Africa

Street scene in the Dominican Republic. Credit: Ben Albano / Unsplash

By Jan Lundius
SANTO DOMINGO, Nov 2 2020 (IPS)

When President Luis Abinader arrived at his inauguration in an electrically driven car as a symbolic gesture of his Government’s intentions to make sustainable development one of its main objectives – he signalled the start of addressing climate change commitments in the country.

Abinader furthermore said he would immediately initiate preparations to make the presidential palace dependent on solar energy for its electrical supply – a commitment towards moving the country from being dependent on non-renewable energy.

Since his August inauguration, his Government has moved towards revising and making good the commitments of the Paris Agreement where it agreed to implement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

The Dominican Republic’s President Luis Abinader

The Paris Agreement was in itself a success because since then, most of the signatories have submitted national climate mitigation goals. Five years have passed, and according to the agreement, the signatory countries must now revise their NDCs, an opportunity for aligning their climate and development agendas and revisit their efforts to mobilise interest and funding for achieving their previously set goals.

On October 1, 2020, the Dominican Republic launched its NDC update process. The event included representatives from the Government, the private sector, the civil society, development and implementing partners and the academia, and its purpose was to showcase and raise awareness on the NDC update process, its steps and implications for these different stakeholders.

As part of an endeavour to mainstream an eco-friendly approach to all policies, the Dominican Republic, with the support of The Climate Action Enhancement Package (CAEP), an initiative of the NDC Partnership, is working on a revised and enhanced NDC strategy. This strategy includes a medium-term implementation, finance and investment plan to effectively address water management, ecosystem preservation, food security, smart urban development and dependency on fossil fuels.

Simultaneously the plan will be supported by a strengthening capacity and awareness for safeguarding natural resources. An assessment of attained achievements will in 2025 constitute the groundwork for the development and implementation of a long-term strategy leading up to 2050.

Max Puig, Executive Vice President of the Dominican National Council for Climate Change and a Clean Development Mechanism

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Max Puig, Executive Vice President of the Dominican National Council for Climate Change and a Clean Development Mechanism said despite a change of regime and hardship caused by COVID-19, many of the commitments made five years ago are gradually becoming realised.

NDCs are country-specific, though Puig repeatedly reminded us that even if every country has its specific character and preconditions, the implementation of NDCs must go beyond national efforts. CAEP is a step in this direction since it provides international expertise, as well as technical and financial support to countries in need of such assistance.

Like most other island nations, the Dominican Republic is grappling with several unique challenges, which solution would benefit from foreign expertise.

A significant concern is that even if the Dominican Republic has one of the largest and most diverse economies in the Caribbean, it still relies on imported fossil fuels for nearly all of its energy needs. The NDCs have become one tool for amending this problem. While seeking solutions to limit greenhouse gas emissions, it is necessary to invest in alternative and more sustainable energy production.

A step in this direction is to determine the extent of the emissions and sources of greenhouse gas, something that has been realised through a CAEP supported cooperation between the Dominican Government and the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). IRENA is an agency that assists Governments towards renewable energy and author of a report A Renewable Energy Roadmap providing essential energy statistics.

Findings and suggestions the IRENA document has been further developed in reports on impacts of renewable energy in Dominican power systems and a study of renewable energy prospects. The research highlighted a potential to increase the share of renewable power generation to as much as 44 percent by 2030, based mostly on solar photovoltaic, wind and bioenergy.

While talking to Puig, you are reminded that the Dominican Republic is part of an island and thus to a great extent dependent on its coast – both for its booming tourism industry and for maintaining its ecological health and distinctiveness.

The coastal ecology is another CAEP initiative, supporting the cooperation between the National Climate Change Council and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). This international NGO is currently updating collected data to identify highly vulnerable coastal areas and in 2019 published a study mapping and describing threatened ecosystems, like coral reefs and mangroves. TNC is currently working with the Government to develop the effective management of more than 3.2 million acres of terrestrial and marine habitats.

Puig mentioned that because the Dominican Republic is an island nation, it is considered to be one of the ten most vulnerable countries in the world when it comes to the effects of climate change.

The Dominican Republic is situated right in the frequent path of devastating hurricanes, which, due to global warming, now may gain even more strength. There is a constant threat of flooding, and the arrival of a hurricane generally causes extensive landslides and loss of livelihoods.

The Dominican Republic’s Unit for Coordination of Water Resources is currently assessing these risks, supported by CAEP activities led by the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB). The analysis will include the development of a viable approach for limiting the harmful effects of sudden flooding based on a multi-stakeholder approach involving relevant sectors of the Global Water Partnership (GWP).

While discussing the ecological peculiarities of the Dominican Republic, Puig accentuated the importance of considering the nation as part of a unique, insular ecosystem shared with the Republic of Haiti.

The island of Hispaniola is, with its 76,000 square kilometres, roughly the same size as the three Benelux countries together (Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg). Despite its limited size, the island has four distinctive eco-regions; moist forest areas, dry forests, moist grasslands and dry savannas.

This diversity is due to the highest mountain range in the Caribbean, which stretches diagonally across the island, placing nearly a third of the territory in a rain shadow. For historical reasons, far too complicated to address here, extreme contrasts are also evident in the political makeup of the island.

It is the only island in the world shared by two sovereign nations, and even if the ecosystem initially has been the same in the two parts of the island, natural resources are more depleted in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic.

Puig lamented that many of his Dominican fellow citizens assume that a wall along the border would solve any problems. Far better would be to consider the entire island as an ecological unity within which social and eco-friendly solutions are pursued in unison.

Hispaniola has the largest economy in the Greater Antilles. Most of this economic development is found in the Dominican economy, which is almost 800 percent larger than the one in Haiti.

As of 2018, the estimated annual per capita was USD 8,050 in the Dominican Republic and USD 868 in Haiti. This contrast in economic well-being makes the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, one of the sharpest divisions between need and relative prosperity in the world. A reason why the Dominican Republic has one of the highest migration influxes in the Americas.

According to Puig, a solution to this problem would be to emphasise the human aspect of sustainable development. Poverty, ignorance and inequality weaken the resilience of any nation and obstruct sustainable development. Cooperation – local, bilateral and international – is necessary, as well as compassion, respect for human dignity and social awareness. If we finally learn to realise that the conservation of our planet’s natural resources is a prerequisite for human survival, maybe every Government would come to understand the futility of short-term actions and unnecessary strife.

With CAEP, the Government is working on several fronts. These include strengthening its overall climate-related mechanisms through coordination of government institutions in charge of the National Climate Change Policy. At a practical level, there will be a framework for ecosystem-based adaptation projects, along with the provision of capacity building for implementing such projects. The Dominican Republic has committed to identify and prioritise a pipeline of investment-ready projects at all levels including energy, agriculture, industry, transport, water and sanitation services, buildings and infrastructure and livelihoods diversification.

Finally, IPS asked Puig why he was engaged in such a thorny venture as Dominican politics?

“In spite of all the difficulties and frustrations you encounter through political engagement, I assume that for many of us, politics equals a belief in a change for the better. A transition of power, like the one the Dominican Republic now experiences, promises improvement, nurtures imagination and action, and stimulates dreams and visions,” he replied.

https://youtu.be/zHyq6mmn52Q
https://youtu.be/RR-ClA3LJaU

(Additional reporting Cecilia Russell)

 

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Women listen to the news in a village comprising mainly of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. After a 19-year-old young woman was murdered and raped in the state last month it triggered nationwide protests. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India , Nov 2 2020 (IPS)

Shabnam*, a young woman from Northern India’s Haryana state, is two years away from becoming a law graduate. She sees parallels between her own rape and that of the 19-year-old Maha Dalit woman whose brutal rape and torture by a group of men from a “dominant” or “higher” caste in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh triggered nationwide protests.

“She was a Valmiki like us, from a landless and poor family like ours. They raped her, brutalised her and when she died, they burnt her body without the consent of her family. And even after all of that, they would not allow her family to talk about it and threaten them to keep quiet. This is exactly what I and my family have experienced and what we continue to go through. The only exception is that I am still alive,” Shabnam tells IPS in Hindi. The 19-year-old young woman eventually died of her injuries. But just like her, Shabnam also belongs to the Maha Dalit – India’s most marginalised and oppressed community formerly known as “untouchables”.

The death of the young woman focused a spotlight on the sexual violence faced by Dalit women in India, who number some 100 million according to a discussion document by Navsarjan Trust (India), FEDO (Nepal) and the International Dalit Solidarity Network.

“Violence, including rape and gang rape, have been systematically utilised as weapons by dominant castes to oppress Dalit women and girls and reinforce structural gender and caste hierarchies,” a soon-to-be-released report by Equality Now, a global non-profit which promotes human rights and equality, and the local charity Swabhiman Society, states.

“In the northern state of Haryana, where Dalit make up around one-fifth of the state’s population, a deeply-rooted caste-based and patriarchal society still flourishes. There are high rates of violence against women – data from the National Crime Records Bureau in 2018 indicates that nearly 4 women are raped every day in this state alone,” the report further states. Titled “Justice Denied: Sexual Violence and intersectional discrimination: Barriers to Accessing Justice for Dalit Women and Girls in Haryana, India”, the report draws from Swabhiman Society’s experience of working directly with Dalit survivors of sexual violence in Haryana over the past decade and highlights insights from this work.  

Shabnam was a minor when she was gang raped in 2013. Over the past seven years, even as her case has gone to trial, there have been several attempts and threats on her life for which she was eventually granted court protection.

“People think rape is a single crime. But for Dalit rape victims, it’s just the beginning of a lifelong chain of crimes and struggles: mental abuse, fear, intimidation, threats, denial of basic rights, denial of education and a decent livelihood – the list is very long. In fact, once you are raped, you stay a victim all through your life,” Manisha Mashaal, founder of Swabhiman Society, tells IPS in Hindi. Mashaal, a Dalit women’s rights defender and lawyer, is helping Shabnam and many other young women in their fight for justice.

Violence against Dalit women – what are the true numbers?

According to the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB), a federal agency, cases of physical attacks on women have been increasing.

In 2019 alone, says NCRBs latest report, there were over 405,861 cases of assaults on women — 7 percent more than was reported in 2018. The crimes include beating, stripping, kidnapping and rape.

Of these, 13,273 assaults, which included 3,486 cases of rape, were against women from Dalit communities.

Jacqui Hunt, the Europe and Eurasia Director of Equality Now, says widespread under-reporting and problems registering sexual assaults with the police mean that the true figures are likely to be considerably higher.

“As a consequence of gender, caste and class inequalities, Dalit women and girls are subjected to multiple forms of subjugation, exploitation, and oppression. Sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, has been perpetrated against them by men from dominant castes as a mechanism that reinforces India’s deeply entrenched structural hierarchies. Women’s bodies are being used as a battleground to assert caste supremacy and to keep women ‘in their place,’” Hunt tells IPS.

Mashaal believes that almost 80 percent of Dalit women who are raped do not report the crime because of political and social pressure as the women and their families are usually threatened by the perpetrators. Besides, Mashaal says, a majority of the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) survivors are minor Dalit girls, while NCRB data for child rape survivors does not differentiate according to caste. 

A safe space for Dalit women

To help break the cycle of silence on crimes against Dalit women and girls, in 2013 Mashaal founded Swabhiman Society – a charity that provides various services, including legal and psychological support to Dalit survivors of SGBV.

“We currently have 25 women who work with us off and on, but this is a safe place for hundreds of women who have been stigmatised, brutalised and yet have nobody else to turn to,” says Mashaal.

Mashaal started the society because she noticed few organisations were aiding Dalit survivors of SBGV and that there was a lack of knowledge and awareness among the community about their legal rights to justice or the procedure to follow.

In several cases, they would be dictated to settle out of the court by the Khap Panchayat – a powerful, traditional, community assembly run by the landowning Jat community, which decides on village affairs. The decisions of the Khap are often controversial and considered anti-Dalit, but few dare oppose them fearing reprisals.

Mamta*, another woman Mashaal represents, was a minor when she was gang raped by “dominant” caste men in 2012. When the Khap Panchayat ordered that she had to marry one of her rapists, her father – a farmhand and daily wage earner — was too scared to oppose the decision.

For months Mamta was locked in a small room and repeatedly raped by both her ‘husband’ and his friends and relatives.

“It was like a cage. I lived in a small room. My husband would lock the door from outside. He would not otherwise touch me as I was a Dalit but would forcibly have sex whenever he wanted. Every day, he would bring other men and they would also rape me.

“I was like a fly stuck in mud – I could not live and could not fly away either,” Mamta, who is now 26, tells IPS in Hindi.

Eventually Mamta managed to escape and discovered the Swabhiman Society. There she met many other women who had also experienced similar abuse and brutality. Together they have received counselling, awareness training about laws on rape and sexual attacks on women. But most important of all, they have gathered the courage to demand justice in a legal court.

Land ownership or lack thereof perpetuating vulnerabilities and violence

According to  Hunt, Dalit women lack economic power and are often reliant on dominant castes for their livelihoods. When survivors of sexual assault or their families are dependent for jobs or other sources of income from someone who is from the same caste as an assailant, or the perpetrator is also their employer, accessing justice for sexual violence becomes even more problematic

“Culprits and their associates often wield their economic power to silence survivors and witnesses. This includes coercing survivors or victims’ family members into settling cases out of court, or hounding them from their home and village.

“Our forthcoming report gives an indication of how common this problem is. In almost 60 percent of the cases we studied, survivors were forced into a compromise, many times caused by threats of economic retaliation,” Hunt says.

According to the recent data published by the Census of India, 71 percent Dalits are landless labourers who work on land they do not own. According to the Agriculture Census, in rural areas, 58.4 percent Dalit households do not own land at all. This gets grimmer in Dalit-dominated states such as Haryana, Punjab and Bihar, where 85 percent do not own land.

“This is the reason why there is continuous gruesome sexual assaults on Dalit women because they are thrice-vulnerable. First, because of their caste, second, because of their gender and third, because of their landless status,” says Mashaal.

Independent studies have established this as well.

According to a 2018 study by Reena Kukreja, an assistant Professor at Queens University, Canada, the Dalit community in Haryana, “with over 80 percent of Dalits living in rural areas, they are dependent on the three landowning castes for agricultural wage labour as their primary source of livelihood.” The study explores the link between land rights and gender violence, especially in the context of Dalit women’s marriages in Haryana.

Preparing for a life-long fight

The women Mashaal represents don’t believe there is a silver bullet for the endemic SGBV against women in their community. It is why a number of them are pursuing a college degree, especially in law.

“Every time we go to court, we see the perpetrators hiring 10 to 15 lawyers to fight their cases. They hire big law firms. On the other hand, a Dalit woman victim can hardly afford a single lawyer. It is very frustrating. So, we encourage the girls who come here to go back to school and study law. We must build our own network of women lawyers who will fight and win every single case of Dalit rape,” Mashaal says.

Presently, at least 10 women from the Swabhiman Society are studying law, says Shabnam.

Pooja* is another young Dalit woman whom Mashaal is assisting. When Pooja was only 17 she was kidnapped by 12 men who took turns to rape her. Pooja – the youngest of the women — just passed her last school exams and plans to enrol in a law school. Though her enrolment has been delayed by COVID-19 lockdowns.

“I will apply to a private college if needed and  take up a job to pay the fees, but will not give up on becoming a lawyer,” Pooja tells IPS as Mashaal and the other Dalit women in the room break into a cheering chorus of support pledging to “make sure that happens”.

Meanwhile, the Equality Now / Swabhiman Society joint report provides recommendations for improvement of the police, medico-legal and judicial processes in Haryana to improve access to justice for survivors of sexual violence, particularly Dalit women and girls. 

*Not her real name. Names of some interviewees have been changed to protect their identity.

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The post The Rape of India’s Dalit Women: It’s All about Gender & Class Subordination appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Drop box outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Credit: Peter Costantini.

By Peter Costantini
PHOENIX, ARIZONA, US, Nov 2 2020 (IPS)

It sits stolidly, bolted onto a concrete base outside the Maricopa County Recorder’s office in Phoenix, Arizona. Weighing in at around 600 pounds,  it sports “anti-tampering features” and “heavy-duty, all-weather construction”. Security agents check it periodically and it appears to be watched by a camera. As I scrutinize it, a man in an SUV pulls up and deposits a ballot in its slot. He tells me he votes this way every election, then drives off.

Despite its impassive demeanor, this drop box and its fellows have flirted with media celebrity. If they could talk about how they came to be deployed – or not – this year, they could tell a tabloid-ready tale teeming with lurid details about the sad state of democracy in these United States of America.

But this one didn’t even offer a “no comment”, so let’s tease out its story from other sources.

Voting procedures in the U.S. vary widely from state to state, in a matrix of Byzantine complexity. Several states conduct elections nearly completely by mail, and most others offer mail-in ballots as a routine option. A few, however, allow absentee ballots only on request and for restricted reasons.

Most states permit bypassing the U.S. Postal Service by dropping mail-in ballots off at a drop box or a polling place, while only four states ban drop boxes. Many states also allow early voting in-person for days or weeks before the election as a way to forestall crowds on Election Day. In several other states, though, permitted voting methods are unclear or pending litigation.

Voting procedures in the U.S. vary widely from state to state, in a matrix of Byzantine complexity. Several states conduct elections nearly completely by mail, and most others offer mail-in ballots as a routine option. A few, however, allow absentee ballots only on request and for restricted reasons. Most states permit bypassing the U.S. Postal Service by dropping mail-in ballots off at a drop box or a polling place

This year, the COVID-19 pandemic left many voters loathe to enter a polling place to vote out of fear of exposing themselves to the virus. Numerous volunteer poll workers, who are often elderly, also decided to sit this election out. In response, many states decided that numbers of polling places would have to be reduced.

Given the unusually high expected turnout, though, this would likely mean long lines of voters. Most states had long allowed “absentee ballots” to be mailed in by those away from home or with physical limitations. So this year, in many places, mail-in voting was expanded, often by sending a request form for a mail-in ballot to every registered voter.

States with all-mail voting (including my home state of Washington) have made voting more accessible to all voters for many years with hardly a whisper of misconduct or controversy. President Donald Trump himself has voted by absentee ballot.

But as the phenomenon gained momentum, he and a chorus of Republican politicians began to raise a hue and cry against mail-in voting, accusing it of fostering massive fraud, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Throughout most of the country a pattern emerged: Democrats were tending to vote in advance by mail or drop box, while Republicans, perhaps heeding presidential warnings, were more likely to plan to vote in person on Election Day.

Then in June, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump and Republican donor, took over as Postmaster. Without missing a beat, he began to dismember the United States Postal Service – a long-term goal of the Republican Party, which has sought to privatize it and break its labor unions. DeJoy reportedly has significant financial interests in firms that compete or do business with the USPS.

The new Postmaster removed essential equipment, fired experienced management, and eliminated employee overtime, resulting in substantially slower mail delivery in some areas. All this obstruction came at the beginning of an electoral season when a major surge of voters, particularly Democratic ones, were counting on reliable, speedy delivery of ballot requests and ballots.

With predictable chutzpah, Republicans in several states have sued to require that mail-in ballots be counted only if they are received by Election Day, rather than if they are postmarked by that day, which is the norm. This would put mailed votes at the mercy of politically motivated postal slowdowns.

I couldn’t find one of the junked mail-sorting machines that was willing to go on record.

 

Credit: Peter Costantini.

Public outcry and Congressional hearings made DeJoy back off on some off his restrictions, but the capacity of the post office to handle high volumes of ballots remained in question. Many voters who had received mail-in ballots became concerned that, if returned by mail, they might still face delays.

Yet entering polling places to drop them off added some risk of exposure. One good solution was to deposit the ballots into the secure drop boxes that roughly two-thirds of the states and many localities already provided outside polling places and in other locations.

Last June, the Trump campaign had sued the State of Pennsylvania for adding ballot drop boxes around Philadelphia, the state’s biggest city, with a combined Black and Hispanic population of 58 percent. Both of these groups vote heavily Democratic.

A Federal judge appointed by Trump found that the campaign “failed to produce any evidence of vote-by-mail fraud in Pennsylvania,” including fraud related to drop boxes. A research project by the Brennan Center for Justice calls voter fraud “a myth” and explains: “Extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare. Yet repeated, false allegations of fraud can make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to participate in elections.”

Nevertheless, Trump later tweeted that ballot drop boxes are a “big fraud” and “make it possible for a person to vote multiple times”. Twitter reportedly put a notice on the tweet saying that it violated its “civic integrity policy.”

The response of some other Republican officials has been – you’ve probably guessed by now – to severely restrict the number of drop boxes. In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott imposed a limit of one drop box per county.

The populations of Texas’ 254 counties, however, vary from under one hundred to several million. Democrats fought this restriction in court, but lost. Now Harris County, where Houston is located, has one drop box for nearly 4.8 million residents. Not coincidentally, the county’s population is around 60 percent Black and Hispanic.

Similar limitations on drop boxes have been imposed by the Republican Secretary of State of Ohio, also provoking a legal rumble. My Phoenix drop box, though, seems to have job security. Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State has rolled out a well-distributed network of its siblings, some of them in drive-through locations. This year, over 80 percent of Arizona voters will send in an absentee ballot, either through the mail or via drop boxes, without perceptible controversy.

Still, the malevolent hybrid of Machiavellian yet transparent voter suppression, bred by the coordinated attacks on mail-in voting and drop boxes, is a lowlight in a campaign full of Republican assaults on democracy. Enumerating them all is a job for historians – and civil-rights attorneys. But another one stands out for sheer vindictiveness.

In most states, prisoners are not allowed to vote, but ex-felons who have done their time and finished probation have their civil rights, including voting, restored. In Florida and a few other states, however, released ex-felons were not allowed to vote again except by special dispensation.

In 2018, Florida voters approved, by a two-to-one margin, a constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to ex-felons. But not long after, the state’s Republican legislature intervened and added a provision that to have their rights restored, ex-felons had to pay all prison fines, fees and restitution charged against them during their incarceration.

Most people emerge from jail with little or no cash on hand, so this amounted to revoking their newly reinstated suffrage. A legal challenge initially struck down the legislature’s changes, but a federal appeals court reversed the lower court and upheld the pecuniary provisions, although confusion persists on how they should be carried out. Out of the 1.4 million ex-felons who initially had their rights restored, a disproportionate number of them people of color, it appears that fewer than one-quarter of them will be able to vote in this year’s elections.

If this sounds like something right out of Jim Crow, it’s not far off. Among the many ways that Black voters were disenfranchised after the end of Reconstruction was imposition of a poll tax, which had to be paid in order to vote.

Few African Americans could afford the cost, and those that could were often denied their rights by other chicanery or violence. The first judge’s ruling against the legislature said the financial requirements amounted to an unconstitutional poll tax.

This chaotic landscape of multi-faceted voter suppression has grown worse this year, but it has roots at least a century and a half old. Just a bit more than a decade after the Civil War, repressive measures like the poll tax combined with outright terrorism – lynching, arson and mass murder – to snatch away the rights and economic advances Black people had won since the end of slavery.

This continued up until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, with the Democratic Party playing the dominant role in denying democracy across the South. With the social changes spearheaded by the movement, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, the center of gravity of Southern racism moved into the Republican Party, which embraced it tightly with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy”.

A political rallying point of the segregationists was the concept of “states’ rights”, the idea that they could defend Jim Crow against Federal efforts to desegregate by invoking the primacy of each state to determine its own laws. Federal enforcement helped Black and liberal movements and politicians roll back some of the worst abuses.

Under the Voting Rights Act, most of the states of the South and a few others with a history of discrimination were forbidden to make changes in their electoral laws without Federal approval. But then in 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that the patterns of discrimination the Act guarded against were no longer occurring, and removed the requirement for federal supervision of voting laws.

Very quickly, many of those states re-enacted restrictions on voting, some more subtle than before, but aiming towards the same old goal: making it harder for people of color people to vote.

Ironically, along with the reactionary effects on voting rights in conservative-run states, the resurgence of states’ rights and loosening of federal control has provided more leeway for some blue states to enact liberal and progressive reforms despite the Trump administration’s opposition.

All but one of the states that have chosen all mail-in voting are run by Democrats. States and cities have enacted sanctuary and immigrant-justice laws in defiance of regressive federal immigration regulations and enforcement.

Underlying all the political and legal hurly-burly, three structural elements deeply entrenched in the U.S. Constitution and statutes help ensure that fundamental democratic principles such as neutral, fair electoral administration and “one person, one vote” remain problematic.

Unlike many other countries, the United States does not have a fourth, electoral branch of government, independent of the executive, legislative and judicial, that could standardize electoral law and practices nationally.

Some jurisdictions have independent, non-partisan electoral commissions, but they are often appointed by a partisan executive. Many electoral authority posts, though, are partisan, and as the 2000 Florida fiasco and Bush v. Gore made indelibly obvious, political pressure and voter exclusion in high-stakes contests can bulldoze even-handed election administration.

The U.S. has a bicameral legislature with a Senate comprising two senators from every state, large or small. This is perhaps the most blatant Constitutional violation of “one person, one vote”: a citizen of the most populous state, California, with a nearly 40 million residents, has only a tiny fraction of the representation of a citizen of the least populous one, Wyoming, with under 600 thousand. Both states have two senators.

The old justification that the collegial deliberations of the Senate would restrain the tendencies toward mob rule in the House of Representatives has been rendered ridiculous by the Republican Senate leadership’s comportment over recent years, but it always reeked of elitism. Senators from smaller states have often been excessively beholden to the biggest local industries: Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, for example, was known as “the Senator from Boeing” for his fealty to the dominant aircraft manufacturer.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast, the House of Lords, the U.S. Senate’s counterpart, has been reduced to a mainly advisor body with little political power. Democrats have long contemplated trying to bring in the District of Columbia, and possibly Puerto Rico, as new states with two senators each, but this would be a heavy lift politically. It’s hard to see a feasible reform short of major changes in the Constitution.

The Electoral College is another negation of “one person, one vote”. Although numbers of electoral votes are very roughly proportional to state populations, they still give considerably more representation to smaller, more rural, whiter states. The winner-take-all nature of the electoral vote, with the exception of two states, means that it frequently does not reflect the popular vote.

The Electoral College is an 18th Century institution that gives far too much leeway to the whims of appointed electors, and can be too easily overridden by state legislatures. It has become enough of an embarrassment that some reforms are attracting public attention. The best known is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Under it, states pledge to give all their electoral votes to the candidate winning the national popular vote, but this goes into effect only after states representing 270 electoral votes, the majority needed to elect a president, have signed onto the agreement.

Elections in 2016 and 2000, in which the winner of the Electoral College lost the popular vote, have inflamed bitter national divisions and installed governments that led the country into ongoing catastrophes. A previous contested election, in 1876, was resolved by both parties agreeing to end Reconstruction, snatching away the barely restored civil and human rights of Black people for most of the next hundred years.

The country’s rickety electoral infrastructure might not be able to weather another such blow.

For one more electoral cycle, at least, the salvation of democracy here may lie in the same decentralization that has caused such frustration. Beneath the brazen attempts to disfigure democracy, there remains a strong, grassroots culture of fairness.

There are millions of voters willing to stand in long lines, even if they’re caused by political manipulation, and puzzle out confusing regulations in order to cast their votes. And there are thousands of local officials and volunteers of all political persuasions who are willing to work long hours and brave stifling bureaucracy to make sure that all votes are counted.

I returned to check on the original drop box. It was clearly the strong, silent type: no complaints, no publicity seeking, it just did its job. I took a few more pictures. A security guard shook his head and told me that he had never seen a drop box attract the paparazzi like this one.

The post Drop Boxes Tell Tale of US Democracy in 2020 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

“If things could talk, then I’m sure you’d hear a lot of things to make you cry, my dear. Ain’t you glad, glad that things don’t talk.” – Ry Cooder

The post Drop Boxes Tell Tale of US Democracy in 2020 appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram
SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 2 2020 (IPS)

US third quarter GDP numbers released two weeks ago delighted stock markets and President Trump. Output had picked up by 7.4%, annualised as 33.1%, the largest quarterly economic growth on record, almost double the old record of 3.9% (annualised as 16.7%) in the first quarter of 1950, seven decades ago.

Anis Chowdhury

Spinning numbers
This news could not have come at a better time for Trump, who is struggling for re-election, as his Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) declared that this affirmed Trump’s claim, “we’re coming back, and we’re coming back strong”. The CEA spun the White House press release headline accordingly, “The Great American Recovery: Third Quarter GDP Blows Past Expectations”.

The CEA attributed the record to “the strong foundation of the pre-pandemic economy and the efficacy of the Trump Administration”, portraying it as “a testament to the fortitude and resilience of America’s workers and families”.

Meanwhile, new US COVID-19 cases on the very same day reached a record high, surpassing 90,000 and still rising, with total cases nearing a million, with deaths four times the total American death toll during the two decade long Vietnam War, and fast approaching a quarter million.

Glass half full/empty
As COVID-19 rages unchecked, economic activity remained US$670 billion below its pre-pandemic peak. According to the ‘Back-to-Normal Index’ of Moody’s Analytics and CNN Business, the economy was only 82% of what it was in early March, with 10.7 million jobs lost since February!

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early October show that more than 12.6 million Americans were out of work while lasting job losses rose, with 36% of the jobless deemed permanently unemployed.

Those permanently laid-off ballooned from 1.5 million in March to 3.8 million in September, and the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) increased by 781,000 to 2.4 million. This number is still rising fast, threatening extreme hardship for many more households.

Prospects for those losing jobs may be bleak as US job recovery appears to be running out of steam. After adding 4.8 million jobs in June, job gains slowed to 1.8 million in July, 1.5 million in August and only 661,000 in September. As time passes and job growth continues to slow, it will take years to bring employment back to pre-pandemic levels.

Exaggerating trends
Annualising a quarterly or monthly rate tells us how much the economy would expand or shrink if the rate of change is maintained for a full year. But this can be misleading, by making mountains out of molehills. Undoubtedly, the second quarter’s massive collapse was followed by a large gain in the third.

But the third quarter recovery of 33% after the second quarter contraction of 33% does not mean the economy is back to where it was. If 100 drops 33% to 67, and then regains 33%, it gets to 89 (from 67) — still 11 short of the original 100.

Rapid growth in one quarter does not mean the economy has gained strong momentum. The collapse in the previous quarter had set a low baseline. Hence, any rebound from that depressed base would generate a huge growth rate.

Hours worked are often a better proxy for employment and economic recovery. Average hours worked in the first quarter were 5.1 million, dropping to 4.5 million in the second, before recovering to 4.8 million in the third, still below pre-COVID levels.

Other evidence also indicates that the economy has been slowing. For example, consumption growth was slower every month from June to August than in the month before.

Similarly, retail sales slowed over mid-2020, before a slight rebound in September. The Chicago Federal Reserve National Economic Activity Index indicated that August growth was the slowest since recovery began in May.

Disparities widen
The prestigious Lancet has observed, “COVID-19 exacerbating inequalities”, as the pandemic sharpened various US disparities already growing for decades. As 45 million Americans lost their jobs, US billionaires made US$584 billion.

Meanwhile, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show hospitalization rates for Blacks and Latinos 4.5 times that for non-Hispanic whites. A US National Academy of Sciences study also found age-adjusted COVID deaths more than 2.5 times higher for Blacks than for Whites.

US income and wealth inequalities have been rising since the early 1970s. The share of total income earned by the top decile (10%) rose from around 31% in the 1970s to about half in 2015, while the top 1% or percentile’s share rose from 8% to 20%.

Much of this increase among the top 10% came at the expense of workers in the bottom half of the distribution whose share of total income halved from 20% in the 1970s as median US workers’ real wages fell from 1973.

Over the past three decades, the wealth share of those in the top decile (10%) of household income rose from 61% to 70%, while that of the top 1% went up from 17% to 26%.

Jobless rates for Asians, Blacks and Hispanics were higher than the national average, even before the pandemic. Disproportionately employed in low paying occupations, they have suffered more job losses due to the pandemic.

Women have also suffered much more, e.g., as 617,000 women, compared to 78,000 men, dropped out of the labour force in September. Half of these women were between 35 and 44, the prime working age.

Omitting the important things in life
The pandemic can even augment GDP, which includes all COVID-related expenses, including those for treatments and funerals, plus the trillions that governments – federal, state, municipal – spend to tackle the crisis.

Perhaps, it is fitting to recall Robert Kennedy from over half a century ago:

“Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product… counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.

“It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.

“It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

“It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

“And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

 

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By External Source
Nov 1 2020 (IPS)

It has been nine months since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a “public health emergency of international concern”. Since then, more than 44 million cases have been recorded and over one million lives lost. Economic costs measure in trillions of dollars. Global recovery will take years.

A safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine is expected to be developed in record time and may be approved for production, distribution and acceptance some time in 2021. Public health experts say that at least 70% of any community must get vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine to achieve an acceptable level of immunity to protect its members.

We recently surveyed 13,426 people in 19 countries. We included two of Africa’s most populous and visible nations, Nigeria and South Africa, which are among the most affected by COVID-19 on the continent.

Overall, we found that 71.5% of participants said they would take a “proven safe and effective vaccine” while 14% would refuse it outright. An additional 14% said they would hesitate to take the vaccine.

But that average figure is deceptive. It was raised by favourable responses from two Asian countries that also recorded very high trust in government health recommendations. More than 80% of Chinese respondents and 75% of South Koreans said they would accept a vaccine. South Africans came closer than any other country to the 70% standard, at almost 65%. But only 46.3% of Nigerians said they would do so. This is slightly higher than the results we found in Spain, Sweden, Poland, Brazil and Ecuador.

 

Hesitancy

These vaccine hesitant people are not necessarily vaccine opponents. A large number of them consistently vaccinate their children against numerous childhood diseases. However, it must be noted that the increasingly well-coordinated global anti-vaccine movement has repurposed itself to challenge the very reality of COVID-19 as well as the usefulness of a new vaccine to prevent it. They have leveraged social media platforms to promote these doubts.

We also tried to determine how much trust people would have in a COVID-19 vaccine if their employer recommended it. Just more than three in five (61.4%) of all our respondents said they would do so. The numbers dropped to less than half of South Africans (46%) and Nigerians (44%).

Our data confirms a troubling trend towards vaccine hesitancy that has been found in other global and national studies. Professor Heidi Larson, a co-author of our paper, and her team at the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently reported on trends in vaccine confidence observed across 149 countries between 2015 and 2019. They found that political instability and religious extremism were critical factors in declining vaccine confidence in many of these countries.

Recent political unrest in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with over 200 million people, does not bode well for a successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign there. Only South Africa and Ethiopia have recorded more COVID-19 cases on the continent.

Many public health workers also recall a massive boycott against polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. It was caused by a single rumour, and not an adverse event. This boycott led to the years of more polio infections and deaths in Nigeria, and delayed polio eradication from the continent as a whole.

So what must be done to get on track for a successful African vaccination programme against COVID-19?

 

Moving forward

As scientists, we should help health leaders to prepare now with education and dialogue to set appropriate expectations for when a coronavirus vaccine may be available. We need to build vaccine literacy with effective communication and community engagement for acceptance country by country, village by village, taking into account community-specific issues, concerns or misconceptions and working with local religious and civil leaders and influencers.

We also need to help people become more fluent about vaccinations: Are they safe? Will they protect me and my family? Do I need to be vaccinated to be able to work? Will everyone be able to get it? Will vaccination sterilise me or my kids?

And we must be realistic that none of this information and advocacy will truly convince people to accept COVID-19 vaccination, or any other, in the absence of genuine societal trust. Without mutual trust, we may not be able to rebuild economies and return to anything approaching “normal” life.

It would be tragic if we developed, made and distributed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines and people refused to take them, when health infrastructure and equipment levels cannot stem the pandemic.

Two authors of this study, Drs. Ratzan and Larson, are co-leaders of a recently launched global coalition – CONVINCE [COVID-19 New Vaccine Information Communication and Engagement]. This initiative is spearheaded by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health, the Vaccine Confidence Project of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Wilton Park, a part of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. A number of African public health leaders have already joined it.

Scott C. Ratzan, Distinguished Lecturer, CUNY Graduate Center; Agnes Binagwaho, Vice Chancellor, University of Global Health Equity; Heidi Larson, Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology & Population Health, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; Jeffrey V Lazarus, Associate Research Professor, Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal); Kenneth Rabin, Senior Scholar, CUNY Graduate Center, and Lawrence O. Gostin, University Professor; Founding Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law, Georgetown University

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

The post COVID-19: A Global Survey Shows Worrying Signs of Vaccine Hesitancy appeared first on Inter Press Service.

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