994), President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists’ Association (1991-1993) and Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1994).

The post America’s Descent into Depths of Disastrous Trumpism appeared first on Inter Press Service.

A wind energy generation plant located in Loiyangalani in northwestern Kenya. The plant is set to be the biggest in Africa, generating 300 MW. This renewable energy project was supported by the African Development Bank. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Nalisha Adams
BONN, Germany, Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

2021 is going to be critical, not only for curbing the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic, but also for meeting the climate challenge.

But as Dr Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) was clear to point out, the climate challenge is essentially an energy challenge. And as large polluters continue to commit to targets of net zero emissions by 2050, the world could — in theory — potentially address the climate challenge.

“The energy that powers our daily lives our economies also alone produces about 80 percent of global emissions,” Birol noted while addressing the virtual COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition earlier this week on Jan. 11.

And as the UN plans to focus on building a global coalition for carbon neutrality by the middle of this current century, there will be increased focus and a push towards providing clean, renewable energy to all by 2030.

Clean and renewable energy was the focus of discussion of this weeks COP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition.

Birol said the good news was that China, the European Union, UK and Japan have ambitious 2050 net zero emission targets. He said he was positive that once he took office, United States President Elect Joe Biden would make similar commitments and other major developing nations may join. The joint global emissions by the current countries committed to the net zero emission targets amount to 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

“The issue is how to transform these ambitions into real energy action,” Birol said. He said in light of this the IEA was going to introduce the world’s first roadmap to net zero emissions by 2030, scheduled to be released on May 18 so that it can be used for input for COP26.

The roadmap will outline how the world needs to transform the energy sector, how much investment is needed and what needs to be done to reach the target and “provide a concrete plan for all of us”.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, also addressed theCOP26 Virtual Roundtable on Clean Power Transition, saying that to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, an urgent transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy was needed but also that developing countries needed to supported with this shift.

Noting the figures of some 789 million people across the globe without access to electricity — the majority of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, Guterres said that while all nations need to be able to provide electricity to all, this energy needed to be “clean and renewable so it does not contribute to the dangerous heating of our planet”.

According to the IEA, while the number of people without access to electricity has decreased over past years — with some two-thirds of the world’s progress occurring in India “where the government announced that more than 99 percent of the population had access to electricity in 2019, thanks to the ambitious Saubhagya Scheme launched in October 2017” — reaching a low in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has reversed past gains particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

“Sub-Saharan Africa, home to three-quarters of the global population without access to electricity, has been particularly hard hit, and recent progress achieved in the region is being reversed by the effects of the pandemic: our first estimates indicate that the population without access to electricity could increase in 2020 for the first time since 2013,” IEA states in its SDG7 Data and Projections report.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, co-chair of UN-Energy, and co-chair of the COP Campaigns Energy Transition, said it would be impossible to achieve zero emissions without delivering sustainable energy to all.

“We have to make something clear. The energy transition story is also the energy access story, especially in Africa. We must recognise that we cannot achieve net zero emissions by 2050 without delivering sustainable energy for all by 2030,” she said.

Ogunbiyi, who was the first female Managing Director of the Nigerian Rural Electrification Agency, went on to say that 2021 was a pivotal year for Sustainable Development Goal 7 which focuses on access to affordable and clean energy for all.

She said with less than 10 years to go on the SDGs, the world must “now turn towards supporting bold and ambitious plans that will deliver impact at scale to help achieve SDG 7 by 2030”.

Dr Akinumi Adesina, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which is also a member of the COP26 energy transition council, outlined what the bank was doing in support of energy transition across the African continent.

Adesina acknowledge that Africa had the lowest levels of access to energy in the world with 570 million people without electricity.

“The challenge for Africa is simple. Africa has so little electricity. This presents a real opportunity to build reliable, affordable and sustainable energy systems for Africa,” Adesina said. He said this is one of the reasons why the bank had launched the Light Up and Power Africa project as one of its High 5 priorities for transforming the continent. Since 2015 the bank has provided electricity for 16 million people by focusing mainly on renewable energy, Adesina said.

Indeed, his comments comes as just last week the AfDB announced it would roll out a second giant electricity-generation project this time in the the Sahel. The first, largest solar power project in the world is funded by the bank and based in Morocco.

The bank stated that the Desert-to-Power project — which covers 11 countries from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east, and includes the Sahel countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger — when completed, “will turn the Sahel into one of the largest solar-power-generating areas in the world”. The AfDB went on to state that the $20-billion programme “aims to produce 10 gigawatts of electricity by 2025, providing 250 million people with power, of whom at least 90 million will be connected to the electricity grid for the first time”.

“The bank has been at the forefront of transformative renewable energy projects in Africa, including large-scale concentrated solar power projects, in Morocco…which are the largest in the world, the wind to power project which is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa,” he said, adding that the AfDB would no longer support coal projects.

“Unlocking that renewable energy future will ensure that we have a clean Africa, however, there are some challenges,” he said, explaining that this included the intermittency of solar and wind, the need for baseload power for grid stability, and the prohibitive costs of energy storage with policy and regulatory environments for renewable energy.

Adesina said the bank expected to invest $10 billion over the next five years in the energy sector.

Meanwhile Ogunbiyi  highlighted the importance of commitments as well as their financing and technical support for successful transition to renewable energy.

“Both the COP26 campaign and the UN high-level dialogue on energy need to be mutually reinforcing, just as energy access and energy transition are support another,” Ogunbiyi said. She said that the UN energy compact — an outcome of the UN high-level dialogue on energy — would be where countries can pledge their new ambitious commitments on sustainable energy in writing.

As member states, organisations, countries and cities sign up to the UN energy compacts, Ogunbiyi said it was critical that the international community rally around these commitments and support them with financing and technical assistance.

Meanwhile, Birol said critical to achieving net zero emissions was bringing the world’s countries together and providing momentum within an international context.

COP26 will be hosted by the United Kingdom and held in Glasgow, Scotland Nov. 1 to 12 and could provide the impetus for this momentum.

The UK announced the Climate Compatible Growth (CCG) programme — a £38 million fund that will focus on supporting developing nations transition to green energy.

Dr Amani Abou-Zeid, Commissioner for Energy and Infrastructure at the African Union said the that 900 million people in Africa depended on charcoal and firewood for cooking.

“This is not only an economic problem but mainly a moral issue and cause,” Abou-Zeid said.

Indeed the access to energy is also about human rights.

Last September, Ogunbiyi led a panel at the UN Global Compact’s Uniting Business Live event, where Chebet Lesan, founder of renewable energy startup BrightGreen discussed how their work in providing renewable cooking energy to vulnerable communities across Kenya and East Africa was impacting on a basic human right.

BrightGreen recycles post harvest waste, waste left on farms after harvesting, and then processes the waste into fuel that is easily adaptable by customers.

“They don’t need much change in behaviour in switching cost because the customers we are dealing with are very risk adverse and very money tight,” Lesan explained.

She said in response to a question on how to accelerate energy services to Africa, she said a key indicator was how good energy access services improved the lives of people in Africa.

“We are beginning to understand that as much as we are in the cooking energy space, our work is directly impacting the most basic human rights, even outside energy,” Lesan had said.

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Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS.

By Esther Ngumbi
Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated food insecurity and disrupted food systems and food supply chains in developed and developing countries alike. In the United States, millions of Americans struggle to put food on the table. Around the world, according to the United Nations over 270 million are hungry, and this is expected to continue to increase. 

As a brand new year begins, I can’t help but think what must be done to mitigate these worrying trend?

First and foremost, there should be continued monitoring of the food insecurity statistics. Real time data to know where food insecurity is highest, and interventions are needed the most should continue to be collected by agencies like United States Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, Feeding America, United Nations World Food Programme.

Collecting real time data and using data intelligence to tackle food insecurity can be extended to cover the entire agricultural food chain-from production, distribution, processing, supply and consumption

Moreover, collecting real time data and using data intelligence to tackle food insecurity can be extended to cover the entire agricultural food chain-from production, distribution, processing, supply and consumption.

As an example, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future has real time mapping platform that shows production, distribution, processing and consumption within Maryland’s food system via its Maryland Food System Map Project.  Around the world, the United Nations World Food Programme continues to track and monitor hunger and food insecurity through its real time HungerMap.

In the end, this kind of real time collected data should be used to identify gaps. In addition, insights obtained should be used to inform decision makers in country governments, nonprofit institutions, food banks and other people responsible for designing programs and policies to address food insecurity in 2021 and beyond. In the long-term, data obtained from real time mapping of food insecurity can be used to distribute food more equitably and reliably.

Accompanying data and on the ground reality should be the continuation of actions that have proven to be critical in 2020 in efforts to address hunger. Throughout 2020, Feeding America and many foodbanks and food pantries have stepped up to the challenge of feeding everyday people.

It is important that they are restocked and the people working there enumerated well. Restocking foodbanks can be achieved through government funding and donations by businesses and individuals who are in a position to do so.

Among the strategies that proved important in 2020 were home and community gardens. These gardens flourished for the best part of the year across many states, with many people venturing into planting their own gardens. In 2021 and beyond, citizens who want to garden come spring should be encouraged and supported with resources and knowledge about how to successfully grow the crops they choose to.

Luckily, many states have Land-Grant Universities such as the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Purdue University that can assist through the Cooperative Extension Service.  As such, Universities should find ways to unpack useful and guiding knowledge in formats that can easily be used by citizens as they look to start gardening.

Consistently, throughout the pandemic, many citizens relied on local food solutions and their local farmers and producers to meet their food needs. Moving on in 2021, everyday people should continue to think locally whenever possible.

Of course, thinking locally when it comes to meeting food insecurity may not always be possible, especially with food deserts in many under-resourced areas and with usually higher prices at farmers markets.

Finally, there is room for more innovative solutions such as food dispensing ATM machines, food finding and food redistribution apps,   and as such, we should continue to look for solutions from food security experts and everyday people that are facing food insecurity challenge and highlight those that are making an impact.

Tackling food insecurity will continue to need all of us to step up. Every action, every strategy counts.

 

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

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Dignity factory workers producing garments for overseas clients, in Accra, Ghana. Credit: Africa Renewal, United Nations

By Franck Kuwonu
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 13 2021 (IPS)

African countries opened their markets on 1st January under the continental free trade agreement and duty-free trading of goods and services across borders is now underway despite the COVID-19 pandemic and other teething problems.

The new market, created under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement is estimated to be as large as 1.3 billion people across Africa, with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of $3.4 trillion. This has a potential of lifting up to 30 million Africans out of extreme poverty, according to the World Bank.

Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat

“This is not just a trade agreement, this is our hope for Africa to be lifted up from poverty,” said Wamkele Mene, the Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, at the virtual launch event.

It is also expected to boost intra-African trade, promote industrialization, create job, and improve competitiveness of African industries on the global stage.

The pact will also empower women by improving their access to trade opportunities. Women make up the largest share of informal traders, representing 70 per cent to 80 per cent in some countries.

“Today is a historic day for Africa. In 1963 the founders of the Organization of African Unity had a vision of creating an Africa common market. The start of trading under the Africa continental free trade area today is an operational start towards the Africa common market. It has been a long journey of focus, determination and resilience,” said Moussa Faki Mahamat, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, at the launch.

He added that the common market brings real hope for inclusive and sustainable industrialization across Africa.

However, for a smooth rollout, countries have to agree on some of the remaining issues such as the Rules of Origin, which are a key element in international trade as they are the cornerstone of preferential trade arrangement such as AfCFTA.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) defines Rules of Origin as “the criteria used to define where a product was made” and are important for implementing other trade policy measures, including trade preferences (preferential rules of origin), quotas, anti-dumping measures and countervailing duties (non-preferential rules of origin). Duty and restrictions in several cases depend on the source of imports.

Countries that have ratified the AfCFTA agreement appeared to have agreed on the Rules of Origin on over 81 per cent of tariff lines.

As of today, Africa is in a position to start trading on over 81 per cent of products on preferential terms. These goods form part of the initial trading, while negotiations on the remaining 20 per cent are ongoing and are expected to be concluded by July 2021, according Faki.

But even as trading formally starts, the road to full implementation remains long. “It’s going to take us a very long time,” said Mene

“If you don’t have the roads, if you don’t have the right equipment for customs authorities at the border to facilitate the fast and efficient transit of goods… if you don’t have the infrastructure, both hard and soft, it reduces the meaningfulness of this agreement,” Mene told the Financial Times, before the launch.

Still, the promises of a free trade area are “transformative”.

The formal start of trading was given the official go-ahead at an extraordinary meeting in December 2020 where AU member states called on “women, youth, businesses, trade unions, civil society, cross border traders, the academia, the African Diaspora and other stakeholders to join them as governments in this historic endevour of creating the “Africa We Want” in line with the Agenda 2063.

The summit gave the official go-ahead for formal trade to start on the first day of the new year.

Over the years, regional economic community such as EAC, the ECOWAS and the SADC have tried to achieve these economic goals. The AfCFTA is set to bring these efforts together.

Franck Kuwonu

It was in 2012 that AU member States formerly agreed to usher in a continental free trade zone and gave themselves 5 years to achieve the goal. But it was only in February 2016, within a year of the initial deadline, that negotiations started in earnest.

Two years later in March 2018 in Kigali, Rwanda, the treaty was signed by 44 countries. So far, 36 countries have ratified the treaty as of 4 December 2020 (see table). It entered into force on 30 May 2019 and trading started on 1st January 2021. Was it not for the COVID-19 pandemic, trading would have started six months earlier in July 2020.

It took just under 5 years from negotiations to implementation. Just about the same number of years that was initially envisioned in 2012.

 

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Franck Kuwonu, Africa Renewal

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Yard signs at polling place in South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

By Peter Costantini
PHOENIX, Arizona, Jan 12 2021 (IPS)

The Valley of the Sun is a vast, flat stretch of Sonoran Desert, etched by arroyos and studded with small, jagged peaks. It spans about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west to east and 40 miles (64 kilometers) north to south in south-central Arizona (the state that borders southern California to the east). After cruising through southward on one of the tangle of freeways that vein the expanse, we can leadfoot it another 100 miles (161 kilometers) southeast to Tucson across much the same hardscape, only gradually gaining elevation. The saguaro cacti grow more thickly, but the higher cordilleras maintain a discreet distance most of the way.

Along Interstate 10, irrigated fields of alfalfa and cotton still unroll green corduroy out to the horizon. But if we could drive through time-lapse photography of the past half-century, farms and desert would be inexorably replaced by malls with supersized parking lots fed by seven-lane arterials.

Earth-toned subdivisions of single-story ranch houses with dirt or paved yards would sprout profusely, and in their driveways would throng hosts of one-ton, dual-rear-wheel pickup trucks with dazzling chrome grilles. Miles of warehouses and car dealerships would sprawl willy-nilly across the thorny aridity, leapfrogging over undeveloped tracts of sagebrush and gravel.

As the years passed, the flows of water in the irrigation canals that bring it to fields and houses and golf courses would dwindle, as the Colorado River and its tributaries were diverted to growing populations and agricultural valleys across the Southwest and California.

If we could watch the residents of those houses over fifty years, we might notice an increase in elderly snowbirds retiring southward to a warm place. More recently, refugees from California real-estate prices would appear. All along, we would see growing numbers of families who looked like they had come from south of the border – including quite a few whose ancestors had been here since before the border was there. (Of course if we could go back a few centuries, nearly all the residents would look a lot like them.)

Many of them would go out in the mornings to weed and harvest those green fields and build the houses and clean the hotel rooms and do the other back-torqueing work that turns the Valley’s wheels of commerce. If the time-lapse visuals had a soundtrack, their accents might migrate from sibilant norteño to Spanglish to Arizona twang. And in recent years, more of their kids would be going off to class at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, or a community college.

The Valley of the Sun is still indisputably a warm place – that hasn’t changed. Phoenix, at its center, is the hottest city in the United States by some measures, with daily high temperatures averaging over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius) from mid-May through mid-October. Last summer, the mercury peaked at 118 degrees (47.8 Celsius), and it has previously hit 122 (50 Celsius). From the air, slot canyons look like deep cracks in the earth through which you can almost glimpse the glow of the infernal brimstone below.

The politics, too, is hot enough to fry an egg on. And it’s contentious enough that the egg would probably end up scrambled.

View of downtown Phoenix across South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

 

Cowboy conservatism: riding off into the sunset?

This year, Arizona flipped from Republican to Democratic in presidential and U.S. Senate races, and the Valley of the Sun led the way. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden squeaked by Republican President Donald Trump by 0.3 percent, roughly 10,500 votes, to win Arizona’s 11 electoral votes. Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton by 3.5 percentage points in 2016, so the 2020 vote shifted nearly 4 points towards the Democrats. This turnround was driven in part by a nearly 10 percent increase in voter turnout over 2016, a significant part of it in Hispanic communities.

(Note: The U.S. president is elected by an electoral college system rather than by popular vote. Each state is assigned a number of electoral votes roughly proportional to its population. The candidate winning the most popular votes cast in a state, regardless of the margin, wins all of the state’s electoral votes – except in two states. In 2016 and 2000, the Republican candidate won the most electoral votes nationally and thus the presidency, but the Democratic candidate won the national popular vote.)

In the contest for a U.S. Senate seat, Democrat Mark Kelly comfortably defeated Republican incumbent Martha McSally by about 2.3 percentage points. In 2018, Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema had won Arizona’s other U.S. Senate seat, also against McSally.

Before that, Arizona had two Republican U.S. senators since 1994. This year, in another drift to the left with libertarian overtones, state voters legalized recreational marijuana by 60 to 40 percent. And by 3.5 percentage points, they approved a tax surcharge on high incomes to fund education, sponsored by the Democrats and teachers’ unions.

A big factor in this slippage of political fault lines has been the mobilization of the state’s growing Hispanic population and other communities of color by grassroots organizations, led by mostly young local organizers.

A time-lapse sequence of politics here would show Arizona’s leftward crossing of the electoral boundary this year as the culmination of a gradual trajectory away from cowboy conservatism towards political and ethnic diversity.

Before 2020, a Democratic presidential candidate had carried the state only once since 1948. In 1964, Arizona offered up as Republican presidential candidate Senator Barry Goldwater, a locked-and-loaded Cold Warrior well to the right of most of his party. His campaign was buried in a Democratic landslide by the incumbent president, Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The old Arizona’s rock-ribbed right projected its hegemony into this century, often coalescing around racist anti-immigration policies. In 2010, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070, known as “the show me your papers law.” It required local police to stringently enforce immigration laws, even though immigration enforcement in the U.S. is a federal function.

Polls showed that the law was popular with conservatives, and five other states passed similar laws. Unsurprisingly, this led to racial profiling and harassment of those who appeared to be “Mexican”, and 100 thousand undocumented immigrants reportedly left Arizona.

The long-time sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio, became a national conservative celebrity by encouraging his deputies to harass anyone they suspected of being immigrants. He also confined jail inmates in tents in 100 degree heat, forced male prisoners to wear pink underwear, and put some of them to work on chain gangs. “He was our Trump before Trump came along,” one Arizonan told me. In fact, after Arpaio’s 2017 conviction on criminal contempt, for ignoring a court order to end racial profiling of immigrants, Donald Trump granted his first presidential pardon to the former sheriff.

Over the past decade, Hispanic groups have grown strong by pushing back against the free-range bigotry and nativism of the state’s Republican establishment. They began with sit-ins at the state capitol against SB 1070, and eventually litigation by civil-rights groups that reached the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back or restricted most of the law.

In the electoral arena, their organizers engineered the recall of state legislator Russell Pearce, the law’s primary sponsor. Community advocates and victims sued Arpaio repeatedly, turning him into an expensive political liability for the county, and finally sealed his electoral defeat in 2016. These groups have also worked to defend asylum seekers, Dreamers, and undocumented immigrants against deportations and the many other depredations of the Trump administration.

Each election, community organizations have sent growing brigades of high-energy, bilingual high-school and college students out into their own residential neighborhoods and shopping districts to mobilize voters. They’ve also developed creative ways to reach potential voters online: for example, the non-profit Arizona Center for Empowerment runs a web site called Votería AZ that uses images and names based on the popular Mexican game Lotería, similar to Bingo, to engage voters to register and vote.

“One of our biggest programs is voter registration – it’s been front and center since SB 1070,” explained Fred Oaxaca, Data Manager of One Arizona, a coalition of these groups. “Every year thus far has always been the biggest voter registration that we’ve done.” When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, he told me in a video call, they wanted to keep all their people safe, so their operations had to pivot suddenly from “everyone out in the field to phones, texts and online.”

Pandemic restrictions hurt their field work, he acknowledges, but he considers their efforts successful nonetheless. Scanning a monitor, he says that in 2018, there were 617 thousand total registered Latinx voters, some 294 thousand of whom turned out to vote, around 47 percent. This year, 802 thousand Latinx voters were registered – an increase of 30 percent – and 375 thousand had voted just by mail-in ballot when we talked. When the final tally is published in February, including in-person and drop-off voting, he expects to see a big increase in total Latinx voter turnout.

A lawsuit brought by several community and civil-rights groups won a ruling obliging the state to move back its deadline for voter registration from October 5 to October 15. During this 10-day extension period, those groups registered an additional 35 thousand voters, according to Eduardo Sainz of Mi Familia Vota (My Family Votes), a national non-governmental organization headquartered in Arizona. If those votes hewed to the roughly two-to-one Democratic ratio of the statewide Hispanic vote, they would have provided an advantage of around 10 thousand votes, roughly the margin of Biden’s Arizona victory.

Over the course of the campaign, coalitions of community groups said, they rang 1.15 million doorbells and made 8 million phone calls to mobilize voters of color across Arizona. Turnout for Latinx, Black and Native American voters all increased substantially this year over 2016, a coalition spokesman told Rafael Carranza of the Arizona Republic.

Alejandra Gomez of Living United for Change in Arizona, a coalition member, summed it up: “All of this was, I think, the perfect storm for our communities coming together and beginning to center all of our communities that had been really left out of the process, especially in Arizona.”

 

Promise Arizona’s get-out-the-vote truck, Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

Riders of the purple wave

Driving these political shifts from deep red to a bluish shade of purple are broader demographic transformations. Hispanic people have become the second largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S. after non-Hispanic whites, with 18.5 percent of the national population in 2019. With numbers up by nearly one-fifth since 2010, they are the second fastest growing race or ethnicity, after Asian Americans.

Out of Arizona’s population of 7.38 million people, 31.7 percent – nearly one-third – were Hispanic in 2019. Roughly 84 percent of Hispanic people in the state were of Mexican national origin. Hispanic voters now represent around 24 percent of the state’s eligible voters, up from 15 percent in 2000. The important role they played in this year’s electoral changes was reflected in exit polls: Arizona’s Hispanic voters cast 19 percent of the vote, giving Biden a 61 to 37 percent advantage over Trump, and Kelly a margin of 65 to 35 percent over McSally.

“The community of Mexican origin gave Joe Biden the victory in Arizona. And now the bill is coming due,” asserted commentator Jorge Santibáñez in the Los Angeles Times. Many needs of the community have been neglected for years, he wrote. “Joe Biden must not repeat the error of Obama, who promised immigration reform in his campaign, but never even proposed it. Biden won Arizona because of this community, and he needs to remember that.”

Ironically, some of the growth of the Hispanic electorate over recent decades came as a result of growing restrictions on migration. When Oaxaca’s parents emigrated from Mexico, he says, they never expected to stay here. “Their main goal was get here, make money, buy some land back in México, go back, build a house, live their lives.” Going back and forth was the norm then for Mexican migrants.

But that changed, he said, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the ensuing border enforcement clampdown. “9/11 placed a wall on the rotating door that was the border. It created a barrier to leap, so it became far more dangerous to travel here, to go in and out. So people stayed. And they wanted to keep building, to provide for their families that were still back there. That was a key factor for my family too.”

Some of those immigrants were able to become naturalized citizens and voters. Many of their children have now turned 18 and registered to vote. Quite a few have become organizers and leaders as well, as did Oaxaca. After going to college in California, he returned to Arizona to do movement work. “I grew up with a lot of these folks,” he said. “Politics is local: it starts with families. If you can’t change your home, why go elsewhere?”

“Ultimately,” Oaxaca said, “the goal here was eliminating the hateful policies from 10 years ago. It was a ten-year plan and we’re at 10 years. I’m excited to start proposing policy rather than preventing policy.” The point, for him, is to try to make direct changes in people’s lives to make them safer, “so folks don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re going to be able to pick up their kid from school. It’s a very big fear that people talk about, but it’s often a very simple thing.”

These days, One Arizona is looking beyond its Latinx base. “In the last 4 years,” Oaxaca explained, “we’ve been doing a very concerted effort on expanding our coalition. We’ve brought in Native American groups, Asian-Pacific Islander groups,” and organizations in the Black community.

Native Americans make up over 5 percent of Arizona’s population, one of the highest proportions of any state. “The tribal areas, especially the Navaho Nation, turned out at much higher rates, and we can clearly see that there was more enthusiasm and energy there. Being able to learn from them is really exciting, on how we do this work better, how we involve the community.”

“One of the things that makes us here in Arizona stand out is the makeup of the people doing the work and the leadership of it,” Oaxaca told me. “A lot of our staff are of color, and there’s a lot of younger executive directors.

There’s a wide mix that embodies a lot of what our communities look like. They continue to guide this ship, and continue to bring others into the fold. I started off as a 17 year old, now I’m a 25 year old who’s also in those rooms. It’s getting people engaged earlier, and those folks are going to be the next round of leaders who push new policies that they care about.”

These population tectonics are thrusting up a brave new political landscape: a majority-minority population in Arizona – with people of color outnumbering White people – by 2027, according to one estimate. For the whole U.S., the change is visible on the event horizon perhaps two or three decades out. This milestone is reportedly a bugbear of Trump’s immigration consiglieri, and it lights the tiki-torches of the ignorant armies of white supremacists.

Other changes in Arizona have put wind in the Democrats’ sails, including a fast-growing and increasingly progressive youth vote, much of it Hispanic, and increased support among suburban women. Another oft-cited local factor is the arrival of ex-Californians fleeing unaffordable rents and mortgage payments in the Golden State. Newcomers from other states also continue to arrive, often seeking year-round sun. Some conservative talk-show hosts fear that the newcomers carry viral loads of West Coast rad-lib tendencies.

Nevertheless, the old Arizona is not disappearing any time soon. Republicans held on to slim margins in both houses of the state legislature, and the governorship, held by a Republican, was not on the ballot this year. The Democratic shift in statewide races did not occur in many local contests.

How much of the presidential vote was against Trump, more than for Biden, remains an open question. Preliminary figures showed that Trump may even have gained a few percentage points among Hispanic men. Biden was boosted by an endorsement from Cindy McCain, the widow of John McCain – former Republican Senator from Arizona and presidential candidate – who often clashed with Trump. And the new Democratic U.S. Senator, Mark Kelly, ran as a moderate and was already personally popular as a former astronaut and the husband of another widely-respected politician.

“Yes, I think [the Latinx] population will continue to grow,” Oaxaca told me. “But the demographic shift doesn’t define the destiny of the political sphere. The Latinx community is not a monolith. There’s a difference between me as first-generation compared to a third-generation Arizonan who’s been here for a long time.

On the political side, there’s a level of maturity that’s happened in the community, but also in the way they’re being looked at, given their growing potential and political power.” Maturity, he said, means continuing to push their agenda no matter who’s in the White House: “Don’t let them take us for granted, hold them accountable.” Political machines are starting to take note, he said, and this time “the Republicans have been trying to do a lot more to make inroads, because of an understanding that it’s not ‘one size fits all’.”

Volunteer at polling place handing out water to voters, Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

 

Showdown at the AZ corral

The old political Arizona lives on as well in small groups of “Latinos for Trump” at city polling places. And outside the state elections office in downtown Phoenix, where votes were being counted, hundreds of Trump supporters demonstrated for days. A week after Election Day they were still occupying a parking lot there.

Big banners portraying Trump as Rambo carrying a grenade launcher were unfurled next to clusters of American flags, and a variety of Make American Great Again and other Trump-themed merch was on sale. Alex Jones, the prominent conspiracy theorist, had made an appearance, and his truck was parked nearby. Sheriff’s deputies kept the proceedings out of the streets.

Mingling with the crowd were small clusters of solid types in tactical gear, open-carrying hefty, military-looking guns. I asked a stocky man with a Van Dyke beard wearing camouflage what he was afraid of if Biden became president. He covered his head and howled “The world is gonna end”, then smiled and said he was just joking.

Taxes would increase, he believed: “I don’t want to pay more taxes. I don’t want it to be mandated that if I don’t have medical insurance that I have to pay a fine. And I’m not giving up my guns, I don’t care what they say. I’m not an illegal person, I don’t break the law.”

Gesturing at his long gun, he said “Americans, this is us.” If Trump won, he said, “I would like to see some changes in the immigration department. I would like to see heavy funding for the police departments, and massive amounts of training. That might lead us to a better selection of police.

Like a Navy Seal – they don’t just walk out and be a Navy Seal after 286 hours of training. That’s years. There’s a lot of freedoms that’s been removed for us the American people over time by politicians. And it needs to back up. Big government is not good for no country.”

Most of his concerns seemed squarely in the Republican mainstream of the past half-century, begging the question of why someone would feel the need to carry guns to express them. I asked him what he was packing. He smiled: “By definition of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Division, this is an AR-15 pistol.” The AR-15, though, is often categorized as a semi-automatic rifle. It has reportedly been used in several mass murders, and is a hot button in gun-control debates.

The pro-Trump demonstration was predominantly White, but two of the speakers were a young woman and a pre-teen-looking boy, both of whom could have been Hispanic or Native American. The young woman said she had worked in urban ministries in Phoenix, was very concerned about school choice, and had been a victim of human trafficking. The boy pumped his fist and yelled, “This is for the future generations! This is for the USA! We get to choose our future! And we vote Trump!” to loud applause.

On a corner across the street, a few dozen Biden and immigration-rights supporters, many of whom appeared to be Latinx, held a counter-demonstration with a Biden-Harris sign and a Mexican flag. Small groups of pro-Trump people crossed the street at one point to engage them, and a few camo-clad open-carriers shadowed them.

One MAGA supporter wearing a black motorcycle helmet brought over a bullhorn and harangued the opposing demonstrators point blank at full volume. Some other Trump supporters also seemed to be trying to intimidate the pro-Biden demonstrators. But most debated civilly, if heatedly, with people on the other side. The sheriff’s deputies watched but didn’t intervene.

At other times, however, Trump followers’ actions have reportedly been more menacing. At a previous demonstration there, a TV journalist said that she and her photographer had been threatened by Trump supporters and were filing a police report. A month after Election Day, the Arizona Republican Party reportedly asked on Twitter if its members were willing to die to overturn the outcome. And Katie Howe, the Arizona Secretary of State who ran the elections, announced she had received “escalating threats of violence” from Trumpists who believed the President’s spurious claims of electoral fraud. They picketed her home, chanting “We are watching you!” Howe, a Democrat, was widely praised for running impeccable elections despite the pandemic.

 

Faith in South Phoenix

Just a few miles from the political circus at the elections office, the new Arizona is flourishing in the predominantly Hispanic area of South Phoenix. To get there, we cruise down South Central Avenue, a main north-south drag currently hosting construction crews and orange barriers along parts of its median. A light-rail line from downtown will be transecting the heart of a very car-oriented community. Along with it could come a proposed big-box store, which is raising concerns among the neighborhood’s small businesses.

Along the avenue, a billboard hawks payday loans from “Tio Rico Te Ayuda” (“Rich Uncle Helps You”). Dollar stores rub elbows with Mexican restaurants and churches. Between Llantera Hispana, a tire outlet, and Annette Mayorga American Family Insurance, the storefront office of Promise Arizona greeted its community in October with a big sign in English and Spanish urging people to register to vote. It’s acronym, PAZ, means “peace” in Spanish.

Promise Arizona’s web site describes it’s philosophy: “We believe that building immigrant and Latino political power is key to bringing hope, dignity, and progress to our communities.” In pursuit of that goal, it has evolved into hybrid organization: community development group, cultural center, immigrant justice advocate, Latinx issues lobby, and voter mobilizer. Much of the group’s political effectiveness seems to derive from being embedded in the community and its culture with deep, multi-generational ties. Instead of an outsider from a political party knocking on your door, it could be the son or daughter of a friend, and the group may have helped a relative get a green card. Fundamentally, it’s community members working with community members to take care of their common needs.

Walking into its main meeting room on a given day, you might encounter an English class, a workshop on filling out citizenship forms, students learning how to navigate technology, a prayer vigil, or a voter-registration phonebank. Many of its meetings are conducted in Spanish. You might be welcomed warmly by Petra Falcon, the founder, executive director, and wise woman in residence. Earlier in life she was an organizer for the United Farm Workers Union. Now, besides serving as matriarch for five children and six grandchildren of her own, she has nurtured and mentored a new generation of up-and-coming leadership.

PAZ and other parts of the Arizona movement for immigrant justice were born out of a 103-day sit-in at Arizona’s state capitol opposing the repressive Senate Bill 1070. The group was also active in the coalition that successfully recalled the legislator who sponsored the bill, and the series of efforts that threw out racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Many of Falcon’s alumni have gone on to organizing and political careers.

A young man with a gentle voice wearing an ASU cap showed me around the PAZ office. Twenty-year-old Alexis Rodriguez is PAZ’s field director, as well as a junior at Arizona State University. He was recruited to activism by a young state senator, Tony Navarrete, who had been deputy director of PAZ. The lawmaker came into Rodriguez’s mainly White high school with his team – “it was a lot of Brown people, people like me, Latinos.”

They exchanged ideas with the students about potential solutions for decreasing gun violence, which piqued Rodriguez’s curiosity. He ended up doing an internship with Navarrete’s campaign, registering people to vote and collecting petition signatures. The student learned from the legislator about working for his community, “building up the economy in our district, creating more opportunities for our families. And now with COVID, he was able to bring in so many drive-through testing locations.”

While still in high school, the young organizer was inspired by a 2018 teachers’ walkout and strike. Thousands of teachers from around the state marched on the capitol in a sea of red T-shirts. Their movement was dubbed “Red for Ed”. Rodriguez agreed with the teachers that the public education for which he was grateful was woefully underfunded.

He organized some friends and classmates to drive down to the capitol to show support. “I ended up packing my truck with about 7 seats, another friend took her car with 5, a different car with another 4. When we found them, our teachers started clapping and cheering. And I’m like, ‘What’s this? We should be clapping and cheering for you guys.’ They’re taking this huge risk to make positive change.”

The teachers’ demand for better school funding finally met with success this year when voters passed an initiative to raise the state income tax on high incomes and dedicate the proceeds to education.

Navarrete introduced Rodriguez to Falcon, who took him on as an intern. PAZ was doing transit-oriented development work, canvassing the community about the impacts of the coming light-rail line, and Rodriguez began by collecting assessments from community members in the transit corridor.

In one corner of the meeting room, Rodriguez showed me a traditional Mexican altar for Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), which fell just before Election Day. “We created an ofrenda, inviting our relatives who have passed away to celebrate their lives with us.

And we provided them with tequila, with what they liked to eat, with pan de muertos (bread of the dead). We have pictures of family members, and marigolds (a traditional flower for ofrendas).” PAZ people lit candles and said rosarios for their dead.

Next to the ofrenda was a mosaic of la Virgen de Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint. PAZ members often pray to it, Rodriguez said. Across the room was another Virgin, a small statue. PAZ delegations have taken her with them on trips to Washington, DC, and Texas. “All across the nation,” he recalled, “she’s been through so much with us, and has seen all of the struggles of our family, and all of our wins and losses.”

PAZ, said Rodriguez, is “a faith-based organization. We focus a lot on prayer, and going into the culture of things.” It is not officially connected with any particular church, but “a lot of our community of Spanish speakers are Catholic.” The group has affiliations with different churches around Phoenix, providing information and doing immigration clinics for them.

A cloth wall hanging in the meeting hall reads: “PAZ – Promise Arizona. Faith. Hope. Vote.” PAZ has been deeply involved in electoral and political work since SB 1070. “For the past 10 years, every election has been important: we get involved in all of them,” Rodriguez said. PAZ registers, organizes and mobilizes the community on social issues and specific electoral campaigns. And this organizing has had an impact on his own family as well.

“My mom, she’s now a resident, but she emigrated from Guanajuato, México,” Rodriguez told me. “She’s the reason why I’m here, and why I have so much opportunity, and why I have the right to vote.” For 35 years, he said, she’s worked hard, now as a housekeeper for Hilton and a janitor at Walmart.

“Now, every time she sees me on the news, she gloats to her friends at church. She’s so happy that I’m fighting for her and our immigrant community as well. She’s very, very proud.” Of her 6 kids, he’s the first going to college. “She never had the space to talk about politics before, my dad too. Now it’s how we bond: we talk about politics and laws. It’s a whole new conversation.”

The dynamism of astute young organizers is at the heart of the new Arizona. They’re crunching data, organizing text banks, riding herd on social media, and training their field people to use online canvassing apps.

But their movement is also grounded in old-fashioned political tactics of feet on the street, even though the pandemic has slowed this work down. PAZ has a campaign pickup truck, a white half-ton festooned with flags and signs exhorting people to vote. It accompanies canvassers into neighborhoods and shopping malls, broadcasting music and messages. Manuel Gutierrez, a volunteer, proudly lent his camioneta to la causa and decorated it as a get-out-the-vote-mobile.

Voters entering polling place in South Phoenix. Credit: Peter Costantini.

 

Hope in Maricopa

PAZ’s electoral efforts focus on the South Phoenix area. It’s one of the main concentrations of Hispanic people, who make up 43 percent of the city’s population – although their percentage of the electorate lags. With 1.70 million inhabitants, Phoenix is the nation’s fifth largest city. It’s also the capital of the state and the county, and is home to more than a third of the county’s population.

Maricopa County, with 4.57 million inhabitants, contains 62 percent of the state’s population. Encompassing most of the urban and suburban areas in the Valley of the Sun, it dominates the politics and economy of Arizona. The state, county and city populations and economies are all growing at healthy rates. Hispanics make up 31.4 percent of the population, slightly lower than the statewide figure. But in the county, according to the Morrison Institute for Public Policy, “more than two thousand Latinos turn 18 every month and become eligible to vote.”

In 2020, Maricopa flipped from Republican to Democratic in the presidential vote. Since 1952, it had voted Republican each year, except for Bill Clinton in 1996. Biden carried the county by 2.2 percentage points, a swing of 5 points from Trump’s 2.8 point margin in 2016. The victory was powered by an increase of 300 thousand Democratic voters. County turnout was a record 80 percent, a level unmatched in the past century. (National turnout in U.S. presidential elections usually runs 50 to 60 percent; this year it was 66.7 percent, and Arizona’s was 65.9 percent).

Some of the increased turnout may have been suburban and rural Republicans turning out for Trump. And several mainly middle-class White areas of the city and suburbs flipped from Republican to Democratic. But a decisive part of the Democratic turnout growth seems to have been newly motivated Hispanic and young voters in the city, notably those fired up by the efforts of community groups.

An under-reported geographical trend, Fred Oaxaca observed, was the strong Democratic advance in Pima County, the state’s second largest, and its seat, Tucson, the second largest and most Democratic city. Tucson’s population, like Phoenix’s, is about 43 percent Hispanic, and many of the Hispanic community groups have branches there. “Pima saw a considerable consolidation of the vote,” he said. Biden won Pima by 18.7 percentage points, a margin of 97 thousand votes compared to Hillary Clinton’s 57 thousand vote margin in 2016.

 

Saddling up for the future

As it catches its breath after the electoral sprint, PAZ is beginning to think about the next ten years.

At the national level, Rodriguez said, the top priority is immigration reform. “Hopefully, Biden invites us to the table and is like, how can we provide immigration reform? And how can we provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and their parents, our immigrant community.”

In South Phoenix, he said, “we’re really invested in developing affordable housing” with local partners. “We’ve done assessments here in the South Central Corridor, so we know people’s annual incomes and how much they pay for rent.” PAZ is particularly focused on providing housing for mixed-immigration status families, “where they can pay the rent, but maybe also provide some savings, so all the paycheck doesn’t just go for rent and utilities.” For PAZ, affordable housing is key to preventing gentrification due to development around the light-rail line and the proposed big box store.

During the pandemic, PAZ has helped people deal with unemployment, access emergency funds, and avoid utility shutoffs. The organizing around these issues that have been so critical in mobilizing the community, he said, will not slow down.

Away from the political hurly-burly and the sprawl, the original Arizona persists in the dry wash of the Salt River just south of downtown Phoenix. There, creosote and mesquite, ponds full of turtles, monarch butterflies and birdsong go on weaving tenacious webs of life. On Piestewa Peak, within the city limits, palos verdes still thrust taproots deep into the fractured ferruginous quartzite.

If we could do time-lapse imaging of the coming decade, odds are it would show, in the strip malls and the cul-de-sacs, rich social ferment continuing to fertilize new Arizonas on the Sonoran hardpan of the Valley of the Sun.

The post Flipping Arizona: Hispanic Movements Flex Political Muscles appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Credit: White House.

By Joaquín Roy
MIAMI, Jan 12 2021 (IPS)

When the “year in which we lived dangerously” has ended, let’s ask about a “new era”, once the defeat of Donald Trump has been confirmed.

The new scene is presided by uncertainty. This sentiment is caused by damage caused by the Trump presidency. The only doubt is about the permanence of the disaster caused by the four-year period that is now ending.

Inserted in the context of satisfaction with the cessation of the nightmare, a prediction of a certain nostalgia is detected.

It is based on a strategy of confrontation in the face of what was labeled as the formation of a dictatorship within the oldest democracy in documented history. We wondered what we would do when we woke up. We were obsessed by a schedule filled by a single issue.

Some of us feared that in the supreme moment of expectation of the success of a confrontational strategy we would be reminded that in the panorama of importance and loneliness of questioning the irrational policy of the president we would be unfairly accused. Unusually, we had had an unwanted accomplice in the urgent eviction of the uncomfortable tenant from the White House.

We did not know how we could be grateful, so to speak, for the assistance of the pandemic that still grips the planet. The irrational behavior of the president in the successive stages of the Cobid19, its development, expansion and implantation throughout the planet, had become Trump’s worst enemy and the best ally of the opposition’s behavior.

Joaquín Roy

At the same time there was an awful sentiment consisting of the implantation of the virus and the consequent denial of Trump joining the efforts of the political opposition to achieve the defenestration, even if it was at the limit of his administration.

Every infected human being in the United States, plus every certified death, followed up by Trump’s erratic health policy, were recorded as “votes” in the tally of the November 3 election. The hope that Covid-19 would magically vanish overnight, as Trump himself surrealistically predicted in the early spring of 2020, would spell the demise of the towering enemy that had loomed over the White House.

Meanwhile, the opposition to the president in the apparent majority of the United States and in a universal proportion abroad were dedicating their efforts on an agenda exclusively full of reaction to each one of the president’s outrages. But there was an absence of a strategy with an agenda for “the day after”.

In the Democratic field there was no plan for the future. The discussion about the best candidates dragged on. That detail was not clarified until the decision in favor of Biden and Harris was done. In an environment reluctant to the formation of “kitchen cabinets” there was no government program to be implemented after 3 November.

In view of the poorly concealed feeling of insecurity, it was feared that one day it would be possible to exclaim with poorly concealed nostalgia: “against Trump we lived better.”

This expression has its origin in the thought that the Spanish Communist Party expressed at the time of the re-installation of democracy in Spain after the disappearance of the Franco regime.

Its precedent was the claim that the remnants of the regime put forward: “with Franco we lived better.” The communists, their reserved space was occupied by the neo-democrats, confessed that when they were in the opposition they had more effective power than in parliamentary democracy.

The oposition to Trump may be forced to express itself in the same way once the system is fully opened at the end of January. This feeling will have based all his conduct on criticism of each and every one of the government’s “policies”.

In reality, they were merely whims expressed in the wee hours of the morning by clicking noises on the mobile. The monumental void left by Trump’s mismanagement will still be occupied by an appropriate vaccine and the verification of its excellence, a task that would be extended throughout the rest of 2021.

It will depend on the effectiveness of the implementation of the urgent measures of the new government that the electorate will not be tempted to listen again to the siren songs of 2016.

The reconstruction of the economy, the reduction of the damage caused to the neediest sectors, the better integration of immigration, and the determined fight to eliminate racism are some of the most urgent tasks of the new government.

Only with its reasonable resolution will it be avoided that part of the 70 million who voted for the outgoing president would be tempted to exclaim: “with Trump we lived better.”

Joaquín Roy is Jean Monnet Professor and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Miami

The post Against Trump We Lived Better appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Small island nations are taking on water in the form of a vicious debt trap which damages their productivity and ability to recover from disasters and other structural constraints. UNCTAD warns the situation is unsustainable and requires urgent global attention.

By External Source
GENEVA, Jan 12 2021 (IPS)

In December 2020, Fiji was pounded by Pacific Cyclone Yasa, the years’ second category 5 storm which destroyed hundreds of buildings and caused about $1.4 billion in damage to health facilities, homes, schools, agriculture and infrastructure.

Yasa was yet another major tropical storm to devastate an island nation in 2020. Similarly, the Atlantic Ocean region saw its most active hurricane season on record.

Small island developing states (SIDS) experience the world’s highest frequency of natural disasters, among them hurricanes, cyclones and other violent storms which lead to severe flooding, and in the worst cases loss of life, homes and infrastructure.

In terms of economic impact, the most severe storm ever, calculated on a per capita basis, hit Dominica in 2017, causing damage equivalent to 280% of the island’s GDP, according to the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT).

For small countries, the costs of post-disaster reconstruction can be exorbitant. On average, natural disasters cause damage equivalent to 2.1% of GDP every year in SIDS.

But they also face many other issues, like their small geographic size, remoteness from trade partners and international markets, and a lack of creditor trust, and economic diversification which compounds their ability to bounce back from disasters.

“The international community needs to work hard to help small island nations build resilience as the threat of destruction expands and the cost of seasonal storms becomes increasingly devastating for SIDS,” said Paul Akiwumi, UNCTAD’s director for Africa and least developed countries. “Future disasters could worsen humanitarian crises and impair economic recovery.”

UNCTAD’s special adviser for the blue economy, Dona Bertarelli, said connection to the ocean is both an asset and a risk for SIDS on the frontlines of climate change.

“Global development partners need to work closely with national governments and the private sector to help small island nations build multi-dimensional resilience in the face of both environmental and economic challenges,” she said.

Building resilience for long-term recovery

Greater access to financial support and better disaster debt management is a critical part of a toolbox for resilience.

A recent UNCTAD study on debt vulnerability finds that SIDS have chronic debt not only because of their vulnerability to disasters, but also due to many other structural issues. Disasters are not the only reason for their chronic debt.

“While disasters add to their burden, there are many pre-existing conditions that affect the debt situation in SIDS,” said Akiwumi, highlighting that the study confirms weak statistical links between debt sustainability and disasters alone.

“Prior to COVID-19, SIDS already faced significant constraints in mobilizing sufficient resources to build the necessary productive resources and infrastructure they need for sustainability, on top of financing the costs of disaster recovery,” Akiwumi added.

“If sufficient resources are not available, countries may end up in a trap where low economic activity and poor competitiveness will cause difficulties in paying external debt, endangering a country’s eligibility for future loans.”

UNCTAD also found that the main drivers of debt sustainability in small islands are per capita GDP, terms of trade, and export diversification.

Stronger economic growth and diversified exports improve SIDS’ capability to manage and repay debts during normal times but become critical in the aftermath of shocks.

There is also a looming debt crisis in SIDS in the aftermath of COVID-19 as their tourism-dependent fragile economies are pummelled by travel restrictions. The International Monetary Fund projects a 9% fall in real GDP for SIDS in 2020.

The severe shortfalls in tourist expenditure have led the IMF to anticipate a steep increase in the current account deficit of SIDS to 12.1% of GDP in 2020.

The recovery will also be slow. Despite an expected, gradual return of tourism activities, a current account deficit of -12.3% of GDP is forecasted for 2021, further straining the capacity of SIDS to service their external debt.

In 2018, the external debt to GDP ratio among SIDS ranged from 6% in Timor-Leste to 104% in Jamaica. The annual debt service to exports ratio was also greatly unequal, ranging from less than 1% in Timor-Leste to 26% in Papua New Guinea.

Despite restructuring Granada’s debt and concerted efforts to improve Sao Tome’s fiscal fundamentals, both nations were rated as being in external debt distress in August 2020.

Though not all SIDS are heavily indebted, 17 of them are considered by the IMF as being at “high risk” of debt distress, meaning they would be unable to meet their loan payments.

Although some of the IMF emergency financing tools such as the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT) can provide important debt relief, they require sufficient administrative capacity to measure and report the impact of disasters to prove the eligibility criteria has been met.

This is not an easy job in some SIDS, where quantifying long-term or more complex disasters, like drought, is undermined by weak administrative capacity.

The UNCTAD study identifies a range of policy options that could help SIDS overcome the challenges they face. These include leveraging available international and multi-lateral emergency financing tools, as well as implementing innovative programmes to attract needed revenue, while protecting the countries’ valuable resources.

Some innovative instruments, such as hurricane clauses already included in debt restructuring agreements in Grenada and Barbados, should be extended to other types of disasters going beyond severe storms, the study says.

Multilateral cooperation to increase private insurance coverage against climate change can also support real resilience. For example, the InsuResilience Global Partnership created in 2017 aims to build local capacity and resilience through climate and disaster risk finance and innovative insurance solutions.

The study advises that access to the Green Climate Fund and other programs must be facilitated through a stronger collaboration between traditional and emerging donors to reduce transaction costs.

Technical assistance to national statistical offices is also required to improve the measurement of natural disasters’ impact on economic, social and environmental development.

“Previous approaches have mainly focused on ex-post recovery and emergency-based financing, but ex-ante financing should also be a priority for resilience-building efforts” Akiwumi added.

In addition, agreements between debtor and creditors to reduce a developing country’s debt stock or debt servicing in exchange for a commitment to protect nature, so-called “debt-for-nature swaps”, could be extended by including resilience building to multiple disasters.

“For SIDS, urgent action is needed to protect lives and livelihoods,” Akiwumi said, warning that the world may see more climate refugees as a result. “It is in everyone’s interests to support SIDS now.”

 

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